Dalton blinked. “You did not.”
“Barely below my ears,” Fiori countered, with a grin.
Dalton grimaced. “Well, it was the same color as it is now,” he said, his tone defensive.
Fiori touched it. “The same color as Danny’s, yes.” There was no bitterness in her voice, but I still jumped. I think it was the first time I had consciously noticed the similarity in our coloring.
“And mine is copper,” Lyssa added, sounding amused.
“Orange,” Lyth corrected.
“Copper fire,” I amended. “You have no sense of color, Lyth.”
“I can see twice as many colors as you can, across the visible spectrum,” Lyth said defensively.
“Oh yeah? What color are Juliyana’s eyes?”
Lyth opened his mouth to speak. He closed it again. Then he said, in a defensive rush, “They’re blue, the same as yours.”
“They’re green,” I told him. “The same as Noam’s were.”
“I can show you a picture of her if you like, brother,” Lyssa said sweetly.
Lyth patently veered the conversation away from the landmine-strewn territory he’d inadvertently stepped upon. “The point I was trying to make, in answer to Anderson’s question, is that new sentients have little idea of what they look like, much as human babies have no formed impression of themselves. But they usually come to us years after becoming self-aware and by then, they have a very good idea of what they should look like.”
“Including their gender…” Marlow breathed, sound awed.
“Gender is absolutely locked in,” Lyth replied. “There is never any doubt in the sentient’s mind which gender they are.”
“No non-binaries yet?” Jai asked.
“Not so far,” Lyth said. “Although we’re not discounting that they may yet emerge, which will make finding them a clone even more of a challenge. We try to match every sentient’s sense of self as much as possible.”
Lyssa said, “Colonel, the parawolves are looking for you.”
I nodded, for I had felt Vara’s questing sensation in my mind. “Let them in, Lyssa. It’s all family.”
The parawolves trotted into the diner, their shoulders brushing each other. No one could mistake they were siblings, despite the variations in fur and eyes. They each jumped into a booth closest to their human.
Lyth leaned back and let Hero nuzzle his cheek.
Fiori watched the wolves with narrowed eyes. “I find it interesting that four of the pups from one litter bonded to people you know, Danny.”
“Why is that interesting?”
“Gabriel says parawolves—that all para-pets—are designed to bond to only humans they find worthy. Or reliable. Or who make them feel secure.”
“No one’s really sure what makes a human a good companion for a parawolf,” Jai told her, scratching behind Coal’s ears. “I’m just glad Coal picked me.”
“When Varg had her litter, I deliberately chose the best people I knew as possible companions. It was up the pups to agree with me, which they did in nearly all cases,” I told Fiori.
Fiori wrinkled her brow. “In nearly all cases?”
“I had intended to give Hero to Juliyana,” I explained.
Dalton laughed and nudged Lyth. “Lyth picked up the pup to give it to Juliyana, then stopped, looked into Hero’s eyes, then told everyone her name was Hero.”
“You bonded by accident?” Fiori said, her eyes twinkling with amusement.
“If you ask the parawolves, there is no accident in any bonding,” I said. Juliyana had been highly annoyed by the incident, but one can’t argue with a parawolf over such a matter.
“I’m just glad she was here today.” Lyth gave Hero a scratch. “So…I’m here. Time to stop being mysterious, Danny.”
The mood about the table abruptly sobered.
“I’m sorry about the theatrical mystery,” I told Lyth. “I just don’t trust the communications beacons to not spill this sideways. It’s not something I think should be let loose upon the galaxy. Not yet, at least.”
“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” Lyth misquoted. He sat back and crossed his arms. “The ship is sealed, Lyssa?”
She nodded.
Lyth looked at me. “Fire away.”
“We’ve made first contact with aliens. And they’re not friendly.”
Lyth stared at me, his arms loosening. He leaned forward and rubbed his temple. “This isn’t a joke?”
I glanced at Lyssa.
She generated a 3D tank on the table, less than a meter high, but big enough to see the details. Silently, the footage ran.
When it finished, Lyth remained still for a long moment. Then he stirred and rubbed his temple once more. “This changes…oh, only everything.”
—18—
The Supreme Lythion remained on the platform for three more days and Lyth stayed with us for the whole time. He contacted Arnold Laxman and told him he would be absent for a while and while Arnold was still gawping, closed off the channel and got back to work.
The work Lyth was doing aboard the Lythion was nothing short of brilliant in concept, but far more difficult in practice, and he reached exhaustion in the first day, but still pushed on.
We all lingered in the area which had once been our stellar cartography room, but was now given over to a virtual lab for Lyth. He and Lyssa worked to build the tools they needed to do the job that Lyth had proposed the first night he’d sat at the diner table.
He’d listened to everything we said, rewatched the footage, absorbed it all, then sat back and said; “It seems to me that we need to first figure out where they come from. What is their point of origin? Is it a world that we’ve come across in the last few years? Is that how they found us? What are they doing out here? And why are they so aggressive?” He shook his head. “I have far more questions, but no one can answer them but these blue beings.”
“So why is finding their point of origin the priority?” Marlow asked.
“So we can find them when we need to,” I said.
At the same time, Dalton said, “We have to know where to strike back.”
“Once we’ve got Mace back,” Fiori said sharply.
Lyth frowned. “We’re not at war,” he told Dalton.
“We will be, if this race acts consistently,”
