Dizzie Drexler
For all that it was tempting to break open one of those tall metal bottles and get a closer read on the Xenium within it, Dizzie wasn’t entirely sure what exposing liquid Xenium directly to the air would do to the mineral… or to the air and everyone standing in it, for that matter. It was a powerful but also highly combustible compound, and they didn’t want to tempt fate, especially without any precautionary measures. So, despite their desires, Dizzie left the bottles alone.
Just for now, though. Later, they had every intention of cracking one of these open – all safety protocols followed, of course – and getting a firsthand look at the mineral they’d dedicated their entire career to, in an entirely novel form. Just the thought of it was enough to make their head spin.
To safely open one of these bottles up, they’d need the right environment. When Six suggested all of them split up to examine the Nexeri, Dizzie was the first to agree. It was risky, exploring a new place with less backup, but also it would give Dizzie a chance to look for what they were really interested in without having to deal with Grayson’s bitching or Divak’s irritated huffs – the labs. There had to be labs on a ship this big, didn’t there?
Corinus volunteered to come along with Dizzie, which they appreciated. Six walked with them for a way as well, which Dizzie knew that Corinus didn’t appreciate, but wasn’t going to speak up against.
“Does it distress you?” they asked as they left behind the immense hangar-slash-storage space-slash-refinery, entering a narrow hallway located in the far north end of it that had a series of tall oval doors on each side, all spaced about six meters apart. Meeting rooms? Crew quarters? Kitchens?
“Does what distress me?” Six asked as they peeked into one of them. Hmm, lots of chairs and tables – perhaps a mess hall.
“Finding out the fate of your legendary ship. Discovering that they all… well, died.”
“Not at all,” Six said with equanimity. “Everything dies eventually. It’s the only constant in the universe, and the most comforting one as well.”
“Comforting how?” Corinus asked as they all glanced inside the next door. This room was small, and there were individual stalls and holes in the ground and – ah, toilets. This was a bathroom. They let it be and moved on.
“Because it means that no matter what one’s life amounts to, whether it is full of joy or full of sorrows, in the end everyone you’ve ever loved or quarreled with will be exactly like you. Entropy is an equalizing force, and I appreciate equality. Self-direction is largely frowned upon among Caridians,” he added, tracing his clawed fingers against the wall. There was some sort of imprint there, a slight change in texture, but Dizzie couldn’t make out enough of it to be sure of the shape, much less know if it said anything. “That said, I’ve always found value in making my own path. That impulse is one of the things I admire most about humans.
“There are many things to admire about Centaurans, too,” he added for Corinus’s benefit. “Your homogeneity and commitment to the greatest good for your people before all else is very admirable.” Corinus just blinked at him.
The next room was full of what looked like dusty, archaic palm fronds jutting down from the ceiling and curling to the floor. Dizzie had no idea what they were, but Six seemed instantly charmed. “A library! Oh, how delightful!”
“This is a library?” Dizzie and Corinus exchanged a look. “Caridians don’t believe in digital media?” Dizzie asked.
“Reading for us is best experienced as a tactile thing,” Six said, wandering over to one of the twisted fronds and picking it up in his claws. “It is as much about the feel of the words as it is about apprehension of their intent. Our stories are meant to be read from bottom to top, with new lessons gleaned along the way in accordance with the individual’s age and height. These ones at the bottom would be appropriate for our youngest nymphs.”
“Oh.” That was… kind of cool, actually. And a perfect place to ditch Six in search of the laboratories. “Well, I think Dr Lifhe and I are going to keep exploring, but have fun here. Remember to keep your helmet close,” they added, still supremely irritated that they and Corinus were the only ones still wearing them. “So you can hear the comm if anyone needs to get in contact with you.”
“Absolutely. Enjoy your discoveries, Dr Drexler.”
“Oh, I will.” They resumed walking down the hallway, and once they were out of earshot Corinus said, “He’s so creepy.”
“Corinus.”
“He is! He never gets upset about anything, that’s weird! Wouldn’t you be upset if you’d found the skeletal remains of humans from centuries ago just shuffled off to the side like that? Wouldn’t it make you curious? But not him.” Corinus inhaled sharply, his equivalent of a derisive sniff. “He doesn’t have that kind of heart.”
“I think you might be projecting a little,” Dizzie said, looking into another room. This one went on for a long way, and had a slender center hallway and triple rows of familiarly narrow, oblong bunks set into the walls on either side. Living quarters, such as they were. Caridians certainly didn’t value privacy the way that humans did.
“I’m not, though! It’s clear he doesn’t feel things the way we do. I don’t know that he feels them at all.”
“You don’t think you’re being unduly influenced by the fact that you can’t read his mind?” Dizzie asked. There was just one door left in this hallway. “After all, I know you’re used to – aha!”
“Aha what? Oh, it’s a laboratory?” Corinus said, answering his own question by sensing Dizzie’s emotions as he, too, stopped in the door.
“I think so,” Dizzie said. It, like all the other rooms, was lit with ambient, yellowish light from the waterfall walls. There were three long tables making a U shape against one wall, covered with the remnants of what seemed to be experiments in situ – devices clearly meant for precise measurement, for holding samples, for… honestly, it looked rather reminiscent of their lab back on the station, minus the computer interfaces. Instead, there were more of the frond-like data storage devices drooping down over the tables from the ceiling, much skinnier than the ones in the library had been. Fascinating.
They stepped inside, hand automatically going to the left of the doorframe to adjust the controls for the lights, which was ridiculous – this wasn’t their lab. It wasn’t like there was going to be any sort of correlation, and yet…
The room went from low-level lighting on the floor to shockingly bright in an instant, darkening Dizzie’s faceplate for a moment. Dizzie’s questing fingers had come into direct contact with a control panel of some kind. There was also a low hum in the room, and a quick look over in the near corner by the door revealed a blocky piece of machinery that, judging from the way it pulsed with energy, was probably a battery of some kind. Separate power for the lab, maybe? “Oh cool, that’s convenient,” they said with a grin, then looked down at Corinus. “Want to check out the testing chamber?”
“How do you know it’s a testing chamber?” Corinus asked as he obediently followed Dizzie over to the far wall, where a recessed, pen-like area was set just off from the main laboratory.
“What else could it be?” they asked. “It’s clearly not used for storage – they wouldn’t have left access to it open like this if it was. I doubt these ancient Caridians set spaces aside just for convenient naps, either. Look along the edges of the wall, here.” They ran their fingers along the entrance to the chamber. “See the bumps? These could be part of an energy projector, to put up some kind of force field between the scientists out here, and whatever the experiment they’d designed was doing in there.”
“It doesn’t seem very secure for the type of experiment I imagine they were doing,” Corinus ventured, sticking his head through the hole to look more closely at the chamber. “With Xenium, one would think it was about analyzing the energy content of the crystals – or liquid, in this case.”
“Maybe they found other things to do experiments on while they were here.” Dizzie started to get excited. “Maybe,” they said, lowering their voice and leaning in toward Corinus, “they found mold here.”
Corinus turned a startled look to her, his eyelids fluttering wildly. “Don’t even say it!” he hissed, looking around like a mold-infested Xeno was going to jump out at him from behind a corner any second. “That’s not funny!”
“It’s something we have to consider! Especially given the lack of bodies we’ve found so far.” Dizzie tapped their helmet. “No one has reported anything like a graveyard or corpse interment so far in any of the other sections of the ship. Six didn’t say anything about Caridians following cremation or liquification practices. Maybe–”
“No!” Corinus shook his head hard, turned around and stalked over to the entrance to the lab. He stopped there, haunches quivering as though he was barely restraining himself from running out of here, away from the person who was causing him so much pain.
Dizzie felt a little guilty despite knowing that they were right about this. Honestly, despite their insistence on keeping their helmet on, the likelihood of any biological contaminant being the cause of death here, and as a potential killer for them and the rest of the expedition, was incredibly low. Everything had a finite lifespan – hadn’t Six just mused about the beauty of death a little while ago? Everything died, and in an inhospitable climate like this place had, they died faster than normal.
“I’m sorry,” Dizzie said, projecting the emotion as genuinely as possible with their thoughts. “It’s probably not mold. I just want to make sure we’re being thorough.”
“I know.” He wasn’t coming back over, though. Clearly, he was still miffed by their lack of concern over his anxieties. Corinus didn’t get into moods like this often, but when he did it could take a while to get back into his good graces.
“How about this?” Dizzie asked with a coaxing smile. “We go find Six and get him to help us figure out how to decipher things in here. If we can get access to a computer, maybe get the power up and running to the machinery in this room, he can show us some of the basics of how to work this equipment. Maybe he’s got a translation device we can use, too. It would be cool to power up some of this stuff, wouldn’t it?”
Corinus looked back over his sloping shoulder. “It would,” he agreed, softening the way Dizzie had been hoping for. Science for the sake of science was all very well and good to Corinus, but at his heart he was an engineering nerd. He’d never told his mentor that – probably he hadn’t had to; Dizzie was willing to bet that Dr Yoche knew. But while his personal preferences wouldn’t get him out of doing what needed to be done for the Centauran species on the whole, Dizzie had long since learned that the easiest way to get Corinus excited about something was to point out its technicalities.
“Maybe the type of containment field itself will give us details about the experiments they performed in it,” Dizzie went on, sidling over to their friend and shutting off the light as they led the way back down the hall. “You’d do things very differently for biological experiments than you would for concussive ones, I’m betting.”
“I wonder what the environmental controls are like for the lab,” Corinus said, finally getting into the spirit of things. “Whether the testing area has its own separate ventilation system. Maybe they even hooked it up to the refineries, to add an additional element of cleansing to their byproducts rather than simply venting them out into the atmosphere or burying them underground.”
“Good point, we’ll try to find out. In fact…” It had been a while since they’d all separated. “Let’s call a meeting, huh? Get everyone together and see what they’ve all come up with.”
Dizzie did so, and fifteen minutes later the group came back together in the same spot where they’d parted. Divak and Mason both looked slightly dusty, and Six looked like he was in some sort of Caridian rapture state, if the wavering of his antennae was any indicator. They also all looked significantly cooler than Dizzie was feeling right now, thanks to chucking all their helmets back in the main bay.
Dizzie reported their findings, and it didn’t take more than the vaguest of suggestions for Six to agree to come back with them and try to figure out how to get the lab into a working, if basic, state once more. Divak, who had been examining the hallway that was this one’s mirror on the far side of the main bay, reported finding nothing more intriguing than another dormitory, a mess hall, what might have been a machine shop – her description was pretty lacking – but not the one thing she was most interested in finding, which was an armory. Even the small ships along the walls carried no weapons.
“Which is foolish, and also atypical for Caridians,” she said with a suspicious look at Six. “Your people are not pacifists. They arm their ships. Even your own small ship has a weapons station.”
“That’s true,” Six said, “but remember, this ship was designed in the spirit of scientific exploration. It was being sent to a part of the universe where it was unlikely to face any serious threat from an indigenous population. I have no doubt that many of the Caridians on board were armed, and that they were prepared to manufacture more weapons at will, but I’m not surprised that you haven’t found a cache of them. Once they began their mining operation here, I believe the Nexeri was reconfigured to make that its primary function, and all lesser concerns were dismissed in favor of supporting this new goal.”
“Makes sense,” Grayson said. “We managed to send Lefty a ways down into one of the refineries in here – if these people were mining Xenium, they were going deep. Got lots of it in storage, tons of the stuff, but it had to be costing a premium in labor and time to get it out of the ground.”
“They must have been running all kinds of tests on it, too,” Dizzie muttered. “We found a lab,” they clarified when Grayson and Divak gave them a strange look. “I think with Six’s help, we could get it running well enough to figure out some of what the last inhabitants here were doing with it. Nobody knows much about Xenium, myself included, and nobody at all knows anything about liquid Xenium. We don’t have a measure of how much energy is released when it’s activated, we don’t know its volatility, we have no clue of its–”
“Eh, easy enough to find out.” Grayson grinned. “Let’s set some on fire and see what it does.”
“That’s a terrible idea!” Corinus objected immediately. “You could blow us all up!”
“It’s a rash idea, but maybe not the worst one,” Dizzie said. Corinus looked like he’d just been stabbed in the first of his two hearts. “I’m just saying, until we get a read on their experiments, we won’t know much about Xenium other than what we find out for ourselves,” they went on, setting a hand on Corinus’s shoulder. “I actually think it might be worthwhile to do a small ballistics test to see how reactive this stuff is. From the little I’ve read before, solid-state Xenium appears to be inert and safe to handle as long as you’re wearing a radiation monitor.” Except for the mold problem, but that was more of a Xeno issue, they added silently.
“That’s what I like to hear!” Grayson grinned broadly, his wide, flat teeth looking too big to be contained by his thin lips. “Mason can go in for a sample, we can set it up outside somewhere, attach a little popper nearby or something, and–”
“I will shoot it,” Divak announced.
“You’ll shoot it? Something so far away you might not even be able to see it in all this mist?” Grayson challenged her. Divak visibly bristled and leaned in closer to him – not just leaned, loomed.
“I could shoot the hairs off your ugly head from over a kilometer away and leave your pitiful brain untouched,” she hissed. “You procure it, I will shoot it, the rest of you will take measurements and samples and whatever else it is useless, soft creatures like you do.”
“Well.” Six, when he spoke, sounded almost the same as he usually did. Almost. There was an undercurrent of excitement there that not even his natural imperturbability could hide. Dizzie noticed Corinus’s eyes widening slightly. Was he finally getting a read on their least readable member? “This sounds like a lovely plan. By all means, let’s blow something up.”
•••
They decided to start with a very small amount of liquid Xenium – a single milliliter of it, to be precise. Divak scoffed, and Grayson looked disappointed, but Dizzie insisted that they needed to prioritize their safety over the fun of a big boom. “Besides,” they added to Divak, “eagle eye or no, it’s got to be big enough for you to hit from a kilometer away.”
“It could be half the size of your little test tube and I would still hit it,” Divak snapped. “And I do not have eagle eyes. My eyes are as sharp as the fiercest of predators, not some ancient Earth dog breed that sniffed out overgrown rats.”
“No, that’s beagles, not–” Oh, whatever.
Getting the Xenium from a storage bottle into a test tube had been the first trial, solved when Mason carted one of the large, incredibly heavy containers out onto the plain, then came back and used his arms at a distance to make the transfer into two different shatterproof tubes safely – one for the test, and one in case something happened to the first one. Then he’d wedged a test tube between two distant rocks, carefully hoisted the larger container of Xenium onto his back again, and returned, giving the spare tube over to his brother before anyone could make a fuss about it.
Dizzie and Corinus both had their multitools out, switched over from particle detection to energy measurement. It wasn’t going to be a perfect calculation, given everything they still didn’t know about liquid Xenium, but it would give them a starting point.
The problems didn’t start until Divak took her first shot. With all the rest of them standing behind her, their backs pressed to the ship while she stood a few meters ahead, she swung her rifle up to her shoulder, aimed, and fired in under five seconds. It was a masterful display of control, over her weaponry and her own reflexes.
Or it would have been, if she’d hit the test tube.
She didn’t. Or at least, it didn’t provoke the explosion that every one of them was expecting.
“Ha!” Grayson was the first one to say something, and he chose probably the worst thing to say. “So much for your sharpshooting skills, eh? You sure you don’t need to move a bit closer, lass? Maybe put a big neon sign over it with an arrow that points right to it?”
“Shut your mouth,” Divak snapped. “I neglected to appropriately account for the wind, that’s all.” She raised her rifle again, sighted more carefully, and fired off another shot.
Again… nothing.
Grayson snorted. “Forget an arrow, you need a laser targeting system.”
Divak whirled around to glare at him. “That one should have hit! It must have ricocheted off one of the rocks the tube is being held in.”
“Right, ’cause those rocks can definitely stand up to the ammunition you’re packing.” Grayson shook his head. “Admit it, you can’t do it. Either move closer or – herkk!”
Before any of them could react, Divak had closed the distance between them and wrapped her hand around his throat, exposed since he wasn’t wearing his helmet. “I would rather move closer to you,” Divak snarled, ignoring everyone else’s shouts, “and remove you like the pathetic little worm that you–”
Divak suddenly dropped Grayson. She had to – each joint of her power armor had just been rapidly infiltrated by Mason Bane’s extensors. They projected from every limb and latched onto Divak’s spine, bending her backward until her armor creaked with warning. In under two seconds, Mason had her off the ground, in his octopus-like grip, completely immobile. Even her mouth was silenced, an extensor shoved so far down her throat Dizzie could see the bulge of it in the side of her neck. Only her eyes were still free to move, and they darted this way and that, ruby-red and getting redder by the second in the darkening gray pallor of her face.
“Let her go!” Dizzie shouted. Mason didn’t react. Dizzie turned to his brother. “Grayson, get him to let her go before he kills her.”
He didn’t seem very concerned. “Weren’t she goin’ to kill me?” he asked, staring at the scene with satisfaction. “Some protector she is. Looks like she’s getting a taste of her own medicine, eh?”
“Grayson!” Desperately, Dizzie looked over at Corinus. “Can you stop Mason with your telepathy?” He’d never done it before as far as Dizzie knew, but they also knew that in desperate times, Centauran telepathy was good for a lot more than reading minds.
“We’re not allowed to use it that way with other species!” Corinus protested with a shrill voice. “I can’t – I just, it would be wrong, I can’t–”
Corinus’s ethical dilemma was forestalled by Six, who stepped forward to look squarely at Grayson. “Release her, or your contract with me will be voided, and I will return you to the authorities at the Bor-Turia Penal Colony the moment we return to the center of Coalition space,” Six said, his voice as calm and composed as ever.
A second later, Mason’s extensors retracted, and he dropped Divak on the ground. The Thassian lay there for a long moment, catching her breath, before she surged to her feet and drew her chainsword off the back of her power armor. “I’ll destroy you,” she screamed, her voice rough and garbled from its recent invasion. “I’ll kill both of you and hang your heads from my belt!”
Six stepped forward. “Do so, and I will inform Leader Pavul that you acted without honor and control in your time with me, and that you should be demoted back to trooper.”
Divak hissed at him. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“You have no idea what I would dare, I think,” Six said, cocking his head slightly to the side. His antennae were perfectly still. “It is best that you don’t find out. Now. Fulfill your task and shoot the Xenium so that we might learn something about its volatility, or keep showing us evidence of your own volatility and ruin your future. It’s entirely your choice.”
Dizzie held their breath as Divak actually seemed to think these options over. It took ten full seconds for her to straighten up and put her blades away.
“Very well.” She sounded back in control of herself, for whatever that was worth. “You are the leader of this expedition, and I will obey your judgment.” Her discontent with that judgment was obvious, but when she bent down to grab her rifle, she didn’t spare either of the Banes a single glance. Divak turned back to the distant target, shouldered her rifle, took a long, slow moment to center herself, and then–
BOOM! The sound of the explosion was bad enough, but Dizzie had just enough time to see the backdraft from it come at them, accompanied by a literal wall of displaced water, before it hit them. They put their hands up over their face instinctively, even though their helmet was protecting their head, and waited for the impacts from the localized storm to die down before they opened their eyes again.
Everyone else – except for Corinus and Mason – was coughing, retching up dirty water and spitting it out onto the ground. Rocky fragments dislodged by the explosion littered the ground all around them – they were lucky no one’s suit had been penetrated. It had to be bad enough to have a bunch of wet gravel smack you in the face like that.
Dizzie and Corinus shared a rightfully smug expression before they turned their attention back to their readings. “Well,” Dizzie said brightly, “judging by what I was able to detect with the energy readout, the joules released by that milliliter sample of Xenium come out to about the equivalent of a kiloton thermobaric bomb. Pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.”
“Holy Mount Mons,” Grayson said between coughs. “Tell me we’re done with testing this stuff, because I ain’t in this to get my head blown off.”
“I don’t think we need any more ballistic tests,” Dizzie assured him. “Figuring out how to take it from its current form and use it as fuel will take a lot more work – actually, Six.”
They turned and looked at the Caridian, who had just finished wiping down – ugh, wiping down his eyeballs with the fuzzy ends of his own antennae. How did that not hurt? Did his eyes not have pain receptors? “Maybe you can make that your research priority? I know you can’t let us look at the Telexa’s inner workings, but maybe you can do some comparisons between your engine and what they’d built here and see if they’d already modified these ships to use Xenium as fuel.”
“Certainly,” Six replied. “Once we get you and Dr Lifhe well situated in your lab, of course.”
Aw, how nice of him to remember that. “Of course,” Dizzie agreed. They were excited at the prospect of really getting down to work on the mystery that was Xenium. The discoveries on the verge of being made! This was following in Dr Rigby’s footsteps in the purest way possible.
Well, except for the Xeno problems Dr Rigby had had to deal with, but given the volatility of this climate, it seemed less and less likely that mold would be a problem here. Dizzie was both relieved and a little disappointed by that. After all, when would a chance like this ever come around again?