I slept like the dead. Some number of hours later, a high-pitched beeping woke me. It didn’t stop until I yelled, “Shut up!” and I realized it was coming from the panel by the door. In a few minutes, Shiro’s voice piped through the panel.
“Jonah, you awake? I’ll send somebody to get you in a couple of minutes.”
I grumbled a response and shoved the blankets off me. The room was dim, and I sat up from the cot. I grumbled some more, swinging my legs unsteadily to the floor.
Bathroom time. The sink water flowed warm, and as much as I longed to get into the bathtub again, I figured Shiro would want me soon. The clothes he had given me were the only ones I had, and they were rumpled from sleep. I hitched the belt up on the pants, put on the boots, and waved a hand in front of the panel. The door slid open, and a bright blue birdman waited outside. Siitsi, I reminded myself. They aren’t really birds.
I examined him more closely as he led me through the corridors of the ship. He walked upright, but his legs didn’t bend like mine. I remembered from anatomy classes I’d taken in preparation for my doctor’s training that many Earth animals had similar anatomy, just put together in different proportions. What I thought of as knees were probably the Siitsi’s ankles, which is why they looked like they hinged in the wrong direction. The blue Siitsi hadn’t spoken to me, and if there was a translator cuff in the feathers on his head, I couldn’t see it.
The ship was a confusing maze. At times we passed open doors that all seemed to be labs of some type or another. No one looked up from whatever they were working on as we passed. But most of the doors were closed, just long hallways of silver hatchways.
We rode the elevator—a different one from last night, at least I thought so—down. There weren’t any buttons on the panel, which confused me until the Siitsi whistled to it. No lights illuminated to show us how many floors we descended. It could have been three very slowly, or thirty very fast. Once off the elevator, he led me to another closed door that opened to his wave.
“Jonah! Come in. We were just talking about you.”
Shiro sat at a long table, along with Priya and the cream-colored Siitsi from last night, Tishi. Corey stood with his back to us, studying a holographic image that seemed to be emitting from a panel on the counter in front of him. The lettering was more of the scratchy language I now assumed was the written form of Siitsi. The image looked like blueprints, hastily drawn with a lot of scratching out, things circled, and arrows pointing at other things. Totally incomprehensible to me.
The back wall of the room held several large aquariums of clear water. Inside, hideous, fist-sized pale crustacean-type creatures crawled around under large, black rocks.
Shiro pushed a covered bowl across the table and motioned for me to sit down. “I brought you breakfast.”
There was more fruit in the bowl, along with some kind of warm, soft grain. I inhaled it, pouring the last bits right into my mouth from the bowl.
“So we’ve been thinking about the ship you described,” Priya said, “and we think we know how they do it.”
“Do what?” I wiped my chin on my sleeve.
“How the ship is invisible like that,” she said.
Corey spoke up, gesturing at the hologram. “We know the Botanists are plants. Or maybe just one plant, with a whole bunch of independent buds. And now, thanks to you, we know they probably use DNA from all the alien life forms they trade for on the trade worlds to allow them to make whatever they want. They’re extruding the materials they make stuff out of, and we think their whole ship might be part of the same giant organism.”
Priya nodded. “We think the ship itself might be alive in a way. Connected to the ‘brain’ you saw, which is how it managed to open up and swallow your shuttle.” She gestured to the holographic blueprints. “Plants can absorb all different wavelengths of light, which they use for photosynthesis to make their own energy. And if the outside of their ship is made of plant material, they could have it absorb whatever wavelengths they need. Whatever isn’t absorbed is reflected back as color, so if it absorbs all visible light, it’s black. Totally invisible. Impossible to track.”
“And it’s not like no one has tried,” Shiro said, brow furrowing. “They always show up in a regular metal shuttle to a trade world. Probably something they scavenged, or maybe even hijacked from space. The things they make that we trade for . . . they’re incredibly valuable, and no one knows how they do it. You tell them what you need, and sometime later, you go pick it up. They make new things out of nothing.”
I frowned. “Not out of nothing. Out of people and animals they feed to the pitcher.”
“Right.” Priya tried to look sad about that, but she was obviously too excited about the science. “So here’s the thing. We trade with the Botanists because they make things no one else can. And every time someone has tried to follow them back to their home world to see how they do it, the shuttle they’re following just disappears.”
“The black bean ship swallows them up, and away they go.” My face felt hot at the mention. It swallowed us, too.
“Right,” Priya said again. “They’re scavengers, and sometimes sell things they’ve obviously taken from other ships.”
Shiro’s face darkened. “They’re invaders and criminals.”
I shuddered. They really were criminals. “Do they steal things? Take the people if they land somewhere else?”
“Worse.” The voice came through my ear cuff, and I watched Tishi’s face as she spoke. Her stiff beak showed no expression, but she made up for it with her huge brown eyes. “We weren’t sure until you told us about the vines. We suspected it might be the same species, but no one ever survived an invasion, so nobody was certain. When the vines have arrived on primitive worlds, they’ve taken over everything. Whatever lived there before was decimated. Our sensors show none of the original species. Those huge vines take over everything and wipe everything else out.” Her shoulders sagged in a very human-like posture. “We never realized the vines were the brain of one huge plant creature and the little Botanist traders are part of it. We only knew that once it took hold, everything else disappeared. And the few times we sent ships to explore or try to help, they never returned.”
Even better. The plant-things that had my people and my brother were world-killers as well.
“So why were you guys going to trade with them? What’s so special that you’d do business with a bunch of murderers?”
Shiro grimaced. “We weren’t sure the little guys were the same species as the vines. And they can make things no one else can.” He gestured around the room. “The Siitsi are great scientists. My people are still alive because of our partnership. But they had an idea for something that would make life on my home planet a lot safer, and we needed seeds for a plant that didn’t exist.”
I remembered the little boxes they had been carrying after the trade. “So what did they make?”
A big sigh escaped Shiro’s lips. “Dinosaur repellent.”