Survey Vessel Hermes — Novum Orbit ***
"Stim, black, no sweetener," Desmond announced, setting the steaming mug in front of Sara Chen. "Just like your soul."
She looked up from her datapad and snorted. "That's rich coming from someone who adds cocoa mix to his."
"It's a mocha! It's sophisticated!" He collapsed into the seat across from her, the chair's cushion exhaling a puff of recycled air, and wrapped both hands around his own mug. The ceramic was warm against his palms—one of the few genuine textures on a ship where everything else was smooth polymer or cold steel. "Besides, we can't all be hardened cynics at twenty-seven."
"Twenty-eight," she corrected automatically, then caught his grin. They'd had this same exchange at least a dozen times since grad school. It was their ritual, a small anchor of normalcy in each new posting.
The mess hall hummed around them—the low thrum of the shuttle's engines transmitted through the deck plates, a vibration Desmond absorbed more in his bones than his ears, settling like a second heartbeat. The air recyclers wheezed overhead, pushing out atmosphere that carried the flat metallic tang of processed oxygen and the ghost of whatever the autochef had last synthesized.
Desmond's smile softened. "You doing okay? I know Arcturus VII isn't exactly the posting you wanted."
Sara shrugged, but he could see the tension in her shoulders. "It's fine. Archaeological survey beats teaching undergraduate Intro to Xenobiology for the third year running."
"That's the spirit! Embrace the mediocrity!" He raised his mug in a mock toast. "Seriously though, Sara. Thanks for taking this one with me. I know you had other offers."
"Someone has to keep you from getting too excited and falling into an excavation pit." She smiled despite herself. "Plus, someone needs to appreciate my terrible stim jokes."
"They're not terrible. They're... deeply flawed, with room for improvement."
She threw a napkin at him.
The computer shrieked—not the soft advisory chirp they'd grown used to, but a priority alert that cut through the mess hall like a blade. Dr. Quentin was already on his feet, crossing to the main terminal in three strides.
"What is it?" Sara asked, her stim forgotten.
"The anomaly." Dr. Quentin's fingers flew across the display. "Energy signature spiked forty percent in the last six hours. Rate's still climbing." He pulled the spectral analysis onto the main screen. The readout pulsed in sharp amber—a graph that should have been a flat line instead climbing in jagged steps.
Desmond leaned forward, pen forgotten against his notebook. "Spiked? As in—"
"As in something down there just woke up."
The words hung in the recycled air. Desmond watched Quentin pull up a Decree classification matrix—the standardized protocol for assessing newly discovered energy signatures. The doctor's jaw was tight as he worked through the categories, and when the system returned its assessment, a red border framed the result.
Class IV. Active artificial source, unknown origin.
"That triggers a full Decree lockdown," Sara said. She was already at her station, pulling sensor data. "No contact until complete biological and technological cataloging."
Desmond's hand moved instinctively to his datapad, pulling up the Decree reference archives. He'd studied it in survey certification—every xenoarchaeologist had to—but the specifics had been abstract then. Academic. He scrolled through the historical precedents and stopped on a name he half-remembered from a footnote in his third-year coursework: Camino Pilaero.
"Pilaero." He said it aloud. "The geneticist."
Dr. Quentin glanced at him without slowing his work. "You remember."
"Mali agricultural research. He compared seed samples from across the empire and found..." Desmond trailed off as the implications crystallized against the current situation. "Genetic uniformity. Thousands of worlds, eight thousand years of expansion, and virtually no variation. A galactic monoculture nobody had noticed."
"An academic curiosity," Dr. Quentin said, "until Breshen and Talmadge proved him right."
Desmond was already scrolling. He found the incident report—two agricultural worlds, a standard rootstock graft between trading partners. Breshen's grape vines to Talmadge soil. The same technique the old French vineyards on Earth had used for centuries. And six months later, Talmadge's grain had started dying. A bacterial mutation dormant in Breshen's soil—harmless locally—that turned lethal when it cross-contaminated genetically identical crops with no natural resistance. No variation to serve as a firewall.
Ninety percent yield loss in a single season. Three neighboring worlds hit before containment.
"Millions starved," Desmond said quietly. He thought of his mother, his brother on Axis Prime. Bread every day, taken for granted. "Gods."
The terminal chirped again. Sara cursed under her breath. "Energy signature up another five percent. It's accelerating."
"Emperor Levetus issued the Decree in response," Dr. Quentin said, still working the terminal. He wasn't lecturing—he was running contamination projections while he talked, overlaying the energy signature's rate of change with atmospheric models. "Any newly discovered world with potential for life gets completely cataloged before contact. Every plant, microbe, every possible biological interaction documented. Because one planet's harmless bacteria can be another's extinction event."
"And if we can't catalog it all?" Desmond asked, though the answer was already forming in his gut.
"Then we don't make contact. We don't risk cross-contamination." Quentin's projection model finished rendering. He stared at it. "And if we land and discover we can't safely leave, the Decree requires them to abandon us here."
"The Wretch would... leave us?" Desmond's voice came out smaller than he intended. The thought of being stranded, cut off—it made his stomach clench.
"I would order them to. One ship, three lives, in exchange for protecting billions." He smiled sadly. "Rather puts things in perspective."
The three of them stood in the humming silence of the mess hall, each turning the implications over. Desmond's stim had gone cold. Sara's datapad lay abandoned on the table where she'd set it down minutes ago, in a different lifetime—one where this was still a routine survey posting.
"So what are our options?" Desmond asked. "Formally."
Dr. Quentin leaned back from the terminal, and Desmond recognized the posture—the same careful stillness the professor assumed during thesis defenses, when he was weighing what a student needed to hear against what they wanted to hear. "Protocol says we log the Class IV signature, transmit it to the Xenoarchaeological Survey Board, and hold position until they dispatch a specialist team. Standard response time for a Class IV is six to ten weeks."
"Six weeks." Sara's voice was flat. She pulled up her atmospheric projections. "The energy signature will be detectable across three systems within forty-eight hours. If anyone with a warship and ambition picks it up before the Survey Board—"
"Then they won't follow the Decree."
"And whatever's down there falls into the wrong hands." Sara crossed her arms. "We could also leave. Jump out, file the report from the nearest relay station, and let it be someone else's problem."
"Could you live with that?" Dr. Quentin asked, and the question was genuine—not rhetorical, not leading. He wanted to know.
Sara looked at the energy readout climbing in its amber steps. "No."
"Neither could I." Quentin turned to Desmond. "Desmond?"
The honest answer was that he was terrified. The Decree existed because first contact had killed millions of people through nothing more exotic than crop failure. Whatever was generating that signal had been dormant for centuries and was now climbing toward a broadcast that would reach half the sector. Landing on that planet meant accepting that they might never leave.
But the alternative was walking away from the kind of discovery that justified every choice he'd made since deciding not to become a doctor.
"I'm in," he said. "But I want it noted that I am deeply, profoundly uncomfortable."
Dr. Quentin almost smiled. "Noted."
"Doctor." Sara's voice had gone tight. "You need to see this."
They gathered around her display. The topographical map showed Novum's familiar surface—forests, ruins, geological features. But overlaid now was a web of energy readings that hadn't existed an hour ago. Not biological. Pure energy. Massive, concentrated in what appeared to be artificial structures deep underground.
A vast complex of chambers, tunnels, facilities. And at the heart of it all, something generating power that climbed by the minute.
"Someone built that," Desmond said, his pulse quickening. First contact was the dream of every xenoarchaeologist. But first contact with an unknown civilization could also be the last thing you ever did. "Someone lived here."
"Someone might still live there," Dr. Quentin said. "Deep underground, beyond our initial scans. Hidden from satellite observation. And whatever they have down there just started running."
Desmond studied the subsurface map, his xenoarchaeologist's eye tracing the structural patterns. The chambers weren't random—they followed geometric principles that repeated at different scales, the same angles and proportions echoing from room-sized vaults to corridors that stretched for kilometers. He'd seen similar self-similar architecture in Kelari temple complexes and in the mathematical art of the Indeil, but never at this depth. Never this old.
"The construction geometry doesn't match the colony records," he said. "The Kanian settlement plans are all rectangular grids—standard imperial urban planning. These structures are curved. Organic. And they're deep—some of these chambers are four hundred meters below the surface." He looked at Quentin. "This wasn't built by the colonists."
"Pre-colonial," Quentin confirmed. "Which raises the question of who built it. And whether they're still home."
Sara was already pulling calculations. "If that energy signature keeps increasing at this rate, it'll be detectable from orbit by any ship within three systems. If we don't investigate now, someone else will. Someone who might not follow the Decree."
"Or someone who doesn't care about the Decree." Dr. Quentin's jaw tightened.
The implication hung in the air. If the empire—or anyone else—detected that signal, they'd come. With soldiers, not scientists.
Sara pulled up another display. "There's more. I've been tracking commercial traffic in the sector. A Ministry patrol vessel is stationed several sectors out—the Vigilant. If they pick up this signature..." She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
"How long before they detect it?" Dr. Quentin asked.
"The signal will reach patrol range within a few days at current rates. Once they detect it and vector in, they could make orbit inside a week or two. Sooner if they have better sensors than I'm assuming."
Desmond felt the weight of the timeline closing in. A week, maybe two. The storm front in twelve days. And somewhere below them, ancient machinery waking from centuries of sleep, broadcasting its presence to anyone listening.
"My mother wanted me to be a doctor," Desmond said suddenly. The words surprised him—he hadn't meant to say them out loud. "A medical doctor. She said archaeology was 'playing in the dirt with dead things.'"
Dr. Quentin turned to him, eyebrows raised.
"Sorry, I don't know why I—"
"Why did you?" Dr. Quentin asked gently. "Trade it, I mean."
Desmond considered the question. Outside the viewport, Novum turned in its slow dance, its secrets now broadcasting their presence to anyone listening. "Because this matters more. Medicine saves lives, and that's important. But this is about understanding life itself. Where it comes from, how it evolves, why we're all connected." He paused. "When you pulled me out of that collapsed site on Kepler-7, I was cataloging bacteria that had survived in vacuum for three thousand years. And I couldn't quit. Because I needed to know."
Dr. Quentin was quiet for a long moment. Then he smiled—not his usual professional smile, but something warmer. "Your mother is wrong, Desmond. What you do matters. And I'm glad you chose this life."
The terminal beeped—another spike. Sara cursed softly.
"We're out of time for deliberation," she said. "That signature is going to draw attention. If we want first look at whatever's down there, we go now. Or we leave and let someone else find it."
Dr. Quentin stared at the planet. Three hundred years ago, four billion people had lived on that world. Their cities had crumbled. Their civilization had fallen. And now something buried beneath the ruins signaled its presence to anyone listening.
He reached for the comm.
"Wretch, this is Quentin. Prepare for descent. Standard contamination protocols. Full atmospheric suits, no exceptions." He looked at his two young colleagues. "And pray that whatever's waking up down there is something we can understand."
Sara was already moving, pulling equipment cases from the storage lockers with the efficient urgency of someone who'd been waiting for the order. Atmospheric sampling kits. Bio-containment scanners. The heavy radiation dosimeters they'd packed for a routine survey and would now carry into something none of them had trained for.
Desmond helped her, their hands falling into the familiar rhythm of pre-field preparation—the same sequence they'd rehearsed on a dozen worlds. Check seals. Calibrate sensors. Verify backup power. The ritual steadied him, the way Sara's terrible stim jokes steadied him, the way Quentin's calm authority steadied him. They were scientists. This was what they did. They followed the evidence, wherever it led, whatever it cost.
Even if it cost them a way home.
Desmond closed his notebook, pressing his palm against the worn cover. He touched the scar above his eyebrow—Kepler-7's parting gift. That expedition had taught him that curiosity could kill you. But it had also taught him that some questions were worth dying to answer.
He hoped this wouldn't be one of those times.
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