Storiesonline.net
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                         The Preacher's Daughter
                             by hammingbyrd7

Copyright© 2007 by hammingbyrd7


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Description: Please accept this story as an encore to The Preacher Man, and as a thank you to all kind emails I received for that story.

Codes: MF fant ScFi PostApoc slow horror rom 1st cons het anal hairy
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Chapter 1: Fledging Flight


Time: January 1, 9570 10:00 AM UCT

Daily commercial flight B210 Doha to Judah took off promptly on time. Eliana would have been very surprised if it hadn't. Except for occasional weather related delays, a commercial aircraft had not missed a scheduled departure time in decades. And the sun over the former site of Cape Town, South Africa was brilliant. Eliana took a moment to admire the brief view of the sparkling South Atlantic as the plane banked over the northern harbor area before aligning itself to its east-northeast flight path.

The plane rose quickly, and as it approached its assigned cruising altitude of 13,000 meters, the powerful p-B11 fusion engines throttled up and pushed the craft to Mach 2. The 3800 km trip to Judah would take two hours, limited not by power constraints but by the supersonic friction heating the aircraft. The fusion engines could keep the plane aloft and supersonic for months, pumping as much power into the jet thrusters as the turbine blades could handle.

"Such a change," thought Eliana as she looked around the half-full forty-passenger cabin. "After six years at the capital, I'll be living at the most isolated township in the world." Named Reunion in ancient prewar times, the island of Judah in the Indian Ocean was about to become her new home.

Eliana's eyes wandered back to the window to admire the beauty of the lush farming areas of the African landscape. Locally there were still more than three hours of daylight left. But sunset at Judah today would be at 10:20 AM universal capital time. It would be full night by the time they landed. As Eliana thought about her new life, her hand came up unconsciously to trace the unfamiliar pattern of the diamond insignia on her arm.

"Having a comfortable flight, Commander?"

Eliana turned her gaze from the window and addressed a uniformed CL-2 standing in the aisle. "Oh yes, I'm fine, thank you. Just admiring the scenery."

The man nodded. "I'm Amir, the flight steward." He looked closely at the emblems below Eliana's Class rank of red diamond. "Ah, a priestess, huh? And a military aviator too! Are you qualified for this plane's pilot cabin?"

Eliana grinned. "Well, most of my flight time has been with jump jets. But yes, I'm certified for transports, military and civilian."

"Excellent. We'll be serving a light dinner at 10:50. If you're willing to pass on the alcoholic beverages, would you like to dine with the pilots? I'm sure they'd enjoy your company."

"Yes, that would be very nice. Thank you Amir."

The man nodded and then gave her a playful grin, tilting his head towards her insignias and remembering her recent hand at her arm. "Let me guess. Recent promotion?"

Eliana chuckled. "Is it that obvious? Yes, very recent! This is my first day to wear the diamond."

"Congratulations then! Especially in the military Priesthood, that's quite an achievement." The man gave a final respectful bow and continued to work his way towards the front of the passenger cabin. Eliana settled back into her plush chair.

After a moment she remembered the present her Stateswoman great-to-the-sixth grandmother had sent her from New Jerusalem. It had been waiting for Eliana unexpectedly as she made her quick change of flights at Doha. Eliana ripped open the package and found two books, one new and one old, plus a short note from her dear distant ancestor. She took a moment to open the old book first. It appeared to be a book on fifth millennium art. She then read the note.

"Eli, the family couldn't be more proud of you, to have you reach command rank at the age of twenty-seven! I believe the last person to advance that fast was a man named Ilias, someone I'm sure you've heard about. Hah! It appears that Riding the Assad is not a lost art. Speaking of which, the enclosed art book is a family treasure. When Abdul Hadi died, your great-to-the-thirty-second grandmother Chanah gave this book to Kefira's granddaughter Thirza, and it has been passed down the family tree ever since. Chanah told Thirza that this was the book she found Ilias sleeping with when she awoke from her purge cycle the day they were married. Quite a bit of history! I've also enclosed the commemorative copy of our ancestor's First Tower, hot off the presses! Again, congratulations, and best wishes on your new assignment. Choose well! Love, Naysa."

Eliana traced her fingers lightly over the old book as she contemplated the gift. Chanah's wedding day was now more than 1300 years in the past, and it was a thousand years and two days since the death of the world's beloved Abdul Hadi. Eliana glanced at the familiar pages of the First Tower, and then read the publisher's note at the back of the book.

"Wow," she thought. "Judgment 4, 9570, two days ago. This book really is hot off the presses. Grandmother, how did you do this? It must be a pre-release proof copy." Eliana read the publisher's note again. One phrase stuck in her mind, the comment that the last thousand years had not been paradise. "No, indeed not," she agreed. "Our species seems determined not to live there."

The flight continued to soar above the African landscape at Mach 2. Eliana gazed out the window again. The view showed that all the farmland had disappeared, replaced by a much more rocky landscape of small ridges and valleys. She sighed and closed her eyes and thought of all the history since the fateful year of 8244.

Abdul Hadi had been overly optimistic in his hope that there would be no backsliding on the promises of the world to end female slavery. After he became an eternal virgin, there were a dozen years of township revolts against the new order and his visions of social justice and gender equality. In many of these early years, the warfare would claim hundreds of thousands of lives, typically one to three percent of the world's population. And all the while the world's birth rate was almost zero, less than a thousand per year. The flood of new children out of the abandoned monasteries had overwhelmed a population that had no experience in raising children in a family setting, and almost no one had a desire to add to the chaos. There were times when the future of the world still appeared very much in doubt. It was during these early years that Abdul Hadi began his preaching ministry among the townships.

The combination of Jibran seizing control of the Supreme Council plus the fierce loyalty of the rank and file militia to Abdul Hadi's cause finally allowed the servant of the Guide's vision for a new society to prevail. By the year 8258, the warfare was over and the population count for a few months dipped below twenty-one million. Six short years later, the birth rate exploded, returning to pre-civil-war values of 480,000 by 8264. After several more years, it became obvious that with no childhood culling nor lottery with the anti-aging drugs, the world was on a trajectory for a huge growth in population. The debates over the next decade were fierce and often divisive. It wasn't until the year 8279 that a consensus was reached and the annual birth rate stabilized at 120,000.

Before the civil war, the populations of the 120 townships were extremely uniform. By law, each township had the capacity to house 200,000 people, with had an actual population of around 167,000. The capital Bandar Arenas was populated with its designed maximum of five million. Based on original estimates of new life expectancies, people thought the population would stabilize at 28.5 million, and the construction of twenty-one new townships began.

By the time Abdul Hadi was cured of his eternal virginity at the start of Judgment in 8316, the world's population was 29 million and growing temporarily at a rate of 75,000 per year due to the artificially youthful population profiles. Several of the new townships were already nearing completion, three in northern Africa along its western Atlantic coast and two in New Zealand. The expectation was that the new construction and reserve capacity of the original townships could comfortably house the temporary bulge in the population.

But no one had anticipated that women on lifetime anti-aging drugs would live longer than men, a few perhaps even reaching 400 years of age. By the mid 8400's, it became clear that the population would stabilize at around 32 million, not 28.5, and the peak bulge would approach 40 million around the year 8496. A massive housing campaign ensued worldwide for the 140 residential townships, increasing the maximum capacity of each to 250,000, with the long-term expectation of 200,000 actual residents. In 8499 the Islands of New Jerusalem were voted to be set aside for special purpose, and like the spaceport Xerxes not be a township for permanent residency. In the early 8500's the population began its slow decline to 32 million and the housing problem was considered solved.

In Eliana's opinion, her ancestor Abdul Hadi saved the world twice, once during the civil wars and again when he helped create the present form of government. The Citizen Level system was preserved. There was still a universal desire to run the society as a meritocracy, in spite of the new family structures. But the value of the promotions changed profoundly. There were only modest increases in stipends between levels, barely more than token amounts. Housing and medical care and basic staples were provided free to all. The real value of promotions came in influence and voting rights.

The names for Royalty (CL-16 to CL-23) and Ruling Royalty (CL-24 to CL-31) were changed to Governor and Statesperson. The Governors typically ran the Guilds, and the Statespersons, typically about 800 in number, formed a body with combined legislative and judicial power. The top eleven Citizens also formed a supreme executive council.

But the real power of the government was distributed back to the general population. Each person had a weighted vote equal to their Class Level, and a 40% weighted no-vote could nullify any legislative or judicial decree of the State House. The State House could design laws, but the ultimate decision of whether the laws would stand forever rested with the lack of a 40% weighted dissent of the population. The ultimate power of the government had thus been returned to the people. The form of government was summed up in a child's nursery rhyme, "The State will propose, and the people will dispose."

"Is it fair?" Eliana thought, as she pondered the structure of her government. All infants legally become one-year old on the Judgment 1 after their birth. At the age of thirteen, they all become CL-1 and have one vote each. Not much to be sure. Eliana guessed the entire class of CL-1 (all children 13 to 20 years of age) would have less than 1% of the world's vote. But at least they were part of the franchise, and Eliana couldn't think of any ancient country that had opened up voting rights to so young an age group.

At age 21, all children became CL-2 and had two units of voting rights. In the following years, citizens could compete for promotional advancement at Judgment, and one in thirty for each age group and each Level would advance, gaining influence in the society both in voting rights and within their Guild.

"Not a paradise," Eliana thought. "No. Perhaps the closest we've come to it was in the early 8500's. Those were good times..." The society had been vibrant at the time. Abdul Hadi had used his enormous influence to resurrect the space program. There were a set of orbiting research space-stations and lunar bases, and dozens of interstellar probes were being launched each year to the surrounding stars. It was a pure gift to the society's far-future children. The light-burner drives were in their infancy then, and now in 9570 more than 80% of the probes still had not returned.

After Abdul Hadi's death, the world seemed to drift. By 8700, the last of the lunar bases was abandoned and all funding withdrawn from the interstellar exploration program. The world suffered through centuries of drug abuse and lawlessness, searching for a new morality to cope with growing pains of the new society.

Men and women might live to be 300 to 400 years, but female fertility ended around age seventy, and most women preferred to have their one or two children between thirty to forty years of age. The result was that for the first time in history, people had the opportunity to interact with their ancestors eight to ten generation back, with the older minorities holding much of the weighted voting rights. At times, the system of government seemed designed to maximize generational tension.

"I wonder if the new voting profiles are posted yet." Eliana thought to herself. She opened her eyes and pulled out her laptop and linked to the UGW (unified global web). After a moment of typing a Class population query for her age group, she had the following information on her screen:

Age 27: CL2=96193 CL3=17851 CL4=1380 CL5=57 CL6=1 CL7=0 CL8=1

"Yep, there I am," she thought. After a bit more typing, Eliana pulled up a table on the first ten voting Classes and found that CL8 represented a Class peak in voting rights.

1.17 million CL-1held 0.62% of the vote, average age = 16

3.58 million CL2 held 4.37% of the vote, average age = 52

3.55 million CL3 held 5.63% of the vote, average age = 83

3.38 million CL4 held 7.16% of the vote, average age = 114

3.20 million CL5 held 8.46% of the vote, average age = 144

2.98 million CL6 held 9.48% of the vote, average age = 172

2.73 million CL7 held 10.10% of the vote, average age = 198

2.41 million CL8 held 10.22% of the vote, average age = 219

2.05 million CL9 held 9.77% of the vote, average age = 238

1.66 million CL10 held 8.80% of the vote, average age = 253

Eliana's uniqueness was not due to reaching Command rank as such, 70% of adults would do so in their lifetimes. Her uniqueness was that she had done it so young, passing all six of her annual attempts at Class advancement. People would typically enter command rank around the age 200. For Eliana to do it at age 27 was remarkable.

"I wonder what Amir would think if he knew I just turned 27. He was so respectful, treating me as an elder. I'm likely to be half his age. Would he be happy for me, resentful, would he feel deceived, what..." Eliana frowned. "It would be awkward to tell him. It would seem like boasting."

Her thoughts returned to the world's history. "And then the late 8900's, what a mess that was." For a brief number of decades, the government tried to push against the human genome's designed birth ratio of three females to one male. The negative feedback from the older society was severe, and from both genders. The males resented the thought of the increased competition and their freedom to choose from both monogamous and polygamous marriages. The women still had a sharp collective memory of their eight millennia of enslavement, and greatly resented the possibility of giving up their hard-won 75% majority in voting rights.

And the artificial gender selection techniques also brought back memories of the horrors of the last time humanity meddled with the human genome, in the thirty years before the War of the Burning Metals. By the year 9000, all official attempts to shift the population gender ratio were cancelled.

Eliana sighed. "Are we in paradise now? The people of Abdul Hadi's time might think so. No major problems, certainly no wars, technology is still advancing, though very slowly, social discontent is at an all-time low. When was the last time I read a news report about vandalism?"

Eliana giggled. "Oh yeah! Four years ago, early 9566, that business at Aleppo, those fake holograms and spoofed news reports about a giant octopus attacking the docks! But that was more hilarious than malicious, playful and artfully done. And the technology! Who would have guessed you could fake a hologram over that large an open area? They had the monster a thousand meters long! Very innovative! It was almost worth the few minor injuries from the evacuation."

The smile faded from her face. "And yet... Are we drifting? Where is our sense of wonder, our yearning to explore? The technology makes life so easy. A typical work-month is fifteen five-hour shifts, and most people don't even work that. There's no need. And yet... We have the technology to explore the universe, have a human presence on Mars for the first time ever. We could be there in five years, maybe a permanent base in eight. What's stopping us? Why don't people care?"

Eliana sighed and stretched and knew she would not find an answer to her question. She glanced back at the sun sinking rapidly to the western horizon. A moment later Amir came and politely escorted her to the pilot cabin.



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Chapter 2: New Assignment

Eliana awoke precisely at sunrise, the first rays of the local morning shining into her eyes from her bedroom's eastern windows. She glanced at the clock, 8:58 PM. "Ah," she thought to herself. "It's one thing to have the dry geographic knowledge, to know that Judah's cathedral has its solar noon 8:25 hours earlier than the capital's. It's another matter entirely to expect a date change three hours after sunrise! I wonder if phrases like tomorrow and later today might have different meanings here."

Eliana rose from the bed and checked her communications log before her shower. She was very surprised to see that her scheduled orders to report in had been postponed for 24 hours. For the first time in many months, Eliana had a completely free day ahead of her.

She decided to go to the beach. Her living complex was only a few hundred meters from the north shore of Judah, and the views of the sand and the surf from her windows reminded her of her childhood and looked just too good to pass up. So she put on a bikini and headed out shortly after eating breakfast, reminding herself to be sure to pick up some sunscreen lotion on the way.

The beach was delightful, fine white sand gently sloping to a warm and pristine tropical ocean. The local beach was a family beach, and there were a number of preschool children playing nearby at the surf's edge. Eliana read a sign which told her that ten kilometers further west was a beach meant for CL1's seeking dates, and then a similar beach for adults, and beyond that a beach where public copulation was permitted. The sign finished by informing Eliana that nudity was permitted on the family beach, but people were asked to refrain from all sexual behavior while naked, including simple petting.

The rules suited Eliana just fine. She felt no immediate need for male companionship. She jogged the beach eastward for more than an hour, an easy loping gait of three-minute kilometers. After a while the township was far behind her and she ran admiring the undisturbed wild shore. At the end of her jog, she spent some time practicing Tai Chi in a deserted cove, and then sprinted back to town at full power, finishing her morning exercise with an energetic swim in the warm ocean. Afterwards she chatted with several of the parents at the beach, mostly mothers with a few fathers, and spent the rest of the time before lunch helping a group of small and mostly unclothed children build a sand castle.

By the time January 2 arrived, the sun was at an altitude of about 40 degrees and Eliana guessed its azimuth about 13 degrees south of due east. The island of Judah was close to 21 degrees south of the equator, but this close to the southern summer solstice, the sun was even further south and would be almost directly overhead at 3:39 AM later this new morning. After six years of living with the much less potent sunlight of Bandar Arenas, Eliana decided not to push her luck with the sunscreen and headed back to her living complex. She spent the rest of the easy day touring the city while keeping in the shade, and meeting a few of her new neighbors. She posted a few notes to her family in the local evening and sacked out early, feeling more relaxed than she had been in a very long time.

At 11 PM UCT on January 2, Eliana finally reported to her military superior at Judah's primary cathedral complex. She was startled to find her placement interview had been redirected to a Governor, a CL-16 Priest named Zaafir, someone with much higher rank than she was expecting. After a formal but friendly exchange of introductions in his spacious office, Zaafir began the placement interview with a totally unexpected question.

"Commander, have you ever considered applying for Conservation Ranger?"

Eliana blinked. "Sir? No sir, not for years." She thought about saying more, but then decided to let Zaafir take the lead.

"You've met all the academic requirements, excellent marks too. Why such a concentration?"

"Yes sir, thank you sir. Ecological studies were a childhood passion for me."

Zaafir nodded quickly. "And your military survival courses are acceptable substitutes for Ranger field requirements. Your qualification is almost complete. Did you know the six-month journey-test is the only credential you lack for permanent Ranger certification?"

"Uh, dimly I guess." Eliana finally forced herself to smile. "Sir, may I ask where these questions portend?"

He didn't answer directly. "Ever heard of a place called Treraksroset?"

"Treraksroset?" Eliana paused for a moment. "No. I'm guessing from the sound, ancient Scandinavia?"

"Wow, you are good! Yes, the name refers to the location where three ancient countries used to meet, Sweden, Norway, and Finland."

"Uh huh. And what's there now sir?"

"Well, the environment is still there of course. Plus a new two-person Ranger station. The Animal Conservation Guild at Cairo has been asking the military for months if we had any volunteers to join a Ranger cadet applying for full certification. What do you think of the idea?"

"Not what I was expecting sir, that's for sure. But I don't want to reject the idea outright. Let me think for a moment." Eliana paused and considered what the assignment would mean, six months of isolation in an arctic wilderness area. The assignment would not be particularly physically difficult or dangerous. Modern Ranger stations were state-of-the-art facilities. The six-month field assignment was in large part of psychological test, determining the candidate's ability to handle the isolation and the relationship with their single partner.

"What's the Citizen Level of the other candidate sir? Can you tell me how old she is?"

"A high achiever I think, like you. Wait. I take that back. You're in a class by yourself." Zaafir typed at his terminal. "Made CL-6 just two years ago, Judgment of 9568. So you'd be in command of the station." More typing... "Thirty-six years old now." Zaafir paused for a moment and then finished with, "His name is Basel."

Eliana stared at him. "A man sir?! You're asking me to live isolated with a man I don't know for six months?"

"Do you have a problem with that?"

"I might." Eliana took a deep breath. "I guess I was being presumptuous, but aren't Rangers almost always female?"

"Well, not always..." More typing... "Worldwide there are currently 983 certified Rangers... about 96% female... almost 4% male."

"And aren't the male Rangers the husbands of female Rangers?"

Zaafir paused for a moment. "I'd have to query personnel files to answer that, and I'm reluctant to do that without a real need. But I'll concede your point. It's very rare for a man not married to a Ranger to apply for the job."

He sighed and then looked Eliana in the eyes. "But don't you think it's unfair that Basel is having trouble with his certification just because he's a guy?"

Eliana felt bewildered. This placement interview was going in a totally unexpected direction. "Well... Yeah, probably. Sir, I support full gender equality, I really do. But why is this particular issue a military concern?"

Zaafir nodded. "Uh huh. I was wondering when we would come to that." He took a deep breath and then frowned. "The Holy! Something unusual happens and nobody seems to care!"

"Sir?"

"About 48 hours ago, a meteorite landed in the Treraksroset area, from the tracking telemetry right on top of the station."

"Wow! What did the station report?"

"It's not turned on yet. That's part of the certification testing. But I was speaking in metaphor. There's nothing to suggest the station itself was hit. But we did have a meteor strike close by. Or at least we should have."

"Should have sir?"

Zaafir sighed. "There was a major snow storm in the area at the time. We lost satellite visuals at about 10,000 meters."

"Uh huh. And radar?"

"The blip came in so fast, we didn't have the chance to align the radar satellites. We have a visual sighting only."

"Oh. Have you identified the impact point?"

"No, and that's what's bothering me. Unfortunately it's not bothering anyone else."

"Sir?"

"The storm cleared a few hours after impact. There was a standard sweep of the area, radar and infrared. Absolutely nothing."

"What about visuals?"

"There's not much. The area is in 24-hour darkness now."

"Oh of course. Sorry sir."

Zaafir shrugged. "The military Priesthood Governors officially voted to ignore the event."

"But not you sir?"

"I don't like mysteries, and the lack of an impact crater is gnawing on me."

"Well, how big was it? Could it have skipped out of the atmosphere?"

"Ah, good point. It was coming in at a very shallow angle. But no, it didn't skip. It definitely landed somewhere. Size? A few meters across maybe, five at most."

"Ah, well, something that small, maybe it burned up in the atmosphere."

"That's the official conclusion. But we tracked it down to 10,000 meters, and there was no sign of disintegration up till then."

"Ah... A lot of snow in the area sir?"

"Yes, quite deep."

"Perhaps it struck and caused an avalanche that buried the impact site."

"Other people are very comfortable with that explanation. There was no trace on the infrared scans though. Avalanches generate a lot of frictional energy."

Eliana paused for a long moment. "Then that would be my assignment sir? To find a buried impact crater?" In some sense, the mission sounded quite ridiculous, and Eliana had to stop herself from laughing.

"Well, once you're up there, I hope you'll stick it out and let the other cadet get certified. But it would be good for your credentials too. You'd be a full Ranger, with permanent legal rights to be in any conservation area in the world. That's about half the land mass of the planet."

"Yes, I know." Eliana sighed. "And that does have a certain appeal sir. But committing myself to live with a man I don't know for six months? Do I have any other choices for assignment?"

Zaafir nodded and then laughed and pointed to a pile of papers nearby. "Are you joking? I have over four dozen requests from around the world with proposals for you, both Priesthood and Guild. Eliana, you have a huge number of choices. You can go in any direction you want. I brought up the Ranger position because of the meteor. Cairo doesn't see it as a Conservation issue, and the military has decided to drop it. If you decide against it, I'll have to drop the issue too."

"I see. How long until I have to decide sir?"

Zaafir sighed. "I'd like to give you all the time you want. But I'm going to catch hellfire very soon for not having someone work these other proposals with you."

Eliana nodded. "I understand... Would a couple of hours be okay?"

Her superior looked at her gratefully. "That would be very okay. Thank you for considering this." He looked at the time. "Report back here by 2 AM."

"Yes sir." They exchanged crisp salutes and Eliana left the office.

Eliana wandered about the cathedral complex for a while, stopping briefly at a cafeteria for an excellent lunch. Afterwards she was walking a deserted corridor towards the main Sanctuary when she saw a heavy wooden side door leading to a meditation chapel. An etched plaque by the door announced the chapel was reserved for Command Class and above. Eliana almost passed it by before stopping and laughing at herself.

Her ID clicked the door open and she entered a small oval hall with a domed oval ceiling. The room was in the shape of half an egg. There were perhaps a dozen plush meditation chairs before an abstract altar at the other wider end of the oval. The altar was made of multiple large smooth crystal prisms washed with trickles of water and lit from below by a variety of slowly moving blue lights at the bottom of a pool. The prisms reflected and sparkled and threw peaceful arcs of bluish light onto the dark curving wood above. As her eyes adjusted to the reduced light, Eliana decided that the effect was quite beautiful and closed the door behind her. As a Priestess, she rested her body into a soft leather chair and silently began to Pray.

"My Holy, so great and good and kind, your child needs your guidance. Help me make this decision, help me make a good choice, help me become what you want me to be."

The room was delightfully silent except for the gentle sound of the water falling off the prisms. Eliana tried to relax her body, but her mind was in turmoil.

"I'm so shy!" she wailed in her mind. "I can work and serve and command with men, I'm just fine there, but socially?! Oh Holy, I get so nervous! Six months alone with a man?! How can I do this?! So many of my age mates are married now, Batshir and Liraz are even planning for children! And I feel like such an awkward duck around men at parties. How will I act, how will I feel living in such isolation? I don't know which would be worse, worrying that he thinks I'm pretty, or worrying that he thinks I'm not. Eliana, stop that! That's not a Prayer!"

She took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. "My Holy, love of my heart. You are the potter, I am the clay. Guide me, mold me, help me become what you want me to be..."

And the time passed in the quiet room. Eventually Eliana felt her body relax as she made her decision, all her tension and worry being drained by her loving Guide. It was Eliana's faith that this was a sure sign of making a good decision. Not necessary a right decision. She thought that often the boundaries between decisions are not as simple as right and wrong. But Eliana felt deep peace now and knew she was had picked a good path. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she whispered in her mind. "Your guided child is extremely grateful."

Her eyes opened. She still had a little time but saw no need to delay. Eliana got up and stretched and headed back to Zaafir's office.



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Chapter 3: Cold Start

Time: January 7, 9570 5:54 AM UCT

"It was a good idea, Commander. I thought we were going to find the problem here too."

Eliana stared at the dead consoles in front of her and replied back to her companion, "Basel, please log that command flow appears to be working, and that the problem appears to be internal to the fusion unit." She paused for a moment in the super-frigid room as Basel spoke into his suit's audio log and then asked him, "Any ideas?"

"Is there much else we can do? These packs are sealed assemblies. The Fusion Guild would go nuts if we opened one up."

"Oh, I wasn't suggesting that. Clean-lab-only for breaking fusion seals, I know the standards."

"Commander, I suggest we concentrate on getting our communications up. Maybe we can call Sidon for advice."

"Without main power, getting the satellite link up will take an hour..." Eliana frowned. "As a last resort perhaps. And I don't know what the fusion e-techs could tell us that we don't already know."

"Well, not just Sidon. We could ask to be evacuated."

"Oh, getting tired of my company already huh?" Eliana was trying to make a joke, but realized she was so tired it probably didn't sound that way. She tried to soften her voice and said, "Basel, part of the certification testing is not asking for help."

Eliana thought she heard Basel give a humph noise through his arctic survival suit. He came over and shined a light on a dark display by her side. "It's -59C in here! We'll have an even harder time getting certified if we're frozen to death!"

Eliana humphed back. "You're the one with the physics background! The prime power pack is supposed to be self-starting! Come up with something!"

"Acknowledged Commander! Working on it now!" Basel stomped over to the non-responsive power core and stood before it motionless.

Eliana thought his move was more to get away from her than to do anything constructive. "Oh hell," she thought. "Did I really have to talk like that? I came close to snapping at him! We've been at this for what, close to six hours now, and he's still looking to me for leadership. Well, not that he wants to..." Eliana sighed and thought again how tired she was, in addition to being numb from the super cold. Her arctic suit had superb insulation and the active heaters were protecting her from serious frostbite, but her tired mind and cold body were demanding that she take a nap, and that just wasn't possible now.

The last few days had been a whirlwind of activity. Zaafir had her flying a jump jet to Cairo less than 24 hours after she accepted her assignment. There was a huge amount of paperwork to go through to have Eliana become a registered member of the Animal Conservation Guild, and it was done in a rushed manner. Eliana later found out from Basel that a number of the construction Guilds that had built the Ranger station were furious with the Cairo Guild. They said it was not in their design requirements that the station would be left inactive and unpowered for so long in such a super cold environment. They were threatening to void their warranties.

Basel! Eliana wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but Basel certainly wasn't it. In general, men typically had an easy time socializing with women. Men could expect frequent offers for dating throughout their lives, sometimes from a single woman looking for a date, but more often from a pair of women who were interested in polygamy or often just a sexual tryst without any commitment at all. Eliana would sometimes laugh to herself as a child and wonder how ideal the men must think the setup was. But ten minutes after dropping in to introduce herself at Cairo, Eliana decided Basel was just as shy about socializing with the opposite sex as she was.

And here they were now, six hours into their 180-day test and off to a very difficult start. They were on Level-2 of the four-level station, one level below ground in a ten-meter diameter circular area filled with the central controls of the station. The only light was from their arctic suits plus an extra battery light Basel had brought down from Level-4 storage around 2 AM. At midnight when the jump jet had lifted off, they had both been expecting to climb down the access ladder and simply turn the station on and sack out in toasty comfort a few hours later.

Eliana stared at the back of her companion. "And he clearly was not expecting to be the subordinate member of the team. Give him some credit for adjusting to that."

The thought reminded Eliana how quickly she decided to accept this assignment without thinking of the practical implications. Ranger was a lifelong certification, but the Conservation Guilds had an age requirement of fifty years maximum for applying for the job. They had found through long experience that the older applicants as a group did not stay with the job.

"The Holy," thought Eliana. "I'm not considering this to be a permanent career either. And Basel! As a CL6 he was almost guaranteed to get a junior citizen as a partner, not a Commander. Eliana, you know the social norms. As a commander, how many women would be tempted to dominate Basel in a setup like this, perhaps even sexually dominate him? I'm not going to, but he doesn't know my character yet. Hell! I can't remember ever mucking up a leadership role this badly."

"Commander?"

"Huh?" Eliana turned to her partner. "Yes Basel?"

"What if it's not the power pack? I'm thinking your first idea might still be correct."

"It's not getting the command to turn on?"

"Yeah."

Eliana waved her arm at the disassembled control panel. "But we're getting strong output from the signaling lasers."

"Commander, strong doesn't mean correct. What if the cold is deforming the optics?"

"What? Oh! You think the power core is getting blurred commands?"

Basel shrugged, the gesture barely visible in the dim light and super-bulky clothing. "It's possible Commander. I've never heard of anyone trying to dead-jump a power pack this cold. Prime units are normally left on from the moment they leave Sidon assembly." He pointed to a control unit nearby. "That booster battery there is Sidon factory issue. I think it was meant to keep the power pack warm, but it's completely drained."

Eliana nodded. "Do we have enough reserve to warm the pack ourselves?"

"It's not obvious. Almost all the batteries in the station are uncharged. I was lucky to find something for the extra lights. I think it was a fluke."

"Yes, that's part of our certification, charging everything from the fusion pack, I know. Basel?"

"Yes Commander?"

"I apologize for being short with you before. Your concern for our safety is completely valid. What do you want to do?"

"Huh?" He looked at her for a long moment. "About evacuation? Really?"

"Yep. You understand the engineering here better than I do, and thus the risks. You make the call."

"I'd be inclined to..." He stared at her for a moment. "You don't want to give up, do you Commander?"

"No. But Basel, I'm feeling so sleepy, I don't want to trust my judgment anymore, not where I might get us killed."

Basel stared at her. "Wow..."

Eliana was silent for a moment and then blinked. "Huh? Wow? Wow what?"

"I never... Oh, nothing..." More silence. "Commander, I know you're the person in charge, know you'll take all the demerits if we give up. Let me take another shot at this."

"Okay. Need any help?"

"I'll let you know sir." And he turned and began working with the hardware.

"Sir?" thought Eliana silently. "Did he just call me sir? That was the first time! Thank you Basel. I know what that means, for a man to call a woman sir. I'm just not sure how I've earned your respect."

And the time passed. About thirty minutes later, they made a complete sweep of the station and found a partially charged battery in the medical bay on Level-3. They both worked to free it from a medical unit. There was a fair bit of predawn light coming in from the southern windows. Eliana made a comment that the dawn looked almost here.

"It is almost here," Basel agreed. "But it's not going to get here, not today. I think the sun was due south at around 6 AM today UCT, about two degrees below the horizon. That's as close as it gets for now. This time of day, it skims horizontal just below the horizon."

Eliana nodded. "I know what you mean. I've lived at Bandar Arenas for the last six years."

"Ah, a capital girl, huh?"

"Yeah, that's me." They were soon back down in the Level-2 darkness working on the primary system.

Eliana stood near Basel as he worked, adding the light from her survival suit to his. There was nothing else for her to do as he worked. She occasionally clapped her arms and hands to keep warm.

After a time she looked down and saw her suit was the only light source for the room. "Basel, is your suit functioning okay?"

"Almost... got it! Brrrrrr!" Eliana heard his teeth chatter, and then the room became blindingly bright with light. Basel called out happily. "We're on-line! Prime pack now delivering one hundred kilowatts usable power!" He stood up and jumped up and down to get his blood flowing.

As Eliana's eyes adjusted to the light, she saw wires from Basel's suit leading into the heating assembly. "You were heating the power pack with your suit?!"

"Oh, we were so close. Yeah. Should I have asked your permission Commander?"

"No, I didn't mean it like that. Great job Basel!"

"Thanks!"

"What are you doing with the power now?"

"Well, except for the lights here, I'm sending everything into environmental heating. We should be adding enough energy to raise the air temperature of the station 1C every ten seconds or so. It'll take a bit longer to heat everything else of course."

"Basel, what's your suit's charge?"

"It's drained Commander."

"Plug in and recharge."

"Not a bad idea." A few seconds after he hooked up, he asked, "How's your own charge Commander?"

"Uh," Eliana glanced at a display within her hood. "I'm okay, still at 69%."

"Hand me your leads. I'll top you off."

"Okay, thanks..." Eliana breathed a big sigh of relief as she felt the extra surge of power warming the heating elements in her suit. They still had a huge amount of work to do to certify the station, including energizing the larger but not self-starting secondary fusion packs. But it seemed the hard part was over. Eliana felt her body wobbling a bit as their success and the extra heat helped her relax.

"Basel, mind if I sit down?"

"No, not at all. The chairs are still super cold, but with you plugged into main power like this you should be okay."

"Yeah, thanks."

"When was the last time you slept?"

"Days ago."

"That's what I thought. The Cairo Guild is crazy sometimes. They do that to their new members. Why don't we start a sleep rotation, you first?"

"Really? You don't know how good that sounds." Eliana gave a deep yawn. Basel wheeled over a command chair and pushed it almost into a full recline position. Eliana collapsed into it gratefully.

"You don't mind?" she said sleepily.

"Oh, I'll be okay. I'll do the first four hours of the startup procedures. Then we'll change places."

Eliana yawned peacefully and nodded, unable to keep her eyes open. "Wake me if you need help with anything."

"Of course Commander." Basel stood there wondering if she had heard him. She was rapidly drifting off. He watched her sleep for several minutes before getting back to work. It was six hours later that Eliana woke and traded places with him.



-------

Chapter 4: First Touch


Two days later... 

Time January 9, 9570 8 PM UCT

Eliana woke refreshed in her cozy bedroom on Level-1. The space was small and the large bed took up almost half the room. Eliana knew the conventions. This was her only private space in the station, just as an identical room on the opposite side of Level-1 was Basel's only private space. The two had a plan to have breakfast at 9 PM, and Eliana had a free hour till then.

Eliana knew the specs of modern Ranger stations, but she thought she didn't appreciate how spacious they were until now. Level-1 was the circular living area with an interior radius over six meters, an intentionally spacious contrast to the five-meter interior radii of the other three Levels. As with Level-2 station control, the living area had generous three-meter ceilings. The ground-floor Level-3 had a five-meter ceiling and the observation dome Level-4 was even more impressive, three-meter vertical walls topped by a hemisphere, providing a majestic eight-meters of head room at the center of the dome. In Eliana's opinion, the best feature of Level-4 was the ability to turn all or any part of the dome and vertical walls opaque or crystal transparent. There was also a well-equipped exercise area there, and earlier before bed she had a wonderful time working out in just leotards under a dome of cold winter stars.

Except for the exercise area in the observation dome, Level-1 was their principal living area. Besides the two bedrooms, there were compact but fully-equipped bathroom and galley-kitchen, a dining / recreation area, two small desk areas, a two-person sofa and two very plush lounge chairs near a state-of-the-art multi-media center. As part of their satellite communications certification, they had verified their links to the world's commercial holographic channels.

Below the living area was Level-0, a self-contained plant recycling air and 64 cubic meters of drinkable water. The technology for Level-0 had been adapted from the era of lunar bases. It was extremely tough and long-lasting, and Basel and Eliana had no expectation of ever having to service the machinery.

Eliana turned on a light in her bedroom as she woke and smiled. She was dressed in just her thermal pajamas and thinking how easy it would be to live a decadent life here. By common agreement, she and Basel had decided to keep the station between 16C and 17C, and as she wiggled her bare feet under her single blanket, she found the mild coolness delightful.

They had the power to keep the station at whatever temperature they liked. It was superbly insulated, and they had one megawatt of power at their disposal, 100 kW from their prime fusion pack, 600 kW from twin secondary packs, and 300 kW from the CAT, a versatile two-person rover with a self contained fusion engine that was currently plugged into central power.

The Ranger station was extremely well constructed, meeting full lunar standards. Normal operating mode was to run completely sealed with the Level-0 machinery purifying the air. The outside could magically turn into a hard vacuum, and Eliana and Basel would still be fine anywhere in the station, including the adjacent CAT garage that connected to Level-3.

There was no particular need to keep watches. Local solar noon would occur around 6 AM UCT at their station's longitude, and they both decided to center their sleep periods at the opposite side of the day, from 4 PM to 8 PM.

Eliana's thoughts turned to Basel. They had had a very busy in the past two days bringing the station up to full functionality. Eliana thought she couldn't be happier how she and Basel were coming together as a team. Over the last few days, they had developed an enormous respect for each other's abilities, and Eliana was touched by how many small offers of kindness he had extended to her. He would log all his certification work but leave it to Eliana to transmit the reports, giving her the opportunity to take the primary credit. In actuality, she was doing exactly the opposite, being truthful and grading him as exemplary in his accomplishments.

"I shouldn't be surprised," Eliana thought. "Zaafir make a comment of Basel being a high achiever, didn't he?" She took her laptop from the nightstand and began typing a simple UGW query, lying prone with her legs bent and her bare feet held loosely in the air above her thighs. A few moments later she had the following information on her screen.

Age 34: CL2=76953 CL3=30941 CL4=5742 CL5=651 CL6=50 CL7=3

Age 35: CL2=74538 CL3=32275 CL4=6488 CL5=803 CL6=68 CL7=4

Age 36: CL2=72200 CL3=33495 CL4=7252 CL5=972 CL6=90 CL7=6

"There's Basel," she thought. "In 9568, he made CL6 when he turned 34. One of fifty in what, a population well over a hundred thousand. He really is your peer Eliana, a high-end achiever. Don't go snooty on him just because he's CL6 and you're CL8." Eliana couldn't stop herself though. She probed the data and found that after herself, the next youngest Commander was 38 years old.

There was a polite knock on her door. "Commander?"

"Oh, hi Basel! I'm decent. Come on in." Eliana turned her head to smile at him.

The door opened and Basel stood in the archway, returning her smile but then looking a little sheepish. Eliana suddenly realized why. She was dressed in close-hugging thermal pajamas and presenting her very clearly defined rump to Basel, lying with her legs raised up in a position commonly understood to be a female request for rear-mounted coitus. Eliana coughed and blushed deeply and turned to sit on the side of bed. "Oops, sorry," she whispered, and then in a clear voice, "Hi! Good morning. What's up?"

"That's okay," he whispered back, and then in a normal voice. "I saw network traffic on the monitor upstairs. I knew you were up Commander. I was wondering if you'd like to review my suggestions for today's duty roster." He gestured to his laptop was under his arm.

"Sure, that would be fine." There was no place else to sit in the room, so Eliana patted the bed by her side. Basel quickly sat down next to her on her left, and then stiffened a bit as their bodies touched, wondering if he was sitting too close.

"No, this is fine," Eliana mumbled as she took his laptop and opened it, supporting it on both her left thigh and his right. "What's our plan?"

Eliana could feel Basel trembling a bit, and thought he was both enjoying the experience and shy about having their bodies touch like this. As a Priestess she was a well-trained councilor, with years of medical training in reading emotional states. Underneath the nervousness Eliana could sense Basel's deep pleasure at having her pajama-clad body against his, and Eliana had to stop herself from putting her arm around him in an expression of returned affection.

After a moment he took a deep breath and pointed to his display. "Well, the station itself is now completely set up. I thought the highlight for today might be to start taking the CAT out for its certification runs. I thought we could make a short run starting around 5 AM. See here? Predawn twilight will run from 3:21 AM tomorrow with the sun's azimuth at 143 degrees, to 8:43 AM with the sun's azimuth at 217 degrees. That's our time window when the sun will be six degrees or less below the horizon."

Eliana laughed. "Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of twilight."

"Oh, sorry Commander! I didn't mean to condescend."

"Huh? Oh Basel, no. I wasn't complaining, just being playful."

"Really, I apologize. Sometimes when I'm nervous, I start run my words and talk too much."

"I haven't noticed, not at all." Eliana decided to take a chance and butted her head gently against his shoulder, and then looked up and smiled at him. She could feel her own shyness within her being overwhelmed by a fierce and unexpected desire to be playful.

Basel shyly smiled back. "You're very... Uh, you're very kind Commander."

"Hah! What was your first word?"

"Uh, I'd rather not say." He was giving her a big grin back.

"Perfect!" thought Eliana. "Now's the time to bring this up!"

"Basel," she said out loud, "before we get into planning, can we talk about our command structure?"

"Huh? Uh, yeah sure. What's on your mind Commander?"

"Well, for one thing, the title Commander. I know the world is holding me in charge here, but between us, can we be equals?"

Basel sat still for a moment, and then his eyes went wide. "You're serious, aren't you? You don't want me to report to you?"

"Actually, I'd rather we treated each other as peers."

"What about an emergency situation?"

"Oh, good point! You're way ahead of me. If the emergency is of a military nature, and I can't imagine us having one of those, let me command. My training there is vast. But if it's an engineering emergency, and that one I can imagine us having, Basel, take control. I'll obey your instructions. And for everything else, let's just plan together."

Basel stared at her. "Commander, that sounds... that sounds wonderful! Thank you! I don't know what else to say!"

Eliana butted his shoulder again and laughed. "I do! Will you call me Eliana?"

Basel gave her a very shy smile back and then nodded his head vigorously. They returned to planning their day. Eliana found herself working to keep a lid on how happy she was feeling. A short while later she was in their common shower washing up before breakfast.

"I can't believe how much I've changed," she thought as she lathered the soap across herself in the hot sprays. "Was I worrying just a few days ago at Judah, whether I would be upset if he thought I was pretty? He does think I'm pretty! His body responses are so classic, maybe even a bit of an erection as we sat this morning. He does think I'm pretty! And my heart is singing with the joy of it!" Eliana dried off and dressed and went to find what Basel had prepared for breakfast.



-------

Chapter 5: First Date

Three days later... 

Time: January 12, 9570 1 PM UCT

Eliana had a few minutes to go in her forty-minute run on the ellipse trainer when she saw Basel climb the ladder and join her in the Level-4 exercise area. He was dressed in workout clothing, thin and tight. His outfit was similar to Eliana's leotards but with bare legs and arms, and Eliana caught her breath as she admired his masculine form. "Excellent physical shape," she thought. "He's so handsome! Why didn't I see this the first time we met?"

"Hi Basel!" she called out loud.

"Hi Eliana!" Basel looked around the domed room in wonder. The entire dome and vertical-wall area was covered by a super-realistic hologram. It looked as if they were standing in the middle of a wild noontime forest. "I saw the sunlight in the ladder-well and couldn't understand what was going on. This is fabulous!"

"Yes! A beautiful surprise, isn't it?"

Basel nodded and walked over to a control console. After a moment he called out, "It's programmable! Wow! I could have a lot of fun playing with this, maybe even add some animation!"

Eliana laughed back. "Yes! We could be at Aleppo eating lobster by the docks and meet the giant octopus!" She was puzzled to see Basel stiffen for a moment, and then he relaxed.

"Uh, yeah, if you want... I see you like the ellipse trainer too!"

"Yep, it's my favorite." Her timed period ended. She jumped off and said, "Here! It's all yours."

"Hey, don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Get off just because I want it."

"What? I'm not. My run just ended." She smiled playfully. "I have proof! You can check the exercise log!"

"Hey, I..." A worried looking Basel suddenly realized Eliana was grinning at him and he smiled back.

"You were saying?" she teased.

"Yeah. I think I was going to say, Hey, I have to remember how playful you are sometimes."

"Uh huh."

"Maybe we should complain to the Guild, complain their hologram present was not enough, demand they put two ellipse trainers in every station."

"Oh, absolutely! There's no reason we should have to share. Uh, Basel, want some company while you work out?"

"Sure, that'd be great! Just remember who's cooking dinner tonight."

"Oh, I haven't forgotten."

There was a mat area near the center of the dome. Eliana did some splits and deep stretching and then a number of basic martial arts moves, practicing slow-motion block-kick-block-counterpunch combinations, a few judo rolls, and then finishing with her favorite Tai Chi. Near the end she heard Basel sighing deeply on the trainer.

She turned to him. "You okay?"

"Your form..." whispered Basel. "It's so beautiful."

Eliana sighed back. It was Basel's first direct comment about her appearance and she felt quite touched by it. She thought for a moment, and realized she didn't know if he meant her martial arts form or the feminine shape of her body in the tight leotards. Eliana wasn't too sure what men thought of her face, but she thought she had an attractive figure, pleasantly proportioned, very fit and a bit curvier than most. "Thank you," she whispered back, and then more loudly, "Uh, time to get dinner going!" She headed for the ladder.

"What's on the menu?" Basel called out.

"A surprise! You like hot and spicy?"

"Oh, my favorite!"

She laughed. "Great!"

"Uh, Eliana?" Basel called out after she was partway down the ladder, only her head and shoulders above floor level.

"Yeah?"

"After dinner, you want to... oh, play a board game or listen to music or something?"

"Sure! Both sound nice. Let's just see if you survive my cooking first!" And so saying, her head disappeared from view.

Eliana was surprised how excited she was during dinner. Her stomach felt tied in knots and she barely noticed the taste of her own cooking, though she was very happy that Basel obviously enjoyed her efforts. After cleanup, they both drifted to the game table in the small recreation area. Basel made a gesture, and Eliana opened the computer log and looked at the game menu.

"There's a huge selection here. What's your pleasure, pure strategy, mostly chance, or something combination like backgammon? Feeling lucky tonight?"

Eliana gulped. Her last question also had a vulgar slang meaning. She had just asked Basel if he thought he was going to have sex with her tonight. She looked timidly in his eyes. He was shaking his head slowly no, but his eyes were full of kindness.

"Sorry." she whispered. "Basel?"

"You are so amazing."

"Oh? How so?"

"You remind me of The Preacher Man."

"Huh? What? I do?"

"Yeah, the First Tower. Ilias made this wonderful observation when he first met Abigail, about how can a woman be so soft and so strong at the same time. His comment reminds me of you."

"It does?"

"Yeah. Your accomplishments, your dedication, your competitive spirit, you are so sharp, and all your abilities orbit such a gentle core. Eli, you amaze me."

"Eli?" Eliana whispered. "I haven't been Eli since my twelfth year. Only my grandmother calls me Eli now."

"Ah. Do you mind?"

"No... I don't think I mind at all..." Eliana gulped and felt herself trembling. "Wow. I didn't think I'd be this nervous."

Basel nodded. "Yeah. I'm feeling shy too, shy with a whole bunch of other stuff trying to burst through."

Eliana nodded back. "I know, I feel it too, and it frightens me a bit in this set-up. I don't want to move too fast. Ranger history is filled with stories of teams becoming their own worst enemies... Murderous enemies..."

"Oh, I know it. That's what these tests are all about. Maybe we should stick with strategy for tonight, leave luck for a later day."

Eliana nodded. "A good idea." She took a deep breath. "So! Strategy it is. Let's see... There's a huge selection here, thousands of games, everything from primary-school up to Jamgo."

"Oh, I love Jamgo!" Basel replied. "Do you play?"

"I'm a ranked player," Eliana batted her eyes sweetly.

"Yikes, really?! Well, let's give it a try anyway!"

"Okay!"

Eliana brought up the image of the Jamgo board. A distant cousin of the ancient game of Go, Jamgo was played in a 13 x 13 x 13 holographic cube, and the object was to encapsulate 3-D regions of space. As a move, a player could insert an offensive stone, insert a defensive stone, or flip the status of an owned stone from one mode to the other. Opposing stones could also be captured with rules vaguely similar to the ancient Go game.

Eliana let Basel go first. After the first twenty moves, she decided his play looked weird, and in kindness she held back on her play a bit so the score wouldn't be too lopsided. At move 48, she suddenly gasped as she realized her whole position had been underpinned and was about to fall apart. And then Basel shocked her by offering a draw.

"A draw?! You can't be serious!"

"Sure I can. You were just being sweet Eli, trying to keep the game interesting, and I suckered you into letting your guard down. I don't want to win a game this way. Let's start over."

Eliana sighed as she studied her position. "Having this mess disappear does have a certain appeal to it. Okay! To the death on the next one Basel!"

"Okay! No mercy!"

Eliana pushed the reset button and the next game started out along conventional lines. On move 53, the pattern was set for classic gambit called the poisoned helix and Eliana offered it. She was somewhat surprised when Basel made a completely unexpected move. She shook her head in disbelief. The whole right flank of his primary sector was about to crumble.

"Basel, I know we said no mercy, but do you want to take your move back?"

"Nope. This is my secret recipe."

"Huh?" Eliana studied the board closely for several minutes. "My Holy! It's a counter gambit to the poisoned helix! Where did this come from?!"

"I wish I could take full credit, but it's mostly from a computer program I wrote as a teenager. The code found a pivot point that unwinds the helix."

"It did, huh? And what should I do, accept or decline?"

"You should decide Commander."

"Ah, right. No mercy, yes..."

Eliana studied the board intensely. Declining the counter gambit looked even more terrifying than accepting it. She decided to take the plunge, and it wasn't until forty moves later that she resigned. "Time to put myself out of my misery Basel."

"Excellent game Eliana." He offered to shake hands. "You walked into my one strength. I think in most games you'll have me."

Eliana accepted the handshake. "Oh, I don't know about that. You could easily compete with the ranked players. Basel, your counter-gambit, will you tell me now? Should I have declined?"

"No."

"Uh, no what? No, I should not have declined, or no you're not going to tell me?"

"No as in don't decline the counter gambit. That path is a quick suicide."

"Then my position was hopeless even at move 53?"

Basel frowned. "I'm not sure. There's a place five moves later where you can make a very non-obvious move and push the position into something incredibly chaotic." He looked at the board. "Want me to show you?"

Eliana yawned. "Oh, that's very kind of you, and I do want to know. But perhaps..."

"Another time?"

Eliana yawned again and nodded.

"Want to sack out?"

"Well..." Eliana suddenly felt herself blushing. "Almost... Want to listen to some music first?"

"Sure!"

Eliana stood undecided for a moment as Basel fiddled with the sound system, finally remembering her favorite motto, "When in doubt, be bold!" and chose the two-person sofa rather than the separate lounge chairs. Her boldness was rewarded by a beaming smile from Basel as he came and sat by her side. A beautiful and famous melody softly filled the room, mournful yet profoundly relaxing.

"Recognize this?" Basel said playfully.

Eliana chuckled. "Abdul Hadi and Hadassa, one of their last ballets, Evening's Loneliness. It was written a month after Dodi's death."

Basel nodded and closed his eyes. "It's an original recording by Hadassa. I love her flute. She floats above the harp like pure air."

Eliana nodded and closed her eyes too and lost herself in the music. After a while she rested her head against his warm shoulder and sighed happily when he rested his head lightly against hers. She felt him tremble, and she sighed again and murmured, "A perfect ending to a perfect day..."

"Hmm..." Basel sighed in agreement and then brushed her soft hair against his cheek and kissed the top of her head.

"A kiss!" Eliana thought. "He kissed me!" She snuggled her head into his shoulder in appreciation.

"Eli..."

"Yeah?"

"I feel so many emotions, excited and happy and nervous, all at the same time."

Eliana let out a long ragged sigh. "It's the same for me..."

"And I'm feeling so embarrassed... How I worried..."

"Hmm? Worried about what?"

"Well, when we first met, back in Cairo."

Eliana lifted her head and kissed his cheek and then returned her head to his shoulder, her eyes open. "Yes, I remember. You were okay Basel, just a little nervous. I had forgotten... What were you nervous about?"

"Well, you I guess."

"Me?"

"Well, you know..."

"Huh?"

"Well, you know..."

"Basel, know what?"

"Oh Eli, I'm so embarrassed about the fears I had."

"You don't have them now, do you?"

"Oh no."

"Do you trust me?"

"Now? Yes I do. Completely."

Eliana nodded and pressed her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes again. "And I trust you completely. I want to lower all my defenses Basel. Let you see the complete me, the strong and the weak."

"You have no weaknesses Eli. You're wonderful."

"No weaknesses?" she whispered back. "Basel, that's not possible for anyone. But I promise, I will have no defenses with you. I will let you see the complete me, all my hopes and fears. I will show you the shy Priestess who gets knots in her stomach when you ask her for a date. I will show you the flirting militia girl who likes to tease and work out in front of you in sexy leotards. I will to show you The Holy's child and all the warts on her soul. We all have them, and I will keep my defenses lowered and let you see mine. I promise."

The time passed, the soft music filling the room. After a while Eliana realized Basel was crying and she put her arms around him and hugged him. "Basel, trust me. What were you afraid of?"

"Oh, this is so embarrassing... G.R." he whispered.

"G.R.?"

"Yeah..." A huge sigh. "G.R."

Eliana giggled. "No, I didn't mean it like that! I don't know what G.R. means."

"Oh... I was afraid of... our age difference. So many months went by! None of the other Ranger cadets would accept me as a candidate partner. And then I heard a woman Commander had selected me. I was terrified! I don't know how you got passed the age requirement..."

"Huh?! Basel! How old do you think I am?"

"Oh, I don't know. Two hundred?"

"My gosh! Basel, I'm so sorry! This is my fault! I should have told you before. I'm twenty-seven."

"Huh? WHAT?!"

"Twenty-seven, that's me."

"Impossible!"

Eliana giggled, trying to make light of his disbelief. "Oh, this is a fine way to show that you trust me!" She then leaned over and kissed his astonished face to show she was just being playful. "Here! Let me show you!"

A few moments later she ran back from her bedroom with her laptop and pulled up the Class distribution on her age group. "See? See that bump at the end of the chain? That's me!"

Basel stared for a moment and then whispered, "My gosh Eli..."

"This was all my fault. I should have told you, but I don't like to boast and a good time to mention it never came up. Forgive me?"

Basel blinked and was silent for a moment. "Forgive you? There's nothing to forgive. But there's so much I don't understand. Six promotions in a row?! Has that ever happened in recorded history?!"

Eliana laughed. "A few times, yes. But I'm the first person to do it straight from CL2. My grandmother Naysa says I haven't fallen off my lion yet."

"Wow... Wow, wow, wow... Eliana, I'm more puzzled than ever. What's the world's greatest achiever doing signing up to be a lone Ranger?"

Eliana nodded and yawned. "We should have done this days ago. Let's take tomorrow off and tell each other about ourselves."

Basel nodded thoughtfully. The music had ended and he realized this was a very good time to call it a night. They shared a brief chaste kiss and headed to their separate bedrooms. Basel thought he would think about and review the evening in his mind for hours, but he was in a deep peaceful sleep moments after his head hit the pillow.



-------

Chapter 6: First History


The next local day the two Ranger candidates both felt the need to back off and have some quiet time alone. So they spent time with different projects. Eliana spent hours familiarizing herself with the operations of the CAT garage, and Basel worked on clearing all the storage out of the Level-4 observation dome. They had agreed to turn the entire top Level into a combined observation / exercise / recreation area, and move everything else to the extra storage lockers on Level-3.

At 6 AM sharp, Eliana rode the elevator adjacent to the ladder well up to the dome from Level-1. In her hand was a small picnic basket. She found Basel standing at the southern end of the circular room, staring at the horizon. The outside weather was clear and much warmer than when they had arrived. It was currently -31C and the dawn looked seconds away from becoming reality.

Eliana stood by Basel's side for a long moment and admired the pristine countryside. "This is spectacular. And it's all real, not a hologram, right?"

"Oh yes. The Holy's truth, in all its beauty."

Eliana nodded. "How close?"

"The sun's due south right now, less than half a degree below the horizon."

"And how long?"

"Three more days." He pointed with his hand almost touching the transparent wall. "Right there. On January 16th, you'll see the very thin tip of the top of the sun from 6:02 AM to 6:08 AM. Assuming good weather of course..."

"Let the games begin..."

"Yeah..." Basel turned to her, nodded thoughtfully and smiled. "Have a nice morning?"

"Okay I guess. The CAT garage is laid out a bit differently than what's described in the texts. The Guild really should update their documentation."

"Not their strongest point. So, what's for lunch?"

"A cornucopia of vegetables and frozen fruit shakes for dessert." Eliana looked around. "You did a nice job here." She turned to the picnic table Basel had set up nearby and began setting up their meal.

They ate their lunch mostly in silence. Near the end, Basel looked up at Eliana and said, "It's amazing how much you and I are on the same wavelength. You feel it too, don't you?"

Eliana nodded. "It is amazing. I ask you very terse questions, and you know what I'm talking about. And now we're about to agree on something we haven't even verbalized yet. And yes, I do agree, we should slow down. Not change course but slow down. The isolation here could kill us if we rush headlong into something and then realize we feel trapped. Basel, I still mean everything I said last night. Let's just take it slowly."

Basel nodded his head. "So, who goes first?"

Eliana stretched and thought for a moment. "I feel like being a listener now."

"All right. Let's see, my life history, where to begin... I was born in Baalbek, near the west coast of North America. My parents are double-shifters and just moved there before I was born, so I spent my whole childhood there. I moved to Aleppo in 9555 when I turned 21. I registered for double shifts too, so Aleppo's been my township residence ever since. Been spending a lot of field time at Cairo of course. I haven't been back home in over a year."

"Aleppo and Baalbek huh? So you grew up with the photonics Guild. No wonder you're so good with holograms."

Basel stiffened and looked a little nervous. "What do you mean?"

Eliana paused for a moment and finally said, "Basel, don't worry. I'm just trying to show you one of the warts on my soul. Did you have anything to do with the Aleppo octopus prank of 9566?"

"How..." he whispered, "did you ever know?"

"Your body reaction when I casually mentioned it. I read your guilt." Eliana sighed. "I'm a trained Priestess Basel. That means I hold a doctoral license for reading and counseling people's emotions. I'm not bringing this up to embarrass you, and I have no intention of ever mentioning this to anyone. I just want you to understand the warts on my soul. Most men would find my reading ability to be a very ugly wart for a wife to have."

"Be afraid of it you mean?"

"Not just fear. Resentment and hatred. People don't like having their emotions read and understood so clearly. All my defenses are down Basel. I'm not going to hide anything from you. I can't bear to."

Basel stared at Eliana until he saw her lip quiver. He reached over and held her hand. "I understand what you're saying. My precious Eli. I still see only beauty."

"My love," whispered Eliana in return. "And I've never called anyone that before. I've been an awkward duck in dating my whole life."

"So have I. Maybe that's why this mallard finds your tail feathers so attractive."

She smiled. "Ah, thank you for telling me. Now all I have to do to keep your interest is to remember to bend over and shake my tail feathers for you."

Basel nodded playfully. "That'll do it; five to ten times a day would be nice."

"Basel, may I take you to the mat?"

"Another wonderful example of our rapport," thought Basel. "There are so many slang ways to interpret that request, yet I know exactly what she's asking."

He said out loud, "Eliana, I accept you as my counselor," giving her formal legal permission to practice. Eliana nodded in gratitude and stood up and offered Basel her hand. She led him to a thick Judo mat a few meters away.

"Here," she said, "take your shoes and socks off, like me." Eliana sat on the mat, backbone perfectly vertical, knees splayed out, the two heels of her feet almost touching her pubis. "Now lie on your back, use my feet as a pillow. That's right. Now close your eyes, relax your mind and body."

Basel nodded. Eliana thought his clean soft hair felt wonderful against the bottom of her upturned feet, and she started to pet his head affectionately.

Basel sighed with the pleasure. "Wow. If I had known counseling was like this, I would have sought help years ago."

Eliana laughed. "Right! My review board would probably go ballistic if they saw me practicing medicine like this. I'm allowed to touch my patients, even caress them under some well-defined circumstances. Touch is an extremely important tool for a Priestess. But here I'm expressing that you're being counseled by someone who loves you."

A quiet minute passed. "What are your thoughts Basel?"

"Oh, just drifting. This is the first time in my life I've been petted like this. It feels so good... And I'm thinking of the dichotomy. Your feet! So soft! You have them in a perfect position to support my head and neck. I could lie like this for hours in the pleasure of it. And the dichotomy! I've seen you work out, practice your punches and kicks. These wonderfully soft feet can kill, can't they?"

"Yes. Military aviators receive extensive martial arts training. But don't think of me that way now. Think of me as a Voice. I want you to think of yourself in a box, a box without boundaries, warm and dark and secure. You are floating there, and my Voice is a trusted friend you want to talk to. Take all the time you want."

The silent minutes flowed by. Basel reached the point he was asked to seek, warm and loved and profoundly secure. He was totally unaware that the loving hands at his cheeks and neck and the feet beneath his head were giving Eliana a very intimate window into his physical and emotional states. "I'm here," he said quietly, "floating in the peaceful darkness."

"And I'm here with you," The Voice replied. "Last night, I looked up G.R. on the web. A slang expression, local to the men at Aleppo."

Basel nodded in the darkness, able to be explicit with The Voice in a way that he was too embarrassed to be with Eliana. "Yes, Grandmother Rape. The Aleppo rape trial of 9563, Sameh was my roommate."

"Oh Basel," The Voice cried and whispered, "I'm so sorry."

"It was a clear case of rape," Basel said in the darkness. "The Upper Commanders raped Sameh. The women were both over two-hundred years old, and Sameh was even younger than I was."

"Yes, I remember the trial," agreed The Voice. "Yes, a clear case of rape."

Basel grimaced. "The Commanders even holographed their attack for their amusement. The recordings were played at the trial."

"Yes," agreed The Voice. "I know. And for a while the Commanders were convicted."

"I saw the recordings, watched my friend being raped! And then the world voted..." Basel sobbed.

"Their awful, horrible, ugly, female vote," whispered The Voice.

"Yes," agreed Basel. "A carve-out was petitioned for the law. Women could not be convicted of raping a man if he maintains an erection and orgasms! Sameh was calling out the word NO! And now it didn't matter!"

"I remember. I am a female Voice, and I am so deeply ashamed of what my gender did. I was furious when I heard of the vote, furious and ashamed and disgusted."

"The damn law! The Commander on top was riding him! Of course he was maintaining an erection! And he was calling out NO!"

"I remember, and I'm so ashamed."

"Any man would," sobbed Basel, "being stimulated like that! And the other woman! She had her finger up his butt! Of course he orgasmed! She was pumping him! And he was calling out NO!"

"I remember," cried The Voice, "and my heart is breaking in the shame of it."

"The women claimed they were just playing, and that Sameh didn't fight them," sobbed Basel. "But Sameh had a very gentle soul. It wasn't his nature to fight. And then the world voted."

"A great weakness in our government," cried The Voice in reply. "The petition for the carve-out reached its 40% goal almost entirely from high Citizen-Level women. They represent an incredible concentration of voting power."

"Sameh was raped!"

"Of course he was!" cried The Voice. "The vote was an abomination! Basel?"

"Yes?"

A deep sigh from The Voice. "Sameh's suicide served a purpose. It shamed a female world that was Unholy. The females were in great need of shame. And when a law is purged, the State can put it back six years later. I've talked about this with a Stateswoman who loves me. She expects the vote to be unanimous to put back the law this year. And the world has recognized its former ugliness. The law will be put back, and the law will stand."

Basel nodded in the darkness. "It's taken a long time."

"A very long time," agreed The Voice. "And you struck out against the ugly world, didn't you?"

Basel paused. "Well, it started out that way, right after the suicide..."

"Was it only you?"

"Yeah, only me."

"Impressive," said The Voice. "Everyone thought the Aleppo vandals were a team, and they looked for a team, not a single angry man."

Basel sighed. "It was just me, an unhappy man with a lot of expertise and a lot of technical ideas and a lot of free time on my hands. And the plan took months to design and execute. But the anger disappeared soon after his death. Sameh had such a gentle soul. I felt I was dishonoring his memory by holding onto my anger, so I pushed it away..."

"And yet," asked The Voice, "the octopus still came to be?"

"I did it as a memorial!" cried Basel. "Sameh loved monster hologram movies. I did it in his memory, for all the good times we had together enjoying monster movies!"

"Oh Basel," cried The Voice, "I understand! How sweet of you!"

"The people injured in the evacuation," cried Basel. "I never meant to hurt anybody!"

"No, of course not! It's okay Basel! What you did was very sweet... Do you think Sameh would have approved?"

"Sameh? Oh yeah. That monster had class! Sameh would have been pleased..." Basel imagined yawning in his box without boundaries. "I still miss him. He was my best friend, and now he's gone. I can't talk to him any more, and I'm tired, and I'm feeling so sleepy."

"Then you should rest. If you want to talk again, remember that I'm here, and I'm a Voice who loves you."

Basel yawned. "I won't forget... ever... Promise..."

"Basel, let me guide you. Remain in your nice box, keep your eyes closed. You'll have to move your feet, just a bit. I will guide you to a nice place to take a nap. That's right, very gently. You feel like you're standing up now, but you're still inside your box. Imagine moving your feet now... That's right... Good..."

For a while there was peaceful nothing, floating in a security he had not known since childhood. And then Basel was dimly aware he was waking up from a nap. A moment later he opened his eyes.

He was in his bedroom on Level-1. Like Eliana's, his bed was large, designed to let the two cadets sleep separately or together as they chose. The bed was being used in its second mode now, their bodies not touching except for a feminine hand chastely resting on top of his. Basel turned slowly and stared in wonder.



-------

Chapter 7: Second History

Time: January 15, 9570 6:03 AM

Their meeting was the reverse of two days ago. Basel rode the elevator up to the observation dome carrying a picnic lunch and saw Eliana standing by the southern wall.

"Weather report is clear for tomorrow," he called out. "One more day till sunshine!"

"Basel! You're just in time! Come take a look at this!"

The pale blue sky and the landscape at the southern horizon suddenly appeared to be deeply tinged in green. It looked as if someone were shining a bright beacon of green light right at them from the distant horizon, a tiny oval of diamond bright green light floating just above the interface line between the distant greenish snowy land and the greenish sky.

"How beautiful..." Eliana whispered.

"It's as if the Holy were trying out some new finger paints..." Basel whispered back.

The phenomenon lasted for about two minutes. And then the beacon was gone and the southern horizon back to its usual whites and grays. Basel and Eliana turned to each other and said simultaneously, "Wow!"

"It's the refraction phenomenon, right?" asked Eliana.

Basel nodded. "Exactly. The top of the sun's disk has to be edge-on to the horizon with just the right atmospherics. Usually when it does occur, it's just for a second or two, a green flash. But right now the sun is traveling perfectly horizontal with the horizon. We had exactly the right conditions for almost, what, two minutes?"

Eliana nodded. "I've talked with military pilots who have played sunset tag with the green flash. They would fly west supersonic with just enough speed to balance the Earth's rotation and keep the sun motionless at just the knife-edge of setting. They could see the green flash again and again." She smiled. "So, Basel, how have you been the last two days?"

He laughed easily. "Oh, I'm fine. I know I've been quite a hermit doing all the Level-0 certification." He gave her a playful smile. "Did you miss me?"

"Well, not just certification. You're being too modest," Eliana replied. "A month from now, we would have been in serious trouble with sewage recycling." She leaned over and gave him a quick peck on his cheek. "And yes, I did miss you. And I would have hated all the crawling you had to do."

"Ah, it was a one-person job. You know, the odds of what happened are almost zero. I've heard rumors the Guild will intentionally muck something up for an isolation trial, nothing the candidates can't handle if they do the certifications correctly, but if they're sloppy about it..."

Eliana nodded and peered at his picnic basket with a playful smile. "Something good I trust?"

"Um hmm. An Aleppo delicacy."

Eliana leaned over and cracked the basket open and sniffed. "Lobster for lunch!"

"You got it."

As Eliana helped set up the table, she asked. "There can't be too much of this in storage."

"You'd be surprised. I pulled some strings. Or rather, Varda did."

"Really? Great! Still, what's the occasion?"

"Well, this is Day 9, the 5% mark of the survival test. Within the next eighteen hours, we're going to have to send the final go / no-go to mission operations. There's no turning back after this."

Eliana nodded as she bit into a piping-hot piece of lobster wrapped in a light buttery pastry. "Oh, this is fabulous! You're a much better cook than I am Basel!" After a few more bites she asked, "Who's Varda?"

"A really nice CL3. We were going to do our isolation testing here together, starting last September."

"Oh... May I ask? What happened?"

Basel sighed. "She's engaged to join another marriage, becoming wife number four. At the last moment, her husband-to-be complained and she switched partners. She's now doing her testing with another woman CL3. They should be more than halfway through now, the largest island of ancient Japan."

"Oh hell Basel. I don't mean to pry, but that must have hurt."

"Oh, Varda and I are good friends, and I've met her other wives. They're really nice people. I didn't want to upset... well... Anyway! This is my day to ask about you!"

"Okay! Let me start by telling you about my family."

Basel listened with interest as Eliana talked about her family tree. The descriptions lasted till the end of lunch.

"Wow," he said at last. "I knew Abdul Hadi never sired any children. His wives were too old by the time he was cured of his eternal virginity, and he didn't want to procreate during his infliction. But his legal descendent through Kefira, yes... Didn't he also have an adopted son through Michal?"

"Yes. His wives traced the child from the medical records at Dalma. He was killed at Jericho in the Judgment of 8244. He was eight-years old, culled at the first childhood gate."

"Hell..."

"I know..." Eliana shrugged and then tried to smile. "I think most people today have forgotten what sacrifices my ancestors made, what a horror they saved us from."

"I know what you mean. Life is so incredibly easy now. The horror before Abdul Hadi is almost unimaginable."

A deep sigh from his companion. "So, Basel, what else would you like to know? I can start with another monologue, or I can answer questions about my life."

"Any questions?" Basel asked with a playful grin.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"Actually, before we start, I was wondering..." Basel began to blush.

"Yes?"

"Eli, may I take you to the mat?"

Eliana gulped. "Huh?"

"I've been thinking, these last two days, all the love you offered me. I'd like to return the affection."

Eliana gulped again and surprised Basel by looking a little nervous. "Uh, okay."

They went over to the Judo mat and took off their shoes and socks. "What do you want me to do?" asked Eliana.

Basel sat in a lotus position. "Just lie and let me hold you, as you held me." Basel made a soft pillow out of a clean picnic towel for her head, and as she lay on her back, he pressed a bare foot against her soft hair and his hand was gently holding the other side of her head. He unexpectedly felt her trembling. "Hey Eli, you okay with this?"

"Yes!" she squeaked back, and then in a more normal voice, "Ask a question!"

Basel was at a loss why she was so nervous, and tried to think of something non-stressful to talk about. "So! Where did you live growing up?"

"Well, it's a tradition in my family to be half-shifters, four times as fast as yours. We moved to a different township every six years..." A long period of silence followed.

Basel was perplexed and tried to keep the conversation going. "Yeah. It's an interesting custom, everybody registering for the township rotations. I believe it was a personal idea of Abdul Hadi for people to shift every Holy Decade."

Eliana nodded. "And his wife Abigail. Her study of history taught her that when a population sits in one place, especially over generations, people get territorial."

"Which leads to nationalism, which leads to wars. Yeah. I think the shifting is a good idea. And it lets you see more of the world."

"Yep, that was my parent's idea. They doted on me, gave me the chance to see lots of different parts of the world. I was born in Nubia, the ancient Galapagos, and when I was four, we lived at Luxor where San Diego used to be. When I turned ten, my parents moved to Humar in New Zealand. And then when I was sixteen we moved to Tarim at Cuba, so I've lived on islands most of my life. When I became an adult, I signed up for a half-shift at the capital. I remember going there... The Holy, Basel! I was so innocent back then..."

Eliana was shivering. Basel tried to be affectionate, gently hugging her head with his foot on one side and a caressing hand on the other.

The effect was immediate and shocking. Eliana's eyes blinked wide and she shrieked and bolted to a sitting position.

"Eli, I'm so sorry," whispered Basel. "What?"

Eliana was gasping for breath and did not answer for a while. "Oh hell, oh hell..." she mumbled.

A quiet question, "You want some time alone?"

"No!" Another few ragged breaths. "It's not you Basel, not at all. I had a flashback." Another few ragged breaths, and then she lay back down and pushed her head firmly against his foot. "Hold me?" she whispered.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes!"

Basel gently cupped her ear on the other side of her head. They sat like that for many minutes in absolute silence, Basel's thumb slowly caressing her ear, feeling the struggle within Eliana's body.

She whispered, "It was early February of 9564. I had been at Bandar Arenas for a month... Oh..." She gave a gasp.

"Eli, wait. This memory is obviously painful, and I don't want to drag it out of you. Won't that make the pain worse?"

"I'm not sure... But it's a part of who I am. Basel, may I show you?"

He caressed her for a moment and then nodded. "Eli, it's an honor to see your soul."

Eliana took a deep breath and nodded back. "I was just making my career choices for my adult studies. I had already picked the military Priesthood, and was also thinking of a medical profession, not counseling though, not a Priestess..."

Basel sighed. "Very ambitious..."

"Oh yes. And I was teased by my age-mates about it. A lot of us new adults were living in the same housing complex. I had a reputation for being too ambitious... and prudish..."

"Prudish?! Like hell! Some of the sexual norms of the capital are horrible!"

"I know that now. But at the time, I was innocent and ambitious and off on my own for the first time of my life and..." She took a couple of big gulps of air. "I tried to make friends with a bunch of medical students, a few years older than I was... There was a party..."

Basel stroked her head in silence for several minutes. Then she continued.

"They thought I needed loosening up, and the vote nullifying the Aleppo rape convictions had just occurred three days earlier. The male students were very angry. There were some recreational drugs at the party. I didn't know. I drank more than I should have... something that relaxes inhibitions."

"Oh Eli..." Basel whispered.

"I was being held down, a man's boot pressed into one side of my head, and he had a firm grip of my hair on the other. Another man was under my dress." She winced. "And I was allowing it to happen."

"Allowing?! Like Hell! You were drugged!"

"There were others too, holding my legs. Maybe my arms too, it's difficult to remember. I remember the grips on my ankles though. And they were all laughing, saying that if I were internally lubricating and then orgasmed, then it couldn't be rape."

Eliana shuddered under Basel's caress. "There was a paste undergoing clinical trials at the capital, a stimulant of the Bartholin's glands. It was meant to help women over three hundred lubricate and have sex. I felt a cold latex hand open my sex, and then a slick finger smeared the paste across my labia. I started to howl and hump my hips. It was sexual heat, white hot! The desire was incredible Basel! And the men were laughing at my flow and how juicy I was. And I could feel the man moving under my dress again..."

Eliana sobbed. "He drilled me! The latex finger returned with new paste and he drilled me under my clitoral hood! I started to scream as I orgasmed! The people at the party said it sounded feral!"

Eliana shuddered and sobbed. "My screams shocked the med students into ending their attack. It turns out... It turns out... It turns out there's a sympathetic chemical link between the paste and the recreational drug I was on. The potency of the paste was augmented... a hundred times... I was lucky not to suffer brain damage..."

Basel grimaced. "Tell me that you didn't prosecute."

"Okay. Basel, I didn't prosecute."

"Oh hell Eli..."

"My soul is like yours Basel. I couldn't bear to hang onto my anger. And my attackers sincerely apologized. I went to counseling for a while... It helped a lot..."

"You still should have prosecuted."

"Oh, I was so embarrassed Basel. Not just from the attack, from the horrible vote voiding the rape law. I was embarrassed about my gender. And the men were sincerely contrite. I didn't want to hurt them, ruin their lives..."

Her hand came up and held his hand against her cheek. "I told the court we were all under the influence of an inhibition suppressor, that we all didn't know. That last part was a borderline lie. The med students were making sure my punch glass was full. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to forgive them." She sighed. "I told the court I couldn't remember much but might have given them permission to use the paste."

Basel caressed her. "Eli, two days ago... I can see why you thought the annulment vote was such an abomination."

"Another wart on my soul..." she whispered.

"What?! This is no wart!"

"I shrieked when you held me! Are you sure you still want me?"

"What a question?! More than ever!"

"I... I... Oh Basel, I don't feel like thinking anymore..."

Basel cracked a kind smile. "This really is a mirror image of two days ago. Come on, I'll tuck you in."

Basel walked Eliana down to her bedroom. The mirror image really was complete. She scooted over to one side of the bed to make room for him. With tears in his eyes, he joined her, and they held hands as Eliana drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

"My gosh, what an angel," he thought. "What a beautiful angel. This is so amazing. After so many years of dreaming about sleeping with girls, I'm finally getting my chance. This is the second time Eli is lying with me and trusting me with her body. And we've been so chaste with each other." Basel lay on his side and watched Eli as she slept, enjoying the feel of her hand and watching the slow rise and fall of her breasts. He felt overwhelmed by a desire to care for this precious creature beside him.



-------

Chapter 8: Cast Off

Later that day... 

Time: January 15, 9570 11:41 PM UCT

Eliana looked at Basel across the Level-2 control center. "You don't mind, do you, that I'm waiting till the last moment to send the final Go code?"

"No, I guess not. It's a bit unusual, but I like your thinking. There's no advantage to sending it early. Your way maximizes our safety, and there's no downside to waiting." He paused to look at the clock and added, "Assuming, of course, we actually get around to sending the code by midnight."

Eliana grinned. "I must say, even our partial isolation thus far has had a certain weight to it. I send reports out, and absolutely nothing comes back, not even an acknowledgment of reception. I've never experienced anything like this. It's a little spooky."

Basel nodded. "I have the advantage on you there. I've talked with lots of Rangers. It'll be even spookier after we send the Go code. Except for the station's encrypted link with the CAT, we will be completely communications isolated. We won't be able to cry for help, scream that our partner is trying to kill us, plead that we're mortally injured... We will be completely isolated from the rest of the world. Even our link to hologram entertainment will shut down. No matter what happens, we won't see another human or hear a news report about the world until July 7th."

"Well, we do have the CAT. We could abandon the station, head south. Water won't stop us, the CAT is submersible."

"It's not the water. The CAT has a governor built into its global positioning system. If we try to leave the area..."

Eliana stared at him. "It'll die?"

"Nothing quite that dramatic. It just won't stray too far. The CAT will start to get sluggish."

"So how far can we go?"

"The Guild doesn't tell the cadets the exact limit, there's a random element involved, certainly less than a hundred kilometers though. Still quite a distance, and heading back to the station will always work at full power. And on July 7th, all the restrictions will disappear."

"Any way to fool it before then?"

"Oh, it's been tried, never successfully. There are some real horror stories in Ranger history."

Eliana looked at the clock and then leaned back in her chair. "We still have some time. Amuse me!"

Basel thought for a moment and then laughed. "Okay, you asked for it! About seven-hundred years ago, there was a Ranger test at a desert station where ancient Lebanon used to be. This was in the late 8700's, when the isolation candidates were never contacted but were still supposed to make daily reports to Guild headquarters."

"Uh huh."

The test seemed to go fine for about four months. Then both Rangers reported that their station was infested with giant poisonous ants, claimed they had giant ant bites covering their bodies. They begged for medical help..."

Eliana frowned. "... and got nothing."

"No, not during an isolation test. Two months later the pickup team found their two bodies. The women were trying to take shelter in the cold storage food lockers. Their notes said the cold was keeping the ants out. Their bodies were covered with tiny puncture marks, and the autopsy concluded they died from formaldehyde injections."

"What?! The ants were real?!"

"That's the spooky part. No trace of the infestation was ever found. The station was clean, no ants, no ant droppings, nothing. And the outside environment was examined and found normal."

Eliana blew a full load of air through her cheeks. "Oh hell..."

"Yeah. The official conclusion was that the two cadets snapped, became delusional, even to the point of self-inflicting their wounds, jabbing formaldehyde into themselves. There didn't seem to be any other explanation."

Eliana looked at the clock. "Basel, let's send the code now."

Basel nodded and turned to his console. He lifted a clear protective cap and inserted a small orange key into an orange slot and turned it full left. "Ready Commander."

"On three, One, Two, Three!" Five meters apart, they turned their keys full right. At another part of the control room, their main communications console blacked out, displaying only a security lockout warning and a countdown clock with 171 days, 0 hours, and some minutes and seconds on it. The second phase of their test had begun.

Six hours later... 

Time: January 16, 9570 5:57 AM UCT

Eliana was standing alone at the southern end of the observation dome, waiting for the year's first sunrise. She was expecting Basel to join her momentarily, and for a while was lost in quiet contemplation as she watched the pre-dawn sky.

She felt a tingle and thought she sensed Basel quietly sneaking up on her on her left. Smiling and about to laugh that she had sensed him and foiled his surprise, she turned her head and realized there was no one there.

She looked around the observation room, her eyes drawn to the eastern horizon for no particular reason she could understand. She saw peaceful rocks and snowy evergreen forest deep within its winter's sleep. Eliana finally heard her companion climbing up the ladder and decided to laugh at herself. "Basel and his ghost story! I didn't realize I was so susceptible. The total isolation is affecting me more than I anticipated." She put the issue out of her mind, and a moment later Basel emerged from the ladder. Eliana offered her hand to Basel, and enjoying the simple human contact, they waited for the dawn.

"Well, this is nice," commented Eliana at 6:03. "Beautiful pink sky, a tip of yellow light, spring is on the way!"

"Well, sort of, it's more than two months till the equinox! Enjoy this while you can. A big storm is moving in tomorrow."

She glanced to the eastern horizon without realizing it and nodded her head. "Tell me Basel, originally you were going to stay here after the isolation testing, right?"

"Uh huh. The original isolation test was going to run from early October to the end of March. We even had our Judgment 4 anti-aging injections sealed and ready to take with us. Then Varda switched partners..."

"What would you have done in April?"

"Same thing that I'm hoping to do now. A large herd of wooly-hippo was observed to move into the area a few years ago. The Guild thinks it might be a new sub-species. I want to do a behavior study, see how they're interacting with the bear and reindeer population." He paused. "And how about you? Eli, the one question I wanted to ask you yesterday, I never got around to it."

"Shoot."

"Why would an ambitious woman who is a Commander, a Priestess, and a military aviator want to become a Ranger?"

"Simple. My commanding Governor asked me to volunteer for this mission."

"Uh... She did huh?"

"A man actually, name of Zaafir, and yes, he did. He sent me to look for a missing meteor crater."

Basel smiled. "Oh? Did somebody lose a meteor crater?"

"Uh huh. Let me tell you the details..." Eliana's description lasted several minutes, and she finished with the comment, "It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?"

"I don't know. It's hard to form an opinion without looking at some data."

"Oh, I have a whole bunch of visuals stored on my laptop."

"Of the re-entry?"

"Yep."

"Processed images or original telemetry?"

"Both."

Basel's eyebrows went up. "Indeed? Let's take a look!"

Two hours later... 

"Eli, this is one weird meteor."

"Basel, if you're about to tell me one of your spooky howl-of-the-wolf Ranger stories, I am definitely not interested."

"Right. I promise, I'm being completely honest. And no, we don't have to worry about alien invaders..."

"Good."

He smiled. "... unless perhaps the aliens are two-dimensional pancakes."

"Uh... what?"

"Take a look at this trajectory. I can see why this meteor was driving your Governor nuts. The telemetry starts when the rock is about 130 km above the Earth's surface."

Eliana interrupted. "It's a rock, right, not a spacecraft?"

"Oh yeah, definitely non-metalic... unless..."

"Unless what?"

"Well, this meteor was so light, I'm thinking it must have been partially hollow."

"Hollow?"

"It's a rock, but it's also extremely light. Look how quickly the atmosphere braked it. At the start of the imagery, it's more than a thousand kilometers from the impact zone, coming in at a very shallow angle of about seven degrees and traveling about 90,000 kph. That's a little slow to be falling in from the Ort cloud but still very fast. If it were a solid iron-nickel meteor, it would have hit in less than a minute and formed a tremendous impact crater."

"But it slowed down, I know."

"Yes. Look how long it rides! It must have been surfing the air, getting pushed back and away as it braked in the air. By the time it enters the top of the snowstorm, it's barely supersonic."

"But it's not an alien spacecraft, right?"

Basel studied the data. "Roughly egg shaped... I'm guessing about four meters on the long axis. Way too small for an interstellar spacecraft, don't you think? And the braking! The entire re-entry track is less than two minutes. Average acceleration is over twenty gravities, and peak acceleration, right here," he said, pointing to a graph, "must be over a hundred gravities."

Eliana was a military pilot. She knew very well what a hundred gravities would do to a human body, a kilogram heart weighing a hundred kilograms and rupturing the connecting arteries from its weight. Asking any animal-like life-form to survive that would be like asking it to survive passing through steel rollers. "Maybe a sponge could do it," thought Eliana, "but nothing capable of flying a spacecraft."

She frowned and felt a bit cold. A small, annoying voice was whispering in the back of her mind, "Is that argument air-tight?" She turned to Basel and said, "It must have left some mark when it hit. Any thoughts if we can find it?"

Basel was quiet for a long moment as he studied the raw visual and infrared telemetry. "The rock would definitely be worth finding, and Zaafir was right, it landed in this area."

"How close?"

"It's hard to pinpoint the location. Look how much the rock is wobbling near the end, wobbling and surfing the air. Look how the wind is bending its path, first to the west, then to the east. Best guess is it landed right on top of our station, but the uncertainly of how much it surfed the air once it hit the snowstorm..."

Basel was quiet for a long moment and finally concluded, "Draw a circle with a 10 km radius from here. That's about the horizon line as we see it from the observation dome. I think the chances are good the strike point is inside that circle."

"A good chance? What does that mean? Give me a number Basel!"

Basel hesitated. "I'm guessing... seventy percent?"

Eliana sighed. "So we have more than 300 square kilometers of ground to search, and still no guarantees. And you don't think a metal detector would be useful?"

"The rock is so light, it can't be metallic; maybe of some sort of silica. Look how it managed to dump all the re-entry heat into the atmosphere. Very little appears to have been conducted into the rock. There's no sign of heat ablation on the infrared telemetry." He paused for a moment and then added, "Yep. This definitely would be worth finding."

"So how do we do it?"

"Yeah... I don't know. Let me give it some thought."



-------

Chapter 9: First Sighting

Time: January 19, 9570 3:52 PM UCT

"Excellent game Basel," Eliana said as she extended her hand. The final score on the Jamgo display was 224 points for her and 221 points for her opponent.

Basel nodded as his eyes left the holographic game board and he accepted the handshake. He then stretched his arms wide. "The closest I've come since our first day. That was fun! Except perhaps for the very end."

Eliana smiled back and said in a deadpan voice, "Not fun at the end? I hadn't noticed." She then laughed. "I need to savor these victories while I can! You play is getting better with each game." She saw Basel yawn and asked, "Like to listen to some music before we turn in?"

"Sure, that'd be great!" Basel got up and went to the entertainment console. "How about something pre Bel'dar?"

"Okay."

"Jazz from the old Karbalan crystal data?"

"Sounds perfect."

Basel turned and was delighted to find Eliana waiting for him on the two-person sofa. He sat by her side and she sighed happily, resting her head against his shoulder. "Ah, nice choice. I love the sound of the clarinet. What's this called?"

Basel was busy burying his nose into her hair and enjoying the clean fragrance. They were already dressed in their sleep clothing, and her body felt delightful in his arms. He sighed. "Ah, the title... I forget. The musician's name is Jimmy Dorsey I think. I can go look up the song."

"No, don't bother." Eliana slowly returned the embrace put her arms around Basel as the music played. They petted each other playfully, and when there was a short break between songs, Basel popped the sofa to an almost full-reclining position. Eliana was soon lying down using his left arm as a pillow, while his right arm lay across her body. Basel started caressing her ribcage as he smiled at her.

"How are you doing Eli?"

"Me? Oh, I'm fine. I'm not nervous at all." She kicked out her legs and wiggled the toes of her bare feet. She purred, "I love how I'm feeling now... Basel, may I ask you a really personal question?"

"Sure."

"If I asked you to bed me, right now, would you want to?"

Basel gulped and then sighed heavily, leaning the side of his head against hers and just holding her for a while. Then he kissed her ear and nodded. "I would."

"That's what I thought. You are so sweet. Before, when we both agreed we should slow down... I think I was the one who was nervous, and you have such great empathy for me, you accepted my desire as your own."

Basel kissed her temple. "I don't want to hurt you Eli, and I don't think you're the type of woman who would like sex without commitment."

"That's true, and commitment takes a long time, I know. And it should take a long time. Commitment should come before sex. And yet..." They lost themselves in a long kiss. Eliana came up for air and continued her thought. "And yet, I feel your desire for me Basel, and I want to respond to it, to accept it and return it. Look at you! You're almost fully erect for me! I want to respond to your desire, to accept my dream of commitment for commitment..."

Basel gasped and held Eliana closely. His hand came up from her ribs and cupped a soft breast, and he cried softly from the pleasure.

Eliana whispered back, "This is your first time, isn't it Basel, to hold a woman like this?"

He nodded and breathed heavily as he lay by her side, stroking the soft breast with his fingers, tracing the outline of Eliana's erect nipple through her thin pajamas, and then caressing the soft underside with his palm. He whispered, "Does it show?"

"Yes. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining! I am your first girlfriend. It shows wonderfully! And you are my first boyfriend." Eliana's hand came up, unfastening his pajama-top and then slipped her hand inside to caress his chest and nipples. And they lay there and caressed each other as the music played. It was all softness and pleasure, excitement and uncertainly and joy and playfulness and sexual arousal, all swirling around the core themes of love and acceptance.

They began to pant as they kissed. Eliana offered Basel her tongue, extending its tip to slide into his mouth. Basel began to moan in his pleasure, and he began caressing Eliana's lower legs with the arch of his right foot. He rolled his body partway onto Eliana to caress her better, and he felt a sharp flash of nervous tension within her.

Eliana grimaced and whispered, "Oh, I'm so sorry Basel!"

He rolled off and gently stroked her head. "It's okay."

"It's not okay. I don't want to frustrate you, especially with this..."

A quick peck on her cheek. "We have a big day tomorrow."

Eliana returned the kiss. "Are you sure? I don't want to be cruel, arouse you and then..."

Another kiss, and then a playful smile. "Look at the time."

"Yes, it's late," she said at last, accepting his kindness, "and we do have a big day tomorrow. We should turn in."

Basel nodded, giving her one last hug. "Goodnight Eli, pleasant dreams."

"Goodnight Basel. I love you." They were in their separate bedrooms moments later.

Five hours later... 

"Oh, fabulous omelet Eliana, bravo!" He took another bite. "What'd you put in it?"

"Oh, nothing unusual." She swallowed a bite of her hot bagel. "Four egg equivalents, sharp cheddar on the inside and sprinkled Parmesan on top, light amounts of garlic salt, paprika, and black pepper, chopped parsley and mint, a little milk and butter..." She took a bite of her creation. "Oh, this is good. You're probably noticing the taste of the gourmet mushrooms... Want to know something Basel?"

"Yeah?"

"Guild Rangers are pampered! The food storage systems here are state-of-the-art. We never eat like this during military survival training."

Basel laughed. "Well, we normally do eat very well on assignment. But this is a little unusual. The extra food rations dropped off with us were gourmet quality. I think the Guild is trying to send you a message."

"Me? Really?"

"Sure. With your achievement record, they must be thrilled to have you registered as a life member. Seriously Eli, you're a great catch for them, especially two hundred years from now. The Guild is probably expecting you to make Stateswoman."

"Well..." She grinned and continued her meal. "So, what's the weather forecast? Are we go for the CAT run?"

"The CAT is in flawless shape, and local diagnostics are predicting a perfect day. We couldn't ask for better."

Eliana nodded. "I miss getting the big picture from the weather satellites."

"Yeah, well, part of the test."

"So, how far do you want to go?"

Basel leaned back in his chair and considered. "Well, if there are no problems, want to test what the distance-governor is on the CAT?"

"That far?" Eliana thought for a moment. She felt vaguely uneasy about the proposal, but couldn't figure out why.

"We'll have more than two hours of sunlight today, 5:00 AM to 7:12 AM."

"I know, but the sun will be on the horizon the whole time." She paused for a moment. "Still, I agree, an amazing change for just a few days."

"The CAT is an incredibly rugged piece of equipment Eli, a reliable as this station. And we'll have more than two hours of twilight on either side of the day. Plus we have a 24-hour waxing gibbous moon tracing a big oval in the sky, and finally, the CAT could find its way back here in a blizzard. Just run the homing program." He paused and shrugged. "Are you worried about a breakdown?"

Eliana sighed. "No, I guess not. What direction do you want to head?"

"Well, how about south?"

For some reason Eliana could not understand, she felt relieved by the choice of directions, and by the end of breakfast they finalized their plans for a 2:00 AM departure.

Six hours later... 

Time: January 20, 9570 3:30 AM UCT

"Well, halfway mark right now," Basel called out. He was driving the CAT south-east across a small frozen pond at an easy pace of 60 kph. Since leaving their station ninety minutes ago, they had been following a natural contour of the land, closely hugging the ancient border between Sweden and Finland.

Eliana turned from gazing out her window. "So, fifty-five straight-line kilometers from the station. There was a 50% chance we'd get this far?"

"Yeah, we're guaranteed ten, and guaranteed not to get a hundred. I'm happy we're in the upper half though. This will really help my studies in April. We lucked out."

Eliana nodded and turned to look out the window again, surveying the landscape in the dim light. The horizon in front of them was showing definite predawn promise, but most of their light was still coming from the moon. But with the bright moon and the CAT's running lights, their visibility was excellent. Eliana felt just the slightest bit uncomfortable that they were advertising their presence with their running lights. She turned to Basel and commented, "I thought you said we'd be heading south. Our course so far has been southeast."

"Hmm? Yeah, sorry for not being more explicit, but this is the natural contour to follow and get some quick distance from the station. Another hundred kilometers or so, we could turn more southward, and 300 km after that hit the top of the Baltic Sea where old Sweden and Finland used to part company. Won't get there today of course, but maybe in July, if you want to go skinny-dipping in freezing water, you could talk me into it."

"Ah, you first Basel!"

He laughed back. "Well, to see you in your birthday suit, it'd be worth it!" He smiled playfully and added, "you know, I'll never understand why they call these things CATs. It's more in the shape of a crab."

"You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"It's an ancient military label, pre Abdul Hadi. The name for the vehicle was Combat All Terrain Transport, CAT for short."

"Ah..."

An hour later... 

"Mark! Ninety-six straight-line kilometers," Basel called out.

Eliana smiled at him. "Think they might have forgotten to put in the governor?"

"Wow. That would be a first. Much more likely we'll lose forward power any minute now." His comment proved prophetic. Less than a minute later their forward drive unit lost all power.

"Can I drive?" asked Eliana.

"Sure. I'll make the measurements." While Eliana drove back and forth in small hops across the deep snow, Basel made accurate measurements of their distance from the station. After a few minutes, he said, "We have full power anywhere within 96.56 kilometers of the station, and then lose all forward drive by 96.6 kilometers."

"What if we tried to drive away in reverse?"

Basel just looked at her and smiled.

She gave it a try anyway and quickly learned the CAT would stray no farther from the station, no matter what gear it was in. Eliana suddenly felt a tinge of nervousness, a vague feeling of dread about the unattended station. "Basel," she said, "Let's head back. I'll drive."

Her companion looked at her thoughtfully. "Acknowledged Commander."

She turned to him and blinked. "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry! We're supposed to be peers. I don't know why I'm treating you like a military subordinate. Basel, what would you like to do?"

"Oh, heading back is fine Eli. But I'd also like to make five or six stops along the way once the sun comes up, when the landscapes are different, maybe five-minutes each."

"Different landscapes? You do, huh?" She smiled. "Want to be a tourist, take a few pictures of the scenery?

He laughed. "Wow, you are good! As a matter of fact, yes!" He pulled out a small device from the storage area in back of their seats. "And here's my camera!"

Eliana stared at the awkward looking contraption. "Basel, what is that thing?"

"Not very pretty, is it? With your agreement, I'd like to do a proof-of-principle experiment. I want to test out an idea for finding where the meteor hit."

"Oh..." commented Eliana, staring at the device. "How does it work?"

"It would take a while to explain, and I'm very uncertain if this will work or not. It's just an idea I want to try out."

"Okay. How about I drive, and you look at the scenery and tell me when to stop?"

"Sounds perfect! Thank you."

They drove for a short while in the ample predawn twilight, the sun just a small fraction of a degree below the horizon. And then their world was touched by the pale yellow light of the sun cresting the horizon behind them. Basel asked Eliana to stop the CAT.

She joined him outside for the five-minute stay, looking around and feeling no immediate alarm. The temperature was cold but nothing unexpected, -32C, a bit warmer than average for this time of year. There was almost no wind, and in their arctic suites and with the daylight around them they felt fine. And then they were off.

"Where did you get that?" Eliana asked, gesturing with her hand at the camera-like device.

"Ah, I made it. The photonics lab on Level-3 might be compact, but it's very well equipped."

"Uh huh..." Eliana concentrated on her driving, moving considerably faster than Basel had on their way out. They drove mostly in silence before stopping again at 5:30 AM, at the southern end of a narrow frozen lake. Eliana stayed inside as Basel took his holographic pictures at the shoreline. She computed they were 80.44 straight-line kilometers from the station, and spent the rest of the time idly scanning their surroundings with the CAT's scanners. As Basel returned and sealed the door, she commented, "Make sure you're strapped in. I want to try a speed test."

"Sure." Basel pulled his harness taut and saluted playfully and said, "You are clear for take-off."

He wondered if she had taken him literally. He was pressed into his seat with a deep acceleration, and moments later glanced down at the dashboard and saw Eliana had pushed them well above 200 kph. He was a little nervous, but as he looked at how calm Eliana was, he realized she was in her element, a military aviator with extensive low-level jump-jet experience. Driving a CAT like this was no particular challenge to her at all. Basel settled back in his chair and tried to enjoy the ride. Four minutes later they were at the other end of the lake and Basel asked Eliana for a third stop. Before he hopped out of the CAT, he noticed they were now 65.66 straight-line kilometers from the station.

The third stop by the northern shoreline was uneventful, and afterwards the way became a bit rocky. Eliana slowed the CAT down to about 30 kph. After driving for about ten minutes, she suddenly felt as if Basel were staring at her. She glanced at him from the corner of her eyes. He appeared to be ignoring her completely and looking at the scenery outside, trying to select another site for a photo stop. Eliana shrugged and continued driving.

The next fifteen minutes were very awkward. The sense of being watched intensified, and Eliana had an overwhelming feeling that Basel was giving her cold stares every time she wasn't looking. When he finally asked her to stop for another photo shoot, she just nodded stiffly and braked the CAT without a word.

She walked around the CAT nervously as Basel took his pictures. The feeling that he was drilling her with his eyes when she wasn't looking was both strong and very unpleasant. She turned her back on him and felt the drill almost immediately. She whirled around to complain.

Basel had his back to her, clearly focusing on his device and calmly finishing the last of his holographic scans. Eliana let out a small gasp and felt totally bewildered. "My gosh," she thought, "it's not him." Her eyes drifted towards the right. "The Holy! WHAT IS THAT?!"

Basel heard her small cry and called back, "Okay, all finished. Let's go." He then turned and saw Eliana standing motionless and stiff. "Eli, everything okay?"

Basel never saw anybody in his life move as fast as Eliana did. In the blink of an eye, she snapped from standing upright into a low firing stance, her devil-dog released from her thigh-holster and targeting the wooded area just to Basel's left.

"Basel!" she yelled out. "CAT, strap in! Move!"

Eliana scanned the area with cold military precision as Basel leaped to obey, and then she sprinted to her side of the CAT and hurled her body inside. She had their transport accelerating at full power before her door was closed.

Basel stared at her as she pushed the CAT passed 100 kph, not wanting to break her concentration from all the minor course corrections she had to make to avoid the rocks.

"Basel, lock us in, full lunar mode."

"Acknowledged Commander," he replied in total sincerely as he worked for a moment to seal their craft. "We are now full internal, all systems report nominal in lunar mode." The CAT in its current state was now prepared to submerge or drive across a vacuous lunar landscape.

"Mark the time and distance-to-station from our last stop."

"Marked and logged."

"I want full decontamination of our hull as soon as we get inside the CAT's airlock. Have the outer doors set to open as we approach. Minimize the time the outer door is open."

Basel typed on a console in front of him as Eliana sped through the snowy landscape. "Done Commander. Plasma decontamination will commence as soon as the airlock seals. All station systems report ready."

"Bring up passive station sensors. No active pinging, but I want full scanning on the passives, vibration sensors and full spectrum from UV to RF."

Basel typed another minute. "Done Commander. Passive sensors are recording now."

"Have them report anything out-of-normal immediately."

Another pause. "Done Commander. Our comm-link is open and linked to auto-sensor evaluation."

A quiet minute passed. "Good job Basel."

"Commander, what happened back there?"

"We were being hunted, by something that almost defies description."

"Hunted?" Basel whispered. He felt his body shiver despite his arctic clothing and the warm interior of the CAT.

Eliana nodded. "Yes. I'll explain more when we get back to the station. Let me concentrate on driving for now."

Considering the wild speed of the CAT, Basel thought that was a very good idea.



-------

Chapter 10: Pedal Offer


Time: January 19, 9570 6:59 AM UCT

"Plasma burn will complete in twenty seconds Commander, QEM bubble remains locked and stable." Basel took a second to touch the cool roof of the CAT, now turned opaque to shield them from the scheduled two minutes of blinding light outside. The ion temperature inside the CAT's airlock and outside their sub-micron-thin quantum electromagnetic shield was now higher than the solar surface.

"What are the residuals?"

"Checking the spectral amplitudes now... Very low. Usual trace amounts of oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon nuclei... a little nitrogen... consistent with having a few bits of dirty snow on the CAT."

Eliana sighed in relief. "We're clean then."

Basel looked at her. "Clean from what Eli?"

Eliana shook her head. "Not yet Basel. Please still consider this a military operation."

"Yes Commander."

"I'll talk soon. As soon as the CAT is tucked down, I'm going to get each of us a pair of multi-scanners. Meet me in Observation."

They jumped and ran from the CAT as soon as it was locked down into its parking bay, and met again a moment later in the Level-4 dome. Eliana handed Basel a scanner and pointer to the CAT tracks leading to the southeast. "Look for anything unusual. If I'm guessing right, we might just get a very brief glimpse of the creature. I'm thinking it's way too smart to give us a good view of itself."

They stood and scanned for a while, the sun moving slowly along the horizon and just about to sink below it. Eliana whispered, "Basel, thank you so much for accepting my command. I want control for just a little longer, okay?"

"Yes Commander."

She sensed his puzzlement. "Just until we sight the creature Basel. I'm expecting we'll have a chance sometime around eight o'clock, later if we're fortunate."

"Hmm?" he said as he scanned.

Eliana also scanned as she spoke. "We were 52.1 straight-line kilometers from the station when the encounter occurred at 6:24 AM, 59.3 kilometers along our driving path. I want to time when we sight the creature again. It might give us a measurement of how fast it can travel."

They scanned for a while. "Commander," Basel whispered. "The encounter, what should I look for? What did the creature look like?"

"It was so fast, I just caught a glimpse in the corner of my eye," Eliana whispered back. "So fast!"

"What shape?"

Eliana sighed. "Indistinct."

"Huh?"

"I'm not sure it had clear edges. It was very hard to tell."

"No edges? How can that be?" Basel frowned. "Well, what about color?"

"Assume fantastic camouflage, chromatophors beyond anything ever imagined, even for an octopus. I think I saw it flow over a dark rock surrounded by snow, and it moved a dark image of the rock across its body as it came towards us. Unbelievably good camouflage Basel, the brain processing power needed for such a feat is staggering. It was orienting its camouflage to my line of perspective, a fantastic feat to do in real time!"

Basel sounded unconvinced. "And you say it flowed?"

"Yes."

"Could it have been a real liquid? Somehow a reservoir of melted snow bursting?"

"What?! No, of course not! Basel, this thing was alive, acting with intelligence. It darted from behind one tree to behind another!"

"But you say it's a liquid?"

"No, just that it flowed like one! Basel, it was flowing out of the gully on your left to attack us! It was flowing uphill!"

"Ah..."

The sun set as expected at 7:12 AM Universal Capital Time. They spent the next hour scanning in silence. They saw nothing in the deepening twilight, except for the occasional flicker of the Northern Lights.

"An hour after sunset Commander," Basel said quietly.

Eliana sighed as she continued her scan. "I'd like to keep this up for another hour before we turn the job over to the automatic scanners. I'm expecting to see something very soon. Focus where our tracks enter the clearing." She was referring to a point about 300 meters away.

Five minutes later... 

"Mark! Twenty meters north of the tracks! Did you see it Basel?!"

"That flicker Commander? Yes. It wasn't much."

"Replay the sequence and focus on the UV spectrum."

Basel complied and said a moment later, "Yes, much brighter in the UV. Very fast."

Eliana. "Oh yeah. When it hit the clearing, it realized it was about to make a big mistake. Very quick response time. I'm estimating it covered 59 kilometers in 105 minutes."

"Thirty-two kilometers per hour," commented Basel, "on par with the world's fastest human."

Eliana gave a mirthless laugh. "Well, for a short sprint! This creature did it for almost sixty kilometers over rocks and deep snow. The point to remember is that we can't outrun it."

Basel gave a small nod of his head that was hard for Eliana to decipher. "Commander, is the immediate emergency over?"

Eliana paused to consider. "Yes, I think we're safe for the moment. We have a triple hull of di-burnium alloy between us and the creature, and the observation dome is almost as tough. I'm hoping all the technology is on our side of the battle. Basel, we have so much to consider!"

"I agree! Eli, can we talk?"

Five minutes later, down in their living quarters... 

"You're not sure the creature exists?!"

"I'm not doubting your sincerity Eli, and I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm trying to keep an open mind..." Basel looked at a loss for words.

They were sitting on their two-person sofa. Eliana was silent for a moment and then surprised Basel immensely by pushing the sofa into a reclining position. She then started untying her boots.

"Basel, as my boyfriend, will you take off your shoes and socks with me?"

Basel at first thought her actions were bizarre, but as he lay by her side barefoot, Eliana lifted her leg and began to caress the top of his foot with the bottom of hers. Slow gentle strokes, very loving. The minutes passed silently, and Basel felt much of the tension between them disappear.

"This feels really nice," he whispered. "I thought it was weird for you to do this at first, but know I understand. You're sending me a message, aren't you?"

Eliana nodded. "Several messages. Message number one, I stayed up for over an hour last night, thinking about how much I enjoyed you petting me like this, and how sweet you were when I froze. Message number two, my defenses are still down. My bare feet are an expression of my vulnerability. Message number three, I accept that you doubt me. It changes nothing of my feelings for you. Message number four... I'm trying to say thank you."

Basel cocked his head. "You're thanking me for doubting you?"

"I'm thanking you for your honesty and telling me that you doubt me. I am convinced the creature is real. If I forced us into battle without knowing about your doubt, I could kill us both."

Basel nodded and was still for a moment, enjoying the simple caress of his foot. He sighed and sat up, popped the sofa to a full reclining position, then turned and lay back down on the flat bed, Eliana's feet by his head and his feet by hers. He took a bare foot in his hand and held it for a moment, then brought it to his mouth and began kissing the ball of her foot and her instep.

Eliana giggled. "It tickles a little, but I like it. And I understand your message back. You love me, and you're suggesting we might have a little easier time talking if we weren't eye to eye." She reached across and held Basel's foot in her warm hand.

"Yes. We're giving each other our bare feet as a sign of our trust. You ready Eli?"

"Oh, I'm looking forward to this. Contention can be an extremely powerful tool when used correctly. Go ahead!"

"Okay. I remember feeling a deep chill in the CAT, shivering when I heard you say some fantastic creature was attacking us. Eli! This has happened more than a dozen times in Ranger history. The fears have always been delusional, and have almost always led to the deaths of one or both of the cadets."

"A completely valid point Basel. I hold no ill will against you for your skepticism. In fact, I'm honored you continued to obey me."

"I'm trying to keep an open mind. And I realize the meteor is reality, and the unusual lack of an impact crater is reality. But heck Eli, an alien invasion?!"

Eliana smiled and kissed Basel's foot before replying. "Well, I never exactly claimed that. One creature might not be an alien invasion. I think that might be the biggest danger here, that we overlay the creature's behavior with human emotions. Its motivations might operate completely differently. We might make an assumption that seems rock-solid but is just plain wrong."

"I agree."

"Basel, what about the UV on our scanners?"

"It was probably just a flicker. It could have been a reflection off the Northern Lights."

"What was doing the reflecting?! It was bright UV! I'm guessing bio-luminescence. Perhaps the creature was being careless or could not control it. You know better than I do, for a reflection to be that bright, it would have to be off a spectral surface."

Basel paused. "That's true. I'd need a mirror polished for UV... Interesting..." He nodded his head. "After we're done here, let's take a closer look at that spot with the sensors."

"Thank you. Basel, would you tell me how your modified camera works? Could it have captured an image of the creature?"

He was silent for a moment, caressing Eliana's foot as he thought. "Maybe. Certainly something to look at. What I was trying to do is really cutting-edge physics. I read about the idea in Quantum Today two months ago."

"And you built a prototype in the photonics lab from just that? Impressive."

Basel blushed. "Well, a bunch of ideas just sort of came together. It isn't usually this easy."

"So how does your camera work?"

"I take two low-frequency holographic oscillators and beat them against each other. I get an intense source of extremely low-frequency photons, ascending pulses from 1 Hz to 10 kHz range. I use the sweeps to penetrate the snow and produce a holographic map of the underlying rocks."

"Oh wow, I get you. Do you have a reference for comparison?"

"Yes. There are detailed topological maps in the station's library. If there's a buried impact crater a few meters wide or more, we might find it from a differential comparison with the library data."

"What a fantastic idea Basel!"

"Yeah well, we might get lucky... I don't know if it'll work or not. Give me a couple of days. I'll also try to see if I recorded anything unusual in the creature's area. Eliana, my device was not designed to do that."

A gentle caress of his foot and a playful kiss on his instep. "I know. Thanks for trying."

Basel smiled as he felt a warm nose sniffing between his toes. "Eli, this morning, was it my imagination, or were you upset about something before the encounter with the creature?"

"I felt it watching me for a while before I saw it. Basel! Your camera! We were at our fourth stop of using it when the creature attacked. Could your camera have drawn the creature to us?"

He paused for a moment to consider, idly petting Eliana's ankle. "Physically possible I suppose. I don't know of any Earth creatures that could detect such low-energy photons. They carry very little information. What would be the evolutionary purpose for detecting them?"

"I don't know. But I'm guessing the creature might have evolved on a much colder planet than Earth. It appears very active at a time when even the polar bears are hibernating. I think we got very lucky today. The creature was careless. Perhaps its camouflage is so good, it's not used to having its prey recognize its presence."

"Ah," said Basel understanding. "You think your pistol might have been ineffective?"

"Would supersonic needles kill something that can survive a hundred gravities of acceleration? If it is a very flat creature, the needles might pass right through and explode in the ground underneath."

"Hmm..."

Eliana shivered. "I think we might have survived today because the creature got careless. I'm determined that we never have to rely on its carelessness again."

"What do you mean?"

"While you're working on the imaging, I'll be working in the garage, installing the auxiliary fusion engines on the CAT. I want to bring it up to its full military potential, especially the laser weapons."

"Heat weapons... Makes sense... Eli, you said you felt the creature watching you? How?"

Eliana blushed. "I'm world-class in this sort of sensory integration. I don't like to brag, but I'm off the charts."

"Oh, shadow of shadow sensing. Yeah, I've heard about this."

Eliana laughed. "That's a terrible name for it. Shadows don't have shadows! But the quantum world of interaction is infinitely coupled. A change in a shadow does cause secondary effects. My brain is very good at integrating holistic input and making associations below my conscious level of thought. I'm off the charts in knowing when people are looking at me. It's a very useful talent to have, in both my professions..."

A long period followed without another word being said. Basel and Eliana spent a long time petting and kissing each other's feet. They finally sat up and smiled at each other and head to the Level-3 control center. A minute later they were busy examining the sensor recordings of the UV flash.



-------

Chapter 11: Acceptance

Three days later... 

Time: January 22, 9570 2:50 PM UCT

"Thanks for the help cleaning up Basel," Eliana said as she put away the last of the dishes.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. "Thanks for helping me prepare dinner." They had a custom of keeping their dinner time free of shop talk, but now it was time to discuss today's progress, and Basel was eager to get started. "You sure you don't want some help with the CAT?"

"Oh, I find the work therapeutic. And I've got the starboard auxiliary engine installed and tested now, 850 kW additional power."

Basel nodded. "I've never seen one of these things fly."

"I wouldn't be surprised if no one alive today has ever flown a CAT. The turbines can handle the power, but their design is just not optimized for flight. I think I'll be able to hover okay, but I doubt the CAT will handle much air speed."

"I have no idea how the distance governor will treat vertical height. Eli, don't assume a spherical shape for the limitation, except maybe as an absolute maximum. We might have a much lower ceiling."

"Okay. Making any progress on the holo data?"

Basel nodded. "Some good news and some bad news and some news I don't know how to classify."

Eliana laughed. "You know my personality. Tell me what I want to hear first!"

"The ground-scanning imaging is working better than I expected. We should be able to detect craters less than a meter radius from the echo delays."

"Excellent!"

"Bad news #1: There was nothing in particular captured in the scanning that recorded the presence of your creature. I detected a hibernating bear at site #2, but nothing seems alive in the imaging at site #4 except you and me."

Eliana sighed. "That is unfortunate. We need more information on this creature. What's next?"

"Bad news #2: Getting the scanners to work inside the CAT's manifold will be trickier than I realized. Assume another five days before we can start our survey."

"Okay. Anything else?"

"A bit of weirdness. Site #4 was a little unusual. The imaging was a little fuzzy, more so than the other sites, but not enough to hurt the scan."

"Fuzzy?"

"More reflections and echoes. I have no idea why. It might be a property of the rocks local to the area."

"That would be something we could test, return to the area and rescan."

"Not a bad idea. Eli, how soon do you think we might be ready?"

"Give me another full day. I want to test all the weapon systems before I try our first flight. We'll have to work out a schedule where I get some flight time and you still have the CAT available to install the scanner."

"Ah, so you're thinking we'll do the scans airborne."

"Sure. I'm assuming the creature is ground hugging. Can't you do your scanning while I hover?"

"Well, we'd have to be very low."

"How low?"

"Let me think about the focal lengths..." Basel thought for a while in silence. "Uh, we might need to be as low as twenty meters, maybe even lower. Would that be okay?"

"I'll take whatever distance I can get. Twenty meters sounds much safer than being on the ground. I'll be ready by daybreak on the 24th. Care to join me for a test flight?"

"Of course! It will be nice to get out." Basel swung his arms and then twisted his shoulders back and forth.

"Any problems?" asked Eliana.

"Oh, just a few kinks. I was doing a lot of tight work in the photonics lab today..."

"Would you like a backrub?"

"Wow, that sounds wonderful. Right now?" he asked hopefully.

Eliana grinned. "My backrubs tend to put people to sleep. How about we take our showers and get ready for bed first?"

Her suggestion was rewarded with a beaming smile from her companion.

Forty minutes later... 

Basel came out of the bathroom in a happy mood, completely dry from the hot-air sprays and wearing a fluffy towel-robe. He appeared to be alone on Level-1, and that puzzled him for a moment. He walked over to peek into Eliana's bedroom from her open door. Nothing.

He turned and saw a barefoot, pajama-clad Eliana descending the ladder. He called out, "Ah, there you are!"

"Just checking the sensors, everything's fine."

"No sign of our elusive visitor?"

Eliana sighed. "No. I hope it hasn't left the area. It has the whole world to hide in if it wants to." She paused for a moment and then smiled at her boyfriend. "We haven't talked about this for two days. What's your opinion of my monster now?"

"I guess I'm still sitting on the fence, and given the risks, I've decided to act as if the monster were real. The one hard piece of evidence we have is the UV flash. You were right, without the monster, there's no explanation for what caused it."

They had been slowly walking to his bedroom as they talked. "So," said Basel, giving Eliana a grateful smile, "want to give me a minute to change?"

She batted her eyes playfully. "Well, you'll like this better without the pajama tops. Why not just take off the top half of your robe?"

He raised his eyebrows playfully in return. "Okay!" A moment later he was lying down prone on his bed, arms by his side, the sheets pulled back, the top half of his robe forming a loose ruffle on his butt. He had his head turned in Eliana's direction, but his eyes were closed. Eliana stood and admired him for a moment. Basel heard her give a small cry before she climbed into bed to kneel on top of him, and it touched his heart to realize it was a cry of joy. Kneeling with her legs straddling him and her knees just touching his hips, her hands began to massage the upper muscles in his shoulders.

The sensations were exquisite, and Basel sighed in his pleasure. "My love..." he whispered.

"My love," replied Eliana. The massage continued for many minutes. Eliana could tell that her lover was deeply relaxed but still very awake. She decided to pop a question. "Basel?"

"Hmmm?"

"How is it that you're still not married? Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining! But you're such a wonderful catch, kind, handsome, smart, everything women look for when they're looking for a husband. I can't believe my fortune in finding you."

"Ah, well... I am a little shy... Hmmm, that feels divine..."

"No, that's not it. I'm the one who's shy in dating. You're very well adjusted. Trust me, this is a trained Priestess talking."

"Oh, I don't know. I shudder to think how I acted with you, the first time we met."

"You had a perfectly valid reason for being nervous. I could well have been a dominating Commander who had just bagged you as my sex toy."

Basel gave a deep sigh. "Yeah, I do remember thinking that. Beautiful Eliana, the thought seems so impossible now..." He let out another deep sigh as she started working his lower back muscles.

"So how is it possible I still have my chance for you? Why don't you have a crowd of females pursuing you?"

"You really want to know?"

She laughed and gave him a playful swat on his rump. "Basel, don't tease me!"

"Okay..." There was a long pause as Eliana returned to giving her massage. Basel finally sighed. "You know the culture Eli..."

"Hmmm?"

"About one in four adults is a guy, but what percentage of the vote do we hold?"

It was Eliana's turn to sigh. "I know... about 21%."

"It was below 20.7% the last time I looked. My age group is very typical. There are ninety CL6 and six CL7 right now. Only six of the CL6 are men, and none of the CL7."

Eliana squirmed. "It's not as if the guys are slaves..."

"Oh, I know. The advancement tests are blind to gender. It's just that the guys have it so easy, there's so little reason to compete. It's so easy for most guys to find two to four women who are very happy to have him as the male anchor for their marriage. And they will love him and take care of him and give him a wonderful life. But when it comes to deciding when a wife gets pregnant, or what's the next city to move to, or whether to add a new sister-wife to the marriage..."

"Oh," Eliana said defensively, "I know lots of marriages where the wives take the input from their husband very seriously, especially before they propose to a new sister wife. Nobody can force you to marry anybody."

"Uh huh. Eli!"

A long pause. "Okay. I know what you're saying. The pressure on the man is enormous, to accept the choice of his wives for a new marriage partner. The common attitude is, it's a woman's world."

"Did you know as little as six hundred years ago, men still had 25% of the vote?"

"Of course..." Eliana continued her massage and sighed. "Basel, I can't be responsible for everything in the culture. I try to support full gender equality, I really do."

Basel nodded. "I know. You treat me as a true equal. That's part of what I love about you..."

Eliana caressed his lower back down to his tailbone, acknowledging the compliment and expressing her love in return. She pulled the bathrobe down to expose his coccyx, and seeing that Basel didn't mind, Eliana bent down and kissed and then licked his tailbone. She then pulled down his covering a bit more and gripped his hips and gave a nip with her teeth on his exposed butt cheek.

Basel accepted the nip and dominating grip as simple playfulness and wiggled his butt in response. "Sweet Eli, feeling frisky?"

"Yes! I don't feel nervous at all. In fact, I feel like dominating you!"

Basel laughed and teased Eliana with another wiggle of his butt. He continued with his story. "I've gotten a few invitations from women for sex, once even from a guy, but it always just seemed... wrong."

"They were bad people?"

"No, they weren't. That's what made it so difficult to say no. I wasn't interested in the guy, but the women were quite beautiful, and they took the time to get to know me..."

After a while Eliana whispered, "I know what you're trying to say. They wanted to try having sex with you, perhaps propose marriage if you performed well..."

"Exactly. And I don't want sex or marriage to be a reward for performance, I just don't. After a while at Aleppo, I got a reputation for being both shy and stuck-up, and things weren't much different at Cairo. A woman hasn't asked me out in years... except Varda."

"Ah..." said Eliana knowingly. She shifted her knees to be on the insides of his legs, pressing against his upper inner thighs and forcing him to spread his legs to accommodate her. Eliana was delighted to find the motion pulled the bathrobe down even further. It was now barely covering his anus and genitals. Feeling very sexy and possessive and wanting to know how far Basel would let her take this, she began to caress his butt with her fingertips. Her fingers did lifting strokes, starting just above and to the sides of the anus, and then pushing up and outward.

The massage opened the outer anal area on each push, and what Eliana was doing was a common and well understood first step for a woman with a strap-on dildo to request permission to anal mount her male. Eliana was not wearing such a device, but Basel was accepting her request by lying submissively. She suddenly began to pant and feel flush.

Her mind tried to catch the thread of their suspended conversation. "Varda asked you for a date?"

"Well, sort of... I..."

Eliana caressed his buttocks in apology. "Basel, forgive me. I didn't mean to pry into something so personal..."

"Oh no, it's not that. I want to tell you. Varda and I... We might have implied some things to each other, but we were never explicit. Looking back, I wonder now if some things were just my hopeful imagination."

"Oh, I don't think it was just your imagination."

"Really? Why do you say that?"

Eliana grinned. "In the storage space under my bed, I found a female strap-on kit."

Basel's muscles tensed under Eliana's fingers. "What? Really?"

"Yes. I think Varda had designs on you."

"Wow... She never let on. Oh, maybe a few comments that I had a cute butt, but I thought she was just fooling around."

"Hardly! You should see this kit! Two dozen different ways for a woman to mount her male, from something sexy and wiggly that looks like it could give a male a great deal of pleasure, to something so cruel looking that I can't imagine any woman ever using it in love."

Eliana let a finger slip beneath the fold of the bathrobe and she started lightly stroking the fur around Basel's anus. "Varda was right about one thing. You do have a very sexy butt."

"Cute," mumbled Basel. "She used the word cute, not sexy... Ah..."

"I think Varda was all set to ask you to be her boyfriend, maybe even propose to you, but then the other women asked her to join their marriage and she changed her mind at the last moment. You had such bad luck Basel."

He let out a slow, deep breath. "Oh, I can't complain. If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."

Eliana blinked and then giggled. "I'll have to remember that one..." Her hands went back to massaging his back, starting at his shoulders and slowly working their way down. She felt her companion shudder in his pleasure as the massage dropped below his waist, and she allowed her fingers to descend again below the towel, lightly exploring his anal and genital areas.

"Basel, I'm not moving too fast for you, am I?" Her fingertips on one hand had nestled into his soft fur between his butt cheeks and found his anus. Eliana made slow up and down strokes very lightly across the sensitive skin, caressing the closed orifice. Her other hand had come up under the towel from between his legs, and she was cradling his testes on four fingers and gently tracing the outline of the back of his scrotum with her thumb.

Basel was in heaven. He sighed deeply and shook his head no to Eliana's question and whispered, "This feels so loving. All I want to do is accept you Eli. I've never trusted anyone like this..."

"My love," whispered Eliana. She pulled the towel down, completely exposing his rear. She watched in fascination and growing desire as her fingers caressed and opened Basel. "So beautiful," she whispered. "This is the first time I've ever done this, ever gotten this sexy with a man. You are so beautiful Basel, such beautiful, silky fur. Your bottom is a lot more interesting than a woman's... My love... My love..."

Basel whimpered in appreciation of the love and pleasure that Eliana was offering him. Overcome with her own emotion, Eliana bent her head down while separating Basel's ass cheeks with her hands. Basel felt a hot breathe of air at his butt, and then a playful tongue began to lap and moisten him.

Basel was breathing is short gasps. The act that Eliana was about to do was more than just anal sex. The announcements and celebrations and legal contracts would all come later, but this was the moment where the decision was made. Basel cried, his mind overwhelmed with the emotions of his love for Eliana and what she was proposing. He expressed his acceptance with his body, his legs flaired out to the sides and his rump lifted up for penetration.

Eliana cried in return as she realized that Basel had accepted her. She wasn't wearing a dildo, and most women in her position would have taken the time to get one or just have used a finger, but for Eliana the actual penetration was irrelevant. She stood up and quickly shed her pajamas. She then spread her legs wide and squatted back down, pressing her vulva against the soft skin between Basel's upturned scrotum and anus. She curled her body and lay on top of him, symbolically mounting him without penetration. She called out in crying gasps, "Mine! You are mine! I own you!"

Basel wept his acceptance, arching back with his rump to encourage Eliana to anal copulate. She made a few shaky thrusts with her hips and pubis against his offered anus, symbolically sealing her promise and commitment, and then she broke down in tears. She was being cradled in Basel's arms a moment later.

There seemed to be so much to talk about, yet neither wanted to start a conversation. The period of rest of quiet affection soon drifted into a state of great drowsiness. Basel was dimly aware that Eliana had fallen asleep in his arms. He had never seen her naked before, but the thought of exploring her while she slept never occurred to him. He covered both their naked bodies with a blanket and joined Eliana in her dreams.



-------

Chapter 12: Test Flight

Four hours later... 

Basel drifted up slowly from a deep and restful sleep. He shuddered briefly when he was almost awake, sensing a human presence next to him. Then his eyes blinked open and he turned his head.

Eliana was lying silently on her side, her head propped in her hand, her elbow on the mattress. She had bare shoulders, and the blanket over them fell across her breasts, covering her breasts from just above her nipples. She seemed totally at ease with her nakedness beneath the blanket, and as Basel looked at her she gave him a shy smile.

"Hi!" she squeaked.

Basel nodded and smiled back. "Well, now that you've just committed to me, have you discovered to your horror that I snore?"

Eliana laughed. "You don't snore! And I do enjoy watching you sleep. You looked so peaceful and contented. Did you have a nice dream?"

"I had a most wonderful dream." His hand came and touched her cheek. "And now I realize it wasn't a dream at all. Eli, we have so much to discuss."

She nodded and quickly scooted her body to press against his. Basel was delighted to feel the long length of her silky nakedness. His hand came across to caress her, starting low on the side of her hip and then petting across her pelvis, pressing down briefly on her womb and feeling the coarse stiff hairs of her pubis. Then the hand slid up, across the trim waist, lingering for a moment at her ribcage, and then completing the arc by cupping the underside of her breast. His forefinger formed a circle with his thumb around her areole, and he gently squeezed her breast, forcing it out from the blanket. He blinked at the fat nipple, erect and dark pink. Eliana gasped and then arched her back, offering her breast for suckling.

Her lips quivered as he leaned over and kissed her sweet nipple and caressed it with his lips. Her hand came up to hold his head to her breast. "I want you Basel, so fiercely my desire overwhelms me."

He nodded. His tongue found the nipple between his lips. He started to trace it lightly with the tip of his tongue until he felt Eliana shiver, then gave one quick parting kiss before he pulled back to smile at her. "Eli, we have so much to discuss."

She suddenly looked a little worried. "I know. Basel, I want you, but I know I moved in awfully fast on you. If you're having second thoughts, I'll understand."

Basel shook his head. "No, it's not that. Eli, if we're going to commit to each other, I want us to be equal partners."

"Oh of course. I agree. I will never treat you otherwise."

"Eli, do you understand what I'm talking about? I want to own you, fully and completely, as fully as you own me." His hand left her breast and dropped to press against her womb. "Your body will belong to me, one-hundred percent."

Eliana stared at him and considered. She finally said with a bit of hesitancy. "I want to give you what you're asking for. You deserve it. Okay, my body will belong to you, just as your body will belong to me."

Basel kissed her cheek. "You sound a tiny bit uncertain."

"Well... I'm just trying to think how this will work if someday we accept another woman into our union."

"Exactly Eli! That's just it. It would be impossible for us to fully own each other if there was another person involved. As soon as there's a third, everything becomes group negotiation. One-on-one ownership is completely different."

Eliana was still for a moment and then nodded. "Yes, I know. Three or more people together are a group, and they interact as a group. Being with a single other person is something else entirely. The intimacy is profoundly different. I've seen this as a Priestess, again and again." She returned his kiss. "Basel, you're asking me to commit to being monogamous, aren't you?"

He nodded and gave her a hopeful smile.

"Are you sure you want this Basel? What are the chances sometime in the next three hundred years that we'll find another woman we'll want to marry? I've done marriage counseling. Most men enjoy having two to four wives, especially for the sexuality. They find the diversity pleasing."

Basel shook his head. "No, I'm sure. One wife is what I want."

Eliana lay flat on her back and stared at the ceiling. "I think it'll be okay with me. I've never desired a sister-wife for sex. But if we make our desire public, we may become social outcasts. Committed monogamists are almost unheard of."

"Well, would we have to tell anybody? Isn't this our private business?"

"I guess so. But if we don't announce, sooner or later unattached women are going to be asking me and especially you for dates. What should we tell them?"

"Oh..." Basel sighed. "I haven't thought of that. I'm certain I want monogamy though."

Eliana gazed at him. "I understand." They spent a few minutes kissing each other, expressing their new affection with their bodies. "Basel, may I have a few days to think about this?"

"Sure. Take more time if you need it." Eliana nodded and a moment later left his bed and headed to her own bedroom to start the day. Basel soon heard her preparing breakfast.

One day later... 

Time: January 24, 9570 4:40 AM UCT

It was three minutes before sunrise, and Basel and Eliana were waiting until the break of dawn to begin their first test flight. Daylight would last three hours and ten minutes today, with the sun making a forty-four degree arc along the horizon. Maximum light would occur at 6:07 AM, with the sun's azimuth at due south and its altitude at 1.4 degrees.

Eliana revved the core engine one last time while closely monitoring the performance displays. Basel thought she looked totally relaxed, a sizable contrast to his own feelings.

"What's the air temperature?" she asked.

"Right now, -41C, a typical dawn temperature for this time of year."

Eliana gave a small laugh as she continued her engine test. "Sure is different than living in Cuba! And I thought Bandar Arenas was cold..."

"Well, the gulf stream is expected to start up again within the next decade. Once that happens, the climate here should warm considerably. And the summers here are quite nice, you'll see."

"Uh huh," she muttered, concentrating on her tests and not paying much attention to what he was saying.

After she finished, he asked, "Are you sure we have enough power?"

Eliana gave a small laugh. "Two megawatts! Are you joking?! It's too much power Basel. This boat would start to tumble if I ever tried to drive the turbines with full throttle. We can hover with either wing engine alone. They're 850 kW each."

Basel nodded and looked out over the short wings of their crab-shaped CAT. The compact auxiliary wing engines that Eliana had installed were barely visible under the turbines. "Hard to believe something so small can generate so much punch."

Eliana nodded. "Yeah. But the high performance comes at a price. Unlike the CAT's core engine, the wing engines need to be turned off completely when they're not under load, and they're also not as reliable."

"What? What would happen if they both fail?"

"We'd still be okay. With just the 300 kW from the core engine, we would be able to glide for a very long time." She paused for a moment and then added, "But we would have to pick one of the frozen lakes to land on."

At 4:44 AM, the CAT exited the station, the airlock doors closing immediately behind them and the station performing a plasma sterilization cycle on the empty chamber.

Their exit ramp faced due southeast, in the general directions of their tracks from their previous outing. As soon as they cleared the shallow ramp, Eliana turned and headed west southwest, parking at the center of a large pond about 600 meters from the station.

Basel turned to Eliana. "Do you have any sensation that you're being watched?"

Eliana scanned around the pond for a moment. "Not particularly. It's not a magic gift Basel. I could be wrong, but I think we're alone right now." She then grinned at him. "Ready for takeoff?"

Basel gave her a slight nod. "Proceed."

Eliana tilted the turbines straight down and engaged the powerful wing engines. There was a rising whine of power, and the craft lifted about one meter off the ground. The snow underneath them blasted away in all directions, revealing the solid ice underneath.

"Amazingly quiet in here," Basel commented. He was speaking in a conversational tone, and Eliana heard him clearly. She nodded dismissively, her mind clearly engaged with another matter. "Eli, what?"

"There's a bit of a risk in doing these tests. I timed the response time of the wing engines. They ramp up from zero power to full power in the time between five seconds to eight seconds after receiving jump power from the core engine."

"Ah. And how much power do we need for the jump start?"

"Almost 90 kW. These engines were designed to use a 100 kW prime pack as a jumper engine. Do you see the danger?"

"Yeah. If we hover above a governor limit, the engines will switch off, and it'll take eight seconds to get full power back once we start to fall."

"Yes, and if we drop like a rock, we'll fall 200 meters in those first five to eight seconds before I have full engine power again. We'll also need some altitude for pulling out of the fall. Bottom line, if we are hovering and lose power within a few hundred meters of the ground, we're probably going to die."

"You want to call off the test?"

"No, but I will if you're uncomfortable with my plan. Our station is 500 meters above sea level. Some of the nearby peaks are a thousand meters higher. Here at the pond we're about nine meters lower. Rather than hovering straight up, I want to go up only fifty to sixty meters, just above the tree line, and then start flying in a tight circle."

Basel nodded. "Build up some air speed?"

"Exactly. We'll fly a tight spiral upward. If the engines trip out, we should be able to glide back to the altitude where we have power. We should be okay. But Basel, there is some risk. I'm assuming these engines weren't left with us as a death trap, that our Guild gave us a reasonable flight window for using them."

He thought for a moment and then nodded. "Sounds reasonable. I've heard of cases where people have suffered from their stupidity or laziness, but the Guild doesn't try to kill its cadets."

"Okay, here we go." Eliana took the CAT slowly up. As she neared the treetops of the mixed pines and taller spruces surrounding the pond, she muttered, "This is where we're the most vulnerable. You strapped in okay?"

"As tight as I can make it and still breathe."

Eliana grinned. "Okay. Here goes!" She started to accelerate and bank the plane. Once the tight loop was established, she slowly started to ascend.

It was a bumpy ride. Basel thought Eliana was having some difficulty controlling the CAT, and he just kept quiet and monitored the numerous displays. He heard Eliana give a sigh of relief when they topped 700 meters above sea level. Basel thought the ground 200 meters below them still looked very close.

"Well," she said, "I think I'd be barely okay if we lost power now." They continued their loop, Eliana looking more and more relaxed with each hundred meters of additional height. As they approached two kilometers above sea level, Eliana leaned back in her chair and sighed. "What a bucket! Basel, if you ever have a death wish, ask me to fly this thing above Mach 0.5."

"Think you can handle it below that?"

"We're going 300 kph now. This is fine. It took a while to get the hang of it. I'm going to keep our slow spiral upwards until we hit the CAT's flight ceiling or loss power."

"What's its flight ceiling?"

"With all this power, it should make 13,000 meters easy. I've got a feeling though the Guild will keep us below that." She thought for a moment and then added. "Our ancestors must have been great pilots to use these things."

"Huh? Were CATs were used in the old wars?"

Eliana nodded. "Summer of 8244, the Battle of Giza. Abdul Hadi's special forces used CATs to attack the Health Faction in their hilltop fortress. All terrain means all terrain."

"Wow. I didn't think the p-B11 engines went back that far, not for aircraft."

"You're right, they don't. They were using chemical jet engines back in 8244, with six-man CATs not much bigger than this. The scene must have been horrific."

Over the next twenty minutes, Eliana slowly took the CAT up to 3,000 meters. Shortly afterwards they both felt a sudden jolt as the CAT lost power from both auxiliary engines.

"Hold on," she called out, as she banked the CAT into a gentle downward glide and back towards the station. "We still have power from the core engine. I'm restarting the auxiliaries now. When did we lose them?"

Basel studied the readout on a display showing flight recordings. "Between 3015 and 3020 meters above sea level. Current distance to the station, about nine kilometers."

By the time they neared two hours into their flight, they had made numerous tests of the CAT's ceiling. The auxiliary engines would always lose power just above three kilometers above sea level regardless of the horizontal distance to the station. On her last run, Eliana was more than ninety-two kilometers due west of their home, flying north and slowly rising. The auxiliaries kicked out right on schedule at 3,018 meters altitude.

She had become very skilled at restarting, regaining full power before gliding below 3,000 meters. The time was a few minutes before 7 AM. "Basel, we have less than an hour of sunlight left. How about we do the weapons test and call it a day?"

"Okay by me."

Eliana reduced speed until she was hovering, and then selected a small snow-covered hilltop two kilometers to the west and about two kilometers below them. She and Basel both operated the CAT's new weapon system built into the auxiliary engines.

"Twin 600 kW lasers on stand-by, tuned for maximum power delivery." called Basel.

Eliana zoomed into their target on the main display. "Scanners locked."

"Weapons locked."

"And fire," replied Eliana. A few seconds later their targeting display showed a small plume of water vapor jetting briskly from the hilltop. "Cease fire," Eliana called out.

"Batteries returning to stand-by. Everything appears to be working fine."

Eliana surveyed the scene for a moment. "Well, it seems the CAT has a couple of claws."

"Yeah." Basel stared at the magnified image of the steaming pit. "I never thought I'd be doing this."

Eliana nodded and turned the CAT for home, flying rock solid at 370 kph. Basel complimented her for how smooth the ride was and asked, "Still think it's a bucket?"

"In the air? Yeah. But a jump jet can't fly underwater. For all the things the CAT can do, it's not a bad aircraft. I'd hate to learn to fly in one of these things though. It's not something for a novice pilot."

"Ah, should I scratch my hopes for flying lessons then?"

"You want to try Basel?"

"Uh huh, if it's safe."

"Let me think about it."

"Okay."

They made in home without incident, and after going through plasma cleaning in the airlock, they both headed up to the observation dome. They were standing by the clear walls with the sun just about to set at due south southwest.

A few quiet minutes after sunset, Basel asked, "Sense anything?"

Eliana shook her head no. "It's not an easy gift to use. It's most effective when I'm not trying to use it. It something my subconscious does. If I try to exert active control..."

Basel gave an understanding grunt. After another minute of quiet staring at the scenery, he commented, "So, I probably should get back to the garage and work on the deep-snow scanner. How about you?"

"I'll be down on Level-2. There are two hours of ground imaging from the CAT I want to download into the library and study." Eliana smiled at him. "Remember it's your day to make dinner."

"Oh, I won't forget. I found an interesting Karbalan recipe I want to try out."

"Ah, lamb!" said Eliana happily. "Something to look forward to!" They shared a brief hug and kiss and went their separate ways.



-------

Chapter 13: Future Dreams


Later that day... 

Time: January 24, 9570 3:00 PM UCT

Basel finished cleaning up from dinner and found Eliana making a selection on the entertainment system. She was still dressed for the day but barefoot, and she had placed their two plush leather lounge chairs side-by-side. As he smiled and started to walk towards her, a haunting melody of a men's choir came from the surrounding speakers.

"Recognize this?" asked Eliana as she made an arm gesture for him to sit.

Basel sat down in the offered chair and smiled as Eliana knelt down and started to take off his shoes and socks. "Sure, early Bel'darian Chant. Sounds like something right after the Wild Times."

Eliana nodded. "Very good. This is from the reign of Abdul Nur, servant of the Light. You can almost hear the weariness in their voices. Three hundred years of political chaos, and the world had had enough."

Rather than sitting in her own chair, Eliana continued to kneel and started massaging his feet. Basel sighed happily and closed his eyes. "Hmm, that feels nice..."

"You have such beautiful feet. I should do this more often."

Another sigh. "Sounds good to me. I'll write you reminder notes. Lots of notes... Ah... Yeah, right there, perfect."

She held his foot firmly in her hands and ran her soft lips up the inside of his arch, and then traced her way back with gentle kisses. "And I want to thank you for a truly scrumptious dinner. I loved your lamb sauce."

Basel nodded. "It was a recipe my great-great grandfather taught me. I had a hunch it would be great with the wild rice."

"Ah, your grandfather. What's he like?"

"Oh, he's a really nice guy. His name is Jafar. You should meet him someday. Happily married, three wives, Gila, Yemima, and... uh... Merav... I'd like you to meet them all, very interesting people..." Basel wiggled his toes in appreciation as Eliana pressed her thumbs into the ball of his foot. "The family has been at Karbala for close to a hundred years now."

Eliana's eyebrows went up. "That long?"

Basel nodded. "They are all such expert shepherds, they have permanent permits from the Sheep Guild for residency... don't have to shift... Yes, you should meet them. Ah, that feels so nice Eli..."

She lowered her nose to sniff between his toes. "Oh, you deserve this. I love petting your feet. I love your man-smell. And besides, you cooked me a fabulous dinner and even did the cleanup."

Eliana continued with her head bent down and kissing and licking his feet as she massaged them. She gave a small laugh. "My moms would be so proud of me! When I was growing up in Cuba, they would sometimes joke and warn me when father wasn't around to be sure not to repeat their mistake. They kept telling me to pick a husband who was good in the kitchen."

"Oh? Your father can't cook?"

"Well, he's been accused of trying to, but my moms have taken over the job. You on the other hand are a fabulous cook. Very attractive!"

He laughed. "Ah yes, the way to a woman's heart is through her stomach."

"It's true Basel."

"I should make you one of my desserts sometime. Do you like chocolate pate with raspberries, or maybe amaretto cheesecake with toasted almonds?"

"Really?!"

"Yep."

She laughed back, "Oh, you are such a fabulous catch!"

He grinned. "But Eli, you're a very good cook too."

"You're being too kind. I approach cooking with cold, military precision. Get into the kitchen, get the job done, move out. You by contrast approach cooking as an art form. I love to watch you while you work! You truly love the job, and you're such a master at the craft!"

"Well, when I'm by myself, I usually eat very simply. I enjoy preparing meals for you."

More kisses on his feet, and then Eliana returned to an earlier thought. "I'd like you to meet my family too Basel, my parents I mean. And I do love my father, in spite of how I might have sounded earlier."

"What's he do?"

"He's with the Literary Guild, works on holo-scripts, mostly entertainment, occasionally a documentary. My family is living in Tehran now. Have you been there recently?"

"Tehran? No, not since I was a child. It's just a short train ride from Baalbek, a hundred kilometers. We used to hop down there all the time."

"Yes, of course. Tehran is such a beautiful city. I saw it for the first time just a few years ago. They were just finishing re-building the golden gate bridge."

"Yeah, the huge earthquake, what a mess..." A contented sigh. "I'd like to meet your family very much. Maybe in July or August, after our test is over... Assuming the monster doesn't eat us first of course."

Eliana stiffened for an instant and then realized Basel's remark was simple playful banter. She decided to reply in kind. "Hah!" A playful nip on the inner arch of his foot. "Basel! You know how sensitive I am about being teased about my monster." Eliana gave one last playful lick to the underside of his big toe, and then got up and sat down in the chair next to him. They held hands and quietly listened to the winsome chanting.

The next recording Eliana had programmed was a pleasant fourth millennium symphony. After the first few movements, she sighed and squeezed his hand. "My love."

Basel nodded. "My love."

"Basel, you're very sweet to give me all this time to think about monogamy. Do you think we can spend some time for a while, talking about ourselves, what a marriage between us would be like?"

"Sure, that's a great idea. And the monster outside is a patient monster. I'm sure it won't mind waiting a bit before we find it."

Eliana reached over and playfully pinched his nipple, and then began to caress him with her fingertips, resting her arm on his chest. "What are your dreams Basel?"

"My dream is lying right next to me."

"Oh, good answer future husband!"

"How about you Eli? A full Priestess, a military Commander and aviator, such an ambitious life, so unusual in these times. What drove you to it?"

She was quiet for a while. "I want to go to mars."

"Huh? You mean the planet? For real?"

"Yep! I want to be an explorer. That's my real passion. We have the technology to do so much more than we're doing. I want to be an explorer. I want to go to mars, maybe even live there if it's possible, at least for a few years."

"Ah, I see. Your careers are stepping stones."

"Yes. As a girl, I tried to imagine what types of people would be chosen for a long-term space mission. I read everything I could about the old lunar colonies. I thought a career in the military and aviation would be a good foundation."

Basel nodded. "And a skilled counselor would also be very useful to a colony."

"Well... It's not just that. My Priestess training also helped me figure myself out. It's a common joke that has a lot of truth behind it." Her hand drifted up, caressing his throat and neck. "Come on Basel, besides me as your ideal girl, what did you dream about as a boy?"

"I liked science a lot. I was fascinated by the research the Photonics Guild was doing. Let's see... As a teenager, I really did dream about you, what my first girlfriend would be like. I had lots of dreams of what it would be like to sleep with you."

"Ah. Someday you should tell me some of your fantasies. Maybe I could help..."

"Really?! Be forewarned! Some of my fantasies were a bit kinky!"

Eliana's eyebrows went up. "But not degrading, I hope?!"

"Oh no. I dreamt of love, and love will always respect..." Basel was silent for a while, occasionally reaching up and petting the back of Eliana's hand as she caressed his cheek. "I had a dream of being on the Supreme Council. I still do..."

"Wow," said Eliana quietly. The time passed, and the short symphony entered its final movement. "I guess in a way we are both shooting for the stars. Right now there are twelve CL-28, four CL-29, two CL-30, one CL-31..."

"... and there hasn't been a male Supreme Council member in almost three hundred years."

"Really? Has it been that long?"

Basel sighed and nodded. "It's been a constant downhill slide. And ever since Fawwaz died six years ago, the entire legislature has been 100% women, 769 Stateswomen between CL-24 and CL27 and not a single guy."

"But there are some guys who are close, right?"

"Just a handful, five CL-22 and two CL-23."

Eliana reached over and returned to caressing his cheek. "I've met a number of Stateswomen through my grandmother Naysa. They're all very dedicated in protecting men's rights. Do guys have a problem with an all-women legislature?"

"Oh, a few do, sure. You can see it at all the Citizen Levels. For every adult Level, the male population is older, not advancing as quickly as the women's. Do you know the numbers Eli?"

"Vaguely. I feel like a bit of a snob when I look at them. I do know my current Level of CL-8 Commander is fairly well balanced, 22.7% guys."

"Yeah, but there's a forty-four year age difference. A woman who makes Commander does so at an average age of 190. The average age for a guy to make Commander is 234."

"Really? That big a difference?"

"Yep. CL-8 is the first Class where the guys are less than 25% of the population. For CL-7, its 25.9%, and for my Class, it's 28.3%,. It keeps rising for the lower Classes until at CL-2 it's almost a third, 32.8%"

"But Basel, that's good for marriages, isn't it? The most common way for marriages to start is for two women to pair up and then search for a husband. Having close to a one-third mix of guys in the lower classes means there's a good supply of both husbands and wife-pairs. And the ratio is always less than a third. The men still get to be choosy."

"Yeah, but we pay the price at the higher levels. Tell me, weren't you the least surprised when you realized your CL-16 superior at Judah was a guy?"

"Zaafir? Oh, I guess a little bit. I think I was more surprised of his high rank. But I don't mind having a male boss. He's a very nice guy. I kind of enjoy it."

"I think I remember being surprised too. I looked something up in the library afterwards. We have the new Judgment 9570 census downloaded. Out of 153,758 CL-16 Governors in the world, only 3,270 are guys, not much more than two percent. And it just keeps getting worse. At CL-18, there are 46,207 Governors with 458 guys, just one percent."

"You memorized the numbers?"

"Sure, why not? At CL-20, there are 11,627 Governors including 53 guys."

Eliana frowned. "I didn't realize a guy would care that much. The government works very hard to keep the law gender-neutral. The legislature did a lot of advertising explaining why they're going to put back male protection into the rape laws, and urging women not to expunge it again."

Basel made a deep sigh. "I know. But if males were treated with full equality, the law never would have been expunged in the first place. This is a good example of why I want to be on the Supreme Council."

Eliana sighed back. "One person can't change the culture Basel."

Basel stared at her. "How can a person who prides herself as being the Preacher's daughter say a thing like that?"

Eliana just stared back and gulped.

Basel gave her a kind smile. "Yes, I can change the culture. It'll just take a lot of work, that's all."

Eliana petted him for a while. As the music ended, she sighed and said, "So, I'm going to marry a man who wants to change the world."

"And I'm going to marry a woman who wants to go the mars."

"Will you come with me?"

"Sure, if it's possible. Will you live in my palace, once I change the world?"

"Okay! It's a deal!"

It was very late. They gave each other brief but playful kisses and retired to their separate bedrooms.



-------

Chapter 14: View to a Kill

Ten days later.

Time: February 4, 9570 2:10 PM

"Basel! What in the world are you doing?!"

Basel looked up from his optics bench in the photonics lab. A large array of lasers and cross-linked holo-scanners were laid out on a precision optics board before him, and Eliana thought the tangle of connecting fiber-wires looked so complicated they reminded her of a bowl of spaghetti.

Basel gave her a beaming smile. "Hi dearest! When you get a chance, you might want to bow down and worship me!"

Eliana shook her head in disbelief, and then forced herself to try to match Basel's playfulness. "Now don't you blaspheme Basel! This is a trained Priestess you're talking to!" She stared again at the disassembled scanner. "What are you doing? We were supposed to have this ready for the test flight tomorrow."

"Oh, I know." The grin was still huge.

"Uh, didn't someone promise me about ten days ago that this would be done in five?"

For the first time, Basel looked a little sheepish. "Uh, well, yeah, I guess I might have said something like that. But there's one thing you have to understand about research Eli."

"Oh yeah? What's that?"

"All good researchers are optimists! Besides, you know we were letting our schedule slip. We've been spending our evenings getting to know each other."

She shook her head dismissively. "I know. Still! Basel, you told me yesterday the scanner would be installed today. Look at this thing!" she cried, waving her hand at the myriad of tiny parts before her.

Basel went back to smiling, barely able to contain his excitement. "But that was yesterday! Today I have discovered the PATH of righteousness!"

Eliana found herself smiling back. "Now don't you blaspheme Basel!" She stared for a long moment at his optical bench, trying to make sense out of what she was seeing. "What is this thing?"

Basel waved his hands over the complex optics before him and looked at her sweetly. "We've been discussing my research ideas. You know my methods. Can you figure it out yourself?"

Never one to refuse a challenge, Eliana stared long and hard at his work. She finally muttered, "It looks like some kind of..."

"No, wait," she thought to herself. "Look how the holo-scanners are cross-connected. Don't the optics manuals tell you never to do this? Why isn't this thing blowing up in his face?" She started tracing the wiring in her mind, trying to develop a mathematical schematic for the optics before her. She dimly realized that Basel had cleverly cross-wired the holo-scanners in such a way that none of their collectors ever made the critical mistake of allowing a loop oscillation. Was that possible? And what was the purpose for all this madness? She finally shook her head in bewilderment and utter confusion.

"No, I give up. I'm staring at this thing, and I don't know what I'm looking at."

"This is huge Eli! I'm going to be famous, Baalbek's photonic researcher of the year! Heck, the century! You are looking at the world's very first example of Phased Aperture Topical Holography!"

Eliana couldn't help but grin at Basel's enthusiasm and new acronym. "The PATH of righteousness, huh?"

"Yep!"

"So what will it do, and when will it do it?"

"I think I can have this installed in the CAT ready to go in two or three days."

"Really? Give me a completely realistic estimate Basel."

He paused for a moment and considered. "Realistically, plan for a test flight on the morning of the 9th, unless something really unexpected comes up."

"A four day delay?"

Basel nodded. "I looked up the difference on the solar charts. The delay will get us another forty minutes of daylight, from 3:13 AM to 9:08 AM, plus another full degree of altitude on the sun, up to 5.2 degrees at local solar noon."

"Okay. I hate missing four days of scanning though."

"Eli, I haven't told you about the capabilities yet! We'll be able to fly over ten times as high, over 200 meters, and do the scanning a hundred times faster. Instead of covering a hectare in five to ten minutes, we should be able to cover a full square kilometer."

Eliana's eyes lit up as she realized what he was saying. "Wow, great work Basel!"

Time: February 9, 9570 3:52 AM UCT

Eliana idly checked the sun's position on her instruments as Basel worked on his experimental scanner, marking it at 1.9 degrees altitude and its azimuth at 147. They were hovering 200 meters above the local landscape, five kilometers north of their station.

Basel looked up from his display. "It could use a little tuning. For now, you'll have to stay within 210 meters of the ground."

Eliana nodded. "I'll make a run at 200 meters. This is so much nicer than 20 meters. I'd constantly be ducking around the trees."

"Two hundred meters will be fine. We'll be scanning in a sixty-degree cone. Try flying straight ahead at ten meters per second."

Eliana typed for a moment on her auto-pilot module, and then said, "Bearing 180, wing five by five, minimal forward thrusters to the helm." The CAT began to glide southward at 36 kph.

"It seems to be working," said Basel after a moment. "In one minute, we will have scanned a strip 600 meters long by 280 meters wide."

Eliana nodded approvingly. "So, a square kilometer every six minutes. This is very good." She paused for a moment. "Are you seeing the detail you expected?"

"Just judging from the sharpness of the echoes, I think so. At the rate we're recording, I can't process the data in real time. We'll be downloading the data into the station library for the image processing."

They settled down into a quiet routine. Eliana would methodically fly south for a thousand seconds, scanning a 280 meter-wide strip ten kilometers long, and then make a U-turn and repeat the process north. As they neared the end of their seventh pass, they had scanned a rectangle ten kilometers long and almost two kilometers wide.

Basel spoke up. "Eli, I have this thing seriously de-tuned. We would have a much easier job at this if I made some adjustments."

Eliana nodded, squinting slightly from flying almost directly into the sun on the southern horizon. "How long would that be?"

"We'd miss one day of scanning, no more. I know exactly what I have to do."

She nodded again. "And what would be the benefit?"

"Well, I've got the angle of the scan set much too wide at sixty degress. I want to narrow it down by a factor of five. We'll still have the same scan width, maybe lose a few meters. But we'll be five times higher up."

Eliana broke into a bright smile. "A full kilometer? That's a much safer altitude! Thank you Basel. We're just finishing this strip now. Why don't we head back home? I'll let you get to work."

"Yeah. Actually, I was thinking we could return to our old site #4 first, where you saw the creature. There were some unusual echoes on my prototype. I'd like to retest."

Eliana forced herself not to shiver. She nodded and without another word throttled the CAT and flew southeast at 400 kph. They were a kilometer above their old site less than ten minutes later. "Time mark, 6:10 AM," she called out, "local solar noon."

"We'll have to drop down to scan Eli, down to 200 meters."

She nodded and gracefully lowered the CAT.

"Scanning now," said Basel. A few quiet minutes went by.

"Well?" she asked.

"I've got the recordings. Just give me another minute for the analysis." A minute later, "It seems completely normal. None of the weird echoes."

A quiet pause. "Interesting. Anything else you want to do here?"

"No, I guess not."

Eliana nodded and then sighed. "I'm not the warrior I'd like to think I am. I'm looking down at our old tracks and it's giving me the creeps. Let's go home Basel." Hearing no objection, she began to raise the CAT.

As they crossed 400 meters of local altitude Basel called out, "Wait! What's that?"

"Where?"

"Northeast of site #4, maybe two hundred meters. It looks like... Is that a wooly hippo lying on the snow?"

"Out in the open? Shouldn't they be buried in deep hibernation?"

Basel frowned. "Yeah, they sure should."

"Let's take a look."

A slow flyby revealed what appeared to be a hippo carcass lying on the snow. After a brief consultation, Eliana landed the CAT nearby, retracted the wings and drove to the site. They soon had the dead animal five meters in front of their vehicle. It was indeed a wooly hippo, the pigmy cousin of its tropical relative, barely 200 kg with a thick and ropey woolen fur. It had roughly the shape of a small pig.

"Well, this is different," said Basel after a moment. "See the tusks? I think this is an adult male."

Eliana frowned. "The animal doesn't just look killed. It looks slaughtered."

"Yeah. When I first saw this from the air, I thought a bear might have scored a kill. They occasionally come out of hibernation early and extremely hungry. But this hippo doesn't look chewed at all. It looks as if something just broke its neck and left it."

"It's not just broken Basel. Look at the throat area. It looks as if half the neck was scissored open and then the head bent way back. That cut looks very clean, almost surgical. There's no tearing at all."

"That's... interesting... Heck Eli, in deep hibernation, the animal would be very sluggish. The poor hippo didn't have a chance." Basel continued to stare at the carcass, a growing frown upon his face. "There's something else bothering me about this kill."

"What?"

"I'm not sure. Let me think."

Eliana stared at the corpse. "Well, this is the first spotted hippo I've ever seen, hundreds of small, dark brown spots. I always thought they were a uniform gray color. Look Basel, the spots seem to form some sort of pattern."

Basel shook his head. "No, that's not it..." Another quiet minute passed. "Blood! That's it! Where's the blood?! Even in hibernation, the blood flow would have been considerable. All the neck arteries have been sliced. But the snow here looks almost spotless."

"Yes... Could the hippo have been killed elsewhere and then dragged here?"

"Possible I suppose." Basel looked around, including the visuals from the rear of the CAT. "I don't see any drag marks, no streaks of blood either."

"Perhaps the wind..." Eliana stared at the corpse and didn't complete her thought.

Basel turned to her. "Eli, are you sensing anything?"

"I feel a little nervous." She paused. "No, nothing overt."

Basel looked at the carcass again. "I'd like to do an autopsy."

"Here?!"

"No, not here. Back at the station, the bio lab. I think this corpse will just fit inside the cargo bay." A long, tense moment of silence passed. "You don't think that's a good idea?"

Eliana grimaced. "I'm trying to weigh unknown risks. What are the odds of learning something valuable? Are they worth the risk of contaminating the station? What if there are parasites within the corpse?"

"We have the means to keep the specimen isolated, carbon nano-tube containers, very strong. We can keep the carcass isolated. And we can incinerate at the first sign of trouble." He looked at her. "Eli, I think we should try to find out what killed the hippo. And if there are parasites within the corpse, don't you think we should know about it?"

She made her decision. "Agreed. We need information. An autopsy is worth the risk." She glanced at a complex set of controls between them. "How good are you with the remotes?"

"I'm very good."

"Why don't you take over then?"

Basel nodded and spent the next twenty minutes manipulating the CAT's mechanical arms, expertly placing the frozen carcass within the hold of the CAT. When he was finished, he retracted the arms and Eliana sealed the cargo area, extended the wings and lifted straight up, applying extra power for the increased weight. At 800 meters, she banked sharply and headed for home, Basel monitoring the inert carcass along the way.



-------

Chapter 15: Dark Dreams


Five hours later... 

Time: February 9, 9570 11:30 AM UCT

Eliana was alone on Level-B, the first sub-level below the CAT's Level-A garage. Like Level-C below it, Level-B was a large work and storage area, 8 meters by 16 meters with a 4-meter ceiling. Along the length of an 8-meter wall were several isolation chambers with numerous diagnostics for bio-analysis. Eliana and Basel had placed their specimen in Chamber-#1, their most secure repository.

The large corpse was frozen solid. Once its transfer was complete, they decided that Basel would work in the station's Level-2 control room and start the processing of the raw holographic data they had collected, while Eliana monitored the slow thawing of the corpse with low-level microwaves.

The work time passed without incident. A bit later than she expected, she heard Basel entering the CAT garage above her from the main station's connecting tunnel. He then climbed down to meet her.

"Hi. Sorry I'm late. I felt the urge to head up to Observation and take a quick look around."

"No problem. That was a good idea. See anything?"

"Not much in the visuals. Twilight ended an hour ago. Everything looked quiet in the infrared and UV. Amazingly long stretch of clear weather we've been having. Typically we would have had a number of storms by now." Basel stretched and noticed for the first time the temperature of the room. "Nice and warm down here," he commented.

Eliana nodded. "I have the room heated to 21C."

"Ah. To help with the thawing?" He turned to the specimen chamber.

"No. I just felt cold I guess. I found out a few things about the hippo."

Basel was staring at their hippo. "Hmm?" He looked back to Eliana. "Did you start the autopsy without me?"

"No. Well, maybe a little, just the surface analysis, once the skin area had thawed. All those spots, I know what they are now. They're not fur color. They're stains, blood stains, all over the body, almost a thousand of them. I've got everything recorded."

"Show me?"

Eliana nodded and went to a control station. "Running the hologram now. This is a typical spot. Here we are moving down into the fur. Notice how the fur is cut?"

"Yes, very clean, a sharp scissoring. The fur hasn't been pulled at all."

"No. And I agree it's a very clean cut. I don't know about the scissoring. I think a razor-sharp hook might be able to make the same cut."

"Really? That clean? A knife perhaps. Hmm... Yeah, maybe..."

Eliana continued to manipulate the holographic display controls. "Here's why I think it was a hook. We're down at the skin level now. See that slit? Here's what the wound looks like with a side-scan from the NMR."

Basel stared for a moment at the nuclear magnetic resonance image. "It's in the shape of a thorn. Looks like a wickedly sharp point too."

"I suspect the inside edge of that thorn is also wickedly sharp. There's no stretching at the edges of the cut tissue at all. It's a surgically clean slice."

Basel nodded. "Did you run a bio-comparison?"

"Yes, very broad sweep. The closest we have for this type of attack pattern would be from cephalopods. Some species of octopi have hooks along their tentacles, used both for seizing prey and for defense."

"Ah. And do you see any patterns of tentacle strikes with these marks, patterns of linear strikes?"

"No, quite the opposite in fact. There's a complex 2-D pattern of marks over the entire body, almost as if a rug woven with a geometric pattern of hooks were wrapped tightly around the hippo." She typed for a moment at her console. "Here's a model of an unfolded rug that would make the punctures if wrapped around this hippo."

Basel stared at the 2-D pattern. "It reminds me of a sunflower. Look at the two Fibonacci sequences. There are repeating patterns of thirteen hooks spiraling clockwise, and patterns of eight hooks spiraling counter-clockwise."

"Yes, and with close to a thousand hooks on the poor hippo, the gripping power must have been close to absolute. My guess is that the hippo was completely immobilized, and then its head was pulled back to expose its throat to some sort of mouth or beak. See how most of the neck has been severed? The cut starts at the throat and goes in and upward, all the way back to the top of the spinal column."

Basel studied Eliana's analysis. "Very impressive," he said quietly. "The neck and shoulder muscles of an adult wooly hippo are extremely strong. The power to pull the head back like that would be extraordinary." He paused for a moment and gestured at the diagrams of the rug pattern and its mapping to the hippo's body. "All the spirals converge to the hippo's throat area. That's where the center of the attacking creature's body is."

Eliana nodded. "The beak area."

Basel stared at the corpse for a moment and then asked, "Is the interior completely thawed now?"

"Yes. Just barely, but yes."

They spent the next several hours continuing the autopsy. To both their relief, there were no signs of parasitic implants, no trace of any foreign material whatsoever. That puzzled them both. Normally after such a close and intense struggle, there would be skin or hair or saliva traces of the attacking creature, but they found absolutely nothing. They did find one thing unusual, and logged it as a second cause of death. In addition to the near decapitation, over 85% of the hippo's blood had been drained from its body.

They sealed the specimen chamber and retired to their living quarters about 2:30 PM, climbing up a level to the CAT's garage and then leaving the annex through the secure tunnel to the circular chamber of Level-3 in the main station. Eliana asked if she could take a shower first, even though it was her turn to make dinner, and Basel agreed without hesitation and offered to make the meal himself. They had a very quiet evening, neither wanting to talk. They both retired early, Basel taking his own shower just before bed. They were both in their own private rooms by 3:30 PM.

Three hours later... 

Basel opened his eyes in the darkness, slowly drifting up from an uneasy sleep. He felt tired and nervous, and lay for a moment wondering what woke him up. He had a vague memory of... of something, but thought it was probably part of a bad dream.

"No, wait, what was that? Some sort of scratching sound?" thought Basel. "What did I just hear?" His eyes were now wide open in the pitch blackness of his bedroom. He lay there without moving, trying to decide whether to turn on a light. He shook his head in disbelief at his growing fear. "Oh hell, am I just imagining this?"

No, there it was again, a faint scratching sound by his door. "Eli?" he called out softly.

"Yes," a small voice replied. "May I come in?"

Basel gave a huge sigh of relief. "Of course."

The door slid open, revealing the dim lights of their living area and the silhouette of Eliana's body. She was barefoot and in her pajamas, shivering slightly. She came over and sat tentatively on the edge of his bed.

Basel cocked his head. "You didn't want to use the door chime?"

"I didn't want to disturb you if you were asleep," Eliana said in apology. After a moment she asked, "May I join you?"

"Under the covers? Sure. I'm not wearing anything though."

"That's okay, I don't mind," she said with a shy smile. She scooted under the blankets a second later. "Ah, you're nice and warm."

"You feel frozen. Want to cuddle?"

She nodded. "I'd love to." Basel put his arms around her and hugged her. They had decided many days ago not to have sex with each other until they had their understandings about commitment and marriage fully discussed, but this didn't feel sexy at all. Well, thought Basel, perhaps that wasn't quite true. They were both extremely attracted to each other both physically and emotionally, and the only thing separating their bodies now was the thin layer of Eliana's soft pajamas. But neither of them was expecting to become overtly sexual now.

Basel felt Eliana shiver in his arms for a while, and then the shivering stopped. She sighed heavily several times and finally seemed to relax. "Basel," she whispered softly, "would it be okay if we slept together?"

He leaned over and kissed her temple. He then rested the side of his face against hers. "I'd love to. You mean for tonight?"

"Tonight, and maybe for a while. I don't mean to press you, and I certainly don't want to frustrate you..."

"You won't. And I promise, I won't get frisky with you unless you want me too. Did you have trouble getting to sleep?"

"Yes. You too?"

"Yeah. I think I just dropped off an hour ago." He looked up and glanced at the time. "Wow, it's almost 6:30. I guess I've been dozing for about two hours.

Eliana nodded and held him tightly. "It was the same for me. I thought I might not sleep at all tonight, and then I finally drifted off. And then the nightmares began..."

"Ah..." A long silence followed. After a while Basel started to caress her, very lightly, stroking the underside of her ribs and paying close attention to whether she wanted to be petted. She did. She wiggled her body in appreciation and pressed herself against him. Basel kissed her and muttered, "Remember much about the dream?"

"Too much. There were two awful, scream-in-the-dark nightmares. In the first, I was alone here in the station. I didn't know where you were. I started to search the rooms. I was disturbed to find the specimen chamber empty, but other than that everything seemed in order. Then I started feeling a presence. Someone was watching me, I was sure of it, someone or something. I started to panic, running from room to room. The feeling of being coldly stared at was overpowering. I was crying in fear in my dream. I finally ran to take shelter in my bedroom..."

"Ah. And the hippo was there?"

"No, even worse. You were there. Your neck had been cut open, but there was no blood, and you were standing and calmly giving me a smile. But the smile never touched your eyes. The gleam in your eyes looked evil and inhuman. All of your goodness was gone."

"And then you woke up?"

"Yes. The fear and shock pushed me awake. I was gasping and clutching my blanket like a child."

"Ah..."

"I tried to be brave, be an adult and go back to sleep. Unfortunately I succeeded. I was right back in the same dream, standing in the archway of my bedroom, staring at you staring at me. You held out your arms to hug me, and in spite of your cut neck I started to come to you to be hugged. At the last moment, I saw that your arms were covered with hooks, nasty looking thorns with needlelike points. You reached for me, and my legs would not move. I screamed again and woke up crying. I came to your door..."

Basel turned and lay on his side, facing Eliana. She did the same and they held each other tightly. Eventually Basel rolled on his back, carrying Eliana on top of him. She kissed his naked chest and then nestled her head upon it, wiggling her body until he hugged her firmly around her back and butt.

"Eli?"

"Uh huh?"

"How about we incinerate the specimen?"

She twitched. "Can we?"

"Sure. The autopsy is complete. There's no particular reason to hang onto it. We either have to refreeze it or burn it. Normal procedure would be to burn it and record the spectrums."

"All right. Thank you. Right now be okay?"

"Sure." Basel turned on a light and they got up. He was completely at ease with his nakedness in front of her, and Eliana was struck with the thought that he was treating her with the complete familiarity and intimacy of a husband being with my wife. She ran back to her bedroom for a moment to grab a robe.

Both dressed, they ascended to Level-3 and then crossed the tunnel to the garage complex, climbing the ladder down to Level-B. Basel heard Eliana give a soft cry of relief when she saw the hippo specimen still enclosed in its container.

Boosting their incineration module with the full power of the CAT above them, Basel started the process of converting the corpse to simple gases. A half-hour later, he turned to Eliana and commented, "We're well over 3000C. All the spectral sampling is complete. You want to go to ionization, or should I just vent the gas?"

Eliana heard his unvoiced opinion in his tone and sighed. "I agree, there's no point to go further. There are no molecules left, just simple atoms. Let's vent."

By the time they finished and left the lab, it was almost 8 PM. Basel was delighted to have Eliana follow him into his bedroom, and as she began to undress he followed her to stripping himself naked. They were both soon under his covers again.

"This feels nice," he muttered. "I had almost forgotten how silky you feel when you're not wearing anything."

She raised her head and gave him a kiss. "You're very sweet to put up with me."

"Hmm? How so?"

"Oh, all sorts of things... How about we take a half-day vacation? Go back to sleep now and not worry about when we wake up?"

"Yeah. Sounds like a plan." They petted each other affectionately for a long while. Then Eliana caresses started to slow down, and Basel realized she was drifting off to sleep. "Eli?" he whispered.

"Hmm? Yeah?"

"The monster, it was always completely real to you, wasn't it?"

"Uh huh," she yawned, "ever since I saw it."

"And I was teasing you about it. I am ashamed of myself."

"Oh, you were just being playful, my sweet husband-to-be. I didn't mind." She yawned again. "In fact, I enjoyed it. Your joking around helped ease my tension."

"I don't feel like joking about it now." His hand lovingly stroked down the side of her relaxed body. "And you don't feel tense now."

"No... I don't think it's possible for me to be tense when you're holding me like this. Your love washes away my fears..." And as if to prove her point, Eliana fell asleep minutes later.

Basel cradled his wife-to-be in his arms, loving the intimacy and the feel of her breathing. He held her near her armpit, his hand lightly holding the side of her breast. He closed his eyes and smiled, and entered a deep and restful sleep.



-------

Chapter 16: New Echoes


Time: February 12, 9570 3:00:00 AM UCT

"And go," said Eliana. They were at a precise coordinate 10 km south and 10 km west of their station, at an elevation 1940 meters above sea-level and 1120 meters above the local terrain. They were entering their first run of the day, traveling due west at 72 kph. The sun was just breaking on the surface below, though at their height they had been enjoying the golden light for several minutes.

Eliana idly recorded the sun's azimuth at 135 degrees into her log and then turned to her companion. "This is perfect Basel. The auto-pilot will keep us at a constant height of 1120 meters above the local terrain, and even with the highest peaks in the area, we still have nice buffer of several hundred meters below our 3000 meter ceiling from the governors. Your latest improvements are letting us use our full capability."

Basel nodded his head at the compliment as he studied his display. "Data collection seems to be running fine. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy the scenery." Below them the PATH scanner was mapping the terrain with snow-penetrating photonics in a 300-meter wide sweep. Their planned mission for the day was to make twenty-two 20-km east-west passes and scan the southern third of a 400 sq km grid centered at their station.

Each pass would take 1024 seconds, 1000 seconds for the 20 km run at 20 m/s, and 24 seconds to complete a half-circle turn of radius 150 meters and position themselves on the next return track. Estimated time for today's scanning was six hours and fifteen minutes. With sunset at 9:23 AM, they were using all their available daylight.

A half-day later... 

Time: February 12, 9570 3:45 PM UCT

"Eliana," Basel called out. "You might want to come up here and see this."

It was shortly before bedtime, and Eliana was curled up in a lounge chair and engrossed in some recreational reading. She glanced at the time and realized Basel must have finished the image processing. "Coming!" she called in reply, and joined Basel in the Level-2 control center a moment later. "Tell me you found the impact location."

He shook his head no. "Something just as interesting though. Take a look at this. These are from our fifth and sixth tracks this morning. We were so lucky! We just barely managed to catch this. Look! This is time-index 987 seconds into the fifth track. See the anomaly right here, at 4:24:43 AM?"

Eliana stared for a moment. "Well, the squiggles certainly look different. What does it mean?"

"These are those weird extra echoes I've recorded before."

"Ah. What will you bet if we go back again, they won't be there?"

"Yeah. We probably should retest, but no bet. And it gets even better. We completed track-5 and then scanned during our 24-second half circle. Nothing interesting there. But then we started the next track. Look at the track-6 data, at time-index 21 seconds."

"Hell Basel, we flew right over it!"

"Uh huh. I did a contour analysis between the two observation points. The shortest distance along the surface is just over 400 meters, with a time interval of 58 seconds."

Eliana paused for a moment. "Seven meters per second?"

"Yeah, just about 25 kph."

"Hmm. A little slower than our last observation." She looked at him closely and smiled. "I must say, I'm very pleased how completely you've come over to my position that this creature exists."

Basel smiled back. "I haven't shown you the last data point." He typed on the controls and zoomed out of the view. The display drew a line across the map, showing the extension of the two data points pointing to a third point in the center of the map.

Eliana sucked in a sharp intake of breath. "The Holy! It was heading right for our station!"

"Yeah. It seems the creature is interested in us just as much as we are interested in it. If it kept its course and speed, it got here around 5 AM this morning."

"To do what?"

"No idea."

Eliana frowned. "Didn't the station sensors pick up anything?"

"I've checked. No."

She sighed. "Basel, can we turn your scanner into a creature detector?"

"I've been thinking about that. PATH is not well suited to the task of giving a quick alert. The scanner has to transmit the raw data into the station library, and there's a two-minute processing delay once the data is in the library." He paused for a moment. "And it takes at least that long for the pre-processing and to transmit the data here from a remote location. In the field, we'll get a warning five minutes late." He shrugged. "All this is assuming the scanner can always detect the creature."

Eliana nodded. "That's true. And it's an important thing to remember. We don't understand how the detection process works. We thus have no idea of its limitations."

"Eli, I have one last thought about this. I don't know if the creature can sense our scanner. Maybe it can. But I don't think it realizes our scanner can sense it. The creature made no effort to avoid being directly under the scanner on our second observation, nor did it make any attempt to change course and hide the fact it was coming here."

Eliana nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, very good reasoning. Basel?"

"Yeah?"

"You've done fabulous work. I couldn't be more proud of you."

"Ah, some days you get lucky."

Eliana grinned. "Some nights too. Ready for bed?"

Basel returned her playful smile. "I do believe I am."

He was soon lying down in his bedroom getting another wonderful backrub. Since his first night with sleeping with Eliana, he had followed her lead and dressed in pajamas before lying with her. They both felt intensely attracted to each other, but were still exercising some discipline and patience and had not yet become sexually active.

Eliana's massage lasted more than an hour, neck, shoulders, arms, back, butt, legs... Basel felt like a pile of melted butter after a while, and the pleasure of Eliana's loving hands was so deep, it kept him from falling asleep. He just lay there and sighed in contentment.

As 5:30 PM approached, Eliana dimmed the lights even further and cuddled next to him. Her arm lay on top of him, and her hand caressed his lower back and butt. Eventually her hand settled on his rump, and her finger wiggled in and began caressing his anus through his pajamas. Basel wiggled in appreciation and sighed again.

"Basel?" Eliana whispered.

"Hmm?"

"I'm almost there. I almost have exactly your opinion of what our marriage should be like. Would you like to start having sex with me? I'm perfectly willing to commit to a monogamous marriage."

Basel turned his head to look at her, opening his eyes. "Almost?"

"Well... A small voice inside me is still wondering what I'll miss by never having a sister-wife. But the voice grows quieter each day. I'm feeling more and more possessive each day, not wanting to share you with anyone, not for sex, and definitely not with our marriage intimacy."

His arm came up and caressed her cheek. "Sweet Eli, you still want to wait, don't you?"

She paused for a long moment and then nodded. "You read me so well, better than I read myself. It won't be long. I soon won't be able to bear the thought of sharing you sexually with anyone."

Further words seemed completely unnecessary. They kissed sleepily for a while, and then both drifted off.

Two days later... 

Time: February 14, 9570 2:45 AM UCT

It was five minutes before local sunrise and the start of their third and final day of the first phase of their scanning. The CAT was hovering at 1970 meters just south of sizable lake. They were 10 km west and 10 km north of home, setting up for their first of twenty-three tracks for the day. They were not having an easy time of it.

Another blast of wind shook the CAT violently. Eliana struggled to hold their precise position, but it was a losing battle.

"Sorry Basel," she muttered. "My only defense is that the auto-pilot would be doing an even worse job. I just can't anticipate fast enough."

Basel nodded and looked to the southeast. The horizon was an angry blur of swirling grayness. There would be no golden sunlight today. He agreed with Eliana's assessment. "This turbulence is way more than the scanner can handle. Why don't we call it a day and try again tomorrow?"

"You sure? In between the wind gusts we do get some stable moments."

Basel shook his head no. "We'll get little bits and pieces and have to rescan everything anyway." As if to confirm his decision, a particularly nasty blast of air started to spin the CAT clockwise.

"Yeah. It's too bad, but the CAT just doesn't fight this kind of turbulence well." Eliana began to accelerate and head for home. At 14 km distant, they'd be there in three minutes. But then Eliana had an idea. She began to increase their altitude rather then descend.

Basel looked at her and raised his eyebrows. She replied, "I want us to do a PATH sweep of our station site, park ourselves 1120 meters above the garage and then do a slow pivot, a half-turn every 24 seconds. The two edges of our scan line will be moving at 20 m/s."

Basel nodded thoughtfully and began to prepare his instrument.

They hovered in a cloud directly above their station. Basel couldn't see much of anything, but the altimeter told him Eliana was keeping the CAT 2990 to 3000 meters above sea-level. She watched the atmospheric sensors closely, and when they showed her a brief period of approaching calmness, she executed a new auto-pilot program. The CAT began to descend rapidly.

Their aircraft stabilized at just over 1800 meters above sea level and began its slow rotation. They completely almost three half-turns before a fierce blast of wind bounced them to the south.

"That's it!" cried Eliana. "Let's head for home." They descended through the last of the cloud cover and landed adjacent to the CAT's garage. They were going through their plasma sterilization process within minutes.

A short time later.

"My Holy Basel!" Eliana whispered with a hiss. "We were right on top of it again!"

"Yeah," he whispered back, "and it's moving right along our scan line. We're getting an excellent measurement of its speed."

Eliana nodded. "And we even picked up an echo near the 26-second mark, on the other end of the sweep. This is good..."

After a few more minutes of analysis, Basel summed up their findings. "Well, I'm fairly certain now the creature can detect my scanner. You were hovering for several seconds before I started scanning, and yet when the scan started we still see the creature as motionless and directly in front of the bay doors. At time 1200 milliseconds into the scan, the shape accelerates to the southeast, reaching a velocity of twenty kph in two seconds. The creature then continues to travel at that rate for several seconds before we lose it. Near the 26-second mark, we get a final echo near the edge of the scan, at a distance of 145 meters. All the rest of the data is blank."

"Curious," said Eliana. "Six meters a second, a bit slower than what we saw it do two days ago. I wonder why it slowed down."

Basel shrugged. "Maybe it was more concerned about its camouflage now, and that makes it move more slowly."

"Yes, perhaps... It's remarkable the station sensors registered absolutely nothing."

Basel frowned. "Yeah. It'll take a lot of storage, but maybe we should store the raw sensor data, and not just the processed images. Seeing the creature might be so subtle, the software isn't picking it up." He paused for a moment. "Eli, what do you think the creature had in mind, being at our garage door like that?"

"I don't know. Simple curiosity, maybe something else. It's impossible to say. It does seem as interested in us as we are in it." She shrugged. "I'm less worried now of it leaving the area. Basel, any thoughts on making a better detector?"

"Not a clue. I'll keep trying though."

"Need any help?"

"No, not yet. I'll just in thinking mode for now."

"Okay." Eliana realized with a start that she had nothing in particular scheduled to do. She kissed Basel and took off to work out in the Observation gym.



-------

Chapter 17: Marriage

Two days later... 

Time: February 16, 9570 2:40 AM UCT

After a day and a half of cloudy, blustery weather, the skies rapidly cleared but the gusty winds continued, and Basel and Eliana decided to continue their break from completing the grid search to the north. Instead they flew southeast at the break of dawn and were planning to spend their entire seven-hour window of daylight making random magnified visual observations along the length of the great lake-filled valley that used to the ancient border between Sweden and Finland. Their plan was cut short less than a half-hour into the flight.

"I see it too," Eliana called out as she banked the CAT to return to the center of a large frozen lake. "Reducing speed..." They were soon hovering at 2400 meters above sea-level and two kilometers above the center of the lake. "I'm logging our position at 41 km east and 44 km south of the station, time is 3:09 AM." She joined Basel in staring at the visual display from the underside of the fuselage. "Any guesses what that is?"

"Looks like some sort of puddle, maybe about a meter in diameter... Look at the edges. Is that puddle lying in some sort of carved depression?"

Eliana nodded. "Yeah, with all the side lighting, it does look that way, doesn't it?" There was a short pause. "Definitely worth investigating. How about I land two hundred meters to the south and then we'll drive up to it?"

A short time later they were staring the puddle from four meters away. Basel was already activating the remotes. "How big a sample do you want?"

Eliana nodded and considered. The brisk winds had blown the lake surface down to bare ice. There was an almost circular carved depression before them, and about 3 cm down the depression was filled with what looked like fresh frozen blood. On top of the blood were approximately fifty black diamond shaped objects, about 2 cm by 3 cm. By the way they rippled in the wind, Eliana thought of them as small cut-out pieces of black paper with one or two of their four edges frozen into the blood.

She turned to Basel. "How about a quarter of the puddle? Be sure to get a good sample of the black diamonds."

"Right..." It turned out the puddle of frozen blood was about 1 cm thick. Basel carefully cracked it and then lifted a rough quarter-circle with a good sample of the black diamonds into the storage bay. "Eli, I'm estimating about eight liters of blood total. This could easily have come from one bled hippo..." He tucked the arms back into the CAT. "Remotes are secure."

Eliana nodded and sighed. "Anything else to do here?"

"Maybe. Should we incinerate what we don't take?"

"Ah, that's an interesting question." She thought for a moment. "I'd rather not reveal the CAT's claws if we don't have to. Why don't we collect everything and incinerate the extra at the station?"

Basel nodded and began to extend the remotes again. "Sensing any watching eyes?" he asked as he guided the CAT's arms.

Eliana was quiet for a moment, then let out a slow breath and shook her head no. The return trip home was quiet and uneventful. They placed their sample in a sealed observation chamber, keeping them at the same temperature at which they were found.

Two hours later... 

"Well, if you had to guess Basel, alive or not alive?"

"Now? This stuff can't possibly be alive. Look at the chemical spectrums. If these specimens weren't contained, the stench would be vile, maybe even dangerous."

"But you think it once was alive?"

"Well..." Basel thought for a long moment. "I'd have to say yes, it's organic. Nothing like an Earth based life-form though. The closest I could extrapolate would be to call these things the decayed leaves of an alcohol-based plant."

"Plant leaves?"

"Well, no," Basel whined. "Not a plant, not in the Earth based sense of the word. It doesn't even have DNA, and least not based on the same amino acids we use. I think this might be an alcohol-based life-form, rather than a water-based life-form. It's so badly decayed, it's difficult to tell. The leaves have a vague celluloid structure, but... Oh heck Eli, they can't be leaves."

"Why not?"

"The decay is so bad I can barely make this out, but there doesn't seem to be anything to suggest a stem direction. It's all self-contained..." Basel frowned at the black sample and looked as if he were going to continue, but then stopped and just frowned instead. "It's so incredibly decayed, right down to the core. How could any life survive like this?"

"What do you mean? The leaves are dead, aren't they?"

"Yeah, most definitely... I'm not sure what I mean... It's almost as if, well, imagine if you died, someone could still sample your DNA. I don't think that's possible here. The decay is that deep."

Eliana stared at their sample. "Excrement is a very disorganized material. Could this be the creature's shit?"

Basel smiled. "Two dimensional shit from a two-dimensional creature?"

"Sure, why not? And maybe alcohol-based shit decomposes at very low temperatures. We know the creature is active and the infrareds are picking up absolutely nothing. Its body temperature seems to be as cold as the environment."

Basel looked skeptical. "I don't know Eli. The creature is alive and active outside, yet these black flaps have broken down in the same temperatures. It doesn't make any sense." He gestured at the black diamond-shaped flaps. "These can't be leaves! You think they're shit? But the celluloid structures are so global, one complex mask over the entire diamond. They seem more like..." The words just wouldn't come.

Eliana said after a while, "Do you think the creature eats blood?"

A long pause. "The idea seems absurd at first, doesn't it? We're such different life-forms."

Eliana sighed. "And yet, a fungus is a very different life-form than us, and we can eat mushrooms, and fungi can thrive on our decomposing bodies."

Basel nodded and shuddered. "Somehow I got a vague impression of the puddle as a feeding pool. I don't know why." He frowned. Somehow a feeding puddle sounded close to but not quite the right explanation.

"Yes. Why else do it?" Eliana turned to Basel and they stared at each other in silence. The issue was bothering both of them, but neither could verbalize their uneasiness.

They returned to their analysis and spent several more hours running diagnostics without finding new insights. Around 9 AM they lowered and sealed everything in a frozen vault on Level-C and went back to the main station for a lunch break.

They decided to dine in the Observation dome and enjoy the last of the day's sunlight. At 9:40 AM, the sun was at azimuth 230 on the horizon and just a moment from setting when Eliana choked on her drink and almost vomited. She put her glass down and coughed.

"Eli, you okay?!"

She coughed again but nodded yes. "We're being watched, right now. The sensation just hit me, very strong." She gave a final cough. "Try to act casual."

"Okay. How about we take a leisurely stroll around the promenade?"

Eliana looked at him and blinked her eyes. "Oh! Yes, very good idea." They held hands and slowly walked the perimeter of the circular dome, admiring the twilight view and chatting with each other as they slowly made the circuit. The light started to fade rapidly as the gusty winds rolled in thick bands of dark clouds, blanketing the waxing half moon in the southeastern sky.

Eliana sighed as she and Basel stared out through the clear walls of the dome. "I'm not sure, but I think it was from the southeast. The light is fading and I'm losing my visual cues. I think the creature might have moved off."

"To the southeast again?"

She nodded. "Yes, somehow I think you're right, to the southeast."

"Well, that's the direction it took when we hit it with the scanner two days ago."

Eliana nodded thoughtfully.

Basel wrapped his arm around her waist and continued. "Which I think makes it even more important we continue our scanning to the north as soon as possible."

Eliana turned to him with a bright smile on her face. She gave him a quick kiss. "My clever husband! You're thinking the same thing I'm thinking, aren't you?"

"Decoys!" answered Basel. "Targets! All our sightings have been to the southeast. The creature badly overplayed its hand today, leaving us the... well, that blood puddle in the center of a bare-ice lake. I can't imagine a more conspicuous spot."

Eliana nodded and stared at the dark clouds of the local evening. "It looks as if another bit of nasty weather is moving in. Our first good day to scan though, I think we're going to find the impact crater in the upper third of our grid." She gestured with her eyebrows playfully. "Pity we didn't start the search there and work our way south."

Basel nodded. A moment later they turned the Observation dome opaque and headed back to Level-B.

The next day... 

Time: February 17, 9570 3:50 PM UCT

"Game and match," laughed Basel. "Wow, I haven't played backgammon since I was a teenager. I had forgotten how much fun the game is."

"Neither have I," said Eliana. "And I agree, and interesting and unusual game. And the old saying rings true, good rolling beats good strategy."

Basel pretended mock offense. "What do you mean?! My play was masterful!"

"Oh yes Basel! You accept a marginal double, and then four rolls of high doubles on the run-off! The world's best players would be in awe of your skill!"

"It's all in the wrist motion as you roll. Someday I'll show you my secret."

"Uh huh." They both burst out laughing. Eliana got up and stretched and then gestured to her bedroom with her head, batting her eyes playfully and with a hint of a question.

Basel heart felt it skipped a beat. They had been sleeping in his room ever since the night after finding the slaughtered hippo. This was the first time Eliana had asked him to sleep in her room. He nodded his head as he gazed at her, a hopeful smile on his face.

Once in her room, Eliana stripped herself naked before climbing under the covers. Basel followed her immediately. As she cuddled with him, she rested her head on a clean pillow. "Ah," she sighed. "I knew you made my bed a few days ago. I didn't know you cleaned my sheets." She kissed him. "Thank you."

Basel kissed her back. "Beautiful Eliana, I'm so happy I've found you."

They kissed for a while, Basel caressing her breasts and ribs until Eliana giggled.

"What? Did I tickle you?"

"No." She held his hand and kissed the inside of his wrist, running the tip of her tongue along the arteries. "I was thinking of our backgammon game. All in the wrist, huh?"

Basel smiled. "It's a gift."

"Uh huh..." More kisses. "Did you know the game was lost for more than eight thousand years?"

"No. Really?"

Eliana nodded. "The game didn't survive the Wild Times. But there was a crude program for playing it buried in the Karbalan crystal data. The game became popular again in the late 8200's."

"Ah..." Basel's hand came up and he started caressing Eliana's hair. They lost themselves in their kissing.

"Take me as your wife Basel," she whispered. Basel just gazed back at her, and it was a gaze filled with pure love. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. "I love you, and I want you so badly, and all to myself too. I'll never want to share you with another woman."

They held each other tightly, the sides of the heads pressed together. Basel kissed Eliana's ear, and then she felt him nod his head. His tears were wetting her temple. Another kiss on her ear, and then a whisper, "I was hoping for this so much Eli, keeping myself clean in the evening and hoping. Sweet Eli, take me as your husband." One last kiss, and then he turned and sighed and lay prone, flat on his stomach on the bed.

Eliana sat up and began the traditional caresses and preparations, her hands and feet and lips all over his body. She stretched out the mating ritual for a long time, feeling Basel's muscular body slowly soften and melt under her attention. Her fingers were everywhere, navel, ears, between his toes, lots of probes into his sac to fondle his testes, lots of caresses down the crack of his ass to play with his anus. After an hour of loving attention, Eliana slipped a finger up inside him so gently he only dimly realized he had been penetrated. He wiggled his rump in appreciation.

"My love," he mumbled.

"My love," Eliana responded in a whisper. She slipped her finger out and sniffed it. "My, you are clean. I can't smell anything. You've been douching?"

"Um hmm," Basel nodded sleepily.

"My sweet love..." Her playful tongue began to explore between his ass cheeks a moment later.

Basel drifted in the sexual stimulation. His rear door felt warm and moist and open, and he wiggled affectionately at the pleasure Eliana was giving him. Eventually he felt the momentary absence of her body, and then heard a couple of soft clicking sounds. Knowing what Eliana had strapped herself to, he spread his legs wide across the bed and arched his hips to lift and expose his anus high into the air.

He felt both of Eliana's hands on his butt. "Just relax husband," she whispered. "You don't have to lift yourself up like this. I'll find you." Basel sighed and relaxed his arch. He felt both of Eliana's hands on his rump, firm grips on both his ass cheeks. With her fingers and palms lifting and separating him, her two thumbs began to push into his anus, one after another. Basel felt something extremely wet and slippery being added to his opening, and then both thumbs popped in easily. "Hmmm, that feels so sexy..." he mumbled.

"Oh yeah," Eliana growled. Basel felt her shaking with sexual desire. She moved into position, kneeling high up between his out-stretched legs, holding him open with her knees against his inner thighs. She then laid her body on top of him. Basel felt her breasts pressing into his back. She started kissing and licking the back of his neck. A super slippery thumb was sliding along his rectal wall just inside his anus, and he could feel her fingers guide something rubbery and rounded up along the back of his scrotum and up towards the waiting thumb.

Basel was floating on a bed of love. As the thumb slid out of his rectum, he sighed and bore down and pushed, trying to open himself to what he knew was coming. He felt a large smooth pressure on his rear door. Eliana moved her hands to grip both sides of his hips firmly to lock his position underneath her. Basel heard her panting with her desire.

"My dear, sweet husband," she whispered. "I love you."

She bore down with her hips. Basel felt something large and smooth and super slippery sliding up inside him, much fatter than Eli's thumb felt. He sighed and accepted the pressure, felt Eliana shifting her weight on top of him to align herself with the natural direction of his rectum. She pushed down some more. Basel let out a long, slow gasp as Eliana seated herself within him.

"My love, my love," she was crying, kissing the back of his neck and mouthing it with her lips. Basel was experiencing both an arousal and a peace he never knew before. He felt washed by the woman's love above him, drifting in the total vulnerability of her mount but feeling infinitely secure and safe.

Eliana gasped and then bent down and gripped the back of Basel's neck with her teeth. She pulled back and then sprung forwards with her powerful hip muscles, driving her dildo home and slapping her pubis against the bottom of her mate's butt. "Mine!" she growled as she released his neck from her teeth.

The impact into his rectum shocked Basel out of his drifting dream. His eyes popped wide open, and he felt utterly helpless and dominated and he never wanted the moment to end. "Yours," he called in reply.

Eliana pulled back and then snapped forward again, a full-bodied slap against his rump. "You are mine!" she growled again, rising up on her arms like a female lioness defending her claim against all challengers.

"I am yours," replied Basel, continuing the marriage ritual. "Now and forever."

A re-cock and then a third swift thrust. "I own you!"

"You own me," agreed Basel. "All that I have and am, I give to you."

Eliana started to cry. Basel felt the pressure slip from his rectum and then felt his anus close. Between her cries, he heard the faint clicking sounds as Eliana freed herself from her pelvic harness. Then her hands returned to his butt, gripping and separating him. He felt a hot breath on his anus and sac, and then soft lips and a velvety tongue began to kiss and caress him. The loving affection continued for quite a while, and then Eliana lay on her back and waited for Basel to mount her.

He lay on his side and petted her, lots of kisses and caresses, all over her body. Her pubis was a swamp, and she whimpered as she lay and shook her body to encourage Basel to mount her. He lay on top of her, their mouths locked, his erect cock butting against her vulva and anus. Eliana groaned and reached to the side of the bed, and then placed a tube of lubricant within easy reach of Basel. She then lifted her legs high and rotated her hips to bring her anus into position.

Basel shook his head and lay down on top of her, his mouth finding hers and his cock continuing to probe her vulva. He continued to wiggle until he felt himself catch and notch into her vaginal entrance. He lowered his hips for more power and started to push in.

Eliana gulped and broke the kiss. "Basel?"

"My love, my most precious love..."

"Basel, don't you want to take me in my butt? It's your right."

Basel blinked himself out of his passion and shook his head no, glancing at Eliana's harness lying nearby. "Eli, I'm almost twice the size of what you used, and your rump is smaller than mine. Don't be ridiculous."

Eliana nodded her grateful understanding and then reached up with her mouth to lock her kiss with Basel again. Basel pushed and let-up, pushed and let-up against the hymen blocking him until Eliana groaned her impatience to be penetrated. He then pushed firmly and broke her, sliding up deep within her.

Eliana gasped at the shock of being torn.

"Eli, you okay?"

"Yes," she lied. "The pleasure just overwhelmed me. My love!" And then suddenly the lie was no longer a lie. The pain disappeared and all her thoughts began to swirl around this most wonderful and beautiful pole of eager maleness buried within her womanhood. She turned her legs and locked Basel into her, her heels kicking his butt in encouragement.

He reared back and gave a powerful thrust. Eliana felt her uterus tent from the impact.

"Mine!" he roared.

Eliana gasped. Basel was repeating the female part of the ritual. "Yours!" she cried in reply.

Another swift thrust. Eliana gasped at the slap on her pubis.

"You are mine!"

"I am yours Basel, now and forever!"

A third thrust, the most powerful yet. "I own you!"

Eliana cried out in surrender. "You own me! All that I have and am, I give to you. My body, my life, my love! My soul belongs to The Holy, all else I give to you!" They both started crying as Basel started a gentle sliding rhythm, gradually increasing the tempo as the passion took them both.

Eliana was the first to orgasm, waves of orgasmic pleasure that were almost too much to bear. Basel followed shortly, changing the sliding in-and-outs to a deep push in and then a slow wiggle of his hips while fully seated in her vagina.

"I can feel it!" gasped Eliana, as pulse after pulse of semen splashed against her cervix. She reached up and held his sweaty body against hers. They both quickly crashed from their emotional frenzy, drifting off to sleep both feeling for the first time in their lives that they were married.



-------

Chapter 18: Playing Tag

Six days later... 

Time: February 25, 9570 11:22 AM UCT

"The Holy!" whispered Eliana in awe. "Basel, I think we've found it!"

It was an hour after sunset, and the two were in the Level-2 control center, reviewing the vast arrays of processed scanning data from the day's run. They were focusing on a spot slightly more than 11 km north and slightly less than 4 km west of the station, at the northern tip of a highly elevated lake.

"I'm reading the distance from here at 11.8 kilometers," said Basel. "And the impact site is buried under more than ten meters of snow. No wonder it's not visible."

"Look at the terrain," said Eliana. "That peak 800 meters to the north and west is 1400 meters above sea-level. That means we have a drop of 470 meters over the 800 meter run. The impact must have started an avalanche, a big one. It buried everything."

"Yeah... 11.8 kilometers," said Basel again. They had completed their initial 400 sq km search grid several days ago and had found nothing. It was only today's effort in their expanded search area that had at last found the meteor site. "Sorry I wasn't more accurate with my original estimate. The meteor must have surfed the air more than I expected."

Eliana looked at him in puzzlement. "Basel, you quoted me a 70% chance of being within 10 kilometers of the station, and the real number was 11.8 kilometers. I think your estimate was fine."

"Thanks... Take a look at this!"

Eliana studied the display. "More echoes of the creature..."

"Yeah. This is the turnaround between tracks 1 and 2, and then again between tracks 3 and 4."

Eliana nodded. "Track 4 is where we discover the impact site. More decoys Basel. It was trying to distract us."

"Yeah. It didn't realize that we have a delay in processing the scanning data. It wasn't helping its cause at all. Say Eli, did you sense anything at the time?"

"From 1120 meters up?! Basel, I know my ability seems a little spooky to you, but there's no magic involved. I'm not a witch!"

Basel leaned over and gave her a playful kiss. "Sure you are! You've bewitched me with your feminine charms." His hand patted her rump.

Eliana kissed him back. "Hah! Back to reality Basel! Any recordings of the creature's speed?"

"Hmm..." They hugged for a while until Basel remembered the hanging question. "Oh yeah. Let me check." Ten minutes later, he answered, "The second observation gives several speed measurements. The fastest was about 19 kph."

"Five meters a second?"

"Yeah, maybe a bit more."

"Interesting Basel. Every time we observe the creature's speed, it's always a little slower than the previous observation."

"What to you think it means? Another deception?"

"Possible. I don't know. Basel, could we use the CAT's lasers to get at the bottom of the impact crater?"

"It does look as if there's something down there. It's quite a distance though. The entire crater is buried in ten meters of snow, with about another ten meters to the bottom of the pit. It'll take a month to carve out a hole big enough to fit the CAT through."

"How about for a person? No, scratch that idea. Too dangerous."

Basel considered. "We might be able to build a flexible probe and drill a hole for that."

"Ah, that sounds better. How long would it take?"

"Well, we have all the conduit we need. I'll have to thread some fiber to channel the laser power, and then add the sensors to the head. A few days maybe. We'd be ready for a test on February 30th if we're lucky. We could remove the PATH scanner and replace it with the probe assembly."

Eliana nodded. "Why don't we get started? Otherwise we'll be waiting for late spring for the lake to melt." A few minutes later they went to Level-A and started working.

Time: March 12, 9570 12:45 AM UCT

The CAT started to cycle through its airlock a few minutes before sunrise, and Eliana had an idle moment to reflect on the changes of the season. Daylight today would be over ten hours long, from 12:48 AM to 11:27 AM, and with more than an hour of twilight on each end. Daytime was finally having a normal feel to it. And after being cooped up in the station for the last seventeen days, Eliana was eager to be outdoors.

At 12:46 AM, she drove out of the garage and then lifted off a few hundred meters away. They met the dawn sunlight almost immediately as they rose. The CAT soon reached its cruising altitude of 2700 meters and began heading due west at slightly over 500 kph.

Basel admired the smoothness of the ride. "I see you're comfortable now flying the CAT close to Mach 0.5."

Eliana glanced down at her hands on the controls, and then flashed Basel a playful smile. "It's a lot like playing backgammon."

"Oh really?"

"Uh huh, all in the wrist."

Ten minutes later they began to decelerate and descend, landing at the bottom of a broad north-south valley 94 kilometers west of their station and 140 meters above sea-level. While Basel worked the remotes to remove the modified PATH scanner from their cargo bay, Eliana took a moment to break the CAT's seals and let in some of the outside air.

"Wow," said Basel. "Salty! It reminds me of the ocean."

"Yeah. There's a brisk northeasterly wind, and it's only another ten kilometers north of here to a large fjord connecting to the North Atlantic." Eliana surveyed the scenery. "Such a beautiful land."

"I'm surprised we came quite this far," said Basel.

"We still have more than a two kilometer buffer to the governor limit. I wanted to give us as much of a time buffer with the creature as possible."

"PATH scanner is deployed," said Basel a moment later. "It's running on full internal power, green-board on the diagnostics. Link confirmed with station processing."

"Disconnect telemetry and re-track feed."

"... Done."

Eliana drove west up a gentle slope for a hundred meters and then prepared for lift-off. "All navigation transponders are on manual override and disengaged. Lifting now." Flying manually 500 meters above the local terrain, Eliana flew due south and began a great circular loop around their station.

After cruising for a half hour, Eliana hovered for a while 200 meters above the landscape looking for her desired landing site. She finally landed the CAT on the western shore of a large lake. "I'm reading our position approximately 50 km south and 80 km east of the station," Eliana said as she parked the CAT over thick drifts of snow.

Basel admired the scenery as he surveyed the lake. "I'm surprised you picked a spot so close to our limit."

Eliana nodded. "I know. I don't want to test our horizontal limits while we're airborne, and I'm slightly within our two-kilometer safety buffer. A few hundred meters more and I would have rejected this. But this seems so ideal."

"It does indeed." Basel looked around and admired the scenery. "What country was this? Sweden?"

Eliana sighed and shook her head no. "It's sad to think that nothing's survived after 10,000 years, not even the roads."

"Well, the Conservation Guilds have been destroying those ever since the first millennium."

"I know. And to answer your question, we're in the center of a narrow strip of Finland. Fifteen kilometers to the northeast would be Norway, fifteen kilometers to the southwest would be Sweden."

They spent the next several hours testing the snakelike probe emerging from the underside of the CAT. It wasn't until midday before they were finished.

It was a few minutes after 6 AM UCT, the sun was due south at an altitude of 16.6 degrees. Basel was frowning for several reasons. "There are a number of changes I have to make, especially with the laser-tunneling mechanism."

Eliana nodded and sighed. "Surprising the problems didn't show up earlier. The prototype tested so well in the garage."

Basel grunted. "Yeah, well, nothing quite like a field test for shaking out the bugs..."

"So are we ready to leave? We're pushing our window for the first landing site."

"I know. And I agree, let's go."

Eliana powered up the turbines and drove a short distance onto the lake, then returned and hovered low near their test site, using the high wind from their turbines to blow snow over the surface of their experiment. Satisfied she did what she could to hide their activities, she lifted and began to retrace their journey.

They touched down at their western landing site at 6:50 AM. The first order of business was to secure the PATH scanner module, which also contained the CAT's encrypted link with the station. They both felt relieved when the module was secured inside the cargo bay and communications reestablished with home.

"Nothing noteworthy in the logs," said Basel. "Here or at home."

"That's good." Eliana spent the next twenty minutes driving around randomly and making several short jumps and landings.

"What are you doing?" asked Basel.

"Absolutely nothing," she replied. "except giving the creature a puzzle that has no solution. It's not the only one that can lay decoys." Satisfied that their tracks would provide hours of useless investigation for their adversary, Eliana finally parked the CAT at their original landing site, its forward sensor arrays facing east. The wait began.

One hour later... 

Time: March 12, 9570 8:15 AM UCT

"It's late," commented Basel, breaking the silence. "Maybe it's decided to stand us up."

Eliana nodded and kept her gaze on the sensors. They had a clear view for 2.5 kilometers of the valley's slope rising to the east, until it crested on a ridgeline about 350 meters higher than their current elevation. "How late?"

Basel rechecked the map displays. "Well, right now we're 94.2 km due west of home. The contour for what the computers have decided is the best path is about 96.9 km. Even as slow as 13 kph, it should have been here by now."

Eliana was deep in thought. "It's either standing us up, or this is another observation of a creature that's slowing down. Or maybe it's waiting outside of our scanning range, giving us another confusing decoy in the time it takes to travel."

"Hmm... Sense anything?"

A long pause, and then she shook her head. "I don't think so."

Basel sighed. "I never realized how much warfare is like playing a game."

"Oh yeah. You win by outthinking your enemies, not by outfighting them."

"Whoa! Look at that!"

"I see it! Bearing due east on the ridgeline, brightness in the UV."

"Locking passive scanners... Visuals and infrared aren't picking up anything. The emission is in the UV only. Wow. We haven't seen anything in the UV since the day of first sighting." Basel blinked. "Are we recording now?"

Eliana glanced down at the controls. "Of course. We're getting a good speed measurement on the sighting too, stable between 12.5 and 12.6 kph. UV intensity is also stable. Current range is 2400 meters and closing at 3.5 meters per second."

Basel paused for a moment. "Eli, this is the first time we have real-time tracking of the creature's presence. We could target it with our lasers."

"Yes..." It was an unexpected opportunity, and Eliana thought furiously on how to proceed. "The Holy, Basel! It's never done anything overtly aggressive against us, other than in my opinion sneaking up on us. Should we try to kill it? Kill Earth's first interstellar visitor?"

"It killed at least one hippo, probably more."

"So what?"

There was a moment of silence. Basel finally whispered, "We need to decide soon. It's at 2200 meters and coming straight for us."

Another pause. "We're in no immediate danger. Let's just observe for a while."

Over the next five minutes, they watched in silence as the shining patch of UV came straight for them. And then at 420 meters, it abruptly came to an abrupt halt. Eliana and Basel gasped in astonishment as the UV emissions faded to nothingness a few seconds later.

"It just faded away," whispered Basel.

"Look! There it is again!"

There was a brief, barely discernable signal for about ten seconds. Basel recorded it as traveling about 3.2 meters per second, weaving in a zig-zag pattern and backing away to the north and east. And then there was nothing again.

"Well," said Basel, "there's goes our chance to kill it, unless you want to start tearing up the countryside."

Eliana slowly shook her head. "We have no evidence that this is a fight to the death. I think we made the morally correct decision."

Basel sighed. "I agree." A pause. "Though if someday I find that creature's beak slicing my head off, I might change my mind."

Eliana's hand came up and she felt her own neck as she remembered the slaughtered hippo. "Yes... Well, we have a ton of data to analyze, and a probe to work on. Ready to head for home soon?"

"I guess. You know Eli, this is the second time we've observed the creature making a run of fifty kilometers or more, and also the second time we seen the creature shining in the UV at the end of a run."

"Yes, I was thinking the same thing. Did you see how quickly the UV faded once the creature stopped moving? Maybe there's some biological reason where it has to stop in a long run to keep from glowing?"

Basel thought for a moment. "Or maybe it's even simpler. Maybe it glows when it's exhausted. Maybe its top speed has been slowing down. We measured its top speed today at just under 3.5 meters per second. That's exactly the right speed to make the trip from home to here in the time that it took. It seems to fit. Why travel more slowly than you have to?"

"You think the creature might be ill, losing its ability to move?"

"Either that, or it is one clever puppy to lead us down the garden path like this."

Eliana nodded. "Yes. Emotional meaning and purpose. They might be so different for an alien life-form."

"Oh, I don't know. I've been thinking about this Eli, about motivations and drivers I mean. I came up with four basic categories. One: Territory conquest. Two: Knowledge Discovery. Three: Acceptance by a group. Four: The desire to express."

"Express?"

"Well, the desire to build something, to be creative, write a book or some music or maybe just sing in the shower..."

Eliana smiled. "I remember the first time I heard you singing in the shower. I'm not complaining. I think you have a beautiful singing voice."

Basel smiled back. "Thanks. That's my thought though, that the fourth basic desire is to express."

Eliana grinned and reached over and lightly stroked his penis with her hand through his clothes. "Including sexual expression?"

He raised his eyebrows playfully. "Of course, that's a biggie, sexual expression, for procreation or just for the sheer pleasure of it." He sighed. "Yeah, the desire to build, to make something beautiful and worthy, something that will last..."

"Ah, to leave your footprints in the sands of time."

"Exactly. It's a powerful fear, the fear of being forgotten."

Eliana nodded. "Yes, I agree, similar to the fear of being abandoned, a powerful motive."

Basel took a deep breath. "My thought was that all species in the universe would share in some mixture of these basic four motivations. Maybe different species might have different concentrations. Grazers might not be motivated to conquer and hold territory as much as predators."

Eliana nodded. "Yes, and some creatures might be loners, while social bonds might be incredibly important for others. I see, a basic set of drivers, and different mixtures for different species, a neat way of looking at it. And I think your four motives form two sets of opposites."

"Huh?"

"Well, one axis is territorial conquest versus acceptance by a group. The desire to possess and the desire to be possessed. The other axis is knowledge discovery versus the desire to express. It's the desire to take in knowledge versus the desire to publish, to push knowledge and beauty outwards."

"Ah... Yeah, I didn't think of that..."

"Like right now I want to publish a kiss." Eliana giggled and leaned over and kissed him. Then she turned serious. "So what's our creature like? It really hasn't shown us much of its desires."

"No, and I'm not too happy about that. It has had ample opportunity to communicate with us, and it's playing games with us instead. I agree with your decision not to fire, but just barely."

They chatted for over an hour, keeping up their observation past 9:30 AM before finally lifting off for home. The creature began inspecting their landing site a half hour later.



-------

Chapter 19: Eureka

Time: March 14, 9570 6 PM UCT

Eliana woke from her bad dream with a start, her eyes popping open in the pitch darkness. "Danger!" her mind was screaming. She fought to control her breathing and to understand what was going on.

The creature! It was here, in the room with her! She had heard it searching. How had it gotten into the station?! And she could sense it now, glaring at her and hating her in the darkness. Trembling with nightmarish fear, her hand reached out into the unknown and sought the light control. She almost whimpered when her hand touched the knob, and she gave it the tiniest of turns.

The dim light brought back all the familiar outlines of her bedroom, and for the first time she sensed Basel lying naked curled around her back, his hand resting lightly on her hip. Eliana lay there motionless and felt all sense of impending peril fade away as she continued to wake up. There was no one in the room with her except Basel. There was no creature.

She rose out of bed as silently as she could and then turned to look at her husband, watching him sleep in the dim shadows. "My Holy," she thought, "our first fight, and it's causing me nightmares. Why did I ever have to say those things? I almost yelled at Basel to sleep in his own bedroom. I'm so glad I didn't. This is his bedroom now, his as much as mine. He owns me! How could I forget my promises?"

Eliana grabbed a thin robe to cover her nakedness and slipped from the room. Still feeling disturbed by her dream, she climbed up to Level-2 control and checked the station logs. Everything was secure.

She glanced over at the master communications console. It was still displaying the security lockout warning, with the time-lock now at 113 days, 5 hours, and 52 minutes and counting down to zero.

"Our test is more than a third over," thought Eliana. "Less than four months to go. But July 7th still seems so far away. Such incredible news the world will get... Oh Basel! How could I have treated you like that? My sweet husband! You let me mount you, accepted me into your body, let me possess you,... My orgasm was incredible. And then I had to spoil everything and talk about a woman's right to anal mount her male! Stupid!"

She tried to check another console, but her memories were making her feel more and more guilty by the moment. "And Eliana, don't forget! Did you really have to call him a men's libber?! Stupid!"

There was a sound on the ladder. Basel was climbing up from their living quarters. "Everything okay?"

"Oh, hi Basel. Yes. I was having trouble sleeping and decided to check the sensors and station logs. Everything's fine."

"Ah, that's good." He came near her and gave her a shy smile, and then seemed to study another console for a while. "Eli?"

"Yes?" Eliana squeaked. She felt herself tensing. "Now don't be surprised that he's not even looking at you," she admonished herself silently. "You deserve this."

He turned to her. "Eli, I'm so sorry."

"Huh?!"

"Last night. I'm sorry I was so dogmatic. I was way out of line."

Eliana stared at him without comprehension. "What?"

"Of course women can expect to get sexy with their husbands."

"Basel, you are being too kind. That's not what I said."

"You said something innocent, and I jumped on you."

"Basel, I have no right to gender bigotry!" Her eyes pleaded with him. "You're not angry with me?"

He shook his head. "I'm just hoping we can put this matter behind us." They were in each other's arms a moment later.

"Come on," whispered Eliana in his ear. "Let's go back and lie down."

They were soon cuddling. Eliana nudged Basel to lie on his stomach. She massaged and licked his sac and the back of his thighs for a long while. Almost asleep, Basel felt her separate him and her delightfully soft tongue began to lap his anus. He sighed in deep contentment. "Ah, that feels so nice..."

"You deserve this... I didn't hurt you last night, did I? I really got wild when I orgasmed."

Basel just sighed. "Hmm?"

"That's okay, just rest. I love you."

"Love..." sighed Basel. He fell asleep a moment later.

Two days later... 

Time: March 16, 9570 1:30 AM UCT

An hour after sunrise, the CAT drove onto the pile of densely packed snow directly above the impact crater. They activated their PATH scanner to sweep the area within 150 meters of their position, and then started to tunnel into the ice with their new probe. After an hour of work manipulating the controls, Basel took a moment to stretch and said to Eliana, "Well, definitely an improvement over our last version. We should be at the central object in another few minutes."

Eliana nodded and stared at the images from the snow-penetrating radar and active acoustical sensors. "It's definitely a craft of some kind. It's amazing how it looks so recognizable. The bulk of it is definitely a light-burner engine, no question. I'm surprised..." There was a long silent pause.

Basel finally looked up from his remotes. "Huh? Surprised about what? Eli, you okay?"

She whispered, "I think we have company."

"Oh... How close?"

"I don't know."

"Close enough for the PATH scanner to pick up?"

Eliana shrugged. "It hasn't signaled anything yet."

Basel nodded and sighed. "Pity I can't reduce the four-minute delay."

She shrugged her shoulders. "There's no particular reason for us to stop. Why don't you keep on working?"

Basel went back to the remotes. The time passed quietly for a while, and then he asked, "What's it like?"

"My sensing? Right now it feels a bit like being embarrassed or hated. It feels as if someone were glaring at me, really loathing me."

"Is it always like this? I mean if other people were watching you..."

Eliana shuddered. "No! Being stared at by this creature is unique. I get a sense of deep hatred."

"Uh huh..." He continued to work the controls. "How can you know such a thing just from secondary shadows?"

"I really don't know. But the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. It's a very unpleasant feeling. I'm fearful, and my brain wants to flood my body with adrenaline."

Basel nodded in sympathy as he worked the controls. "That must be exhausting after a while."

Eliana sighed. "I'll survive."

Ten minutes later, Basel drilled through the last of the ice and began direct observations of the meteor. "Look at this! This is so fascinating! No wonder the meteor didn't ablate during reentry. It's coated with some sort of heat shield."

"That's a heat shield? It looks like a rough, rocky surface."

"Yeah, but look at its physical properties! Some sort of disguise? I don't know. But it has to be artificial. Look at the spectrum. A silicate base, but so many strange additives. This isn't my field, but I'm guessing we're looking at some sort of ceramic stabilizer."

"What? What's a ceramic stabilizer?"

"I'm not sure, just a phrase I made up for what I'm observing. The laser diagnostic is showing an extremely low heat transfer coefficient, lower than I've ever seen for a solid. Yet the stress-strain probe is showing a high degree of flexibility. It's better than spring steel." Basel gulped when he realized what he had just said. "A ductile ceramic?! Eli, this is huge!"

"Can you get a sample?"

"Sure. The impact flaked off a few bits. I'll vacuum them up the conduit."

"Great..."

Basel collected his samples and then continued his exploration. "There's a large crack in the engine housing. I'll be able to go right into the core assembly. It'll be interesting to compare their technology with ours..." Basel continued to work the controls. "This is interesting."

"What?"

"I thought this crack was caused by the impact. But the fracture is showing signs of an outward blast."

"The light-burner exploded? That's odd."

"Yeah, it sure is. It's an alien technology of course. Who knows what mistakes they might have made? Still..." He continued his exploration and then a few minutes later asked, "Are we still being watched?"

Eliana took a moment to survey their surroundings. "I think so. Nothing on the scanner though. Perhaps the creature knows its range."

Basel blinked and turned to her with a puzzled look. "How could it know that?"

For some reason just beyond her grasp, Eliana found Basel's question deeply disturbing, as if it were pointing to a great vulnerability that they were both overlooking. But then Basel gave a shout that drove the thought from her mind.

"Eli! This is unbelievable! Look!"

Symbols were etched into the interior of the engine housing of the light burner drive. As Basel brought the image into focus, it became a recognizable serial number. The meaning hit Eliana and Basel immediately. The light burner drive had been manufactured on Earth.

Four hours later... 

"There it is! Probe NCX-1175, launched May 4th, 8550," said Eliana. She and Basel were huddled over her laptop on the living area dining table. They had been searching through her old files on the space exploration programs ever since they had returned to the station.

Basel nodded. "Thoughtful of them to etch the probe-ID on the inside of the engine housing."

"Oh yeah. People were sharp in those days. They didn't miss a trick."

"So it's been gone close to 1020 years."

"Uh huh. Due back in 9573, three years from now..." Eliana was intently reading her file. "It's a Eureka-class probe. Those were the best that were ever made, a full 31% light velocity on the outbound side of the round trip, minus any requirements for the pivot jog. Target star was Tariq-H2458704, over 107 light years from here. The pivot star was Tariq-H2458689, about 5 light years closer." She continued to study the information. "Nice alignment on the two stars, the pivot was less than ten degrees."

Basel looked at her. "What's a pivot jog?"

"Ah, you don't know? People were masters at security back then. Some of their finest mathematical works are almost a lost art. Abdul Hadi didn't want to leave a traceable path back to Earth in case we happened to live in a hostile neighborhood. These weren't first-contact probes, far from it. Their missions were strictly for one-way information gathering."

Basel began to understand. "I think I see. So the probe would change direction at a pivot star before going to its final destination?"

"Exactly. The path from Earth would intentionally involve a mid-course correction to do a close flyby on the pivot star. The extremely shallow hyperbolic orbit there would do the final alignment to the probe's true destination."

"Ah. But a civilization at the pivot star itself could see where the probe came from."

"No. At those speeds the hyperbolic orbit is almost flat. Remember there's an intentional offset from Earth and then corrections midway in the first leg of the flight. Also at the pivot star, the probe comes in dark and hot, no active sensors and traveling close to a third of the speed of light. It does a close flyby with the star, but it would only be inside the equivalent of a Mars orbit for less than an hour. It takes a light-burner engine months to build up that kind of velocity. We get the added bonus of a quick close look at another solar system, and the probes are considered uncatchable at the pivot star location."

"They could be chased though."

"If the probe sensed that, they are programmed to fire-up and sail to infinity. On the outward journey, they have so much light-burner fuel remaining that nothing could ever catch them and return."

Basel nodded. "So you think our creature came from the probe's true destination?"

"Yes. It seems a certainty."

"And there the probe was captured?"

"Uh huh. They were programmed to spend a dozen years at their target locations, maybe even drop into a planetary orbit if something looked interesting." Eliana sighed. "I guess something was interesting and so different that it didn't spot the danger."

Basel frowned. "Are we really safe? The true course home must have stored somewhere in the probe's memory."

"Basel, people were paranoid about security back then. And thank The Holy they were too! I don't think our neighbors at Tariq-H2458704 know where we are. They were up against the finest encryption methods of the 8500's. These creatures did manage to insert a stowaway onboard, a remarkable achievement, I'll admit. But I don't think they know where their stowaway went. And least not yet."

"Not yet?"

Eliana shrugged. "Well, they know the probe came from somewhere. Eventually I suspect they'll start looking at other stars, and in this direction too. Remember the takeover happened almost 700 years ago."

Basel frowned. "It seems so fantastic, to think of an intelligent life-form in stasis for 700 years..."

"Yeah, it sure does." After a bit more reading, Eliana and Basel went back to Level-A to study their samples from the probe site.



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Chapter 20: A New Dawn

Time: May 19, 9570 5:20 AM UCT

Basel and Eliana had arrived back at the station twenty minutes ago. They had not ventured outside the protection of the station or CAT for close to four months now, not since January 20'th when Eliana first sighted the creature. The strain of their self-imposed imprisonment was wearing on them both.

Earlier this morning they had made a field trip to a large fjord and had landed on an island 67 km north and 8 km west of home. Eliana thought the island beautiful, and one spot in particular stuck in her mind. It was a grassy knoll with a fine prospect of the water thirty meters below. It beckoned to her as a perfect site for a picnic, so much so she mentioned to Basel her great desire for them just to get out and walk around a bit. What were the odds the creature would be lying in wait for them here?

Certainly almost zero. Perhaps the creature was even dead now or had moved on. They had no indication of its presence since the day they found the probe, and even that was just a subjective feeling by Eliana. Their scanner had recorded nothing. Still, the risk to Earth was so monumental, they ate their lunch inside the CAT.

After collecting data on the island for Basel's ecological studies, they flew home and went to separate tasks. Basel went to Level-2 in the main complex to analyze his data while Eliana went down to Level-B in the garage complex and commanded the system there to retrieve one of the samples from the Level-C cold vaults.

She had devoted the last two months of her life trying to gain some understanding of the creature's biochemistry from the strange diamond black wafers, and it was a standing joke between her and Basel that with the utter lack of competition, she was now the world's leading expert on extra-terrestrial biology.

Eliana smiled to herself as she worked. It was time to open the gap with her nonexistent competition a little wider. As she waited for her sample to thaw, her mind drifted back to the beauty of the morning's excursion.

"A world of light! Even Bandar Arenas was never like this, and we're still 36 days from the solstice!" Leaving the chamber control system, she walked over to an adjacent console and began punching up some observation data from the station sensors.

"Sunset yesterday was at 4:20 PM, the sun's azimuth just 22 degrees west of north. Sunrise was three hours later, at 7:25 PM. Three hours of twilight, that's it. The sun was never more than two degrees below the horizon. And today solar noon will be, uh, let's see... In just a few minutes, at 5:52 AM. Sun's altitude will be forty degrees... And the world loves it! The countryside is bursting in the joy of springtime!"

Eliana wandered back to check on her specimen chamber. "In six more days, we'll have 24-hour sunlight. I'll be able to see the sun at due north, no sunsets for two months. So incredible..."

There was a large mechanical sound in the garage above her, totally unexpected. Eliana's mind was just starting to pay attention to it when she heard Basel's worried voice on the intercom.

"Eli, you're breaking station integrity! What are you trying to do?"

She opened the comm line. "What do you mean? I'm down on Level-B thawing my specimen."

"What?! The CAT's airlock just cycled! You didn't do it?!"

Eliana felt her body tensing from the danger as Basel's words struck home. She grimaced as she thought of her devil-dog. She had left it in the back of the CAT. "No! Basel! Are you in the control room?"

"Yes!"

As if to confirm the danger, the station siren began a warning wail. The presence of the creature had been detected outside four minutes ago.

"Basel, lock us... No, wait! Too late! I see the creature! It's coming down the ladder-well from Level-A! I'm trapped!" She desperately wondered what sort of weapon her chair would make.

Basel shouted at her. "Climb into an empty specimen chamber! I'll seal you in from here!"

Eliana spun around and leaped to the back of the room, her mind filled with gratitude for Basel's quick thinking. "I'm in chamber three!" she cried out. "Seal! Seal!"

As the clear carbon nano-tube door began to slide into position, Eliana got her first good look at the creature, or rather, her first good look at its camouflage. It was just a shimmer, a slight distortion of her view of the floor, and it was coming straight for her. The door continued to close, and the creature got to her chamber about two seconds after the lock clicked home. Eliana thought she had never heard a more pleasing sound. And then she gasped in astonishment as the creature slid over to a nearby console and turned off the comm system, cutting her link with Basel.

The two life-forms stared at each other for a moment. At least Eliana knew she was staring, and she suspected the creature was doing the same. Her mind was thinking furiously about how to communicate with her husband, and then she thought of something. "Basel, can you hear me?" she called out. "If you can, wiggle the manipulator arm in my chamber."

The arm remained still. "Apparently not," she thought. "Come on Basel, it's not obvious but there is a way..."

"Eliana, can you hear me?" a weak, tinny voice said.

"Yes! Can you hear me?"

"Thank The Holy! You made it! Yes, I hear you fine through the vibration sensors in the remotes."

Eliana nodded. "But how am I hearing you?"

"I set up a reverse transpondence. I'm vibrating the arm with my voice."

"You are quiet but I can hear you. Excellent idea Basel!" She took a breath. "The creature! It turned off the comm system!"

"Yes, I know. It also tried to transfer primary station control to the garage console. I barely managed to lock it out in time."

"It knows our systems!"

"Yes!"

"How?!"

"I think I might know how. But for now, what's it doing?"

"It's pretending to be an invisible rug about one meter from my chamber."

"Uh huh. Eli, I'm slowly transferring all garage control to here. Should I seal the creature in with you on Level-B, or leave the well open?"

"Seal it in here with me as soon as you can. I want to keep an eye on it."

The creature started to drift away from her and back towards the well. Eliana waved her hands briskly and caught its attention. Eliana then watched in utter fascination as the creature headed for the well as soon as it started to seal. It did not make it, and then returned to its position by Eliana's chamber.

"Basel, this is interesting! I estimate the creature's speed to be at most one meter per second."

"Eli, what's our plan? I know you've been giving this creature every benefit of doubt, but I want to suggest that we kill it."

Eliana paused for a long moment and sighed. "Agreed. Any ideas?"

"A number of them. This might not be too hard. It's in our station now. We control its environment. I think your idea months ago with the lasers is a good one. Let's test if the creature can withstand high heat."

"How soon can you effect the change?"

"Just a few minutes. Let me set up a cool-air feed for your chamber first. It's probably getting a bit stuffy in there anyway."

"Uh, I hadn't noticed but yeah, some fresh air would be nice. Basel!" she cried.

"What?!"

"The creature! It just jumped up against my chamber! I'm seeing its underside!"

"What's it like?"

"No chromataphors at all! I see the spirals of hooks! So incredible, like a sunflower! And it's trying to break into my chamber!"

"How can you see?! Do you have light?"

"Yes! Bioluminescence! My gosh Basel! Such a wondrous ability! I believe I'm seeing thousands of light emitters and light receptors covering the creature's underside." Eliana heard a hiss of cool fresh air entering her chamber and she took a deep breath. "Thanks for the air! The underside Basel, that's how it does its camouflage." Another deep breath. |"It's bio-light and eyes must transmit directly through the creature to control the chromataphors on the other side. What a wondrous design!" Another deep breath, and then a shiver. "A bit chilly in here."

"I'm trying to build up a cool reserve for you. I'm about bake your level with some serious heat." Basel heard Eliana give a small groan. "Eli, what?"

"I just saw its beak! You were right Basel, a flat scissoring action, a wickedly powerful tool! My gosh! It just put a scratch in the specimen door!"

"It's scratching nano-tube composite?!"

"Yes! A big scratch!"

"Stand by, I'm heating the room now."

Eliana waited in silence. She was eye to eye with the creature, with only the centimeter thickness of the carbon door separating them. The creature reset and then scissored its beak again, deepening the groove it was creating in the chamber door. Eliana stared into its eyes, and the creature stared back. She felt almost paralyzed, not with fear but from the hatred, intense waves of black and feral hatred were pouring from her attacker.

And then the creature backed off and returned to the floor. It moved towards the sealed ladder-well, and then stopped halfway there. As Eliana watched, the perfect camouflage disappeared and was replaced by a glowing purplish skin. The skin started to tremble.

"It's working Basel! You were right! It does glow in the UV when it's exhausted! It's exhausted now, and it's not even moving!"

"What's it doing now?"

"Shaking! Violently! I think it's dying. Oh, this is so sad."

"I have the air temperature at 42C right now and rising."

Eliana cried for the creature's misery. "Its internal alcohols are vaporizing, rupturing its body. Its body is all surface area. It has no defense against the heat. Basel! The creature is in agony!"

"I'm trying to kill it as quickly as I can!"

"Hurry!"

"You still okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine," she cried, tears falling down her cheeks. "I'm still cool in here." A moment later she said quietly, "I think it's over. The creature is unmoving and turning black. The body is curling and crisping. My gosh, it's so thin..." And then she gave a small shriek. "Basel!"

"What?!"

It's in the shape of a diamond!"

"Huh?"

The revelation struck Eliana with full force certainty. "The hippos! The pools of blood we found! They were feeding pools, but not for the creature! They were nurseries for its young!"

Ten hours later... 

Time: May 19, 9570 4 PM UCT

A short while ago, Eliana felt in desperate need of a break, and she came up to the Observation dome to try to relax. She was standing silently at the northern point, watching the sun make its approach to the northern horizon from the west. It would not quite make it, not today, but soon... 

She heard a noise in the ladder well. They had not eaten for more than twelve hours, not since their picnic lunch on the island early this morning. It seemed like so long ago. Basel was carrying up a basket with a light late-night dinner. They quietly set the table as the last of the day's shadows washed the room.

"Ah, this good," smiled Eliana, as she bit into her toasted bun. "What's in here?"

"Oh, simple fare, chicken from yesterday's dinner, shredded carrots, various herbs..." He took a bite and smiled. "Ah, you're probably noticing my creamy mustard sauce. It's a specialty of mine. Here, try some chips with it." As the pleasant meal progressed, the tension of the day finally began to leave them.

"I got a confirmation from the PATH scanner," Basel commented. "The creature was traveling 0.96 meters per second in its dash to the airlock. Our first sweep recorded its position at 131 meters from the front door."

"It could see everything, couldn't it?"

"I think so. Its skin surface was incredibly receptive to all forms of light, right down to the control codes we were using to command the airlock. And its skin could emit those same frequencies."

Eliana sighed. "We were so careless. We knew it could sense the PATH scanner."

Basel nodded in agreement. "Yeah, that was a tip-off. We both just missed it. What can I say?"

"It would have been so easy to activate the Heisenberg shields."

"Well, they're on now. We've got this station running on full military mode. I'm almost certain we were always dealing with one creature. Still..."

Eliana nodded. "Oh yes, we're making the right decision. Another 47 days of being cooped up." She reached over and touched his hand and wiggled her body playfully. "I'll do my best to keep you distracted."

He raised his eyebrows and grinned back. "I can't wait to see you succeed." He sighed. "I'm surprised the creature waited so long to attack us."

"I'm not. Its chances would have been infinitely greater if it could have found us outside away from the CAT. But we never gave it the opportunity."

"It could have come into the station while we were out."

"And do what? We had a continuous comm link with the station. It would have shown us all its cards, with us safely away in the CAT. No, its best chance to murder us was a sudden entry with us here."

Basel shuddered. "And if we had been working together in Level-B when it came, it might have succeeded." He paused. "Any progress in understanding its reproductive cycle? Is it asexual, or did the aliens send us a pregnant commando?"

Eliana paused for a long moment and shrugged in confusion. "It does make me wonder. What killed its children?"

"Oh, I think I have a good idea about that."

Eliana looked up startled. "Really?!"

"Yeah, the same thing that killed the parent. It was already dying when it got here. We just put it out of its misery... and ours..." Basel sighed for a moment and then said, "Cosmic rays."

"Ah, radiation poisoning. You think?"

"Yep. Sea level air pressure is just over 1 kg per square cm. What would be the equivalent height for the weight in water?"

"That's easy. At 1 gram per cc, you would need a thousand cc for 1 kg, a ten-meter column of water to give a pressure of 1 kg per square cm."

"Uh huh. And that's the kind of shield the Earth's atmosphere gives you against cosmic rays, the equivalent of a ten-meter thick shield of water. It's all electron-photon interaction. The cosmic rays don't see the nuclei much at all. Using a denser material with a higher ratio of useless neutrons is even worse, more dead weight."

Eliana laughed at the concept. "Surrounding a light-burner with a shell of water ten-meters thick?! Those engines are ultra-light! It could never escape the gravitational pull of an asteroid, let alone accelerate to the light regime!"

Basel nodded. "DNA is an aperiodic crystal, extremely low entropic, very vulnerable to cosmic ray damage. The creature was different, but still a chemical-based encoded life-form. A trivial amount of radiation killed it, just as it would kill us."

Eliana nodded. "And they thought they were going to a star 5 light-years distant, not 107. The trip was far longer than they expected. Basel, this news will change the world." She stared at him. "You're smiling?"

He was smiling. "You should be too. This will be our ticket to go to mars. We have hundreds of years before the aliens find us, probably thousands..."

"They may never find us."

"Perhaps. But we can't assume that."

"You think the aliens will try again, don't you?" Eliana shuddered. "I do too."

"It's time for our species to get back into space again. We're sitting ducks staying down here on the surface like this. I'm sure the world will recognize this."

Eliana slowly nodded her head. "Did you know the old lunar colonies were over 47% male? The colonists were almost exclusively monogamists."

"Yes, I do. The urge to explore! Forgive me if I sound like a gender bigot, but I think the desire runs stronger in guys. Women are more the nest-building type."

Eliana laughed. "You're probably right! Just wait and see what a beautiful nest I build for you on mars!" It was a sweet laugh, full of her goodness, and Basel was overjoyed to see her happy again. And then she sighed. "It's so tragic Basel. All my life, I was taught to love and respect the life around me, human and non-human. Here we have our first contact with another world, and the preparation for war seems inevitable."

Basel nodded. He stood up and walked around to hug her. Eliana got up too and they walked to watch one of their few remaining sunsets. Basel kissed and hugged her as the last rays departed. And an evening's peace formed over the land.


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The End
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Posted:  2007-02-21
Last Modified: 2007-05-05 / 08:24:43 am
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