The words came out before I could stop them. A compliment. An acknowledgment. The kind of thing that built rapport and established connection and led to exactly the sort of familiarity I didn’t want. I wished I could take it back.
Baleck was the type of person who made friends easily. I could see it in the way he interacted with everyone. The diplomats, the D’tran guards, even Rezor himself. Baleck had a natural warmth that drew people in and a genuine interest in others. He was the type who made others want to open up to him. It was partly his personality, enhanced by skills he’d picked up through years as a communications specialist. But mostly, it seemed to be simply who he was.
I didn’t make friends. I didn’t want to make friends. Friends were complications. Attachments that could compromise judgment, cloud decisions, create vulnerabilities. Friends were liabilities that enemies could exploit. I had learned that lesson early.
Baleck would not be an exception.
“The object is this way,” I said, turning away from him before he could respond to the compliment. “About twenty paces.”
The terrain here was brown and rocky, scarred by the storms that had ravaged this planet for so long. But life was already pushing through. Small plants sprouted from cracks in the stone, their leaves a vibrant green that seemed almost defiant against the barren backdrop. Moss spread out like a fuzzy carpet. Not far away, I could hear the sound of water. A stream, probably, flowing down and carving new paths through the landscape.
It made something in my chest loosen, seeing it. The resilience of growing things. The way nature reclaimed what had been taken from it, slowly but inevitably. I had seen too many dead worlds, too many places where nothing grew and nothing ever would. This planet was healing. It was good to witness.
The object sat on a flat stretch of ground ahead, exactly where I’d seen it from the ridge the day before. My cybernetic eye adjusted automatically, bringing it into sharp focus.
Tear-shaped. Brushed metal that caught the morning light with a dull gleam. Roughly the size of a bed pillow, though more elongated. Several protrusions extended from its surface at odd angles, and even from here I could tell they hadn’t been there when the thing landed. They’d emerged afterward. Deployed.
“A probe,” I said.
Baleck came to stand beside me, studying the object with obvious curiosity. “You’re certain?”
“The shape. The protrusions. The way it’s positioned.” I moved closer, circling it slowly. “Something designed to land, deploy sensors or transmitters, and gather information. I’ve seen similar designs before, though not this exact configuration.”
“I’ll defer to your expertise,” he said. “My knowledge of alien probes is not comprehensive.”
I pulled my pack around and retrieved my handheld scanner. It was a compact device, military-grade, capable of detecting a wide range of materials, energy signatures, and technological components. I powered it on and swept it over the probe in a slow, methodical pattern.
The readout confirmed what I’d suspected. Standard probe mechanisms. Power source, minimal but functional. Sensor array, currently dormant. And there, buried in the data, evidence of a transmission. The probe had sent something. Asignal, a data packet, a message. But it wasn’t transmitting now. Whatever it had needed to communicate, it had already done so.
“It sent a transmission,” I said, showing Baleck the scanner display. “Recently, based on the energy residue. But it’s stopped now.”
“Sent to whom?”
“Unknown.” I crouched down beside the probe, examining its underside. The metal was smooth, unblemished except for…there. Markings. Etched into the surface with precision, small enough to miss if you weren’t looking for them. “There’s something here. Symbols of some kind.”
I tilted my head, trying to get a better angle. The markings were unfamiliar to me. Not any human script I recognized, not any of the alien languages I’d been trained to identify. But Baleck might know. He was a communications specialist, after all. Languages were his domain.
“Can you take a look at these?” I asked. “Do you recognize the language?”
He moved closer, handing me the sunglasses he’d been holding. Then he crouched down beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him again, and peered at the etched symbols.
For a moment, Baleck said nothing.
Then he let out a hiss and his skin changed. This was different than the Destran color shifts I’d seen before. It wasn’t the calm blue and greens of contentment. Not the violet of cold. Not the warmer tones of amusement or interest. This was vivid red flooding his face and neck, electric blue crackling through his skin like lightning. Colors so intense they seemed almost to glow.
Then, just as quickly, it all vanished. His skin shifted to match the rocks around us. Browns and grays, mottled anddull. The instinctive response of a species that had evolved to camouflage from predators.
He scrambled backward, nearly falling in his haste to put distance between himself and the probe. His expression was stricken. Pinched beneath the camouflage pattern. Eyes wide with something that went beyond fear, into territory I couldn’t name.
I moved without thinking, closing the distance between us and grabbing his arm. His muscles were rigid under my grip, trembling with tension.
“Baleck.” I forced him to look at me, putting myself directly in his line of sight. “What’s wrong?”
He swallowed hard. His gaze met mine, and I saw it there. Not just fear. Recognition. Horror.
“Brakken,” he said, and the word came out rough, scraped raw. “Those symbols. That language.” He looked back at the probe, and his skin flickered red again before settling into that defensive camouflage. “It’s Brakken. The language of the Destrans’ old enemies.”
CHAPTER 6
