Genus: Unknown Adaptation (5 page)

'things' as her people did. He had to rely upon his physical superiority for defense. He saw nothing wrong with it, but she did.

It angered him. He had known that she would not receive him as a mate unless he convinced her that he was just as she was. That had always been the way of his clan. It was necessary to complete the gathering to align themselves in any case, but they had always gathered from the beasts of Mother Ra before, creatures far below them in intelligence that had abilities worth collecting. With them, it was easy enough to pass themselves off as being the same.

The mating he had set his mind on would not be accomplished, he realized, if Kate knew what he was. It would not be enough to appear the same and align himself so that her body would be able to nurture his seed.

Despite the fact that she had appeared to accept them and even to care about them-for she had nurtured them when they had needed it, protected them from real harm-she believed they were inferior beasts.

He was so angry at that discovery that he almost missed the leap of her thoughts in another direction.

She had, in fact, been vocalizing for some moments before her thoughts caught his attention once more and, at that, it was the emotion that caught his attention rather than the thoughts themselves.

His heart leapt at the discovery that she was to be moved to the 'surface'-when he discovered what that meant. The rest of her thoughts confused him, but he realized finally that she was afraid because they meant to

'detain' her on the surface and that it had something to do with punishment because she had tried to prevent the security team from slaying them.

Rage and fear poured through him with the understanding that punishment meant harm. He did not know what kind of harm they had in mind, but he would not allow it. He was so unsettled by that discovery and the instinctive urge to rush to protect her at once, that it took all he could do to restrain himself and consider the situation.

They would not harm her here. That would come once she had been taken to the surface and since he and the others must find a way down to the world below anyway, then he would need to wait. As little as he liked that idea, an attempt now would most likely result in failure and death.

Closing his mind to Kate with an effort, he focused on trying to locate Dae and Rak within the space station. He did not think he would have been successful except that he discovered that they were also trying to locate him. After waiting until the corridor beyond his hiding place was clear, he returned to the corridor and made his way back to the pod/lift, ignoring the reluctance coiling tightly in his belly the further he got from Kate. The pod went up and came down, filled and emptied of humans, several times before he reached a level where he felt Dae and Rak strongly enough that he knew he was as near to them as he would get on the pod/lift.

He stepped off and found himself in the part of the station that he had been brought through when he had first come. He felt his hackles rise at that discovery and had to struggle to maintain his guise once more as he moved quickly toward Dae and Rak. He found them in a space so wide and high that it almost did not look like a pod at all. It was filled with pods of many shapes and sizes, including some that were similar to the spacecrafts that had brought them to the space station, although these were much smaller.

It is what they call a hanger, Dae responded. The spacecrafts they use to travel from this place to their world are here and that one is to leave shortly to pick up passengers and supplies.

Excellent! They are going to take Kate down to their world. She is charged or to be charged. I did not perfectly understand that except that she is afraid of punishment. We will hide ourselves there and find a way to free her.

What is this punishment, Rak asked, uneasiness threading his thoughts?

Harm, Noo responded grimly. I do not understand it myself, but she is afraid. What else would she be afraid of?

Rak considered that and finally shrugged. You must be right, he agreed tightly. We will not let them do that … whatever they mean to do.

I think we must make ourselves look like those humans and go inside carrying something and then hide ourselves, Dae said. The skins they are wearing are different from these that we have imitated.

Then we should hasten to do so, Noo agreed. It will not do to linger. They are bound to find those we killed and then we might not be able to leave this place. Do not try to verbalize. I tried to verbalize for their machine and it did not understand. It is a machine, though, and it was not alarmed or suspicious. They will be both if we are not able to make ourselves understood.

Nothing that had happened since she'd discovered the project was to be scrubbed and the specimens destroyed had seemed entirely real to Kate. She hadn't, in point of fact, been able to focus on much of anything beyond her discovery and the helpless anger and nausea that washed over her as her imagination supplied her with one nightmarish scenario after another of what was happening in the habitat. She'd demanded, over and over, to speak directly to the commander, General Lawrence Hart, and yet when she was escorted to the command center to speak to him less than an hour after they'd reached the surface, she was so unnerved by the frenetic activity around her in the command center that she had trouble gathering her thoughts.

It seemed to take General Hart a few moments to place her when she'd been introduced to him by the guard that had escorted her. His gaze slowly focused on her face, however, and his expression became even grimmer. "The Sirian beasts have escaped," he said tightly. "If you know something, now's the time to spill it."

Kate felt her jaw slide to half mast in shock. Her thoughts went chaotic. Dominant among her thoughts, however, was the sudden realization that she'd left the containment door unlocked when she'd dashed off to protect her project. She felt her face flash with guilty heat and then all the blood rush away as the enormity of her breech of protocol struck her. "Escaped?" she echoed faintly, visions of long term imprisonment replacing the horrific images of the slaughtered beasts.

The general's lips tightened. "They found the bodies of the security team that was sent in to destroy the animals."

The shock that hit Kate that time almost felt like a physical blow. She reeled, felt as if the room around her did a slow spin. Blindly, she reached out in search of some sort of support as her legs went rubbery. "The Sirians …? How …?" she asked through numb lips.

"Nobody knows what happened-yet!" Hart growled. "I was hoping you could shed some light on it."

Kate blinked at him. It descended upon her abruptly that she was being accused, that the general thought she'd had something to do with the slaughter. Indignation flickered through her-but a sense of caution, as well.

"They took me into custody before they even went to my lab. How could I possibly know what happened?"

"The security electronics had been disabled-and your lab system had been wiped clean. You don't know anything about that?"

The coldness Kate had felt when she'd realized the behavior of the Sirian wasn't the acts of 'smart'

animals, but intelligent beings, swept through her again. "If you're suggesting I had anything to do with that, you're way off the mark!" she snapped. "Everything was working when I left the lab. Sissy … Dr. Terry Carter, had come to tell me the project was being terminated. We left together to go to speak with Dr. Warner and we were intercepted by the security team."

The general studied her assessingly for several moments, but apparently he decided she wasn't lying.

"Just what kind of animals are we dealing with here, Dr. Drexel?"

Kate compressed her lips, wrestling with her theory. Was it really no more than a theory now, though?

Hadn't the Sirians proven themselves that they weren't mere animals? "I don't think we're dealing with animals at all," she said. "I think we're dealing with intelligent beings."

That time the general reeled in shock. "And you didn't think to mention this theory of yours to anyone?"

he roared when he recovered from his momentary shock.

"I didn't realize it myself until just before Sissy arrived to tell me the security team was on the way!"

Kate bellowed back at him furiously. "I tried to tell them! I couldn't get anyone to listen! Instead, they hauled me down to the brig and locked me up!"

Discovering that their heated conversation had the attention of everyone else in the command center, the general dismissed the guard, grasped Kate's upper arm and escorted her to his office adjacent the command room. Urging her toward the chair in front of his desk, he moved to his own chair and dropped heavily into it.

"Tell me what you know."

Kate wrestled to bring order to her mind. "In all honesty, we haven't managed to make much progress with them at all. They seemed docile," she added a little defensively. "They haven't shown any signs of aggression. Sissy and I have both interacted with them."

General Hart's face contorted with rage. He pulled up a series of holo images on his computer. "Does that look like the work of docile animals?" he growled.

Bile rose in Kate's throat as she stared at the twisted bodies hidden among the plants she'd so carefully arranged to imitate the Sirian jungle where the eggs had been recovered. She dragged her gaze from the images after a moment. "They went in to kill them," she said shakily, gesturing toward the observation window in the common wall of the command center. "Any animal will attack when they're threatened. If it had been me, or you, or anybody out there, they would've defended their life!"

"Do you see any sign at all that the team attacked? They didn't get off one single shot! They were ambushed. They never knew what hit them!"

As convinced as she'd been that the Sirians were intelligent, that information still sent a jolt through her.

Her mouth went dry. "They knew they were coming," she said in a hoarse whisper.

The general stared at her blankly. "How would they know?"

"I don't know how!" Kate said, shooting up from her seat and pacing agitatedly. "They must have heard, or they were intelligent enough to deduce the intent when the team went in. What do you think happened? I rushed in and warned them before I dashed off to try to stop it?"

"Did you?"

"I did not!" Kate snapped. "It didn't occur to me that they could understand that much! We haven't tested their intellect. Everyone assumed they were animals. We haven't had time to observe them enough to collect nearly enough data on their behavior-certainly not enough time to measure their intelligence!"

"Your team has had over a year! I thought the job of a scientist was to make no assumptions?"

"We're still human!" Kate snapped. "We may be trained to collect the data and analyze it before arriving at any conclusions, but we had no reason to suspect that we were dealing with anything but the flora and fauna of Sirius."

"They breached containment before they even arrived. No one considered the possibility, then, that they were a higher intelligence life-form?"

"They hatched. As far as anybody could determine, they hatched from the eggs we'd brought on board and their natural instinct would be to find food. I'll admit there was some speculation to begin with that they were 'smart' animals, but they didn't display any particular aptitude when we ran preliminary tests on their intelligence."

The general looked disgusted. "So, you're saying we don't really know what we're dealing with?"

Kate bit her lip. "If they deliberately sabotaged those specific systems aboard the ship and they've been playing us ever since-I'm guessing highly intelligent-at least on a par with humans and possibly even a higher intelligence."

General Hart studied her for a long moment. "I think that's doubtful," he finally said dismissively. "What made you suspect that they were more intelligent than we'd considered?"

Kate didn't agree with him. It was possible that they were just intelligent enough and intuitive enough to figure out what was going on around them, but she was beginning to think they might have a far larger capacity than humans. After all, they'd been mere babies when they arrived. If they'd figured out how to disable systems aboard the ship to protect themselves, then didn't it follow that they were extremely intelligent? "The data I'd collected," she answered finally. "I'd been going over it, trying to figure out what was bothering me and it suddenly dawned on me that they always seemed to know right where the cameras were … even though we moved them regularly because they had a way of hiding, making it hard to observe them. When I began searching for the image that had stuck in my mind, I found dozens of them and I realized it wasn't just coincidence that they always managed to have their backs to the cameras any time they were doing anything. I saw something else, too, that I hadn't noticed." She paused, wondering whether to voice that suspicion or not.

The general lifted his brows questioningly.

Kate shrugged. "I could be wrong, but it looked like they were communicating with one another-somehow. The alpha-the one we named Ronan-always had his back to the camera-so I don't know if he used hand signals or not, but there were certainly no sounds that I could detect. They could make sounds that aren't detectable to human ears-they might even be capable of speech, have their own language. All I do know is that he seemed to be directing Dax and Jarek-the other two. He would look at them and then they would go off and perform some task as if they'd been told to do it."

The general considered that thoughtfully for a while and finally shook his head. "That seems a little farfetched. Well!" He got to his feet. "That's for someone else to worry about. My job is to have our teams locate them and eliminate the threat."

Kate gaped at him. "You're still going to destroy them? After all I've told you? If they're intelligent, we need to try to communicate with them!"

General Hart's face contorted. "They killed an entire security team, Dr. Drexel! I'm not interested in anything but finding them and eliminating the threat they represent as quickly as possible!"

"But …! But …! We have colonists who'll be arriving on Sirius any time now! And more due to ship out! They need to know what they're up against! If they are an intelligent species, we need to try to set up some kind of communications with them!"