In Her Name: The Last War (23 page)

“However,” Novikov went on, “we did find clear evidence of physiological manipulation.” On the screen, the blinding list of tests disappeared, replaced by side-by-side bioscans of Sato’s jaw line. “In this case,” Novikov went on, “the cracks that Lieutenant Sato had in two of his lower teeth, sustained during his first year at the academy-” the hairline fractures were highlighted in the bioscan on the left, “-have disappeared, as you can see in the bioscan on the right.” The audience murmured as they examined the two images. While the cracks were subtle in the “before” image, they were nonetheless clear. And they were plainly gone in the “after” image. “We examined them extremely closely, and they are definitely the original teeth, not replacements. But there are no indications of any type of repair: no fusing or any other technique. It’s as though they were never damaged in the first place.”

A new set of bioscans flashed onto the screen, this time of Sato’s left ankle. “Lieutenant Sato had mild scarring of his left achilles tendon from a childhood accident,” the doctor continued. An easily visible mass of tissue at the base of his achilles tendon was highlighted in red. “Again, the evidence of this injury is completely gone in the bioscans we made after his return.” The image on the right showed Sato’s achilles tendon again, but this time in pristine condition. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no medical application or science we have available to us today that would repair these injuries and leave absolutely no trace behind. There are also other, more subtle, differences that we detected in Lieutenant Sato’s physiology that indicate some sort of medical intervention.” He paused, looking across the audience. “Without a sample, we obviously cannot corroborate Lieutenant Sato’s report of an alien ‘healing gel.’ However, based on our findings, we can certainly say that
something
happened to him that is beyond our ability to satisfactorily explain. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the medical portion of this briefing.” 

“Thank you, Dr. Novikov,” Admiral Tiernan told him. “And now I’d like to move on to-”

“What about psychological aberrations?” someone interrupted.

Tiernan frowned. Someone always didn’t get the message about what “hold your questions” meant, but he let the question stand. Novikov hadn’t touched on the psychological aspects, and Tiernan himself was curious.

Novikov shook his head. “We ran an extremely intensive series of psychological tests,” he said. “The reason I did not include the results here is that, aside from some understandable emotional trauma, we could detect no unexpected or unreasonable variations from normal.”

There were some sidelong glances around the room, Sato noticed. More than a few people were concerned that he might have been psychologically influenced or brainwashed by the aliens and made into a spy or assassin. He didn’t really blame them: it was a lot easier to believe that than face the truth.

“Any other questions?” Tiernan asked, the tone of his voice making it clear that there had better not be. Heads shook around the room. “Very well. Captain Bennett, if you please.”

The woman sitting next to Sato rose and took up a position behind the podium. Captain Leona Bennett was the chief engineer that had led the team that had taken
Aurora
apart from stem to stern. When she looked at the audience, she didn’t smile. She had not liked what her team had found.

“As Dr. Novikov’s team did with Lieutenant Sato himself,” she nodded at him from the podium, “we conducted extended forensics tests of the
Aurora
, including her hull, interior, and all ship’s systems.

“We found that
Aurora
herself was completely free of any suspicious microorganisms, particles, or devices. However,” she went on, “as Dr. Novikov found with his patient, there were a number of oddities about the ship that we are at a complete loss to explain.

“The first,” she said as a projection of the ship appeared on the screen, the camera panning from the bow toward the stern, “is that there was no evidence at all of any holes having been cut anywhere in the hull. Even microscopic examination of several specific areas that Lieutenant Sato pointed out to us revealed nothing.

“However,” she went on, “the microscopic scans revealed something completely unexpected, and led to a detailed metallurgical sampling of the hull and interior components.” She flashed a chart up on the display screen. “These are spectrographs of samples of the ship’s outer hull plating during her last refit. As you can see, there are tiny variations in the composition of the alloy. This is normal from slight imperfections in the production processes.
This
, however,” she said as she changed the display to a new chart, “is not.” Where the previous chart showed slight differences among the samples, the samples in the new chart were eerily identical. “These samples were taken from the same plates in the hull as those in the chart you just saw. Not only are they all identical, but they’re all slightly different than the samples taken during
Aurora’s
last refit.” She paused, her face taking on a grim expression. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is flat-out impossible unless someone completely remade, on a molecular level and with a precision that we cannot match - the entire ship.”

That sparked an uproar until Tiernan ordered everyone to silence so Captain Bennett could continue. 

“That’s not all,” she told them. “More perplexing to us were the findings from the analysis of the ship’s engines. As most of you know, certain components have a limited operational life because of heat, friction, or a variety of other factors and must be periodically replaced.

“But everything in
Aurora’s
sublight and hyperdrive systems looked brand new,” she explained. “And I have to emphasize that some of the components are normally extremely difficult to get to, and require very special tools. It took my engineers a full week working around the clock to pull the hyperdrive core. And it was clear from the part identification markings and three-dimensional scans that they weren’t replacements:
they were the very same parts as installed on the ship’s last refit
. But somehow made new.”

Looking directly at Admiral Tiernan, she summed up her findings and her fears. “Sir, I can’t confirm Lieutenant Sato’s story from what we found on the ship. But I can definitely confirm that something incredibly strange happened to that ship, something that’s centuries beyond our current engineering capability.”

Those around the room fell silent. Bennett had a reputation for being an engineering genius, and many had long thought her talents wasted in the Navy. Her last words sent a haunting chill through the senior military officers and civilian officials who sat around the table at the center of the room.

“Thank you, captain,” Tiernan said into the resounding silence. He had already read the summary and most of the details of Bennett’s findings, but was nonetheless disturbed. While she made it clear that there was no indication that the ship itself posed any danger, whoever had manipulated the vessel was clearly in a league of their own in terms of technology.

“Dr. Larsen will now present the results of the study of the substance, believed to be blood, found on Lieutenant Sato’s sword,” Tiernan said, nodding toward a tall, thin man with thinning blonde hair who sat on the other side of Sato. “Doctor, if you would, please.”

Larsen was nervous as he took the stage. Unlike many academics who had a lot of experience in front of people, even if just students in a classroom, Larsen had very little: his life was spent in the laboratory. He was widely published, but had generally avoided giving public talks himself. Instead, he almost always trusted it to one of his understudies. 

Sato grimaced inwardly, expecting a droning catalog of esoteric genetic technobabble, but he, along with most of the rest of the audience, was surprised as Larsen’s stage fright was overcome by enthusiasm for his topic.

“You have already seen many incredible things in the various reports from the analyses of
Aurora
and young Lieutenant Sato,” Larsen began, reading from his notes after clearing his throat several times. “But I believe that those revelations pale in significance to the findings I bring before you now.” He groped around on the podium for a moment, finally finding the control to bring up his first display.

“Here you see the double-helix that we are all familiar with,” he explained as a strand of DNA slowly turned on the screen behind him. “While it varies depending on the species used for comparison, human DNA - a reconstruction of which you see on the screen behind me - is much more similar to other Earth-descended life forms than it is different. For example, we share roughly ninety-five percent commonality in our DNA with chimpanzees.” A second strand of DNA appeared on the screen next to the first, with a watermark of a chimp behind it. To the untrained eye, the two strands were identical.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” Larsen said, for the first time glancing up from his prepared notes, clearly excited, “I know that you expected me to ramble on about gene sequences and such. But there is no need once you’ve seen
this
.”

The chimp DNA disappeared, and was replaced by the image of a new double helix. It was nearly twice as long as the human DNA strand, and had strange protrusions from the helix at regular intervals along its length. The audience made a collective gasp: Larsen’s team had only just finished their analysis, and no one, not even Tiernan, had yet seen the results until now.

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen,” Larsen told them, turning to look admiringly at the image. “This is something entirely new to our science! Nowhere in all the worlds we have surveyed have we seen anything like it. Some parts of it, we understand; others, such as these strange extensions-” he pointed to one of the protrusions, “-continue to baffle us. There is much controversy among those of us looking at the samples brought back by Lieutenant Sato. But there are two incontrovertible facts. First, that this gene sequence can encode vastly more information than our own DNA; and second, that it is not from any known species of life that humanity has ever encountered and sampled.

“While this is all still very preliminary,” he went on, turning back to his stunned audience, “I feel compelled to point out that a majority of my colleagues are convinced that the species or sub-species that this sample came from was genetically engineered, that there is far too much data in the structure to have been encoded naturally, even over an extended period of evolution. Others believe differently. I myself am not yet decided on the matter. But we are all in agreement that it is of completely unknown origin.”

“I don’t bloody believe it,” someone murmured. 

I wish I could say that
, Tiernan thought. Whether Sato had really found blue-skinned alien women from hell out in deep space or not,
something
was out there. “Thank you, Dr. Larsen,” he told him, relieved that the haunting image of that alien DNA had been taken off the screen. 

As Larsen shuffled off the stage, Tiernan turned to look directly at Sato. “Okay, son, it’s your show.” 

Sato took his place at the podium, facing his audience. In his earlier life, he would have been terrified of briefing such an assembly of senior officers and civilians. But he had already come to know many of them fairly well over the last few weeks through an endless series of vidcom calls, and what he had experienced on the
Aurora
had forever changed his threshold of fear. His eye caught Steph sitting in the back row, again wearing her “killer red dress,” as she liked to call it. He didn’t acknowledge the wink she gave him, but her confidence warmed him nonetheless.

“Thank you, sir,” Sato said, his strong voice carrying well without the need for artificial amplification. “Since most of you already know the background on what you’re going to see, a comparison of the cloud formations on the alien artifact representing Keran with time-matched meteorological records sent back from the Keran government, I’ll skip over the preliminaries and get to the bottom line.” He pressed a button on the tiny remote he held, and the massive screen at the head of the room suddenly showed an image of a planet that looked much like Earth, with a set of time and date information at the bottom. “This is satellite data that was delivered to us this morning by courier from Keran,” Sato explained. “Please note the date and time information, which is shown in Universal Standard to correspond with the times of the images I took while returning on
Aurora
.” The view of the planet suddenly changed from that of a typical sphere, expanding to show a two-dimensional display of the entire planet, as if it had been converted to a wall map. Three red circles flashed on, illuminating some large cloud masses. “These three major storms are good points of reference for what we’re about to see in this first sample.”

He clicked the remote again, and that image shrank to half the screen, while another image of what looked like the same planet appeared, except that it was suspended on a metal ring in an image capture stand. Identical time and date information to what was on the first image appeared at the bottom. “This is the alien artifact that appears to represent Keran, taken at the same relative time.” Another click, and the sphere was reformed to show a rectangular display of the entire planet’s surface as Sato had done a moment before with the satellite imagery, with three red circles around major storm systems. 

“These cloud formations look similar, but the question is, are they the same? I had the computer highlight any differences between them in bright red.” Sato clicked the remote again. The two images came together and were merged. “As you can see, they appear to be the same. Closer analysis revealed, however, that the two images are not just similar, but are
identical
.” He paused. “This means that the alien artifact is showing not just some random representation of Keran, but is actually echoing an image of the planet in real-time, even from hundreds of light years away.”

“That’s impossible,” someone blurted.