Quoted By:
“There was a certain desperation in that question – a yearning frustration that was almost enough to burrow through the layers of enmity and confusion and distrust that separated us. I am not sure if I can make the alien understand. But I also cannot bring myself to lie.
“Do you recall the first question you asked me?”
“Yes,” replies the alien.
“Is it truly a hypothetical? Our positions are now switched. I have brought destruction to your home, and I am poised to end your species. I now possess information that your kind does not have.”
“And yet there is a part of my that still chooses defiance – not against your kind, but to bring an end to the forces that hold your extinction in lockstep with our own.”
I pause for a moment, grasping justifications that seem both reassuringly solid and worryingly pliable.
“Perhaps that was what sparing your vessel meant to me. A sign that we can find something beyond extinction.”
The alien watches me as I finish my words, studying the few features that I have permitted it to see. Without warning, it rears back, lines of deep-red pigment pouring down into its gill-line.
“Know that your sign will perish, then, human.”
Anger. Rage. Grief.
“Know that it dies here, as the individual/lineage you spared freezes millions of units away from the waters of our home-tides.”
The link goes dark. My first and only attempt at reconnection is rebuffed.
Two hours later, the muted light of a low-yield fusion detonation pricks against the surface of the RAIN’s hull. Through long-range scopes, I scan aimlessly through the vast, oblong debris field centered on the shattered transport. Steel and ceramic. Plastic, ice-dust, and trace organics. There is nothing that I could recognize – nothing which differentiates the…individual…I spoke to from the remainder of its ship or kin-lineage.
Yet there is something. It is small, unpowered, and non-emissive – a makeshift parcel less than half the size of the RAIN’s escape pods. It moves on a modest intercept course towards the RAIN, carried on the vapor-wind of fusion detonation. MERRYGATE tags it immediately with a hostile threat marker, warming the RAIN’s laser array to perform a trivial intercept task..."
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, DECEMBER 5th, PERSONAL JOURNAL
>INTERCEPT. Intercept the parcel.
>WAIT. Wait for the parcel to move closer; retrieve it if close range scans fail to show a harmful payload.
