The food samples they had been gifted were isolated and sent to the nutritional analysis lab, while the medical samples were even more carefully decontaminated, sealed up, and decontaminated again, before being taken to the ship’s infectious disease lab. As much as the navy would like an extensive logistics network that allowed ships to be purely military vessels, the realities of deployments even during the pre-war period meant that it was often necessary for ships to buy local food that weren’t beef, pork, chicken, or some other common human staple food as local foodstuffs were the only thing available in Frontier Cooperative refueling stations. While an attempt to compile a list of human edible foods had been made, between all the available foodstuffs on all the friendly planets…
It had been faster to simply set up a simple lab to analyze the composition and content of foodstuffs, first unofficially as the mess officers had taken it upon themselves to keep their crews fed, and then officially as the admiralty had finally admitted to the need. It had become more needful once the Confederacy had formed and ships had become multi-species affairs. Usually the lab analyzed raw ingredients, or ingredients after they’d gone through simple cooking like boiling, frying or roasting, but Trout was sure they would be able to analyze cooked dishes.
If they couldn’t, they’d damn well better find a way to.
And if everything was edible, Trout hoped they’d leave enough for him to try. The nugget things had looked delicious.
The medical samples had gone to the ship’s disease control lab, which had been established practice for far, far longer, and ironically for much the same reasons.
Once he was certain the ship was safe, Trout had given the conn to the watch officer and had immediately locked himself in his office and written a report on his conversation with the Kaydekeenian, getting all his initial thoughts and impressions on metaphorical paper, even as a general call went out for anyone with any sort of relevant experience to analyze the video of the conversation with the alie—with Rain, which had been answered by most of the off-duty rakido on the ship. He was not surprised to learn that many of them had a degree in sophontology. The fact that so many of the off-duty changers also volunteered wasn’t surprising either. While they didn’t collect multiple advanced degrees—at least, advanced degrees as humans recognized them, as rakido academic culture possessed more advanced degrees beyond a doctorate—changers were very long lived and apparently many had taken an interest in alien psychoanalysis at some point.
The survey team’s leader had also volunteered their services, although it had taken several hours to come to Trout’s attention. In addition to geology and minerology, many of them apparently had secondary degrees in things like linguistics, sophontology, astrobiology, someone who specialized in something called semiotics, a psychologist, a sociologist…
He’d actually been curious enough to send Doctor Gonzalez a message asking why a resource survey team had members with such specializations. The reply he’d gotten back informed him this was the unofficial norm for many survey teams who worked beyond the frontier, most of whom hoped to be involved in a first contact scenario, and had prepared themselves accordingly.
In the meantime, they had been able to get more readings of what Trout supposed was ‘Stargazer Fortress’, as the Kaydekeenians didn’t seem to object to their launching sensor probes. Well, they hadn’t shot any down. While the bad scan readings on the planet were still present—and was probably the result of deliberate obfuscation—they had focused their attention on the orbital station, sensors set on maximum sensitivity and keeping the intensity of their scanning pings as low as possible. Rather than being a saucer, the station turned out to be tiered cone with four increasingly smaller cylindrical segments behind the disk face like a circular ziggurat, each cylinder a kilometer long.
There were, as far as anyone had been able to tell, no visible weapons mounted on the surface of the station. While they could be recessed behind armored doors, that was usually done as a stealth measure to minimize the reflective profile of a vessel, something the station hadn’t seemed to need. For the moment Trout chose not to draw any conclusions from that, like the Kaydekeenians were just full of bravado and other things and not really ready to counter ambush an invasion force, and afforded them the benefit of the doubt that all their guns were just hiding. Perhaps they thought having guns out on the side facing the Venture was impolite. The invisible orbital base was already evidence they were halfway there, and just because the other half wasn’t obvious didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Senior Medical Officer Commander Clarabelle Mussel—who despite the name was fairly sure her parents had loved her when she’d been born—took charge of the xenomicrobial culture samples with an excitement and relief she didn’t often feel while on duty. Officially, the disease control lab was there to identify, analyze, and find treatments for exciting new diseases that members of the navy might encounter ‘in the wild’, while preventing their spread through the rest of the ship’s complement. Unofficially, it’s where everyone went about a week after shore leave to show their interesting new STDs and try stop feeling like their crotch was on fire, or numb, or shriveling from dehydration. Yes, they also dealt with local diseases, but that usually involved making arrangements with a local hospital and getting the latest local vaccine or antibiotic, and maybe culturing them in the ship’s lab for those who started showing symptoms after leaving port, but it was mostly venereal diseases from people who didn’t understand that just because human, rakido and pajhadin external genitalia were compatible but couldn’t result in pregnancy didn’t mean they should stop wearing the damned condoms.
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To receive sealed and prepared bacterial and viral cultures for study instead of having to get it from a patient’s discharge was almost novel. The fact that it was coming from a new alien civilization made it unprecedented. There had even been enough samples for everyone, meaning they didn’t need to try to culture more samples so they could run tests.
The samples were all neatly labeled, with names in English like ‘hot scales’ and ‘bleeding rash’ and ‘violent guts out‘, which were all very concise and vivid and enough reason to not want any of the samples to get loose. There were more extensive descriptions to accompany the names, such as an infection of ‘hot scales’ involving in a hot fever, skin flaking, and swelling of the joints and tongue. The description of ‘violent guts out’ would have made Mussel put more safety measures in place to handle it if they didn’t have all the measures in place already as the samples were assigned and work began.
A part of Mussel wanted to actually handle the samples, preparing them, analyzing them, exposing them to human tissue cultures to test how they attacked the body, and record results. Most of the rest of her reminded her that she was too old for that, she had other responsibilities, and it wasn’t as exciting as it sounded.
She still had to actively stop herself from doing it, because new alien bacterial and viral samples prepared by a newly discovered species… that also conveniently spoke English. That last honestly made it sound absurd. Aliens who spoke modern English—and conversational modern Pagabat, modern Lehtada, modern Song of Tiania, and modern Atsinagi—from learning it over radio transmission sounded like a lazy explanation thought up by a children’s show. But it actually happened, and the aliens even had conversational mastery of it, which showed that the universe didn’t actually need to make sense.
“Doctor Mussel?”
Mussel looked up from where she’d been staring at her tablet and not actually reading. “Yes? What is it, Doctor Balle?”
The rakido doctor had a complicated expression on his face. “Could you please take a look at my sample? I believe I need a second opinion on something.”
Mussel frowned, but stood up. “Which sample are you working on?” she asked as she followed him to the station he was using.
“It’s the one labeled ‘malaise’,” he said. “Although when I opened the sample case it turned out to be multiple samples, each labeled as variants of the same virus.”
Well, there went some of the good feeling about well-labeled samples. “All right, I’ll get it reassigned.”
“That would be helpful, but that’s not the help I need,” Balle said as they reached his station, and he turned on the screen of the microscope. “What does this look like to you?”
Mussel looked at the screen and frowned. “Is this a joke?”
“No, doctor. I prepared the slide myself, then made more from the other samples just to be sure.” The screen switched to the images of other viral structures, presumably the other samples.
“…what were the listed symptoms?”
“Sore throat, runny nose, nasal congestion, sneezing, coughing, muscles aches, fatigue, headaches, muscle weakness, loss of appetite, fever and feeling very unwell and like they’re about to die. The sample’s words, not mine.”
…
If this was someone’s idea of a prank, there was going to be hell to pay.
Chief Petty Officer Vicente Valdemor frowned at the open container containing an alien dish. And it was alien. The oily orange sauce looked like a finely ground root or vegetable stem, and from the smell something in the dish contained a lot of capsaicin. The grains were round, pea-sized kernels of some kind of green starch, boiled and then stir-fired if his nose didn’t deceive him. Egg was recognizably egg, and looked suspiciously chicken-like in its colors, but that could be a coincidence. A lot of eggs in the galaxy turned out white and yellow, when they weren’t green and gray, black and red, or some other combination. The bits of dark meat would need testing to see how alien it was, but it smelled similar to the nuggets supposedly made of ‘knugrind’ meat.
The last ingredient, however…
Frowning, Valdemor took a pair of tweezers and picked up a shriveled, deeply browned piece of… something. He sniffed it, and his frown deepened.
Then, to the horror of everyone else in the lab, he popped the piece into his mouth.
Passing it over his tongue contemplatively, Valdemor took a sample petri dish and spat out the brown thing.
…
If this was someone’s idea of a prank, there was going to be hell to pay.
The next day, Trout stared at the reports being presented to him by the disease control lab and the nutritional analysis lab. “How certain are the two of you about this?”
“I had these samples prioritized. Everyone in the lab went over then, and then checked to try to rule out contamination from a local source,” Commander Mussel said. Despite wearing a clean uniform, her hair had that quality that said the person it was on top of hadn’t slept a wink recently, nor had they taken a bath. “We checked every sample five times, and watched each other to make sure there were no mistakes. It’s as certain as we could be, under the circumstances. Those are rhinoviruses for the common cold.”
“I’ve been a navy cook for most of my professional adult life, Captain,” Valdemor said. “The only times I wasn’t was when I went to college on the navy’s scrypt to keep up to date on food chemistry. I know what fried garlic looks, smells and tastes like.”
“We’re not saying they’re not real aliens,” Mussel said. “The other bacteria and viruses they sent us show strong indication of being non-terrestrial, at least in the initial gene sequencing we were able to do before priorities shifted. However, we have to conclude that we are not their first contact with humans.”
“It was definitely fresh garlic, sir, it wasn’t toasted enough to be shelf stable. Whoever they are, they’re growing their own garlic,” Valdemor said, equally solemn. “The rest of the food is definitely alien, though. They have some kind of oily plant paste full of capsaicin, which implies something on the planet eats the roots specifically and the plant doesn’t want it to. The meat isn’t beef or pork, but what DNA we were able to get from it was inconclusive. It is safe for consumption by the crew, though.”
“…” Trout shifted his gaze between the two of them. “Is this the best you’ve got?” he said, his voice neutral.
“For now, captain,” Mussel said. “We don’t have anything else to draw conclusions from.”
Trout nodded slowly. “Thank you for your report. I will take it into consideration.”
Exactly 23 hours after their visitor left the ship, the Venture began to receive a transmission on a wide band of radio frequencies. It began with two pulses, then dead air. Then three pulses and more dead air. Then five pulses. Then seven pulses. Eleven pulses. Thirteen pulses.
After pulsing through all the prime numbers up to ninety-seven, the signal reset back to the start. Two pulses. Three pulses. Five pulses. Seven pulses. Eleven pulses. Thirteen pulses…
- there are more existing buddies than there are girls. Girls die of course, and when that happens most of their buddies become very depressed and inactive. Some of the buddies eventually request assisted deactivation, but most eventually recover and either continue as an independent being or request to be paired again with a little sister. Said little sister is usually immediately adopted into the surviving family of the buddy's girl, because she was family now.
- The name of the vessel that the Kaedekin arrived in is 'The Frilly Pink Fortress Of Friendship', which in Kaede's time was just called 'The Fortress', because the full name was too much even for most magical girls. It was not actually pink on the outside, since it was hard to paint in vacuum, but a lot of the inside was painted pink.
- Ghosts cannot come into existence on Surcease. They can come into existence on Nightmare and every other moon and planet.
- The Kaedekin do not celebrate Christmas, as such. The closest they come is eating a lot of fried chicken around that time. If asked after becoming adults, they'd probably consider themselves very lapsed secondhand Catholics by remembered upbringing.
- The most common dying words of the Kaedekin are "Go! I've got this!" and "I love you".
- The most popular sporting event on Surcease is a reality tv competition called 'Sakura', where Kaedekin girls all try to beat an elaborate obstacle course with no magic. Second are track and field events, and a close third are various dueling circuits and battle royale team events.
- Kaedekin do not have toy weapons, only weapons of varying levels of lethality.