Emancipation (The World Eaters Book 1) by Jason Paul McCartan

Author:Jason Paul McCartan [McCartan, Jason Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945826184
Publisher: Above The Fold Books
Published: 2019-09-01T22:00:00+00:00

9 Meeting The Scientists

The inside of Tao’s rover was barely big enough to contain both scientists and the marines, with Anderson and Nowak taking up most of the space.

“Okay, Doc,” said Jack. “What have you got?”

“Silas,” Caroline said. “Please display the summary of item P4S1766 holographically.”

“With pleasure,” said Silas, vocalizing from the small speaker built into his containment unit. Above the desk, a holographic display leaped into life, displaying what to Jack looked like a three dimensional scan of something blobbish, with lots of data around it.

“How much do you know about xenoarcheology, Private Conway?”

“It’s just Jack,” said Jack. “A little. Basically, it’s about digging up alien planets.”

Caroline smiled. She was used to hearing that kind of dismissive talk about her field of expertise.

“If you want to be crude, yes. Until we encountered the Shiveen, my field of xenoarcheology had been about finding signs of intelligent alien life. There’s been plenty of alien life found in the worlds the Sphere has expanded into, and some of it being close to sentient, but there’s been no discovery of truly alien settlements or ruins.”

“And now?”

“It’s still much the same, unfortunately. Even in the past five years since we’ve known about the Shiveen, we’ve rarely come into contact with them, and we’ve found nothing to show that they’ve created short or long-term settlements in this area of the galaxy.”

“Which means they’re transient and not from around here.”

“Possibly. Or they were and abandoned the area. What do you see on the holo there?”

“Not much. Looks like something organic?”

“Look closer.”

Jack looked at all the information displayed, searching for what Caroline wanted him to find.

“Okay, so it’s alien. Is this Shiveen?”

“I believe so, although there are some subtle differences from data collected on the Shiveen. Mostly different protein sequences in the DNA of it. It’s ancient, according to the survey data from the area. But there’s something else. Look again.”

Jack did.

“I’m not seeing anything, Doc.”

Caroline sighed audibly.

“Silas, enhance the embedded unknown object by a factor of ten.”

An area of the holo display enlarged to show the outline of something triangular deep within the mysterious Shiveen blob. It was small, perhaps only an inch in diameter, but deep within the center of the mass.

“Okay, what is that?” asked Jack.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” said Caroline. “It’s not Shiveen and matches nothing we have in the database. From everything I can tell, it’s made of a metal alloy we’ve never encountered before. I can’t tell exactly until I open it up. And I can’t do that just yet.”

“Why not?”

“A few reasons. I don’t have the proper equipment here to examine it properly. It may not be as inert as it seems, so it needs to go into quarantine first. Plus, this is the only sample I’ve found like this. And if this is what I think it is, our employer wouldn’t be happy with us finding it.”

Jack drummed his fingers against the top of the desk. What was a xenoarchaeologist doing working for a mining company, especially one that

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