Chapter 4

The darkness slowly receded and the oddly familiar jumble of conduits and beams coalesced into something real. Ross wondered briefly what it could be, and then it hit him. He was seeing the ceiling above his bunk aboard the Eudoxus.

"What the hell?" he said aloud — well tried to say. It sounded more like 'uhangghh?' He groaned at the effort and sat up, fumbling in the dark for the squeeze bottle he usually kept on the table next to the bunk. His hand found it while his eyes were still trying to refocus and he took a long swallow of the cool water.

"How the hell?" he said, memories beginning to come back to him. Again he said it aloud, though much more clearly. The last thing he remembered was feeling a funny vibration and then a flash of white light. That was during his EVA on the alien ship's hull!

'Pete must have saved my bacon, ' Ross thought. He slapped the intercom's call plate by the cabin's hatch. "Pete!"

Nothing. "Pete!" he called again.

"Yeah? Came the groggy voice of his partner.

"What the hell happened?"

"What?"

"What. The. Hell. Happened!!" Ross asked, getting angry.

"Shit man, I don't know. Last thing I remember was seeing some odd flicker along that alien ship's hull, then there was a bright white flash of ... something, light I guess. That's the last thing I remember before your screaming ass woke mine up!"

"Then how the hell did I get back in the ship, out of my suit and laid out in my bunk?"

"Same way I did, I guess," Pete said, feeling a bit angry himself. "Last I remember I was on the bridge, staring at you on the view screen. I have no idea how I got to my bunk either."

"Okay, okay. We both got it, whatever it was. We'd better get to the bridge."

"Right. I'll stop and make a pot of coffee first. I think we're going to need it."

Pete had just flipped the 'brew' switch on the coffee maker when Ross called over the intercom. "Pete? You better get up here. You are not going to believe this."

When Pete got to the bridge, his eyes followed Ross' to the view screen and to what... ? A large room of some kind?

"How?" he started, but interrupted himself to ask the more important question. "Where?"

"Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I'd put my money on the inside of that alien ship."

"Damn," Pete felt a little stunned, plopping down in the copilot's seat. His eyes took a practiced glance at the telltales and readouts
as he did, and his eyes went wide again. "Oh crap!"

"Yeah," Ross said. "Our front door is open and there's breathable air out there. Before you look, I already checked our levels. That's not our air filling that hold out there, its theirs."

"There's something else too, you may not have noticed it if you came straight here and sat in the pilot's seat. You know how your body gets after a month or so of shipboard duty. Achy, lethargic, all the usual complaints?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, how do you feel? Once the cotton cleared out of my brain I realized I was feeling pretty good."

"Yeah, come to think of it," Ross agreed with a grin. "I feel like I've just come off of three months of R&R at Jango Beach on Asgard."

"We're still breathing, anything beyond that is a bonus right now."

"Yeah, I saw that too," Ross and Pete had both seen the ship's chronometer. Whatever had been done to them, two weeks had passed since they'd both lost consciousness.

"Let's do a quick search to see what might be missing or mucked with. If its been open house on the Eudoxus while we were out, they had to have come and poked around."

The two men spent an hour poring over the ship, and at the end of that time, decided that the aliens must have indeed gone through the ship. Little was missing, and much disturbed, but only slightly. They had been very meticulous, but careful not to damage anything, leaving most things where they found them. At the end of the hour, they met back at the bridge, where they could monitor the exterior scene through the view screen.

"Looks like some of the food is gone, but just samples of the various things it looks like," Pete offered.

"Some of the technical manuals are gone from the library, but only the duped hard copies. The portable vid player is missing too, along with the entire collection of vids, including all the news feeds from Asgard that we picked up at Tenerif Station.

"All the vids?"

"Yeah, all. The bachelor's entertainment selection too."

"Well, there goes our chance for leaving a good first impression," Pete joked.

"Maybe, who knows, they may think they're just more technical manuals." Ross countered. "Of the how-to variety."

"More like do-it-yourself manuals then," Pete laughed.

Just then some movement caught both their eyes. On the view screen they saw something with a lot of appendages come scurrying out into the middle of the hold where it began fussing with something it had been carrying. A moment later the something was revealed. Three folding chairs had been set up, two of them side by side facing the third, set ten feet away. Between them, a table had been set up.

"Was that one of our hosts, or some sort of robot?" Pete wondered aloud.

"Didn't exactly look alive to me,"

"It really looks like They did poke around in the ship. Those are our own chairs, and I think they were stuck way down in the midships storage compartment along with all our good clothes."

"That's what I remembered," Ross nodded. "Though with the engine pod missing, those midship compartments are now stern compartments. Looks like we're being invited to have a sit down meeting."

"Lets go then, they're probably waiting for us."

Dar watched the hold from an exterior view screen just outside the hatch separating it from the main service corridor. The two aliens walked out, having put on some of their own clothing, and sat side by side in the two chairs. They understood the significance of the chairs and their placement at least.

"I hope your translator is going to be sufficient," he said to Ship.

"We can assume we will have errors in translation, but the video data we found has given us more than enough data for the translation routines to have a basic offering."

"We'll see," Dar muttered, and activated the hatch. He stepped into the hold and walked slowly, and he hoped non-threateningly, to the chair opposite the two beings. The differences in their heights might have made the chair a bad choice, but his people seemed longer in the lower torso than these beings, so the chair was actually very close to the ideal height from the floor. Deeper than it need be though, so the service drone had placed a padded rest against the back of his. The two beings returned his gaze with what seemed to Dar to be calm attentiveness. He smiled.

Ross and Pete were both startled at the furred creature who sat down in front of them. When it smiled, it revealed a mouthful of teeth quite a bit further towards the carnivorous end of the scale than their own, but nothing nightmarish. They returned the smile, which caused a twitch in the smile of their host. The three of them held their smiles for a moment of mutual dental cognition.

The alien spoke unintelligibly, but before either of them could react, a disembodied voice said in a smooth but flat voice, "Hello."

Ross looked at Pete and Pete nodded towards the alien to indicate he should go ahead.

"Hello," Ross answered. He heard what he assumed had to be the translation taking place in the other direction. He purposefully turned his head towards Pete to make a comment. "It appears they have some sort of translator."

"Let's hope its better than anything we could do."

Ross turned back to the alien and waited. Encouraged, it spoke again and the translation came across immediately.

"I am Dar. Welcome to the Kadamon."

"Dar," Ross pointed to the alien. "Catamount?" he motioned around him, using what he thought he had heard as a translation.

The alien turned its head slightly and spoke, but the words weren't translated. A different voice answered and also was not translated.