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NON-CONTACT

Charlie shrieked.Her body went rigid and her hands grabbed the sides of her head. "Holy shit, Katie!"

She began to pace, walking around Reyna's office in tight circles, bobbing around like a pinball between the desk and the meeting table and the beings who stepped aside to let her spiral.

"Who or what is 'Katie'?" Reyna asked, worry overtaking her face.

"Katie is mysister!" Charlie's voice was climbing. "I was on the phone with her when... when...whateverhappened to get me HERE." Her breathing was getting heavy. "She heard me. She heard something happen and then the line went dead and she hasno ideawhere I am or if I'm even alive. Katie doesn't know if I'mokay."

The room went quiet.

"Okay," Reyna said. Her voice was calm, that same measured authority from before. She moved through her office, gathering the crew with small gestures and pointed looks. "I think it's time we had a conversation about what happened and how Charliegot here." Reyna gestured to a chair beside her desk. "Charlie, sit here, please."

Charlie sat down, her bag still on her shoulder, the strap leaving a clean line through the batter on her coat.

Reyna pressed something on her desk and the wall across from Charlie lit up.

Charlie had seen a lot of screens in her life. Monitors at JPL, projections at Caltech, the green glow of an Apple II in a dark classroom. Yet none of those prepared her for the wall display in Reyna's office.

The screen showed a chamber filled with dark water. And in the center of it sat something Charlie's brain couldn't categorize. A figure, dense and angular, made of what looked like dark slate with veins of deep iron-red running through the surface. Her eyes, if that's what they were, glowed amber from deep recesses in what could maybe be described as a face, like someone had cracked open a rock and found light inside.

Charlie stared. The figure didn't move or blink. The water around the being seemed darker where they sat, as though light simply gave up trying to reach them.

It looked like the ocean floor grew a person.

"Admiral," Reyna said. "We have a situation."

When the figure spoke, Charlie felt it more than heard it. A resonance that seemed to come from the water itself, translated by her Voxlink into words that landed like stones being placed, one at a time, exactly where they were meant to go.

"So I've gathered, Captain. Your emergency signal was... emphatic." A pause. "Report."

Reyna looked at Charlie. "Charlie, this is Admiral Vondra. She oversees the Emberkind's operations for the Coalition." Then, to the wall display, "Admiral, this is Charlie Wickett. She's a human. From Earth."

The stone figure was eerily still. Then, very slowly, the head turned. The geode eyes found Charlie through the screen.

"Earth," Vondra said. Just the word. Letting it sit.

"I think it would be best if Charlie explained what happened in her own words," Reyna said. She looked at Charlie with an expression that was half encouragement, half apology for putting her on the spot.

Charlie took a breath. Every eye in the room was on her, plus two amber geode formations from across whatever distance separated this ship from that underwater chamber.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

She started from the beginning. Not the very beginning, not Indiana, not with the people who raised her, not the girl who fixed toasters at the age of seven, but instead from the part that mattered here. New Year's Day, 1990. JPL and no one on campus. How she'd gone in to work because it was a holiday and nobody else would be there.

She explained her job as an experimental engineer in the Advance Propulsion Concepts group for NASA, stationed at JPL, she explained the project she was assigned to work on, and the debris on her workbench. She explained that it was fragments of something that had been recovered from a storage room months earlier. Material that didn't match anything in NASA's database. She'd been assigned to take it apart, scan and try to decipher it, and then catalog it. It was assigned to her because it had been sitting there, waiting for someone curious enough and stubborn enough to figure out what it was. That was Charlie.

"I'd been examining the debris all morning," Charlie said. "Following protocol. Gloves, goggles, the works. I'd even logged a temperature anomaly on one of the larger fragments about how it was running warmer than the others." She could feel her voice steadying as she talked. This was data. This was a report. She could do reports. "I took a break to make a phone call. Tookmy gloves off. And when I went back to the workbench, the fragment was glowing. Glowing with light that shouldn't exist, colors I've never seen. And I just..." She stopped. "I reached for it. Except I'd forgotten I wasn't wearing gloves anymore. The second my skin touched it, there was a pulse, a sound, a light. And then, what felt like instantly to me, I was in cake batter."

"Gula cake batter," Borran grumbled. Reyna shushed him.

"Not now, Borran."

"Sorry, Captain." At least Borran recognized when it wasn't his time.

Charlie looked down at her hands. "I don't remember the transit, or arriving. But I do remember the light, and then I woke up on the floor in..." She gestured behind her. "In his kitchen."

Borran grunted.