Chapter 2

The cheap little pod with the ordinary girl inside did not, against all reasonable expectation, come apart along the way.

It slipped through asteroid belts. It missed the gravity wells of black holes.

Long after the government's premium escape vessels had been smashed into fragments and scattered through interstellar dust, that unremarkable canister went on drifting through every lethal hazard the void had to offer, untouched, for a full ten thousand years.

And nobody could have guessed that she survived because of her figure.

Mary stood five foot six and weighed nearly a hundred and sixty pounds. A little heavy.

Naperville had no shortage of tall Midwestern kids, boys and girls alike.

At five-six, Mary often found herself the short one among her classmates, which had made her feel out of place for the entirety of high school.

And it was exactly that height and weight, the source of so much quiet misery, that saved her life at the end of the world.

The cheap pods rolling off those lines were built to an international standard in three sizes.

The small ones had crude, stripped-down internal systems. The large ones had been cost-cut so aggressively to save on materials that the structure itself became a rumor.

It was the medium that came out best. Its dimensions sat closest to the original design prototype, which gave it by far the highest manufacturing pass rate of the three.

Which is another way of saying it had the highest margin of safety.

And Mary's body fit into that life-saving medium exactly.

Cryosleep suspends nearly all metabolic activity, but a ten-thousand-year journey burns energy regardless.

Had Mary been thin, her reserves might not have carried her to the end.

She wasn't.

She had enough subcutaneous fat to serve as a buffer, and it lasted.

When the pod finally came down on an unfamiliar planet and the door opened, Mary not only walked out alive — ten millennia of slow burn had left her slim and, by any reasonable measure, healthy.

Which is American practicality restated on a cosmic scale, if you like: keep a little extra on you, and one day it may be the thing that saves your life.

...

The ship called The Wanderer was not a legitimate operation by any definition.

She was crewed by a gang of former blue-blood soldiers out of Thorne, and for the past hundred years they had worked the Thorne system and the neutral stations, never staying anywhere long enough to be a problem.

They knew every gap in every planet's customs regime and made a living out of all of them, running banned alien organisms into the black markets on Thorne — some of it sold as rare ingredients, the rest of it going to the rich as pets, or as labor.

They had run half the galaxy and moved a catalogue of alien organisms bizarre enough to fill a museum. Every man aboard The Wanderer was, by long and practical experience, an expert on species.

And yet this time, with the entire crew crowded at the observation window of the vacuum-sterile chamber, not one of these famously unshakable men could say what they had pulled out of the debris field.

Captain Robert Williams stood with his brows drawn tight, eyes fixed on the dull silver pod in the center of the sterile bay.

Pale blue scanning beams swept across it from a half-dozen angles, and a detailed three-dimensional cutaway assembled itself slowly on the display beside the window.

Nobody breathed.

Then the humanoid skeleton resolved on the scan and the crew lost its composure entirely.

"Is that a human skeleton? Or is it one of the Blood?"

"Impossible! How would one of our people end up out here, frozen in a box like that?"

"Wait, look at the frame — that's an adolescent. Or younger."

"Scan says the cosmic dust layered on that hull is thick enough to mean at least ten thousand years adrift. The only thing that lives that long is a Sacred Blood, from the old stories. But nobody in the registers of the thirteen Sacred families is unaccounted for!"

"This is insane!"

"What the hell is going on—"

"All of you shut your mouths." Robert's voice came low and flattened the noise instantly.

He swept a cold look across his crew and rapped his knuckles against the projection wall.

"Open your eyes." Quiet, and every man heard it. "Look properly. The bone structure on that thing is nothing like ours."

There was a pause, then confused muttering spread through the room.

"He's right. Look at the teeth. The nails. Wrong shape."

"Damn it, skeletal composition's up too. Density and mass are way off our baseline."

"But the shape of it. It's so close. What did we drag in?"

Over the rising noise, Robert increased the resolution on the spectral analyzer.

The hologram on the wall shifted.

The organism inside the freezing unit assembled itself outward starting from the skeleton — the muscle layer, then fascia, then the internal organs, and finally the dense branching sprawl of the vascular network, one layer resolving over the last, until the whole of it lay there like a biological specimen that had been thoroughly dissected and pinned open.

"Look closely." Robert's voice carried across the main bay and cut everything else out. "It isn't only the bones. The way the muscle attaches, the architecture of the organs, the entire pattern of vascular distribution — none of it matches us."

He paused, pointed at the fluid moving through the image, and put weight on it.

"And here's the strange part. According to the spectral analysis, this thing's blood is red."

The crew erupted again.

"Red blood? That's not possible!"

"Scan confirms it. The cells are red!"

"Nothing in this entire system has red blood except a Sacred Blood! Have we actually found—"

"Its physiology is a completely different animal! It doesn't match a Sacred Blood either!"

"Then what is it?"

"As for its appearance—" Robert paused, and pushed the imaging to its final setting.

Skin arrived over the figure on the screen all at once, and every man aboard found himself looking at a woman with long golden hair, light tan skin, and freckles across her cheeks, sleeping with her eyes closed.

After several full seconds of dead silence, the bay exploded.

"Blond? But that skin tone — that's wrong!"

"A living humanoid, looks that much like us on the outside, and it's running an entirely different system underneath. This is impossible!"

"Red blood, which only Sacred Bloods have. The face of a common person. A skeleton nobody's ever catalogued. Every trait it has belongs to something else!"

"It can't be. What is that thing?"

The creature in front of them was outside their knowledge entirely — and its close resemblance to their own kind stirred something in every man in that room that none of them wanted to name.

For the first time in their lives, the well-traveled crew of The Wanderer had nothing to say.