Dek Singahl was Buckled and Belted....

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec 11, 2025

Dek Singahl was buckled and belted into the ship's drive room. He flipped the K'larsi-made brainwave wand down and looked through the device's aperture. "The grid's too wide!" he called over his shoulder.

"What?" a feminine voice floated up from the downladder that was behind him.

Dek turned and shouted louder. "I said the grid's too wide. Do you have your wand on?" He turned back around and started punching buttons on the panel in front of him. The ship was cycling through the last portion of its destination deceleration, and the slow, gentle, almost soothing, wave-like pulse of the ship's engines, also of K'larsi manufacture, was turning into an insistent shaking that would increase as Dek and the K'larsi watcher on the bottom floor brought the ship through the planet's magnetic field and atmosphere and to a landing on the surface of Outpost 4246.

Outpost 4246 was one of several thousand small Guild Outposts that were put in place in the vicinity of unusual or strategically important naturally occurring phenomena and objects within the Guild Universe. Some of the outposts were automated, but most were inhabited. A few, like 4246, were crewed by a single individual—in this case, a human male—who was contracted to observe, collect data, and issue reports. The object in question for Outpost 4246 was a small black hole, discovered by robot neutron telescope and given the designation TY4P in the Wilson Gravimetric Catalog, or WGC.

The single individual in charge of monitoring WGC TY4P from Outpost 4246 was Velmont DeGrassier—self-trained astrophysicist, researcher on the culture of the Meloti peoples, and occasional trader in legal, semi-legal, and downright illegal alien objects and lifeforms, although he did the best he could to keep that last part quiet. There had been an unfortunate incident on Delos-VII involving some miniature giraffe-worms that turned out to be not miniature adults but the larval stage of Mickelson's giraffe-bears. When they pupated and condensed all the oxygen out of the air on Delos, there was the enormous expense of imported oxygen generators to reestablish the ecological balance of that world. To be fair, it must be said that telling the difference between the charming, delightful, and harmless giraffe-worms and the larval stage of the Mickelson's giraffe-bears is almost impossible, but that did not stop the Delosian World Government from issuing a death warrant for DeGrassier—in the name he used on Delos, Grangier Styx Vormaldish. The event precipitated DeGrassier's idea that spending a couple of decades alone on a Guild outpost might result in things blowing over with the Delosians.

The ship shuddered through the magnetic field and the atmosphere of 4246 and finally came to rest on the shiny metallic surface of the outpost. There had been no radio contact with DeGrassier—either he had turned the radio off, was on the wrong channel, or was ignoring it. This was not unusual in that some outpostkeepers spend years and decades alone, and thus they develop their own way of coping with the brief-moments-of-sheer-terror-separated-by-long-periods-of-intense-boredom way of life on a distant, one-crew outpost. However, as Del landed the ship and went through the procedure to power down the spacecraft, he noticed a robed figure padding slowly toward the ship as it sat on the bare metal of the outpost. "I see him," he called to the K'larsi on the deck below him.

"DeGrassier?" the female voice said.

"Yep. I think so. He's wearing a robe and a hood over his face."

"That's not DeGrassier," the K'larsi said after a moment. The K'larsi was not actually speaking--that task was completed by a computerized robot voice which was included among the instrumentation just outside his tank, or her tank, if you listened to the voice.

The K'larsi was an aquatic creature, living in and doing his work from an irregularly-shaped tank of mostly water. Pumps circulated some ordinary and rather unordinary but necessary chemicals into the mix, the most unusual of which was one of the biz-triazenoquinazoines containing an ethylaminoethyl linker flanked by two identical anilinoquinazoline rings. Or perhaps it was the low concentration of alkyl tetraalkylphosphorodiamidates the creatures needed. Del had had all the details presented to him in his K'larsi Metabolism and Excretion class, but he hadn't paid much attention. His approach to the maintenance of the K'larsi's tank amount to that of a swimming-pool maintenance man: he simply poured the chemicals in the way it said to on the bag.

"That's not him?" Del repeated.

"No."

By this time, the figure outside the ship had stepped up to the closed hatch, pulled back his robe, and stuck his face up against the hatch camera. Del turned the camera on and routed its feed to his main viewscreen—the face was fish-eyed and distorted, but it plainly matched the file photo of Velmont DeGrassier, aka Grangier Styx Vormaldish, that Del had pulled up on one of his monitors. "Looks like him," he said.

"It's not. The creature is a Taledok, surgically enhanced and psi-active, manipulating your mind to accept him as DeGrassier. It will take me a moment to disable him."

As the feminine voice was sounding this last, behind it was a shrill whistling-moaning sound, as if songbirds were being tortured. It was the K'larsi, perhaps speaking in his own language, perhaps making a log entry—or perhaps moving his bowels, for all Del knew. The K'larsi language had proven impenetrable to humans so far, as had their strange practice of swimming in circles and loops which they periodically engaged in when groups of K'larsi came together—and which none of them wanted to talk about.

Del activated the speaker-microphone outside the ship alongside where DeGrassier was peering into the camera. “Outpost 4246, this is Captain Singahl, of the Guild cruiser Connecticut. Authenticate Foxtrot Delta Papa Papa, provide answerback, please.” It was the standard security protocol—in the outpost, there would be a book with a page that contained the appropriate answerback code for the challenge FDPP. If the outpost commander could successfully authenticate, then formal exchange would begin. If not, then Connecticut’s instructions were to depart, orbit the outpost, and contact the nearest Guild base for further instructions.