Hieros Ichthys (backpost)

Posted on Sat Mar 14th, 2026 @ 12:54pm by Ensign Cassius & SubCommander Saa
Edited on on Sat Mar 14th, 2026 @ 12:54pm

1,216 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Masters of the Stars [2]
Location: Deck 35 Arterial Serviceway
Timeline: 0706, MD04

Saa’s muscles screamed. DS13’s ordnance chief, Cassius, was a C-type orca, one of the smallest species of genus Orcinus, but he still had twice her length and four body masses on her. Keeping pace with his powerful strokes had been challenging enough before her injury. Now, the strain on her still-healing muscles was something close to agony. But she was grateful that he wasn’t taking it easy on her any more than he was. After twenty-four hours spent immobilized in a recuperation tank in the station's hospital, her body needed the movement.

The aquatic habitation decks on DS13’s upper hemisphere were stratified according to the different pressure, temperature and salinity requirements of the species quartered within them. Here on Deck 35, environmental conditions were ideal for two oceangoing cetaceans—a deliberate recreation, in fact, of a spring day in the temperate seas of Earth. Saa found it an invigorating change after the warm waters and thin air of Vulcan. The increased oxygen meant a better and easier workout—particularly useful at this moment, with the active pace bringing her to the surface seven or eight times a minute to breathe, while he cruised imperturbably beside her like an overgrown photon torpedo, such was the privilege of his biology.

Traffic was just starting to pick up, although it would have made no difference either way. The arterial serviceway in which they swam, a three-kilometer loop running the inner circumference of Deck 35, would have been spacious enough to accommodate a pair of humpbacks swimming side by side and still leave room for the occasional service hydrocraft that shuttled past. The scale of operations on this station was genuinely mind-boggling. True, Saa had been aboard larger stations before. Vulcan’s Spacedock 2 was significantly wider at its widest point. But it was smaller along most of its length, and more importantly, she’d never been in overall charge of engineering on Spacedock 2. Here, no matter where she looked in several thousand kilometers of interior passageways, every single thing she saw was her responsibility. She wondered if the sensation of drowning would ever subside, or if she’d get used to it in time. But the upside to such a colossal assignment was the colossal amount of interior trackway it afforded. A few morning laps around the station could at least let her body forget, even if her mind could not.

As they swam, they conversed in Atlantic 1, their pulsed sonar emanations filling the water with vivid acoustic sign language, a simpler and easier style of communication for two odontocetes than the laborious composition of syllables into phonetic sentences. The subject, of course, was the only one anyone had been talking about since yesterday: the mysterious extrauniversal prisoner now being held behind a custom-built force field in Alpha Dock.

“How could a human not recognize a dolphin?” Cassius was asking. It was their first swim since her discharge from sickbay, and he’d been taking advantage of the opportunity to pump her for information. “That’s unnatural. Hale’s Law of complex systems: he couldn’t have evolved in an identical way if the planet was that different, seed-codes or no.”

Saa resisted rolling her eyes. She understood the emotional undercurrent of his question, beneath the surface layer of enlightened incredulity. Cassius was full to bursting with the same questions that every other Terran had approached her with since her discharge. The news that their visitor from the future was a Homo sapiens, of all things, had sent ripples of understandable curiosity through the ranks of humans, dolphins and other Earthlings aboard DS13. And then, when other findings began to circulate, a crosscurrent of unease as well.

Saa could sympathize with both stages, because she’d been experiencing them herself. She had rarely been to Earth, but the community of sapience that began on that world had by now spread far out into the stars. On Pacifica, she’d grown up surrounded by humans, whales, cephalopods, other members of the Terran diaspora. There was strength in that grouping. When venturing out to explore strange new worlds, it was a kind of comfort to have old friends at your side. A species that had depicted your kind in cave paintings eons past, or perhaps, made a habit of rescuing them from sharks. On Vulcan, that sense of easy familiarity among the small Terran expat community had been even more acutely felt. And Terrans overall were proud of their interspecies unity—truth be told, they were smug about it. The model of an enlightened ecosystem, or at least the beginnings of one.

But this individual had come like a smack on the beak from the far future of an Earth that sounded nothing like the one her people envisioned themselves as working toward. A dead, wasted Earth that was home to only one species, alone, adrift in an apparently hostile universe. She wondered what it would be like for any branch of the Terran family to live without the cozy shelter of the modern symbiosis she knew.

“I asked him that question myself” she admitted. “It bothered me that he didn’t seem to recognize my species. He took me for an alien of some kind. It didn’t make sense, until he told me a little about his Earth.”

“...And?” The ordnance officer persisted, waiting while she spumed off another hot breath and filled her lungs with fresh oxygen before diving back down.

“It’s a dead planet,” she said, confident that he’d already heard this rumor. “No oceans, artificial atmosphere. Some kind of antimatter war, it sounded like. Ages ago, and his people have no record of anything before. Nothing sapient lives now except humans.”

Cassius swam in silence for a moment, his beamform narrowed to a point in front of him.

“You must have heard this already,” Saa asked.

“I had,” he answered, sadly. “But I’d hoped you’d tell me something different.”

She felt a little cruel, now, swimming beside him. Maybe she should have softened it a little.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she attempted, “His quantum signature rules out any possibility of causality. He’s from the future, all right, but not our future. A different timeline.”

“A timeline in which humanity goes crazy and wipes out all other life,” he finished her description, gloomily.

“Could be,” she agreed. “It would fit the facts. But there’s another possibility that occurred to me, the more I thought about it. Although it might even be sadder than that one.”

“What could possibly be sadder?”

Saa thought again about the humanity she’d known all her life. Curious, complex bipeds. She pictured how they were at their finest, their most noble. Struggling up from brutish apedom through a thousand harsh millennia to reach for the stars, but even as they’d looked out to the stars, they’d also looked back, saw the light of mind flickering in her own people, recognized them as fellow sapients, taught them tool use, awakened them to science and true understanding. In teaching others, you learn about yourself, her mother, the professor, had once told her.

“Maybe,” she said, “They went crazy because they were alone.”

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