The communications tower was complete. As of that morning, Tobias had sent out a distress signal. I expected more: news, information, at least a conversation. But according to Nicole, we needed a satellite for more complex communication and well… that was still on the Euphorion.

  So we waited, everyone waited. There didn’t seem to be a way to know if the message had been received, or how long a response would take after that. The consensus seemed to be days.

  It made no sense to me. Communication had been so quick before. But space was really big, even within the same galaxy. Every new thing I learned about it made it scarier. And that was saying something because usually knowing made things less scary.

  I lay on my bed while Nicole fiddled with some box thingy. I was hungry and in the process of considering the logistics of stealing another mollusk from the cooking cabin. I probably needed to eat other stuff; the mollusk-exclusive diet since I had become a furry dinosaur was probably why I was feeling off. That and general chaos. There was a lot of general chaos.

  A strange shivery feeling went through me, a weird pulse. It tasted like a static jolt, scratchy wiggly. I had no idea where the sensation had come from, let alone an adequate way to describe it. I stood up, looking around. I didn’t see anything that would have caused it. Then again, I didn’t even know what to look for.

  The pulse happened again.

  I spun around. My confusion shifted towards unease. Strange, unexplainable sensations couldn't be a good thing. I hurried over to Nicole with a whine. Yeah, okay, it was pathetic. I had long ago lost any sense of pride.

  “What is it?” Nicole frowned, looking down at my urgency. Even she could tell this wasn’t just boredom. That made the herculean task a tiny bit easier.

  I racked my brain as to how to communicate what had happened. I was immediately stumped. I swallowed, trying to remember what the pulse felt like to best do a visual presentation of it. I was grasping at straws, and I knew it.

  Except I didn’t need to remember what it felt like, because I could still feel it… kinda. A weird… not a hum, that implied I could hear it. Like an audible taste. However, that worked.

  “Is it this?” Nicole asked, hitting a button on the device.

  The tingly pulse bubbled through me again. The machine whizzed with a mechanical noise.

  “Whoah,” Nicole muttered, frowning at the screen in distraction before glancing at me, who was nodding intently. “Does it hurt? Should I stop?”

  I shook my head. It felt weird but not… bad. Now that I knew what she was doing I wasn’t so worried. I signed a question mark and pointed at the machine. It was a box with dials and a long metal thing coming off the side.

  “It’s a radio,” Nicole explained, turning back to the box. “The technology has advanced massively, but they were originally named after that because they used a certain kind of electromagnetic energy called radio waves. MRI machines don’t primarily use them anymore, either, but I was trying to get as big a picture as possible when you had that reaction. I ruled out magnetic forces, so I thought I would try to downgrade this back to old school radio waves to see if you would be able to sense it.”

  I glared at her. The machine had made me feel horrible before. And now she was trying to make it happen again? I gave her thumbs down.

  “What?” she frowned. “Elsy, the MRI uses extremely high frequencies; this thing produces a fraction of that. Yes, I was taking a slight risk, but now that we know you are sensitive to radio waves, we are better equipped to handle something going wrong,” she defended.

  I sighed, eventually nodding in acquiescence. I couldn’t be mad at that necessarily; I just wished I had been consulted. Included in all of this. I didn’t even have a fucking way to complain. It was so infuriating. Without language, communicating nuance and depth was impossible.

  The radio whirred. Nicole turned back to it with a frown.

  “Did you just do something?” she asked me.

  I shook my head, perking up to see what was going on. The radio stopped whatever it was doing.

  “Can I send out the pulse one last time?” Nicole asked apologetically.

  I nodded. Why not at this point? The weird zap buzzed through me, making my tongue taste like dust clouds. The radio warbled loudly.

  “Fascinating,” Nicole breathed. “You just… The whirring the radio did, that's not from sending out the pulse, that's from receiving one. Somehow, you reflected the wave? Or you produced your own in response. Hold on,” she added, tapping away on the thing’s screen. “I’m going to see everything this can pick up.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Well, that was… interesting. I watched her work, no idea what any of this meant or how it was important. But Nicole was entranced by whatever it was. Was this how she had spent her days on the Euphorion? Brilliant and a little crazy doctor-esque as she conducted her tests and experiments? It was definitely a believable mental image.

  Nicole hummed, looking at a bunch of squiggly lines that wobbled up and down consistently. I just watched her; when she found whatever she was looking for, she would make it clear.

  So we waited. Nothing happened.

  I remembered that I was supposed to be irritated. But scientific discoveries were a good distraction.

  Repeating pops echoed in the distance. Gunshots. The radio screeched as I also screeched, ducking under the table and nearly knocking over everything if Nicole had not caught it. I was doing my best to hide before I even fully processed what was going on. Fear. Danger.

  The same few moments of flesh bursting into bright blue goo.

  My heart thudded in my chest. The radio was now incessantly warbling.

  Nicole crouched down, ducking under the table as she sat on the ground beside me. I was shaking, trembling. “You’re okay,” Nicole said firmly. “They’re probably just hunting something for the stew.”

  I shook my head. I knew they weren't doing that. That's what the traps were for. Gunshots were bad. They were really bad. They meant death and danger, and all the other bad things. People died when gunshots happened.

  The radio kept buzzing. A rhythmless repeating sound.

  “Elsy, you’re safe here,” Nicole tried, offering me her hand.

  I nuzzled it halfheartedly. Were we? That's what the alien had probably thought before its existence had been snuffed out. I had already come too close to being snuffed out– several times at that. We weren't safe at all.

  “You hear the radio?” Nicole asked. “I think that’s you,” she continued, scooting closer to me. “I think for whatever reason you emit radio waves and the receiver can pick up a fraction of them.”

  I didn’t care about some stupid wave. The radio screeched, crackling mechanically.

  “Elsy, if you send out signals that I can pick up, we can communicate without speech,” Nicole finally said.

  The radio cut off. All of my attention snapped on those simple words. Communicate without speech. I hardly dared to get my hopes up.

  Too late.

  I wanted it so desperately to be true.

  Nicole smiled; my reaction was probably written all over my furry face. I could have cried from joy. I don’t even know that was possible outside of movies.

  “Obviously, more testing will have to be done,” Nicole continued. “But the communication tower will let me pick up nearly anything locally. It will depend on how much control you have over the radio waves you emit, but considering all the noise you just made, I think it’s really promising.”

  I practically jumped onto her in my excitement. Crambling onto her to do my best to hug her with my little arms. Nicole wrapped her arms around me, pressing her nose against mine with a laugh.

  “Doctor!” Someone yelled.

  Just like that, Nicole pulled away. My disappointment was quickly swallowed up by worry as the shouting continued from outside. Nicole was on her feet in a flash, flicking off the radio and slipping into the medical area. I was right behind her.

  Three officers stumbled into the tent; the man in the middle had his arms over the shoulders of the other two as they hauled him in. His uniform was drenched in blood.

  “On the table,” Nicole ordered, slipping into gloves and grabbing a pair of scissors with practiced calm. “What happened?”

  “We were out by the jungle,” the younger man blabbered. “We got attacked.”

  “It stabbed him, in-in the abdomen, with its tail,” the other added, waving at the man on the table.

  Nicole sliced the man’s shirt open. Blood oozed from a large, nasty gash near his belly button. I immediately felt dizzy, and I slipped back into my little corner of peace. I couldn’t… handle that.

  I had no tolerance for blood, especially after… everything. Yet I could hardly ignore what was going on either. I could hear far too much. Quiet talking, the injured man’s terror, whirring of machines. I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t want to know. I would just stay here and hope he would be okay.

  N7 wasn’t safe. That much had become clear long ago. The Euphorion may have been boring, but there was no blood, no violence. Too many died exiting hyperspace for me to even wrap my head around. We had survived a… mass extinction, but now every day there was something new. A bite, a burn, a cut, an illness.

  I couldn’t wait for the Imperium to respond.

  Maybe I could leave. Maybe Nicole and I could go to a different planet, one where no one bled or got sick. Tobias was wealthy; his whole family was. They lived in luxury on a core world. Probably in a mansion or something, with big fluffy beds. Maybe we could just turn around and go back where we had come from.

  The emptiness in all of that is that I didn’t have a home. I couldn’t… I couldn’t even remember the name of the planet we had lifted off from. It was nothing but a short, confusing blur before the familiar cold steel of the Euphorion.

  But anywhere would be better than here. I wasn’t built for any of this. I was created to look pretty and… fuck.

  What a horrid thing I was.

  There was no going back, was there? I knew there wasn’t. But I didn’t know what else to hope and dream for. I had come so close to death I couldn’t do it again.

  I had never known the thing people craved when scared. Nicole was my little beacon through all of this, but it still wasn’t safe. We were in this together. And as comforting as she might be, she could die too. We could all die.

  Maybe I could just squeeze myself into a mollusk shell and hide from it all.

  Well… I couldn’t exactly do that, but maybe there was more than one reason to find a better host.