Dr. Lena Vasquez had achieved eminence among the galaxy's leading xenolinguists, her name whispered with reverence in every research station from Earth to the outer colonies. So when the distress signal arrived from Kepler-9, she was the only one called.
The colony ship Meridian had gone dark three weeks earlier. Now its lone survivor, a man named Cade, sat across from Lena in the interrogation bay, his eyes carrying something ancient and unsettling.
"He's an insurgent," Commander Holt warned her before she entered. "Fought against the Colonial Authority on Titan. His loyalties are questionable at best."
Lena didn't care about his politics. She cared about the symbols he'd carved into the ship's walls — 847 of them, repeating in patterns no human hand should have known.
"You've been in contact with them," she said quietly.
Cade looked up. "Contact isn't the right word. They were inside my mind. For edification, they said. Like they were teaching me something I was always supposed to know."
Lena leaned forward. She was conversant in eleven alien language systems, had spent thirty years decoding dead civilizations — and she recognized three of those symbols from a site on Mars that had been sealed for a century.
"What did they teach you?" she asked.
Cade pressed his palm flat on the table. Beneath his skin, faint lines of light traced the same patterns from the ship's walls.
"That we're not the first experiment," he said. "And we won't be the last."
The lights in the bay flickered once, and somewhere deep in the station's communication array, something began to answer.