After evading another barrage from the Kig-Yar in the hold, he scampered through an umbilical back onto Minor Transgression. He hurried into the ship's methane suite (the only room constantly filled with the gas), and eagerly undid the chest-buckles of his harness. As he backed into a triangular depression in one of the square room's walls, a hidden compressor sputtered and began to refill his tank.
Dadab slipped out of his harness and swung his oversized forearms across his chest. His jaw ached from his mask's tight seal, and he tore it off and flung it away. But before the mask hit the floor, it was intercepted by a lighting-fast pearlescent swipe.
Floating in the center of the suite was a Huragok, a creature with a stooped head and elongated snout held aloft by a collection of translucent pink sacs filled with a variety of gasses. Four anterior limbs sprouted from its spine—tentacles, to be exact, one of which held Dadab's mask. The Huragok brought the mask close to a row of dark, round sensory nodes along its snout and gave it a thorough inspection. Then it flexed two of its tentacles in a quick, inquisitive gesture.
Dadab contorted the digits of one of his hardened hands so they matched the default arrangement of the Huragok's limbs: four fingertips, facing straight out from the Deacon's chest. <No, damage, I, tired, wear. > His fingers splayed and contracted, bent and overlapped as they formed each word's unique pose.
The Huragok released a disappointed bleat from a sphincterlike valve in one of its sacs. The emission propelled it past Dadab to the tank receptacle where it hung the mask on a hook that protruded from the wall.
< Did you find the device? > the Huragok asked, turning back to Dadab. The Deacon held up the box, and the Huragok's tentacles trembled with excitement: < May I touch what I can see? > < Touch, yes, smell, no. > Dadab replied.
But the Huragok either didn't mind the box's residual Kig-Yar stench, or it simply failed to get Dadab's joke. It wrapped a tentacle around the alien plunder and eagerly lifted it to its snout.
Dadab flopped onto a cushioned pallet near the suite's free-standing food-dispenser. He uncoiled a nipple connected to a spool of flexible tubing, put it in his mouth and began to suck.
Soon, an unappetizing but nutritious sludge surged down the tube and into his gullet.
He watched the Huragok pore over the alien box, its sacs swelling and deflating in an expression of what? Impatience? It had taken the Deacon most of the voyage to grasp the creature's sign language. He could only guess at the emotional subtleties of its bladder-speak.
Indeed, it had taken him many cycles just to learn the Huragok's name: Lighter Than Some.
Dadab knew the basics of Huragok reproduction, or rather Huragok creation. The creatures manufactured their offspring out of readily available organic materials with the same deft activity of their tentacles' cilia, which Lighter Than Some was using to bore a neat hole in the alien box. It was a truly fantastic process, but what Dadab found most unusual was that the most difficult step for Huragok parents was to make their creations perfectly buoyant—to fill them with the exact right mix of gases. As a result, new Huragok would initially float or sink, and their parents would name them accordingly: Far Too Heavy; Easy To Adjust; Lighter Than Some.
Clamping the nipple in his teeth, Dadab inhaled through his nose, swelling his lungs to capacity. The methane in the suite was no less stale than what he carried on his back, but it felt good to breathe unencumbered. As he watched Lighter Than Some insert his tentacle into the box and cautiously probe its interior, Dadab was once again reminded of how much he appreciated the creature's company.
There had been multiple Huragok on the training voyages he'd taken during his education at the Ministry seminary. But they had kept to themselves, and had been singularly focused on keeping their ships in good working order. Which is why Dadab had been more than a little surprised when Lighter Than Some had first flexed its limbs in his direction—repeated a single pose over and over until the Unggoy realized it was attempting a simple: < Hello! > Suddenly, Lighter Than Some jerked its tentacle from the box—drew back as if shocked.
The Huragok's sacs swelled, and it began flailing its limbs in spastic discourse. Dadab struggled to keep up.
< Intelligence! … Coordinates …!… Undoubtedly the aliens … Even more than our own!
> < Stop! > Dadab interrupted, spitting out the food-nipple and jumping to his feet. < Repeat!
> With visible effort the Huragok forced its tentacles to curl more slowly. Dadab watched with darting eyes. Eventually, he grasped Lighter Than Some's meaning.
< You, certain? > < Yes! The Shipmistress must be told! > Minor Transgression was not a large ship. And in the same amount of time it took Dadab to refit his tank, doing his best not to wrinkle his tunic, he and the Huragok were out of the suite and down Minor Transgression's single central passage to the bridge.
"Either remove your mask," the Shipmistress said after Dadab breathlessly delivered Lighter Than Some's assessment, "or learn to speak more clearly." Chur'R-Yar was perched on an elevated command chair. Her light yellow skin made her the brightest thing on the small, shadowy bridge.
Dadab swallowed twice to clear some residual sludge from his throat and began again. "The device is a collection of circuits similar to the processing pathways running throughout our ship."
"My ship," Chur'R-Yar interjected.
Dadab winced. "Yes, of course." Not for the first time, he wished the Shipmistress shared Zhar's spiny plumage; the appendages changed color depending on the male of the species' mood. Right now the Deacon was desperate to gauge the level of Chur'R-Yar's impatience. But like all female Kig-Yar the back of the Shipmistress' head was covered with dark brown calluses—thick skin like a patchwork of bruises that made her narrow shoulders seem even more hunched than they really were.
Dadab decided to play it safe and cut to the chase. "The box is some sort of navigational device. And although it is damaged …" The Deacon gestured furtively at the Huragok, who bobbed to a wall-mounted control panel. "It still remembers its point of origin."
Lighter Than Some drummed the tips of its tentacles against the panel's luminous switches.
Soon, a three-dimensional holographic representation of the volume of space around Minor Transgression coalesced in a holo-tank before Chur'R-Yar's chair. The tank was merely the space between two dark glass lenses: one built into a platinum pedestal, the other imbedded in the bridge's ceiling. Like most surfaces on the Kig-Yar ship, the ceiling was covered with a purple metal sheeting that, catching the hologram's light, displayed a darker hexagonal pattern —an underlying Beryllium grid.
"We were here," Dadab began as a red triangle representing the Kig-Yar ship appeared in the projection. "When we registered the alien vessel's radiation leak." As he continued, the projection (controlled by Lighter Than Some) shifted and zoomed, presenting additional icons as required. "This is where we made contact. And this is where Ligh—where your Huragok believes the vessel initiated its journey."
The Shipmistress angled one of her globose, ruby-red eyes at the highlighted system. It was outside the missionary allotment the Ministry had charged her with patrolling—beyond the boundary of Covenant space, though Chur'R-Yar knew it was heresy to suggest such a limit.
The Prophets believed the Forerunners once had dominion over the entire galaxy, so every system was hallowed ground—a potential repository of important relics.