Through Glass Darkly: Episode Two by Peter Knyte Page A

but then, as it is with many parcels, just as my fingers were finding their way into the string and brown paper, I figured it out.
    He’d given me a leather covered journal filled with sheet after sheet of plain white paper. It was a lovely thing that immediately felt good in my hands, and like a moth to a flame I found myself opening it up, and before I’d washed or changed or done a single other thing, I picked up a pen and allowed the things I’d been bottling up inside me to spill out onto the page.
    I began with my very first memories on this world, of the rain soaked night on which we appeared out of the void, and everything else between then and now. Nothing too detailed, just enough to keep the memories fresh.
    For nearly two hours I sat at my little desk and wrote, and in the process I felt something happening in my mind, perhaps the regaining of perspective that Hughes had mentioned. I still sensed the smouldering pit of anger and rage deep inside me, but committing my thoughts to paper seemed to soothe the glowing coals more than I’d known of late.
    I’d spent so long, just sat writing, that when I finally realised the time, I had to hustle in order to get washed and changed before heading off to our afternoon briefing session.
     
    Platt was evidently not a great believer in formality for its own sake, so the briefing moved along quickly. We started with the findings form the rail-yard, followed by what we’d discovered in the sewers and the samples I’d brought back. Hughes offered to have these analysed at a lab his company owned nearby, and have the preliminary results back to us within a day, which was an unbelievably fast turn-around time.
    Once we’d finished with the facts of what we’d discovered I mentioned the theories that Agent Fraser had come up with earlier on in the day, emphasising the point that we had no concrete evidence to support either idea.
     
    ‘They might not be substantiated by any evidence Mr Hall,’ commented Captain Platt. ‘But they are at least something that we can start to put contingencies in place around, particularly the idea that this creature might somehow be capable of reproducing.’
    ‘Do you have any idea how these creatures reproduce, the numbers of young that might be born, the time to maturity, anything?’ he asked, looking between me and the Captain for any sign that we could help.
    ‘We know very little about the reproductive cycle of these creatures,’ the Captain explained, earnestly. ‘From our examination of the dead specimens we’ve recovered on our own world we had thought they might be somehow hermaphroditic, as every specimen seemed broadly similar in physiology, but since then from some of the experiments we’ve done on specimens we’ve killed in the Expanse, we now think it may be more complex and that these creatures actually need something else to help them reproduce, not another gender so much as a substance of some variety that somehow allows fertilising matter to develop within the creature.
    ‘The thing we don’t know is what this matter is, whether it’s something that just causes a kind of mutation within the creature, or whether it somehow allows the creature to generate new genetic material that is somehow different to its own, our scientific team just couldn’t tell.’
    As the Captain had been explaining this to everyone, one of Platt’s assistants had entered the room with message written down on a slip of paper.
    He quickly read it, before addressing us.
     
    ‘Gentlemen, I’m very pleased to tell you that your colleague, Ms Ariel Shilling has regained consciousness and is asking for you.’
    ‘She seems to be herself, as we’d hoped?’ The Captain asked.
    ‘The information I have from Dr Bach at the Sanatorium is limited,’ Platt continued. ‘But he informs me that she regained consciousness at approximately twenty minutes to four. She knows her own name, is not experiencing any pain, and is asking about the