The Irish chap interrupted me again while I was working hard! How irritating... :)
Rael'Zorah entered the control room, moving to stand next to the sensor operator. "What is it?" he asked, looking at the image floating in the holotank.
"We don't have a match in the database, Admiral," she replied, working on her system and not looking at him. "I've run it through every algorithm I can think of and there's no hits at all. It's definitely not the work of the Turians, or the Asari, or the Salarians. Not ours either, or anyone else I can identify."
A nasty possibility crossed his mind. "Geth?" he asked.
This time she did glance at him, the faint glow of her eyes behind her faceplate looking a little worried. "If so they're not using any of the old designs we know about, sir. Which is..."
"Worrying. Yes." He leaned closer, studying the small vessel that had approached the Fleet minutes ago. "So what do we know about it?"
"Small. Only about… twenty meters long or so, perhaps? It's hard to be completely certain, since whatever it's made of is difficult to see on conventional scanners. I can't see any signs of deliberate active stealth, the effect is more like it's made of some sort of absorptive material that simply doesn't reflect much energy. There's also no eezo emissions from it. At all."
He stared at her, then the holo. "None?"
"No. I can't explain it. Either it's incredibly well shielded, way past anything I've ever heard of being possible, or it genuinely doesn't use eezo at all."
"But it decelerated from superluminal velocities?"
"Yes. We had no idea it was coming until we detected breakthrough radiation as it slowed to sublight velocities. The frequency suggests it was moving much faster than conventional eezo FTL can manage, although that's also supposed to be impossible." She made a gesture at the tank. "My best guess is it's someone we've never met before, who knows a lot more about esoteric physics than we do. Or anyone else for that matter."
Nodding a little, Rael studied the image of the tiny ship. It was barely the equivalent of a planetary shuttle or perhaps a fighter, but it apparently had a drive that was technologically superior to anything currently used by any species. The thought made him ask rather uneasily, "Indications of weapons?"
She shook her head. "Nothing we can detect but that's not a guarantee considering the tech base is clearly very different to ours. It's much too small to have a mass driver of any real power, but beyond that who knows? It could be full of antimatter for all I can tell."
"A very unnerving idea," he muttered.
"Sorry, sir. But it's something that occurred to me."
He nodded absently, wondering what or who was behind the small craft.
The design was sleek and streamlined, like something you could use in a planetary atmosphere, with what might have been stubby wings on either side. There were symmetrical protrusions in a few places, but nothing he could immediately identify, and the rear of the thing narrowed vertically while spreading out horizontally in a way reminiscent of a sea-going animal. In fact the entire design was oddly organic in shape, as if it had been patterned on some living creature, with modifications for space.
And it was just sitting there a few kilometers away, having zipped up to them then halted just outside the automatic interdiction boundary.
"Any signs of communications?" he asked.
"Not so far. We held off attempting to initiate comms until you arrived. Do you want me to try to raise it?"
Moving to a free seat in the control room, he sat down and thought for a moment. Eventually he replied, "Hail them, see if we can find out who they are and what they want."
"Yes, Admiral." She looked at one of the other officers who nodded and worked for a moment.
"Unknown vessel, this is the Quarian ship Yipson, please state your intentions. You are within the self defense zone of the Quarian Migrant Fleet without authorization."
Everyone waited to see what happened next.
A few seconds later, the main holotank flickered. "Incoming transmission, Admiral. Standard Fleet format, valid authorization codes. ID is..." The comms officer paused, then looked at him. Even as he began to speak, an image formed.
"Hi, Dad."
"...your daughter," the man finished a moment later.
Rael stared in complete shock at the image of his only child, who looked back, the body language showing she was probably smiling at him although he couldn't make out her expression through her environment suit. "Tali?" he questioned, almost unable to manage the word.
"It's me, yes," she replied, sounding… a little apprehensive?
He blinked a few times, took a breath, and shouted, "Where on Rannoch have you been for the last year? The ship you were last reported being on disappeared! There was a rumor that the Batarian scum got it! Do you have any idea how worried your mother and I have been?"
Everyone was looking at him now, but apparently didn't dare interrupt.
"Sorry, dad. It got a little… complicated." She sounded apologetic. "The rumor was right, the Batarians did attack us. I was the only survivor."
He dropped back into his seat, not having realized consciously that he'd stood up as he shouted. His feelings were swinging wildly between relief and fury. "Those..."
"Yeah. I know. But I made it, so calm down. And I made some friends."
The view of the camera widened to show that she apparently wasn't on a ship, based on the background. He could see a window through which was a tree of a species he'd never seen before, shown against a blue sky with a few clouds in it, the whole scene lit by yellow-white sunlight. The room she was in, apparently sitting at a table, looked oddly low tech by his standards, although neat and well maintained. It was nothing at all that he recognized.
And next to her was sitting an alien of a species he'd never encountered or heard of before. It looked amazingly Asari-like, but was entirely the wrong color, with curly dark hair instead of the Asari crest, subtly different eyes, and a wide grin.
It also looked to be a teenager at best if he was any judge.
"Hi," the alien girl said, waving. She seemed pleased to see him.
"Hello," he replied automatically, before fixing his eyes back on his daughter. "Tali… what is going on?"
Tali reached up and did something that astounded him, namely taking her helmet off and putting it on the table. Under it her face looked happy, healthy, and excited.
"What are you doing?" he screeched.
"Relax, it's fine, dad," Tali assured him. "This is Taylor, she saved me, and her friend Amy fixed the immunity problem."
Everyone present went completely still, staring at the image.
"Fixed it?" he managed to repeat some seconds later, not sure if he'd heard her correctly.
"Fixed it." She picked up a small transparent bottle that was sitting just out of frame and showed it to him. It contained, as far as he could tell, a transparent blue liquid. There was a label on it with writing he couldn't read. "This is the cure. It completely repairs our immune system and boosts it to a normal level for any other species. Better, actually. It also makes it possible to eat levo food without any trouble."
She shook the bottle a little, making the liquid inside slosh around, then put it down. He still couldn't say anything. "The ship relaying this transmission has enough doses on board for everyone in the Fleet. There's also the full medical documentation on how it works, with data on me before and after. One dose is a lifetime fix."
Rael'Zorah closed his eyes for a long few moments. When he opened them again, he leaned forward and said intently, "Please explain what happened. Very carefully."
His daughter smiled a little and replied, "I was stuck, all alone, drifting in space in a wrecked ship. Then I got a weird idea..."
The next couple of hours produced the sort of story that no one sane would believe without copious proof.
Amazingly, she actually had that.
When she finished, and after a very long silence in the command room, he turned his head. "Call the Admiralty board and tell them we need to talk."
"Sir," the comms operator said in a somewhat stunned voice, before moving to do as ordered.
Nine and a half months earlier…
Tali kept looking around the room she'd found herself in, after the strangest adventure she could even conceive of. It was obviously a research lab, with equipment that was of completely unfamiliar make but in many cases recognizable function. Some of it was quite low tech, some easily up to what she was used to, and quite a lot that looked far more advanced than anything she'd ever seen before. Vast quantities of material, electronic components, wire and optical cables, hand tools, portable instruments, and who knew what else shared the space with larger gear. All of it was very neatly and professionally fitted into a space that was compact but well laid out, clearly after a lot of careful thought into how to best maximize the utility of the room.
Several flat-screen displays of fairly significant size and excellent resolution, albeit not holodisplays, were arranged around two different stations. One of them was obviously a general work area while the other appeared to her to be a specific piece of dedicated, and incredibly complex, equipment that had a purpose-built table as the core structure. The lower section was largely filled with some sort of crystalline machinery, something she studied with interest and finally decided had to be a form of optical computing hardware, but of a very different design to anything she'd seen in the past. Parts of it were flickering with tiny lights that came and went in a way that was curiously hard to focus on, but suggested it was fully active.
Surrounding that were a lot of devices she hadn't got the faintest clue about, and on top was an even more complex device filled with remarkably complicated coils of bizarre shape, more glowing components surrounded by a shimmering haze in several colors, and other things she couldn't even think of a name for. All of this lead towards the center where a smoothly curved hornlike structure was somehow holding a tiny pinprick of silver light suspended just above the center.
Tali somehow got the distinct impression the little pinprick of light was looking at her with as much interest as she was looking at it.
The screen next to this device had one display that intermittently showed various complicated glyphs that were probably a form of symbolic writing, but it was nothing she had a hope of understanding without more information.
And the final part of this whole thing was the young Human who was now sitting in a very comfortable-appearing chair watching her look around with a smile on her face, having finished talking to someone on the communications device she was still holding. The display on the device turned off after a few seconds, Tali noticed, as Taylor put it down on the bench next to her.
The girl stood up again and walked across the room to stand next to Tali. They were roughly the same height, although the Human probably had a couple of centimeters on her. "My friend Amy will be over soon, her sister is bringing her. Then we can get you checked out properly." She seemed happy and was smiling. Looking Tali up and down, she added, "Cool suit. It looks good on you."
Unable to help it, Tali burst out laughing. Taylor grinned at her. When she was able to speak, the Quarian leaned on one of the workbenches, careful to avoid touching anything as she wasn't either careless or stupid, and shook her head. "Thank you," she said. "For everything."
"Hey, I like helping when I can, and you needed a friend right then," Taylor replied with a smile. "It would be a poor introduction to Humans if I didn't do what I could. No one deserves what you went through. I'm just sorry I couldn't help your friends."
Tali sighed deeply. "It was far, far too late for that, Taylor," she said in a wan voice as the reality of this entire ridiculous event sunk in. She was safe on a planet, who knew how far from her people, through means she had little to no understanding of, but at least she was alive. It was still a lot to take in and she suspected that when she had time to really think about it she was going to fall over. "By the time you contacted me, everyone else was dead and had been for months."
The girl put her hand on her shoulder, making her look up from where she'd been staring at the tiled floor. Her expression was as far as Tali could work out sympathetic. "Even so, I'm sorry."
"It's appreciated, believe me." Looking around again, Tali asked, "So this is your research lab, I assume? Are we in some sort of university?" She turned to inspect Taylor. "Your species looks amazingly similar to one I'm familiar with, the Asari, but even if your people live as long as they do I have to say you look young for a researcher. No offense intended, of course."
The girl laughed quietly. "None taken, at all. Ask any questions you want, I'm not easily offended. No, this is my home. Or my dad's house, actually, and we're in the basement." She waved a hand around the room. "We set it up so I had somewhere to work in private. My dad's company is a few kilometers away and there's a much larger facility there where I and the others do most of the really big work, but it's nice to have somewhere to sit and experiment with new ideas on your own."
Looking around again Tali was impressed, as this was far more in the way of resources than almost anyone in the Fleet could claim as their own.
"And I'm fifteen, as it happens," the girl added, making Tali snap her head around to stare. "My species normally lives to around eighty years old or so, although we're going to fix that too." She thought for a moment, before continuing, "I'm not sure how old that is in your years, since I don't know how long they are, but if it helps, I'm still in school. We generally go to school until we're eighteen years old in this country, and can then go on for further education after that."
"Keelah, you're just a child," Tali breathed.
Taylor made a gesture she couldn't decipher. "Kind of, yeah, but it gets a little complicated with me. I'm weird." Her expressive mouth widened in a smile again. "And way too smart. But it's fun." Looking curiously at Tali, she asked, "How old are you?"
"I'm twenty two in our years, a young adult," Tali replied after shaking her head a little. This entire encounter was even stranger than she'd initially expected. She wondered rather desperately if fifteen Human years was really as young as she suspected it was.
And how smart Taylor Hebert really was.
'Very,' she had a feeling would be the answer…
"Like I said earlier, I was on my Pilgrimage, it's something most of our people do when they enter adulthood, and was working on the Klaatu as an engineer. We go out into the galaxy and learn interesting things that will help when we go back to our home. And make friends, hopefully." She sighed faintly and despondently. "I made several friends I'm never going to see again..."
Taylor watched her, then nodded a little. "I think I understand the idea." After a moment, she went on, "Hopefully you're going to make new friends here, and I can pretty much guarantee that you're going to learn interesting things."
Looking at the currently inactive teleport device, Tali couldn't help snickering under her breath. "Yeah, I doubt you're wrong with that, Taylor." She pointed at the thing. "Do your people use that technology a lot? It's far past anything I've ever even heard of."
Taylor followed her finger, then walked over to the machine and folded it up into a more compact form, which she put under one of the tables on a vacant shelf. She shook her head as she turned around. "Not yet. I only just invented it, and I haven't written up the full report on it yet."
There was a long silence as Tali ran that statement through her head somewhat incredulously. "You… invented… it?" she echoed in a faint voice.
"Yeah. That's what I do. I invent things. Come up with new theories, work out the math, build prototypes, document them, and hand them off to my dad's company who then works with our government to use them in useful ways." She seemed entirely matter of fact about what she'd just claimed. An expression that seemed slightly mischievous flickered across her face. "I don't tell them everything, of course, I have a few tools that are private for now. Just in case, you know?"
Moving to sit in her chair, she waved a hand at the other one that was on the other side of the room. "Have a seat, by the way."
Tali rather gratefully took the opportunity offered. The chair was amazingly comfortable.
"There are a lot of things about this I'm still trying to process," she admitted, looking at her savior.
"I'm not surprised at all," Taylor replied sympathetically. "It must be hard to deal with after everything that's happened."
"Just a little, yes," the Quarian mumbled. She suspected shock was setting in. "Your species doesn't have FTL travel, you said?"
Taylor shook her head. "No. We don't really have much in the way of space travel at all yet, although we've put up a lot of satellites, been to our moon a few times, sent probes to several of the other planets, that sort of thing. Pretty basic, in your terms, I guess. But I've got some pretty big plans..." She looked amused, as she picked up a device about the size of a kuan fruit. "This is the key to some of them."
Holding it out she prodded a button on it, then let go. Tali watched as it entirely failed to drop to the floor. Raising an eyebrow at the antigravity machine, she pointed her omnitool at it curiously, then looked at the result of the scan with an open mouth.
"It's not using eezo!"
"Using what?"
"Eezo. Element zero?" Tali looked at Taylor, who was looking back with a curious expression. "It's the key to almost all our technology. It's a metamaterial with an atomic mass of zero, and it's used as an interface between electrical charge and dark energy, so it can be used to alter mass and act on gravity. Faster than light travel is only possible because of it."
The girl studied her closely. "Huh. And how does it work?"
Tali opened her mouth, thought for a moment, then closed it. "I don't know. Not at the fundamental level. I don't think anyone does."
"Ah." Taylor sighed a little. "One of those. Sounds like Tinker Tech. I don't like Tinker Tech. I'm a scientist, not a Tinker." She sounded mildly irritated. While Tali was wondering what she meant, the girl waved it off. "That's something for later. No, this doesn't use your magic space material. It's a perfectly sensible and explainable gravitational reference frame regenerator. One of my best inventions so far." She poked the device with a finger and it slid through the air towards Tali, who stopped it with her hand, then experimentally moved it around. She was fascinated to discover that she could move it freely in any plane other than vertically, in which it appeared to be utterly fixed in place.
"That's… amazing," she commented after scanning it more carefully with a couple of specialist programs she'd written for her omnitool. "I can't get anything on how it's doing that, and the power source is far too small to allow this behavior." She moved it around, then flicked it back to Taylor, who turned it off and put it on the bench. "Fascinating."
"I like it," Taylor smiled. "I think we can probably teach you some interesting stuff. And I'd like to learn more about your technology too." She looked around as a chiming sound came from somewhere above them. "Later, though. Stay here, I'll be right back, that's Amy and Vicky. You'll like them, they're good friends of mine."
Getting up she disappeared up the stairs at the side of the room and through the door at the top. Tali watched her go, then looked around again, astounded at how she was surrounded by technology that was in some cases centuries ahead of her own knowledge, but was in a room made in a manner that her ancestors five hundred years ago would have entirely understood. The stairs were made of real wood, she saw, as were the beams holding the ceiling up above her. Scanning them to be sure, she made a little sound of amazement, thinking just how valuable that sort of material would be in some places she knew back home. Genuine plant-based wood was an exceptionally costly material due to how rare it was. Normally you'd only see it in very wealthy people's homes on planetary surfaces, in anything like this quantity, or in small and highly sought after ornaments on ships. Her mother had a little wooden pendant that dated back to well before the Morning War that was worth as much as a compact fusion reactor.
The whole effect was disorientating to her.
Centuries old technology mixed with far future tech, and in the middle an alien schoolgirl who seemed to know vastly more about science than seemed possible.
These Humans were… something unlike anything she'd ever come across.
On the other hand, based so far on a sample of one, they were also helpful and friendly, so that was good.
She heard voices speaking an alien language she recognized as Taylor's one above her, and only then realized that the entire time the girl had been speaking perfect Keelish. That was… hard to explain.
A translator program in an omnitool was one thing, but as far as she could tell Taylor didn't have an omnitool, and it had been so natural she hadn't consciously noticed the oddity.
The door opened again and Taylor descended the stairs once more, this time followed by two other young female Humans, one a fair bit shorter than her with similarly dark hair and alert brown eyes, the other one being about half-way between them in height and having hair that was a bright yellow color, and eyes of a distinct blue tinge. Both the newcomers paused when they saw her, then looked at Taylor, who had retaken her seat. Her new friend beckoned to the other girls, saying something that made then exchange a look then keep coming down the stairs.
"Tali, this is Amy Dallon, and her sister Vicky, good friends of mine," Taylor said to her, indicating the shorter brown haired girl then the other one. Both waved to her, seeming slightly surprised and uncertain if Tali was getting it right. "Amy is a… Hmm. You guys probably don't have Parahumans. Paraaliens, even." She looked thoughtful and amused at the same time as Tali tried to work out what she was talking about. "Right, it's sort of complicated and will take a while to explain, but basically some Humans have unusual abilities that are able to do strange things."
"Like biotics?" Tali nodded, thinking she had the basic idea.
"Biotics?"
"Eezo in a living organism can give certain abilities such as mass control and force over a distance," she replied. "It's not something my own people really have, but other species do to one extent or another. The Asari are all biotic, most other species only have a relatively small number of biotics."
"Hmm. Interesting. I wonder how..." Taylor shook her head as the two other girls listened curiously, obviously wondering what they were talking about. "Never mind, that's something else for later. Anyway, no, I don't think it's like 'biotics.' The method behind it is… complicated. But some of the abilities are a lot more powerful than basic telekinesis or whatever it is." She pointed at the one she'd introduced as Amy. "Amy's ability is incredibly powerful biological manipulation. And it makes her the world's best healer among other things."
Tali looked at the other girl, wondering if her new friend was playing a joke on her, then back to Taylor, who smiled. "Honest. I know it's a bit weird but she's really, really good. And she can help you with your food situation, and that immune thing you've got going on."
After thinking it over, Tali decided she had little to lose and there was no reason to assume Taylor was lying to her, as crazy as it sounded. "All right, I suppose. What do I do?"
"Take your glove off, she needs direct skin contact." Taylor looked at Amy and said something to her, then turned back to Tali after the reply. "She says she's completely sterile and not to worry. This won't hurt, she's a professional."
With a snort of humor, Tali made sure her environment suit was properly sealed around her wrist to prevent any contamination, checked it had enough reserves of air and emergency drugs in case this went horribly wrong, then unsealed her right glove and pulled it off. Wriggling both fingers and her thumb in the free air, she found the temperature was just about perfect. Amy stepped forward after having looked at her sister for a second and reached out to take her hand.
"You have an alien in the basement."
Taylor grinned at Amy's flat tone and expression, as Vicky stood next to her with her eyebrows disappearing into her hairline.
"Yeah. I rescued her from a wrecked spaceship." Having closed the front door, she walked around her friends and leaned on the wall.
"Spaceship. Yeah. It's in the back garden, I guess?" Amy snarked, her voice incredulous. "I mean, sure, Taylor, you do the impossible every day, and twice on weekends, but alien?"
"Nah, it's floating about a third of the way around the galaxy in a different dimension," Taylor chuckled. "Dad would go mental if I put it in the back garden. It's way too big, and think of how the neighbors would complain!"
"Your neighbors all work for the CIA or something," Vicky giggled. "This entire area has more secret agents than the rest of the country combined, I bet."
"There are a lot of them around, yep," Taylor grinned. "But don't say that where they can hear you, they like to think no one knows. And I'm being entirely honest, Amy, I rescued Tali'Zorah, that's her name, from a spaceship that got all shot up by pirates a couple of months ago. She built a distress beacon out of scrap and managed to make something strange that I detected with my own equipment, so I figured out how to contact her using her beacon as a carrier wave. We worked out how to talk to each other well enough for her to sent me a huge chunk of data on several languages, I programmed up a translator, and then invented a teleport portal she could build from spares at her end."
She waved a hand at the door to the basement as her friends shared another odd look, before staring at her. "It was simple enough. She came through and we talked for a while, and right now she's waiting downstairs. Her people have a weirdly bad immune system from what she said and they have to wear sterile environment suits all the time unless they're in specially built rooms. And they also use dextro amino acids, which makes it hard for them to eat food with levo proteins in it."
"That's not how it works, Taylor," Amy replied, looking somewhat lost. "Humans can eat either with pretty much no trouble at all. I mean, you might not get much in the way of certain essential nutrients from entirely dextro-amino food, but it won't kill you unless you do it for years and end up with malnutrition. Most of it will just go right through you. Might give you the runs but that's about it."
Taylor shrugged. "What can I say? That's apparently how it works for her species. Maybe they're not as well designed as we are."
Amy snorted. "Humans are horribly badly designed," she grumbled. "I've put enough of them back together to know that. Evolution is a shit engineer..." She seemed thoughtful for a moment. "I could do a much better job with a bit of work..."
She trailed off as Taylor met Vicky's eyes with a small smile. "Later. We can work on it. Right now, we need to get Tali fixed up so she doesn't end up with a fatal case of death or something because I sneezed."
"Fatal death is the worst sort," Vicky put in brightly, making Taylor laugh and Amy sigh.
"Quite. Come on, she's really nice and very smart. You'll like her." Opening the basement door Taylor went through it, hearing her friends follow.
Halfway down Amy and Vicky spotted Tali in her suit, which was impressive and different enough to look like a really high end cape costume. The faintly visible glowing eyes looking through the faceplate at them left quite the impression. Tali looked a little uncertain as she studied Taylor's friends, then turned to her.
"Holy shit there's an alien in Taylor's basement," Vicky muttered just audibly in an incredulous voice.
"Told you." Taylor grinned over her shoulder at them, before switching to the language she'd used her neural processor to quickly learn once she'd worked out a translation. It was much easier that way. She talked to her new friend for a little while, the Quarian looking somewhat confused but agreeable in the end. When Tali took off her glove Amy stared at her bare hand with great interest, then slowly reached out and held it.
"Oh… Oh, wow, that's different," she breathed, smiling in a slightly manic manner as the others watched. "Yeah, that's really cool..."
She fell silent for thirty seconds or so. Taylor and Vicky looked at each other, then the shorter girl, while Tali just stood there looking a little confused.
Reaching out Taylor poked her friend's shoulder with a finger. "You in there, Amy?"
"Huh?" The girl twitched, then looked around, before nodding quickly.
"Sorry, it's fascinating and I sort of got lost in it," she explained. "I can see the problem, yeah, her immune system has bits… missing. I think it probably evolved to work in symbiosis with other organisms and without those it goes wrong."
"They live on spaceships their entire lives now," Taylor explained, remembering some of the background Tali had told her.
"That would do it, yeah," Amy agreed, frowning thoughtfully. "Hmm. OK, I… I can add a few tweaks to boost it up to where it should be by simulating the missing parts, that's easy enough, and while I'm at it I can improve it past that level. May as well. The dextro-levo thing is because her species is missing some critical enzymes pretty much everything on Earth has. I'm guessing that her world has a lot less of one chirality present, where ours has lots of both, so they didn't evolve from something that was exposed to levo-chirality molecules. And from what I can see the result is they're basically allergic to certain organic compounds that we wouldn't have any trouble with. There might be other reasons too but that's the end result."
"I'm glad you understand that, Ames, because I have no idea what you just said," Vicky commented from where she'd sat on the stairs and was watching with interest and a certain amount of disbelief.
"It's simple enough, pay more attention in biology," Amy replied absently. "Yeah, I can tweak that too. Ask her if she's OK with me fixing the problem."
Taylor turned to Tali and asked her, "Amy says she can fix both your immune system and the dextro food issue if you allow her to."
Tali cocked her head, seeming confused, then shrugged a little. "That's hard to believe, Taylor, considering my people have been having trouble with it for three centuries."
With a smile, Taylor replied, "She's very, very good at this sort of thing."
"I'm still having trouble with the whole concept, I have to admit." Tali seemed uncertain.
"The super powers thing? Yeah, I can see why," Taylor agreed. "It's pretty weird. But I can prove it to you." She pointed at Vicky, who looked back curiously. "Her sister can fly with her powers."
"Fly." Tali sounded like she was trying not to laugh. "Without any machinery? No antigrav harness?"
"Nope. Just herself."
"I have to say that I would like to see proof of that," Tali remarked.
Taylor turned to Vicky. "She says she needs to see you fly to believe in Parahuman powers."
Vicky grinned and simply lifted straight up into the air, not moving from her seated position with her hands propping her head up and her elbows on her knees.
Tali froze motionless for some seconds, watching as Vicky then rotated in space a complete circle vertically, her hair dangling down as she went inverted. Then she frantically grabbed for the cool wrist-computer thing she was wearing, yanking her hand out of Amy's in the process, worked rapidly on it for a moment, and scanned Vicky. She looked at the results and did it again. "She's flying," the woman breathed in shock.
"I did tell you she could," Taylor agreed calmly.
"Without any technology. Just floating there."
Her voice was incredulous and faint.
"Yeah. Parahuman powers have some really interesting applications. Flying is one of the quite common ones. Most of her family can do it."
"How?"
"Ah. That's where it gets really complicated," Taylor commented. "And it's something that would take a while to explain. But powers are real, and Amy's powers are incredibly powerful biological manipulation. If she says she can fix your immune system, she means it."
Tali kept staring at Vicky for some seconds, the blonde waving to her as she bobbed up and down in the air, then rather jerkily held out her hand to Amy again. "Sure, why not?" she said in a bemused voice.
"She says she's fine with it," Taylor translated, smiling. Amy, who was looking rather amused, merely nodded then concentrated for about a minute.
"There. That should do it. She won't have any trouble digesting either chirality food now, and her immune system could tank Ebola and laugh at it."
"Thanks, Amy," Taylor grinned. "Amy says you're all fixed," she added in Tali's language.
The Quarian twitched as Amy let go of her hand, lifting it to inspect it closely, then used her wrist computer to scan herself. After she'd done that she moved to the case she'd brought from the ship with her, opened it, and rummaged through the contents for a little while until she found some sort of sealed food packet with alien writing on it. Without saying anything she did something to it that made a tube fold out from the side, which she stuck into the port in her helmet that was clearly there to allow this. The foil and plastic container collapsed as she sucked the contents out.
The three girls watched as she put the empty packet on Taylor's workbench then stood motionless for a minute or so. When nothing happened, she scanned herself very carefully again.
"Ancestors," she whispered as she looked at the results.
"Like I said, Amy does good work," Taylor said cheerfully.
"Apparently so," Tali agreed in a strained voice. "Do you have any idea what she's actually done?"
"I think I probably do, yeah," Taylor replied with a nod. "And I bet that with some work we can come up with a way to help the rest of your people too. But here and now, you're safe and won't get any horrible diseases."
Tali slowly looked around at them all in turn, before she lifted her hands a little shakily to her helmet. She pressed a few places on it, rotated it slightly and pulled it off her head.
Her bare face, the features quite different to a human's but not at all unattractive, with large eyes that literally very faintly glowed like a cat's in the dark, looked around at them. Vicky peered curiously at her, as did Amy, both girls fascinated. Taylor smiled.
"Guys, this is Tali'Zorah, a Quarian and a friend of mine. She's come a very long way and had a horrible time, so let's welcome her to Earth and give her a good time, OK?"
Tali sat in Taylor's spare chair and stared at the helmet in her hand, before raising her eyes to meet Taylor's. "I am having a very odd day," she said in a confused voice.
"Don't worry, lots of people around here say that sometimes," Taylor assured her. "Right, then. The next job is getting you a decent translator so other people can talk to you! Let's see… what's the best way to do that, I wonder?" She moved to her workbench and started poking through a couple of the drawers looking for the parts she'd need while Tali watched, looking like she couldn't work out what was going on, and Amy sat next to Vicky on the stairs and started whispering to her sister.
As she worked she hummed happily, feeling that Science was having a very good day right about now.
And she'd made another new friend in the process! Win win, really.
When Danny got home he walked into the kitchen and stopped dead, his briefcase swinging back and forth in his hand.
"This is a lemon," Taylor said as she handed a slice of the aforementioned fruit to the person sitting at the kitchen table, Vicky and Amy also present and watching with interest.
That person, who most definitely didn't look at all standard in a number of important ways and was wearing a costume based by the looks on some sort of high tech spacesuit, accepted the slice in a three-fingered hand and inspected it curiously. "It's very sour, but the juice makes a really nice drink," his daughter added.
Their apparent guest sniffed the slice of lemon, then cautiously tasted it.
A moment passed before her face screwed up in a way that Danny, even through his bemusement, winced at.
"Ack. Sour doesn't even begin to describe that," the woman said as she hastily put the slice down on the plate in front of her, which had traces of other fruits and vegetables on it.
Taylor shrugged, taking a big bite out of the rest of the lemon half she was holding. Danny, along with everyone else present, stared in horror. "I kind of like sour," Taylor said as she swallowed something he couldn't have stomached without a run up. "But not everyone does, I'll agree."
She sucked the rest of the juice out of the lemon half, then dropped the remains on the plate. "Let's try an orange, they're much sweeter." Picking up a large orange she sliced it in half and handed one piece to their guest. Looking up while that person dubiously studied the orange, she smiled at Danny. "Hi, Dad."
"Taylor?" He waved a hand to indicate the odd looking woman, who was in the process of trying the orange. Her eyes widened, then she quickly ate the entire thing, peel and all. "I feel I may well be missing something important…"
"You're not supposed to eat the peel," Amy hissed, as she picked up another orange and started peeling it.
"That's the best part!" the woman replied in a low voice.
Taylor ignored the byplay, and stood up to walk over next to Danny. "This is Tali'Zorah. She's a Quarian, they're an alien species who roam the galaxy in a massive fleet of spacecraft. She got into trouble with pirates, I picked up her distress beacon, one thing led to another, and now she's staying with us for a while." The girl smiled a little guiltily at him as behind her Vicky collapsed onto the table in a fit of giggling. Amy was shaking her head sadly, her lips twitching.
Very carefully Danny put his briefcase down, put both hands on his daughter's shoulders, and met her eyes. "Taylor?" he said calmly.
"Yeah, Dad?"
"One day you, my dear girl, are going to be the utter death of both myself and poor Brendan." He sighed heavily. "All right. I'm going to make some coffee, then we're going to have a very, very long talk."
"Sure. Orange?" She held up the other half of the one she'd cut and smiled winningly at him.
He shook his head, accepted the piece of fruit, and with a look at the alien woman who was now sneaking the bits of peel Amy had removed while the girl wasn't looking, walked over to the coffee maker feeling that he might need more than one cup this time.
But he ate the orange anyway since it was very nice.