It was 0300 before sleep, never a close friend, finally deigned to visit Noelle in her quarters. She'd been avoiding it for the better part of thirty hours, but when she dozed off at her workstation and dreamed about finding cryptic messages in the genome she was analyzing, she crossed out the note that read, "TAG A GAGA CAT--Significant?" in a loopy scrawl and stumbled over to the tiny bed in her quarters to at least nap for a few hours.
Noelle hadn't expected to sleep long--she never did when she was working on a project. But even by her standards, she'd barely closed her eyes when the door opened to cast a bar of fluorescent light across her face and interrupt a tangled, unpleasant dream of accepting the Nobel Prize from a giant cat with wide, staring eyes. She rolled over, too groggy to process the intrusion as anything other than unwelcome, when she heard someone speak to her.
"Doctor Heddison," a woman's voice said. "Something amazing's happened."
Noelle rolled back over, still brushing aside cobwebs of dream from her mind. "Vasquez?" she asked. The other woman was silhouetted in her doorway, a shadow in front of the harsh corridor lighting. "What time is it?"
"0400," Vasquez responded. "This couldn't wait. Doctor Heddison, Specimen U-79 sprouted."
That woke Noelle up. C was the designated term for control specimens, E stood for experimental, and U...it stood for 'unknown', but that was a polite euphemism to keep people from getting unprofessional and jumping to conclusions. Specimens designated "U" came from extra-terrestrial sources. Most of them were the barest scraps of self-replicating amino acid chains, a few had been found on spaceships with dubious decontamination protocols and were almost certainly just terrestrial life that had hitch-hiked on a rocket for a few thousand miles, but Specimen U-79...
A team of scientists in the Antarctic had returned Specimen U-79 three months ago from an impact crater, nestled snugly in a tough husk of fibrous material that had withstood the heat of re-entry. They'd taken it back to a research base on an island off the coast of Argentina, where Vasquez' group had been tasked with extracting the material inside the husk and determining whether any viable genetic information could be extracted from it and whether it could replicate in a terrestrial environment. Or, if you wanted the version that would would upend all of existing science and reorient humanity's place in the universe, Vasquez and the rest of them were trying to grow an alien seed from outer space into a living plant.
"What does it look like?" Noelle asked, hearing the excitement flood her voice. "Is there enough to get a sample yet? What nutrients is it responding to? Have you done an analysis on the soil it's planted in?" Adrenalin pumped into her like a gallon of hot coffee, sluicing away her exhaustion and filling her with energy. It was the kind of energy she'd pay for later, she knew, but it would be worth tomorrow's exhaustion to make history today.
"It looked like a vine," Vasquez said, stepping across the threshold and entering Noelle's room. "A bright green vine, roughly a quarter-inch in diameter, with nodules roughly every two inches."
"Every two inches?" Noelle asked, sitting up in her bed. "It's already more than two inches long?"
"It's more than eight inches long," Vasquez said as she approached. "I've never seen a plant grow this fast. I suspect it may be some sort of adaptive behavior, a survival mechanism to allow it to gain a foothold in already-developed biospheres, but it's maturing at a tremendously accelerated rate. It's already blossomed at each of the nodules."
"It's a flowering plant?" Noelle asked incredulously. If it had flowers, then that implied pollination in the species' native environment, which meant that there were other forms of life capable of distributing that pollen. They'd just proved by implication the existence of alien life. Apart from the giant cat, that dream about the Nobel Prize suddenly seemed a lot less implausible.
"More than that," Vasquez said. She was less than three feet away now, still just a dark shape backlit by the hallway lighting. "It's producing pollen. Active, viable pollen." She sounded excited, but more than that--she sounded awed. Like a priest who'd just experienced direct communion with God. "It's trying to reproduce."
Noelle frowned. Something was nagging at her hindbrain, trying to get her attention away from scientific wonder and arrested exhaustion. "We need to double-check our quarantine procedures," she said, her mouth running on automatic while her brain tried to sort out whatever was bugging her. "If it grows that fast and reproduces that quickly, we could have a major invasive species on our hands if we don't keep it in the lab."
It was a smell. That was what her subconscious was trying to get her to pay attention to. There was an odor coming off of Vasquez. The moment she noticed it, she realized the room was thick with it. It didn't smell bad, though. It smelled like...Noelle inhaled deeply. Why did she suddenly think about daycare?
"It's magnificent," Vasquez said, as though she hadn't heard a single thing Noelle had just said. "It's absolutely beautiful. I don't know what I was expecting, but the flowers--they're black, Noelle. Jet black. They smell like wet limestone. It's the most amazing thing I've ever experienced."
Noelle nodded, still trying to place the smell. Not wet limestone--it was organic, like babies. She kept thinking about her cousin, the one who did in-home daycare. Every time she visited, all the babies had a scent like this. Faint, but omnipresent, like it was coming out of their pores. It didn't smell bad, just biological, like--
