Carl had seen a lot of strange things in his lifetime, but that came with the territory. He’d spent twelve years learning and studying biology in all known forms just so he’d have a chance to get off world and see the strange new plants and animals that existed beyond Earth. He’d succeeded, in a way; he’d gotten off world and wound up shipped a thousand star systems away to a state-of-the art space station orbiting a living, habitable alien world.
It was, in Carl’s experience, a much less glamorous position than he’d expected. Station number 78-10 had been brand new when Carl’s parents were toddlers, and it hadn’t been properly maintained for years. The result was a space station that reeked of machine oil, fumes, and beer. Yes, Carl’s primary source of human interaction on the station was a crack team of space marines; brutish, drunken, filthy space marines, who routinely went down to the surface of the planet, shot everything in sight, and then brought the mangled remains of a xenobiological goldmine back to the station for Carl to inspect.
It didn’t help that most of the marines were women. Nothing says ‘feminine’ like belching and scratching your crotch after destroying some of the most valuable fauna in the known universe. Of course, Carl had greatly exaggerated the importance of his own position in his mind, as there were dozens of worlds in the empire of man that hosted species more interesting and valuable than the extremely dangerous natives of the planet below.
Carl was, in the grand scheme of things, almost completely unimportant. The same could be said of the station, and the group of marines assigned to it, and this was in fact the exact reason the Empire had set the supply ships to automatically restock the station and then promptly forgotten about it entirely.
Still, every discovery Carl made was, to him, extremely interesting. None of them made any change in his life, though, nor did they get him the respect he desperately wanted or change the galaxy as he'd dreamed. None, that is, except for the last discovery made aboard station 78-10.
It began with a specimen which had not come from the usual source. This one was intact, and on reading the short report left by the marines, Carl was shocked to find it had been extracted from inside what they described as “creepy, slimy old ruins.” Carl immediately wanted to report that tidbit to the empire; it was the first he’d heard of ruins on the surface of the planet. But the specimen they had retrieved was there before him, and he couldn’t resist examining it first.
As per the usual routine, the specimen had been loaded into a sealed, clear-walled and reinforced observation room, within which a pair of arms adapted from the stations long-defunct android had been mounted. These arms could be directly manipulated by Carl to assist his inspection of any specimen – a necessary precaution, in many cases, as the bodily fluids of the native fauna were extremely corrosive. In this case, at least initially, it all seemed a bit unnecessary to Carl.
The specimen was, at a glance, an egg. It was approximately the size of Carl’s head, black, and fleshy. A cross shaped orifice dominated the top of the egg, though it was clamped tightly shut. Carl didn’t see any indication that the egg was going to hatch anytime soon, and as per station regulations he’d have to incinerate the entire thing within twenty four hours. As a result, after a few minutes of gentle prodding and pulling at the egg, he took a more direct approach.
Using the android arms, he forcibly pulled the orifice on top of the egg open. Explosively, an insectile creature shot out of the top, bounced off the container ceiling, and clung to a wall. It was like a large, tan-colored spider, but with a long tail and an extremely small mammalian mouth in place of mandibles. The creature reacted to all forms of interaction he tried by attempting to bite and swallow whatever was presented, which, in the case of the android arms, meant not a great deal happened.
Carl was ecstatic. This was the first live alien specimen he had seen; this was the moment he’d dreamt of since he was in elementary school! He desperately wanted the specimen to grow, and to see how it developed, so much so that he sacrificed his lunch. Using a slot normally reserved for exposing chemical solutions to the container, he presented a slightly stale peanut butter sandwich to the insect.
It was astonishing how quickly the sandwich was ingested, and equally astonishing that within seconds of completing the meal, the insect had tripled in size. Enthused by the results, Carl proceeded to order up four days’ worth of food and water to feed to the creature. It gorged, devouring every bit provided, all the while swelling up like a puffer fish. Its tiny legs could barely touch the floor once it had finished.
As the case is with science, a great deal of it involves sitting and watching. Car