The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part One

The Doctor sat behind a three inch-thick wall of bullet-resistant glass, in an air-tight hermetically sealed chamber behind a metal bulkhead door.  From his folding metal chair he had watched the creature they called "The Ambassador" for almost two hours.  Projection sensor telemetrics inside the walled portion of the chamber scanned the room and the being within it through spectrothermal, bioelectrical, and magnetic resonance frequencies while the filtered air the creature presumably breathed was scanned for viral, microbic, and alien particulate matter.

 The Ambassador didn't seem to be at all stressed or disoriented by its surroundings.  If anything, it looked bored.

 The Doctor mentally chided himself for anthropomorphizing The Ambassador.  Telemetry couldn't pick up a heartbeat or pulse of any sort and the thing's body didn't seem to emit any sort of heat or possess a bioelectrical aura.   It was almost as though The Ambassador wasn't really there.

 But there was a detectable energy field around it, an envelope of sorts, pulsing with irregular and intermittent bursts of quantum energy that seemed frighteningly similar to what non-scientists popularly called "anti-matter".  The truth was that, from the faint gravitometric effects it had on other things inside the glass-walled chamber, the being seemed to be composed of dark matter.  Neutrinos, axions, non-baryonic particles, cosmic microwave energy taken physical form.  The stuff of impossibility. 

 The Ambassador looked human, but he, or "it" rather, wasn't in any way human by current scientific definition.

 “We shouldn’t be doing this,” a soldier in full military uniform said from slightly behind the doctor.  His deep baritone was hard-edged with anxiety and accusation.  “The scenario we presented to the Senate’s Scientific Defense Research SubCommittee didn’t include this.”

 “A sin of omission,” the doctor replied calmly.

 “Really?   Wonder how that’ll play out at our criminal trial before the World Court,” the soldier, an Air Force officer, said cuttingly.  “I mean, this could be interpreted as false imprisonment of a diplomatic ambassador from non-U.S. territories.  Or even as unauthorized criminal detainment of a refugee.  At its worse, it could be considered kidnapping and torture, or have you managed to forget the medical testing we performed on The Ambassador?  Maybe even treason for harboring a foreign terrorist or potential enemy of the state…  After all, we’re not all that sure we can trust The Ambassador’s declaration of his true intentions, are we?”

 “No, we’re not sure.  What’s your point?  The man is an alien humanoid from a heretofore unknown planet the para-illicit scientific community has codenamed ‘Brimstone’.  Its existence is highly top-secret and not shared with the general astronomical community.  So, we’re a little far down the track to be worried about any of that,” the doctor said as he momentarily turned away from watching The Ambassador.   He locked eyes with the soldier and shook his head.  “Major Holloway, the proverbial genie is out of the bottle.” 

 “The Ambassador isn’t a genie,” the Major, a middle-aged ex-college football star from the Bible Belt and a veteran of Desert Storm, muttered.   “We don’t really know what he is, or even if he can actually be considered a ‘he’.  Your medical scans didn’t isolate any indicators as to his biology’s sexual nature or specification.  Brimstone isn’t like anyplace else we’ve discovered.  I mean, come on, this certainly qualifies as a First Contact situation and yet we aren’t sharing that with anyone not specifically cleared by the U.S. Intelligence apparatus.”

 “Perhaps where he’s from, genetic sexual identity is fluid, contingent on population conditions, or maybe it isn’t really necessary.”

 “Yeah, there’s that.  And just maybe he’s somehow blocking our efforts to classify and identify what he is.  And if that’s the case, we need to be very worried.”