Free Jaunt by Erik Kreffel

genuine object he had first caught sight of several days ago, halfway round the globe.
    Marlane typed a series of buttons on her keyboard, which then displayed a crude image of an anthropoid skeleton on her monitor. “Without a specimen from the rest of the body, I can’t do much better than this.”
    His eyes shifted from the exquisite rendering of the complete skull to the highly speculative framework. “This is an approximate head/body proportion? The skull’s rather large in comparison to the whole.”
    “I agree. Human children exhibit this, as well as those of other hominids, as you are aware, but not to this degree.” Marlane glanced back to the reconstruction. “I’m convinced. What about you?”
    De Lis nodded. His eyes roamed the holograph’s cranial roof, noting the absence of unfused cranial plates. Human children are born with highly malleable bones, which knit themselves together, particularly in the cranium, as they mature. If this was indeed a hominid, it was not a child. Its size could potentially mislead a less educated person, but its unusual characteristics would not fool an anthropologist, or anyone with a basic understanding of human anatomy.
    Despite this, the skull remained unknown. Although she had been encouraged to discover its genus or species, Marlane hesitated to create a new label for the specimen, especially if it was extraterrestrial, which would have to be debated by all the world’s primatologists before she’d even get a paper released. She had been witness to—and nearly part of—many groups who had employed a new find to try to gain prestige by creating exotic, but ultimately worthless, nomenclatures.
    “Right now,” she said, “we’re performing cell analysis. Hopefully, we will also find some fossilized protein chains in the remnants of ligaments, or perhaps some other biomolecular systems, to do a full genome and proteome, or at least partial ones.”
    De Lis clapped her shoulder. “Good work, Carol. Take a break every so often, would you?” He smiled at her, hoping his conviviality would boost her confidence.
    Marlane managed a grin, but it was all that her exhausted muscles could achieve. Her reputation was her stamina—which was nearly boundless—but this case was one of only a few that had brought her to her knees. The usual fuel of choice was coffee, but even that had failed her. For reasons unknown, it seemed like time itself was slowly sapping her strength.
    Dark Horse coughed in his hand before releasing the latest reports to Gilmour and Mason. The two agents, who had days ago fully mastered the content and form of the less-thansmooth reading of the DoD’s reports, eagerly digested the data while Colonel Dark Horse relayed updates from Washington.
    Contrary to the media clips praising the St. Petersburg summit as a first step to a thawing of relations between East and West—the usual hyperbole—the DoD thought less highly of the President’s trip. So less that half the North Pacific Fleet’s submarine units had been dispatched to secure various positions in the Pacific Ocean in anticipation of renewed Confederation maneuvers, thanks to the confidence gained in part by their Premier’s webcasted flag waving.
    Dark Horse replayed the President delivering his rhetoric concerning arsenal downsizing, promises to deter future weapons development, pledges to the peoples of the Confederation of full North American support (whatever that meant), and North America’s willingness to cooperate with the civilized Eastern nations in rebuilding the shattered global economy.
    The lieutenant colonel was brutally honest: the President may as well have stayed home. Showing newly processed images obtained from the subterranean Sudbury Quantum Laboratory, Dark Horse ably demonstrated that the Russians had accelerated their neutronic particle production. A dozen green points on the holobook represented key sites across the Confederation frontier where neutronic particle