Free Carinae Sector: 01 - Traders' Scourge - Part 2 - Maveen Offer by David Buck

in a heated argument earlier with that particular team member and knew that more arguments on the issue were to follow.
    Eventually the Southern Cross moved off again, this time to the south. The ship orders had been changed so that they skirted to the south of the alien space ships down to rendezvous with HMAS Sydney, who was now closer to the Aurora Discovery. Douglas continued looking at the space ships and considered that there must be a way for humanity to avoid the possibly lethal trap of merely seizing the alien ships.
     
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    Rebecca carefully prepared the tissue samples via swabs from the blackened tattoos that they had taken from Garendestat. She wiped the contaminated swabs across several different types of agar and cultivating media dishes, labeled them and placed the media dishes in a variety of locations. A set of the media dishes went into the refrigerator to simulate low temperatures, another set went under an ultraviolet light, a third set went into a darkened draw, and then the several remaining sets when into desktop racks. She had enjoyed working in medicine ever since she had done work experience with her famous father in his impressive medical facilities in Perth.
    Her father had spent most of his life researching treatments for addictive diseases, types of depression, and diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The innovative and courageous researcher had also discovered a way to defeat alcoholism and drug dependence by neurotransmitter therapy over twenty years ago now. As a result her father had received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2029.
    Even after Rebecca left university and also went into medicine, she caught up him with as often as she could during her overseas aid missions during the pandemic. Rebecca’s father had been among the multitudes of older people killed by the pandemic and she sorely missed him. Rebecca would keep a close eye on the media dishes over the next few days to see if she could potentially locate a new bacterium present that could kill either the aliens or humans. Rebecca then turned to a blood workup to see if she could recognize or locate any virus’s that could do the same thing, but Garendestat’s blood was just too different to get any immediate results on. Quietly Rebecca hoped that these differences would provide a degree of protection for both intelligent species.
    Samantha was over at the other end of the lab and first reviewed the unfamiliar X-ray of Garendestats’s broken arm. She again noted the differences in the arm, as there were two long bones wrapped in a spiral in the massive alien’s upper arm. A pattern she verified as natural by also X-raying Garendestat’s other limbs. The fractures did indeed seem massive compared even to a human leg, though the bones had suffered a minimal amount of displacement. Samantha was optimistic about the fracture, as Garendestat now moved freely enough once a makeshift splint was placed on his broken arm.
    She was also concerned about the practical aspects of alien biology as anything they did not know about could eventually kill him. It was not outside the realms of possibility that an innocuous virus in mammals could kill every alien in all the ships over an extended period of time.
    Also what did they eat? How did they process wastes? How long do they live for usually?
    Samantha was well aware that she had more questions rather than answers, so hopefully they would return Garendestat to his ship soon. She also considered that the best way forward from just about any viewpoint, let alone the medical viewpoint on the patient, was to go forward with the return of the alien to his ship.
     
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    Gindane considered the news she was seeing on the bridge screen of her