Empyrean Iris

Chapter 37

  "What are you looking for, Doctor?"

"What connects them."

Rita placed her hand on the back of his chair, where he was more floating than he was sitting, "Don't you think you should wait until the captain comes back?"

"What is he going to see that I'm not?"

She crossed her arms over her chest, a stray strand of her long, dark fur slipping from its restraint to fall into her field of view. She huffed out a gust of air to brush it to the side, "Well, he is a human after all, so I would wager to say that is something he knows more about than you, besides. Hundreds of people have looked over those files and seen nothing."

"But I am not hundreds of people now am I?"

The human shook her head, "Yeah, just one really stubborn alien."

"You are missing the part about my superior intelligence."

"That can be debated." She leaned up against the wall beside him, looking down at the panel before her, "Besides this isn't even your job, you're a doctor, not a detective."

Dr. Krill waited impatiently for the files to be uploaded to the proper format meanwhile turning to his skeptical human companion, "I know what I am, better than most of you humans do, but as far as I can see, there is no one here to attend to, and this mission is the reason some of my humans are getting injured. I must take preventative measures."

The human laughed in disbelief as he turned back to his work, "Wait, hold on, your humans."

"Yes,"

"Preventative measures!"

"You heard me correctly."

She shook her head again, and he wondered, not for the first time, if she was going to give herself permanent brain damage from all of her disapproval of him, "You may leave me." He announced as the little icon popped up before him, letting him know that the files were ready.

She huffed and walked off, and he could still hear her muttering as she walked away.

He could not understand what she was saying, but by now he had enough intimate knowledge of humans to know it was nothing flattering. That fact didn't bother him so much, and he turned his attention back to the information before him.

On screen the individual files of 41 missing humans appeared before him. That was 41 missing humans and one deceased.

It was time for Dr. Krill to do a little digging.

Maybe he would find something that the humans had not, maybe he would find nothing, but either way, what he had said to Rita was right. He did see this as a preventative measure. The crew of the Harbinger was assigned to the mission of finding the missing 41, and because of that mission, they had been put in danger more times than he would have liked to acknowledge, some of those, which included putting his own life at risk.

He intended to prevent any more danger or injuries, and he intended to do it with the power of his intellect, not through field work.

First, it was important to determine if any of the 41 missing humans had anything in common. If they did that he might use that line of inquiry to determine who might have been interested in exploiting them.

He ran the most obvious variables using the computers to compare keywords in each document.

The most obvious factors were quickly ruled out as possibilities. 18 women and 23 men, an almost even spread across the two variables making him assume that was probably chosen at random.