A Snippet from: EMISSARY, A Novel
by Chris Rogers
Perched at the edge of Addison Hale’s drink container, Emissary Ruell’s biological energy spark hesitated before entering the president’s corporeal form. An instant earlier, aboard the Szhen ship, Ruell’s assignment had seemed challenging and adventurous.
“You can do this,” his mentor, Kralaill, had said during last-minute instructions for Ruell’s deputation as Emissary to Earth.
“I wish I shared my mentor’s confidence.” The Human words grated like sand on Ruell’s thought sensors.
“Twenty-three emissaries have been successfully integrated on other planets, Ruell. You will be number twenty-four.”
In the blackness of the Ready Room, Kralaill’s brilliant spark flickered from blue to green. Ruell frequently envisioned his mentor’s image before Kralaill relinquished his corporeal form and boarded the ship, but there was no time now for such sentimentality. For both of them, the comfort of occupying a body of one’s own was forever in the past and best forgotten.
“How many emissaries have actually fulfilled their mission, Mentor, and returned whole?”
Instead of answering, Kralaill ushered Ruell to the conveyance chamber. Before engaging the relocation beam, he repeated, with a shift of inflection, “You can do this, Ruell.”
Expanding now into President Hale’s neural network, Ruell peered out at a world he previously had viewed only in scanner waves. Everything looked glossier than expected, and multi-textured. And strange. After the bland colors and sterile, mechanical odors aboard the Szhen ship, this environment aroused Ruell’s visual and olfactory sensors, provoking memories of home too painful to endure at the moment.
Groping for stability in the unfamiliar body, he sampled the rich sensory stimulants of Air Force One to strengthen his spark—authentic wood, freshly cut flowers, leather seats—and he tried not to think of being separated from everything he knew and loved.
“Madam President, this report just arrived.” The more interesting of the two men approaching President Hale extended a sheaf of papers.
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