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Delivering babies is the highlight of a paramedic’s career, a welcome respite from the daily parade of illness, injury and death that otherwise defines our existence. Bringing a new life into the world is transcendent, a near-magical affirmation of our profession’s essential goodness, a welcome reminder that we are more than mere escorts for the dying into whatever afterlife awaits them.

All of that happy horseshit goes out the window when the baby has tentacles and fangs dripping with toxic goo.

It’s nothing personal, mind you. The kid can’t control itself, and I certainly can’t expect much from the parent at this point. She (or he; with this species it’s interchangeable) is strapped to a gurney in the back of our bus, with her tentacles pinned beneath a makeshift concoction of restraints and her fangs safely concealed behind a breathing mask. Childbirth can drive a human mother half crazy, but a hextopus in labor is like wrestling snakes and there’s no referee to call foul when the teeth come out.

At this point I should mention “hextopus” isn’t what they call themselves, but it’s the best English classification I can think of for a species with six elongated, retractile limbs: If an octopus has eight tentacles, then six makes for a hextopus. If I’d paid better attention to Latin in college I could probably come up with a more scientific-sounding taxonomy, but at this point I’m just trying to get the baby out alive.

Hextopods are technically amphibious, but they strongly prefer water. Our immediate problem is that we’re in a standard atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, which is what most Union races breathe, but I’ll save the exobiology lesson for later. This species normally gives birth underwater, and I’m told it goes a lot more smoothly in their natural environment. That makes sense, and it also explains why the mom-to-be is damned near out of her mind right now, to the point of being dangerous.

I take my eye off the job at hand for a split second to check the cat’s cradle of cargo straps holding her back. Each of her tentacles is a couple meters’ worth of pure muscle and could tear me in half like prying apart a mollusk. The oxygenated fluid we’re pumping through her mask calmed her down enough for us to get her into our cobbled-together restraints, so at least I don’t have those appendages to worry about.

The baby is another matter. It won’t be nearly as strong as a full-grown hextopus, but it’s absolutely complicating things. Thankfully our scanners show the head is coming first, because I don’t want to reach up into Mom’s birth canal to wrestle with a writhing mass of tentacles, much less have to deal with the fangs. Our anatomy instructor warned us that these things come out instinctively snapping at whatever’s close, which in this case is me. And while they’re not venomous, their saliva is toxic to most other races, including humans.

The normal reflex would be to close my eyes as I reach into the birth canal, but that’s something I learned to control a long time ago on the farm. I tell myself this is no different than delivering a calf, while the carbon-flex protective sleeves I’m wearing ought to shield me from the pointy parts and their poisonous slime.

I find the head, and here’s where I have to be extra careful. The birthing process is a lot less complicated underwater, where Mom naturally spits the baby out when the time comes. Here, they have to work at it because they’re averse to delivering in open air. That means going elbow-deep up her birth canal, finding the baby, and pulling it out. It’s almost all head but for those flailing tentacles, and my hands quickly find something about the size and shape of a football. I start massaging it toward me, gently coaxing it along with my fingertips.

Thing is, you have to be cautious with the head because these creatures are smart. And I don’t mean “smart” like trained horses or dolphins; these creatures are fiercely intelligent. Beyond human intelligence, in fact beyond a lot of other Union species. Their method of communication is so subtle as to have been overlooked for centuries, at least by my notion of time. It wasn’t until they’d built vehicles to finally leave the confines of their underwater homes that the powers-that-be realized these beings were deserving of membership in the Galactic Union.

The Union’s not quite sold on humans yet, which is why I’m here, but that’s another story.

I feel my way forward until my fingers move past the crown and the first baby tentacle wraps itself around my hand. This is not a pleasant sensation, and I fight the urge to recoil in fear and disgust. Before long both of my hands have these wormy little appendages wound tightly around them, and I’m safe to start applying some force. I take a deep breath, my translator tells Mom to do the same in a burbling speech I can’t begin to understand, and I pull back in one smooth, continuous motion.

In my hands is a writhing infant hextopus, its skin frantically changing colors as it reacts to the shock of its new environment. This kaleidoscope of hues is the baby’s silent cry as it emerges into its new world. Mom begins changing colors in rhythm with her baby; this is how they communicate. There’s no time for me to marvel at their strange symbiosis, so I place the baby in a makeshift tank and am immediately rewarded by its tiny tentacles releasing their death grip on me. The newborn is now in its natural environment and I watch its colors settle into calmer shades of pink and blue as it breathes for the first time. I realize I’ve been holding my breath as well and collapse onto the floor with an exhausted groan. I’ve been on shift for barely an hour.

Back home, this would’ve earned me a stork pin for my EMS uniform. I don’t know what the Union awards for delivering an alien squid baby.


My name is Melanie Mooney, and on Earth I was a paramedic. That’s also what I do here, though the job is equal parts medic and veterinarian. I realize that sounds either contrary or redundant, but stay with me. The Union tapped me for this job because I’m something of a unique asset in their view.

In case you haven’t already figured this out, the answer to the longstanding question of whether there’s other intelligent life in the universe is unequivocally yes. Lots of it, in fact. At present there are over two dozen different intelligent species in the Union, with many more lingering on the outskirts who’ve yet to be selected for admission.

Ours is one of them. I mentioned they weren’t entirely sold on humans yet. There are a lot of criteria the big brains in charge (and some are literally just that—big brains) have for judging a species’ readiness, but the main one is culture. If they don’t believe your species is prepared for the shock (and trust me, it’s shocking) then they’ll keep their distance and quietly observe until they think you’re ready.

That doesn’t always work out as planned, which is how I got here. They might be smart, but they’re not infallible. That should offer our own species some encouragement.

The reason I’m a “unique asset” is because I have an ability that is almost unheard of in the Union: that is, I’m able and willing to care for a wide range of species. For being so technologically and culturally advanced, when it comes to medical care a lot of the various Union species can be surprisingly provincial. Very few are willing to provide medical care to anyone outside of their own kind. They have reasons, sometimes not particularly good ones, but it’s encouraging to know that civilizations more advanced than ours aren’t perfect either.

I don’t know if this is a quality all humans share—many surely don’t—but if it’s widespread enough then that’s a big check in humanity’s “plus” column, so I’d better not screw up this gig. I attribute my own flexibility to growing up on a farm and being a veterinary student before switching gears to become a medic. Being able to diagnose and treat creatures who can’t tell you what’s wrong with them turns out to be a valuable skill in the rest of the galaxy.


The “bus” I referred to earlier is our ambulance. On Earth we’d also call it a “squad.” Cops usually called it a “meat wagon,” but we hardly ever use “ambulance.” Too many syllables.

In its former life it was a Union Class III executive transport, with the comfy interior stripped out and replaced with an adjustable gurney and every type of life support we might need. Air ambulance services on Earth would do the same thing, equipping old private jets for rapid patient transport.

As you can imagine, an interplanetary transport can do a lot more than a boring old jet. And I’ve learned “interplanetary” doesn’t do it justice either. It’d be like calling that Earth jet a puddle jumper. I’m no rocket scientist, but these things can zip around in ways that would make actual rocket scientists need to change their shorts.

I understand enough to know that the distances between worlds are almost beyond comprehension, and the technology used to bridge that gulf is even more so. I never paid much attention to this kind of thing before, but I’ve learned the reason it takes our puny space probes years to reach other planets is because our methods are antiquated by Union reckoning. It was explained to me that our probes are passively coasting between worlds, whereas Union pilots can keep their feet on the gas, so traveling across a solar system can be done in a matter of hours. I’ve been able to grasp that much.

Getting to planets in other star systems is a whole other feat which I don’t begin to understand. Translated into English, they said it’s best described as creating a bubble in space that lets a ship move almost instantaneously between stars. However it works, they don’t even describe the technology as an engine; it’s a “drive.” After it was described to me, I asked, “Like warp drive?” and they said that’s essentially correct. I may not have paid much attention to the actual science before, but I have watched a few sci-fi movies.

If I’d taken more physics in college I might understand it better, but I’d been in veterinary school, so biology it was. My Union mentors assured me that even if I’d done better in freshman calculus it still wouldn’t be fully explainable. But thank goodness I had at least that much, because I’ve learned that math is the true universal language. The symbology may vary, but in the end two plus two equals four and the first derivative of any whole number is zero, no matter which star system you’re from.

It kind of has to be. I remember my old math professor said that calculus is the key to understanding nature, which I didn’t fully grasp until much later. It’s been used to do everything from determining that the speed of light is a universal constant, down to setting the ideal price for a bag of chips at Walmart.

He also said there was some debate as to whether Newton invented calculus or discovered it, since it can model pretty much everything in nature. The longer I’m out here, the more I’m convinced he discovered it. It’s just too perfect.

My hosts patiently explained our transport’s basic functions in a way I could comprehend. Knowing that is kind of essential to the job, for the same reason a flight medic needs to understand how the aircraft she’s riding in works. Doesn’t mean I can fly the thing, but when the pilot tells me why we have to do certain things in a certain way, I get it. For the same reason a flight medic knows that taking a helicopter into severe icing is suicide, I know that certain phenomena in space are off-limits to us even though I’m not able to pilot the ship. Black holes would be the most obvious example, but there’s more ways to get yourself killed out here than I thought possible. Of course vacuum is bad; that’s what space suits are for. What I didn’t know was how dangerous the radiation environment can be—there are limits here despite the Union’s advanced technology, and where we can go depends a lot on what our little ship is equipped to withstand. Just as you can’t use a fishing boat as an icebreaker in the Arctic, we can’t take a Class III transport anywhere near a pulsar: the radiation would overwhelm our plasma shields and cook us in our own skin. That’s one of many no-no’s.


I’ve been doing this going on six months now, but I was an earthbound medic long before that. Ten years seems to be the point when most of us get burned out and either move on to other work or stay on as jaded losers. I hadn’t reached that point yet, but had sure felt it coming. Getting tapped by the Union might have moved the timeline further out for me, but it’s on my mind as we clean up the back of the squad from our messy hextopod delivery.

Cleanup after a big run is never pleasant, but this one’s even more difficult thanks to the cumbersome hazmat suit I’m wearing. Among all of the water and alien bodily fluids is the creature’s toxic slime. It’s nothing personal on their part, it’s a natural secretion that helps them digest their food. Like stomach acid, just highly concentrated, and it happens to come out of their mouths which are uncomfortably close to their birth canals. I try not to imagine the prospect of having my mouth that close to my privates as I mop up the mess, wipe down every surface, and sweep a glowing decon boom over the remaining nooks and crannies to finish the job.

As I strip off the hazmat suit and stuff it into the recycler—nearly everything’s recycled on a spaceship—I take a look around. The bay is all gleaming silver and pristine white ceramic, lit by ceiling panels that hold some type of organic illumination I don’t understand. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie, which is kind of my life now.

It didn’t start out this way.


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Framed