by I. O. Adler
Her own suit was trying to tell her something. But the garbled string of letters only obscured her vision. She willed them away, but they persisted.
“Mom, wait. What is all this stuff? I can’t read it.”
Sylvia stopped and got close enough that their helmets touched. “It’s telling you the air is breathable. My readings confirm it, but the oxygen is thin. It’s also cold.” She examined one of Carmen’s gloves. “Touch that pad twice.”
When Carmen spotted the nondescript square on the back of her left glove and double tapped it, her display cleared.
They met the worm in a round chamber with three other corridors leading off. A yellow glow emanated from the ceiling. The worm had plugged itself into a raised console and was hunched over it as if in deep concentration. It had done the same the first time it had tried to steal the harvester. She had locked the worm out when she had control. But now she felt helpless and could only wonder what it would do once it hacked into the Cordice vessel’s computer system.
Carmen stepped next to him and examined the console. It had no tactile controls. Before, when she or her sister had been piloting the sphere, they had managed to summon a series of displays. She swiped her hands about. Nothing showed up. Did the harvester remember her? Did she still have access?
There was no command couch upon which she could lie.
She chose one of the other corridors and headed down.
“Don’t go far,” Sylvia called.
Carmen gave a backward wave as she continued forward. She took each step with greater confidence. Still awkward and uncomfortable, with each lift of the suit’s boot requiring a conscious effort. But it beat floating helplessly. She imagined it might be possible to vault herself forward and glide along the interior of the ship, but the lights weren’t following her as she plunged into darkness.
As she stepped into another room, the ceiling illuminated. Several long tanks occupied one wall. When she touched one a display popped up but she couldn’t make sense of it. It vanished once she withdrew her hand. She didn’t remember the room or the reactor from the myriad schematics available to her when she had piloted the harvester. It had all been too much. But now she regretted not paying better attention.
She tried resting her head against the tank where the display had been. Felt silly. But it couldn’t hurt to try. “Come on. Wake up. I’m here. I want to be in control again.”
As expected, the ship ignored her. Whatever command she’d once had was gone. If the harvester had reset, it meant the Cordice might be the ones who would have to resume control from afar. And the dreadful news from their operator meant they wouldn’t be able to do anything until they restored their home ship’s malfunctioning reactor.
Remembering the Cordice caretaker had tiny articulated fingers, she probed about for any handholds or compartments or manual controls. A screen on the wall opposite the tanks lit up. She examined it. Several round meters or gauges showed something was fluctuating at a steady rate. Was this the reactor? Was it a measurement of fuel or power? Oxygen? The volume on the surround sound? Labels appeared next to the gauges. But without help from She Who Waits, making sense of the script or the controls proved fruitless.
A soft shudder ran through the floor.
“How’s it going back there, Mom?”
Carmen’s suit accommodated her by amplifying her voice, as if expecting her desire to be heard. She strained her ears for a reply, then realized they had established no kind of radio connection. An oversight to assume their suits were compatible.
The wall shook, causing Carmen to lean to steady herself. The sensation passed.
“Mom? Hey? What was that?”
She began the laborious process of returning down the corridor to where the worm had been busy hacking the ship. It was dark up ahead. Why had the worm turned the lights out?
“Hello?”
As she entered the first chamber, the illumination above winked on. Both the worm and her mother were gone.
She felt her stomach squeeze. Swallowed, but the moisture had left her mouth.
She hurried towards the shuttle. The hallway felt as if it had grown longer. She tripped and accidentally detached both her boots, and then she fell, touching off the floor with a glove and tumbling. She pushed off the ceiling in time, only to find she was moving too fast to get her feet beneath her.
Wham!
She collided hard but arrested her motion by spreading her arms out and pressing against either side of the narrow corridor. Placed one foot down. Clunk. Then the other. Clunk.
With renewed concentration, she navigated to the airlock hatch. The door was dark. She fumbled about and touched it. Found a fingerhold. When she pulled it, a fresh display blinked and flashed.
She swiped each portion of the virtual controls. A new screen appeared. It was a view of the opposite side of the airlock. Something was moving away from it.
The Melded shuttle. They were leaving.
“Mom! Hey!”
A sinking feeling in her gut told her what she refused to believe.
Her mother had abandoned her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Carmen felt as if she was suffocating.
She undid the helmet and tore it off. Sucking in the thin air, she fell to her knees. Pounded on the airlock with her fist. She took a last look as the Melded shuttle vanished from sight.
Her mom’s voice came from her pocket. “There’s enough air, honey.”
Carmen fished out the card Ovo had slipped her. Held it at a distance. It glowed. A tiny round blue light winked as it relayed the incoming message.
“Car, I know you won’t understand,” her mom said, “but this is the only way. There’s enough air and we’ll be back in a few hours.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“There’s no time to go through it all again. You’re right that your sister won’t want to come with us. I can’t ask her to bring the boys. The Cordice simulation isn’t safe as long as their ship is in danger. The infestation has spread. They’re compromised. The only option left is for us to leave. Once we secure the missing harvester sphere, we’ll come back to you.”
Carmen couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice. “You can’t do this. You said you wouldn’t. Mom? Mom!”
Sylvia Vincent wasn’t answering. The card had gone blank. Carmen threw it against a wall and curled up.
Her mother had lied. The Melded had lied. Again. They had no intention of helping Earth or the Framework. With She Who Waits catatonic, there was no way to warn the One or anyone else to prevent them from stealing the harvester. And without controls at her disposal, this section of the ship was a prison.
She sniffed and wiped her nose before trying to raise her mother again. If this was Sylvia’s last act, then at least Carmen could return to Earth. But she felt ice in her heart as she understood her mother needed her for something.
Access.
Somehow she and Jenna might still possess the key to the encryption, even though Carmen hadn’t been able to reestablish control with the harvester. Or was there more to why her mother would want to take her along on their mad charge against their faceless enemy?
The chance to make her mom whole again was slipping through her fingers. Even just consenting to a checkup with a human doctor on Earth might reveal something about her state of mind. Her mother trusted science, trusted medicine. But Carmen now understood she didn’t trust her own daughter.
She rose and picked up the card. It let out a feeble amount of light, which somehow felt comforting.
Step by step she returned to the first chamber. With her helmet off, the silence felt overwhelming. Unlike the shuttle, the Melded frigate, or the Framework, the harvester was soundless while not in motion. Maybe it was her ears. Being hard of hearing meant she was accustomed to quiet spaces. But now it felt crushing as she was left with little but the noise of her own breathing.
After a thorough examination of the console where the worm had pl
ugged itself in, she found no interface. Time was hard to track as she went down the next corridor to continue her search.
When the card flashed, she almost dropped it.
A triptych of images rolled past.
A stick figure holding a card. A stick figure dropping the card. A stick figure leaving the card and walking off screen.
The animation continued, left to right, top to bottom, the frames reconfiguring over and over and the speed adjusting as if by an impatient hand using a set of sliders they barely understood.
“Ovo, is that you?”
She watched the screen for a moment. The meaning was obvious. She was to drop the card and leave it.
“Why?” she asked.
The montage grew in size and kept flickering past.
“No. Talk to me. You gave me this thing so my mom could let me know she was screwing me over. Now tell me, what’s going on?”
The three images vanished. Three blank squares replaced them. The squares shifted. A few lines and shapes appeared before getting wiped. This happened a few more times as if Ovo, if it was really him, was unsure of how to draw something.
“Can’t you just say it? I don’t understand.”
But then the first frame was a decent two-dimensional line drawing of She Who Waits. The second frame was a shuttle. The next was the shuttle flying and docking with a sphere. This was quickly wiped away, replaced by a single frame of animation.
She Who Waits, along with a stick figure with a green eye, moving to meet a second stick figure.
“That’s you and She Who Waits, isn’t it? You’re coming to get me?”
The image vanished, replaced by the first animation. Hold the card, drop the card, leave the card.
Carmen examined it as if the card might reveal some unseen feature. She felt suddenly worried about what it might be. Hadn’t her mother told Ovo to give it to her? How could her mom miss their communication? Perhaps the device had a second nefarious purpose. The worm had showed it knew how to hack other races’ ships. And while the damage was done to the Cordice, they needed Carmen and wanted the harvester and had locked her there for more than the obvious reason of getting her out of the way.
Disposing of the glowing card meant returning to the dark hallways. She chose a direction. While she still couldn’t get her suit’s light on, the two primary rooms provided enough gloomy illumination that she at least wouldn’t walk into any walls. She left the card by the reactor before returning to the airlock.
“Now what?” she asked the silence.
She stared at the blackness outside. As the minutes passed, she wondered if Ovo’s messages were some new Melded ploy. Ovo had given her the stupid card, then asked her to ditch it and wait for rescue.
Let’s watch the human jump through hoops.
Her species couldn’t have a monopoly on cruel humor.
She kicked the airlock door and began pacing. Finally, she grew tired. Sat. Leaned against the wall. Noticed that her bladder was full and wondered where inside the harvester she might relieve herself.
The floor vibrated and a series of clicks preceded the arrival of a vessel attaching outside the airlock. Not the Melded. She Who Waits’ ship.
Carmen got up on her feet and stared through the airlock porthole. She realized she might need her helmet and pulled it on. The suit sealed up as the outer airlock door opened. Ovo’s thin frame floated to the door. His green eye peered through at her. It took a moment before the harvester’s hatch slid aside.
He wasn’t wearing a suit. His throat swelled. Was he talking? Carmen couldn’t hear his croaking sounds. He didn’t have any of his usual displays up, including the makeshift app he used for translation.
“Where’s She Who Waits?” Carmen asked.
He began drawing. The virtual stylus program appeared to be trying to autocorrect his air doodles and kept dropping in images, which he swiped away. His fingers were trembling.
Carmen leaned closer and tried to make sense of what he was doing. The screen grew larger. He dropped the image of the shuttle, the sphere, and a larger ship. Then he showed the shuttle racing off and out of the frame.
“Okay. We’re leaving.”
He was on her heels as she entered the airlock. Barely waited for the lock to open inside the shuttle. She Who Waits was still where she had been. Her colors remained black. Ovo led Carmen to the crash couch before racing forward.
But Carmen didn’t want to lie back down. “Wait up. You’re going to show me what you’re doing.”
She hadn’t seen the frontmost compartment past the center chamber before. With her suit on, she felt confident the harsh atmosphere wouldn’t affect her. Past the center hold, the front of the shuttle was little more than a cramped closet with a She Who Waits–sized ceiling.
Ovo crouched over a raised altar a quarter the size of the one in the rear bay. Attached were a few small devices that reminded Carmen of a circuit board with visible wiring and nodules that might have been soldered on.
He had hacked the elevator inside the Framework. Now it appeared he had done the same with the Dragoman shuttle. If he had managed to pilot it to rescue her using jury-rigged controls, she was impressed. He began working at a display.
“Can you talk to me? Tell me what’s happening. What was that card?”
He answered but looked distracted. One of the devices connected to the altar translated after a delay. “Besides a multipurpose communication tool, it was a relay for your biosignature. With it on your person, the former Primary wouldn’t need you to be present in case the encryption stands.”
He reached over and turned the translation device off. She had more questions, but let him work.
A screen appeared.
He glanced at it before looking at Carmen. Shapes were moving about. But it wasn’t an abstraction. She recognized the image of the Melded frigate zooming along past the arc of harvester spheres towards Earth. A line traced out the ship’s path before it. It would descend towards North America.
Carmen knew it would lead them to one place, and it wasn’t Area 51.
They were heading for Garden Village.
Home.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ovo had a winking light on the side of his head next to his artificial eye that kept flickering. He tapped it. It would stop for a moment before resuming blinking. Something or someone was demanding his attention.
Carmen tapped the translation device fixed to the altar. “What’s the plan?”
He pushed her hand away and began drawing on one of the virtual screens.
“No. Talk.”
He licked his lips. Made a vague gesture, as if frustrated. Something was wrong and she couldn’t wait for him to draw it out for them. Why didn’t he want to use his translator?
Carmen pointed to Earth on the display. “We have to go there.”
He began making croaking sounds.
“Yeah, I know. I want to understand you. Believe me, I do. I don’t know if I can trust you, but you came to get me and I want to think you’re trying to do right by me. But we have to go where they’re going. To my world. You can fly this thing. We have to catch up to them.”
She jabbed the Earth image again and stepped back into the doorway to see if he understood.
His throat swelled one last time before deflating. Then he opened two more screens and began entering a row of symbols. An elliptical line appeared which matched that of the Melded frigate. The shuttle started moving.
Carmen didn’t want to be standing once it gained momentum and hurried back to her couch. She could only hope Ovo knew what to do and would likewise be protected from whatever g’s they might experience in their pursuit of her mother.
Going home.
The pressures of flight and reentry intensified. If Carmen never set foot in space again, it would be too soon. However, the next fifteen minutes weren’t as taxing as she expected. She couldn’t decide if this was because of the Dragoman shuttle handling the maneuver well or
because Ovo was an excellent pilot. Perhaps she was just growing accustomed to it.
Would they catch up with the Melded before they made it to the hospital where she had left the sphere? She assumed that was where they had to be going. The worm didn’t seem like the kind of person who would bother with any type of formalities. There would be no Melded meet-and-greet at Area 51.
Her mother remained the unknown factor.
Perhaps she had spoken with Earth and had convinced them that the Melded came in peace. Made them promises like she had with Carmen. Carmen had a nasty taste in her mouth thinking about what those promises might be. More deception. Sylvia Vincent was a Melded now, whether by choice or by her new nature. The chance for Carmen to make her mother whole had slipped through her fingers. Now she could do little but try to stop her from spoiling both Earth’s and the Framework’s chances for survival.
The harvester remained the key, but Carmen did not know what she could accomplish if they locked her out of the ship.
She stared at the ceiling until she couldn’t take not knowing where they were and whether they had gotten close to catching up with the Melded or had fallen behind.
Rising carefully, she made her way forward, moving hand over hand as she steadied herself. It felt like trying to walk down the aisle of a jumbo jet during turbulence. As she passed the first altar and She Who Waits, she almost jumped when the translator’s shell went from black to gray.
A pulse of diamonds rose inside She Who Waits’ suit, followed by a new color Carmen hadn’t seen before: a reddish pink.
From the front of the shuttle, Ovo screeched. A series of exclamations followed that Carmen could only interpret as pure panic.
“What’s happening?” Carmen cried. But she didn’t want to leave She Who Waits’ side. “Ovo is flying your shuttle. He’s helping us.”
When She Who Waits spoke, her voice sounded hollow and distant. “Designate bioform Melded has gained unauthorized access to this vessel. I have reassumed control.”
“I needed him to. You weren’t awake and he came and rescued me. We’re trying to catch up with the Melded frigate before they steal the harvester. If you don’t want him piloting your ship, then you do it.”