Valence (Confluence Book 4)

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Jane unlatched the hatch and swung it open. “Not so bad at the moment,” she said.

  It was a short hop down and then thirty yards or so to the nearest structure with a ground egress point. The weather might be a little tamer today, but the wind still howled and sucked her breath away even when she was prepared for it.

  They’d placed a rope between the ship and the small elevator column so they wouldn’t get lost or separated. The wind often made it hard to see. Jane ducked her head and tried to keep her eyes open at a squint. She heard something behind her that sounded like a scream swallowed by the wind. She turned to see Ajaya and Alan engulfed in what looked like a purplish-brown tarp. It whipped violently around the edges. Ron was fighting to knock it loose.

  Jane grabbed another edge of it and joined him in an attempt to push it over their heads. It was thick, leathery material. Finally they worked it free. For a second, it started to lift Jane into the air, like a parachute. Then Ron let go, and before she could do the same, it whipped savagely in her grip and tore off, leaving her left arm red and sore, with a chunk of the material still in her hand.

  She shouted, “Everyone okay?”

  Everyone was nodding. They finished the trek across and into the glasslike structure. As soon as they were through the opening, there was instant relief from the wind. Pausing a moment to catch her breath, Jane looked down at the leathery material she still held. There was something wet glistening at the broken edges of it. She held it up to her nose and sniffed. Floral and sugary with an aniselike note. She turned it over and noticed one side was paler than the other and had thick veins. This had to be a piece of one of the Tree’s leaves. She frowned and set it down in a corner to pick up on the way back. She couldn’t know if carrying it around might give offense, and it seemed wise to be careful. The Tree seemed to have mystical, almost religious significance to the pligans. But she did want to take it back to the ship for Schlewan to analyze.

  There was something very special about this tree.

  2

  BRAI ROAMED the ocean in the vicinity of the Speroancora with Pio, extending their range in one direction or another with each excursion. They jetted in surges and then drifted, taking in what the locale offered, stopping frequently to hunt for food.

  A lumbering marine mammal followed them sometimes as they moved through the bay to get to the open ocean. Timid, it would remain just out of reach until something else caught its interest or it got hungry and went away. Pio sometimes devoted an hour to coaxing it closer, stimulating the primitive anipraxic structures in its tiny brain.

  Though the animal wasn’t sentient enough to carry on a conversation, it was an interesting exercise in interspecies communication and patience. Pio had made some progress with it, as she was being exceedingly gentle, and it did seem the comical-looking animal was growing bolder and venturing a little closer to them as the days passed. A couple of times it had even seemed to invite Pio to play, though when she’d tried, the skittish animal had vanished. They hadn’t seen the animal yet today, but he could tell Pio was keeping her eye out for it. She’d noticed an old wound on one of its fins, which worried her. She felt that it swam even more awkwardly than it was supposed to.

  Brai’s first impression of Pio, that she was timid and skittish, couldn’t have been more wrong. That had been circumstance. Pio’s primary personality trait was kindness. She had a great capacity for caring, but could be fierce when necessary. Her thoughts were full of curiosity and warmth. Their differences delighted him.

  Pio preferred the flavor of a certain species of fish, and they often sought it out. If the fish had a name on Pliga, neither of them had any way of learning it. If it had a color, they had no way of knowing that either. Pliga’s red sun mostly emitted longer wavelengths of light that were unable to penetrate sea water very deeply. In the upper layers they sometimes saw brightly colored fish, but with any depth they had to rely on their finely honed visual acuity, evolved for deep, dark waters on some distant unknown world, and enhanced by their cybernetics and nanites.

  Here, the ocean was already dark, cold, and mysterious. It was exciting and invigorating. These excursions evoked buried memories of watching his sectilian crews go off on science expeditions in the past—except this time he was the one doing the exploring.

  On some deep feral level he relished it.

  He stayed alert but felt little fear. After months of these outings, they’d yet to encounter any dangerous predators. They’d seen a colossal plankton-sifting beast, but it had ignored them. It had not been sentient. Most of the creatures they’d come across were relatively small and innocuous.

  Brai sensed movement in his peripheral vision and redirected his funnel to turn and look. Pio had already taken off in that direction. As he got closer he could see that it was a school of her favorite fish. He held back to watch her, as he had no interest in catching any for himself.

  She held herself in a compact, torpedo-shaped form, letting a bolus of water through her siphon peter out slowly so that her momentum pushed her into the middle of the school in a nonthreatening manner. She opened her arms ever so slightly and deployed her tentacles lightning quick, before the fish even knew she was among them. They scattered, most of them never knowing why the school had dispersed, only the panic communicated through the movement of the others around them. The enormous school reformed nearby, where Pio took a few more in the same manner. She repeated this process until she’d had her fill.

  She rejoined him, her mind full of satiety and pleasure, and they continued on toward a continental shelf where Brai sometimes hunted for crustaceans or jellies, though truth be told he was relying more and more on his bland premade nutriment now that his facilities had been repaired.

  He struggled with his conscience daily whenever hunger pangs struck. On one hand, the premade food was convenient, easy, and nutritionally complete. It was technology used in a positive way to make his life simple so his energies could be expended on higher-level thinking and complex actions that his wild brethren probably could not even conceptualize.

  On the other hand, eating it seemed like acquiescence, complaisance, a betrayal of his own people. The sectilian rations had become a symbol to him of the forced confinement, the lack of personal freedoms—all the way down to the banishment of his very emotions.

  And then there was the fact that eating wild food required killing. It required breaking of protective shells, rending of flesh, spilling of lifeblood, and crunching of bones. He had some difficulty getting past that. The animals he took were not capable of the kind of complicated action or thought that he was, but did that make them any less deserving of life? Was he so important that he could take life because he was hungry?

  It was all jumbled up with Kai’Memna’s message. What did a kuboderan want? What did a kuboderan need or deserve? Was it a privilege to be taken and trained as a gubernaviti as they’d been told, or was it a prison?

  Perhaps these questions were moot now. The vast fleet of Sectilius was gone, though many others of his kind were used in other ships all over the galaxy, originally sold on the black market by a less scrupulous sectilian individual and bred in captivity centuries prior. Some of those kuboderans could be living under better circumstances than he had been, but it seemed probable to him that most were not.

  In all likelihood Kai’Memna had found and destroyed the world where sectilian mind masters trained captive kuboderan paralarvae. Perhaps he had even found the kuboderan home world. Brai wondered if that knowledge had died with Kai’Memna or if he’d shared it with any others. He intended to ask Jane to survey the wreckage of the Portacollus to look for any surviving databanks.

  Jane still intended to seek out any marooned kuboderans remaining scattered around the galaxy and give them the choice to find their own crews or take a human or sectilian Quasador Dux once Alan set them free by breaking the yoke. Kai’Memna had done such a thorough job, however, that Brai wondered if there even were any others still out t
here, trapped, as he had been for so long. Brai had been spared Kai’Memna’s impossible choice of joining his genocidal movement or death, but that was only by sheer coincidence. The secrecy surrounding Terra had kept the Speroancora’s location out of the official record, and the planet’s remote location had prevented accidental discovery.

  Brai hadn’t realized he’d stopped moving, completely lost in thought and unaware of his surroundings, until he saw Pio’s large, unblinking eye loom near his own. One of her arms reached out to him and she used the smooth side to caress his mantle. The rest of her arms curled around the both of them gracefully.

  “Distraction could be dangerous in these waters, Brai,” Pio said.

  A cloud of bioluminescent plankton drifted around them. The pink light they emitted reflected off her silvery skin. He twined one of his thick arms around one of her more-delicate limbs and savored the intimacy. He was unsure if this kind of contact was natural for his species, but they both liked it. He and Pio had learned this kind of warmth from their contact with sectilians and humans.

  Alien wants and needs had become their own.

  After much reflection into his more base urges, he was fairly certain now: mating among wild kuboderans involved blind attraction by pheromones, bumping into another individual in the dark, a moment of panic and uncertainty that the individual was actually of the opposite sex, grappling violently with all eight arms and both tentacles to maneuver the female until she was beak to beak, stabbing blindly with one’s terminal organ and hydraulically injecting spermatophores into her arms as she fought to break free. Each wormlike spermatophore contained thousands of spermatozoa and, like a parasite, would burrow even deeper into her flesh, releasing chemicals to trigger her reproductive organs to mature ovum.

  Humans would call that act rape, and they’d be right.

  It was distasteful. Thankfully he had more self-control and rational thought than that. He would not do that to her.

  What he had with Pio was gentle and safe. They worked together, shared thoughts and emotions and…this. This tenderness. Perhaps it wasn’t kuboderan. Perhaps it was better. They’d become something greater through their contact with other species. This act of cultural appropriation could be forgiven, he thought. Though it was nothing like the recreational lovemaking Jane shared with Alan—there was no burst of intense pleasure to culminate their moments together—it was enough. It was contentment, and that was so much more than either of them had ever had before.

  Soon the pligans would finish the repair work on both of the ships, and the two of them would be separated. This brief vacation would be over and he’d be isolated once again. He had mixed feelings about that.

  “We’ll be useful. We will do good,” she said, picking up his train of thought. He kept himself open to her now as a matter of habit. Once they’d gotten past that first hurdle of trust, it’d been easy. She was as transparent as glass. Her memories, her musings, her dreams and nightmares, all of it. She’d borne as much pain as he had over the centuries. Probably more. She was a lovely mosaic of warmth.

  They were healing each other. They were each learning who they truly were without a yoke constricting their every movement, their every thought. They were maturing into themselves.

  “We could stay here,” he said, though they both knew he didn’t mean it.

  “And strand Jane?”

  “After Jane warns Terac. We could come back. She’d let me go.”

  “She would. That’s true,” Pio agreed. There was melancholy in her mental touch, a strand of wondering what it could be like. He latched on to that. He wanted to pretend, at least for a while, that something like this bliss could last.

  “Some might say this, here, is true freedom,” he said.

  But he’d tainted it. He couldn’t help it.

  “Kai’Memna said that.” She ground her beak. Brai had hurt her unintentionally. “Freedom is not at the bottom of a gravity well. Not for us. We’ve been changed. We need the stars. We need a community. Even Kai’Memna wouldn’t give up his ship for the taste of fish.”

  He conceded silently and turned his gaze away from her in shame. It was selfish to want it all. To want both her and Jane.

  “They need you,” she said softly, turning him back toward her. “Besides, give us a couple of decades down here and we’d get so bored, we’d tear each other apart.”

  He didn’t believe that. “They need both of us.”

  Her mental laugh was a tinkle. “That’s debatable. I’m extraneous. But hopefully I’ll serve a purpose eventually.”

  “You saved all of us,” he admonished. She needed to be reminded of her worth, so she wouldn’t despair. She’d lost too much.

  “I had to.”

  The statement hung heavily between them. Pio feared being stranded alone more than anything else in the universe.

  He didn’t blame her. They shared that fear.

  3

  October 12, 2017

  Two weeks after Jane Holloway’s Global Announcement

  ZARA HAMPTON silently thanked the house once again for the squeaky floorboard in the hallway just outside the family room. She closed the laptop silently, slid the afghan over it, and opened a waiting paperback book toward the last third of its pages—all in one fluid, practiced motion. The television squealed in the background, some silly cartoon that kids her age supposedly liked. It was good cover.

  Her mother stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching her.

  Zara pretended she didn’t know that her mother was there, her eyes darting over the pages, mimicking reading. What she was really thinking about was the last private message she’d gotten from Becky before shutting the laptop, cajoling her to stop chickening out and download something alien related from her dad’s laptop already.

  She wished she’d never told a soul her dad worked for NASA.

  It was creating unwanted pressure from her friends, both online and IRL. She felt like she was being ganged up on. They wouldn’t let go of the idea, were sure it would be easy for her to accomplish.

  She was less sure. She’d never tried to steal anything from her parents before. Could she really do it? Was it even possible? Was it really harmless? Would it make her a bad daughter? Would she survive the guilt? What would happen if she was caught?

  “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

  Zara jumped. She’d already kinda forgotten Mom was there. “Hm?”

  “Dinner.”

  Zara blinked and picked up her bookmark, careful not to move too much under her mother’s scrutiny, fearful she might inadvertently reveal what she’d actually been doing. Her daily time online was tightly restricted to a desktop in the open-concept living room where her parents could watch the screen. They didn’t know she’d found this run-down old laptop in the hall closet. It had been miserably slow before she’d run a disk refrag, reset it to factory settings using online tutorials, and removed all bloatware and unnecessary programs.

  It was much better now—adequate for social media, messaging, surfing the Web, reading free e-books, watching the occasional cat video—and most importantly checking online news sites.

  It was necessary. Mainstream media were unreliable. Everyone online said so. The media toed the government line, only gave out information the government wanted the public to see. She could see the evidence for this in her own home every day, because it was clear her dad knew something no one else did. She could see it in his face, in his reactions to anything anybody said when the topic inevitably strayed to current events. Most of the rest of the world seemed very, very confused though. It was easy to see why.

  “What are we having?”

  “Oh, sweetie. It’s your dad’s night to cook. You know what we’re having.” Her mom chuckled.

  “Stir-fry.” Zara scrunched up her face. “Not too spicy?”

  “Nope. I didn’t let him put in any sriracha. He can add it to his own.” The last was tossed over her mother’s shoulder as she headed back down the
hall.

  Squeak.

  Zara slipped off the couch, silently sliding the laptop underneath to retrieve after dinner, if possible. The battery life was terrible and it needed to be recharged. She’d have to smuggle it into her bedroom tonight to do that, which was normally easy to do. She headed for the kitchen and heard her mother say, “Nose in a book again.”

  “Like mother, like daughter,” her dad replied. He was probably smiling.

  On impulse Zara turned back to her backpack, which lay propped against the couch, and unzipped the tiny front compartment. She fished out a thumb drive her mother had bought her for school that she hadn’t used yet. It probably wouldn’t have enough storage to save a big file, but she had to try. If this didn’t work, she’d have to find a way to buy a 1 TB drive and try again.

  She slipped the drive into the front pocket of her jeans. If the opportunity arose, she would take it. She wouldn’t lose her nerve. She’d do it and she knew how. She’d been watching him. He always set his ID card on the counter with his keys alongside the tiny black notebook where he kept his passwords written down because NASA made him change them so frequently that he couldn’t keep track of them any other way. Her heart sped up, and a jangly, uneasy feeling put some tension in her muscles.

  As she entered the kitchen, her dad held up the remote and turned off the evening news. There was a scowl on his face as he picked up the still-sizzling wok to carry into the dining room. They didn’t want her to see the turmoil the world was in, but it was all over the internet and it was all anyone talked about, even thirteen-year-old kids. She played along because there was no other option. They had good intentions but they couldn’t really shelter her from it. It was far too big.

  “Hey, Daddy,” Zara said, feeling twinges of fear and guilt pinching her insides as she wrapped her arms around her dad’s waist and gave him a quick squeeze. He protested, holding the hot wok well away from his body. She ignored that and grabbed the pitcher of iced tea to carry into the dining room, noting that Dad’s laptop was still open on the counter, having gone into screensaver mode. It was out of the line of sight of the dining-room table. And there was his ID card and that little black notebook.