She could survive without arms. Limbs could be regenerated. She could not survive without her internal organs or her brain. He could not allow the shark to do that again. It was already too close to those vital parts of her.
Brai wedged two more of his own arms between its teeth and pressed down, ignoring the pain of the sharp teeth piercing his skin. He would sacrifice his own arms to save her if he had to.
His beak hit bone, sending a jolt through his body. He kept hacking blindly at the long, wide portion of the shark’s head. It wasn’t enough.
Another of his arms reached for one of the animal’s eyes. Just… there. He raked his barbs over one eye. This malevolent creature would never hunt properly again.
The creature jerked and spasmed. It released her. He saw her fall away, limp, to the surface of the continental shelf.
He was torn. Should he try to finish this thing off, to make sure it wouldn’t come for them again as he carried her back to the ship? Or should he go for her—protect her from any other creatures that might take advantage of her weakened state?
Then there was the problem of his own limbs still stuck in the thing’s mouth.
The shark dove over the cliff on the side of the continental shelf, taking Brai with it. It was moving fast. They were already too far away from Pio.
What if there were more of them down there? He wrestled, desperately prying his limbs from its mouth.
It gnashed its jaws and suddenly Brai broke free. He threw out his arms to slow down.
He saw something long and narrow falling away, still writhing spasmodically. The shark swerved to scoop it up and was gone almost instantly. It had what it wanted. One of Pio’s arms.
Brai surged up and over the cliff, directly to the last place he’d seen her.
She was gone.
His hearts palpitated out of sequence. Pain was beginning to set in. He fought to segment it away, but he’d lost a lot of blood. He was becoming weaker by the minute, and his thought processes were affected by the drain on his body. His squillae were doing what they could to minimize the damage, but there was so much.
He darted jerkily in one direction and then another, calling out to her. Had some scavenger carried her off? Was she disoriented? Had she gone over the side of the cliff after him?
He stopped where he was. Anguish and fear were clouding his judgment. He had to think. Racing back and forth was wasting time.
She was wounded and hurting. He went back to where he’d seen her land, put himself in her place, and looked around again. Why was she silent? Where would she go to hide?
He saw a crevice between two rocks, just large enough to slip into. He slid an arm in and instantly tasted her blood again. Then more pain. She was lashing out in blind terror. It was the most primitive form of self-protection. He ignored it and slid between the rocks himself, blanketing her mind with calm reassurances.
She stilled. He gathered her up and crept back out of the small space, darting looks in every direction. It seemed safe enough, but he should hurry. That shark might have comrades that were just as hungry as it had been.
He filled his mantle full to bursting and jetted directly toward the hatch of his own ship. Jane was already watching. She knew what was happening. She was rushing her crew back to the ship. She’d have Ajaya and Schlewan ready to help when he arrived. They would know what to do. He just had to get her into the diagnostic bubble.
Pio was catatonic. She sagged in his grasp, creating drag.
He pushed and pushed more. With each surge toward the hatch, he felt his resources diminishing.
Perhaps it would have been better to remain hidden in that cleft and let the squillae mitigate the damage instead of risking flight. But if they couldn’t save her, that would have doomed her, and he couldn’t have entertained that possibility.
If he ever left the ship again, he would need a weapon to be used against local wildlife. He would never be so arrogant again, to think he was safe out there with only his natural defenses to protect himself—and her. What foolishness. Alan would be able to modify something for him to use…
His energy was flagging, his mantle fluttering instead of properly filling.
He would rest a moment.
His eyes rolled around. He forced them back into alignment and warily scanned the area. The shark might come back for more.
A large shape loomed ahead.
He lurched into a defensive position, curling his arms around Pio next to his own mantle.
Jane was calling to him.
His eyes refocused again. It wasn’t the shark. What was it?
Large, brown, sympathetic eyes. Curious eyes. It was Pio’s marine mammal, the one that foraged in the seagrasses not far from shore. It was herbivorous, so not a threat. He relaxed slightly.
He was on the verge of losing consciousness himself. He struggled to stay awake.
The animal swam circles around him. It had a spindle-shaped body with a wide, downturned mouth covered in thick whiskers, and a pair of tusks curled up and around in comical swirling shapes on either side of its head. What a silly-looking creature.
It nudged him. He startled back to wakefulness.
Obnoxious git.
He peered into its mind and was perplexed by what he saw there. He could only get a glimpse of purpose from something so primitive. It was on a kind of mission… it… A wave of fear pushed him to sluggish alert. The creature was fending off small scavenging fish that were after him and Pio, but it was getting overwhelmed as the number of the fish steadily increased.
He lashed out with his tentacles, slashing their bodies and pulling fish after fish to his beak to end each threat. His new companion kept most of them off him by blocking their path with its body and swatting them away with its massive tail.
He’d never noticed these carnivorous fish before. But then, he’d never been bleeding in open water.
They worked together until the fish were all either dead or dispersed. He found the energy to fill his mantle again and pushed toward the ship, which he realized he could now see in the distance.
Jane was coming. She was walking across the ocean floor toward him in battle armor, along with most of the crew. He felt her presence growing stronger.
The marine mammal kept pace with him. Brai sent it a feeling of gratitude, though he wasn’t sure it understood the concept. It answered by finding purchase on his body and using its own propulsion to assist in pushing him in the direction of his ship. Its mind was fixated on getting him and Pio back there safely. It seemed odd that this previously timorous individual would have so much empathy for a stranger, but he wasn’t going to question its motives. It may have saved his and Pio’s lives.
He just kept pushing doggedly. These waters were far more dangerous than he and Pio had ever suspected. They’d been so naive.
And then Jane was there with help. She hugged his mantle against her body, barely able to hold him, with his limbs flowing behind them. The suit gave her the strength to move fast against the friction of the water, and she bounced her way to the egress portal the pligan workers had made for him. He managed to tell her the marine mammal was friendly and note that someone else was carrying Pio before he fell into unconsciousness.
13
October 13, 2017
GETTING home during rush hour on crowded buses wasn’t as easy as her trip out to Hilliard had been, but at least now she didn’t look like she was playing hooky. She was just a kid going somewhere after school. She ended up riding one bus for its entire route before she realized it was the wrong line and she had to get off again and wait for another.
She couldn’t remember ever being this hungry before. Some of the other passengers were taking food home to their families, and the buses smelled of the comfort food and spices of many different traditions. Despite the ambient noise of the crowded bus, a person next to her guffawed when her stomach protested really loudly. She got off, walked about five blocks wearily toward home, and then saw the bus s
he’d just gotten off rumble past as she got close to her own house.
She braced herself. Her parents were going to be livid that she hadn’t come straight home from school. It was late. Really late.
She opened the door and immediately heard her mother gasp from the kitchen. Then Mama appeared. “Zara! Oh my Lord, girl!”
Mama rushed her, wrapped her arms around her tight, and started rocking back and forth, crying. “Thank God, thank God,” she repeated over and over again. “I gotta call your father.” She loosened her grip enough to dial the phone. “She’s home. She’s safe. Okay. Okay. Bye.” Then she was being squeezed again.
Zara just blinked. This wasn’t how she’d thought this would go.
Suddenly her mom pushed her to arm’s length, with a vicelike grip on her upper arms. “Start talking.”
This was what she’d expected.
She began as she’d planned. “I’m sorry, Mama. I got lost.”
Mama’s eyes widened. Her chin went down. “You got lost? On the way to school? How?”
She almost missed the detail. In her fear, hunger, and exhaustion, she almost went ahead with the lie she’d rehearsed. Now she scrambled to reformulate and decided to stick as close to the truth as possible.
They knew she hadn’t gone to school today. She didn’t know why that possibility had never even entered her mind.
“I—I went to the bus stop and the mean kids were there, pushing each other around. I freaked out. I’m sorry. I didn’t want them to pick on me. I thought I’d hold back, wait until I saw the bus coming, then run and get on, but I—I didn’t make it.”
“You didn’t make it?” Her mother’s tone was flat, unbelieving.
“So, I knew you were sleeping. I thought I’d just take a city bus to school or walk or something…”
“That’s too far to walk alone!”
“I know. So I got on a bus, but it was the green line. I thought the green line went by my school, but it went to Hilliard. Then I…” She pulled the tattered pamphlet from her jeans pocket. “I…I got on…” She screwed up her face and sort of traced her finger around on a couple of different lines. She really had been confused on the way home. She really had gotten on the wrong bus. This wasn’t hard to fake. It was mostly true.
Her stomach protested again. A long, loud gurgle, lending some credence to her distress.
Tears started streaming down her face. She was so tired. So hungry. “I haven’t had any food since breakfast! I’ve been trying to get home all day!”
Her mother looked surprised and then sympathetic. “Are you okay, baby? Did anyone touch you?”
“I’m okay, Mama. No one bothered me.”
“But why didn’t you call?”
She was sobbing now. All the pent-up fear and frustration just poured out. “I kept thinking I had it figured out. I thought I’d just be tardy. Then when I realized how late it got, I was just trying to get home. I was afraid to ask for help because I…I was scared.” Could her mom could even understand what she was saying?
The squeezing and rocking resumed. “You can trust women with children. You know that. You should have asked another mama for help, baby.”
And that was that. Her dad brought home burgers and fries. She stuffed her face while they watched, both of them looking sort of shell-shocked.
They said they thought she’d been kidnapped. They said words like nightmare and afraid. They’d been searching for her all day long. She had to promise over and over not to do something like that again, promise to call, promise to ask for help if she needed it.
And there would be no more bus rides with bullies. Her dad would drive her to school on his way to work and her mom would pick her up. Or maybe they’d find a carpool. She felt guilty about that because she could tolerate the bus rides. She really could. But now that she’d terrified them, they would do anything to protect her.
She felt guilty about all of it, actually. Her remorse was real. Her mom had called in sick to work and hadn’t slept all day. Her dad had left work early to drive around town. She’d caused a lot of grief without even thinking about the harm her actions would cause. She hoped it was worth it.
After dinner, they insisted she sit with them on the sofa to watch TV. She sat sandwiched between them and they both kept squeezing her like they couldn’t believe she was real.
It was surprisingly nice, a reaffirmation that she was important to them. While she normally felt like she wanted more space, more freedom, to be treated like an adult—this, in this moment, felt good.
She’d scared herself a little, too, with what she’d done, with how far she’d been willing to go. Being treated like a child after making grown-up decisions all day was… not as bad as she might have thought twenty-four hours prior. They had her back. That felt good.
The long, stressful day, the lack of sleep the night before, and the bellyful of french fries caught up with her. She dozed off in her parents’ arms, and her dad carried her to her bed and tucked her in like he’d done when she was just a little girl.
Her adventure was over.
14
ALAN FOLLOWED the rest of the crew up to the medical suite around Brai’s diagnostic bubble. Schlewan and Ajaya monitored the two squidsters closely while sanalabrium-like filaments tethered both of them, diagnosed them, and began to stitch up wounds, administer medications, and so on. They were both unconscious.
Looking at them drifting around in there, unmoving, sort of grayish, their blue blood still clouding the water in spurts occasionally, was unnerving. Frankly, they looked dead.
It was the damnedest thing how that shaggy manatee-looking animal with the enormous tusks had followed the crew through the hatch, all along the submerged corridors, then helped move Pio the short distance across the open habitat into the diagnostic bubble. Now it was sort of just hanging out, watching the whole process with big brown eyes, its long whiskers twitching occasionally. The bubble’s medical filaments just worked around it, and somehow it wasn’t getting all tangled up in there.
It seemed like it was touch and go for a while for Brai’s girlfriend. She’d lost an appendage, though they were both really beat up. They were lucky to be alive.
Jane looked calm enough. She stayed close, but out of the way, and waited patiently for reports from the docs. But he could see that tight little muscle in her jaw was clenched. She was seriously worried. He figured as long as she felt the need to stick around, he should too, despite the fact that all he wanted to do was collapse on their bed and sleep for three days. Moral support and all that.
They’d been concerned at first that their new manatee friend might die from being trapped in the habitat, and some time had been spent trying to coax the critter out, though it refused to budge. Marine mammals on Earth had to surface for air, but Huna volunteered that these animals didn’t have to do that. They had adaptations to use oxygen sparingly and store large quantities of it in specialized hemoglobin structures in their blood, and they had rudimentary gills. Though they foraged in the sea grass near the shore, they were rarely seen at the surface of the oceans of Pliga. So, the crew left him or her in there.
“They’re both stable. We’ll only see improvement from here,” Schlewan announced.
Jane looked directly at Ajaya, who nodded agreement. Jane seemed to sag with relief.
“There is an anomaly I’d like to study further, however. It’s unrelated to the accident,” Schlewan said.
“What is it?” Jane asked quickly.
Ajaya put a hand on Jane’s arm. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“No, no, no. Not worrisome at all. Just curious.” Schlewan pulled up images of both squids’ brains on a nearby monitor. “I noticed a change immediately with Ei’Brai during his initial scans, so I pulled Ei’Pio’s files from the Oblignatus to compare, and what I’ve found is fascinating. Both kuboderans have experienced significant growth in the Tuvold Region, the area of their brains used for anipraxic communication.”
She placed transparent before images over the after images with the affected areas highlighted. The difference was shocking. He could see it with the naked eye. In just one two-dimensional slice of one of the brains, there had to be at least a fifty percent increase in size.
Jane studied the images carefully. “What could cause changes like this?”
Schlewan looked back at Jane blankly. “That is unknown, but in all my years working in the sectilian fleet I never saw Tuvold Regions of this size, nor any variation in size or growth over the lifespan of a kuboderan individual past adolescence. Records in the database confirm this. This change is unprecedented.”
Alan asked, “They both have this at the same rate?”
Schlewan nodded once and pulled up three-dimensional renderings of both Tuvold Regions, a hologram that rotated in the air in front of them. “Ei’Brai has experienced a 74.832 percent increase in total area of this region. And Ei’Pio is at a 76.432 percent increase. It is unknown whether these regions are still growing or if the process has already stopped.”
Ajaya leaned in. “It could be due to dietary changes from eating a more natural diet. Or the alteration of the squillae code. Or possibly from having more freedom to move in a larger environment.”
Alan raised his eyebrows. “These guys were raised in captivity. It makes sense that this change is just bringing them closer to what a wild kuboderan looks like. We know animals in captivity can have all kinds of issues.”
Jane pivoted and looked Ryliuk squarely in the eyes. “What do you think?”
Ryliuk stiffened. “My work was exclusively with kuboderan paralarvae and adult individuals needing reconditioning in the fleet. I don’t know anything about their wild counterparts.”
Jane turned back to Schlewan and Ajaya. “What does this mean? Will they have more range or signal strength or something?”
Schlewan said, “I have been thinking it odd, odd, odd that Ei’Pio was able to communicate, even rudimentarily, with a nonsentient animal. I’ve never heard of such a thing occurring. I had thought it was merely a lack of opportunity. However, this change may have made it possible.”
Valence (Confluence Book 4) Page 10