Valence (Confluence Book 4)

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Feig and Ouvaq returned while Jane was composing her reply to the requests for exception to the blockade. Celui then showed her how they’d been sorting her correspondence and why he felt that some messages should be answered before others. He gave her a lot of insight into how pelimarians viewed galactic politics. After several hours of work, she rose to go meet Ajaya for lunch in the crew cafeteria. Ajaya would want to know whether she’d heard anything yet from Darcy. She hadn’t. She asked the pelimarians, “Would you like to accompany me?”

  The three exchanged enigmatic looks as they got to their feet. Feig replied, “We will join you shortly. We need a small rest in our rooms first.”

  Jane was instantly uncomfortable again. She glanced over her shoulder as she left the bridge to see the three of them converging, and the affectionate petting she’d noted when they arrived resuming.

  35

  ALAN SPRINTED FOR THE BRIDGE. Something interesting was going down and he didn’t want to miss a second. “What kind of ship? Who is it?”

  “The captain appears to be terran,” Pio replied. “And I believe this is not someone you already know.”

  “Is Ron already talking to them?”

  “He is.”

  “You’re sure they aren’t nintergertewhoever? Or—what’s that other race that looks kinda like us? Nieblic?”

  “They used the word ‘human.’”

  “Holy shit.” He hit the symbol for the bridge level on the deck transport. How many humans were there out here? And even weirder—how did they find the Obli?

  He arrived on the bridge along with everyone else to see the girl Jane had been looking for up on the viewscreen. Apparently she’d found her.

  Ron turned slightly. “Hey. Everybody, this is Darcy Eberhardt. She’s also from Earth.”

  “What did I miss?” Alan said.

  “Not much,” Ron said with a grin. “Captain Eberhardt brought us a message from Jane.”

  Alan nodded. “So Jane tracked you down?”

  “She did. And you can call me Darcy. But before we get into chit-chat, I think you better watch this.” Darcy leaned forward and tapped on a console. Jane came up on-screen. Her message was brief and to the point. Kai’Memna was publicly plotting revenge and likely knew exactly where the Obli was. Jane wanted them to pack up and leave.

  “Damn,” Ron muttered.

  Alan rubbed the back of his neck. “Here we go again.”

  “You have a wormhole drive, right?” Darcy said anxiously.

  Ron leaned against a console, squeezing his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. “We do, but we’re not going anywhere.”

  “Is something wrong with your ship?” she asked. “Because I’ve got plenty of room. I can’t take you to Terac, but I can give you a ride to a hub or something—”

  Ron shook his head. “No. We’re in the middle of an important project. We can’t leave it untended.”

  She looked confused. “This is an abandoned planet.”

  Ron nodded. “It’s a long story. Basically we’re growing something that we hope will protect Earth from a pretty severe threat.”

  Darcy looked surprised. “Oh.”

  Ron’s eyes flicked back and forth. “Do you have any idea how many ships he’s bringing with him, what types, when we can expect him?”

  Her face went blank. Alan knew that look. She was connecting with her kuboderan to ask for more information. She came back to herself and said, “My kuboderan got the feeling that his plans were impending. My kuboderan and yours are exchanging information now.”

  “Thank you. We appreciate the heads-up. I’d love to talk to you more, but you better make yourself scarce. This guy is—”

  Her chin jutted out a little bit. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Ron opened his mouth to speak but she cut him off again.

  “I know this ship looks like a cracker hauler, but it’s not. I have a crapton of weapons. I also have a co-captain who is no stranger to combat.” Darcy waved to someone offscreen, who came forward. “This is Hain.”

  Alan blinked. Hain was a goddamn plant. Now he’d seen everything.

  “Greetings,” Hain said breathily.

  “If Earth is in danger and you’ve got some project that will help, I’m all in,” Darcy said defiantly. “And my crew is with me. We knew we were taking a risk coming out here, and we’re ready to fight. When I get to go home I want the Earth I know to still be there.”

  “If I may, Qua’dux?” Pio interrupted.

  “Go ahead, Pio,” Ron said.

  “After conferring with Do’Vela, I must conclude the Vermachten is a match for the Portacollus. It’s small but well armored and boasts considerable armament.”

  Ron looked up. “If I could shake your hand, I would. We’ll definitely talk more soon. But for now, I think we’d better work on battening down the hatches.”

  “Good enough,” Darcy said. “I’m sending an encryption code now. Any further communication should take place on this channel, but encrypted.” She started to reach for a control.

  “Hey,” Alan said, taking a step forward. “If this goes horribly wrong, you’ll get word to Jane in Terac, won’t you?”

  “You bet.” The screen went blank.

  36

  March 23, 2027

  Ten years after Jane Holloway’s Global Announcement

  ZARA CLOSED her eyes as the countdown timer started from ten. She forced herself to breathe evenly in an attempt to calm her nerves. These simulations felt real and there was a lot riding on them.

  Her future. On a ship. Like Jane.

  The enlistment requirements were savage. The simulation she was about to undergo was designed for a position she was overqualified for, but that didn’t matter. Everyone in the engineering track went through this one whether they were training to be an officer or a specialist. You had to prove you knew your stuff.

  A decade had passed since the MSTEM program had started, since she’d taken that trip to the library in Hilliard. She was twenty-three and had just defended her dissertation a few weeks prior: “Sectilian Metamaterials: Feasibility of Manufacture and Potential Applications.” She’d completed officer-training coursework and the special basic training session designed for M Scholars. She was just beginning life as a full-time NASA employee.

  While she’d been busy studying, the world had come together like never before to build a fleet. The truth had begun to seep into the collective unconscious. There was a big universe out there. The Sectilius had clearly documented threats to their own worlds and their colonies. As Mensententia became more common than even Chinese, Spanish, or English as a world language, more and more individuals had read the sectilian download.

  People began to demand that Earth build its own defense. The momentum was slow to build, but grew in intensity as Ms grew up and lent their adult voices to the conversation.

  Earth was vulnerable. Suddenly a fleet became a top priority. It was the will of the people, though many governments—and Western governments in particular—continued to drag their feet and deny that there was really a threat.

  The funding for materials and labor came from corporations, private donors, crowdfunding, and—in lesser amounts—international governments. Early on, someone with deep pockets had the presence of mind to stipulate their donation would only go forward if the ships were built free of national borders and influence.

  It was a global fleet, an Earth United fleet, not divided by or representing individual nations. The population of Earth watched as the shipyards were set up. A new international committee had oversight. Exchanges were created so that no one culture dominated any single geographical building site. A new Earth United military was being formed, an amalgam of the world’s armed forces to serve within this fleet.

  The first four starships took four years to build in pieces on the ground. During that time a space elevator was erected near the equator in the Pacific Ocean to get the individual sections to Low Earth Orbit for assembly
using the robotic arms of the International Space Station. Over the next few years a larger space station was constructed at the top of the space elevator to assemble and service these ships, and eight more ships were scheduled for construction. In the end, they would have a total of four large, heavily armored dreadnoughts and eight smaller cruisers.

  The first twelve ships were built mostly to sectilian specifications with minor deviations. But plans were under way, even before work began, to redesign them, improve upon them as only humans could. This was reflected initially in the new-and-improved sectilian shuttlecraft, which was reconfigured to perform more like a fighter plane than a jumbo jet.

  Earth was united in a common goal as it never had been before. National identity had its place—it helped to define an individual—but the emerging language of Earth was Mensententia, and a united Earth was beginning to be ready to defend itself should the need arise.

  And Zara wanted to be a part of that.

  When the counter hit zero, all hell would break loose and she’d be performing a role as junior engineer in a scenario on a replica of one of the sectilian ships Earth had built. It was a test.

  Rumor had it that simulation scores were the final determining factor in whether or not an M got assigned to a ship or was stationed on the ground. And being stationed on the ground was no guarantee that an M would even be working on these projects anymore. Danny Jarvik, who at age fifteen had created the nanites using sectilian tech that had turned all of the Ms’ hair purple across the globe, had been “loaned” to a big pharmaceutical company for research and development. He’d written a blog post describing how he got poached. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t have any recourse. He was basically indentured because of documents they’d all signed when they joined. Fine print. Fine print allowed the government to choose a life for them.

  Zara had been among the first humans to lay eyes on the blueprints for these interstellar ships. She’d worked on them since she was thirteen years old. She knew them inch by inch, inside and out. She’d watched them being built in stages over live cameras online and marveled at how beautifully they’d come to be. She’d held her breath as the pieces were lifted to Low Earth Orbit via the space elevator in the Pacific. And now she had a chance to live and work on one.

  A buzzer sounded. She opened her eyes and scanned all the primary system readouts on her console. Everything was nominal, as the American astronauts had traditionally said. But it wasn’t nominal for long.

  The deck vibrated under her feet. The lighting changed to a red tone. A klaxon broadcast over the ship’s speakers. Orders came down from the captain, and Zara was given a task by her commanding officer: reroute power to exclude a damaged area so that repairs could safely begin.

  She double-checked her console to verify the source of the problem and then strode swiftly, trying to appear unruffled but quick, to one of the main electrical-conduit bays. The door slid open under her hand. On a sectilian ship, these would include parallel neural-electric pathways, a network of special synthetic neural channels allowing ship information to be transferred to a kuboderan’s cybernetics almost instantly. But humans didn’t have access to kuboderans, so these ships contained only electrical conduits.

  It was a simple task if you knew the ship as well as she did. That’s what she thought at first. She pulled a tool from its convenient casing nearby and quickly punched in a bypass code that would allow her to loosen the connection and reroute power away from the damaged area of the ship so that someone in that section could start work without fear of electrocution.

  The tool wouldn’t budge. Someone had torqued the conduit housing down hard. Completely unnecessarily. The outer housing had nothing to do with the connection. It was just an additional safety feature.

  She knew that rerouting could be done with a computer keystroke. That wasn’t the point. The point was to know the ship well enough to handle any and every situation. If computer systems were down, manually rerouting would be necessary. Anything could happen in space. A good engineer knew every part of the ship like the back of her hand.

  Was this part of the test? Brute strength?

  She moved in closer and wiped her forehead on her shoulder. Stray purple curls were falling down, drooping from sweat, and getting plastered to her forehead. She should have pinned it back before starting the simulation. It wasn’t too warm or anything, she was just amped up and sweating freely.

  Placing the tool high with both hands, she dropped into a squat, forcing her body weight to do the work. The housing loosened and she got the casing free. She grabbed the quick-connect mechanism and froze as her eye caught a small readout next to the flexible pipe.

  Hold on.

  She couldn’t reroute this. She jogged to the nearest console and pulled up energy-usage charts for each conduit. They looked normal. But the reading she’d just seen didn’t match. It was triple the reading on the console. This wasn’t just a few kilowatts. Something was wrong. If she manually rerouted this, it could create serious problems down the line. Something could explode. People could die.

  This had to be part of the test. She was supposed to figure out what to do. A monkey could reroute a conduit. But only a good engineer would notice this weird discrepancy and do something to fix the problem.

  She used the interface on the console to trace the conduit and could find no reason for the surge. She went back to the bay and checked the readout again. It hadn’t varied.

  “Hampton? Check in. What’s the holdup? Have you completed your task?”

  Zara tapped the control on her ear to answer. “No, sir. I’ve found another problem. The conduit may be overpowered or there may be a fault in the sensor here. I’m about to check that.”

  “Just reroute and get back over here for your next task.”

  She bit back a reply and returned to the conduit. But she couldn’t do it. The people on this ship were her family. She couldn’t let anything bad happen to them. She took apart the sensor and checked it. It was working fine.

  She left the conduit disconnected in case people were moving in to do repairs and went back to the console. A surge wouldn’t normally last this long.

  She checked the other sensors. She couldn’t find any difference. Then she decided to inspect the software inside the sensor. That’s where she found the problem. The software in the display had been uploaded incorrectly. It was for the wrong sensor and displayed a conversion error. Someone had just tapped the wrong button as they installed it. That was why the console was correct, but the display was wrong. She found the correct software and loaded that. The display changed instantly to safe levels. She finished the rerouting task and scuttled back to her supervisor. The lighting changed back to normal and the klaxon silenced. The simulation was over. Her superior officer looked grim and gave her definite side eye.

  Three days later she met with a sergeant to go over her performance.

  Sergeant Krapf slapped a stack of papers down and frowned. She was one of very few African-American officers Zara had run into in the quasimilitary version of NASA that funneled people into Earth United forces.

  Zara met her gaze evenly. She wanted to impress this officer.

  “You completed only one of three tasks,” Krapf said.

  Zara opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “I’ve watched the footage of your test so you don’t need to explain. Let me tell you the numbers.”

  Zara nodded slightly.

  “Twenty-three people completed the simulation before you. Of those, ten noticed the display on the conduit housing. Three of those rerouted anyway and went on to the next task and didn’t say anything to their commanding officer. Five immediately contacted their CO and asked for direction. When they were told to reroute anyway, they did as told. Two checked the console, like you did, and apparently decided the display was wrong, rerouted, and went on to the next task. You were the only one who defied a direct order.”

  Zara felt the blood drain from
her face. “I—”

  “You don’t need to tell me what you were thinking. You thought you knew better. That’s not how the military works. You’ve been trained. You should know this by now.”

  “But a surge of that magnitude—”

  “It was a simulation and you failed. I’m recommending you stay dirtside.”

  Dirtside. The derogatory word for those trapped on Earth.

  She couldn’t stop herself from protesting. Her throat ached. She choked out, “With all due respect, we were supposed to treat this like it was really happening. I was trying to prevent unnecessary casualties. How could I know what was part of the test and what wasn’t? If I were in your position, I’d fail anyone who ignored that faulty display—or worse yet—didn’t notice it!”

  Krapf narrowed her eyes. “It wasn’t part of the test, Hampton. It was an oversight during installation. As a matter of fact, it’s fixed now. You fixed it. This simulation was meant to test simple knowledge of the engineered structures of the ship.”

  “And didn’t I demonstrate that I know them better than anyone else?”

  “What you’ve demonstrated is you can’t be counted on to follow orders in a crisis. You’re unfit to serve. I’m recommending another round of basic for you. Dismissed.”

  37

  ALAN CAME the closest he’d ever come to shitting himself.

  Mere minutes after they got off the call with the new kid, fourteen ships jumped into the system.

  Fourteen.

  He glanced down at the console in front of him as he estimated how long it would take Kai’Memna’s fleet to arrive—less time than it took to get the jump drive ready. Shit.

  Darcy’s ship might not be just a simple cargo hauler, but there was no way it was fitted out with enough firepower to face down fourteen ships with a grudge, hell bent on revenge and destruction.