Jane’s heart beat a little faster.
The globe quickly filled.
Jane swallowed hard as it went over Ouvaq’s head.
Imadua looked like he belonged there. His limbs ceased to remain vertical. He pulled them up and they mostly disappeared under his mantle. He floated in place, looking very much like a pink jellyfish. Then the portal on the other side opened and they both glided out to hover near Brai. The chamber emptied and Feig triggered the portal again, motioning to Ajaya and Murrrsi. Another cycle, then Pledor and Feig herself went.
Everyone seemed just fine out there, floating in place. There was no localized artificial gravity in Brai’s enclosure to pull them in any direction. Nothing to drag them down. But no up to escape to either. Her fingers tingled.
Finally, it was time for Celui and Jane.
Celui looked at her searchingly. “Your skin has lightened in tone. Are you cold?”
She laughed nervously. “Oh, no.” She was actually sweating a little in the wet suit Ouvaq had loaned her. She gritted her teeth and stepped inside.
He cocked his head to one side as he reached for the controls. “Ready?” he asked gently.
She didn’t reply for a moment. She’d been underwater many times in her mech suit. That hadn’t seemed as nerve-wracking. She felt safe inside the suit. It was made to protect soldiers at war and seemed nearly indestructible. Now she felt like she was nearly naked, soft and squishy, exposed.
“Jane?” Brai’s voice rumbled in her head. He drifted closer to the examination chamber, his limbs slowing their curling motion. “Ah. Jane, you should bring me these issues when they arise.”
She huffed. “Very funny,” she replied to him alone. He was attempting to lighten her mood. He knew why she was so afraid. She had once shared the memory of her father’s death with him.
He pushed a soothing blanket of thought toward her through their narrow private channel. She grabbed ahold of it and let it in fully. It helped. A lot.
She licked her lips. “Ready,” she said firmly.
Brai stayed close, eyes locked with hers, as the water rose. The bubble filled quietly. When the water reached her chin she couldn’t help but raise herself up on her tiptoes and lift her head, gasping for air.
Celui grabbed her hand. “It’s okay,” he said.
She breathed rapidly and closed her eyes. Her ears popped from the pressure change as the portal opened. She couldn’t move. Not yet.
“Shall we go back?” Celui asked.
She opened her eyes again. Her vision filled with Brai. She focused on him, on shedding the panic. Finally she would get the chance to actually swim with him. She was not going to let this stupid fear keep her from doing that. “No, I’m okay.” She let go of Celui’s hand and paddled forward awkwardly toward Brai. He reached out an arm, hooks pointing away, and held her steady. It was exactly the right thing.
She took a moment to acclimate. She could feel the pressure of the water all over her body, but that was soothing rather than frightening. The water was completely calm. She had no trouble breathing and concentrated on doing just that, slow and steady. She was okay.
She looked around. It was dizzying how large his enclosure was. Seeing the ellipsoidal shape from this side of the glass was very different. In some ways it was like a massive clear-glass skyscraper with fire escapes wrapping around the outside.
“Welcome to my home,” Brai chuckled.
“Shall we begin?” Feig’s voice said over the small communicator in the face mask. “First we must all open our thoughts to Ei’Brai, as well as each other through him, so that we may coordinate our activity.”
Jane cleared her mind of her trepidation as well as she could and connected to the rest of the group. Their overall sentiment was eagerness and curiosity.
Feig’s mental voice was soothing. “I will lead us by projecting our movement. It will begin simply, and as we become comfortable I will increase the complexity. Do not focus on perfection, just relax and enjoy moving and sharing. No assumptions will be made. No judgments about ability. We are here to commune with as few words as possible, just using our bodies and our emotions.”
Feig conveyed a rudimentary image of their bodies equally spaced around Brai. The swimmers moved into position without much difficulty. The mental image gradually morphed to show them all from Feig’s perspective. And then one by one each swimmer’s viewpoint, including Brai’s, was incorporated into the whole, creating a new kind of point of view that anchored each individual. Simultaneously many of their minds experienced surprise and wonder at this new way of seeing.
Through Feig’s mind’s eye they began to move, circling Brai. Hesitantly, they sought to mimic her projection. Their first movements were uncoordinated, and a few were confused about which direction to turn. But soon Feig’s expectations and reality were not so very different. Jane pushed herself through the water with relative ease.
Now Brai was incorporated into the movement. He pulsed toward one end of the enclosure with the ring of swimmers spiraling around him. Then he began to spin, steadily, in a circle.
Jane saw him, seeing them through each other’s eyes. His brain took in the data from all of them and integrated it into something utterly new.
They reached one end of the tank, twirling, whirling together. A kaleidoscope of sight and motion. As Brai spun, he offered each member a different arm or tentacle. Every swimmer reached out in turn with whatever appendage they had to touch him. Jane marveled at how perfectly they were spaced. No one had to swim forward or even stretch. It was just right. She could feel each caress from giver to receiver.
And now a rush. Together they dove as fast as the slowest among them could go toward the other end of the ellipsoidal shape, always sensing each other’s movements, spacing, and limitations. Jane didn’t even have to think about which way to go. It seemed to just flow naturally through this method of communication.
She forgot her fear completely and concentrated on the whole.
Gradually they converged into a cone, bodies close, undulating like natural sea creatures. They slowed and drifted to a stop with Brai at their center. Hands and other appendages reached out with featherlight brushes against his mantle as he spun.
Inside and outside of each other’s minds they bloomed with pleasure. Their senses were multiplied, stacked. Taken altogether it was exhilarating.
Then they turned away from Brai, spreading out like a slowly exploding firework until some point, predetermined in Feig’s mind, was reached. They curled into a ball and hugged themselves, then burst, expanding their limbs fully. She, they, felt like something larger unfurling.
Brai darted up, and one by one they followed him. A spurt of motion and then drifting, hanging suspended in the water. They chased him until they reconvened into a new shape, this time a rotating sphere with Brai tumbling at their center, passing each other narrowly, each in their own orbits.
Someone began to tire. Jane could no longer pinpoint who in the elated fog of reaction and response. Feig signaled it was time to draw the exercise to a close. Like children called in from play too soon, they protested in wordless echoes.
Feig chided them gently, directed them to say their goodbyes, and one by one they left through the airlock, also leaving Brai’s collective channel.
Jane stayed behind. She faced Brai and took off the warm gloves of the diving suit. The water was cold, but she didn’t mind. She was warmed through from the exercise.
“May I?” she asked.
“I should be offended if you did not,” he replied.
She placed her hand on one of his thick arms. He moved it to wrap around her and she nestled against him, beside one of his enormous eyes.
43
ALAN LIKED HUNA. He did. But the dude had been raised on a world where no one understood the concept of time. So when asked how much longer something would take, his standard answer was, “It’s not ripe yet.”
Irritating, but it was what it was. Alan ju
st kept working on his blink drives and so on. He tried to keep as busy as possible while he waited.
However, once Huna’s first test pods ripened and were harvested, they all had a much better understanding of the time involved. Huna tested these pods extensively and decided that his idea would work. He wanted to grow three more experimental sets to work on further optimization, but when he and Ron sat down and calculated the time required to complete all of the experiments as well as the final crop, they realized that it would take way longer than the two standard years that Jane was stuck in the Terac system, under quarantine. They compromised on two large experimental sets followed by a single worldwide crop of particulos oscuros.
When they harvested the first of the large experimental sets, it was time to work out the details of containment and delivery. The particles were grown inside a football-sized organic husk. If that husk got too dry, the end opposite of the stem started to curl back and open, prematurely exposing the contents, which were a fine, light, shimmery powder very easy to scatter. So Alan converted cargo bays into enormous humidors to maintain the pods optimally. It was a good project. Lots of challenges but not impossible. Just like he liked it.
The next issue to tackle was delivery. On New Pliga, the Tree held billions of these pods evenly distributed in a sort of suspended animation just at the brink of full viability. When they detected a Swarm pod on the approach, a dehiscence protocol was activated. All over the planet, the particles were released in the turbulent winds, spilling them into the atmosphere to do the work of hiding the planet.
He, Huna, Jaross, and Ron sat down and brainstormed ideas for release into Earth’s atmosphere. They came up with a drone system that would perform the final drying of the pods and release the particles in the upper atmosphere simultaneously. Pio and Brai would be able to orchestrate their movements easily. After the design work, they made a few prototypes and tested them. When they had the system optimized, they went into full production. Their first order of business was manufacturing more 3-D printers and setting up factory staging. Then it took all hands to keep production going around the clock so they could manufacture enough units by the time the final pods reached maturity. When they ran out of raw materials, another step was added: breaking down components of nonessential materials. In a ship that big, there was plenty of that, but it was time consuming.
To say they were busy was an understatement. Once they were going full bore, the time slipped by quickly. And now things were coming to a close. The final crop was on the vine. Preparations to harvest and store the pods were nearly complete. The delivery system was in manufacture. They’d have a massive payload ready to put in Earth’s atmosphere in just a few weeks.
He’d be going home to Jane soon.
44
January 29, 2031
ZARA GAVE THE NASA ADMINISTRATOR, Dr. Kenneth Lin, a personal tour of Jane’s not-so-secret file two days later in Dr. Sakey’s office. She’d caught up on sleep the night before, but she still felt clumsy and stupid with nerves, though she did everything she could to not let that show.
He never brought up the controversy, but the offices and labs were buzzing with it. She was sure Lin suspected she was the source of the opposition to his takedown. He had to. Who else could have been responsible? It was very unlikely anyone would notice that file disappearing when no one else had noticed it to begin with. Her roommate Dominica had instructed her to suggest someone had probably set up a macro to monitor any tampering with the sectilian files online. That would give her plausible deniability. It was never necessary. She wasn’t about to bring it up if he didn’t.
Lin leaned back and exhaled heavily. “I’ll be briefing the president on this information in person tomorrow.”
Zara nodded and kept her expression blank. She was sure that was unnecessary. Though the situation had gotten very little coverage, there had been enough that the government had to be aware of it.
“Dr. Hampton, I’m aware that you were the very first MSTEM Scholar. I wanted to thank you for your service and personally hand you your next assignment. Many of your peers will be receiving these today—right now, in fact.” He handed over a pale blue envelope.
She took it from him, perplexed. “My next assignment?”
Lin’s expression was grim. “Earth has built twelve starships. The time has come to see them fully manned and operational.”
“Manned?” She tore open the envelope so fast she ripped off a corner of the letter inside.
She’d been commissioned to serve aboard the Aegis, the fleet’s flagship, as a second lieutenant.
She glanced up at Lin, not making any attempt to conceal her shock. Then she looked back down. The paper went on to say in some kind of legal language that any rank given was a rank within the Earth United Fleet and contained a brief description of her rank’s seniority and responsibilities. The Earth United Fleet’s newly devised ranking system used ranks drawn from all of the most easily recognizable ranks in the proud tradition of Earth’s many military services.
She flipped the paper over, but it didn’t say anything else—not the position she’d occupy or the department in which she’d serve. She had to report for duty early the next morning.
This was exactly what she’d always wanted. But it was sudden. She had to abandon her work, her home, her family and friends. There was no time to prepare. No time for proper goodbyes.
There were more shocks to come when she got home. Every one of her roommates had been conscripted as well. Ben would be with her on the Aegis and the rest of her roommates would be scattered across different ships.
Zara cleared off a spot on the living-room sofa and sat down to check a few more things off her list, the butterflies in her stomach growing stronger by the minute. The house had been ransacked as all six of them scrambled to find everything they’d need to take to their postings and to tie up loose ends. There was stuff scattered everywhere—clothes, luggage, toiletries. The ancient washing machine chugged in the background, baskets full of washed and unwashed clothes clogging the floor in the adjacent kitchen area.
Charlotte flopped down beside her, ignoring stacks of white T-shirts, underwear, and socks someone had left there, and heaved a heavy sigh. “There’s so much to do. They aren’t giving us any time. I wonder why? What’s the big rush? And what the hell are we going to do about the house and all our stuff in it?”
A loud thump came from upstairs and they both reflexively looked up at the ceiling.
Zara frowned. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. I was about to call my parents and tell them the news. I guess it’s silly to pay rent on an empty house, especially since we haven’t been told how long we’ll be gone. But we don’t have time to move out.”
Charlotte said, “I’ll set out some boxes for all of us to put things in that we really want to keep. Maybe someone can put them in storage for us. That’d be a lot cheaper than rent. The rest of these treasures can be donated.” She waved her hands around to indicate the shabby, mismatched furniture and piles of computer components and gaming systems.
Zara’s phone rang. It was her dad. He’d probably heard about the assignments and wanted to know if she’d managed to get one. She held up the phone with a smile. “I’ll ask my dad if he’ll handle it.”
Charlotte hopped up and jogged upstairs, several pairs of socks and a pile of underwear tumbling off the sofa in her wake. “I’m going to ask Danny if he knows what he’s going to do with Buster.”
Zara blew out a heavy breath. She hadn’t even thought of the cat. She slid her finger across the screen, mentally shoring herself up for what was going to be an emotional conversation. Her dad knew this was her dream, but he would be worried about what it meant. “Hey, Dad.”
Zara was flown to the base of the space elevator on a tiny island in the Pacific, where she was vaccinated, then handed a rucksack containing three dove-gray uniforms and told she’d have ten minutes to change. She wouldn’t be allowed to take anything with her
that didn’t fit inside that bag. Most of the careful packing she’d done the night before had been a waste of time. She barely had room for undergarments, a few toiletries, a laptop, and her e-reader. She packed the sack until the seams were tight and she had to struggle to get it closed.
Then they were crammed inside a windowless capsule and strapped in, standing shoulder to shoulder, for the long trip up the elevator. In the chaos she’d been separated from all of her roommates. To pass the time, the new recruits introduced themselves to each other.
It was necessary to use Mensententia. The crews of all of the ships were international, the total number from each nation proportional to the population of their country of origin and distributed evenly over all twelve ships, officers and enlisted alike. Seeing faces of every color and ethnicity imaginable, nearly all sporting purple hair, buoyed her spirits. NASA had been a multicultural place, but this was something altogether different.
The nervous energy and excitement were contagious. They’d all known this day might come. The general consensus seemed to be happiness that they had been chosen and trepidation over what they might have to face in the coming years.
The mood was buoyant until someone wondered aloud if a threat had already been detected. Then everyone went silent for the remainder of the trip to ISS-2, tethered at the other end of the elevator.
She would have liked to explore the ship a bit, take it all in, but there was no time for sightseeing. They were handed papers, then told to dump their rucksacks in their quarters and report for duty. The main thing she noticed was a ubiquitous presence of the recently commissioned Earth United crest. Most people called it the green pretzel. It was three interlocking triangles made of one continuous forest-green line, superimposed over a simplified cloud-covered Earth.
Zara followed the crowd to a bank of deck-to-deck transports, scanning the blue slip of paper she’d been handed. Her quarters were on deck thirty-seven. She was to report to deck six, conference room three, on the Command Deck. Her heart did a backflip. She searched the slip for more detail, but they were still keeping her in the dark. She’d find out what she was here to do soon.
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