[Confluence 01.0] Fluency

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  “He was following orders. He had military training to rely on. But you didn’t have any kind of backup when you were tromping through the jungle, trying to survive. You didn’t have anything or anyone to depend on except your wits and your gut. That’s what got NASA’s attention, Jane. It’s why they wanted you to lead this mission. It’s why I’ll follow you to hell if I have to.”

  He was thinking specifically about an essay Jane had written about her experience in the Amazon, in which she’d described how she’d been searching for water, in a febrile state, unaware that, after uncounted days of wandering, encountering one bizarre, dangerous situation after another, she and her companions had ended up within five miles of a paved road. She had encountered a woman washing clothes beside a stream.

  The woman had been mistrustful, had never seen a person with blonde hair before. Bergen was pretty sure that most people in such a dire situation would have just prostrated themselves, begging, when they finally found another human being that wasn’t immediately hostile. Somehow Jane had known that would just scare the woman away. Instead she’d calmly sat down some distance from her, quietly asking questions to determine if they shared a language in common. When they had settled on a pidgin version of Portuguese, she hadn’t asked for help or food; she had complimented the woman’s infant and had offered to help her with her chore.

  When the woman had left, Jane had lain down next to the stream to gather strength before returning to her companions with the good news that they were near a village that might be sympathetic to their plight. She had awoken surrounded by native men, who—after a few confusing hours of propositions, bitter cups of local tea, and the first food she’d eaten in days—had led her to the road and rescue.

  Jane sat up, searching his face in the dim light. He reached out to stroke his thumb slowly over her cheek, and leaned in to kiss her. She stiffened. Her lips were lifeless under his.

  He was taken aback, suddenly insecure about his instincts. He’d felt certain, in that moment, that he’d felt something from her, an encouragement.

  He pulled back, mumbling an awkward apology, when he felt her fingertips on his face, in his hair, and suddenly she was kissing him back, fervently. His stomach tightened in response and his pulse raced. He turned her, slightly, so that he was hunched over her, shielding her. If the others glanced at them, they might wonder, but it wouldn’t be obvious, he didn’t think.

  He touched his tongue to her lips, a question. She opened to him, deepening the kiss, their tongues smoothly flowing around each other. He wanted it to escalate. He ached for more of her. He wanted to pretend they were alone, safe, that they had all the time they could want. He imagined his hand moving to her zipper, slipping inside her flight suit…

  But she ended it far before he was ready. She pressed her forehead to his, exhaling raggedly.

  “Distracting ourselves like this could be dangerous,” she whispered.

  “I don’t care. I want you, Jane.” His voice sounded hoarse. His hand was tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck, keeping pressure on her, keeping her close.

  A choked laugh escaped from her. “I’m beginning to comprehend that.”

  “Do you—”

  She laid a hand over his pounding heart. Her voice was resolute. “We can’t do this now.”

  He was surprised by how much that hurt. He’d never done this before—confessed, tried to make something real happen. But this wasn’t a rejection, exactly. It was more like a deferral.

  So, that’s how it would be. Survival would be a prerequisite. Well, then they were damn well going to survive this.

  She was pulling on his arm, forcing him to release his grip on her. He lowered his hand reluctantly and she scootched back a little to put some distance between them. She gave him a small concession—she wrapped her fingers gently around his and squeezed. His hand still hurt, but he didn’t care.

  “The old carrot, huh?” he said ruefully.

  She was staring at his hand in hers. “Did you mean it when you said you would follow me to hell?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Good. This isn’t going to be easy, especially with Compton the way he is and Walsh…” She trailed off and her expression glazed over.

  He panicked and clutched at her arm, but she snapped out of it. “Jane? What just happened?”

  “I don’t know if I can explain it adequately. There’s a place, inside my mind, that’s plugged into him. Each hour that goes by, I’m closer to him, and, by extension, the ship. The download he gave me was part of that. It fits like puzzle pieces in my mind. It’s a kind of awareness—like knowing that someone you care about is there next to you, without having to look or speak. It’s getting easier and easier to hear him. I’m vaguely aware of his thoughts, some of them, anyway, in real time. It’s scary. But…” Her breath hitched. She stopped looking at him, staring instead at his hand, twined with hers, in her lap.

  “What?” he prompted her.

  “I like it.”

  He didn’t know what to say to her. This thing was changing her and he was powerless to stop it.

  “I wish I could share it with you. You will, won’t you? You’ll learn the language and come here, with me?”

  “Yes,” he answered, huskily.

  “The Sectilius that lived on this ship formed a mental community that revolved around Ei’Brai. Each member of the network was abstractly aware of the others, which built a synergistic experience—artists and engineers, community leaders and philosophers, scientists and entertainers—the entire city-ship fed off this creative mental energy. In the early days the Sectilius created these connections with Kubodera to keep them happy, to keep them challenged, because they’ve been taken from everything they’ve ever known to navigate these ships. The Kubodera are starved for experience. They thrive under this kind of mental stimulation. It’s necessary to keep them from going mad. But the Sectilius quickly learned that Anipraxia was a richly rewarding symbiotic relationship for everyone involved. It’s incredible.”

  Her eyes were shining in the dark. He reached out and brushed back a stand of her hair that had fallen forward over her face.

  “He knows about Tom. He’s very upset about it and he wants to help us. He’s letting me decide for myself how to handle it. He’s not telling me what to do—I want you to know that. He’s not influencing me, okay?”

  “Okay. What’s he doing now?”

  “Right now he’s very busy managing the, um… I think you would call them nanites. That’s taking most of his attention at the moment.”

  He mentally shifted gears. Nanotechnology on Earth was in its infancy—little more than research and development—an engineer’s dream. “Nanites?”

  “Yes. The whole ship is swarming with them. They repair things at a microscopic level. They were never meant to be the only defense against the slug population, but without a crew, there’s no other way to maintain the ship. Ei’Brai kept life support levels at absolute minimum all those years to keep the slug growth rate as low as possible, but when he turned the life support back on for us, the population exploded and the nanites are barely keeping the damage under control. Do you see? This isn’t his fault. He’s doing his best to protect us. There are things that are beyond his ability to control.”

  He stared at her, trying to understand. This alien guy was using nanites as damage control? It was plausible, he supposed, to a certain degree. He’d kill to know how that was done. But, with the number of slugs he’d seen in that one room alone… the nanites’ job seemed like it was verging on impossible. He started to feel skeptical, but tried not to let it show. “But why didn’t he warn us from the start, Jane?”

  “He’s very proud. He feels like the ship’s an extension of himself. These mishaps feel like failures. It’s mortifying to him. He wanted so badly for this to go well. He knows we’re his only hope to survive. He knows about the asteroid, Alan.”

  Bergen frowned. Jane got to her feet and extended a
hand to him. He knew he should say something, but everything he thought of sounded like something Walsh might say and he didn’t want to risk putting distance between them.

  14

  As Jane rose, Walsh and the others immediately gathered their things. She stood apart from Bergen, her chin lifted, keeping her expression stern. No one else needed to know that inside she was roiling with conflicted thoughts. A good leader acted the part no matter what they felt.

  She didn’t allow her gaze to linger on Alan as he labored to his feet. Alan’s confession was heartening. He believed in her. She hoped his faith wasn’t misplaced.

  But there was the nagging doubt, the suspicion that he was affected by the agent that had felled the Sectilius. She’d seen hints all along that he was attracted to her. The possibility had always seemed tantalizing and thrilling, but she’d never believed he really meant any of it. She’d concluded that it was just part of his nature to be flirtatious in a razor-sharp way, that he couldn’t help but be enigmatically charming to stoke his own tremendous ego.

  Now he seemed to be saying it was more than that, and the timing couldn’t be worse. She was already scattered enough, dealing with a constant influx of revelations, insights, foreign concepts—all creating a tumult inside her head. She didn’t have the luxury of time to consider what his proposition might mean about him—what it might mean to her—what it might mean for the mission… any of it.

  She wondered—if he’d done something similar just a month before, would she have responded in the same way? There’d been that moment in the capsule, the day she’d succumbed to childish grief, reeling from the news that her closest confidant had just given birth to a healthy child. Suddenly she’d found herself unable to contain her feelings, which ran a gamut of extremes—joy, sadness at missing the event, jealousy, loneliness, disconnectedness, and shame.

  He’d embraced her tenderly, throwing her concept of his character into complete disarray. It had been a bewildering moment because it hadn’t changed anything between them. Things had continued on just as they’d been before, as though she’d just imagined it. It had left her watching him curiously for other signs of depth or gestures of goodwill. When nothing else had surfaced, she had decided that it had meant nothing to him and had done her best not to think about it. Though, if she was completely honest with herself, that had been hard.

  At the time, she had found herself behaving like a young girl, suddenly self-conscious about her appearance, finding reasons to engage him in conversation, asking for his assistance when she didn’t really need it, surreptitiously watching him work, eat, exercise… dress.

  She had tricked herself into thinking that he was playing along, that he felt the same, that they were both feeling their way in that bizarre environment, knowing that such thoughts were prohibited, should be ignored, or extinguished. Then he would do something callous or would say something that was so off-color that she had been sure she was fabricating the whole scenario as a mental defense against boredom.

  She shouldn’t have kissed him. In that moment, it had felt like clinging to life as it was shattering around her. She couldn’t deny her attraction to him. He was solid and real when her grasp on reality felt like it was slipping. She was being pulled in too many directions. If she wasn’t careful she’d be drawn and quartered before she could achieve her goals.

  Time was a trap. After all the months of confinement—to be confronted with a ticking clock, after only a single day aboard the ship, was cruel. If she waited to send a message to Houston, concentrated on understanding this enigmatic disease, she might wait too long and doom the Bravo mission as well. But every minute spent getting to the capsule, arguing with Walsh, and then getting back again might be letting life trickle through her fingers.

  If only Walsh had trusted her, then everything would be different now. They could split into two teams, send a couple of people to the capsule to transmit a message home while the rest of them worked on a solution. But it wasn’t like that. She wondered where along the line she’d lost his trust, or if she’d ever really had it to begin with. Maybe he didn’t think she was a worthy leader. Deep inside, she was afraid he was right.

  She didn’t have any business leading others. She’d lost people in the Amazon. No one had ever faulted her for that, except for herself. The circumstances had been horrible. But she always felt that if she’d been a little better prepared, a little more vigilant, a little more proactive, she should have been able to save them.

  And now it was happening again. Compton was clearly sick, possibly irreparably. Walsh, too, and maybe Varma.

  Ei’Brai felt that there was hope, and she clung to that like a lifeboat adrift on a stormy sea. He believed that she could solve it. That seemed absurd. She wasn’t a scientist. How could she hope to understand an alien disease that struck so suddenly, dragging down the faculties needed to stop it? Like Alan, she didn’t feel affected, but she knew that it might be self-deception. She had let her guard down with him, had let herself get caught up in a self-indulgent moment. When so much was resting on her shoulders, when so much was at stake, her lapse in itself might be a sign that something was already going wrong.

  She led the way down the hall, the lights in the floor lighting up in front of her—a demonstration of support from Ei’Brai. She didn’t have to look back to know that the lights coming on that way were pissing Walsh off.

  On top of everything else, Ei’Brai was feeding her the atmospheric mood of the rest of the group. She caught flashes of images, thoughts, emotional states—all on a level verging on subconscious. She was aware of perceiving it, even when she wasn’t giving it her full attention. She wanted to tell Ei’Brai to stop, to quit pushing her, that she couldn’t take any more of it, but that wouldn’t be true. It was unnerving how fast she was adapting to it.

  The others filed into the deck-to-deck transport behind her. Jane didn’t like the way they were all looking and feeling so uncertain about her. Walsh seemed more pacified since things were going the way he wanted, but still grim and angry.

  Gibbs gently urged Compton to keep up, caught Compton’s arm when he tottered. Compton was shuffling along, completely withdrawn. He seemed to have aged at least twenty years since the last time Jane had seen him. Once a lively junior/senior pair of colleagues, a gulf of age seemed to have opened up between them. Gibbs fell naturally into the role of youth, caring for revered elder.

  Jane pressed the symbol for the deck where the Providence was docked. A beat later, the door rose midway, paused, then dropped again. Everyone watched her expectantly. She frowned, reaching for the control, but before she could make contact, the door rose again, this time all the way.

  A grey mass slightly larger than a football hit the floor with a sickening, wet thud and wobbled to a stop. Thin, webby tendrils stretched from the object to the top of the open doorway. A fetid odor, redolent of rotting garbage, hit them like a wave. The corridor beyond was dark.

  “What the hell?” Bergen grimaced, pulled a flashlight out of his pack, and shone it on the mass at their feet.

  Walsh’s face was red with choler. “Holloway—what are you playing at? Is this the right deck?”

  “Of course it is,” she replied, trying to hide her own bewilderment.

  Ei’Brai surged in her head, a disorienting, buzzing flood, and she reached out a hand to steady herself against it. He was filling her head to overflowing with urgent warnings.

  Varma was pulling on latex gloves. She took a pen out of her breast pocket and scraped it across the top of the doorway, lifting away the gooey strings, and stepped out to inspect the object.

  “It’s not safe here anymore,” Jane murmured out loud to the others.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Walsh eyed her suspiciously.

  “We need to go. Come back inside, Ajaya.” Jane took a step forward, reaching for the door control.

  Walsh blocked her. He towered over her, his manner threatening. “Stay put, Varma. Nobody’s goi
ng anywhere until we have some answers. What is that thing?”

  Jane stood her ground, resisting the urge to back away from him.

  She could sense Alan’s protective ire rising one second and Walsh’s seething anger the next. It was coloring her own state of mind, making her feel like lashing out, losing control.

  She forced herself to stay calm. “I don’t know what it’s called. It’s the next stage in the life cycle of the slugs. Whatever is going to hatch out of there—we don’t want any part of it. We need to go.”

  “More delay tactics,” Walsh growled.

  “It’s a pupa,” Varma murmured and they all turned to look at her. She was using the pen to move the mass from side to side. The tip of the pen disintegrated under the gentle pressure she exerted at the point, leaving blue plastic blobs dotting the thing.

  Then the mass moved, swelling under the surface on one side. Varma gasped and scrambled back.

  “That’s enough. Let’s go,” Walsh barked. The others stared at him, unmoving.

  “Wait. Hold on. I’m not saying we don’t go back to the capsule. I’m saying we protect ourselves better first. I can take us to—”

  Walsh bellowed over her, silencing her, “I said, enough! Move out.”

  Gibbs looked back and forth between Jane and Walsh and then put an arm around Compton, urging him forward around the mass at their feet. Gibbs’s gun was still clutched in his hand.

  Jane reached out to touch Walsh’s arm. “No! This is too dangerous. You have to listen to me.”

  “Like hell I do.” Walsh leveled his gun at her chest and wheeled around, ready for an attack from Alan.

  Alan’s fists were clenched. His nostrils flared. He was on the verge of doing something reckless. Ei’Brai was silent in her head—he was as appalled and unnerved as she was.

  Chagrin left her feeling cold. How could she possibly change the balance of power now?