Confluence 2: Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Ajaya shook her head. “You need to rest, Commander. The jumps are taking a physical toll on you.”

  Ron moved closer, a wry look on his face as he rolled his shoulders. “There’s always work to be done.” He came up to stand behind Ajaya as though lending his support to her argument. His large, brown hand came to rest casually on Ajaya’s shoulder.

  Jane stifled a yawn, nodded her agreement to Ajaya and Ron, and headed for Tech Deck. She’d rest a little as soon as she finished this next task. A batch of squillae had recently completed production, and she needed to distribute them as soon as possible. These sectilian nanites, programmed to repair and maintain every ship system, made it possible for such a small crew to manage the city-sized vessel. Normally the ship would replenish and distribute the tiny machines automatically, but since they’d been forced to destroy every last one of them to survive, she’d taken on the task of personally dispersing them to the most critical areas herself. It would take a full year to manufacture them to the level they’d been at before she’d obliterated them. It left the ship vulnerable and that wasn’t okay. This was her ship, at least for now, she thought wistfully. She had to optimize its condition.

  As she walked through the corridors, the need for sleep pressed on her. She stretched her arms out and twisted her head to one side and then the other, trying to push the sluggishness back, wake up more fully, and get rid of the creaky feeling in her neck that kept making her wince. Duty had kept her on her feet long past the point of sanity.

  Her somnolent brain drifted as she went. Echoes of the former Qua’dux Rageth’s memories crept to the forefront. She could see the empty corridors as they were, but also as they had been in Rageth’s time, full of bustling people—a mixture of short, stocky sectilians with corded muscles and willowy atellans from Sectilius’s moon, Atielle. They all shared an angularity—high, geometric cheekbones and froths of bushy curled hair ranging from light gray-brown to medium brown. She wondered what thoughts had been lurking behind their somber expressions. Then she could see those thoughts in Rageth’s mind too, funneled through Ei’Brai’s perception of the crowd. They all had been filled with purpose, just as she was, driven to complete their myriad goals. These sectilians were gone, but surely someone had survived on the sibling planets. She couldn’t wait to meet them.

  3

  Alan Bergen ran a practiced hand over the wall, seeking the spot where a light touch would trigger the opening mechanism. Around him there was a barely perceptible hum of machines and that faint, peculiar odor that he smelled only on Tech Deck—wintergreen and burning paper. The odor had come to represent an overall sensation of curiosity, excitement, and frustration for him.

  The chamber he occupied was less room and more corridor, though the walls terminated at roughly two and a half meters of height, so that there was a huge volume of shared air overhead. These walls meandered in a maze of undulating lines, arranged with these door-sized drawers set at regular intervals, containing the most important mechanicals on the ship. At first he’d found the layout irritating, but then he realized there was a method to it. It wasted no space and all the turns and cul-de-sacs allowed a kind of privacy that would be welcome when working with complex mechanicals in a busy ship.

  Under his hand the mechanism engaged, and Alan straightened, watching the drawer slide smoothly from the wall. In his left hand was a device he affectionately called the Viking. It was an MCA or multichannel analyzer. He was using it to detect a number of things, though his primary interest was gamma radiation, the presence of which he hoped would clue him in to whether or not there was a fusion drive on the premises.

  Since the first jump had taken them out of their native solar system, he no longer had the luxury of sending data to Houston to have his compadres look over and verify the conclusions he was making. There was no one to argue with about what was the best next step to take. He was on his own.

  For that reason, he was forcing himself to go slowly and to work methodically. He could talk to Ron about some of this stuff, but Ron was an electrical engineer and computer specialist. He had little training in theoretical physics. The dude was brilliant in his fields, but he couldn’t really talk fusion with Ron. Well, he could, but not extensively.

  He probably should talk to the Squid. He would get up to speed a hell of a lot faster with help from the tentacled bastard, but at this point he’d rather figure it out on his own. It meant something to him, this process of discovery. Occasionally Jane rounded them all up for shuttle-pilot training or bridge-console training or a nepatrox hunt, but overall his time was best served figuring this shit out. What could be better? This was every engineer’s dream.

  He did feel a lot of pressure to learn as much as possible as fast as possible. They’d arrive in Sectilius space in just a few days. Who knew what would happen then? Everything was going to change and he wasn’t looking forward to that. He wasn’t done yet. He needed more time. He’d begun to feel almost a possessive feeling about the ship. Tech Deck was his. He didn’t want to hand it over to the Sectilius—he wanted to keep it for himself. Being there was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was the culmination of a lifetime of dreaming. He loved every single minute of the process of understanding how it worked.

  One of the things that surprised Alan the most about the Speroancora was that very little of what he studied was incomprehensible. Overly complicated sometimes, yes, but not defying human understanding. Science fiction led the average person to believe that when a spacefaring super race finally deigned to pay Earth a visit, their tech would be mind-blowingly superior. So far that wasn’t the case—okay, aside from the artificial gravity, the wormhole generator, and the fusion reactor he was looking for. But he suspected that if he looked at the math even those things would be within human reach. They’d be comprehensible, he was sure of it.

  There was no reason to believe that the Sectilius had necessarily invented all of those devices themselves. They may have appropriated that tech from other cultures in their galactic wonder alliance. Maybe no single planet in that alliance was any farther ahead than any other, but the sharing of the technologies got them all farther faster. The only handicap humans had, as far as he was concerned, was the fact that they hadn’t known until now that there were others out there.

  A lot of this stuff—the nanites, the ship’s computers, the medical equipment—human science was on the cusp of making happen or already had. And the sectilian shuttles—while awesome—were only a few steps ahead of the kinds of things NASA was imagining creating in the next few decades. It would take another hundred years, maybe less, for humans to reach the same technological milestones the Sectilius had with this ship—two hundred if he was feeling particularly pessimistic.

  What the Sectilius didn’t have was also notable. Number one: no magic shields to protect the ship from external roughhousing. The escutcheon was a kind of shielding made up mostly of nanites. The concept of an energy barrier to protect the ship was a sci-fi crutch, a good storytelling device that had no practical application in the real world. There were no magic weapons either. This was a science and diplomatic vessel, so all it had were a few missiles and a couple of laser cannons—nothing he couldn’t have built in his garage back home.

  The most magical thing they had—anipraxia—they’d discovered that. They hadn’t created it. They exploited a biological resource that benefited them.

  The Sectilius weren’t a super race. They weren’t thousands or millions of years more advanced than humans. That simultaneously amazed, confused, and reassured him.

  It was reassuring because it meant that no one out there was necessarily smarter than him…or humans in general. That was actually pretty profound. The big-dumb-object-in-the-sky idea didn’t necessarily have to mean that humans were the dumb ones.

  The consensus at NASA prior to the launch of the mission to the Target had been that it would probably take decades to unravel the alien science. He wasn’t convinced that was th
e case. In fact he thought that if the bigwigs could just efficiently cut through the bureaucracy bullshit they could probably be building their own versions of the Speroancora and her shuttles within a year or two with the specs Jane had given them when she sent Walsh and Compton home.

  And when they did, they’d streamline all of it. Everything about this ship seemed overly complicated. Nothing was straightforward. He’d mentioned that to Jane once and she had looked surprised, disagreed, saying that once he had met and spent time with the Sectilius, he’d understand the ship on a much-deeper level. He’d narrowed his eyes and blinked at her but refrained from saying anything else about it. She’d never met one either, and yet she acted as though she had. He didn’t think the Squid counted, but maybe he did in her book.

  He sighed, his right hand going to the back of his neck. He hoped she was okay. This whole jumping through wormholes business seemed to be taxing her to the reaches of her endurance, and yet they pushed on relentlessly. It had been almost seventy years since the Squid was stranded in their solar system. What harm would it do for her to rest a few days? But no one wanted Alan’s opinion on that subject.

  Bergen frowned as he stared at the neat arrangement of components in front of him, willing his subconscious to come up with something…anything for this device. But unfortunately all he could think of was spaghetti and meatballs. That was probably his stomach’s fault. He wondered absently how long it had been since his last bland meal. It was easy to lose track of meals and sleep without light cues or other people around to prod him.

  He had all the data Jane had sent to Earth with the Speroancora shuttle. He studied it for a few hours each night before bed, reconciling the principles it outlined with the hardware he was physically in contact with every day. So far, he’d had a few really great eureka moments—those were the best. One of the things holding him back was his limited understanding of Mensententia. So he studied, observed, and took data. It was all coming together that way—a deeper understanding. It was pretty freaking awesome.

  There were definitely multiple layers of command and control integral in every system he studied that had something to do with Ei’Brai. The neural-electric pathways that ran throughout the ship were connected to the aquatic beast cybernetically and the Squid had implants inside his body that communicated directly with the ship. It gave Bergen the eerie feeling that the ship was an extension of the Squid. That he was always watching them. Add that to his telepathic feats, and Alan just wasn’t a big fan of their host.

  It wasn’t the difficulty involved with understanding. He’d never shied away from a challenge. Rather it was a pervasive feeling he couldn’t shake that the Squid obfuscated everything on purpose somehow, to keep him from understanding. He had no evidence to that effect, but he wouldn’t put it past the Squid to do such a thing, not after everything they’d been through.

  Jane would say he was being ridiculous, but he felt that a healthy dose of skepticism whenever the Squid was involved was warranted. He just didn’t trust him. He was in the minority there, too.

  He recorded his data, made the necessary notations in his laptop, checked to be sure the data had uploaded from the Viking to his laptop properly, slid that compartment closed, and moved on to the next one. This one was larger, wider—probably three meters wide. He remembered this compartment from when he went through the entire deck doing spectral and thermal analysis. This segment was very different from many of the other ones. There was a round drum inside. The drum took a specialized tool to open—a tool he hadn’t yet found anywhere on board, though he’d found many other tools. It was on his list of items to manufacture with the 3-D printer.

  He took a step closer. Hold on. Something was different this time. All around the drum, amber lights were glowing. He narrowed his eyes. There was a definite low hum coming from this device. He tentatively put his hand on the outside. There was the slightest vibration. Something inside the thing was spinning or rotating in some way. What might they use that would require a centrifugal setup?

  He knelt down so he could give it a full 180-degree sweep with the Viking. He was up to his armpit in the device when a sudden sound behind him made him jump, banging his elbow in just the right spot to trigger his funny bone. He almost dropped the instrument—which would have been disastrous since he only had one.

  Pulling himself from the guts of the device, he staggered backward and upright until he bumped into the wall, cursing a blue streak as he swung his head around to see what had startled him. Some part of him was almost certain that one of these days a nepatrox was going to come up behind him and take a bite out of his ass.

  It was Jane. He hadn’t even heard her coming.

  That was kind of weird, because even though he consciously worked most of the time to exclude Ei’Brai from his thoughts—which was freaking exhausting—there was still always an element of supra-cognitive awareness. He didn’t have a clue what it was about, but he’d come to realize that he was just sort of aware whenever one of the other humans was nearby, especially if they intended to speak with him. He’d been taking notes on it for a while, which he intended to pass on to someone at some point. No idea who.

  He set the Viking down on the nearest flat surface and straightened, shaking his arm, which had gone painful, numb, and tingly.

  “Jesus, Jane! Give a guy some warning!”

  Her eyes were wide and she looked like she was swallowing a smile.

  Dammit.

  “I’m sorry, Alan.” She gestured in a way that encompassed the cavernous room and pointed to somewhere on the other side of him. “I’ve just come for a fresh batch of squillae.”

  He tried not to smirk in response to her persistence in using the word squillae even when speaking in English. It was the word in Mensententia for nanite, but the literal meaning was shrimp and it just made him want to laugh every time he heard it. He blew out a breath and sagged a little bit, cradling his arm, as his heart rate slowed. She was just passing through and probably hadn’t wanted to talk to him. He was just in her way.

  Mental note: add this encounter to the Journal of Bizarre Telepathic Bullshit. Could be significant. She didn’t seem to have known he was here either. Further note to self: try really hard not to read anything into that.

  “Yeah. Of course. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m so twitchy.” He damn well did know, but he wasn’t going to admit that to her. “How did the jump go?”

  She nodded. “It was successful.”

  He nodded too, inanely. Was he turning into a bobblehead? “Good, good. How many more now?”

  “Just two more,” she said gravely. She pointed at the large drum behind him. “How are things going here?”

  He thumbed back at the open device. “This? Well, you know...” He didn’t really know what to say. Did she expect some kind of progress report?

  She half smiled and bobbed her head like she was uncomfortable too and ready to be on her way.

  He couldn’t keep himself from watching her as she approached the open device. He realized it would be a tight squeeze for her to get past and moved to close it so she could slip by more easily. She put out her hand to wave him off, but suddenly her expression went strange and she stumbled.

  Alan lurched to brace her. She leaned into him for a moment. When her eyes met his, they were wide. She looked around as though she were searching for something she’d lost.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked her. He found himself looking around too, though he wasn’t sure why or what he was looking for.

  “Oh...I just...I don’t know.” She looked confused.

  He took on a stern tone. Someone had to get through to her. At this rate she was going to stroke out or something. “This is about enough, Jane. You’re pushing yourself too hard. You need to get more goddamn sleep.”

  “No, something is...” She shook herself and turned away from him, back the way she had come. There was a panicked expression on her face.

  He let her go reluct
antly as she moved away. He took a few steps after her, wanting to say more, but feeling completely impotent.

  She reached the point where she’d been standing when they’d first begun this bizarre conversation and she stopped suddenly again, swaying.

  He leapt after her and put his arms around her. “Jane,” he said gruffly.

  “No, it’s…” She swiveled in his arms, and her eyes locked on the open device. “Oh,” she mumbled. “It’s from the jump…”

  His eyes darted from her to the drum and back again. This device had something to do with the folded space-time they used, the artificial wormhole technology? A limited understanding dawned on him—and then grew exponentially. He’d relaxed his mental guard in his concern for Jane. The information that she was unlocking was passing out in the open between the three of them: him, her, and Ei’Brai.

  He almost slammed closed the conduit that allowed the information to pour through, but stopped himself. He was too damn curious to pass up the chance to understand the device, even though it felt like cheating.

  He looked at Jane with awe as he realized the level at which she understood the mechanics inside the device. They were completely open to each other now, as they hadn’t been in ages. She registered his admiration, and the dimple on her right cheek deepened and her clear, gray eyes brightened. He liked that.

  She was pleased that he noticed. He also registered that she was cautiously enjoying his embrace. There was hope in her mind—a breathless anticipation. That, added to his own feelings, which were igniting… Okay, that was an understatement. He was fucking en fuego. It was intense to feel her feeling him, feeling her—it all seemed to roll up into something more. Something…was snowballing…

  He scooped her to him, tightening his hold slightly and extending their contact to cover more surface area. He bent his head over hers and feasted on her lips.