Fluency

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

She cradled him against her. It flashed through her mind how ridiculous it was for a woman of her size to be holding someone who measured eight inches taller and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, probably a lot more. But there she was.

  Alan’s eyes opened to slits as she moved toward the Sanalabreum chamber. He gazed into her face, his mouth turning up on one side. “Is this it, Jane?”

  She smiled a tremulous smile. “Nope. There’s hope for you yet. But you’re not going to like what comes next.”

  “Really?” he whispered. “I’m not really very enthusiastic about much these days.”

  She wished she could get out of the suit, ruffle his hair, coddle him, soothe him with her hands.

  He cleared his throat and spoke again, sounding marginally stronger. “Lay it on me.”

  She lowered him into the gel up to her suit’s elbows.

  His eyes went wide. He grasped at her weakly, finding little to cling to on the suit’s slippery surface.

  She kept her voice calm, reassuring. “I’ve just come out of one of these, Alan. It healed my leg. It’s unpleasant, but it’s your best chance. Don’t—don’t fight it, okay? Just rest and sleep. I promise you’ll be safe. I’ll be watching over you.”

  He relaxed a bit and nodded wearily. He managed to push a bit of snark into his voice as he muttered, “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  He made a face like he was vexed.

  “What? Alan, it’s okay—”

  He stiffened a bit, but didn’t open his eyes. “I know it’s okay. I’m just fucking tired of playing Princess Buttercup to your Wesley. Next time, I’m rescuing you, goddamn it.”

  She couldn’t help but smile. After all the months of listening to the crew bicker about movies, she finally understood a reference.

  She could see the filaments weaving their way around him. It made her skin crawl, but he didn’t seem to notice. She lowered him farther, up to his chin. She kept a firm hold on him. The device didn’t have control yet. “You’re going to go under the surface of the gel. It’s okay. You’ll be able to breathe. Sort of.” She smiled at him, hoping he would find a smile soothing.

  He opened his eyes. The filaments slid purposefully up his neck, pausing at his lips and nose, waiting to time their entry perfectly. “Let go, Jane. I trust you. I feel better already.”

  She located a suit command to force her arms to hold him steady as she lowered her face to his. She kissed his bushy brow. “I’ll see you soon. Be good.”

  “Shut up and give me something good,” he grumbled.

  She chuckled and bussed his lips.

  He rolled his eyes, then closed them. “You can do better than that.”

  Her chest felt tight, remembering how much she’d done, when she thought she’d been alone with him. “Later,” she choked out.

  “There better be a later, or I’m going to be pissed.”

  He sank under and she stood there with her arms dripping gel, watching for a long while. A few small bubbles escaped his lips, remaining suspended in the gel above his face. She caught glimpses of the filaments as they moved over him, began their work. He didn’t struggle. His eyes were closed. He looked peaceful.

  Ei’Brai broke into her reverie. “He is in hand. All is well. You must conclude the attendance upon your own injuries, Dr. Jane Holloway.”

  She straightened and squared her shoulders. “No. I’m not done yet.”

  “The remaining nepatrox will wait. Your brethren are safe.”

  Jane blinked slowly and pushed him back to the periphery of her mind, holding him there, so he couldn’t see her intention.

  She turned away from Alan’s tank. She marched.

  23

  This part of the ship was distinctly different from the rest. For one thing, it was downright chilly. When Jane shivered, the suit’s internal systems engaged and she felt waves of dry warmth radiating from the dense walls of the suit.

  Little puffs of warmed air blew around her face, tickling tendrils of loose hair around her ears. She’d left the helmet open because it didn’t seem necessary to close it and she felt more… human this way. Still, her nose was cold and occasionally she could see her breath frosting up in front of her.

  She was heading toward the heart of the ship.

  The lighting was also different here—more blue-green, and not nearly as bright. In fact, as she made her way deeper and deeper, the light dropped off substantially until she was walking in twilight, just on the cusp of absolute darkness.

  Ei’Brai’s presence in her mind was calm, expectant. He knew by now what she was about. He wouldn’t try to stop her. It was time.

  She could no longer see the walls as she walked. They’d long since receded into darkness. There was a light integrated into her suit that she could turn on with nothing but a thought, but she held that in reserve, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom.

  The blueprint inside her head told her she’d reached the point where all the ship’s corridors converged like spokes to a central point. She slowed down, every sense on alert.

  A wall of cool air slapped her in the face. She’d just walked into a vast, open space.

  Her eyes drifted to a small pool of reflected light. It rippled.

  She froze. She’d been here before. Except she’d been on the other side of the glass, looking out, from inside Ei’Brai’s mind.

  She squared her shoulders and stepped out onto the railed gangway that led to Ei’Brai’s domain. She leaned out and turned the suit’s light on at its lowest setting as she darted looks up and down over the side of the railing. Every deck had its own service-gangway identical to the one she occupied, leading to hundreds of catwalks circumnavigating the core habitat. They seemed to go on for miles in each direction, mirrored by hundreds of catwalks tracing the curving outer wall.

  She strode up to the glass, reached out a hand to touch it, and lifted her chin. She cleared her throat, though she wasn’t speaking aloud. “Show yourself to me.”

  He didn’t answer. But she felt him inhaling, burgeoning to the fullest point, limbs languidly drawing together to a tight star as he exhaled in an enormous whoosh, sending himself shooting like a torpedo down many deck levels toward where she stood, peering through the glass.

  He stopped his rapid descent by throwing his arms out, the membranous webs between them billowing, creating friction. He constricted the flow of the squeeze to a trickle and came to a full stop opposite her, while at the same moment a pair of soft lights came on, illuminating his environs so that she could see him, fully.

  She flinched and berated herself for it. She’d known he’d make a dramatic appearance.

  She’d had some inkling, of course, that he was an aquatic creature before now, but nothing could have prepared her for the fact that each of his eyes was larger than her head, or that his longest limbs appeared to be five times the length of her body or more.

  His many arms twined around him as they regarded each other, just a few inches of air, glass, and water between them. Each of his eight arms was studded along its length with pale, semi-transparent suction cups, a large portion of which brandished a prominent, barbed hook curling over the top, clearly meant to shred prey as it was dragged relentlessly toward his mouth, which was currently hidden from her.

  In the murky light he was creamy white, shimmering with a metallic sheen, alternately silvery and golden. Every languorous, sinuous movement drew her eye to the light reflecting off his gilded, iridescent skin. He was mesmerizing.

  Tears pricked the backs of her eyes. She hadn’t expected him to be beautiful.

  Though she tried to remain guarded, he picked up on her mental state. Proximity seemed to be a factor. She felt an even greater sense of the multiple layers of his racing thoughts. She could almost see, as well as sense, the multiple brains beneath his translucent skin.

  His mantle swelled in an almost child-like expression of pride. He bobbed in place. “My appearance pleases you?”

  One of two
tentacles extended toward her, far longer and thinner than his arms and terminating in a leaf-shaped club. Suction cups, with serrations, like teeth, flattened against the glass where her own hand rested. His words reverberated in a hushed timbre, full of surprise. “Unexpected. Your kind is indeed dissimilar from the Sectilius.”

  As he spoke, his skin flashed crimson and glowed with an inner luminescence. Simultaneously, he fed her the meaning behind the primitive communication. It was a cordial greeting, meant for an age-mate. It implied that he felt connected to her, that he was grateful for her presence. He called her friend.

  She nodded slowly, unable to take her eyes off him, but ready to broach the subject she was there to tackle.

  But he distracted her again. This time forcing a flash of insight into how he perceived her, both visually and mentally. Through his eyes, she could see herself in almost microscopic detail. Small, by comparison to him, he divulged that her body was also small by Sectilius standards. More fleshy, soft, rounded, than a typical Sectilius female, though, he’d decided that he preferred her appearance to their more angular, muscular structure, for no other reason than it was more like his own, if only in an abstract way.

  He saw her as upright, tightly controlled. Her jaw was set with determination and her eyes were expressive, burning with an inner fire—a fire he knew to be rare and valuable—juxtaposed against the hair, flowing wild around her head, similar to the way he perceived her internal landscape—disorganized, fluid, organic.

  He saw her decisiveness, her duty, her compassion, her sense of responsibility as most desirable traits. He presumed her to be the very pinnacle of humanity, the ideal specimen. Perfect.

  She leveled her gaze on the eye closest to her. He was unblinking. That was a little unnerving. She pushed that feeling down as irrelevant and put steel in her internal voice. “Perfect for what purpose, Ei’Brai?”

  He pivoted slightly, his arms curling around himself. He was calculating the reorganization of the micro-robotic squillae to prevent a minor hull breach. But she knew those were calculations he could literally do in his sleep. He was not truly preoccupied by them. That was a misdirection.

  “Quit pretending to be distracted. Quit putting me off. What do you want from me?”

  “You know. You’ve always known.”

  She wanted to scream with frustration. She racked her brain for any kind of hint of what he might be referring to, but came up blank.

  He waited for her to reply, his limbs drifting around him on a silent current. His only intentional movement was the slow undulation of the fins on either side of the conical mantle above his eyes.

  Her muscles tensed to such a degree that the suit’s internal sensors brought up a prompt, asking her if she was experiencing a muscle spasm. “I know that you’re doomed, that you’ve decided to try to bring us down with you. You’ve managed to keep Alan, Tom, and me from leaving with the others. But for what? To keep you company, until the moment the asteroid hits? You would sacrifice us, too—so that you won’t be lonely in your final hours?”

  “None of us are doomed.”

  It was a flat statement of fact—she could see he was completely convinced of its truth.

  “What?” Was he mad? There’d been moments she’d suspected…

  “Dr. Jane Holloway, you are the key that will unlock all of our futures. Terra’s future as well. We can still fulfill the primary mission.”

  He didn’t sound crazy. He sounded calm, certain. That was so damn infuriating.

  “We? You—”

  It struck her, suddenly, what he must mean. He’d been obliquely feeding her clues all along. One of the first things he had said to her was that he wanted something from her—not them, her. He had told her, “you are home,” which she’d dismissed as a cultural reference, a welcoming gesture, a throw-away. But there had been the moment he had described the command hierarchy of the ship… the journey to Castor and Pollux… the download… his satisfaction when she’d gotten herself out of the gel… the computer’s greeting in the infirmary only an hour before…

  It all snapped into place.

  “You can’t seriously want me to—?”

  “I have already appointed you—you have already utilized your proto-command when you extricated yourself from the Sanalabreum. Under martial law, an expeditious vote of the Quorum is all that is necessary. I am the only surviving Quorum member. It is merely a formality now. You have only to accept.”

  She staggered back from the glass, blood pounding audibly in her ears.

  “What then?” she mumbled aloud.

  “I am your servant.” Another fact. Another truth, from his point of view.

  “Oh, give me a break!” She raised a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, but caught sight of the gauntlet just in time and threw her arm away. They really should retract like the helmet, for goodness sake. “So, we just… we move the ship.”

  “Obviously. We complete the mission and return.”

  She stared at him, aghast, her lips formed in a moue of disbelief. “To Sectilius? You’re joking!”

  “I do not dissemble. It is your duty to complete the mission begun by your predecessor. It is not in your nature to shirk duty, especially to those to whom you believe yourself responsible. I am now your ward. That responsibility extends to me.”

  “That—I—that’s ridiculous! I don’t know anything about—”

  She paused. But she did know, dammit. She knew everything about it, if she just searched in the right corner of her mind. The sneaky bastard had put everything into place at the very beginning with that insane download.

  She half-expected to see a maniacal grin on his face, which wasn’t there, of course—only an innocent, wide-eyed look, that bespoke nothing of the devious nature of the mind beneath the white flesh, still rhythmically flashing a crimson “friend” signal at her.

  She turned and walked a few feet away, grateful for the support of the suit. Her legs felt wobbly and weak within its generous support, and her injured leg ached. “This is nonsense. We’ll go to Earth and let the bureaucrats there work it all out. They’ll appoint someone suitable for this task. It’s not me you want.”

  “It is you, Dr. Jane Holloway. There can be no other.”

  She stopped, began to form a retort.

  He interrupted her thought. “This is what you will give me over to them for?”

  He pushed a memory at her. She meant to resist, but when she saw familiar faces, curiosity got the better of her. It was a small conference room, somewhere on Earth.

  In the memory, she stood stiffly, with folded arms, and made eye contact with the Deputy Administrator of Johnson Space Center.

  What was his name again? Dr. Marshall?

  Marshall nodded brusquely, indicating that she should dim the lights. As she turned, she glanced into the faces of three others that occupied the room—Ajaya Varma, Tom Compton and Ronald Gibbs stood at ease nearby, dressed in fatigues. She was feeling grim. She moved forward, picked up a remote, and looked up.

  She could see her reflection in the television screen before it came to life, and her reflection had Walsh’s craggy face. She was Walsh. This was his memory.

  As she watched, ancient black-and-white film footage played on the screen, hastily shot, documenting some long ago event that the military had been brought in to deal with. She was aware that Walsh had seen this before, but he was still squinting to see the grainy images, interspersed with snow and flashing jumps. It was dark. There was smoke, lots of smoke. There were floodlights in a perimeter, flooding a large object with harsh light, making the camera white out from time to time.

  Then she recognized the ship that the soldiers were swarming over—a Speroancora shuttle—and she realized that this had to be the 1947 New Mexican crash site. There were Sectilius inside that small ship. The cameraman drew closer and asked questions of men working on and around the ship in a disgustingly jaunty manner, belying the seriousness of the moment.

  E
i’Brai watched and listened, silently absorbed in her reaction. She perceived him and the video on different levels as information streamed between them. He did not understand the language spoken, only the emotions conveyed. She was surprised at how accurate his interpretations actually were.

  Several soldiers on the screen put their backs into using some large tools to pry open a hatch, which suddenly gave way with a hiss. Someone barked an order at the cameraman and he moved in closer. The camera shook, making the footage difficult to watch. The cameraman didn’t sound so jolly anymore. Soldiers moved in with guns drawn. The camera followed.

  There were four Sectilius inside—three men and one woman. One of the men was obviously dead, impaled by a twisted component of the control console. The other two were stunned and moving lethargically—at some point during their journey to Earth they would have been affected by the same mysterious illness that had affected Compton.

  The female Sectilius was in the process of donning an armored suit, exactly like the one Jane was wearing. The woman was exceedingly thin, tall, lithe, sharply featured—to Walsh’s eyes, alien and suspicious.

  She was ordered to stop what she was doing. She answered calmly, matter of fact, in Mensententia that she meant no harm, that she intended to protect herself from the violence of this bizarre, chaotic world. These men couldn’t comprehend her, nor Walsh, but Jane could and the following sequence made her blood run cold.

  Two soldiers advanced on her while other soldiers crowded the unresisting, catatonic Sectilius men, slumped at the controls of the vehicle. The soldiers ordered the woman to stop again as she slipped one arm down into the suit. She narrowed her eyes and slowly continued, no expression of any kind on her face. They tried to stop her physically. She pushed them away with a force that clearly surprised them.

  There were angry words, cursing. A shot rang out. The Sectilius woman looked down at her torso, registered that she’d been wounded, and shouldered the suit, which instantly enveloped her. She returned fire, obliterating the man who’d just shot her with a single concussive blast from her wrist. The camera rocked violently and it was hard to tell what was happening for a few moments. When it righted itself, bullets were pinging off the Sectilius woman as she staggered forward, arm raised, sending out a few more pressure waves before she collapsed.