Dense Space

by Robert Harken

  “These are my friends, Pheno and Ti. We touch words, so they understand.” Silence followed. After a moment, Eddientis pulled a tentacle away from a white disc on the wall and spoke. “You touch with words or swim away.”

  “You shame your pod with words,” said the Ertryd from the asteroid they approached.

  “My pod being dead,” said Eddientis.

  “How?” The Ertryd seemed genuinely surprised.

  “In the death of our world,” said Eddientis.

  “You being ignorance. Did you taste the message after impact?”

  “I tasted nothing. Gressa stagnated after impact. My friends being help me escape capture. We swam to Ertryd seeking answers to the strange taste of its end, but we jetted away before debris destroy us.”

  “Debris? No, no your ship being placed to orbit Ertryd after planet clears dangerous fragments. My ship will swim its own orbit when home passes. We being protect planet,” said the Ertryd.

  Ti asked, “Can you save Trelia? Ask it if you can save Trelia.”

  “Its name is Krestur. Can we help Trelia, Krestur? The exoplanet remnant will being destroyed Ti’s home soon,” said Eddientis.

  “No, we school at Ertryd to protect. Too few evaded capture; you being critical. Many waters you have yet to drink. We must touch the Ertryd way; no other will do.” Krestur’s tentacles writhed urgently.

  Eddientis sighed mechanically through its translator. “Tasting understanding.” It placed three tentacles against different mucus discs on the wall. After a few moments, all its tentacles pressed onto discs.

  The silence extended through curiosity and awkwardness to tedium. Pheno fought a growing urge to press buttons or goo spots or whatever on the command center to see what they would do. Despite knowing they required an Ertryd to operate, the urge to press the buttons gnawed at him. A lost world threatened two more, one of which Ti called home, and he wanted to press buttons. Gah! What is wrong with me?

  He twisted to look at Ti. She floated at the tube’s edge anchored by one hand on the edge of their tube’s entrance. Ti focused intently on Eddientis as if absolute concentration could translate the proteins being exchanged. How can she content herself with watching? I need to do something! Pheno hugged himself hard and waited.

  When Eddientis broke contact with the discs, it drifted, tentacles slack, in the middle of the command center.

  “What is it, Eddientis? What did the Ertryd say?” asked Ti.

  Eddientis said nothing and pressed a button. An image of the Ertryd fireball appeared on both screens.

  “Eddientis, are you OK?” asked Pheno.

  “I’m . . . no,” Eddientis said.

  “No, what?” Ti pushed herself toward Eddientis. “What did that Ertryd say?”

  “Ertryds saved our sea with dark matter.”

  “I knew it!” said Ti. “Those anomalies on impact—your kind caused them. Wow, Ertryds altered a planetary impact using dark matter. Eddientis, can you replicate the feat?”

  “The school forms around Ertryd. I join,” said Eddientis.

  “Why must you protect a ball of molten rock?” asked Ti.

  “Secret must settle in still water,” said Eddientis.

  “What does that mean?” Ti grabbed Eddientis’s mantle with both hands below its eyes. “Do you have dark matter tech? Can you save my planet?” She shook Eddientis violently. “Tell me you damned squid!”

  “That’s enough, Ti!” said Pheno.

  “No! Tell me! We’re wasting time. I need to save my family!”

  In a fluid, graceful, gentle, and precise motion, Eddientis coiled a tentacle around Ti’s waist, pulled her off, and stuffed her back into the shaft they had arrived in. “All Ertryd knowledge settled here, including dark matter. I taste that now, but I cannot help you. No other eddy except protecting my home.

  “What about my home? Who will protect Trelia?” Ti looked at Pheno and Eddientis then spun and swam down the tube after neither answered.

  Pheno heard her sobs through his com link, but he let her go. “So . . . you’ll wait here for Ertryd to catch up then enter orbit I guess.”

  “That tastes clean,” said Eddientis.

  “Who wants to harm the planet?” Pheno asked.

  “Everyone and no one being possible predator.”

  “For real, you don’t know?” asked Eddientis.

  “Being real,” said Eddientis.

  “I’m guessing you can’t tell me what you’re protecting.”

  “You taste truth.”

  “Do you know when you’ll fight?” asked Pheno.

  “No, I being more like a sentry,” said Eddientis.

  “Do you need any help?” asked Pheno.

  “No.”

  “Ok . . . Eddientis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there any other options? Any way you can help Ti without compromising Ertryd?”

  “I see no fork in the current, Pheno.”

  “Ti and I should probably go then. She wants to make a run for Trelia.” Pheno shrugged. “I doubt we’ll breach the blockade, but I also didn’t think we’d make it off Gressa.”

  “May the current carry you swiftly,” said Eddientis.

  “Thanks, Eddientis.” Pheno hugged his friend. The soft tentacles encircling his body stirred memories of panic on a rooftop, but the touch, tender and tentative now, calmed him.

  Pheno swam away from the command center without looking back because he didn’t want the last memory of his friend to be Eddientis watching him leave—his parents had cursed that vision when they watched him board the servile trader’s ship. The ship’s current now moved him toward the airlock where they had docked. Pheno wondered how the ship’s designers handled intersecting currents at junctions; but before his imagination tangented down that shoot, he found himself floating in front of the airlock—a neat trick except there was no docked ship.

  “Eddientis, can you hear me?” asked Pheno.

  “Yes, Pheno.”

  “I think you sent me to the wrong airlock. There’s no ship here.”

  A long pause passed before Eddientis responded. “You swam true; the ship’s gone. Ti left.”

  Chapter 10

  “Try to hail her,” said Pheno.

  “I being trying,” said Eddientis. “She stopped the flow.”

  Pheno signaled her with the link in his helmet, but found no presence. “I can’t reach her; she must be out of my range.”

  “Yes and accelerating,” said Eddientis.

  Pheno read his oxygen level. “I have a few hours of oxygen left. Does this ship have a way to recharge my tank?”

  “No,” said Eddientis.

  “And no other ship.” Pheno sighed. “I’m coming back to you. If we can’t get Ti to turn around, I’ll . . .”

  Pheno swam back to Eddientis. The current moved faster this time or perhaps he swam faster, which burned more oxygen. He looked at his forearm monitor. His heartbeat faster. More oxygen gone.

  “She abandons our pod,” Eddientis told Pheno when he arrived.

  “I don’t understand. Why would she leave me to die? Ti wouldn’t . . .”

  “But being done.” Eddientis placed his tentacles on the controls. “I never leave pod in shallows.”

  Pheno felt the brief shift of movement before the countercurrent stabilized him. “Eddientis, what—”

  Krestur appeared on the display. “Why flowing away from position? No orbit possible in direction wave carries you.”

  “I bring my pod to deep water,” said Eddientis.

  “Return to position! No dry your home for gas breathe—”

  Krestur’s image disappeared.

  Eddientis said nothing. After a moment, Pheno spoke, “Thank you, Eddientis.”

  “I am unable to damn her flow if she refuses to dock,” said Eddientis.

  “She’ll dock when we catch her.” Then again maybe not, thought Pheno, she did strand me here.

  Pheno watched the monitors as the solar sai
ls unfolded. Their massive scale and odd shimmer surprised him. He knew the sails for such a large vessel had to be huge, but surfaces of this scale shocked him. When the acceleration lasers fired, Pheno expected a blinding glare from what must be the most powerful lasers in the galaxy, but he saw only a faint light. He felt the counter current increase to stabilize him as acceleration from the sails replaced the thrusters’ force.

  “What gives with the sails, Eddientis? How come they’re not as bright as those on Ti’s ship? Will we be able to catch her?”

  “Ship’s trainer says recirculates eighty percent lasers’ energy for conserving.”

  “Wow, I didn’t know that was possible. Does that slow us down?” asked Pheno.

  “Yes, makes slightly weaker current, but Ertryd technology very wet,” said Eddientis. “We will catch Ti.”

  As expected, Ti plotted a course home to Trelia. The Ertryd ship’s artificial intelligence calculated that they would catch Ti when they reached the exoplanet fragment destined to obliterate Ti’s home world. Pheno spent the time trying to sleep or at least remain motionless and slow his breathing to conserve oxygen. Calmness proved elusive because when he forced himself to stop thinking about how much air remained in his spacesuit, he thought of Ti’s abandonment and grew aggravated, which made his breath quicken.

  Pheno distracted himself at first by questioning Eddientis indirectly about the Ertryd secret. How long would Eddientis protect the planet? How many asteroids would orbit the planet? Would they do anything other than wait for an attack? These and other questions failed to garner any insights, so their conversation shifted to Trelians and Noolak. Pheno shared his knowledge of the two species from xenobiology class and Eddientis described their societies and culture.

  Trelians lived on a sun-drenched world rich in plant and insect life. Noolak inhabited a barren, night-shaded moon orbiting a gas giant. Trelians preferred solitude and ate bugs while the nocturnal Noolak sought companionship and feasted on bacteria cultured in chemical reactors surrounding their planet’s many thermal vents. While the two species occupied radically different ecological niches, Eddientis argued that similarities in their civilizations enabled sociologists to define and benchmark their societies as transcendent. They forsook conflict for personal and communal development, overcame dependencies on economic systems, and harmoniously coexisted with their respective ecosystems—that is each overcame their respective survival, motivational, and self-centered biases to transcend the lifecycle of beasts. Losing both of them, Eddientis said, snuffed two beacons of hope for the rest of the galaxy.

  Pheno thought about these things—what makes a person or civilization noble—as they approached the fragment. Gressa, with its commercialized morality clearly fell short of enlightenment. His birth world’s poverty preempted individual rights. What about Ertryd? Had the technology masters built a nirvana doomed by a dumb rock? Should the Galactic Fleet have helped save them instead of barring the flight of refugees? Sociology offered no judgment. The verdict, Pheno decided, must be rendered by someone. He just didn’t know who.

  Their approach to the fragment interrupted his thoughts. Calling what headed toward Trelia a fragment might be technically correct in the sense that the mass was a third the size of the original exoplanet but misled on the magnitude of the impending disaster. The moon-sized remains that ricocheted off Ertryd had formed a molten ball that rapidly crusted in rock after leaving the impact zone. Jets of lava and hot gas shot from a multitude of pores. Further, Pheno thought he saw the halo of an atmosphere surrounding it. This “fragment” will do some serious damage, he thought.

  Tracking to the right and above the rock, they had almost caught Ti. “Hail her,” said Pheno.

  “No need to swim into current; she hails us and,” Eddientis paused and focused on the disks it had pressed its tentacles against, “the Galactic Fleet.”

  Ti’s image appeared on one of the screens. She still wore her space suit. On the other screen, a Galactic Fleet officer appeared on the bridge of a warship. He looked strikingly similar to Ti though more menacing both in physique and demeanor. Pheno wondered if all Trelian males looked so . . . deadly.

  The Fleet officer spoke first. “You are approaching a Galactic blockade. Passage to Trelia is prohibited. Power down and identify yourselves.”

  “Hi, Daddy,” said Ti.

  “Ti?” he asked.

  Daddy?

  The officer appeared as stunned as Pheno. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ti, I’m low on oxygen. I need to recharge,” said Pheno.

  “I know Pheno; I’m sorry,” said Ti. “There was no other way to ensure Eddientis would follow.”

  “Who are those two?” asked Ti’s father. “I sent an entire battalion to search the parsec radius surrounding Gressa on a report you had been abducted. Are these two your abductors?” He looked to someone on his left, a person from Luritan, Pheno thought. “Lieutenant, target that asteroid and fire on my command.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Wait! Daddy, these are my friends. No one abducted me. I brought them here to save Trelia.”

  The admiral leaned forward in his chair. “How?”

  “Eddientis, the Ertryd, has dark matter tech,” said Ti. “It can save our home. I know it can.”

  “Ti, don’t do this,” said Pheno.

  “Impossible. We’ve searched all remaining Ertryd installations; no dark matter technology exists.”

  “It’s wet-wired in all Ertryds. Their computing platform is genetic. You need an Ertryd to complete the circuit,” said Ti. “That’s why you never found the tech. You only saw half of the machine.”

  “So what?” asked Pheno. “Just because dark matter technology exists doesn’t mean it can save your world.”

  “I know it can!” shouted Ti. “It has to.”

  “She tastes truth,” said Eddientis.

  “What?” asked Pheno.

  “Ertryds poured dark matter into gravity well at instant before impact to deflect exoplanet strike.”

  “Yes, I knew it!” Ti shot her arms into the air. “The feed’s schism, the shadows, your people shifted their planet.”

  “Impossible, no one possesses the power to do that,” said the admiral.

  “It’s true, Daddy. I parsed the feeds myself,” said Ti.

  “Why would Ertryd bother? It didn’t do enough,” said Pheno.

  “The ricochet saved my planet’s core,” said Eddientis. “Without the shifts of Ertryd and the exoplanet, the impact angle would have desiccated both.”

  The admiral stood and stared at Eddientis. “You admit that the Ertryd people intentionally sent the fragment toward Trelia?”

  “They tasted all possible trajectories of exoplanet remains before swimming forward,” said Eddientis. “Ertryds made the moral choice.”

  “To save a fireball?” The admiral appeared to speak to himself as he paced in one of the few luxuries aboard a large warship, artificial gravity.

  “But you can save Trelia now. Can’t you, Eddientis?” asked Ti.

  The admiral stopped and studied Eddientis. Pheno also watched his friend, but without insight despite knowing it for years. Since Eddientis’s communication with the other Ertryd something had changed. Pheno thought Eddientis’s demeanor looked like a hardening of hope.

  “The technology floats within me, yes, but the energy required to shift planets existed only in the impact. Ertryds redirected gravity current as exoplanet struck. The impact destroyed the array used. I cannot dive that deep.”

  “But this piece is much smaller. I can run the calcs if you give me the parameters,” said Ti.

  “I am siphoning the information to you,” said Eddientis.

  “I’ve heard enough,” said the admiral. “Commander, bring them in.”

  The commander, who bore a scar from cheek to mouth and sufficient muscling to threaten a pack of demented Shulan warriors hopped up on Narida juice, took a tentative step toward the admiral. “Sir . . .
”

  “Do you understand my order, Commander?”

  “Yes, Sir . . . but—”

  “Then execute it immediately,” said the admiral.

  The commander stepped back slightly, stiffened, and lowered his chin. “Sir, protocol twelve prohibits Fleet interference with celestial events. Collateral damage to other worlds—”

  “I’m aware of protocol twelve, Commander. I order you to bring them in.”

  “I cannot follow an order to violate protocol, Sir,” said the commander.

  “Stand down, you’re dismissed,” said the admiral. “Lieutenant Philon, lock the tractor beam on that rock.”

  The commander’s hand moved to his sidearm. “Sir, the imminent destruction of Trelia has compromised your judgment. As first officer, I relieve you of command.”

  “History shall judge me, Commander.” The admiral walked over to his chair and pressed a panel. “Attention battle group personnel. This is Admiral Tau. Execute Protocol Broken Blade immediately.” He turned slightly toward the commander raised his sidearm and fired.

  The commander slumped backward, firing wildly as he fell. Energy bolts hit control panels shattering displays and shooting sparks in all directions. The image blanked on a scene of hand-to-hand combat on the bridge of the admiral’s flagship. Eddientis pulled up a visual of the Fleet ships blockading Trelia. Some of them already fired on others.

  “I’ve got your data, Eddientis,” said Ti.

  “Data? Your dad just started a revolt, and you’re focusing on data?” Pheno asked.

  “My dad’s a total hardass. He’ll win; he always does. After he takes the ship, he’ll expect me to produce a solution. We don’t have much time to save Trelia, so I’m gone.” Ti’s image disappeared.

  Pheno threw his arms up but had to pull them back down in the zero gravity of Eddientis’s asteroid, which frustrated him more.

  “I suggest we float away from the Fleet’s whirlpool,” said Eddientis.

  One of the smaller warships flashed briefly then disintegrated. The firing between ships had subsided.