Entanglement Bound: An Epic Space Opera Series (Entangled Universe Book 1)

by Mary E. Lowd

  Clarity hadn't realized Mazillion could spread apart like that—stretched out so far. Perhaps it wasn't on purpose. Maybe this individual component of their body had gotten lost and only now noticed the way up to the rest of itself. Clarity wasn't entirely sure how a hive creature like Mazillion worked. However, she'd have to keep a closer eye out for pieces of their body flying around.

  8 Breakfast for Dinner in Space

  In the kitchen, Irohann had organized their passengers into chef's assistants, each of them working to realize his vision of a big, friendly dinner together.

  Am-lei was setting out synthesized dishes and cutlery on the breakfast bar in the middle of the room. The Serendipity's kitchen didn't generally have more than a couple bowls and forks on hand, but Irohann had clearly synthesized a few more using the moldable plastics setting on their synthesizer. The extra dishes and cutlery could be melted back down later and the base plastics reused.

  Roscoe was sitting at the breakfast bar, on one of the two stools, slicing what looked like a large green brick—probably some sort of plant matter Irohann had synthesized—and arranging the slices in a big bowl. While he was working, Irohann brought over a couple smaller bricks of various shades of orange, yellow, and red from the synthesizer.

  "Shall I slice those up too?" Roscoe asked, cheerful as ever.

  "That's the idea," Irohann said.

  Wisper, who wouldn't be eating, had even been conscripted to stir a vinegary smelling concoction in a smaller bowl. Probably some sort of salad dressing. She held it in one metal hand, stirring with the other, while standing politely out of the way in the doorway to her and Roscoe's room.

  "I was thinking of synthesizing some of the protein you like," Irohann said to Clarity as she squeezed her way over to him on the far side of the breakfast bar. "The one that reminds you of teriyaki tofu? I thought the plant-eaters here might be able to eat it. I thought it might round out the meal."

  "Maybe," Clarity said. "But I have a better idea." She reached toward the synthesizer's control panel, but couldn't quite get to it around Irohann's furry, red bulk. "Can I—" She reached again, still no luck. "Can I get to the synthesizer? I've got something I want to try to program into it."

  Irohann put his paws on her shoulders, pulled her in close, and pivoted around. "I'll help Roscoe finish slicing the vegetables."

  Clarity punched the buttons on the synthesizer, adjusting the levels of the sugars, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats the machine would mix together before printing them out. She lowered the protein levels; raised the sugars and more complex carbohydrates; and added a few less common fats and minerals to alter the flavor. When the synthesizer began printing, the kitchen filled with the buttery, maple smell of warm pancakes—probably not the same as it had been during her childhood, but close enough given that it had been decades since then.

  Clarity took the lumpy, golden brown brick of pancake matter out of the synthesizer and plopped it on a serving plate. It was soft and wiggled when she dropped it.

  "What's that?" Roscoe asked, nose twitching like crazy, sniffing the air.

  "It's based on a dish I used to eat growing up—pancakes," Clarity said.

  "It smells scrumptious." Roscoe's whiskers spread in a wide grin.

  Even Am-lei's mouth parts were working busily, as if she found the smell enticing too. Clarity had another idea.

  "Hold on a sec," Clarity said, punching a few more buttons on the synthesizer. She grabbed a cup to place under its printing nozzle, then pressed the start button. A thick, golden nectar drizzled into the cup. When it was full, Clarity placed the cup on the breakfast bar in front of Am-lei. "This is my best attempt at simulating maple syrup. The maple flavors are already baked into the pancakes..." She looked over at the large lump of pancake matter. It wasn't exactly plural pancakes yet. More of a pancake loaf. "Anyway, in case you want to try something similar to what we're eating, I thought..."

  "Thank you," Am-lei said. Polite, possibly interested. Clarity wasn't entirely sure.

  "Do we know what Mazillion eats?" Clarity asked the room.

  "According to my files," Wisper said from the doorway where she was still mixing the bowl of salad dressing—it couldn't possibly need so much stirring. Clarity came over and took the bowl away. "Mazillion is a primarily carnivorous creature."

  "Protein, then," Clarity said, pouring the dressing over the finished salad. It didn't look like a bad approximation of a salad for something out of the food synthesizer. In order to have an offering for Mazillion, she punched a final code into the synthesizer, causing it to print out a piping hot slab of in vitro meat that smelled like toasted ham. She didn't know if Mazillion would like the ham substitute, but she knew she'd enjoy it. Besides, it would go well with the pancake slices.

  When they'd first moved onto The Serendipity and started using the food synthesizer, Clarity didn’t know any better than to punch in the nutrients she needed and then end up eating a plain, healthy, boring brick of food. Irohann was a clever chef, though, and had figured out ways to synthesize all different sorts of bricks of food, chop them up into different shapes, and mix them together like they were actual cuisine. Not mere sustenance.

  The door to Clarity's room, which had been shut, slid open, and Jeko stood behind the door, calico dress rumpled, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the prehensile tip of her long nose.

  "We made dinner," Irohann said.

  Clarity gestured grandly at the spread on the breakfast bar and said, "I'd say sit down, but there are only two stools, and I think they go to Roscoe and Am-lei since they're the shortest."

  Am-lei straightened her long legs, gaining herself nearly six inches of height, and shoved the stool closest to her toward Clarity using two left arms.

  Roscoe, however, said, "Thank you all kindly," as if there had ever been any question of taking his stool away. Without it, the top of the breakfast bar would be above his head, about level with the tips of his ears.

  Clarity settled on her stool, thinking about how useful it would be to have a few extra stools stashed away. If they were going to be taking passengers on again, Clarity would need to get some more furniture for the ship. Most of the time, they could store it in the extra room, where Roscoe and Wisper were staying right now. Of course, they'd probably need to furnish the extra room too. Not every passenger would be as understanding of their room lacking a bed as Roscoe was. Or Wisper, for that matter.

  Even so, if this haphazard, hurried departure was a dry-run for taking on passengers, it was going okay so far. It was kind of like being a bed and breakfast in space.

  Jeko took a place at the breakfast bar beside Am-lei, and Irohann took the head of the table. Wisper stayed awkwardly in the doorway to the extra room until Clarity waved for her to come over. Then the robot stood awkwardly at the table, an empty place setting in front of her.

  Mazillion funneled into the room like a tiny storm cloud, but then the cloud poured itself into the shape of a bipedal alien, standing beside Wisper at the table. Buzzing and vibrating.

  Clarity took a knife and sliced into the spongey loaf of pancake like it was a roast. She cut thick slices and served them onto each plate that was held out toward her. And everyone, except Wisper and Am-lei, held their plates out toward her. Even Mazillion, which made Clarity really nervous to see—the dense, roiling cloud of buzzing insect bodies reached down and picked up their plastic plate with the simulated shape of a hand, lifted it, and held it across the table.

  There was something very unsettling about it. Clarity knew Mazillion didn't have a hand in the same sense each of the rest of them did. There wasn't a single mass of flesh lifting the floating plate—it was hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, flying insects, working together as if they made up a single hand.

  Clarity was having trouble wrapping her head around the very idea of Mazillion, even though Mazillion was right in front of her, staring her in the face. Clarity tilted her head to the side, suddenly noticing something.

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bsp; Mazillion tilted their head to the side as well, mimicking her motion. Subtly, but Clarity caught it.

  While Irohann served the salad, Clarity watched Mazillion. The hive alien's shape kept fluctuating—not just due to the roiling nature of their composite body, composed of all those fluttering tinier bodies—but also the overall shape. Mazillion's head grew longer, and the top split in half like long ears when Roscoe was talking. When Am-lei started speaking, Clarity was sure she saw the shape of a curling proboscis in the roiling optical illusion of Mazillion's face. Then when Jeko spoke, the proboscis grew thicker, longer, like Jeko's prehensile nose. Clarity wondered if the others had noticed.

  Mazillion was mirroring each of them, showing who they were paying attention to by how they shaped themself.

  Clarity wanted to ask Mazillion, "How do all your individual bodies communicate with each other in order to know how to move together?" She wanted to just blurt the question out and hopefully learn whether they were communicating by dance, like bees, or possibly even telepathy. (Hey, if stars could be sentient, anything was possible—maybe telepathy could be real too.) But it seemed too personal, like someone asking her about how mammal stomachs worked, what kind of acids they contained and why the acids didn't eat through her own stomach.

  Clarity took a spongey bite of pancake loaf, and the maple sweetness melted over her tongue. She'd have to make this again. Though, it was possibly less like dinner and more like cake. She balanced out the sweetness with a vinegary bite of crisp, crunchy green-and-red slices of vegetable matter. The salad was awfully good for having been designed by a chef who disdained plant matter. She noticed Irohann was wolfing down one slice after another of the ham-like protein, and had even wrapped one thin slice of the protein around his salad in order to eat it like a wrap.

  While they ate, Roscoe regaled them all with stories of his grandchildren, nieces, and nephews—all the little, hopping bunny-aliens who had been bouncing all over his quarters when they'd come for him. Then Jeko told them about her childhood, growing up as her parents dragged her from station to station. The childhood Jeko had longed to escape from—filled with transience and adventure—was like the adulthood Clarity had chosen for herself.

  When the dishes were empty and their bellies full, the friendliness wore thin and awkwardness set in. Roscoe ran out of stories about bunny-children, and Jeko ran out of stories about being a young elephantoid. No one else seemed to have stories they wanted to share. Am-lei had been almost friendly when she was alone with Clarity; in this larger group, she withdrew, quietly sipping at her cup of maple syrup with an unfurled proboscis. Mazillion mostly spoke in one-word sentences, and their buzzing voice seemed to put everyone else on edge whenever they spoke.

  Would it be rude for Clarity to shut herself in Irohann's room and ignore their guests? Was she expected to entertain them in addition to ferrying them?

  Irohann didn't seem to think so. He excused himself from the table and disappeared into his room, tail swishing as the door slid shut behind him. He left Clarity with a room full of dirty dishes and alien strangers. She bristled at being left behind. While she probably could follow him straight into his room—it was where she'd be sleeping this week—she felt like she'd be intruding on his privacy. Of course, she didn't have any privacy of her own right now.

  In fairness, though, Irohann had made a lovely dinner happen, and none of this had been his idea.

  Clarity stacked a few of the dishes up, dumped them into the recycling chamber of the synthesizer, and said, "I'll be up in the cockpit if anyone needs anything." As she climbed up the ladder to the cockpit, she heard Mazillion's voice buzz, "Wisper, tell us about this mission."

  Clarity hesitated with her right hand between rungs. She was curious about Wisper's mission. She wanted to stay and listen, but it wasn't her mission. She wasn't part of this team, and Mazillion had clearly waited to ask until she was leaving—the last outsider, bringing the group down to Wisper's hired experts.

  Clarity settled into the captain's chair in the cockpit and directed the computer to select an audiobook on solar biology for her. She leaned back, slipped the earpiece in, and listened to a cheerful but serious voice tell her about noble gases and isotopic variations as she watched the stars glitter past. She fell asleep, listening to the voice discuss fluctuations in radiation and patterns of solar flares. She dreamed about stars. They danced with her, holding her in arms made from solar flares, warm and red. A lazy red giant spun her around, then passed her into the arms of an energetic white dwarf. They twirled and whirled, trailing tongues of flame, until a blue dwarf cut in and led her in a spicy tango, blue fire surrounding her.

  Finally, a simple yellow sun pulled her in close and whispered in her ear, "I wanted to check on our progress."

  Clarity startled awake. The voice had been Wisper's, and the skeletal blue and silver robot was already sitting in the co-pilot seat beside her.

  "The ship flies itself," Clarity said. She glanced down at the control dash. "There's still five and a half days until anything interesting will happen up here." She pulled herself out of the captain's chair and stumbled her way down the ladder, still half asleep, and much too tired to care if Wisper commandeered the ship's controls while she was gone.

  Clarity entered Irohann's room without knocking and slipped into bed beside the big, warm, red, fuzzy body. He made a muffled sound in his sleep, acknowledging her presence, and wrapped an arm around her. Covered in long red fur and warm with sleep, his arm reminded Clarity of the red giant star from her dreams, and within moments, she was dancing across space with sentient stars again.

  9 From Slow to Very, Very Fast

  The next five days passed excruciatingly slowly. Clarity was used to turning up the speakers in her room and flooding the mid-ship level with music while they cooked and ate meals. She and Irohann had a rhythm to how they spent their time in deep space—there was a pattern to their late breakfasts, forgotten lunches, dinners eaten while scheming together about where they wanted to travel next, and late nights binging through whatever vid-dramas they'd downloaded from the most recent solar system they passed through.

  All of that was thrown off by the presence of all their passengers, crowding into every nook and cranny of the ship—in Mazillion's case, literally. Clarity spotted pieces of Mazillion's body in the strangest places, hiding in drawers, clinging to the ceiling. Once she even saw a little six-legged, shimmer-winged piece of Mazillion crawl out of the earpiece in the cockpit when she was about to listen to another audiobook, this one about gravity wells. Somehow, the presence of all these scientific experts—although she wasn't actually sure what Mazillion's expertise was—made her feel threatened. She made up for it by listening to science books, trying to prove how virtuous and intellectual she was, even if only to herself.

  After a week of science books and guests who were mysterious but managed to be simultaneously dull, Clarity was more than ready to offload their passengers, blow a little of their windfall cash on furniture for the extra room, and sink into the most soap-operatic vid-drama she could find. Or maybe spend a few days daisy-chaining through an asteroid belt with a jetpack. Whichever Irohann preferred would be fine by her.

  The first clue they'd arrived at the outskirts of the Eridani 7 system was a stomach-churning sideways lurch in the gravity as the auto-pilot began rotating the ship around for deceleration. In order to decrease the strain on the ship's systems, The Serendipity was designed to flip itself around and decelerate rear end first. So, after the lurch of sideways gravity, they were back to the heavier downward pull of acceleration—in this case, deceleration.

  Clarity fought her way against the extra strong gravity up the ladder to the cockpit. Irohann followed behind. Wisper, of course, was already up there in the captain's chair.

  "Out of my seat," Irohann said, and the skeletal robot climbed out of his chair.

  "Yeah," Clarity said, settling into her own co-pilot seat. "I thought you didn't need furniture?"
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  "Need is a relative term," Wisper intoned. "I would like to oversee our arrival."

  Clarity glanced up over her shoulder at the skeletal robot. "You're welcome to do so," she said. "From right there. Now, where are we heading? The fifth planet has a colony on it. There's a space station orbiting the gas giant. Which one's our destination?"

  "Neither," Wisper answered. "This would be easier if you'd let me take the controls." She reached toward the control dash with metal hands. Though, Clarity suspected what she really wanted was to plug her skull directly into The Serendipity's computer again.

  "No dice," Irohann said. "Give us answers, or we'll drop your crew off at the colony. I'm sure you can charter in-system transportation for a small fee from there. You can deduct the cost from our payment."

  Wisper didn't answer at first. The stars in the front window slowed their vibrating, twinkling dance as the pocket of warp space around them folded back out to normal space. Just as Irohann was about to punch in coordinates for the colony world, Wisper said, "The outer asteroid belt. That's where we're going."

  "Any particular part of it?" Clarity asked, pulling up a system map on one of the screens on the control dash.

  Wisper pointed.

  "There's nothing there," Irohann said.

  "My science vessel is waiting for me," Wisper said. "Take us there."

  Irohann hesitated, paw hovering over the controls. He was clearly picturing dumping Wisper's metal ass and ragtag crew of scientists on the colony world anyway.

  "The timeline is quite tight," Wisper reminded them. "If I must spend an extra half of a day traveling across this system, my team might not arrive in time to save the lives of the scientists waiting for me."

  Irohann punched in the coordinates, and the ship began to veer sideways again, subtly correcting course.