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

by Mary E. Lowd

  Clarity opened her eyes and saw Mazillion, swarming all around her, diffuse and spread out across the entire zero gee cockpit. However, an orb pulled together densely in front of her face and buzzed, "We are ready."

  Clarity was loath to leave Cassie alone, disconnected right now, but she also didn't think she could bear staying with her, mind joined to an incoherent ball of emotions.

  "I'm coming," Clarity said to Mazillion as the swarm funneled out of the cockpit, down the hall leading to the airlock. To Cassie, she thought as hard as she could, You'll be okay. Wait for me. She also filled her thoughts with incoherent excuses about how she had to keep an eye on Mazillion, how she didn't entirely trust the swarm creature, but she didn't expect Cassie to believe that was her reason.

  If Cassie could understand Clarity at all right now, then she'd see right through those excuses to the truth that their communion was simply too hard, too wearing without the facilitation of the computers. But, for all Clarity knew, Cassie felt the same. That was the point, right? Clarity couldn't tell. She couldn't understand Cassie. There was no reason to stay here, shoving her way through one wave of emotion after another, unsure what any of it meant.

  Clarity took each sucker disk between her fingers in turn, pulled lightly, and persuaded the fungi-like suckers to let go of her skull and her mind. The overwhelming emotions subsided, and she felt small inside her own body again as she floated away from the captain's chair.

  And then she felt a wave of bleak gray depression and bright blue sadness wash through her anyway, even without Cassie's suckers attached.

  These were her own feelings, and they were still huge and overwhelming, as large as if Cassie were feeling them with her mammoth body. Clarity breathed raggedly, trying to push the sensations aside—the twisting sadness when she thought of Irohann's betrayal; the sadness that knocked her like a full body slam when she thought of The Serendipity torn to shreds; and the sadness tickling up from her toes, like the sensation of stepping off a ledge and missing the ground, whenever she thought about Project Merlin and the universe swallowing itself in a cannibalistic destruction.

  There was so much sadness filling Clarity, she couldn't find any room left for even the smallest sensation when she looked at Wisper, curled up and floating in the corner, a metal skeleton wrapped around a plush koala-like doll, still clasped tightly in her metal, immobile hands. Wisper was gone; only the stolen robot body was left. Yet, there wasn't room for a single scrap more of sadness inside of Clarity. Only numbness.

  Maybe Cassie's feeling hadn't been the problem in their fusion; maybe Cassie truly was better off alone right now.

  Clarity kicked a foot down toward the captain's chair, launching herself toward the opening of the nearest vein-like hallway. She pushed her hands and feet against one side of the hallway, then the other, floating and flying down the passageway as fast as she could, as if fleeing her own emotions, following the trailing buzz of Mazillion.

  When they got to the airlock valve, Mazillion took one of the spacesuits from The Serendipity out of the vesicle closet next to it. The swarm creature held up the flaccid smart-cloth, spreading it out in the air to show its baggy, vague, bipedal form. Unlike the formless cloud of insects holding it.

  Clarity pulled her own spacesuit out of her duffle bag, discarded the duffle, leaving it floating in the middle of the hallway, and began pulling the smart-cloth over her normal clothes. As she zipped up the side of the garment, the smart-cloth cinched tightly around her. The comforting rectangle of the inset algae filter presssed into her back; the algae filter was squishy like a gel pack, with rounded edges. The air filtered through it always smelled fresh and mossy to Clarity.

  Beside her, Mazillion funneled into their spacesuit, filling out the empty arms and legs with the buzz of tiny bodies. Clarity had begun to get used to Mazillion's complicated, ever-changing, mutable forms, but the surreal truth of how different Mazillion was from all of the rest of them hit Clarity squarely again as she watched their cloud body disappear into a familiar bipedal form.

  Once Mazillion zipped up the side of their spacesuit, the only clue that the inhabitant inside the smart-cloth wasn't another human was the frenetic roiling of fluttering bodies visible through the transparent cloth of the faceplate. No face; only dozens and dozens of insect bodies, crowding together, flying and hovering inside the tight, enclosed space of the spacesuit's head.

  Clarity shuddered, trying to shove aside her sudden sensation of creepy-crawly tickling all over her body. Mazillion had done nothing but support Wisper this entire mission. Mazillion was the only member of Wisper's team who hadn't made the mission harder; they didn't deserve Clarity's hind-brain prejudices.

  Mazillion reached out with a spacesuit arm and pressed a nipple-like bulge in the wall beside the airlock valve. The valve puckered, opening a seam in the flesh of the vein-like wall taller than Irohann. The seam had an S-like curve to it, and the flesh on each side bunched up, scrunching away from the seam, almost like an eyelid, sliding into the space above an eye.

  Clarity and Mazillion floated into the airlock, and the valve door sealed behind them. Inside her spacesuit, Clarity couldn't hear or feel the air shifting, evacuating the airlock as clearly as the last time she'd entered it. With Irohann. Leaving The Serendipity. She couldn't let those feelings overwhelm her. She had to help Mazillion navigate a dead science base.

  The airlock valve on the other side opened, and Clarity saw the metal expanse of the space station's side stretched out before them. "Oh, god," she breathed. "We're not sealed to another airlock." Of course, her words didn't transmit to Mazillion. Or Cassie. Or anyone—there wasn't anyone else out here. No electronics meant no radio. The smart-cloth of her spacesuit could regulate her body temperature and filter her air, because those were, strangely enough, organic processes. But the radio built into the base of the faceplate was as good as dead until they turned Project Merlin off. She and Mazillion would be operating in total silence.

  The silence was oppressive.

  So was the weight of their mission.

  Clarity pulled out the cords to control her spacesuit's built-in jetpack from where they were coiled inside pockets at her hips. The jetpack would work even without electronics, the reactions involved being entirely simple and chemical. Thank the stars.

  The nearest star flickered purple, winking and laughing at Clarity. She wasn't so sure she should be thanking it. Merlin was complicit in all of this, involved somehow in the mad science wreaking damage on the universe and drawing them all here.

  Clarity aimed her body carefully, squeezed the jetpack trigger, and launched after Mazillion. One spacesuit followed the other, across the bleak metal landscape of the outer shell of the Wespirtech science base. She hoped to the high heavens that Mazillion knew the way in, because right now, Clarity was filled with serious doubts about her life choices. She had no idea how to break into this defunct science base, where the entangled particle was inside of it, or what it would even look like. It wouldn't simply be lying around, under a careful sign labeled, Evil Entangled Particle Swallowing the Universe, Please Destroy.

  Clarity was a fool.

  Mazillion didn't need her. Cassie probably did.

  Clarity squeezed the jetpack trigger on one side and spun around, planning to fly back to Cassie. But Cassie wasn't there. The metal surface of the science base's hull stretched out in front of her, empty, barren, certainly not featuring a hulking purple-skinned, pointy-horned space whale.

  "Hell!" Clarity swore. She looked up, to each side, and finally she spotted Cassie's behemoth bulk in the distance, flying above the field of ice, straight away from her and Merlin. The purple strobing light of the pulsar gleamed tauntingly off Cassie's tail fin as she flew away.

  Without the radio working, Clarity had no way to contact Cassie or anyone aboard her. She was stranded, outside of a dead science base, orbiting a shard of pulsing starlight in the middle of a field of godforsaken icy asteroids. She was having the worst
week of her life. And she was probably going to die.

  Her only hope was to get inside the science base with Mazillion and turn off Project Merlin. Maybe with the radio working, she could get Cassie to come back. Maybe. Or maybe she'd end up dying inside of this science base in exactly the way she'd imagined Wisper's scientists slowly starving, suffocating, freezing, whichever bodily function the base stopped supporting first. Except, unlike those imaginary scientists, Clarity wouldn't have Wisper coming for her.

  This mission had already killed Wisper. Clarity might be next. She started to hyperventilate, choking on the mossy smell of her spacesuit's air.

  She needed to clear her head. She needed to focus and get out of here alive, so she could retire to some horrid, little dirtball like she'd grown up on and never enter space again, never interact with lying aliens like Irohann, or be manipulated by complex rogue AIs like Wisper.

  Clarity spun herself back around with a light touch on her jetpack's control and exercised all the self-control she could to tap the control lightly as she jetted across the metal surface of the base's hull, chasing after Mazillion. She wanted to squeeze the controls hard; she wanted to zoom; if she followed her impulses in outer space, though, she'd end up dead. Navigating in zero gee required a gentle, gentle touch.

  Mazillion's space suit knelt at the end of the field of metal, the top of the barrel-shaped core of the base. Before Clarity could reach Mazillion's side, a panel in the metal hull slid open under their kneeling form. The spacesuit containing Mazillion climbed inside through the open panel.

  As Clarity approached the opening, floating distressingly slowly, she saw Mazillion had forced open a small control box beside the panel and left the wires torn out, splaying and frayed. The panel itself was jarred halfway open, and from what she could see, it didn't seem to be a true airlock door, more of an opening into the base's mechanical guts; Clarity didn't think this was supposed to be an entrance to the base at all.

  Clarity hoped they wouldn't end up stuck on this station after turning the Merlin Project off, because it looked like Mazillion's plan for reaching it involved ripping the base apart as they went.

  Clarity placed her gloved hands on the edge of the open panel as she floated by, catching herself so she wouldn't have to carefully maneuver herself through the opening using the jetpack controls. It was a relief to be able to pull herself inside of a space station. Even the burst-open mechanical guts of a dead one. It was a relief to have walls around her, even ones filled with wiring and metal widgets looking all wrong and askew. For goodness sake, did Mazillion need to cause this much damage?

  Regardless, being inside the metal guts of the base was better than being in open space. The emptiness of space is not safe or comforting. Space extends in every direction, mostly empty, and waiting for arrogant planet-dwellers to draw their last breaths. Space can outwait you. Always.

  Clarity climbed her way through the mechanical wreckage wrought by her strange partner in crime, following their spacesuit-clad feet. She was relieved when the soles of Mazillion's spacesuit boots disappeared over a ledge, and she found herself looking into the space station proper. It was nothing more than a metal hallway, but it looked like a metal hallway designed for humans to be inside of it. Clarity launched herself in and didn't look back at the path of wreckage they'd wormed their way through to get there. Mazillion was already floating down the hallway toward a sealed door. When they reached the door, Mazillion braced against it, pushing at the seam along the side, trying to pry it open. Clarity joined in, and together, they forced the door open.

  What Clarity saw on the other side of the door took a moment to make any sense. There should have been a room, or a hallway. Something with square, or rectangular, edges. Instead... It was like Clarity was staring into a metal whirlpool. She thought, maybe, it had originally been a room, but some horrible force of gravity had twisted the entire space, rotating and squeezing down.

  Clarity's stomach clenched and flipped as she imagined the forces required to do this to a room. If a wave of gravity like that hit them now... She didn't want to think about how that would feel. Oh god, she hoped it would kill her instantly, because she really, truly, deeply never wanted to experience it. And yet, she couldn't help picturing arms and legs twisting at bizarre angles, and her whole body squishing into a squiggle of flesh and crushed bone.

  Clarity drew a deep breath of mossy air, trying to keep her vision from going dark around the edges. She wanted to lie down, but she was already floating. And she needed to turn off the haywire experiment that had caused this.

  Mazillion had already floated forward into the center of the frozen metal whirlpool. Clarity pushed herself forward to follow them into the twisting, narrowing path through the whirlpool's hearth. What should have been a rectangular hallway squeezed itself down into a cylindrical tube with disturbingly rumpled walls, and just as Clarity thought the path was getting too narrow for her to continue, there was a sudden bend to one side. She barely squeezed herself through, but around the corner of the final corkscrew, the pathway opened back up.

  Clarity climbed out of the mouth of the whirlpool to find herself in a wide-open space, filled with rows of other spacesuit-clad people. No, wait—Clarity lifted her arm, and half of the other spacesuits lifted their arms too. All of the spacesuits were Clarity and Mazillion, reflected ad infinitum. Every wall in this room was a giant, floor to ceiling mirror. But at least, she was back in a normal-shaped room with four walls. This one hadn't been twisted through a frightening, destructive gravity-scape.

  As Clarity stood by the mouth of the whirlpool, examining the giant room for anything useful—an exit, a box labeled Please Destroy Me, anything at all other than herself and Mazillion—her strange companion began to zip open their spacesuit.

  There couldn't be any atmosphere here. Even if they were inside the space station, based on the way they'd come, there could be no air here. Clarity wanted to shout something, a warning, anything, but the radio didn't work. Nonetheless, Mazillion's tiny bodies began to filter out of the open seam in the side of their spacesuit. Thousands of tiny bodies dispersed, flying out in straight lines away from each other. Without air, they couldn't breathe, obviously, but they also couldn't fly. There was nothing for their wings to push against. So, they simply floated outward, away from each other.

  Clarity was bewildered, but the sight became a whole lot more confusing as she realized there was something truly eerie happening in front of her. Something so strange, she couldn't even admit to herself what she was seeing at first. She kept denying it until Mazillion's tiny multitude of bodies dispersed far enough to begin crossing the invisible plane that should have been mirrors.

  They should have been mirrors. But they weren't, and Mazillion's bodies flew across those invisible lines from every direction. There were no mirrors.

  And as soon as Clarity admitted that to herself, she was able to admit the truly upsetting thing she'd noticed just below the level of conscious thought: Mazillion's reflections weren't dispersing from their spacesuits at the same rate. Some of them were already dispersed throughout this large, confusing space, bouncing off of the far, far away walls; others were only beginning to leave their spacesuits in tiny clouds of dark bodies.

  They weren't reflections. They were... What could they be? Had time itself shattered and split here?

  Clarity raised her arm again and watched her—reflections? future and past selves?—raise their arms a little before and a little after her. As if in a trance, she pushed herself away from the wall, toward one of the seams in reality that should have been a mirror. Oh god, it should have been a mirror. But it wasn't, and she found herself staring through her faceplate at her own face, slick with sweat and framed by greasy, green hair. Her eyes looked haunted, but the look of horror on her reflection's face happened too fast, before the horror of the situation had time to pass from her racing heart all the way to the nerves in her face.

  Clarity looked away, but she fou
nd herself looking into her own face again, another version of herself floating toward her from her other side. This time, her expression changed too slowly—her eyes widening, her mouth separating to scream, all of it too slow. It was like watching herself with a time delay, and she found herself reacting more strongly—opening her eyes wider, twisting her lips with a melodramatic grimace—as if trying to force the reflection to speed up. But it was not a reflection. And it did not speed up, only continued to follow her lead, falling farther and farther behind.

  Clarity raised her hands to cover her face. She couldn't stand to see this wrongness plastered across the face of the universe in front of her. She felt as if she'd looked the universe itself in the eye, and the eye was twisted, deformed, sickly, and wrong.

  19 The Depths of Horror

  Minutes passed or maybe hours. Maybe lifetimes. Clarity couldn't float through this haunted science base with her face covered forever, but she couldn't bear to look herself—hundreds and thousands of herself—in the face again. She couldn't bear the anguish and terror in her own eyes. She felt like she'd become Mazillion—one creature, one consciousness, spread across multitudes of bodies.

  One soul. She had one soul. She needed to pull herself together, literally. Forget all those other selves, and simply take the actions she needed to in order to get herself out of here alive.

  But she couldn't bear to look into her own face again. Hey, today was a day for stupid choices. Clarity pulled her hands from her face, but closed her eyes. She held her arms out to protect herself from slamming into anything—especially herself. How dangerous could that be, she wondered? Would she create a time paradox and destroy the universe? You know, more than it was already being destroyed. And more than she was already inside a time paradox...

  To hell with it all. She wasn't going to be able to think herself out of this one. She grabbed the controls for her jetpack and squeezed down hard, launching herself forward at an accelerating rate. As she flew, objects slammed against her, bumping hard into her shoulder or legs, throwing her off course. Not that she had a particular course in mind during this mad, blind dash. After a while, Clarity stuck her feet out, expecting that in spite of the infinite breaks in time she'd seen, there had to be a wall. She was inside of a space station—one haunted with time ghosts, but still, a metal structure. There had to be a wall.