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

by Mary E. Lowd

  Clarity opened her eyes and immediately regretted every decision in her life leading to this moment. She was inside a room that reminded her a little of Maradia's workshop; scientific equipment and gear strewn everywhere, across lab benches and work tables; metal surfaces covered with intricate metal and glass apparatuses. Except much of the glass was shattered and floating like tiny crystals throughout the room. And all of it—the tables, the benches, the equipment, and the walls—were all pulsing, warping like she was looking at them through a fisheye lens.

  Parts of the room extruded toward her; others melted away, as if the fabric of the universe itself was being pulled through tiny pinprick holes inside of itself. Swallowing itself. Clarity looked at her own hand and saw it stretching, twisted, away from her. Her arm bent, squiggled like an S, both above and below her elbow. Her gloved hand had grown comically large; the other had shrunk down too small to see, like it had fallen through a hole in the universe.

  All around Clarity, Mazillion buzzed, flying in millions of straight lines, tracing geometric patterns as individual bodies bounced off of the walls, the tables, the benches, and each other in midair. Except there was no air. And there shouldn't be millions of Mazillion, only thousands.

  Had Mazillion multiplied themself using the bizarre properties of the previous room somehow? Clarity couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of anything. She had no idea what was going on, and her head had begun to ache fiercely. Pounding in rhythm with the room. The entire universe for all Clarity knew. Perhaps they were too late, and this was how the universe ends. With visual distortion and time dilation. But also a whimper, because Clarity couldn't entirely hold her panic back.

  The bouncing bodies of Mazillion moved faster and faster, gaining speed without the drag-resistance of an atmosphere. Their straight lines—curved by the bending of space—began to make patterns together; stripes and plaids. As Clarity watched, she saw those straight lines crisscrossing each other form sudden starbursts, gone as soon as she saw them.

  Then all at once, Mazillion's multitudinous bodies came together into one buzzing clump, centered on a simple metal box with an opened flip top. Mazillion's bodies joined together, holding onto each other with tiny many-jointed legs, and pulled the flip top up. Clarity's breath caught, waiting for the lid to close, but instead the entire box, covered with Mazillion's bodies, disappeared down the center of a whirlpool, twisting reality.

  Clarity screamed, expecting to feel herself crushed like the metal walls of the whirlpool-shaped room she'd crawled through earlier.

  But suddenly, the box snapped back into place. Lid shut. Closed tight with a clunky metal latch.

  Clarity dropped to the floor; the artificial gravity was back on. Her headache stopped. The room returned to sanity all around them. A simple room. No longer a metaphysical horror twisting up the fabric of space-time itself.

  Clarity took a careful step, still unsure of reality itself, toward Mazillion and the metal box. The ground held steady beneath her. Her own arms held straight, bending only once at the elbows. She'd never been so grateful to simply stand on a solid floor and have both of her hands be the same size.

  Each step felt like a divine gift from the universe, a beneficent boon, but she grew concerned that much of Mazillion's body had stopped moving. Tiny insect forms lay scattered over the table, around the closed metal box, lying still. Clarity had never seen Mazillion's tiny bodies hold so still before; even the injured bodies which had landed on her palm had continued to flutter their wings fitfully and shift their weight between legs.

  Only a small cluster of Mazillion was left swarming above the box, flying about erratically, failing to pull together into a coherent form.

  Since gravity was back on, the radios might work. Of course, Mazillion wasn't wearing their spacesuit anymore to receive the signal; the smart-cloth garment had been discarded in the room of mirrored time-verses. But there had to be, at least, a thin atmosphere in this laboratory room, or else Mazillion wouldn't be able to fly at all.

  Clarity said, "Testing?" Micro-broadcasters in the edges of her spacesuit's faceplate successfully amplified her voice to the room, as well as transmitting it to the discarded spacesuit. She could tell Mazillion had heard her by the way the tiny flying bodies stirred; an unfocused clustering, and a slight shimmer across the little cloud, like dozens of tiny insects had turned to face her, antennae bent at the alert. "Are you okay?" Clarity asked. "Can I help?"

  The bodies pulled closer together and said, "I am... diminished." The orb Mazillion made now was smaller than the mouth that had come to summon Clarity when she awoke on Cassie. And Clarity feared this was all that was left of Mazillion—a small mouth and a few stray wisps. They wouldn't be enough to lift the Merlin Box, let alone carry it back to Cassie. Assuming Cassie came back...

  Clarity looked at the control panel built into the fabric of her spacesuit's wrist. The cloth buttons lit up now when she looked at them, like they were supposed to. She worked the controls, telling her suit's radio to broadcast her speech on the same frequency Wisper had insisted they use for talking to Cassie back at Aether Gaia. She also set her suit to broadcast a general distress call, in case anyone else was out there.

  "Cassie?" Clarity said. "We have the Merlin Box. We're coming back now." She tried not to let her voice shake too much or pitch too high from the strain and fear. Mazillion was injured enough; they didn't need to know Cassie had abandoned them. At least not yet. Hopefully never.

  "Come on," Clarity said. "I can carry the box." She reached out and grabbed the box carefully, sliding her gloved hands along its metal sides. The metal was almost dangerously hot. She tried not to crush any of Mazillion's tiny bodies, in case they were only dormant and would rejoin the swarm shortly. Though she had limited hope in that regard.

  Mazillion's mouth buzzed. "Containment, needs containment." The orb elongated, spread out across the room, and pointed like an arrow at a squat crate with a hexagonal top; thick ridges ran down each of its corners, and rows of thin, coiled copper tubing filled the spaces between. It had a console on one side with a small display. The whole thing was about half Clarity's height and as big around as she was tall. It looked very heavy.

  "There's no way you could carry that, even at your full..." Clarity wasn't sure what the next word was: size? She decided it was safer to skip on. "What was your plan here without me? Hack through a super secret base's safety protocols without clearance and turn the gravity back off?"

  "Secure base," Mazillion said, reforming from an arrow into an orb.

  "Sure, you did that fine without me." Clarity was perfectly aware she'd been no help at all so far, except to leave their fickle, finicky, frightened young ride alone to ditch them here.

  "Secure base," Mazillion repeated, pulsing in time with the buzzing words. "Stay." The orb wobbled through the thin air, up close to Clarity. "Regrow. Contact bidders."

  Clarity tried to process those words, but as she did, she couldn't help wondering how much of Mazillion's mind was left and how much had been destroyed by being... diminished. She couldn't fight the feeling that she was speaking to only a piece of the creature Wisper had hired and trusted.

  "You were planning to stay here and regrow," Clarity said, not quite making it a question. She almost asked what Mazillion had planned to eat, but she remembered the food synthesizers here would probably be working again now that the power was back. She decided to believe that was the plan and not think about alternatives involving dead scientists, even though she had doubts about what kind of state the food synthesizers would be in after the time and gravity distortions this base had undergone.

  Honestly, it was shocking the gravity was working and the base had found a way to automatically seal itself up enough to refill with a thin atmosphere. According to the readings displayed on the inside of her faceplate, the atmosphere was far too thin for her to want to try breathing it.

  Mazillion was one damn resilient creature to have survived at all without t
heir spacesuit, inside this base before the atmosphere returned.

  Clarity placed the scalding hot Merlin Box inside of the coil-wrapped hexagonal crate. There was a lid beside it. She lifted the lid up and placed it on the top. The lid was heavy enough on its own, without worrying about the rest of the cooling crate. Clarity latched the lid in place, then checked the little display on the crate's side. It showed a few numbers; as far as she could tell, the Merlin Box was safely contained for now.

  Clarity turned to look at Mazillion, who was hovering in the air, worrisomely, beside her. It was comforting when Mazillion was this close to be covered with a thin layer of smart-cloth. "What do you mean," she asked, "by 'contact bidders'?" That part of Mazillion's plan made the least sense to her. "What kind of bidders?" They couldn't be planning on selling an object that was so dangerous; a single box capable of destroying the whole universe. No one could be psychopathic enough to plan on selling such a box.

  And for heaven's sake, who would buy it?

  "Was this part of Wisper's plan?" Clarity asked, but Mazillion didn't answer. The orb that was left of the swarm creature was flying lower and lower, settling down toward the table top where so many of its bodies had seemingly already died. "Whoa, there," Clarity said. She held out her hands. "Come to me; I'll keep you safe. I'll get you home."

  The word 'home' was nothing more than a habit; Cassie was clearly not her home, nor Mazillion's. But that's what people say. And Clarity knew she shouldn't feel bad for saying it. Yet, she was kicking herself on the inside—for being disloyal to The Serendipity, barely a day gone, and for leading on Cassie, who wasn't even here to hear her.

  Or was she? A voice crackled over Clarity's spacesuit radio: "Message received. Be there soon." Was that what Cassie's voice sounded like over the radio? Or Roscoe's? Or had someone else picked up their message? Maybe one of Mazillion's mysterious bidders...

  The orb of Mazillion came to rest in Clarity's open hands, melting from a coherent orb into a layer of twitching, fluttering insects perched on the cloth of her spacesuit gloves.

  "Okay, first step," Clarity said, "let's get you back in your spacesuit."

  Mazillion didn't answer. Right now, the swarm alien seemed less like a single consciousness and more like a multitude of disparate insects. Clarity carried them, open handed, back through the path she must have followed to get here. In places, there were scorch marks on the walls, or the metal was distorted into frozen ripples. Clarity was amazed she'd made it through here alive. She realized now why Wisper had chosen Mazillion for this task—with a distributed swarm body, Mazillion was more likely to survive destructive bursts of gravity or ripples of time. She should never have followed Mazillion in here.

  And yet, if she hadn't, she'd have never looked the universe in the eye. At the time, it was the most horrible, frightening thing that had ever happened to her, but she already wished she'd had the fortitude to stare back at herself through the rippling time fields. She felt like there had been a key to the mysteries of the universe waiting for her, and she'd been to afraid to take it.

  Clarity found her way back to the room of infinite time—now it was just a small metal antechamber outside the giant lab, filled with strewn mechanical equipment. Mazillion's spacesuit was lying, crumpled on the floor.

  Clarity tilted her palms, lightly rubbing the palm of one against the edge of the other, encouraging Mazillion's multitudinous bodies to resettle on only one hand. By the time she got one hand free of the little bodies, the rest coated her other arm all the way up to the shoulder. She lifted the spacesuit up with one hand, planning to encourage the little bodies to fly back through the unzipped opening.

  But the transparent faceplate was cracked. This spacesuit would offer no protection from a vacuum. "Damn," she said, turning the suit over, looking at the cloth as well as she could while holding it in only one hand. "I don't think I can repair that."

  Then she had a horrible thought that made her skin crawl all over. Mazillion's diminished size and flexibility in form meant—oh, she was loathe to think it—but it meant they could fit inside her spacesuit together.

  Clarity said, "Okay, I'm not a fan of this plan, but you can't use that spacesuit. I know you just survived in vacuum for—" She wasn't sure how long it had been. It felt like only fifteen or twenty minutes, but time had been so distorted, it could have taken much more or less time than that to get to the Merlin Box. "Look, clearly you can survive in vacuum for a little while, but look what it's done to you... I can't let you do that to yourself again for getting back out to Cassie. There'd be nothing left of you." Clarity drew in a deep breath of mossy-smelling air. "So, I'm going to unzip the side of my spacesuit and let you in here with me." She hesitated and added, "As soon as we're ready to head back out into space."

  Mazillion's constant low-level buzzing changed pitch slightly; Clarity decided she was hearing the sound of unenthusiastic agreement. She could identify with that. She wasn't enthusiastic about this plan either.

  As she walked back through the base, looking for a dolly to load the containment crate onto, Clarity talked mindlessly to Mazillion, describing what she was doing the way one might to a dog or a person in a coma. She was trying not to worry about whether Mazillion would survive and, even more worrisomely, whether Mazillion had actually psychopathically planned on betraying Wisper and selling the Merlin Box.

  After twenty minutes of digging through broken and twisted scientific equipment, muttering and grumbling to herself, Clarity decided she needed a different plan. She found one of the station computers and, wonder of wonders, it actually turned on. She looked up a layout of the base, thinking maybe they could get Cassie to seal to an actual airlock this time. Then she wouldn't have to invite Mazillion—with all their creepy crawly legs—into her spacesuit with her. Shudder. No luck, though. Both of the airlocks seemed to have been entirely squashed, fused shut beyond any possible usefulness. Clarity supposed Wisper had known about the crushed airlocks from the original destruction of the base, and that's why Mazillion had broken into the base a different way.

  As Clarity cruised through the uncorrupted portions of the base's computer systems, she realized that her first idea for lifting a heavy crate wasn't as unreasonable as she'd assumed. The base's safety protocols had been almost completely destroyed by all the chaos, and she had no trouble whatsoever turning the artificial gravity back off.

  "There we go," Clarity said as her feet floated off the floor. She hadn't been able to find a dolly, but she had seen a good solid rope. She tied one end securely to some of the coiled tubing on the outside of the containment crate. She tied the other end into a loop and slung it over the shoulder that wasn't covered with Mazillion.

  The containment crate floated weightlessly after Clarity as she maneuvered her way back through the base. It only barely fit through the corridor that had been twisted into the funnel of a metal whirlpool, but it did fit. When she reached the hallway where Mazillion had ripped right through the station's guts to enter, she saw the shimmer of a force field, sealing off the breach. That explained the return of a thin atmosphere, allowing Mazillion to fly properly.

  "That'll have to go," Clarity said. But as soon as it did, Mazillion would be done flying again. "So that makes it time for you to crawl inside with me." Clarity unzipped the side of her spacesuit, but Mazillion's many bodies kept crawling around her shoulders where they'd mostly settled at this point. "Come on," she said. "I don't like this either, but it's the best way." She tried to lightly brush Mazillion's bodies toward the unzipped opening in her spacesuit using her hands. Eventually, they started crawling inside. She couldn't possibly feel the light touch of their legs through her clothes under the spacesuit cloth, but she tickled all over and had to hold her breath to keep from laughing or maybe sobbing hysterically.

  When the last of Mazillion's bodies were inside the spacesuit with her, Clarity moved very carefully, trying to adjust to the tickling sensation and figure out where they'd mostly settled. "Ar
e you..." She tilted her head and felt the creepy-crawly sensation all around her neck. They'd settled into the tresses of her green hair. That was probably the safest place for them, as the helmet portion of the spacesuit was more rigid than the rest of the smart-cloth—both to allow greater mobility in the other parts of the suit and to provide greater protection around the head.

  "Yeah, that's good," Clarity said. "Stay around my neck and you'll be fine." She wasn't sure if she'd be fine though. She needed to get back to Cassie as soon as possible and get those thousands of tiny legs out of her hair and off her neck.

  Clarity left the containment crate tied to a handle in the hallway and floated back through the base to the computer station where she'd turned off the gravity. This time, she turned off all of the force fields.

  By the time Clarity got back to the containment crate and dragged it out through the base's mechanical guts to the empty space on the outside, her own guts were all gnawed up worrying about who had answered her distress call, and she was going nearly out of her mind trying not to think about the tickling legs all over her throat and the weirdly bright coppery smell of the air in her spacesuit ever since Mazillion joined her.

  Right now, saving the universe hardly seemed worth it.

  20 Twisting the Knife

  Floating outside the broken, haunted science base that had recently tried to devour the universe, it occurred to Clarity that what she and Mazillion had just done was heroic. She should feel like a hero. But it didn’t feel heroic; it felt scary. And she didn't feel like a hero. She felt angry the universe had put her through so much.