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

by Mary E. Lowd

  "True," Clarity said. "Solanese isn't exactly a natural language for starwhals, even specially gengineered ones."

  Am-lei's antennae bent forward, and she drew all six of her limbs in close, steeply angled. She looked really tense and worried.

  "We can't help with this part," Clarity said. "Let's get out of Roscoe's way." Though she knew from experience that Roscoe probably didn't care very much about what anyone else aboard Cassie was up to right now. He had his paws—well, mind—full of starwhal right now. Regardless, she wanted Am-lei at her best when they got to the Devil's Radio, and that probably involved getting her out of the cockpit and tricking her into relaxing, or at least resting, until they arrived.

  Irohann stayed behind, claiming he wanted to keep an eye on Roscoe, in case the lapine man needed anything. Probably, Irohann mostly wanted to stay out of Clarity's way. He knew she was still mad. He might think that if he gave her space, she'd cool down, come around, and forgive him. She wasn't so sure.

  Clarity led Am-lei back to the room she'd set up camp in with Jeko during the flight to Leionaia. They sat together, both cross-legged but with varying amounts of legs, on the patchwork quilt covered bed, and Clarity prompted Am-lei to tell her more stories about her time at Wespirtech.

  Partly, Clarity was interested in the stories. Mostly, she needed to keep Am-lei busy. So, she listened as Am-lei explained how the primary Wespirtech campus was inside an atmo-dome on a small, rocky moon, devoid of atmosphere. It orbited a beautiful blue and green planet, rich with life and culture, but Wespirtech itself was a relatively dreary set of boxy buildings filling a crater on its bleak little moon.

  Am-lei told Clarity stories about how she and the other Wespirtech scientists liked to hack the atmo-dome's climate controls. The way she told it, there was a constant, unending battle between the prankster scientists and the more conservative administration. One week, the scientists would decide it was time for a snowstorm inside their little bubble of atmosphere; the next, they'd want to throw a tropical island themed party and would hack the heaters to blast at a toasty level. Next, they'd tweak the controls so days and nights lasted slightly longer, stretching out the length of each day until they were totally out of sync with the day-night cycles on the planet below. The administration was always a step behind.

  Clarity wondered what Wisper had thought of all of these pranks. She must have allowed them; the way Wisper had told it, she certainly could have shut the pranks down if she had wanted to. Of course, maybe she'd been exaggerating her power to Clarity. Or maybe she could have stopped the pranks, but she hadn't wanted to draw attention to herself. Or she'd seen interfering with human pranks as beneath her. Maybe she'd simply been less powerful back when Am-lei was a young student at Wespirtech.

  Or maybe Wisper had had more of a sense of humor than Clarity realized. She wished she'd gotten to know the AI better before the EM-fields around the unprotected entangled particle on the Merlin Base had wiped her clean from the stolen robot's mind. She wished Wisper were here with them now. Wisper had been stunningly bad at handling the erratic emotions of her crew—the job Clarity was working on right now—but somehow, it had felt less frightening for Clarity when she was only helping Wisper untangle her problems, rather than being the leader in charge of the team herself. That's what Clarity seemed to be now.

  Clarity couldn't calculate a gravity field to save her life, let alone save the universe, and she'd proven a poor pilot for Cassie. She had no useful skills here, and yet, it still felt like the fate of the entire universe hinged on her managing to keep Am-lei calm until they got to the Devil's Radio.

  As Clarity listened to Am-lei ramble on about her time at Wespirtech, she wished she could work whatever mathematical magic the lepidopteran knew by herself. Then she could lie down on the patchwork quilt, fall asleep, and rest easy until it was time to do her job. Instead, she had to keep herself awake, no matter how tired she got, how close she got to nodding off, so she could keep prompting Am-lei. "Please, tell me more about the time you reversed the gravity inside Wespirtech so everyone had to walk on the ceilings."

  Maybe if they all survived, Clarity would try watching some of those vid lectures on gravity fields again. She would rather have the skills to save the universe directly in her skillset than simply be the person who held the team together. Of course, the next time the universe was in grave danger, maybe it wouldn't be a question of gravity fields. Maybe it would be solar biology—sentient stars going to war with each other, and planetary sentients like herself being caught in the cross-fire of an interstellar stellar war.

  Damn, it was hard to stay awake; the naps she'd taken against the airlock door on Lo'riana Station's docking level had barely left her rested at all. Clarity thought for sure she'd been dreaming, if only for a moment, about stars going to war—a red giant dressed in full knight's armor with a heavy broadsword, and a blue dwarf in leather armor (why didn't it burn up?) wielding a crossbow. Her conscious mind would never have summoned such a ridiculous image.

  "Tell me about the other scientists you knew," Clarity said, adjusting her chin leaned against her fist. Her face was leaning so heavily, she could feel her fist leaving an indentation. It was impossible to stay comfortable while being awake right now; and all she wanted was to go back to watching those stellar warriors battle each other across the galaxy. Instead, she had to keep listening to inane stories about young scientists playing god while worrying that those same scientists might have already caused the end of the universe to be set in motion. "I want to know about the solar biologists."

  Am-lei looked surprised by Clarity's line of questioning, suggesting Clarity wasn't doing as good a job of pretending to stay awake as she'd hoped. Am-lei's antennae waggled in a way Clarity couldn't read in her tired state, but then she fluted, "Everyone thinks the solar biologists are kooks, so they mostly keep to their own little clique. A lot of us don't even think solar biology is a real science."

  As Am-lei fluted on, Clarity wondered if it was too late for herself to pick a science and study it. Could you get into Wespirtech when you were already entering your sixth decade of life? Or did they only accept the young kids straight out of primary school, barely a decade and a half old?

  Given what Am-lei had told her about feeling out of place, simply for being a different species than human, Clarity had her doubts about applying to a place like Wespirtech so far removed from her youthful schooling. Even though humans lived longer now than they ever had before—often two hundred years or more—there were still lingering prejudices in favor of the freshly youthful, newly minted adults. The human equivalent of a lepidopteran teenager who'd just sliced off their wings.

  Besides, even if a place like Wespirtech would take her, as little as Clarity wanted to admit it right now, she couldn't picture herself ever truly settling down. Sure, for the moment, she was longing for a tether to replace her bond to Irohann, but at heart, she was a wanderer. If she weren't a wanderer, she'd have never seen the Grove of Changes filled with teenaged lepidopterans, testing their wings for a few hours before cutting them off to pursue adulthood.

  Settling down might seem attractive—bright and colorful like a pair of vestigial wings—but it was freedom and flight that truly appealed to Clarity. And settling down wouldn't give those to her any more than their large, awkward, beautiful wings helped lepidopterans to fly.

  After hours of talking, Clarity suggested she and Am-lei go for a walk through Cassie's corridors. Clarity thought that might help wake her up, and Am-lei agreed her six legs could use stretching. They moved from the small bedroom-like ventricle into the hall, planning to walk for a while and then end up at the much larger scullery. Clarity hoped a snack might help her stay awake too. Am-lei showed no signs of tiredness. Of course, Am-lei was probably buzzed by the knowledge that she'd soon have work to do, and she'd probably gotten a good night's sleep on the surface of Leionaia.

  Clarity wandered through Cassie's vein-like halls, listening to Am-lei flut
e on, telling her about the live-action role-playing games the human scientists had played in the corridors of Wespirtech's Daedalus Complex. They'd pretended to be vampires and zombies—fantastical monsters from human legends—and chased each other with cardboard daggers like children playing tag.

  Clarity felt far too old for Wespirtech. Besides, the way Am-lei described them, the corridors of the Daedalus Complex sounded sterile and lifeless. Metal halls in a metal box, under an atmo-bubble on a dead moon. There were much more interesting places to visit in the universe. So much for her career as a scientist. It had lasted about two hours, in her imagination.

  As they walked, the air moved past her, subtly changing direction like Cassie was breathing. Clarity had never thought about how still the air had felt inside of The Serendipity, but she had to admit there was something pleasant to the slight motion of the air here. It felt more like being on a planet's surface where air gets tossed about by massive weather systems, larger than anything inside a space station, let alone a single, tiny spaceship.

  As she'd predicted, Clarity did feel herself waking up as she trudged up and down Cassie's halls. When they'd begun, the passages had felt like a maze to her—they all looked the same when she'd arrived, and she hadn't taken the time to figure out Cassie's layout since then. Now she was wandering through Cassie with no objective—other than to keep Am-lei talking about the childish games of godlike scientists who played with the rest of the universe like toys—and she was finally getting a feel for where everything was located.

  The cockpit was in Cassie's nose; the airlock near her tail. Six small ventricle-like rooms clustered around a globular bulge that Clarity couldn't help but think of as Cassie's heart. Those rooms were set up like quarters, and they were between the cockpit and the much larger scullery. Mirroring the scullery, there was another large, empty room with an even larger airlock than the one they'd been using. Perhaps it was designed to be a cargo bay. The way it mirrored the scullery caused Clarity to think of those two large rooms as a pair of lungs. Adding to the illusion, the air in the empty cargo bay-like room moved much more noticeably than anywhere else. Vents in the ceiling looked like gills, and it was almost windy beneath them.

  Finally, Clarity tired of walking, and she led Am-lei, still fluting away, to the scullery. Inside the scullery, the wide viewscreens showed only static, and it took Clarity a moment to realize the buzzing sound she heard wasn't associated with the static. A roar filled the room, completely surrounding them. Mazillion's body had grown and extended; beard-like structures of buzzing insectile bodies clung to all of the walls in the scullery and completely filled the trough under the udder-like organs beside the food synthesizer.

  "Oh my god," Clarity said, suddenly shocked back to fully awake. "Mazillion, have you been growing the entire time we were gone?"

  The roaring buzz modulated, adjusting its tone, like a radio searching for the right frequency. Sometimes, Clarity thought she heard the chatter of Solanese words and voices inside the buzzing, but then the sounds mushed together, disappearing into the noise.

  "Mazillion?" Clarity asked again, stepping deeper into the room. "Are you okay?"

  Am-lei stayed in the entryway, her proboscis coiling and uncoiling nervously. She said, "This doesn't seem right." She stepped backward, lowering herself from standing two-legged to standing four-legged. She could probably run faster that way. "I don't trust this."

  "I watched Mazillion sacrifice most of their body to fight their way to the entangled particle and seal it safely in its containment box," Clarity said. "No one has done more for this mission than Mazillion." She said it, and she meant it. She'd lost her home and had questioned her sanity when she'd seen herself reflected across the fractures of space-time on the Merlin Base, but she hadn't been injured. Wisper had let herself be wiped clean from the robot body she'd downloaded into, but some other version of her code still existed, out there on every Wespirtech computer.

  Mazillion had faced physical harm, losing a full half of their tiny bodies, to save them all from the entangled particle.

  "I trust Mazillion," Clarity said. And again, spoken with gentleness and an honest solicitation, she said to clumps of buzzing insectile bodies all around them, "Are you okay? Why do you need to be this big?"

  Before Mazillion could answer—their roiling roar of buzzing continued shifting in pitch and tone, still unintelligible—the giant viewscreen flickered back on. At least, Clarity thought it had flickered back on, but then she doubted herself. The static was replaced by plain black. Had it turned off? Or were they back in normal space, staring at... She realized the truth. She was looking at the Devil's Radio. Darkness more complete than she'd ever seen before.

  No stars. No static. None of the organic details she always saw inside her own eyelids with her eyes closed. This was a flat black. Total and complete darkness, pulling and sucking, and trying to swallow the universe inside itself.

  Clarity had to be imagining all of that drama and detail. She couldn't possibly see so much in a viewscreen image, even if the image was of a black hole.

  Clarity shivered. She had expected to feel relief when they got here. Now the next step could begin. Am-lei could work her mathematical gravity magic, and the universe could be saved. Or not. Either way, it would be over soon.

  Clarity didn't feel relief. She felt even more panicked.

  Mazillion's roaring buzz grew louder, deafening, and Clarity backed out of the scullery, following Am-lei into the hallway. Cassie's pink bioluminescence dimmed all around them, as if the pull of the black hole was weakening her. But Mazillion only seemed to grow stronger. Their beard-like clusters took flight from the walls, swirling into the full space of the scullery in a myriad of tornadoes.

  "I don't know what's going on with Mazillion," Clarity said nervously to Am-lei, "but it doesn't matter next to saving the universe. You need to get to the cockpit and work the necessary calculations for us to dump the entangled particle back to its partner."

  "Untangle the threads of the universe," Am-lei said.

  "That's right," Clarity agreed, relieved to see Am-lei looked calm, but also annoyed at how much work it had been for her to keep the lepidopteran that way. "You go—I'll stay here and keep an eye on Mazillion." As as afterthought, she added, "Send Irohann to me when you're ready for us to dump the particle out of the airlock. The crate is heavy. I may need help moving it, and"—She gestured at the scullery full of buzzing bodies of Mazillion—"I don't know if Mazillion is coherent enough to help."

  Clarity pulled her pocket computer out and checked it was still working. It was. "If there's anything else I need to know, you can contact me here." Suddenly Clarity remembered how all the electronics had gone out back at the Merlin Base. "At least, unless we open the containment crate around the particle up..." With a growing horror in the pit of her stomach, she realized, that was exactly what she'd have to do. But god, she hoped it wasn't true. She didn't know anything about this science stuff. Maybe she was wrong. "We'll have to do that, right?" she asked. "To destroy it?"

  "Yes," Am-lei agreed. "The particle can't rejoin its partner while locked inside the crate, even if we dump the crate into the Devil's Radio."

  That was not the answer Clarity had hoped for. She'd been hoping to hell she was wrong. She didn't want to stare into the fractured face of the universe again. She didn't want to open that box. "Are you sure?" she asked. "Wouldn't the, uh, gravitational forces of the black hole rip the containment crate apart once it was inside? And free the particle?"

  "No," Am-lei said. "Just squeeze it down, making the crate ever more impenetrable. The universe would end up wrapped around the containment crate, endlessly contorting around a single point, unable to regain anything like its normal shape."

  "That sounds bad," Clarity said. "That's bad, right?"

  Am-lei tilted her head, causing the multitudinous reflections of Clarity in the facets of her disco ball eyes to rotate. "Life as we know it would become impossible. Painfu
lly impossible."

  "How long would it take?" Clarity asked, wondering if she could make a devil's deal—skip opening the box and get in a few last trips to exotic worlds.

  Am-lei shrugged with four arms. "Five years, maybe."

  Clarity could do a lot of traveling in five years. But no, the universe needed to be saved. She wouldn't doom the entire population of the universe—every person, every species, every planet she'd met, and all the ones she hadn't—to an uncommutable death sentence in five years because she was a coward. She would do what needed to be done. She could open that box again, one last time, face the horrors it unleashed, and then watch it fall into an endless pit of darkness. She would face the maddening reality of the universe breaking open in front of her, for the sake of saving it.

  Am-lei scurried off toward the cockpit, and Clarity watched Mazillion's swarming bodies of tornadoes inside the scullery, feeling very scared.

  28 Plans Awry, Battle Plans Drawn

  Clarity swung her arms, gesturing, gesticulating, sweeping and clawing at the air, trying to persuade Mazillion to follow her down to the airlock. But all of her efforts were as pointless as trying to direct the weather. She pleaded with words as well, but her words fell on deaf ears, swallowed up by the mounting buzzing. She hoped Irohann would be down this way soon, because she wasn't sure she could face re-opening the Merlin Box alone.

  As if in answer to her prayers, Irohann's orange muzzle peeked through the door into the scullery. But he didn't look helpful. He looked terrified. His triangular ears had fallen so flat on top of his head that they'd blended right into the puff of his mane. His cheerfully orange fur was utterly at odds with the wan look of despair in his brown eyes.

  "What's wrong?" Clarity asked. Her own mind threw answers at her, pelting them toward her like paper airplanes with sharply folded noses—the universe is about to end, unless you save it; Mazillion's gone mad and won't answer you; even if you do save the universe, you might go mad yourself staring into the cracks of space-time again; even if you do succeed, you'll be alone and scared and unsure of your future. Each answer sliced like a papercut, surprisingly deep and stinging.