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

by Mary E. Lowd

  On a whim, Clarity raised her arms above her head like a ballerina and twirled into the center of Mazillion's buzzing cloud. She pirouetted and danced. At least, she tried. She had no training or practice. Nor any real natural grace. She was, after all, just a naked-skinned primate. Monkeys are not the best dancers. But the amorphous clouds of Mazillion striated; the angry bulk of cumulonimbus storm clouds soothed into peaceful strands of cirrostratus.

  With Mazillion's tiny bodies following her arms and legs like streamers, ribbons trailing after kites as they glide on the wind, Clarity felt graceful, and her mind cleared. She stopped, and Mazillion stayed clouded around her.

  "If we can't stop the Doraspians from taking the Merlin Box," Clarity said, "can we destroy it onboard their vessel?"

  "Like a bomb?" Irohann said, a little too eagerly. His tail should not have been swishing at the idea of killing Doraspians.

  "Like a last-ditch effort to save the universe in the face of impossible odds," Clarity reprimanded.

  Am-lei turned back to the computer console in the corner of the bank of screens, made some calculations while her antennae vibrated, and then fluted through a tightly coiled proboscis, "The containment crate would have to be breached, but yes, if we could... well, knock the Doraspian vessel into the event horizon, with exactly the right velocity and angular momentum... then yes."

  "That's horrible," Roscoe said, but somehow, Clarity could hear in his voice—the softness, the gentleness, the youth and naivety—it was Cassie speaking through the lapine man's mouth.

  Clarity shuddered as she was overtaken, for only an instant but that was enough, by the visceral memory of her mind blending with Cassie's. The memory washed over her like a wave, leaving her cold, wet, and dripping. Emotionally. She was so glad Roscoe was piloting Cassie right now, and not her.

  "That just leaves two questions," Clarity said, pulling herself back together. "Can you," she pointed at Am-lei, then Roscoe, "knock the Doraspian vessel into the event horizon in just the right way. And can we," she swirled her hands around in the cloud of Mazillion, "figure out how to get the containment crate opened once it's on there?"

  "We can try," Am-lei said, already busy with the computer console.

  "We cannot!" Roscoe squealed. Cassie's viewscreens filled with images of the Doraspian soldier, alternated with photographs of lush but insensate bouquets. Colorful, beautiful, totally irrelevant. "But we must," Roscoe whispered, barely audible, hardly more than a breath, but in a voice much more his own. "We must, child." He crooned the words, a lullaby, a promise, an apology all at once.

  Clarity wished she'd had a grandpa like him. She walked up beside Am-lei and looked at the numbers and equations streaming across the corner-most screen as the lepidopteran typed with four talons. "What do you think?" Clarity pressed. "Can you do it?"

  Am-lei's talons halted, hovering above the keyboard, twitching. "Yes," she said. "But only if the other vessel is distracted. If they shoot at us..."

  "No defenses," Clarity said. "Right. But here's the thing—I've seen what happens when the Merlin Box is opened, and it's damned distracting."

  On the screens above them, the floral images of rose bouquets and irises in glass vases were replaced with images of young lapine sentients. The lapine children looked like Roscoe's grandchildren, probably pulled from his memories. Clarity's best guess was he was persuading the youthful spaceship that murder could sometimes be justified—if it meant saving others, especially if those others were baby bunnies with long ears, twitchy noses, and little cottontails poking out of their overalls as they hopped and scurried through Roscoe's quarters on Crossroads Station playing some variation of tag.

  Am-lei's proboscis coiled and then stretched out long like a straw. She said in a quavering voice, "If the distraction isn't enough..."

  "The Doraspian vessel will fight back," Clarity said.

  "And kill us," Am-lei added. She didn't have to add that if that happened, she would never see her daughter Lee-a-lei or her wife Jeko again. Roscoe would never see his grandbunnies. And Cassie... Oh, Cassie.

  "I guarantee, on my life," Clarity said, "I will not let that happen." Either she would keep her promise, or she wouldn't live to know she'd broken it.

  Am-lei's proboscis coiled up primly, and her antennae bobbed forward. "We will do our part."

  "Come on," Clarity said, raising one arm like she was directing an orchestra and reaching out with the other to grab Irohann's paw. The cloud of Mazillion responded to her summons with a satisfying swirl and reformed beside her in a shadow of herself. Irohann was more reluctant. "We may need you," she coaxed. "I know you've been running for as long as I've known you, but there will be nowhere left to run to if you don't come now. The Doraspians won't just punish you—"

  "Kill me, horribly and slowly," Irohann corrected.

  "—they'll destroy the entire universe." She pulled his paw, and he followed her grudgingly down the vein-like hallway leading to Cassie's airlock.

  29 Suicide Mission

  The farther Clarity dragged Irohann down the vein-like hall, the thinner Mazillion's crowd grew around her. Beside the bulge in the wall that she thought of as Cassie's heart, Clarity turned and looked behind to see the cloud had taken on the form of a squiggle, tracing her trail down the hall in physical form. "What's wrong? Aren't you coming?"

  "It won't work." Mazillion's voice sounded strange—stranger than usual—stretched across a trailing squiggle down the center of the hall. Some of the voice came from up close, all around Clarity, and some of it came from far away, echoing slightly along the curve of the hallway.

  "What won't work?" Clarity asked, ignoring Irohann's incessant tugging as he tried to slip his paw out of her hand. Instead of letting go, she just squeezed down tighter.

  "We can't open the containment crate onboard the Doraspian vessel without also being knocked into the black hole's event horizon."

  "The swarm of turncoats has a point," Irohann said, giving one final, big tug on his paw before sighing and giving up.

  "We don't know that," Clarity argued. "We can bring our spacesuits; slip back out the airlock as soon as we open it, before Cassie knocks the vessel into the..." She trailed off, too busy picturing all the possibilities to keep speaking out loud, lying to herself and them. Avoiding the truth that of all those possibilities, only one had any chance of happening. They'd fall into the black hole.

  Mazillion was right. Escape would not be possible. The only way for her and Irohann to get aboard the Doraspian vessel was as Mazillion's prisoners. They'd be lucky to get the containment crate opened at all. There would be no escaping.

  "It's a suicide mission," Irohann said. His paw fell slack in Clarity's hand as his shoulders slumped under their puffs of fur. "But I guess I was dead anyway, as soon as the cloud of bugs told the Doraspians my new name."

  The buzzing in the hall grew in volume. "We have not told them your name," Mazillion said. "Only that Sloanee is here."

  Irohann's long muzzle fell open, slack-jawed, and his fluffy tail risked swishing, just a little. "Truly?" he said. There was hope in his eyes again. He really did want to stay being Irohann. Clarity's Irohann. He hadn't been looking for an excuse to run. And he'd been right—he was in danger.

  "We do not share extra information with One Bodies." Mazillion's squiggly shape coiled up into a tangled knot; there was a shape to it, a structure, but it wasn't a shape mimicking any other species. They were only shaped like themselves.

  The hope in Irohann's eyes died as suddenly as it had appeared, a tiny spark put out by a cold breeze, and his tail tucked between his legs. "It doesn't matter. If I go over to that ship, I'm dead. If I don't, the universe ends. Better to go out a hero, right?"

  "Not necessarily..." Clarity said.

  Irohann looked genuinely surprised, and Clarity couldn't figure out why at first. Then she said, "I don't mean, don't save the universe. I mean..." She looked at Mazillion's buzzing cloud body and tried to judge how much of them w
as here, versus how much had decided to betray all the One Bodies by selling them out to the highest bidder. "Mazillion," she said, "how does it work? Are there two of you now? Are you completely separate? Or can your other self still hear everything we're saying?"

  Mazillion's indescribably roiling shape grew even more chaotic, filling the hall with a blur, blocking out the pink light glowing from Cassie's walls. When they spoke, their voice sounded sad, confused. "We are separate." The amorphous cloud drew together, pulling densely into a shape a little like Roscoe's—bipedal and shorter than Clarity, but there were none of Roscoe's distinguishing features, like his long ears or feet. The figure almost looked like the shape of a human child, like Clarity when she was young.

  "Can you..." Clarity didn't want to hurt Mazillion, but the question had to be asked. "I mean, could you—or parts of you—rejoin your other self? If you had to? Or wanted to?"

  "What do you mean?" Mazillion's form grew a little taller.

  "She's asking you to be a spy," Irohann said.

  "We communicate through a combination of what you would call dance and telepathy," Mazillion said. "When our dance is in perfect harmony, then our component bodies are in tune with each other and share minds across space. But our dance fell out of tune... the harmony broke... and we can only communicate with our other self through dance now."

  "Then the rest of you doesn't know our plans," Clarity said, "and might believe you, or part of you, if you claimed to have changed your mind. If you could sneak aboard—" Clarity hesitated, seeing Mazillion shrink away from her as she spoke. "Not all of you," she amended, "just part of you... then you wouldn't really die, right? Because most of you would still be here... but part of you could open the containment crate. Then the rest of us—me, Iroh, and most of you wouldn't have to risk going over there."

  "This is why we do not like One Bodies," Mazillion said, losing any coherency to their form. They became a shapeless tornado, angry and twisting. "One Bodies want us to diminish ourself to save them. They assign no value to ourself. What if cutting off your arm would save the universe? Should you do that?"

  "Yes," Clarity said.

  Irohann said, "Her arm won't grow back. From what I understand, you do."

  "Half your brain then," Mazillion buzzed in a mocking tone. For an instant, the tornado of Mazillion's bodies seemed to take on the shape of a human brain, a crenulated, lumpy mass. Clarity almost laughed at the sight but managed to catch herself. This was not a time for laughter, and she had surely imagined the brain-shape in Mazillion's roiling buzzing.

  "Our brains don't grow back either!" Irohann snarled at the cloud of insect bodies.

  "One Body brains don't seem to grow at all." The Mazillion tornado wandered down the vein-like hall, its funnel mouth touching down on the floor here and there, putting some distance between themself and the offending One Bodies.

  "This is fruitless," Clarity said. "I'm not going to stand here watching you mock each other while the universe ends. And at this point, I don't trust either one of you to save it alone. All three of us, in our entireties, are going to have to go."

  "The Doraspians don't know or care about you," Mazillion said.

  "I've aided and abetted the traitor Sloanee for three decades," Clarity countered. "I've been harboring a criminal. So, if they want Irohann, they want me." She tugged on Irohann's paw, pulling him down the hallway again toward the airlock. "Catch up, Mazillion. We need you to look like you've captured us."

  For a moment, the buzzing behind her quieted, and Clarity worried Mazillion had abandoned them. She doubted whether she and Irohann could open the containment crate and keep the Doraspian vessel from destroying Cassie without their help.

  The buzzing swelled again, and tiny bodies swarmed around Clarity, brushing through the strands of her green hair and tickling the bare parts of her arms. The tiny bodies settled over Irohann's head and shoulders like a shroud. Clarity could feel them perched all over her as well. "Thank you," she whispered. "We couldn't do this without you. We'd simply be turning ourselves over as prisoners."

  "Save the universe," Mazillion said. Clarity could feel the gentle vibration of their voice against her cheeks and goosebumped arms. The countless pinpricks of pressure rippled across her skin again as Mazillion said, "We will not be able to talk to you anymore when we reach the airlock. We must pretend to have changed our mind, been convinced we were foolish to have wasted our time on the concerns of One Bodies. We will pretend we wish to rejoin with the rest of ourself, as you suggested before. We may treat you harshly. We are sorry."

  "Wait," Irohann said, "how do we know your other self doesn't have a scout body here? Listening to our plan?" Like you listened to Clarity and me sharing our secrets—he didn't say, but Clarity heard it anyway.

  "We are still bound enough," Mazillion said. "We would feel our own presence; a deaf, mute presence; a silence where there should be song. Our other self is either too busy or does not care what plans we might make with the help of One Bodies."

  Clarity and Irohann continued down the hall, hand in paw. Mazillion's swarming blotted out the pink light of Cassie's bioluminescence in flitting, flickery patches, and the gentle, omnipresent weight of Mazillion's legs in the thousands on Clarity's skin prickled and itched. She dared not brush the insect bodies away, both because she didn't want to harm them and because she could feel the weight of their role-playing already setting in. Mazillion was their enemy now. Ostensibly. Those were the roles they had to play.

  They came to the airlock, and the buzzing of Mazillion's stormy cloud of bodies more than doubled. The buzz became a roar, filling her ears, and the prickles on her skin burned.

  Clarity realized she'd left her spacesuit in the duffle bag, laid out on the bed where she and Am-lei had talked for hours about Wespirtech. And she didn't know where Irohann's spacesuit was at all. She could feel the panic rising inside of her—without spacesuits, there would be no possible escape, not even the delusional hope of one, from this mission.

  Before she could cry out her objection though, three limp spacesuits floated toward her and Irohann through the hall, held aloft by the buzzing bodies of Mazillion.

  "Put your suits on," Mazillion said. "The Doraspians will pay more for you alive." There was no way to know if the Mazillion speaking to them was their own, their ally, or the Mazillion who had split off and continued to betray them. Or both.

  Clarity and Irohann obeyed, taking their spacesuits from where they hung limply, floating in the air, and pulled them on. It was a relief as Clarity zipped the suit up to feel the prickly legs of Mazillion's multitudinous bodies fly away, leaving her totally alone and isolated in the recycling air of her spacesuit.

  While Clarity and Irohann had been pulling their suits on, Mazillion had funneled into the third suit. This time, the suit was filled much fuller—it swelled with a large belly, and the arms and legs were thick. The faceplate glittered with the tiny black insect bodies crammed inside.

  The radio in Clarity's helm relayed the buzzing from inside Mazillion's: "We may not have hold of your epidermis anymore," Mazillion warned, "but we can tear open your suit, exposing your singular bodies to the vacuum of space, if you disobey us for an instant." Mazillion's suit lifted an arm, revealing its glove fisted around a blaster. The suit aimed the blaster at Clarity. She raised her own hands reflexively.

  "We'll obey," Clarity said.

  Next Mazillion aimed their blaster at the sealed airlock doors.

  "Don't!" Clarity cried. She hoped Roscoe and Cassie were listening to her: "Cassie, open your airlock doors! Mazillion is going to shoot their way out if you don't!"

  Mazillion turned their blaster back to pointing at Clarity, but before they did anything more, the membranous airlock door slid open. The hexagonal containment crate with its metal coils sat heavily on the fleshy floor in the middle of the airlock where Clarity had left it.

  Mazillion's suit jerked the blaster, making the nozzle gesture at the now open doorway. Cl
arity and Irohann followed the implied instruction and shuffled inside the airlock, edging to either side of the containment crate. Mazillion followed, and the membranous door slid shut behind them. The air cycled out, and the outer door slid open.

  Pink light glowed around them, but in front of them, the blackness of the Devil's Radio stretched out like the end of space and time. It seemed like a wholly appropriate place for the toxic particle locked in the Merlin Box inside the containment crate to disappear into forever. The Merlin Box housed a crack in the universe. This was the end of the universe. There could be no better place to take a crack in space-time like the Merlin particle to heal.

  Cassie hadn't docked with the Doraspian vessel, obviously. She'd held firm on her promise. However, the metal sheen of the Doraspian vessel drifted soundlessly into sight. Clarity stepped toward the edge of the airlock. They were still protected by Cassie's field of artificial gravity, and even though she was standing in a vacuum, she could step forward and not float away.

  Standing closer to the lip of the airlock, Clarity's view was wider, and she saw they were nearer to the seedpod end of the Doraspian vessel. The oblong metal shape was a dark shadow, lit by the cracks of light escaping from tiny windows dotting its surface, but a dark shadow is a pale gray bastion of reality compared to the endless dark of a black hole.

  Clarity wished there was a bright, shining line of swirling nebula matter, purple-green clouds, showing exactly where the black hole began. Where the mathematically abstract concept of its event horizon became a fatally concrete reality. But there was nothing. Only dark. Only black. Only nothing.

  A magnetic grappling hook on the end of a steel cord shot out from the Doraspian vessel like a harpoon barreling through the ocean toward their beloved space whale. The steel cord snapped taut before the grappling hook hit them; the aim was true; the shot perfect. The grappling hook hovered in the space directly in front of Cassie's open airlock.