by Ann Aguirre
“I’ll check back later.”
Don’t think about failing life support. Don’t think about the worst-case scenario. But I did, of course. The average time to failure of human-based systems in the event of a Leviathan’s death was less than half an hour, which had been one of those statistics that they’d taught us in orientation classes. As I looked up more intel on the console, I found that human-based systems might be able to function for two to three days in the event that a Leviathan was unresponsive due to injury or illness. At that point, Nadim would start shutting down what his instincts told him were unnecessary systems—unnecessary to his survival—to save energy.
Where were we on that timeline? Better than halfway into it.
I didn’t want to imagine Nadim finally coming awake and finding us frozen and dead inside him. But of course, I did. I role-played through his rage and grief and guilt. I wondered what he’d do with us. Take us home? Give us a burial in space? Send us into the red giant, a star for a funeral pyre? Morbid thoughts. I couldn’t help it. That carried me along a dark road that led to my own role in this mess. Because I always wanted a little more, skated a bit closer to the edge, and so did Nadim. We’d tipped over that edge and now, my recklessness might end Beatriz, Nadim, and me.
Impossible not to wallow some in that guilt.
There was no telling how much time had passed when the comm crackled with a shocking burst of sudden, inhuman noise, which slowly resolved into English. Some translation protocol coming into play, I guessed, via the data console.
Holy shit, I’m listening to an alien.
“. . . responding. We heard your message—bond-name?” A lot of whatever was being said didn’t translate, or maybe our translation system was one of the first things to start shutting down.
For a few seconds I trembled, and then I stumbled upright, two left feet all the way. “I’m Zara. My partner’s Beatriz. Our Leviathan is called Nadim. Hello? Hello?”
A long silence followed, ominous by any token. “. . . your bond-name?”
“Excuse me?” Distance could account for some of the pause, and there’d been some of that inhuman wailing that didn’t translate again, but I had the awful feeling I wasn’t giving the right answer to a question I didn’t even understand. It was downright frustrating, these time-lag stops and starts, but the response—when it came at last—nearly froze the blood in my veins.
“. . . without bond-name cannot—” A series of beeps and whistles cut into the audio stream, obliterating any hope of comprehension.
“Look, screw the rules! This is an emergency. We need help and you’re the only other Leviathan in range. He won’t wake up, and if he doesn’t soon—” I swallowed hard to continue. “If he doesn’t, we’re dead.”
I got nothing but static in response.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Breaking Even
BEA SCOWLED, PACING beside the console. “Was that a good idea? I told you I found the standard distress beacon. You have no idea who you were talking to . . . or what their intentions might be. I’ve never heard of a bond-name, what is that, a code? We don’t know codes!”
“We’re in the red zone,” I said softly. “That means trying all angles to survive. If playing by the rules means waiting to die, I just can’t.”
Still, her sensible fear was rubbing off on me. Maybe I’d screwed up in a colossal way, announcing our weakness to somebody inclined to exploit it. I didn’t have a monumental amount of trust in strangers, come to that. I didn’t even trust most friends.
She seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “The Leviathan aren’t all gentle. Remember Typhon? What if this one’s . . . gone rogue? What if the crew are pirates or scavengers? I have a bad feeling about this, Zara.”
The continued comm silence felt ominous; that was for damn sure. Because I couldn’t just stand still, I got to work on the console. Maybe I could at least get a decent tracking on the approaching ship. With some searching, I located their signal. We watched the trajectory for a while.
“They’re coming in,” Bea said, and looked up from the console at me. Our eyes met and held, and I nodded.
“Let’s try the comm again.” I sent two more messages. No response at all this time. Panic wouldn’t help, so I considered why they might not answer. “Maybe they’re having technical problems?”
“You think?” Bea sounded dubious.
On the third try, we got the same sounds I couldn’t process before. “Damn, what is up with this translator?”
“Low-power mode,” Bea said. “It’s pretty worthless right now. The sounds have a pattern, but I don’t have the experience to translate this. Do we have anything in our database . . . ?” She started searching frantically, but we only found logs and Honors material, nothing related to exo-translation. Probably deliberately, since the Leviathan didn’t want us ugly, violent humans messing up foreign relations.
“They’re coming in fast,” I said.
We couldn’t manually vanish walls or ceilings with Nadim out of it, but I watched their Leviathan close on the console screen. I let out a nervous breath.
Then a little blip split off from the main bulk.
“Their Hopper’s been deployed. Zara—”
“I know, I see it.”
“What should we do?” A light came on, messages scrolled, and a warning tone sounded. “They’ve overriding our docking bay doors!”
More alien chatter came across the comm, but we had no idea if it was an offer of help or a demand for surrender. “I’ll go.”
“You’ll need a skinsuit. Life support’s already down in the docking area.”
Yeah, that was a hot, fresh reminder of how screwed we were and why I’d beamed an SOS in the first place.
My suit was still being repaired, so Bea offered to get hers, but before she could, the console warning tone got louder. An automated voice said, “Interior breach, docking bay. Unauthorized personnel detected.” The computer went on about how we should respond to the intrusion, but we’d already activated our distress beacon, and Nadim was still out.
None of the standard protocol helped.
This is what you get for breaking the rules in deep space. Guilt and remorse had no place in what was about to go down, though, so I sealed those emotions away. Bea grabbed my arm, thirty seconds from a meltdown. I shook her off and defaulted to what I did best, sprinting to the weapons locker to grab a few options at random. Whatever was coming, I needed to face it full-on.
Squaring my shoulders, I took a deep breath. I was about to meet an alien, and all my bravado aside, I wasn’t ready. This wasn’t a Leviathan, after all. I’d grown up knowing about them from countless holos. This was coming face-to-face with the unknown . . . and I’d invited it in. I knew how bad that could be. I’d seen the old horror vids.
When I got back to the hub, Bea was peering at the console, her hands shaking. “It’s heading this way!”
“How many?” I asked.
“Just one? I think? The reading is—yes, it’s one.”
I confirmed that with a glance at the biothermal signature and relaxed a touch. If it had bad intentions, at least the odds were even, though I was assuming it didn’t have tech that could melt my brain or disperse me into atomic dust. Turning to Bea, I said, “Find some place to hide.”
She gave me a doubtful look, but I shook my head. Bea was great, but if this went sideways, she needed to survive to protect Nadim. She paused to give my arm a squeeze, a last, wordless message of good-bye and courage, and then she took off.
It didn’t take much studying of the console to figure out that our intruder was heading straight for us. I realized that the lights were getting dimmer. Normally Nadim’s natural bioluminescent glow provided sufficient light for me to navigate; when I checked the console, I saw we were operating on auxiliary power now, conserving resources to keep our life support on longer. Nadim was starting to ration his resources.
Great. Darkness and an unknown trespasser.
I intercepted the alien just outside the hub, and it was big. Topped me by at least a meter, and it was far wider. More importantly, it wasn’t remotely human.
My brain went on strike and refused to make sense of what it was seeing; to reconcile the number of limbs, the configuration, with something in our human database. I forced myself to calm down and slow my rapid breathing.
The creature, whatever it was, wore a skinsuit and a mask, though in its case the mask was more like a misshapen helmet. Its head was elongated, and not even the skinsuit disguised that it had a multiplicity of eyes behind that visor.
Below that, it was a nightmare of tendrils, tentacles, nothing like arms or legs I could recognize, all contained in individual little skinsuit extensions. The suit didn’t seem to know what color scheme to take; it cycled wildly between matching the whitish color of the room around us and a deep eggplant purple that lightened to red and whirled to white again. I had no idea what it meant.
If the alien had come to help, I didn’t want to start some shit, but it was hard to stay calm when I had no training, no frame of reference for any of this. This is why Nadim said humans aren’t ready. Because we aren’t. At all.
The strange speech I couldn’t interpret on the comm didn’t make any more sense up close; the frequencies were ear piercing. Another noise; then the swaying of the tentacles increased. So did the patting of the little filaments. It adjusted something on its suit, and since it wasn’t attacking, I tried talking.
“I’m Zara. Our Leviathan—”
A screech that seared my eardrums cut me off, and it performed more multitentacled gestures I couldn’t interpret, then blew past me to fiddle with our console.
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “Stop!”
I tried to tell myself it was here to help, but truth was I had no idea why it was here or what it was doing. Fear negotiated with uncertainty, and I clutched the stunner I’d pulled from the weapons locker, palms sweaty. So far, it hadn’t attacked me, but I didn’t get a good vibe about the way it just came aboard and started messing with our stuff. If only it would say something I could understand . . .
It paused to adjust the tech affixed to its suit as I said, a bit more forcefully, “Hey. You. What the hell are you doing?”
The alien thrashed, like it was in the midst of a convulsion, all its tentacles twisting and flailing the air, filaments rising straight up like a ruff around its head. It made an absolutely chilling howl, tentacles flaring wide, and it looked so much like the posture of a snake before it struck that I didn’t even think about what to do.
I fired my stunner.
Wasn’t exactly a considered decision; my mind went blank with gibbering terror. The beam caught the creature where a human neck would have been, between the head and the explosion of tentacles thrashing at me.
It collapsed into a limp sack, tentacles still flapping, and I nearly shot it again before I got my shit together. It was making some weak whistling noises, but hell, I didn’t speak Tentacle, and apparently neither of our translators was helping.
“Zara!” Bea’s voice came from the corridor. “What happened?”
“Um.”
She looked properly appalled. “Did you kill it?”
“I don’t know.”
I edged forward. No idea where to check for a pulse on an alien or even if it had one. I tentatively pressed my fingers to the neck, and instantly, half a dozen filaments whipped out to wrap around my fingers, hand, and wrist. “Not dead!” I squeaked, and tried to yank free. It took effort. “Really not dead!”
The creature burbled at me. It sounded angry. A tentacle raised and slashed at me, and before I could duck, it connected and sent me spinning out across the floor. Strong, I thought through a fog that wasn’t entirely due to the hit.
I rolled to my feet, bouncing and ready for a fight. The alien made a roaring sound like water as it thrashed around on the floor, slapping tentacles. Not coordinated yet, but it wouldn’t take long, and then what was I going to do? We needed help. Maybe I’d already screwed that up, but I wasn’t even sure how to start apologizing.
So I just started. “Uh, look, we got off on the wrong—” I was going to say foot but how would that translate at all, if his translator was working? “I’m sorry. I was just asking what you were doing!”
Apology was not accepted.
It was fast. I watched it writhe toward me, filaments stiff and jutting like knives around its head, tentacles slapping the floor with angry emphasis as it came at me. I clutched the stunner and considered firing again, and before I could, its limb wrapped around the barrel and wrenched it decisively out of my grip to crush it into sparks.
“Doing?” Finally, it produced a word I understood. “Not hellfire damnations?”
I had no idea what it meant; something must’ve gone badly awry in its translation matrix. “Yeah, doing. You.” I pointed, hoping it wouldn’t take that as a hostile gesture. I had a huge bruise forming where it had slammed me into the wall. I didn’t want a repeat.
More tinkering with what I took to be a translation aid. “Reading. Learning starsign. Yours need . . .” Alien chatter. It played with the settings again. “White dwarf.”
A deep, groaning sound rushed through me; it came from outside, echoing through flesh and metal and rushing on past us.
That was a Leviathan song. I was sure half of it wasn’t within the range of my ears, because the floor under my feet vibrated. My bones too. What I could hear of the sound was keening, sharp, and decidedly unmusical.
Definitely not Nadim. It’s the other ship.
“Angry,” the alien said. “Try to calm. Soothe. Sing.” It extended two tentacles toward me in a whiplike motion. They wrapped around my arms, strong as steel cables, and yanked them hard out to the sides. “Do not make me _____ you.” That important verb was replaced with a harsh gurgle. The concept of what they were going to do to me simply didn’t translate. That was terrifying.
“Hey, easy,” I said to cover my trembling. “Those don’t grow back. I made your ship angry when I stunned you?”
That made sense. Nadim would be pissed at the way this dude knocked me around too.
Pure alien sounds—the translation matrix failed again. To me, it seemed like they—somehow, the intruder had settled down to they in my head—didn’t have any more experience with humans than I did aliens. Which was maybe why they’d tried to take my head off over a simple question, even if I did swear at them. With a wonky translation, maybe it had sounded like a threat of violence? I had no idea what they were trying to say now.
Something hit Nadim hard enough to send us tumbling. Gravity disappeared, and we slammed around like dice in a cup. The alien wrapped their many limbs around metal braces and grabbed me too, holding me as Nadim spun and twisted. The other Leviathan must have rammed Nadim again, this time from the other side.
You asshole, I wanted to scream, but I was too occupied trying not to bash my head against the console. Tentacle Alien had a good grip on me, but whiplash was a bitch, and I could feel new marks where Nadim was hurt in the dark, throbbing stars erupting on my skin.
The spin slowed and stabilized, and gravity melted back in. My weight sagged toward the floor, and Tenty—I had to call them something—gently lowered me down. The filaments were waving in agitation around their helmet.
It said something, maybe a good-bye, flared tentacles at me, and then raced toward the docking bay while I tried to get myself together. I’d done exactly what Nadim had been afraid I’d do: I’d shot the first alien I saw. And what had we gotten out of that? I had a fresh set of bruises, and so did Nadim.
And he still wasn’t awake.
But Tenty had said something, I realized. Something important. They mentioned a white dwarf. At least the shitty translation gave us that much, even if it had failed in every other conceivable way.
The console was still reporting that we had an unauthorized intruder on board. I slapped at controls until it shu
t off, along with the droning alarm. I tracked Tenty’s progress on the console screen; they went straight back to the docking bay, no detours. I watched the alien Hopper swoop out, and as soon as it was gone, I hit the lock button and sank to my knees against the hub wall. Delayed shakes. My head hurt. My back and right arm ached where I’d hit the wall.
What in the blazing hell had just happened?
“Bea?”
“Here,” she said faintly, tiptoeing to my side. “Are you okay? I thought—”
“Whatever you thought, it’s probably worse,” I said. “What’s happening out there now?” It was easier to ask than to haul my exhausted body upright to look.
“The other Leviathan—it attacked us, didn’t it?”
“Sure felt that way.”
“It’s circling us. I don’t like this, Z.”
Nadim was helpless. This other ship could kill him in his weakened state.
“Bea, can you pilot?” I asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Then chart a course to the nearest white dwarf star and get us out of here!”
I put my head in my hands, and after a moment I felt the rush of acceleration; she’d really punched the speed. I couldn’t blame her.
A few minutes later, I felt well enough to get up and leaned in to check the console, not wanting to distract her. “Damn. They’re following? No, they’re breaking off.”
“I’ve found a nearby white dwarf. At top speed, it won’t take long. We’re okay. We’ll be okay.”
Sure. The lights were dimmer now. It felt cooler in the room, and I shivered. Bea’s assurances had to be a litany of wishful thinking. I crawled over to the seat nearest to the console and shut my eyes. When I did, nausea came back with a vengeance. If the alien had meant to kill me, I’d be meat paste on the wall, so I counted my blessings. I was a mess of bruises, damaged hands, and phantom pain from the beating Nadim took. I guessed I could call it a win.
Whatever the hell had just happened, I hoped it was worth it.
It was exactly half a day until we detected the white dwarf star’s radiation. I put it on audio for Bea, and together, we listened to the starsong. A strange, eerie chorus, full of rising and falling hums and hisses, clicks and ticks. An alien choir singing in keys humanity had never imagined, but there was something organized and beautiful about it too. It felt more vibrant than the atonal hiss we’d heard coming off the red giant. This seemed . . . younger, somehow. More vital.
