“Any news?” Falconi asked.
Nielsen looked at him with a worried expression. “Vishal just kicked us out. He’s working on her now.”
“Will she live?”
Hwa-jung nodded. Her eyes were red from crying. “Yes. My little Sparrow will live.”
Some of the tension in Falconi’s posture eased. He ran a hand over his head, tousling his hair. “Damn foolish of her to jump out the way she did.”
“But brave,” said Nielsen firmly.
Falconi tipped his head. “Yes. Very brave.” Then to Hwa-jung: “The pressure breach in the hold needs fixing, and we’re out of repair bots.”
Hwa-jung nodded slowly. “I’ll fix it once Vishal is finished operating.”
“That could take a while,” said Falconi. “Better to get started on it now. We’ll let you know if there’s any news.”
“No,” said Hwa-jung in her deep rumble. “I want to be here when Sparrow wakes.”
Falconi’s jaw muscles bunched. “There’s a goddam hole in the side of the ship, Hwa-jung. It needs to get patched, now. I shouldn’t have to tell you.”
“I’m sure it can wait a few minutes,” said Nielsen in a placating tone.
“Actually, it can’t,” said Falconi. “The Jelly ripped open a coolant line when it cut its way in. We’re dead in the water until a replacement is hooked up. I also don’t want our passengers roaming around the other hold.”
Hwa-jung shook her head. “I won’t leave until Sparrow wakes.”
“Gods above and—”
The machine boss continued as if he hadn’t spoken: “She will expect me to be here when she wakes. She’ll be upset if I’m not, so I will wait.”
Falconi planted his boots flat on the deck, anchoring them so he stood upright, swaying in the zero-g. “I’m giving you a direct order, Song. As your captain. You understand that, don’t you?” Hwa-jung stared at him, her face immobile. “I’m ordering you to go down to the cargo hold and fix that shi-bal breach.”
“Yes, sir. As soon as—”
Falconi scowled. “As soon as? As soon as what?!”
Hwa-jung blinked. “As soon as—”
“No, you head down there right now and you get this ship running again. Right now, or you can consider yourself relieved, and I’ll put Trig in charge of engineering.”
Hwa-jung clenched her hands, and for a moment Kira thought she would strike Falconi. Then the machine boss broke; Kira saw it in her eyes and the slump of her shoulders. A dark scowl on her face, Hwa-jung pushed herself down the corridor. She paused at the end and, without looking back, said, “If anything happens to Sparrow while I’m gone, you’ll have to answer to me, Captain.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Falconi said in a tight voice. Then Hwa-jung vanished around the corner, and he relaxed slightly.
“Captain…” said Nielsen.
He sighed. “I’ll sort it out with her later. She’s not thinking clearly.”
“Can you blame her?”
“I suppose not.”
Kira said, “How long have they been together?”
“Long time,” said Falconi. Then he and Nielsen began to discuss the state of the ship, trying to figure out which systems were compromised, how long they could keep the refugees in the other hold, and more.
Kira listened, feeling increasingly impatient. The thought of Trig alone on the alien ship continued to bother her, and she was eager to start digging answers out of the Jellies’ computers before anything happened to disable them.
“Listen,” she said, interrupting. “I’m going to go check on Trig, see if he needs help. Then I’m going to try and find out what I can.”
Falconi gave her a critical look. “Sure you’re up for it? You look a little off.”
“I’m fine.”
“… Alright. Let me know once the ship is clear. I’ll send over the Entropists. That is, if they’re interested in examining the Jellies’ tech.”
3.
Kira made her way to deck D and then flew along the curve of the outer hull until she arrived at the airlock that joined them with the alien vessel.
Again she had the Soft Blade cover her face, and then with a twinge of apprehension, she dove back through the short, white tube of the Jellies’ airlock into the murky shadows beyond.
The aching pull was as strong as ever, but Kira ignored it for the time being.
When she arrived at the chamber with the birthing pods, she found Trig going around to each cloudy pod and incinerating it with a flamethrower mounted on his forearm. As he played the jet of fire across one of the larger pods, something thrashed within: an unsettling collection of arms, legs, claws, and tentacles.
“All good?” Kira asked as the kid finished.
He gave her two thumbs up. *I still have another dozen or so to go. The captain sent me here just in time; at least two of the pods were about to hatch.*
“Charming,” Kira said. “I’m going to go poke around. If you need any help, just let me know.”
*Same.*
As she left the chamber, Kira put a call through to Falconi: “You can send the Entropists over. Ship should be safe now.”
*Roger that.*
Kira took her time exploring. Her impatience was stronger than ever, but there was no telling what dangers the Jelly ship held, and she was in no hurry to fall into a trap. She kept close to the walls and, wherever possible, made sure to have a clear line to the exit.
The siren-call seemed to be coming from the front of the ship, so Kira headed in that direction, passing through circuitous corridors and half-lit rooms that, more often as not, were half-full of water. Now that she wasn’t in immediate fear of her life, Kira noticed patches of nearscent at certain points within the ships.
One said: [[Forward]]
Another said: [[Co-form Restriction Sfar]]
Yet another said: [[Aspect of the Void]]
And more besides. There was writing also: branching lines that repeated the message of the nearscent. That she could read the lines gave Kira hope: the Jellies were still using a written language the Soft Blade recognized.
At last she arrived at the very front of the ship: a hemispherical room wedded to the prow of the vessel. For the most part it was empty, save for a twisting, branching structure that dominated the center of the room. The material was red (the only red she’d seen on the ship) and textured with tiny pits. Overall, it reminded her of nothing so much as coral. The structure aroused her professional interest, and she detoured to examine it.
When she tried to touch one of the branches, an invisible force repelled her hand. She frowned. Naturally occurring gravity fields were attractive (or at least gave the appearance of such). But this … The Jellies had to be using their inertial tech to increase the flow and density of spacetime around the branches to create an area of positive pressure. That would mean their artificial gravity was a push not a pull. As in, it would push her against the floor. Still, she could be wrong. That sort of thing was way outside her area of expertise.
The Entropists have to see this.
Strong as the field was, by anchoring herself against the floor with the Soft Blade, she was able to push her hand through it. The coral-like structure (growth? sculpture?) was chill to the touch, and slick from condensed moisture. Despite the pits in the material, it was smooth. When she tapped it, a sharp, brittle tink sounded.
It sure felt like calcium carbonate, but Kira wasn’t sure of anything when it came to the Jellies.
Leaving the structure, she followed the tug of obscure sorrow to a section of wall covered with glassy panes and dotted with starry lights. She stood before it, and the ache within her was so strong, it caused her eyes to water.
A double blink, and then she studied the panes, searching for a hint of where to begin. She touched the glass—afraid of what might happen if she activated machines or programs without intending to—but there was no response. She wished the xeno would tell her how to work the console. Ma
ybe it couldn’t.
She ran her hand across the glass, again with no results. Then, for the first time, she tried to consciously produce nearscent. The Soft Blade responded with gratifying ease:
[[Kira here: Open … Activate … Access … Computer…]]
She tried all the normal words and phrases she would use with her overlays, but the glass remained dark. Kira began to wonder if she was even in front of a computer. Maybe the panels were just decorative elements. But that didn’t seem right; the transmitter for the summons was obviously near. There ought to be controls of some sort nearby.
She considered going back to the birthing chamber and cutting off a tentacle from the corpse of the dead Jelly. Maybe DNA or a tentacle-print was needed to access the computer.
She put off the thought as an option of last resort.
Finally, she tried saying:
[[Kira here: Two-form … Manyform … Idealis…]]
A kaleidoscope of colors blossomed across the panels: a dazzling display of icons, indicators, images, and writing. At the same time, puffs of nearscent wafted past, pungent in their intensity.
Her nose itched, and a sharp pain formed behind her right temple. Words jumped out at her—some written, some scented—words freighted with meaning and memories not her own.
[[… the Sundering…]]
The spike of pain intensified, blinding her—
Battles and bloodshed against the spread of stars. Planets won and lost, ships burned, bodies broken. And everywhere, graspers killing graspers.
She fought for the flesh, and she was not the only one. There had been six others set in the ancient reliquary, placed there to wait in readiness for the expected summons. Like her, they joined with the grasping flesh, and like her, the flesh drove them to violence.
Some fights she and her siblings were allied. Some fights, they found themselves pitted one against the other. And that too was a perversion of the pattern. Never had it been intended, not in all the fractures they served.
The conflict had roused a Seeker from its crystalline cocoon. It looked upon the torment of the war and moved to eradicate all such wrongness, as was its wont. And the Sundering had consumed flesh old and new.
Of the six, three were slain in battle, while one more fell into the heart of a neutron star, one went mad and killed itself, and one was lost in the bright realm of superluminal space. The Seeker too had perished; its abilities in the end no match for the swarms of flesh.
Only she, of all her siblings, remained. Only she still carried the shape of the pattern within the fibers of her being.…
Kira let out a low cry and hunched over, her mind spinning. A war. There had been a terrible war, and the Soft Blade had fought in it along with others of its kind.
Blinking away the tears, she forced her gaze back to the panel. More words sprang out at her:
[[… now the Arms…]]
She cried out again.
Ctein. The great and mighty Ctein. It basked in the wash of heat from the nearby vent in the ocean floor, and its tendrils and feelers (too numerous to count) waved in gentle accord.
[[Ctein here: Speak your news.]]
Her flesh answered: [[Nmarhl here: The spinward shoal has been destroyed by the indulgence of the Tfeir.]]
Upon its mounded rock the terrible Ctein pulsed with bands of color, luminous in the purple depths of the Plaintive Verge. It smote the rock with a thrashing arm, and from the prominence rose a billow of blackened mud flecked through with pieces of chitin, broken and decaying.
[[Ctein here: TRAITORS! HERETICS! BLASPHEMERS!]]
Kira winced and looked at the deck by her feet while she regained a sense of place and being. Her head was throbbing enough to make her want to take a pill.
As she reviewed the memory, she felt a sense of … not affection but perhaps regard for Nmarhl from the Soft Blade. The xeno didn’t seem to hate that particular Jelly the way it did the others. Odd.
She took a fortifying breath and again braved the panel.
[[… Whirlpool…]] An impression of hunger and danger and distortion intertwined—
[[… farscent, lowsound…]] FTL communications—
[[… forms…]] Jellies, in all their different shapes—
[[… Wranaui…]] At the word, Kira stopped, feeling as if she’d crashed into a wall. Recognition emanated from the Soft Blade, and with a slight sense of shock, Kira realized that Wranaui was the name the Jellies used for themselves. She couldn’t tell if it was a racial or species term or just a cultural designation, but from the Soft Blade at least, there was no doubt whatsoever: this was what the Jellies called themselves.
[[Kira here: Wranaui.]] She explored the feel of the smell. There was no exact vocal equivalent; nearscent was the only way to properly say the name.
With trepidation, she resumed studying the displays. To her relief, the flashes of memories grew shorter and more infrequent, although they never entirely stopped. It was a mixed blessing; the intrusive visions kept her from focusing, but they also contained valuable information.
She persisted.
The Jellies’ language seemed relatively unchanged since the last time the Soft Blade had encountered it, but the terms Kira encountered were context dependent, and context was something she so often lacked. It was like trying to understand technical jargon in a field she wasn’t familiar with, only a thousand times worse.
The effort exacerbated her headache.
She tried to be methodical. She tried to keep track of every action she took and every piece of information the computer threw at her, but it was too much. Far, far too much. At least her overlays were keeping an audiovisual record. Maybe she could make more sense of what she was seeing once she was back in her cabin.
Unfortunately, she had no way to copy the nearscent for later study. Again Kira wished she had implants, ones capable of full-spectrum sensory recordings.
But she didn’t, and there was no changing it.
Kira frowned. She had hoped it would be easier to find useful information on the Jellies’ computer. After all, it wasn’t hard for her to understand the aliens when they spoke. Or at least that was the impression the Soft Blade gave her.
In the end, she resorted to pushing random icons on the panels, hoping that she wouldn’t accidently vent the air or fire a missile or somehow trigger a self-destruct. That would be a bad way to go.
“Come on, you piece of shit,” she muttered, and hit the paneling with the heel of her hand.
Alas, percussive maintenance didn’t help.
She was just grateful there was no sign of pseudo-intelligences or other forms of digital assistants guarding the computer system, and no indication that the Jellies had anything similar to human ship minds.
What Kira really wanted to find was the Jelly equivalent of a wiki or an encyclopedia. It seemed obvious that an advanced species like theirs ought to carry a repository of scientific and cultural knowledge in their computer banks, but—as she was painfully aware—few things were obvious when it came to an alien species.
When button-pushing failed to yield helpful results, she forced herself to stop and reevaluate. Surely there was something else she could try.… Nearscent had worked before; perhaps it would work again.
She mentally cleared her voice and then said: [[Kira here: Open … open … shell records.]] Shell felt like the correct word for ship, so that was what she used.
Nothing.
She tried twice more with different wording. On her third try, a new window opened in the display, and she caught a whiff of welcome.
Gotcha!
Kira’s grin widened as she started to read. Just as she’d hoped: message logs. Not a wiki, but equally as valuable in their own way.
Most of the entries didn’t make sense to her, but some things started to become clear. First was that the Jellies had a highly stratified, hierarchical society, with one’s rank determined by all sorts of complicated factors, including which Arm you belonged to and which fo
rm you had. The specifics escaped Kira, but the Arms seemed to be some sort of political or military organizations. Or at least, that was what she assumed.
Many times in the messages she saw the phrase two-form. At first she thought it was a term for the Soft Blade. But as she read, it became clear that couldn’t possibly be the meaning.
It was with a sense of revelation that she realized two-form had to be the Jellies’ term for humans. She spent some time puzzling over that. Do they mean men and women? Or something else? Interestingly enough, the Soft Blade didn’t seem to recognize the term. But then, why would it? Humans were newcomers to the galactic stage.
With that crucial piece of information, the messages began to make more sense, and Kira read with increasing avidness of ship movements, battle reports, and tactical assessments of 61 Cygni and other systems in the League. There were numerous mentions of travel times, and from the Soft Blade, Kira was able to glean a sense of the distances involved. The nearest Jelly base (system, planet, or station, she wasn’t sure) was several hundred light-years away. Which led her to wonder why no hint of the aliens had shown up in the League’s telescopes. The Jellies’ civilization had to be far older than two or three hundred years, and the light from their worlds had long since reached human-settled space.
She kept reading, trying to pick out confluences of meaning—trying to see the larger patterns.
Perversely, the more she understood of the aliens’ writing, the more confused she became. There were no references to the events at Adrasteia or to the Soft Blade, but there were references to attacks she’d never heard of: attacks not of Jellies on humans but of humans on Jellies. She also found lines that seemed to indicate the aliens believed that humans were the ones who had started the war by destroying … the Tower of Yrrith, and by tower she understood them to mean a space station.
At first Kira had difficulty believing that the Jellies—the Wranaui—thought they were the victims. A dozen different scenarios flashed through her mind. Maybe a deep-space cruiser like the Extenuating Circumstances had stumbled across the Jellies and, for whatever reason, initiated hostilities.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Page 28
