Valence (Confluence Book 4)

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  When all three of them were satisfied with the final model, Alan began the printing phase, and Jaross helped him build the device right there on Tech Deck where they could tap into the neural-electric pathways that connected Brai cybernetically to the ship. There would be controls for the blink drive on the bridge, but ultimately Brai would be the most qualified person to use it, as navigator. If their experiments went well, Alan would make a second one for the Oblignatus. The process of creating the experimental drive had cost him a lot of sleep, but he felt sure that eventually it would all be worth it.

  Living was good.

  There were plenty of other things stealing his sleep as well. Work on the Tree-grown hull plating had been taking place erratically around the clock. He felt he had to be there when one of the pieces was positioned—he’d never seen the pligans do a bad job of it, but the plating wasn’t easily repositioned once it was sealed down, so it seemed best to supervise each placement.

  Basically, the work crews showed up at any freakin’ time and gave no warning that they were about to start. That meant he was often woken by the rumble of the crane moving into position. He’d rouse himself and throw on some clothes and get out there. Then, more often than not, he’d just stay awake and work because the exposure to sunlight seemed to trick his body into day mode. Ron and Jaross were the same. Sometimes even Ryliuk showed up.

  That guy.

  Ryliuk had been throwing a big stink over how Pledor had mishandled some of his pet plants. He and Pledor had a couple of yelling matches. It wasn’t pretty. So much for the planet of cooperation. Schlewan and Tinor were always going on about how sectilians were collaborators, and shared resources, and cooperation blah blah, on and on. Well, Alan was beginning to think that was some pretty idealistic stuff they were spouting and nothing like reality at all.

  It got so bad Jane and Ron had to take it into account when they worked out ship assignments. Pledor had now run both Huna and Ryliuk off the Speroancora.

  And Pledor was still there.

  Alan sighed and stretched out on his back to think for a minute before getting out of bed.

  Ryliuk was nonessential anyway. He didn’t really have any useful skills aside from brawn. His super mind powers were matched or exceeded by Brai’s. So, meh. It was fine. Ryliuk had packed up all of his stuff and transplanted his fuzzy-huggy plants to the Oblignatus. Apparently Huna was helping him nurse them back to health, and everybody was happy over there communing on the Greenspace Deck like a bunch of hippies.

  As far as the other ship assignments were concerned, they had two engineers and two doctors, so it made sense to split them up by job. Jaross had been handy to have around. She’d gotten up to speed quickly by taking some computer course she found in the database—the very same one he was taking, now that he knew it was there—and had become exceedingly competent. He’d miss the help, especially with Ron gone too. He’d manage though.

  Ajaya and Ron were pretty low-key about their relationship, but it was clear they were a thing, so he wasn’t surprised when Jane said Ajaya would be moving to the other ship. Man. They were splitting up the band. He’d always known it might happen, but he still didn’t like it much. He hadn’t been sorry to see Mark Walsh go, but Compton…yeah, that dude had been all right. And now this. It felt weird. He didn’t like it.

  So that meant that the Speroancora would be manned by himself, Jane, Brai, Pledor, and Tinor. He and Jane, and their tentacled third wheel, would be stuck with the two people he liked least. Pledor was just an ass. And Tinor… well… he just couldn’t look the kiddo in the eye after she’d managed to sneak into his bed. It was freaky. He would continue to be uncomfortable and to avoid her whenever possible.

  He was kinda sorry Schlewan would be staying behind. He might actually miss the old bird.

  The Oblignatus would be crewed by Pio, Ron, Ajaya, Jaross, Huna, and Ryliuk. And, of course, Lira as team mascot. They had gotten the better end of the deal, by far.

  He rubbed his face again, scrubbing at the drool collected in his beard. He was definitely alert. He must be awake. He launched himself out of bed, tapped the lights, stretched, and wandered over to a terminal to check the time.

  Fuck.

  He’d slept for more than sixteen hours. That must be some kind of record. They’d be launching soon.

  He took a quick shower, dressed, and headed up to the bridge. Jane was there by herself. She looked like she was in a deep trance but kinda perked up when he moved into her field of view.

  “Hey,” he said. “Still green for launch?”

  “Almost ready. Brai is doing the last-minute checks.”

  Alan rubbed the back of his neck. He should have been helping with that. “I wish you’d woken me.”

  “Oh, no. We’re good. You needed the sleep.”

  And she really meant it. It wasn’t some passive-aggressive lip service. Jane said what she meant. It was damn refreshing. She was literally the best.

  Alan sat down at the engineering console and cracked his knuckles. Everything looked good there. He connected to the Braimeister. “Hey, big guy. Help me get up to speed?”

  “Certainly,” was the reply he got. Then the flood of information hit him like a tsunami. He did that mental pinching thing he’d learned, to slow it down so he could parse it all. Within a couple of minutes he was aware of everything he needed to know and agreed that they were safe to go ahead with launch.

  He and Brai had obsessively checked and rechecked every pertinent system aboard for the last few weeks while Brai and Pio were recovering from their shark encounter, between plating installations and the other projects. Everything should be fine. But Alan knew that things had a way of cropping up at the last minute when it came to launches, and he’d learned long ago that with this kind of immense power use, there was no such thing as too many system checks.

  It went off without a hitch. Within moments of Jane giving the nod they were in orbit, and the Oblignatus joined them a minute later. Of course, no one patted him on the back for doing his job properly, but that was part of being on a team.

  Immediately, Jane was on to the next thing. “Scan for the debris of the Portacollus. Let’s see if there’s any information we can salvage from the wreckage. We need to know more about what Kai’Memna was planning.”

  Alan frowned. It had been months since they’d landed. They knew the Portacollus had crashed on the dark, arctic side of the planet. Atmospheric conditions in the transition zone between the habitable side and the frozen side were too intense for a shuttle to pass through. After their descent on Atielle, they were certain of that. So they’d had to wait until now to attempt reconnaissance. Surely the crazy winds would have scattered anything useful, destroyed it, or buried it in ice and snow. It seemed unlikely they’d find anything that would yield information about Kai’Memna’s plans for galactic domination.

  But still they scanned.

  And scanned.

  And scanned some more.

  They easily found the other ship, the Colocallida, which had been captained by one of Kai’Memna’s minions’. It was smashed to smithereens on the dark side of Pliga.

  But the remains of the Portacollus were nowhere to be found.

  Jane was beside herself. “Let’s look at the sensor data again from the day we landed.” She and Ron were on the mental-squid-phone, along with everyone else. Things were pretty tense.

  “Yeah, that looks bad,” Ron said as they replayed images from Pio’s Hail Mary maneuver, when she docked the Oblignatus with the Colocallida and rammed that ship into Kai’Memna’s Portacollus, creating massive destruction.

  “See there? His tank was breached,” Jane said. “I don’t see how he could have survived that.” She was right. Ice shards were visible in the recording.

  Alan cleared his throat. He didn’t want to say it. “Brai survived a breach to his tank.”

  Jane flinched visibly. “Barely. He had help.”

  Ron said, “Don’t forget Kai’Memna
had a sectilian crew on board. He would have had even more help than Brai. He must have managed to limp away.”

  To fight another day.

  Holy shit.

  Kai’Memna was still out there. He knew where Earth was. He’d threatened Earth. And he claimed he knew how to talk to the Swarm.

  And they’d just been sitting there on Pliga for months.

  Earth was fucked.

  21

  FOR BRAI, it was a maelstrom.

  He’d felt something like it only once. He and Pio had gotten too close to the surface while exploring near the shore. A strong rip current had caught them off guard. In those moments, all they knew was the sudden chaos echoing in each other’s minds, tumbling, panic spiking through flailing limbs, reaching out and finding nothing to grab as they were pushed out to deeper waters in a dizzying rush. It was a storm of disorientation and fear. No sensory input made sense.

  It was very much like this.

  They had just discovered that Kai’Memna had not met dusk as they had all quite firmly believed.

  Each member of both crews reacted to this discovery passionately, and their simultaneous emotions overwhelmed him—disbelief, panic, desperate fear, despair, anger, a desire for reprisal. It felt toxic. He could not begin to process his own feelings on the matter because their emotions broke over him like a dam bursting. He couldn’t control it or even stem the tide.

  It was worse than any physical pain, and he found himself with his limbs reflexively pulled in, barbs out, to protect himself from it. Of course that offered no material defense. It was just a vestigial, instinctual compulsion without meaning in this context.

  He had no distance. There was no insulation within his mind to retreat behind. The old squillae programming would have allowed him to merely watch this happening dispassionately, but that was gone. He wondered momentarily if that would have been better.

  And then it ebbed. Just a bit. And his own fears got purchase. Then the dam broke again as they cascaded out of control.

  Kai’Memna was a treacherous, genocidal fiend. He was alive out there, might still be murdering their brethren, converting them to his cause, sounding a call to war, or communicating with the Swarm to further his nefarious agenda.

  He had already nearly killed them, and would have succeeded, if not for Pio and Jane and their resolute bravery. Kai’Memna had a vindictive inclination. He would most certainly come for them again. And he was powerful and devious. What if he could bring fifteen ships—or fifty—against them? It was certainly possible. They wouldn’t have a chance against such numbers. Kai’Memna would be free to forward his plot to destroy anyone he opposed, which seemed to be the entirety of the sentient races.

  After seconds that lasted eternities the worst of the emotional tempest subsided, leaving a corporeal ache throbbing in his brains. Rational thought returned.

  Pio. He worried for Pio. What would this news do to her? Kai’Memna had forced her to choose between death and participating in his evil plans and then used her as bait to trap the Speroancora.

  He reached out to her, a private thread of thought, to assess her mental state and to query about her reaction to all of this. To his astonishment, her mindscape was smooth, unruffled, even tranquil. In fact she seemed to exude a sense of wonder. At first he thought it was stupefaction, that she was so distraught she had become completely dysfunctional. But then gentle amusement seeped into his awareness and he knew his primary assessment was incorrect.

  She was watching him watch her, and she found that rather droll.

  “Brai, I’m fine.”

  He probed a bit deeper, verifying that what she said was true. It was. “I was concerned.”

  “Not without good reason,” she conceded.

  “How can you be so calm?” he asked.

  She paused to reflect. “I have just realized something about myself that has changed everything. Perhaps you’ll find it foolish, but it has oddly given me some peace of mind. Perhaps it won’t last, but for now, I am fine.”

  “What is it?”

  “I felt dread as we began to search. The fear intensified as we went on. It was near to paralyzing. I was fully present, though, the moment Qua’dux Ronald Gibbs made the statement that Kai’Memna must be alive. I was well on the way to shutting down completely—but I noticed something. I noted the first flicker of Jane’s fear. It caught my attention and held it. And then I just observed. Her—all of them. Even Huna. Even you. And the longer I watched all of you react, the more I felt my own fear slipping away. Brai, four very different, unrelated species of sentients reacted to this realization in much the same way.”

  Brai stared at the glass wall of his enclosure, wishing he could see her physically—another data point to confirm that she was as stable as she seemed. “Yes?”

  “I have been struggling… with pain, sorrow, loss on so many levels. But the primary source of that struggle has been with the feeling of it. I rejected the emotions out of hand as being weak or inferior because I’d never had to process them on such a scale before. I did everything I could to resist them, to avoid them, to distract myself from them. But I couldn’t. Not completely. I felt brittle. I thought there was something broken inside me. Kai’Memna reset my nanites so they would not control me, but I had no context within which to integrate a wholly new side of myself. I was breaking apart from the inside out.”

  “I have felt that myself,” Brai confessed. He sensed her drifting weightlessly through her own enclosure.

  “Having you in my life, the humans, sectilians, and now Lira as well—these experiences have brought me so much joy—a positive emotion that makes life pleasant. Realizing that laid the groundwork for this moment, I think.”

  “I’m glad—”

  “Brai. I’m normal. My reactions are normal. It is normal to feel. And there is something else—it is also normal to resist feeling unpleasant things. The sectilians do. You do. The male humans do somewhat more than the females, but they all do it to some degree. This was an instructive moment for me. I am normal within the parameters of this highly variable group.”

  Something inside him relaxed. He went limp, his limbs loosening around him.

  She continued, “My deepest fear for many standard years was that these emotions were proof that I was becoming something akin to Memna. That they were just the beginning of a path to madness. That I was undeserving of freedom. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Ever. But this is not madness, Brai. It’s normal to feel. We aren’t monsters. We’re ordinary.”

  She was right. How strange to observe something in others in order to realize something fundamental about oneself. Their bodies might be different. Their thought patterns, abilities, and needs even more so. But every sentient being had a sense of self that was composed of primary emotions, common to all.

  It was completely daft to realize such a fundamental thing—an understanding that should be present at birth. But somehow he’d always thought he and all of his species were different. Better in some ways and inferior in others—many others. The squillae had imposed that, made it integral to his core personality. But now, perhaps he and Pio could be free.

  “We are. Yes,” he agreed. He began to share the sense of wonderment she’d been experiencing.

  “It has given me great peace to know this. It’s probably obvious to most people, but I hope I can be forgiven for being slow to understand.”

  “Of course you can!” he exclaimed, so forcefully it embarrassed him a little. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “Memna will want revenge for my betrayal. That puts my new crew in peril. I must be as honest with myself and others as possible now. Especially Quasador Dux Ronald Gibbs. I must be hard and sharp when that is necessary and soft and pliable when that is necessary. I must adapt or we will not survive.”

  Brai considered this. They were all adapting, learning from each other, changing. By working together, this multicultural crew had developed strengths that were formidable.

  Kai
’Memna was a single-minded individual. He could not comprehend what they were becoming together.

  Woe to him, if he tested that.

  22

  JANE FELT her connection to Brai and Pio weaken and knew they must be discussing this discovery between themselves privately. She hated to interrupt, but the other three members of her crew were on the bridge looking to her for direction. She would be surprised if Ron wasn’t experiencing the same. They needed to talk. The best and fastest way they could do that, without docking with the Oblignatus, was through Brai or Pio or both.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on getting his attention, something she rarely had to do. “Brai, Pio, we need you to be fully present.”

  Instantly the anipraxic connection between all of them strengthened, and it was like lights coming up to full in a dark room. The part of her brain that was connected to Brai and Pio was fully active, and she now had a sort of external sense of every member of both crews. Everyone seemed much calmer than they’d been only minutes before. Brai especially. That was good. Jane took a deep breath. Brai and Pio were good for each other—and that was good for all of them.

  She squared her shoulders and walked over to the communications console to send a request for visual contact to the Oblignatus. She could feel them, but she just needed to see them as they talked. Her request was answered immediately, and the large central viewscreen came to life. It was like a mirror inhabited by Ron, Ajaya, Ryliuk, Jaross, and Hator.

  “We have to decide a course of action,” she said.

  “He knows the location of Earth. We have to go home,” Alan said.