Confluence 2: Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Jane nodded. “I think so. Its mass is nearly nine times the mass of Earth. Its gravity is greater—”

  “Yes, but its gravity isn’t nine times the gravity of Earth!” Alan interjected.

  Jane raised a hand to forestall further comment so she could finish a thought. “True. The gravity of Sectilia is just under one and a half g.” She’d found that a bit odd until Ei’Brai showed her how planetary density and radius worked to create surface gravity. The concept didn’t seem to stump anyone at this table, so she went on. “Atielle’s orbit is closer to Sectilia than our own moon’s is to Earth. And there are three other moons which exert some gravitational force on it seasonally, as their orbits converge in proximity—this pressure and friction leads to a lot of volcanic activity. There is sporadic volcanic venting which creates uneven heating. The atmosphere destabilizes as hot and cold pockets of air continually collide—this results in a monsoon season that lasts for months.”

  “Without breaks?” Ajaya asked.

  “The breaks in weather are very short windows and unpredictable. Minutes or hours,” Jane replied.

  Alan shook his head and blew out a heavy breath. “Jesus.”

  No one was questioning her choice to go to Atielle first, rather than Sectilia. That was good. Her official reason for going to the moon was to pay respect to the descendants of the former Quasador Dux and to have a soft introduction to the culture without a lot of pressure.

  The real reason driving her there was more amorphous than that. Rageth Elia Hator was in her head. She had this woman’s memories, put there by Ei’Brai along with a command-and-control engram set that connected her to him and the ship. He’d done this when he’d selected her from among her crewmates for the position of Qua’dux. It was a way of transferring power and wisdom that went deep into the cultural construct of ship life, so very different from life planetside. The average sectilian would never experience anything like this. It was a special gift bestowed upon a select few.

  Rageth’s memories were filled with sentiment and a strong sense of home. It was like a beacon calling her there. She’d tried resisting it, but whenever her thoughts turned to landing near the capital city on Sectilia some intuition told her no, that was the wrong choice. She had to go to the moon where she would be surrounded by people she could trust. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but she’d learned long ago that she shouldn’t ignore her intuition when it spoke that strongly. So far Rageth had never steered her wrong. These things, like many of the things that involved Ei’Brai, would be hard to articulate in a way that the others could understand, so she was glad she didn’t have to try to just now.

  If they did decide to visit the larger planet, they’d have no choice but to go in power armor. Adjusting to that kind of gravity for any duration would be exhausting—it would effectively increase their weight by roughly forty percent and create tremendous pressure on their joints and muscles. It was a painful process every atellan who moved to Sectilia transitioned through slowly and with a lot of additional conditioning, both biochemical and physical training over time. It wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

  She and her crew couldn’t present a strong first impression if they were fighting debilitating fatigue the entire time. They’d do it if they had to, but she hoped they’d get the answers they needed on Atielle.

  Their mission was to return Ei’Brai to his people and tell them what they’d gleaned about the nanites, though she assumed the Sectilius already knew these things by now. After seventy years it seemed likely that the Sectilius had long since begun some kind of rescue operation for the stranded kuboderans and were in the process of rebuilding their fleet. Another ship would likely be a boon. The rogue nanites were probably just a memory by now, a problem long since solved, but they wouldn’t know until they got there.

  Ron leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “It is what it is. How do you want to proceed, QD?”

  * * *

  Jane strapped herself into the generously sized pilot’s seat in the shuttle. She forced herself to take a deep breath, blew it out slowly, then glanced at Ron in the seat next to her. The air was a comfortable temperature, but she felt clammy from cooled perspiration. She wished she could just skip landing the shuttle and go straight to the part where she got to meet sectilians.

  She wasn’t a pilot. Ron, and even Alan, had undergone far more training in that department as part of preparations for the original mission to the Target. However, Ei’Brai had placed that engram set inside Jane’s head, a set of skills, memories, and blueprints that theoretically included everything she needed to know to pilot this vessel. It made her the most qualified.

  Jane had chosen Ron as her copilot because he had logged more real flight hours than the other two—back on Earth, in Speroancora shuttle simulations, and actual practice flight. Behind them, Alan and Ajaya silently strapped themselves in to the one-size-fits-most seats, both trained to step in, if necessary. The four of them had pored over the schematics. They had gone over every control together and had done a few practice runs in this shuttle, between jumps, throughout the cross-galaxy journey.

  Those forays had helped Jane cement the connections between the alien memories and the implanted engram. Once the shuttle was moving, she found herself making automatic choices—much like driving a car back on Earth. That had put her mind at ease to an extent. She hoped her instincts would work equally well in an environment with gravity, atmosphere, and plenty of rain.

  Ron quirked an eyebrow at her, and his lips turned up in a reassuring smile. He’d be right there as her backup, to help her monitor everything, ready to catch her if she fell. “You ready for this, QD?” he asked, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning.

  Jane grimaced at Ron. “Ready.”

  Ron guffawed at her expression. Jane glanced back at Alan and Ajaya. Alan was nodding his head at her and Ajaya was double-checking her gear.

  Ron’s expression grew more serious. “All right, then. Preflight checks are complete. Let’s do this thing.” He reached out and flipped a switch that began the process of starting the engines.

  Jane nodded and began her part of the process. She spoke aloud, because that seemed right. “Gubernaviti Ei’Brai, terminate synthetic gravity in chamber 245 and open the cargo door.”

  She felt the gravity go, and the door lifted. Before them a new world curved away with a halo of blue and gold at the horizon. It gave way to black space, pricked with millions of dots of light in a denser arrangement than she’d ever seen. They were no longer in the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, looking at the flat disk from the edge on, as one would on Earth. They were closer to the galactic core, where the stars clustered together. These stars seemed larger, more luminous—and there were many more of them.

  The tables had turned. She was the alien visitor in someone else’s system now. She hoped the Sectilius hadn’t developed xenophobic tendencies since the squillae catastrophe.

  She eased the craft forward, moving it clear of the Speroancora, and swiveled the shuttle to face its parent ship. Atielle tumbled under them and Sectilia loomed large and distant in the background. The Speroancora looked right here against the blue-and-green world feathered with wisps of white cloud cover.

  Swooping translucent structures slid over Speroancora’s hull, resembling fins gleaming in the light of her home system. The immense ship looked more like a sea creature than it ever had before—an artistic homage to the gubernaviti within.

  And deep inside that ship, Ei’Brai looked upon it with her, through her eyes.

  Remove the terror of the unknown, give a thing meaning, call it home, and you can see all the grace inherent in it.

  Her eyes felt full. She looked up and blinked, hoping the tears wouldn’t spill down her cheeks.

  She had needed to see the ship this way. It seemed likely that the next time she went aboard, she’d be a guest. The Sectilius would reclaim their wayward vessel and from here on out, the humans would be
at their mercy. Jane’s short time as Quasador Dux would conclude. She was surprised to realize she didn’t want that. The Speroancora was starting to feel like home.

  She glanced at Ron. He looked as dazzled as she felt. “She’s a beaut, QD. No doubt about that. It’s the right thing to give her back, but damn, I sure wish we could keep her.” He looked down at the controls in front of him, and she returned to the matter at hand. Descent.

  It might be a simple matter on other worlds, but not here, not now. Atielle’s atmosphere was teeming with fragments of broken-up ships and satellites. Over the decades, derelicts the size of Speroancora or larger must have collided with each other or natural and artificial satellites, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Now these billions of pieces were in slowly decaying orbits. It was a three-dimensional minefield, replete with torrential rain and excessive wind gusts—not simple at all. And all of the navigation satellites had been destroyed by the debris cloud. There would be no autopilot on this descent.

  Jane laid her hands over the controls and engaged the flight path Ei’Brai had planned to skirt the largest obstacles. He had analyzed the weather patterns to determine the safest time to descend through the troposphere. They had a narrow window between thunderstorms, and sitting here gaping at the ship was wasting those precious minutes.

  They approached on the night side of the moon, near their preferred landing site. They’d stood by, waiting for a break in the weather for some time. It was nearly dawn in that location on the surface. Jane was glad they’d been able to approach early in the day.

  Atielle grew in size, and they dropped through the outermost layers of the atmosphere without incident. There was no air resistance at this distance and there was only a momentary spike on the shuttle’s instrumentation as they punched through the magnetosphere.

  As they passed through the thermosphere, Jane saw a few orbital satellites at a distance. She wondered if any of them were still functional. Had the Sectilius detected their arrival? Would someone meet them on the surface at the landing site near the Hator compound? Some of these satellites had been part of a defense grid, but as they were in a sectilian vehicle, they had nothing to fear from them, even if the defense drones were still active.

  As they approached the mesosphere the external air pressure began to rise. They’d be hitting denser air soon and would need to reduce velocity so they could deploy the wings.

  “All systems ready, QD,” Ron stated.

  “Engaging reverse thrust,” Jane said and set a timer to fire the forward thrusters.

  “Fifteen-point-four vastuumet per aepar, and slowing…” Ron called out.

  Ron reached out to key the deployment of the wings. It was time to convert from a space vehicle to an aeronautical vehicle. Jane moved her feet into position to use the new controls that would be needed. The shuttle vibrated as the wings extended, then reverberated with a loud thunk as they snapped into place.

  Alan was up, peering through a small window. “I have a visual on port wings,” he announced, sounding like a kid in a candy store. She heard him cross to the other side. “And starboard. Wings have deployed.”

  “Thank you, Alan,” Jane said, with a slight smile. She’d already checked them herself with cameras mounted to the outside of the ship for that purpose, but she knew he wanted to not only see it for himself, but to contribute. “Strap in. This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

  “Roger that,” he answered. There was a loud snap as he refastened himself in.

  The shuttle’s handling changed as its flight surfaces bit into the thickening air. A faint glow built as the craft’s thermal shielding dissipated heat caused by friction with the atmosphere. She still couldn’t see the surface. The dense cloud cover of the underlying layers of atmosphere far beneath them blocked her view. Ei’Brai monitored the weather conditions between them and the ground in real time, streaming that information to Jane and Ron.

  “Tropospheric conditions are rapidly changing now. There is some rotation developing, Qua’dux,” Ei’Brai intoned.

  “Damn it,” she muttered.

  Ron sent her a sharp look. “This could get rough. We can make it, but it’s up to you. Should we abort, QD?”

  From the back Alan voiced, “What’s wrong?”

  Jane frowned and ignored him as she tapped a control to bring up more information about the storm from the shuttle’s sensors. Alan had been letting Ei’Brai in a little more lately, from time to time, but still didn’t want to link with him and the network consistently. She heard Ajaya patiently explain to him about the weather.

  Dark and ominous clouds flowed in swirls below them. Here and there flashes of lightning crackled as the storm gained some steam. Weather on Atielle was chaotic. Based on Jane’s imprinted knowledge, this storm wouldn’t stop a sectilian from completing the descent. The shuttle was built for this. These same types of shuttles would have routinely passed between Sectilia and Atielle for transportation and trade no matter the moon’s weather.

  But she wasn’t sectilian and she didn’t have any experience piloting through this mess. It made her nervous.

  Ron heard that thought and turned to her to address it aloud. “That’s all true, but we could wait weeks and still not see a better opportunity than this unless we decide to wait four months for the dry season to start.”

  She sensed Ron’s eagerness to get on with it. Ei’Brai and Ajaya echoed the same sentiment to varying degrees. They were right. She was going to have to do this or wait for months, twiddling her thumbs.

  “Okay, then. Here we go,” she said, and grit her teeth. She searched for the spot with the thinnest cover. She set a trajectory for a thirty-degree descent through that location. Ei’Brai confirmed her flight plan with minor changes. Jane adjusted the controls to reflect his suggestions and locked it in.

  They descended through a layer of wispy, white, vertically trailing tendrils.

  “Noctilucent clouds, maybe?” Alan mused from the rear. No one answered him.

  The layer of storm clouds was coming at them rapidly. Her fingers tightened on the control wheel. She just had to follow the flight path.

  Some great distance away, a red plume shot up from the gray clouds and lingered for a few moments before fading.

  Ron’s jaw was bulging with tension when she glanced at him. “That was a sprite,” he said, and she noticed his dark fingers clench and unclench before he reached out to tap another monitor. “It’s a form of lightning that goes up instead of down.” Several more sprites popped up around it, leaving what almost looked like jagged red streaks of paint that rapidly faded away.

  “It’s lovely,” Ajaya murmured from the back. No one else spoke. Jane thought it was lovely too, but it also looked dangerous.

  The air around the vehicle grew misty. A red ring popped up out of the clouds in front of them, and a second later another column of glowing red light shot up from the center of it, directly in their flight path.

  Jane instinctively jerked on the control wheel to avoid flying through it. She wasn’t fast enough. Red plasma flowed over the shuttle in a crackling wave of light and electricity. Every light and screen inside the shuttle went dark.

  A meager amount of illumination came in from the windows, primarily from the unearthly orange-red glow of the heat shielding. The interior of the shuttle was dimly outlined in black and white.

  She could hear her own jagged breathing dragging painfully through her throat. Cold panic flooded her body.

  They were tumbling through the atmosphere of an alien planet with no control over the vehicle.

  6

  The interior lights came on a split second later. Then the dashboard lights and monitors lit up. The shuttle shuddered.

  Jane struggled to determine how far off course they’d gotten. She had to re-establish their flight path.

  “Everything’s back online. All systems nominal,” Ron reassured her. His hands danced over his side of the dashboard. “On Earth aircraft are made to tolerate l
ightning strikes. This shuttle can handle them too. It was made to react this way. We’re fine. You got this.”

  She was too busy to reply.

  A proximity sensor began to alarm. They’d gone too far off their safe route. Something was close. Too close.

  Before she could assess the object’s trajectory and move evasively, something collided with a loud thud against the underside of the shuttle then skittered off to clip the port wing. The ship bucked.

  The controls became jerky under Jane’s hands. She activated a stabilizing subroutine meant to compensate for wing damage. It didn’t do much. They’d gone into a wobbly spiral.

  Ron’s voice raised in intensity. She could see in her peripheral vision that he was leaning forward against the straps, all his concentration on readouts and controls. “Damn. We’ve just lost the starboard engine, but we’re okay. We’re okay.”

  Losing an engine was not okay, but they could land with only one. Engines weren’t necessary for landing. The real concern was how they were going to get back to the Speroancora at the end of this visit to Atielle.

  Jane grit her teeth and struggled to get the ship back on course. “Keep an eye on the proximity sensor,” she told him. “The storm must be flinging some debris at high velocity. It’s more dangerous than we anticipated.”

  She activated an external camera and had it zoom in on the damage on the underside of the craft. The debris had punctured the fuselage at the point of the starboard engine, destroying it, and left a trail of destruction in a jagged line across the vehicle before striking the port wing. There was a chance the portside engine had taken some damage too. That would be bad. Very, very bad. How would they get back to the Speroancora?

  She realized dimly that Alan had joined the anipraxic network. She saw his intent and heard the clack as he released his harness.

  “I have a visual on the port wing!” he yelled. “We’ve lost about a quarter of it. It’s hanging on and flapping around, creating drag.”