Confluence 2: Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Jaross had brought a data stick that contained everything they needed to know about where Atielle’s Ladder could be found, how the elevator worked, and how to hook a shuttle to the system so that the shuttle’s drive could engage with the climber and push them up the cable through the planet’s atmosphere and into space.

  Jane stood back and watched as Alan, Ron, Ryliuk, and Jaross hooked the shuttle to the climbing system. They opened specialized compartments on the underside of the shuttle and fed the thick cabling through an arrangement of mechanical components and then locked it back into place. She stayed back with Ajaya, Pledor, Schlewan, and Tinor, lending a hand when extra hands were called for and she was told exactly what she needed to do.

  Ryliuk was able to take concepts from Jaross’s mind and transfer them without language so that Ron and Alan could grasp them easily. Jane occasionally jumped in to work out translations of technical information for Alan or Ron, but for the most part, the humans and atellans worked very well together. The process went smoothly. Jane began to hope that this newly integrated crew would work efficiently together, especially once Brai was brought into the mix more fully.

  Brai, however, was still strangely quiet. He was declining conversation or interaction and seemed intent on observing the new crew. There was something serious going on with him, but he wasn’t ready to get into it. She worried about him, though there was not much she could do. She could only lend support.

  Alan remained cold. For the most part, he either avoided or ignored her. There was no getting him alone for a quiet word of explanation. Nonetheless he was working well with the others and she noted he relaxed a bit when she moved to the opposite side of the building as they rummaged for additional safety gear before launch.

  Yes, he was being stubborn and proud. That was his nature. But she knew he was in pain. She’d hurt him, inadvertently. She’d have to give him time to come around, to be able to hear her side. Until that happened, she’d give him a wide berth. Forcing a confrontation would only make things worse.

  Ryliuk was incredibly perceptive for an outsider. She noted that he intervened frequently to assist Alan so that she wouldn’t be called to translate. Alan seemed to be comfortable with that, far more comfortable with Ryliuk than with her. And Ryliuk’s brute strength came in handy several times throughout the process.

  Once the shuttle was attached to the climber, they boarded again. Jane was tense. She’d never sit in a cockpit with ease, and the memory of their descent was heavy on her thoughts. Nonetheless there wasn’t anyone more qualified than her, so once again she was in the pilot’s seat with Ron at her side.

  Jane powered up the ancient shuttle, made the final checks, and engaged the engine. She glanced at Ron.

  He was back in his element. He nodded in his levelheaded way, fingertips dancing over the dash as though it held controls he’d known all his life. “All systems nominal, QD. We’re ready to go when you are.”

  Jane swallowed the lump in her throat. “Engaging thrust.” The shuttle lifted off the floor with the sounds of groaning and creaking metal. The drag on the cable straightened it a bit more, and they were pressed into their seats as the nose of the shuttle pointed nearly straight up and began to climb.

  The passengers were silent. Minutes ticked by. As they picked up speed, the artificial gravity caused by acceleration coupled with Atielle’s gravity, making them feel much heavier. Luckily the coupler that connected them to the cable contained a rotating adapter that kept them from spinning around the axis of the spiraling cable. In the rearview cameras she could see the ladder station receding in the distance. Ahead was a gray sky with rushing clouds. Nothing threatening as of now, which was reassuring. Brai was tracking the debris field in the upper atmosphere with more detail than the shuttle was capable of and routing that information to the shuttle’s computer.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the cloud layer. They passed through the gray, cottony stuff without incident. Jane took a deep breath and tried to relax a little. It was going smoothly thus far. But she wasn’t naive enough to think all danger had passed.

  Their rate of ascent increased gradually with altitude according to an algorithm that set a pace based on where they were on the elevator. Apparently there were points where it was dangerous to go too fast or too slow. Doing so could trigger too much sway. Sway in the line would throw the anchor at the other end of the elevator off course and could also be dangerous for the integrity of the cable itself.

  It was even more complicated because Atielle’s Ladder was designed to be in constant use. Only one climber ascending at any given time was unusual and could be problematic. Normally there were up to ten climbers at a time at various stages, coordinating their ascent according to complex algorithms in order to keep the line stable.

  They passed through the stratosphere without incident. The view outside the cockpit windows went dark, with many pinpricks of light. At this altitude the climber began to pick up speed quickly.

  “How fast are we going?” Ajaya murmured.

  “We are going…” Ron drawled, checking a readout and pausing to calculate in his head, “…just under 150 kilometers per hour or about 100 miles per hour.”

  “Oh, my. I can’t feel a thing,” Ajaya said absently.

  Alan moved around restlessly. “It’s a far cry from rocket boosters, for sure. ’Course it would take forever at this speed—probably twenty days or more. We’ll pick up more speed soon. But get comfy. This is still going to take a while.”

  The mesosphere was the part that Jane was most worried about. That was the section of the atmosphere where there was the most debris from derelict ships and satellites falling from orbit and burning up. The cable was thin, flexible, and made of the most durable materials the Sectilius had been capable of creating during the peak of their civilization. It had likely weathered some impacts without a catastrophic failure. But the shuttle would be more delicate by comparison. A collision could be devastating, as they’d already experienced during their descent.

  Alan must’ve been thinking the same thing. He said, “Now we play debris-cloud Frogger until we clear the mesosphere.”

  He was right. They began a kind of dance. Forward. Wait with the brake engaged. Slow ascent. Fast ascent. She had to override the shuttle protocols that dictated their rate of speed. These protocols were meant to handle some debris, but nothing like what they were experiencing. It was a rapidly changing environment.

  Alarms went off. The cockpit lighting shifted from a soft, neutral, blue-white tone to red. Jane leaned forward, searching for a clue as to what had gone wrong. Brai knew before she or Ron did.

  “There appears to be an issue with a segment of the cable, Jane.”

  “We ran a diagnostic—” Jane blurted in disbelief.

  “What is it?” Alan demanded. He released the latch on his harness and pulled himself up over her shoulder, gripping her seat.

  Jane manipulated the forward cameras until they ran along the sight line of the cable. She frowned because she couldn’t see much.

  “Pull up a 3-D render!” Alan barked.

  When she didn’t immediately respond, he said, “A hologram—” He lurched against her seat, trying to reach for the controls.

  Jane batted his arm out of the way. “I know what a hologram is, Alan.” She did her best to sound calm and unruffled, but the stress she felt was immense. Who knew what could be hurtling toward them while they figured this out?

  Ron raised his eyebrows and changed the setting so that a hologram of the cable floated between the three of them. Nothing was immediately apparent. Ron scrolled up. Alan found purchase on something behind him and pushed farther into the cockpit. His left shoulder pressed hard into hers. Some of the atellans began to unlatch themselves and push up to look as well.

  Jane bit back the urge to tell them to stay seated. She didn’t have to. Ajaya was saying it for her. Except no one was listening.

  A mass came into view on the line. It w
as a gnarled tangle that looked like a bird’s nest. Ron tried to focus on it, but it was nearly out of range of the cameras and remained blurry.

  “What is it?” the booming voice of Ryliuk called from the back.

  “Space junk,” Alan barked over his shoulder.

  Jane let out a tight sigh. This piece of debris could be the remains of a ship just like the Speroancora. She could scan it to find out, but she didn’t want to. “It’s a hunk of wreckage from some satellite or ship. But…it can’t be fused to the cable or the diagnostic would have detected it.”

  Jaross peered around Alan. She was wedged into the cockpit now too. “How do we dislodge it? Does someone have to go out there?”

  Pledor said, “Fools! We can’t go out there—there’s no air! We’ll all suffocate if you open that door.”

  Alan growled, “We’ve got safety equipment for that.”

  Ajaya pierced the grumbling conversation that filled the tiny ship. “Everyone return to your seats at once. The commander is fully capable of attending to this problem without all of you crowding her. Let us give her the space and the silence she needs to determine a solution.”

  This time they listened, and Jane heard them sliding and shifting around and buckling their harnesses again. Except for Alan. Alan stayed pressed up against her.

  Alan murmured, “I’ll never understand why they didn’t put laser cannons on these things.”

  Ron huffed. “I heard that. We could really use a phaser right now.”

  Jane gave them both a stern look. She distinctly remembered someone rebuking her for wondering about what kind of devices the Target might have had before they boarded. “Let’s stick to realistic solutions, please,” she said dryly. “This isn’t the Starship Enterprise after all.”

  Alan cleared his throat. The comment had hit home.

  Jane’s fingers fluttered over the controls. She urged the craft forward at its slowest possible rate, the alarms blaring louder and louder until the ship simply wouldn’t budge another inch and the brake engaged automatically due to safety protocols. But she was able to bring the obstruction into focus.

  Jane wished she had something at hand to block her ears. It was hard to concentrate with all the noise and the shouting of questions.

  The debris was made up of green-coated wires and sheared-off metal. A coil of insulated wire had caught on the cable. It didn’t look like it was fused to the cable in any way.

  “Just plow into it. It’ll break free and we can be on our way.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. The safety protocols won’t let me get any closer,” Jane said.

  Ron continued to tap and peck at the controls on his side. “Yeah, I’m trying to override them from here, but this isn’t looking good.”

  Brai, who had been silent up until now, said, “Overrides would be difficult but plausible on the ground. During operation such endeavors would be impossible. This is not the solution.”

  “I’ll do an EVA,” Alan said flatly.

  “No!” Jane said, then ground her teeth together. She continued more evenly, “No, that’s not an option. There has to be another way.” A spacewalk would be her last possible choice. It was just too precarious.

  She opened the panel that would release the clamps and free them from the cable. A quick burn, a little bit of supremely dangerous fancy flying, and they’d be into the far-safer reaches of the upper atmosphere and well on their way to the Speroancora. She stared at the open panel and the releases that resided inside. It would be easier for Ron with his larger hands. She turned to him.

  Ron stared back at her with a grave expression she didn’t like. He gestured at the dashboard. Jane blinked. She could hardly believe what she was seeing. One of the engines was now performing at only 32 percent capacity. They wouldn’t have the punch needed to outmaneuver all the space junk. They had to keep traveling vertically on Atielle’s Ladder at least until they cleared the mesosphere. “Damn it.” What could have happened to the engine?

  Well, that settled that, anyway.

  Ajaya broke in. “A spacewalk may be the only option. It should be a fairly simple EVA. We are all trained—”

  “No,” Jane said. The cabin went silent.

  Jaross spoke up. “You spoke to me of the Speroancora scooping up your smaller vessel when your comrades were in trouble. Why couldn’t your navigator perform some variation on that operation now?”

  Jane shook her head, but before she could speak, Medical Master Schlewan said, “The yoke. The kuboderan cannot move the ship to such a degree without the Quasador Dux aboard. Impossible, impossible, impossible.”

  Pledor Sten’s grating voice rang out. “I thought you set it free?”

  Brai’s rage was immediate and scorching hot. It took Jane completely by surprise. She reeled, her hands balling into fists as she tried to push him back, tried to regain her sense of self among the roiling thoughts of fury and anguish.

  Jane looked up and caught Ron’s gaze. His eyes were wide, his jaw clenched. He looked angry enough to kill someone.

  She felt Alan swing away from her and turn toward the back of the craft. She knew without looking that he was focusing on Pledor. Only the awkward angle was keeping him from tumbling back and lunging for Pledor’s throat.

  Alan’s voice rumbled through the shuttle. “You stupid—”

  “Brai,” she commanded as she retook some measure of control, “disconnect yourself from us until you can behave rationally.”

  Instantly the connection was severed. Jane exhaled in a rush and panted for a few seconds. She consciously unclenched her fingers and looked down at her hands. Red crescents marked her palms from her nails digging into her flesh.

  “Jesus…” Ron murmured.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Alan asked.

  Ryliuk spoke calmly from the back. “Pledor, you will do well to remember that the Gubernaviti is sentient, male, and—above all else—can sense your thoughts and overhear your utterances through his colleagues here, even if you haven’t connected with him directly.”

  Pledor seemed unfazed. “What? Out here? We’re tens of vastuumet from the ship.”

  “Yes,” Ajaya said. There was a shrill note to her voice. She was shaken too. “Even out here. He is more powerful than you can imagine. And you just made him very angry.”

  He had made Brai very angry, but Jane wasn’t sure why. It had been a thoughtless slight, but she’d made mistakes like that herself when she’d met Brai and was learning about what and who he was. He’d always been patient and instructive with her. Why would he be anything different with the sectilians? She wasn’t sure. It worried her, but she didn’t have time to explore that now.

  He would give her the answer when she was ready to probe. He couldn’t hold things like this back from her if she commanded him.

  She lifted her head to gaze over her shoulder at the atellans in the rear compartment. “To answer your question, I gave Ei’Brai, the Gubernaviti, as much autonomy as was possible. The yoke is complex and there was only so much I was able to do within the scope of its boundaries. We haven’t yet determined how to sever it completely. So no, he can’t perform such a rescue operation. That would be impossible under current conditions.”

  Brai reconnected abruptly, breaking into her thoughts with a painfully discordant reverberation, the likes of which she hadn’t experienced since her earliest days of bonding with him. She winced. His mental voice was clipped and harsh. “I am tracking an object approaching in an erratically oscillating orbit. There is a twenty-six percent chance it will pass within an estimated fifty-five exiguumet of your vicinity.”

  That was too close for comfort. Jane gritted her teeth so hard her jaw hurt. They were stuck there waiting to see if they’d be hit unless she took some kind of drastic measure. “Hold on. I’m going to try something.” She turned back to the proximity sensors, calibrated the cameras to remain focused on the cable obstruction, and released the brake by degrees without engaging the drive,
allowing them to be pulled back down the cable by gravity to wait until they were well clear of any potential collisions.

  There was a loud squeal and a grinding sound as long as they were sliding in reverse. The shuttle wasn’t designed to go that direction, and the brakes were protesting. Jane flicked a glance at Ron. He shook his head and grimaced. She heard someone moving restlessly behind her in the cabin, probably Alan.

  At least the proximity alarms stopped blaring. That helped. She could think again.

  The cameras stayed focused on the cable obstruction. Though the resolution of the image became poor again, she could tell the obstruction was swinging around the cable lazily from the movement and vibration they’d just created on the line.

  A high timid voice came from the back—Tinor’s. “Could we create enough movement in the cable to fling the junk off?”

  It got Jane thinking. It could work. She made sure everyone was safely harnessed and told them to brace themselves. After the orbital debris passed their former location, she set the controls to override and put the pedal to the metal, zooming back up the cable until the proximity sensor screamed and the safety protocols put on the brakes. They lurched against their harnesses. The cable began to sway. She watched breathlessly as the obstruction swung around the cable…but didn’t break free.

  She ground her teeth and released the brake again. It screamed in protest as they slipped down the cable even farther this time, and put them in free fall for a few moments.

  Then back up again, the sudden stop grinding her into her harness so hard she was sure she was going to have bruises.

  She waited as the cameras refocused, swallowing the bile that was rising in her throat. The cockpit was a cacophony of alarms. The cable was not only swaying now, but also vibrating, and they had begun to create some bounce along the vertical axis of the coil. The inertial dampeners couldn’t control for all of these variables. It felt like being tumbled in a clothes dryer.