Fluency

25

Jane felt out of sorts, like she should be doing something important, though she had no idea what that might be. She’d eaten and found herself wandering the corridors of the ship. Her trajectory seemed aimless, yet she was compelled to continue. She was giving herself a tour of her new domain, layering her own concrete experience on top of the mental map in her mind’s eye.

The ship seemed different to her now, since her immersion in the Sanalabreum. It seemed shockingly silent, lonely, perhaps even haunted. She half expected to see Sectilius purposefully bustling by as she rounded every corner.

Alan and Ei’Brai wouldn’t need her for a few hours. She should have slept, but she felt restless. She’d been sleeping in the spartan crew quarters within the medical center to stay near Alan. Those were adequate, but they weren’t intended to be permanent quarters for any crew member, just a place to nap during a long, uneventful shift. They didn’t feel…right. She spent as little time there as possible.

Neither Alan nor Ei’Brai could be convinced to rest much either. The two of them were inexhaustible when faced with an intellectual puzzle. They went round and round for hours on end, arguing about how to deal with the rogue squillae.

Alan had come up with a solution straightaway, but Ei’Brai rejected it just as quickly, insisting Alan’s plan was fraught with pitfalls that neither of them could adequately anticipate. So the endless research, analysis and translation began. It was draining and frustrating for Jane, because she was forced into the role of translator within a sphere that she knew nothing about.

Alan was picking up Mensententia quickly, but even a genius immersed in a language wouldn’t be immediately proficient in the complex vocabulary of engineering. Jane had to pull from deep within and all of them had to exercise extreme patience as they learned how to communicate in this complex way.

Ei’Brai made the link possible and Alan adapted to Anipraxia quickly. He seemed to like it, though he wasn’t about to admit that, because he harbored intense levels of mistrust toward Ei’Brai and his motives. He’d heard the whole story, all the justifications for it, and he didn’t like any of it. He made it very clear that he thought Ei’Brai should have been upfront from the beginning.

Jane did her best to keep the squabbling between them to a minimum. Since she was the intermediary for nearly every conversation between them, that was a constant role she was forced to play.

It didn’t help that Alan was stuck in the Sanalabreum. He seemed to despise being interred there every bit as much as Jane had. He was a restless type, needed to keep moving, keep busy.

At the moment, Alan was occupied with picking apart lines of computer code and he’d be immersed in it for hours. They’d recovered a single example of the miscreant squillae from Compton’s Sanalabreum and immobilized it for study. Jane downloaded its code under Ei’Brai’s instruction. Alan was studying that code, line by line.

He’d picked up on the structure and rules of the alien code quickly, drawing parallels to his extensive knowledge of code on Earth.

He’d riffed, “It’s all just ones and zeros no matter where you go in the universe, Jane.”

She hadn’t gotten the joke, but she didn’t think he expected her to. Before she could ask what he meant exactly, he was back in it again.

She’d been walking for some time and he was still at it. She came back to herself and realized she was standing in a deck transport. She selected the deck that contained the public and private rooms of the ship’s governing body. Soon she was standing outside the door of the rooms of the Quasador Dux. This corridor was the same dull green as any other on the ship. It could have been any door on the ship.

She reached out her hand purposefully to the door control. She knew the woman who had occupied this room in an unsettling and unearthly way. Jane had seen many of her memories. No, not just seen them. She had, in fact, inhabited them.

Jane knew what it was like to be Qua’dux Rageth Elia Hator. Jane knew her favorite places in the ship, knew who her lovers were, knew what her favorite foods tasted like. Jane had seen her ferocity in battle, had seen her coping stoically with adversity. Jane knew her—knew that she’d been intelligent, determined, secure in her own abilities and those of her crew. She was respected and revered by the majority of the Sectilius onboard. She’d been an intrepid woman. Her loss was a tragedy. These were deep boots to fill.

The door slid into the ceiling with a near-silent whisper. Jane gasped with surprise and stepped inside the large, sparsely furnished room, mouth still agape.

Color. A riot of color.

Each wall had been painted in great blocks of swirling color. The wall opposite the door was particularly stirring. She moved forward to examine the work up close.

It was painted with wide smears of pigment so thick there were peaks and ridges within the medium itself. At the top third of the wall, the colors blended from amethyst to azure, thin streaks of vivid, contrasting colors commingling so well that they could only be distinguished at close range.

There was a break in the painting where the dull green of the wall was exposed, much like a Rothko, and the lower portion of the wall was a study in blues and greens, lighter near the top, gaining depth and mystery as the heavy strokes of darker pigments blended toward the bottom of the wall.

It was a depiction of dawn over a vast sea. She knew it intuitively, as if she’d been there, as if the experience was personal. She fingered the textured surface with the lightest of touches, thinking. Maybe she had, indirectly. Her own memory was a mixed-up jumble now.

It seemed like the break between the two paintings wasn’t meant to separate them entirely, only to highlight the contrast. They co-existed. They depicted the same location. They were different realms within the same world, a watery world. Ei’Brai’s home world, she realized suddenly, stepping back and taking it all in again. Water and air.

Qua’dux Rageth Elia Hator had felt so strongly connected to Ei’Brai that she felt compelled to create art from the memories he shared with her.

Jane flashed on a memory of standing in this room, holding a wide, shallow bowl containing a traditional mixture of mineral clay slurry thickened with a bright blue pigment. There were many more bowls on tables nearby, filled with similar shades as well as contrasting colors that she had painstakingly mixed. Some of them had strong, chemical odors. Others were earthy and pleasant.

She reached into the bowl, scooping the cool paste into the spoon-shape she made with her fingers. Then, with a practiced hand, twisted and twined her fingers to release the thick pigment on the wall with special attention to how the paint flowed from each long finger. With a new color, she went back to that same spot, arching, extending her willowy body to reach, creating highlights, ridges and valleys, building up texture and color with each stroke.

She’d been at it for some time. Her fingers were stained, cold, and stiff. The muscles of her arms burned and her back ached, but she took little notice. This was her space and she would fill it with something lovely. She felt content and highly motivated to complete this section before someone interrupted her.

Her form was still very good, she thought, as she paused, scrutinizing her progress. She frowned when she realized she’d brushed her hand against her brow, smearing her forehead with dark cyan pigment.

Painting was imbedded in her. She’d practiced this technique since she was a child, had been good enough for formal schooling, but the stars had beckoned to her. She wasn’t fanciful about it. She was thoroughly practical. She could have had a good life as an artist. A safe life. But she knew she was made for more.

As the wisps of the memory faded, Jane imagined what might have happened, had circumstances been different, had the squillae not destroyed this incredible women, so that Jane might have met her, on Earth, as Rageth had intended.

Jane sighed and turned, realizing the adjacent wall wasn’t just a depiction of geometric shapes as she’d originally presumed. It, too, was an impression of a place that meant something to Rageth. This painting was more detailed.

From this angle, she could see it was a view of Sectilia from her moon, Atielle, where Rageth had been born. Sectilia hung large and low on the horizon, a misty, blue-green sphere, dominating the painting. Dawn encircled the planet with a brilliant halo of color—violet and coral and tangerine on a sky that was a slightly different cast of blue than Earth’s sky. It was so lovely, this moon with another world looming in the heavens.

There were other rooms adjoining this one, including a bedroom, but Jane didn’t have the desire to explore them yet. This room was appointed with plenty of sturdy-looking, simple seating. It was a room meant for social events. Jane approached a piece of furniture that resembled a streamlined, low, modern couch and sat down opposite one of the paintings, still absorbing its details.

“You have many attributes in common with her,” rumbled softly in her head.

“That’s very kind of you to say,” Jane replied with a wry smile.

“I do not contrive the assessment to inflate your sense of self. I observe. I do not embellish.”

“Thank you, then.”

“Do not compare yourself to her. You exceed the necessary criteria required to perform.”

Jane looked down at her hands in her lap. “I know you believe that’s true, but entire worlds full of innocent people are depending on me to get these next steps right. It’s such a heavy weight. I don’t want to fail.”

He acknowledged that, silently. He felt a similar responsibility. They communed in that. It helped, somehow.

After a moment, he rumbled, “Those other worlds beckon to you.”

She frowned. “They terrify me.”

“No. This is not who you are.”

She saw a face in her mind’s eye and wrinkled her brow. Ei’Brai was summoning a memory that’d been buried deep. She hadn’t thought of Mowan for decades. He was a Nawagi boy she’d met when bushwalking with her parents in Queensland in the months before they started their new venture on the coast. The two of them had spent more than a week romping in the scrub before it was time to move on. One day, he’d arrived at their campsite and said he wanted to take her to a special place.

He’d held her pale hand in his warm, dark one and led her across the plain to a rocky outcropping and an ochre pit. He said the adults in his tribe ground the brightly colored, soft stones with fat to make a paste that they used to paint the body for secret dancing ceremonies that sometimes lasted for days.

He picked up a bright orange stone and rubbed it against a flat rock jutting out of the dry landscape, quickly creating a small mound of orange, chalky powder. Smiling, he pressed his finger into it and drew his finger from her hairline at the center of her forehead, down her nose, over her lips and chin. Jane chose a small, yellow lump of ochre and ground it against another stone nearby. She smoothed the powder in stripes over his cheeks.

They took turns daubing each other with the mineral dust—faces, neck, arms—giddy with the results. They transformed each other into otherworldly-looking creatures. His lips twitched when he said his mother had painted his sister’s chest to make her breasts grow. Jane laughed and told him she didn’t need breasts yet.

The sun grew hot overhead and they tired of smearing each other with the colorful rock dust, so they crossed the dry grassland until they came to a greener place with a rushing stream. They splashed the pigment away with cool water and laughter, then went off to explore some other delightful thing.

As the memory faded, Jane eased back into the stiff furniture. Ei’Brai had uncovered a long-forgotten memory of Australia that was untainted by the aftermath of her father’s death. He made his point eloquently. She’d arrived in Australia, a child eager for experience—curious and open. The months and years that followed had changed her.

It was more than just coming of age, slipping into an adult skin. She’d always thought her proclivities toward adventurism, risk-taking, exploration, hedonism had simply been tempered by time. They hadn’t. They’d been crushed by fear—her own and her grandparents—who feared losing Jane the same way they’d lost their daughter to the wildest corners of the world. They questioned her every inclination, brandished the potential worst-case result of every action, relentlessly reminding her of her father’s death, until she began to doubt all but the most mundane desires for herself.

She’d learned never to trust herself.

Yet somehow she’d still ended up here. What was keeping her from reveling in this adventure now?

Some worry was normal. Paralysis was not.

Ei’Brai was right. Just look at the child she’d been. She owed everything to that child—her language ability, her curiosity, her passion. How could she have ever buried her so deep?

Jane slipped off her boots and pulled her feet up onto the low couch. She hadn’t slept properly for so long. The meal she’d just consumed was making her feel drowsy.

She could hear Alan now, the murmuring of his mind as he worked. She could tune him out if she wanted, but she didn’t need to. It was comforting. She curled on her side and tucked her hands under her cheek, adrift on the sound of his mental voice.

Jane woke to Bergen cursing.

“Fuck! Oh, shit! Jane! Fuck-fuck-fuck!”

Jane sat up, wiping moisture from the corner of her mouth, struggling to shake off grogginess.

“What is it, Alan?” she asked, scrubbing at her face.

“We’ve got a problem. A big fucking problem.”

Ei’Brai broke in without preamble, “Indeed. Counter-measures are already implemented.”

Alan continued, urgently, “These nanites are programmed to destroy the goddamn ship if they’re discovered, Jane. The only reason we aren’t dead yet is because there are so few of them left.”

Ei’Brai cut in irritably, “There is no need for explication. I am presenting Qua’dux Jane Holloway with the particulars now.”

She barely heard that, immersed as she already was in the memory stream of Alan’s thought process just moments prior. Ei’Brai had been monitoring Alan’s progress as he worked through the code, when Alan discovered that there was an additional layer artfully hidden in plain sight within the squillae’s most basic command code. Ei’Brai indicated that this was a section of code the average Sectilius scientist would ignore or only look at cursorily, since it would vary little within the spectrum of types of squillae.

But it was all new to Alan. He wouldn’t ignore any part of it. She felt Alan’s flash of insight as several seemingly disparate pieces of information flitted through his mind and he connected the dots between them. Jane could see the pattern form just as clearly—as Ei’Brai interpreted what it meant in real time.

If even a single squillae were discovered, scrutinized with this level of intensity, it was programmed to send out a signal, organizing all the rest of them to abandon whatever they were doing and congregate in groups along the major hubs within the network of the ship’s neural-electric pathways, where they would work together to build structures intended to create a series of feedback loops simultaneously.

In other words, a self-destruct—a massive, redundant, instantaneous overload. And it was probably already underway. It wouldn’t take many squillae to make an explosion happen. With fewer individuals to do the work, it would take longer to accomplish, but they could still blow a very large hole in the ship. There was no way to estimate just how many of them there were, how long it might take for an explosion to happen, or where the explosions would take place.

The ship was absolutely teeming with squillae and they were impossible to sort. Only at the microscopic level could one squillae potentially detect the difference between itself and an individual that was different. If a squillae worked hard at keeping to itself, which these clearly did, it could avoid detection altogether.

Jane stood, fully awake now, blood pumping at an alarming rate, and left the room, heading for the nearest deck transport, ready to go wherever she was needed. As she strode down the hall, Ei’Brai showed her how he’d already begun to organize the squillae in every sector of the ship to police the neural-electric pathways in search and destroy mode.

Alan interjected, “That’s not enough, Jane. They’ve already missed a few of these before—and these things are capable of rapid replication, using whatever materials are at hand. They will miss them again. Eventually we’re going to go boom—unless we get rid of all of them at the same time. It’s the only way, Jane.”

She’d heard this argument before.

As well as Ei’Brai’s rebuttal, which he began anew, “Unnecessary and imprudent. Entire sectors of the Speroancora would experience explosive decompression from the Coelusha limax infestation, alone. Every system on board would be affected—repair and maintenance would be impossible. That course of action would have far-reaching consequences.”

“More far reaching than blowing all this shit up? Really? Come on! This would only be short term,” Alan insisted. “We can make more nanites.”

“You underestimate the amount of time it would take to repopulate the ship. You would leave us in a vulnerable state for, at minimum, a complete revolution around this star,” Ei’Brai protested.

Jane hesitated in the deck transport, not sure where she was going.

Alan countered, “Jane—listen to me. I’ve only scratched the surface on this code and let me tell you, it was written by some devious bastards who did not want to be identified under any circumstances. We now know there were at least two different ways they intended to kill everyone onboard this ship. Who’s to say there aren’t three more ways to die programmed into these things? Every second we delay, we’re gambling. What if these damned things are already working on life support or the engines or something I can’t even think of yet? Jane—”

Jane held up a hand as she came to a firm decision. It was time to exercise her new role. “Ok. I’ve heard enough. We’ll do it. Begin the preparation for an ionic burst, Ei’Brai.”

His voice was acquiescent, “Acknowledged.”

Jane felt a small measure of relief followed up by trepidation. This really was up to her.

Ei’Brai continued, quietly, “All Speroancora binary processors are locally shielded to varying degrees. However, most of the vessel relies on the escutcheon—external hull shielding. With your permission I will work to augment local shielding while simultaneously disabling the escutcheon. Such a precaution will take some small amount of time, but will greatly augment future probability of survival as we go forward.”

Jane saw that he was troubled about deactivating the escutcheon. It was a risk, but that couldn’t be helped. “Yes, of course. We should protect the computers and anything else that could be affected. You did say the ionic burst will be harmless for living things, though, right? We’re not going to be exposed to radiation or anything are we?”

“We shouldn’t,” Alan cut in testily. “Tell him to show me what he’s going to do.”

Jane smiled and bit her lip at the mental glower Ei’Brai emanated, as he illustrated how he would modify the ship’s engines to create a burst of positively charged ions and send it on a magnetic wave coursing through every corner of the ship. The minute circuitry of every single squillae aboard would be overwhelmed and rendered inert, useless, effectively dead.

“Ironically, it is the squillae that will perform this preventive work. Pay close attention to the details, Dr. Alan Bergen. You may be required to reverse these changes manually, without squillae to perform such functions,” Ei’Brai commented reproachfully.

Alan responded without antipathy, completely enthralled with the images and concepts Ei’Brai presented. “Understood,” he replied eagerly.

Jane watched with amusement as their interaction changed from antagonistic to one of esteemed teacher and earnest student.

She hated to interrupt them. Her stomach churned with nerves, but she put an authoritative note in her mental voice. “There’s just one more thing we have to do, before the ionic burst.”