Valence (Confluence Book 4) Read online

  VALENCE

  CONFLUENCE BOOK 4

  JENNIFER FOEHNER WELLS

  Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Blue Bedlam Science Fiction

  www.jenthulhu.com

  [email protected]

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Art © 2017 Stephan Martiniere

  Book Layout © 2017 Vellum

  Valence/ Jennifer Foehner Wells. — 1st ed.

  ISBN

  Created with Vellum

  For Geoff

  May we live long and prosper

  “If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

  H.G. WELLS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  About the Author

  Also by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Explore Confluence

  1

  February 16, 2018

  THE PLIGANS HAD, without a doubt, endeared themselves to Jane’s crew. They’d been lucky. If the Speroancora had been destined to crash-land somewhere, it’d been fortunate to land on Pliga, where the people were kind, generous, and capable. The crew, human and sectilian, had gathered in the ship’s dining hall in preparation for heading up to the nearest segment of the Tree, and the conversation had turned toward pligan syntax.

  “They talk like Yoda,” Alan said. He was smirking, completely certain in his conviction. This clearly amused him greatly.

  The Tree—alternately called Existence or Optimal Existence—was an architecturally stunning interconnected set of structures grown from, in, and supported by a worldwide network of cloned trees. The trees themselves were dramatic. Larger in diameter than the largest sequoias, their massive black trunks suspended the pligans’ crystalline cities one hundred feet and more above ground.

  Their foliage was dark, almost black, and their leaves were broad and dense. This was because Pliga’s sun was a red dwarf. The light from this kind of star was far less intense than Sol’s and more toward the less-energetic infrared spectrum, forcing the vegetation to evolve more pigments to harvest as much light as possible and reflect far less. The people of Pliga lived and worked in these structures, rarely coming down to the ground.

  Thankfully, the pligans had been making an exception for the Speroancora and the Oblignatus, both of which had been badly damaged in a skirmish with a group of rogue kuboderans—and the subsequent crash landing, which they’d barely survived. The pligans were using their vast knowledge of materials science and engineering to repair both ships. Today, a pligan named Gili was going to show the crew how some of these materials were created by the Tree.

  “Naw. Not like Yoda. That’s nothing like Yoda,” Ron said, shaking his head. Ron was generally agreeable, a typical astronaut, so Jane took notice when he challenged Alan.

  “It’s exactly like Yoda!” Alan looked affronted. “Tell him, Jane.”

  Jane inhaled sharply and raised her eyebrows. “Yoda?”

  Ron roared with laughter, doubling over and pointing at Alan.

  Alan made a long-suffering face. “Lady, we are going to have to nerd you up when we get back to Earth.” Alan was an engineer and took his fandoms very seriously. It was a fascination they didn’t share and was among the smaller challenges in their budding relationship.

  Jane frowned, trying to remember the character fully. “Yoda was one of the Muppets, right?”

  “He’s a puppet, Jane. There’s a difference. Actually, he transcends puppetry. I can’t believe you haven’t watched that movie. Everyone has watched it.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows. “I’ve watched Star Wars. I just haven’t watched it fifty-seven times, like you have.”

  “Forty-three,” Alan grumbled. “And we’re talking about The Empire Strikes Back, for the record.”

  Ajaya’s lips were twisted in a suppressed smile. “Yoda uses unusual sentence construction, doesn’t he? It’s out of order compared to standard English. I don’t know if that’s how the pligans speak, but I am eager to find out.” Ajaya, the crew’s doctor, had recently emerged from the healing gel of the sanalabrium. A nearly fatal injury, incurred while retrieving a sample from a booby-trapped ship, had kept her submerged for months. Today would be her first outing to meet the pligans.

  Recognition hit Jane fully. “Oh, yes. Yes. I remember that now. It’s a pet subject among linguists. It’s a clever device to make the character seem more alien. But there actually are a few languages in Brazil that use that construction, like Nadëb. It is organized as object-subject-verb rather than English’s more standard subject-verb-object construct—although poets like Shakespeare and Whitman have played with syntax this way for hundreds of years to work within a meter or for rhyme or rhythm.” She realized she’d gone off on a linguistic tangent and everyone’s eyes were glazing over. “As a standard construction, it’s very rare.”

  “And…?” Alan said, leaning forward like he was waiting. He gestured with his hand, urging her to continue to speak.

  “What?” Jane asked, her brow furrowing.

  “And that’s also how the pligans speak,” Alan said, with a flourish of his fingers.

  Jane shook her head. “No, it’s not.”

  Ron guffawed and clapped his hands.

  “Well, not always, anyway,” she amended. “I’m not saying they never do. Their speech patterns are very individualized, in my observation.”

  “I think it’s like poetry,” Ron said. “The other day, when I mentioned I was thirsty, Gili led me to a fountain and said to me, ‘Distinguishing the need when water is quenching.’ It’s Mensententia, but it’s barely understandable without some kind of context I just don’t have yet.”

/>   Alan leaned back against a table and folded his arms. “That’s not how Bigu talks to me. Bigu talks like Yoda.”

  Jane put a hand on Alan’s arm and squeezed. “If we see Bigu today, I will seek her out for conversation.”

  Ron eyed Alan. “One hundred bucks says Jane decides Bigu doesn’t speak like Yoda.”

  Alan narrowed his eyes, then stood up and held out his hand. “You have yourself a wager, my friend.”

  They shook.

  Ron said in a funny falsetto voice, “Easy money, this is. Hrm.”

  Ajaya ignored them and looked at Jane, curious. “Is it a dialect of Mensententia, Jane?”

  “No. They use the same words and the words seem to mean the same things—they simply express themselves differently. Their usage reflects cultural influence, or perhaps a different way of thinking. And they aren’t often in touch with other Mensententic-speaking cultures, so they may have developed some idiosyncrasies. I’ve thought of about twenty dissertation topics in linguistics that could be done here so far. It’s fascinating.”

  This time on Pliga, though not entered under the best of circumstances, had been extremely interesting. Still, a frustrated sense of urgency was pushing at her to get moving. Kai’Memna had given the Swarm the coordinates for all of the planets in the galaxy inhabited by sentients. She needed to get to Terac, the galaxy’s central governing planet, to warn the people there. Something had to be done to prepare for the Swarm’s invasions, or a lot of innocent people would die.

  They’d managed to dispatch Kai’Memna before he could transmit the location of Earth to the Swarm, but Sectilius was vulnerable, completely unable to defend itself. And Jane had no idea how well equipped other planets might be to resist the behemoth insect scourge. The repair work to the Speroancora was taking a great deal of time, however, and couldn’t be rushed no matter how much she might want that.

  The pligans had a unique method of manufacture. They were biological engineers. She wasn’t sure she’d interpreted everything they’d said to her correctly, but it seemed that the Tree somehow grew everything they needed. They said they genetically programmed special nodes of the Tree to create things out of various polymers, and right now the Tree was growing plating for the Speroancora’s outer hull. She wasn’t sure what that meant exactly and was very excited to see the production process in person.

  Based on what she’d seen so far, though, she didn’t doubt their engineering prowess. Even Alan was impressed with their ability to manufacture materials. All of the interior work on the Speroancora was complete. Brai’s habitat had been repaired, even improved upon, and was ready for his full-time return.

  After hearing about their encounter with Kai’Memna in orbit around their planet, the pligans had insisted on rebuilding the outer hull with a light and durable material that would work comparably to the passive-solar-collection plates and extruded materials that had been buffeted and broken off during their descent onto Pliga and impact with the ocean.

  Alan had run tests on samples and had determined that the new hull was worth any additional weight and the time to grow it. They could still continue to create a nanite escutcheon for added protection, but these polymer materials were pretty amazing stuff, according to him, and an excellent backup, considering how long it would take to manufacture enough nanites for the job.

  Some of the plating had already been mounted on the exterior of the ship. Rather than abutting edge to edge and creating seams, they overlapped the plates and chemically welded them together—she was assured this was not even remotely like gluing—in a configuration that resembled scales. She’d only seen the effect once, and briefly, on a rare calm day. It had induced a smile. The Speroancora was looking more and more like a sea creature all the time. When this project was complete, the ship would look very different from the way it had when they’d found it in their solar system. The swooping extrusions were gone. In their place: smooth, glittering, purplish-black, transparent scales.

  Jane noted that Jaross, Ryliuk, and Pledor—three of the five sectilian members of her crew—were finishing up their meal and cleaning up. Pledor had put out an elaborate spread from the Greenspace Deck, saying he wanted to eat a big meal before going up to the Tree. He complained that the ubiquitous sap the pligans frequently offered them for sustenance did not agree with his digestive system, and he wasn’t alone, though Pledor, formerly the Gistraedor Dux of a sectilian enclave, frequently found things to complain about.

  Schlewan, a sectilian medical master, had tested several samples of the sap and found no dangerous compounds or pathogenic contaminants. What it did consist of was a large percentage of a family of difficult-to-digest carbohydrates. This apparently suited the pligan digestive tract perfectly. It was all she’d ever seen them consume. Schlewan had concluded that most sentients would be uncomfortable if they tried to ingest more than a small quantity.

  Jane never refused the drink in order to avoid offending her hosts, but took tiny sips at Schlewan’s suggestion. She liked the way it tasted, and it didn’t bother her in small amounts. It made her think of very sweet floral hibiscus tea with a hint of licorice, brown sugar, and a light estery aftertaste, sort of like banana. While that might seem to be an odd combination, it was tasty and refreshing. She thought that if it were fermented, it might make a nice wine or beer that was more digestible for humans and sectilians.

  Schlewan entered and gathered some food cubes into a small container. It was time to go, but Tinor, the youngest member of the crew, was nowhere in sight. Jane frowned. In her experience it wasn’t like a sectilian to be late.

  Under normal circumstances Jane would have simply asked Brai, the kuboderan ship’s navigator, where Tinor was and what she was up to. But Brai was out exploring the ocean with Ei’Pio—the kuboderan navigator of the Oblignatus who had single-handedly prevented the destruction of the Speroancora—and Jane didn’t want to interrupt them. Brai wasn’t keeping tabs on all of them as closely as he would have had he been in his internal environmental enclosure, but that was fine. She kept a very light link with sectilian Mind Master Ryliuk instead.

  Brai had come back to assist with some of the initial repairs before the pligans helped them move the Speroancora more fully onto land. Now only a small part of the tail section was submerged, and a special access chamber had been installed so he could come and go as he pleased. He was still adjusting to the radical changes in his squillae code that had once suppressed his emotions and controlled his behavior. It was the first time in his adult life that he’d been allowed to voluntarily leave his tank inside the ship. He deserved a vacation after centuries of work without breaks of any kind.

  Jane crossed over to Schlewan. Before she could say a word, Schlewan said, “Tinor is waiting near the exit.”

  Jane nodded. No matter what she said to the young woman, Tinor continued to avoid contact with her whenever possible. Jane had accepted Brai’s explanation that Tinor wanted to stay beneath Jane’s notice until she could accomplish something that would capture Jane’s attention in a positive way after the gaffe with Tinor’s coming-of-age gift, but this seemed a bit far to go. When they were together, Tinor acted as though nothing were wrong, but she persisted in this avoidance whenever possible.

  Jane hadn’t made it an order that they would meet in the crew dining hall, but she had said it, no one had disagreed, and everyone else had come at the appointed time. She shrugged it off. It was just a minor irritation, nothing truly troublesome.

  “Okay, let’s go then.” She gestured for her crew to follow her down the corridor.

  Ron put his arm protectively around Ajaya as they walked. “Are you ready to see your very first gray sky?”

  Ajaya smiled. “I am indeed.”

  Visually, Pliga’s sky took some getting used to. The whole world was colored like a sepia-toned photograph, only occasionally punctuated here and there with a yellow, orange, or red tone bright enough to stand out from the endless sea of drab gray, purplish brown and bl
ack. There weren’t even any sunrises or sunsets to add color to the pale sky. It was always day on this side of Pliga. The planet was tidally locked with its dim star.

  They reached the hatch and there was Tinor, waiting, with her gaze averted.

  “Brace yourself,” Ron told Ajaya. “It can sometimes be hurricane-force winds. It’s a short walk, though. Just hold on to the rope. I’ll be right there with you.”