Confluence 2: Remanence Read online

  Remanence

  Confluence Book 2

  Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Synopsis of Fluency

  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

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Copyright © 2016 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.

  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.

  Created with Vellum

  For my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Plog, who was the first to encourage me to read and write.

  “The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

  ―William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 2

  “Fuck a doodle do.”

  ―Dr. Alan Bergen

  Synopsis of Fluency

  Confluence Book 1

  For more than sixty years, an alien ship drifted in the Greater Asteroid Belt just beyond Mars. It hid in plain site, never moving, never receiving resupply, its intentions unknown.

  Dr. Jane Holloway was a linguist savant, expert at making first contact with isolated human societies. She was recruited, along with five NASA scientists and engineers, for a mission to explore the city-sized ship, with the goal of uncovering its technological secrets. They assumed the ship was empty.

  As Jane analyzed language fragments, a symbol opened and expanded into a hologram, revealing its meaning to her. She conversed with the voice of an alien who welcomed her, but was otherwise reticent and remained hidden. Jane awakened from this experience unsure if it was real, a dream, or a hallucination. The crew continued to explore, but Jane opted to stay quiet rather than confess what she feared might have been space madness.

  After two of the crew stumbled upon a room full of slug-like creatures and xenon gas, Jane received instructions from the alien, allowing her to save her crewmates.

  Her colleagues had lots of questions. She confessed she had made contact with an alien and offered proof to her colleagues by leading them directly to a fully automated medical facility to receive treatment. Walsh, the commander of the mission, was wary about Jane’s silent interactions with the alien, Ei’Brai.

  The mental bond between Jane and Ei’Brai grew stronger. She was undergoing medical treatment with engineer Dr. Alan Bergen when she sensed something was amiss with the ship. She reconnected with Ei’Brai and demanded to know why the ship had come to Earth and why it was uninhabited, except for him.

  He disclosed that his crew, from a race called the Sectilius, had been lost to an unknown silent agent. They’d come to warn Earth of impending danger and recruit humans to fight in an intergalactic war. Someone had wanted that mission to fail.

  While Jane was unconscious, her comrades discussed the situation. Walsh believed Jane was compromised, putting them all in danger. Tom Compton began to behave strangely, fueling Walsh’s argument. They decided to retreat.

  When Jane returned to consciousness she realized Compton’s odd behavior was a symptom of the agent that had wiped out the Sectilius. As they backtracked, it became clear that the xenon gas leak had triggered a metamorphosis of the slugs, which had encased themselves in pupa and were hatching into hordes of venomous creatures. The crew was cut off from escape.

  Before long, they were surrounded, fighting to survive. When Jane tried to protect Compton, she was separated from the others and badly injured. Ei’Brai mentally inhabited Compton’s catatonic body and used it to carry Jane to safety, then cut power to the deck-to-deck transport so no one could come after her. Bergen was injured and doggedly searched for Jane. The rest of the crew retreated to the capsule.

  Ei’Brai placed Jane in a regeneration tank and drugged her. He tried to distract her, but his methods violated a human cultural taboo, outraging Jane, making her more determined than ever to escape. She feared that her colleagues were either dead or had left her behind.

  Jane broke free, donned sectilian battle armor, and searched for her colleagues. She found Bergen holed up, barely surviving, near death. She got him to safety and decided to confront the alien face-to-face.

  She approached Ei’Brai’s inner sanctum and discovered that he was a massive, cybernetically enhanced squid. He revealed that everything she’d endured so far he had engineered as a test. Due to the way the sectilian government had programmed his computer interface, he couldn’t move the ship without another person aboard as his democratic check. He needed a ship captain, and he had chosen Jane as the most suitable candidate.

  She was reluctant to take the job. He threatened to injure Bergen if she refused. She called his bluff, countering that she would destroy his life support if he were to hurt Bergen. They came to terms. She agreed to take the position with stipulations.

  Jane, Bergen, and Ei’Brai worked together to get to the bottom of the nanite infection that had wiped out the Sectilius and infected part of the human crew. Their only option was drastic. Jane took command, maneuvering the ship to rescue her colleagues, who were drifting through space in the capsule. She issued an order that annihilated the nanites.

  Jane made contact with Mission Control on Earth to arrange to send the rest of the crew home. She explained to Houston that she intended to take the alien ship and return Ei’Brai to the sectilian home world in order to investigate the mass genocide that had killed the original crew and to search for other kuboderans stranded throughout the galaxy.

  1

  When the first blow hit the ship, Kai’Negli was thrown across his enclosure with a violence he’d never known in his long life. He thudded into the wall of his tank so hard he lost consciousness for a moment. When he came to, he reeled with p
ain and consternation. He had incurred soft-tissue damage, for sure. He’d regenerate, but it was a blow to his ego to be treated with such blatant contempt.

  His limbs curled in impotent rage and he went immediately to assess the damage to the ship. Some of his equipment was failing from the impact, but he was able to determine that there was a breach on the starboard side—a gaping hole in the protective envelope of the ship. If there had been sectilians still alive onboard, thousands would have met dusk from explosive decompression.

  He was incredulous. This was a science vessel. It was unthinkable to damage a functional ship so wantonly.

  He itched to retaliate, but of course he had no recourse and they knew it. Without a commanding officer he was powerless to do anything but endure this insult. They’d made their point. Perhaps they thought he’d change his mind under threat.

  He would not.

  He set several thousand cadres of microscopic escutcheon squillae to move into the damaged areas. It would take years for them to close that gap, harvesting material from other areas of the ship molecule by molecule. But if anyone could guide them to such a feat, it was Kai’Negli.

  Then he saw it. Red light in his peripheral vision. He rotated his funnel to change direction and froze in place, his eyes widening. They wouldn’t dare.

  A laser was shining through the opening they’d created in the hull of the ship. They were slicing open his enclosure.

  He trembled with horror.

  How could they even contemplate such an action? Because he’d refused them? They would kill him for that? Why not just let him be? Move on?

  He had to verify it with his own eyes. He jetted closer to that end of his habitat. Without the tough exterior of the ship in the way and the escutcheon to re-form over the cuts, there was little to impede the laser. The line they were scribing was moving fast and water was already spilling out of the opening.

  He marshaled every squillae in the area to converge on the line already cut to re-bond the material. They moved en masse but most were caught up in the flood of escaping water, carried away to be lodged within shards frozen in the vacuum of space.

  Nothing could save him. He had nothing left. He was powerless to stop them.

  Perhaps they expected him to capitulate now, but he would never cooperate with thugs like this. This kind of behavior was beneath him.

  He watched the laser mercilessly cut across the barrier between himself and the void. Cracks began to form in the transparent material as the pressure of the water pushed against the weakened areas. He could hear the tank creaking and groaning under the strain.

  He never would have guessed he’d meet dusk in this manner.

  Suddenly it gave way.

  He didn’t even fight the rush of water.

  The sluice hurled him through the line of the laser itself. He barely registered the pain of amputation as he flipped end over end, his remaining limbs reaching out and finding nothing to cling to. He was thrown clear of the ship, his mantle fluttering with no water left to push against.

  The last thing he saw before dusk settled over him was the Portacollus initiating a jump sequence and leaving him behind.

  2

  Jane Holloway’s heart slammed against her rib cage as microseconds ticked by. She could see the leading edge of the swirl, smudging the stars beyond into indistinct commas of light. They were almost to the tunnel. Her vision blurred as the wormhole generator deep inside the ship roared to a crescendo, dominating her consciousness, linking machine to living flesh through Ei’Brai. She could feel it resonating in her bones.

  Almost…there…

  Absently, she felt her body lean against the straps, eagerly pushing toward the wormhole as if she could make the ship get there faster somehow. Pain pulsed in her head with every heartbeat. It felt like her brain could split in half. She did her best to ignore it. It wasn’t important. She focused all her concentration on the jump.

  Jane breathed shallowly, stubbornly clinging to consciousness and the mental link with Ei’Brai. She’d felt the rest of the crew wink out ages ago, though she knew it had only been tiny fractions of a second. It felt like forever.

  A seemingly endless stream of calculations—distance algorithms, wormhole formulae, coordinates in space—flowed from Ei’Brai through her, then the ship’s computer, and finally the drive in a seamless and nearly instantaneous cascade of incomprehensible data.

  She could not let go. If she did, the wormhole jump would fall short and they’d have to add another one to the route. That was the last thing she wanted to do. The fewer jumps they had to endure, the better.

  Ei’Brai’s consternation grumbled through her. The end of him and the beginning of her was indistinct. He didn’t know why jumping with her was so difficult, but every jump so far had been like this—grueling, with her barely making it to their destination conscious. He blamed it on her inexperience, on her otherness, but he didn’t really know the cause.

  He’d never jumped with any species aside from sectilians before he’d jumped with Jane. Human minds, as he often reminded her, were very different from sectilian minds—less organized, more tangentially driven—which under certain circumstances might be construed as a good thing, but not when jumping. It could be that or any of a billion other factors. She might never know.

  A ring of stars before them turned to streaks, smudged by the gyre of the wormhole as it moved to envelop them. Through the lens in the center were the distant stars on the other side, many light-years away. She held her breath as the funnel sucked them in. There was a long moment of utter chaos during which no thought could find a place to stick.

  Then, relief. They’d arrived…somewhere, anyway.

  She sagged back in the oversized command chair, breathing raggedly, one critical question on her mind. She sent the thought to Ei’Brai, who had already receded from her to watch the computer analyze star maps. “Did we reach our destination?”

  He didn’t reply immediately. He put her on hold, a mental gesture, as if he were sticking up a finger as he watched data scroll by.

  They’d left Earth weeks before to begin a sequence of jumps toward the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Their trajectory would eventually take them to the Sectilius system and the sibling worlds of Sectilia and her moon Atielle, where Jane would turn over the ship to its rightful owners. When Jane had taken command of the Speroancora, she’d pledged to take Ei’Brai home, and that was what she was doing. Once there, she hoped to find out who had orchestrated the genocide that had killed Ei’Brai’s original crew. She also hoped the Speroancora would be used in the search for the kuboderans stranded all over the galaxy. Jane and her human crew would join in that mission, if the Sectilius would have them.

  She’d never imagined the journey would be this difficult but that didn’t matter. She’d gladly face ten times worse for the opportunity to meet sectilians in person. She needed to go to Sectilius like she needed to breathe. She had to see it for herself, meet the people for herself, for reasons she couldn’t fully comprehend.

  Finally the strand of tension between herself and Ei’Brai broke. “Yes,” he said. “We have arrived at the target destination.” She felt him go limp, drifting, as he let go of his own anxiety, letting exhaustion take him. She did the same.

  * * *

  “Jane?” Ajaya’s voice and gentle touch broke through the heavy blanket of sleep.

  Jane opened her eyes to find Ajaya Varma leaning over her, her hand on Jane’s arm, with a kindly look on her weary face.

  “What?” Jane stammered. “Oh. I…” Her mouth was dry. She needed a sip of water.

  “We all fell asleep, Commander,” Ajaya said kindly, in a manner probably meant to obviate Jane’s embarrassment. No one used the sectilian term Quasador Dux or Qua’dux except Ei’Brai, though Ron called her QD sometimes in a jocular way. Only Ajaya used the term Commander. Ajaya would feel the need to dignify Jane’s place as the leader of this ship, but apparently the alien title still felt odd
on Ajaya’s tongue, despite the fact that she’d made great strides in learning the language.

  Ajaya straightened from her position stooped over Jane and glanced back.

  Ronald Gibbs stood behind her, rubbing his eyes sleepily. “Alan must have woken first. He’s probably off exploring Tech Deck again.”

  Jane pushed herself up, her body stiff and painful. She’d been slumped at a strange angle in the command chair. She had no idea how long she’d been like that. Too long, judging by the muscles protesting in her neck.

  Ei’Brai briefly checked in to confirm what Ron had said. Alan was on the deck that housed the engines, drives, and various electrical systems and water-processing systems. Alan called it Tech Deck, eschewing the longish Sectilius name for it: Tabulamachinium. They could have called it engineering, but Tech Deck was fine. It was probably better than “TMI deck,” which was what she’d been calling it in avoidance of saying the name. She’d thought that was a mildly amusing name. No one else had.

  Jane frowned and wiped at her face, hoping she wouldn’t find drool there. She wished Ajaya would call her Jane. Mark Walsh had been the commander, but he wasn’t there anymore. He was safely back on Earth, along with a much-rejuvenated Tom Compton.

  Ajaya said, “You were positioned awkwardly, such that your airflow was restricted.” She paused, her lips pressed together.

  Jane wondered what Ajaya wasn’t saying. Then Jane’s sleepy brain caught up. Ugh. How embarrassing. She’d been snoring, not getting enough air. She sighed and shrugged at the ache in her neck and shoulder.

  Ajaya grimaced. “I felt it would be better to wake you and get you to your quarters and a proper bed where you might get more restful sleep.”

  “Thank you, but I think I’ve slept enough. There’s work to be done.” Too much work. She felt an urgency to accomplish as much as she could before they reached Sectilius. She wanted to turn over the ship in the best condition possible.