Current drift, p.7
Current Drift, page 7
It was right to wonder if it had ever had a body. Very right.
“So do I,” Sloane said softly. “So do I.”
“Bodies are weird, however,” BRO continued. “I don’t know if I would like sneezing. It looks uncomfortable. And I definitely would not like my brain to be processing the auditory input of the Currents the way the Commander’s is. Do you think there was anyone else with him when he first got stuck in the fields? You looked lonely when you first got stuck in one. Like a sad armadillo trapped in jelly.”
Sloane stopped, one hand on the rail. “What did you say?”
“A sad armadillo trapped in jelly. An armadillo is an armored mammal with—”
“I know what an armadillo is. Before that.”
“You looked lonely.”
Sloane was already moving toward the lab, heart beating faster. When she opened the door, Gareth was sitting on the table beside Damian, who was eyeing him watchfully, as if expecting him to collapse off the table at any moment.
“When you first encountered that stasis field out in the bands,” she said, “did anyone else get stuck in it with you?”
Damian lifted an eyebrow. “And you call her reckless.”
Gareth nodded. “A newer soldier. He went in first. I followed, hoping to rescue him.”
Headaches. Headaches that had plagued him for weeks and tapered off once he was assigned to ground duty on Lostelle. It had to be him. “Was it Ensign Sands?” she asked.
Gareth’s eyes widened. “It was,” he said. “How could you possibly know that?”
CHAPTER 10
“I cannot see any reason for the Commander’s connection to the Current.”
Chief Escher was standing with her arms crossed, as if she were a teacher and Gareth a student who she suspected of faking an illness so he could get out of class. Only he was the Commander, and she was a science officer, supposedly under that command. Though he wasn’t sure how she’d react if he attempted to remind her of that.
Escher and Alex had been discussing Sloane’s theory about Sands for the last half hour, during which time Sloane had disappeared back up to the flight deck. He wished she’d come back, but they were getting close to Ilya, and she’d surely need to prepare. Check on Hilda and Brighton, and make sure the bots had what they needed.
“We need to get Ensign Sands in here for testing,” Escher continued. “Two test subjects are better than one. What do they have in common?”
“I know,” Damian said. “They’re both soldiers.”
Damian had amassed a pile of pillows from somewhere on the ship, arranging them into a nest in the middle of the floor, where he now lay with his hands propped behind his head. He looked much more comfortable on the floor than Gareth was on the table.
The floor would be nice. It would give him the chance to close his eyes, maybe calm the turning inside his head. As it was, Gareth feared closing his eyes up here would lead to him falling off the table.
“Oh, a game!” BRO sounded like would be clapping its hands in excitement, if it had them. “They both went into the field on the same mission. They both rode the same shuttle to get there. Are they both tall? Are they both men? I’m good at this.”
“You are,” Damian agreed.
Gareth had been starting to worry that they’d never work out the mystery of his own connection to the Currents. With Sands in the mix, it felt like there was fresh hope. A chance to straighten it out.
What would happen if the Currents remained operational, but Gareth could no longer travel them for fear of getting sick? He wanted to retire from the Fleet, sure, but not from life. Not from adventure. It was as inconceivable as the Currents going down entirely.
Gareth risked shutting his eyes for a long moment, willing the dizziness to subside. It didn’t help. “We need to investigate the wreck itself,” he said. “See if there are any clues there.”
They’d very likely already thought of it. In fact, if he knew them at all, they’d probably already been lobbying Sloane to make the wreck their next stop. If not to detour there right now. But the wreck was located in the bands between Torrent and Halorin, wedged well out of the way of the Current. It would take over a week to get there.
First, Ilya. Then, they’d see what came next.
“We’ll find a reason,” Chief Escher said brusquely. And then, rather surprisingly, she gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder. When he opened his eyes, she gave him a firm nod, and he got the distinct impression that she was trying to be comforting. “We’ll find a solution.”
“I realize the Commander is your priority,” Damian said, “but does all of this talk about saving him and understanding him mean you do see a reason for my connection to the Currents?”
Escher pursed her lips. “You are of equal priority.”
“Oh, I’m not offended,” Damian said. “I understand completely. He signs your paychecks.”
Escher punched her hands onto her hips. “If you’re suggesting I make scientific conclusions because of who I work for—”
“He’s not,” Gareth interrupted. “He’s just being Damian. Damian, stop it.”
Damian shifted on his bed of pillows, grinning up at him. “Stop being Damian? I’ll do my best, but you’ll understand why I find it challenging. I attempted to be Brighton for a while, but it was an abysmal failure. I’m not tall enough, you see.”
Gareth suppressed a sigh. When Damian was in a mood like this, it was best not to react. The man was like a four-year-old that way.
Escher turned her hawk-nosed appraisal to Damian, glasses slipping as she looked down at him. “You, we see the reason for,” she said. “Your cells are wrong.”
Damian wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Thank you.”
“But there’s nothing to do about it,” Escher continued, ignoring Damian’s eyebrows. “We don’t have any models to base it on. We’ve never seen any precedent. We’re in the dark.”
She scrunched her nose, like the thought made her uncomfortable. It made Gareth uncomfortable, too.
“We need more time to study.” So far, Alex hadn’t contributed much to the back-and-forth between Damian and Chief Escher. Now, she spoke from the counter behind them, where she’d been staring into a microscope for the last half hour and looking up only to make occasional notes on her fliptab.
“We need more data,” Escher returned.
“Which,” Alex said, “we’ll get by studying.”
Good to see they were getting along.
Damian propped himself up on his elbows, nodding at Gareth with a conspiratorial twist of his lips. “Do you think she’s going to call us test subjects again?”
“Probably.”
Escher had gone around the table, perhaps to argue with Alex in more detail. Damian was watching her with a peculiar look on his face. It almost might have been longing.
“What happened to your book?” Gareth asked.
Damian blinked, snapping his curl of a smile back into place like a mask. Gareth wanted to kick him—gently, probably—with one of those pillows. To tell him the mask wasn’t necessary. Not here.
Damian raised his eyebrows, cocking his head to the side with practiced innocence. “What book?”
“The book you nearly killed us all to steal from the Interplanetary Dwellers? The one you had your nose buried in for weeks afterward?”
“Oh, that book.” Damian lay back, adjusting his shoulders before replacing his hands behind his head. “It was nothing. Useless.”
“What did you want it for?”
“Do you ask your soldiers this many questions?”
“When they’re acting like buffoons, yes. The difference is that they answer me.”
“You’re very intimidating, that’s why.” Damian closed his eyes, like this was the most comfortable place on the ship for a nap. “What do you think they’re like? The aliens?”
He changed the subject in an offhand kind of way, casual, as if the answer didn’t matter one way or the other. But Gareth suspected that if he’d opened his eyes, there’d be hunger in them. Which was very likely why he had them closed in the first place.
“I don’t know,” Gareth said slowly. “I imagine you’d like to, though.”
“They might be long gone,” Damian mused. “They might be extinct, and my blood is a remnant of a remnant. There might be no answers at all.”
Alex and Escher were murmuring in low tones, the hum of the ship vibrating through the table beneath his legs. Calming. Grounding, with the melody of the Current grinding on in the background.
“Or they might know all the answers.” Gareth completed his friend’s thought. Damian left too much unsaid, kept too much to himself. One day, it was going to get him into trouble.
“They might be family.” This, Damian said so quietly that if Gareth hadn’t been leaning forward to catch the words, they might have been lost.
For Damian to admit it was something he wanted… well, that was out of the norm. Damian’s father wasn’t a good man, and Gareth knew nothing of his mother. He was clearly close with Ivy… and no one else, as far as Gareth had ever seen. The pirate kept even his sister at arm’s length, most of the time.
Perhaps it was his illness that made him think of family. Or perhaps it was something that went even deeper.
“I know you prefer to work alone,” Gareth said quietly, “but it feels very much like you are a part of this family.”
Damian quirked that smile again. “The squabbling, the dirty dishes. Yes, I suppose you are a family, aren’t you?”
Gareth let the words hang there for a second, until it felt like the air was thick with them. “But not you?”
Damian didn’t reply. As long as Gareth had known him, the man had worked alone. If he’d taken up with Moneymaker’s crew for a little while, it was merely to serve his own aims. Or so he would no doubt claim.
Before Gareth could decide whether to push him on it—which would very likely earn him nothing more than a quip of a response—the ship rocked gently, and he recognized the sensation of yet another Current exit.
“Believe it or not,” Sloane said through the comms, “we were actually supposed to exit that time. We’re in Ilya. Brighton and I are up by the pods. We’re letting the bots out to search.”
Gareth wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, or how the bots would go about their searching. Probably something he should have investigated when he’d encountered them before, but he’d mostly been focused on finding ways to shut them down.
He eased himself down from the table, still feeling unsteady on his feet, though the song of the Current had faded, leaving his ears ringing in relief. He’d probably do well to get some sleep—he’d barely been able to shut his eyes since Lostelle—but as soon as the bots pinpointed Vin’s location, Moneymaker would be headed after him, and Gareth definitely needed to be on the ground for that particular operation.
To his surprise, Damian stirred, rising from his makeshift bed as if to follow Gareth upstairs. Those thorn-like snakes of poison still webbed their way across his skin, but he did seem to have more energy than he had a few days ago. Even if he wouldn’t use that energy to discuss things like family.
Gareth headed for the door, and Damian made to follow. Escher, however, wrapped her fingers around the pirate’s arm, tugging him back toward the table. “You stay,” she said.
Damian actually fluttered his eyelashes at her. “I’d love to, doll, but I don’t do well cooped up. I warned you not to get hooked on me, but—”
“Sedate him if you need to,” Ivy said, coming around from the back with a clean set of beakers, which she set carefully on the table where Gareth had been sitting.
Damian sighed and pulled himself back up onto the table, apparently giving up on his nest for now. “No need,” he said glumly. “I’ll be here until I die. Useless. Don’t step on my pillows, Ivy.”
“You won’t be useless if we can get you to communicate with the Currents,” Alex said.
Damian raised his hands, like he was pleading with the heavens. “Is that all I am to you? Not a man, not a friend, not a potential future brother-in-law, but a mere alien technology comm device?”
Alex looked him over, then stuck a needle in his arm. “Yes.”
Damian shot Gareth a pleading look, but he just shook his head. “You’re on your own.”
“Traitor.”
Gareth backed out of the lab, hurrying in case Alex or Chief Escher decided to change their minds about letting him leave. “You can’t scare me with that one, pirate. I’ve heard it too many times before.”
CHAPTER 11
From the pod-side viewports, Sloane could easily make out the stream of bots as they flew out of the now-open cargo bay, their orange lights flaring like a road of sparks in the black. Apparently, the small ones could fly as well as GRO could.
Unbidden, her mind conjured an image of GRO teaching them a lesson, like a mother bird instructing her babies.
“Do they have engines in the back or something?” she asked.
Brighton shrugged his big shoulders. “Didn’t do much investigating. But they must.”
“GRO seems to have taken on a leadership role,” she said. Which brought up more than a few questions about bot social hierarchies. Who did you bring in to study something like that? Anthropologists? Psychologists? The bots weren’t people, but they could be quite person-like.
Sloane suspected someone would need to start figuring it out sooner than later.
For now, the bots were carving a definite path, all of them streaming in the same direction and leading the way through the black, and Sloane sent a message to Hilda instructing her to follow.
In the distance, Ilya’s light was little more than a thumbnail, the planets too distant to make out. When Moneymaker drew nearer, they would be able to see the shields the CTF had locked around the surfaces. Sloane swallowed hard against the inevitable flood of images that crowded into her mind at the thought of seeing Elter contained. What was her family doing down there, and were they even still alive? Would she crack those shells—she would crack them—to find they’d perished at once? Or languished for days before succumbing to extreme heat or cold?
She might find that Vin had been right all along, and that she ought to have hurried here without delay. She might find that she’d failed them one last time.
Gareth joined them at the viewport, looking no worse for wear after his latest round of testing in Alex’s lab. A bit pale, maybe, and she thought he was moving with extra care—perhaps to hide a fresh round of dizziness—but now that they’d exited the Current, she hoped his pain would subside.
“How do they sniff someone out in space?” Brighton asked, gazing after the bot swarm as Hilda eased the ship after them at a distance. While Sloane was imagining the fate of Ilya’s planets, the mechanic was still clearly focused on how the bots did their hunting.
“It’s not sniffing so much as it is measuring atmospheric input,” BRO said wistfully. Sloane wondered if it wished it could be with the other bots, zooming ahead through space.
“I don’t know what that means,” Sloane said absently. There wasn’t atmospheric input to measure in the vacuum, was there? Or maybe BRO was using ‘atmospheric’ as a more general term.
Brighton crossed his arms over his chest. “Me neither. I’d like to, though.”
BRO gasped. Or at least, it made a gasping sound. “You want to dismantle us!”
Sloane wasn’t quite sure how BRO had gotten that. Though, Brighton did sound nearly as wistful as the AI. Perhaps he was dreaming of screwdrivers and drills.
Brighton huffed. “That is not what I said. And I do not.”
“You do! You clearly do. Those are my siblings. My family!”
“I’m not dismantling anyone,” Brighton said grumpily. “Calm down.”
“No one with good intentions ever told an upset being to calm down!” BRO wailed.
“It’s got a point,” Sloane said.
Gareth cleared his throat, perhaps preparing a change of subject. Good plan. “They look like they’re heading for Elter,” he said.
Because of course they were. Where else would Vin go? But Sloane couldn’t help wondering what the point was when Elter was locked in its shell. What could he possibly hope to do?
But Sloane found she was unable to leave the viewport, even when it took an hour for the planet to swell into sight, and still another before they were close enough to make out the surface. Such as it was, anyway. Instead of its signature mottle of blue, green, and brown, the planet glinted like a metallic eye winking in the dark as its cage reflected Ilya’s light
Gareth stayed with her, even after Brighton disappeared, no doubt to get some rest before the coming operation. Whatever that would entail. Sloane knew she ought to do the same, but her legs didn’t want to carry her away from the viewport. She just stood there, throat dry, watching as her imprisoned home planet drew ever closer. What kind of maniac locked entire planets away, entire populations, just to get his way? What kind of maniac would create the tech to make that possible in the first place?
“Are you all right?” Gareth asked finally, softly, as if he’d been mulling the question for a while and finally decided to voice it.
“Not really.” Her voice broke, and she startled; she hadn’t meant to admit that. She gripped her elbows, hugging herself, unable to look away from what felt like her own failure to protect her family.
“When my father retired,” Gareth said, “they threw a party on Fane to celebrate his career. It was a huge blowout, but you know, Fleet style.”
Sloane glanced away from the window, settling her gaze on him for a moment. He wasn’t much for stories, so this was probably a bid to distract her. Well, why not? She could use a distraction. “So it was boring,” she said.
“You can’t even imagine,” he replied.
She’d been to more than a few deadly boring functions in her day. She probably could.
“Dad wanted me to trade shifts so I could attend as part of the family,” Gareth went on. “But I’d just been named his successor, and I was hellbent on proving I deserved it.”
