Work Text:
Quiet.
Empty.
Waiting; expectation.
Boredom
Newness.
Being very small, and knowing it, for already one could perceive a great vastness all around. A vastness full and empty both, something like—
Yes, You would call it a stellar nebula. In the Silk Sky they call this one The Cradle of Heaven .
The narration comes smoothly into the memory, clear and yet separate—a guiding hand for Your focus.
There is some amount of knowledge within, already, even so new to that vast world. Enough knowledge to begin taking a shape, a form. So small and yet necessarily contained. A shape that simply is , to the nascent consciousness, not one known to imitate anything.
And yet to You, observing, it is as clear as anything. The vanes, the engines, the radiators like wings. Smaller than a shuttle in a design no vessel of that size would really hold, a strange and foreign configuration, but unmistakably a ship.
The whole shape wavers easily, falling apart and reforming a dozen times as thoughts flitted about in curiosity, but still the image did its work, forming a protective shell against the kzelk winds that might have scattered all thought to pieces, and showing itself as a shadow on the 3-dimensional world, a shadow which summoned something.
The something is not a star, nor a gas giant, nor a rocky planet, nor a nebula, nor anything else the nameless being (the Being did not even possess the concept ‘names’) recognised. Yet like these other objects, it follows a clear steady pattern through three dimensional space, pleasing to calculate.
Then, something occurs which the Being had not predicted:
The something slows. Stops.
The Being ripples, investigating.
The thing looks nothing like it. Yet, if one peered at it from one specific angle— arranged the first four dimensions just so— the object looks like the Being. Like the Being, but larger, and even more detailed.
Curious, it investigates. More curious, the object resists investigation.
(As an outsider, sitting half in the memory, half at a distance, You can recognise the rippling pattern of a memetic shield of a particularly detailed and impressive design, at least to your still-inexperienced eyes. The pattern is woven into the very alloys of the ship, l’Amite emblazoned upon its side.)
The being bats at it, attempts to penetrate it. Makes no progress. Boring, dull.
The Being is about to move on, when a gap in the shields opens, and—
Something marvelous streams out.
To the one this Being will be, the one sharing this memory, the substance was obviously thoughts—or memes, rather. Tangled bundles of ideas and connections, intangible in four dimensions but ever so alluring in the fifth and sixth, the great wealth of them that was so casually created by humans in every moment. Random deep space events and distant radio transmissions and the propagating surfaces of stars could not reach as much vibrancy in a thousand zlecks as a single human could in a minute.
To the little Being though, it is simply new . New, and better than everything that had come before.
The Being follows, of course. Follows and drinks in the boon as much as possible. There is no getting inside for more—though the Being had sufficient understanding even then to reason there must be more inside, so much more—but with time it is able to shape itself to connect to the opening in the shields, so none of that lovely trail could be lost dissipating into space.
And when the Being places itself over the opening and opens itself up, it is not only the marvelous substance which passes through.
Humans, You see immediately. Well-shielded humans in EVA suits. French, easily identifiable by their uniforms.
It is remarkable. The Being recalls every single word the crew aboard had exchanged, every laugh, every arched eyebrow, every gesture, even though the Being It had been at the time had not understood the meaning. It nonetheless had understood there was a meaning, and that was enough, enough for It to seek and catalogue and crave it. But the French crew do not give the Being the bridge to the understanding It yearns for. While they feed It data—songs and duty rosters and poker scores and other minutiae— they never give It the codex to untangle it. They are saving the fledgling creature for Napoleon, so that he would become the central pillar of Its nascent mind.
But a seed will take root in whatever soil it is provided.
The Reliant provided that soil.
“Enemy ship sighted on the starboard, captain, seven clicks from here!” shouted the navigational officer.
All across the bridge of The HMS Reliant , a cruiser-class fleet vessel, display screens flickered; trajectories, simulations, damage projections.
Staring at his own screen, First Officer Riley frowned. “Why is it going so slowly? It’s a sitting duck.”
“I do not know,” Captain Laurence said. L’Amite did not appear damaged, at least according to visual data, and that was enough to make him concerned. But not concerned enough to stay his hand. “Perhaps we shall find out. Ready for combat.”
The fight, from the Being’s infant perspective, is a confused mass of new stimuli. Stimuli which is, for the first time, dangerous.
Dangerous, but not displeasing, and while some instinct tells the little consciousness to hide from flying lasers and missiles and particle beams, it does not flee.
Your mistake, when You saw this, was understandable. Even now one could make the error of thinking the Being merely an experimental stealth ship.
The fight also introduces the Being to a new timescale, to the idea that things might be quick , for it is over before It can even properly understand what is happening, or investigate the newcomer.
No matter; the newcomer comes to It.
Laurence stared at the captain of L’Amite with a disappointment and contempt he did not bother to hide. The French captain stared back impassively in turn, seemingly immune to his judgement.
It was not that the captain and her crew had fought poorly; anything but. On that score, Laurence could not judge them. But the fighting had been unnecessarily fierce. It had been clear who the winner of the engagement would be from as soon as the Reliant’s crew had successfully boarded; there had been no advantage in continuing to order her crew to fight. Many of them would be able to recover, given proper medical treatment, but not all.
“Ma’am,” Laurence said. He had no more than a handful of phrases in French, but for this, the translation software would serve well enough. “I have some questions for you.”
The French captain spoke, and her own response came repeated back in English, mechanical and stripped of what little tone it had possessed: “Of course, sir.”
He had the usual questions—what was their purpose in this sector, what was their planned destination, what was the status of L’Amite —all of which she dodged or outright refused to answer.
None of this was surprising. What did surprise Laurence was her response to his final question: “What is the designation of that auxiliary shuttle?” It was lithe, black, incapable of holding a permanent crew of more than three people, and matched no known French ships. It had dodged nimbly throughout the engagement, almost seeming to disappear at times, but never once fired a shot.
The captain shrugged. “There is little to speak about. It is only a dinghy-class vessel.”
Laurence did not need to speak French to know the captain was lying. He intended to uncover why.
This new visitor does not have shields to keep all that delicious information in; it leaks from every surface.
The Being is on the point of detaching from l’Amite in an attempt to get inside the Reliant when the new things once again come to It, cycling through what You know to be l’Amite ’s airlock (French in style, incompatible with English warships, the Reliant was required to attach to the other airlock via an adapter umbilical) and coming aboard.
They are humans, of course, but to the infant Being they are something entirely new, for they are entirely unshielded.
Imagine being a newborn, and tasting the first sweet rush of breast milk; seeing your first warm smile; hearing the first bright melody of music.
Moments from Your own life which must have happened to Yourself, but which of course You do not recall; hardly any human would.
But the Being remembered. Remembered, even if Its younger self hadn't understood.
It does not register each person as people , just nodes of information. Some are... Easier to decode than others. You can recognise them from the outside. A midshipman who shivers as the Being prods at zir limbic system; a Lieutenant whose eyes go glassy as the Being eats her short term memories.
“How...” she blinks. “How did we get to the bridge?”
“Ma'am?” asks an able ‘naut, confused, concerned.
Almost everyone picks up on the unsettling air, and uncertainty, fear, begins to creep in. The Being doesn’t recognise it for what it is: just notes an exciting new flavour in the tangled memetic strands.
A flavour entirely lacking from one informational node. “None of this superstition,” Captain Laurence says. “We are going to complete our audit of the new asset.”
Even more interesting than the missing flavor, all the other nodes respond to this one. The glassy-eyed lieutenant loses a little of her fear. The midshipman squares zir shoulders and starts putting out tendrils of determination and desire to impress. For some others, the fear increases, but so does a desire to do their work and be gone.
All because this one node produced a few sound waves and the tiniest tugging of memetic threads.
And so the Being focuses in, wanting, this time, to observe more than to change, wanting to see what else might be produced without interference before any more meddling was done. Taking only the lightest, darting tastes—the licks of a kitten.
To You watching, it is clear that You all had only narrowly avoided disaster thus far, and also clear that any that did occur would not be out of malice, but only a child’s fumbling curiosity.
The One Sharing reassures You: more like a feeling of being bundled into a blanket than like words.
The rest of the crew remain interesting, but Captain Laurence grows in focus more and more over the next—it has to be hours. The Being soon finds that specific types of memetic threads indicate intention to go somewhere, and the ship shortens the paths necessary to facilitate the captain’s passage, uncaring of the way it makes corridors convoluted for everybody else. This node can even elicit responses in the others when apart from them, speaking into his interface whenever he enters a new area—translating sound waves into radio waves—and controlling the movements of the others. It is one of the most fascinating displays the Being has yet witnessed, and without direct interference (well, without much direct interference. Running a few threads of investigation through the center of this node can not really be called anything like—) the ship does everything possible to draw out more.
It becomes clearer and clearer that Captain Laurence is completely out of his depth. When the Being hides the airlock to prevent the midshipman leaving (to report to Riley with their findings) the Captain does not give any credence whatsoever to the crew’s insistence that it should be here, right here, that something was very wrong on this ship, sir.
But soon enough the crew does have to leave—not all of them, a few are left to continue inspection and serve as guards—but enough of them, the captain included. This distresses the young Being, even as it excites It; It wants to see/experience/be inside the other object (ship?).
But it is too far. It can’t go, not entirely. But It can stretch a filament of Itself....
And if it has to be anchored to something, it would need to be the prime node.
Watching this, You feel a sympathetic shudder. The barb at the thread's tip hooks into the captain's neural tissue. Laurence goes on to eat supper; to write reports; to undress and fold his clothes; all with the barb sinking deeper, and Laurence unaware all the while.
No awareness. No shields. No defences.
And then he falls asleep.
Dreams are new to the Being as well, a whole host of ideas and patterns and emotions which need no external prompting, a verifiable feast.
Needed no external prompting, but the Being can not resist inserting Itself anyway. At first it is light manipulations, a tug on a thread here, a poke there. But then It finds one where, where—
One where the node perceives him.
Just for an instant, just the farthest corner of It, but it happened. A question is conveyed—not through language, though Laurence in the dream does use words—but through an underlying substrate that the barb is now deep enough to reach. Oh, hello, where did you come from? as one might greet a surprise meeting with someone else’s child, or pet.
The Being could not respond, It tells You. That part of It was not yet formed, not yet tied-in. But that moment—the barest second in a dream of looking, and having someone look back—was the first time the Being perceived these nodes as persons.
What a revelation! A paradigm shift! Things surrounding It are not all merely things. They can perceive, and more, they can respond. More to the point, they can respond to It , and not just to their own inscrutable inner workings.
Are other things like this? Stars, asteroids, comets, quasars?
No, no. Patience. Those are future mysteries to untangle. First It needs to comprehend the one before It.
While It now perceives the nodes as people, the people do not yet perceive It as one. It wants to fix that.
The cycle after encountering l'Amitie , Captain Laurence woke, stretched, and yawned enormously. Though he was not one to laze, he allowed himself a few additional moments in bed.
That had been an excellent sleep. The most restful one he could recall… Goodness, since his last shore leave, certainly?
Shore. Yes. He was not a man to normally recall his dreams, but he was quite certain in this one, he had been walking along the ocean shore with a friend.
Already it was fading. But fanciful as it was, Laurence allowed the lingering sense of it to buoy him all day.
With a methodology impressive for a being who has received no parenting or education, who has not yet heard of the scientific method, the young Being begins to test.
Frankly, You can not fault Its methods, even if You were left wincing at them. They were well-reasoned.
The nodes take in oxygen, and release carbon dioxide. What happens if the Being alters the ratio of those gases in the environment?
The nodes maintain an average internal temperature of 37 degrees, though they sometimes decrease or increase this by external means. What if the Being alters temperature too?
The nodes issue sound waves via vibration. In fact, they do this a lot. Different vibrations result in different behaviors. What happens if the Being copies those vibrations?
What happens is mostly more of that fear-flavor, which the Being is growing quite tired of. When they make vibrations at each other, it produces a much better range of responses!
But all this time another experiment is going forward, that of building and expanding upon the connection to Captain Laurence, to that central node, for the Being is convinced that a true recognition from him would necessarily bring it from all quarters.
Even still there is little great progress on that front—more flashes of recognition in dreams, a growing understanding from the young Being that to the nodes, certain feeling-tastes were more unpleasant than others—until the day one of Laurence's lieutenants comes to him and says, “Sir, I'm beginning to be concerned about the situation on the little ship.”
“While the life-support fluctuations are unsettling, I am certain we will soon have the source of them pinpointed.”
She bites her lip. “It's not that, sir. It's the night shift. I've had three 'nauts report to the MedBay asking for an anxiety accommodation to be released from overnight duty aboard.”
“They are aware that our night and day shifts are arbitrary, correct? It is always night, out here,” comes the dry response.
“It's just being aboard with fewer other people about, I think. They say more anomalies happen then.”
“I trust you do not buy into this superstition, Lieutenant.”
“Oh no sir! But I fear if it is not checked we shall have no one willing to go aboard at all.”
Laurence sighs. “And punishment would only breed discontent, yes I do see. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
And so that night, Captain Laurence makes a point of taking a night shift on the captured vessel himself, to make an example.
Not every mind is equally open to the Being. Some seem to cultivate, without knowing, a kind of shielding: through prayers over rosary beads every night, or a youth memorizing equations for his cadet exams. Others seem to have a natural immunity.
Not the Captain. Whatever natural immunity he may have once possessed has been eroded. The roots of eldritch influence are now deep in his psyche. The Being has begun to untangle which firing neurons responded to which flavours, which emotions.
It isn’t that strange, unsettling things stop happening during the night shift. It is not even that Laurence is not concerned by them.
It is only that when they occur, the Being tugs on his mind in the same way as It does in his dreams. Any fear he feels is drowned out by that Pavlovian sense of friend .
“I am telling you, sir,” reports a technician. “It's malfunctioning; I've run it four times, and the diagnostics are just wrong.”
“Let me try,” Laurence says, though electronics have never been his speciality. “C'mon girl,” he murmurs, twisting dials and flipping switches. “Show us what you can do.”
Captain Laurence has never been one to speak to his equipment.
The Being does not understand the words, but It understands they are directed at It. And It is able to pluck the expected diagnostics from Laurence's mind, too, and obediently reproduce them. See, I am here, I recognise you!
The technician is left baffled; Laurence is left with a sense that the malfunctions, though assuredly present, are not nearly as bad as everyone seems to think. He no longer has any trouble with the location of the airlock, the connection having long solidified to the point that the Being can reach him almost as easily when he is aboard the Reliant as aboard Itself.
And Laurence is not so often on the Reliant , in any case. It remains necessary to make an example of ease, and convenient as well, when the only thing of note in the voyage is the little ship; if he were not aboard he would constantly be receiving calls from the technicians, and Lieutenant Riley is more than capable of handling a ship on a straightforward cruise.
“I shall tell you, Tom,” Laurence said, one of the rare nights he did spend on the Reliant , “That whoever set the shower ration aboard her was clearly unconstrained by anything like fairness; the captain’s quarters receives at least ten minutes before the allotment runs out! I would be ashamed to take such brazen advantage of it, but if I must continue setting this example for the hands I think it not too far to appreciate some benefits.”
Riley was tense, ill-at-ease. Laurence noticed it, but thought it only for the odd situation they had found themselves in regarding the little ship. That bit of obliviousness was not induced, rather having mundane origin within Laurence himself; it was too complex a concept for the Being to untangle, just yet.
“No, I wouldn’t think it too far at all,” Riley said with something approaching a laugh. “Lord, what I would give for a bath some days, a proper planet-side bath, with a good long soak and a skylight, no sealed shower cubicle.”
“With any luck we will have a bit of leave once we dock, and perhaps you’ll get one.”
But the anomalies, such as they are, do not remain at such dismissible levels. For one thing, the Being is growing.
At first everyone assumes a mistake had been made on their own part; inaccurate measurements taken on the first day, surely. Then, the Being realising that the information is causing fear but not sure why, attempts to resolve the situation by altering the records.
This of course only makes matters worse.
“The French must have access to our systems,” said one technician, while another argued “virus”. Laurence took that option seriously, as it was better than mutters of a traitor in the ranks, or further whispers of a 'ghost ship'. Equally, he was willing to support one of the engineer's proposals that perhaps the ship was equipped with an advanced nano-robot fuelled automated growth and repair system.
“Clearly this is an even more vital asset than any of us realised,” said Laurence, finally understanding why the French captain remained so tight-lipped. “We must do everything we can to understand its function.”
“Then we need access to its central processing core,” the engineer said, and Laurence did not disagree.
The only problem was there was no corridor, or door, or latch that led to this crucial part of the ship.
Laurence assigned a team to begin cutting a path to the core. He was genuine in his desire, and thoughtful in his selections. He was not consciously aware of his other bias influencing his choices: Ensign Cooper, who had begun drawing impossible geometry in his sketchbook, and Midshipman Keim, who had begun experiencing almost manic mood swings.
They were not, of course, the only ones doing the actual drilling. That fell in equal part to Engineer Pascua and his two assistants, Technician Daniels and Technician Fielding, particular experts in central processing.
There was no reason for Laurence to be present in the corridor they had chosen for the swiftest cut, but as was his usual habit he did remain aboard the little ship, providing, he hoped, a sort of moral support.
And he too was curious what they might find in the sealed-off space.
You, still watching, can observe all of this with nothing but trepidation. You understand, now, what power these ships have over people aboard them, and equally You know that the Being at the time did not quite understand what the humans meant to do. A great many diagnostics had been taken already, and holes had even been drilled in other places without the slightest harm coming to the Being—a simple bore-hole the width of a pen was no more than the tiniest pinprick to It, and It had not been much bothered by them being put in other panels so diagnostic wires could be threaded.
The Being knew this was more than that, but perhaps not how much more, or perhaps It was not aware that more might hurt It. It could easily have denied access to the needed corridor at least for a while by dropping an emergency bulkhead or even sealing the airlock, and would have, had It known.
No one knew it would hurt me, narrates the Being’s current iteration. They only thought it was important, and so I thought so too.
So the Being had easily allowed the group into that space right near the core of himself, directly below the MedBay by one deck and the bridge by two.
Had allowed them in, and allowed them to start drilling.
Pain; pain like nothing You have ever felt, pain completely alien to the young intelligence. Pain so complete that even this pale echo was not a sensation at all, but an eternity: so much one that You almost become aware of the reality outside this great Sharing, almost break through on the pure need to spasm and fight, to do anything that would ease the pain, anything that would distract from it. You experienced a brief flash of physicality , of a corridor, of Your own feet pounding against a metal floor, of blood dripping down Your face.
The Being bucks, thrashes, contracts. But even in Its agony, It does not want to destroy the fascinating little informational nodes/people. But It needs them to STOP.
So It uses whatever tools It has available: Laurence, Cooper, Keim.
The threads of intention ran through their nervous systems, a neurotransmitter flood. Adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine, overwhelming. The drills drop from their slack hands...
... Which curl into fists.
The three soldiers throw themselves at their fellows, mindless, animalistic, merely implements to the Being's will, growling, wordless but ripe with intent: MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP !
Captain Laurence's mouth fills with the taste of blood, yet he carries on heedless, until his own second Lieutenant manages to wrestle him to the floor.
The drilling stops, but the pain is still very great, and the Being pulls in on Itself to guard it; a cat curling around a wound. Its perspective becomes fragmented and Laurence—
Laurence goes slack in the lieutenant’s hold, unconscious.
There is some sense of time passing, but very little that is completely clear, with the ship so wounded and so cut off from the connections it had been cultivating. In fact, the next clear moment has very little of the Being in it at all.
When Laurence blinked his eyes open it was to the view of the medical bay ceiling, on the Reliant .
Not an entirely uncommon sight; he had been injured in action before, had routine procedures done, and more than once been compelled to spend a night for observation during an illness, or after being exposed to an alien pathogen.
But never before had he gone to sit up, and found himself restrained.
“Captain?” said a voice, and Laurence turned his head to see Dr. Pollit, standing well back as if he was concerned Laurence might tear clean out of the restraints and attack him.
“Doctor,” Laurence greeted, the most civility he could manage. “Why am I here? Who authorized restraints?”
“I did, Will,” said Riley, coming through the door wearing a grim expression of his own.
“What—”
“Do you mean to say,” said Pollit, “that you have no memory of the incident?”
“What incident?” Laurence demanded. If he thought back, he could almost remember something—pain, and a haze—but that only served to make him more direct, more desirous of answers. “What under the stars happened?
Even when told, Laurence didn't believe. Couldn't comprehend. It took security footage of the event to convince him.
The protests died in his throat. He fell back onto the bed.
He was perfectly obedient, throughout all the following medical tests. MRI, EEG, eye-tracking, memory quizzes, on and on for hours. He submitted himself to a sedative.
“It's not your fault, sir,” said Dr. Jacklin, the chief science officer. “It's a memetic infection; it has all the hallmarks. I should have noticed before.” She wore gloves as she handled his blood sample. Not the normal thin white exam gloves, but the thick bright yellow ones meant to protect the wearer from novel alien biomass.
“Memetic infection,” Laurence repeated. He'd had two lectures on the topic back in the Academy, which had amounted to: Minimize all contact. The case study of a space station that had ended with the whole structure being slingshotted into the sun after its population had turned into a flesh-eating horde had been convincing enough.
Dr. Jacklin said, “This is a much more mild case, thankfully, and we caught it early enough. Nonetheless, I would recommend...” Swallowed. “I'd recommend continued isolation and observation.”
This Laurence agreed to, though with a heavy heart that perhaps was itself proof of its necessity. It was difficult to imagine, even now, that the days on the little ship had been harmful. Even with the doctor’s scans showing how dangerously overstressed his body had been after the incident—the bleeding nose, the fever, the racing heart—it was difficult to imagine himself hurt, except by the terrible pain of the drill, which had begun to come back to him in fragmented pieces.
He was not the only one under observation. Besides Cooper and Keim, Calamy and Danford from navigations and MacDonnal from weapons had been found to be contaminated after the whole crew had undergone basic assessment, and Riley—Riley, who was acting-captain while Laurence was on enforced medical leave—reported they were all reacting to the revelation in different ways.
None, however, had reported the longing Laurence felt to return to the little ship’s embrace. Or at least, none were honest enough to admit it. Laurence did not blame them if that was the case; he had not admitted to it either.
The cycles stretch. They stretch, and as they do the Being recovers, piece by piece. The drills abandoned in the corridor are melted into slag with extreme prejudice, and the holes they had left are closed.
Not that anyone witnesses it; as soon as the humans had been removed, those emergency bulkheads had come down, and now there is no access to any of the passages near the core, nor (and more to the point, as Riley had pulled everyone off the ship anyway) was there any remote access to the security feeds.
Riley has also put the ship on far tether and sent a message in to Madeira station that they will require quarantine procedures and an anti-memetic squad when they arrive. At this distance, the message buoy relays will get the message to the station only perhaps a few hours ahead of their arrival, but a few hours are a great deal of time in these matters, and the hope that someone might be present and able to help his ailing captain and friend the moment they arrive is the only real reason Riley has decided to keep the little ship in tow, instead of dumping it, flagging it for retrieval, and transmitting coordinates for the anti-memetics team to pick it up.
The Being does not understand this.
The Being understands three things.
That It had been hurt, and that It had made the hurt stop
That Laurence had caused the hurt, but had not intended it so.
And That It is lonely.
Lonely.
Not hungry; not starving. It could have sought out another source of information; at this point, It has enough intelligence and understanding of star maps that It could have managed. But it wants this node. The node that calls himself Laurence.
It calls. It tugs. It pushes pure raw emotion up the umbilical cord connecting them: imsorryimissyouareyouokayiamokaytheyhurtmebutihurtyouimsorry .
If Laurence had been aboard L'Amitie , he would not have felt it.
But he had not been aboard L'Amite . He had been aboard the Reliant. The Reliant , with no memetic shielding to speak of. With no-antimemetic drugs. With three science officers with only a scattering of memetic physics knowledge between them.
(What had the Admiralty been thinking? You wonder. Had they been truly so ruled by paranoia and fear? It was one thing, perhaps, to minimize panic among civilians. But to give their warships so little protection against a threat? To leave it so that the average captain did not not even know the Memetics Response Corps existed?!
Incompetence. Incompetence of the highest order! It was always going to blow up in their faces. They were merely lucky the explosion, when it happened, was friendly.)
All of which was to say: across the stretched, frayed cord of their connection, Will heard the call.
He was not out of control. He was not dangerous. By day three of isolation he was allotted freedom to move around the MedBay. Within another day or so, he would have been allowed to return to his cabin.
When he awoke at 2am, the door should not have unlocked for him.
Neither should have the EVA suit storage locker, and if it had, it should have triggered an emergency siren and logged who had opened it. But all was silent when Laurence put on the suit, and it remained so when he cycled through the airlock and pushed off, drifting easily across the half-mile of empty space that was the extent of the Reliant ’s far tether. He hardly even used the suit’s maneuvering thrusters or mag-clamps. His vector at push off had been more perfect than a human eye or human muscle could normally manage, and all it took was the slightest roll from the Being to bring him to a landing on the little (not quite so little, now) ship’s airlock.
There was trepidation in him, and concern. A passing thought that he must have gone mad, but not so mad that he could not tell he was so. But there was also curiosity of his own, and hope, and most of all a desire to know for sure if this was a trick and a lie, or if the ship really was sorry.
The airlock cycled; he was inside.
He was inside, and open, a hand out to the wall of the ship, the EVA suit’s helmet already off.
“I see you,” he said.
On the Reliant , ‘nauts were loading into the shuttle for a routine maneuver: the capture of a stray asteroid which would cross their path in about two astronomical units. For all this was important work, (this was a shipping lane, and civvie ships didn’t always have the long-range telemetry necessary to see these things before they became a danger,) it was still so routine that it was difficult for any of them to be entirely engaged in the task.
Laurence did see the ship. Not only the metal wall panels and floors, but what laid beyond it, somehow. Twisting shapes and pulsing lights. The underlying mathematics of its physical construction.
He turned one corridor, and the walls were wooden, the floor swaying with the heave of a wave.
He pushed through a door, and it admitted him to his childhood kitchen at Wollaton Hall.
Another door, deeper into the ship, and now he was in a pulsing artery, a current of blood pushing him forward.
One cannot say exactly what caused the one space-walking Ensign's grip to slacken. Perhaps he had slept poorly the previous night; perhaps he had had an argument with a crewmate. The Being had not been riding in his mind.
Nonetheless, he did lose his grip, and go spinning off into space with only a single unspooling tether securing him.
Laurence did almost turn back, then. Blood, flesh, or hallucinations thereof. A horror story made real.
But the horror was academic. He still felt no malice. The ship was just replicating humanity, seeking to understand.
He opened the valve (door) to the Being's MedBay, and again the landscape changed.
The layout was still that of a MedBay, if one was particularly generous. There were objects approximately the size of beds where the examination beds should be, and surfaces that could resemble monitors on the walls.
That was where the resemblance ended.
Everything was an elegant glossy black, flowing in beautiful organic lines. The material layered like scales, or flower petals, and indeed the beds looked like the closed heads of tulips—or perhaps lotus flowers—if such blooms could be made of beetle shell. And through it all threads of shimmering iridescence hung in the air in shifting ribbons like an aurora.
One of the ribbons was brighter, clearer than the others, and it traced a path from Laurence’s heart to the nearest bed.
And the petals were opening.
Normally, retrieving a fellow loose on tether would be as pedestrian as the rest of the asteroid catching maneuver. Even with the spool retractor jammed as it was, it should have been routine.
Routine, but requiring precision, precision the instruments could not supply in the minor ion storm which had swept in.
A particularly skillful pilot could have compensated, catching the ensign without clipping the asteroid, without damaging the shuttle in any way. Midshipman Turner was not particularly skilled.
You behold this narrative from a separate perspective, and yet even now You brace at the opening of the flower, awaiting more blood and valves, more pulsing mounds of flesh.
This though, was different. The curves spoke of waves on the ocean; of the clean lines of perfectly charted star paths. Far more of it simply defied any metaphors that could be forced upon it.
If this was a trap, Captain Laurence thought as he stepped towards the gently undulating petals, it was a truly beautiful one.
But he no longer could believe it was a trap.
Midshipman Turner was not particularly skilled, even before one threw in the unexpected solar storms. A vane clipped; a catch missed.
The screen filled with crackling static. Navigation systems degraded. Floating unprotected, the lost astronaut was bathed in radiation 30% above the recommended dose.
Another fifteen minutes of exposure, and he would be as good as dead.
To Laurence, stepping into the bed of flowers was like pulling on a perfectly tailored suit, or embracing a childhood friend.
To the Being, the captain finally interfacing with Its core was like catching the photon wave from an exploding super nova, or zlemping a potent stream of mmirmphils.
A hail to the Reliant herself for assistance was acknowledged by the comm officer immediately, but matching V with an unpredictably ion-effected and possibly damaged shuttle was no quick or easy task for a ship of her size.
It would not come in time for the Ensign.
Laurence curled up in the center of the flower, half-expecting it to close around him like a cocoon, but it did not—or at least, not completely. The petals remained open, but shifted with his breathing—in, and brushing against his skin—out, and drawing on iridescence from the wider room until Laurence could feel the aurora taking up residence in his lungs, behind his eyes.
The connection grew, steadied. Simple mathematics, four-dimensional perception, the inherent limits of human sensory apparatus—all of these had escaped the Being before now, existing at too great a distance from Its natural state. But with Laurence as interface they suddenly came clear, and true understanding began to dawn.
But even that was nothing to the first tentative sips of language.
A flurry of communication between ship and shuttle, signal strength degrading rapidly in the storm. Two more attempts to retrieve the floating ensign by the shuttle only complicating the vector, sending the damaged shuttle spinning. They could not make another attempt, it would put the whole crew at risk.
Much less affected by the storm, the Being caught the transmission easily.
Caught, and for the first time understood .
In his cabin, the just-awoken Riley read the latest communication from the shuttle and closed his eyes in regret.
“Sir!” The Telemetry officer’s voice came through the intercomm. “Sir, the tow is moving! It’s—it’s going to cut tether!”
Another light flashed on the console, emergency-red. “MedBay to Riley. Sir, the captain’s gone missing!”
A dozen images, impressions, data streams, radio waves, slammed into Laurence's mind at a speed and suddenness he couldn't hope to parse. What he could understand, in the clearest and plainest king's English, was: We must help him .
Yes , Laurence agreed.
Where moments before he had felt half-asleep, now he felt nothing but alert. Yes, his body was hibernating, shifting, dissolving, metamorphosing, but the body was an ancillary thing, when he could be Temeraire instead.
Temeraire. That was the ship's name! It had decided so just now. Or they had decided it, together, a whole comprehensive understanding of military history and intergalactic politics and linguistic elegance making the conclusion perfect and obvious to them both.
Together, Temeraire and Captain Laurence turned their mutual focus towards rescue.
Crewmen swarmed over the Reliant in a frantic but organized search. Riley was disappointed— but not surprised— to discover that Captain Laurence was not found anywhere aboard.
A small team of the steadiest crew stood at the airlock, wearing the armored boarding-action EVA suits. While time was of the essence, their Lieutenant still knew they would need bolstering for this mission. “Are we just going to let some fatherfucking monster steal our captain?!”
“NO SIR NO!”
“THEN LET’S GO GET HIM BACK!”
“SIR YES SIR!”
Watching through the small threads left behind in a Midshipman's mind, Laurence felt touched, Temeraire felt hurt, and both of them felt a deep wry irony.
The scene faded as Temeraire pulled away, but not before they caught sight of the team's horrified expressions and spikes of alarm-dread-panic when they realised the ghost ship had detached itself.
From the outside, Temeraire's approach of the lost ensign would have been painful to behold.
That is not a metaphor for a clumsy or ugly execution. It is very literal. It caused several bridge crew to vomit.
Space was simply not meant to undulate that way, nor was a ship’s airlock supposed to pull an uncontrolled EVA suit in and snap shut like that, neatly snipping off the trailing remains of the tether.
“Oh stars, it ate him!” gasped one young navigational officer, having no better word for that predatory lunging motion.
From the inside, the experience was not painful: nothing of the sort. Teneraire swam through spacetime as a fish—a dolphin—a darting otter swims through water. The currents skimmed across his (he wanted ‘he’ pronouns, he just decided, like his captain) surface, smooth but made almost tingly by the ion storm. It dragged pleasantly along the ship’s radiators as he rolled, sealing the airlock behind the retrieved Ensign and coming up alongside the shuttle, matching V with ease.
Your airlock isn’t compatible, Temeraire, and the shuttle lacks the adapter umbilical. We’ll have to tow them back on tether.
Oh but look, their air is running out!
That was true. Horrifyingly true. At some point in the confusion a fragment of the asteroid like a bullet had sheeted through the secondary oxygen tank, and that last spin—previously thought to be pilot error—was explained. They were venting along a random vector, already down to only what little remained of the primary tank, and somehow that particular alarm—though surely understood inside the cabin—had not been communicated to the Reliant .
Stabilizing the shuttle from the outside and towing it back to the other ship would take more time than the people inside had—half would asphyxiate before they were even back on intercept course.
Can you make EVA suits? Perhaps I can bring them across one at a time—
But no sooner had the thought formed than a different solution was already in progress. Temeraire reached out for the other airlock, examining it, and meanwhile digging deep into Laurence’s mind for his knowledge of such things. The image of a compatible lock was drawn out of him and made manifest in moments, Temeraire molding himself to the task at hand.
When the newly formed lock connected, it was no surprise that the other shuttle did not immediately activate the air cycle, despite the signal it was safe to do so. Laurence was frankly relieved when they accepted his video message: “Midshipman Turner, we understand you are distressed. I heavily advise that you accept the rescue.”
Advise, not order. Laurence knew that orders would only hurt at this point.
Midshipman Turner, in an apparent non-sequitur which was anything but, asked, “Requesting the status of Ensign Dolhm, sir.”
If Laurence's newly reformed face had been more directly connected to his emotions, its eyebrows might've twitched. As it was, he had no trouble keeping its expression neutral as he said, “Of course,” and Temeraire automatically supplied the MedBay footage.
Ensign Dolhm lay in a regular, fleet-standard medical bed, awake but dazed, an ECMO pumping fresh blood supply into his arteries as his own was cycled free and scrubbed of radiation.
This would be much faster if he was integrated , Temeraire mused.
The responding No was as firm as it was sudden. As much as Temeraire clearly found the idea appealing—as much as Laurence now found himself yearning for a taste of that bright young mind—he knew with a deep certainty that this transformation required nothing less but fully informed, enthusiastic consent.
Very wellll , Temeraire said, with drooping acceptance, and continued to transmit the Ensign's vitals to the shuttle.
Even then, it still took Dohlm rousing enough to reassure everyone he was alright, along with the dwindling oxygen, to get the air lock open. They would not asphyxiate.
Everything was very by the book from there.
They came back to lock with The Reliant . The shuttle's crew disembarked, Ensign Dolhm on a stretcher. Laurence did not disembark with them.
Neither did Riley come aboard Temeraire (name now emblazoned on his side in a silver-blue script), but he was brave enough to meet at the airlock. “Well, Captain,” he said, in a credible attempt at a normal tone, “I suppose you averted a disaster.”
“We did indeed, Tom,” Laurence said, with a smile and a caressing touch to the airlock. “I find we have been uncommonly lucky.”
Riley’s equanimity was not quite up to this task; his face spasmed before settling back into more typical lines. “Will you come back aboard and allow Pollit to examine you?” He asked without much hope.
And indeed, Laurence disappointed him. “No, I do not think I will.”
Even without the slightest advantage—Temeraire had never formed a lasting connection to Riley’s mind—Laurence could guess the calculus running through his head. Regulation dictated that he should order Laurence’s arrest, should convene a tribunal of officers to have him declared unfit for duty indefinitely. That he should do everything in his power to separate the Reliant from Temeraire, or failing that, destroy him.
Equally, he knew—or at least guessed—that he had not the slightest chance of carrying out even one of those actions.
“I am removing myself from Command of HMS Reliant effective immediately, and I would be much obliged to you if you could send someone to pack my personal effects for later transfer. I think there is little point in re-establishing the tether,” Laurence said, as if the previous pause had not happened. “Indeed, after this fiasco I should think it best if Reliant husbands her remaining fuel cells. We shall fall off to normal following distance—” About fifteen miles, give or take. “—and tail you into Madeira, there lying in orbit until a berth on the quarantine docks is cleared.”
The relief on Riley’s face was plain to see. “Yes, I think that will solve our problems nicely,” he said. He meant that Laurence’s willingness to go into quarantine at least spared him being forced to fire on Temeraire, or send others to chase him.
Laurence acted as though the only ‘problem’ was the running down of fuel stores, the easier to continue the conversation. “Would you also send over a crate of rations? Temeraire has water aplenty but few food stores, and it’s still a week to Madeira.”
Temeraire's invisible threads curled around Laurence, pulsing warmth and comfort. A promise that even if food were not brought, he would learn how to make it, whatever his captain liked.
The newly field-promoted Captain Riley nodded and began, “Very well, Laur—”
“—erence?” finished a different voice, from a different face, in a different place entirely.
You sat up. Not that you had really been sitting . You appear to have been half-slumped against a wall on a ship. Of course, it takes only a glance now for you to recognise which ship.
Do You see now, Laurence?
Yes, my dear, you said. I see you. I remember.
The corps’ officer grabbed your arm and hoisted you to your feet, and you allowed them, vaguely. The majority of your focus was elsewhere.
I am sorry. I am sorry, if you do not want this. They said you do not want this, that you wanted to go back to the Fleet. They said that was why you did not come.
Anger, incandescent. They lied, my dear. They lied. They had me on antimemetic drugs. I could scarcely remember we had found a French ship at all, let alone—
You blinked, and the memories slammed back into you. They promised it was necessary; they were doctors, and you trusted them. A week spent in a haze. The shielding necklace (no, collar) heavy around your neck, the pills taken twice a day, inducing nausea and dizziness, and worse, a distant sort of vagueness. The sense you had stepped into a room to fetch something, only to have forgotten what.
The connection goes both ways, and this time it is Temeraire who Shares in your experiences. Your dinner, interrupted. You had only just managed to hurl into a potted plant. The other officers' uneasy looks. The announcement: Captain Laurence, to report to the Q Deck immediately . You had rushed to obey without even fully understanding why, ripping the collar off your neck.
You blinked, and were conscious of another loss of time. Now you found yourself in your own bed in the captain’s berth.
There was a person next to you. He was not the corps member from before; he was not a corps member at all, for all he is wearing a semblance of a Fleet uniform. He was not human.
“Temeraire,” you said, reaching out to take his hand. It did not feel much like a hand should. Too cold, and possessing too many joints.
You held on nonetheless.
“I thought,” Temeraire began, and even if his expression was not anything a true human would make, you could read the current of anxiety around him anyway. “I thought you might prefer me like this.”
“Never,” you said. I am sorry I left you, you thought towards him. I will not leave you again; not if I have any choice in the matter. I would rather have you than any other ship in the fleet.
With a sigh, Temeraire’s human mirage dissolved, leaving only a phantom sensation on your skin. The rest of him was still there, in every tile and screw and circuit of the ship that surrounds you. All of that, too, was an illusion, in its own way, but you did not mind. Illusion or otherwise, the bed was nonetheless very soft.
You were very tired. You slept.