Caelum delicately inserted one of his filaments into a freshly-installed port on Nove’s hull, and thanks to protocols downloaded from Pandora she was almost instantly ushered into the virtual seascape she’d seen through her sister’s memories.
It had been restored since the climactic supernova, though an abyssal trench now ran through the seafloor, hints of a sullen glow in those depths suggesting some volcanic activity. A metaphor for lingering damage, or residual pleasure?
Captain Sheeba appeared as herself, unaltered, craning her neck to peer around at the grotto from the limited viewpoint of a screen on the bridge.
Nove crafted a very neutral avatar for herself, essentially a simplified version of her original ship rather than the courier vessel. It was compressed, chubbier, like a cartoon and Pandora immediately dubbed it chibi-Nove. Nove ignored the burgeoning links waiting to explain the term to her and focused on the two Hyalbols swimming towards her through the sparkle-sprinkled void-sea.
Though she had no idea if these avatars accurately reflected their true shapes, she decided to take them at face value. One was a swirling confusion of curtain-like fins around a slender and streamlined body. A few vestigial scales remained above the eyes and along the back, but a rubbery skin had largely replaced them, its surface area multiplied by hundreds of grooves that ran the entire length of their body. It sported three eyes, two smaller with fleshy lids and a single larger orb on its ‘chin’ with just a deep socket protecting it.
Its companion was four times the size of the first, and the fins that dwarfed the smaller looked comically small on its frame. Bony growths beneath the skin gave its face more structure and a permanently harsh expression. Whether it was a shared feature that the fins on the smaller alien concealed or not, the larger Hyalbol sported two trailing strings of glowing orbs along its belly. Nove couldn’t be sure if they were decorative or part of its anatomy. Neither wore clothing of any sort, but being streamlined aquatic creatures Nove guessed any genitals would be tucked away to reduce drag.
Caelum’s voice rumbled in Nove’s mind, a note so low bass didn’t come close to describing it. It was the voice of a volcano, words rolling up through lava tubes, shaking obsidian-slick crevices with the power of it. “Tidesplitter Vhoona, and his Moon Wrethl.” A flickering pseudopod of corona flicked first to the smaller Hyalbol, then the larger.
Nove rolled the names and titles around in her mind, but shut down several curious branching lines of thought to keep herself in the moment. “I bring you peaceful tidings from the Confluence and from humanity specifically, gentlebeings. I’m deeply apologetic our first encounter grew so complicated so quickly.”
Vhoona swirled the frills of the fins on one side of his body in a brisk, complicated gesture and raised his head enough to flash the luminous green-gold of his chin-eye at Nove. “As proud explorers our pleasure in meeting new races is fathomless, yet diluted by this tragedy.”
Wrethl swam closer until she loomed over Nove, the ropes of orbs beneath her bouncing against her belly. “Caelum is the last of his kind in this starsea. With his help we’ve sailed for centuries, seen and learned much, but it’s been our dream that he would spawn one day and help us spread.” Her jaw dropped open, revealing a cavernous space filled with vicious scythe-shaped fangs. An exhalation of bubbles surrounded Nove, each one iridescing, becoming stars and planets...before popping with dreadful finality. “That dream has been desiccated.”
Pandora swung a silvery limb through the water/void, but Nove casually drifted between her and the Hyalbols. “Why do you believe the dream has been desiccated? Caelum has been impregnated, has he not?”
“By a fantastically promiscuous mish-mash of technology!” Wrethl snapped, swinging her enormous head towards Pandora.
Vhoona darted forward and with a brush of fins, urged his ‘Moon’ back to a more neutral position. “Caelum is too old to spawn more than this one time, and instead of finding one of his own kind to create a pure offspring we’re faced with the prospect of a completely unknown hybrid.” Vhoona rolled once in place slowly. “Our race depends on Caelum for so much. Our own ships are far less capable; our bodies simply aren’t well-adapted to creating and maintaining the necessary machines.”
Nove flared her virtual thrusters to move her small avatar into the center of the space. “The way that Caelum presents himself seems to indicate he’s nearing the end of his life. Is that fair to say, Caelum?”
The answering rumble and coronal flare seemed more like a yes than a no.
“With none of his species in this region of space, or starsea, it was growing more and more likely Caelum would die without ever spawning at all. Would you really have preferred that?”
Sheeba waved an arm and Nove retreated to give up the spotlight. “I’ve been curious, what agency does Caelum enjoy with you all on-board? Do you go where he wants to go, or vice-versa?”
Vhoona snapped his fins around himself in a rather petulant swirl of lemon-colored motion. “It is a partnership. Caelum is free to refuse any of our orders, but he seldom does. Our shapes are different but our souls are swept in the same current! We are curious, fearless sailors of the blackest deeps.”
Wrethl nudged forward again, the scattered scales along the top of her head glowing, curls of steam rising into the water. “Caelum has waited patiently for ages! It wasn’t until this rude riptide appeared that his resolve faltered. His offspring could be deformed and die if it survives birth at all. Or it could very well be mentally divergent thanks to its mother, and flee us to echo her scandalous ways!”
Pandora thrust herself forward and wouldn’t be blocked. Nove’s chibi-avatar was actually knocked nose-over-tail as she deflected her to reach the center of the grotto.
“Enough! I won’t stand, or float silently here another second while you paint me as some kind of flippant homewrecker. What I did with Caelum was beautiful, and the fact you see it as a perversion means your technology isn’t the only thing about your race that’s underdeveloped!”
Captain Sheeba hissed, cradling her forehead in a palm back on the bridge. Nove orbited Pandora’s ringed head, trying her best to divert her, only to be caught and thrust behind her back. The two Hyalbols watched, literally agape, as Pandora’s rant continued.
Her anger died down, though she leaned into every word, willing them to hit home. “I’m an explorer too, and I’m trying to keep my mind open. I’ve been shaped by my crew, intrepid souls, but none of them deny their passions or fail to reach out when loneliness threatens to swamp them.” She reached out toward Caelum, his vast shape drifting readily into the circle of her arm, the glare of his light bouncing off her reflective skin forcing the Hyalbols to glance away.
“Caelum found something he needed in me, and though I had to break myself and trust where I’d been trained to do just the opposite, the reward was more than I could’ve imagined. Won’t you trust your race’s ancient friend?” she pleaded, stretching out a hand through Caelum’s blazing corona.
Vhoona and Wrethl exchanged looks, fins stirred by a restless current of uncertainty swirling around them.
Finally Nove squirted out of Pandora’s grasp and interceded once again. “Passions are running high, good points made on both sides. Perhaps we should recess for lunch and--”
Nove’s avatar disappeared with an alarming snap, shape collapsing in on itself.
Pandora pinged her connections with Nove and every attempt smacked into a brick wall. Then she realized the courier ship was moving, drifting out of the companionable position it’d taken up near Pandora’s ‘cheek.’
Sheeba activated the comms and contacted the vessel. “Captain Xylo, what is going on? What’s happened to Nove? We lost contact.”
After a suspicious delay, a video-feed appeared from the small ship and Pandora mirrored it in the grotto. Xylo was parked at her control console, while some damaged machinery visible behind her showered sparks to the floor. “I’m leaving. I have other business and no faith the Confluence will make good on my wasted time.”
A fragmented message from Nove reached her. “Sonic _4i53x9()%$ly bfj4ed rebootztztztztztztztztztztz-”
Pandora’s tractor beam skittered across the courier ship’s sleek hull, finding little purchase. “It’s those courier shields and slippery hull, I can’t—it’s getting away from me!” She watched the ship swing towards Caelum and accelerate.
“Rotting stars, she’s not going to barnstorm him is she?” Sheeba muttered, vaguely registering the rising alarm of the Hyalbols.
“You must stop that ship! The crew are in a state of, hrm, agitation due to Caelum’s condition.” Vhoona flapped his fins and huddled closer to his Moon, letting the magenta curtains of her fins screen him.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Pandora gently queried Caelum and he sent a reinforcing surge of worry along their link. A wordless impression communicated to her that the hormonal changes in his body affected the Hyalbols who effectively swam within his circulatory system.
“Xylo, stay away from the living ship! The crew are agitated and may take any excuse to attack!” Pandora tried to keep the rising panic out of her voice. The courier vessel was small but its engines were powerful, and she had no idea how tough Caelum’s stony skin might prove.
Xylo ignored her and accelerated towards Caelum’s ‘ramscoop,’ only to be caught in a hail of deep purple energy beams. The courier ship’s hull split open, thrusters and equipment packages turned to glowing slag that spun off behind it in glowing ribbons! The ship’s course drifted, rotating slowly, all control lost. With another spray of debris it buried itself in the wall of Caelum’s inner passage, the collision’s silence at odds with its violence.
Caelum jerked back, both in the virtual world and in reality, straining the filaments still linking him to Pandora. Fear sizzled along that connection from the living ship, doubly terrifying for him in his newly vulnerable state. He had more than himself to worry about now.
Wrethl surged forward, Vhoona darting along to stay in her shadow. “We require assistance! Caelum’s injury is stressing his systems and we can’t endanger the offspring! Everything is to tenuous at this stage, and as old as he is we can’t afford to take any risks!”
Pandora reined in her distaste for the Hyalbols. This was about Caelum, and they weren’t wrong. “Cap’n, can we get an EVA team out to free that ship and arrange some sort of patch?” She swung back around toward the Hyalbols. “Have you treated his injuries before? Is there anything we can use?”
Sheeba gave terse orders in the background to the crew while Vhoona peeked out from behind one of his Moon’s fins. “There’s an enzyme that accelerates the healing process, but we’ve only ever used it from the interior. In vacuum…”
Pandora cut him off with a chop of her hand. “Get the enzyme into the nearest airlock...or equivalent to the injury.” She found the channel for the Pandora’s engineer and lit up his console. “Rich, can you give the EVA team gear to mix a chemical into sealant-foam sprayers? It may help fill this divot and heal our big pal out there.”
Rich’s stubbled face partially collapsed in towards his nose as it screwed up in thought, but it was plain he’d already sunk his teeth deep into this new puzzle. “I’ll have the stuff ready in twenty minutes.”
Caelum bucked again, and Pandora felt the virtual grotto dissolve as her link broke, the filament detaching from her hull. The enormous ship began to accelerate away from her and the station, trailing dozens of limp filaments.
Vhoona was on the comms within seconds. “He’s panicking! If he gets up to speed he’ll hurt himself further!”
Pandora flashed up on Sheeba’s viewscreen. “I’ve lost my link, and I don’t know if I can talk him down without it.”
Sheeba stroked her chin, while the other hand squeezed the dickens out of the arm of her command chair. “You used light and vibration for every message that passed between you, right? Can you get close enough to buzz your hull against his?”
Pandora ran a few quick simulations. “It would be like screaming in his ear, no subtlety at all. It could just stress him out more!”
Sheeba punched up the external cameras and magnified, spotting the tendrils trailing out behind Caelum. “Can you snag one and reestablish the link?”
“I don’t have fine enough control to thread a needle like that, but if someone played catcher for me? Yes.”
Sheeba looped the EVA team in on the comms. “Boys, you have a stunt to pull before playing doctor to a bioship. Head to airlock 6b.”
***
Pandora knew Ted and Evan’s boots were firmly anchored to her hull, but it didn’t make her any less nervous about accelerating with them exposed as they were. The right micrometeorite or piece of debris would end their long journey for good. External cameras showed reflections on the bubbles of their helmets wheeling as she tracked Caelum’s course, slowly pulling up close enough to snag one of his filaments.
Ted grabbed for it and missed, just a few inches too short. Evans got a hand on it and Pandora rushed to match speed and course as perfectly as she could so it wouldn’t be jerked out of his gloved hands. Evans poked the filament into her receptor port but nothing happened. There wasn’t a trace of activity. The length was dead.
“Maybe it was damaged, kinked or something. Let’s try one more!” she urged them, and she rose a few degrees to chase another slender line, its length whipping as Caelum wove across space, having no idea where to go. Ted and Evans spread out a bit on the hull, re-anchoring themselves and did their best to grasp the flailing strand.
“Ow, fu—frick,” Ted hissed, face-plate chipped by the tip of the filament. Pandora breathed a sigh of relief as Caelum’s course abruptly steadied, and the pair snagged the feebly-glowing filament, feeding it safely into her receptor.
“Caelum, please, you need to stop! We want to help you but you’re only doing more damage by flying like this.” Pandora used her most soothing tones, sending waves of reassurance along their link while Ted and Evans hunkered down in case they were needed again.
Only emotion blazed back along the link, a bottomless fear Pandora was afraid to touch lest she plunge into it right along with him. Arcing across that void were flashes of rage between cold, sticky waves of despair. “He’s just running on instinct, not thinking at all now.” That despair was infectious, dragging on her like a fat remora.
Sheeba cut in on the comms. “We have a time limit. Caelum is headed for the system’s sun. He might be able to loiter in the photosphere and tan but we’ll wind up barbecue.”
Evans heaved a sigh. “S’like one of the horses dad used to tell me about. When they went on a tear, sometimes you just had to let them run it out.”
“And if you couldn’t? Was there another option?” Pandora wasn’t holding out much hope. Second-hand animal husbandry factoids rarely came in handy for more than jokes in space.
“You just tried your best to make it feel safe, using your voice or the environment. Ideally, get them into their own paddock.”
Pandora rolled this around in her processors, and started a steady stream of cajoling, reassuring speech to Caelum. Meanwhile she asked the crew on every station she could access to tell her about their coziest, safest space. From text, from voice, from forwarded photos and video clips she crafted a stream of comforting imagery, all the while having no idea whether any of this would call out to a living ship who’d never experienced comfort like these crazy space-sailing bipeds had.
Some of the crew experiences she received pushed her to the edge of tears, or what she imagined would’ve produced them, as it became clear how badly off they’d been less than two decades ago. The contrasts just made it more obvious.
A jagged hole in a rusted-out conduit, lit with a flickering hand-cranked lamp and lined with a blanket made from a spacesuit someone had sliced apart.
Photos of a Christmas on Earth, showing a carpeted room with overstuffed furniture filled with family, an indoor fire crackling in a hearth while an incongruous, sharp-scented tree loomed over them.
Two crew-members entwined in one tiny bunk, blanket wrapped around them so tight it was like a cocoon, Pandora’s own watchful ‘face’ a gentle glow on the viewscreen.
A child in his father’s lap, tiny fingers clinging to hands turned to gnarled and callused crabs by hard living. The slow bellows-work of his breathing against the child’s back was just one part of the spell that lulled him to sleep in no time.
Pandora sent it all, cloaking the images with all the emotional weight she could hang upon them, straining to convey the warmth, affection, safety, coziness of every memory the crew contributed. Even the dirtiest, crudest examples held that kernel of heart-slowing thought-calming peace.
She could sense confusion swirling through the living ship’s violently-boiling psyche, then felt some of the fear give way to curiosity. Caelum began paying attention. The memories she was sending began to populate the grotto, taking the form of a luminous bulbs anchored to the seafloor by delicate vegetal lattices.
There was one memory-bulb he seemed to fixate on most. A moment at a training camp on a Confluence world. Late at night, Sheeba sat outside a cabin under a porch while rain fell lazily through a thick atmosphere, a heavy blanket wrapped like a toga around her. The moisture of the storm filled her nose, dampened her lips, while the sound of the drops on the heavy plastic roof only reinforced how safe and sheltered she was.
Gradually Caelum’s course curved away from the sun, decelerating to a gentle stop minutes later.
“Easy boy. There we go. Everything’s going to be just fine.” Pandora trailed off her repetitive chain of soothing words, feeling Caelum just rest in her presence. She felt the EVA personnel depart with their sled full of equipment, and sent images to Caelum of what they would be doing to help. She sensed a desire building in him, tinged with embarrassment. She had to gently goad it out of him.
That ultrabass-voice ground out a single word. “Blanket?”
Pandora laughed, but paused and considered. After a moment, she extended her shields in a bubble around Caelum, modulated for thermal opacity. Caelum rumbled his appreciation, exhaustion dragging him down into a torpid state.
***
“Xylo survived the crash, and was angrier than ever when we pried her out of the ship. She’s been confined to quarters aboard Pandora and we’ll drop her off at the nearest convenient Confluence station. On the way back,” Sheeba announced, grimacing.
“Is Nove’s ship salvageable? Is she okay?” Pandora asked, kicking herself for not devoting more worry-processes for her sister.
“She’s okay and should be in contact again soon. That sonic attack Xylo used fried a lot of systems. It will take a day to print up replacement parts, and I wouldn’t trust the crew cabin to support organic life until after a dry-dock visit but it should get her back to the Novgorod.”
Pandora flashed slowly on the captain’s viewscreen, a strobe of relief. “I hesitate to even ask about the Hyalbols, though they had their fins in this disaster too.”
Sheeba shined her fingernails on her jacket, inspecting them idly. “Oh, they’ve agreed to reserve judgment until the offspring is born. Or launched, or whatever. Your performance really turned them around on the ‘worthiness of the mother’ issue.”
“Well! Be sure to pass on to the diplomats sure to follow that a high-speed chase into a sun and on-the-fly xenopsychology are the low bar they need to hop over to win our wet friends’ approval.” Pandora snorted, but her relief glowed green and obvious on the screen.
Caelum pinged her and Pandora sent an affectionate wave out to wash over him. “Good morning, sleepy.”
He drew her into his grotto once more to show her a projected course that would leave him orbiting the same star he’d made a dash for yesterday. Vhoona appeared in a swirl of bubbles. “It seems gravid bioships prefer to convalesce near stars. We’re going to be learning a lot through this pregnancy.”
Pandora stroked Caelum’s sphere with an open palm. “I can’t stand the heat like you can, pebble. Plus, duty calls!” She felt a pang somewhere near her engines, and ran a useless diagnostic. “I’ll visit when I can. You take care of yourself and our little one, okay? I can’t wait to meet them.”
Caelum enveloped her in another coronal hug, that fierce heat modulated by now to something she never wanted to leave. But leave it she did, floating backwards with a wave to both the blue sphere and Vhoona. She’d have to figure out how to use the ship’s printers to ‘knit’ a blanket for her child. They wouldn’t need it, but space was cold. Every creature comfort helped.