Entanglement Bound: An Epic Space Opera Series (Entangled Universe Book 1) Page 9

  "Come on!" Irohann barked, tugging Clarity roughly into the airlock by her arm. She stumbled through the door and slumped against her friend. Jeko stood beside them, her long nose coiled tightly around the cylindrical cargo crate, hugging its metal bulk close to her. The octagonal door cycled shut behind them, and the squealing screech of The Serendipity's air trying to escape through the hole in the floor of the cargo hold was finally muffled enough for Clarity to think straight. Suddenly, she recognized the screech for what it was.

  The screech wasn't simply the sound of atmosphere trying to escape. It was The Serendipity's death scream.

  "No!" Clarity screamed, throwing herself against the airlock door. Her home was on the other side of that door!

  But Irohann lifted her right off her feet. She kicked and screamed, but Irohann carried her relentlessly, ruthlessly away from her home. Three steps away from her home—but that was far enough for the gravity to flip thirty degrees to the side as they crossed from one ship to the other. The Cassiopeia must have an artificial gravity generator as well.

  Irohann dropped Clarity on the floor of The Cassiopeia's airlock beside Jeko's cargo crate. The spacesuits and duffle she'd been carrying spilled on the floor around her. She landed on all fours, like a wild, bereft animal. The ground was squishy and giving under her hands and boots like muscular flesh, and the warm air smelled like copper and fish. Before Clarity could move, The Cassiopeia's airlock door slid shut like a nictitating membrane over an empty eye socket completely silencing The Serendipity's death scream.

  10 The Cassiopeia

  Clarity sobbed on the squishy floor of The Cassiopeia's airlock, curled in a tight ball until Irohann lifted her up and carried her into the ship proper. Through the blur of tears, Clarity saw The Cassiopeia's hallways—they looked like the inside of blood vessels; tubular, smooth, and slightly pulsing. Such a deep purple. The kind of dark purple reserved for nebulas and distant galaxies. Bioluminescent light sparkled pinkly from the veins in scattered patterns, adding to the illusion.

  Clarity wasn't sure if The Cassiopeia was beautiful or creepy. Mostly, all she could think was "Murderer," even though The Serendipity had never actually been alive and The Cassiopeia wasn't the one to stab a horn through its cargo hold.

  The Serendipity had seemed alive to Clarity. Alive with memories and plans and hope. The Serendipity had been the physical extension of Clarity's own life, like her own turtle shell, large enough to live inside, travel inside, and protect her from the rest of the universe.

  Now, Clarity had no turtle shell. She had no home. She was a pitiful, bipedal creature, fighting her way naked through a hostile universe.

  Maybe, maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe The Serendipity could still be salvaged.

  Clarity pushed her way out of Irohann's embrace and said, "I need a window." As soon as her boots hit the squishy floor, she took off running.

  Behind her, Irohann said, "I'm not sure there are windows on this ship..."

  Jeko said, "Let her go. She's mad with grief."

  That showed how little Jeko knew—right then, Clarity was mad with hope. She ran haphazardly down the blood vessel of a hallway and looked frantically into each ventricle-like room she passed. Some of them were outfitted with technology—one looked like a kitchen with a food synthesizer. There were also udder-like protrusions on the wall that Clarity didn't want to think about. The flesh itself in the room seemed to be shaped into tables and benches. Clarity shuddered to think of scientists breeding—or gene-modding—a starwhal to be structured this way on the inside.

  Along the curving wall of the strange scullery, a large screen was inset into the deep purple flesh, displaying a view of asteroids in the distance and the field of snowy sparkles in the clearing. Clarity stood transfixed. The scene was so peaceful; there was no sign of The Serendipity or the violence being wreaked upon its classically smooth, silver hull by a giant starwhal gone mad. That had to be happening on the other side of this ship.

  Clarity went up to the small control panel in the corner of the large screen and, after pressing a few buttons, gave up in frustration. If it was possible to switch the view shown by this screen, Clarity didn't know how.

  Clarity continued on through the vein-like hallway, running and swearing as the ground buckled beneath her, seemingly contracting in reaction to her pounding footsteps. At periodic, irregular intervals, she passed columns of a hard, straw-colored material like the starwhal's horn. Inside the fleshy belly of this beast, the horn-like material looked like bones. For all she knew, it was bones.

  Finally, the vein-like hallway opened up into a large chamber where the fleshy, pulsing walls held inset computer screens and control panels. In the middle of the chamber, a half-dozen spires of the straw-colored, bone-like material pointed sharply down from the curved, glistening, purple ceiling toward a fleshy mound-like protuberance on the floor. The fleshy mound dimpled down in the middle, and the sharp tip of each spire above it ended in a dangling cord with a sucker disk on the end. The entire contraption looked like the creepiest bowl chair Clarity could imagine.

  Wisper was trying to force Roscoe into this captain's chair from hell. The bunny-man was resisting, struggling for all he was worth, kicking his long feet and squirming in Wisper's metal arms. The robot couldn't hold him down and attach the sucker disks to his skull at the same time, and that's what she appeared to be trying to do.

  Clarity briefly considered trying to help Roscoe, but an ominous buzzing from above reminded her that Wisper had more cooperative allies. Besides, this was not her problem. Saving The Serendipity was.

  She scanned all of the screens in the room, looking for The Serendipity. Some of the screens showed interior views of Cassiopeia—mostly empty ventricle rooms—but Clarity could see Irohann helping Am-lei and Jeko with their cylindrical crate in one; others showed exterior views. She saw asteroids, asteroids, asteroids, and then finally, a behemoth of a starwhal struggling with the beautiful metal contours of The Serendipity, impaled on its hideous horn.

  "It's not too late!" Clarity cried. "We have to calm that starwhal down. Can Cassiopeia talk to it? Soothe it somehow?"

  Wisper had no interest in helping her; she was busy humming at Roscoe. "We have to leave this system now, and you agreed to pilot this ship for me!"

  Roscoe wasn't interested in talking, only squirming and biting; although from his expression, it looked like his teeth ended up hurting more than Wisper's metal arm.

  "You need a biological pilot?" Clarity asked.

  "Yes," Wisper said, clearly angry and frustrated.

  "He doesn't want to do it," Clarity said. "Let him go and use me. I'll pilot Cassie." Or at least, try to use her to save The Serendipity.

  Wisper turned her head to stare at Clarity with her glassy eyes. They looked purple in this purple room. "Cassiopeia is expecting Roscoe."

  "Well, it doesn't look like Cassiopeia is getting Roscoe," Clarity countered. "But if she'd like, she can try me."

  Wisper looked skeptical, but she didn't have time to be skeptical. The skeletal robot must have relaxed her metal grip on Roscoe, because the bunny-man slipped out of her grasp and wasted no time hopping straight out of the chamber and down the nearest vein-like hall. Clarity noticed that there were three of the vein-like hallways converging on this room that had to be Cassiopeia's cockpit.

  "All right," Clarity said, climbing onto the fleshy mound. She sat in the middle of it, cross-legged with her wrists resting on her knees. Zen, relaxed, ready for whatever those terrifying sucker disks would do to her skull. Completely unconcerned by the way the purple flesh beneath her rose and fell, as if the starwhal breathed, which it clearly couldn't, as it lived in the vacuum of space. She would let none of these things bother her, not when there was still a chance to save her ship. "Plug me in."

  The sucker disks squelched onto her forehead, the sides of her face, and the back of her scalp, nestling into her photosynthetic hair, like overly eager kisses. Clarity felt dizzy and her
vision went dark.

  She felt huge and floaty. Empty space was all around her, tingling with its vacuum against her thick flesh. She yelped and tried to jump, but her human body didn't move. She didn't have arms anymore, only a long fin tapering down her belly and dorsal tube organs. A ripple coursed down her fin, and she jetted to the side.

  Her vision started coming back—double and confusing. Wait, no, it had never been gone. The darkness she saw was space—she could make out the field of asteroids dimly in the background. She wasn't used to this type of vision. Superimposed on her view of space, Clarity could now see Wisper's metal face and glass eyes, right in front of her own face, screaming something. At least, it looked that way. It took Clarity another moment to remember how to hear. But what she heard wasn't Wisper's voice—it was a deeper voice, thick and resonant like bassoon or a cello: "Where bunny?"

  And then, superimposed over the dark asteroid field and Wisper's face, Clarity saw yet another layer of reality: a little, brown bunny rabbit in a field of grass. The bunny rabbit was perfectly still, like a photograph. Then suddenly, the brown bunny was replaced by a white one with red eyes, one ear lopped over, inside a wire mesh cage. Also perfectly still. They were photographs. She was seeing photographs of bunny rabbits superimposed over reality.

  Clarity heard the cello voice again, "Where bunny? Want Roscoe."

  Overwhelmed by the layers of reality she could see and feel, it took Clarity a moment to find her own mouth and say, "Roscoe... couldn't be here right now. Maybe later. But I'm happy to meet you—Cassie, right?" She wasn't sure if she'd said any of those words out loud or only imagined saying them, like in a dream.

  Yet, Cassiopeia seemed to hear them. "Why no bunny right now?"

  Clarity wasn't sure how honest to be with this starwhal. She wasn't sure how smart Cassie was, or whether Cassie could read her mind through those sucker disks connecting them. She sounded like a young child. Clarity hadn't liked it as a young child when adults had lied to her. "Roscoe isn't a bunny," Clarity said, taking a risk. "He's a sentient lapine lifeform, and he's scared. He's never met anyone like you, Cassiopeia, and he needs time to get used to you."

  Clarity heard no response, but the still photos of bunnies melted out of her vision. Now that she was getting used to the double sensation of having her brain plugged into Cassie's, Clarity could make sense of both what she was seeing through her human eyes and through Cassie's visual sensory organs—whatever those were.

  With a little more concentration, Clarity managed to tune her hearing until she could hear Wisper's voice: "Is it working? We need to get out of here!"

  Clarity didn't feel beholden to what Wisper wanted right now. She was the one hooked into Cassie. She had the control.

  "Cassie, can you help me calm down that... friend of yours?"

  "Hercules?" Cassie flashed an image of the biggest starwhal in the herd over their shared vision.

  "Yeah, that one." Clarity countered by picturing the starwhal with The Serendipity speared on his horn.

  "Not a friend," Cassie said. "He's a bully."

  Clarity was beset with what she could only assume were very vivid memories of a very large starwhal hassling her—chasing her through the clearing, poking her belly fin with the point of his horn, and singing incoherent but annoying songs about "Cassie, Cassie, Smarty-pants."

  "That doesn't make sense—it doesn't rhyme, and starwhals don't even have pants!" Clarity blurted out.

  Wisper stepped back, surprised by the outburst, and Clarity realized she'd spoken aloud and not just through her mind connection to Cassiopeia.

  "This is very confusing," Clarity said aloud now that she'd figured out how to use her physical human mouth again. "You're going to have to give me a few minutes to figure it out."

  "We may not have a few minutes." Wisper pointed at the bay of screens inset in the wall, and Clarity flinched from the sudden memory of how painful it had been when those screens were installed. Still, she pulled herself back out of the deep well of memories Cassie wanted to share with her and focused on what Wisper had been pointing to: another spaceship approaching.

  Expanding her mind back out to use Cassie's vision, Clarity saw the spaceship more clearly—it was boxy and dull gray. The scientists used this ship to drill the asteroids for nutritious minerals to feed the starwhals. Clarity only knew that because Cassie did. The boxy spaceship must be coming to help Hercules get his horn out of The Serendipity.

  "This is good," Clarity said to Cassie. "If they drill a small hole right to the side of his horn, then Hercules can pull his horn out and The Serendipity can still repair itself. Can you... tell them that? How do we... communicate with other vessels?"

  Cassiopeia wasn't interested in relaying messages to the scientists on the boxy vessel. She was diving into Clarity's memories of life on The Serendipity like a playful dolphin splashing about in a sun-warmed cove. She especially liked Clarity's memories of crawling onto the ledge under the window in her own room. She loved perching on that ledge, watching the stars dance by.

  "I don't have any ledges like that," Cassie said. Her cello-like voice sounded mournful, disappointed in herself. "I don't have windows, just screens."

  Clarity felt flustered. Did she have to comfort this living spaceship? Or maybe, if the boxy vessel was going to cut Hercules loose from The Serendipity, then it was time to cut herself loose from Cassiopeia.

  "Is there any way you could help tow The Serendipity out of here?" Clarity asked, even though it was a long shot.

  Maybe Clarity and Irohann could just put on their spacesuits, wait outside in the emptiness of space, and get themselves picked up by the scientists. That could work. She'd get The Serendipity repaired, then get to go back to her home.

  "Home?" Cassie asked, filling Clarity's vision with memories of living in this enclosed clearing, messed with by scientists, trained to do tricks for treats. Cassie started rifling through Clarity's memories—any memory that was strongly associated with the word home. Somewhere along the journey through Clarity's memories, Cassie decided the point of continuity was Clarity herself.

  The way to have a home was to become a home. For Clarity.

  "I can be your home," Cassie said in a way that was at once endearing, like a puppy eagerly licking her face, hoping to be adopted, and also bone-chillingly terrifying. Like a prison cell grinning hungrily at her with sharp iron teeth.

  This starwhal was inside her mind. What would Cassiopeia do to Clarity if she felt rejected? Suddenly, Roscoe's desire to stay as far away from those sucker disks as possible seemed a lot wiser to Clarity than her own actions.

  "Cassie," Clarity said, still trying to work out what came next. But she never got the chance—she was interrupted by seeing the boxy science vessel extrude a mining drill toward The Serendipity. "That's too high..." Clarity said. The drill was pointing at The Serendipity's middle, not at all close to where Hercules' horn pierced the cargo hold. "What are they doing?"

  The drill soundlessly pierced The Serendipity's gleaming hull, but Clarity could imagine the horrible tooth-aching squeal it must be making on the inside of her ship. When the drill withdrew, the remaining atmosphere burst outward, carrying scraps of the ship's homey interior with it—were those broken plates? A jacket she'd left draped over one of the stools?

  Clarity didn't want to imagine how wrecked her home was on the inside right now, but she couldn't help picturing it anyway. Everything would have flown toward the hole with the escaping atmosphere, then fallen or floated, depending on whether the artificial gravity was still on.

  It could all still be repaired; Clarity clung to that. Then a mechanical arm extended from the boxy mining vessel and inserted an oblong casing into the hole in the side of The Serendipity.

  "Seriously!" Clarity cried. "What are they doing?"

  "That was an explosive device designed for aiding with the mining of asteroids," Wisper said bleakly.

  Cassie simply said, "Bomb."

  The silver sid
e of The Serendipity's hull burst outward, peeling into petal-shaped metal curls. The explosion bloomed like a flower of death and destruction. Debris floated above the flower like a toxic cloud; bits and pieces of Clarity's life, blown into unrecognizable smithereens.

  "My god," Clarity said. "They don't even know we're not on there... What do they think this is? Some kind of wild west, where you can shoot cow hustlers dead for stealing your cattle?" Clarity could hear the potential for outrage in her own words as she spoke them, but she couldn't hear the outrage itself. She couldn't feel it either. All she could do was stare.

  Hercules successfully wrested his horn free. Now that the hull of The Serendipity had been compromised, the metal walls that had felt so strong and secure to Clarity when she lived inside of them tore like aluminum foil, laying bare the spaceship's innards, exposed to harsh vacuum.

  Apparently angered by his previous captivity—or just in the mood for wanton destruction—Stabby Hercules speared his horn into the carcass of The Serendipity again and again, shredding what remained.

  11 Changing the Game

  A new voice pierced into the complicated shared consciousness of Clarity and Cassiopeia. The voice was smooth and cultured with an unidentifiable accent, something that sounded like it had been gleaned from one of the low-rez, gray-scale vids archived from Ancient Earth. The voice spoke over all of the layers of sensation and emotion, bringing the chaos to a simple focal point. It was transmitted via encoded radio waves from the base on the far side of the clearing, and the voice said:

  "I am Wisper of the Wespirtech Extension Campus in Eridani 7 System. This message is for Wisper of the Defunct Merlin Project. Please pass it along to her, Roscoe, and thank you for agreeing to bond with Cassiopeia. Hi Cassie! You're a good girl!"

  Clarity felt Cassiopeia thrill at the simple praise. She had so many questions, but if this voice—this second, enigmatic Wisper—believed she was talking to Roscoe, then she was likely nothing more than a recording. Clarity wouldn't be getting answers from her.