Oblivion (22 page)

The command positions, circles built onto the walls and extended so that the officers seem to float by ranks, had all been repaired. The Commander’s circle was in the middle on the only real floor. Before it were half a dozen round balls, all of which represented a different information feed about the third planet.

A cone-shaped command center encircled the Commander’s position, with ten spots built into the board to rest upper tentacles during long battles. The entire design, using perfect shapes throughout, would relax a crew that had had a long space voyage or suffered a long tense battle.

Cicoi didn’t want to think about the battles that had been waged from here. He knew enough of his people’s history to know that those battles had been waged against either the North or the Center. Once upon a time, his people battled themselves.

Now they had a truce, built by circumstance and need. It was no longer as fragile as it had been when the Elders decided to save the planet, but there was still talk that if the survival situation ever eased, Malmur would separate itself into three distinct sections once more.

Cicoi wasn’t here as Commander of the South. He was here as leader of the fleet. He had come to customize the command center for himself. This ship, the first warship to be fully repaired, would be the flagship for the new battle. His experience gained him the position of leader of the fleet. His youth had raised him above the other two contenders: the Commanders of the North and Center. The Elders believed that Cicoi had the reflexes, both mental and physical, to withstand a long battle. Since no one except the Elders had ever used this warship, true battle experience did not exist, and Cicoi had a hunch that the Elders were lying about the real reason they wanted him to lead.

They did think him more physically able: that was true. But they also thought him more malleable than the others, more willing to do their bidding.

And he was. Cicoi had always bowed to experience. He did not know the history of these ships well enough to know when the Elders had used them, but he knew from his Elder’s sharp commands, barked to Cicoi from inside his own brain, that the Elder had once commanded the flagship himself.

Against whom or what Cicoi could not imagine—and was not even sure he wanted to.

The rungs leading to the command circle were built into the wall, and Cicoi had fallen in love with them immediately. He could wrap a tentacle around one and hold himself in place, while placing another tentacle above to pull himself up, or another tentacle below to ease himself down. After only a few weeks, he had already become so accustomed to this design that he moved along it rapidly, sometimes choosing to hang from the rungs while he gave orders to his repair crews.

They had looked at him with a mixture of fright and awe. The Elder had told him that the rungs had once been the latest design, the newest technology—the last new technology invented before the great move through the darkness of space— and there had been no time to implement it planetwide.

Cicoi wished their sun still existed. He wished he had seen the light and the plant life, and the waters Malmur once had. He wished all the buildings he frequented had had rungs instead of glide paths that broke down, or ramps that strained the tentacles, or even the awkward steps that had been cut into rock and tangled tentacles into awful messes.

The Elders had the wisdom of technology. Cicoi wished he had seen what other things their fertile brains could have created.

Even though the Elders had saved all of their lives— indeed, made it possible for Cicoi to be hatched.

And now, they made it possible for Cicoi to lead a fleet that would rescue his planet once again.

Cicoi grabbed a rung with his tenth upper tentacle and pulled himself upward, working his tentacles as the Elder had taught him: tenth, ninth, eighth, and so on, until it became time to repeat. His lower tentacles did not mirror, but floated free.

In space, the Elder warned him, gravity was sometimes lost on the warships—destroyed—or the energy from the gravity controls was moved to weapons or propulsion. The rungs made it possible for any command staff who were knocked loose or in the wrong place to return to their stations.

The stations were also models of innovation. In the harvester vessels, the circles were marks on the floors, as they were in the buildings planetwide. In the warship, there were tentacle hooks in the circles as well, so no matter what happened to the ship, the staff could remain in place.

Cicoi’s upper tentacles twitched with anticipation. He longed to get this vessel spaceward. He longed already for the fight.

He glided across the floor and stood in the command circle. From this place, he could see all the other stations, above and below. Around him, if he needed it, the entire inside of the command chamber would become a viewer that would show him the vastness of space. He would see in three dimensions, pointing his eyestalks in all ten directions, including the lesser directions of above and below.

The Elder had told Cicoi to practice this maneuver so that he would not become dizzy at crucial parts in the battle. Cicoi had promised he would, and he had also ordered his team to do the same.

They would be ready. He would not underestimate the creatures of the third planet again.

Cicoi straightened all his tentacles and streamlined his body. He slowly raised his eyestalks, as he would before the formal order to launch the ship, and he turned them in the proper ten directions, feeling that half moment of dizziness as stalks two and seven went above and below simultaneously. Then he extended his upper tentacles, resting them on the console in the designated areas. His lower tentacles wrapped the rungs inside his command circle.

Never before had his body been fully utilized like this. He understood now why the Elder wanted him to practice.

Cicoi examined, from his post, all areas of his command chamber. This was the first time he had ever been inside it alone. First he had come with his Elder, and the command chamber had been a mess of collapsed circles, shattered rungs, and dust. The Elder had been distressed by this, his tentacles wrapped around his body, all but one of his eyestalks protruding as if he couldn’t stand the sight of the destruction time had wrought.

All the other visits Cicoi had made had been to check on the progress of his repair team, and to learn how to run this command chamber. As the Elder taught him the tricks of the command circle, repair workers floated around them, tentacles clinging to rungs, or stations, or suspending them above work areas.

It had seemed like a pod-hive to him then, a child’s pod-hive, safe and full of countless bodies learning how to move tentacles without tangling them.

Until now Cicoi had no idea this chamber was so vast. Or how much power it seemed to have in its glistening parts. It made him feel as if he could win anything, anything they faced, just by standing in this circle at this time.

And that, of course, was how he was supposed to feel. The comfort of circles, the confidence they gave.

But now the repair crews, trained as the Elder taught them through Cicoi—and in the process giving Cicoi more power than he’d ever had before—had moved on to the other ships. They had to work at full strength. Cicoi spared all the workers he could for this, but even that fell short.

The warships were so badly neglected, the damage time had caused so terrible, that the amount of work to fix them was tremendous. Even with this repair crew working at full ability, no more than ten warships would be ready by the time Malmur was in position to launch them.

Cicoi was taking a large risk moving this many workers to warship repair. Malmur needed a new harvester ship. It needed to absorb all the energy it could from this Pass around the sun. It needed to make provisions for the problems that had occurred last Pass.

And now the Elders were siphoning off more of the workers, making them work on the Sulas. The Elders wanted as many Sulas as possible. Instead of two harvests, the Elders wanted to do three, and that would take millions and millions of additional Sulas to replace the ones lost each harvest. The Elders had programmed the Sulas so that they would eat quicker, which would enable the extra harvest, but it also meant that they would use additional energy.

Cicoi’s people were working all the time, with very short rest breaks. As the Elder said, sleep was something that happened in darkness, not light. Still Cicoi knew most of his people would rather have their stalks in their pockets once per decaunit. It kept them fresh. He worried about errors.

He worried about a thousand things.

He even considered asking the nonfertile females to leave the pods and come to work, but the training would be terrible. Still, there were easy jobs that even an untrained worker could do. Suggesting such a thing, though, was close to heresy, and he feared doing it.

If things got much worse, however, he would ask that the females become involved.

His tentacles were growing tired. His eyestalks were quivering slightly. Holding this position was much more difficult than he had thought.

He snapped his eyestalks into their pockets and relaxed his lower tentacles. Then he let his upper tentacles rest against his sides.

He had much to do before he met with the Elder again. Cicoi needed to check the newest batch of Sulas, the ones designed not for the third planet, but for the dead fourth planet. In this last Pass through this particular solar system, the harvester ships would make a stop at the fourth planet as well, and strip it of raw materials.

Cicoi hoped the materials on the fourth planet would be worth the effort. The loss of energy in this last effort had been tremendous. Workers reassigned. New parts for these warships. New Sulas.

Cicoi did not know what the plan was. He had tried to ask several times. But the Elder had told him he would learn what he needed to when he needed to.

Only, Cicoi was beginning to believe he would never learn of the plan. And he feared he was trusting in the wrong place. The Elders had lived in a time of unlimited energy. They hadn’t experienced an entire lifetime of deprivation.

Cicoi had. And he knew the cost of each bit of energy used. If it wasn’t replaced, then the Malmuria would die off slowly, unable to support new pods, new life, new anything.

Malmur would be dead.

And it would be his fault.

June 5, 2018
3:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

131 Days Until Second Harvest

“Lunch,” Bradshaw said as he backed through the door of Portia’s lab at NanTech. He held one large greasy white bag, and balanced a drink holder in his left hand. Portia’s giant cup of Surge had spilled twice, and his fingers were sticky. He’d have to wash them before he got any work done at all.

Not that he was really working. Sometime in the last month, he had gone from being the adviser on fossils to the fetch-and-carry man for Portia Groopman. She didn’t seem to notice and he really didn’t mind. There wasn’t much for a nearly retired professor of archaeology to do anymore, anyway.

After Leo Cross first got in touch with Bradshaw, a year earlier, the first six months had been heady. Suddenly archaeology had a relevance to modem society—more of a relevance than it usually did. So many archaeologists mouthed the old trope: You won’t understand your present if you don’t understand your past. But few believed it. Bradshaw found it ironic that the thing that discredited him—the alien nanomachines he found fossilized decades ago—were the things on which all of society depended today.

Now, since his training had again become moot for the moment, he stuck close to Portia, helping in every fashion that he could. He had begun to feel responsible for her.

Portia’s parents were mostly absent. They felt that since Portia had found a profession she loved, and was making more than enough money, she could take care of herself. And she could. She had always done so, even when her parents’ medical expenses had far surpassed their teachers’ salaries, and caused them to get thrown onto the street. Portia had always found ways to survive.

But Bradshaw believed people needed to do more than survive. He believed they needed affection and caring and a useful purpose. Portia had affection from her coworkers and a useful purpose. But she didn’t really have anyone to care for her.

Until him. He saw himself as the grandfather she had never known. Although if he really and truly were her grandfather, he would buy her a house, with a soft comfortable bed, and make her sleep in it once in a while. He was probably the only person who knew that Portia had lied about having an apartment. She slept at NanTech, showered at the health club across the street, and often bought her food from vending machines.

The least he could do was make certain that she was well fed. He’d actually set the chime on his watch to go off every three hours, and he supplied either a snack or a meal, whichever was necessary.

This time, he was bringing lunch. He’d found a superb deli two blocks away that made sandwiches of a kind he’d never seen. Stacked with meat, lettuce, tomatoes and whatever other vegetables he wanted, cheeses, and some kind of sauce that was to die for, all on a caraway rye that caught in the teeth and lingered on the tongue. The smell of these sandwiches alone could pull Portia away from her research long enough to eat, and today, he was counting on that.

She’d been working nonstop all night long. He couldn’t get her to quit and sleep. He’d finally gone home around eleven— he was of no use to anyone if he didn’t sleep—and when he woke up, feeling guilty, at 4 a.m., he called. Portia answered, wide awake. No, she hadn’t slept. No, she didn’t know what time it was. And no, she didn’t care.