Now, what is the disaster? Ships? Still where they were. Ambassadors? A spike of alarm from Portia at some rubbery octopoid groping but otherwise unharmed. The Lightfoot? Currently seeing the second emergency treatment of Meshner Osten Oslam in recent memory.
Kern troubleshoots immediately, comparing Meshner’s (recovering) neural activity with her own experience of being in his implant. She comes to a profoundly awkward but inescapable conclusion, one she will have to discuss with Meshner, and possibly the entire crew. Currently they are blaming Meshner again, and that is not entirely fair, but Kern feels that setting the record straight while engaging in first contact diplomacy will be counterproductive.
And besides, she needs to find a way to phrase her confession so that she gets to do the forbidden thing again, because it was . . . She reaches into herself because she knows that she should feel something about the experience she had in Meshner’s brain, but all she finds is the unsatisfying knowledge that it was intellectually fulfilling, and that just isn’t the same.
Because her attention is now just about full with all of these things, her knee-jerk impulse to reply to the Imperial C signal is allowed to go ahead and she sends a simple Received and acknowledged.
Moments later everything goes to hell.
6.
One moment the octopus is right before her – far closer than within arm’s reach as it explores her suit curiously, the hard parts and the soft, the different materials. Helena is looking at its eye, its pupil swelling from a horizontal bar to an irregular blot as it examines her. She has no sense of eye contact from it; its attention is on her body as its own scrolls with dignified, slow pulses of colour. And I am mute, to it. Her slate is still presented, and the creature plainly notes the colour-messages she has cobbled together. Occasionally the ghostly reflection of one of her signals ripples back across the octopus’s skin. Received, but is anything being understood? And yet she feels curiously at peace, floating here in a bubble of force and water out in empty space. There is no sense of threat in the creature, for all that Portia is grumbling in her ear, the electronics-only transmission is simply conveying the spider’s general dissatisfaction with the tactile nature of their host’s advance.
And then something changes. The octopus abruptly broadcasts colours that Helena knows mean agitation and fear. It jets away from them, seeking to escape to its own ship. She feels herself lumber in the water, unwilling to simply activate her own thrusters and retreat without greater understanding. A babble of alarm comes from amongst her colleagues on the Lightfoot.
The ink clears: she sees the octopus has fallen back from its exit, dead white now, its skin raised up into barbs and devil’s horns. Beyond the transparent membrane of their bubble the universe wheels, the great ponderous baubles of the alien ships spinning – which means that they are spinning, disconnected from the umbilical. Helena flails at the water to turn herself, hunting out the Lightfoot, seeing a glimpse of it before the monolithic curved side of one of the alien vessels cuts her off from it.
Trapped, and in a bubble. Her environment, which seemed perfectly still and safe only a moment ago, now seems no more than a dream to her, that might vanish the moment some vast being awakes. ‘Portia—!’ she starts, but the spider cuts her off.
Electromagnetic signals are fluctuating wildly.
For a moment, floating at the centre of her little aqueous universe, Helena can’t understand what she means. Some manner of weapon, lancing through the invisible walls at them from the alien ship? Then she catches up with what her own instruments are telling her. There is a particular problem with unstable electromagnetic fields, right now: electromagnetic fields are what form the outside of the bubble.
‘Oh . . .’ Helena says, because even as the revelation hits she sees cracks form on the outside of the bubble, as though it is glass. No, not cracks at alclass="underline" they spread outwards from seed-points all over the membrane, beautiful, dendritic, like shimmering flowers that glitter in the light from the ships and the system’s star.
Helena hangs in the water, helpless in every possible way, and watches the outer layers of her watery sphere crystallize into ice, until all the universe is occluded, until a pale shell encloses the entire bubble, growing thicker by the moment, creaking and cracking and forming faultlines as it expands messily, spears and shards of rigid water jabbing into the interior like roots, jutting out fresh branches like trees. Like a forest, razor-sharp tines reaching and dividing and growing inwards, ever inwards. The cold comes to her through her suit, the bone-cold of freezing water leaching at her body’s precious heat.
She calls out to Portia again, feels the spider’s legs curve about her body, Portia’s underside clasping against her back in a futile attempt to conserve heat. Both their suits strain with the chill. Heaters that would have coped in the insulated cold of space are losing the battle against the conductive cold of the swirling water, and the spearheads of the ice forest grow closer and closer.
Helena feels another pressure around her legs. The lamps of her helmet show her the octopus, still as bleached as the ice itself, clinging there: one more doomed living thing seeking warmth and solace in these last few moments.
Her visor readouts tell her the exact moment when her suit heater gives out, ahead of schedule, shoddy workmanship, do better next time.
She had not known how much work it was doing to keep the cold from her. Even as some scientific part of her mind complains, It can’t be losing heat this quickly, they must be doing something to us, it’s not natural— the cold rushes in and clasps her so tight she can’t breathe. She feels Portia shudder at her back, legs clutching tighter – and then not even that, as she loses track of her own body, numbed into insensibility. Her heart slows.
The light goes out.
7.
The switch from calm to chaos is without warning. Helena and Portia’s readouts are replaced by warnings that the alien ships are lumbering into motion, weapons systems lighting up across their curved hulls. The Lightfoot is already pulling away – not that a little distance will make any odds – and readying its defensive measures. One screen reads out their available mass capable of being used as anti-missile chaff or to absorb laser energy, which has dwindled alarmingly since their first engagement. Meshner, himself in no position to contribute to the effort, hopes that at least the Voyager is watching somehow. Someone should learn something from this mess.
The aliens – the octopuses or whatever they are – seem infinitely mercurial. After his own shutdown he is entirely prepared to accept that he might have missed some nuance, but everyone seems equally taken unawares. The other side have gone from cautious diplomacy to full battle stations like a flipped coin.
‘Is there another ship coming in?’ he croaks. ‘They were fighting each other.’
‘No other vessel, Meshner,’ Kern says in his ear, sounding weirdly solicitous.
Fabian stamps out a new message that Artifabian translates as ‘The bubble’s lost its field.’
For a moment Meshner can’t work out what that means; then his stomach plunges. If asked, he would say his relationship with Helena and Portia is about as distant as you could reasonably get on a small ship, but in that moment he discovers that the prospect of losing more comrades is too much. He lurches over to a console, calling up information, already halfway through plotting some mad rescue attempt, scooping the pair of them from the rapidly expanding ice-grit of their habitat. Except the ice is only expanding the regular way, not dispersing. The smooth, perfectly round surface of the bubble is now a jagged tectonic chaos, as plates of freezing water shoulder against each other, rupturing into miniature mountain chains, cracking and shattering, spitting retorts of crystals and water vapour into the void. Yet the whole remains miraculously intact. Two of the alien ships have drifted into a stately opposing orbit around the smaller sphere – or around each other, with the iceball caught between them – denying the Lightfoot any chance to get at it. The third vessel is executing a very slow manoeuvre, clearing its colleagues to have an unimpeded view of them.