Portia has been calculating and sends her over an estimate of scale. Four kilometres from chin to forehead unless there is something wrong with the waves. And of course there is something wrong with the waves. There is something wrong with all of it. The world has been overtaken by a churning pandemic that leaves nothing but itself. That is what they feared; that is what came from the other world. That is what her fellows had gone to find and why the octopuses, or some of them, some proactive faction of wardens, destroyed them. In that moment she can only nod numbly along with the sentiment.
3.
Fabian has been in a fugue state. It happens to both genders, although the Portiids still tacitly consider it a male condition despite centuries of social change. There was a great deal of heat, which the spiders cannot shift as quickly as mammals. There was a lot of noise and movement that came to him like the thundering voice of a god. There was fear. All together the sensory load simply overwhelmed his sense of self and he ceased to be Fabian for a while. Some fuguing Portiids run around like mad things but Fabian feels that he has been frozen still, clinging to a wall that is now a ceiling.
They are down.
He cannot process what that means quite yet. He feels the fugue hovering nearby, waiting for its moment. It is enough to enjoy the comparative quiet. Enough to consider that there is a slightly uncomfortable amount of gravity that has the distinctive savour of the real thing, and not its rotational stepsister. None of that makes sense but he holds off on too much analysis in case he turns up answers he won’t like. Not that, he considers, any answers to be had are likely to be amiable in any way.
Meshner, he sends out, finding that he can access the ship’s comms channels. He has no sense of Kern, meaning nothing he has to say would mean anything to his Human confederate.
And of course Meshner isn’t there. Meshner went onto the orbiting station. Meshner is gone.
The fugue leaps on him. Fabian hasn’t had an attack for many years before this, but when he was a moult or two off full adulthood he suffered greatly from the fits. Back in the old days, that would have been a death sentence for a male – either killed out of annoyance or for sport, or starving because he could not be useful in the way males were supposed to be. Nowadays the times are more enlightened; a little handicap is recognized as nothing more than that. Even in a male.
And he fights it off, this time. He goes straight through it and out the other side, because to forget Fabian, comforting though that might be, would be to forget Meshner, and that would be poor service to his colleague and experimental subject.
He is already wondering if there might possibly be a way to retrieve the implant. Cold, he knows, but . . . science!
He builds on that, slowly re-establishing his understanding of what has happened. The fugue has several more goes at him, because (as suspected), nothing he works out is remotely encouraging.
The crew section of the Lightfoot is considerably rounder than it was, its walls buttressed. He recognizes this from drills back over Kern’s World. Their chamber has been made an emergency capsule, the walls thickened to become strong but yielding and flexible, able to cushion impacts and shed heat. What remains of the rest of the ship is unknown so far. He is not finding Kern on his personal comms menu, and he is not sure how to engage damage control without the computer. It is possible that this capsule, containing two Portiids, is all that is left. The light is bluish, drawn from chemicals mingled from reservoirs broken when the chamber reconfigured into its emergency state. Possibly there is no power, which means that the continued congeniality of the air is going to be a problem.
Viola is present, bandaging herself, mostly ignoring him even though it’s literally just the two of them. Two of her legs are broken, left three and four, and she is sealing the breaches in her exoskeleton before her internal structure loses too much fluid. Fabian feels a keen need inside himself to ask her what has happened and what must be done, which he irritably rejects as the result of a lifetime of social conditioning. That irritability completes him, makes him fully Fabian again, and he takes stock.
They were attacked and the Lightfoot’s defensive measures were inadequate to protect them from a long-range barrage that hit them almost on the heels of the first warning they had of it. This raises some uncomfortable implications, including (1) the locals were able to analyse Kern’s evasion and detection ability from the first clash and neutralize it; (2) the locals could effectively have destroyed the Lightfoot at any time after becoming aware of it, and at any distance, and perhaps only their bizarre factionalism left the action so long.
On the other hand, Fabian and Viola, at least, remain very much alive. Fabian marks that up as a substantial plus.
On the other, other hand, they are evidently no longer spacebound. In fact the only place they can reasonably be is on the surface of the planet they were formerly orbiting, and Fabian now knows a remarkable amount about the biology of this alien world. What he also knows, although he has no explicable mechanism for it, is that something on this world has the ability to infect Earth-born life.
We remain inviolate, Viola states, without turning her major eyes on him or pausing in her patient medical attention. Fabian deduces that his feet had been betraying his thoughts.
Again, he will not simply ask for orders or reassurance. Instead, he tries to coax anything at all out of the panels and consoles despite the universal lack of power. He feels Viola’s disdain through the prickling hairs of his abdomen, but then has a flash of triumph as the ship thrums about them and minimalist readouts sprout dimly on some of the screens.
Did I do that? he wonders, briefly taken by his own capability, followed by the resignation of: No, it’s Kern.
For a long, yawning moment there is no more, as though this fragment of the brilliant mind of Doctor Avrana Kern has been reduced to nothing but dumb numbers, but then she speaks to them, directly into their individual comms. To the Portiid senses, Kern’s voice can be a fantastically rich and expressive thing – she has been talking to them for far longer than she ever spoke to her own kind – but right now it is shorn of qualifiers, a mere transmission of information; she is either damaged or occupied in dealing with damage.
Yes, crew section intact. Quarantine section located, reports damaged. Power minimal but under restoration. Life support adequate but under restoration. External comms minimal but under restoration. Motive ability, none. Fabrication ability, none but investigating.
Fabian and Viola look sidelong at each other, something they are uniquely designed to do.
Quarantine section? he asks timidly because, last he checked, the Lightfoot didn’t have one.
Zaine, Viola states. She hobbles forward: no jumping for this spider for the foreseeable future, until she can get some prosthetics manufactured. And she’s right, of course. Zaine got back to the ship, unlike poor Meshner, but she was put into quarantine for fear of airborne particles of whatever-that-was on her suit. She had been undergoing, or about to undergo, decontamination when the attack hit.
Quarantine section reports dwindling power and danger of structural integrity loss. Zaine Alpash Vannix alive. Request received for replacement environment suit and retrieval. Artifabian unit not detected. No other mechanical units available.