From this angle, she could see it was a view of Sectilia from her moon, Atielle, where Rageth had been born. Sectilia hung large and low on the horizon, a misty, blue-green sphere, dominating the painting. Dawn encircled the planet with a brilliant halo of color—violet and coral and tangerine on a sky that was a slightly different cast of blue than Earth’s sky. It was so lovely, this moon with another world looming in the heavens.
There were other rooms adjoining this one, including a bedroom, but Jane didn’t have the desire to explore them yet. This room was appointed with plenty of sturdy-looking, simple seating. It was a room meant for social events. Jane approached a piece of furniture that resembled a streamlined, low, modern couch and sat down opposite one of the paintings, still absorbing its details.
“You have many attributes in common with her,” rumbled softly in her head.
“That’s very kind of you to say,” Jane replied with a wry smile.
“I do not contrive the assessment to inflate your sense of self. I observe. I do not embellish.”
“Thank you, then.”
“Do not compare yourself to her. You exceed the necessary criteria required to perform.”
Jane looked down at her hands in her lap. “I know you believe that’s true, but entire worlds full of innocent people are depending on me to get these next steps right. It’s such a heavy weight. I don’t want to fail.”
He acknowledged that, silently. He felt a similar responsibility. They communed in that. It helped, somehow.
After a moment, he rumbled, “Those other worlds beckon to you.”
She frowned. “They terrify me.”
“No. This is not who you are.”
She saw a face in her mind’s eye and wrinkled her brow. Ei’Brai was summoning a memory that’d been buried deep. She hadn’t thought of Mowan for decades. He was a Nawagi boy she’d met when bushwalking with her parents in Queensland in the months before they started their new venture on the coast. The two of them had spent more than a week romping in the scrub before it was time to move on. One day, he’d arrived at their campsite and said he wanted to take her to a special place.
He’d held her pale hand in his warm, dark one and led her across the plain to a rocky outcropping and an ochre pit. He said the adults in his tribe ground the brightly colored, soft stones with fat to make a paste that they used to paint the body for secret dancing ceremonies that sometimes lasted for days.
He picked up a bright orange stone and rubbed it against a flat rock jutting out of the dry landscape, quickly creating a small mound of orange, chalky powder. Smiling, he pressed his finger into it and drew his finger from her hairline at the center of her forehead, down her nose, over her lips and chin. Jane chose a small, yellow lump of ochre and ground it against another stone nearby. She smoothed the powder in stripes over his cheeks.
They took turns daubing each other with the mineral dust—faces, neck, arms—giddy with the results. They transformed each other into otherworldly-looking creatures. His lips twitched when he said his mother had painted his sister’s chest to make her breasts grow. Jane laughed and told him she didn’t need breasts yet.
The sun grew hot overhead and they tired of smearing each other with the colorful rock dust, so they crossed the dry grassland until they came to a greener place with a rushing stream. They splashed the pigment away with cool water and laughter, then went off to explore some other delightful thing.
As the memory faded, Jane eased back into the stiff furniture. Ei’Brai had uncovered a long-forgotten memory of Australia that was untainted by the aftermath of her father’s death. He made his point eloquently. She’d arrived in Australia, a child eager for experience—curious and open. The months and years that followed had changed her.
It was more than just coming of age, slipping into an adult skin. She’d always thought her proclivities toward adventurism, risk-taking, exploration, hedonism had simply been tempered by time. They hadn’t. They’d been crushed by fear—her own and her grandparents—who feared losing Jane the same way they’d lost their daughter to the wildest corners of the world. They questioned her every inclination, brandished the potential worst-case result of every action, relentlessly reminding her of her father’s death, until she began to doubt all but the most mundane desires for herself.
She’d learned never to trust herself.
Yet somehow she’d still ended up here. What was keeping her from reveling in this adventure now?
Some worry was normal. Paralysis was not.
Ei’Brai was right. Just look at the child she’d been. She owed everything to that child—her language ability, her curiosity, her passion. How could she have ever buried her so deep?
Jane slipped off her boots and pulled her feet up onto the low couch. She hadn’t slept properly for so long. The meal she’d just consumed was making her feel drowsy.
She could hear Alan now, the murmuring of his mind as he worked. She could tune him out if she wanted, but she didn’t need to. It was comforting. She curled on her side and tucked her hands under her cheek, adrift on the sound of his mental voice.
Jane woke to Bergen cursing.
“Fuck! Oh, shit! Jane! Fuck-fuck-fuck!”
Jane sat up, wiping moisture from the corner of her mouth, struggling to shake off grogginess.
“What is it, Alan?” she asked, scrubbing at her face.
“We’ve got a problem. A big fucking problem.”
Ei’Brai broke in without preamble, “Indeed. Counter-measures are already implemented.”
Alan continued, urgently, “These nanites are programmed to destroy the goddamn ship if they’re discovered, Jane. The only reason we aren’t dead yet is because there are so few of them left.”
Ei’Brai cut in irritably, “There is no need for explication. I am presenting Qua’dux Jane Holloway with the particulars now.”
She barely heard that, immersed as she already was in the memory stream of Alan’s thought process just moments prior. Ei’Brai had been monitoring Alan’s progress as he worked through the code, when Alan discovered that there was an additional layer artfully hidden in plain sight within the squillae’s most basic command code. Ei’Brai indicated that this was a section of code the average Sectilius scientist would ignore or only look at cursorily, since it would vary little within the spectrum of types of squillae.
But it was all new to Alan. He wouldn’t ignore any part of it. She felt Alan’s flash of insight as several seemingly disparate pieces of information flitted through his mind and he connected the dots between them. Jane could see the pattern form just as clearly—as Ei’Brai interpreted what it meant in real time.
If even a single squillae were discovered, scrutinized with this level of intensity, it was programmed to send out a signal, organizing all the rest of them to abandon whatever they were doing and congregate in groups along the major hubs within the network of the ship’s neural-electric pathways, where they would work together to build structures intended to create a series of feedback loops simultaneously.
In other words, a self-destruct—a massive, redundant, instantaneous overload. And it was probably already underway. It wouldn’t take many squillae to make an explosion happen. With fewer individuals to do the work, it would take longer to accomplish, but they could still blow a very large hole in the ship. There was no way to estimate just how many of them there were, how long it might take for an explosion to happen, or where the explosions would take place.
The ship was absolutely teeming with squillae and they were impossible to sort. Only at the microscopic level could one squillae potentially detect the difference between itself and an individual that was different. If a squillae worked hard at keeping to itself, which these clearly did, it could avoid detection altogether.