Alecha glimpsed movement in the window’s reflection. Behind them, the common room’s door parted; a couple of vulden walked out, followed by several more of the meeting’s guests. Faint patterns of light drifted along the wall, directing them toward the transport room.
T’bia waited for the last of the attendees to pass by on their way to disembark. “I won’t presume you and I are—”
“We’re good,” Alecha said. “I would appreciate at least an effort to stay on the truth side of things, especially with anyone not prepared for… shall we say, ‘maximum T’bia’?”
“Fine, but I’m still serving up heaping portions of snark. That said, I need to bounce over to the J’Ruhn. Jay needs me to collect close-up readings of Tier’s powered core, and I’m confident that if I feed a rat a treat Tier won’t flag me as a threat while I’m there. Is my count correct that they managed to build and install six cores for her use? Or are there a couple hidden in those last two cryobays we haven’t managed to open or scan inside?”
“The engineers wanted eight cores, but there were issues getting the last two built in time for departure. Six for redundancy and parallel processing fell well within our fault-tolerance needs… So we thought. What’s wrong with the last two cryobays?”
“Nothing, as far as we know,” T’bia assured her. “We just haven’t been back to unlock them since atmosphere was restored in the corridors. Nine was the one we found Anolis in, but he told me all the others were deadlocked by the time he boarded.”
“The stockroom of spares.” Alecha covered her eyes, giving her forehead a rub. “The failsafes kicked in to protect the bays…”
“Failsafes?”
“In case of pressure loss. If the corridors connected to the bay read as unsafe, the doors lock down to keep atmospheric pressure inside. The deadlocks release once sensors all agree that the outside environment is restored. Security can force a re-check if the system is being stubborn.”
T’bia clicked her tongue. “Nine’s was leaking when we got there… Sensors probably failed sometime over the years. Explains the lock I had to break, at least. All right. I’ll be back soon.”
Alecha nodded, her gaze drawn back to the J’Ruhn as T’bia left. Had Shaytelli known all this would happen? Had Arvus ever been their true destination? Anytime Shaytelli discussed the colony mission, Alecha always felt that her words were in earnest. Either the old vixen sincerely believed in what she shared, or she was far better at hiding the truth than even Alecha thought was possible from a fellow Artisan.
Turning from the window, Alecha stepped back into the Serin’s common room. The illumination remained subdued on the sides, the table the only bright spot. Pakar had moved to the table itself; Tarioshi was in front of the replicator, waiting for something to finish.
Jadyn now commanded a large fleet of datapads; a few were flat on the table, but the majority had taken flight, hovering in his line of sight. A faint flicker of Elemental Air energy held each aloft. He didn’t acknowledge Alecha’s return, appearing lost in concentration. An occasional flip of his fingers sent the tablets shuffling. A mind-map arrangement of sorts? Interesting technique, at least.
Alecha reclaimed her place at the table; Tari set a mug of herbal tea in front of her, giving her a slight smile. “Welcome back. Everything all right?”
“As best it can be for now. What have I missed?”
“J.T. cut everyone else loose,” Pakar said, taking a moment to savor the vapors rising from her own mug. From where Alecha sat, it smelled mostly of burning pitch. “No value in keeping them here until a final decision gets made. We couldn’t reach a consensus on if shutting Tieralyene’s core down would render the ship safe, but there aren’t many alternatives on the table.”
Alecha gestured to the flotilla of datapads. “What’s all this?”
Jadyn didn’t look away from the tablet currently earning his attention. “Individual notes from the meeting and a few to-do items I don’t want to forget. I’m sincerely hoping to draw out an alternate cause of all the problems.”
Tari placed another mug in front of Jadyn before sitting down with her own. “I don’t think I’ve seen you this focused on anything, Jay… Not sure I like this deadly serious side of you.”
“He was always like this when he was studying,” Alecha said, taking a sip of her tea and savoring the warm notes of citrus and spice.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask about that.” Pakar leaned forward, ready for gossip. “Were you one of his instructors back in the day? Any delightfully embarrassing stories to share?”
“Not particularly,” Alecha replied, grinning at Pakar’s pouting disappointment. “I only occasionally instructed him before I switched my long-term career plans to the colony effort. I do recall a few times I saw him engrossed in the study of a manuscript, or something in the Concatenations. I don’t think he moved for hours aside from turning pages or making notes. He took studies almost too seriously. From what I could tell before I left, Melichanni really helped break him out of that rut.”
“Yes,” Jadyn said, a smile breaking through while he continued to rearrange his notes. “Yes, she did.”
Alecha darted a glance at Tari, making her best effort to stay stone-faced. “What about you? I can only assume that you don’t have a serious bone in your body, yet someone thought it a brilliant plan to put you in charge of our ship?”
“Yeah,” Tari admitted, turning her mug in circles. Chocolate notes wafted from within. “I’ve never had the responsibility of caring for a pet fish, let alone a starship full of colonists. Someone will eventually ask me for real leadership decisions and I don’t know what I’ll do.” She waved her finger scoldingly at Alecha, who was just starting to open her mouth. “Don’t you dare.”
“Perish the thought, Captain.” Alecha smirked, focusing on the reflections in her own beverage. “In all seriousness, I meant what I said during the meeting. At this moment you have as much right to be in command of the ship as Jadyn or I or even Kaler.”
“But…” Tari shook her head. “Look. Everyone in this room knows I’m not—”
“Stop. There’s more to being Val’Traxan than just looking the part. Back home, we adopted a number of outsiders into our culture. Some were better at integrating than others. It isn’t hard to tell the difference between a tourist and someone really trying to fit in. We haven’t known each other very long, but I’m already confident that when you inevitably find yourself required to make a snap decision on our behalf, you’ll make the one we’d have made.”
Tari’s ears flicked back in embarrassment. “Thank you. With you and Jadyn around, I doubt I’ll be making many of those decisions alone.”
“On an unrelated note.” Pakar stirred her drink with a finger, glancing around at the still-darkened walls. “Why do we still have this place lit like an interrogation room?”
“Thought it might help to not see the walls while staring down this mess.” Jadyn stretched his arms over his head, grumbling as he worked out some tension. “Isn’t working. Aerin, resume normal lighting.”
The bright illumination over the table faded as regular lighting across the rest of the room resumed. Alecha squinted, letting her eyes adjust to the new status quo. The room was adorned with a variety of photos, trinkets, and other mementos, all presumably artifacts of Jadyn’s personal journey across the galaxy. She let her eyes drift across the collection, gently turning in her chair.
And then, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted something impossible.
Waves crashed against a rocky shore, the ocean breeze lifting salty sprays of water up the cliffs. Orange fire painted the eastern sky and chased away the cool shadow of night. Dawn approached the Velorian island of Picuji. Uninhabited by anything but wildlife, the tiny dot of land was utterly isolated and all but forgotten.
The mefiritan-avatared AI had assured him no one would disturb this place, that Khamai’s final request could be carried out in unmolested peace. Anolis looked over to his son, watching his labored breathing. Vel’Halio’s original weeklong estimate rapidly deteriorated into only days, and then mere hours, as more and more of Khamai’s internal organs exhibited signs of failure. Khamai now barely clung to life, and would not hold off the Kshorah of Death much longer.
Anolis turned the thought over. At what point had he himself adopted the Val’Traxan pantheon as his own belief structure? Would the Eight even acknowledge his existence? Might they simply ignore him as some sort of aberration? The Val’Traxans themselves failed to define whether their AIs entered the After once their service was completed, whether an AI truly possessed a soul.
Perhaps the ones who built him had known something, and were simply afraid to share what they knew.
Perhaps more likely, they were simply afraid of being wrong.
“Father…” Khamai whispered. “I am sorry.”
Anolis squeezed his son’s hand, his eyes moving to the horizon. “As am I.”
“Do not let my and Iguano’s deaths end your work,” he rasped. “Your research… as well as our own experiments… may yet hold some use for the Val’Traxans. Perhaps they may succeed where we failed.”
Anolis raised an eyebrow. While he would expect such a thought from Iguano, this was somewhat strange coming from Khamai—even taking into account his mental recovery. “After all that has transpired, do you believe they are deserving?”
“I am still not fond of them,” he replied. “I cannot forgive what they did to us. Rather, to you. However… just as there is little sense that they hold you in contempt for my actions, there is little sense that you hold these survivors in contempt for the actions of their late brothers and sisters. Those who persecuted you… are long dead. One who defended you… is not.”
“Mm.” Truthfully, Anolis had already decided. Knowing that his remaining son agreed provided a sense of satisfaction. “Should the research be recoverable, they shall have it. Whether it is useful depends on their needs.”
A green flash appeared on the horizon, lasting a fleeting second before melting away into the golden yellows of morning’s first light. As the disk of the sun rose above the ocean, Khamai took a deep breath, savoring the salty air.
“Father,” he breathed, his gaze moving away from the horizon to the space before his hovering life support chair. “It is time. She can delay no longer. I am to tell you something first.”
Anolis peered at his son. “Of whom do you speak?”
A small smile lit Khamai’s face as he closed his eyes. “She says not to worry… You will see for yourself, someday.”
“We are alone here.”
Khamai drew one final breath, letting it out in contentment, and fell still. Several warnings sounded from the life support chair; Anolis silenced them and disabled the system, then turned back to the sunrise to contemplate the final words of his son.
Jadyn rubbed his eyes as the common room’s regular lighting returned. The mind-map was getting him nowhere. He knew he was simply delaying the inevitable. If stalling bought anyone time to find a better idea, he was all for it.
Pakar swirled her drink, a fresh shot of the vapors hitting Jadyn in the nose. The tall, steaming mug in her hand spewed forth a seemingly never-ending stream of noxious odors currently reminiscent of burnt beans and boiling turpentine. Drekiran ‘coffee’ was a peculiar thing. While naturally poisonous to most species—causing symptoms ranging from mild hallucinations to gastrointestinal trouble and worse—a drekiran’s digestive system possessed the ability to process the beans’ toxins into stimulants. This unfortunate fact originally confined the beverage to specialty shops serving primarily Drekiran clientele, and occasionally also those daring few who wanted to sample something ’exotic.’
And, of course, research laboratories.
An enterprising young graduate student at a local Velorian university had isolated several enzymes that dismantled the more hazardous compounds in the beans. Demand across the Aligned Worlds surged almost overnight. Despite the acrid taste, many non-drekirans now swore by the beverage for their morning pick-me-up. Drekiran coffee remained one of the most popular breakfast and lunch items sold in Jadyn’s bookstores.
He couldn’t stand the stuff. The awful flavor of smoldering tar permeating the thick, grainy texture always made him think that someone simply liquefied a pile of roadway construction materials and poured the result into a cup. Why replicators failed to flag the raw coffee as a biohazard still escaped him.
What a strange and wonderful coincidence it was that, despite his personal tastes, he’d heavily invested in both the university research to make the drink safe as well as in establishing exclusive supply contracts with local growers and roasters of the bean plants—well in advance of the final safety approvals.
The emerald-scaled drekiran eyed Jadyn sideways, noticing his brief attention while half-chewing a swallow of her drink. She’d probably never know that she’d inspired the whole effort.
Turning his thoughts back to more important things, Jadyn considered several notes describing the curious biotech failures aboard the J’Ruhn. Tari’s silent but visibly guilty reaction during the meeting hadn’t escaped him. If she truly was at fault for any of them, the act was hardly malicious. It probably wasn’t even intentional. Stressed and lacking any other major source to draw upon outside of herself, her spirit-side had likely depleted the minuscule traces of energy from the only plant-like things she came across. As scattered as the biotech component failures appeared, she must have randomly explored all over the ship.
That raised two new questions he couldn’t answer. First, could Tari safely board the J’Ruhn without accidentally harming other components in the future? Second, how had the cryopods’ biotech escaped unscathed? She’d likely been past the cold storage bays during her captivity. She’d also been inside more than one with him. The latter may not have caused issues due to their link—
“How in the grace of the Light and the Void did you manage to run off with that?” gasped Alecha.
Jadyn glanced up from the datapads, finding Alecha’s attention fully fixed upon the tapestry of Kshorahii Tarisali adorning the wall. The piece’s presence was now so familiar that he barely noticed it. Pakar had been standing in front of it during the meeting, and the lighting had been dimmed low. It was no wonder that Alecha hadn’t spotted it until now. Drekirans made far better walls than windows.
“I walked into the ruins of the temple, rolled it up, and carried it back to the ship,” he answered.
“But…” Alecha pinched herself between the eyes. “Ruins. Right. I still picture the temple the way I remember it… Not as a heap of rubble. So, this is now her last surviving work? Fitting, in a way.”
“I rescued the others.” With a gentle wave, he coaxed the pads holding biotech failure notes into proximity with each other. The data didn’t entirely fit with the problems stemming from a dying AI, but the possibility remained that they played a role. His other questions on ‘how’ they failed could wait.
Alecha stared blankly at Jadyn through his digital airshow, struggling to process what he’d just told her. “You’re… You have… the entire set of Vel’Neekuk’s tapestries of the Eight?”
“I recovered all nine pieces, yes.” A flick of his fingers sent the rest of the tablets shuffling around once again. Maybe a new arrangement would help spark an idea. Just because it hadn’t worked yet didn’t mean anything. “I felt like a looter when I did it. I couldn’t find anyone else willing to take them and keep them safe as a set. I swap out which one is on display once in a while, but I keep coming back to her portrayal of the Kshorahii.”
“Swap them…?” Alecha cradled her head in her hands. “You’re treating them like common pieces, stuffing them into storage…?”
Hanging one piece at a time in a starcutter with no room for a gallery hardly made them common. Before he could defend himself, Tari interjected a question.
“Who was Vel’Neekuk?” she asked. “When I first asked about this, Aerin said the artist was unknown.”
“Really? Mmm… I suppose that’s technically accurate, depending on which scholar you ask.” Alecha gazed at the image, gathering her thoughts in the brief pause. “Faeymu Neekuk was quite possibly the most talented textile artist in all of Val’Traxan history. She was never part of the Guild, but I believe she possessed a latent talent for the Art that went undiscovered during her lifetime.”
Alecha gestured at the tapestry. “This… The weaving, the composition, all of it is very well done… But it’s far above and beyond a simple woven image. Neekuk both literally and figuratively wove the Art into her creations. There’s an especially strong presence in the pieces portraying the Kshorah. Sometimes, I really believe each of the Eight is looking back at me from their portrait.”
“I’ve found that same feeling in this one,” Tari said. “It creeps me out a little if I look at it for too long. I can’t think of any works of art quite this haunting back home. How many pieces did she make like this?”
Alecha scratched the side of her muzzle. “Maybe sixty-four? She didn’t take attribution for much of what she created. Of her anonymous works, the best preserved are these depictions of the Eight. The nine tapestries Jadyn saved are likely the last surviving examples of her work.”
Tari fidgeted with her cup, turning it in place on the table. “This is probably a dumb question. If there are eight Kshorah…”
“Why are there nine pieces?” Alecha supplied. “The final tapestry of the set is a group portrait of the Eight. It is a curious piece of work, though.”
“How so?”
“It’s hard to explain. All the Kshorah are accounted for, but the balance of the piece gives the impression that she almost made space for one more. Hopefully, someone will dust it off and show it to you when the mood suits him.” Alecha grunted to herself, sliding out of her chair. Stepping before the tapestry, she bowed her head in respect and whispered a quiet prayer. While most of her words fell just out of his hearing, Jadyn had little trouble picking out her slightly louder apology for his thoughtless treatment of their depictions.
Finishing her moment of respect, Alecha lifted her head and took another look at the work. Abruptly, her ears flattened back against her head. Moving to her chair, she turned it slightly back toward the table. The tapestry remained in her line of sight while she tried to simultaneously steal a discreet peek at Tari.
The snowy vixen returned a wry smile. “Would it help if I stand beside it so you can make an actual comparison? For lack of a star and a planet, I can grab a light globe and a rock to strike a similar pose.”
“No, no… I’m sorry. Having Her likeness should be a compliment. I’ve made it seem like anything but that, I’m sure. I’ve really tried not to think about it, but it is difficult to ignore how much you look alike when this is right in front of me.”
Tari turned an expectant gaze in Jadyn’s direction. Under the weight of her glare, he scribbled himself a simple reminder on a blank datapad: ‘Swap out tapestry in common room.’ Putting out the group portrait wouldn’t help—the Kshorahii’s image would still be present. Maybe it was time to put the ship’s namesake, the Kshorah of the Light, back on display?
Then again, another of the Eight would only delay the problem. Perhaps something more mundane would be better. A picture of some flowers, or a novel abstract piece.
T’bia’s avatar materialized beside Jadyn, distracting him from the decision by placing another datapad in front of him. “These are the latest scans from Tier’s active core. In short: She does still appear to have a level of influence over some ship systems. I doubt she actually knows what she’s doing or what’s going on around her in any meaningful way. Sanusin kept control over her through the malicious code, but even trying to leverage that hole won’t help us anymore. Our presence on the ship combined with his absence aggravated her condition. She will suffer a complete systems failure soon. That said, we can in fact shut her down as one solution to the immediate security issue. I strongly doubt we will ever be able to start her back up.”
“Terrific,” Jadyn muttered. Scanning through the pad’s contents, he gave a sad shake of his head. “First Iguano, then Khamai, now Tier. Not a good few weeks to be a child of our technology. And that’s not even counting your brief bout of illness.”
“I got better,” the AI replied. “That’s more than I can say for most of the others.”
“Khamai’s gone too?” Tari asked. “I noticed Kaler in his spot.”
“Bee told me yesterday he’d pass by this morning.” Jadyn blinked, looking at the AI. “Wait, no… You said gone.”
“That is what I said, yes.” T’bia stared at him with that ever-so-fake blank and innocent expression. “What’s your point?”