Given the circumstances, I would be foolish to do otherwise.
Thirteen
I could only wait in the ship for so long before I set off to find Jorgen and the others. It wasn’t hard to find Jorgen at least, because I could feel his mind and follow in that direction. The passageways here were smooth and sterile, similar to the ones on Detritus, though these were structured more like large tubes than square halls.
Jorgen seemed to shift for a moment, and I wondered if he could sense me coming toward him.
And then— Alanik? he said in my mind.
Yes, I replied. You were able to establish contact.
It’s…similar to communicating with the slugs, but also different. It’s easier when Spensa establishes the connection first.
Have you spoken with Spensa recently? I didn’t know if she’d be able to communicate out of the negative realm the same way we communicated through it.
Yes, twice. Both times she kind of…appeared. But she wasn’t really there. Not like a hyperjump.
There was a kind of sadness that accompanied this. A wistfulness maybe.
You and Spensa are close, I said.
Another emotion joined the sadness. Embarrassment perhaps.
Oh, I said. You and Spensa are a mate pair?
A what? A…no, not a mate pair. I mean, there is no mating involved. I mean—
I laughed, and Jorgen’s voice disappeared from my mind. I thought he’d withdrawn intentionally, and if so that was good. He was learning even without my instruction. I’d found that was the best way, with cytonic powers. They weren’t learned directly so much as experienced and guided. Your mind knew what to do intuitively, if only you could get out of your own way and let it.
I caught up to some of the humans outside a room filled with instrumentation panels. Jorgen and Kimmalyn leaned in the doorway, watching FM as she pored over them.
“Did you find anything useful?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Jorgen said. “I don’t suppose you happen to be an engineer?”
“No, only a pilot,” I said. I approached and glanced at the buttons and switches FM was examining. “Do any of you have expertise?”
“Rig does,” FM said. “He might be able to tell us if any of this would activate a shield, or connect to a cytonic inhibitor.”
“Any of those would be useful,” I said.
FM looked over her shoulder at Jorgen. “As much as I’d love to ask Rig, I don’t know that dragging him into this is a good idea.”
“I wonder if we could get him out without anyone noticing,” Jorgen said. “If we had one of the slugs take us H-O-M-E…”
The pin translated that last bit as a set of letters, but I had no idea what they spelled in the human’s language. “What does that mean?” I asked.
Jorgen sighed. “It’s the word for the place where you live. FM accidentally made that the keyword for the slugs to take us back to Detritus.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” FM said. “It was a logical choice.”
“And we’re trying to get them to only do it if we say their names first as a command,” Jorgen continued. “But sometimes they mess up and someone says something like, I miss H-O-M-E, and their slug takes them to the engineering bay on Platform Prime. Which is only an inconvenience if they were, say, in the mess hall or something.”
Kimmalyn sighed. “But it’s a lot more annoying if you were about to climb into a cleansing pod, naked as the day you were born.”
“Not that she would know,” FM said.
“Bless the stars of those startled engineers,” Kimmalyn added.
“So now we’re reduced to spelling basic words,” Jorgen said. “When we could have picked something more unusual for the code word.”
“So you say the word,” I said, “and the slug hyperjumps with you? That’s convenient.”
“When it works it’s awesome,” Jorgen said. “When it doesn’t it’s annoying at best.”
“Humiliating at worst,” Kimmalyn said.
“It could be life threatening,” Jorgen insisted.
“Hey,” FM said. “You and Rig were the ones who said we should stick with the same word when we trained the rest of the slugs for simplicity’s sake.”
“We’re still working with them,” Jorgen said. “We only had a short time with them before you arrived. But so far they will all go H-O-M-E when they’re asked. Some of them will also take us out a couple of kilometers if we tell them to J-U-M-P.”