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All of a sudden a hundred other disjointed voices joined us on the ’qa—one after another after another—until it felt like I was swimming in them, their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams, their wisdom.
“Brother!” shouted the first kraken again, finally appearing—glowing for our sake, because I had cut my lights off to conserve energy. He took both of us in. “What is this? A human? Down here?”
Cepharius presented me, suit and all. “Her name is Elle. She is my mate,” he said, and the way he said it contained all the multitude of meanings it might have: that he loved me now, that he would love me forever, and that he would know great pain if anything were to happen to me.
I expected his brother to refute this, but he did not. Instead he glowed brighter. “I knew you were happy!” At least Cepharius was as confused as I was, as his brother went on. “You cut yourself off from the ’qa, but the ’qa was not done with you.” His brother moved to slap a broad hand across Cepharius’s shoulder, but then restrained himself. “I got a feeling not that long ago that you were happy, and I thought, if this thing were true, I needed to see it for myself! Then on the way here, we got your message and—what the pump is this?” he asked, gesturing behind us, before looking at me. “Excuse me for cursing.”
“You’re fine,” I said, biting back a grin.
“It’s a spaceship,” Cepharius told him. “Things have been complicated.”
“Let me see, let me see,” his brother said, holding out a hand.
Cepharius looked at it for a moment, and then took it gladly—and I could feel everything that’d happened since he and I had met, trickling over to him.
I knew his name was Balesur, that he was Ceph’s older brother, and that he really was a king.
“Yes, yes,” Balesur said, sorting through our memories—until he reached the end. “Oh, Ceph,” he said, looking at me with great sorrow.
“I cannot bear it alone this time,” Cepharius said.
“I’m also not dead quite yet,” I complained—just as the read outs on my helmet went dim, and the bail-out oxygen kicked on. “Well, I take that back. T-minus fifteen.”
Balesur was confused, but Ceph explained, finding the information more quickly in my mind. “It’s space talk,” he shared, before looking tenderly down at me.
“What can we do?” Balesur asked, and I got the impression that all of the krakens around were holding their breath on my behalf.
Then the ship rejoined our ’qa. “>”
chapter 66
CEPHARIUS
“With what?” I thought back angrily. It had already cost me my love, what else could it possibly want?
“Ceph,” Elle said, tempering me.
“We cannot >”
“What the pump—” Balesur began, raising the spear by his side.
“It’s the ship—it talks,” I said, waving a glowing arm to calm him.
“We have been here too >. We are >,” the ship thought out to everyone in the vicinity. “Our rescue > but they cannot come this >. We need to >”
“Trapped like how?” Elle asked, and received a picture of the ship trying to escalate. “Oh—I think that’s easy?” she said, searching out on the ’qa. “Remember how you broke down the rock, Ceph?”
“Ah, yes,” I said, transmitting that thought out to the rest of my countrymen. “It needs to be freed from ancient sediment.”
That was something useful to do, for everyone but me. My people swarmed the base of the ship and began tearing away the millennia of silt that had encased its bottom, while the entire thing kept glowing.
But I only had eyes for Elle.
“Let’s just disconnect this,” she said, reaching back to pop off her umbilical cable, still snuggled up against me. “And get it out of the way. It’s amazing.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and she laughed.
“All of them. You. That I even got to have this experience.”
