Otters in space 2, p.21
Otters In Space 2, page 21
Then she moved her tentacles in the familiar sign language they shared with the otters: "What do you mean?"
Kipper found it comforting to think that Emily might find this sunken base under the surface of Europa as mysterious and alien as she did. Even if it did look like it had built perfectly to the specifications of Emily's tentacled body.
Kipper signed, "I think this place was built by octopi."
Emily blinked. Twice. Then signed, "I can read some of the writing in these computers."
Kipper looked at the panels surrounding them. She hadn't noticed writing on them. They were lit up with moving squiggles. She supposed it could be writing. "Is it octopus writing?"
"Yes," Emily signed. "It's very ancient, but I studied some when I was a mother."
Kipper and Emily had discussed the different meaning of the word "mother" in the octopus culture before. Emily was referring to the time when she was still fertile, before she'd laid her clutch of eggs, done the unthinkable for a female -- namely, surviving their maturation -- and become an outcast who lived among otters. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise Kipper that Emily didn't feel at home in a world built for octopi. She hadn't felt at home among the octopi living under Earth's oceans either.
"Can you tell what any of these controls do?" Kipper signed.
"I'm a chef," Emily signed. "Not a physicist. And this looks like physics."
Kipper peered at the squiggles. They writhed and danced, little worms of light, playing with her vision. They didn't look like physics, not to her, but, if they did to Emily, then maybe they were. "You're not a pilot either," Kipper signed. "But you got us here. Now, if you can figure out what this place is... Maybe turn on some life support? I dunno, but there are cats dying up there on the surface, and there must be some way we can use this place to help them. Maybe as a bunker to shelter refugees from the raptor attacks?"
The rectangular pupils of Emily's eyes narrowed: a look of determination, recognizable across species. "Aye, captain," she signed, a slightly mirthful writhe in her tentacles at the use of Kipper's newly earned title. Then all eight of her appendages shot into action, reaching around Kipper, working the control panels in every direction. The tendril thin tips of her tentacles traced out delicate squiggles of light, writing her own commands in this octopus language, while the larger sucker discs at the trunks of her arms worked dials and switches. It was amazing and wonderful how much her eight tentacles could do at once.
Kipper had always been impressed by the way that Emily's arms flew into action, wielding knives, kneading dough, cooking an entire meal and several appetizers in the Jolly Barracuda kitchen at once. This was the same but with alien computer consoles, and all Kipper could do was stand there and watch, trying not to worry about the kittens in New Persia.
Chapter 29: Earth
In the hidden base on Europa, the minutes passed like hours, but back on Earth the hours passed like minutes. Trudith's apartment had become the spontaneous headquarters for her scramball team's efforts. Dahlia and several of the other dogs, at Trudith's request, had brought laptop computers with them. Now they crouched around the different computer screens haphazardly arranged on the coffee table. Clips of Kipper played on all the screens.
Trudith had opened up the entire video history of conversations she'd had with Kipper to the team, and they combed through them, scene by scene, looking for snatches of conversations, brief phrases, that could be used in their campaign.
Of course, the crowning jewel of all the clips would still be the clip where Kipper told everyone to "vote for Brighton." Dahlia believed Kipper's word would carry more weight if they came at the end of a longer campaign. Dahlia meant to release a series of short videos to increasingly prominent news sources. The first ones would be leaked to the public, as if they were meant to be kept underground. By the end, top news channels would be clamoring for exclusive first access.
Each video in the series would close on a black screen that read, "Kipper Brighton: The Hero of Europa," and would feature short snatches of Kipper and Trudith's conversations together. Mere moments. The briefest moments, chosen carefully to leave the viewers wanting more of Kipper, just the way that Trudith always did.
Dahlia meant to make the disenfranchised cats and underdogs of Earth love Kipper. Then, in the last video, Kipper would tell them how to vote, and the final black screen would read,
"Kipper Brighton: The Hero of Europa
Alistair Brighton: The Hero of Earth?"
Trudith didn't know if Dahlia's advertising campaign would work, but it gave her chills to hear Kipper's voice repeating lines of their conversations over and over again from each of the computers. She also noticed as the afternoon progressed into evening, more and more of her teammates asked her questions about Kipper. They wanted to hear the stories about the Hero of Europa.
The most important story about her hadn't ended yet. Trudith began to realize that Kipper wasn't carrying only her own burdens on her shoulders but also the weight of Alistair's election. If Kipper could save all those cats on Europa, she really would be a hero, and Alistair could easily ride the wave of her success into office.
If she didn't...
Trudith shuddered. She couldn't think about her friend not coming home.
Chapter 30: Europa
For all the responsibility hanging on her shoulders, Kipper stood uselessly in the dark, watching Emily's spacesuit-wrapped tentacles fly around, working the panels. The glowing lights on the panels danced, and Kipper watched their reflections play across the bubble of helmet over Emily's eyes. None of it meant anything to her, but clearly it meant something to Emily.
Kipper's paws itched to sign questions at Emily: "What are you learning? What does it say? Can we use this base for anything?" But she kept her paws to herself, endeavoring to stay out of Emily's way and keep from distracting her. It would do her no good to act like an impatient kitten, swatting at anything she saw just to evoke a reaction.
Emily's tentacles slowed to a halt, and she turned her eyes to look at Kipper. There was concern in the creases of her skin. That faceless expanse that nonetheless was her face.
Impatience bubbled out of Kipper, and she signed, "Is there life support? Can you fill this place with some kind of atmosphere?" She still hoped to turn the underground base into a bunker to protect New Persians.
Emily shrugged, a gesture that always looked impressive on her many-armed body but that was incredibly frustrating to Kipper right now. "There are a lot of controls," Emily signed. "I don't know how long it will take me to understand them."
Kipper sighed. Maybe they could load New Persians into space suits and hide them down here anyway. It wouldn't be comfortable, or a long term solution, but it would be safer than that unprotected city on the surface.
"Kipper," Emily signed, "I'm confused. Everything on these control panels points toward one thing. It's like a big red button in the middle with giant arrows pointing at it. But, I don't know what the button does."
"What do you mean?" Kipper signed. She didn't see anything like a big red button on the smooth panels, laced with intricate glowing squiggles all around them.
"I think this base was built with one big purpose," Emily signed. "Like a nuclear power plant -- turn it on, and it will generate nuclear energy. Except, I don't know what this base is designed to do. If I turn it on, it will do something, but I don't know what."
Kipper thought about that. "Could it be a power plant?"
"Could be," Emily signed. "I don't understand all the physics. I think it generates electro-magnetic waves or a field? Or maybe it's gravity? Some sort of..." She shrugged again.
The roots of Kipper's ears prickled and she felt the tip of her tail start twitching against her leg in the spacesuit. "Could it be a weapon?" Perhaps something that could shoot down the raptor vessels.
Emily's expression was unreadable. "If it is, I don't know if I'll be able to control it."
That could be dangerous. If they started up a planetary defense system down here in the dark, might they accidentally shoot down the Jolly Barracuda? Would that casualty be worth it if they saved an entire colony of New Persians?
When it came down to it, Kipper realized, she was responsible for the final decision. It was better not to over think it. "Press the red button," she signed.
Emily signed in the affirmative, showing she understood. Then her tentacles flew into a whirl, filling the alcove they shared with writhing motion. The glowing squiggles on the panels began dancing again. Apparently, the metaphorical big red button was pretty metaphorical, because Emily's eight tentacles did something a lot more complicated than pushing a single button.
As Emily worked, the lights embedded in the material of the walls of the giant room brightened. Kipper saw better, but nothing else changed. Nothing Kipper could sense anyway. Eventually Emily stopped.
"Is that it?" Kipper signed. "Did it work?"
"I don't know," Emily signed. Her tentacles drooped, expressing the same disappointment that Kipper felt.
"We can't even tell if it did anything," Kipper signed. She felt a huge temptation to start pawing at the control panels herself, as if her random interference was more likely to produce an interesting result than Emily's careful work.
Kipper jumped in surprise as a robotic voice spoke in her ear. "Jolly Barracuda to Kipper, this is Jenny. Kipper come in."
Kipper's startled jump had sent her sailing in the low gravity. She scrabbled uselessly with her paws in the air trying to catch herself midflight and cried out inarticulately.
"Kipper?" the robot said. "Is that you? Please speak clearly. The voice-to-text translation made complete gobbledygook of your last transmission."
Kipper landed several alcoves over from Emily, who was peeking over the top of her alcove to watch Kipper's inelegant flight. Kipper spat at her, ineffectively, and then regained her composure enough to say, "Jenny? You sound like a robot. Please tell me that the raptors haven't turned you all into robots."
The robotic voice replied with an eerie, "Ha, ha, ha." It sounded nothing like laughter. "No, I'm typing messages into a text-to-voice translator for electronic transmission to your spacesuit radio. We're still onboard in oxo-agua."
Kipper climbed over the honeycomb alcoves back toward Emily. As she climbed, she said for her radio, "Okay, well, things haven't gone as planned here."
Emily signed, "Are you okay?"
Kipper replied with her paws to explain the radio messages. She wondered if Emily's spacesuit was set up with any kind of radio receiver -- could she send and receive messages in text form? Kipper found her own otter-spacesuit confusing enough. She had no idea how Emily's octopus-suit worked.
"Look," Kipper said for the radio. "We got kind of sidetracked." She was preparing to explain the underground octopus base and her complete failure to organize the cats of New Persia into refugee groups.
Instead, the robot voice cut in to say, "Yes, we can tell you've been up to something."
"What do you mean?" Kipper said, her heart thumping and her tail fluffing. "Are you all okay?" They wouldn't be calling her on the radio if they'd been shot down by a planetary defense system, right? At least, not unless they'd survived it.
Out of respect to Emily, Kipper signed her words too as she spoke them; she translated the robotic words into signs for Emily as well.
"We saw the strangest thing happen to a pair of raptor vessels."
Kipper's paws followed along, signing as the robotic voice in her ear continued.
"We'd led the raptor ships away from Europa and then doubled back at full speed. When we got within sight of New Persia again, it turned out that a couple of raptor ships had broken off from chasing us and were already flying toward the surface. As they got close though, it was like they just crunched, like something invisible chewed them up and spat them out. Before either of the raptor ships could finish their descent, each of them exploded.
"We broke away and have entered a high level orbit."
There was a pause where Kipper and Emily stared at each other wide eyed. What had they turned on?
Kipper said and signed, "We found an underground base -- it seems to have been built for and possibly by octopi. We don't know what it does, but we turned it on, hoping it could help the New Persians. So... I guess that was us?"
Static sounds erupted in Kipper's ears. She expected it was the sound of a text-to-voice translator sputtering mashed keys of infuriation. She felt the pit of her stomach twist at the thought of how close she'd come to killing all her friends.
It was cold comfort that the octopus base had in fact done something to protect the New Persians. That had been her goal. She had succeeded. However, she realized, if she could go back in time twenty minutes, she wouldn't have the courage to do it again. It was too much of a risk. It had come too close to having too high a cost.
"Okay," the robotic voice said, "well, can you turn it back off to let us in?"
Emily signed to Kipper, "I think so."
"Yeah," Kipper relayed back to the radio in her helmet. "But, can you send some sort of test objects through before going through yourselves? 'Cause, I really don't want this to go wrong."
"No kidding," the robotic voice replied. "We don't either." After a moment of silence, the voice continued, "Felix says we can shoot crates of empty fish tins ahead of us to see how they fare."
Turning off the newly powered up base turned out to be harder than turning it on. Emily's tentacles whirled around Kipper, working their magic on the glowing squiggles. Nonetheless, one crate of fish tins after another crunched into a ball of scrap metal on the Jolly Barracuda's viewscreen. On one paw, this meant the New Persians were safe from the raptors. On the other, the Jolly Barracuda was trapped on the raptor side of a powerful force field, and the longer it took to let them in, the more raptors there would be ready to follow them.
One by one, the raptor ships returned to Europa. The first few threw themselves unwittingly against the standing gravity wave that now surrounded Europa a couple hundred miles above the surface. The crunched and exploded like the fish tins. The rest of the raptor ships wised up fast.
The Jolly Barracuda led the raptors in a complicated game of chase, hide and seek, and the occasional round of dodge ball at a high orbit. All the while, Felix kept hopefully lobbing empty fish tins toward the moon, and Emily tinkered with the mysterious glowing control panels.
The robotic voice in Kipper's ear couldn't convey frustration in its tone, but Kipper could hear it in her own voice. She knew the tension on the Jolly Barracuda must be rising when the robotic voice switched from Jenny's matter of fact updates to the enigmatic though flatly delivered line, "One fish short of a mackerel! Can't you two move any faster? We're a flamingo without a leg to stand on up here!"
"Captain Cod?" Kipper asked.
"Sorry, that was the captain, but this is Felix. There are enough raptors up here that I don't think you should shut down the force field for us even if you can."
Kipper swore under her breath. "What are you going to do? Fly away and leave us here?" She and Emily didn't have the resources to make it to New Persia on their own.
"Maybe, but I have an idea first. Since we can't shut down the whole field anyway, let's see if we can cancel out one part of it. That way, the Barracuda could fly through without all the raptors following us."
Unlike Emily and Kipper, Felix was an expert on physics, but he was trying to understand physics equations written in a language he didn't understand, on a console he couldn't see, translated into Swimmer's Sign by an octopus, relayed by a cat whose speech was being converted to text by the Jolly Barracuda's computer. It was not ideal. Not at all.
Nonetheless, Felix and Emily figured out how to send a directed gravity wave to cancel out a small part of the planet-wide wave, effectively creating a temporary opening. The Jolly Barracuda slipped through the opening. Several raptors vessels tried to follow the Jolly Barracuda, but Emily closed the field, crunching them, before they made it through.
Kipper's body flooded with relief when the robotic voice said, "We've landed next to Brighton's Destiny." She hadn't realized all her fur was fluffed out against her spacesuit until she felt the prickly sensation of it smoothing down.
"Emily sure did a number on the Destiny, but the captain says we'll put a team on repair duty, see if we can't fix that broken wing for you. This is Jenny again, by the way. We're also going to send a team to investigate the octopus base. Felix wants an up close look at those control panels."
"What about New Persia?" Kipper asked. Now that her friends were safe, he mind turned to all the cats and kittens who'd been scared and wounded by the raptor attacks. "They probably need medical aid. And, even after we get this base figured out, I bet a few of them will still want to go home. Force field or not, Earth is a lot safer than anywhere in Jupiter System right now."
The voice in Kipper's ear was quiet. As she waited to hear the captain's plan for dealing with New Persia, she found herself formulating her own plans. If there were too many cats who wanted to leave New Persia right away, there would need to be a hierarchy assigned to their level of need and perhaps a lottery to maintain fairness when the level of need was unclear or approximately equal. She'd never had so much power over so many people's lives before.
The next voice Kipper heard through her space helmet was Captain Cod's, buoyant and flamboyant, a huge contrast to the robotic monotone of the text-to-voice translator. The oxo-agua must have finished draining from his captain's quarters. "Skippy sandpipers, Kipper! Congratulations on a job well done! Now, I know you were planning to decommission, but before you do, I hope you'll accept a promotion."
Kipper's ears twisted uncomfortably against the otter-shaped ears on her spacesuit helmet. "A promotion?"
"I'm going to need some help sorting out the New Persians," Captain Cod said. "And I'll need your help. I'd like to promote you from Ship's Spy to Diplomatic Ambassador to Independent Cat Nations."
