20. Don’t Get Me Wrong
TWENTY
DON’T GET ME WRONG
The Canoplyn Glider rescue was Charlie's fourth mission, and the first one where she didn't have to remind herself to breathe during the shuttle take-off.
When Charlie first saw them, she felt she had found her spirit animal.
The creatures were massive and heartbreakingly beautiful, with wingspans wider than the shuttle bay.
Their translucent membranes stretched between elongated forelimbs.
What Charlie couldn't get over was that those membranes caught thermal currents and turned flight into something close to music.
However, the three they were rescuing had been found in a decommissioned research facility on a moon the Coalition had flagged for environmental cleanup.
Gratefully, someone had called Admiral Vondra to send the Emberkind out before the cleanup.
The crew discovered the Gliders in enclosures too small, with their thermals gone cold and their wings folded in on themselves trying to maintain a temperature they could live through, looking like origami left out in the rain.
Charlie's job for this mission was to contain the environmental for transport to the Emberkind.
Essentially, the same job she'd completed for the Aetherfin.
This job, or something similar, was one she'd done three times now.
She knew the protocols, knew how to calibrate the atmospheric seals, and knew exactly which pressure tolerances the shuttle bay could handle during reentry.
Funny how over two months ago, Charlie had been the human they picked up on the side of the galaxy highway who didn't know which panel opened the airlock.
Now, she was the engineer crawling underneath a containment unit, rerouting its thermal regulator because the factory settings were calibrated for a species half this size, and not set to adjust for the thin membranes on the Gliders' wings.
"Wickett," Torvax's voice came through comms from the bridge. "Captain wants you to adjust the thermal gradient to compensate for the wing membrane—"
"Already on it, Commander," Charlie answered, pulling herself out from under the unit.
She went straight to the console and checked her readings.
Something didn't look right. All the numbers were correct, everything would work as it should, but Charlie felt that the default timespan to change the temperature for the Gliders wasn't slow enough to really remove any chance of panic for the creatures.
Their shuttle trip back had more time than was programmed to temperature change.
So why had it just been set to the default?
Immediately, Charlie knew the answer. Cael. Most likely, he just left it at what was passable, instead of thinking through what would happen on the ground.
So, Charlie opened up the code and data and did something she wouldn't have two months ago. She overrode the standard gradient curve and programmed a custom one, tapering the temperature change across a longer window. Sure, standard protocol would have worked. Cael's plan would have been okay.
But frankly, hers would work better. And the Gliders would be happier.
"Wickett," Torvax's voice again.
"Yes, Commander?"
"Captain wants to know if you changed the gradient curve."
A beat of silence on comms.
"Yes, I did, Commander."
"And we want to confirm you're seeing the same readings we're seeing up here. Are you showing a 98.7% adaptability rate, compared to the 89% showed in the data earlier?"
"I can confirm, Commander."
The lines went quiet again.
"Good call, Wickett," Reyna said, her voice coming through comms.
Charlie felt those three words in a way she didn't expect.
"Thanks, Captain."
Suddenly, Tavi was standing at the side of her console, grinning at her.
"That's strike one, Spark Plug."
"Strike one for what?" Charlie asked, but Tavi was already walking over to Maren's console, laughing quietly to himself.
Back on the Emberkind, Maren appeared by the console stations. She'd been assigned to help Charlie log the rescue parameters for the new Canoplyn Glider habitat setup.
Charlie pulled up the environmental readings from the rescue on her console. "Maren, you're about to be a lifesaver. I was told you can help me with schematics?"
"That's correct."
"That's such a relief. Okay, so then I need the exact atmospheric composition from the original Glider enclosure, the full numeric value of the adjusted gradient I programmed during the transfer, and the readings from the first hour in the new habitat. Do you have those from the shuttle logs?"
Maren sat down at the adjacent console. Her eyes moved across the data, and Charlie witnessed the action behind Maren's eyes.
A shimmer of light, subtle at first that then turned into a cascade of iridescent color rippling across as Maren's Eye Shimmer activated.
Finally, it brightened, and Charlie watched Maren's eyes capture and keep light in a way that made them look like they contained entire galaxies.
Maren caught Charlie looking and the shimmer dimmed immediately. "Sorry, I can just read the logs normally if you prefer."
"Why would I 'prefer' that?" Charlie asked, utterly confused by the statement. "Whatever you just did was... amazing! What was that?"
Maren turned to face Charlie fully. When she did, her eyes flickered again.
"That," she said, "is my brain filing this conversation."
Charlie blinked. "You did it again? Right now?"
Maren nodded gently. "Yeah. Everything I see, hear, and feel gets captured and then put in my memory, permanently.
It's not like I have a 'good memory.' It's fully permanent.
For instance, Charlie Wickett from Shelbyville, Indiana, United States, who went to California Institute of Technology and worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. "
Charlie's eyes wouldn't blink. Maren laughed softly. "I remember every word you've said to me since the day you landed in Borran's kitchen, in chronological order, with full context, including what you were wearing and even what the room smelled like."
"That's..." Charlie searched for the word. "You can remember all of that? Including what you just read on those shuttle reports? Exactly?" Charlie was still reaching. "Every reading?"
Maren's eyes fell to her lap and her whole demeanor shifts. "It makes some people feel uncomfortable."
Charlie sat up in her chair. "Maren, it makes me want to hire you as my accomplice to every activity I ever have in my whole life!" And she meant it.
Charlie's hands went up to her head, where she held her forehead. "That's incredible! Don't dim that on my account. Seriously. Ever."
Something shifted in Maren's posture. Her shimmer returned, brighter this time, and held.
"The original atmospheric composition was 78.
2% nitrogen, 18.4% oxygen, 2.1% argon, and 1.
3% trace elements including elevated krypton from the moon's volcanic vents," Maren said, without looking at the screen.
"The adjusted gradient you programmed tapered the temperature change across 4.
7 minutes instead of the standard 2.2. The Gliders' membrane response was 0.
3 degrees behind real-time, which is why you extended the window. "
Charlie stared at her. "I'm going to need something to write with and get that all down. But you got all that from a glance during the rescue?"
"I got all that from standing near the shuttle bay door for eleven seconds."
"Maren."
"Yes?"
"You're terrifying. And I mean that as the highest compliment I could give."
A small smile touched Maren's lips. "Depending on what I'm doing, the intensity can change.
Right now it's gentle because we're talking and I'm cataloguing at a normal pace.
But when I'm learning something new, processing and diving deep into the material, it gets brighter and stays lit while I'm working through it.
" She paused. "There are times, sometimes, especially when a memory has weight to it, it can carry color. "
"Color?" Charlie asked, her voice in awe.
"Usually warm tones for the good ones. Cooler for..." She trailed off and her shimmer dimmed for just a moment before returning. "The memories to erase if you could."
That made Charlie go quiet, because she heard what Maren wasn't saying.
"You can't erase any of it," Charlie said gently.
"No," Maren responded quietly. "Every conversation I've ever had, I remember word for word.
Every face I've seen, even just once. Every language I've heard spoken, even yours, I could learn it in a day if I needed to by just listening.
" The shimmer flickered, and Charlie watched as something softer moved through.
"Every mistake I've ever made. Every loss or moment of grief, remains exactly as vivid as the day it happened.
It never fades or dulls. It's just... there. All of it. Always."
"Maren," Charlie whispered.
"It's okay." Maren said it so quickly, Charlie wasn't sure if it was for her benefit or Maren's.
"As a species, Noethans learn to manage it.
As children, we learn forgiveness before we even learn math.
We've learned that when you can't forget, you have to get very intentional about what you choose to carry forward.
" She looked over at Charlie. "I can't control what I remember.
But I can control what I dwell on. That's the whole practice. Choosing the warm tones."
Charlie looked at Maren's eyes. "For what it's worth," she said, "I'm glad you're filing this one."
Maren's shimmer brightened. Warm tones.
"Me too, Charlie."
Later that day, Cael had reassigned Charlie from work she was engaged in doing, work she was good at and that mattered, to a cargo bay inventory in the aft section.
It was busy-work and they both knew it. Charlie knew already, even as a human on a Coalition space vessel, that this was the kind of task you gave a first-week apprentice, not the engineer who'd solved the Aetherfin pressurization in eleven minutes.