Conics Unfortunately: 36

The floating garden was a monster of a room. According to a small placard at the main entrance, the walls stretched radially almost fifty meters towards the center of the station and then another 100 meters below the main floor, and the numerous terraces replicated a wide array of gravitational forces. The multi-colored plants native to the hydrogen floaters’ home planet hovered mid-air in every direction.

At the main terrace level, most of the plants came in shades of indigo, probably a product of how their native atmospheric layer refracted light. When Ellipse looked up, where gravity’s pull was weaker, she saw plants in purples and whites, and down past the glass floor floated plants ranging in color from light blue to red to black. Add to that the diverse selection of shapes and sizes, and the garden felt like being eaten by a kaleidescope.

“There’s a green layer right down there,” Tejal said, pointing at a mass of green behind the bulbous, tulip-shaped blue plants under the floor. “Should we check it before we go elsewhere? I feel like that’d be a good hiding place for a specifus.”

“Can we even get there?” Ellipse asked. She held up her watch and squinted at the tiny map on her screen. “I do not see an elevator.”

“You could jump,” Tejal said.

With all the floaty plants in the way, Ellipse could not even see the next floor down. No way was she jumping. She opened her mouth to tell Tejal off when Focci tapped her leg. “What,” she snapped.

He pointed past a giant, upside-down-iris-looking plant, where a black ladder hung down from the floor above. It was clearly recycled from an old earthling fire escape, and with all the glass and metal, the ladder looked like an out-of-place afterthought.

“Focci,” Ellipse sang, “you remember that I am the only one here who can climb that, right?”

“I know that.” He turned to Tejal and prodded at the pouch hanging off the back of Tejal’s chair. “Your tablet can do ultraviolet interpretation, right?”

A few moments later, after Mouthbot finished speaking from the tablet, Tejal reached over and pulled it out. “It has a couple different light interpretation methods, actually.” He pulled up the camera app and pointed his tablet up at the white and purple plant layers, then tapped a series of icons. “Why do you want ultraviolet?”

Oh, Ellipse understood. “Sirens have eye structures that work the same as ours,” she explained, “with all the rods and cone-type things. But because the ocean drowns out colors at certain depths, sirens have an extra cone that senses ultraviolet light. Combined with their ability to read red, blue, and green, the UV cone adds to their color spectrum in a way that we cannot even imagine.”

“Huh,” Tejal said. He tapped a final icon and shifted the tablet over so Focci could see. “Is that good?”

Focci nodded. “Can you make it so Ellipse can see? I have heard earthlings sometimes develop ultraviolet photography in black and white.”

Tejal tapped a few more things, and Ellipse crouched to see. The photo turned to greyscale, and all of the white plants at the top stayed white, while the lower levels began to show spots and lines where the plants could absorb ultraviolet radiation.

“Take this down to the green level,” Focci instructed, “and look for a pattern that differs from the rest of the surroundings. Specifus tend to have thick surface veins that you can see with ultraviolet reflection and they do not have the reflective surfaces that Un plants have.”

“Okay,” Ellipse said, accepting the tablet from Tejal. She held it out to look at the indigo plants on the main level and frowned. “How am I supposed to climb a ladder while carrying this?”

Tejal reached over the back of his seat and detached the pouch where he stored the tablet. “There are two straps on this for holding it to the chair,” he said. “Pull them through your belt loops or something.”

Ellipse handed back the tablet and took the pouch. She felt silly with the fabric hanging against her butt, but she could handle looking stupid for a few minutes. Besides, it did not seem like many other people were hanging around the garden. Because of its inaccessible design, it was not exactly a major tourist attraction.

Once the tablet was in her butt-fanny-pack, the boys bid her goodbye, and she hefted herself over the main floor’s guard rail. Ellipse descended a few rungs of the icky fire escape ladder and then stopped.

“Wait,” she called. “What do I ask if Max is here?”

Tejal wheeled towards her. “They were the pilot, right? I just want a summary like last time, and then ask if there was any kind of resistance when they pulled the small generator through the other fold.”

“Anything else?” Ellipse sang, turning to Focci. She clenched the ladder and tried to will away the sweat on her palms.

He shook his head. “My questions are probably best asked of Ami. Go on.”

“Okay then. Shout if you come up with anything.” She kept climbing down, past blue tulips and teal vines, and then reached a terrace covered in powdery lime green moss. At this level, the gravity was just slightly stronger than earth’s, and as Ellipse traipsed through the powder, the tiny plants swirled around her feet like glitter in water. Overhead hung the vines which were strung across the gaps between squarish, translucent green air sacs that dripped with dark emerald fern fronds. Under the floor, and occasionally visible through the swirling moss, was a sea of yellow flowers that looked like phlox but with tiny air bubbles as the petals.

A small family of avians wearing lavish jewelry burst up from the next level down, sending the green layer into a tangle of particles and vines. Ellipse almost gasped, but then covered her nose and mouth and waited for the moss to settle back onto the ground. She pulled out the tablet as soon as the surroundings were quiet again and held it up to a particularly thick clump of vines.

In the ultraviolet display, all she saw was the vines and and the bright white dashes that coated their surfaces. She turned a full three-sixty, looking for dark spots, and decided that Max was not in this area.

But just as she moved her hand to turn off the tablet so she could move to a different section of the floor, Ellipse spotted a figure hidden behind one of the green air sacs. Though washed out by the dim white glow from the floating plants, she could see the telltale dark veins of a specifus, and so she headed that way.

“Ellipse!”

That was Focci. Keeping the tablet trained on the specifus, she tilted her head up and sang back.

“What?”

“Specifus bounty hunters! I think they are Maj’s friends from Sauron.”

Heck. Clucking her tongue, Ellipse lowered the tablet and opened up a drawing pad. She scribbled out Tejal’s question and the address of the Europa safe house, and then tucked the tablet into her butt pouch. Taking care not to stir up the moss too much, she pulled on her gloves and scurried towards the specifus in the plants until she was close enough to pick them out from between the vines and air sacs.

Max, if this individual was truly the Impending shuttle pilot, had curled their roots up between their curling green trunk and smooth limbs, but Ellipse already knew where to look. The specifus in hiding sat wedged between two masses of vines, closed in on both sides by the green sac-plants. When Ellipse stood underneath them, she saw the vines move, and she jumped to action.

She leapt onto the nearest frond and pulled herself up, aided by the way the tiny leaves bunched up under her fists. Her shifting weight jerked down the floating air sac, which in turn threw off the specifus’s balance, and as Ellipse reached the vines, she saw the specifus’s roots unfurl so they could grab onto a frond from a higher sac-plant.

That was definitely Max, since they were trying to run. Ellipse swung herself onto a thick, net-like clump of vines and reached out for a vine that had not quite attached itself to another plant. She gave it a tug, found it acceptably stable, and threw herself off the net.

Her little Tarzan stunt forced Max to steady themselves with another limb. Then, as Ellipse’s vine hit the apex of its swing, she let go and flew towards Max’s hanging frond. As she hit, she slid down a bit, popping off fern leaves as she fell, but she managed to stop before falling too far. She looked up to find Max quivering, stretched between vines and fronds that had drifted apart, and gave a sigh of relief. She had caught them.

“Bounty hunters on the ladder!” Focci sang.

Ugh. Maj’s friends needed to chill. Grunting, Ellipse hauled herself up to Max’s level and pulled out the tablet. She turned it on and flipped it so the vine-like specifus hanging in the garden could read it.

“Max,” she had written, “I am not a bounty hunter. My friend wants to know if there was any resistance just before you attempted to pull the fold generators through each other. Find passage to the moon Europa and give this address to any driver, and you will be safe.”

The specifus tugged on their handholds, and the two lines of lights embedded in their main trunk flashed. “Prove I can trust you first.”

She only had two hands. Ellipse could not flash a response back. As she racked her brain for a solution, she heard Focci’s voice float down again.

“They are on the green level! If Max is there, get them out!”

Ellipse slid the tablet back into the pouch and made the I-am-watching-you sign at Max. She lowered herself down the frond and peered into the mass of green.

The broccoli-shaped specifus came into view first—their texture was different enough from everything else that they were easy to spot—and then the wrinkly bonsai specifus. The team split in two, with three members in one group and two in the other, and the broccoli and bonsai specifus headed straight towards Ellipse.

“That earthling looks vaguely familiar,” the broccoli one flashed.

“It does have the same garments as the one at Savra Station.”

Ellipse glanced up for a moment, to make sure Max had stayed, and then let herself drop to the ground. She rummaged through her pockets and pulled out her light box. “Hey! We meet again!” she flashed. “I saw you talking about me.”

“It is the one from Savra,” Broccoli confirmed.

“What kind of criminal are you looking for this time?” Ellipse asked. Hopefully her speed was right and she sounded innocent.

Bonsai-specifus curled their wrinkly limbs down, irritated. “Keep your roots out of this. Para, continue searching for Max.”

“Yes Captain,” the broccoli specifus replied. They glided past Ellipse and into a different grove of floating plants.

Ellipse watched them leave and turned back to the bounty hunter captain. “If you are looking for another specifus, do you not think this is a super obvious place to hide?”

The captain’s vines unfurled a little.

“I mean, we earthlings are not designed for camouflage, so I would not know how that all works, but you all are smart. You know that obvious things are wrong a lot.”

Vines twisting inward in contemplation, the bonsai specifus considered Ellipse’s point. “True,” they conceded. “Our first guesses are typically wrong in this line of work.” They began to move again, to follow Para and maybe call them back, but the captain stopped at Ellipse’s side. “Give Maj my regards,” the bounty hunter flashed.

Then they continued along, roots carrying them across the floor. As soon as they were out of view, Ellipse glanced up.

Max had vanished, of course. They had probably used Ellipse’s conversation as a diversion in order to escape. But then Ellipse noticed something falling towards her. It was a blue scrap from the plants one level up, tied up by a young frond so it would fall straight down, and as it neared her, Ellipse held out her palms and caught the scrap.

She untied the frond and unrolled the blue plant scrap. Carved into the surface was a message from Max in the braille-like specifus language.

“Heavy resistance, engines at full,” Max had written. “Thank you.”