Atlantea

Intro

"You did not ask for this. But..." Kels paused for almost a full minute, trying to figure out how to make himself understood.

Jay waited patiently. Handling Kels was a learning experience every single time they made contact. The cold blooded Kels thought very slowly, but his intelligence was unquestionable. The neural interface augmentations were tweaked and improved after each encounter, but their interspecies vocabulary was still fairly limited, and Jay relied on intuition as much as anything else.

Kels finally moved. He was clearly indicating that he wanted to initiate another data transfer, but his motions were exaggerated. He repeated the moves several times, each time in larger motions that were more forceful.

Jay though he got the point. He directed his thoughts through the neurocom to Amy who was waiting inside their ship. "Hey, I think Kels wants to try another data dump. But can we connect the receptor to a larger buffer?"

Amy tapped a few buttons on her console. "How much larger are you looking for?"

"Whatever you can spare."

"You got it. I patched it through just now. Should hold whatever fishface wants to tell us this time."

"Hey... That's Mister Fishface to you. Or else next time you go swimming, I'm telling him to forget that time I explained the difference between you and a seal." Then Jay gave Kels the signal to begin the transfer.

Kels moved to the transfer interface, gracefully positioning his giant body into the cradle designed specifically for him. Jets moved water over his gills while he held unnaturally still and rolled his eyes back. As far as Jay knew, Kels was the only one of his kind to forgo his vision during transfers. Jay had decided to take this as a sign of trust. The connections for the receptor made a light contact with shark's skin, and the transfer started.

Amy checked the data stream and almost spat out the tea she was sipping. She nearly asked Jay to pause while she reconfigured things, but then decided against it. There was no way to know if Kels would do this twice. Her fingers flying over the screens and keyboard, she rerouted all the processing power and temporary memory available in their main computer over to the receptor. She watched the transfer progress, relatively slowly but seemingly never ending.

Almost an hour later Jay's voice startled her out of her daze. "I think he's almost done. His tail is starting to twitch." Sure enough, the transfer petered out over the next five minutes.

Outside the ship Kels gradually started sweeping his tail side to side, and slowly moving his fins. He took a few minutes to undulate his body, still in the cradle where his respiration was aided by the machine around him. Once he felt like his circulation was back to normal and he could move properly, he tentatively swam out.

Jay once again marveled at his partner's foresight. In the early days of experimentation, a shark had bolted out of a cradle only to almost suffocate when his muscles froze us after their period of inactivity. Luckily it had been a small shark, and his handler had been able to move him back into place under the water jets until he recovered. If something like that were to happen to Kels, there was a handheld water jet attachment to the cradle - because there was no way Jay could move the great white.

Kels hovered expectantly, then came closer to Jay than usual. Jaw gaping, his intent was clear. To make his point even clearer, he started using his interspecies communicator again. "Jay, that was very hard. You're going to feed me a lot. I want such a big fish. So much food. SOO MUCH! Or you might be tasty. Can I try you? Please?"

Jay laughed. The first time Kels had done something like this, Jay had almost soiled himself. Now he understood that it was as close as his partner's brain came to formulating a joke. And hey, the best jokes are those with a grain of truth. He pushed a few buttons on a panel, and Kels darted in to swallow the dispensed meal in one bite. Before Kels could gather himself sufficiently to complain that the amount was insufficient, Jay repeated the procedure again. And again. After the fourth time, Kels was moving less frantically. After the fifth, he simply swam off into the darkness.

Jay watched him go, and sent out "Thank you. Farewell, friend." As far as he knew, none of the augmented sharks cared much for goodbyes.

By the time Jay went through decompression and got himself a meal, Amy had almost finished processing the data. He brought her a burger, because he figured she'd be hungry and because he wanted to make sure she got a portion of the small amount of meat left. The stuff took forever to grow, no matter how they tweaked their synthesis vats.

Sincerely hoping that the info Kels had provided would be worth the crew eating a vegetarian diet for the next month, Jay walked over to Amy's console. He handed over her food, and sat down to eat his. She nibbled on it inattentively, focused on finishing the project in front of her. Eventually she leaned back and cursed.

"Your friend outdid himself. We should have given him a real life cow for this. Wait... " She checked a small popup on her screen. "You requisitioned the entire ship's meat rations for the next month!? Oh well. Worth it."

She paused to eat with a bit more enthusiasm. She hadn't realized how hungry she was. Jay would just keep looking at her like that until she got to the point though, so she went on. "He didn't just map the target's exterior wiring. He mapped the interior. And not just the overall wiring... he mapped the actual circuits in so much detail that I could probably use it to rebuild their hardware. In every single square inch of space. Oh, and what I thought was nonsense at first turned out to be biosigns. They have mice. Wait for the best part though."

While she finished her burger, Jay didn't have much of a choice. Finally she went on.

"See this blob? It didn't make any sense at the scale he gave it to me, and I spent an hour thinking it was fuzzy gibberish. But the rest of his info was so detailed that I kept playing with it...And get this. He read the data off of their computers."

Stunned silence, followed by "You're right. We should have given him a cow."