Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Fourteen

Ekur of the cohort Tkalal was subjugator-librarian for the sixteenth dactyl of the third limb of the twentieth exploratory body. The librarians of the other ships of the dactyl gave their information and reports to it, and accepted direction and instruction from it just as it, in turn, relayed those things of importance to the subjugator-librarian of the third limb. Like nerve fibers in flesh or void tendrils in asymmetric space, the librarians coordinated the actions of the Sovran’s will. A vast network of judgment and obedience that splayed across thousands of stars.

Its present action was the conquest and subjugation of a small world in the diffuse space between two galactic limbs, and as the Carryx librarian squatted in its niche—legs folded under its abdomen, fighting limbs set against the deck, and feeding limbs moving through the streams of the dactyl’s signal transfer—it did not guess how badly things were about to go.

The major indigenous species were land-based hexapods who called themselves something like Eelie and their world Ayayeh. The subjugator-librarian had all the information the initial probes that had followed the void tendrils had given. The half-mind re-formed and deepened the data points into something akin to insight. The Eelie moved across their world in packs of twelve to forty, establishing no hives or cities, but singing to one another in waves that traveled across continents. Their atmosphere was awash in a vast world-song.

In the belly of the Carryx ship, nodes shuddered in their liquid wombs, ready to be born. Eager. Ranks of Rak-hund and Soft Lothark prepared to fall through the high air of the world, bringing the word of the Carryx and the changed fate of Ayayeh. The violence to come was not a victory, but a growth pang. The displacement of a species that had grown in the universe directionless and feral discovering its purpose within the Carryx and being shaped into utility.

A Sinen coordinator paused at the subjugator-librarian’s door, pulling its attention from the coming battle. Seeing the animal’s complex eyes and facial appendages sent a cascade of disgust rippling through the Carryx librarian, as it always did. Others among the ranks of the empire’s librarians were capable of interacting with the animal captives with equanimity. Ekur-Tkalal was quietly proud that it had not developed this callousness toward perversity.

The Sinen burbled, and the translation half-mind at its throat took the wet, sibilant noises and turned them into language. The subjugator-prime is prepared. Ekur-Tkalal pulled its feeding limbs from the flow of information, rose up on its legs, and went to make its final connection before the outspreading began.

The prime, the highest of the subjugator caste of their dactyl, lowered itself to the deck in ritual abasement as Ekur-Tkalal entered its niche. Even pressed down, the prime was almost as tall as the librarian. When it rose, it towered.

“We are prepared,” it said.

Ekur-Tkalal shifted its gaze across the long rows of Carryx soldiers and the animals of violence that expressed their will with a thrill of disgust. Its part now was to check for signs of irregularity and error, to match what was against what was expected, and it did this with great efficiency. When it was finished it turned back to the prime.

“Begin,” the librarian said, and left. Once it returned to its niche, it expressed the intention to the other, lesser librarians who would express it to the lesser leaders in their ships. Like a fist closing around a stone, the Carryx reached out their nodes and their soldiers, the animals that announced the end of Eelie history and the beginning of their service to the Carryx. The wandering troops of alien things were counted, divided in two, then two again, then two again, and the limb was chosen. One in eight of all Eelie died. All was moving as intended.

It was only when the soldiers reached the planetary surface that unexpected things began to happen.

In the planet’s northern hemisphere, a collection of the Eelie in the valley of a vast plain drew the attention of the prime. It directed one hundred Carryx and two thousand animals of violence to descend on the indigenous population for acquisition and subjugation.

Half of their animals of violence died, and a third of the Carryx. Ekur-Tkalal rechecked the information, but the half-mind—passionless and incapable of meaningful surprise—remained adamant. One of the largest groups of conquering Carryx forces had just suffered massive casualties. As the subjugator-librarian narrowed its attention, searching for details from the battlefield, another group—this one in a cave complex of the southern hemisphere—blinked out. Two hundred animals and six Carryx. In an archipelago just north of the equator where twilight was pulling the sky into shadow, five hundred animals and ten Carryx vanished. Another group. Another. Another.

It would have been unthinkable, except that it was happening.

The drone grid found the prime in transit between a half-constructed extraction center and a wide lake where several groups of Eelie were shown to be nesting. The prime’s voice vibrated with confusion, and something the librarian refused to believe was fear.

“The species is not as the probes and void tendrils reported. We have only collected a few of them intact, but they are not from this world.”

“Repeat and clarify.”

“They are unrelated to the planetary ecosystem. Manufactured life-forms intended to trick us into believing they are the indigenous species,” the prime said. “This is a trap.”

Ekur-Tkalal’s feeding limbs twitched, fingers plucking at each other as it thought. There was no time to consult the librarian of the third limb. No time to ask for counsel and direction. The choice needed to be made now, and as the senior librarian of this dactyl, that gave it both the burden and the power.

“Return to the ships,” it said. The prime braced as Ekur-Tkalal shifted its attention to the half-mind. The drone grid identified and destroyed the remaining Eelie—half a billion more deaths in the span of moments—but the subjugator-librarian was already shifting the half-mind’s focus outward to the dead planets, moons, and asteroids of the system.

The simple volume of a solar system made the search difficult. Time-consuming. The animal transfer ships, empty of captives, were hauling themselves up through the air, and the drones in their grid were starting to wither and decohere before the librarian found what it was looking for. What it was certain would be there.

A stretch of vacuum the size of a small moon had begun to stutter and boil. Exotic waves that the half-mind displayed as blue and gold light though they were not light flickered in the gap. Another rip appeared on the far side of the system’s star. A third above the ecliptic. The strategic half-mind pointed out the resonance relationship between the intrusions, and offered a geometric explanation for why there wouldn’t be a fourth unless the existing rifts changed position.

The battle had been chosen. The enemy had arrived.

From the three rifts, ships began to spill out into normal space, blinking into reality from whatever non-dimension the enemy employed to undo the limits of the local universe. The strategic half-mind marked each one as it appeared, delivering something like knowledge to the librarian. Ten enemy vessels had come through each rift. The patterns of heat and light that came from them matched what the Carryx had experienced in previous encounters, with six exceptions. If the enemy used energy weapons that traveled at the local maximum, it would be eight hours before the first attack would arrive. The ships themselves would take much longer. The librarian mapped the possible paths that the dactyl could employ to engage or avoid, and the strings of possibility bloomed in its mind like a terrible flower.

The drones withered and fell into the atmosphere of Ayayeh, burning one by one, and then by the thousands. The grid collapsed unnoticed. The Eelie were a sprung trap. The damage they would do was done, and the violence played out now in the void between the planets.

The librarian moved a duplicate of the strategic half-mind into the body of a low-status Sinen, erasing the animal’s mind in the process. The living corpse that the half-mind now inhabited would be fed into a message casing and sent through asymmetric space alone. Carrying news of the attack to the librarian of the third limb would take seven days. If it was relayed all the way up to the regulator-librarian at the center of the empire, a reply might not come for months.

Until it did, this battle belonged to Ekur-Tkalal and whatever unknowable mind directed the limbs of their enemy.

Three weeks into the long conflict, Ekur-Tkalal won its first victory and suffered its worst loss. The librarian of the ship that was lost sent out its last report from the second-eighth mark of a gas giant’s gravity well where the resonance of the huge planet and the local star created optimal conditions for a close-quarters battle. The images the lesser librarian sent, captured by the optical matrix of a Rak-hund, showed the passageways of the Carryx ship as the animals of the enemy flowed through them. Ekur-Tkalal knew that the enemy was virtually deathless, that their animals of violence could be riddled with injuries and flow forward like a tide. The heat and pulse of the living organism could fade without ending its assault. Knowing this prepared it for the images, but didn’t undo the mystery of how.

The Carryx of the ship had led its forces in a final effort to cast the enemy back into the vacuum, and they had almost managed. The final images showed the breach, the uncanny field waves that the enemy used to weaken the ship’s flesh.

The enemy bled black and red and clear. Their voices were a mesh of radio signals that danced to evade all the Carryx efforts to drown it out. Ekur-Tkalal watched as the enemy weapons split the air, as the Carryx’s white-green battle shells cracked, as the Rak-hund and Soft Lothark died in waves to push the fight a little farther from their dying masters’ bodies.

The ship had been lost before the word of its loss arrived. Its death was a brightness across the spectrum of energy, a sphere of irregularity in space expanding until it was indistinguishable from the vacuum itself.

The incalculable loss was also an opportunity.

Traveling in the skin of that detonation, hundreds of escaping enemy wrapped in shells of titanium and deep copper fled death and found captivity. The webwork of void tendril and magnetic force gathered the escape pods like a net hauling in fish. The enemy saw what was happening too late. Five of their ships turned toward the failed evacuation. When distance and the laws of the local universe kept them from rescuing their companions, they launched an attack. The deathless could still be annihilated, and the enemy would rather slip into oblivion than be yoked. The librarian understood that, and took something like pleasure in the enemy’s frustration.

The librarians of the remaining ships reported an increased ferocity in the enemy. Loss, it seemed, drove them to recklessness. The subjugator-librarian noted this, added it to the body of knowledge that was the eternal battle. Out of more than a thousand species, this enemy was the most recalcitrant, but the patterns in its behavior and design would bring it to heel in time, and domesticated, would add its great strength to the empire.

Enemy ships dove deep into the center of the system, skimming through the star’s corona to evade the tracking eyes of the Carryx. The leaders operating the Carryx ships launched clouds of projectiles—some alive and some inert—at the enemy ships and watched as they were unmade or evaded or—rarely—as they struck home. The disabled enemy ships flickered into knots of nuclear fire and faded to ash. Whether that was the nature of the enemy or a choice to deny information to the Carryx wasn’t clear.

With each engagement, the subjugator-librarian sent another message casing to offer up its decisions and intentions to the librarians whose work was to see a larger image of the empire in less detail and guide the grand strategy of the war, of all the wars, of the will and intention of their species. Day after day, cycle after cycle, no direction came back, and Ekur-Tkalal coordinated the lesser librarians, gave shape to the will of the soldiers and their animals of violence.

One of the Carryx ships stumbled into a volume of space studded with nearly invisible mines and was destroyed. Two of the enemy ships, straining to scrape away pursuing projectiles, came too close to the atmosphere of the icy fifth planet. They burned and they fell.

When Ekur of the cohort Tkalal had been young, it had tried to claim status over one of its siblings. The two of them had reared up in the open plain by the birthing crèche, their fighting arms spread wide, and flailed their adolescent strength into each other’s bodies. It had hurt, but not enough to be decisive. Unsure how to approach an unfinished challenge, they had kept going, slamming their fighting arms together, each hoping to snap the other’s leg. It had gone on until their crèche leader had appeared and pushed them apart. The battle around Ayayeh had the same bruising violence and the same frustration.

When the message casing from the subjugator-librarian of the third limb did appear, blinking back into symmetric space at the edge of the heliosphere and spitting out its message in a burst of stuttering radio waves, Ekur-Tkalal was relieved.

The chain of identifications on the message was longer than it had seen before, tracing its origin back to the center of the empire and the librarians with the broadest scope. The battle that the dactyl fought here was part of a vastly larger action, playing out across space and time in ways that Ekur-Tkalal would not know because it was not called upon to know. But that context made directions that would otherwise have been strange, comprehensible. Unpleasant, but comprehensible.

It summoned the ship’s prime to its niche. The huge, overwatered bulk of the soldier was repulsive in one way, endearing in another. The soldier and the subjugator-librarian, born of equal dignity to any other of the Carryx, and imbued with the same potential, but here they were. Genetic dead ends, made to consort with animals. The gendered cohorts of the Carryx, the moieties of production and distribution and reproduction, would look down upon them both with the same contempt that Ekur-Tkalal felt toward this soldier and the animals it controlled. They had this one dignity left to them, dying to protect their betters.

The subjugator-prime bent, abasing itself. The librarian noticed for the first time that the soldier’s fighting arms had stripes of red much like its own. The feeling of kinship was brief and fleeting.

It passed a series of directions to the prime, the information hovering in symbols of light, the wavelengths shimmering with nuance, specificity, and intent. The soldier rose, considering what it had been given. Its eyes betrayed confusion.

“You are to prepare your soldiers and their animals for these actions against the enemy,” the librarian said. “Once they are prepared, they will shift to the other ships of the dactyl to aid in carrying them out. The captives you have taken will be brought here and will leave with me and a minimum crew.”

The prime’s shifting stilled as it understood what it was seeing. Each of the actions was made to provoke a different kind of response from the enemy ships, and each ended with the details of the counterattack sent in a message casing. It was a profligate use of a limited resource. Most of the space within the casings would be empty, blank, and wasted. That as much as anything else was the message the empire had delivered to the dactyl.

“Are we no longer trying to win?” the old soldier asked, and its whistles and rumble were plaintive. The prime was Carryx, but simpleminded and emotional. The librarian understood how it had fallen to soldier caste. Removing it from the lineage of the Carryx was to the benefit of the species. The same could be said of the librarian, but for different reasons.

“You will observe the enemy in action, and preserve those observations. We are not the only battle in the war, and if we must bend here to break them elsewhere, of course we will.”

“Yes. Yes, I understand.”

The librarian chirruped an idiom of the Carryx language that the half-mind would have translated as You can’t win a fight without bruising your own limbs. A spark of what might have been anger lit the prime’s eyes. The librarian supposed discovering that its utility to the Carryx was in the details of how it was killed would be distressing, even for a more advanced cohort than theirs. The secondary librarians, not welcome on the one ship carrying away the captive enemy, would likely also resent the directions that it was about to give them.

But the prime bent again and scuttled away to do as it had been told. The librarian passed the relevant directions on to the secondary librarians under it, adding its mark to the chain of identifications as it did so.

Transfer boats that had been meant to carry away the elite of the Eelie instead moved between the ships of the Carryx fleet, transferring soldiers and animals to the part of the dactyl that would remain, and bringing the enemy captives and their Soft Lothark guards to the one ship that would leave.

The captives were thin-bodied animals with fivefold symmetry in their hard, crusted epidermis. The half-mind had been observing them carefully, but had not yet gained context enough to communicate with them beyond the simplest levels. That was fine. There would be time enough to question them when their journey was complete.

The ship that had once been the central organizing point of the sixteenth dactyl of the third limb of the twentieth exploratory body turned its face away from the sun, accelerating toward the edge of the heliosphere and the vast unreality of asymmetric space. Behind it, the remnants of the dactyl probed the forces of the enemy, engaged, disengaged, danced, fought, and died.

If any of the Carryx ships survived, they would rejoin the librarian later. If not, then it was better for the species that they had died.

What is, is. It can be nothing else.