Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Fifteen

The work was a blessing and a burden, often at the same time.

Whenever Jessyn couldn’t sleep, she’d imagine herself dying. Drowning, maybe. The hurt at first, and then tunnel vision, and everything going away and never coming back. She was mortal. It was going to happen eventually. She wasn’t suicidal, she was just taking comfort in the idea that no matter what, she wasn’t here forever. It wasn’t suicidal until she started making plans. That’s what she told herself.

Then, when she was calm enough, her mind blinked out and she just didn’t exist for a few hours. It wasn’t really sleep, but it was similar.

When she came back, there was the choice of what she was going to do. Stay where she was and try to sleep again or else push the blanket off and live another day. The work gave her a default. She pulled herself out of bed, stood under the weird bedroom shower, dried herself off, got dressed. All the things that normal humans were supposed to do. Including eating breakfast—eggs, cured meat, citrus fruits that were starting to get a little woody but still added some acid and sweetness, a cup of fresh coffee—and walking to the lab. None of that was as hard as choosing would be, so she didn’t choose. She just ran on automatic. Not thinking was almost as good as not being. A strong second best. She threw her mind into the research to get away from everything she felt, and it was so familiar, she had to believe this wasn’t the first time she’d done it.

When she faded into the routine, lost herself in it, she could almost convince herself she was living her old life. Working in the labs with Tonner and the team. Her brother waiting to talk about dinner and whoever his infatuation of the week was when she got home. Not a person slowly losing her mind. Not the chattel of aliens. It was a nice dream to live in, for a few moments each day.

She and Irinna relieved Else and Campar. They took the experiments and procedures that the others had started and saw them through, then did whatever Tonner had assigned as the step to follow. It would have been easier if there had been a board or a messaging system or paper and pens and thumbtacks. Irinna had a good memory, though, and Jessyn was happy to trust her.

Today, they were checking cellular motility along nutrient gradients. Else and Campar had harvested tissue from the not-turtle and put it on gel sheets with plausible food supplies—simple sugars, alcohols, and soluble carbohydrates—diffused through them. If the not-turtle cells moved toward the source, it was a possible nutrient. If they moved away, it might be a toxin. If they just stayed there—and mostly they just stayed there—either it wasn’t metabolically active for not-turtles or the tissue they’d sampled wasn’t motile.

Jessyn had been running tests like this since she was in basic education classes. Make the slime mold solve the maze. Look how smart biology was. Something as simple as mold could thread its way through the labyrinth and find the thing that would sustain it. As she stood, watching the gels, she wondered again about Jellit. Maybe he was here, in the Carryx world-city, too. Her brother could be out there, somewhere in the thousands of levels, hundreds of thousands of hallways and chambers, lost among the monsters. If she just had the right kind of mold, maybe it could show her how to reach him. Him and all the other captives of Anjiin. She sure as hell didn’t know how to do it.

“What we need is sperm,” Irinna said.

Jessyn lifted an eyebrow. If Irinna was trying to act normal, she could follow suit. Rise to the occasion. She smiled the way she would have if she were sane. “The dating pool has thinned a bit, of late.”

Irinna rolled her eyes, then waved her fingers in a circle while she chewed on a bite of the ham and cheese sandwich she’d brought for lunch. “Or pollen. Spores. Whatever. I mean, they’re not clones. Lots of individual variation even in the small sample we have here. So assuming some sort of genetic mixing during reproduction, the berries are going to have some way to swap chromosome analogs. Find that, and we’ll find the encoding medium. We already know the kind of patterns to look for. Aperiodicity, multiple copies, presence in all generative tissues. But if we could get sperm out of them, we wouldn’t have to wash through a bunch of functional molecules we don’t know what they do, you know?”

“I could ask them back to my room,” Jessyn said. “Get some candles. Slow music.”

“Well, I’m not an alien stick-eating berry-thing, but if I were…”

“I’d do better if I had some perfumes, or scented soaps,” Jessyn said. “Anything other than that red glop the shower blasts at us. It makes me smell like an old hospital ward.”

“Maybe disinfectant is the height of olfactory fashion among aliens?”

Jessyn chuckled. Irinna grinned. She might almost have been herself. Almost. There was a darkness under her eyes, and her hands were never still. When she talked, there was a bright, compact brittleness about the words. All the familiar signs of someone trying to keep their shit together.

How are you? sat at the back of Jessyn’s throat, waiting to be asked. How bad is this for you? Are you losing your mind, and if you’re not, why aren’t you? What happened to you on those ships? What happened to you before that?

A chittering like the voices of lab monkeys came from the mouth of the alcove, and Jessyn turned in time to see four of the little animals hauling themselves up onto the countertop. Wide golden eyes, a brown-gold coat that split the difference between fur and feathers, each of the four about the size of an eight-year-old.

“God, not again,” she said, moving toward the intruders. She lifted her hands, patting the air, and tried to block them. “No. No, bad monkey. Off you go.”

One of the four bared dark teeth set in black gums at her, but it looked less like a threat than a complaint. The other three bounded around her, hopping from countertop to floor and back up again like they were made from springs and rubber. Irinna put down her sandwich and followed them toward the back, making shooing sounds as she went.

“What we really need is a door,” Jessyn said. “Or a baby gate. Something.”

“Out out out. No! All of you, out!” Irinna said, and the three bounced back out, loping toward Jessyn. One paused to look at the gels like it was curious about them. Like it had notes to offer on the process. And then all four were gone, vanished back out in the cathedral-tall common space that all the alcoves shared.

“Those things are annoying,” Irinna said.

“Enthusiastic, though. Got to give them points for peppiness.”

“No, I don’t think I do,” she said with a sigh, and popped the last bites of her lunch into her mouth. “Are they lab animals or fellow scientists?”

Jessyn started to laugh, then caught herself. Irinna wasn’t making a joke. “That’s actually a really good question. Are they here to eat our experiments or steal our data.”

“We don’t know anything except what the Carryx tell us, and they don’t tell us anything.”

“It’s like we’ve been given the most important test of our lives,” Jessyn agreed, “but all the questions are in secret code.”

“On the plus side, if we fail,” Irinna said, “they kill us, so no need to worry about placement rankings.”

While Jessyn was trying to formulate a reply to that, Irinna went to the protein database, tapping the input display like she was trying to get its attention. The machine chirped.

“Why?” Jessyn asked. Meaning to ask, Why bring us all this way and set us up for failure and death.

“This?” Irinna replied, as though Jessyn had asked about her entries on the display. “It’s my work-around for not having anything to write with. I’ve been coding in the work like it was a peptide sequence and using the error log. See?”

Jessyn leaned over. The little display read ERR:‘MID-PH PROTEIN ASSAY OF SOURCE SPECIES’:BAD FORMAT.

“That’s brilliant.”

“That’s why we’re all here,” Irinna said, and it was half a joke. If they hadn’t all been just a little brilliant. If they hadn’t been part of Tonner Freis’s workgroup. If the research they’d done in the past years hadn’t been noticed or celebrated, maybe they’d have been back on Anjiin instead of in this prison.

Jessyn wondered what was happening back at home. Whether she’d been lucky to escape, or if she was being punished for her little sip of celebrity and status. She wondered if Jellit was alive. She wondered how long she was going to be able to keep going. And here was pretty little Irinna, youngest of them all, smiling and typing her notes as though anything about where they were made sense. But what else could they do?

“Protein assay,” Jessyn said. “I’m on it.”

“I’ll tare the CCA if you make the soup?”

“Deal,” Jessyn said, and went back toward the cages.

The organisms were, in their own ways, fascinating. The berries—which were profoundly not berries in anything besides size and shape—contained an order of magnitude more silicates in their chemistry than anything Jessyn had seen before, and the internal structure of the little beasts—simplistic and undifferentiated as it appeared to the naked eye—was protected by a thick layer that seemed at first like epidermis, but the more she looked at it, the more it looked like a separate organism. Discovering whether this was mutualism or parasitism or a gender dimorphism thing like a female torrent mold enclosing the male would have to wait until they had determined the medium of genetic inheritance, but one way or another, it was actually kind of cool.

She opened the transparent cage and plucked four of them out. They clung to the stick, trying to resist her, but not more than a grape would cling to its vine. They were warm in her palm and rippled a little against her skin.

She carried them to the sampling array and dropped them down among the blades. White dots tracked along their skin, little foot analogs trying to find purchase in this new environment. Wherever the little animals or plants or fungi had evolved, it hadn’t been a lab grinder. The skills and abilities they’d developed, generation after generation under whatever alien sun they’d called home, weren’t going to help here. They were as helpless and out of place as she was.

“Sorry, little guys,” she said. “Hope you’re not sentient. Try not to feel this.”

The rooms smelled good when Jessyn and Irinna returned from their work: rich and yeasty like bread or beer. Outside the big window, the sky was turning a ruddy orange. The huge arcs of alien structure, one part building and two parts the bones of strange gods, glittered with a million other windows like theirs. The ziggurats that marched along the curve of the planet, poking their sullen bronze heads up above the clouds, were a cityscape twisted by nightmare, starkly beautiful but vast enough to induce vertigo.

They had just left Dafyd and Tonner in the lab. Else was probably sleeping or taking a shower or being alone for a moment. Synnia sat on one of the couches, her hands folded on her lap, her gaze fixed on nothing. In the little kitchen, Campar stood by the basin, washing dishes. The sounds of water and plateware were comfortingly domestic. Rickar, across from Synnia, had a bowl of something green and white that he was eating with a length of bent metal like someone had seen a knife and spoon and decided to split the difference.

“What’s that?” Irinna asked.

Rickar paused. He did that a lot these days, shying away from social contact like a dog that’s been hit too many times. But he gathered himself and hoisted the bowl.

“Basil and garlic pasta,” he said. “The basil’s a little old, but the garlic’s fine. Can’t complain.”

“Well, that sounds tasty,” Irinna said. Brittle. Sharp. Trying too hard. Jessyn wavered. The smart thing, the right thing, was to get some food before she went to her room. She didn’t want to. She wanted to be alone with her eyes closed. She wanted the chance to not exist. It was just the small, sane part of her that forced her to the kitchen and the pot of food. She filled a bowl, took a knife-spoon thing of her own.

“Do we still have eggs?” she asked.

Campar didn’t answer. She looked over at him, then put her bowl down. The big man’s eyes were fixed ahead of him, his face pale and gray. He was washing a plate, just one, his movements exactly the same, repeated.

“Campar?” she said.

He turned, and the plate slid out of his fingers. When it hit the floor, he screamed at the clatter and then collapsed. Oh, Jessyn thought. So this is finally here.

The others ran over, Irinna pushing into the kitchen with her hands out, grabbing for Campar. What’s wrong? Is he hurt? What happened? Jessyn grabbed the other woman and hauled her away.

“It’s okay. Don’t touch him,” Jessyn said, kneeling on the floor beside Campar. His breath was fast and labored. Wheezing. “Campar? Hey, it’s me. Listen. You’re having a panic attack, okay? It’s scary, but it’s going to be okay. Just listen to my voice, all right? Just follow my voice. We’re going to breathe in for the count of four, then hold it for four, then let it out for four, be empty for four, and start over. Do it with me.”

His eyes moved over to her like he’d just noticed that she was there. His lips were dark. This was a bad one. She counted as she breathed in, mouthing the numbers—one two three four—then switched to her fingers—one two three four—and then murmured them aloud as she exhaled. The second time through, he tried to mirror her, but his breath was frantic, unsteady. She kept mirroring the breath for him the way Jellit had for her during her attacks. By the fifth time through, Campar was almost in sync. The rictus of tension in his face and shoulders was releasing a little. Just a little.

Else appeared, her hair unkempt from the pillow. The others were all crowded behind Jessyn and Campar like they were at a puppet show. She hated them all a little, just then. All of them except Campar.

“Are you here?” she asked. “Are you back now?”

Campar’s eyes found her. The little laugh that came out of him didn’t have anything to do with humor. “Not… not entirely. Jessyn. Did you know? There’s aliens?”

“Yeah. It’s hard. I know.”

“They look like giant seafood and centipedes made out of knives and they killed us and carried us off, and… And we’re… we’re just acting like… we’re doing…”

“Yeah. We are.”

“Like nothing happened. Like this is normal.”

“It isn’t. Nothing is normal now.”

Campar shook his head and whispered. “I’m not all right. I’m not well.”

Jessyn took his hand, chancing that he was stable enough for the physical contact. He didn’t pull away. “You’re not. You’re pretty fucked up. We’re all fucked up. Look at us. Tonner’s tripling down on the research thing because it’s something he understands. Synnia’s completely shut down. Rickar’s focused on all of us being mad at him so that he doesn’t have to think about the rest of it.”

She didn’t say Else is drumming up bullshit sexual drama with Tonner and Dafyd. Dafyd is intellectualizing himself into a small steel cube. I’m pretty sure I’m suicidal. She’d made her point.

“We’re all broken. We’re trying to find something we can control, because we can’t control anything,” she said. He was weeping now. And shit, so was she. “None of us are okay. That’s all right. We don’t have to be. It’s all right to be fucked up right now.”

The swarm is lying on its bed. The part of it that needs to sleep sleeps and is dreaming. The part of it that doesn’t need sleep stretches its senses out.

Because it occupies a body that is afraid, the swarm knows fear. It also knows hunger and desire and annoyance and curiosity. None of these things are necessary to its original design and function, but they are all part of it now, as inextricable as cream poured in coffee.

It knew that the others could be influenced by chemoreception. It can choose the simple aromatics that its skin produces and nudge the others to calm or panic, bonding or rage. It had not expected how much it is, in return, affected by them. The sour ache of Jessyn’s sweat, the shuddering panic of Campar’s. The body it inhabits receives these chemical signals and reacts to them, dragging the swarm along with it. The swarm has considered disabling the host’s pheromone receptor sites, blinding itself to the fears and stresses all around it. But the danger now is being noticed, and so it acts as the host body would act, feels what the host body would feel, participates in the subliminal conversation of primates whose subjective experience is a thin skin over an oceanic subconscious.

It feels the slow magnetic pulse that among all the captives of Anjiin only it can feel. The pulse rises and falls away, and the swarm feels the information-rich stuttering within the field. It knows something about how the Carryx communicate within their world-palaces. It senses compounds in the air, its chemoreceptors turned for a moment to something more sensitive than a bloodhound’s nose, and it catalogs them. It has recorded every species that it passes on its way to and from the laboratory, every detail of the landscape outside the window in the common area, every variation in the wavelengths of light. It is the deepest record of the great enemy ever created. It knows more than armies have gleaned in centuries of war.

The parts of it that dream, dream together. The host and the girl named Ameer that preceded her now bleed into each other more easily when both are unconscious. The smell of cut weeds from the host’s childhood summer fills the girl’s recurring nightmare of missing an exam. The shopkeeper that the girl is trying to argue with is also, in the logic of dream, the host’s first lover. The swarm is aware of all this without participating in it.

It has stopped all active probing. No radio or nIR pings. No echolocation mapping. Temptation erodes it, eats away at its resolve. There is so much it could discover, so much it could know, just there beyond the reach of its senses. To come this far, to achieve this much, and miss the one unforeseen fact that could end the war because it was too timid…

But its discipline holds for now. Its mission is as simple as it is difficult: Find a way to share the data it has gathered and is gathering. Somewhere in the world-city, there is a pathway for it. Somewhere in the Carryx security protocols, there is a flaw.

Until it can find that pathway, it has to be indistinguishable from the others. They are traumatized, so it must be traumatized. They are in pain, and so it must be in pain. We’re all broken. That was what Jessyn had said. We’re all broken. So it must be broken too.

It has to find ways to explore more than the quarters and the laboratory, but in a way that won’t draw attention. Not from the Carryx, not from the humans, not from anyone. It has to take whatever freedom it can, flow into whatever niches are possible for it, all without getting caught. Without getting itself and the others killed.

The magnetic pulse rises again, shuddering with information. An answering pulse comes from the north, and another from above. The network of ships or drones or organisms at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere sing down to the world-palace, their attention like a spotlight sweeping the darkness of a prison yard. The swarm keeps still.

As if in response, the dream shifts. The host is naked on a vast plain of tall yellow grass. Animals move, troubling the wide blades. The host and the girl who is gone are both there, they both know that if they move, predators will find them. But if they don’t move, they will never escape. The tension between these two facts is a kind of horror and also an excitement. A thrill.

The part of the swarm that needs to sleep dreams, and for a moment the part that doesn’t sleep dreams with it.