Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Nineteen

There were normally between two and four people in the common room, and usually they included Rickar and Synnia. He and Synnia, both exiled in their ways, were the homebodies of the group. This wasn’t the first time Dafyd and Campar had spent part of an evening in the common room with them. It only felt different because before, it hadn’t been a funeral. A wake.

That wasn’t true. It had always been a funeral. Irinna’s death didn’t change all they’d lost, except to add to it. It just gave them permission to stop pretending.

“We were idiots,” Campar said. “Letting ourselves feel safe? We were idiots.”

“I didn’t feel safe,” Synnia said, but her voice was gentle.

“Yes, well. I was an idiot,” Campar said, and twirled a hand like he was taking a bow. It wasn’t a joke so much as a confession dressed up in party clothes. Campar had a way of turning his humor against himself at odd moments. Rickar hadn’t liked the man that much back in the ancient past of last year—back when Irinna and Nöl had been alive—but he’d always admired the big man’s ability to walk the rope between wit and actual humor.

“It’s not just you,” Dafyd said. “Even after everything they’d done, we wanted to think we could make them care about us.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Synnia said with a snort.

“It’s also very human,” Dafyd replied.

The silence was thick. Rickar felt it like a resistance in the air. They should have had beer. Or something stronger. They should have been singing with a chorus under the stars and burning offerings. Or listening to a holy man intoning platitudes. But they were here, and this was all they had.

“All right,” Rickar said. “I’ll go first.”

The others looked at him in a spectrum of confusion.

“The first time I met Irinna would have been about five days before the lab opened. I’d met Tonner and Jessyn, but not Else and none of the assistants. I was at the research complex early, yeah? Trying to find everything, and then this perfectly lovely young woman appeared at my side. I didn’t figure out she was part of the team until the next day. I just thought she was really friendly and helpful.”

The others laughed even though it wasn’t funny. It didn’t need to be funny. It just needed to be gentle. Nothing was gentle anymore.

Synnia sighed as a way to take the floor. Rickar turned to her. “We saw her at the orientation. Nöl and me and Irinna and that one boy who didn’t last. What was his name?”

“Ellix,” Dafyd said.

“That’s right, that’s right. She was so nervous, Nöl didn’t think she’d come back. He thought we’d scared her away.”

“She gave me an ice cream one time,” Dafyd said. “This was… maybe half a year into the project? I was staying late to wash up the yeast baths—”

Campar shuddered. The yeast baths had been famously rank, dark, and pungent.

“—and Irinna was going out with some of her friends. She saw that there was someone in the lab, and so she brought me an ice cream. It was orange flavored.”

“She was kind, wasn’t she?” Campar said. He was weeping. They all were. They weren’t sobbing, though. That might come, but not yet. “I remember one time I came to the labs after a particularly difficult parting of ways with someone I was seeing. I try to keep all that to myself, but she knew as soon as she saw me…”

It wasn’t the first informal memorial Rickar had sat in on. A few people in a strange place at a strange time talking about the one that was missing. They weren’t even friends, not really. They didn’t need to be. The ritual was the thing. As Rickar half listened to Campar and Dafyd and Synnia taking out their memories of the dead woman and passing them around, he wondered if this was something universal to humans. If the prisons and labor camps of history had been made a little more bearable by people sitting together in groups like this one. He hoped so.

Part of him wanted to go and get Jessyn. Maybe Else and Tonner. Part of him wanted to let them sleep. The impulse that required the least effort from him won, and they talked until he half expected to see the alien sky start to shift out of darkness.

The tap at the door wasn’t an announcement or something asking permission. It was just something hard knocking against something else, and then the wide door rolled to the side. Four of the goat-squid things that called themselves Sinen trundled in. They smelled like a fish tank that needed cleaning, and they had a little structure of metal and mesh between them. Maybe he was just tired, but Rickar didn’t understand what it was at first.

Dafyd stood. “She’s this way. Follow me.”

And then Campar rose to his feet, and a moment later, Synnia too. Rickar joined them. There was scraping and bumping and a high squeaking sound more like a slow leak from an inflated tire than language. Another door opened, and Jessyn appeared in the hallway. Then Tonner and Else.

No one said anything, they just stood in place while the alien guards carried what had been Irinna back out, with Dafyd following close behind. Irinna looked peaceful enough, but without the undertaker’s art to hide it, her death wasn’t photogenic. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes were sunken, and even though the lids were parted a little, she didn’t seem to be looking at anything. She seemed like a partly scorched object that was more or less the shape that their old friend had been.

The aliens reached the hallway, and Dafyd pulled the door shut behind them. It closed with a sound like the end of a sentence.

For a moment, no one moved or spoke. Then Tonner took a step out into the room. Rickar was afraid he was going to give some kind of speech.

But all he said was “Work tomorrow.”

“Work tomorrow,” Campar echoed, and turned toward the hall. The others fell back toward their rooms after him, with Rickar staying until the last, looking out the window at a world that wasn’t his. He wished he had a cigarette. He wished a lot of things.

Life went on. That was the terrible thing. They were ripped out of their world, their lives, their sense of who and what they were. Their history. They were killed, or made to watch the people they loved die. And then, at some point, they were hungry. Thirsty. They had to piss. Someone told a joke, and they laughed, however darkly. They washed dishes. Changed clothes. Held funerals. It felt like it should have stopped, all of it, and it didn’t. The slow, low pulse of being alive kept making its demands, no matter what. However bad it was, however mind-breaking and strange and painful, the mundane insisted on its cut.

He waited for a little while after he was alone, then headed for his own rest. The funeral was done.

Campar’s fingers hurt, right at the tips where he’d scraped them a little raw. And the centrifuge still wasn’t quite out of its seating.

“One more time,” Tonner said.

“A minute,” Campar said. “Gather my strength, yeah?”

Tonner’s nod was curt, but he didn’t lose his temper. And Campar couldn’t fault him, not really. He also would have liked to be anyplace else. The lab was a mess. The lighter equipment—trays, sample tubes, insertion sensors—was scattered or destroyed. The heavier pieces had been fouled by what Campar assumed was the enemy’s fecal offerings, but otherwise seemed intact. There were scorch marks on the wall. Blood too. Some of Irinna’s, some Jessyn’s. Some, he liked to think, the enemy’s. He pressed his back to the wall, flexed his hands like he could work the ache out of them.

Part of his mind kept a running commentary, trying out quips and lines. Have you ever realized something was doing you permanent spiritual damage as you were doing it? Can’t think what brought that to mind. or Makes the library annex seem positively civilized. or If this keeps up, we should put in a complaint with the union. Chattering, reflexive attempts at humor, all of them as empty as birdsong. Another part of him listened and wished he could shut it off. If there was enough liquor, maybe he could.

At the mouth of the alcove where it opened into the cathedral, Dafyd and Rickar stood like security forces at a crime scene. Campar noticed that Tonner hadn’t complained about the black sheep coming back to the flock. The calculus had changed for all of them. He wasn’t sure what it had changed into yet, apart from the joys of equipment transport during wartime.

“Are you back?” Tonner asked, not quite snappishly, but not quite not.

“Like I was born for it,” Campar said. He turned, pressed his fingertips into the little crack they’d opened between the centrifuge housing and the countertop, and waited as Tonner counted down from three. They pulled together, the flesh of the workspace creaking under them. Tonner murmured a low, constant litany of obscenities, and it seemed to make him stronger. Campar just pulled…

And with a shriek like someone ripping green wood, the centrifuge came loose and tilted into the aisle. The other equipment was gone already, the gaps where it had been seated gaping like the holes from missing teeth. Campar chuckled, a little trickle of victory running through him, despite the context. Despite all the contexts.

He wondered, looking back at all the forced labor in the darker corners of history, if some percentage of the victims had always taken pride in their work. He wasn’t sure which answer would be more disturbing.

“There! Right there!” Dafyd said, taking a step forward. Campar rose to his feet like someone had picked him up. His hands balled into fists, and the voice in his head finally went quiet for a moment. He walked forward without any thought at all beyond the violence to come… Except there weren’t any of the Night Drinkers. Dafyd was pointing at a herd of the horse-sized, chitinous animals, the ones with little greenish sparks at the joints, as they retreated across the wide space. He shot a glance to Rickar and saw his same exasperation mirrored.

“They had one,” Dafyd said. “One of the bone horses had a translator. It’s not only the guards.”

“That is lovely,” Campar said. “Maybe no more startling cries of alarm while I’m half waiting for a monkey to lob a bomb at me? My heart can’t take it.”

To the young man’s credit, he looked chagrined.

The structure under the counters was a construction of crystal and fiber, more brittle than coral but still usable. They’d salvaged enough to make a mover’s sling, and he and Rickar slid it over their shoulders now and lifted from the knees. Rickar’s groan could have come from him.

“It’s not the centrifuge,” Campar said. “It’s the sampling arrays.”

“Doesn’t help.”

“All right, you two,” Tonner said. “Let’s get moving. I don’t want to be out here.”

So they moved. The salvage had taken most of the morning. Jessyn hadn’t been able to get out of her bed, and Synnia wouldn’t join in, even now. But Else had come along for the first few runs, then stayed back to start splicing in the power cable for the resonance sampler. The samples were all ruined and the proteomic dictionary was going to need some more tools before they could pop it free, but they had retrieved more of the lab notes and reports than he’d expected. It could have been worse, except for Irinna. That couldn’t have been.

“Turning to my left,” Rickar said. “Are you all right? You need a break?”

“Let’s get this done,” Campar said between breaths. “I’m not going to feel calm until we’re back behind the battlements.”

“Meaning the door?”

“I’ll take what I get.”

The improvised straps cut into his shoulders. The mass swayed between them, steadied by their hands. Campar felt his breath deepening, but not as badly as he would have expected. His legs burned, but they didn’t give out.

When he was young, Campar had seen an educational recreation of Neo-Cordist genocides in the south. One picture had shown a line of young men carrying a massive tree on their shoulders. Staggering under its weight, but because they were together, not being crushed by it. Not quite. Seemed appropriate somehow.

“You know,” he said. “When I was… ah… younger? I saw a picture. Neo-Cordist. And a tree.”

“You sure you don’t need a break?”

“Fine,” Campar said. “Keep going.”

When they reached it, the common room was already a mess. The furniture had been spread to the sides of the room, space cleared for the larger equipment. What had been kitchen counters and a dining table were workstations now. A few dozen samples of the berries and some not-turtles, and the whole place would be an unholy mashup of living space and work. Tonner’s less-than-secret ambition of having all of them live at the laboratory would be fulfilled at last.

Else, her sleeves rolled back and a knife in her hand, was leaning over the power cable from the resonance imager. The splice was clean and professional-looking, and the imager’s output was shifting blue and white, which meant it was going through its calibration run. Synnia sat at the dining room table, and Jessyn was at her side. The tunic and trousers that all of them wore looked like a hospital gown on Jessyn. Her face was waxy, her shoulders bent in like she was protecting something at her collarbone.

They lowered the centrifuge, slid the mover’s sling out from under it, and draped the power cable out toward the feed. Campar’s back hurt. At home, he would have gone to a masseur he knew who worked out of a little yellow shop in the plaza near the Scholar’s Common. Here, he stretched and wondered whether there would ever be more to his life than these few rooms, the space he could inhabit contracting until he died in a corner for want of someplace safe to be.

“All right,” Tonner said, hands on hips and scowl fixed like a bayonet. “The dictionary’s going to need some engineering to get it out. I’ve got some ideas, but if we can get these running, we can keep that effort in parallel.”

“So picking up the same plan?” Campar asked. He hadn’t meant for it to sound as cutting as it did. More of the same? Just hope for a better outcome? But maybe the subtext lay so near the surface it was impossible to touch lightly.

“Once they bring us the new samples,” Tonner said through a tight jaw, “we can start the assay again.”

“I can do that,” Jessyn said.

“Can you? Because it feels like maybe you’d be better off sitting this one out. If you hadn’t kept your medical issues hidden, we could have kept two people at the labs the way I planned it.”

Oh, Tonner, Campar thought, and pictured what Tonner would look like as he beat the living shit out of him. The thought replaced the pain in his back with a new warmth in his belly. Jessyn sat forward, her eyes open but seeing something other than the room, the table. Synnia reached to take her hand, but Jessyn ignored the gesture.

Tonner seemed to realize he’d gone too far. “I mean. No offense.”

“Say something like that again,” Campar said, “and I’ll—”

“Actually,” Dafyd interrupted. “The more I think about it, the more I wonder if Jessyn didn’t save us.”

Tonner turned on the boy, but Else made a sound. It was a soft thing, a little glottal click, but it pulled Tonner up short like he had a leash on. The little line drew itself on her brow.

“What do you mean?” she asked, and Tonner folded his arms.

Ah. Else Yannin, kingmaker, Campar thought. Who would have suspected? Something had changed about the woman even before the invasion, but he wasn’t sure what.

Dafyd looked like he’d been caught sneaking in after curfew. He gathered himself visibly. “We’ve been… What if we’ve been thinking about the test wrong? We’re treating it like it’s the protein translations, and why wouldn’t we? It’s what the librarian told us they wanted. It said that was what we’re supposed to do. But just because it’s what we’re supposed to do, that doesn’t mean it’s the test.”

“Alkhor—” Tonner snapped, but now that Dafyd had started talking, he didn’t seem able to stop.

“That’s what the attack showed us. Okay, Jessyn left Irinna alone, and it turned out that was a security issue. She didn’t know that. None of us did. Because it doesn’t make any sense. If the librarian cared about good lab work, there wouldn’t be bombs. There sure as hell wouldn’t be bombs we didn’t even know about. So either the Carryx are stupid or they’re testing us for something besides good lab work. And I think it’s the worst mistake we could make to assume the Carryx are stupid.”

Tonner’s expression was fascinating. Campar had worked with the man for years, and he thought he had a better-than-average read on his moods and reactions. When he spoke, he sneered, “So they’re hiding some secret agenda?” But under the derision was something like hope. Campar glanced over at Else, but she’d gone still and weirdly focused. Her mouth was a careful O, like she was blowing out smoke from some invisible cigarette.

Campar caught a scent that he couldn’t place, except that it was like the warm smell of a newborn baby’s head. Very strange.

“Or they’re not hiding it,” Dafyd said, “and what they mean by ‘useful to the Carryx’ isn’t what we thought. We assumed the task they gave us was the thing they cared about. But maybe it’s just the thing that keeps us busy while they see if we can self-organize. Or if we need a lot of protection they’d have to supply. Or if we die easily. Hell, if we smell bad. I don’t know. I don’t understand how they think.

“Maybe we’re more useful to the Carryx if we can produce our own medicines,” he continued, gesturing toward Jessyn. “We aren’t getting fresh food anymore. Did you notice that? It’s preserved. What happens when that runs out? Are we supposed to be developing our own food supply? Every time I ask one of the Carryx or the Soft Lothark about other humans, they either say it’s an interesting question or they don’t answer at all. Are we supposed to be finding each other? Building networks so that the Carryx don’t have to spend time organizing us? If we were wrong about the scope of the test—and I think we were—it was just a matter of time before we ran into it. If it hadn’t been this, maybe we wouldn’t have known until it was the librarian telling us we didn’t make the cut. If it wasn’t for Jessyn needing her medicine, maybe we wouldn’t have known anything was weird until it was too late. Maybe—”

Tonner raised his hand, palm forward. “I get it. You made your point.”

Dafyd took a step back. Campar pressed his hand to his mouth. Jessyn didn’t speak, but she was sitting up straighter, and there was a sharpness in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in weeks. Or maybe ever. The room was quiet, and this time Dafyd let it stand. Like the man said, he’d made his point.

Back on Anjiin, Campar would have stayed quiet. There was no advantage to speaking up when the cub called out the lion. But they weren’t on Anjiin, and they weren’t going to be. Maybe not ever. And besides that, Campar found himself feeling oddly calm and confident.

“I think,” he said, “that’s a good piece of analysis.”

“Needs some fleshing out,” Tonner said, which was as close as he was likely to get to agreement.

“Changes things,” Else said.

“It does,” Tonner said. And then, “Shit.”

Tonner glanced over at Dafyd, and Campar saw the phase change. Like water turning to ice or the subtle morning chill that announced the arrival of autumn, the workgroup had belonged to Tonner Freis, but at least for the moment, it was now Alkhor’s.