Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Twenty-Three

The sunlight spilled through the window of Else’s bedroom and spread itself along the wall. Unseen clouds softened the edges. Dafyd lay on his side, his arm under his head like a pillow, and watched her. Of all the unthinkable events in his life, the fact that the universe had put him beside this woman felt the most unlikely. Had he been in love with her before, or had it just been a passing infatuation? Had they forged something deeper during the terrible passage from Anjiin, or had they just uncovered a connection that had always been there waiting? Or, worse, was this moment as ephemeral as his old life had been.

Else’s eyes opened just enough for him to see the glimmer of them. Her smile was the smallest twitch of her lips.

“You’re thinking something,” she said. “I can hear the gears turning.”

“I am.”

“Share?”

“They gave us rooms with windows,” Dafyd said. “These buildings are massive. Most of the space in them will have no windows.”

“So?”

“So, did they do that because humans need more sunlight than other species? Is natural light high status? Low status? An accident based on timing? Does it mean everything, or nothing at all?”

“Why does that matter right now?”

Dafyd sighed, shifted. Else hooked her leg around his, pulling him against her. Her skin was warm.

“I haven’t figured it out yet,” Dafyd said.

“You haven’t figured out why having windows matters?”

“No, I mean… I don’t understand the Carryx. I don’t understand how they think.”

“Is this really your idea of afterplay? Revisiting the story of Little Dot the Water Beetle?”

“You asked what I was thinking.”

“It would have been all right with me if it had been a little more flattering. What’s puzzling you about the Carryx today? It’s not just the windows.”

“Why they win. It doesn’t make sense.”

“They’re huge, strong, and difficult to kill. That seems like a good start.”

“Guns and explosives solved the large-animal problem on Anjiin centuries ago. And this is a spacefaring species. The least dangerous thing about them is that they’re big and strong. It’s what they are that confuses me. I thought the librarian was going to be happy to have a chance to tell us what it wanted. Why wouldn’t you want your servants to be attentive and willing?”

The flirtation drained out of Else’s expression. “Maybe there’s some cultural taboo?”

“These things have taken over… I mean, how many worlds would you guess are represented here? Look at all the varieties of life they have on a leash. They’re doing something right, and I think about what I expect from a species or government or organization that could do this. I expect them to be open to learning, but when I made the offer, it was like I’d insulted it. I expect meaningful information flow, but these things had to be told we needed pens. I expect guidance, but there isn’t any. The librarian said it was here to help us and didn’t mention that the Night Drinkers might want us all dead. That’s a big omission. They won’t learn from us. They won’t teach us.”

In the distance, Rickar yelped. A moment later, Campar’s laughter followed. Something flew past the window, its shadow making the light flicker once. Else sat up, turned, leaned her back against the wall. The sun caught her shoulder like a tattoo inked in light.

Dafyd said, “I don’t know if there’s some bit of information I’m missing, or if I have all the pieces and just can’t fit them together. I keep trying to find it. Is the way the walls don’t stand square important? Is the way they walk signaling something about how their bodies work? The librarian said, ‘Possibility is irrelevant.’ What does that mean? Can an advanced scientific species really not understand probability and inquiry down multiple paths? Why does it use Rak-hund and Soft Lothark as enforcers and not those bone-horse things? It’s right there, and I just can’t…”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Yeah. Probably more than anything else right now.”

Else tilted her head. The light spilled onto her jaw, her cheek, set her copper-colored hair on fire. “Why? I mean, I don’t disagree, but you know whatever you find here, it’s not going to get us where we were.”

He took her hand, lacing his fingers in hers. “Might help keep us where we are. We’ve lost a lot. But I’ve still got some things I’d like to keep.”

Jessyn knew the medicine was starting to work when her fantasies changed from suicide to murder.

Time had become a strange thing since the Carryx descended on Anjiin and ended everything. She didn’t know how long it had been, but with how stingy she’d been with her pills by the end, she was certain that even the last traces had washed out of her blood and brain. Her mind had reached its default, unmedicated state. Some days, she was able to function. Some days she didn’t get out of bed, and when she tried to calm her unquiet, the thing that worked was her own death.

Sometimes it was drowning, sometimes it was bleeding to death, but the scenario that brought her the most peace was to replay the attack in the lab. Irinna at her side, the enemy Night Drinkers around her. Some nights, she imagined their small arms pulling a rope around her neck and cutting off her windpipe, the darkness flowing in at the edges of her vision until there was nothing left. Some nights she imagined a second bomb, and the nothingness coming in fast.

And then Tonner had given her the first little glass of red liquor. It tasted bitter and salty and it had an aftertaste that crawled up the back of her nose. For the first couple of days, she hadn’t noticed a difference, and then the details of her fantasy changed.

It was still the attack in the lab. The day Irinna died. But her imagination shifted away from the end of her own life. She remembered the one that she’d killed, and the half-recalled, half-imagined death of the little alien had a satisfaction to it. The sense of being in control tasted like water to a woman dying from thirst. Slowly, the dreams of suicide faded, the dreams of murder bloomed. She lulled herself to sleep conjuring up the resistance of a little neck and the crunch it made when she broke it.

For Jessyn, it was what passed for sanity now.

“So you feel like you’re back to baseline?” Synnia asked. The older woman smiled hopefully at her, the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes bunching up. How many years did Synnia have left in her aging frame? Jessyn thought about telling her that her mind always focused on death these days, but at least it wasn’t her own now.

Instead Jessyn shrugged and smiled. They were in her bedroom. She’d hauled in one of the couches that had been part of the common area and used it to make a little drawing room space. A little bit of privacy in their everyone-in-each-other’s-lap lifestyle.

“I think so,” Jessyn said. “It’s a little hard using your brain to take accurate readings of itself. Fundamentally bad data.”

Synnia poured them both a little more of what she was calling tea from the pan she’d brought in. They’d run out of actual tea, just like they’d stopped getting coffee and fresh produce. But it was something. The last batch of food to arrive had included a sachet of leaves that seemed too thick and unpleasant to use as a spice, too sparse for a salad. So Campar had started steeping them and everyone called the result tea. They were minty and rich, and not quite unpleasantly bitter. That was as much as anyone hoped these days.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t know,” Jessyn said. “When it kicked in? I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I mean—” She gestured broadly.

“You’re ripped from your home, put in an alien prison, almost killed,” Synnia said, her tone grave but gentle.

“Right?” Jessyn said, and sipped her not-really-tea. The bitter aftertaste rode the edge of pungent without quite tipping over it. She drank it anyway. “But I could. It wasn’t even subtle.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

I’m not, though, Jessyn thought. I’m just feeling a different kind of bad. She didn’t say it. She remembered a day from another lifetime when she and Irinna had knocked off work at the labs a little early and gone out to a café for dinner. They’d had spiced chicken in fry bread, a sauce of peppers and apple, and more beer than had probably been wise. Jessyn could still picture the woman she’d sat across from then—slender, pale, and bright-eyed, with long, expressive hands. They’d intended to go dancing afterward, but had instead gotten into a conversation about hybrid protein synthesis that excited them enough that they’d lost track of things. By dancing time, they were both too drunk.

It was strange to try and make that memory reconcile with the life she had. So instead, Jessyn remembered killing the Night Drinker, feeling the impact as she swung its body, and an angry little warmth touched her. She didn’t have to pretend her smile anymore, only what it was about.

They talked awhile longer, speculating about the work and sharing old memories, telling jokes that weren’t particularly funny but that made a bridge between them all the same. Synnia never mentioned her dead husband. Jessyn never brought up her fear for her lost brother. It let them pretend, at least for a moment, they still had normal lives.

In the main room, Tonner, Rickar, and Campar were all standing around the resonance imager. The men all wore the same tunics and loose trousers that the Carryx had supplied, but they wore them very differently. They were small on Campar’s broad frame, seeming like something he’d have worn to the gymnasium, only with the collar plucked up to give the tunic the best possible drape. Tonner wore them like a necessity, unaware of how he looked and not interested if he did notice. Rickar rolled up his sleeves and cuffs, just a little. On Anjiin, he always had the slightly rumpled, slightly erotic style of an unmade Sunday morning bed. Now on the prison world of the Carryx, he still did. Dafyd and Else weren’t there, and everyone was pretending not to notice the fact or its implications. Schematics of the weaponized berries were tacked up on the wall, different biochemical pathways mapped out with hand-drawn diagrams of individual proteins at each phase. Two pans filled with prototypes sat on the dining room table, but they were all looking at the imager’s display.

“It’s got the right general form to be a signaling protein,” Campar said as Jessyn carried the remains of the tea to the kitchen. “All polar knobbies on the ends, and that tertiary structure. And since the medium was a little basic, I’d assume the active form is the curly one.”

Jessyn started rinsing out the cups. Even at full heat, the water wasn’t hot enough to scald, but it did turn her fingers and the backs of her hands a little ruddy. The last dark swirls of not-quite-tea leaves danced at the bottom of the pan.

Tonner made a familiar little cough that meant he was thinking. Jessyn had a flashbulb memory of being in his laboratory the first time, of seeing him walking in front of a wall filled with notes and chemical diagrams. It had felt like the most amazing thing that would ever happen to her. Seemed silly now. She turned off the water and set the cups upside down on the counter, a bit of absorbent foam under them like a little copy of the shit mat from the ship.

“We still don’t have those three cofactors, though—”

“They’re inert,” Rickar said. “They’re probably just manufacturing artifacts. This one right here is the best candidate for an active factor, and we have it. We nailed it. It’s right.”

Tonner ran his fingers through the gray thatch of his hair. “I want to agree. I kind of do agree. But… it bothers me? I want a match on the whole thing.”

Jessyn pressed her hands against her tunic, letting the fabric wick away the dampness as she walked over to the samples. A dozen pale, soft bulbs, like egg-sized translucent water balloons. White, papery membranes, strong enough to hold without splitting. She rolled one across her palm. This had been a little animal, once. Red, with a tiny silicate farm that it protected with this same skin.

They knew more about their enemy now. They’d cut open the dead ones and made the corpses offer up their secrets. They’d learned how they pumped their version of blood using a network of muscular arteries instead of a heart. That their one oversized lung pointed to a low-oxygen homeworld. It was Tonner who’d pointed out that if the Night Drinkers were constantly suffering from a low-level state of oxygen poisoning, it might explain their hyperactivity and violence. As though one could understand the motives of alien monsters by looking through their corpses. As though it mattered why they killed Irinna. The autopsy did tell them something about how the Night Drinkers died, though.

And this berry they’d modified into a bioweapon. That told them something too.

“We should field-test it,” Jessyn said.

“Invite one of our little friends over for dinner and some light vivisection?” Campar said. He was joking, but only just. The anger and the fear were as alive in him as in any of them.

“Or take it to them,” she said, tossing the pale bulb in her palm. “Their place works for me.”

The others were quiet for a long moment. The air felt charged, a shift in pressure. She felt like she’d opened a door in her mind and invited them all to step through it. Pain and fear were just the ocean they swam in. They could make light of it, and they did. They could keep living their lives in it, because there wasn’t an option. But here was some power, and all they had to do was take it.

“You think we can find our way back to them?” Tonner asked.

“Can’t hurt to try,” Campar said, his tone mild considering what they were talking about. Jessyn felt something expanding in her chest, tugging her mouth into a feral grin.

“Should we gather up the others?” Rickar asked.

“No,” Tonner said, and none of them argued.

Campar carried the bulbs in the same pan Synnia had used for not-quite-tea, and Jessyn walked at his side. Tonner came behind them, and then Rickar with the crowbar in his fist. The air seemed crisp, and she felt herself bouncing a little with each step.

She had never anticipated violence with joy before. When she’d been young, she’d seen other children building themselves up to schoolyard confrontations, and she’d thought that they were overcoming a natural urge toward peace. That fighting meant working up enough emotion to force your way past essentially peaceful nature. It turned out that sometimes it was easy. Her hands tingled. Part of her hoped that the Night Drinkers would fight back. That they’d bite her again. That they’d come close enough that she could put her hands around their little bodies.

Everything she’d gone through seemed to funnel down to the pure and simple moment. Her captivity, yes. Irinna’s death, yes. The abasement of Anjiin, yes. But also all the years of feeling ashamed of her weakness. All the guilt at the ways her disease held her and Jellit back. All the damage the universe had done to her, she’d taken somehow and reforged into something sharp, a weapon that for once wasn’t meant to cut her.

The cathedral was bright, broad beams of sunlight filling the space above them. A flock of something that could have been birds or bats and probably wasn’t either swirled lazily through the air. The press of alien bodies on the ground was thicker than usual. A dozen or more Soft Lothark ambled in rough formation like a troop of chimpanzees walking through unfamiliar territory. Two wide-bodied quadrupeds she hadn’t seen before shifted by on thick, ropy legs. Jessyn found she was humming a song to herself that she’d heard when she was back on Anjiin. Come come come to the fair and see what we shall see.

The wall where the Night Drinkers lived was just where it had been. If there were any defenses, she didn’t see them. A bat-winged thing with iridescent dust on its thumbnail-long pelt stumbled by, four dark eyes next to a round, tooth-filled mouth. Something about the set of its face made it seem embarrassed. One of the crab-dogs scuttled by, making loud ticking sounds. Miracles and wonders and moments that would have astounded her once, and they were just distractions between her and—call it what it was—her prey.

A Night Drinker popped its head out of one of the holes, saw them, and darted back inside. The alarm was being raised.

Rickar moved to the front. “How do you think we should—”

Jessyn plucked one of the bulbs out of the pan, cocked her arm, and threw. It traced a fast, shallow arc through the air and vanished into one of the holes with a wet pop. She took another one, aimed, threw again. Then Tonner was doing the same. They didn’t have very many. This wouldn’t take long. She threw another, and missed. Instead of going into one of the holes, the bulb splashed against the fungal-looking wall itself. Where the gel touched it, the wall began to melt into an inky black fluid.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Tonner said, and then the screaming started.

The voices were high and chittering, rattling like a thousand little gnashing teeth. A dozen Night Drinkers boiled out of the wall, their arms stretched wide and their mouths gaping in rage or anguish. They swarmed out, but haphazardly, like they were all half-blinded. Rickar hunched forward, crowbar cocked back over his shoulder and ready to fight.

One of the largest sprinted toward them by itself, like it was leading a charge that the rest weren’t quite ready to follow. Rickar hit it hard and low. The impact sounded heavy and solid like someone dropping a bag of rice. The Night Drinker screamed and leaped back, limping on its left side. Rickar swung again, but it stayed just out of reach. A black wetness on its leg could have been blood. Jessyn discovered she was laughing. “You started this,” she said. “You wanted a fight, but you can’t take it now?”

She darted forward, and the Night Drinkers shied away in fear. Jessyn scooped up another bulb—they were down to five now—and threw it at the coming horde. She caught one of them in the chest. It screamed like she’d lit it on fire, and it fell to the ground. Three of the others stopped to help their fallen comrade, and Tonner got all three of them with another bulb. Jessyn remembered something she’d seen as a child: an old war where one side had left an enemy soldier wounded and screaming so that they could kill anyone who came to help. It had been presented as an atrocity then. It just seemed like good tactics now.

Another large one came to the front of the pack. It had a deep red pelt and eyes wider than usual for the species. It looked from Jessyn to Campar to Tonner, reached out its hands, making fists like it was milking the air. Its mouth was a scattering of ebony on meat spoiled to darkness.

“I think it wants something,” Rickar said.

“Here. It can have this,” Tonner replied, and pelted it full in the chest with one of the globes. It screamed and danced back, trying to wipe itself clean, and then collapsing to the ground.

“The ammunition’s getting a bit low. We should go,” Campar almost sang as he walked backward, away from the fallen enemy. Tonner hefted one of the last bulbs, Jessyn the other. Not to throw, but to threaten. We can’t get all of you, but we will by God get the first one that tries. The monkeys screamed and waved their arms. The ones that she and Tonner had pelted were lying down or trying to wipe themselves clean. The bleeding one that Rickar struck had stopped advancing, but was staring at them, its teeth bared. Its distress was weirdly clear for an organism that had evolved on some other world. Campar kept backing away, and the enemy didn’t charge. After not very long, they didn’t even follow, disappearing in the flow of alien bodies. As they retreated, Jessyn saw one of the huge bone-horse aliens pause near where she thought the damaged wall would be, its slow, vast attention caught by the wreckage.

When they got out of the cathedral and into the corridors, Jessyn and Tonner put the two remaining bulbs back in the pan. Rickar kept looking back over his shoulder as they walked, and Jessyn did too. Nothing seemed to be following them.

“Well, that was fascinating,” Tonner said. The smile in his voice was so clear, he almost sounded giddy.

“The structural damage to whatever that infill material is was surprising,” Rickar said. “I wonder if it’s a separate organism or something that the little fuckers produce. Like bees making wax?”

“Or they could be the same organism with two forms. Differing genders or ages?”

“That’d be a pretty vast dimorphism.”

“Not unprecedented…”

The men chattered, each talking over the other, their voices high and joyous. Jessyn let them. The words and concepts flowed over her like smoke from a fire, but they didn’t touch her. They could pretend that they were excited by the increase in knowledge, that they were scholars before anything else. She’d let them. Later on, she’d probably even join in. But just then, with the smell of victory still in her nose, she knew better. They were excited because they’d won. They were alive, and many of the enemy weren’t. For the first time since before the humiliation of Anjiin, they had faced a threat and unequivocally come through as powerful, dominant, safe. It was intoxicating.

As they made their way back to the wide door, she imagined what they would have looked like to the little enemy. A new race of nearly hairless giants, twice their size, set to their same task, and clever enough to be a threat. She pictured herself clambering through some vast laboratory the way the monkeys had in those early days. Chided and tossed out by the rulers of that place, but with access enough to see what they were doing, to know that they had to be stopped.

And then what? They had tried to kill the giants with explosives, and the giants hadn’t died. They’d put together a chemical weapon and soaked the giants with it. The giants had shrugged it off and poured it back. To the little fuckers, humans would seem unkillable. Like gods.

When they reached the rooms, it was Else who pulled open the door. Her long, elegant face was tight with concern. Behind her, Synnia and Dafyd were sitting on the floor by the big window. Sunset was coming, turning the scrim of white-gray clouds to gold and peach and red.

“What happened?” Else asked as she closed the door behind them.

“More data,” Tonner said, a little coyly. He seemed to like having something Else wanted and not giving it to her. Those two and Dafyd were going to have to come to some arrangement, but even bullshit sexual politics couldn’t take the shine off Jessyn’s day.

“I think it’s safe to say our version of their devil’s brew is sufficiently evil,” Campar said, putting the pan down and plucking the last two bulbs back out to put in the sample case. “The cofactors aren’t necessary to make the weapon effective.”

“What did it do?” Synnia asked. Even her usually kind voice had an echo of bloodthirst. Or maybe that was just Jessyn. Maybe she was drunk enough with it that she could hear it even when it wasn’t there.

Campar and Rickar retold the story as they started preparing the next meal. Normally, they all ate at odd times, but the occasion seemed to demand something communal. Even couched in terms of molecular action and evolutionary biology, the tale was thrilling. Jessyn went to the door a few times, looking out to make certain that the enemy hadn’t followed them.

The raid had been her idea. Or if not exactly her idea, at least she had been the one to trigger it. To move herself and the others into action. She wouldn’t have done it a week before. Or a week before that. That she was able to take action was a result of the medicine that Tonner and Campar and all the others had engineered out of their alien berries. And without it, there would be some of the feather monkeys alive tonight who now weren’t. They’d made two weapons from what they had. She was one of them.

“We need to be careful,” Dafyd said as the victory dinner was served out. “I mean, this is great. Really, really good. I just… I don’t know. There’s something about it that feels like we’re agreeing to play things the way the Carryx want us to.”

Campar’s nod was polite but cool. “I’m not certain that we have the freedom to rewrite their rules.”

“And ignoring them got Irinna killed,” Jessyn said, feeling a hot little rage kindle in her belly for Dafyd now.

“I just want to understand better what the context for all this is, you know?” Dafyd said, holding up his hands in mock surrender.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Campar said. “Do you understand what we’re saying?”

Dafyd seemed to deflate a little. “Yeah. I do.”

That night, Jessyn slept like the dead.