Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Twenty-Four

By the time Ekur of the cohort Tkalal fell out of asymmetry and entered the protected zone of Carryx-controlled space, it had been out of communication with both its dactyl and the librarians of the world-palace for weeks. It disliked those periods of transit, cut off from both the librarians under its command and the structures of power whose directives might remove from it the burden of choice. In asymmetry, it was unreachable and incapable of reaching out, alone in a single ship with only animals, soldiers, and the navigation half-minds. It passed the time by recording and reviewing all that had happened up to then. The decisions it had made when not under the direction of the librarians above it were its own responsibility. If the outcomes of its actions were particularly good, it might be elevated in the hierarchy. If it failed, it could suffer the indignity of growing into a soldier.

It would never be promoted back into the highest levels of the Carryx, never be included in the noble ranks that might offer genetic material for the next generations. That decision had been made many years ago, and it was as irrevocable as it was correct. The scars on its fighting arm showed where the break had been, and that it had failed was proof that it had deserved to fail. It felt neither shame nor regret. It did, however, review its independent decisions in Ayayeh, searching for flaws or weaknesses in its strategies.

When the ship entered symmetry, the silence of transit gave way to a flood of messages. The only one that concerned it was the regulator-librarian: A message waited from the highest voices of the empire, one of the eight limbs of the Sovran herself. It had passed, of course, through each of the librarians in the path, but this was the world-palace. The time required to pass each level of responsibility was minimal. If the regulator-librarian had made its choice fifteen breaths ago, the order would already have reached a lowly subjugator-librarian like Ekur-Tkalal.

The regulator-librarian was easily twice its size, more in keeping with the scale of a soldier than a librarian. But where soldiers were simple in their design—with broad, undifferentiated arms, and eyes that all focused on the same thing like a child’s—the regulator-librarian was complex. Its skin was a filigree of silver over bronze. Its voice spoke at several resonances simultaneously, so it could fit a poem into a syllable. Its eyes shifted in the image, as if each was responding to a separate brain. Even before it spoke, Ekur-Tkalal was overcome by a rush of awe at its magnificence. Deep in its own brain, chemicals released that suppressed Ekur-Tkalal’s sense of self and opened it to the will of its species.

You are to escort your prisoners, the regulator-librarian said, to the keeping pens of low animals and oversee their interrogation.

There was a moment of dismay, a sense of loss, even a shiver of disgust. Interrogator-librarians were of a dignity equal to subjugator-librarians, but became tainted by more direct contact with animals. Ekur-Tkalal had avoided direct interaction with the fivefold enemy during their transit. It would have no such luxury now. The flush of hormones was already cascading through its blood, preparing its body for the subtle changes that came with its new place within the moieties.

By the time it responded I understand, it had already begun to change.

They walk together, the swarm and the older woman. Once, they had explored the world prison together, ranging far from the quarters they all shared. Now they stay close, not exploring but keeping watch. The swarm knows that the Night Drinkers are nowhere near them. It cannot smell the particular musk of their coats, cannot hear the patterns of their voices in the echoes that form the white noise of the corridor. But the host wouldn’t know, so it acts the part of ignorance. It places the distress it does feel where the anxiety it should but doesn’t feel would go.

What was it like for you at the start? the swarm asks. After so many months of practice, it feels natural to speak like this. It no longer feels like manipulating a body, like mimicking life. It feels like being alive.

Synnia’s mouth tightens for a moment in grief, and then softens with nostalgia. It isn’t the swarm that makes these translations from movement to meaning. It is what remains of Ameer Kindred. It is the captive consciousness of Else Yannin.

Synnia talks about meeting Nöl when they were young. About falling into his company, the way he made her feel needed, the way he made her feel a little certain of herself. The decision to win his affection that he never knew about.

What about you? Synnia asks, and adrenaline floods the swarm’s stolen body before it understands what has inspired the fear. The older woman is asking about Else’s heart, and in omitting a name—not what about you and Tonner or what about you and Dafyd—she has left an implicit question that leaves the part of it that was Else Yannin exposed and embarrassed. The swarm notices its own relationship to exposure and embarrassment.

My version is more complicated, the swarm says, and looks away. It hopes that Synnia won’t push, and she doesn’t. They walk together, down hallways and through chambers, then back the way they came. Synnia looks for other humans, the scattered prisoners from Anjiin, and the swarm looks for other things.

There are hundreds of other bodies that pass by them of a dozen different species. The Rak-hund, long servants of the Carryx, and loyal as a dog. The squat-bodied jailers of the Soft Lothark, the odd walking cuttlefish Sinen. These species are given greater freedom. Some of them, the swarm guesses, will leave this world with the gathering armies just as they did when they came to Anjiin.

They turn down a new hallway that has bright yellow light spilling down from a vaulted ceiling, and Synnia makes a note of it on the paper that they carry. Something has decorated one wall with chips of color in a wide, swirling mosaic that reaches out into colors that human eyes cannot see but the swarm can. It is beautiful. Some other prisoner has come to this place and made art from it. Created something meaningful and joyous in this place of loss and terror. The swarm is surprised to find that inspiring and sad.

Something touches its mind, soft and distant as the scent of a flower or a whisper in the next room. A pattern of murmur played on a chord of frequencies that would seem random, but aren’t. The swarm freezes, Ameer freezes, Else freezes.

The swarm was not a conscious being before it reached Anjiin. It has no memory of a time before, but it does have knowledge. Instinct. Programming.

It knows a distress call when it hears one.

In captive species that had been taken through the normal course of expansion, the half-minds would have had signals to absorb and model: patterns of chemical release and sound and controlled radiation of light and heat that the enemy produced in its natural environment. By consuming the ways in which the animals conversed with each other, the half-mind would have found the ways to mimic them, shape them, translate the thoughts and meanings of low animals to the Carryx, and issue instructions to the animals in ways they could comprehend.

Without that, the fivefold captives were a cipher. But only for a time.

The beginning work of the interrogation was carried out in a series of long, low rooms by Soft Lothark and Sinen. In one, the captives were vivisected. Their anatomy, chemistry, and energetic activity were measured and given to the half-mind as context. In another, captives were trained one at a time to perform simple tasks in exchange for food or the cessation of pain and then monitored as they communicated these lessons to others of their kind.

Ekur-Tkalal watched over the process. To minimize its contact with the Sinen, it chose one to act as its factor: a white-eyed semi-male that seemed well enough liked by its companions. When the interrogator-librarian decided that the metallic threads in the captives’ five arms were of interest, the white-eyed Sinen relayed the command to vivisectionists. When it saw two of the captives curling around one of their wounded like they were cradling it, the white-eyed Sinen carried the order to scan their energy profile when they came into contact. And when the half-mind reached baseline competence, it was the white-eyed Sinen who brought word to the librarian that the true interrogation could begin in earnest.

The subject was one of twenty who had survived the process. It was in a dry tank under the ultraviolet light that the captives seemed to find noxious. Its communication style was a combination of chemical release and electromagnetic waves, so when they conversed, it remained silent apart from the half-mind’s translation.

“Answer my questions, and you and your kind will be considered for inclusion in the moieties. Refusal brings death.”

The translation half-mind pulsed once as it passed this on in terms the captive could comprehend—a mist of esters and cyclic terpenes, a burst of radio waves on a combination of frequencies. The captive squirmed, shifted its limbs.

“I understand,” the half-mind chirped.

“Identify the star, planet, or system in which your species evolved.”

The half-mind was quiet for a long time. Then, “No such place exists. My kind are not the products of evolution.”

Ekur-Tkalal settled its weight more deeply onto its fighting arms. The idea of being a special creation was common enough among animals, but teasing information from the animal’s religious delusions would be tedious. It plucked its feeding arms and considered breaking one of the captive’s limbs.

“Identify the star, planet, or system in which your species resided before you achieved the ability to move between stars.”

Another pause. “No such place exists. We were created as tools of the war, and did not exist before the ships we pilot.”

“Explain that.”

“We are designed life,” the half-mind said, then paused for a very long time as the captive muttered through the electromagnetic spectrum, exuded clouds of scent. The interrogator-librarian remained patient. “We are like half-minds made from life.”

A thrill of disgust ran through the librarian’s body. The Carryx had come across manufactured life-simulacra before. Stick-flowers on Ursin-Qin, the Stone-Mind of High Lothark, the Ambients of Cahl and Deáphan. They were perversions. Imitations of mind doomed to degradation and death like an animal fed nothing but its own waste. To build a monstrosity like that out of living flesh was depraved in a way that the librarian had never considered.

“Describe the nature of the beings that built and commanded you.”

Again, the pause. In the back of the room, a Sinen shuffled through the entrance arch with an armful of cables and a round black filter that would help collect the aromatic molecules from the air and separate them for reuse by the half-mind. The librarian tried to ignore the intrusion.

“They call themselves Aunjeli. Their flesh is made from semi-stable plasma, and they build their cities in the coronas of stars.”

The librarian shrugged its fighting arms and turned up the intensity of the ultraviolet light. The captive shuddered and squirmed.

“Do not try to deceive me,” the librarian said. “Your defiance gains you only additional pain. Describe the nature of the beings that built and commanded you.”

A moment later. “Turn the light down. I can’t think with it on.”

The librarian turned the light down. The Sinen left, talking wetly to another of its kind not quite far enough away that Ekur-Tkalal was spared hearing it. The captive spoke again. The translation half-mind paused, as though parsing the reply.

“Go inseminate your Sovran, we aren’t going to tell you feces eaters anything.”

The librarian turned the light back up and prepared for a long, tedious day.

They wait for the Night Drinkers to come, and the fear makes it difficult to do what needs to be done. They are all on alert, and the swarm needs to go into the nightmare of architecture without them. It takes the better part of a day before the opportunity comes. It finds itself alone in the common room, and slips out the door. There is a scent of Night Drinker in the air. The enemy has been close, but they aren’t here now. Depending on what enemy it means.

It walks quickly, purposefully, as if it had every right and reason to be where it was. The radio wave shriek is faint, fading in and out of detectability like the perfume of someone who has already left the room. The swarm follows it, remaking the host’s flesh as it walks. Dark patches grow on its skin. None of the things it walks past is likely to know what normal is for a human any more than it would be surprised by the specific number of legs on a Rak-hund. It feels Ameer and Else straining with it, listening. It feels their terror and elation when the signal grows steady, becomes a direction.

The swarm finds its way up. Stairways and ramps and a thin scramble like a ladder cut from stone. It has never been this way before. The hallways are narrow here and the sound of wind taps at the air. There are fewer and fewer of the menagerie of alien captives, more and more of the Carryx and their soldiers. The sense of being anonymous in a crowd falls away, and the swarm begins ducking from shadow to shadow. It stops the human scents from leaving its flesh, softens its footfalls. It becomes a shadow in a prison uniform, and the alarm grows louder. Closer.

One of the cuttlefish-goat aliens—the ones called Sinen—pauses to look at the swarm. Adrenaline makes Else’s borrowed heart beat faster, but the swarm keeps a steady pace, walking as if it had every right to walk. The Sinen hesitates, steps after it, then turns away. A wide-bodied Carryx lumbers into view at the end of a corridor, its abdomen dancing from side to side like it is impatient and wants to go faster than its thorax. The signal would lead the swarm toward the huge, murdering arms, the wide, black eyes. Instead, it turns away, finds a little chamber with round containers filled with a fluid it doesn’t recognize.

Though the risk is immense, it remakes its flesh again, burning energy that would surely shorten the lifespan of the host body, in the unlikely event the swarm were to remain in it into senescence. It finds the frequencies of the cry. It responds.

Where are you?

Don’t approach, its hidden ally says. We are taken. Don’t approach.

What are you?

The pause lasts less than a moment, and then a flood of information, all encrypted in ways that the swarm knows without knowing, like hearing words in a language it had forgotten it could speak. The pilot replays the battle, the trap that was sprung at Ayayeh and the damage that the Carryx sustained. Its capture, and the capture of its cohorts. All that it has learned by being questioned, all the questions that the Carryx interrogator has asked. The swarm swallows the information, folding it into the packet of all that it has learned.

The signal between them stutters, the swarm cuts off its broadcast, turns away, walks as casually as it can down the paths it followed to come here. They were heard, they were noticed. The agents of the Carryx will be hunting them. It can’t be caught, not now. Not ever.

Go! Else urges. Run. What are you waiting for? Get out of here!

The swarm shifts its flesh back into a more nearly human appearance. It can claim it got lost. It can ask for directions back to its cell.

They’ll put us together with the signal, Ameer thinks. Two weird things at once makes a connection between them. If they find you, they’ll look.

The swarm agrees with the dead girl. It retraces its steps, pulling itself back inside its own skin. If the distress call is still out there, it chooses not to hear it. If there is more information… It wants the information badly, but has drunk too deep already.

The swarm drops down the stony ladder, turns to the ramps leading down, descends to lower levels of the vast prison palace. As it does, it reviews all that it has just learned and is intoxicated by the information. It plays the damage estimates again and again like a favorite song. The Carryx dying by hundreds on the surface of Ayayeh, the ships being pummeled in the dark void.

For a moment, it forgets the Night Drinkers and Dafyd and Tonner. It forgets Irinna’s death and the abasement of Jessyn. The fall of Anjiin. The great war has touched the swarm. It wants desperately to reach back.

“What was the signal?” Ekur-Tkalal asked.

The white-eyed Sinen shifted, uncomfortable. “The half-mind suggests it was a report of the events in Ayayeh. We didn’t get the full message, but there was enough to make context from.”

The interrogator-librarian lifted one fighting arm off the floor, and the Sinen flinched back. It didn’t make sense. It needed to start, or Ekur’s patience with animal incompetence would end. “How strong was the signal?”

“Enough to cut through the dampers inside this complex, but not more than that. No one outside would have received it.”

There was nothing within the animal holding complex that the captive could have shared information with. Not in any way that mattered.

“It may only be a hiccup,” the Sinen said. “A reflex that the captive triggered inappropriately because of their physical distress.”

“Perhaps,” Ekur-Tkalal said. “That’s something we’ll ask them.”