Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Twenty-Five

Now that he’d been accepted back into the fold, there were times when Rickar missed being an exile. The long, empty days sitting with Synnia and looking out the window, talking about nothing in particular. The two of them mourning quietly together while Tonner whipped the others into becoming a human clockwork. As though he believed that, under his magisterial direction, he could make everything right again through the sheer force of intellect. Being on the outside had seemed unpleasant at the time, but he wondered now if it hadn’t also given him the chance to heal in a way the others hadn’t.

The impulse to carry their history with them, to be the same research group they’d been at Irvian, to will some kind of familiar order into their daily lives… It had been hard to resist. It had also been an illusion. The truth was that they’d had their lives cut in two. Before and after. Everything they’d known and thought and believed and hoped, and then… And then, the Carryx.

Tonner had given him time for his soul to grow still again after that. To find a kind of peace in being burned to nothing and starting over. Maybe he should have been grateful.

“Do you need anything?” Jessyn asked.

He chuckled, and it was a rueful thing. Anything? Yes, anything. A book. A film. A guitar. An afternoon walking in the gardens outside Dyan Academy with the trees turning red for the autumn. Dance with me. Come to bed with me. Anything to fill his hours besides prison and Carryx and how to turn the little organisms they called berries into something more useful to them. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

She nodded, headed back toward the kitchen and whatever it was she was getting for herself. Rickar was going to have to start going on the walks with Else and Synnia. He wouldn’t enjoy it. The awe that came from passing by a dozen different creatures from as many unknown worlds was fun for about the first fifteen minutes, and then he could feel himself shutting down. There was a constant sense of overwhelm that haunted him. Haunted all of them, except maybe Dafyd Alkhor. Rickar had thought very little of Dafyd, before. The nephew of a powerful woman, a middling scientist, a half-assed lab drone. He’d always seemed like he was moving through life on autopilot.

Now, though, Rickar thought he’d underestimated the young man. Now he seemed like he was only moving slow while he put all the pieces together in his head, readying his game-winning move. Rickar thought maybe constantly being underestimated was just part of the strategy.

As if the thought had summoned him, Dafyd’s door opened and he came into the corridor, toweling his hair dry. Rickar didn’t know if Dafyd had always been the youngest in the workgroup, but with Irinna gone he surely was now.

“Dafyd,” he said. “Do you think we could talk the librarian into giving us some paint?”

Dafyd looked confused. “Paint?”

“It’s a good idea,” Jessyn said. “This place could use some sprucing up.”

“I was thinking of the outside of the door, actually,” Rickar said. “Something that would tell the others we were here if they saw it.”

Campar leaned back on his stool, his eyes flashing with a little merriment. “Beware of dog? No trespassing?”

“Student financial aid,” Rickar said. He didn’t know why that was funny to him, but he started laughing, and the others joined in.

The scratching at the door stopped them. For a second, Rickar thought he’d imagined it, but it came again—claws scraping against the outside of the door like a pet asking to come in. Rickar’s heart tapped at his ribs. Dafyd went pale and gray. Tonner rose to his feet, the pen clasped in his fist like a weapon.

“What is it?” Jessyn said from the kitchen, and Rickar didn’t know if she hadn’t heard the noise, or had but hadn’t realized what it was.

Dafyd raised his hand, telling them to keep back. Jessyn grabbed a pry bar. The air felt heavy with threat.

Dafyd shifted the door a crack, just enough to look out of, and then slammed it closed again. When he spoke, he had the matter-of-fact calm of a surgeon whose patient was dying on the table. “It’s them. They’re back.”

“The others,” Jessyn said. “Where are the others?”

“Else and Synnia are patrolling,” Rickar said.

The scratching came again, fast and insistent. A high chittering followed. The voices of the enemy. Rickar wanted to say something noble and funny. Something like If this is it, it’s been a pleasure working with you. The only thing in his mind was shit shit shit…

Jessyn, Tonner, and Campar lined up facing the door, faces grim. Dafyd passed them knives. Tonner handed his knife off to Rickar and instead grabbed the last two papery bulbs of poison. “It’s what we’ve got,” he said.

The scratch came again, louder this time. Longer. More insistent. They shifted into a rough semicircle around the door, millions of generations of evolution expressed as the readiness for violence.

“We could just wait,” Campar said. “They might go away.”

“Or Else and Synnia might get back, and we can hide in here listening as they’re murdered.”

“Ah. Well,” Campar said. “Dammit.”

Dafyd nodded. “I’ll open on three.”

Rickar’s mouth was dry. Tonner was squeezing the bulbs so hard, Rickar worried he’d pop them early and have to run around smearing the goo on the enemy…

Dafyd hauled the door open. A dozen of the murderous little animals stood arrayed in the hallway, chittering and shuffling back and forth. Tonner lifted a bulb, ready to splash the first one that charged in…

The Night Drinkers knelt, lay on the deck, and spread their arms out at their sides. All of them except for one, who moved forward from the back of the group, its head shifting from side to side like it was searching for something. It had an object in each hand. In its left fist, a dull charcoal-colored square that Rickar recognized as a translator, even though it wasn’t hung around anything’s neck. Its right hand had something black and tarry, a mess that Rickar’s mind rebelled at.

The ambassador Night Drinker set the box down at the edge where the door would have been, and the black thing beside it. It stepped back, chittering loudly, gnashing its teeth. It held out its hands, opening and closing its fists like it was squeezing the air.

Rickar recognized the gesture from when they’d made their attack on the Night Drinkers’ base. He hadn’t known what it meant then. He was starting to guess now. It was a sign of surrender. They’d been trying to surrender.

The voice that came from the box was the eerie, toneless one that had announced the death of Anjiin. It was exactly the same.

“No more war. No more fighting. No more.”

Dafyd, the only one of them without a weapon, stepped forward. The Night Drinkers pressed their heads more firmly into the ground, preparing, it seemed, to suffer violence without complaint. Rickar saw the wet, black thing for what it was: a severed head. They’d killed one of their own as a peace offering. The ambassador squeezed the air more frantically as Dafyd stepped toward it.

“What is your name?” Dafyd asked. The little box was silent for a moment, then chittered and squeaked. The Night Drinker that had carried the offerings forward looked up. It was difficult to see it as anything but startled. It bared its teeth and squawked.

“Don’t hurt us. We submit.”

“We’re humans,” Dafyd said. “We’re from a planet called Anjiin. We didn’t want to come here. Was it like that for you too?”

But the little enemies—former enemies, maybe—crawled backward, arms still out at their sides. When they’d gone two body lengths, the ones at the back chirped, got to their feet, and fled. A heartbeat later, the others were up and gone as well. Tonner stepped out into the corridor, the bulbs of murderous goo still in his hands. Rickar realized he’d been gripping his knife so hard that his hand had cramped. He felt shaky.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” Campar said. “Are we assuming that was sincere? I don’t mean to imply the alien monkey is a liar, but…”

Tonner rolled the little blood-soaked head onto its side with the toe of his shoe. “This one seems pretty committed to the gesture.”

Dafyd knelt, picking up the translator like it was as fragile as spun glass. It was the same size that all the others had been, even the ones the massive Carryx carried. It only seemed larger compared to the Night Drinkers’ slight bodies. “This is amazing. It changes…”

“Changes what?” Tonner asked. It could have been contempt, but there was no heat in the words. It was like he was actually curious.

A brightness was in Dafyd’s eyes Rickar hadn’t seen there in weeks. Maybe ever. “Come on.”

Dafyd stood, striding out and down the corridor like a child who was expecting a present. The rest of them exchanged looks in various shades of uncertainty.

“He seems pretty confident it’s not an ambush?” Jessyn said, her inflection making it a question.

Rickar moved toward the doorway, but not to follow him. Just to see where he was headed. Only once he was at the threshold, he kept going. Jessyn trotted to come up beside him.

“Any idea what we’re doing?” she asked.

“Following Alkhor.”

Dafyd strode to the cathedral, and then through it. At first, Rickar thought they might be going to the Night Drinkers’ enclave, but Dafyd didn’t stop. He kept the same quick stride, the same excited focus, through the whole space and out through a wide archway. Rickar looked back, but Tonner hadn’t come. That was probably wise. Someone should be there when Else and Synnia came back from patrol. Empty rooms would have been ambiguous in unfortunate ways.

Rickar had never been to see the librarian in its den, but he’d heard Tonner talk about it. This seemed like the right path. The broad hallway with its arches that led to other spaces, other microclimates, other sets of alien life laboring under the Carryx yoke.

Dafyd paused before one of these. On the far side of the archway, a short corridor opened into a huge space, as large as their cathedral, but built with what looked like ropes hanging down the walls. A clicking came from everywhere and nowhere, like a swamp at evening when the insects began to stir. Dafyd slowed, his gaze ranging across the space. Rickar and Jessyn caught up to him.

“What are we looking for?” Rickar asked, but Dafyd was already off again. Something had lumbered out from among the vines or ropes or tentacles. It was the size and build of a hairless bear with half a dozen eyes arranged in a brightly colored face.

Dafyd went toward it, and when it deflected its path around him, shifted to block it. He held the little square from the Night Drinkers in his hands.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m sorry. We need help. Can you understand me?”

It might only have been Rickar’s imagination, but the ticking in the room seemed to grow louder for a moment. The bear stopped and the colorful face shifted, looking Dafyd up and down, then Jessyn, then himself. He felt the fear like a hand around his throat.

And then the translator spoke. It said, “I can.”

Dafyd’s smile was pure joy. “Good. That’s good. Have you seen other creatures that look like us?”

Jellit sat down gingerly. The wound on his right leg ached, but not as badly as it had the night before. He resisted the urge to pluck away the bandage. Looking at it wouldn’t help.

“You all right there, old man?” Allstin asked. He was at least four decades Jellit’s senior, and he called all of them old man or old woman. The joke had never been funny, but had now stopped being annoying and had just become an idiom of their little group.

“Not dead yet,” Jellit said. “What about you?”

“Spry as a kitten. Strong as an ox.”

“You can do my chores, then.”

The routine phrases completed, Allstin let out a little grunt and headed for the ladder up to the sleeping chambers. Dennia and Kell were up there already. Llaren Morse was gone, off to the meeting. It was Jellit’s turn to take watch. Not that he could fight, but he could shout. That was going to have to be enough.

Once he was alone, he dimmed the common room lights. The brightly colored walls faded into shadows of themselves. The boxy kitchen off in the rear fell almost to black. The others liked keeping the space bright more than he did. The chance for a little twilight was the advantage that came from standing guard. It wasn’t even that he liked the darkness that much. It was just the joy of being able to control something—anything—about his circumstances. And he wasn’t going to fall asleep.

He settled in, preparing to sit through the long hours of the night. The gun that Kell had rigged up sat on the table beside him, a little black knot of violence waiting for its moment. They only had three cartridges left. He didn’t know if they could make more. The group had made these, but what Jellit knew about weapon crafting could be written on his palm with room to spare. He forced his jaw to relax, kept his back upright and strong, and he waited for Llaren Morse or morning, whichever came first.

Neither came first.

The first sounds were clunks, footsteps or pipes or the vast architecture of the Carryx prison expanding and contracting with the day’s temperature shifts. But they got louder. Grew regular. Jellit put his hand on the butt of the gun, not raising it. Not yet.

And then: “Hello?”

He knew the voice, and he didn’t. It wasn’t Llaren. It wasn’t any of the workgroup. But it was human, and it wasn’t coming from one of the black translation boxes. He levered himself up, limping toward the door. He was afraid to speak. He was afraid not to.

“Who’s there?” he said.

“Hello?” the other one repeated, and the adrenaline hit his system like a hammer. He pulled the door open, and against all probability, against all hope, she was there. Thinner than he remembered. A haunted expression around her eyes, but Jessyn. Unmistakably Jessyn. And behind her, Rickar Daumatin and Dafyd Alkhor.

Tears rose in Jellit’s eyes. He felt stunned. Like he’d been struck with a current that left his arms and legs limp and powerless. Jessyn stepped into the room, and even in the dim light, he saw she was weeping too.

“Hi,” she said.