Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Thirty

There’s not a goddamned thing any of us can do about it.

Dafyd sat in his usual spot watching the play of alien traffic through the cathedral. There had been a joy in it before. He had wanted to share it. Wanted someone to be at his side while they admired the grandeur and strangeness of it all.

He remembered feeling that, but he didn’t feel it now.

He knew some of them. The bone horses were Phylarchs. The clicking globes were Oumenti and Soun. The dog-sized crabs wouldn’t say their names.

Before, he had been an observer. He’d been an unintentional intruder in the vast organism. Now he knew names and histories, he had glimmers of the competitions and rivalries that shaped the beings there. The intersection between evolution and politics that came when whole species could be put to death.

When his species could be. Would be. And there was not a goddamned thing any of us could do about it.

There was a way that the world prison was very much like one of the berries. The way that the berries were really just a balloon skin around a rich pulp of other organisms that it managed and exploited, the Carryx were a boundary civilization that farmed other species, gathered other aliens, managed them. Lifted some up, and edited others out. This was the pulp. They were the farm.

Except that even the berries worked to keep their little farmed organisms alive. The Night Drinkers had possibly been poisoned into madness by too much oxygen in their air. One of Ostencour’s group had been dying of a very treatable hereditary disease. Jessyn had nearly become suicidal before they coaxed the berries into making medicine for her. And the food supply was dwindling by the day. At every turn, the system the Carryx had set up said Be useful to us. But it seemed part of being useful was solving your own damn problems. Every species moving past him in the cathedral had faced the same challenge: Find a way to stay alive and produce something of value to the Carryx.

And as his sense of the prison as a vast organism, a city, a tissue made from a thousand different kinds of cell grew deeper, the knowledge also intruded on him that there was a black thread in it. Little knots of humanity planning out their revenge like a cancer still too small to detect. He knew it was there, and it laid a sense of dread over everything. He wished that he knew the details of the plan, and he was glad that he didn’t.

A Soft Lothark ambled past on its long, furry legs, the same kind that had exploded once and sickened him. The same kind that he’d seen eaten by its fellows. A flock of Jayaster swirled overhead, glittering the yellow and blue of an angry conversation. Dafyd rose and turned toward home, walking slowly, pouring his attention into the slow shift from one foot to the other like he was pouring the weight from one half of an hourglass into the other and then back again. Letting his mind rest on something meaningless, innocuous, simple. The weariness in his body wasn’t lack of sleep. Resting wouldn’t fix it.

He turned left instead of right, moving deeper into the cathedral-wide common area and toward the new alcove. The new lab. The spoils of war. He didn’t particularly want to go there, but he didn’t particularly want to go back to the quarters either. If there had been a bar, even if it had been half a day’s walk away, he’d have been heading for it.

Jessyn was standing guard alone, and he saw her before she saw him. Captivity had changed her. The short, round-bodied woman that she’d once been had changed to someone thinner and sharper, like someone had put her on a grindstone and turned her into a knife. Her eyes had a darkness they hadn’t had on Anjiin, and she held her shoulders back and her chin up in constant, unconscious aggression. He tried to think when it had changed. On the transit, maybe. Or when she’d led the attack on the Night Drinkers. There were so many changes they’d all gone through. Dafyd wondered what she’d see in him, if she thought to look.

She raised a hand as he approached. From the alcove behind her, human voices came. Campar and Tonner, each talking over the other. Dafyd nodded toward them, and she shrugged.

“They have a difference of opinion,” she said. “Tonner wants to start feeding things to the not-turtle. Tolerance testing. Campar thinks we should keep mapping the plasticity of the berries’ internal farm matrix.”

Her smile was thin, and he knew what it meant. As if any of this matters. She wasn’t ready to say it aloud, but she thought they were all going to die. The conspiracy against the Carryx would come to its climax, make whatever mark they could against their oppressors, and then humanity would follow the Night Drinkers down to slaughter. His sense of weariness redoubled.

In the lab, Tonner snapped It doesn’t make sense. The expression that flickered in Jessyn’s eyes could have been impatience. Or contempt. Whatever, it wasn’t how either of them had reacted to the team lead’s temper before they’d come here.

Dafyd wanted to ask how Jessyn was, what she thought about Ostencour’s proposal. If it made her feel as powerless as it did him. Instead, he nodded and walked away. Jessyn went back to peering at the crowd and waiting for the next unanticipated violence. The mutter of alien voices and footsteps made a gentle roar, like a waterfall. It drowned out the need for thought, and he let himself walk the pattern that habit had made for him.

At the rooms, the wide door was cracked open, but nothing uninvited seemed to have made its way in. The common area was empty, and the handwritten notes that had been tacked on the wall shifted in the faint breeze. The resonance scanner was ticking to itself thoughtfully as it went through its run. Everything was as it was supposed to be, except that no one was there. Outside the window, the local sun beamed down through a brilliant blue-green sky. Dafyd sat alone, looking out, and remembering how it had felt when he was an adolescent and his parents left him alone at home for the first time. The emptiness and the possibility.

That boy was gone now and would never come back. The world he’d known had gone with him.

A soft sound came from the hall, cloth against cloth. When he looked back, Else was standing in the shadows. Her hair was messy from her pillow, and her face was sober and pale. Still, when their eyes met, she managed a little smile.

“Where is everyone?” Dafyd asked.

Else shook her head, as if she were saying she didn’t know, but then answered anyway. “Tonner and Campar are working at the new lab. Rickar and Synnia went somewhere with Jellit. Jessyn might be with them.”

“She’s not. I saw her at the lab.”

“She’s there, then. I was out… I was out for a while. Exploring.”

“You should take someone with you. It’s not safe out there.”

“I know, but…”

“What are you looking for, anyway? I understood it when you and Synnia were trying to find other people. Or patrolling. But the Night Drinkers are gone and we found the other people, and you’re still looking.”

She stepped out into the light. He expected her to blink or squint, but the shift didn’t seem to bother her at all. Her fingers tapped against her thigh, fast and tight. Her lips moved as if she were speaking, but no sound came out.

“Else?”

“They can’t fight back.”

“Ostencour and Synnia and all the people with them? They’re going to. It’s their pathological move. It’s reflex. It’s the organism we are.”

“If they try to kill the librarian or raise some kind of insurrection, we’ll die here.”

“I know. But… maybe it makes sense to go down fighting.”

Her jaw slid forward, and her hands curled into fists. “It doesn’t. It makes sense to win.”

“I don’t see how that’s an option.” He tried to be gentle, but whatever storm was raging in Else’s mind, he wasn’t able to calm it. She moved sharply, pacing from the kitchen to the window and back again. Her lips twitched into the shape of words. Dread was a stone in Dafyd’s chest. If Else was breaking down, it was fair. She was the only one who hadn’t, so far. It was her turn. But he wasn’t sure he had the reserves to help her. He was too near the edge himself.

She paused at the window, looking out into the vastness. The grid shone in the sky, the ziggurats squatted below them, standing in ranks that passed off to the horizon. They were silent for a moment. She turned, leaned her shoulders against the glass. He had a powerful memory of being in her room on Anjiin, her leaning against a doorframe with the same posture. That had been just before the sirens started shrieking to announce the attack. It felt like an omen.

“I’m going to tell you some things,” she said. Her rage had been replaced by an eerie calm. “I need you to promise you’ll hear me out before you pass judgment.”

“On you?”

“Promise me.”

He shifted, leaned forward. “Of course.”

Else gathered herself, but only for a moment. The resonance scanner chirped that it had finished its run and went quiet, waiting for new instructions.

“There is a war,” she said. “The Carryx are fighting a vast, terrible war. They have been for generations. It’s touched hundreds of solar systems. Maybe thousands. You’ve seen all the species they’ve put the collar on. For every one of these, there are many they’ve judged unusable and eradicated. But this great war has another side. There are forces that are pushing back against them.”

“How did you find out about—”

She lifted a palm, commanding silence. “They knew. The other side? They knew the Carryx were coming for Anjiin. And they knew how the Carryx treat conquered worlds. Six months before the attack, they snuck a weapon onto Anjiin. It was… I don’t know how to describe this. Think of a billion tiny machines that can take over a living host. Hide inside it. The other side, they didn’t give it a lot of information in case the Carryx found it. Just enough for it to perform a mission. Connect itself to someone who would be taken back into Carryx territory. Sneak in… here. Right here.”

Else paused. Distress drew a vertical line between her eyebrows. Her fingers moved like she was looking for a cigarette she’d put down, then brushed her lips. The ghost of an old habit. Dafyd wasn’t sure if she was waiting for a response from him or gathering her thoughts. He waited. The silence only stretched a few seconds.

“This spy was supposed to get all the information it could. Intelligence gathering. And then it was supposed to find a way to send that data back out to the other side.”

In the sky behind her, something flared a bright yellow and faded just as quickly away. The stone in his chest was still there, but it meant something different.

“And you knew about this… this spy thing? It was in touch with you?”

“Yes.”

The air seemed to have gone thin. “You knew they were coming. You knew what they were going to do.”

The words came out from her, high and fast, slowing as she went, until she stopped like a balloon gently deflating. “I did. In general terms. The workgroup was high status, and that’s who the Carryx take. It’s who they think they can learn from. Make use of. However you want to phrase it. But I knew it was coming. I knew.”

“And you didn’t warn anyone?”

“I couldn’t. More resistance from Anjiin would have changed nothing. The only result would be the Carryx wondering how the security forces knew. A reason to suspect. Maybe find the spy.” She stepped away from the glass, pushing off from it with one shoulder and stepping closer to him. “There’s hope. That’s the thing. There is hope, but it’s a long kind of hope. A slow one. It will take a lot of suffering along the way, but—”

“The spy? Where is it now?”

Else lifted her hand. For a moment, he didn’t understand. Then the motes shifting under her skin darkened and grew, flowing like a black snowstorm along the surface of her fingers, the subtle lines of her palm, before fading away again.

“It’s in you?”

“It’s in me.”

“For how long?”

She looked away. It could have been embarrassment. “A long time.”

“Is it conscious?”

“Yes.”

Dafyd’s breath was slow, and it shook. The world had taken on a distance, like this was a dream he was having. He recognized that he was having a reaction, but he couldn’t pinpoint the emotion he was feeling, only that he wasn’t angry. He was surprised by that. “Is it you? I mean, are you still Else?”

“I’m Else,” she said, quickly. Sharply. “I’m just…”

“Cooperating with it?”

“Something like that. It’s complicated. I’ve been looking for a way to send out everything we’ve learned. There isn’t one. The Swarm’s creators knew security would be tight. They suspected that it would be difficult to get information out while we were on one of the Carryx homeworlds. If we can get transferred to a conquered system, it should be less rigorous. And they do it all the time. There were probably a dozen different species they brought to settle on Anjiin. We just need to survive long enough that they see a reason to take us along.”

“But that’s not going to happen.”

“Not if Ostencour goes through with his plan. I know this is a lot to take in. You don’t have to say anything. Just… I know why Ostencour and Jellit and Synnia and all the rest of them want to fight. I want to fight too. And I could. I am the weapon of their greatest enemy. I could kill many Carryx before they destroyed me, if I chose to.”

“But that’s not why you’re here,” Dafyd said.

“No. Because then I would be destroyed and everything I’ve learned would be lost, and all to take lives the Carryx themselves won’t care about. They think that if one of them was weak enough to be killed by an animal, then it should have been killed by an animal. What is, is.”

“You’re saying we beat them all at once, or not at all.”

“Yes. The others want to make all this terror and pain right, but they want to do it fast, and if we go fast, we lose.”

“So we tell them,” Dafyd said.

Else’s smile was unmistakably her. He’d been thinking about that smile since he’d first joined the workgroup. He took her hand. It felt the way it always had.

“How would that go?” she asked. “Best-case scenario would be a debate with a lot of people arguing about it. The Carryx might seem like absentee landlords, but don’t assume they don’t have ears everywhere. I wasn’t even going to tell you, except now I need you to know. And… I owe it to you.”

“Then isn’t telling me right now a huge risk?”

“I can make sure no one listens for a while. But it’s dangerous to do too often. The absence could become noticeable.”

“Does Tonner know about the thing inside you?”

“God, no,” she said with a laugh. “Can you imagine? He’d have me listed up there as another project to schedule out.”

Dafyd found himself laughing too. His mind clung to the warmth, the normalcy, like he was drowning and it was the only thing afloat. Else tapped his hip, motioned for him to move over. He made room, and she sat beside him. He leaned into her, then remembered the swirl of darkness under her flesh and shifted away. He felt her start to move toward him, to close the distance, and then hold herself back.

After a time, he said, “I don’t know how I can stop Ostencour. I don’t even know who’s working with him, not all of them.”

“You can’t do it. But you know someone who can.” Her expression was an apology. “The librarian.”

When he recoiled, she grabbed his arm. She didn’t feel machine strong. Was she? If he just got up and walked away, would the thing inside her stop him?

“Wait, Dafyd,” she said. “Think it through. If we warn them, then it’s not all of Anjiin that can’t be domesticated. Just part of it needs to be culled. If I report the insurgents, then the Carryx will look at me more closely, and we can’t let them do that. Of all of us, you’re the one who assimilated the most. It would make sense coming from you.”

“If I warn the Carryx, they’ll all be killed.”

“They’re going to die anyway. And everyone else with them. And more than that, we’ll all die for nothing. We sacrificed the lives we knew for a chance at this. Maybe we didn’t know it at the time, but it’s what we did. If we can keep that chance alive, even just for a little while, we have to. We owe it to everyone who didn’t make it. Nöl and Irinna…”

In his mind, he saw Jessyn sitting beside her brother for the first time since the attack. The darkness and pain that she’d carried, and the moment of light that the universe had given her. Dafyd thought about being the man who took that away from her.

“You kissed me just before the attack. Was any of what happened between us real? Or was it just part of your plan. Turn me into a willing tool for your mission. Because the choice you just dumped on me? I wouldn’t ask that of my worst enemy.”

Else didn’t answer. The machine inside her didn’t answer. Dafyd wondered if he’d have been able to tell the difference.

“I have to think about all of this,” he said when it was clear she wasn’t going to speak first.

“I know that I’m asking a lot. And I understand why you’d distrust me. Just while you think it through, don’t tell anyone about me. And Dafyd? Don’t take too long.”