Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Thirty-Three

Jessyn liked the new alcove for several reasons, not the least of them being that it gave her a chance to get away from the rooms for a while. Moving the equipment from the first lab to the common area at home had been a good idea for defense, and it had made things possible at the time that wouldn’t have been with the Night Drinkers still mounting their attacks. But the enemy was gone, and the new alcove felt like opening up. More space, more safety, less of the claustrophobic pressure that came with being under siege. It was a small pleasure, and it was in the shadow of a lot of bad things. But that made the small pleasures matter more.

Added to that, it was a nice space with good equipment. The lab equipment was better, not just in quality, but as a mutually reinforcing set of tools. There was just more that they could do with these. Even the quality of the lights seemed more pleasant, like their spectrum had been tuned to match an early spring afternoon. And, of course, there was the constant, mostly subliminal knowledge that this space had belonged to the fuckers who had killed Irinna. And that she’d seen them all dead.

The murmur of the cathedral reached back into the alcove, but it was almost soothing. The sounds of aliens and animals going about their business had become like the sound of traffic in a dense city. Background noise, less a sensation than an environment. True, they were never there without a guard. Synnia was sitting at the mouth of the alcove now, watching for anything suspicious and visiting with Dennia, who always seemed to be somewhere in Rickar’s vicinity these days. Despite that, Jessyn was able to forget that she was a prisoner, forget the grinding sense of loss and displacement, Ostencour’s simmering rebellion, Irinna’s death, the abasement of Anjiin. Sometimes, for a little while, she could live in the moment.

It was as close as she could get to freedom.

“All right,” Rickar said. “I think we are ready for the next phase.”

“Meal prep?”

“Meal prep.”

The container was the size of her two cupped hands. Enough to hold a generation of berries that crept and shifted, as sleepy as starfish in a tide pool. Tonner’s breakthrough didn’t require raising dedicated animals for sacrifice. All the alterations he wanted could be done with a few catalysts and a mild acid bath. Rickar plucked one of the berries out from among the crowd and tossed it to her. She caught it out of the air and stepped to the little trough.

“How many of these little guys do you think we’ve gone through?” she asked as she slit the berry’s skin and squeezed the pulp into a dish.

“Thousands, I imagine,” Rickar answered. “The harvesting part always reminds me of eating clams. I used to spend summers at Causon Bay with my uncle’s family. We’d dig up dinner and cook it on the beach. Cracking open the clams and pulling out the meat was… I don’t know. It seemed like a chore at the time, but it’s the part I miss.”

“Funny how that goes.” She discarded the skin and held her hands up to catch the next one. At the back of the alcove, in the sample case, the little animal that wasn’t quite a turtle scratched at the wall of its cage like it knew that something important was happening. The scraping of its claws sounded like anticipation. “Did you ever wonder what you’d have done if you hadn’t gone in for research?”

“I apprenticed in industrial coral,” Rickar replied. “Three years. If I hadn’t done this, I would have been growing houses in Dunstenai. Freezing through the winter at four times base pay and vacationing all summer someplace green and calm.”

She caught a third berry, slit it open, squeezed out the pulp. “Why do research, then?”

“Honestly? There was a girl. By the time it didn’t work out, I had a career path. What about you?”

“I was always going to be this.” She held up the dish. “I think this is about enough?”

“Wouldn’t want to overfeed him,” Rickar agreed. “Let’s cook.”

The process was brief, and less complex than making a slightly fancy dinner. The pulp was a warm off-white to start. When Jessyn poured in the acid, there was a smell like yeast and lemon. Five minutes later, they added the catalytic compounds, and the pulp began off-gassing, bubbling, and turning dark like a casserole just taken from the heat. Rickar spooned up a lump of the sample and fed it into a set of five microsampling slides. Fifteen minutes later, the pulp had turned a uniform toast-brown, and the data reports were all in the expected ranges.

“Is it ridiculous that I’m actually excited about this?” Rickar asked. “I mean, this has got to be the worst set of conditions anyone’s ever done serious research under. And at the same time, we’re about to reconcile two trees of life that we didn’t even know existed before we got the assignment. It’s amazing.”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Jessyn said. “Even if we have the nutrition right, it may taste rotten.”

“But you know what I mean, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Curiosity dies last, I guess.”

“I was thinking less curiosity and more the unending drive to feel competent at something. But maybe that’s two ways of making the same point. D’you want to see if our shelled friend thinks this smells edible?”

“I do.”

When she looked at it more closely, it didn’t really look that much like a turtle. It was wide and flat, but its shell didn’t seem to be joined to its body in quite the same way. The colors shifted in the light in a way that had nothing to do with dyes and everything to do with diffraction, like a butterfly’s wing. And Jessyn had never seen evolution favor a three-legged design before. She wondered what kind of environment it had risen up in—mud or water or land. Its face was roughly like a turtle’s, though, and its jaw gaped in a toothless ridge. Rickar put it on the countertop, placing it gently on its belly, and put down a plate of the pale brown mash that was biochemically almost identical to its own flesh.

The not-turtle lifted its head and opened its mouth like it was trying to bite the air. Jessyn had seen snakes and dogs do something very similar when they were trying to catch a scent. The not-turtle turned its head to the left and then the right, and then, like it was flipping a switch, began a mad scrabble across the countertop, racing toward the food. When it reached the dish, it threw its head into the pulp, scooping jawfuls and swallowing them with an enthusiasm that bordered on lust.

Rickar laughed. Jessyn felt the smile pulling at her lips. The turtle gulped down more.

“Well, I don’t know for certain that it’ll be nutritionally complete, but he seems to like the taste.”

“Not even any extra salt,” Jessyn said. “Synnia! Hey, come look at this. Synnia?”

“Huh,” Rickar said. “That’s…”

He was looking out toward the mouth of the alcove. Concern had furrowed his brow. And then fear. For a moment, Jessyn was back in the first lab, the smell of explosives in her nostrils and Irinna bleeding in her lap. The memory was so vivid, so transporting, that all she could look for were the small, feather-haired enemy, returned from their deaths. It took her the span of an extra breath to see what was actually there.

Synnia was where she’d been before, arms crossed and looking out at the pandemonium. But instead of leaning or sitting, she’d stood up. The thing approaching her was familiar, in a terrible way. One of the Rak-hund, pale and snakelike, stood before their guards. The bent-knife legs rippled without moving them, like a man flexing his hands before a fight.

Synnia looked back over her shoulder. For a moment, her eyes met Jessyn’s. It was a look that she would remember for years. For the rest of her life. The peaceable old woman who had worked, her lover at her side, in Tonner Freis’s labs on Anjiin was gone. The angry, grief-stung woman was absent as well. In that moment—that fraction of a second—Synnia had become something regal. Something more than human, or else what humans can become when they face the universe and refuse to look away. There was no fear and no pleasure and no hope. Maybe serenity, if serenity could sometimes be terrible.

Dennia shouted Run! and pulled something out from under her tunic and pressed it to the Rak-hund’s head. The report of the gun was a violence in itself. Synnia spun, put her head down, ran. The Rak-hund reared back, pale blood pouring from a gash where something like an eye had just been.

It pushed Dennia. It didn’t seem like more than that. Like a bully on a playground, fighting over a toy. Dennia cried out once and folded to the ground. The Rak-hund snapped down on top of her, stabbing her with a dozen of its legs all at once.

Rickar grabbed Jessyn by the shoulder, hauling her back into the alcove. He stepped in front of her, the scalpel they used for shucking the berries wrapped in his fist. He was chanting obscenities like he was trying to remember them. Jessyn felt herself come unstuck, the freezing horror letting go of her with a click. She needed a weapon too. She needed something to fight with. She had a gun back in her room. Why had she left it in her room? The only thing at hand was the empty flask that the acid solution had been in, so she picked it up like it was a grenade and turned to face the enemy.

The Rak-hund shivered forward, leaving a trail of blood. Pale blood from its wound, crimson from its feet. It chittered to itself. The seconds lasted lifetimes.

It turned back, curving to press against the back half of its own body as it departed, undulating away into the crowd that had paused to watch the mayhem.

Rickar walked to the mouth of the alcove, and she followed, the empty flask still in her fist. Her mind was cold. He knelt at Dennia’s side. Her death was unmistakable. Her eyes were open, but sightless. Her face was slack and calm. One of the wounds had taken her in the throat, and from the angle of it, Jessyn guessed it had severed her spine. If so, it had been a mercy. The blood was only seeping from her wounds. There was no heartbeat to push it out from severed arteries.

“Shit,” Rickar said softly, but she didn’t have the sense he knew he was speaking. It was a reflex. “Shit shit shit.”

Jessyn stayed cold. Detached. Dissociated.

“Her. Not us,” Jessyn said. “They came for her and Synnia. They checked to see who we were, and they let us live. Because they wanted to.”

“I don’t understand,” Rickar said. “I don’t understand.”

Jessyn did. “We haven’t said yes.”

“What?”

“Ostencour’s group. The bioweapons against the Carryx. Synnia was part of his group since the transport. The whole near-field team was all in. But us? We hadn’t said yes. And they knew it.”

Rickar’s face was gray except for two bright, unhealthy splotches of red on his cheeks. “Someone talked.”

“Or no one needed to, because they’re listening to everything we say all the time. How the fuck would we know?”

“Right.”

Jessyn dropped her flask. It was a pathetic weapon, anyway. “I have to go. You stay here with her. And the work. Take care of it.”

“No, I’m coming with you.”

“Rickar, you have to stay. You have to be with her.”

He looked down at the woman he’d been sleeping with. The lover he’d taken in hell.

“She’s not here anymore,” he said. “She won’t mind.”

For a moment, the monstrosity of leaving the corpse unattended seemed vast, impossible to overcome. And then, a heartbeat later, it seemed trivial.

Synnia ran, moving faster than she had in years. If she had been hoping to save herself, she would have gone someplace new. Someplace they didn’t know to look for her. She headed for the near-field quarters instead. If there was a chance she could warn them…

Her side hurt. The same sharp ache that she’d suffered as a girl running too long and too fast in the play yards at school. Synnia gritted her teeth and pushed through the pain.

The path to the near-field workgroup’s quarters had become as familiar as the much shorter one to her own rooms. It was only fear that made it seem strange. The alien bodies she passed felt like trees in a vast and unsafe forest. Everything was infused with menace and the threat of violence. Everything could kill.

When she got close, the sounds of violence came to meet her. Human voices raised in alarm, the growls and shouts of alien throats. The deafening explosion of cartridges and the dry crack of electromagnets. As she pulled herself around the last corner, a Rak-hund’s body lay splayed on the deck. Allstin, a gun in one hand, was helping Merrol over the corpse with the other. Llaren Morse stood at the open door, gesturing like he could pull the pair of them toward him by grabbing at the air.

“Wait!” Synnia tried to shout, but it came out barely more than a whisper. “Wait for me.”

Allstin saw her, pushed Merrol toward the door, and waited, God bless him. His mouth was all white teeth and rage. Synnia clambered over the dead Rak-hund. Its legs shifted and clattered under her. And then Allstin had her by the hand, leading her into the quarters. Merrol and Llaren Morse hauled the door closed, creaking on its fabric hinge, and barred it with a crowbar.

“Ostencour,” Synnia said. “We have to warn the others.”

“I was with Ferre,” Merrol said, her low, vibrant voice reduced to a croak. “She got away. I think she got away. Vivan didn’t.”

“What we need,” Allstin said, “is weapons and a place to make a stand.”

“The energy physics group,” Llaren Morse said. “If we can get—”

The door boomed. In the silence that came after, the four of them looked at each other. Synnia watched the others as they all came to the same understanding. The door boomed again, and shook against its frame.

“No back way out, then?” Synnia said.

“There is not,” Allstin said. He looked at the gun in his hand, opened its magazine, then tossed it aside. The door boomed a third time, and a crack appeared shaped like a lightning bolt, only dark, running through its center. Merrol shrieked, not in fear. Or not only fear. Frustration, rage, sorrow. Llaren Morse ran to their little kitchen, the mirror of her own, and took a knife in either hand.

Synnia had imagined how she would face death. She supposed everyone thought about it sometimes. In some scenarios, she was brave and stoic. In some she was lost and fearful. Now, at the end of all things, she found herself just standing, like she was waiting for a train. Waiting for Nöl to come from the garden and join her.

The door split open, and two Rak-hund boiled through the shards. At the last moment, she charged toward them, her hands in fists. Something punched her just under her rib cage, and she lost her breath.

Somewhere very far away, Allstin was screaming.

The wide door of the near-field group’s quarters stood in ruins. A smear of blood marked the side of it. The smell from inside was like a lab that had spent the day in sacrifice. Blood and fear. The body of a Rak-hund lay in the corridor, its knife legs splayed like the petals of some terrible orchid.

“Look,” Rickar said, pointing at the ground. The same dots of red that the Rak-hund had left walking away from Dennia. Jessyn put her hand on the remains of the swinging door and pulled it open.

Allstin sat where they’d kept their guard post. Blood had soaked his tunic and pants, turning the pale fabric a deep purple-red. His eyes were open like he was still watching the door. Still guarding, even now that all reason for the watch was gone. Synnia lay on the floor, face down. The pool of blood around her was small. She hadn’t lived long enough to bleed out.

Rickar, in the kitchen area, made a small, despairing sigh. Merrol and Llaren Morse lay side by side on the floor, both face down and motionless. Rickar didn’t look angry or frightened. He looked old. He looked weary.

“We have to check upstairs,” Jessyn said. For a moment, she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he nodded.

The ladder leading to the bedrooms and the shower had streaks of blood on the rungs and bright new scratches in the metal. Jessyn lifted herself up, trying to imagine how the Rak-hund would have swarmed up the ladder. She dismissed the trembling in her hands and legs. She had work to do. Weakness could come later.

She paused in front of Jellit’s room, too aware that the next few seconds might divide her life into before and after. There was no lock. All she had to do was pull on the little handle. She didn’t want to.

Something touched her hand. Rickar. He wrapped his fingers around her palm. She took his hand. She had to do this. She was grateful she didn’t have to do it alone.

She took the little handle and pulled. The door swung open silently on papery hinges. It took her almost two long, unsteady breaths to understand that the body on the floor wasn’t her brother.

Else Yannin lay on her back, one arm folded across her belly. Her chest was still, her face pallid in death. Her copper-colored hair spread around her head was the only red in the room. There were no wounds, no blood. They knelt beside her corpse, still hand in hand.

“This isn’t like the others,” Rickar said.

“All right,” Jessyn said. The emptiness of her voice said the rest for her. It didn’t matter. Something inexplicable had happened. Someone they knew and cared about, maybe even loved in their way, was dead. She didn’t have the resources to care about the details.

She squeezed Rickar’s hand and let it go. There were more rooms to search. More opportunities for destruction. But all the other bedrooms were empty. Jellit wasn’t there. It didn’t mean he was alive. He could have been visiting one of the other workgroups or off on some errand for Merrol or Ostencour. The Carryx could have slaughtered him someplace she didn’t know to look.

When they were done, the rooms all searched, they walked out to the corridor together. Rickar swung the shards of the wide door closed and leaned against the wall beside them. One of the tall, bone-carapaced aliens lumbered by. A Phylarch. A group of things that looked like jeweled crabs. Four of the squat-bodied, long-limbed Soft Lothark, moving together and making soft screeching noises at each other that were probably words, gathered around the body of the Rak-hund, gesturing at one another and at it.

“We should…” Rickar began, and then seemed to lose his train of thought. He seemed distracted or sick. In shock. Of course he did.

“We’ll go home,” Jessyn said. “They’ll need to know about Synnia and Else. There might be news about the others.”

“Yes. I hope the others are all right. I can’t believe that Dennia… I mean, I can, but… I don’t know what I mean.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “It’s all happening again. Just like on Anjiin. It’s all happening again.”

“Not again. Still. It’s still happening, we just lost sight of it for a little while.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s right,” Rickar said. Then, a moment later, “I think I’m going to scream now.” He said it like a sick child announcing he was about to vomit. Equal parts dread and apology.

“Go ahead,” Jessyn said. “It’s all right.”

Rickar blinked, nodded, then took another deep breath. The first howl was weak and tentative. The second, deeper and more authentic. All the ones after that were raw and ripping, the kind of grief and horror that tore the throat and darkened the face with blood and loss. His jaw didn’t close between them, just gaped. He leaked spit and tears and snot as he screamed and screamed and screamed. After a while, he sank to his knees and Jessyn sat beside him. The aliens walking past didn’t pause or stare. Why would they? For all they knew, this was normal. Just something primates did.