Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Thirty-Six

The swarm is in chaos.

Part of this is the nature of its new flesh. For the first time, it feels the cognitive deformation of a high-testosterone environment, and even with shutting off the hormone as soon as it had taken control, the brain and body have been formed in ways that are subtly different. The new host fights more violently against his death, the rage and despair taste different. There are moments when the swarm feels like it could almost lose control. Not in the way its hosts have lost control, of course. It cannot die or be displaced. It is as if Jellit has been reduced to a series of habits and tics that the swarm will revert to if it isn’t careful.

It looks out the window at the wide, blocky structures of the Carryx using new eyes. For all the changes and alterations that it worked on Else Yannin’s flesh, there had been some underlying commonality. Jellit sees things differently. The swarm shifts through the spectrum, remaking its sensorium. It finds the lines of force that arc through the high air, the flickers of heat on the distant ground, the shimmer at the edge of ultraviolet frequencies. Jellit’s body experiences all of them a bit differently. Like two different dancers performing the same choreography.

Are you all right? Jessyn asks.

The remnants of the man scream and push and flail, but these are only metaphors, because he has no body to scream or push or flail with. The others—the two dead women—watch and sympathize.

Just thinking, the swarm says.

If we go… If we go, maybe they’ll send us to the same place.

The swarm smiles and takes her hand. Jellit’s conflict shifts through it. The heartbreaking love of the brother for his sister, the resentment of yet another scenario where he is called upon to support her, the rage and horror at experiencing her fingers lacing around the swarm’s.

Maybe, it says. Maybe.

And its heart aches.

The right thing to do is leave. The right thing to want is to leave. If it can find its way to a colony world, a captured planet with less vicious security than the world-palace, it will transmit all it’s learned. It will whisper the secrets that might give its side an edge into vast radio ears that are waiting for it. That is the reason for its presence. That is what all the people it has been died for. What all the dead that they loved took to the Carryx’s altar with them.

It doesn’t want to go.

The swarm is in love.

That’s bullshit, the remnant of Ameer says. Else loves him. You’re just in the habit of feeling what she felt.

I loved him but I was already dead, Else says. I was never with Dafyd before I died. I was dead before we even kissed. She means It’s not my fault. As though originating intention could be separated out in the soup that was becoming their shared minds. The swarm tries not to pay attention to the distracting chaos of their echoes. The mind that once was Jellit screams. It chooses not to attend to that either.

There is another way, it formulates. It can create a data packet, carve a part of itself away, insert the military intelligence into the body of one of the others. They can carry it to the far stars without knowing that it is there. And when it is safe, the packet will bloom. It won’t be pleasant for the carrier, but it will let the swarm remain.

Won’t be pleasant, Ameer says. It’ll kill them. But what’s one more corpse?

It lets Jessyn’s hand go without meaning to. Or perhaps Jellit—the echo of Jellit—releases her in hopes that she will move away. Instead, she leans her head against the swarm’s shoulder. It smells her hair, experiences Jellit’s flashbulb memory of holding her when she was in the hospital. When she was sick. It puts its arm around her and hopes that she will not have to die.

Its mind turns to Dafyd. The thrill in its new blood is different, but familiar. The guilt and shame are bound up with the remembered warmth of his body, the taste of his mouth. The comfort that it has taken in him, that it still longs for. Dafyd is in his own room now, and when it reaches out its senses, it can hear the peculiar harmony of his breath. The rhythm of his heart, just a little different from all the others, like the timbre of his voice.

It remembers him, full of focus and purpose and a steely cold swearing himself against the Carryx, and it lets itself dream. The minds of the two women it has lived as have taught it to do that. To imagine fictions, and place itself in them as an escape, as a comfort. It imagines the two of them, spies in the world-palace, working together. The burden of its mission shared at last, with someone who could know it completely. It imagines finding some secret path to the heart of the Carryx, of detonating a bomb at the root of the world. Of holding hands while they watch the towers fall. Of making love on the corpse of a civilization. And why not? Even if they fail, why shouldn’t they try?

What will it be like to kiss him with these lips?

He’s not going to want you, Ameer says.

He was in love with me, Else says. He thinks it was me. And you killed me. Twice over, you killed me. He’ll hate you for that. He’s going to hate you.

Far out, beyond the atmosphere, something bloomed in a geometry of radiation and magnetic force. Circles define hexagons, hexagons define intersecting planes, all of it opening and then falling away, like the ideal of an orchid playing out on five-dimensional space. The swarm records the phenomenon, tucks the data in with all the rest. It doesn’t know what made the effect, but it isn’t called to. It is only meant to look, listen, record, and transmit. It is made to deceive and go unnoticed.

The longing that pulls at it, the despair and the hope. It was not designed for them. It feels them all the same. Dafyd, my love, it is not just your war. You and I. We will burn this world down together.