Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Four

It’s true,” Rickar Daumatin said, spreading his hands in a little deprecating gesture. What can you do? Tonner felt his fists clenching and made a conscious effort to release them.

Their laboratory hadn’t changed. It felt like any day of the last eight months. The north wall was still covered in their notes and lists. The tables had trays of reaction assays stacked five deep. The air smelled like compost and cleaning fluid. They could have been talking through any problem on the project. Given that everything they’d tried to build was now coming apart, the sameness felt obscene.

Tonner looked around at the others. Irinna, newly arrived from her parents’ home in Abbasat, was the only one who looked dumbfounded. Nöl seemed sorrowful in the way he always was. The others—Jessyn, Synnia, Campar, Dafyd, and Else—were a spectrum of disappointment and anger.

Rickar boosted himself up onto the worktable and leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs, fingers laced together like he was waiting for questions. Giving them time to process. Campar was the first to gather himself.

“Well, that’s a remarkably casual way to detonate the most important project of our lives.” Tonner appreciated the acid in the man’s voice.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Rickar said. “Or my choice. Samar Austad is the chief administrator at Dyan. He’s the one pushing it with the colloquy, not me.”

“But you went along with it,” Tonner said. “You agreed.”

“Of course I did,” Rickar said. “What else would I do?”

“Refuse the position,” Tonner said. “Tell him you won’t accept it if offered.”

Rickar’s shrug had a depth of world-weary resignation. “This isn’t how I wanted things to be, but it’s the way things are. If I had my pick, I’d have kept the group as it is for another few years and had medrey and collegia competing to give me a laboratory. But it didn’t happen that way. It happened this way, and the reed that doesn’t bend, breaks.”

“This is my project,” Tonner said, and took a step forward. The rage he’d felt for the last days felt thick in his throat. Rickar just tilted his head.

Else stood up. “We are the most celebrated researchers on the planet right now. We are. As a group. A team. If we’re scattered, that won’t be true anymore.”

“I didn’t ask Austad to do this. But he’s good at what he does. He wouldn’t have made the proposal if he didn’t have the support to make it work. It may take a few more days, but this is going to happen.”

“What happens to the rest of us?” Jessyn asked.

“We’ll find other placements,” Nöl said. “We’ll have status for a moment. The next year, someone will have us. After that, who can say?” Synnia put a hand on the older man’s arm, comforting or counseling him to silence or both.

“It’s not your lab yet,” Tonner said. “Until the colloquy votes, it’s still mine.”

“It is,” Rickar agreed. “For a few days, anyway.”

“So get the hell out of it.”

Rickar eased himself back off the table, his feet touching the floor gently, like he was trying not to make noise. He pressed his hands into his pockets and walked carefully out toward the common halls. His apologetic manner felt like an act—the performance of a man sure enough of his victory to be magnanimous.

The door closed behind him with a click, and the others were quiet. Campar broke the silence with an angry chuckle.

“I didn’t know about any of this,” Irinna said, taking a step toward Tonner. Her hands tight at her waist. She looked very young and pale with worry.

“I know,” Else said. “No one thinks you did.”

“I really didn’t.”

Tonner turned away. His lab seemed quieter than it should have. The workstations with their shelves stained by years of soil uptake dyes, the wallscreens all dark now with the maintenance of the term break, the thin windows spilling milky light across the gray tiled floor. It was his kingdom, and even though he’d spent more time in these rooms than in his home, it felt like he hadn’t seen it. The threat of losing it washed all the familiarity away, and left it before him like he had stepped into it for the first time.

“It’s not over yet,” Tonner said. “The colloquy hasn’t decided anything. We can still keep this from happening.”

“What do you have in mind?” Jessyn asked.

“Call in all our favors. Promise new ones. If all of us reach out to our old leads and advisors, we can flood the caucus with objections. Drown Rickar’s sponsor—” He snapped his fingers, trying to recall Rickar’s words.

“Samar Austad,” Irinna said. “His name is Samar Austad.”

“Drown him in outrage. Let him see how much this move will cost him.”

Dafyd made a small noise. Another day, in a different mood, Tonner would have ignored it, but he was frustrated and upset. “What?”

Dafyd met his eyes, then looked away. When he spoke, his voice was calm enough. “Going loud is an option, but it can backfire. The colloquy’s wary of letting popularity campaigns affect decisions. They think it encourages people to arrange more campaigns later. They don’t want to deal with those.”

“You’re an expert on research administration?” Tonner snapped, and then remembered again who the boy’s family was.

“If there isn’t a quieter way, we can always go loud,” Dafyd said. “But once we’ve gone loud, we can’t go quiet.”

“Is it worth doing at all?” Nöl asked. “If the fight’s as good as lost already, it might be wiser not to make waves, yes?”

“No,” his wife said, and Tonner was pleased to hear the certainty in her voice. “No, good things are rare. They’re worth fighting for.”

“How would you approach this, Dafyd?” Else asked.

The research assistant paused, thought. It was all Tonner could do not to interrupt him.

“I’d talk to people near the caucus. See who Austad’s allies are and who he’s crossed. If we know who his enemies are, there might be a way to put up a counterproposal. Something that pulls his coalition apart or puts together a stronger one. We’ll still lose something. We always lose something. But giving a different way forward is a stronger argument than just saying no to the one that’s on the table. Harder for Dyan Academy to counter. More likely to change the conversation.”

“We don’t have time,” Tonner said.

“Could you do it in two days?” Else asked, as if Tonner hadn’t spoken. The boy met Else’s gaze, blushed a little, and nodded like he’d just been given a quest.

As project lead, Tonner had gotten first choice in housing. His instinct had been an old instructor’s cottage with worn bamboo floors and the smell of mildew that never quite vanished, even with remediation. It wasn’t that he liked the place, but it was closest to the labs. If he’d followed that impulse, he would have saved himself almost half an hour each day. But Else had complimented one of the newer coral-grown buildings, and one apartment in particular with a balcony that looked north over a long, curving street. She had just abandoned her own project to join his team, they had been in the first blush of their relationship, and he’d hoped that by living in a space she enjoyed he would encourage her to spend more of her nights with him. She wasn’t project lead, and her official rooms were in the basement levels of an old ecosphere an hour’s walk to the south. She was almost never there, but she used it to store some things.

He stepped out to the balcony—the balcony he’d gotten just for her—and sat in the chair beside hers. Tonner found Else endlessly fascinating, and only more so because of her few bad habits, one of them being her fondness for smoking. The fact that he found her so attractive in spite of it made her seem all the more exotic and exciting. The little brown roll of paper and herbs between her fingers smelled of marijuana and clove. He didn’t mean to grimace, but she saw it anyway and shifted the cigarette to her far hand.

“Looking at the stars?”

“Looking at whatever there is to look at,” she said.

The night was cloudless, but a haze caught the lights from the medrey’s research complex, the shipyards to the west, the sprawl of the city beyond. The spill of stars was less than a clear night would offer, and still millions. He watched them glimmer for a while—the stars above and the homes and streets and buildings below, like the tiny corner of their world could mirror the cosmos, if only you stood at the right place to see it.

“Do you ever regret going into research?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” Else answered. “I would have been good in practical applications too. I worked at an aquaculture farm for six months between primary and advanced. Mostly cleaning the sea tanks. I was hell on kelp.”

“You would have been great, but I’m glad you chose not to stay there.”

Three lights—two pale yellow and one blinking orange—rose up from the city. A transport for Obbaran or Glenncoal. He could imagine it was a star trying to get back to the sky. He’d believed stories like that when he was a child, and some part of him still did. The thing that children didn’t understand and that adults forgot was that stories like that were all analogies at heart.

“You would have wound up in management,” he said. “You’d be in a colloquy by now.”

“I’m not a politician. All the best administrators are politicians.”

“Like Alkhor.”

“She’s good at what she does.”

“I didn’t mean the aunt. I meant yours. The boy.”

Else took a long drag on her cigarette. The ember glowed a deeper orange than the transport, then faded to gray. When she spoke, soft white smoke spilled out of her. “Are you angry with me for taking his side?”

“He’s a research assistant. Research assistants haven’t earned the right to have a side.”

She lifted the cigarette toward her lips again, paused, then licked the finger and thumb of her other hand and pinched out the ember before flicking the rest away into the darkness. She didn’t speak. Tonner knew it would be better to keep quiet himself as well. He managed for a while.

“I know all of you like him, but I don’t trust him. He’s a schemer. Everything he does is for effect. He’s always watching people.”

Her smile was so brief and understated, he might only have imagined it.

“I think he’s charming. And schemer or not, I’ve never seen him be cruel.”

“Ah. So I’m being cruel now?”

“Tell me again how you aren’t angry with me.”

“I’m not. I’m not angry with you,” Tonner said. And then, “I’m just angry. And you’re here. So I’m being a little shit.”

Else considered. “That sounds right.”

“If Rickar does this… if they take the project away from me…”

She shifted to see him better. When she spoke, it was a challenge, but a gentle one. “Finish that thought. If you lose the project, what?”

Tonner leaned forward, ran his hands through his hair. The transport light switched from orange to green. “This work is what I am. If I don’t have it, I’m not sure what’s left of me. I know that all the literature talks about reinvention and remaking your career every ten years, but I don’t know if I have it in me to start over. Does that make sense?”

Else’s eyes narrowed. A little smile touched her lips, but her gaze wasn’t on him. She was seeing something internal. When she did this—retreated into her own thoughts without including him in on what they were—it left him anxious.

“You understand how much this is,” he said, filling her silence. “You gave up more than anyone to be part of it. You had your own project. You were lead.”

She waved the thought away with two fingers, like her hand had forgotten there wasn’t still a cigarette between them. “Spiral analysis was a dead end. Everyone knew that. I could jump ship or spend my career driving coffin nails. I was glad to get that number-two spot on your team. It was a very rational choice.”

“And you are nothing if not rational.” It had more bite in it than he’d intended, but she wouldn’t be baited.

Else stood, lifted her arms over her head, and stretched to one side and then the other. When she turned back, heading into the rooms, she touched his shoulder. It wasn’t an invitation, but it was intimate. A private idiom between the two of them that the day was over. Tonner wondered whether he’d be able to sleep. He was weary, yes, but he wasn’t tired. She drew her hand back and went inside. He listened to her start the shower, heard the change in the sound of the splashing as she washed the day off her skin. The transport vanished over the horizon. A formation of high-altitude ships tracked overhead—national security or deep survey, he couldn’t tell which.

The shower turned off. He thought about going in, then he thought about Rickar. His jaw ached. He could imagine himself sitting there, staring into darkness until the dawn came up. And then… what? Wait patiently for a research assistant to save the project for him? That sounded like a thin slice of hell.

Else touched his shoulder again. He hadn’t heard her coming up behind him. She passed a glass forward, one finger of rich amber whiskey in it.

“Brooding won’t help,” she said. “Come inside. Relax. Get some sleep. Things will seem better in the morning.”

He took the glass, sipped the liquor. The first warm bloom spread through his throat and chest. “I hate losing. I hate being embarrassed.”

“I know.”

“Alkhor has a crush on you.”

“I know that too.”

He drained the glass in a swallow and set it on the tile beside his chair. It would be there to clean away in the daylight. The rooms were grown in light green and yellow that made him feel like an insect sleeping inside a flower. It was oddly comforting. Else was already on her side of the bed, curled under the sheet with her head turned away. Tonner shut off the lights, stripped in the darkness, and climbed in. He didn’t think sleep would come, but as soon as his head touched the pillow, he felt himself swimming.

In his dream, he was trying to get across the square to his labs, but the paving stones were falling away into a vast pit. Every step was dangerous, and the ground collapsed behind him or where he’d been about to go as the world ate itself under him.

Later, it would seem like a premonition.