Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

PART TWOCATASTROPHE

We did not create the logic of the universe, but we express it, as do those who we yoked to our will. Good and evil are constructs lesser beings build to create divisions in places where rigor and intelligence are insufficient. It is a sloppy shorthand, and prone to error. The Carryx gained all we gained by not needing such things. The universe tells every being exactly the same implacable truth. The Carryx listen and thrive, where others squirm and express opinions and then are crushed and forgotten.

The truth is this: That which is, is. The Rak-hund execute our will. If there is any because in that, it is because we killed or sterilized all aspects of the Rak-hund that didn’t, and we kept the remnant that did. The Gar of Estian, Kirikishun, Ouck, the seven Lek-Variable, the Whirl-Ghost. The same is true of all of them. If there is a moral question in that, it is the same moral question a species asks when its star novas and melts its world to glass.

When a primitive of your own kind cut a branch from a tree and carved the wood into a tool—an axe handle, a tentpole, whatever your will designed—you placed no moral judgment on the act, nor should you have. To do so would have been perverse. The tree had no power to stop you, and so it became a tool in your hand.

What you did with a tree branch, we did with you and countless others before you. Why me? is not something the universe ever answers.

—From the final statement of Ekur-Tkalal, keeper-librarian of the human moiety of the Carryx

Seven

The seventeen Carryx colony ships had passed through the terrifying improbability of asymmetric space, which only the cold illogic of the navigation half-minds could master. They followed the beacons that their early void tendrils had scouted and laid down. They knew already a great deal about the system they would emerge into. There was only one planet of interest, and only one—or at most two—species on the planet that held both enough abstract complexity and severability to be of use in expanding the canopy of the Sovran’s will or serving in the war. In one way, it wasn’t a particularly interesting find.

But in another, it promised to be one of the more fruitful discoveries since the great conflict began. That potential would be measured later, and by others.

They returned to symmetry just outside the membrane of the heliosphere, keeping only a protective bubble of projected gravity as they fell sunward. The star glow of the galactic disk showed the plane of the ecliptic, and the colonization half-mind drank in the light of the local star and a thousand others, comparing spectra and spacing, confirming that the transit had taken them where they intended. The blue-green dot curving its eternal orbit through gravity-warped spacetime was indeed the one that the locals called Anjiin.

The half-mind was not capable of joy, but there was still a clinical satisfaction in tasks well completed. The seventeen vessels accelerated sunward, both sped and concealed by their bubble.

Or so they thought.

They were unaware that on the distant surface of the world, a man named Llaren Morse had seen his doom approaching and hadn’t recognized it for what it was.

The nodes were woken and prepared. They shuddered in their liquid wombs, stretching electromagnetic limbs as their sluggish intelligence coalesced, waiting to be born. The Rak-hund were woken to eat and shit and beg for approval as was their nature. The Sinen gathered their excavation tools. The Carryx watched over these moieties, masters of all.

As they entered their final approach to the planet, a small correction was needed. A few degrees, but not more than predicted by the uncertainty of asymmetric interactions. What they hadn’t predicted, what had never been predicted, was the signal from the planet. It covered a broad spectrum, but a narrow band of space. The chances that it was a random effect were vanishingly small, and one band penetrated their protections, echoing back toward the target planet. The seventeen ships prepared for violence.

But hours passed, and no violence came. The blue-green dot in the void grew closer. The stream of radiation from the local star shuddered and rippled along the surface of their gravity bubble. The enemy didn’t appear, and with every minute that it didn’t come, the pattern of the moment grew further from the expected choreography of ambush.

The half-mind found nothing in the burst beyond the raw fact of its existence, and while the burst had some features in common with the enemy’s targeting systems, it had several structural differences as well. Evidence suggested that it was a local invention, a parallel evolution in technology, and not a cause for alarm.

It was unsettling, though, that the creatures of Anjiin had noticed their approach at all. It was something else to take heed of. The Carryx ships moved with a greater caution than they might have. At the decision of the colony effort’s command, the ships dropped the bubble early, letting the shroud fall and the full noise and flow of normal space rush around them. They scanned the vacuum, the mist-thin scatterings of matter, the wildly dancing fields of energy and force that radiated out from the star and echoed in the cores of its little planets. If Anjiin had a protector, this was the moment they would arrive.

Anjiin had no protector. Nothing arrived.

The attention of the Carryx turned to the planet. All through the vast ships, nodes reached their maturity, gaping open in something engineered to mimic lust, ready to receive their burdens. Rak-hund and Sinen and Soft Lothark poured in. Those that couldn’t tolerate the closed spaces and variable gravity were lulled into a preparatory catatonia. The others were encased in fluid tanks. The Carryx soldiers came last, taking their places like warriors lifting up the reins of their chariots.

Anjiin was near enough now to make out features on the surface: the green and black of land, the complex blue of the seas, the whiteness at the poles and the upper reaches of mountain ranges where geology itself had touched the cold of space and been withered by it. A decision was made. A command went out. All along the skins and surfaces of the colony ships, hatches slid open, and the laden nodes spilled out of them. Out, and down.

They fell by the thousands and the tens of thousands. Nodes leaped and sang, surging one past another slowly at first, and then faster and faster, in the joyous race to the thinnest part of high atmosphere, little more than stray helium atoms lofting up and away from the stone and water they had escaped. The nodes shifted their paths, spilling out in a curve so wide it could seem almost flat, each oblong spheroid jockeying for its place in the matrix, reaching out and grabbing on to its neighbors with invisible lines of force and then using its stability to whip the remaining nodes more quickly into place, first a hundred, then a thousand, and then a hundred thousand. Like a great fist closing, the nodes made their net around Anjiin.

The half-mind gathered what it had instead of knowledge. The primary species communicated with sound and a narrow spectrum of light. Some chemoreception, but rarely at a conscious level. No protein messaging, no blood sharing. No fusion, either of full bodies or child organisms. No qliph. Many technological connections made through frequency and amplitude modulated electromagnetic waves, although there were also similar modulations along mineral channels laid between structures. Some of these converted to pressure waves in air, some into patterns of light on mechanisms that the species built for the purpose. All of it was deep and rich with pattern, language, meaning.

The half-mind dipped into the flow of chatter that was in one sense below the node matrix, in another sense inside it. The early scouting of the void tendrils had sent back volumes of information deeper than oceans. Without them, the half-mind might have taken days to understand all that it needed to know. Instead, it confirmed what it already assumed, changing only superficial expressions. The grammar fit into channels worn by a million other grammars. Analogies came together with a depth so profound it approached sentience without ever quite reaching it.

It turned its attention to the second species. Primary means of communication was chemoreception, with fruiting bodies that exchanged heritable structures. Intelligent, yes. Rich with meaning, yes. But slow. Very slow, and integrated more fully and dependently with the local biome than the void tendrils had indicated. Barely aware, it seemed, of anything above the soil. Air was a mystery to it, much less space and stars and a universe that existed in something more than darkness.

The half-mind recommended that only the primary species be considered, at least in these first stages of colonization. There would be time to determine whether the other organisms of Anjiin were useful later. The coordinating half-mind concurred. The Carryx considered and approved.

In bunkers all around the planet, voices of fear and alarm grew. Leaders of nations and mutual interest zones and cooperative organizations reached out to one another, hoping that the events of the day weren’t what they seemed to be. Each of them tried to get one of the others to admit responsibility, but no one did because no one could. Focused radio signals went up to the nodes and the ships beyond them. Identify yourself and state your intentions and We are peaceful, but can and will defend ourselves if provoked and Remove your ships immediately or suffer the consequences. There was no single unified voice, and the Carryx would have ignored it if there had been.

Military bases built for the local factions to defend against one another swarmed into activity, reaching for ways to use old defenses in a new context. Slow-moving armored vehicles, fast-moving airships, and the small mobile cities of support and logistics services scattered into the open plains of the world’s largest continent. Bombers and fighters and denial-of-access dirigibles took to the air. Missile silos opened. Submersible weapons platforms sank beneath waves. The elites fled to shelter or dressed in the uniforms that they imagined would look best at the historic moment of contact. The chaos of the day was evidence of the underlying chaos of the organism, and interesting in its own way. The Carryx allowed it to go on longer than was strictly required so that they could see a little more of the world in its natural state before they changed it.

A few missiles rose in the thick lower air. Plumes of smoke and heat announced them as they struggled against gravity toward the node matrix above. They came from Ondosk and Irvian and Dyan and Soladan: old rivals working in concert at last, now that it didn’t matter.

The Carryx waited as long as was comfortable, and then disabled the offending missiles with discharges from the nodes like dry bolts of lightning falling from far above the clouds. One of the missiles bloomed in a nuclear fireball, but most lost power and fell or exploded with mere chemical detonations. Slowly and methodically over the course of seconds the nodes identified the places the missiles had risen from and all the other structures like them around the planet’s surface and destroyed them. A handful of cities and military bases dissolved in fire. It was no more an attack than a singer clearing her throat was a song.

The half-mind announced to the coordinator that it was finished with translation and ready to deliver their message.

If the process had been translated into any human tongue, it would have been something like breaking the limb. The idiom was peculiar to the Carryx, but the logic behind it was not: a single overwhelming act of violence that would establish social dominance. The node matrix turned its full attention to the planet’s surface, mapping the location of every member of the primary species. The concentrations in the large cities, the scatterings in the broad rural stretches, the rare individuals who had chosen isolation from their people for reasons the Carryx could not fathom and about which they did not care.

The nodes found the range of physical temperature, the electrical patterns of their nervous systems, the subtle alterations in gas concentrations that were their breath, and dozens more signs and signifiers that all came together to say one more and one more and one more. Three billion, six hundred seventy million, eight hundred sixty-two thousand, five hundred and thirty-three, with two thousand two hundred and seventeen signals that were ambiguous.

With the impersonal logic of machines, the species was divided into two intermixed populations. Those halves were then divided, and the new groups divided again. In the abstract non-mind of the node matrix, a decision was made and one of the eight groups was chosen. It had taken the half-minds whole minutes to be certain and prepared. The order went out to the nodes, and each received its targeting priority for the culling to come.

A hundred thousand nodes bloomed, their bronze shells opening to release white, diaphanous bodies that unfurled in the atmosphere, growing bones made from carbon and silicon. They were a nameless quasi-species, and would live only long enough to fulfill their purpose and then die. Vast and trembling, fighting against the high, thin winds of the atmosphere and burning through the long-chain hydrocarbons that were the fuel of their lifetimes, their membranes unfolded, stabilized, and turned with something like devotion to the half-mind. Under its direction, they shuddered, the pressure waves of their trembling designed to harmonize as they reached the surface of the planet into a single, clear, and unechoing voice.

The future fell invisibly toward the inhabitants of Anjiin at the speed of sound. You are, individually and collectively, under the authority of the Carryx. You have been measured, and your place within the moieties will now be determined…