Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Eight

The first explosions came from the military base south of the complex. Inside the thick terra-cotta walls of Nöl’s house, they sounded like a rumble of distant thunder, closely followed by alarms and sirens. The smoke that rose from the base was thick and white. It wasn’t clear to him whether it was an attack or a coincidence. Certainly he could imagine someone frightened by the day’s events trying to bring some rarely used system up to readiness and making a catastrophic error.

But the reports began coming in from other places, and he had to accept that it had been an attack. A defensive one, given that their own forces fired first, but an attack all the same. He found that disappointing. It seemed to him that this wasn’t a time for escalation, but no one asked.

Else Yannin looked out at him from his home system’s screen. Her eyes were a degree wider than usual, her cheeks flushed, but her voice was steady and authoritative. “It’s the sub-basement of my arcology. It’s hardened. Tonner and Campar are getting fresh water. Irinna—”

The system hung for a moment, Else ceasing to move with her mouth a bit open, her eyes halfway through a blink. The communication infrastructure was overloaded. Of course it was. Nöl waited.

“—for the whole team, but you have to come now.”

“I understand,” he said, and that was for the most part true. Else and Tonner were putting together a hole for him and for Synnia to hide in, should things go poorly enough that a hardened room underground would help, but not so poorly that it wouldn’t matter. Considering the size of the attack fleet and their apparent level of technology, the safe space between those two error bars seemed incredibly narrow. Even so, it was a kind thought. “I’ll speak with Synnia about it.”

Else frowned and froze again. Nöl considered dropping the connection. It was hardly useful, anyway. Else clicked back to life. “—to bring you here.”

“Yes, yes,” Nöl said. “I’m going now.”

He thought Else had given one of her curt little nods, but it was hard to be sure. The screen shifted to an emergency page: HIGH DATA CONGESTION, PLEASE RESTRICT ACCESS WHERE POSSIBLE. He closed the system and leaned back in his chair. The house was quiet because it always was. If there was just the slightest smell of fire in the air, that was probably his imagination. It was easy to imagine things in unsettling moments like this.

He thought about whether there was anyone he should talk with. If it was coming near dusk here, the sun would just be coming up at his brother’s apartment in Chabbit Close. But he was supposed to restrict access, and not making the connection was also possible. He drank the last of his tea. It had gone tepid, and little bits of mint leaf made the dregs gritty.

Synnia was in the back garden. She’d braided her hair tight against her scalp the way she did when she was going to a formal party or else preparing for physical labor. The braid down her back was still as thick as his wrist. But it was gray now, instead of the shining ebony it had once been. She stood on the stone path, her arms crossed, looking up at the sky.

On good evenings, the sunset from their house could be lovely: gold and green and rose pink. It wouldn’t be like that tonight. There weren’t enough clouds to catch the light, and it wasn’t the sky he knew. The blue was stippled with dots that caught the sunlight and glowed with it. Or maybe they glowed on their own. It was hard to say. They covered the high air in a complex but regular formation. If he let his eyes unfocus a little, he could actually see lines between them, like a child’s optical illusion.

“They made the sky into graph paper,” Synnia said.

Nöl chuckled. “So they did.” And then a moment later, “They don’t move much, do they?”

“They aren’t orbiting. They’re frame locked with the surface.”

“That’s odd. But I suppose everything’s odd, isn’t it?”

Far above, the complex grid of dots grew slowly brighter as the angle of the sunlight changed. Nöl wondered what shape the objects were, and whether there was a way to know that by watching them interact with the setting sun. Likely there was.

“Why didn’t we ever talk about children, you and I?” Nöl asked.

“Busy with our careers, and then later too set in our ways.” Synnia shot him a frown. “Strange time to bring up regrets, if that’s what this is.”

“No. I’m just wondering how much more terrifying this would be if we had kids.”

Synnia nodded. “Who were you talking with?” she asked.

“Else. She’s found a bolt-hole. They’re gathering up supplies and preparing to… I don’t actually know what they’re preparing to do. Ride out the storm, I suppose.”

Synnia pulled her eyes from the sky like it took an effort. “Should we go?”

“I don’t know. It’s all fear. Everyone reacts in their own way. But… it sounds unpleasant. And if”—he pointed upward—“if they wanted to kill us all, I can’t think all this would be needed.”

“You think we’re safe, then?” He couldn’t tell if her tone was hope or incredulousness or some more complex mixture of emotions.

“I think we’re probably as safe here as we would be hiding underground with Tonner Freis, and this is more pleasant.”

She moved her arms in a distressed flapping, the way she did when she was feeling overwhelmed. Nöl felt a little twinge of annoyance with her, but he kept it to himself.

“We should do something, though,” she said.

He nodded, giving her comment a little space so that his reply seemed less snappish. “What is there for us to do?”

She looked up at the ominous sky and then down. Nöl stepped away to the little garden shed. His gardening gloves hung from their usual peg, and he tapped them out as he always did before he put them on. There had never been any insects hiding in the fingers, but making certain was part of his habit. He only noticed it now because the events of the day seemed to make everything a little bit too real. Too present. He pulled the gloves on. The leather was still damp from the day before. As he walked back out, Synnia passed him, heading for the shed herself.

He knelt in the nearest bed and brushed the soil to reveal any little sprouts of weed that hadn’t quite broken the surface yet. There were a few, some almost white with the green tint that meant they were DNA-based plants, others the uniform pinkish that identified the quasicrystal tree of life. He pinched them up and out, keeping the soil clean for the experimental bean vines that climbed the little wooden trellis. If he’d let the weeds live, they would have converged to an almost identical color of rich green, the better to drink in the sun. Synnia knelt down at the other end of the bed, her gaze on the dark soil. The sunlight shifted, turned ruddy. The smell of fresh earth was like a kind of perfume, and Nöl found his shoulders relaxing from a tension he’d only known intellectually was in them. If there was a war coming, it would find them gardening.

On the stone path, the little bodies of plants lay side by side, pale green beside pink, their roots exposed to the unkind air. It occurred to him for what couldn’t really have been the first time that he was killing them.

“You know,” Synnia said, and then trailed off.

Nöl waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he sat down on his ankles. His knees were wet with the soil. The house and the garden were in twilight now. The alien objects in the sky were still bright from a sun he couldn’t see. Synnia sat back, took a deep, shuddering breath, and wove her fingers together around her shin. Her mouth moved hesitantly, as if she were fighting some internal battle.

When she spoke, her voice was oddly calm. Almost normal. “I just wanted to tell you that if something happens to me, it has been a pleasure being with you.” She nodded, as if approving the words to herself. “It has been a pleasure,” she repeated.

“I don’t think we’re important enough to bother with, love. We’re research assistants. Nothing we do matters all that much, does it?”

There were tears in her eyes. “It does to me.”

Nöl sighed, and then something invisible spoke as though it were standing in the garden with them. The voice had no gender markers or recognizable regional accent, but somehow also didn’t sound like a machine. It was authoritative and calm. “You are, individually and collectively, under the authority of the Carryx.”

“What’s saying that?” Synnia asked, her voice barely a whisper. Nöl didn’t respond.

“You have been measured, and your place within the moieties will now be determined. Your distress with this change is irrelevant. Adapting quickly will reduce your discomfort and increase your potential utility. Ready yourselves.”

“‘Potential utility’ sounds ominous,” Nöl said. He stood and pulled the glove off his right hand before scratching his ear.

“To demonstrate that your submission is necessary,” the voice continued, as though it had heard Nöl and was in a hurry to prove him right, “we will only kill one-eighth of your population.”

Nöl’s eyebrows rose. Something made a sizzle in the air, and a hornet stung him on his left clavicle halfway between the joint of his shoulder and his neck. He hadn’t seen or heard the insect, but he recognized the sudden pain. Also, and strangely, his cheek was pressing into the soil of the garden. He’d fallen down, though he didn’t remember doing it. His shoulder hurt badly, and there was something wrong with his arm, as if he’d numbed it. Synnia yelped and came to his side, her eyes wide.

“I’m all right,” he said, and then caught his breath. It was annoying that he’d fallen over just at the time it would alarm her the most. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

He tried to sit up, but he was weaker than he should have been. He licked his lips, his tongue finding damp bits of garden soil there. He was surprised that it tasted so much like blood.

A vague sense of concern bloomed in him, but only for a moment.

Campar leaned forward, as if he could will the transport to go faster. All around him, the night shrieked. Military aircraft raced through the sky, rattling the ground with their engines. Transports followed, their running lights casting red glows along the countryside. The trees seemed to move in the shifting light, looking like gigantic soldiers finding their way into formation. The smoke smelled like a chemical fire and stung his eyes.

“Come on. Come on,” Campar muttered between clenched teeth. There was no one in the transport to hear him, and the communications grid had collapsed even before he left the shelter of Else’s underground rooms. The roads were clogged with people fleeing the city for the safety of the countryside, people from the countryside running for the shelter of the city. Campar and a dozen others had abandoned the pavement. The raw land rattled under the transport’s wheels, the darkness hiding stones and logs and wire fences. He felt every judder and bounce, waiting for the grinding that meant he’d broken his best hope at evacuation. It hadn’t happened yet.

He had been to Nöl and Synnia’s house dozens of times since he’d joined the workgroup. He knew the way well enough that he could find it even without the guidance of the comm systems. He hoped that he’d get there and find they’d already fled. For all he knew, they were in one of the dozens of vehicles running the other way.

Except that he knew them, had eaten with them, talked, joked, and built the long intimacy that comes with friendship and close work. Nöl wouldn’t leave his house, and the worse the danger, the more he’d hunker down. And wherever he was, Synnia would be. Irinna had wondered aloud where they were, Tonner had snapped that the only way they’d come was if someone went and hauled them out, and Campar had volunteered.

He hadn’t thought about it. It was a crisis, and in a crisis you did what needed doing. Stopping to think was a short path to panic. He didn’t have time for that.

The transport hit something, rocking to the side, but it didn’t stop and no alarms appeared on the controls. There were only another ten minutes to go. Maybe less. If he was stranded, he could make the rest of the trip on foot.

And then pick up his friends and run back to the city like something out of a Serintist myth cycle. Ogdun the World Father, striding the land with research assistants on either shoulder instead of crows.

“This was a mistake. This was a mistake. Oh, but I have made a mistake.”

High above, maybe even above the air itself, something bright happened. At first the roof of the transport hid it, but the landscape all around him brightened to a uniform gold. Campar leaned against the window and squinted up. A thousand stars were falling at once, and then another thousand behind them, and another. The night became a shadowless, uncanny noontime, and the transport slewed back onto the gravel road and sped for the little house and garden. Campar popped the door and jumped out almost before the wheels stopped rolling.

Synnia was in her garden, sitting with her legs tucked beneath her. Nöl lay face down in the dark soil. In the golden light, his blood looked black as ink. He wasn’t breathing.

“Oh no,” Campar said. “No, he isn’t—”

Synnia turned and looked up. The emptiness in her eyes answered his unspoken question. “I don’t understand,” she said. Then again, “I don’t understand.”

Campar went to her side, squatted next to her. Took her hand. A high screaming sound fell through the air, coming from everyplace at once and growing louder. He gently pulled at her. “We have to go. Come with me. I’ll get you someplace safe.”

Or die trying, if we’re putting bets on it, he thought. He managed not to say it aloud. Restraint was harder than it should have been.

“Oh,” Synnia said. “Yes. Of course.”

She stood and brushed the dark soil from her knees with her free hand, then let him guide her to the transport. The first wave of falling stars was getting close to the ground, trailing bright lines of smoke and fire behind them. If they were bombs, the world would be a single, unending fire in a few minutes. Campar chose to believe that they weren’t. Campar was no physicist, but flying gigantic ships across interstellar space just to bomb a world mostly covered in farmland seemed a terrible waste of energy.

With Synnia bundled into the transport, he set the path back to Else’s arcology. The wheels groaned and whirred, but they moved. The transport jerked, made a strange thumping sound, and turned back toward the city.

They hadn’t gotten more than a few minutes from her old home when the first shock wave hit. The earth bucked and shuddered like a little earthquake.

“What’s going on?” Synnia asked, and he didn’t know how to answer. The high scream was coming in waves now, throbbing against itself as the next wave of fire and smoke came close. Something sped through the air above them, its engine roar deafening them even inside the protective shell of the transport. The fighter curved up, tracer rounds stitching the smoke haze as it tried to engage with the falling things. Enemy ships, then. Transports of their own.

“It’s going to be all right,” Campar said.

He saw the first of the invaders just outside the city. It was as tall as a table, and longer than the transport. A long, pale, snake-supple body with a hundred knifelike legs that undulated as it moved. Campar’s biologist mind couldn’t help but wonder how the aliens had built spaceships when they only had bony legs. Surely technology required hands or tentacles or fine cilia-like appendages. The knifesnake followed alongside the transport for a few seconds, then curved away. The sound of weapons fire was everywhere, and the stink of smoke choked him.

The transport slewed into a plaza just south of the Gallantist cathedral. The huge old church was engulfed in fire. Another wave of alien transports was coming to ground. He’d lost track of how many there had been. More than five, fewer than ten. His transport juddered, an alarm sounding, and it stopped. They were close. He knew the way from here. Longish as a walk, and interminable as a sprint through a firefight. But as there wasn’t an option…

“Join me?” Campar said, offering Synnia his arm as if they were about to step onto a ballroom parquet. She didn’t take it, but she did square herself, ready to run. He popped open the transport door.

The civil defense sirens wailed, almost drowned by gunfire and screaming and the bellow of military engines. The ground trembled. The smoke was thick enough to taste.

“Nöl,” Synnia said. “They killed Nöl.”

“They did,” Campar said. “I think they’re killing quite a few people this evening. But we’ll go someplace safe. We have food and water. We can stay hidden as long as we need to.”

People dashed past them, some wearing security forces uniforms, some not. Campar couldn’t manage more than a fast trot, and even that strained his lungs. He wished he had a cloth to wet and string across his mouth. Or one of the particle masks from the lab. Just getting to Else’s in this fog of fire was going to do more damage than smoking hundreds of cigarettes.

Ahead of them, the staccato of gunfire and something else. A kind of stuttering whistle that Campar had never heard before. Shadows danced on the walls of an apartment building where an old boyfriend of his had lived. The familiarity and fond memories of the place made the violence more nightmarish. Another of the centipede-things scurried through the street ahead of them, and down the block where they’d just been, something exploded.

“Keep going,” Campar coughed. “Keep going.” He didn’t know if he was speaking to Synnia or himself.

He didn’t see the danger he was running into until it was much too late. The forms hidden in the smoke and fire were shadows, meaningless except as texture to the violence. And then they were more than that, and Campar turned. Synnia was gone. He didn’t know when she had stopped following him. He hoped it was soon enough to save her.

These things were different. Not the knife-legged snakes, but something almost familiar. Long, thin limbs recognizably arms and legs, though jointed differently than their human analogs. Squat bodies covered with a dirty, short coat of fur. Their faces were unreadable. Black, small eyes. Mouths that seemed too wide to be plausible. Campar assumed that the tools in their hands were weapons.

One stepped forward. It wore a black square around its neck, and when it spoke, it sounded like a fish flopping to death on a dock—wet and violent. The words that came from the little black square were the same voice that had announced the death of one out of every eight people.

“We are Soft Lothark. We serve the Carryx. You will submit to us now as you will submit to them.”

“No. You go fuck yourself, monster,” Campar said, and raised his fists to fight. The creature’s arm snapped around faster than Campar would have thought possible. The weapon in its hand struck him across the face and the world went distant.