Chapter 52 Ghorak
“Ow!”
I wince as the Znthian cleans my wounded hand with an alcohol-soaked rag. Never have had much tolerance for pain. You’d think I would by now, but no.
“Oh, stop whining like a hatchling,” the Znthian says. “It’s a mere scratch.”
I’m about to inform him that we Grangorians don’t hatch, but before I have a chance to do so, the little human female interjects.
“A scratch? Venim, he’s got a hole through the middle of his hand.”
The Znthian just shrugs and applies more alcohol to the rag.
He’s using a flask of spirits scavenged off one of the inmates he killed back there in the Vents.
Hardly an ideal disinfectant, but it’s better than nothing.
Burns like null, unfortunately. He turns my hand over and cleans the other side where the tip of the crossbow quarrel pierced through.
I do my level best not to wince this time, but of course I fail.
Never have had much of a tolerance for pain.
Too bad dreamweed doesn’t work for me. Got a whole damn satchel full of the stuff. I’m half tempted to light up a stalk purely out of habit. After so many cycles of smoking the stuff, I guess I’ve gotten a taste for it, even though it has no effect on me.
And now the others know.
Somehow, I’ve managed to put off talking about it for the better part of the afternoon.
It was agreed that my explanation could wait til after we’d put a little distance between ourselves and the site of our battle.
Spent several draleths hoofing it ’til we reached the far side of the Vents.
Now we’re camped somewhere on the outskirts, close enough that the plasmatic lights can inhibit Jean’s estrus, but far enough away to avoid another ambush.
Once he’s finished cleaning my wound with the rag, Venim takes a roll of bandaging material and starts to wrap my hand with it. Once the wound is thoroughly covered, he turns to Jean, who is sitting nearby, watching.
“Hold this.”
She holds the excess material while Venim moves away for a moment. Her eyes widen just a little when he picks his sword up off the ground. I have to admit, my heart jumps a little too. The Znthian sees our dismay and sighs with exasperation.
“Calm down,” he says. “You think I’m going to attack him right after I finish dressing his wound?”
“At this point,” Jean says. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”
Venim just shakes his head and snips the fabric with the tip of his sword. Then he pulls everything snug and tucks the end under to secure it.
“There,” he says. “How does that feel?”
I flex my fingers gingerly, clenching them into a loose fist, then straightening them out again. The wound hurts, but the hand still works. I nod, doing my best to look tough.
“Now we match,” Scythro says.
The Hassaith has been lounging nearby, watching the proceedings with hooded eyes. He lifts one languid arm, showing off the bandages I put there a few days ago, following his run-in with the ashmaws.
He’s right, we do match. Our wounds might not be exactly the same, but we acquired them doing the same thing.
Protecting Jean.
I turn and look at the human female. She’s still kneeling in front of me, slightly off to one side, not having moved since holding the bandage for Venim to cut. Her tattered outfit leaves much of her body on display, and the pink light of the Vents plays across her ample curves.
At the moment, however, it’s her eyes that I’m most interested in. They’re aimed right at my chest, staring at the glyph burned into the skin there. You want to talk about pain? That one hurt like null when I received it. Still does.
“That’s my brand,” I tell her, tracing the hardened scar tissue with my finger. “Everybody on Ul’s got one. Well, everybody but you.”
“I know,” she says, looking away. “Venim told me.”
“He tell you what it means?”
“That you’re a mass murderer.”
I nod. “He told you the truth.”
Guess I could be mad at the Znthian for snitching, but I’m not.
Any inmate on Ul would know the meaning of my brand.
Only fair that Jean should be on equal footing.
I tilt my head back and look up at the mostly cloudless sky.
The sun is still out, but it won’t be for long.
I’ve put off my explanation long enough. It is time for me to tell my tale.
“I was known as an artificer,” I begin…
On any other planet, I might have been called an inventor, but I never much cared for that term.
Never felt that the machines I built were my own.
They preexisted, ideas in the aether, just waiting for someone to come along and give them form.
So, on Grangor, an artificer is what I was called.
A practitioner of mechanical philosophy.
This was in the old days, when my species had just begun to grapple with the possibilities of steam power—locomotives, airships, and the like.
I had some wealth in those days. My own laboratory and workshop where I could experiment with new designs. And I had a wife.
Then the Znthians came, and everything changed overnight.
I reckon I made it through the conquest better than most. Lost my lab and most of my wealth, but the invaders educated me about technologies far more advanced than anything on Grangor at the time.
I excelled in the art of hypercosmic engineering, and before long my knowledge of the subject surpassed that of my teachers.
And more importantly, I still had my wife. She was not among the unfortunate women who were taken away to be concubines. I couldn’t imagine how the Imperial Procurers had passed over such a beauty, but I was grateful for the oversight.
For a while, life was all right.
It didn’t last.
The trouble started when my talents caught the attention of a Znthian general by the name of Malvek. He wanted me to build him a weapon. A hypercosmic device that could destroy entire planets from half a galaxy away. I politely declined.
Okay, maybe not so politely.
Unfortunately, Malvek was no ordinary general.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was actually a traitor with plans of usurping the throne for himself, and he was willing to do anything to make that happen.
He kidnapped my wife. Imprisoned her. Threatened to kill her if I didn’t build his weapon for him.
I had no choice. I would have the blood of millions on my hands, but that seemed like a small price to pay to get my wife back.
For the better part of a cycle, I was in charge of the project.
Everything was highly secretive. The facility where I worked was located in a remote, mountainous region.
It was state-of-the-art. There were several dozen people working under me—scientists, engineers, mechanics, security.
I knew what we were building was wrong, but I didn’t care.
The only thing that mattered was getting my wife back.
Then, as the project was nearing completion, something happened. I can’t say what it was exactly. Just an intuition, I suppose. I hacked Malvek’s personal computer, spied on his correspondences.
What I discovered shattered me.
Malvek was not holding my wife hostage. Not anymore. At some point, the imprisonment had become too much for her. She had taken her own life.
In that first tide of grief, I contemplated many things. Ending Malvek’s life was foremost among them. Ending my own was a close second. Then, as the tide ebbed, I experienced a kind of clarity. I realized the enormity of the project I had been working on. The barbarity of it.
I had to destroy Malvek’s weapon before it reached completion.
It wasn’t all that difficult to accomplish. Simply a matter of turning the weapon against itself. The hypercosmic detonation would consume the entire facility, along with all the designs and blueprints inside.
There was just one problem. I could not warn any of the other people at the facility of the danger they were in. Had I done so, they might have tried to interfere. Their lives had to be sacrificed to avoid an even greater number of deaths.
And so… I destroyed the facility, and everyone inside.
I could have remained inside the facility and died along with the others, but I wanted to make sure the destruction was complete. If even the slightest trace of the weapon survived, it might be used to reconstruct that horrible device.
My plan was to end myself afterward. Fling myself off the side of one of the mountains…
“But?” Venim asks.
I realize I have not spoken for a kethar or more. My vision is all blurry. Tears in my eyes. More of them on my face. Like I said, I’ve never had much of a tolerance for pain.
“I couldn’t kill myself,” I answer. “I just… couldn’t.”
“But you did destroy the facility?”
I nod.
“Had to. No telling how many countless millions would have died if the weapon had been completed.”
“But Malvek was a traitor,” Venim says. “He was going to use the weapon against his own people. Znthians. Your enemy.”
I knuckle some of the wetness away from my eyes.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Still people. Still sentient and sapient. People who didn’t deserve to die.”
“So how’d you get caught?” Scythro asks.
“I didn’t. I turned myself in.”
“You turned yourself in?”
I nod again. “Nearly half a hundred people died when the facility went up. I had to pay for their deaths. But I lied and made it seem like I was just some Grangorian freedom fighter getting revenge on the invaders. If the Imperials had known what Malvek had really been working on—or that I was the brains behind the project—they would have tried to force me to make a similar weapon for them. So I played dumb. I hadn’t counted on them sending me to prison.
Figured they would give me the punishment I hadn’t had the courage to give myself—death.
But when the tribunal saw my build, they reckoned I could be more use digging ore.
So they sent me here. To Ul. Some would consider it a fate worse than death. ”
I look at Jean. The human has been silent for the duration of my story, and she remains so now.
The sun has gone down beyond the horizon, but there is still some light in the sky.
Enough for me to see her face behind her breathing mask.
There are tears glistening on her cheeks.
As many as are on my own. Whether they are tears of sympathy or betrayal, I cannot tell, and I do not dare to ask.
“Well, that explains your brand,” Venim says. “But why this whole pretense with the weed?”
“Right. About that…”
I explain.
When I first arrived on Ul, I was racked with pain.
Grief over the death of my wife. Guilt over the lives I had ended.
I was desperate to find some way to drown my sorrow, and I quickly learned that dreamweed was the Ulian inmate’s drug of choice.
Imagine my dismay when I discovered the stuff had no effect on my Grangorian brain chemistry.
But I soon realized this could work to my advantage.
Ul is a dangerous place. Making others underestimate my abilities seemed like a reasonable survival strategy.
Moreover, it gave me a way to indulge my love of engineering in secret.
No one would ever suspect that a bumbling weedhead could cobble together devices such as my ore gun, or my night-vision goggles.
“So this mysterious friend of yours,” Scythro says. “The one who is so good with machines…?”
“Yes,” I answer. “It’s me.”
I turn to Jean again. She briefly raises her facemask to wipe the tears off her face. Then she lowers it back into place again. The little winged android is lying on the ground beside her. She always keeps him close, like a child with a doll.
“I already started working on fixing him,” I tell her, “that first night, after you and Scythro were asleep. Had a set of tools I would carry with me whenever I made my rounds, just in case I needed to repair my rifle or one of the other devices. If I had them with me now, I could probably finish repairing him in another day or so.”
“What happened to your tools?” Venim asks.
“Kept them in a hidden compartment under the saddle of the longstrider. That’s why your men didn’t find them. Your former men, that is. But they turned the longstrider loose and sent it wandering off into the wasteland on its own. No telling where that poor creature is now.”
Venim frowns and looks off into the distance. After a moment, he says, “Sorry about that.”
The apology surprises me, coming as it does from a proud Znthian warrior. My response is equally surprising, at least to myself.
“Forget about it,” I tell him. Then I turn my attention back toward the human. “If anyone should be apologizing, it is me. I am sorry for deceiving you, Jean. I felt it was necessary to… to protect myself.”
“Shut up,” she says softly.
“I can still fix your android,” I tell her. “Once we arrive at the Weedian camp. But it will take us several days to get there. I’m sorry, I know you were hoping to make contact with your friend before that. If I hadn’t deceived you, perhaps I could have already—”
She cuts me off.
“I said, shut up, you big dummy.”
There is no malice in her voice. Her eyes are dry now, but I can sense the emotions churning behind them. Does she still trust me, after learning how I have deceived her? Wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t.
There are many things I would like to say to her, foremost among them that my feelings for her are not counterfeit, even if my personality has been. I decide to keep that to myself, however. She must make up her own mind about me, and I must let her.
After a moment, she does.
“Thank you,” she whispers softly, before pushing her breathing mask up on top of her head. She bends down and presses a gentle kiss against my bandaged hand. Then she climbs into my lap and gives me a second, deeper kiss.
This time it’s on the mouth.
And it is far less gentle.