Chapter 32
One hour earlier
- Nora -
The passage the Beast has opened for us is nothing like the tunnels Krix'vorr and I crawled through to find the memory chamber.
Those felt old and set. This one is raw.
The walls are wet and unfinished, still faintly warm from having been grown only hours ago, and in places my hands sink into tissue that hasn't fully hardened yet.
"She made this just for us," Lucius says from behind me, his voice hushed in a way I've rarely heard from him. "I find that remarkable. I didn't know she could produce new structures this quickly."
"Or at all," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“Oh, I knew she could,” the drone chirps. “She keeps changing herself and growing. But not nearly this fast.”
“It's very kind of her,” I reply, my mind full of other things as I slowly separate alien spaceship tissue so I can move through it.
“It's not from kindness,” Lucius tells me cheerfully. “She just wants to get rid of you. And when I suggested this, she was as enthusiastic as I've ever seen her.”
“How did you know this was possible, anyway?”
“I went through her memories, and I found one that was really strong - Krix'vorr allowing her to have a calf. So I asked her where the calf was now, and she proudly told me. The Beast and I are on quite a friendly basis now, Nora.”
“Okay.” I stop moving. Just for a second. Behind me, down the passage, is the way back — back to the cabin, back to the flower still sitting where I left it, back to a version of tonight where none of this happened yet. There's still time.
I don't move that way. I make myself keep crawling forward.
The passage opens into a chamber unlike anything else I've seen inside the Beast. It's small, compared to her. Small enough that I understand, all at once, exactly how big a thing I'm about to do.
The calf hangs in a cradle of tissue, and it isn't sleeping.
Its many eyes are set along a skull that must be a miniature echo of the Beast's own. They're open and moving, tracking me, tracking Lucius, tracking everything at once.
Its body is the size of a bus. It trembles, a low continuous shiver that I feel more than see, like a sprinter waiting for the starter's gun.
It radiates something I have no trouble reading at all, alien as it is: eagerness.
Pure, uncomplicated, straining-at-the leash eagerness, the kind I only remember from a few times in my life. Some very recent.
Three horns the size of lampposts protrude from the head, and I can see how they would be deadly weapons.
A black, hard-looking beak the size of a big traffic cone protrudes from the fur.
"Oh, this is wonderful," Lucius breathes, circling the creature in a tight, delighted loop. "Do you see the propulsion nodes? Already mature. She's been growing this for... Captain, this must have taken years."
I'm less enthusiastic about trusting my life to this thing. “Mhm. Can it fly? In space?”
“It looks ready,” the drone says, inspecting the miniature Beast here and there. “I can sense the furnace burning hot. This is a male, by the way.”
“And is there room for us inside this male?”
“For me, certainly. For you…” His sensor cluster looks me up and down. “Maybe. You just have to try.”
There's only one opening in the side, and inside there's a warm inviting light.
I climb inside.
It's a tight fit. My shoulders brush both sides of the opening, and I have to fold myself smaller than feels natural.
But once I'm through, the interior chamber is almost cozy.
It's the only finished space in the whole living ship, a miniature echo of the Beast's own command chamber, complete with a scaled-down cluster of dark, wet eyes set into the front wall and a row of fleshy, lever-like protrusions along one side.
"These control heading and thrust," Lucius says, hovering at my shoulder to point out each one with his laser.
"This regulates the atmosphere, as I understand it.
You have a small reservoir of air, enough for several days if you're careful.
And this," he taps a soft ridge near the floor, "will let you communicate with him, in a very limited way.
Perhaps it's better if I deal with that part. This calf is basically a newborn."
I settle into the space in front of the eyes, my hands finding the levers more by instinct than understanding.
"Ready, Captain?"
I look back at the wall of raw pink tissue, the passage that leads back into the vast, sleeping bulk of the Beast, back toward the Beast's center and Krix'vorr's chamber and everything I am about to leave behind.
"Ready," I say. It's a lie, and Lucius is polite enough not to say so.
The calf detaches from his mother with a soft, wet release, and for a moment we simply drift, untethered, in the dark space between the Beast's flank and the stars.
Then the calf moves. It banks first, slow and deliberate, and carries us in a single looping circuit around the Beast's enormous flank, close enough that I can see individual hairs moving in whatever thin field of energy surrounds her.
And the horns, long and sharp, three of them, looking like they're made of dark bone.
They're stained with the blood and fluids of other living ships, scratched and burned from many battles.
Near the front, behind the cluster of eyes Krix'vorr calls the command chamber, the calf slows almost to a stop and presses itself, gently, against her hide in a gentle nuzzle. A small creature saying goodbye to its mother in the only language it has.
The Beast nuzzles him right back, then gives her calf a gentle nudge, pushing him out into space.
I feel it through the floor of the little chamber. Something in my chest gives out entirely, silent, and I have to press the back of my hand against my mouth.
Then the calf turns away, and the Beast falls behind us. Ahead there's only the false, glittering promise of the space station's lights.
I find myself reaching for where the translation flower would have sat against my ear, an old habit. I won't need it. If I find myself having to talk to a Gzet, it means the plan has failed.
"He'll be furious," I say, to no one, to the dark. "Or he already knows. Maybe he's found it by now."
Lucius says nothing. I suppose there's nothing useful to say.
I don't know what Krix'vorr is doing at this exact moment.
Maybe he's still inspecting the Gzet worlds in triumph, maybe he's noticed I'm gone, maybe some small part of him already understands.
I hope, distantly, absurdly, that he'll be happy.
I hope that he gets to have this one thing, that he's worked for all his life.
"Goodbye," I whisper, so quietly that even the translation flower, if it had still been listening, might not have caught it. "I love you. I'm sorry."
The calf carries us on, small and eager and alive, toward the lights of the station and everything waiting inside it.