Three
Three
J essyn kept the device beside her bunk: glass panes each a little larger than her two splayed hands together and held about a thumb’s width apart.
It sat upright on one edge, looking a lot like the transparent cases children kept insects in so they could watch them tunnel and nest. Except that the gap between the panes wasn’t filled with insects and sand, it was filled with the white slurry that she’d harvested from thirty-five of the complex symbiotes they called berries, which weren’t berries at all.
The slurry was a mostly inert silicate base that supported billions of microscopic organisms, a complete ecosystem as complicated as a coral reef in a gentle sea.
It was balanced so that Jessyn could pour a half cup of glucose solution in the top of the device once a day, clean a handful of the rat-turd-looking precipitate out once a week, and decant a daily dose of clear, bitter, astringent soup that would keep her mind from fishtailing out from under her.
If the slurry started discoloring red or yellow, her little ecosystem was getting out of balance, and she’d add a little acid to the sugar until it cleared up.
Black or green meant a contaminating organism had gotten in, and she had to sterilize the whole thing.
Before she’d left the Carryx palace world, Tonner had made her enough dry starter to reset the device three times.
She’d already used one dose, but she was pretty sure she’d figured out where that contaminant had come from and fixed the problem.
So that was her margin of error. Screw up the mix more than twice or let the device break once, and she was fucked. Keep it safe and working, and she’d be fine until something else killed her. She didn’t remember when she’d stopped considering old age a likely cause of death.
The ship bounced and shuddered again and then seemed to swing under her.
The motion jostled a wave of little bubbles up through the slurry.
Jessyn took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth.
She’d gotten used to the low, pulsing hum of the Carryx ship during the time they’d spent in asymmetric space, and then the smooth whine when they’d returned to the universe with physics she knew and understood. This new turbulence bothered her.
The door opened and a Sinen trundled in with its long nose, irregular goatlike eyes, and boneless arms. The horror show that was its head would have risen to the middle of her rib cage if she’d stood up. She didn’t.
It made wet, slapping sounds, and the box at its throat translated in a calm, featureless voice. “The first ships have landed at the central camp. We will be on the surface in”—the translating half-mind stuttered—“forty-five minutes. Be prepared to join your group when this happens.”
“Will do,” she said, and the box beside her on the mattress plopped like someone had dropped a fish into water. The Sinen turned away and trundled back out of her room, leaving the door open behind it.
She noticed the hiccups when the translator struggled.
She wondered what it was about the Sinen ideas of duration that made forty-five minutes difficult to parse.
The ship lurched again, and a long deep creaking noise rose from the deck.
She chuckled. Hauled halfway across the galaxy by alien murderers and slave masters only to die because of mechanical failure would have been just her luck.
But the ship didn’t come apart, so she got up and started gathering her things.
It was hard to know how long it had been since she’d left the Carryx world-palace.
Campar and Rickar had been taken before she was, assigned to some other duty for the Carryx empire.
She’d let herself hope they would be the only new losses that came with humanity’s promotion.
But then Dafyd had come to her room one day with a hard expression and two Soft Lothark.
The librarian of their moiety had decided there was work for her.
A place in the vast mechanism of the Carryx that she’d make a fine little cog for.
She’d wept, and Dafyd had too. And Jellit.
They hadn’t pushed back against it, though.
They hadn’t fought. For all Dafyd’s radical pronouncements of future rebellion, the real lesson they’d all learned was this: They were powerless.
And so she’d come here, to her bunk, and time had stopped meaning as much.
She remembered old stories with prisoners carving tally marks into the walls of their cells. She hadn’t understood why they did it. How time could become a featureless thing. How it could pass without notice. She did now.
On the ship there was no rhythm of day and night.
She slept when she slept, and woke without knowing how long she’d been unconscious.
There were displays on the ship, some flat, some volumetric, but if any of them were clocks, how to read them was not something the Carryx shared with their subjects.
And the length of a day on the prison world wasn’t the same as it had been on Anjiin.
Time, for all she knew, might be a mess of relativistic effects and asymmetric physics.
Once, she had lived at the Irvian Research Medrey, but the idea of measuring how long ago was a sad joke.
Years, probably, but she couldn’t be sure, and it didn’t matter.
There were some number of days or weeks since she’d left the remnant of the workgroup—since she’d seen another human face—and she didn’t know how long ago that was either.
She lived in the moment, because the moment was what she had.
What is, is , echoed in her mind, and she pushed it away with a shudder.
The turbulence came again. She heard one of the gray-winged moth-bat things that called themselves Euruk of Lydiándar scream in distress from the common room, then the Sinen’s voice, like two steaks being pounded together.
It had to be a rough job, keeping the zoo of captives in line.
She’d have felt sorry for the poor Sinen if she hadn’t hated it quite so much.
She caught a whiff of something rich and pungent.
Probably some kind of pheromone. It wasn’t a message meant for her.
The ship lurched, and for a second she was twice her normal weight.
Her stomach tightened. If she was going to vomit, she wanted to get to the toilet.
If she wasn’t, she wanted to lie down in the bunk.
It took her longer than she liked to decide which was more likely, but she took her chances on the bed.
The shaking grew worse, then smoothed out.
The sound of the engines changed again. Then a final shock ran through the body of the ship, and it went silent.
Jessyn lay on her back for five long, slow breaths, letting her guts settle.
Just as she was ready to stand, the ship’s half-mind spoke.
Disembark now. You will be directed to your proper workgroup for instruction.
You may leave supplies in your present quarters.
Wherever they’d been headed, they’d arrived.
She checked the irreplaceable glass device that kept her sane.
No cracks, no leaking, and only a little turbulence in the slurry.
She hated leaving it behind, but she also hated taking it into the field.
In the end, she didn’t put it in her satchel, but she didn’t like it.
The common room was busy with alien bodies.
Two of the Euruk were flying in fast circles near the ceiling.
A lumbering, stone-skinned thing with a dozen black eyes, six double-jointed legs, and a beak where the legs came together hauled a bag onto its back.
Jessyn hadn’t talked to that one. Half a dozen of the crablike True People of Hannic clicked their claws at each other and hissed, fighting or trading jokes or professing their undying love.
She had no way to tell. The Sinen who had been giving them orders and keeping tabs on them was consulting five Soft Lothark.
One of the Soft Lothark turned to look at her.
The attention of the squat-bodied, long-limbed creature made Jessyn flinch away, her heart racing a little.
She hadn’t done anything to bring their wrath down on her, but the Lothark scared her anyway.
She’d seen things like this one murder people and eat their own dead.
This Lothark gestured toward the corridor, and she took it as an order.
The hallway had been closed during the journey out.
It was open now, and she walked along it carefully.
The light at the end of the hall had a different feel than the artificial illumination of shipboard.
Almost like sunlight in the middle of the afternoon.
A fresh breeze touched her, and her heart did something—skipped a beat or doubled one. She started walking faster.
Four of the Carryx ships were on the ground in a rough semicircle.
They weren’t the city-vast ones that had come to conquer Anjiin.
Each of them stood only a dozen or so stories high, bronze and black, with ramps that stretched down to the bare pale soil.
Jessyn walked down her own ramp, squinting into the light.
Two or three hundred bodies of a dozen different species milled in the improvised yard between the ships, and some of them looked human.
In the center of it all, two huge Carryx stood in pale green shells of armor.
Soldiers or guards or something Jessyn had no context for.
Her eyes watered, but not from any emotion. It was just so bright.