Three #2
The sun was wider than it had been on Anjiin, and white.
The sky it stood in was the robin’s-egg blue of high oxygen.
The clouds were white, but with notes of gold and rose like a sunset in mid-afternoon.
Something bright was happening above them.
The air smelled like fresh grass and mint, and after the metallic scent of the ship it was intoxicating.
No one was handing out respirators, so she assumed someone had determined breathing it wasn’t going to kill them.
She took several long breaths that made her head swim.
She reached the end of the ramp, looking up as a fifth ship dropped through the air toward them.
She expected a roar of fire, but it only buzzed like a thousand angry beehives, settled on the earth, and went dark.
If anything, there was a wave of mist that came from it before it extended a ramp of its own.
While Jessyn stood, waiting for someone or something to instruct her where to go and what to do, she opened her mouth wide, just breathing in the free air.
Under the grass and mint it also had a faint petrichor scent like coming rain.
The smell took her back to her childhood on Anjiin and almost made her burst into happy tears.
Some distance away from the huddled ships, a swath of green and black rose from the ground.
Plant analogs, she guessed. They were the right colors for photosynthetic life.
And beyond them, structures that could have been the remnants of buildings or the skeletonized corpses of alien leviathans.
Whatever they were, whatever they had been, they were beautiful in their way.
Something tugged at her impatiently. A Sinen—maybe the same one who had been on her ship, maybe a different one—had been trying to get her attention for a few seconds now.
“You are to go there,” it said again, pointing one of its quasi-tentacles to a place near the ramp off the farthest ship. “You are to be with them now. Go. Go go go.”
Jessyn tightened her grip on her satchel and let herself be hurried across the yard.
Something like a dozen aliens stood in a rough group.
Euruk and True People, but also a long-beaked thing that would have been a bird if it had feathers and wings, and an oblong, gray-shelled thing the size of a sofa with hundreds of tiny legs around it like ruffles on a skirt.
And, at one side, a man.
She didn’t recognize him, but she wanted to so badly that her brain kept trying to put names to him.
He was almost Lorrin Hant, who she’d studied introductory systems math with.
He was almost Carwin Moor, who’d read the headlines on the news when she was young.
He wasn’t anyone she knew, but he was human, and seeing him was like seeing part of her family.
He stood a little shorter than Jellit, with a head full of curly dark hair and a beard with the first dusting of gray in it. His skin was warm gold a bit lighter than hers. He was looking up and weeping. She tried to follow his gaze, but all she saw was clouds and sky.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
At first, he only answered with a moan. Then, “I haven’t seen this much sky since…
since they took me from Anjiin. I haven’t felt the sun.
Or fresh air.” He tore his gaze from the open world around them and settled it on her.
His smile was like an image of a Serintist saint, but the chuckle was warm and rueful. “I may be a little messed up.”
“Messed up is normal,” Jessyn said. “Messy is fine.”
He wiped the sleeve of his tunic across his eyes. “You’re holding together better than I am.”
“I had a window at the world-palace,” she said. “The rooms they put me in came with a view. So, less of a shock, I guess.”
“Oh,” he said, but his tone meant something. She nodded him on, and his smile turned less certain. “The only one I heard of like that was Alkhor’s group.”
“Yes. That was us. We started off as Tonner Freis’s group, but I guess that’s not the description anymore.”
“You’re the ones who sided with the big guys?” the man said. “I mean, I don’t judge. You do what you have to if you want to survive. But Alkhor’s the one who turned in the resistance plotters, right?”
“It was complicated. I wasn’t really part of that conversation until it had already happened. Dafyd was… He was just the guy who cleaned the glassware in my lab before he was in charge of everything.”
“Field promotions, I guess,” the man said, and held out his hand. “Garral P?r. Once upon a time, I was the head of the archaeology department at Hibbrin Medrey.”
She put down her bag and took his hand. He had a pleasant grip. “Jessyn Kaul. Adjunct in the biology department at Irvian. Good to meet you, Garral.”
He held her hand a beat longer than normal, then seemed to realize he had and let her go. “I’m sorry. Did we know each other, back before? I feel like I recognize you from someplace.”
“I can’t place you,” she said. “But I was thinking it too. So maybe?”
A gabble of human voices interrupted. Three more people—two men and a woman, all in the same standard tunics—marched toward the group along with another of the gray-shelled sofa-things and two of the not-quite-birds.
A Sinen trundled behind them, a knife-legged Rak-hund undulating at either side.
The arrival of the new people made the little group denser, and without meaning to, Jessyn found herself moving a little closer to Garral P?r.
The not-quite-birds made soft chiming sounds and clacked their beaks together, but the half-mind didn’t translate anything, so if it signified something it wasn’t meant for them.
The Sinen waved its quasi-tentacles and made a shrill whistling that Jessyn had never heard before.
Noises came all around the group—a fast clicking from the not-quite-birds, a thin screech from the Euruk, a bass rumble from the gray-shelled things, and from the half-minds the humans carried, a voice.
“I will be acting as oversight and support for your group,” the Sinen announced.
“You may refer to me as Third Gardener. All requests and concerns you have come to me. If you ask assistance from any other, it will only be help in locating me. Because I will be stationed here at the center camp, you will also be permitted to reach me through your”—the voice hesitated—“research notebooks. These will be issued to you before you leave camp.”
“Leave camp,” Garral echoed without seeming to realize he’d spoken.
If the half-mind relayed the words to Third Gardener, the Sinen chose to ignore them.
“The planet you are presently on is named World.
It was, until recently, under the control of our enemy.
The strategic and tactical victories of the fifth military body were such that the planet was taken without permitting them to sterilize it. This is an opportunity for the Carryx.
“You have been chosen from among your moieties as individuals with expertise and skill appropriate to gaining a greater understanding of this enemy. You will survey and explore the surrounding areas as your natures and abilities support, and you are to relay the information and insights you gather to me.”
The Sinen paused for a moment, as if to let that all sink in. Or maybe some of the translations to the other species just took longer, and it was waiting for them to catch up. The new woman who had been herded in with the group met Jessyn’s gaze and nodded. Jessyn smiled back.
“World has not been made safe,” Third Gardener continued.
“Some of you may encounter traps left by the enemy. Some of you will encounter unfamiliar dangers. Except as subjects for your work, these are not of interest. You will continue to prove your use to the Carryx through the utility of your discoveries.”
“Death isn’t permitted,” Jessyn said, “if it hurts production.”
Garral coughed and put his hand over his mouth to hide a smile. Jessyn looked down.
Third Gardener ignored them. “There is also an evacuation procedure that you must learn. This enemy has a history of destroying the worlds they are driven from. They may return here in such an attempt.”
It paused again and began shifting its weight back and forth like a child excited to get on a thrill ride at a park.
“What we are doing here now has rarely been done before,” Third Gardener said.
“A possibility exists that our work will reveal the pathway to the enemy’s defeat. You are to do everything in your power.
“The Carryx are watching.”