Four
Four
R ickar was at Irvian Research Medrey back on Anjiin, and he was trying to get across the city to Dennia before the attack started.
That was wrong, of course. He hadn’t met Dennia until after Anjiin fell.
She had died on their prison world, slaughtered along with the rest of Ostencour’s rebels.
He knew that, but he was also running down streets that were almost the ones he’d known, trying to flag down transports that were always just out of his reach.
He forced himself awake just to stop it and lay in the dim half-light of his cell with an aching jaw.
One of these days, he’d clench his way into a broken tooth, and then he didn’t know what would happen.
There were only about a dozen humans aboard the Carryx warship, and he didn’t think any of them were dentists.
He could imagine the Carryx being surprised he didn’t just grow a new tooth.
Or that a broken tooth would hurt. They might just kill him for this imperfection and move on with their day.
All the possibilities seemed equally likely.
There wasn’t anything on the ship that was recognizable as a clock, so he didn’t know how long he’d slept. He didn’t feel rested, but that didn’t indicate much. He could lose consciousness for a few minutes or half a day and wake up with the same sense that the air was too thick to move through.
He thought about closing his eyes again and trying for sleep, but he had the sense that the dream was waiting.
After a while, he levered himself up to sitting and rested his skull in his hands, rubbing his aching masseters and temples.
His stomach rumbled. He resented being hungry.
Resented his body’s insistence on mundane concerns.
There had been a time when Rickar Daumatin had planned out a life for himself.
A posting at Irvian that led to a senior position at Hausen Educational Medrey, and then an early and comfortable retirement back home at Dyan.
Three decades. Maybe two and a half. It hadn’t seemed implausible at the time.
It seemed like the absurd fantasies of a child now.
The warship on which he served was immense, but his place in it—the place many of the animal servants of the Carryx shared—was restricted.
When he’d come to the Carryx world what seemed like a lifetime ago, he’d had the sense of being in a great menagerie.
Without considering it, he imagined the whole Carryx empire to be the same pandemonium of life-forms.
Here, on the ship, he wasn’t as certain.
There were spaces where animals like himself were permitted.
Some low-status castes of Carryx were debased enough to interact with them.
The main body of the ship, however, seemed to be reserved for the masters themselves.
The Sinen that had done something like an orientation when they’d been brought aboard explained that straying from their places would mean death.
Rickar believed that enough that he didn’t experiment.
He kept to the bronze-walled chambers and corridors, listened to the hum and rumble of the ship as it traveled through asymmetric space or else the normal kind he knew, and tried to keep his mind from falling apart.
Sanity was a full-time job for him these days.
Sometimes he remembered when Jessyn had confessed that she needed medication to keep her mental illness from overtaking her.
He’d actually felt a little pity for her at the time.
He wondered how she was, wherever she was.
He wondered if he’d ever see her again, ever have a chance to apologize for that pity and disdain.
He hoped he would, but he didn’t expect to.
His stomach grumbled again, and this time there was a little stab of discomfort too small to call itself pain. He rose from the cot, pulled on the same clothes he’d pulled off when he’d lain down, put the translating half-mind around his neck, and went to see if Campar was in his cell.
The animal quarters on the ship had some aspects in common with the labs on the Carryx world-palace and some with the prisoners’ hold that they’d suffered after Anjiin.
The rooms were as cold as the prison ship, and with walls and lights that reminded Rickar of that transit, though these lights were thankfully brighter.
There was a central room where the subject species mixed the way they did in the cathedral back on the prison world, and private quarters in the halls that led off it.
The quarters were cells, though. Single-occupancy rooms took the place of the little group homes they’d had before. Rickar couldn’t say which he preferred.
Campar’s cell was across from his, and down about halfway to the common room.
He knocked on the door with the back of his knuckles the way his grandfather had taught him to play the aqlava.
The metal seemed to eat the sound, so after a moment, he hit it again harder.
Campar still didn’t answer. He shifted the door open a fraction to make sure the big man wasn’t there.
There were no locks for them. Locks meant privacy and agency and power. That wasn’t how things worked anymore.
Since there was no Campar, he made his way to the common room alone.
The chamber itself was comfortably large, the size of a dormitory cafeteria.
The ceiling was twice as high as in his cell, though there didn’t seem to be any species that flew or floated to inhabit the taller air.
Or at least not on this mission. Three people—humans—sat close together near one of the entrances, locked in an intense emotional conversation that exhausted Rickar just by existing.
Two Soft Lothark guards lumbered through the hall, their gazes taking in everything and giving back nothing. Rickar shifted his path to avoid them.
The dispensers where the Carryx delivered food and water were along one wall and built to accommodate a wide variety of hands, pseudopods, and manipulating limbs.
He didn’t understand the rules the Carryx had for him.
On the prison world, humans were expected to make their own food.
On the ship, gruel and water were provided.
It seemed inconsistent that they didn’t let him starve to death if he couldn’t sustain himself.
But maybe that had happened often enough that the rules of utility had been bent.
Rickar ambled to the dispensing wall at the same time a vast, blue-gray mass of flesh roughly the size of a side of beef lurched away from it. It called itself Vaudai, but Rickar didn’t know if that was its name or its species. It didn’t matter, because he didn’t call it that.
“Good morning, giant slug,” Rickar said.
The box at his throat made no sound that Rickar could hear, didn’t pump out a chemical signal that he could detect, but a box in the folds of the alien body replied. “Greetings, sticks-with-meat-on-them.”
“Any news?”
“Yes. I have determined that we are in the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body.”
“And what does that tell us about what we’re doing here?”
Vaudai shivered. Its flesh took on a nacreous sheen for a moment. “Exploratory bodies are often involved in explicitly military endeavors. It seems likely that we are on our way to the forefront of the war.”
“The front lines,” Rickar said.
“If you consider complex surfaces in asynchronous time a ‘line,’ yes.”
“Well, that’s not exactly a surprise. Any idea how long our tour of duty will be?”
Vaudai shifted its weight and was silent for a moment. Then, “Not a”—the translator hiccuped here for a moment—“ painful-birthing clue.”
A smile flickered over Rickar’s lips. The translation half-minds didn’t always handle expletives or express emotions well, but it had caught the giant slug’s curse and impatience beautifully. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Campar around here?”
“What is the Campar?”
“Another human. Like me.”
“You all smell the same. Salt and dead skin.”
“Fair point,” Rickar said, and moved on.
There were two large things that looked like featherless herons with their beaks cut off and uncomfortable rippling villi at the ends of their wings.
They called themselves Budon of Luus, and they didn’t like to talk, so he waited for them to get their bowls of what looked like black rocks in brown sludge.
There were no buttons on the food dispenser, Rickar just walked up and stood in front of it for a moment.
Something in the device scanned him and decided that instead of black rocks and mud, he got a bowl of undifferentiated grayish goo and a shallow spoon.
His ration of water came in a gel pouch the yellow of chicken fat that he’d bite the corner off to drink from.
He was fairly sure he’d lost weight since he’d gotten on the ship, but he hadn’t been eating well even before then.
He’d lost his appetite when Dafyd Alkhor had warned the Carryx about the rebellion and gotten Synnia and Dennia, Ostencour and Allstin, all of them slaughtered.
For the best of reasons. To save all the others, including himself.
All you needed to understand the necessity of that sacrifice was to listen to Alkhor for a few minutes.
He’d be happy to explain why he was right, and then he’d promise he’d avenge all the lives he’d helped end.
As bad as it was, at least Rickar wasn’t still on the same planet with him.
He sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at the green-gray slurry in his bowl, the sloshing bag of water. Then, grudgingly, he ate and drank and waited for Campar because he knew him, and had known him before, and didn’t have anybody else left to wait for.
“Stay awake. You don’t sleep in my room,” Ghati said, flicking Campar’s bare buttock with his finger. “We agreed.”
“But I’m tired,” Campar said. “I’m sleepy. I’m spent. Pity me.”