Thirteen #2
It was only as he stood up that he started becoming aware something was wrong.
He noticed that all the Lothark guards were lying on the floor, which was very odd.
He had never seen them do that. His own balance felt off, like he’d just stepped off a roller coaster and didn’t quite have his feet back under him.
“Campar?” Ghati said. “I don’t feel right.”
Across the common room, Rickar was waving a hand, trying to get Campar’s attention, his eyes wide with alarm.
The ship lurched, the deck falling out from under him and then slamming up into his feet hard enough his knees bent.
Something that wasn’t sound rushed like a river in flood, drowning out the actual noise of the room.
People were screaming, Campar could see their gaping mouths, human, Budon, Soft Lothark. They were screaming, but he couldn’t hear them. Something that wasn’t light flashed behind his eyes in an annihilating blue, and Campar lost himself in it.
The battle, it seemed, had come.
Rickar didn’t sleep anymore so much as lapse out of consciousness.
There was no sense, when he came back to himself, of anything but the bone-deep tiredness that he’d carried to the pillow with him.
The tension of knowing that he could die at any moment for no reason always at odds with the thought that, if he did, at least it would be over.
He was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, looking at the wall without really seeing it, when the sound came. It was beautiful and strange, and so out of place he wondered at first if he was hallucinating. He almost didn’t get up.
When he reached the common room, it was still like something out of a dream. Four of the featherless, beakless herons seemed like they were holding hands, their heads swaying on prehensile necks, and filling the room with their chorus. It was entrancing. He was entranced.
But also, as he stood in the corridor looking in, something in the back of his mind shifted. A slick distrust distracted him. Something new was happening, something unexpected, and while he might once have believed that some omens could be good, he didn’t anymore.
The song ended. Someone started clapping.
The giant slug was still spread out, hugging the deck with as much of its surface area as it could manage, like a man on a transport bracing in his straps.
Across the common room, Campar told the singers how beautiful the song had been, and adrenaline was already flooding Rickar’s bloodstream.
The Soft Lothark—instrument of the Carryx—had begun lying on the floor and bracing themselves.
Something was wrong.
He tried to catch Campar’s attention. Or Ghati’s.
But the something had already started happening.
The deck fell away from under him, and he hit his head against the bronze roof of the corridor hard enough to make his ears ring.
An incomprehensible thing happened that involved the color blue, and then the battleship was shaking like a rat in a terrier’s teeth.
Rickar tried to cross the swinging, bucking, violent deck to Campar and his new boyfriend.
He didn’t have anything in his mind clearer than that they were in trouble, and that somehow by being together, they’d be safe. Safer. More nearly safe.
The Budon were screaming high, reedy shrieks that struggled to cut through the rushing sound that threatened to swamp all thought.
The Soft Lothark, soldiers of the Carryx and tool of violence, were bracing themselves on the floor and in doorways, their tiny black eyes wide and limbs trembling.
A thought passed through Rickar’s mind— I’ve never seen them frightened before —and blew away.
The ship groaned and shook, throwing their bodies around like hard candy shaken in a tin cup.
But there was something more, a kind of internal violence that Rickar felt without being able to localize it anywhere in his body.
His ability to think in language drifted away and came partway back.
Blank spots appeared in his field of vision.
The chaos of the room seemed to stutter like time had bits cut out of it and the broken ends jammed together.
And all through it there was a deep sense of nightmarish wrongness, the universe slipping off its mask and letting him see the monstrous face underneath.
His first coherent thought was I must be having a stroke .
His second was that he remembered having the first, and that he hadn’t been able to do that in a while.
He was lying on the deck, his cheek pressed hard against it like he’d been trying to pass through it by main force of will.
His body felt distant. The trek from his mind to the distant colonies of his feet might take days to complete. With a vast effort, he turned his head.
The common room was in chaos, but he saw Campar in it.
The big man was helping Ghati to sit up; the smaller man’s eyes were blank and stunned, but he seemed to be moving under his own power.
Campar, always helping. The Budon were vocalizing in distress and dancing around the bodies of two of their kind that lay on the deck like Rickar, unconscious or dead.
To his right, Vaudai was swelling up and pulling in, resuming its usual shape.
Where its flesh let go, a hard, white resin stained the deck.
Something smelled like acetate. The Lothark were getting up from their places on the deck and checking each other for injury.
One of them pulled a device off its harness and waved it at everyone in the room.
Rickar shut his eyes, but the darkness brought on a wave of nausea and vertigo until he opened them again.
When he found enough will, he sat up and checked himself for wounds.
His left knee was swollen. There was a cut over his right ear that had bled into his hair long enough to leave it hard and scabby.
Whatever they’d just been through, it had lasted long enough for blood to dry.
Other than that, he seemed more or less intact, though his head throbbed when he moved too quickly.
The expansive emotion in his chest was so unexpected and so long-absent that he didn’t recognize it at first. It was more than just relief at having survived.
For the first time in a very long time, he felt joy.
The enemy had tried to kill them and failed.
Rickar felt giddy that he wasn’t dead, and he laughed at the pleasure of the sensation.
Campar caught his eye, and Rickar gestured that he was all right.
He wasn’t losing his mind, he wasn’t breaking down.
He was genuinely happy to be alive, and his surprise at feeling that way was hilarious.
The big man came over anyway, Ghati at his side. The smaller man’s face was pale, and one of his eyes was bloody like he’d taken a punch, but he was steady on his feet. Rickar decided that Campar’s boyfriend might be a lot tougher than he looked.
“We’re going to check the rooms,” Campar said. “See if everyone’s all right.”
“I’m going to let you do that,” Rickar said. “I’m not sure I trust myself to walk yet.”
“If you need me,” Campar said. He was a sweet fucker, Campar. A better man than Rickar was. Probably an indication that he’d die in the war. Good people wore out faster than bastards, the universe using them up like it held a grudge against kindness. Rickar grinned at him. “I’ll be fine.”
After Campar left, more of the Budon filtered in from their private quarters, swaying around what Rickar now thought were their dead. Vaudai, its usual shape regained, moved across the common room floor as if it had someplace to go.
“Hey, giant slug,” Rickar said. “You all right?”
“I will be fine, sticks-with-meat-on-them. I have suffered overspill before.”
“Overspill?”
Vaudai didn’t pause, but its movement was slow enough that it didn’t stop the conversation.
“The enemy set a trap with projection fields. The fluting-stink-sacks sense variations in quantum flux a thousand times better than the best half-mind. It is why they are here. They sang, it raised the alarm, the masters put countermeasures in place. We suffered what little couldn’t be dampened out.
Overspill. If they had not, we would not be suffering. ”
“That was normal?”
“Nothing is normal in war,” Vaudai said.
“It is always an experiment to discover what will undo the last encounter’s defenses and what will defend against the newest angle of attack.
One creates the form of the other, and echoes back again in an endless spiral of sophistication and elegance.
Conflict is the engine of excellence, and war is the distillation of conflict.
It is the grand unfolding that ends in the embrace of eternity.
Also, it is like painful defecation and leaves me with an ache. I am going to rest now.”
“Wait. If those bird things are sensors, what are you here for? Do you smell incoming missiles or something?”
“The gift of my kind is to ponder the patterns of violence. If we live, I will provide our keeper-librarian with analysis of these battles. If we don’t, it won’t be my concern.”
“What about us? What did they send humans out here for?”
“At a guess, to see whether there is a reason to send humans out here. Or perhaps something more. It will be interesting to discover.”
“Will we be part of your report?”
“If there is a report.”
Vaudai made its slow, creeping way back toward the cells and private rooms. Rickar tried standing up, then decided against it. The Budon circled their dead, clucking and muttering at each other, but they didn’t sing.