Seventeen #2
There wasn’t a discussion. Jessyn kept hold of his hand as they moved back to the little place where she’d slept the first night, and he let himself be led.
Garral lay behind her, hesitated, and then seemed to come to some sort of decision.
He put his arm around her. After a moment, she nestled back into him.
He held her tightly, and even through his pants she could tell he was erect.
She realized that if there had been more privacy, they would have undressed.
They would have fucked. It felt both surprising and obvious to her.
She pulled his hand off her breast and guided it to her waist, pulling it tight around her.
Making it clear that this was about comfort, not sex. At least, not this time.
Manta dimmed the lights and sang something to the children. To all of them. Jessyn felt Garral’s erection fade, and his breath began to catch. Then he began to quietly cry, in small barely-present sobs. Jessyn leaned her head back, pressing gently into him. He smelled like tears.
“Tell me,” she said, softly enough to hold the moment between just the two of them.
He shook his head like he was saying no, but then a moment later, he spoke. “My boys. Back on Anjiin. I hope they’re all right.” She reached her hand up to his cheek. He wrapped his fingers in hers. “Did you ever think about having kids?”
“Thought about it. Society doesn’t let you get through life without thinking about it. During your fertile years the question is omnipresent. But I thought I’d be a terrible mother,” she said.
“Why’d you think that?”
“I couldn’t put someone else at risk when my brain went rotten.
Wouldn’t have been fair to them. And I never felt the pull as strongly as some other people, I guess.
I could decide intellectually without making it personal.
But I’m honestly grateful now. I’d die before I brought someone else into this fucking universe. ”
Garral kissed the top of her head. Jessyn closed her eyes and waited for sleep to come. She thought it would take longer than it did.
When she woke, Garral was gone, she was cold, and there was a familiar headache wandering around just behind her eyes.
She’d missed her dosage, and now she was going to pay a little price.
It would still be three or four days before the darkness started coming on.
If it did. There had been times she’d been able to go without medication for months at a time.
It seemed too much to hope that this was one of them, though.
She hoped her medication farm was still in balance.
Even if it was, it wouldn’t be for much longer.
She’d have to reseed it. Or maybe they’d all be killed and she wouldn’t have to worry about it.
That sounded restful. Jessyn laughed to herself, which was fine.
No one else was going to think it was funny.
She sat up and wiped the grit from the corners of her eyes.
If she’d had a toothbrush, this would also have been a great time for it.
Her mouth tasted like dirt and old food, her hair was greasy and wild, and she’d been wearing the same tunic for too many days in a row.
That everyone else was in the same condition didn’t make her feel any better.
The lights were on, so it was probably day.
Garral was at the side of the cave, deep in conversation with Omco, Manta, and Corvall.
The children were all busy packing up their things.
The move, it seemed, was back on. Jessyn found a bag of pears—maybe ones from her orchard—and took one.
The juice from it was more welcome than the sweetness.
She’d have to watch it, or she’d get dehydrated.
As she approached the other four, their meeting ended.
Omco and Manta went to the children, exhorting or helping or reassuring.
Doing the job they’d had when they were just teachers and were now trapped in for as much future as any of them had.
Corvall turned toward the mouth of the cave, walking with surprising grace on his asymmetrical legs.
It was hard to believe that there were scraps of a human body in the black suit.
When she tried to picture the wounds he’d survived, it was horrific.
“What did I miss?” she asked as Garral walked up.
“Corvall has a plan,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m about ninety percent sure I understand it. It’s…” He shook his head.
“If we had good options, we wouldn’t be here. It’s all right. I can handle it. Whatever it is, I’ve lived through worse. Promise.”
“There’s a fallback campsite. Corvall scouted it out when our ships started landing.
Manta’s going to take the kids there. The rest of us—you and me and Corvall and Omco—are going to go where Corvall’s ship crashed.
If I understood correctly, and I really think I did, there’s an emergency beacon.
It’ll tell Corvall’s people that he’s still alive and he’s got a ton of intel about the Carryx incursion here his side will be salivating to get.
You and I and Anjiin are part of that. He’s pretty sure they’ll risk sending ships to collect that information, and when they do, he’s hoping they’ll take the kids. ”
“That is a terrible plan,” Jessyn said. “The Carryx are already on alert. They aren’t going to just overlook the fact that a beacon fired off.”
“They won’t. They’ll come hunting for Corvall, and they’ll find him. He’s not going to live through this. He knows that.”
Jessyn took her hand back. Something was wrong.
“We’re going with him,” she said. “Why are we going with him to set off the beacon?”
“There’s something we need to do once we get to the ship and before he sends up the flare. He needs to teach us how to do it.”
“Garral?”
“We have to keep the rescue from turning into a battle. Corvall is giving us a device that will disable the Carryx ships, but only for a little window. We’ll smuggle it inside, you and me.
When the Carryx start gearing up to fight, we’ll deploy it already inside the defense perimeter.
It turns off their engines and messes up the power systems for a while, and by the time they get them back on, the kids are gone and safe,” Garral said.
In the back of Jessyn’s mind a thought shifted, and the sensation was weirdly physical.
For a dozen seconds, she read the variations like she was seeing them on a spreadsheet.
That was all it took. She turned toward the cave’s mouth.
Corvall was a silhouette, black on charcoal.
She wondered if they’d all missed the hole in the plan, or if the soldier knew and thought it was an acceptable loss.
“Get them back,” she said. “Corvall, Omco. Both of them.”
“I know it’s risky—”
“Get them back. Tell them you’re evacuating with the kids, or it’s not a deal.”
“I’m not sending you into danger by yourself. Neither of us are smugglers. Whatever happens back at the ships, it’s going to be safer—closer to safe—if we have a team. We can support each other, and—”
“I like you, Garral. I really do. But if you patronize me right now, I won’t anymore. You have to go with them because otherwise we both get killed.”
He took a step back, confusion in his eyes.
“Look one more step down the road,” she said.
“The rescue ship comes thinking they’re getting some kind of elite soldier filled with valuable information about the enemy.
Only he’s not there. There’s just a bunch of civilian kids and some teachers with a story about the Carryx having pet humans.
So sure, you scoop them up. But the enemy ships are sitting there on the ground, shut down.
Vulnerable. Lumps of metal. No threat to you.
You don’t leave, Garral. You kill them. You turn on the Carryx ships, and you throw every bullet, every bomb, every rusty razor blade you have at them.
You reduce them down to blood and ash before they can turn their guns back on, and then you piss on their graves. It’s what I would do.”
Garral took a deep breath, and it seemed like he was about to say something. But then he only exhaled again.
“Yeah,” Jessyn said. “You tell Corvall that you’ll spill your guts about the Carryx and Anjiin and everything you know about what they’re doing and what they’ve done. You’ll give them every bit of intelligence you can scrape out of your head. But in return, they don’t murder the ship I’m on.”
Manta called out to one of the kids, her voice sharp and annoyed in a way that made Jessyn think she was scared. That was fair. They were all scared. They had reason to be.
“I’ll take the device,” Garral said. “You can go with the kids, and—”
“I don’t speak a fucking word of their language. How am I going to convince them not to destroy a bunch of helpless enemy ships. Mime it at them? Interpretive dance?”
Defeat was just a shifting in his shoulders, a dropping of the tension in his jaw. And then, close behind them, something that looked like resignation.
“I’ll tell them,” Garral said.
“And then we’ll go.”
“And then we’ll go,” he echoed.