Twenty-Two #2
The Carryx soldier shifted, turning its attention to the reclusive beetle-things—the last of the moieties on the ship.
Rickar sank down on his haunches. Putting his head lower seemed to keep the ship from swaying as much.
Out of nowhere, he was struck by an almost overpowering craving for a cigarette.
He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d had one—years, maybe—but he could taste the smoke and feel it in his sinuses. He closed his eyes.
“Oh,” Campar said. “Oh no. No, no.”
Rickar opened his eyes and looked up. Campar stood beside him frozen.
His eyes had gone wide, and he had a fist pressed against his sternum.
Rickar felt a rush of panic, sure that thinking about a heart attack had somehow brought one on for the big man instead of himself. But then he followed Campar’s gaze.
Ghati was on the far side of the room, standing at the edge of the other half of the human moiety. His hair was still wet from the shower. His hands were at his sides. His expression was the emptiness of shock and loss.
Campar shook his head and said No again, but he wasn’t saying it to himself. He was talking to the universe. He was begging.
Rickar had always thought of himself as a pragmatist, sometimes to the point of fatalism.
They were powerless in the face of Carryx authority.
The illusions he’d had about living a life shaped by his own choices, of finding comfort in a woman’s bed, of making a future and family, had all been stripped away.
The Carryx had taken his world. He’d lost Dennia in the collapse of Ostencour’s rebellion.
Hope had failed him too many times for him to lean on it again.
He was watching hope die in Campar’s eyes. He recognized the expression from when he’d worn it. Seeing it on the big man’s face didn’t dispel Rickar’s anxiety, but it changed the flavor.
At the archway, the Carryx soldier had turned to address Vaudai.
Whatever Vaudai was saying, it wasn’t being changed into any human language, but the trills and rumbles of Carryx song coming from the half-mind meant it had a great deal to say.
The four Sinen had taken positions in the corners of the common room, like teachers watching a class of children.
The Soft Lothark were occupied for the moment keeping the two flocks of Budon from trying to merge again.
“Ghati,” Rickar said as he stood, “let me borrow you for a minute, yes?”
Rickar stepped into the open space between the groups, one hand in his pocket, the other motioning Ghati forward.
If he’d planned or thought about it, it wouldn’t have been as smooth, as casual.
For a moment, he was walking across the quad in Dyan and waving a colleague over to ask an idle question.
By the time Ghati noticed him, he’d already covered a quarter of the space.
Rickar saw one of the Soft Lothark trotting toward him.
He willed the little man to come forward, to take a few steps into danger. And as if he’d heard, Ghati walked toward him. They met closer to the Sinen than to Campar, but that didn’t matter.
“Owe me one,” Rickar said softly as he took Ghati’s elbow and turned around it as gracefully as a dancer, propelling the other man in Campar’s direction and continuing forward to the gap in the line that he’d left.
“Sorry, sorry,” Rickar said to the Soft Lothark when it reached him. “I’ll stay here. No trouble, no trouble.”
The guard looked from him to Ghati, who had crossed to the other group now. Rickar smiled into its black eyes. A little sense of elation lifted him. “One of us is just as good as another,” he said.
The Soft Lothark put a hand on his chest and made wet, clapping sounds with its too-wide mouth. “You will stay in place,” the half-mind said.
Across the room, Campar had the smaller man in a bear hug that lifted Ghati’s feet off the floor. The big man was weeping with relief.
“I will,” Rickar said. “I’ll stay here.”
Vaudai and the Carryx finished their conversation, and the soldier left, Vaudai creeping after it at a speed Rickar hadn’t known it could manage. The four Sinen moved in, directing the other group to follow them.
“Where are they going?” Dervan asked from somewhere behind him, her voice tight with fear.
Emmin and Danna, understanding too late that their little triumvirate had come to an end, looked back at her as the other group started forward.
A few at a time, the group disappeared through the archway.
Campar looked back and waved just before he vanished from sight.
He did it with his left hand, because his right was holding Ghati’s.
Rickar waved back, and then the big man was gone.
After that, the Soft Lothark set themselves up at the entrance and discouraged a few Budon from trying to follow where the others had gone.
Even with the bodies of all the remaining captives in the common room at the same time, the chamber felt empty.
Vaudai’s display was still up, but the slug was gone.
The beetle-things avoided conversation and went back to their cells.
The red-haired man grabbed a bowl of food and a sack of water almost furtively and vanished as well.
Rickar didn’t know what was going on there, and didn’t particularly want to.
Dervan made her way to the crowd at the entrance. Distress gave her voice a shaking timbre. Almost vibrato. “Where did you take them? When are they coming back?”
The shorter of the two Soft Lothark consulted with its companion, then turned to Dervan with more patience and calm than Rickar expected from a jailer. He edged close enough to hear the thing’s reply.
“The assignment of that part of the moieties has changed. They are tasked with exploration. You are the part held in reserve.”
“No,” Dervan said. “I have to help them. I need to be with them. I can explore. I’m good at it.”
Rickar got a sack of water, bit a hole in the corner, and sipped from it as he went back to watch the images on Vaudai’s abandoned display.
The disabled command ship was highlighted, and text in an alphabet he didn’t know shifted beside it.
When Rickar touched the image of one of the Carryx ships—maybe the one he was on, maybe one of the others—a thin, curving line appeared leading to the edge of the system.
To the heliopause, where Carryx ships went before they entered asymmetric space and violated the boundary of light speed.
Someone was leaving, and he guessed it was them.
He noticed Dervan coming up to his side, but he pretended not to. She didn’t take the hint.
“What do you know? Your slug friend told you something, didn’t she. That’s why you made Ghati switch places. What did she tell you?”
“Vaudai didn’t tell me shit. I just saw that Ghati and Campar were on different teams and they didn’t like it.
” There was a distinction between not believing him and so badly wanting to understand the inexplicable that she chose not to believe him, but it didn’t matter.
“Look,” he continued, “strategy and tactics in a galactic war are above our duty grade. We don’t control them.
We can’t affect them. The only things we can control are the little ones, so I decided to care about a little thing. That’s it. That’s all.”
“If they don’t come back,” Dervan said, and it sounded both like a threat and utterly impotent. Rickar ignored it. At the food dispenser, a clump of the Budon of Luus started shouting at each other, soft coughing barks that reminded him of dogs running a fence. He still wished he had a cigarette.
“Anyway,” he said, “Campar’s never happy unless he’s taking care of someone.”