Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
T he passage through asymmetric space was the shortest Rickar had ever made.
Wherever the Carryx were hauling him now, he guessed it wasn’t far from the system where they’d left Campar and Ghati and Vaudai behind.
Captivity and space travel made time a strange thing, but Rickar would have guessed that they spent a day, maybe a day and a half, in the blurred consciousness that came with asymmetry.
The common room felt empty. The Budon of Luus took up less space than they had, often running out to the food and water dispensers and then back to their cells, as if by being elsewhere they could avoid the next cull by the Carryx jailers.
Dervan, stripped of her usual companions, had gravitated toward him.
She was a thin woman with a tattoo on her left wrist that Rickar associated with Gallantist missionaries.
In any other circumstance, he wouldn’t have spent time with her.
As it was her company or nothing, he sat with her a little under half the time.
“I talked to one of the Soft Lothark,” she said as he sat by Vaudai’s abandoned viewscreen. The pause after was his prompt to ask breathlessly what she’d heard.
“Did you get anything interesting out of it?”
“We broke into the system at the heliopause, same as always, but we’re going to be at the planet much faster than when they came to Anjiin. Now ask me why.”
Rickar bristled, but kept it from showing. Mostly. “Why?”
“They have to go slowly when they’re staying hidden. Whatever it is we’re doing here, they’re not staying hidden. They want the enemy to know we’re coming.”
Rickar leaned forward a degree. That was actually interesting. “And why is that?”
Dervan lifted her hands in a shrug. “It didn’t know. Or if it did, it wasn’t saying.”
The subjugator-librarian of the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body had made the decision to divide the dactyl.
The alternative—keeping the full force in Ashtin-Kah system and battling again over the dead command ship—had been attractive.
Under its direction, the dactyl had beaten the enemy back once.
The librarian had faith that it could win a second engagement, should one arrive.
The strategy of the larger battle, though, was broader than any one opportunity.
By leaving a minor expedition ship behind, it put pressure on the disabled enemy ship and also permitted action that would advance the body further into contested space.
Success in either would advance the war.
Success in both would force the deathless enemy into defensive retreat.
It had left one minor subjugator-librarian and three subjugators with the expedition ship.
Three adult Carryx to oversee a roomful of animals reflected its expectation of traps and subterfuge more than a concern that the animals might misbehave.
The choice had cleaved that effort from its immediate responsibility. The ship in Ashtin-Kah was outside immediate communication, and would therefore rely on the judgment of its librarian while the rest of the dactyl flew through the void of Jurupe system toward the major inhabited world.
That the Carryx were aware of Jurupe would be a surprise to the deathless enemy.
The void tendrils had only revealed it recently.
The security the local enemy had thought to keep by staying silent and small had failed already.
The ecology of the world teemed with life, including hundreds of cities and townships.
Settlements by the enemy’s client animals advanced enough to move between worlds now protected only by their own defenses.
No other fleet had entered the system to save them.
Not yet.
Nodes shuddered in anticipation, flooding themselves and their neighbors with hormones and signaling proteins.
Still without minds, they longed for birth and violence.
Rak-hund slept in their dens, their bodies kept cold to prolong their hibernations.
The violence to come had no role for them.
The subjugators at their stations prepared, channeling base matter into energy, energy into motion, motion into a sunward fall filled with intent.
The dactyl’s arms were wide. The tension made the subjugator-librarian’s keel bone creak, an old reflex expressing in its flesh as the extended body of its command followed its will and the will of the Sovran.
Even without fields of stealth to obscure their ships, the enemy planet was slow to see the threat.
It was another sign of how thinly the enemy’s resources were stretched.
In other eras of the war, a system with so rich an ecosphere would have been protected by millions of half-mind-like drones and sensing platforms. Weakness expressed itself in their blindness and sleep.
But surprise would not serve the Carryx now.
With its feeding arms in the flow of information that tugged the remaining ships of the dactyl to its will, the subjugator-librarian expressed the needs of the mission to the subjugators.
Its meaning was understood, and the field projectors woke on four of the ships, their crystal petals blooming slantwise in the void and the strange energies they commanded glowing in complex and symphonic patterns of the spectrum.
The animals of the planet—the advanced ones, the ones who were of import to the deathless enemy—would hear the field weapons like a footstep in the dark.
Because they heard, they would look, because they looked, they would see, and because they saw they would scream out in fear and anguish, begging their protectors for aid.
It was the screaming that the Carryx required.
“I hate feeling like this,” Dervan said. “Don’t you hate feeling like this?”
Rickar didn’t pause his effort to change the view on Vaudai’s screen. He’d watched the giant slug manipulate images for days, but had never seen how the controls might work. Trying to make sense of it was like having a puzzle to solve.
“I don’t know how you’re feeling.”
“Everything’s happening, and we’re just washed along by it. You, me. Your friends. Mine. I don’t know what this war even is. I’m just in these fucking rooms, dying a breath at a time.”
Rickar ran his finger along the bottom of the display, and the image shuddered. When he glanced at Dervan, he caught a series of dots on the display, too dim for his focused vision to perceive. She mistook his grin for criticism and scowled.
“No, I just figured something out,” he said, turning back to the screen.
Now that he knew to look… “I hear what you’re saying, but I think the universe is always like that.
My grandfather fought against Itzibahn Common in Maryangul.
He was a gunner for one of the extraction teams, so they moved around a lot.
They picked up a pet mouse. It had been like a classroom pet in one of the schools that got evacuated.
It was just going to starve in its cage, so they took it.
And then, for a while, it was their pet.
We’re like that now. We’re just mice on the fire team. We go where they take us.”
Yes, there were the dots. Knowing they were there was enough to make them visible. When he took one and shifted it, the image on the display shifted too.
“I saw an ant on the school transport when I was a girl,” Dervan said.
She had a habit of answering any story Rickar told with one of her own, like it was a competition that she was determined to win.
“I don’t know how it got on there, but it was this big black ant crawling along the window.
I thought it was going to bite me, so I opened the window and blew it out.
And you know, now I feel like I understand how it must have felt.
Little ant going through the world doing ant things, and then the whole structure you were crawling around on moves.
Takes you away from your anthill and your ant buddies and your queen, and you’re in this whole other part of the world that you didn’t even know existed.
And then some girl blows you out a window.
I wonder what happened to that little guy. ”
“Oh, it died,” Rickar said. “No question.”
The screen hiccuped and shifted. The schematic view of the system vanished and a single image took its place.
A blue-green planet wrapped in a lace of white cloud.
Sunlight spilled on it in a crescent, leaving almost three-quarters of the world in darkness.
Only it wasn’t dark. The lines of the unfamiliar continents continued in light into the night side, glowing gold and white in splotches and lines, like neural clusters reaching for each other across the darkness.
“Are those…?” Dervan asked.
“City lights, it looks like. I think those are cities.”
“God, it’s so beautiful,” she said. “Were we like that, do you think? On Anjiin, did we glow like that too?”
“I’ve seen satellite pictures, and we absolutely did,” Rickar said, but something had shifted in his gut. It was like part of him had seen into the future and didn’t want to go. Like he was trying to swim against the current of time.
The Budon of Luus began to sing.