Twenty-Six #2
The first signs of success came with an uptick in the background radiation in four places through the system, locked in the familiar geometry of the enemy.
Then, an hour later, the ships of the deathless enemy started to boil out of flaws in spacetime that they used in place of the purity of asymmetric space.
Across its ships, a thousand different kinds of eyes and sensors trained themselves on the new ships pouring into reality, categorizing them and comparing them to known conflicts: weapons, weaknesses, the kinds of enemy animals that had crewed ships like them before.
The dark enemy itself could be on any of them or none, but the librarian expected the masters of the war to be well represented in this conflict.
Its dactyl had the honor of pressing the raw edge of the war where the enemy was at its most alert and inflamed.
Within the first hour, the subjugator-librarian became certain that the effort to draw the greater force of the enemy to Jurupe system had succeeded.
Even before the fine-grained analysis came to it, the simple fact of numbers told the story.
If there were ships returning to destroy or defend the command ship they’d left behind, they would be few.
The enemy’s priority was, as expected, to defend the population on the planet here.
Or, failing that, to avenge their deaths.
As soon as the enemy ships arrived in normal space, they began their attacks.
Their fields were at distances too great to be effective, but they threw them out anyway.
Other animals did this as well—parent organisms engaging prematurely in an attempt to keep a predator’s attention from the vulnerable young.
Even propagating at the local maximum, the blows would take hours to arrive, and the Carryx ships would not be where or what they had been when the enemy launched them.
They could not be ignored, but neither were they of great concern.
The strategic half-mind brought the librarian’s attention to the far side of the local sun, and another sphere in the void that had become active. The geometry of the enemy’s arrival became complex. There would have to be two more groups arriving. The relationships would allow as many as six.
The enemy was arriving in power, but it was the power of the desperate and afraid.
The strategic half-mind adjusted to the new information, but the subjugator-librarian had already made calculations of its own.
The Carryx ships increased their fall toward the world.
The nodes, quivering in their wombs, stilled as the nutrients and stimulants left them.
There would be no need this time. This was not a prize to be taken, but a resource to deny the opponents of the empire.
The dactyl split again as the subjugator-librarian fashioned its report and ordered a Saren-hund prepared.
In the event that the dactyl was destroyed, it would send as many of its resources as possible into asymmetric space so that which could not be recovered by the rest of the limb would be destroyed and kept from the deathless enemy.
But only when it was needed. The battle had barely been joined. There was much to be done before death took them. Its preparations now were simply appropriate hygiene.
The dactyl turned its full attention to the enemy world, the hundreds of small ships and missiles rising up from it, the field suppressors that had begun to arc through the skin of its atmosphere.
There was a beauty to the violence. The half-broken symmetry of forces rising and falling, of time and light and the play of matter and energy, of the unmaking of complex forms into something infinitely simpler—of thinking bodies becoming ash.
The subjugator-librarian summoned the subjugator prime, then waited as the lumbering, scar-armed soldier abased itself.
“Prepare weapons for attack at range,” the subjugator-librarian warbled and cooed. “We will not seek prisoners nor accept them.”
Rickar congratulated himself. He was getting acclimated to the strangeness of the attacks.
The shifting sense of gravity, the flashes of color that seemed to reach his sensory theater through some pathway other than his eyes, the creaking and groaning of the ships, the occasional squeaks and chirps from the Budon.
All of it was uncomfortable and a little nauseating, but his distress wasn’t as deep as it had been before.
He was even able to eat a little of the mush that the dispensers gave him.
There was also the simple fact that he’d been through this before and hadn’t died.
Intellectually, yes, there was no reason to think that this time would be the same.
But some old primate instinct kicked in, saying that if it hadn’t killed him last time, maybe he was safe.
It was astounding what humans could get used to.
He hoped that Campar, wherever he was and whatever they had him and Ghati doing, wasn’t under fire. But then, it was war.
“Did you get me any?” Dervan asked, nodding toward the bowl.
“I did not.”
She frowned, and he sat on the deck beside her anyway.
The tactical screen was the closest thing to entertainment that there was, and Rickar wasn’t ready to go try sleeping or exercising or any of the little mental games he used to keep from going stir crazy.
That would come later. Hopefully after Dervan had gone away back to her cell.
He took another scoop of the mush and tried unsuccessfully to enjoy the texture of the food against his palate and the taste that was almost like almonds.
“Oh, what’s that?” Dervan said, leaning in toward the screen. “Something’s happening.”
“Well, sit back and let other people see.”
The planet had almost all of its night side toward them now.
Unfamiliar continents were a lacework of golden light bounded by dark, alien seas.
He couldn’t know what walked or flew or crawled under those streetlights apart from the educated guess that they saw light in about the same spectrum that he did, but Rickar imagined them as what he knew: men and women, parents and children, the young and the old.
Cafés and bookshops and markets with pastries and coffee and tea.
He imagined the billions of pairs of eyes looking up at him as he looked down at them.
He didn’t want to remember the wonder and the fear that he’d felt, but the past insisted.
It took a few seconds to see what Dervan was talking about, but there at the northern point of the sleeping world there was a little wisp of color that shifted coral to pink to green to gold. It danced like an aurora, gaining strength as it spread.
“What is it, do you think?” Dervan said, and the tightness in her voice meant she already knew.
The dancing color widened, moving out across the dark surface of the land.
At its leading edge, the city lights had changed into a deeper, dimmer, more unified light.
A dull red light. Fire through smoke. The ship shuddered.
A sensation like a thousand invisible claws gently pricking at him passed over his skin, and he wasn’t sure if it was more overspill from the battle he was in or something deeper. Something that came from inside him.
The killing aurora spread, brightening. As slow as it seemed on the screen, its leading edge had to be moving like dawn breaking across the surface of the planet.
Dervan was making small, unconscious sounds at the back of her throat that weren’t quite sobs and weren’t quite anything else.
Rickar’s food went cold and solid in its bowl.
He wanted badly to look away, but he kept not doing it.
A thin line appeared at the planet’s edge.
True dawn replacing the false and rising on a very new day.
Where the aurora had been, there was no green on the land, no blue in the water.
Only a slowly swirling darkness dimming a fiery red glow.
Dervan swung a fist through the projected light.
Then another. “Make it stop. Stop it,” she said, and Rickar selected one of the barely visible dots.
The image shifted to a schematic of the whole system: the Carryx fleet, the planet they were bombarding, the impotent enemy rushing in from all directions and too late.
The Budon, who never paid much attention to Vaudai or his screen, eyed the two humans with alarm, burbling and muttering to each other. The Soft Lothark guard at the door stared into the distance. The ship rang and creaked.
Rickar shook his head. “You know,” he said. “I had to work at it. I had to focus on other shit like Alkhor selling us out, but I managed. I did it, for a while.”
“Did what?”
“Forgot,” Rickar said. “I made myself forget what the Carryx are.”
“And now?”
“Now I remember why I made myself forget.”