Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
T he animals of Jurupe system had been, for the most part, exterminated.
Some few thousand had survived in the deep and hardened cave structures far under the planetary surface and a few hundred more in minor facilities on other planets and moons within the system.
Billions, however, had died, and not only the advanced animals.
The ecosystem of the major planet had been unmade.
What little still lived did so in a shattered world.
For the subjugator-librarian of the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body, this victory was almost incidental.
The deathless enemy was denied one of its newest holdings.
Its toehold in this curve of the galaxy was weakened.
That was all to the good, but the real targets were the ships that had come too late to defend their little world and that now burned toward the Carryx on a mission of vengeance.
The tactical half-mind suggested the half dozen most plausible scenarios, ways that the coming engagement might play out.
Those which followed tactics similar to the engagement in Ashtin-Kah system—as successful as they had been there—were broadly the least likely to succeed in the present fleet configurations.
Most of the incoming ships were familiar configurations of the enemy’s force, but three had novel alterations and one was an entirely new design.
As closely matched as they were, the subjugator-librarian could be sure of neither victory nor loss, and so it opted for a strategy that would serve both.
It had intended the evacuation of resources to be in the event of defeat, but it now saw advantage in moving the schedule forward.
Not the soldiers, which were still of immediate use.
Those it would reserve. But the data stored in the hollowed-out mind of the Saren-hund, the other animals of service, and many of the undeployed nodes.
They would be packed and released, routed to the edge of the system and asymmetric space beyond.
If their dactyl lost the battle, some percentage of these could be gathered and reused.
And if the enemy chose to reroute and intercept the detritus or if they fired on it, it would give the dactyl information about enemy capabilities and priorities that could offer an advantage in the coming conflict.
It was clearly the best choice, and so the orders were given.
Something was in Rickar’s cell. The simple animal awareness of an unexpected presence took Rickar from dead sleep to awake and ready for violence with nothing in between.
The light spilling in from the open doorway silhouetted the Soft Lothark guard, but the nearer thing—the one that had woken Rickar—was a Sinen.
If it understood what Rickar’s panicked yawp and balled fists meant, it was unimpressed.
“You will come now and prepare to evacuate the ship.”
“I’m… what?”
“You will come now,” the Sinen repeated, then turned and trundled out of the cell. The Soft Lothark remained, its tiny black eyes not particularly focused on Rickar or the spare contents of the room. That it stayed was threat enough. Come or be brought.
In the corridor, there were other voices—some human, but most not—raised in confusion and fear. Three of the beetle-like things were ushered past his door, scrambling and darting ahead of a Soft Lothark guard of their own.
“Do I have time for food?” Rickar asked. He was putting a brave face on the situation. The stress of the change probably wouldn’t have let him eat.
In any case, the guard tilted its head and the translation half-mind on its tool harness said, “No.”
When Rickar left his cell for the last time, the guard didn’t go with him.
It only shifted into the corridor and placed itself, a living embankment that kept all the other captives of the Carryx flowing along in the same stream.
Despite the fear and anxiety that bloomed whenever their alien masters changed the rules again, Rickar also felt a little glimmer of curiosity.
Whatever this was, the Carryx hadn’t actually started slaughtering them yet. That passed for hope.
The stream of bodies carried him out into the parts of the ship Rickar hadn’t seen.
The smell of the air here was thicker, something equal parts incense and sty, and hot enough that just walking down the dark hallways brought out a sweat.
The Budon chirruped and muttered around him, but there was no music in their voices.
“What’s going on,” Dervan asked, trotting up from behind him. “Where are they taking us?”
“The one that came for me said they’re evacuating the ship.”
Dervan’s eyes went wider. “Is the ship broken?”
“I haven’t seen anything to make me think so,” Rickar said with a shrug. “But they don’t tell me much.”
The stream of bodies turned down a brighter corridor. The walls were the same deep bronze tipped subtly in at the top that Rickar remembered from the ship that took him from Anjiin what felt like lifetimes ago. That had been chilly, though. Everything here was uncomfortably close to hot.
“If they’re bothering to evacuate, that means they want to save us,” Dervan said. Her voice had the certainty of someone trying to talk themselves into belief.
“You’re right,” Rickar said, not because he believed it. “We’re valuable to them. They’ll make sure they don’t lose their investment.”
At the end of the corridor, a Carryx soldier stood.
Its thorax and abdomen were covered in a pale yellow shell and its eyes—only four of them—considered the person at the head of the line as if they were the only one there, sorting them and directing them down one of five narrower corridors behind it.
When Rickar’s turn at the front came, the soldier’s feeding arms shifted.
It whistled, and the translation half-mind spoke in the same calm voice it usually employed.
“You will confirm that you are Rickar Daumatin of the human moiety.”
It had been so long since anything had used his name that Rickar felt disoriented hearing it. “Yes,” he said. The idea that his identity might be important, might signify anything to his captors, felt almost like pride. “I am Rickar Daumatin.”
The soldier gestured toward the middle of the five hallways, and Rickar walked down it with his head a little higher.
The hallway descended in a gentle ramp, then turned to the right.
Rickar passed through an archway and onto something between a train platform and a hospital waiting room.
Along the far wall, wide silver bodies lay open like someone had been dissecting massive pale fish and been distracted halfway through.
A dozen Sinen were moving through the room, directing Budon and humans and strange things, like translucent eggs larger than a man, toward the open waiting bodies.
The red-headed man was there. In all the weeks of their captivity together they’d never spoken to each other, but now he approached Rickar.
“They’re loading us into those things,” the man said.
“They are.”
“We shouldn’t let them. We ought to tell them all we won’t do it. That we won’t go.”
“That’s probably true,” Rickar agreed. A Sinen overseer came, plucked at the man’s arm, and pointed across the room.
Rickar and the red-headed man exchanged a look—shame, despair, a bleak amusement—and the other man hung his head and let himself be led away.
It wasn’t more than a minute before a different Sinen came and pointed Rickar on as well.
The silver body was more interesting as Rickar saw it better.
Close up, it looked less like an organism and more like a machine made to mimic one.
What had looked like skin at a distance was more clearly a sort of epoxy sheath.
The edges where the not-quite-flesh came together were marked with little fasteners like something from a carpenter’s shop.
Only the opened wound of the center still resembled a living thing—pink and damp and soft as an uncooked chicken breast the size of a small bed.
“This is your evacuation pod,” the Sinen at his side announced. “When you take your place in it, you will be given a treatment that we expect to slow your metabolism. You will not resist it.”
“Just ‘expect’?” Rickar asked. “And what happens if you’re mistaken?”
“We expect it will slow your metabolism,” the Sinen repeated, gesturing Rickar on. “You will not resist it.”
Flesh only crawling a little bit, Rickar hefted himself into the pod, and as the wide fleshy machine closed over him, something like the first warmth in the throat after a shot of whiskey suffused through his body. The bed was both slick and adhesive.
In the darkness, he closed his eyes and did not resist.
Across the full volume of the system, the battle began.
Thousands of hardened missiles flew from the enemy ships, dancing and darting in attempts to defy the Carryx trackers.
Beams of coherent light moved through the dark, seeking and burning.
Fields that mimicked the primordial energy of the birth of the universe sought to swamp the enemy’s dampening counter fields and annihilate them utterly.
In the heart of the Carryx ship, Void Dragons woke and remade the nature of space, narrowing the degrees of freedom with which the enemy could travel.
A few enemy ships set up fields to counter them that caused the Void Dragons to screech their distress like claws across the subjugator-librarian’s mind.
Every battle was its own object. In this, the Carryx had chosen the field and their position on it first: the heart of the system, the newly killed planet. The enemy had come in response, not quite haphazardly, but without the lengthy planning that they might have wished.