Thirty-One #2
The dead leaves had blown around and the damp had pasted them together.
They felt slick in her fingers as she lifted them out.
The gun was still there. Two snails the size of her thumbnail were crawling along the long, smooth side of Corvall’s sabotage cylinder.
The metal was warm. It seemed to weigh more than she remembered.
The translated voice of the Sinen came from behind her, as calm and certain as the voice of doom. “You will justify your presence here.”
She didn’t know if the little alien had been more adept than she’d expected in following her or if it had lain in wait all this time. Either way, here it was, lurking in the gloom, dappled by moonlight and leaves. And the Rak-hund at its side like an attack dog made of knives.
“Yes, of course. Let me explain,” she said, lifting the gun.
She shot the Rak-hund first, walking forward as she did.
The first shot went wide, but then it charged her, and as the distance between them grew smaller, her aim improved.
The second shot shattered one of its leading legs, and the third, fourth, and fifth pulped its head.
As the knife-legged alien skidded to a stop, Jessyn shifted her attention to the Sinen.
It might have been her imagination, but it looked surprised.
One tentacle raised up, like a human putting up a hand to say wait .
She didn’t wait, just put a slug between its goatish eyes.
Third Gardener tipped over backward. She put two more rounds through its translation half-mind.
She wasn’t sure that would help to hide what had happened here, but it couldn’t hurt.
Then, realizing she knew nothing about Sinen physiology or where they kept their central nervous system, she emptied the gun into the creature’s torso to make sure.
Jessyn felt her heart racing, felt her blood throbbing in her hands and neck, she knew that physiologically speaking, she was in something like panic.
Her experience of her own mind, on the other hand, was an eerie calm.
The possible futures played out with the clinical distance of a flowchart.
She had the canister of spores that would disable the Carryx ships, and so she had to go back to the ships.
If Third Gardener had shared its suspicions with the Carryx, they would kill her the moment they spotted her, but maybe she’d have the chance to spring the trap before she died.
And maybe it hadn’t. It might have been waiting for proof before it brought anything to the attention of the Carryx. She would have, in its position.
She looked around the orchard. Most of the signs that she’d been here could be explained as remnants of her studies.
She found a bit of dead bush, tore it off, and swept the ground near the stump and the bodies.
Part of her wanted to keep the gun, but it was empty and she had no idea how to find more ammunition for it.
Even so, she couldn’t just drop it. It would be better if the weapon weren’t found here near the bodies.
She’d throw it into a thicket someplace along her way back.
Fine then. All right.
Only pausing to pluck one last nearly-ripe pear off a tree, she started back toward the ships. The cylinder was heavy in her pocket, but not unpleasant. She didn’t run. She didn’t want to run. She didn’t weep, because she didn’t feel sad or scared or upset. She felt satisfied.
Somewhere in her journey between Anjiin and this planet, she’d become someone who could kill her jailers and enjoy it.
Could look forward to the prospect of killing more of them, if the universe allowed it.
Even the little twitch of regret that she felt sacrificing specimens in the lab was simply absent from the moment.
The violence felt pleasant. More than that, it felt familiar.
She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one, but it was the situation.
What is, is , she thought, and smiled. If you didn’t want it like this, you should have been nicer.
She made her night-shrouded way back to the ships, to her cell, and into bed.
Nobody stopped her.
By sunrise, the Carryx compound was as busy as a kicked hive.
Voices echoed down the ship corridors, and not all the voices were human.
Jessyn pulled herself out of her bed and a deep, dreamless sleep.
She showered, and then put on a fresh set of clothes.
She ate her morning mush, then decanted herself a day’s serving of the slurry that kept her illness at bay.
If everything was about to go to shit, she was going to face it with her full powers at the ready.
The common room was much more crowded than she’d become used to since their arrival on the planet’s surface.
A third of the humans there had the deep tans and sunbleached hair of people at the end of their field rotations.
The air smelled of unwashed bodies and fear.
The deck of the ship vibrated, like some deep machinery had been turned on.
“I feel like I missed something,” she quipped as Manni handed her a mug of something hot.
“They locked down the ship. No one in or out. I don’t know if they’re going to let us go get our field equipment even.”
“That’s a change,” Jessyn said. “Did Third Gardener say why?”
Manni looked away like Jessyn had said something rude and she was trying not to draw attention to it. A little rush of pleasure ran down Jessyn’s throat.
“The Sinen didn’t give us the order,” the older woman said. “It was one of the big boys.”
“A Carryx?”
She nodded, then looked up and stepped off into the crowd.
Jessyn drank what turned out to be almost-tea, and she waited.
When she was done, no one came to solicitously carry away her mug or ask after her invalid status.
Her near-death and Garral’s absence were old news now, and all the attention was on whatever the hell this was.
The Carryx arrived just before lunch and summoned Jessyn out of her room.
As soon as she left, she regretted not opening the cylinder before she went in case she was walking to her execution.
But by then it was too late to be unobtrusive about it, so she put on an imaginary cloak of perfect innocence and did as she was told.
The Carryx was massive, even compared to the keeper-librarian back at the world-palace, but it was also oddly simple.
Only four eyes, and the plates of its armor made its body seem like it had been built out of fewer pieces than the others Jessyn had seen.
Compared to the overwhelming size and complexity she’d seen in the Sovran, this one was a thumbnail sketch discarded when a better thought came along.
She could practically see the big alien’s flesh crawling as it talked to her.
She wondered whether, if she touched it, it would go and clean itself with soap and water.
But she was revolting to it in the same way a slimy bug crawling on her arm was revolting.
Its disgust at her didn’t mean it wasn’t perfectly capable of squashing her.
The soldier muttered and trilled, and the translation half-mind said, “Your place of work was in the orchard to the south of the ships.”
“Yes, among others,” Jessyn said.
“You returned there last night.”
She’d wondered about this. Her first impulse was to deny everything, but first impulses came from anxiety.
She was past anxiety now. “Yes. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I should use the time instead of wasting it.
I went out to retrieve my equipment, but Third Gardener was there. It told me to go back to the ship.”
“It expressed a reason why you were to leave.”
“No, and I didn’t ask. It was very insistent that I depart.”
“It told you of an incoming ship.”
“No,” Jessyn said. “Is there a ship coming?”
“It mentioned fear for your safety.”
“No,” Jessyn said. “I came. It was there. It told me to leave, and I left.”
“It was alone.”
“No, it had one of the Rak-hund with it.”
“Nothing else.”
“Nothing else,” Jessyn said. “Did something go wrong? Is my equipment all right?”
“You will return to your pen now,” the Carryx said. “A new overseer will be assigned to your moiety for the remainder of your duty.”
“I understand,” she said, and left, lips pressed thin to stop her smile.
She tried to get through the common room without the others grabbing her, but the human need for information in uncertain moments was too much, and she had to relay the whole conversation and pretend exhaustion before they let her go on.
As she left, the conversation was already turning to the prospect that something bad had happened to Third Gardener, even though the Carryx hadn’t said so.
It wouldn’t, would it? Not to animals of use like them.
But it had mentioned the incoming ships. It had locked all of them away. And the deck was vibrating in a way it hadn’t since they’d landed. The Carryx were prepping for the coming fight.
That meant it was time.
When she was alone in her room, she pulled the cylinder out from under her mattress.
Thin lines of dried mucus marked where snails had traveled over it.
She hefted it, feeling the weight as if there might be anything she could learn from it.
The artifact had traveled farther than she could imagine and through a stranger path to end up here, in her palm.
She took the body of the thing in one hand, gripped the top with the other, and twisted. The cap came off easily.
The dust that spilled out was a dull ashy gray, dense as sand but finer. Jessyn let it pour through her fingers and onto the deck. For a moment, it seemed inert.