Thirty-One #3
The cold started at the vestigial webbing between her fingers, first a chill and then a numbing bite that spread.
She flapped her hand, brushing off the dust at the same time she thought Well, that’s pretty damned endothermic .
The dust on the deck moved like invisible winds were stirring it and leaving a few pale needles of frost behind.
And then, between one breath and the next, it was all gone and the cylinder that had carried it decayed to tiny flakes of black rust on her bed. Then that broke down too, and all that was left was a persistent coolness and a smell like a stone quarry in winter.
Jessyn sat, waiting. Now that it was done, she recognized that she’d strategized and worried over everything up to this moment, and then had no plan for what came after.
Some part of her had expected the sabotage to take place all at once, like a wave of darkness passing through the ships and disabling everything it touched.
Or alarms to sound. Something. Instead, her cell slowly grew warmer, the voices from the common room changed without ever shifting their significance.
The lights stayed on. If it had failed, it would have looked just the same.
She’d learned the basics of minima physics when she’d entered the medrey, and while most of it had been empty language, some of the images still had power.
The idea that the smallest particles passed through every possible path between interactions didn’t make any intuitive sense to her, but it resonated with her present.
Somewhere out there, an enemy rescue ship was burning toward Garral and the children, but it could be in the high vacuum between planets or already inside the world’s atmosphere.
It could be falling down like a stone from the sky or skimming up toward them from the horizon.
Without information, it was all of those places for her, and every moment was the opportunity for a new interaction.
A new piece of information that would close off some possible futures and define others.
The nattering of the common room sounded like a slice of hell and the little bed felt too small to hold her, so she paced and stretched and meditated and looked through her satchel and reviewed her field notes and willed time to move more quickly unless the future was bleak.
Then, she wanted the moment she was in to extend forever and never quite pass.
And then, it did.
“All moieties will prepare to leave the local gravity well. Assume turbulence and lock down all equipment. Remain secured until the transition to asymmetric space.”
Jessyn’s mind tripped over itself. From now until they hit heliopause was a long, unpleasant time to stay strapped to her bed.
But she also really hoped they wouldn’t actually lift off.
If the ships managed to make it only halfway out of the atmosphere before the dust shut off the engines, she and all the others would be just as dead as if the enemy shot them.
She couldn’t imagine traveling this far through so many dangers just to die by smashing on the ground in a stalled spaceship.
But unless she called out for the Carryx and confessed everything, that was the risk.
She checked the two glass sheets and their precious garden of slurry, then folded them into the same carrying space she’d used in the journey over.
Someone in the common room was shouting, someone else—maybe Holom Coombs—was making reassuring noises.
The low-level vibration in the deck shuddered once, then twice more, then settled into a steady, almost subliminal throb. She sang a nonsense song to herself as she made ready and then realized that the lyrics were We’re all going to die now in a gentle, childish singsong. She made herself stop.
Somewhere beyond the walls of her cell, some enemy ship was preparing to engage in battle with the five Carryx exploration vessels.
Or was already leading them in a chase. Or had landed and was trying to usher in all the civilians it could before the window of opportunity closed.
That she didn’t know— couldn’t know—ate at her.
She hoped that Garral had been able to radio ahead and explain to them why, despite all instinct and evidence, this one time they shouldn’t just kill every Carryx ship they could see. If he hadn’t, then all her worry about getting caught sneaking the canister on board would at least be short-lived.
The shaking of the ship’s engine shifted again, growing both louder and somehow more violent.
The hum took on weird, uncomfortable harmonics like the metal was singing in a distant, inhuman choir.
Jessyn wondered how high the ship could get before it fell without killing everyone inside.
She strapped herself into the bed, keeping her arms inside the frame and an extra blanket under her head and upper back as if the thin layers of material might be enough to save her from the coming crash.
The ship lurched and she yelped in alarm.
Then she laughed a long, rolling hilarity that fed on itself.
A small, still part of her that watched the rest recognized the hysteria and panic, but there was nothing to be done about it.
There was no way to soothe away fear that well-founded.
The engines whined again, and Jessyn felt herself growing heavier, like when an elevator started hauling her up into the high reaches of a tall building.
It didn’t mean they were rising. The Carryx ships did strange things with inertia and gravity.
They might still be on the ground or halfway to space. That she couldn’t know made it worse.
Something stuttered. Something snapped. For a fraction of a second, she was weightless, and the whole room rose up and struck her on the back. An alarm was blaring someplace, or maybe it was some alien screaming in panic of its own. The lights flickered, went off, flickered again.
Relief rose up in her chest—the sabotage had worked, and she’d lived through the aftermath—but it didn’t last.
“All moieties not tasked to violence or repair are to remain braced and in position. Do not release from your areas of protection until given permission. All moieties with duties in protection and damage mitigation, prepare yourselves to serve. Brace for enemy attack.”
Oh , she thought. And then, more deeply, I see .
She’d almost made it. She’d done her part, she’d stopped the Carryx ships in their tracks.
And now they were under fire. Missiles or guns or lasers or whatever instruments of death the human ships used were speeding toward her.
The ceiling of her cell looked just the same.
The blanket under her head and back had only shifted a little.
The wide restraints meant to hold her in her coffin were disarranged, but only slightly.
This was going to be the last thing she saw. The last air she breathed.
Garral had tried, she was sure, but it hadn’t been a fair thing to ask. If she’d been the war leader facing the Carryx, and the opportunity had come to kill five of their ships, she probably wouldn’t have let one man—a stranger from a vanished tribe—dictate her actions either.
There was a kind of peace, though, in having tried.
She undid the restraints and let them drop away.
With what was coming, she couldn’t believe they’d help.
Better that she should die with a little agency.
She’d heard that at the end, a person’s life sometimes flashed before their eyes, but she didn’t see anything besides the ship that was her prison.
No tall man in a dark cloak came to harvest her.
No glowing angel of mercy like the Gallantists preached.
She just took a breath, and then another, and waited for one of them to be the last.
The lights of the ship went black, then came back on at a blinding intensity.
The hum that had gone silent returned as an earsplitting shriek, and the ship lurched.
Jessyn fell off the bed, splitting open both knees, and screamed.
Something else happened, something violent enough to shake the room, but she was clawing her way back into the bed.
One of the restraint straps was in place now, digging into the skin on her rib cage.
The others were flapping loose like long strands of fresh pasta that had been animated into some simulacrum of life.
She slammed into the bed. Her mouth tasted like blood.
The cell was quiet.
The hum of the engines began, quieted, swelled.
“All moieties, prepare to leave the local gravity well. Assume turbulence and lock down equipment. The transition to asymmetric space will occur in seven cycles. Plan your physical needs accordingly.”
A few minutes later—a lifetime—the hand of gravity pressed her gently into her bed. The Carryx ship murmured as it rose. The planet Third Gardener had called World fell away invisibly behind her, and with it, everything that had happened there.
For a long timeless while, Jessyn was a lump in her cell, rising to change her bandage, clean the cuts on her knees, eat or bathe or visit the toilet and then crawl back into her blankets.
She didn’t know what had happened, and neither did any of the others. Their fear and confusion at being kept in the dark were beneath the notice of the Carryx. And she didn’t find the annotation in her work until they had already made the jump into asymmetry.
She was sitting in the common room. A bowl of something that was almost rice and eggs was about halfway eaten and cooling at her side, and Jessyn was reading through her field notes.
The extra entry looked like a normal aside, except that it was added to her draft in the moments before the exploration ship had lifted off.
Added, she knew, from some other notebook besides her own.
One of the curious effects in botanic signaling—especially in strawberries —is the need for a plant to present sufficiently convincing evidence of countermeasures to an unwelcome guest. See also: authenticity and deception in interspecific predation markers, and forgive me for leaving without you.
“Are you all right?” Holom Coombs asked.
“What?”
“You made a sound? Like a little grunt? I thought maybe you were hurt?”
“No, I’m not,” Jessyn said. “Actually, I feel great.”