Escaping Exodus

by Nicky Drayden

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  “Well, there it is,” Adalla says. She presses closer and I start tingling all over. Her body against mine. Thigh between mine. Breath hot and so close to my lips. She stops half an inch before our mouths meet. “Seske,” she says. “I think something weird is happening.”

  “Nothing weird is happening.”

  “You’re wet. Down there.”

  “I think that’s pretty normal.”

  “Like really wet.”

  “And that’s good, right?”

  “Seske?”

  “Yes, Adalla?”

  “There’s some kind of tentacle thing curling around my thigh.”

  Daidi’s bells.

  Adalla

  Of Damp Slips and Dry Buckets

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say. I shake the ley light with all my might until our space brightens, even though I’m scared of what I’ll see. I start getting dizzy-headed, but I keep my eyes locked on Seske’s, ignoring the dozen black tentacles erupting from her humble bits.

  “Why are you apologizing?” Seske asks, swatting the tips of the tentacles away like they’re merely bothersome flies.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. All that talk about accepting you for who you are . . .” I bite my lip and oh, blessed mothers I could have dealt with it being Wheytt’s baby, but this? “How are you so calm?”

  “Because I think I understand what’s happening, and I know how to make things right with the beast. She needs our help.” A tentacle curls lovingly around Seske’s pinkie finger. She strokes it softly with the tip of her thumb. “I have to deposit this egg into one of the other beasts for her. When Wheytt and I were in the beast’s orifices, when we were, you know . . . we were intimate, connected to a memory or something. It felt so real . . .”

  “This sounds like information you might have volunteered earlier, Seske. You’ve lost your honor to an alien.”

  “I think I might have been given a chance to regain my honor. A chance to fix it all.” Seske pulls down the hem of her dampened silk slip, then proceeds to wrap herself back into her raiment. At least the tentacle things are out of view.

  I take a deep breath. I have to get that thing out of her, but it won’t be easy. “We’d best get you to the doctor. Just to have a look.”

  “There’s no need to look.” Her hands cradle her belly, plump and firm as a gall bud beneath her dress now. “Everything is fine. Right on schedule.”

  I shake my head, fearful of what other tricks beastie is using to get its way. But whatever is inside Seske, it’s growing fast. If it keeps up this rate, she’s going to be in a whole lot of trouble.

  “For me, Seske. Please, come with me,” I say.

  She shakes her head now. “I need to get to a shuttle. Probably quickly.” She descends down the hole in the gall, barely fitting through, a noticeable waddle to her step once she’s out. “I need to know now, whose side are you on?”

  “Me? I’m on your side!” I say, scurrying after her.

  “That was a trick question. There’s only one side! What’s good for the beast is good for us. What’s bad for the beast . . . likewise. I need you to understand this is what has to be done.”

  “I’m not letting you go out there alone.” I wring my fingers. Doubt floods my mind, but I’ve never heard Seske speak so surely, so confidently, about anything. I know that it is her and not the beast, but there’s no way anyone else will believe it. “But we can’t just go demanding a shuttle so we can impregnate another beast. The Accountancy Guard will have you locked up so fast. They’ll smell you coming. Daidi’s bells, the smell, Seske.” It’s not entirely unpleasant, but it is unhuman.

  “I’m the Matris of this ship. All shuttles are at my disposal.”

  “They won’t see you as Matris anymore. They’re willing to put up with a lot of things, betcha, but tentacle-cooch isn’t one of them.”

  Seske aims a mischievous grin my way. “We have to risk it,” she says. “This egg is too precious. You remember how you felt about those embryos? Well, this is my thing I need to protect.”

  “What if . . . what if we found another way?”

  Seske turns around, faces me. “What other way?”

  “That gel, the one that let us travel through space. We can use that.”

  “I thought our beast didn’t secrete that stuff.”

  “It doesn’t. But I can get it to.” I bite my lip. “I’m sure of it,” I add, but mostly to convince myself.

  Seske shakes her head. “We are too far away from the beasts. It would never work.”

  “We will need to get closer, then. We’ve—”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got to trigger an emergency exodus. Make them think we need to cull another one.”

  Seske flinches, visibly hurt by the idea.

  “We won’t, of course. It’s just so we’re close enough to fly.”

  “We?”

  “I’m not leaving your side. I’m going to help you deliver that . . . that . . .”

  “Zenzee . . .” Seske says confidently. Whatever happened between her and beastie must go deeper than I thought. “That’s what their kind is called. How do we trigger exodus?”

  I hand her my knife. “You’re going to trigger exodus. Now listen carefully . . .”

  While Seske goes to make the slit, I go to get the ichor supply to the mucous gland rerouted. I try to recall exactly the configuration I’d seen on the Serrata ship. I feel naked without my knife, but I trust Seske with it. Me, I make do with sharpened bone scraps, filing the edges so fine like Laisze used to do. I find a nice, thick artery, cut carefully, and reroute the flow to the wilted gland. It puffs up some, but it still looks nothing like the glowing, magnificent organ I’d seen on that other ship. I massage the organ, helping the flow of ichor fill it. It purrs against me, so I massage harder. Finally, the first drop of golden gel drips from the puckered orifice. I place a bucket beneath, continuing to milk the gland. My arms are aching, and yet the bucket is an inch deep, only enough to cover a pair of legs.

  A tremor comes, deep and long. An expected tremor. Lasts longer than any we’ve ever felt. Then the air starts to change. A doldrums breech, venting mad vapors right into the living quarters. If Seske followed directions, the Accountancy Guard should be detecting the effects of a leak. Irreparable. Fatal. The cutting of the doldrums’ branch nerves should also give that reading, but it’s reversible. At least if we repair them in time.

  Alarms ring, calling for emergency exodus. There is sheer panic all around me, everyone running around like they’re being chased by vengeful spirits, but I keep beating the organ, three inches in the bucket now, enough for Seske at least, with nothing left over for me. I beat harder.

  Finally, Seske’s by my side, holding a couple re-breathers. She looks in the bucket and strips before I get the chance to tell her.

  “They’re probably looking for you,” I say.

  “Let them look. If I can’t trust them to orchestrate exodus, then we’re as good as finished anyway.”

  I stop beating the gland and stare at her. She’s radiant, the swell of her stomach something close to perfect. Even the tentacles seem fitting now. She applies the gel to her skin, and all I know is that I’ve got to make enough of this for me too, because there’s no way I’m letting her out there alone. I close my eyes and punch my hand up the orifice, hard as I can, deep as I can, and then I feel it, the hunk of atrophied muscle that should be doing all the work. I squeeze it once, twice, again, and all of a sudden, the flow floods down, and there’s enough gel for me and half a dozen more people.

  And then we’re at the gills. Sure enough, the herd is in sight. My breath catches in my throat as I watch them, a handful of precious jewels strung among the stars. We have to time this just right. Hand in hand, we wait for the herd to swing back around into view, and we launch. Seske looks over at me, smiles. I smile back. She points us to one of t
he beasts—the Zenzee, I guess I should call it—a big, beautiful creature, the lights on its hide strobing in a mesmerizing pattern like it’s trying to speak to us. Somehow, instead of feeling miniscule and insignificant aside its vastness, I feel honored and welcome. We land near its underside, and we crawl our way toward the patch of black tentacles surrounding an open maw. A large expanse of pale-purple flesh greets us inside, and when we pry open the lips, we’re able to pull ourselves in. A whole ecosystem is spread out before us, swampy with drifts of fog floating past. The plant life gets denser the farther we venture in, as diverse as species in the woodward canopies.

  I stop to caress the petals of a black flower. It curls up at my touch and disappears into the moist ground with what sounds like an aggravated harrumph.

  “We’ve still got a bit of a hike,” Seske says, huffing and wheezing.

  “You look like you need to rest.”

  She shakes her head. “The egg is pressing up on my lungs. We need to get it out. Soon.” She hands my knife back to me. “If things go badly, do what you have to. Don’t worry about me. Just get that egg to the ovispore. Promise me.”

  “Seske!”

  “Promise me!”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s just hurry, okay?”

  We move faster then, swatting away the flies and curious buggies wandering about us, the invaders. The ovispore is just ahead.

  “There,” I say.

  “It’s just like in our vision,” Seske says. “We’ve made it. Thank you.”

  A light flickers. A light that didn’t come from the lamps on our re-breathers. I turn slowly and see a set of pincers, each the size of a woman, attached to a phosphorescent creature with a face so ferocious it could stop a heart cold. Nearly does, mine, betcha. But I can’t die, because Seske needs protecting, and our world needs saving, and neither of those things is going to happen if I let this creature get the best of me. I swallow back my fear, push Seske toward the ovispore, and pull out my knife.

  Seske

  Of Infinite Pain and Null Gravity

  I fly toward the ovispore, hands out, and orchestrate a perfect landing. There’s fighting going on not far—Adalla fighting . . . something—but I can’t let those worries distract me. She’s tough. She’ll protect me and I’ll protect this egg.

  Relax, I tell myself. The ovispore is a nest of fine hairs, and I lie upon them. The tentacles are excited. I grab a patch of hair in each of my fists to steady myself against the pressure mounting within me. I bear down, trying to help the process, hoping I’m not too late. Everything from my ribs down is a flame of pain, as if I’m being split apart. I’m there like that for five minutes, maybe ten, maybe an eternity, my screams blending with Adalla’s.

  Finally, she’s at my side, covered in neon-green blood, literally glowing with the life force of some poor creature. Flecks of its carapace cling to her skin. Deep scratches cross her face. They’ll make good scars and a good story if we get out of this alive.

  “You’re doing just fine,” she whispers as she wipes the sweat from my forehead. “Where do you want me?”

  “Close,” I moan. “Behind me.”

  She quickly slips behind me. Whatever’s going on down there, she doesn’t want to be a witness to it. Neither do I. But with her touch, my resolve redoubles, and I press harder, press until I’m about to pass out, and then there it is . . . a moment of lightness, of freedom, and I gasp. The egg has slipped out. The tentacles draw it into a deep divot, then the hairs start to press down neatly over it. Adalla scrambles to pull us out of the way before it drags us down with it.

  She hugs me close for a long, long time. The fog of my mind clears, the hormone-induced euphoria ending so abruptly that I puke on the spot. Horror strikes next as I start to process what my body has just been through. Phantom tentacles whip across my thighs, and I remember the feeling of that alien thing stretching my womb thin, wrecking my insides, leaving little bits and pieces of itself tied to me.

  I try not to panic.

  “You did it. You were amazing,” Adalla says, holding me tight. “We can rest here for a while, but we need to lie low. There are more of those beetles grazing about.” She’s being flippant. When she’s flippant, there’s more bad news to be had. Worse than woman-eating scarabs.

  “Adalla. What’s wrong?”

  “You mean besides everything that just happened? Well, there’s that, for one thing.” She shines a light up to the dome where we’d come in. It’s no longer supple flesh but webbed concrete and barbs, similar to those that had protected the baby Zenzee, but on a much grander scale. It looks impenetrable. Depositing the egg must have triggered a hormonal reaction. “We’re not getting out that way for sure.”

  “We’re trapped here?” I ask.

  “We’ll find a way out. Just think of it as one of our old adventures,” Adalla says.

  Somehow, this fails to comfort me, but as soon as I can drift, we’re floating toward the wall. Adalla sizes up the space, doing some sort of mental calculations in her head; then she makes a straight cut, effortlessly slicing through layers and layers of flesh. She goes in first, takes my hand and pulls me through. A couple more turns, and a swift trip through some sort of ooze-lined tube, and we’re here, in the Zenzee’s stomach. Pristine, like an unspoiled garden.

  There’s no gravity, and palm fronds light up the entire inside of the stomach, and I see for the first time what they look like in their natural state, not the oozing puddles to be stepped upon. Dallis ferns reach up so high, some of them touch their counterparts on the other side. And patches of day moss! It had grown so wildly on our last beast, and as children Adalla and I had adorned ourselves with them. They had medicinal uses as well. It should have been a sign that our current beast hadn’t any. I pick up a handful of it, take in a smell like warm vanilla. I hold on to it as a specimen to take back.

  Above, flocks of murmurs drift through the air. Adalla and I look at each other, and then kick off our perch to fly among them. They know no fear and accept us into the flock. We cut through them, playing with the large ones. Several small ones land upon Adalla’s back, but she doesn’t flinch. In fact, I’ve never seen her so happy. We should be looking for the exit. Our oxygen is running low in our re-breathers, but I don’t dare cut into this moment. She deserves this little bit of happiness. Maybe I do too.

  “We could stay here forever,” Adalla whispers to me, and the way she says it, I know it’s not a hypothetical wishing. She means it. We could. Just her and me. Live off the land, make a home out of a gall, spend our days free, beyond judgment and expectations.

  “I wish we could,” I say. But my mind slips back over that time when interspecies hormones made me say some weird things. Weird, but true. We cannot be on different sides—Adalla and me on one and the crew of the Parados I on the other. Or the Serrata and the other ships. We are all on the same side, the side of the Zenzee. If we cannot all make this work, then ultimately there’s no hope for any of us. “But we have to get back,” I say.

  Adalla kisses the wings of a baby murmur, no larger than the span of her hand. “Why? Don’t you love it here? Couldn’t you live like this—”

  The Zenzee shudders, then reels. The entire stomach goes quiet.

  “That’s why,” I say.

  They’ve started the culling already. We scramble back down and toward the gills.

  “If they’ve hooked her already, then I’ve got an idea to get us back home,” I say.

  At the gills, we stare at the harpoon lodged into the Zenzee’s side. We wince as it pulls against the beast, trying to reel it into submission. Several others are lodged in it too, but I choose the closest. I press the moss sample to my stomach. “You trust me?”

  “Of course!” Adalla says.

  “Press your body to mine and hold tight. We need to make sure all three of us make it back safe.”

  Adalla looks side-eyed at the little tentacled flowers, but says nothing and presses to me.

  “How steady i
s that knife of yours?” I ask.

  “As steady as they get.”

  “Good. Because we’ve got one chance to make this work. When I give the signal, cut.”

  There’s no more time to explain. I wrap my arms around her as tight as I can, then we kick off toward the cable. It’s mostly copper, but in between each section, there’s a space about a fourth inch thick that’s rubber. If Adalla can get her knife in there, she can cut it loose.

  The cold is ripping at us so hard. Patches of the gel are already gone, the cold of space burning me badly. But we’re almost there. Finally, she grips the rope with one hand. I nod at the section, and she swipes down, perfect cut, through and through. With the tension released, the cord slings back toward the ship, sending us careening with it. We hit the hull unceremoniously, then Adalla skillfully cuts us an entrance, moving at a shallow angle through the flesh so that the atmosphere won’t vent.

  We fall into a pile on the floor. Adalla is burned worse than I am, but she’s the one fussing over my wounds, talking about whisking me off to the doctor. But there’s no time to worry about our bodies—there’s a larger body that needs us more. We need to stop the culling.

  We race to the throne room, both of us covered in semitranslucent gel and looking a complete mess. The only good thing is that the halls are empty since everyone is filing into stasis pods in the ship’s cargo holds. “Go patch up the severed nerve and get our Zenzee stabilized,” I tell Adalla. “I’ll fix things on this end.”

  In the throne room, Doka is in the command seat. With no heirs and no other wives, the position has fallen upon him in my absence. A strangeness washes over me, seeing a man in that chair, but I know he is ready for this.

  He catches my eye, looks me over, then waves for his guards to clothe me. “Seske! Where have you been? What’s happened to you?”

  “I’ve been busy trying to save our asses. There’s no void leak. We tricked the system. Adalla is fixing it right now. I impregnated the beast you’re trying to cull, and now ours isn’t mad at us anymore. We don’t need to go through with exodus. We’ve still got a chance to fix everything we’ve broken. It’s not too late!”