Honor Bound

by Rachel Caine

  Come on, I told myself. You’ve seen some shit.

  I made myself turn my head, slowly, trying to bring just a little into focus at a time. That wasn’t so bad. Grayish flesh that looked thick as rubber. I was looking at . . . what? An appendage? Hand, foot, tongue? No idea. The god-king they’d sunk beneath a floor and protected with traps . . . it looked like a dozen of the universe’s worst nightmares had been melted together, and formed something even worse . . . but when I finally brought the whole creature into view, that wasn’t what I saw at all.

  I hadn’t averted my eyes because it was so horrible. I’d done it because it was too . . . too beautiful. That was what my brain kept telling me, anyway, but my eyes reported something entirely different. Nightmare, they insisted. Miracle, my brain interpreted. The dissonance made me feel sick, but I held on, staring at the thing. I remembered how Bacia had overwhelmed us with their presence. This creature, even dead, had the same lingering, slick charm that convinced you something was wonderful when it was foul.

  Dead, though, it couldn’t quite pull it off. Makeup on a nightmare only made it more of a nightmare.

  Starcurrent seemed unaffected, but then again, I guess ze would be; after all, ze’d had to wrap tentacles around this massive thing and haul it out of a lethal temple. If ze’d been overwhelmed like us, ze wouldn’t have gotten far. Ze was coiled next to the misshapen, fungus-like bloom of what I guessed was a head, using a sharp knife to scrape a sample into a tube. Ze was wearing gloves on zis tentacles. Condoms, really. At least ze was being safe.

  “Magnificent, yes?” Starcurrent said. “An unbelievable opportunity to view one of the .” There went the translation again, fritzing out on what was surely a very strange word that didn’t get used much. “Have always believed none remained, even as dust and bones. The honor of being here is beyond my experience.”

  “So, what is it?” I asked. I finally let my gaze drift away, because I could feel bile rising in my throat as my body tried to argue more strongly with my brain.

  “Few records, more legends. Great voyagers. Conquerors. A hunger in them like that of humans, to explore and dominate.” Starcurrent was using a medical drill. I didn’t watch. I wanted to tell zim off for including us and this monster in the same sentence, but I couldn’t. “Few still existed in the early days of the Abyin Dommas. We were singers to them.”

  “Great. They liked art.”

  “Singing soothes,” ze corrected. “A troubled race. Hungry always for more, more devotion, more worship, more acquisition. Our songs calmed for the kill.”

  That got my attention. I forced myself to focus on zim, not what ze was working on. Tentacle condoms and all. “What do you mean, the kill?”

  “Early days of my race, we were slaves,” ze said. “Pets, perhaps. Of little consequence. We sang them to sleep.” Ze calmly sliced off a thin strip of skin from what I might loosely call a shoulder. “In sleep, they were killed.”

  “By you?”

  “Was not yet alive, Zara Cole.”

  “By your people, I mean?” This had taken on a whole new dimension for me. Ze wouldn’t know it, but we had things in common. Half my heritage came out of slavery, out of being considered worth less than someone with whiter skin. The other half had been the ones doing the owning. Many generations had passed for us, but that didn’t make it sting less. I had never expected to find slavery out here, for some reason. Or its toxic aftermath.

  “Yes,” Starcurrent said. Ze sounded a little sad. “We did not wish to. We are not a violent people. But the threatened more than we could allow. Is not something we are proud of. Necessity.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They destroyed many, many planets. Many races,” ze said. “That was why they were called Lifekillers.”

  The translation matrix had finally settled on words. God-king of death. Lifekiller.

  FROM THE ANNALS OF THE BIIYAN, BEAMED FROM STAR CLUSTER X3458

  —audio* extracted from drifting detritus by Leviathan Moira, just before her disappearance

  *translation from Old Biiyan by Bruqvisz scholar Mindshine Farlander

  A sea of inky blackness surrounds me in this barren wasteland. No light.

  The stars have been drained to ash. Strange and terrifying, there is immense pressure. Dread. He comes.

  I am going to die.

  This is a warning. We thought they could be appeased. If someone recovers this fragment, they will know what happened to me and be aware of the threat.

  He draws near; I can feel myself growing weaker. Take my words; sow them far and wide. He has grown too powerful. He must be stopped. Tell my family I love them. Tell them—

  [audio ends in static]

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Binding Tyrants

  I SHUDDERED, WANTING the answer to this question almost as much as I feared asking it. “How did you . . . defeat them?”

  The Abyin Dommas paused as ze sealed up a large clear box full of samples. “We made them dream of their own ending,” ze said. “We made them believe they were dead, until they ceased to function.”

  That was the most sinister thing I’d heard in a while, and I shivered, but this time, it wasn’t because of the thing on the floor. No, this was about my friend. I didn’t say anything. Neither did Bea, who hadn’t turned around at all, but I could feel her listening to every word. The Brazilians had a complicated relationship with slavery too. They came out of conquerors and conquered, death and slavery and despair.

  Seemed like everyone in this room had something to do with it. I’d never expected to find the Abyin Dommas at the center of it though.

  “No need to fear me,” Starcurrent said. Zis voice sounded mournful now, and I realized zis tentacles had drained of all color. Ze looked gray now. “Kill only when we must, to preserve life. Not warlike. Not conquerors.”

  I nodded, but I was thinking that ze had betrayed something earlier. Ze’d put humanity into the same category with these creatures he called Lifekillers.

  If the people of Earth couldn’t keep it together, maybe they’d end up sleeping too, convinced of their death until death took hold. A whole planet, slowly going silent under the weight of the song of the Abyin Dommas.

  We’re not like that, I thought. But we had been. The Leviathan had seen our violence and anger; they’d quarantined humanity, evaluated us, brought us out in carefully curated groups. They couldn’t risk us becoming that kind of conquering, ravaging plague on the universe. They already had the Phage to contend with.

  Obviously reeling from exposure to the corpse, Bea bolted for the exit, and I heard her gagging out in the hall. She hadn’t even really gotten a good look at the Lifekiller, but it had been enough. My head ached, my skin felt painfully tight, and my mouth had gone very dry. My broken ankle hurt like glass splinters had been driven into it. I just wanted to get the hell out and forget—if that was possible—what I’d seen and heard in here.

  Starcurrent slid by me, heading for the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught something. Couldn’t even say it was movement. Couldn’t say it wasn’t anything but tight-cranked nerves.

  I turned around in time to witness the Lifekiller’s awakening.

  It was like a switch going on, a star going supernova. One second, the nightmarish shape of the Lifekiller was sprawled on the floor . . . and the next, it was sitting up, and it was beautiful.

  I froze. My lips parted on a gasp. Exaltation flowed in me like sap in a tree, and I felt myself falling, but I didn’t know why. Didn’t feel the impact when my knees hit the deck. Pain was forgotten. Bacia’s presence had been overpowering, mind-numbing, but now, in the presence of this, I realized that they were feeble, weak, nothing.

  The creature that rose before me glowed, shimmered, gleamed with light. Its open eyes held dark universes.

  And it was looking at me.

  “Zara!”

  Someone was screaming. Not me, or at least I didn’t feel it if it was. A distant voice, ech
oing inside me like a gong being struck over, and over, and over. I could feel it, but not reach it, because I was caught in the thick, sticky glamour of a god.

  Then someone grabbed me by an arm and dragged me, limp as a rag, out of the hold. I came out of my trance and started to struggle halfway out, not to get to my feet and run out, but to retreat to the god I’d just abandoned. I couldn’t leave. Why would anyone want to? I tried to twist free, but the hand grabbing me dug in hard enough to make me wince, and I felt healing skin break and cuts open. Smelled blood.

  Then I was out, and a door slammed shut, and I heard Nadim’s voice shouting both in my ears and inside my head, and I groaned and rolled over as the hand finally let go, trying to block out the noise. I felt emptied out inside. Grief-stricken for what I’d just lost.

  I knew what this was. I’d felt it before, seen it on others. Chems did this kind of thing, left you with this horrible craving for what killed you. Left you feeling incomplete without it. I’d had seconds of exposure to that—that thing—and it had left me hollow. Tears flooded my eyes. I was shaking with withdrawal. Ashes in my mouth, bile in my throat.

  So much longing.

  “Nadim,” I whispered. I felt broken, and I needed to feel right. “Nadim?”

  “I’m here,” he said, and when he felt me reaching out to him, he reached back, flooding into those empty spaces I now realized were wounds gouged in my soul by that creature. That god-king. That Lifekiller. But Nadim . . . Nadim reminded me what I was. What we were.

  When I stood up, favoring my aching ankle, my stance was firm and my eyes were clear, and I hugged Beatriz’s distress away. Starcurrent was near, but ze wasn’t at all affected by our emotional storm. Ze watched. I realized there was a very different dimension to it now, a color in zis limbs I hadn’t seen before. I interpreted it as on guard.

  “Lifekiller is not dead,” ze said. “This is bad.”

  “No shit,” I said, and let Bea go. Nadim was still with me, but we weren’t deep bonded, not quite. It was more like a full-body embrace, holding me up and guarding me from harm, just as I’d done with Bea. I silently reassured Nadim that I’d be all right now. His presence kept the influence of the thing in that room down to a dull ache. “Nadim? Does that . . . that thing affect you at all?”

  “It is uncomfortable,” he said. “I can feel it trying to access my consciousness. I will not allow it.”

  Nadim had more control than I did, then, and that scared me; if Lifekiller could take hold of me, could he puppet Nadim through our bond? I didn’t think so. Nadim had just pushed him right out of me.

  Together, we could do this.

  “What are we going to do?” Bea looked lost now but still strong, as I knew she would be. “I mean, against something like that . . .”

  I waited for Starcurrent to speak. To suggest something. But ze stayed unnaturally quiet. It’s a test, I thought. In zis eyes, we were already dangerous. I wondered what future humans would have in this hostile universe if we failed against the Lifekiller. I pictured the Abyin Dommas singing us all to sleep, all of humanity. The gentlest of murders.

  “Easy. We kill a god,” I said, and flashed her a cocky, confident grin I didn’t feel.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Bea flicked a nervous glance at Starcurrent.

  Before I could answer, a massive force slammed the door that separated us from sheer destruction, and the metal buckled. “That won’t hold it long,” I said.

  “Why did it wake up?” Bea was asking in a thin, high voice. I hadn’t heard that tone in a while; it was the nervous girl who’d nearly thrown up on the trip to meet Nadim. “It was supposed to be dead, right?”

  “Obviously not. But maybe . . . dormant? The way frogs go to sleep and kind of freeze for the winter and then when they thaw—shit.”

  “You’ve thought of something.” Bea hadn’t been down in the temple of doom or she would’ve noticed this straightaway.

  Maybe I’d have picked up on it faster if I hadn’t been hurt. No way to be sure now, and it didn’t matter anyway. Done was done.

  Another gargantuan slam against the door, and I saw gaps, between wall, floor, and ceiling. We didn’t have long.

  Starcurrent started singing this eerie-as-hell tune, and it put pictures in my head, scenes I didn’t entirely understand. Kind of reminiscent of the way I saw things when the crystals lit up on Firstworld. Dammit, I couldn’t afford to be distracted now. The Lifekiller paused, though, and his next attack didn’t have the force to break the door.

  I AM COMING YOU WILL KNEEL

  There was no sound that anyone else seemed to hear, but the words broke across my brain, as if they were eggs, and the yellow oozed into the seams and cracks, until I couldn’t think. I’d just . . . my knees started to bend.

  “What’s on your mind, Zara?” Nadim’s steady voice got me back on track.

  Clutching the wall for support, I managed to say, “The temple, the tomb. It was cold there. Frosty. M-maybe that was on purpose.”

  “Like cryo,” Bea said. I didn’t think Lifekiller had reached out for her yet. Maybe I was the weak link, somehow. Not a thing I liked to be.

  “Exactly. Nadim, can you lower the temp in the secure hold?”

  “On it, Zara.”

  Starcurrent’s song didn’t seem to be enough on its own, and we needed this thing back in stasis ASAP. Could be it required a choir of Abyin Dommas to do this job, but we didn’t have one of those . . . or did we? “Bea! Can you record Starcurrent’s song and multiply? Make it a whole backup band?”

  Her face flooded with understanding. “Yes! Yes, hang on!” She grabbed her H2 and hit controls, and as Starcurrent sang, zis voice doubled, tripled into a chorus that filled the ship. I felt Nadim’s response to the song—he thought it was beautiful, and peaceful—but all I wanted to do was clap hands over my ears. Not for human consumption.

  Another strike on the door, this one more like a toddler kicking his feet. Just in case, I threw down the portable force field, and it covered most of the gap.

  Bea readied the rifle as Starcurrent kept singing. If Bacia was expecting a dormant god-king and we delivered a truly dead one, I figured we weren’t getting paid. I didn’t like the thought of giving this to them, but we couldn’t fight the Phage without this devil’s bargain. I swore beneath my breath as the thing kept chewing at my brain, working the edges, until my mind felt like a lace handkerchief.

  I am coming you will kneel

  This time it was an insidious whisper, ants crawling in my ears where I couldn’t dig them out, and it stung. Before I realized it, I was scraping my nails against the side of my head, and Bea had to physically stop me, grabbing my wrists with her full strength. The shakes came on hard, like Derry on some bad chem, and Starcurrent’s song was making me want to peel my face off. I wasn’t used to threats like this, where I couldn’t punch it until it fell down.

  “Leave Zara alone!” Bea cried, and then she took a deep breath, and her powerful soprano glided over the song of the Abyin Dommas, interweaving, counterpointing in alien beats and measures.

  I was going to hurt her if she didn’t let go of me, because I had to dig the worm out of my head, dig it right out of my brain tissue . . .

  Then Nadim touched me lightly, mind to mind, and it was instant cool water. I stopped fighting Bea’s hold and let out a breath. The music flowed over me, and filtered through Nadim’s perceptions, it was soothing too. Bea’s voice, Starcurrent’s amplified, invisible chorus . . . all spreading peace like a thick, warm blanket.

  I couldn’t hear anything from inside the cargo hold. Best to ask, though, because I damn sure wasn’t going back in. Bacia’s people could come aboard and take possession when we got to the Sliver.

  “Nadim, what’s going on in there?” I had to swallow hard to keep my morning coffee down. All my aches and pains were back, and I smelled blood on my body again. EMITU was going to get another visit. If we lived that long.

  “It appears to have gon
e dormant, Zara. Likely a combination of the lower temperature and the soothing song. Thinking to amplify and replicate zis voice was very smart. Beatriz’s additions were beautiful.”

  “Music appreciation later. Keep it icy,” I said. “I don’t care if it takes a year to thaw out again. We can’t risk it waking up again while it’s on board.”

  Starcurrent’s song faded into silence, and the eerie echoing digital avatars went silent too. We all listened for a long moment. I imagined the god-king slumped just on the other side of the damaged door. If he’d gotten out of there, what would we have done? He’d have taken me over, no problem. Bea too, most likely. And together, we could have created a pipeline for the Lifekiller to make Nadim a slave too. If this god-bastard had any memory of how his people had gone down, he’d have killed Starcurrent first thing.

  It would be hard for me to sleep until we got rid of this Lifekiller. If I wanted to stay sane, I couldn’t ponder long what Bacia planned to do with it. Some days you just had to choose between bad and worse. There were lots of Abyin Dommas on the Sliver. We could pass the word for them to work up a nice lullaby.

  “Typhon reported some anomalies.” Suddenly Marko was on my H2. “Everything all right over there?”

  “More or less. I’ll get back to you.”

  No reason to give details right then. First, we had to repair this door.

  After I collected the personal force field, it took all three of us—Bea, me, and Starcurrent—using all our collective strength, to unbuckle the damage. After that, I used welding torches to make damn sure it wouldn’t open again. Might be overkill, but right now, overkill sounded pretty good.

  Still, as I’d predicted, I didn’t sleep for shit, and I was cranky as hell by day two. The sick helplessness, the feeling of being in thrall? I wouldn’t forget that anytime soon. Oh, I knew Nadim could’ve pulled me back—if we’d gone Zadim, I’d have been fine, just like I was in Bacia’s sanctuary.