Absence of Blade

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  9

  Shomoro stands over a bed, as invisible to the one lying there as a shadow on the wall in the darkness. The medical crèche isn’t quite the proper nest an injured Osk would receive, but it comes close. Tubes and wires line its edges, gleaming silvery-green in the thin light seeping under the door. The Terran sunk in fitful sleep within looks almost like an afterthought, a lump in the shape of a living being.

  Gazing down on his pathetic form, she feels a stroke of pity flutter in her chest. She leans her elbows on the railing of the crèche as the emotion catches her by surprise, closing her eyes as she tries to organize her thoughts. The mission. Shomoro must focus on the mission. She opens her eyes and looks again at the reason why she is here, lying in the bed under sedation.

  This man is to be her first mission on Olios 3. She’d been settled into her lab outside Za for only a week when the call came in from the Surarch’s administration.

  The Terrans are learning how to fight by Osk rules. The man in the crèche is a spy for the government in Nheris, sent across the ocean on an infiltration mission. Hidden in the Dursh-Kren in a burrow not unlike her own, he infiltrated Za with an army of tiny spying machines. Stole information on everything from the location of storage chambers in the city to the directory of sephs currently deployed there. Though her briefing hadn’t mentioned it, Shomoro suspects the machine spies may have even taken a shot at Za’s mainframe, although its rings of security made penetration unlikely.

  Last night, the Terran spy’s luck ran out; for the Osk, too, are busy learning their enemy’s capabilities. A Fleet task force traced the man’s mechanical spies back to his hideout less than a standard day ago. The ensuing firefight destroyed his base and left the man with grave injuries—though not quite enough to prevent him from escaping back to the Terran capital in his cruiser. So the Surarch of Za has sent Shomoro to close the Terran’s mouth forever.

  Safer to assume some damage has already been done, of course: that the spy was able to get off some of the information he discovered before being found out. She knows this is a salvage mission, Za scrambling to limit the leak’s spread in the best way they know. Otherwise they would not have entrusted it to her, a young seph whose blades have not yet been blooded. Nothing she can do about that, except to carry on with the mission.

  Shomoro opens her eyes on the quiet room; the clicks and pulses of medical equipment syncopate with her calmed breathing. The purple of pre-dawn filters between the blinds of the single window, casting horizontal blades of violet light across the hospital bed, illuminating the patient’s upturned face. The light draws a hard line down the edge of her left-hand blade as it slides forth to half length. This will not be difficult.

  As her blade casts a shadow over the Terran’s supine form, she looks down in preparation for the cut—and feels her heart freeze into a lump of ice in her chest. The Terran’s eyes are open, not glazed or catatonic but aware and full of fear. He can see her. Eyes shining with terror, open as wide as they will go. The whites glisten around deep green irises; each pupil is a black well as final as the depths of space.

  When the dark hole of his mouth opens wide for a scream, Shomoro remembers where she is. Hauls up her seph spirit from the depths of those sea-green eyes and grabs the spy by the hair, her blade sweeping down in the arc-shaped stroke she has perfected through years of training.

  The scream almost comes anyway, dropping to a gurgle at the instant of the cut. What comes out instead is blood, from between his lips and from the horizontal slash across his throat that leers like a second mouth. It splashes the walls and crèche with crimson and catches her in its hot spray. She can taste the metal on her tongue. The geyser’s pressure slows to a trickle as the man’s heart stops. Through a film of red, Shomoro watches him convulse once, the breath sighing out of him as he dies. The work is done.

  She brushes the blood away from her eyes, shakes out the droplets collecting in her dark mane. Glancing around the room, she takes in the splashes of red, the heavy copper smell hanging in the air. Gruesome work. Her work, in the service of peace. Necessary. The man’s fate was decided by events far above the both of them, and some inexplicable turn of those events had selected Shomoro to bring that fate to him. There is honor of a kind in that—in the meeting of fates that is the seph’s work. It fills her with a warm excitement and awe and not a little pride. Her blades have been blooded now.

  As she slips out the door into the hallway, a snatch of red catches her eye. She glances down at the floor and realizes she has tracked blood into the corridor. Crimson liquid is pooling on the white-tiled floor in vivid swirls that flash her success back at her. Shomoro grins at them.

  A grating sound like metal on stone scrapes across her brain, and she snaps up her head in surprise still tinged by the vicious exhilaration of her first kill. Farther down the hall a Terran nurse stands frozen, beige towels piled up in her thin arms. The awful, painful cry is coming from her. It is a wail of surprising strength for such a weak-looking creature. The idea that this is the race that purports to take Olios 3 from the Osk suddenly seems laughable, an absurd fantasy. Shomoro’s hissing laughter only makes the nurse cower closer against one wall, the reaction amplifying her disdain. These Terrans are beneath contempt. Flat-toothed omnivores. Herd animals!

  She gives the woman a feral grin and bursts into motion, dashing past the terrified nurse and making her drop the load of towels. The window at the corridor’s end explodes into a rain of shards under her armored weight. She’s gone before the towels hit the floor.

  The rush of air beneath her ends in an impact with smooth metal as she lands on her ship’s hull. The floating craft rocks as it accepts her weight, ready to ferry the young seph onward to her next mission. The slick feel as Shomoro cleans her blade of the metallic alien blood is like a drug, a chemical rush that sweeps away the last traces of her cold logic in a molten flow of power.

  She is unstoppable … she is invincible!

  And someday the whole world is going to be hers.

  And now . . .

  Something was seeping through the red-black haze . . . not sweeping away the wave of crushing pain cleanly, like her long-disappeared blades would have, but squeezing its way in like a worm.

  A voice. “Shomoro . . . you can hear me, can’t you? Come now . . . I know you can. I know you too well for that silent treatment to work.”

  She cracked one eye open, reducing the room’s glare to a tiny blazing slit. Other senses came filtering in: she was in the white-tiled room, sitting propped up against some kind of rigid board, hands splayed flat against the rough material and held there by restraints she couldn’t see. Her breath ratcheted in her throat, straining against the thick collar around her neck. She could smell something chemical and cloying on her breath, with a rancid aftertaste.

  The voice had come from her right. Sluggishly, held under the surface by whatever drug she’d been filled with for that day, Shomoro inclined her head toward it. Berkyavik’s features came into view, the forgettable face made blurry and swimming by chemicals and exhaustion.

  She squinted past his shoulder; the rest of the room was empty except for her two Urd guards, standing point on either side of the entrance. Grelshk glanced over from her post and gave Shomoro a nasty, long-toothed smile. Over the sessions the Urd had hurt her in a dozen different ways: sometimes with barbed whips, or with a cruel system of manacles and pulleys that bound up her limbs until her joints screamed. Sometimes Grelshk would ravage Shomoro with her own claws and teeth, small cuts that brought pain—but not death, never that. Berkyavik always intervened before it went too far. She was slowly becoming immune to the Urd’s narcotic venom, but not the other drug, the one that took her away from herself, left her watching a small, bloodied doll babbling answers to Berkyavik’s questions in slurred O’o Nezz.

  But that was not for today, it seemed. Grelshk looked away with a snort and became a s
tatue again. Berkyavik leaned forward, as though he were taking Shomoro into some confidence.

  “Do you know why they call it humiliation? It’s actually not a mean-spirited word at all. It means to make humble; to make one realize his own smallness in relation to the events unfolding around him. Or her,” he added with a generous smile. “A painful process for most of us, ego-bound as we are, but a good one, wouldn’t you say?”

  She held her silence whenever Berkyavik was feeling conversational. Forced him to move the session along by retreating into her helplessness, into the lack of control that was her last form of control. She would say nothing for as long as she could . . . until he asked her a question he really wanted the answer to.

  He reached forward, and Shomoro recoiled wearily, too drained even to muster hatred toward him. Felt him caress her whitened mane as she trembled under his touch.

  “Listen, Shomoro,” he coaxed, not taking his hand away. “We can end all this, make it all go away . . . wouldn’t you like that, Shomoro?” His voice was as pale as his countenance; it meant nothing to her anymore. But there was a scent floating beyond it, just out of her reach, sweet and salty like the sea she had never been to. She craned her neck up. He held something between his fingers: a brown morsel, the intoxicating aroma coming off it in waves.

  Shomoro’s mouth began to water, her shrunken stomach rumbling longingly. The one thing worse than these weekly torture sessions was the hunger. Ever since she’d been brought to the base, the White Arrows had kept her on the edge of starvation, reducing her robust and healthy body to scrawny limbs and flesh pulled taut over bones visible in her ribcage and back. The hunger made her long perversely for the white room as she lay in her cell the rest of the week. Sessions were the only times Shomoro knew she would be fed.

  She stretched her head toward the speck of food, mewling her desire like a hatchling. Smiling kindly, he lifted the morsel to her mouth, stroking her smooth snout as her tongue plucked the bit of food from between his fingers.

  “That’s it,” Berkyavik said as he watched her chew and swallow it down eagerly. “It’s fish from the New Pacific Sea. Your favorite, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so.”

  She looked at him, ensnared in a morass of emotions. Who was this man, again? Torturer ... interrogator ... provider? She knew he was connected to all this, somehow; in the tiny corner of sanity left to her, Shomoro knew he was responsible for all the pain and hunger and humiliation she endured. Yet in the self-contained world of the session room, all she could remember at those times was Berkyavik’s absence. He had never hurt her, never starved her. When Berkyavik appeared, the pain went away; he fed her, comforted her, cared for her. He cared for her.

  “Please . . .” she whimpered, her voice soft and cracked and broken. “Please . . .”

  “More?” he asked, one simple word that encompassed so much, that told her here he was, just for her, when there was no one else left . . .

  She nodded, and he smiled.

  “Of course, Shomoro. Anything you want. But first, you must give me the right words.”

  And she would let words spill out in an agonized rush from a parched throat, afraid to stop until she’d said the thing that would make him hold up his hand again. Another chunk of meat held between the pallid fingers, the face behind them beaming with a pride and love that made her weak with gratitude as the next morsel touched her lips.

  Interlude

  A Visit from Father

  He was late. It was at least a quarter after midnight; past the time Berkyavik had been expecting him to arrive, and even farther past the time he preferred to turn in for the night. Yet however erratic his visiting schedule, Berkyavik did not even consider blowing off an appointment with the Father. To be visited by the founder of the Church was a rare privilege; any number of minor inconveniences paled beside it.

  So, he sat at his big mahogany desk for close to an hour, going over what he was going to say to the Father as he waited for the announcement of his arrival. At last a tinny voice crackled over the concealed desk radio, startling his buzzing nerves.

  “Excuse me, sir. Are you still there?”

  He pressed the relay, yawning. “What is it?”

  “We received a transmission from the Gabriel.” The Arrow soldier’s words were clipped and crisp. “It will be docking at the nearest available port in about five minutes standard.”

  Finally, he thought, his voice jumpy even in his own head. He addressed the radio. “Excellent. See that he receives an escort to my office upon docking.”

  “Yessir.” The voice clicked off in a whisper of static. Fingers tapping on the keyboard across the top of his desk, Berkyavik accessed the live video feed from the exterior camera nearest the docking bay.

  The perspective laid him flat on his back, the lens staring up into a sky the color of fire-blackened silver sparkling with cold drops of rain. Moisture clouded the lens before vaporizing into steam, banished by the heat billowing from the craft as it descended into his view.

  Berkyavik felt the usual shiver of awe as he beheld the Father’s massive flagship, so much like the avenging angel after which it was named. The Gabriel’s descent was slow and magnificent; it filled the camera’s vision by degrees, blue discharges of electricity coursing along its smooth, golden hull in little seizures of light. The main body was a streamlined triangle, the two lower angles extending into long scythes whose ends glowed moon-yellow with heat. A stylized pair of angel wings sprouted from its sleek sides, outlined in chrome, sweeping out to either side in defiance of the dark, miserable night. The sharpened pinion feathers took bites out of the black sky. A white hole irised open in the Gabriel’s underside, extending a tube down to the docking port and wedding it to the White Arrow base. The camera picture wavered into gray snow.

  With shaking hands, he shut off the screen—it slid back into the wall behind a mahogany panel—and folded his arms on his desk, staring fixedly at the door across twenty feet of rich oriental carpet.

  Two minutes later, it slid silently open.

  The man standing in the doorway was not particularly tall or imposing, yet Berkyavik found himself straightening his shoulders. A light sweat broke out under his clothes.

  The arrival was dressed simply, in a dark business suit and patent leather shoes, a small golden cross suspended around his neck on a silver chain. His head was square, with salt and pepper hair, a small patch of beard on his chin, and eyes as piercing as a hawk’s, though their color was not gold but the green of moss on rotting tree trunks. Berkyavik had known someone else with eyes that color, but he had never known anyone quite like the Father.

  “Welcome to Olios 3, Father.” He rose grandly from his desk and walked over to shake the Father’s hand. The handshake was returned firmly. He knelt to plant a respectful kiss on that same hand, his white robe billowing around him.

  “Hello, Tor. It’s been a while,” replied the Father with a slight smile.

  As Berkyavik rose again, he looked around the room. “Agreed. I’m very glad you could find the time to visit our little home away from home . . . but where’s your escort? It should have been waiting as soon as your ship docked. If my men were remiss, I can assure you I will not allow such discourtesy to stand—”

  “Oh, they had an escort ready,” the Father responded with a wave of his hand. “And I declined it. I brought my own. No need to burden your men with my safekeeping.” He snapped his fingers and two figures entered the room, stooping under the doorframe.

  The Arashal halted on either side of the Father, their snakelike heads bowed respectfully to the man over whom they towered. The aliens were clad in transparent ponchos against the rain; each garment could easily have served as a two-man tent. Underneath the plastic, the Arashal wore no clothing: the three-meter-tall reptiles were each resplendent in a shimmering coat of green scales, from their bullet-shaped heads to their long two-toe
d feet. Their eyes were crimson with a vertical black pupil, set into narrow slits of dark flesh along their long heads. A band of iridescent blue plates ran from the undersides of their thick, whiplike tails and up their bellies, finally disappearing under heavy steel collars that clamped over their shoulders and the base of their necks. At the throat of each glowed a round green light.

  Their tails alone are longer than I am, Berkyavik thought uneasily. He’d never been closer than a holophoto to one of the Urd’s massive reptilian slaves before. At this distance, as he gazed up at the Arashal’s thick limbs and barrel-chested bodies, the stories about the species’ general timidity seemed hard to believe.

  “I’d like you to meet Isaac and Abraham. I acquired them on my last stopover on Rreluush-Tren. I was forced to stay there for several days: you wouldn’t believe the amount of red tape tying up the Urd Empire. Charming world, though; it’s greatly improved since the end of the war.”

  Berkyavik turned this over in his mind. “I’m sure . . . meaning no disrespect, Father, but—are you sure using Arashal as guards is a good idea? What if they rebelled? You could come to serious har—”

  The Father’s chuckle cut him off. He waved a chiding finger at Berkyavik. “Did I say they were guards?” He shook his head. “I would not trust something as basic as my own safety to anything less than a qualified complement of our own troops. Anyway, they’re quite docile. No, these two are more of a . . . personal project. Say hello to Tor, you two.”

  The Arashal strode a pace or two forward (as Berkyavik suppressed the urge to run behind his desk for protection) and executed graceful bows from the waist. “Hello, Tor,” they croaked. The big reptiles’ voices were oddly childlike.