by A. R. Knight
Back towards the cockpit, though, there’s more than the smoking ruin of the pilot. Viera and I step over the downed Sevora into a spectacular view over the mountain range as the shuttle clears the cavern and heads for the skies.
Browns and grays spread out beneath us, merging eventually into greens and blues as the mountains meet the jungles I know so well. Somewhere across that horizon is Damantum, or, at least, what’s left of it.
There’s a bank of terminals set across from the netting the Flaum occupied, with a single flight stick locked into its autopilot position.
“Where do you think it’s going?” I venture to ask, moving around to get a better look at the screens.
“Nowhere we want to be,” Viera replies.
T’Oli launches itself off of me as we continue our flight. The Ooblot swarms over the terminal, hunting and searching until T’Oli finds something it likes. Flapping its cream-colored skin, T’Oli flags us over to what looks like a dusty, small-screened terminal with a wide set of lettered keys.
“This is what we’re looking for,” T’Oli says. “It’s an emergency broadcaster. It’ll send out a signal that can be caught by the Amigga’s Q-Net. Then they’ll come find us.”
“None of that makes any sense to me,” I say, and confirm that Viera’s equally confused.
“Light and sound can only travel so fast,” T’Oli’s going all teacher-voice on us now, and both Viera and I take looks out the windshield to see how close we are to a Sevora ship. None visible, yet. “If we sent a message from here towards, say, an inhabited planet, we might be long dead before they even received it. The Amigga knew there might be a need to talk across vast distances quickly, so they developed the Q-Net.”
“Ok, T’Oli,” Viera interrupts. “This is fascinating and all, but we’re going to need to shift plans here. There’s a big Sevora boat up there now, and we’re heading right towards it.”
“Grab the flight stick and get away,” T’Oli replies, as if this is the most obvious solution. “It’s going to take them some time to realize we’re actually running.”
“On it.” I settle into the netting, put my hands on the flight stick and judder it out from the autopilot position.
Immediately the shuttle swings as I angle it down and away from the Sevora ship and black space. Back towards the mountains, towards the jungle far below.
“The Q-Net is made up of small satellites scattered all throughout the galaxy.” T’Oli drones on as I try to figure out where all the buttons are.
Some are similar to the Amigga shuttle we flew over here, but the Sevora change other things around, and it takes a few random guesses, which result in a few sudden lurches and one half-roll before I feel like I’ve got a good idea on how this thing flies.
“And that’s how quantum computers work.” T’Oli’s voice fades back into my concentration as my concerns about crashing our ship die down. “Essentially, if we can get a message to the Q-Net, they’ll learn about it almost instantly at the Chorus, and since leaping folds a ship across space-time, the Amigga could get a Vincere force here fast.”
“Sounds great,” Viera says. “Kaishi, any guns on this ship?”
“My miner’s right there.” I point to my weapon, lying on the ground next to me. “Why?”
“Because I think they’ve noticed we’re not friendly anymore.”
A couple of the terminals have started flashing red, but it’s not till a couple of blue-lit beams shoot by overhead that I realize Viera’s serious. I immediately twist the shuttle into another roll, leveling it out over the mountains, and the craft shudders and groans as I make the move. Almost as loudly as Viera, who’s cursing up a storm as I send her bouncing around the inside.
“Watch that wind resistance,” T’Oli says. “You’re not in space. Too sharp a turn and this shuttle will snap apart like a tree in a tornado.”
“Just get that message sent, will you?”
“Oh. I have to find a Q-Net satellite first. It might take a while.”
“We don’t have that. Go faster.” I risk a look back - Viera’s cursing is getting farther away - and I notice she’s back by the bays again.
“Open up the doors, Kaishi!” Viera calls. “If this boat doesn’t have any weapons, we’ll have to improvise!”
As if I know how to do that. Thankfully, though, the Sevora aren’t completely obtuse when it comes to the icons on their shuttles. I tap at the terminal that has six glowing squares, each one with a small line descending from it, and Viera’s happy shout comes back my way.
“Now you just need to get us near one of them!” Viera says.
Near one? The shuttle rattles suddenly, and the terminal to my right, showing what I think was the battery’s power, bursts out in a spray of sparks. I juke hard, sending our oval ship to the right and down, closer to those mountains. I keep looking up through the windshield, but I can’t see anything, only blue sky and a few clouds.
“They’re following you!” Viera yells. “Can you flip us?”
“I wouldn’t try that, Kaishi,” T’Oli says, but it’s too late.
I pull back on the flight stick as T’Oli delivers the warning, and the Sevora shuttle veers back, replacing mountains and ground with horizon, sky, and then mountains again, only on the other side of the windshield.
For the first time, I see what’s chasing us: a pair of three-pronged, rock-like craft whose ends glow bright red against the soft blue of home. Fighters, Ignos called them.
Well, I’ll give them one.
20 A Long Walk
Solis hangs against the stars. Sax watches through his own eyes, through the screen hanging against the ceiling. Thick green-purple fluid laps around him, over and across his scales. Some his natural gray, others a decidedly more metallic color. The patches cover his body, mar it like an infection. Each one a product of haphazard surgery, of the frigate’s limited resources.
Then again, the Oratus are an unnatural creation. A product of engineering. This, perhaps, is the only course that makes sense.
Sax wouldn’t mind so much if the patches didn’t itch. Supposedly the fluid, in addition to helping his nerves, his muscles repair, is also suppressing his body’s reaction to its new additions. He’s to stay in the bath until the Flaum doctor - the frigate’s sole medical officer - and its robots determine Sax’s cells won’t commit genocide against their new brothers.
He’s alive.
The thought keeps coming back like his heartbeats. Sax marvels at it.
“The Chorus have asked if their transport arrived,” Rav says as the door to Sax’s cell shifts open.
Behind the red-gold Oratus, Sax can see tufts of Flaum fur and the points of miners on either side of the door. Rav may have kept him alive, but she’s not exactly trusting him.
“What did you tell them?”
“That it never showed,” Rav says, standing over Sax.
There’s plenty packed into that statement - for one, it makes Rav, and her crew, traitors. They’ll be attacked and eliminated by the Vincere, and with another frigate and the massive Oratus-housing ship in orbit around Solis, saying that a ship any of them could have seen didn’t arrive is a huge risk.
Sax’s eyes must say what he’s thinking, because Rav nods towards the door and the Flaum guarding it, “I already spoke with my crew and they agreed. I’ve asked to meet with the captains of the other two ships here, and they’re coming over before communicating with the Chorus.”
“How did you manage that?” Sax is stunned, though perhaps he shouldn’t be - loyalty to the Chorus doesn’t seem to be all strong anymore.
“By showing them the recordings,” Rav replies. “Your fight, the words you said. We all have crews, Sax. Hundreds that depend on us to make the right decisions. If we plunge blindly ahead and let the Chorus decide whether our species survive, then we deserve to die. It’s time the Amigga share their control of the galaxy.”
Oratus are trained to work in pairs, at most in sets of four to accomplish missions. They�
�re not expected to share a common bond with their species, or with anyone outside their immediate chain of command. Sax has only ever cared about himself, Bas, and defeating the next enemy.
And yet, now he has a larger focus. There’s a bigger goal out there, larger than destroying the next ship or even saving Bas from her mission on Solis.
Her mission.
“I need to get down to the planet,” Sax says.
“Why?”
“My pair is on a mission that shouldn’t succeed. Not if there’s a chance the Oratus can turn against the Chorus.”
“You’re not well enough,” Rav hisses. “Not yet. Tell me what she’s doing, and I’ll have her stopped.”
Does Sax trust her here? Does he have a choice?
“You won’t hurt her?” Sax says.
“Why would we?” Rav reaches in with her left midclaw, into the healing broth, and grips Sax’s right. “I swear, Sax, we’re in this together. Every Oratus we have is valuable. Tell me where to find her, and I’ll bring her back.”
Sax weighs the options and decides to trust this Oratus. Rav’s repaired his body, and she isn’t shipping him back to the Chorus. So she must be on his side. So he speaks, tells Rav what he knows, and the frigate commander declares she’ll go back through the logs of ships recently come to Solis, find the little craft Bas came in on, and track it down.
“Now, heal,” Rav says. “I’ll need you when the other captains come by so you can convince them to join our cause.”
Rav, though, isn’t quite done. “There’s someone else who wants to talk to you. Someone we found wandering a corridor, that you stashed away.”
Sax doesn’t have to see the little Teven making his way into the room to know it’s Nobaa. Rav shifts to the side to let the Teven up to the edge of the bath, and Nobaa immediately starts throwing his spindly arms from his carapace towards Sax’s metal patches.
“You both know, too,” Rav says. “That you owe me quite a lot for destroying most of my med bay.”
“Guess you’ll have to help us, then,” Sax says. “Because we have no money, and no power.”
Rav doesn’t laugh. “You have your claws. This little one has his mind. I’ll take those.”
With a swish of her tail, Rav leaves the room, though the door stays open. No doubt those Flaum standing guard will tell her everything said in the room, but at this point Sax doesn’t care. He’s too tired, too changed to worry about keeping secrets.
“Do you like them?” Nobaa asks after he’s looked at each of the metal patches on Sax’s chest and legs. “They were my idea.”
“Your idea?”
“They thought you were dead. With the med bay gone, they didn’t have enough supplies to heal you up and repair the muscle,” Nobaa sticks a small hand from a hole near the top of his carapace and waves it around the room. “Plenty of metal, though! We grabbed some scrap, sterilized it, and used the engineering equipment to put it together.”
“Will it work?”
“If I’m right, you’ll be even stronger than you were before!” Nobaa giggles. “We reinforced the patches, so you can take more hits. They should even stop a miner’s bolt, at least the first one. You want to know the best part, though?”
Sax closes his eyes briefly. Nobaa is so exhausting.
“Your claws, Sax! They were all broken and burnt, so we replaced them.”
His claws? Sax didn’t notice this. Now he looks and, instead of the dull-and-dirty white they’d used to be, Sax’s most prized possessions are now the glinting silver of shined, unnatural stuff. Sax can’t help it, he tries to lunge for Nobaa, a snapping bite that can’t get there because, well, Sax can barely move.
The Teven jerks back anyway, his eyes cowering in the carapace holes and his hands waving high in the air. “I know! I know! It’s not easy to take but you have to believe me, they’re stronger this way.”
“Those were mine,” Sax manages to hiss. “From birth.”
“Yes, but these are better. They’ll never break, Sax. I mean, not unless you try with a combination of—”
“Nobaa. Stop.” Futility and growing resignation drain away Sax’s anger to a simmer. “Leave. Now. Or I’ll figure out a way to leave this bath and devour you.”
“Sure, sure!” Nobaa waddles back. “Just, trust me Sax!”
All the Oratus can do is glare until the Teven is out of the room and the door is shut behind him. Sax, alone with his fabricated claws and patches of metal skin, tells himself that these are the wages of war. That these are the sacrifices required for his species to survive.
What settles in his mind most of all, though, is who took his body away from him.
The Chorus.
The next time Sax wakes up, he feels weighed down by a thousand bricks. Healing without the right creams, the right baths with true molecular repairing liquids rather than stabilizing ones is a mistake Sax refuses to make again.
Now, though, time is passing and Bas is either in danger or about to make a move that could end future Oratus forever. Sax doesn’t have the luxury of waiting anymore. Rav hasn’t said whether she found Bas or not.
The door to his room is shut, and while Sax could probably call for help, he’s not going to. Not now. He starts first with his talons and his tail, pressing them through the thick fluid towards the tub’s floor. The move comes with aches, pains, so Sax buries them beneath an avalanche of frustration and determination.
An Oratus is meant to move, not to sit.
When he strikes the bottom of the tub, Sax pushes himself back. His head strikes the wall first, hard enough to jolt, but not enough to hurt. Sax keeps pushing, pressing with his talons and swimming with his tail until, with his neck and back using the wall for support, he’s standing.
The gooey stuff drips from his arms and away from his vents. His new metal claws gleam in the room’s white light. Sax keeps himself from looking at his own body, at the strips of scales sliced away and replaced with bands of knitted metal.
Instead, he focuses on his right leg. The lift is slow, as though Sax is shoving up a body ten times his own size, and his muscles quickly burn like neon fire. There’s a point, a singular moment where the pain intensifies and it feels like his leg might tear apart when Sax could give in, when the cool relief of failure is right there.
He falls. Presses with his tail and left leg and throws himself over the edge and out of the tub, landing on the hard floor. The impact rattles Sax’s teeth, shudders up and down his arms, and Sax feels the metal plates, his skin wrapping and roiling as it moves them. None of them, however, pop. Nobaa’s work holds.
The door opens a moment later, two Flaum standing there, miners at the ready. They take a long stare at Sax, before the lead one, a patchwork project of gold and brown, speaks, “We heard a roar?”
“A roar?” Sax manages to hiss, and at their look, the Oratus realizes he just might have bellowed out when he hit the ground. “An accident.”
“Do you need help?” the Flaum asks. “To get back in the tub?”
“No,” Sax says. “To both.”
With his foreclaws, Sax rolls onto his chest and pulls himself the rest of the way out of the tub, which eventually requires all of his limbs working together to get to a standing position, as the room’s too thin for Sax to lie across on the floor.
The two Flaum stay right where they are, miners still ready.
“What are you trying to do?” the gold one asks.
“I’m going to the bridge,” Sax says.
“No you’re not,” the Flaum replies. “Orders are to keep you here till you’re healed and, uh, you’re not looking good.”
Sax takes a step towards the Flaum, keeping his right claws against the wall for support. His muscles are weak, his vents tired, and a faint itching pain has started up around the metal plates in his body. All of these are inconsequential. All of these are pushed away.
“I will do as I wish,” Sax hisses, his mouth hanging open a fraction too long as the ener
gy to close it doesn’t come quick enough. A big splash of spit leaks from his mouth and hits the floor, the Flaum paying it rapt attention. “You can choose to die, or get out of the way.”
The Flaum opt for a combo package instead, backing out of the room and placing a call to Rav.
“You’re a stubborn one,” Rav’s voice comes over the intercom moments later, as Sax is about to reach the room’s doorway.
“You already knew that.” Sax keeps moving, keeps his eyes on the next step.
The corridor here isn’t a main artery; it’s thin, and the outer walls shift translucent as various species walk by. Black space and the stars speckling it cover the view, with the edge of Solis visible off to the right, its reflected light shedding misty rays. The two Flaum guards establish a perimeter, waving by any passing crew member and making sure they keep out of the range of Sax’s claws.
Not that Sax cares. It’s one step at a time, and now he shifts to his left claws and leans on the inside wall.
“What are you trying to prove?” Rav asks over the next intercom. “You’ll just hurt yourself.”
“I’m done resting, Rav.” Sax is about to reach the next door when one of the guards darts in front of him, swipes a badge at the panel and locks it, which lets Sax use the door as a crutch a moment later. “You’ve brought me back, and now I’m going to find my pair.”
“Even if it kills you?”
“What better thing to live for?”
Sax keeps moving, and he realizes he’s attracting onlookers. Crew members and soldiers, Flaum, Whelk, Teven and more who cluster to watch this wounded, mismatched Oratus struggle step after step towards the bridge.
For Sax, every step brings with it pain, but it’s as nothing to what he earns, what keeps him moving forward. Bas is on Solis, and when he gets to the bridge, he’ll make Rav get her meeting, get her support, and then go planetside.
When the big bridge doors slide open, Sax nearly falls in. Only through the sheer weight of his tail is Sax able to keep himself up. He doesn’t want to, hisses at himself to keep standing, but Rav moves forward to help him anyway. If before, during their conversations, Rav looked at him with mistrust, or calculated concern, here there’s only open respect.