by Alex Oliver
He backed away from the mechanical dragon, slow and easy as though it was a real animal that must not be spooked. A glance to the side showed him that Harcrow's beast already had him in its mouth—he had still been reeling from the head-wound. Its jaws were straining against his forcefield, and golden lightning was spitting from around his wrist where the bracelet glowed white.
Turning his head had been a mistake. It only took a moment of inattention, and Yas's creature was storming up toward him like a lightning bolt himself. Its great jaws opened in a gape big enough to swallow a buffalo and its scythe like teeth came down and sank silently a half inch into the shield before stopping.
Agony lanced through his arm as the bracelet he wore turned white hot. But if he took it off, nothing would be holding back the teeth, so he just held the wrist as far out from himself as he could as his knees buckled and his mind refused to hold on to anything but the immediate experience of pain, pain, pain.
After what seemed like forever, even that became too much for him to process, and his mind slid sideways out of consciousness with a faint sense of doomed relief.
Against all expectations, he woke, slowly becoming aware that his whole body hurt, but nowhere hurt quite as much as his wrist. This time he didn't need to move to know that he was back in the cage—the bonds were tight enough that he could trace their locations by the path of the bruises. His wrists were behind him, and although one of them sang with an excruciating burn he didn't feel the weight there that he would if the bracelet was still present. They must have taken it off him while he lay unconscious.
He was back in the same formation as previously, just able to see Harcrow's slack face where the captain hung from his bloody restraints motionless. Sasara on his left was already awake, but looked gray-faced and spent. The others were behind Yas so he couldn't see if they had all survived. He hadn't expected any of them to. But perhaps, if Kelkalyn had brought them aboard to be his audience, they were not getting out of that role until he had finished having his fun.
Kelkalyn had fixed his hair, and his teeth in the meantime, golden eyes unbearably smug when he smiled at Yas.
"I see why they need so many of you," he said in a light tone as if he and Yas were just having a nice chat. "They must rely on you to overwhelm us by numbers, because you are, otherwise, rather sad specimens.”
Sasara breathed out softly beside Yas. He could almost feel her, gathering herself to try again, and he remembered that talking to Kelkalyn had been her idea, and that talking was her job. He wondered how many other successful negotiations she had handled, if she had ever faced odds this high.
"Please," she began. "You're talking to us as if we know what you're talking about—as if our allegiances are already made and we are simply trying to mock you. But that’s not the case. Is there any way I can prove to you that it's not like that? Do you have mental adepts? You could look into our minds and find out what we really think."
Kelkalyn exchanged a look with a red-robed alf at the center of the sweep of consoles. The creature had white hair and small, pearly horns. Bone plugs in his earlobes matched the bone wand he was clutching firmly in his six-fingered right hand. Yas couldn't have said why, but the creature had an aura of great age, even though its face was as smooth and child-like as a porcelain doll. The effect was creepy even in that assemblage of monsters.
The horned guy shook his head slightly. "My lord, they come straight from the chariot and they have already attacked you. Who knows what new tactics and other surprises they might be concealing. It is important for us to know that your mind is your own, my lord. Do not risk it."
"Aeryn is right," Kelkalyn pivoted gracefully to look down into Sasara's face. "Yet I am curious as to how you lifted my command module with your thoughts. The last time we met your people, you were not capable of that. You were a savage, brutish people who made nothing of worth and loved no art but that of killing. I am astonished you would have the mental capacity for this. Is there perhaps some dark-alf blood in you that also makes you such a comparatively superior color?"
Sasara huffed a quiet laugh, face twisted in a rueful smile. "No, my lord," she said, giving him what must be his proper title to show respect. All navy cadets got that part of the "basic etiquette for first contact" course, and Yas remembered it as though it was a long ago utopia now lost. "It's as I say, humans these days are very different from how you remember them. If I'm understanding this correctly, the race we used to think of as gods--"
"The Oses."
"Oh," she smiled with what seemed like real delight. "Is that their name? Thank you. The Oses left our planet thousands of years ago, and everything that we knew of them then dwindled into legend. Other religions came and went, and even those who still believed in Freya and her ilk believed in them as supernatural forces, not as aliens. We left them behind as we left our home planet. We learned to live with and even to rejoice in each others' differences, to make peace rather than to make war. If we had once had a special relationship with the Oses, it was forgotten long before we met the Ocuilin—Desultory's people. They are our allies now. They are half of the combined society that we make up. It is their welfare and our own that we care about, not that of the so-called gods."
Yas held his breath. The alfr appeared to be listening with interest. Against the large viewscreen to the right of the door one of the tank-like mechanical dragons also appeared to be transfixed, its faceted eye clicking as it brought a different lens to bear on Sasara's face.
"It is an interesting thought," Kelkalyn looked again to the horned alf, Aeryn, as if seeking approval. Yas wondered what that guy's deal was. Was he a priest of some sort? Second in command? He wasn't the one in the throne, but he seemed to have a good deal of influence. "What if the pets grew tired of servitude and worship? What if we could add them to our army instead? Would it not be a delicious irony if it was their very creations that were the means of finally defeating them."
"Ideally," Sasara carried on without waiting for Aeryn to reply, seizing the moment while she had it, "you should send representatives to meet us at one of our centers of government. You'd be welcomed, even if you did introduce yourself by bombing a settlement, and we could start the process of getting to know one another and finding out in what ways we could help each other to prosper. It's a big universe; there are worlds enough for all of us."
Aeryn sniffed. "It's like being lectured by a talking dog. The creatures have bones," he said as if that was the ultimate in moral failings. "What allegiance could they possibly come to with us? Remember when we made allegiance with the Oses—what a short time it took for them to start treating us as deceivers, when they were the ones who wanted out of their promises. The promise of friendship, of mutual protection? It was that promise that lead the Liosalfr into slavery. Do you make treaties with rabid animals? No, because you know you will be bitten the moment you turn your back."
"What gives him the right to tell you what to think?" Yas asked, genuinely curious and forgetting that it wasn't his business to interrupt a delicate negotiation. Kelkalyn wheeled and fixed him with an astonished glare, his eyes like forest fires. Once Yas got over the fact that they had no pupils, they were oddly beautiful, like looking into twin suns.
Aeryn drew himself up, gaining a good foot in height as he did so. "I am the adviser agreed upon by Cruin, king and by Hel, queen of the host."
"Cruin..." Yas was sure he'd heard that name before. "Oh right, his dad." He smiled, and Kelkalyn strode forward and backhanded him across the mouth, the assault utterly unexpected and oddly upsetting. Yas hadn't been ready for that and it made his blood boil.
"The name of Cruin, king, is too holy to come out of your mouth, dolt," Kelkalyn glowered, fuming.
"Yas, just shut up," Sasara whispered urgently. "I'm sorry, my lord. Please, Yas is... we haven't known him long, but he doesn't seem to have any brain to mouth filter. I don't think he meant any disrespect."
"Respect?" Yas laughed, still stinging from th
e slap. "Why should we respect you if you don't respect us? I say we should play this fair or not at all."
"Yas!" Sasara shouted. Now she was furious too, and maybe Yas should have left it there, but it had been a very long week and quite frankly he'd had enough.
"No, look, we get kidnapped by Freya and brainwashed into serving her. I have to spend my whole time there trying to stop her love-sick slaves from spacing Desultory and Dr. Wakes, and then I get here and this... this prick is all "Oh, you're an animal, a pet, a talking dog." We keep trying to tell them we don't care about their stupid war, but nobody is listening at all. Just..." he raised embarrassingly teary eyes to Kelkalyn's astonished face. God, he hated it when things were not fair. It was so stupid, so pointless, and so easily avoided. "Just get all the data before you make a decision. How hard is that?"
Sasara closed her eyes with a groan. There was a moment when looking at Kelkalyn's face—still round eyed with astonishment—Yas almost believed he had been shouted into a revelation. Kelkalyn took a single step backward. His brow furrowed.
"How dare you," he said, his voice rising to a shrill thunder. "How DARE you? Do you know who I am?"
"No," Yas insisted, caught up in an exchange that seemed to have become more deeply personal than he had meant it to be. "No, I really don't. That's the point."
"I am the person who will raze this galaxy of the presence of your kind!" Kelkalyn strode back to his command seat and threw himself down there with a sharp hand-gesture that Yas recognized with a stab of panic.
"No!" he yelled, and Kelkalyn laughed.
"You see. You know me better already. Now watch and see if you will forget me again."
While they had been talking, the five elvish spaceships had remained in formation above the city. As Kelkalyn's hand swept down they all fired at once. The lights in the city below went out and a great plume of ash rooted in fire billowed into the sky, turning the blue planet gray.
"Onto the next world," said Kelkalyn with a satisfied smile, and Yas struggled against his restraints with all he had. The next world was Nahasdzáán.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
No way out
In system, the elvish ship did not seem to be able to use whatever method of propulsion it had used to skip from one side of the galaxy to the other. A course had been set in for Yas's homeworld, curving around the plane of the sun to avoid the oort cloud that protected the inner planets. Even to the most up to date NXA ship, the course would take a week at maximum thrust, and it was clear from the alfr's relaxed expressions that their massive arrowhead ship wouldn't take it much faster. There had been a notable drop of tension on the bridge once the course was confirmed, and perhaps as a result Kelkalyn had decided to stow his toys away until more drama could be wrung from them.
Yas and the crew had been marched by their suits down a series of narrower and colder corridors until they were herded into one room and disgorged onto the floor. Only Yueh had been active enough by that point to spring up and try to get to the door before it closed, but she was too late. The cages marched out by themselves, and the walls irised shut behind them, leaving the crew trapped in a spherical cell without a door, without bars or a lock or an apparent ventilation system. It was as if they had materialized inside a geode, or the giant's body had engulfed them, all that time ago, and hardened up around them.
When Yas had worked the numbness and the pins and needles from his arms and legs—the throb of blood rushing to his extremities proof of how tight his bonds had been made after the fight—he staggered around the walls, feeling for air-holes, for gaps and flaws. He could find none.
The urge to scream and beat on the walls was all but overpowering—they were coming for his world, his parents, the places where he had grown up, his grandmother's garden and his grandfather's herds, and they couldn't. They couldn't do that! The universe should stop them. There should be something he could do to turn the threat off. Something he could say to make them see reason. They couldn't touch the very center of his universe; those things were inviolable. The very nature of reality should demand that they be safe.
"Let me out!" he yelled at the ceiling, angry that media had given him this impression that there was always a way out of a cell for the intrepid hero. This was the second time now that there hadn't been, and it wasn't fair! "Let me out! Let me talk!"
"You've talked enough," Ambassador Sasara snapped. Yas turned and looked down into the hollow of the sphere, where Lieutenants Zardari and Vasto were kneeling over the prone form of the Captain. They had wound a torn-off sleeve around his head, and Zardari had obviously been carrying an emergency medical pen in their pocket because he had just finished applying it to Harcrow's neck.
Ambassador Sasari was a little way away from the rest of the crew, hunched up like a bedraggled crow opposite where the door had been. She had lost her hooded cloak sometime during the fight, and her face was fully revealed, with a swollen bruise on one cheek making a purple dust-cloud beneath the stars on her cheek. Yas was surprised to see she was about his own age. New at this too.
"I'm sorry," he said bitterly. "Is that what you want me to say? I shouldn't have spoken up. I should have let you handle it. That’s what everyone keeps telling me and—"
"Negotiation is what I am trained for," Sasara interrupted, her voice level in a way that conveyed restrained fury. "I was doing a good job. What on Earth persuaded you—"
"We're not on Earth, are we?" Yas snapped, taking it out on her because he couldn't live with the storm that was going on in his head, and no one else was in reach. He was watching himself with disapproval even as he did it. "This is not theoretical to me. This is my home! My uncle worked on Ahoa Nda'iilniih. I don't know if he's dead now! And my mum and dad are on Nahasdzáán. They're there right now and I don't know how to stop them from being destroyed too. I couldn't just sit there and say nothing."
"You couldn't just trust me to do my job?" Sasara's eyes flashed, and she struggled to her feet. On the floor, Zardari was waiting with the medical pen in their hand, looking at Sasara and Yas as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing. Another part of Yas's mind told him he was making a fool of himself and that he should get a grip, but it wasn't strong enough to over-rule the panic and fear.
"Well you weren't, were you? He was just playing with us, and you were going along with it. We had to make our position clear. None of this 'my lord' kowtowing to try and get them to behave better. None of that stuff ever works. They promise you consideration and then they kill you. You can't expect--"
"They're not even human. We don't know how they behave!" Sasara shouted. She stretched out her hand, making a focusing gesture, and he realized with a start that he had made an Inquisitor angry with him. She might look like she'd just come out of the classroom like him, but the studies she'd mastered were how to bend minds and strip thoughts. He'd seen her lift and use an object at a distance. She could certainly reach into his brain and squeeze, cut out a neuron here or there and leave him a vegetable. "Damn it, Sub lieutenant Sundeen, if you can't control yourself I will do it for you."
"Kids." The weary, growling voice turned them both around. Harcrow was awake. "You know my monitoring system never gets switched off. Just cos I'm out doesn't mean the whole galaxy isn't watching you. Let's do something more constructive than fight. What have we got? Ideas?"
He pulled his broken arm into his chest and sat up, watching them expectantly. Yas had indeed forgotten that he was on camera whenever Harcrow was in the room. Having an audience for this made it seem even more petty than he'd thought. Turning on each other out of frustration? The Academy course was meant to educate that out of its soldiers.
He dropped his gaze to Sasara's feet. "I am sorry," he said, meaning it this time. "I'm... terrified for my people, and I just want to be doing something, even if it's yelling."
Sasara snorted and let herself sit down again, hugging her knees to her chest. "I'm sorry too. I am angry at myself. I should have maintained control of
the room. I was so focused on talking to Kelkalyn that I missed your distress and I allowed the interruption. I'm... actually quite new at this. And we've—the College, I mean, we've always assumed we wouldn't meet anyone with old grudges. How could first contact civilizations have old grievances? My training assumes we would meet on an equal footing of curiosity and ignorance. Not with prejudice so old it's been allowed to harden into 'knowledge'."
She took Zardari's medical pen and injected herself, her shoulders slumping as the analgesic effect cut in. A standard medical pen contained ten doses of emergency nanites that would work against any disorder in the body. It wasn't strong enough to completely repair Harcrow's broken arm in moments, but it had obviously already begun to treat his skull fractures, and it would continue to be active in his system until his immune system shut it off, or all the damage was undone. The swelling on Sasara's face had already begun to go down.
Yas waved the pen away when she offered it to him. He wasn't badly hurt and until they could get back to med-bay for more it was too valuable to waste. He should have stuffed one in his own pocket— he would make a habit of doing that in future.
"At least the people of the galaxy know what's going on, then?" Yas offered. "I mean, if they're watching all of this through the Captain's eyes, they know as much as we do."
"Maybe they've had time to evacuate," Yueh said softly. She hadn't spoken up much so far, and Yas had no real belief that he knew her. She liked hydroponics and running the life-support systems, apparently, and she was seeing Vasto Mari in a non-professional capacity on the side. That wasn't much to base an opinion on, but he was prepared to vote her 'favorite member of the crew' on this suggestion alone. "Do the cities on Nahasdzáán have bunkers? Are there any troops based land-side?"