by Alex Oliver
Yas's stomach squirmed again with misery. "Of course there aren't standing troops. We're not barbarians. And there's no evacuation fleet. Our capital city is ten times the size of the one they've just bombed and doesn't even have orbital defenses." He crumpled to the ground and hugged his own knees, mirroring Sasara's defeat. "Some of us can shoot arrows at the sky," he said bitterly. "Before they vaporize us."
"Yeah, well, I'm not accepting despair," Harcrow said. "I'm serious. Gimme some options."
"From in here?" Yas shrugged. "Nothing. We can't do anything."
"Then we get out of here, and—"
Yas opened his mouth to protest that he had just searched the cell and there was no way they were getting out of there, but he shut it again, vague first year lessons about the importance of morale echoing in his head. He rubbed at the dents in his flesh where the bands had been, smoothing away the last of the pins and needles, getting ready for action just in case.
"Maybe the ambassador could mind-control one of them into letting us out," Vasto suggested. "I don't know what kind of a distance it works at?"
Sasara hugged her knees in tighter and sighed. "I tried that on the bridge. That is, I tried to make a connection between my mind and Kelkalyn's, trying to prove to him that I was telling the truth." She shook her head. "I couldn't. It was like trying to understand a foreign language without a translator model. The most I could get was the feeling that something was going on—like a sleet of white noise-but I couldn't say what. And without that fundamental understanding, there would be no way for me to compel one of them into anything. Is there no way we can melt through the walls? I mean they're obviously designed to be malleable. It can't be as hard as it seems."
Keva barked a short laugh. "It can be," she said bluntly. "They're using those stick-like controllers to create the change? My guess would be that the walls are made of some kind of magnetized particles and the controller throws a beam of EM and other fields. Looks like magic, is in fact fairly basic tech, but in here with nothing but the clothes we stand up in, we don't have either. Unless anyone here's carrying a laser or blaster in their pockets?"
"Can't you just smash your way out?" Yas asked, uncertain of Keva's upper limits when it came to strength. As time went on, he found himself more and more uneasy in his mind about how he had handled the situation on the bridge, and although the reprimands he deserved had been shelved for now, he felt it was now vital to be as helpful as he could.
"Punching my way through a metal wall? Kind of never occurred to me," Keva raised her eyebrows, but unfolded her augmented form and looked carefully around. "Where was the door again?"
Yas reached up. "About a foot above where I'm pointing."
"Okay," Keva clumped over to settle her weight widely on her braced feet. She sank a little into her stance, clenched her fist. The rods and pistons that encased it would surely protect it too, but the gnarled pink scars where they entered the skin still made him hurt for her.
She drew back her arm, breathed in, and when she breathed out moved like a jackhammer, driving her fist into the wall at a hundred miles an hour. The impact was like hitting the inside of a bell. A gong-like bellow rang out, its harmonies reverberating through the small chamber, reflecting through the walls, mixing and mingling with its echoes into a maddening aural scream before it slowly diminished into something that didn't feel like it was going to burst their eardrums.
"Ow," Keva complained, grabbing her fist with the other hand and cradling it to her chest. "I think I've bust a tendon-rod. That fucker isn't going anywhere."
The wall itself was completely unmarked, not even a scratch.
"We are so useless," Avril Yueh complained as Keva returned to her spot beside her. "I'm a botanist. If I had a lab I could probably breed a new species of mold that would digest its way out through the walls. But I don't have a lab. It's probably a good thing that we never found anything more complex than bacteria before, given how well we're doing with Oses and alfr."
"Maybe Freya will help," Yas said, hating himself that that had now become a hope. "She said that was the whole point of recruiting us—to defend humanity from these creatures. Maybe she's actually out there with her weird horse-bikes, fighting these guys off for us."
Zardari laughed suddenly, making everyone turn towards them with incredulity. "What?" they said, noticing the stares. "Oh. I was just thinking; it's all a little odd, isn't it? All these alien races we've never heard of before—except that we have, in fairy tales. And their tech still looks like magic to us, even though we have our own tech now. It's... I keep wanting to pinch myself and telling myself it can't possibly be real."
"Their tech formed humanity's ideas of what magic should look like," ambassador Sasara smiled back. "It's well known that oral traditions preserve much better records than might be expected. I'm personally impressed by how accurately Keva's ancestors reported what they were seeing. And I wonder now if there are Oses from all traditions. I would be interested to meet Moreyba, goddess of Women." She uncurled a little form her crouch. "Do you think they have their own galaxy? A whole civilization of the gods of the ancient peoples? If they weren't all such dicks, I might like to see that."
The rising mood caught Yas unexpectedly, making him snort with amusement too. "They really are dicks, aren't they?" He rolled his eyes. "Or at least, Freya was. I'm so glad you guys are back to yourselves. I didn't like the brainwashed versions."
Harcourt rubbed his hand through his hair, grimacing as it came away tacky with drying blood. The dent around his skull looked like it had filled out, and the raw edges of the wound were even now healing back together. "Looking back, I didn’t like them much either."
"Freya said my sister Dezba was on board the chariot too," Yas said, trying to be reassuring, not to bring the mood back down. "Maybe she's out there now, fighting for us."
Dezba would look good on one of those golden horses. Grandpa had taught her to shoot a bow while riding and to throw a spear with wicked accuracy. If she didn't get a feather cloak and a special Valkyrie weapon there was no justice in the world.
But the thought reminded him that while he talked in here, the spaceship could even now be bombarding what was left of his family. Dezba could be flying into the beam to try to block it with her body and keep their parents safe.
"So what can we do?" Harcourt asked again. "If we could get out of this cell, what are we planning to do to help?"
"I don't think there is anything," Keva said, sliding down the wall. "We gave it our best shot trying to blow the Raggy up, and they reversed time to fight us off. We're hopelessly outclassed, guys and that's all there is to it."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The excellence of alien slugs
Yas raised his hands to the band of bruised flesh around his forehead, pressing in. The ache flourished all over his head, but when it passed a heavier ache replaced it. So was this it then? All those people at the academy who had been convinced he would amount to nothing - they were right? Like all of the NXA's children he'd been brought up on stories of heroes. People who dug deep and strove harder and changed the world as a result. He'd always had an unquestioned assumption that his own path would be a heroic one. Perhaps, if the academy couldn't acknowledge his worth, he was destined to great things elsewhere. A chance would come for him to prove he was immortal and glorious. A chance would come for him to make a difference.
Now, fighting not to slip down the curved floor of an uncomfortable jail cell while—for all he knew—his world was having to fight for its survival outside, it came home to him that he might not be a hero. He might be one of the extras in the stories the universe was telling of itself. He could just disappear, starved or suffocated in here, and his life would have made no difference to anything.
He was, in fact, unimportant.
Perhaps it shouldn't have been such a wrenching shock to confront that realization. Perhaps he'd been arrogant all along to think that he, a perfectly average sort of student from
an average sort of background, was somehow destined to change the fate of the galaxy. But if that had been arrogant then why had they fed him all those stories in which an ordinary youth just like him was revealed to be a chosen savior, a long-lost prince or the son of a god?
Why had they fed them to everyone, knowing that most people would grow up to be farmers and artists, workers in coffee shops, spaceship habitation cleaners, ice-haulers, cooks, welders, makers of socks?
He hissed out a deep breath, this forced sense of grievance for the storytellers of the world all that he had to protect himself from despair. That was it, was it? They were just going to sit here and hope someone else came to the rescue instead?
"That's not acceptable." Captain Harcrow clambered stiffly to his feet. He had taken the bandage from his head and used it to tie his broken arm across his body so it wouldn't be jostled as he moved. Yas watched him with a stirring of surprise. The man had been wasted when Yas joined his crew, and the impression of someone who'd let go so profoundly he was never coming back had stuck with Yas ever since. A week on the chariot, watching him go through the DTs and sit back in happy relief, glad to pass all authority and responsibility over to Freya had not shifted Yas's impression that he was indolent, soft, slow and lazy.
But right now, battered and injured, blood drying in his hair, he seemed to have regained some of the backbone that must have lead to him being given the once prestigious command of the Raggy. Back then he'd been picked to be the first human any alien race they might encounter ever met, and from the gleam in his eye, Yas could see it suddenly.
"Giving up is not acceptable," Harcrow repeated. "I know, over the years, all of us have had some of the shine rubbed off. We've spent so long cataloging dust clouds or spending week after week accelerating through nothing with no contact from outside and nothing to do with ourselves but slowly shut down. I don't think we should be ashamed that we've got to this point, but we damn well don't get to stay here."
He lifted his good hand to toy with the NXA emblem on his dog-tags. Two interlocked circles were incised there, one of sapphire to represent the cultures born from Earth, one of color changing titanium to represent the Ocuilin, side by side and interlinked. Yas had never really felt patriotic about the NXA—it was too big, too diverse, for him to treasure as his own possession. But it was also what both races had chosen. Without coercion and unguided, they had overcome some of their mutual distrust and created a society in which everyone got to be what they truly were. Everyone's right to existence and independence was respected, and everyone cooperated freely because they wanted to.
The thought of Kelkalyn razing Nahasdzáán hurt Yas personally, but the thought of him going on and razing Mars, Earth, the Polaris worlds? That was a duller but no less real horror. And he would oppose it if he could. If there was a chance of getting out here and opposing that, Yas would.
"Likewise," Harcrow continued, looking at the wall as though he was speaking directly to an onlooker behind it. Yas realized with an uncanny twist of the bowel that the captain was addressing his viewers. Somewhere at High Command an observer would be manning this feed. From the moment of contact with Freya's ship Earth would have had teams analyzing everything Harcrow was seeing. Newscasts would have woken up, be sending out snippets of the feed with commentary. Subscribers would have rocketed.
Yas straightened his back, remembering that it wasn't just the crew in here with him. Millions of people were watching what he did. No wonder the captain had turned to drink the first time.
"Likewise all the people of the Alliance. We've been at peace, mostly, for hundreds of years now. I don't think there's any shame in the fact that we let our naval forces decay. We didn't need them then. We've got to face the truth that we've been caught unprepared. But we've been running this civilization for centuries. We've passed through hard times before and figured out how to live and thrive and expand, together. I know we're going to come back from this, because the human race does not lie down and die without a fight, and the Ocuilin race has never found a challenge it could not engulf, digest and learn from. We feel like we weren't ready. but we've got this. You'll see."
Yas found himself on his feet, moved. He reached out to touch the captain on his good elbow, bracing himself for when the full force of that camera-modified gaze fell on his face. This might be the only chance he had to say it.
"Mom, Dad. I'm okay, they tell me Dezba's okay too. I'm coming to help. Please be safe until I get there. I love you."
Harcrow nodded, with a small smile lightening the weight on his craggy face. When Yas had finished, his throat closing up with tears he didn't want to shed in front of the universe, Harcrow turned to Lieutenant Vasto. "Lieutenant? You got anyone you want to give a message to?"
It rather undercut the captain's message of hope, Yas thought, turning away so he didn't have to watch the painful farewells of the rest of the team, letting them dictate what were obviously last words. But he was very grateful for it regardless. He hadn't said 'I love you,' enough to his parents over the years. At least this way they'd know.
He frowned at the smooth wall of the cell. Like everything else in the spaceship, it was black, but hadn't it been more polished than that only a moment ago? The rest of the metal around them was smooth enough to show a faint reflection in the light of the luminous strip Keva had attached to her spine, but this hand-sized patch about the level of the corridor floor outside looked rough, friable.
He touched it and it flaked into dust around his fingers, which sank into the wall. It was as if he'd buried his hand in ash, fluffy, dry and cold to the touch. But then something moist wriggled in it, and he felt a sensation as though a severed tongue had crawled onto his palm.
"Ew!" he exclaimed, pulling his hand back and interrupting Zardari's message to their brother.
The tongue came with him into the room, trailing something that clicked and skittered on the polished floor. Revulsion forced him backward and further into the single patch of light, bumping into Yueh as he went.
"What is it?" Yueh asked as the crew straightened up and gathered round to look.
In the poor lighting, it seemed at first to be a naked rat with a very straight tail. Then it flexed again, elongating. He felt a rasping sensation as tiny blunt teeth scraped across his palm. Its tail uncurled and it dropped what it carried straight into Yueh's hand.
It was one of Desultory's cleaning creatures—known to the humans as remoras—and it was carrying an elvish command wand.
"That guy needs a medal," Harcrow said, picking the wand from the creature's tentacle-like grasp. "Him and the doctor between them. Proof positive of why we're stronger together than apart." He shook the wand by his ear as though it was a present and he could guess what it was by the sound of what was inside. "Anyone know how this works?"
"May I try it?" Yas asked, stretching out a hand. It was dropped back into his palm, which he took for permission, and he settled the remora back on the ground before he grasped it. The controls had to be mental, right? He grasped it firmly by one end, pointed the other at the wall and thought "Open," as hard as he could.
Nothing at all happened.
"Maybe the other end?" Keva suggested. "Are there any knobs? Designs? Is there, like, a groove or something you could dig a fingernail into. Here, let me have a go."
Yas turned the wand around and pointed the other end at the wall, hoping that the business end wasn't going to take a huge chunk out of his stomach if he got it to work. This time he ignored the word 'open' and concentrated on picturing the cell wall turning into the dry ash he had stuck his hand into. A rectangle of wall just ahead of him was going to change color, get really brittle, and when he walked forward it was going to puff out into the air around him and allow him to walk straight through.
Still nothing happened.
"Sundeen, let the ambassador try. She's our psionics expert."
Sasara took it from his hand with a nervous expression.
"It can't be
that hard," Yas reassured her. "After all, the remora managed it, and they're only semi-sentient."
"You didn't," she pointed out, but it seemed like an affectionate dig, as though their earlier argument had put them within bantering distance. Yas thought again that without making any real effort in that direction he was beginning to become very fond of these people.
"Yeah, well. The jury's still out on my level of sentience too."
"Maybe if I replicate the way Kelkalyn's mind felt to me before I give the command?" Sasara turned the wand end over end, examining it closely. There were no buttons, switches or any other visible controls. "Okay. Stand back."
She drew herself up and her expression morphed into something Yas had seen on Kelkalyn's face, a sort of smug amusement as of someone trying very hard to look superior. It seemed even more artificial when she wore it because she had the right to look smugly amused whenever she wanted and never did. Perhaps it was something to do with getting into the right mindset. When she flung out her arm to aim at the wall, she moved more like Kelkalyn than herself, with a kind of languid grace like smoke twisting through a still room.
A pearly white beam emerged from the tip of the wand and struck the wall, splashing like water. Where it touched, the fabric of the cell began to vaporize, steaming into the cell and outward through the hole into the corridor outside.
When the hole was big enough for even Keva to climb through, Sasara lowered the wand and wiped sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her robe. "That was... Useful," she said.
"You're telling me," Harcrow agreed. "D'you think if we get back to the bone-pile you can open a hole in the hull big enough for the Raggy to fly through?"
"I'm telling you," Keva interrupted, "the drive core is suspect. It needs a proper going over by sub-atomic engineers which we can't get here—"
"Okay," Harcrow interrupted. He gestured for Vasto to clamber out of the cell first. "Then we go to the hangar and steal one of the dark-alf's ships. Sasara, you uh... are you up to that?"