Ardulum

by J. S. Fields

  Nicholas jerked quickly away, and the Ardulan processed the sounds of stifled retching. Yorden’s expression hardened as his face paled. He didn’t speak. Instead, Yorden took one of the Neek’s limp hands and remained silent, staring down at the body. After nearly a minute, he replaced the cloth over the Neek’s face and scooped the body up into his arms.

  “Come on, Nicholas,” he called out dully as he moved towards the doorway. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “These things don’t happen in the Systems,” Nicholas said softly to himself. “I thought you both had a plan. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Yorden paused and turned around, eyes blank. “Sometimes plans don’t work,” he said simply, his voice strained. “Right now we have to leave. With Neek…with our Neek dead, we have to find Emn. It’s what she would want, what we discussed. Right now, our best course of action is to head back to the ship. We can regroup and figure out our plan from there.”

  Nicholas nodded and fell in step behind Yorden. The woman watched them pass through the doorway and realized she wanted. She wanted them to stay.

  As the men moved just outside her vision, Nicholas turned back and addressed her again. “You didn’t see her, did you? A little girl in a yellow dress, two triangle outlines under her eyes?”

  She turned to look right at the smaller man. The girl in the yellow dress—that face she did remember. Even the fog in her mind couldn’t obfuscate that image. She didn’t know where the girl was, and she certainly couldn’t communicate anything to the two men. Instead, she slowly shook her head.

  “Thanks anyway,” Nicholas said, smiling halfheartedly. He turned back and quickened his pace to catch up to Yorden, who was halfway down the hallway despite his struggle to balance the Neek’s limp form in his arms.

  The Ardulan woman watched as the two men carried the Neek out of the medical bay. She thought again about the girl. The feeling of want filled her. She wanted to see the girl, to help her. The two men—they also wanted to help the girl. Perhaps they would even find the girl.

  The Ardulan noted that she could no longer see Yorden and Nicholas. She couldn’t move without permission. The want persisted, even as the fog fought to block her perceptions and erase the girl’s face from her mind. The woman realized that she could make a decision. She could decide to follow the men, to help them as she’d been trained. Perhaps they would be pleased. Perhaps they would let her see the girl when she was found.

  The decision was quick. The woman struggled to hold onto the thin thread of her desire as she moved from the table to the doorway and continued to watch the men as they proceeded down the hallway. She took a step out of the door, intending to catch up, when something caught her eye. Tiny strands began to spark from the wood walls in time with Yorden’s footfalls. At first they were sporadic and few, but they quickly increased in both frequency and magnitude. The woman watched, perplexed, as the sparking strands continued to generate and build, remaining lit and gathering with the others to form a thin tendril that wove against the bulkhead, following the two men.

  Neek! she heard inside her head. It was a call from the girl in the yellow dress. A call for the dead woman. Neek, I don’t know what to do!

  The Ardulan stepped from the doorway and broke into a run, years of caution and training abandoned due to an impulse she couldn’t explain. She didn’t care about her orders, or that she was directly defying something she had been told to do. She cared about the girl. She cared about that strand and the voice behind it.

  Her footfalls were loud on the floor as she ran. The men turned around at the sound, and Yorden stumbled, the Neek’s body threatening to slip from his grasp.

  “Quiet!” he hissed as the woman drew up towards them. “We didn’t plan a loud rescue, just a well-timed, stealthy one. Stop drawing attention to our location.”

  Breathing hard from the exertion, the woman pointed at the arcing strand, still lazily weaving across the wall.

  “What’s she pointing at?” Nicholas asked in confusion.

  “Damned if I know,” Yorden responded impatiently. “Look, if you want to come, fine. I don’t think the Neek government can get any more upset with us than they already are. But we have to move. Security will make a pass in another forty-five seconds, and we have to be back in the hangar bay before then.”

  The woman nodded but continued to stare at the strand, transfixed.

  “Right then,” Yorden grumbled as he turned back and broke into a light jog. “Let’s get moving.”

  The woman matched their pace, and the strand followed along, always parallel with Yorden and growing steadily in size. The Ardulan’s pulse raced. The girl’s voice still rang in her head. Neek! Neek, where are you? The hair on the woman’s arm rose. She blinked. Something exciting was coming. Something new. Something old. Something powerful.

  Removing her gaze from the strand, the woman continued to trail the men as they rounded the final corner into the hangar bay. There, they encountered their first heaven guards, and Yorden halted them abruptly.

  “Shit,” the captain murmured under his breath. “They weren’t supposed to be off lunch yet.”

  Nicholas placed his hand on the hilt of the containment rifle that the woman saw bulging in his pants pocket. “What do you want to do, Captain?” he asked in a hushed voice. “They haven’t noticed us yet. They’re too busy doing whatever over at that energy port.”

  Yorden didn’t have a chance to answer. Alarm klaxons began blaring throughout the hangar. The guards spotted the three standing awkwardly in the entryway.

  “The Terrans. They’ve got Emn with them!”

  The guards broke into a run and pulled out their weapons, aiming straight at Yorden. The Ardulan watched the men, curious as to what they would do.

  “To the ship!” Yorden bellowed. He sprinted to the far corner of the bay where a dilapidated ship was docked behind a skiff. Nicholas followed quickly behind.

  The Ardulan stood her ground, concentrating on the weapons. Weapons were easy. Weapons were simple. The beings she’d chosen to be her new masters were in danger. There was weaponry present. She could help.

  The woman sank deep inside her mind. She checked her small energy reserves and then refocused outwards. The crew shot at her new masters—one, two, three—four times in quick succession. The bullets flattened and fell short of their targets. She reached out and pulled at the disordered cellulose in the gun matrices, collapsing all the weapons into perfect balls.

  Surprised, the guards pulled back, the metal falling with loud pangs onto the floor. Pleased at how easily the threat had been neutralized, she looked around for the girl’s strand. The klaxon continued to blare loudly, the sound assaulting her ears as she searched.

  When her eyes settled back on Yorden, she noticed that the energy was a strand no longer. In the moments she had let her mind focus on the weapons, the strand had spread into a wave that, with a loud burst of static, crashed over the Neek’s body and stayed there. Pulsing, it slowly absorbed into the Neek’s skin. The woman tried to follow the wave as it entered the body, but her mind became fuzzy. She was not of Science. Bodies were too hard to focus upon.

  The klaxon silenced. The air stilled. She watched the guards split into two groups—the first running to the comm system and the second to the weapons storage locker. The woman heard Yorden utter a curse as strands hopped from Neek’s limp body onto the captain, causing him to stumble. As his arm hair began to singe, Yorden dropped the Neek unceremoniously to the floor.

  “Captain!” Nicholas called out.

  The woman noticed that the black cloth had fallen from the Neek’s legs when Yorden dropped her. Her bare legs glowed with a halo of white. They jerked back and forth and then stilled as the strand wrapped around her torso and head, causing each area to spasm.

  “What is going on?” Nicholas begged.

  “I don’t know,” Yorden replied, his eyes dark. “It was like getting a hand caught in an electric fence. Except instea
d of a hand, it was my whole body.”

  Nicholas looked around. “Any idea where it came from?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  The Ardulan woman could see strands hopping in and out of Neek’s skin, coursing along veins and massing near the giant hole in her face. Another Ardulan was healing her. That was strange, because she couldn’t feel another around her. The little girl should have been too far away to carry out such a task.

  “I can’t carry her like that,” Yorden said, his voice low. The captain glanced back at the Ardulan woman, and she returned the stare, awaiting an order.

  “If they come back with knives, Captain, I don’t think she can help us,” Nicholas said urgently. “I read parts of the old Neek texts while we were at the house. Those marks on her side indicate she’s an Aggression Talent, and knives, even though they’re weapons, are supposed to be part of the Science Talent. Aggression Talents work on weapons with moving parts. I think. That or they actually have to be considered weapons and not tools.”

  “Then run, Nicholas,” Yorden ordered, turning and pushing the youth towards the ship. “Run and fly the ship out of here. Take the Ardulan with you. No one else needs to die here today.”

  Nicholas stood his ground. “If you won’t leave Neek’s body, then I won’t either.”

  “You’re an idiot,” the captain responded gruffly.

  Unsure if Yorden had given her an order, the woman moved to stand next to him anyway.

  “Orders, Captain?” Nicholas breathed.

  “Don’t die,” Yorden snapped.

  The hangar door opened and twenty heavily armored heaven guards entered the room, all brandishing long knives. Their leader, a short woman with close-cropped, cinnamon hair, carried a Dulan knife. The Ardulan shuddered despite her conditioning as the hangar lights reflected off the dark material. The knife was something she knew, although she wished she didn’t.

  “Drop your weapons and step away from the Ardulan,” the short Neek commanded.

  Yorden merely snarled in response. Nicholas tensed and took a step forward, but he fell to the ground when one of Neek’s prone legs jolted and kicked the back of his calf.

  “You desecrate our dead,” the leader snarled. “You try to abduct our Ardulan. You will now be killed for your intolerable actions.”

  “So we have no reason to lay down our weapons,” Yorden quipped, his tone calm.

  “Emn,” the leader said gently, turning to the Ardulan. “Come away from them. You’re not in danger anymore. They can’t hurt you. Come back, and we will protect you from the off-worlders.”

  The Ardulan remained where she was. She’d made a choice, and it had stopped the funny feeling in her stomach. She would not move from the body and the strands that surrounded it. The strands belonged to the girl, and the girl was important. Focusing on the strands helped clear the fog, and the situation was plain. Her new masters were in terrible danger, as was she. They needed to escape.

  When the Ardulan didn’t respond, the leader motioned to her subordinates. “Those of you around Emn, sheath your blades. If the others resist, kill them. Don’t lay your hands on the Ardulan.”

  A tighter circle formed around Yorden and his group. The Ardulan ignored them, the whipping current around the body suddenly increasing in intensity and recapturing her full attention. She made another decision. Slowly and deliberately, so as to not provoke the Neek, she stepped over to the body and knelt onto the floor.

  “Don’t give them your gun, kid,” she heard Yorden instruct. “They’ll kill us one way or another. Better to go out fighting.”

  Nicholas harrumphed in assent. More armored Neek surrounded them, but their focus seemed to be only on the men.

  “Bind their hands,” she heard the short Neek command.

  The Ardulan looked up to see Yorden brandish his gun.

  “Do you want to lose your eye the same way the exile did?” the leader asked curtly. The captain nodded sideways at Nicholas, who drew his gun as well.

  “Fine. Do it your way,” the leader muttered. She gestured to the other Neek.

  “Time to shine,” Yorden said grimly. When the first Neek broke the circle and advanced on Yorden and Nicholas, the captain fired. The Ardulan grimaced at the loud sound, but the Neek were not deterred. They ran at Yorden and Nicholas, knives tucked close to their bodies.

  Nicholas fired, caging them in a Dulan Field. Another three went down, the puppuppup of Yorden’s deadlier riot rifle echoing in the hangar bay. By the second round of shots, the rest of the contingent had climbed over or around the bodies of their colleagues and were engaging Nicholas and Yorden directly, knives slicing through the air in their attempts to connect with soft flesh.

  The Ardulan woman wanted to help protect her masters but was unsure how. The Dulan fields and knives she could do nothing with, and only Yorden seemed to be using a gun. Instead, she reached under the blanket and touched the Neek’s skin. Jolts of energy snapped onto her fingertips. Without understanding why, she took both hands and laid them on Neek’s cold arm, ignoring the shooting pain that threatened to make her lose her grip.

  The connection was instantaneous. Strands pulsed through the Ardulan’s body, pushing away the fog and clearing her mind. She felt things rearranging, snapping into place. Sounds, smells, colors—everything deepened and intensified. She could feel the real Emn on the other end, afterimages of the child’s panic and confusion a steady undercurrent to the energy.

  There was something else there too…rather, there was someone else. Another consciousness swimming in the waves, trying to gain a foothold on…on her body. She watched in fascination as Emn’s energy directed the strands inside Neek, repairing the tissue, connecting the blood vessels, and pulling and pushing with such force that the woman was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of tasks. Somehow, through all of that, the dead Neek’s consciousness was tugged and guided and, finally, bound to the body by millions of shivering strands that raced in every direction.

  It was too much. The woman drew her hands away and opened her eyes. As she did, her senses flooded. There were the sounds of the fight. Smells of body odor, metal, wood, and burning. She understood the sensory information—she contained it; she reveled in it. A smile crossed her lips for the first time.

  The Ardulan remembered, then, why she was here, and the decisions she’d made. She looked down at the black sheet and saw Neek’s legs grow still and the glow fade. This didn’t seem right, so she tossed the blanket off Neek and ran her hands wildly over the body, hoping to find a lingering trace of energy.

  The leader crashed to the ground next to the Ardulan, her arm bleeding. The Ardulan looked up, wary, but the guard’s focus wasn’t on her or her open wound. Instead, the Neek stared at the glowing body, her own form trembling.

  Disinterested in the leader’s discomfort, the Ardulan returned her attention to the Terrans’ Neek. As the woman’s gaze scanned the body, she finally brought herself to look at the head. Emn had finished her task. The Neek’s face was whole. Her missing eye was back in its socket. The incidental burns from the impact area were gone as well. Her skin looked healthy. It even looked like she was breathing, and she watched the Neek’s chest rise and fall in a slow rhythm.

  The Ardulan turned back to the leader and watched the woman’s face contort. Slowly, the leader’s gaze turned to her, and she got to her knees in reverence.

  “Praise,” the guard murmured. “Praise to Ardulum. A miracle has occurred.”

  It took the Ardulan a moment to realize that the heaven guard was referring to her, thinking that she had somehow healed the broken body lying before her. It occurred to her then, for the first time, that the Neek did not treat her as the Risalians did. The Neek…the Neek revered her.

  The thought made her head swim. When she tried to sort out just what that might mean, she again found herself distracted by the gunfire, slashing metal, and yelling in several languages. There were too many swinging arms to make out what was really going
on, but it seemed like Nicholas and Yorden, or at least one of them, might still be still alive.

  Could she help? She’d made the decision to do so once; making the same decision again didn’t seem so difficult. With the fog gone, things seemed clear—crisper. Somehow everything in her world now seemed almost real.

  Communication, however, was a problem. All the other beings had words and sounds. She had only movements. Perhaps the movements would be enough. With at least one Neek so intent upon her, it seemed plausible that a simple gesture might be understood.

  She decided to try. The woman turned back to the leader and pointed to the fighting. Then she scowled and shook her head, miming disapproval.

  “Everybody stop!” the leader yelled. The confused Neek halted midmovement, allowing Yorden to finish another volley of shots. Around Captain Yorden and Nicholas lay a pile of bodies—some frozen; some dead. Both humans were bleeding badly, Yorden down the side of his sliced shirt and back of his right thigh, and Nicholas from a knife embedded solidly just under the left side of his rib cage.

  “Give up?” Yorden asked in a tired tone. Nicholas had squeezed his eyes shut and was holding his side. No one was paying either of the humans any attention. The heaven guards had dropped to their knees and were staring, first at the Ardulan, and then at the healed Neek.

  “It’s a miracle,” the leader repeated. “She healed the exile. Now she’s asked for the violence to stop.” Her jaw hung agape. Several other Neek began praying and two Neek in the very back of the hanger started a hymn.

  “To be healed by an Ardulan,” someone whispered.

  “To have the exile healed by an Ardulan,” someone else responded. “She heals even those who scorn her.”

  “Captain,” Nicholas whispered urgently. “Our Neek is…”

  “Ugh,” Neek groaned as she rolled over, her face a grimace of pain. The entire bay fell quiet. Nicholas’s gun fell from his hands and clattered onto the floor.