There was a squarish hole, lined with sharp curls of steel and jumbled wiring. A hole big enough for one of us to enter through — once the spar had been removed.
“Let’s pull the spar out,” Lackofa said quietly.
It was gruesome work. When we lifted the spear stuck and the alien corpse began to rise through the hole. Lackofa and one of the techs put their pods against the alien’s soft, yielding skull, and we pulled all at once. There was a sucking sound and the spear came away. The body fell in a heap on the deck of his ship.
Two of the techs flew the spar away for disposal. No one was going to suggest reattaching it. Not a killing weapon. No one looked at me. No one said anything, but no one looked at me, either.
“We need to see whether we can fly this thing,” Lackofa said. He licked his lips. He wasn’t volunteering. Neither was Jicklet.
It wasn’t hard to understand: An enclosed space was bad enough. An enclosed space occupied by a corpse was still worse. Dead bodies were not meant to be kept around. They fell away from their docks to burn up on the surface below. Anything else was hideous and perverted.
And yet I had a relationship with this dead alien. He was mine in some indefinable way.
“I’ll do it,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to,” Lackofa said kindly. But his eyes said different: If not you, gamer, then who?
“You’ll have to help hand me in and out,” I said. I looked pleadingly at Lackofa and Jicklet. “You’ll get me out?”
Jicklet put her hand on my arm. “If I have to slice the ship up like a fresh bat, we’ll get you out.”
I took a couple of deep breaths. No time to waste. Farsight would be anxiously waiting our report. He wanted — we all wanted — to get back to Ket.
“Look for weaponry,” Lackofa said.
I nodded. I’d look for weaponry. If I could fight down my urge to panic and lacerate my wings in an enclosure rage.
I landed on the ship. I folded my wings tightly. Do it in one quick drop, Toomin. All at once.
I stepped off, fell through the hole, and landed with one pod on blood-slicked floor and the other on a pair of the alien’s arms.
I fell over, prostrate on the deck, my face inches from the Capasin’s now-opaque eyes. The scream was in my throat before I could think.
I screamed, panic, all around me, closed in! No sky! No sky!
“Close your eyes!” Lackofa yelled. “Toomin, shut your eyes. Don’t look!”
His own fear-edged voice scared me more. But I closed my eyes. Squeezed them shut. And my wings stayed tight.
I breathed hard, then softer, forcing myself to be calm, calm.
Slowly open one eye, Toomin. No, look away from the Capasin. Up. Look up at the hole, look up at the open hole and beyond at the star field. A night sky. Not my night sky, but a sky just the same.
Sky. Okay, I can do this. I can.
I opened my other eyes. I climbed erect, shaky, but not panicky. But it took real effort to tear my longing gaze away from the safe square above me, to look away from the sky and the faces of my companions.
The cockpit of the ship was small by any standard. And it was made smaller still by the instrumentation that seemed at first to be a randomly assembled pile of black boxes with glowing green lights.
It reminded me of nothing so much as our own emergency backup systems. Primitive systems made of metals, using electrons rather than photons to carry data. And all designed to be manipulated by touch rather than memm.
It was crude. How could it be so crude? The larger version of this ship had murdered my home crystal in less than five minutes. How could this ship be so laughably backward? It was an insult, an outrage.
“You need to hurry, Toomin.”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes. I just … it’s not right. I mean, they’re … Why would they …”
“Toomin, this isn’t the time.”
“They killed everyone!”
“I know, Toomin. But we don’t have time right now. Don’t think about that. Focus. It’s … it’s a game, Toomin. It’s a game and you’re Ellimist. Analyze. Don’t feel, it’s just a game.”
Yes. That’s what it was. A sim, not real. There had been no dagger-sharp ship. No pale red beam. No tornado of flechettes. A game. A problem.
I shook myself, loosened my painfully tight-gripped wings. There were controls. Physical fly-by-wire controls. Some would run the ship. Some would be for simple maintenance and environmental functions. Then there would be the weapons.
What could that symbol mean? Was it ship’s attitude? Probably. At least to my own Ketran sensibilities. Yaw. Roll. Attitude. Air speed? And beside those … yes, yes, those had to be flight controls. Thrust. Reverse thrust. Microthrusters.
Okay, then those long things, those jointed sticks, those were the weapons controls. It would require skill to fly and fight the ship simultaneously. Could I at least fly it?
Not well. But yes. Maybe. Maybe as well as a flightless alien, anyway. What did a surface creature understand of flight after all?
“Ellimist?” Lackofa prodded gently but insistently.
I took a deep breath. My next words would seal my fate, perhaps all our fates. “You can report to Farsight I can bring this ship within our field. And fly her when we get home.”
“It has weapons?”
“Yes. I don’t know what they do. But yes.”
“They kill, that’s what they do,” Lackofa said grimly. “And it may be that’s what we need.”
I was not in touch. No memms. And no time for instructions beyond those passed on from Lackofa. He shuttled to dock, quickly explained what we’d learned to Farsight, then raced back to instruct me.
“We’re jumping back through Z-space. We think from this short distance we can hit reentry pretty accurately. The Wise One’s orders are that you and I take control of this alien vessel and carry out any defensive actions possible.”
“You and I? You mean … you understand we’d have to be sealed in.”
“Yes,” Lackofa said flatly. “Yes. Jicklet will seal us in.”
I felt sick at the thought. But not as sick as Lackofa. He was oozing mones. Fear. The smell of it triggered my own panic reflex and I had to struggle to maintain my shaky control.
The Illamans travel for years at a time locked in their rectangular spacecraft. But Illamans are surface dwellers, used to taking shelter in constructions. For a Ketran the very idea of being enclosed is horrible.
Jicklet grabbed Lackofa’s arm. “Can you do this? I’ll take your place. You’re a biologist, I’m a tech. It’s not a job for a biologist.”
Lackofa looked for one drawn-out moment like he might grab at the safety hammock she was offering. But he shook his head no, unable to speak, but signaling no, he would do this himself. He would endure what no Ketran could endure.
“Like you told me, Lackofa, close your eyes,” I said to him. “Close your eyes. I’ll help you down.”
He had nothing to say, no wisecrack or wry observation. He was beyond that. And now I found that helping him with his fear helped me with my own.
I lowered him down gently to stand beside me. He was as stiff as a length of conduit.
I kept talking to him, reassuring him as Jicklet and her fellows worked to seal us in. No sky. No sky at all. Just keep talking to Lackofa, I told myself, just keep talking, don’t want him to panic, no panic, no panic.
I realized my own eyes were squeezed shut. I opened them a slit and looked out through the window. What kind of sub-Ketran beast could tolerate this? Peering at the sky through a false transparency? Locked inside a steel box? The Capasins must be animals. No sentient could live like this.
Not fair, not accurate, of course; both the Illamans and the Generationals endured captivity and were sentient. But I wasn’t in the mood to be reasonable. I wasn’t in the mood to do anything but scream.
“Are you okay?” Lackofa asked me. He had pried
open one eye.
“No, are you?”
“No.”
“Come on. I’ll show you what I’ve figured out.”
“Do we have a name for this death crate?”
“Crate. That’s good enough,” I muttered. I considered which control stick would be easiest for Lackofa to manage. “Here. Put one hand here. This controls thrust. Forward is more, back is less, twist left I think means reverse thrust.”
He nodded. His quills were slowly draining their pink and the stench of terror mones was fading. He was scared but no longer near panic.
Through the window I saw the sky turn white. We had reentered Zero-space. In a few short minutes …
Lackofa looked away from the controls and down to the dead alien. “I was right. Probably Capasin,” he said. Then he actually touched the head, turned it to one side, peered at it thoughtfully, and drew out a small instrument pouch. He was a biologist — an exobiologist, for that matter. I guess touching dead aliens was easy for him. Probably even comforting.
All at once the white sky was black again, black and star-filled. I could not see Ket. Had the navigator failed? Did we even have a navigator aboard? I was ready to ask Lackofa, when we rotated and all at once my home world rose into view, huge, close. The familiar red rivers and gray-green morasses, the brown-scarred deserts and puffy, pale green clouds, all lovely beyond enduring. It was a stab to the heart.
My world had been assaulted. I let the rage flow freely. It drove out the fear, a little at least.
The MCQ3 swooped down and down, into the edge of atmosphere. The force field glowed red as we slowed to atmospheric speeds. We were returning to our old station, looking for the home we all knew was gone.
Nothing. The sky was empty. The sky that should have been filled with the Equatorial High Crystal and all the tens of thousands of beating wings and happy faces and … all of it gone, leaving a soul-hollowing emptiness in the sky.
The ship turned away, reluctantly it seemed to me, though of course a crystal, even the EmCee, has no life, no emotion.
We raced along at supersonic speeds toward an intercept with our sister, Equatorial High Crystal Two. We slowed in anticipation and found nothing but empty sky.
Another vector, another slow realization that where a thriving crystal should be was nothing but empty sky.
Around the planet. Station after station. Orbit after orbit. Race, then slow. Search an empty sky. Accept the unacceptable with mounting horror.
Twelve crystals gone. How many lives lost? Was anyone alive? Was anyone left alive anywhere?
We hit a cloud bank, a three-day bank where our recent dance partner, Polar Orbit High Crystal, should be. Maybe the cloud bank had hidden them, saved them.
We eased our way forward. I knew every eye was straining, searching. Surely if they knew of the alien attack the Polars would kill momentum and stay within the cloud.
We emerged into an oasis of sky. One of those wonderful clear holes that the bigger cloud banks sometimes develop. Polar Orbit High was there. It was moving as fast as it could, every wing beating, racing to cross the oasis and find shelter in the far towering cliff of clouds. But the airfoil was more a concept than a reality, and the Polars moved no faster than any crystal could.
The Capasin ship was two hundred yards above. Watching. Waiting.
“Why don’t they attack?” I demanded. “Why do they wait?”
“Some creatures enjoy the hunt,” Lackofa said with professional dispassion. “Some take pleasure from the kill.”
Just do your slaughter, I raged impotently. Was it funny to them? Were the filthy aliens laughing as they watched the frail-winged creatures trying to move their home away at a fuzzball’s pace?
Suddenly the Crate’s sensors came alive. Farsight had lowered the force field and the Crate’s sensors, liberated, were picking up data from the surrounding environment.
It was our signal. Our signal to … to do what, exactly?
I swallowed stale air and said, “Lackofa. Thrust.”
“What?”
“Thrust. Fifty percent.”
The result nearly crumpled us both. The Crate kicked forward. The dead alien rolled onto his belly. We blew away from the EmCee and shot toward Polar Orbit High Crystal.
My turn. I worked the controls with my two hands and very quickly discovered that my guesses about their function had been wrong. We arced downward at an airspeed just below supersonic.
“Pull up!”
“I know!” I yelled.
I twisted the stick and with a death shudder the Crate bottomed out, took the gees, and blew skyward again. I trimmed and we were aimed for the Capasin ship, still going way too fast.
No. I was thinking like a Ketran, not a Capasin. Engines not wings. A box not a body. More speed, not less.
“Increase to seventy-percent thrust.”
“Are you crazy?”
“DO IT!”
Faster! Up and up and was I right about the weapons controls? Was I going to annihilate my own ship or, worse yet, hit the poor, fleeing Polars?
I squeezed a finger around a protruding ring.
The beam drew a perfect line through the air and hit the Capasin ship. There was a small explosion on the steel surface twenty feet back from the dagger’s point.
I twisted and bellied the Crate out to zoom along the spine of the Capasin ship.
A shameful part of my mind thought, Now, this is a game!
It was a game. Like nothing I’d ever played. But it helped to think of it as a game. Don’t think of it as lives, actual lives. It’s only a game. When it’s all over Inidar and I will laugh and …
Only Inidar was dead, wasn’t he? And everyone … everyone.
I took my momentum and held it through a turn, making unchecked leeway that carried me a mile before I could engage thrust again. The leeway was a surprise. Not like winged flight.
I zoomed back, but the Capasin ship wasn’t going to give me another free move. It was turning to meet us. Its much more powerful beam would soon be trained on us.
And yet, in this game perhaps the edge went to the smaller target? No way to know. I was guessing. Intuiting. Large, slow ship with powerful beam versus small, more maneuverable ship with a stinger. Who wins that game?
I fired. Missed!
“Take your time, aim carefully,” I said.
“Do what?” Lackofa cried, hands clutching, blue-knuckled at the controls.
“Reverse thrust! Now!”
The alien body slammed into the back of my pods. But I kept my eyes on the window and saw the pale beam lance harmlessly by. I had made them miss!
Okay, then. That was the game. If my edge was maneuverability, I’d better maneuver.
The Capasins were surface dwellers, had to be. They flew their ships like surface dwellers, more in two dimensions than three.
“Up thrust. Twist it right and … yeah, like that!”
The Crate moved straight up, breaking free of the Capasin ship’s plane. I tilted the nose of the Crate down and fired. A hit!
An engine. I’d hit an engine. Sizzling sparks and burning gases blowtorched from the hole. The engine pod blew apart. The Capasin ship spun, wild, out of control.
“They’re disabled!” Lackofa cried triumphantly.
I fired again. Not thinking. Not intellectualizing the decision, just knowing. I fired and the beam missed.
“What are you doing? She’s disabled,” Lackofa said.
Careful aim this time. I fired and held the ring down. The Capasin ship blew apart, a thousand small fragments.
“Now she’s disabled,” I whispered.
I glanced and saw Lackofa’s horrified stare. I couldn’t share it. It wasn’t coldness on my part, I just knew the game and he didn’t. The Capasins could have fired again and killed us. They could have fired flechettes at the crystal.
“The only win is a kill,” I said. “That’s the game. It’s their game. They didn’t disable the home crystal, they annihilat
ed it. Their game, their rules.”
Lackofa made no answer. We returned to the MCQ3 and parked the Crate within a flutter of the main perch. We had to confer with Farsight. I suggested Lackofa go.
“No. No, Ellimist, you. If I get out of this box I’ll never get back in. I can rest here, keep my eyes closed. Or maybe look at this alien. You go. Besides, you’re the gamer.”
I didn’t argue. He was right. He could be of some use examining the Capasin. I found the hatch and the release. Sky! I moved with deliberate slowness to exit the death trap. If I allowed myself to feel panic then like Lackofa, I’d never come back.
Once outside I saw that the Polars had killed momentum and were nearly stopped. They were maintaining station and half a dozen of their people were racing toward the EmCee. I beat wing and reached the main perch minutes ahead of them. Farsight would want my report first before having to cope with the no-doubt-panicked Polars.
The Wise One was resting in a hammock. He looked a bit orange. Sick or just old? Either way it was disturbing to see our only leader being supported in a hammock with never a stir from his tired wings. He was surrounded by advisers, maybe a dozen, all looking scared or confused or sly.
An officious female Pink I’d never met cut me off. “Go away. Farsight is busy.”
“I am Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension —”
“There is no Azure Level. Not anymore,” she snapped. “Go away. Don’t you know what’s going on?”
“I’m the one who just blew up the Capasin ship,” I said, not in any mood to have some mid-level pull rank on me.
Her eyes narrowed. Her expression went from stony dismissal to clever anticipation. “You’re Toomin?”
Lackofa must have given them my chosen name. She grabbed me and nearly shoved me through the press of hovering advisers. All at once I was eyes-to-eyes with Farsight. I tried not to look at the hammock netting.
The Pink, whose name was Tatchilla, introduced me in quick, almost brutal terms. And she stayed close. I had the feeling I had just become her protégé. Even her property. Deep worms, were there really people who could think of ambition at a time like this?
Ellimist Chronicles Page 5