“Lead Templar Satran,” he said as their hands touched. “Well met.”
“Well met, Rax.” At least her voice didn’t reflect her disquiet, and fortunately, he couldn’t sense it. “This is…unexpected.”
“It turns out that being a spokesperson isn’t a job you get to quit,” he said wryly.
Khasar’s shock was written all over his face when Rax turned to him. He had never seen a walking, talking Voloth in person until this moment, and Lanaril suspected their host was quite enjoying the moment he had engineered. Certainly this would be all over the news tomorrow.
When greetings had been exchanged and Rax was seated, the host wasted no time getting to the big question.
“As you may have heard before coming on, there is some debate as to whether your compatriots are suffering even though they’re sedated. Rax, what is your opinion?”
“I believe they’re suffering,” Rax said. “Look, we’re all soldiers. We always knew we could end up dead or disabled. But this…” He hesitated. “I saw some of them, you know. That day. We were all being brought to the same place before getting sorted out, and I saw people I knew, but they weren’t who I knew anymore. None of them recognized us. They didn’t even know where they were. They were just…in torment.”
“Which is why we sedated them,” Khasar said. “They’re no longer aware of the memories. They just sleep.”
Rax met his eyes. “Ever had nightmares?”
Khasar was visibly taken aback. “I do not think this is the same thing. Their level of sleep is too deep—”
“Dokshin,” Rax said, and Lanaril nearly cracked a highly inappropriate smile. “If their level of sleep is as deep as you say, they wouldn’t be putting out such horrible emotions that your healers can’t handle it. They would just be…blank. Wouldn’t they?”
“Yes, they would,” Lanaril said. “That was what we believed would happen. But we’ve never dealt with this precise medical situation before, and the actual results did not match the healers’ expectations.”
The host cut in. “If your compatriots are indeed in torment, what do you think they would want for themselves? If they were here to speak, what would they say?”
“They’d say ‘let us go.’” Rax spoke without hesitation. “They’d say ‘put us out of this misery.’ You sedated them as an act of mercy, but that was before you knew it wasn’t. Now that you know, you can’t just keep them there. Or at least, we don’t think you should.”
“We?” the host repeated. “Are you speaking in your official role?”
Rax nodded. “We voted. The majority of us believe that your mercy, as well-intentioned as it was, is really torture.”
“What would your compatriots say if there was a chance they could recover?” Khasar asked.
Rax went still. “Is there? Nobody mentioned that.”
“Because it’s highly unlikely,” Lanaril began, but Khasar spoke over her.
“Our medicine is more advanced than yours. And now we have a treaty with the Protectorate, which means we have access to any advances they make. Who knows what will happen one, two, three cycles from now? Fahla gives us life, and only Fahla can decide when that life is over. She has decided that your compatriots have not yet finished their journeys. How would you feel if we murdered them all now, and two cycles from now we learn how we could have saved them?”
“But is that a real possibility?” Rax asked. His tentative hope was so bright and clear that Lanaril winced.
“Yes,” said Khasar.
“No,” said Lanaril at the same time.
Rax looked back and forth between them. “Which of you are we supposed to believe?”
“It is an extremely remote possibility—”
“But it is a possibility!” Khasar interrupted. “Who are we to play the role of the Goddess when we do not have her knowledge?”
This was always the sticking point. Lanaril had lost count of the number of times a templar discussion on the topic ended right here, because there was no definitive answer and each camp was firmly entrenched.
When she received the invitation to take part in this broadcast, she had thought long and hard about how she could change that dynamic and had come up with something she thought might be powerful enough. But she hadn’t known she would be doing it in front of Rax.
She reached into the satchel sitting on the floor by her feet and took out a large, overripe panfruit. “Rax, I apologize in advance for what you’re about to see. But you have asked the same question many, many Alseans have asked. You want to know if it’s a real possibility that your fellow soldiers might be healed. It is not. Those who say it is are speaking in terms of faith, not in terms of medical science.”
“Faith is all we—”
“If I might finish,” Lanaril said firmly.
Khasar subsided, a suspicious look on his face as he glanced from her to the panfruit.
“Thank you.” She set the panfruit in the middle of the table. “The medical facts are these: The Voloth have had their entire neural capacity burned out. They are no longer capable of coherent thought. They cannot function at even the most basic level, and they are irretrievably broken. Everything that made them who they were is gone. Forever.”
She reached into the satchel again, stood up, and smashed a heavy mallet onto the panfruit.
It exploded, splattering bright red pulp and seeds in all directions. Half the table was covered, and a few seeds stuck to her jacket. In her peripheral vision she saw two of the vidcams zoom directly overhead to get a top-down image of the red, glistening mess.
“That is what has happened to the Voloth,” she said. “Now tell me, Khasar: Do you believe that in one, two, or three cycles, we will be able to put that panfruit back the way it was?”
CHAPTER 23
Mercy
Talinn opened the sealed package and looked inside at the five identical skinsprays. The four other healers on his team crowded around.
“I expected them to look different,” said one.
“Me too,” Talinn said. “Like…solid black, maybe.”
“Or red.”
After several pipticks of uncomfortable silence, Talinn reached in and selected one at random. “Come on, choose. It’s time.”
One by one, each of them chose a skinspray.
“I’m required to explain the process once more before we begin,” Talinn said. “One of these holds the fatal dose. The others are biologically neutral. Each of us will inject the patient, with no more than ten pipticks between injections. The sedative won’t take effect for three to four ticks, so there’s no way of knowing which of us gave the fatal dose. We have sixty-three patients but only three injection teams. That means each of us will be giving twenty-one injections.”
“Yes, I noticed how many declined,” one healer said bitterly. “We were only supposed to be injecting a maximum of ten.”
“I know. We expected more volunteers. But I don’t blame the conscientious objectors, and I hope you won’t either. This is a very difficult duty.”
They murmured their fervent agreement.
“The hope was that we could reasonably say you might not give a fatal dose. Statistically, there is still a chance, but…it’s not a good one. This is your final opportunity to withdraw. If you don’t believe you can live with this, tell me now.”
He looked each of them in the eye. All four stood straight and silent, skinsprays in their hands.
“All right. Then I just want to say…” He hesitated, then continued, “I’m proud to be part of this team. We’re doing the right thing. Some people won’t see it that way, but none of those people have felt what we’ve felt.”
“Words for Fahla,” muttered one.
“Let’s just get started,” another said. “I’ve been wanting this and dreading it for what feels like five cycles already. I
need it to be over.”
Talinn turned and led his team out into the corridor. As they neared the barracks, the horror reached out for him, just as it had every day.
He had never thought much about his mid empath rating before this job. He was on the high end of the midrange and that was fine; he didn’t pine for more. What he had was what Fahla gave him.
But he didn’t think Fahla meant for them to deal with what lay behind those doors. If she had, she would have made them all high empaths, with blocks strong enough to wall off their minds completely.
The horror grew blacker and thicker, and when he opened the door, his stomach rebelled at the stench of fear. In ten moons he had never gotten used to it. By his third moon here he was getting sick even before leaving his house for work, the mere thought of walking into that room enough to make him nauseous. That he had survived for seven more moons of it was something of a miracle. Today’s nausea had been the worst of all, and the thought that this would be his last day was all that kept him going.
Curtained cubicles stretched the length of the barracks, housing beds on both sides of the central aisle. The first cubicle was open, and a healer stood at the head of the bed. She looked pale when they came through the door.
“Right on time,” she said in a misplaced attempt to sound cheerful.
Talinn had no patience for that. “Do you have the monitor set?”
“Yes. The patient is ready.”
He looked down at the Voloth, whose smooth, slack facial features belied the activity of his subconscious. Like all of the insane Voloth, this man’s mind had been shattered by a blast of pure terror, and terror was all that remained. It leaked out even under sedation, because as long as there was any brain activity at all, there was terror.
The only cure was in his hand. Without any fanfare, he lifted his skinspray, rested it against the patient’s wrist, and pressed the button. The medication hissed into the Voloth’s bloodstream.
He stepped back and motioned his team forward. One took his place while another went to the opposite side of the bed and injected the Voloth’s other wrist. Bare pipticks later, the last two healers had injected their skinsprays. All six of them stood back and watched the status displays.
They wouldn’t do this for each of the Voloth. There wasn’t time to stand and watch every one of them die, not when they had so many to get through. Or rather, there was time, but none of them could tolerate it. It was one thing to deliver what might be the fatal dose, and something else to watch it take effect twenty-one times.
But this first one—this they had to see through to the end.
The displays didn’t change, their blue and red graphs showing normal readouts for what seemed like half a hantick. When the heartbeat finally dropped by a single digit, his own heart nearly stopped. He glanced at the other readouts, seeing similar minuscule drops in all of them.
It was very slow at first, hardly even noticeable and certainly not obvious without the readouts. But after the agonizingly gradual start, the overdose seemed to slam into the patient’s systems. The heartbeat dropped so rapidly that the numbers were scrolling, and the vertical graphs looked as if someone had unplugged them, draining all the color out.
Less than two ticks later, all readouts had zeroed. Their patient was dead.
Talinn looked at the Voloth’s face again. It appeared exactly the same as before. But the horror was gone. It still filled the air all around them, accompanied by that awful stench, but the leakage from this Voloth had ended at last.
He frowned when the Voloth’s face shifted, not understanding how it could be moving after death. Then he realized that it was his own vision creating the illusion. As the tears dropped down his cheeks, he dashed them away with his free hand and glanced at his team to see if they had noticed.
Every one of them was weeping.
And they had twenty more to go.
CHAPTER 24
The Voloth solution
Upon hearing that the full Council had voted in favor of euthanasia, Lanaril poured herself a celebratory glass of spirits and lifted it in the direction of the State House. Its main dome loomed over the trees, and she focused on its top floor as she called upon Fahla to bless the Lancer and keep her in office for a very long time.
In the past, there had been many a time when she had scowled at that view and wished she could visit a few old-fashioned plagues on its inhabitant. Lancer Tordax had been an arrogant ass and an embarrassment to the scholar caste. When his seat was won by the relatively young warrior she had voted against, she was sure they were in for more of the same.
But Lancer Tal had surprised her. While Lanaril didn’t agree with all of her decisions, she supported more of them than she would have expected. As the cycles passed, she even found herself supporting some she had initially opposed, once the long-term consequences manifested themselves. She came to realize that their new Lancer played a long game, foregoing the quick, easy positions in favor of the harder, less popular ones that looked toward the future.
And then one day the Lancer appeared in her study, looking for assurances while she made one of the hardest decisions of all. From there they had begun a friendship, which Lanaril had come close to exploding in one ill-advised moment.
She should have known that Andira would play the long game in this as well. The debate had been intense, but with the Prime Scholar spearheading the yes vote, supported by the Lancer and the Lead Templars of Blacksun and Redmoon, opinions had begun to shift. Lanaril’s visceral demonstration on the broadcast debate had been replayed over and over again, along with the now-famous quote from Rax Sestak: They’d say “let us go.” They’d say “put us out of this misery.”
The Council vote was decisive, with a two-thirds majority voting yes.
When Andira made the official announcement, she had Rax at her side. He thanked the Council and the people of Alsea for showing true mercy.
Three days later, the shattered Voloth were finally being released from their suffering. Every news channel had wall-to-wall coverage of the event, most with a readout on the screen counting the number of Voloth reported dead. Lanaril spent the morning and afternoon in her temple, helping those who sought guidance or reassurance on this terrible day and praying when she had a moment to herself. Now and again she would slip into her study for a breather and to check the ongoing count.
It was almost evenmeal when the readout reached its final count of two hundred and forty-four.
Lanaril turned off her vidcom and called her aide. “It’s time,” she told him.
She was pouring her first drink when the great bell of her temple rang out a single, sonorous note. One tick later, it tolled again.
It would take nearly two and a half hanticks for the bell to toll once for every Voloth death. She had consoled and prayed all she was going to; now she just wanted to be alone in her study. Perhaps she could drink enough to forget the part she had played in this event. Releasing the Voloth was the right thing to do; she had never questioned that once her decision was made. But it was done and there was no going back. She had helped—no, she had actively strategized and fought—to kill two hundred and forty-four living beings.
The knock on her door startled her as she was picking up her glass, and she swore softly when a few drops spilled. “Just a moment,” she called, wiping up the liquid.
A second knock sounded before she could reach the door, and she opened it impatiently. “What is your—oh.”
Andira held up a bottle. “Have you started drinking yet?”
“Only just.” She stepped aside and watched her walk in, tension in every line of her body.
“Oh, no. Not that,” Andira said, setting her bottle next to Lanaril’s. “That’s much too light. We’d have to drink at least a bottle each to stop feeling. I’ve brought something much more efficient.”
Indeed she had. “I don�
�t normally drink grain spirits.”
“This is not a normal day.” Andira fetched new glasses from the sideboard, uncapped the bottle, and poured their drinks. Handing one to Lanaril, she held up the other in a salute and then tipped its entire contents down her throat.
Lanaril watched in amazement. “I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can. Go on, the first is the hardest. It will get easier after that.”
She had never seen her friend in a mood like this. Hesitantly, she lifted the glass and took a sniff. “Great Mother! Did you get this from the small-engine repair shop? I think they use it as a degreaser.”
Andira chuckled, the tension in her body easing slightly. “That probably would have been quite a bit cheaper. Come on, Lanaril. I brought you the expensive stuff. The least you can do is try it.”
Taking a breath, Lanaril drank off half the contents of the glass, which was as much as she could force down before her lips closed of their own accord. She swallowed hard and gasped for air. “Holy shekking—”
“Ah, it seems to be working.”
“Whew! I can feel it all the way down to my stomach.” Lanaril licked her lips and examined her glass. “And now it’s up in my nose. This is potent.”
“That’s the point.” Andira was already topping off the glass. She refilled her own, set the bottle on the side table, and flopped into the armchair next to it.
Lanaril took the other chair. “Are you all right?”
“Are you? We just killed two hundred and forty-four Voloth in their beds. Your bell is tolling for them right now. Should we be all right?”
Lanaril sipped her drink, which didn’t taste quite so harsh now. “I thought it might be easier for you,” she said. “You never gave any indication that you had a moral issue with this.”
“You mean you thought it might be easier for me because I’m a warrior.”
Lanaril reached for her hand. The emotions that came through their touch were stronger than she would have guessed, and she sucked in a breath. “I’m sorry. I should know you well enough by now to know better.”
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