by Scott Warren
The human considered for a moment. "If I may, leave me a detachment of ten ships. Your vessels may not be able to detect and outmaneuver the Maeyar in Juna’s storms but the Howard Phillips can be your eyes and ears. I can get close enough to transmit ranging information and navigation adjustments."
The humans must be desperate for friends indeed if they were willing to brave the thunder of Juna. "You will be nearly blind. It will be like fighting underwater."
Jones just smiled, an expression involving the corners of his mouth exposing tiny white teeth and the reddish tissue that made up the insides of humans. The expression was meant to convey warmth, but it held nothing of the sort.
"Very well," said Raksava, "You will have your spacecraft. Destroy Arda on the surface or force her out of hiding and destroy her in space."
"It looks like the majority of the fleet is moving out, they’re headed to Pedres. We counted eight warships heading down on a shallow approach to the northern hemisphere, but Raksava’s transmission promised ten so be on the lookout. That was some stunt you pulled with the dive. It will take them a while to follow you."
Aesop listened as the scratchy reply came over the communication array. Sothcide had to climb dangerously clear of the storms to make their broadcasts. He risked detection, but Aesop had access to the Gavisari communication network, and hopefully soon limited sensor operation as well depending on how he routed power.
"Heavy losses in the planetary dive, two ships never checked in."
Sothcide didn’t recognize the voice making the report. Down four ships in total then. That put them at or below force parity with the detachment Jones was leading, but he’d have to find them first. Down there the murky black of electrical storm clouds would offer no visibility and practically blind any advanced sensors outside a few thousand kilometers. Jones wouldn’t be as hampered as the Gavisari, he could navigate the treacherous peaks and canyons with lidar that would keep him above obstructions and able to hunt the Maeyar. He’d been a blue-water navy submarine officer before being accepted into the Union Earth Privateer program. He experienced tracking and outmaneuvering the quietest Chinese ships in the world through hundreds of miles of open ocean. This was his calling, and it appeared that he could no longer remain in a recon role. This is what Red Calhoun had warned Aesop about. Jones was taking up arms directly against the Maeyar in a visible show of support for the invasion fleet, and whatever happened, Aesop couldn’t reveal information that would put another Privateer ship at risk, even one at odds with the goals of the old lady. But he could still follow orders to the best of his ability.
"You’re outgunned, but they’re still reporting their communications from the ionosphere through a compromised network. I can help you stay ahead of them, but without sensors we’re limited to optics."
"Do as you can, but we cannot afford to sit idle. Wing Commander Arda has positioned us to meet their strikes. I must go, human Aesop. The clouds here are thinning, and my risk of detection increases. I will relay your words. Good luck, and I hope your captain returns soon."
Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be the first time the old lady had left marines on station when the situation demanded it. "Copy Sothcide, see you on the next pass," he said. Aesop Cohen cut the transmission, returning the recording equipment to the general Gavisari bands. When he turned away from the dish he found Singh waiting for him, floating halfway through the hatch down to the sensor compartment.
"We have a problem, Sarge."
Singh’s North Indian accent carried a harder edge than usual. Aesop had been about to have her switch the power bus back over to the sensors so he could continue working on them, but that could wait. Without further explanation, the marine swung back through the hatch and Aesop pushed himself after her. In the deck below he found Vega, hard connected to Maggie Chambers’ vacuum suit via a fiber optic line. His black faceplate lifted up as Aesop drifted into the room.
"Her arm showing sepsis symptoms?"
"Her arm’s fine. She lied, and it’s real bad, Cohen. Something punctured her suit when you guys hit the hull, and it self-sealed but whatever it was tore a damn hole through Mags. That’s why she been self-dosing with painkillers, but now she’s almost out. And the bleeding never fully stopped."
"How bad’s the bleeding?"
Vega put his hand on Maggie’s shoulder, as much in admonishment as compassion from the way he squeezed the composite plating. "Her back teeth are floating," he said.
"And of course she didn’t see fit to tell us. Didn’t want to be a bother, eh Chambers? Christ, girl, you could have died."
Maggie shrugged silently inside her suit, which quickly turned into a spasm. Aesop shook his head. "Vega, could you patch her up?"
"Shit Cohen, I don’t know. I don’t even know what’s in her. Maybe if I got a look, and maybe if I had my field-dress kit or a battle surgery kit, but you can’t swing sutures in a vacuum. She needs atmo."
"I know," said Aesop, the palm of his hand pressed against the translucent faceplate of his helmet. "She’s lucky to be alive at all, but damn if I’m losing her just because she was too stubborn to admit she got hurt. I’ll think of something."
Vega squeezed her shoulder again as Maggie Chambers twitched in pain. Whatever she was feeling in that suit must have been hell if she’d been pumping herself full of painkillers. "Better think quick."
Chapter 13 – The Fate of Gavisar
Victoria awoke somewhere other than her rack. Naked.
Not an altogether unfamiliar circumstance, though it lacked the characteristic screaming of a jealous wife. Also the characteristic light source of any kind whatsoever. And if she was being completely honest, the characteristic not-being-sucked-through-a-tear-in-horizon-space that she’d thus far enjoyed in her life. The things one took for granted.
Before long her eyes began to adjust to the gloom, and instead of the perfect pitch black she’d initially took herself to be in, there was in fact a subtle glow in the floor, defining an elevated ring. The conn.
"Huian? Are you there?"
No answer. Slowly more of the Condor’s control room began to take shape around her: the command couch, her repeaters, and lower down, the navigator’s station, having lost the majority of its Chinese population in just a few short minutes. Not that Victoria had any idea how long she’d been out.
"Avery? Carillo? Red?"
Not even the hum of the engines answered her, nor the reverberation of the metal and composite hull. Hell, the air didn’t even taste like desiccate. Whatever this was, it wasn’t the Condor.
"Davis? Doc Whipple?"
Nothing. No sailors, no marines, none of her officers or crew. She’d been separated and isolated from the one thing she couldn’t manage without. Humans.
"Alright enough, the jig is up. Who’s pulling the strings here?"
A shadow passed over the dim luminescence of the conn. Victoria looked up. There was no upper bulkhead. Instead there was only the vague, distant, blue-black artifacting of horizon space, and a black silhouette drifting across it. The hair all over Victoria’s body began to prickle. She was a bottom feeder, looking up at the underbelly of a great white shark. This place, this thing, this not Condor was a creation for her benefit, fabricated from what? Had they torn apart her ship already? Had they plucked it directly from her brain? No one knew what the Kossovoldt were capable of. Rather, no one knew the extent of their capabilities.
Down it floated, swimming against some unseen current as tendrils snaked out behind it, like something between a squid and a deadly man of war. Its flesh had the same red patterns as the hull of the hulk, and Victoria could see the back of the thing was ridged with undulating vertebrae. The Kossovoldt spiraled down, its enormous streaming length suspended in the air, until it could regard Victoria at eye level. Not that the xeno had eyes, just a slick sensory band wrapping around the foremost protuberance, wherein perhaps it had what one might recognize as a brain. It passed directly over her, smelling like a truck full o
f dead fish, and she could see multiple openings underneath crossed by a lattice of small triangular teeth. The bulk of it was the size of a van, and tentacles and streamers that snapped and sparked with static in the air extended another forty or fifty feet. Hard to judge while the thing was in constant motion, waves rippling through its trail while she tried not to vomit. In part because of the smell, in part because watching the thing was making her seasick.
"So here we are," said Victoria. "Middle of fucking nowhere, my ship falls into the hole you tore in the ass-end of space, and now what? I hope you don’t plan on just killing me after all this song and dance."
A tendril reached down, causing Victoria to recoil. The Kossovoldt retracted it, almost startled.
"Wayward child, I have no intention of killing you."
It was strange hearing Kossovoldt spoken by its namesake species. Every xeno had their own unique spin on it, Earthlings included. But coming from the multiple mouths on the underside of the Kossovoldt it sounded . . . right. Almost enough to lull her. It was a siren song. Ultimately, the Kosso were predators, all the apex xenos were. You didn’t get this far ahead in the stars without a carnivore’s mindset, and those teeth Victoria had seen weren’t for shredding veggies.
"No? Well then why am I here?"
"I brought you here."
No shit. Who would have thought that her first time meeting a Kossovoldt, Victoria’s biggest concern would be minding her own belligerent temper? She grit her teeth.
"Alright, then why are you here?"
The Kossovoldt performed a slow roll that translated down through its myriad appendages. "To speak with you, wayward child."
"Why do you keep calling me that?" Victoria asked.
The hues on the Kossovoldt shifted from red to a deep blue, its pattern mimicking the horizon space artifacting. "It is what you are called. You who has turned the atom upon yourself, and yet made it to the stars. You whose world is ravaged still by war, and yet made it to the stars. You who have shunned our gifts and yet made it to the stars. You are truly our most wayward child, and now have found yourself embroiled in a conflict older than your written word."
Victoria shook her head. The Kossovoldt spoke like it had a personal interest in humanity. "Gifts? What gifts? I think if you’d been to my neighborhood there would have been some record."
The Kossovoldt stopped its swimming, and in doing so took on a new motion. Its skin became a deep brass hue specked by eye-like markings. Its tendrils curled into enormous rings that spun and undulated slowly about each other as it tread the air before Victoria. It had stopped directly above the main viewscreen, which flickered and displayed a blue marble hanging in space.
Earth.
"We gave you the first gift, our spoken and written word. But that tribe like so many others was swallowed, and so it remained only in your past until you rediscovered it from your neighbors. Ever you would be satisfied only with what you stole or built for yourself, never with what you are given. There has been contention, whether it was worth the journey at all. Your flame burned so dim it was argued that it would never be bright enough to pierce the wall of light. It was argued that you were best left forgotten. But yet again the wayward children found another unlikely path. Through this."
The blue orb of Earth was replaced with the small insectoid shape of a microchip. Humanity’s secret weapon in a universe of tape and punch cards.
So contrary to popular opinion, the Kosso language had been given to early humanity. Which meant that a Big Three xeno knew the location of Earth, and if that were the case then likely they knew of Ithaca, Eden, and Kepler. The Kossovoldt could snuff out their entire species in an afternoon, and judging by the Kosso Standard’s uncanny similarity to Ancient Sumerian, Victoria surmised that they could have done so anytime in the last seven thousand years or more. But they wouldn’t even need to do it themselves, all it would take would be a few hints dropped to the right xenos, and the enemies of humanity would set aflame the skies of Earth. Not exactly the Kossovoldt’s typical M.O., but then Gavisar had changed all that, hadn’t it? Victoria burned to ask the question, but not wanting to give the floating fish any ideas, refrained. But the question of Gavisar still remained.
"Why did you destroy Gavisar?"
The Kossovoldt resumed its circuit, as the main viewscreen now displayed Gavisar as it had been before their arrival. Lush blue and green oceans covered the planet, while thick white clouds twirled overhead. An aurora crested the northern reaches, and but for the unfamiliar continents, and the size which Victoria knew to be closer to Jupiter’s, it might have looked like home. Or at least as much as Earth had ever felt like home. Victoria had been on space assignments longer than she’d been planetary.
"You know why."
"Do I? You’re the one who brought me here, rebuilt my conn, told me that you visited Earth and I still don’t know why. Shit, I don’t even know why you stripped me naked. If it was to try and intimidate me, you should know I’ve been naked in more compromising circumstances."
There was a hesitation in the forward momentum of the xeno, causing the trailing streamers to bunch up briefly, as if the Kossovoldt was noticing something for the first time.
"Your nudity was not of my doing, wayward child. The Kossovoldt do not share your need for garments, but I did not take them from you," it said, with some measure of incredulity. It pointed a barbed tentacle tip at Victoria as it drifted overhead. "You left them behind."
Victoria looked down at the stocky frame of her body, marred by the chronic bruises of life in space. Shit. That actually was more plausible than some tentacle-on-tushie back shelf pulp fiction. She had spent near on fifty years in the thing, and would likely spend another seventy if the job or the drinking didn’t kill her first. She was more comfortable in her skin than in any uniform.
"You, wayward child, have found yourself not only centered in a thousand-year war, but to be one of the driving forces at the helm of it. Now your intervention demands a more immediate response on our part."
"The truce talks between the Dirregaunt and the Malagath."
"Just so."
Victoria considered as the xeno shifted to hues of blue and green. "Dirregaunt halted Malagath expansionism into the Orion Spur with their war near the Perseus Arm. That expansionism was pressing into systems defended by the Kossovoldt on the side of the Sagittarius arm. The Duchess’ interest in the Maeyar is an indication that things with the Praetory have becalmed enough for the nobles to resume their favorite pastime of empire building."
"Now follow the chain to its logical conclusion."
"The Kossovoldt can keep the Malagath and the Dirregaunt from pressing into the galactic core, but only so long as they are also at war with each other. A unified Empire and Praetory could jointly be a threat to the Sagittarius bottleneck, so your presence this deep in the Orion Spur is meant to provoke one or the other into diverting their attention to you, leaving them too vulnerable for the other to pass up."
Victoria’s unearthly companion turned a slow circle in the air. "I am pleased that our most wayward children have not lost the spark of guile for which I sought to elevate you. It is amazing how leaving a body behind can free one's perceptions in this place."
"This place?" asked Victoria.
The blue-black lines of horizon space pulsed for a moment, and Victoria noticed the familiar chill creeping up her skin. For the first time, she realized that her retinal implants had not picked up anything the entire time. Did she even still have them?
"My home."
Victoria shuddered. The Kossovoldt was casually gifting her knowledge stretching back a thousand years before civilization.
"Well you still murdered an entire planet just to get the Malagath’s attention. Likely two, if we can’t keep the Gavisari from scouring Pedres. Can’t see as you give much of a shit what happens to the Orion Spur or us Lesser Empires."
If it were possible for a color to be somber, the Kosso managed it with a dark sh
ade of red speckled with shifting sprays of dark blue that reminded Victoria of rainfall on a terrestrial cockpit.
"Nothing could be further from the truth, wayward child. The Unveiled are our pride as much as any other. Our coming gave them what they always wanted: A second chance at their place among the stars, a place so callously stolen once before that their only way to cope as a species was to rationalize a collective falsehood of dogmatic inequity. May you someday forgive us, for we removed the only thing holding back the Gavisari, as you call them."
"And what was that?" asked Victoria.
"Themselves. We do not lightly intervene to elevate a mature culture. In this it was necessary. Gavisar had certain physical properties unique and necessary if we are to keep the Malagath and the Dirregaunt and all other challengers from the . . . Sagittarius Arm, you call it? Yes."
"What’s down there that’s so great it’s worth all this fuss?"
Jet black shot through the Kossovoldt. Electricity snapped and arced in its tendrils as it lifted an admonishing coil at Victoria. "That," it said, "is not for you to know." It drew back, coiling on itself again, the soft streamers spreading out like a sunburst. "The time is coming, wayward child. You are not a chosen one, but you are the choosing one and you must decide. Will you return to your war under the watching eyes of the Malagath, and by proxy their Praetory wardens? Will you continue helping the Maeyar and the Gavisari to kill each other? Or will you leave, and draw yourself away from this conflict? I can deliver you to your world of wayward children, or anywhere you desire. But I will not make this choice for you."
There it was. No matter how hard and fast she ran from the choices she’d made with the First Prince aboard her ship. Humanity was visible now, and having an impact disproportionate to their standing in the Orion Spur. If the war across the thin stretch of stars connecting the Perseus and Sagittarius arms ignited in earnest then no world was safe, no party neutral, and billions, perhaps trillions of lives across countless worlds would be snuffed out as the Big Three seized strategic systems and resources to better position themselves. The Kossovoldt began already, whatever they were doing at Gavisar was not a peaceful act and the Malagath were not likely to see it as such. Through their watchful eyes they had known just how to stimulate the invasion of Pedres, and it seemed not even the secrets humanity harbored so closely were safe from their reach.