by S. L. Viehl
Posbret stopped, reached back, and pulled the blade out of his neck, tossing it away as if it were no more than a toy.
I couldn’t reach the other syrinpress I had in my pocket, so I prepared myself for the moment he put me down. I would run in any direction, as long as it was away from him.
Posbret pulled me off his shoulder and held me in front of the scorched ruin of his face. His mouth opened, and he jerked me close as if he meant to kiss me. The stink of his charred flesh made me gag, and then I went still as I saw a bubble of something streaked yellow, red, and green bulge out of his mouth.
It had to be the Sovant embryo, ready to pass from Posbret’s body into my own.
I groped in my pocket, hunting for the syrinpress. I found Mercy’s mindset instead. I used my thumb to switch it on and jammed it over Posbret’s eyes.
He made a guttural, wordless sound and tried to shake off the mindset. When one of his hands released me to claw the unit from his face, I wrenched out of his grip, fell to my feet, and turned to run.
Posbret tackled me before I took three steps and yanked me back up to his face again. The embryo bulged out of his mouth.
I turned my head, clamping my mouth shut and tearing at him with my fingernails, gouging at his eyes and burned flesh. The embryo contracted, hiding itself back in his throat. He seized my head by clapping his hands against my ears, and forced my face to his.
The blows nearly deafened me. I saw a shimmer of dimsilk, and without warning we both collapsed on the floor. I saw Posbret’s legs roll away from his body and tried to do the same. The raider leader reached out and clamped his hand around my ankle and began dragging me back to him.
“You can’t have her,” I heard Davidov say through the roar in my ears, and then saw a sword flash as it came down. The blow severed Posbret’s arm from his body, and I kicked free of the dead limb. Davidov anticipated the raider leader reachingout with his remaining arm and severed that one as well.
I crawled away from Posbret, turning over in time to see one of the rogur’s spines punch through his torso. As the Sovant embryo began to swell outside the Gnilltak’s mouth, Davidov bent down and punched it as if to force it back inside the body. The embryo broke apart and dribbled small versions of itself on Posbret’s chest and the floor around his body.
Tya/Swap yanked the limbless torso into the water, where it sank without a sound and was enveloped by the dark mass beneath the surface. The smaller embryos began to roll toward me and some of the crew of the Renko, but more pods shot out of the water and speared them, dragging them away from us. The last embryo expanded wildly before it was cast into the maw and swallowed whole.
I shook my head several times, trying to clear the ringing from my ears. I did not hear Reever saying my name until he lifted me from the floor and held me steady.
“I thought I sedated you,” I said, frowning at him.
“You did.” Anger gleamed for a moment in his dark gray eyes. “The chameleon cells must have neutralized it.”
The rogur slid back into the water trap, its body shrinking and separating. A dark pink column of ooze emerged for a moment and shaped itself into a vaguely humanoid form.
“You needn’t worry about it now,” Swap’s voice said. “I have contained all of it inside me, and it cannot free itself.”
I stumbled over to the water’s edge. “Swap, you must expel it before it takes over your body.”
“It cannot control my brain center, Doctor, because I didn’t bring it with me,” the worm said. “I left it in another part of myself in the tunnels. The Sovant will not eat its way out of me, either. My cells, as it happens, are quite toxic to it.”
“Can you digest it?” my husband asked.
Swap made his laughing sound. “Our imitation of the rogur was rather more convincing than I had wished. No, I do not dine on living creatures, even those as destructive as the Sovant.”
“You can’t keep it inside you forever,” I said.
“Its voracious hunger will grow until it eventually consumes itself,” the worm said. “That is the ultimate poetic justice.”
A part of Swap’s dark pink body broke free and moved toward the far edge of the water trap. It became a very tall, gaunt humanoid female with a long mane of silver-white hair and gray flesh who surfaced and began walking up onto the shore.
Tya, now in her Odnallak form.
As she left the water, tiny lights seemed to fly out from her wet hair and circled around her head, spinning down to cover her naked form in a simple tunic the color of new ice. When the garment was complete, they spiraled back up into her mane and became part of her hair again.
“The first time I saw her do that,” Davidov murmured to no one in particular, “I understood what beauty was.”
Tya’s features were not especially beautiful. They looked blunt, soft, hardly more than indentations in the skin covering her face. Then she lifted her heavy eyelids and looked at me directly. Her eyes, two brilliant orange orbs with compound black pupils, seemed to burn with a contained fire.
She walked over to where Drefan still lay, stunned from his fight with Posbret. She seemed to look upon him with regret before her expression blanked and she turned to face Davidov.
“Aleksei,” she said in a low, resonant voice utterly unlike the one she had used as the Hsktskt. “You have had your revenge.”
“So I have.” He looked at her without interest. “And you are no longer under my control.”
I caught my breath, I was so sure that the two would attack each other. Then Davidov sheathed the two blades he held and showed her his palms.
Tya turned and walked back to the water trap, diving in and disappearing under the surface.
Swap slid across the grid until part of his form curled around Mercy’s bare foot. “Are you well, little one?”
“I have a headache that’s bigger than your fossil collection,” she snapped, and then reached down to stroke her hand over the ooze. “Other than that, I’m fine.”
“Come and see me again soon.” Swap licked her chin, making her laugh, before he slid back under the water and funneled himself into the water supply pipe.
Drefan pushed himself up and came to loom over me. “I will help you with the wounded.”
Reever took my hand in his and eyed the games master. “We all will.”
We spent the next few hours transferring the surviving crew and raiders to the simward, sorting out who needed treatment first, and patching up innumerable injuries.
Drefan left only long enough to shed his damaged drednoc body and resume using his glidechair, which, when connected to the hover view, worked admirably as a small tractor.
“James,” I said after I had seen the last of the wounded. “I am impressed with your version of prosthetics.”
“It helped to have a working body again, even if it was mostly drone.” He sounded embarrassed.
“I also thought it was very clever of you to program that water trap into the Itan Odaras simulation. “ I studied his guarded expression. “Although not precisely accurate, considering that there are no lakes, seas, rivers, or other bodies of water on that planet.”
He shrugged. “I like water.”
“So do Swap and Tya.”
“Come here.” Drefan led me away from the patients into a quiet corner. “A few days after you and Reever crashed on Trellus, I had a long talk with Swap about the Sovant,” he advised me. “I agreed to help him capture it. The water trap and the rogur were his idea.”
“The rogur is extinct,” I said. “All of the stories and images of it were destroyed by the Hsktskt during their prehistory. So tell me, how did Swap know how to make himself and Tya look like something no one has actually seen in thousands of years?”
“Swap already knew,” he said in a low voice. “He’s a larval form of the rogur.”
“If you’re worried that big, pink, and smelly thing will someday evolve into the gigantic, vicious, mindless, planet-eating bogeyworm of myt
h, Doc, don’t,” Mercy told me as she joined us. “It’s not going to happen.”
“You knew about this, too.”
“Some of it.” She glared at Drefan. “Some of my so-called friends didn’t trust me to keep my head clear. Anyway, Swap can’t go to the next stage of his evolution unless he ingests a massive amount of energy. Which he won’t.”
Energy could be measured in countless ways. “How massive?”
“Take the largest bomb in League inventory,” she said. “A couple hundred of those is his idea of a snack.”
The power it would take to contain even one blast . . . “What if he doesn’t acquire that much energy?”
“Nothing. He sticks to being a sappy, poetry-reading, junk-collecting, overprotective, moveable mountain of pink ooze.” She smiled at Drefan. “Which is what we’d all like. More than anything.”
It was obvious that Swap had made a difficult choice. Life forever trapped in a body that could do little but could think and reason and love required great sacrifice. But the alternative—becoming an invincible terror that the Hsktskt had described to me as being as voracious and mindless as the Sovant— must have seemed much worse.
“Will Swap die someday?” I asked Mercy.
“If he doesn’t evolve, yeah, eventually he will.” Something sparkled in her eyes as she glanced behind me. “Don’t worry, Doc. Until that day comes, we’ll look after him. In the meantime, I think there’s someone coming to look after you.”
She and Drefan departed as Reever came to me. He didn’t touch me, but stared down at me with stony disapproval.
“I’m sorry I drugged you, but I couldn’t let it take you,” I told him. “I am very attached to your skin.”
He inclined his head. “As I am to yours.”
“My blood is poisonous,” I continued. “Yours is not.”
“True.” He didn’t seem impressed by the fact. “Do you have any other excuses to make?”
“I love you.” I smiled up at him. “That is not an excuse. It is why I did what I did. I love you, Duncan, and when it came I was so afraid that it would take you away from me that I couldn’t think. I just . . . sedated you.” Tears slid into the corners of my mouth. “Okay?”
“No.” He swung me up in his arms and carried me out of the simward. “It is not okay.”
I tried to look tired and helpless. “What can I do to show you how sorry I am?”
“You can stop trying to look tired and helpless.”
A laugh escaped me, and I covered my mouth.
“It is not amusing,” he promised me. “For future reference, if you ever again drug me while we are being attacked, and we survive, I will beat you harder than ten Iisleg men.”
No, he wouldn’t. “Yes, Duncan.” I rested my cheek against his heart. “I realized something today.”
His eyebrows arched. “You mean, besides the fact that you are extremely reckless and possibly suicidal? “
I nodded. “Swap said something to me after we met him. He said we don’t have to make Marel immortal. You and I can choose instead to be mortal.”
Reever stopped and put me down on my feet. “Do you know what it would take now to end our lives?”
“We’d have to embrace the stars,” I said, referring to the Jorenian term for dying. “Literally.”
“Would you sacrifice eternal life for our daughter? “
I thought, fleetingly, of the black crystal. Maggie had said that Cherijo had been created, no, designed to stop it from destroying all life in our galaxy. Part of that design was making her immortal. Perhaps someday Maggie might try to force me to do everything she had expected of my former self.
But I was not Cherijo, and that day was not today.
“I will live for her,” I said. “And you.”
Twenty
We should have done something more romantic that night than fall asleep the moment we climbed onto the sleeping platform, but Reever and I were both exhausted. It took every ounce of strength I had left simply to crawl into his arms and close my eyes.
Some ten hours later I woke to find my fully dressed husband placing a tray of tea and morning bread next to the sleeping platform.
“How long have you been up?” I said around a yawn.
“A few hours.” He put a hand to my shoulder when I tried to get out of bed. “Keel and Cat are looking after the patients. Drefan and Mercy have Alek in a detention cell, and they are trying to decide what to do about him. They would like to talk to us about his future.”
“I hope you aren’t going to defend Davidov, or what he did to these people,” I said before I took a sip of my tea.
“No, this time Alek is on his own.” Reever sat down beside me. “The repairs to the scout are completed. We can leave Trellus as soon as you’re ready to go.”
“I’ll start packing right now.” I drained my server and swung my legs over the side of the platform, and then hesitated as I thought of the wounded still needing care. I could leave instructions with Drefan and Mercy on how to deal with them, but that would serve only as a temporary measure. “Duncan, these people need a doctor who can live on colony, or at least visit them regularly. Do you think the Jorenians would be willing to help them?”
He nodded. “There is one more problem we need to discuss. Swap, and Tya. No one can know about them, Jarn.”
I didn’t think anyone would believe me if I did tell them. “Where is Tya?”
“She disappeared into the water system pipes, and hasn’t come back.” He gave me a troubled look. “Both Swap and Tya are extraordinary beings. If the Hsktskt knew a larval rogur existed, for example, they would not rest until they destroyed Trellus.”
I knew how much the Hsktskt feared their ancient, extinct enemy—even thoughts of the creature could alter the reptilians’ brain chemistry. “Agreed. And knowing the League, they would try to steal the worm and use him as a weapon.”
“Odnallak are universally feared and despised throughout the galaxy for their abilities,” my husband said. “Most are imprisoned or killed.”
I gave him a troubled look. “We can’t tell anyone what happened here. Not even our friends.” He shook his head. “All right, I will say nothing about them.”
Reever kissed my forehead. “Thank you.”
I pulled back, surprised. “Were you concerned that I would expose them?”
“I know how you feel about lies.” He ran his hand over the untidy mass of my hair. “Now eat your breakfast. We have much to do before we leave the colony.”
We entered the detention area where Tya had been kept a prisoner for so long. Most of the lights were dimmed, but I could see who now occupied the cell: Alek Davidov.
“Is this more of Swap’s poetic justice?” I asked my husband.
“Perhaps.” Reever may have had no intentions of defending Davidov, but I could see that he didn’t care to see his former friend locked up.
“It’s our justice,” Mercy said as she and Drefan joined us. “Colonial security has given us their blessing. We can do anything with him that we like.” Her voice hardened. “I’m thinking execution. “
Davidov came over to stand by the inhibitor webbing. “How do you propose to do it, beautiful?” he said in a perfect imitation of Cat’s voice. “Will you make me the happiest man in the galaxy and fuck me to death?”
Mercy turned to Drefan. “If we go with the execution option, I get to be the one who pushes the button.”
The games master nodded. “I want the brain and spinal tissue. He can power one of my drednoc chassis for a few decades.”
“Isn’t there another option?” I asked.
Mercy took out the mindset. “I meant to tell you, Doc, you didn’t hit playback on this when you jammed it on Posbret’s face. You hit record.” She dangled the mindset in front of Davidov’s face. “How would you like to spend a few decades in my fantasizer, reliving what it was like for poor old Posbret to be possessed by a Sovant and have his face burned off and his insides eaten a
live?”
“Enough of this,” Reever said suddenly. “Alek, you have to tell them.”
“Duncan. Giving into threats of unbearable torture, so soon?” The Terran’s expression grew mockingly pained. “I thought my secrets were safe with you—”
“Tell them about the Sovant,” my husband said flatly, “or I will.”
Mercy looked murderous. “There had better not be another of those fucking things on my colony, or I will weld this mindset to your head.”
“No.” The ironic pleasure disappeared from Davidov’s face. “That was the last one.”
Drefan began to say, “How could you—”
“Because I’ve killed all the others.” Davidov turned his back on us and sat down on the cell’s berth. “I had to. You can’t tell them apart, and you certainly can’t interrogate them. I’ll never know which one got onto my ship. I like to think it was this one. It seemed to have a taste for remote places and clueless victims.”
“You had a Sovant on your ship?”
Davidov nodded. “It was clever at first, and made the killings look like accidents. An air lock failure. A flash fire in the galley.” He took in a deep breath. “And then it took my wife.”
As angry as I was with Davidov, I felt a small surge of empathy. “Did you have to kill her?”
His hands dug into the berth’s edge. “She was mostly gone by the time I discovered it was inside her. My pilot tried to stop me, of course; the crew thought I had gone mad. The next thing I knew, I was locked up in the cargo hold and that thing had free run of my ship.”
“How long did the crew last?” Drefan asked.
“A couple of months. We were on a remote route, and the men really didn’t understand what was happening. They thought it was a disease, and signaled for help, and diverted to a trade outpost with a small FreeClinic. By the time we reached it, I was the only one left. The Sovant was saving me for last, I guess. It landed and came for me. I wounded it, but the outpost officials boarded my ship and took it to their medical center.”