Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Woozy inside his cocoon, Mose could feel the craft cutting its momentum using a combination of braking jets and atmospheric friction, slowing from a bone-crushing speed to a merely exhilarating one, then a gentle glide as it dropped below the altitude of the city’s towers. At last the tendrils relaxed their hold on him, slithering out of the spaces between his cells, and the fluid level dipped below his head. The tendrils’ tips remained just under the surface of his skin as a precaution, but at least he could see, smell, and hear again. His craft was kilometers from the city, cruising a few dozen meters above the calm waters of the An. The angle between the craft and the water’s surface grew more acute, until the capsule slipped underwater. Its profile shifted again, from a sphere to a blunt-nosed one-person submersible, and it started motoring toward the city.

  Intelligence had done their research. Anmerresh was a canal city, like so many on saturated Teluk. There was no clear division between the city and the sea on whose shore it sat. Mose would probably be able to travel via canals into the heart of Anmerresh.

  It was close to midnight when Mose’s craft rolled itself out of a canal and onto dry stone. He’d dozed for most of the journey, trusting the navigation system to find a path through the mess of canals.

  The matte black curve in front of his face cracked into two halves like the dry husk of an insect. The hull wall behind him crumpled inward, pushing him out of the craft as if it couldn’t bear to contain him any longer.

  The feeling was mutual. Mose grabbed the edges of the hull and pulled himself from the craft. The carbon snakes enmeshed in his flesh slithered out and melted into the main body of the craft, which had resumed its spherical shape. Mose pulled out the last of the tendrils from his back and shoulders and tossed them aside. The craft rolled back into the canal and sank, the water sliding near frictionlessly over its nanocarbon shell.

  Mose sought cover as soon as he was free, sidling into the shadows of a building alongside the canal. He scanned the street, but the thoroughfare was of course deserted. The capsule wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise. It had deposited him on a broad boulevard cobbled in sandstone, wide enough that two canals ran through it with a stone median between them. Bridges arched over the canals from the median.

  The buildings on either side of the street were hybrid structures: Spacious storefronts and cafeterias at ground level melted above into a honeycomb of small windows and the balconies of private apartments. Mose glimpsed a dozen architectural styles and materials on this one block—even a mass of blobby chambers percolating off one building’s roof like an insect hive. It was the sort of patchwork that had surrounded Mose growing up in Anmerresh.

  A fountain at the north end of the boulevard caught his attention. The central median connected to a round plaza that branched off into several narrower canal streets. Dominating the open space was an ornate fountain a good three meters high and half that wide.

  Mose remembered this fountain. He began to walk toward it, unhurriedly, following his memory as he approached the monument. The fountain had been hewn of black basalt, inlaid here and there with a lambent flash of gold. It was a replica of a piece by an artist of some renown, one of the monuments commissioned by the High Council to commemorate the struggles and victories of the Teluk-Terran War. Most of the other monuments memorialized the conflict more directly: bas-reliefs of space battles, or statues to great and fallen heroes of the Coalition Fleet. Mose had felt only a fleeting interest in those works.

  This fountain was different. Here, the artist had taken on the seldom-discussed side of Teluk’s victory. Mose remembered when he had first learned of the creatures living in the An—the captive colonists. The artisan of the original piece had been one of them.

  Centuries ago, in the time of the Terran Exodus, the Veert had discovered Teluk and found it good. Teluk’s estuaries and seas suited the aquatic Veerten physiology quite well, and the colonists had decided to settle there.

  But the Veerten homeworld had played both sides of the Expansion Front. A tentative alliance made with the initial wave of the Exodus had endured even after the eruption of the Terran-Urd war. Cautious in their interstellar dealings, the Veert had become frightened at what might happen should they deny the Expansion their trade privileges and ’stream access to Veerten space. So Veerthome maintained their ties with the Terrans without evacuating the Veerten colonists on Teluk, even after it became evident that the Coalition was determined to make a stand against the Expansion. The Veerten immigrants had paid for that decision with their present exile. A new generation of Veert had hatched on Teluk since then; it was more their home than anywhere in Veerten space, yet many of them still called Teluk by the old name: the Shining Cage.

  Mose walked up to the lip of the fountain. He ran his hand over the smooth-polished stone, contemplating the thoughts of its creator. The sculpture was of a sea stack, one of several great piles of basalt formed by tidal erosion along the cliffy shore of the An Sea. The aquatic Veert had hollowed out a number of sea stacks into hives. Mose had seen the actual sea stack from a distance many times in his childhood: it was the famous citadel of Traat, thirty meters of jet-black basalt that the Veerten inhabitants had carved into a twisted spire and inlaid with streaks of pyrite. It had been beautiful, and this fountain captured much of the aesthetic. Mose wondered what the Veerten citadel looked like now.

  In a final, daring touch, the artist had included several small Veerten figures poking out of burrow holes along the spire’s shaft. The figures’ broad heads were tilted toward the sky, tendrils waving questioningly upward. Like everyone else in Anmerresh and across Teluk, they’d been watching the fiery orbital battle between the vanguard of the Expansion fleet and the cobbled-together Coalition craft unfold across the sky in vivid jolts of light.

  Watching the bars of the Shining Cage closing around them, Mose thought gloomily. Watching their hopes of returning home burn up and disappear.

  But he was getting distracted. In order to create the smallest possible radar signature, his craft had contained nothing but himself; Mose had been dropped into Anmerresh with nothing but the robe and cloak he wore, not even a set of armor. He had to meet his contact in the next few minutes at the rendezvous point. He consulted his mental map of Anmerresh and headed for an alley that branched off the plaza to his immediate left.

  In the alley’s shadows, Mose breathed easier. The air within the alley was subtly different from that without. A slight tinge as of decaying fish hung on the breeze, overlapping the salt smell of the sea. Yet it was a familiar difference.

  Mose let out a breath. “I knew you’d be here.”

  “We try not to disappoint. You are the one called Mose Attarrish?” The voice was papery dry and thin, with no lungs behind it. A translator box. Then Mose knew for sure he was dealing with a Veert, though their scent alone would have been enough. Veert had mouths, in their main visceral mass, but no vocal cords; amongst themselves, they communicated using infrared pulses from an organ in their heads.

  “I am. May I see my interlocutor?” Veert could blend into their surroundings by means of skin camouflage. Mose scrutinized the alley walls, knowing it was fruitless; even with the low light working to his advantage, unless the Veert moved Mose wouldn’t be able to spot them.

  A patch of stonework on the wall before him lightened, taking on a gelatinous texture; thick tendrils seemed to detach themselves from the stone, followed by a disc-shaped head on a flexible trunk. The trunk broadened at the bottom into a fleshy foot that contained the Veert’s visceral mass. Their tan body was slightly translucent, and glistening—they must have emerged from the street’s canal only a few minutes before his craft had.

  The Veert’s sensory organs formed a circle divided into three wedges in the center of their face: dedicated gills at the bottom, and the other two organs set side by side, one for emitting radiation and the other for receiving it. The translator box sat over part of the transmitting organ, secured by a band of elastic fabric.
r />   “Hello, Mose Attarrish. You may call me Sand.”

  “All right, Sand. I was told you would have some sort of package for me.”

  “Not here.” The Veert’s flowerlike head swiveled around, as though they nervously shifted their gaze. “You will follow me now.” Sand swiveled their stalk and began to lurch down the alley. Mose kept pace, resisting the impulse to outstrip his guide. Aquatic creatures were always tiresomely slow on land.

  Yet their journey ended sooner than Mose expected. They followed a loop of alleys back into the square, so that he found himself standing before the fountain again. Mose opened his mouth to demand an answer from Sand, but the Veert was not beside him. With surprising alacrity, his guide had hopped into the shallow water at the fountain’s base and sidled up to the spire.

  “While I do this thing, you will not have eyes to see it, nor a mouth to repeat it,” the Veert hissed in their bone-dry voice. “Is that understood?” Mose could only jab a yes, staring in bewilderment. Then his confusion turned to amazement as the Veert grasped one of the tiny figures carved into the monument and pulled down. An entire curve of the onyx spire simply unfurled and disappeared into the floor of the fountain as if it was sliding on tracks. A dark aperture gaped in the stone, faint yellow light filtering up from the unknown space below to reveal rough-hewn stairs leading down.

  “In, quickly,” the Veert wheezed quietly, squeezing them-self into that hidden space. Mose followed, aware that his mouth was hanging slightly open in a manner unbecoming to a seph. He didn’t care; this was just too much to bother with decorum. Beside him, Sand pushed up on a lever in the wall, and the stone curve slotted into place behind them.

  The tunnel’s arch prevented him from seeing more than a few steps down, but a humid breeze welled up from below, heavy with overtones of salt and fish. As they descended, Mose’s stomach rumbled. His back teeth ached with sudden hunger, saliva spurting in his mouth as he realized how many years had passed since he’d eaten fish from the An . . . indeed, how long it had been since he’d eaten at all. Sand was silent on the way down, though Mose suspected they could hear his complaining stomach. If Sand was offended at Mose associating their scent with food, they gave no outward sign.

  The faint yellow light resolved into lamps recessed into the ceiling as they stepped down into a vestibule that appeared to have been carved from the bedrock basalt under Anmerresh.

  The vestibule was cave-like, with rounded walls that looked to be the product of erosion. A tunnel yawned to their left, betraying a second glow, blue-green this time. To their right, a huge steel door surmounted by a wheeled handle was sunk into the floor.

  Sand started lurching down the corridor with surprising speed, so that Mose had to trot to catch up.

  “What’s the purpose of that door?” If he was to be staying in the Veert’s care, Mose might as well learn as much as he could about their secrets.

  “It’s a portal to the city’s canal network,” Sand wheezed.

  They added, “A hidden one, used only by our allies.”

  Like him, Mose thought. “This little hideaway isn’t legit, I take it.”

  “We aid the Expansion, yet live on Teluk,” the Veert replied as if that was all there was to it, which Mose knew was true. Even all these years after leaving Teluk, Mose could still recall the punishments he’d seen publicly meted out to traitors.

  Those were among his most vivid memories.

  Mose visualized the likely design of the base from what he’d seen. This far underground, the base must already be under the waterline; the Veert must have to run pumps continuously to create dry pockets like the vestibule. They had probably only switched them on in anticipation of his arrival, and once those were turned off, the space would rapidly fill with water.

  A queasy thought occurred to him. “What if we’re discovered? You must have a contingency plan.”

  “If we are discovered,” Sand said, it seemed more slowly than translation alone warranted, “the water-locks will be blown and the tunnels flooded. The Veert will swim away, and our enemies drown.”

  Mose frowned. “I’m no Veert. What happens to me, then?”

  Sand paused; their head tendrils coiled and loosened rhythmically in what Mose could have sworn was amusement. “Pray to your gods, Mose Attarrish, that that does not happen.”

  “Osk don’t have gods.” Mose said. He’d been over this with Terrans too, many times.

  “Regrettable,” was all Sand said.

  Mose had hoped only the vestibule was cave-like, but as it turned out the entire Veerten safe house was more rustic than he’d have preferred. They fed him, though, on fish and a delicate jelly of mollusk and seaweed, so he couldn’t complain.

  Sand had led him to a kind of mess hall, one chamber of several that radiated from a central gallery. Some kind of lichen or fungus encrusted the walls of the complex and provided the source of the eerie blue-green radiance.

  Veert roamed the tunnels in tight knots of twos and threes.

  Mose observed a few of them scraping some of the growth from the walls into woven baskets and guessed it was a source of food for them rather than light. He was glad of that. His preference for the dark had been difficult to satisfy among Terrans, who with their weak eyes insisted upon lighting their rooms to a painful incandescence. Yet it was a bizarre feeling, an alien feeling, to be surrounded by these silent plantlike creatures, as though he were moving through a patch of seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. Mose imagined invisible conversations whizzing all around him, their meaning locked away in tones of deepest infrared.

  Mose kept his eye on Sand as he ate. His Veerten guide was apparently locked in conversation with a trio of other Veert across the cafeteria. He guessed the group had reached a conclusion when their head tendrils halted their animated dance and drooped, like flowers wilting in the cave’s humid heat.

  Mose set down his bowl—one half of an iridescent gray shell—on the upraised stone table as two of the Veert detached from the rest and made their ponderous way to him.

  Sand had returned with a friend. The new Veert looked nearly identical except for a beautiful dappling of aquamarine spots that ran up their trunk from the foot-body. The arrival dipped their head.

  “Hello, Mose Attarrish, returner to Teluk. You may call me Shell.” Its voice was the same box-mediated rasp, but with a subtly different inflection. Mose could hear the hint of a personality emerging through it.

  He stood with folded hands. “I appreciate your contacting me so swiftly. Project Intelligence told me I’d be provided for once I arrived, but I admit I am . . . surprised.”

  “That we Veert, notorious for neutrality, would dare the wrath of the High Council to help an assassin in league with the Terrans?” The coiling tendrils meant laughter; Mose was sure of it now. He could think of nothing to say in response, and after a moment Shell tactfully filled the silence.

  “Come. Sand and I will show you where you are to sleep, evacuate, and whatever else Osk do when alone. You don’t mind solitude, do you?” Without waiting for his answer, Shell swiveled about on their foot and led the way out of the cavern, in a side-to-side shimmy that was much more graceful than Sand’s ungainly humping. Mose padded after them, and the sound of Sand’s squelching told Mose that the other Veert had fallen in line behind them.

  They came to a sort of burrow, an oval concavity bored into the rock of a side tunnel. Mose guessed the narrower vertical shaft cut in the floor was the toilet Shell had mentioned. The cubbyhole itself looked cozy: a ceiling of bluish lichen provided soft light, and some considerate Veert had lined a depression in the floor with silky dune grass. It was almost like the nest he’d slept in as a child.

  Mose turned to the Veert swaying expectantly behind him.

  “I thank you,” he began formally. “And no, my kind don’t mind being alone.”

  “Veerten and Osk, so different,” Sand wheezed. “We find solace in one another. For Veert to be separated from Veert is hard.”
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  As if in illustration, the two Veert brought their heads together, their tendrils entangling and sliding over each other. Mose sensed he was witnessing an act of palpable affection, even eroticism. Of course, he’d spent enough time among aliens to know not to get carried away.

  Mose bowed his head. “I don’t presume to understand the emotions of other sentients, but I know what it feels like to be far from your home.” He nodded around the tunnel, the gesture taking in the city above them. “I hatched in Anmerresh, but I’ve been away . . .” For a lifetime: another life filled with guilt and dread, one that had hollowed him out until what remained was less a person than a cast of someone once living.

  He wondered for a moment if his child self would even recognize the adult he’d become. Mose swallowed hard. “I’ve been away for so long.”

  Shell turned their weedy head back to their guest, keeping the tips of their tendrils in contact with Sand’s. For a heartbeat, Mose feared Shell was about to welcome him back. He didn’t know if he could keep his fragile composure intact if they did.

  But in the end they only said, “Rest well, Mose Attarrish.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When he awakes, the humidity in his little alcove seems to have disappeared. Instead, the air is warm and dry, with a faint tinge Mose can’t place . . . until his eyes open of their own accord and he realizes he isn’t awake after all.

  Pri looks out on a dark chamber filled with the hunched, bushy forms of sleeping Drevl Char. She takes another steadying inhalation of methane, its familiar pungent tinge reassuring her, and rises from the sleepless crouch she has been in for most of the night. As she weaves through the herd of Drevl Char, her eyes adjust to the dim night lighting in the chamber. As the details emerge, Mose realizes that it isn’t the volcanic tunnel under Charel’s crust, as he’d first assumed—or if it is, the Drevl Char have somehow coated it with metal walls fitted with airlocks. Either scenario—that these Drevl Char are no longer on Charel, or that they’ve acquired the tech to retrofit the cave—suggests quite a lot of time has passed since the last memory.