Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  Gods, what have I done?

  Chapter 38

  “Onaya Bone!” Talis cried, taking a step forward, her hand extended in warning.

  Dug and Sophie turned toward Talis, their eyes clouded and unfocused. Still enthralled, but whether by Onaya Bone or by Meran, Talis couldn’t tell.

  Her crew moved to stop her. Their hands clamped on her arms, hard enough to hurt.

  Sophie held Dug’s scimitar across Talis’s throat to warn her back, and Talis felt the sting of cleanly slicing skin. Little Sophie. Her eyes were steel. Cruel.

  She forced Talis back to her knees with a hand on her shoulder. She was unnaturally strong, with a grip of iron. Talis resisted, but to no effect. She could only watch.

  Onaya Bone’s focus had flicked to Talis when she called out, but now returned to Meran. Onaya Bone reached out to caress her jaw, her neck. Traced her shoulder with the back of a taloned finger. Meran withstood the intimate touches, her chin raised toward the taller woman.

  But Tisker approached the goddess from behind, seizing her arms. Talis expected her to shrug him off as easily as a silk wrap, but she wrestled as Talis had, unable to free herself.

  In the tense silence that followed, laughter bounced across the deck.

  Hankirk emerged from behind the engine house and crossed to stand beside Meran. He had torn strips from the hem of his jacket and bandaged his left arm, which was cradled against his chest, wrist held gingerly in his right hand. The dressing was unskilled, the fabric soaked through with blood. There was other blood on him, too. Dark blue, in a spray across one pant leg.

  “We came to an understanding,” he said. “I will lead her to the four remaining rings.”

  A rasping caw rang loudly across the deck as Onaya Bone scoffed. She spat a ragged word at Meran: “Fool!”

  Without seeming to move, Meran had her lips on Onaya Bone’s mouth. The goddess’s shoulders came up in surprise, but Tisker held her in place. Electricity crackled along his hands and up his forearms as Onaya Bone struggled under his grip. His skin smoked and blistered.

  Onaya Bone’s limbs began to tremble. Starting at her face, where Meran’s lips touched hers, Onaya Bone’s brown skin began to turn black. The darkness traveled in curling tendrils across her cheekbones and forehead. As it passed through her eyes, the whites around the dark purple irises went dark. The color traveled down her throat. The golden collars and heavy jeweled necklaces fell away, dissolving into purple dust before they reached Wind Sabre’s deck. The shining gown, in a burst that outpaced the change to her skin, flared into darkness and took on a texture of feathers that rippled in a wave from shoulder to hem.

  Her elbows folded painfully, the wrong way, and curled against her body. Tisker let go, stepping back as she began to writhe. Her bones shortened here, extended there. Her legs twisted. Her torso bent, and Meran broke contact, standing tall again, as the Bone goddess collapsed to the deck. The transformation changed Onaya Bone’s very contours, reduced her in size. With a great, painful arching of her back, she erupted in a flurry of dark shimmering feathers.

  What remained on the deck, struggling to its taloned feet, was an enormous six-eyed raven. Weak, she visibly gasped for air through a serrated black beak. Blinked the pair of eyes in her head, which were dark brown and unreadable. Blinked the four livid purple eyes forming a diamond in the center of her chest.

  Above her, Meran lifted off the deck as if caught up in a cyclone. The blue points of light along her skin and her backlit eyes intensified until Talis had to look away. Her head tilted back, arms outstretched to either side, feet flexed and crossed at the ankle. Her chest expanded upward, her spine arched and stiff, as though she’d been speared from below.

  Hankirk adjusted the ring on his hand and ran its surface against his cheek. “I will have command of the greatest force on Peridot.”

  Without warning, the wind that held Meran aloft vanished, and she collapsed to her hands and knees on the deck, screaming in agony.

  Chapter 39

  Clutching the sides of her head between her hands, Meran howled from deep within, a scream that seemed to stretch and elongate in pitch and tone. Her muscles and tendons tightened and stood out against her skin with the strength of the pangs that wracked her body.

  The cry stretched quieter and weaker, then choked off. Meran collapsed again, panting.

  Without Meran to maintain it, the blue force field vanished from around Wind Sabre, sputtering out like a dying flame. Talis felt the deck lurch sideways as gusts pushed across the ship again.

  As the wind reached them, Sophie and Tisker woke from their trances. Sophie looked at her hand, the knuckles white around the grip of Dug’s blade still held at her captain’s throat. She made a small sound of surprise and released the blade. Her eyes were wide as it rattled on the deck. Hankirk’s blood had begun to dry along its edge and where it pooled against the guard.

  “Captain, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was small. She stepped closer again and helped Talis to her feet.

  Dug took an unsteady step forward. One foot made a misstep as the hull bounced in the wind. His legs buckled and he fell. Though he had already moved beyond her reach, Talis reached out a hand, her chest tight with empathy.

  But Onaya Bone was not completely lost. Not destroyed as Silus Cutter had been. Only diminished. The body of the six-eyed raven hinted at the power she once possessed, but her caw held none of the divine volume as she faltered and struggled on the deck, trying to put distance between herself and the restless form of Meran.

  Tisker wobbled and held his head. Registered the damage to his hands, and the pain, and tucked them protectively against his chest. He stared down at the giant raven, his face in turmoil. His eyes went to Dug, who crawled forward, tentatively, and gathered the half-limp avian form of Onaya Bone into his lap. Though their minds had been influenced by the powerful women, they clearly remembered the actions they’d taken as their own. Tisker backed away from where Dug sat curled around the raven, knowing well that this was no time to remind Dug he was there.

  The raven tucked her head under Dug’s arm. Her wings pulled up against herself, and she shook with silent sobs. Or rage.

  Hankirk’s attention was fixed on Meran, his expression tightened into an exaggerated look of intense focus. But Meran, crumpled on hands and knees, responded to no command he willed at her. She looked up at him, eyes burning beneath the hair that hung in her face, and Hankirk took an instinctive step back from the tangible malice.

  “Why won’t you… ?” His question trailed off as Meran fought to get back to her feet. Crouching, with trembling muscles, she smiled at him. It was terrifying. The lips curled back, the glint of white teeth predatory. The tip of her tongue slid across the pointed tip of a canine. There was more than just Meran in there now, Talis realized. And together they had quite a grudge with Hankirk.

  The hull started to rock, began to spin laterally. Tisker tore his eyes away from Dug and Onaya Bone and made his way back to the wheelhouse. With blistered hands, he seized the wheel to fight the wind, and his face flashed with pain.

  Sophie gave Talis’s hand a last squeeze and ran back to help him.

  Meran turned her focus beyond the railing, to the Yu’Nyun starships. She reached out with one hand, keeping balanced with the other, and Talis anticipated the blue threads of light. Nothing happened.

  Yellow-green beams struck Wind Sabre as the Yu’Nyun weapons fired again and again. The deck rocked with the impact, and the air smelled of scorched wood.

  Talis nearly fell to her knees again with the shuddering of her ship beneath her. Her gut wrenched, not only with the sickening turn of the deck, but with her own abject failure. She was going to lose her ship. They were going to fall. Dug, Sophie, Tisker. Her mind tortured her with images of their faces frozen and encrusted with ice.

  She had failed them.

  A se
ction of decking burst in a spray of splinters. Dug curled his torso tighter around Onaya Bone, wordless as shards of wood railing and planking struck him in the side and across his back.

  She had failed a god.

  A single large piece of wood, cracked as sharp as a blade on one side, split up from the railing and spun into the air.

  All this for twice her slight weight in gold and gems. Her reward sat heavy in the cargo hold. Dragging them down from the moment it had been loaded aboard.

  Talis watched, frozen, as the chunk of railing speared the lift envelope above them.

  The canvas tore with a shredding hiss. The air it contained escaped in a whoomph. The rip opened itself up until it reached the nearest seams, which held. Strained, but held.

  And thank the gods, it was on the underside of the envelope. The heated air within stayed at the top of the balloon. Air would escape as it cooled, and they’d lose the recycled water as it re-condensed, but as long as the engines still worked, and if the lift lines held.…

  They might limp back to civilization. If they survived this.

  Meran pushed up from her crouch and wavered on legs that seemed barely able to support her. The alien flagship was approaching, but the simula was weakened after deposing the goddess, and Wind Sabre was hopeless against another attack. Talis resisted the urge to shut her eyes.

  Cradling Onaya Bone with one arm, Dug scooted backward using his free hand and feet to retreat from the center of the deck to the dubious protection of the engine house. His jaw was set. His eyes were on Meran, who fought to maintain her balance against the pitching deck.

  A new sound, grating and dry, interspersed with a wooden tapping, caught Talis’s attention. From around the engine house, dragging xist-self with xist arms and one leg, Scrimshaw appeared. From the blood on Hankirk’s clothes Talis had assumed the worst. The truth was not much better. Scrimshaw’s right leg was broken, the calf and foot missing beneath the ragged ruin of xist knee. Xe was covered in xist own blood, yet xe pressed forward across the deck. In one hand xe gripped xist tablet.

  Xist voice was heavy with the alien accent as xe called out. “Here, bring it to her!”

  Talis, startled out of her reverie of self-admonishment, crossed to xist side. Meran joined them, stumbling on unsteady feet. Together the three of them clung to each other to maintain their balance. Scrimshaw reached out a hand for Meran, and rested it on her knee.

  “Your body is the same technology as that ship.” Xe paused for breath and xist nictitating membranes half-closed over xist eyes. “Compatible. The being ‘Meran’ is too weakened by the absorption of Onaya Bone’s energies to fight them, but the device that contains her is fully functional.”

  Sophie had run to Scrimshaw’s side and took the Yu’Nyun device in both hands as she kneeled beside the broken and bloodied alien. Readouts on the cracked screen indicated the presence of the nearby alien ships and provided rotating lists in Yu’keem characters. Scrimshaw’s skeletal fingers danced across the display, which Sophie held out for xin, and the view split. The outline of a bipedal figure appeared in the right half of the screen, blinking. Xe tapped the figure, and both images turned blue, pulsing with light in a ­synchronized blink.

  Meran’s eyes went from blue to brilliant white, and a detached smile dawned on her lips. She raised one hand toward the ships, as if reaching to caress them.

  “I am inside them,” she said, and with Sophie’s help, she rose to her feet.

  The Yu’Nyun flagship was only a length away from Wind Sabre’s hull now, dwarfing the defenseless carrack. The gleaming pointed ends of its bizarre cannons trained on the deck and crackled with building energy.

  Meran gracefully turned her hand around, palm out.

  All the weapons went dark.

  “I have interfaced with their systems,” she explained. “I am free to explore their mechanical pathways. I am a virus, a poison in their veins.”

  As if to punctuate the point, an explosion rocked the flagship. The ventral weapons lowered, drooping with a low moan.

  The sky was silent except for the wind.

  Talis looked back at Sophie, who caught her eye and smirked. “Can’t be too jealous of those systems now, can I, Captain?”

  Talis was going to reply, but both Sophie’s and Tisker’s expressions shifted into surprise. What now, Talis thought, turning back to Meran and the Yu’Nyun ship.

  Meran had pulled the ship right up to Wind Sabre’s port railing, and moved to meet it there. She laid an outstretched hand on its silver hull, and the invisible seams in the metal plating flashed with blue light.

  The air became still, though Talis could still hear the wind. A deafening sucking sound. Only a few feet away, Meran’s long knotted hair and loose clothing flapped as though the gale was still buffeting her.

  Her back arched again as she reclaimed Silus Cutter’s powers.

  The ship glowed like the end of a poker in a forge as Meran lifted into the air and lost contact with the metal hull. There was a seismic groan, the protesting scream of twisting metal. The ship foundered, nose up. It spun clear of Wind Sabre, and then it went down, dropping out of sight below the railing.

  Meran lifted her arms to the sides, struggling to control her motion within the whipping cyclone. She brought her hands together in a dramatic clap, arms extended, elbows straight. Talis heard the roar of wind again, as though it was approaching from across a great distance at high speed, and all the remaining alien ships rocked. Two of the vessels knocked into each other in the tumble, and the nearest fell out of the sky, without fire or any obvious damage. The rest scattered, blown back, tumbling bow over stern into the empty skies, until they were too distant to see.

  The display in Sophie’s hand bleeped a complaint. The diagrams flashed, outlined in red, and then switched to solid gray. The ships were out of range.

  The wind went quiet. Meran stumbled as she landed, and she dropped to one knee. Hugged her arms tight over her chest as she cried out in pain. Her back rose and fell with heavy breaths.

  Talis heard the crackle of a fire in the stillness that followed. Smoke rose from the hull of her ship, drifted up over the railing. It was the black of a full blaze.

  Talis looked to her crew and barked, “Someone wanna go put out those fires?”

  Sophie handed the tablet back to Scrimshaw and moved for the companionway, pulling up the bandana from her neck to cover her nose. Her hands left blue streaks on the fabric and her cheeks.

  Talis helped Meran sit up. Her grip was tight and her lips a thin line, but she nodded wordlessly. Leaning against Talis’s shoulder, Meran closed her eyes and fought to control her breathing as she braced to metabolize a second god’s power. Her shoulders tensed and twitched as her body shook.

  Dug looked up from where he cradled Onaya Bone on the deck, uncertain. He looked at Talis but didn’t move. His captain, or what remained of his goddess. Talis forgave him the hesitation and was about to tell him so. But as she inhaled to say the words, the raven wriggled free of his arms, stumbling for a moment on unfamiliar limbs and joints that did not move the way she expected them to. She held her new wings as though she was still humanoid, clutching a blanket up around her throat, rather than a flighted creature who knew what to do with the appendages. When she’d taken a few steps away from Dug and the engine house, the dark wings expanded. Flapped. Tentatively at first, then with strong beats that lifted her from the deck. She lowered her head toward Dug. The motion might have just been her catching her balance, but Talis got the sense it was an expression of gratitude. Dug seemed to think so, too. He nodded and rose to his feet.

  Onaya Bone circled them and let out an echoing raven’s cry before soaring away. Her black form quickly disappeared against the darkness.

  Dug moved, as if freed, to follow Sophie below, but he halted, drawn up short before he reached the access hatch. Talis followed hi
s gaze to the three figures hovering in the open sky, in the empty space formerly occupied by the Yu’Nyun flagship.

  Arthel Rak, Lindent Vein, and Helsim Breaker watched Onaya Bone fly away, then turned their attention back to Wind Sabre and the strange woman on deck. They weren’t happy, but they held their position, looking as likely to retreat back to Nexus as to advance on the woman who beat the aliens they had battled against so ineffectively.

  “Now!” Hankirk yelled. His hand clenched into a fist, he brandished the ring above his head. “Destroy them!”

  Meran looked at him. Her eyes had returned to their simula blue. She raised one eyebrow.

  “All your research,” she said, simultaneously mocking and pitying him, “and yet you know nothing.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but in an instant Meran had crossed the deck and seized him, one-handed, by the throat. Though shorter than him, she lifted him from the deck until his toes barely touched as they kicked desperately for purchase.

  “I will no longer be commanded by anyone.”

  “No,” he gasped through her grip. “The ring!”

  Talis chuckled wryly, despite the scene. Despite the goddess in ruins. Despite her friend’s spiritual agony. Despite her own.

  All eyes on the deck, except Meran’s, turned to her in disbelief.

  “It’s a matter of willpower,” she told Hankirk, standing up and straightening her jacket, flicking the splinters of her ship from the lapel.

  The corner of Meran’s mouth pulled back and up in a smile.

  Hankirk gurgled. His eyes bulged. He clutched at Meran’s wrist. His left arm was a tattered loss, but his good arm was just as useless against her steel grip.

  Talis rubbed at her throat. She felt a sting there and pulled her hand away. Her fingertips were red. She wiped the blood off on a pant leg.

  “She only had the power of her little ring, but you scrapped that right down.”