by A. R. Knight
The escape craft is study, though, and it batters through the vines like a miner’s blast through a thin wall. The viewport goes from a small window into the outside world to a useless smudge of purple and green sludge as their crash makes soup of Aspicis’ foliage.
At least, until they hit the ground beneath.
It’s soft, loamy soil - everything on Aspicis is controlled for optimum conditions - and it catches the evac mod like the pillow Sax wishes he has behind his head, which bangs into the side of the mod as it tilts over and stops.
A hot second later, having confirmed the atmosphere breathable, the evac mod pops its hatch open and lets Aspicis’ humidity flood in A safety feature in case the mod’s passengers are incapacitated or it’s landed in a sinking lava lake, the quick open lets Sax slice away his small netting and bound out of the craft.
Onto a world he never dreamed he’d see.
7 A Dying Message
Our quarters are little more than a few scraggly nets hanging from the ceiling. One for Viera, one for me, and T’Oli weaves itself through and then uses its Ooblot genes to harden itself around the bands. The room we’re in is thin and featureless, with a panel on the outside of the entryway and none on the inside. As soon as Lan shows us in, the Oratus retreats out of the room and the door shuts in a final way that says it’s only going to open when someone whose not us tells it too.
“Guess I shouldn’t have expected better,” Viera sighs as we slip into the netting.
A voice interrupts her, playing through an intercom embedded next to the door, beginning a countdown to the leap.
“Why, because we’re on a Vincere ship?” I ask.
“I thought these were the good ones,” Viera replies. “We fought so hard to escape, and then beat back, the Sevora. Seems like we’re owed a break by now.”
“Clarity’s Dawn survived for a very long time in the depths of Vimelia,” T’Oli breaks in then. “Every one there deserved a break, a chance to leave and make something of themselves, and we never did.”
The mention of the rebel group takes me back. We’d barely escaped Vimelia because of the large raid the group of freed species staged. Their goal had been to get a signal to the Vincere, to tell them the location of the Sevora’s homeworld so the Chorus could use their military might to end the war.
Clarity’s Dawn hadn’t pitched the thing as a suicide mission.
“No,” T’Oli says when I ask it. “But just because you don’t come right out and say it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Few of us expected to live through that day.”
“Well, I’m glad you did.”
The leap comes hard and fast, a sudden lurch followed by the twisting, bending and almost breaking of reality. My senses go haywire as colors splash across my vision, my stomach heaves and roils, and waves of ice-cold numbness play touch-and-go with extreme heat. It lasts a few seconds and feels like years.
“I’m never going to get used to that,” I say when the universe rights itself.
“It’s not the easiest method of travel,” T’Oli says, “but it is the fastest.”
Viera expresses her feelings through the contents of her stomach, which make a splashy entrance on the room’s floor. Lan, who opens the door a moment later, doesn’t spare the residue a look. As the three of us head back out into the corridor, small cleaning robots, looking like whirring disks, hover into the room.
Lan doesn’t speak as we head back to the bridge, even when I ask her a few questions, like where are we, when can I get a meal, and how high rank is Kolas. Her mind is obviously elsewhere, and eventually we all join that soft silence.
When we get to the bridge, I understand why: out that massive windshield is a shape I’ve seen before. A large, beige sphere, the home of the Sevora is awash with flashing light. Out here, what must be dozens and dozens of ships swirl around each other in deadly dances - shapes that I think would be invisible save for the red and blue outlines the windshield places around all that come into view.
Kolas no longer stands free and clear in the middle of the platform: four struts have risen out of the edges of his station, and the Oratus’ head is wrapped in what looks like a half-sphere of pearl.
Lan keeps us well back, letting us take in the constant stream of voices from the pits below, the intercoms around us, and the overhead announcements. Those last sound like orders, demanding this and that group report to this and that section.
“You’re attacking their home,” Viera manages to say. “Didn’t think that’d ever happen.”
Now Lan hisses low and slow. “We never knew where it was, until an anonymous signal came through one of our listening beacons not long ago. All it had were these coordinates, and what they were.”
“Then we succeeded,” T’Oli says, but the Ooblot’s slapping voice hardly sounds jubilant. “There were no others?”
“Not that I know of.” Lan asks T’Oli what the Ooblot means, and T’Oli goes into Clarity’s Dawn.
I tune out their discussion, instead focusing on Vimelia, and how the planet is coming closer as our cruiser approaches it. I’ve picked out the color scheme now too, and the vast amounts of red indicating the Vincere forces have the blue-tinged Sevora in a slow collapse. A tightening vice around the planet.
“This isn’t just a battle,” I say to Viera. “This is an extermination.”
“The Sevora killed Malo,” Viera replies. “Exterminate them.”
Without the Sevora, without Ignos, I wouldn’t be here. Viera and Avril’s people, the Lunare, would have rolled through our jungle and destroyed our tribe. Their weapons would have proved too much for Malo’s people, the Charre, as well. Only with Ignos, a Sevora that crashed to Earth, did we put up enough resistance to save ourselves. And yet, all of that pitched against the horrors the Sevora deliver to the galaxy, that they delivered to me... I’m not lifting my voice to save them.
We spend a long time watching the slow-moving destruction. However hungry or thirsty I may have felt before, the thought of leaving the bridge and the view of the constant explosions, the burning death by fire, and the inexorable advance of the Vincere, doesn’t cross my mind.
Only when Kolas emerges from the sphere, striding its gleaming, scarred rust-colored self up to us do I shake out of the battlefield trance.
“So you see,” Kolas says. “At last, we have them trapped. Not a single Sevora ship has escaped the system since we arrived, and not a single one of them will live out this fight.”
“How can you know?” I say. “There might be more of them throughout the galaxy.”
Kolas gives me a slight nod. “True, and one may create their entire force again someday, but without Vimelia’s resources behind them, the Sevora will need many miracles to threaten the Chorus again.”
“Are you going to burn every inch of the planet, then?” Viera says.
Kolas points out the front of the windshield, towards the bottom of the viewing area, where a hint of the golden oval on the cruiser’s front peaks through. “Vimelia has a large satellite moon. With this ship, we can break its orbit. When the moon descends into the planet, the impact will do our work for us, and ensure any Sevora buried deep in Vimelia’s crust die as well.”
Viera’s speechless. I’m not so impressed.
“You’re claiming they’re all guilty,” I say. “That they all deserve to die?”
“Of course,” Kolas says. “The Sevora are the only advanced species left that is not bound to the Chorus. They have refused to accept our terms and join the galaxy. As such, they are a threat and must be obliterated.”
Kolas finishes speaking, inhales as though the Oratus is going to continue its listing of reasons why the Sevora must die, but a sudden call from one of the Flaum below kills the idea.
“Admiral, we have an incoming message from one of the Sevora factions,” the Flaum, a scruffy white-and-tan one, announces from its terminal. “I wouldn’t bother sending it to you, but it’s a strange one, sir.”
“Stage i
t,” Kolas says, nodding towards the windshield.
“For everyone?”
“These are the last gasps of a dying species,” Kolas hisses. “We all deserve to know how they would end their lives.”
The Flaum argues no further and turns back to its terminal. I’m staring at Kolas, wondering what the Oratus could be thinking - as an Empress, I heard plenty of private messages that would be both interesting and entirely inappropriate for other ears. Apparently the Vincere, or at least Kolas, operates in the open.
There’s a flicker across the windshield, and then a large part of Vimelia disappears beneath a wide black rectangle. One that fills in with a vast, crowded chamber. Species sit in rows, pressed in among each other. Flaum, Whelk, Teven, and others I can’t name are all staring stiffly back at the window or at the other, miner-armed guards caught on the edges of the frame, aiming at what are apparently prisoners.
“Do you see all of these innocents?” Jel’s warbled voice comes through, slightly garbled in the transmission. The creature and its Whelk host lead a faction of the Sevora that wants peace with the rest of the galaxy, but that have never had the power to force it. “If you continue your assault, all of them will die. Their blood will be on your claws. Or, you can negotiate. Work with us to find a solution that does not require genocide!”
As Jel’s warble dies away, the window pans to the far end of the lines of species and begins a slow crawl through them. I’m expecting to see anger, fear, on the faces there, but all that shows is a steady resignation to the fate consigned to them. Many of the species look old, with falling clumps of hair, blotches of broken skin or even lost limbs. Hosts rejected and unwanted by the Sevora.
“Kaishi,” Viera says.
I know. I see him too.
“Malo,” I say his name and it’s a ghost coming back to life, a spirit I never thought I’d see again made flesh right there on the windshield.
It’s easy to identify the Charre warrior, my friend and leader of my armies, as he stares straight back at us. Always courageous, always defiant, Malo nonetheless looks closer to the edge of death than when we left him. I see cuts running along his skin, bruises along a frame that’s thinner than I remember. Still, those eyes pierce across the distance to me.
“Reach out, and help us save the galaxy!” Jel’s final plea dies as the window fades and vanishes, putting Vimelia back in its center frame.
The Flaum manning the bridge don’t seem to have noticed - they carry on their chittering commands the same as before. Lan, though, has her eyes on me, as does Kolas as soon as the admiral turns around.
“They have a human?” Kolas asks as it approaches.
The question prompts a recapping of our last trip to Vimelia, one I speed through with as little detail as possible, because every second that passes, I feel, brings the Vincere closer to their moon-crashing moment.
“Then you would have us save him?” Kolas asks. “You would have us negotiate with the Sevora to save the life of a single human?”
I know what the Oratus is doing. I know Kolas wants to trap me in a terrible argument - the one that every ruler must make at some point: how much is a single life worth?
To me, though, Malo is worth whatever it takes.
“You’re not going to destroy this planet,” I say. “Not with Malo still on it.”
I make the gamble. I don’t think Kolas will give up on torching Vimelia or eliminating the Sevora entirely, but I might be able to persuade the Oratus on this one life.
Kolas folds its four claws together and gives me the sort of toothy grin I’ve come to associate with predators who know they’ve caught their prey.
“Do you know why we brought you here with us, human?” Kolas says.
“I thought it was about witnessing revenge,” I reply. “For what the Sevora did to Earth?”
“In part. Yet, we need to see your resolve. The galaxy has no place for species unwilling to make sacrifices for its progress.”
“Saving Malo is a sacrifice?”
“The Chorus would say that your ties to a single person make you weak,” Kolas says. “However, as an Oratus, bound by the strength of the pairing, I think a single person may be the thing most worth fighting for.” The Oratus reaches out with its left foreclaw claw towards me. “You want to rescue your Malo? Then I give you leave to do so. I cannot, though, risk any Vincere lives in the process, and the Sevora planet will be destroyed, with or without you on it.”
8 Lay of the Land
The evac mod’s crash has punched a hole through the tangled ceiling of vines, a hole which now casts the only light Sax can see into the space. Aspicis orbits a white dwarf star, and its pearl sheen has Sax wincing as he scans for any immediate threats.
If there are any, they’ve been coated by the dirt thrown up by the crashing mod. Beyond the shower of deep brown - almost black - dirt, there’s evidence of what Aspicis looks like when it’s not serving as a landing pad; a thick coating of browning, old vines and the mosses intent on consuming them. Even these have probably been constructed by the Amigga to grind dead vines and refresh the soil.
The mosses, though, aren’t making the noises Sax hears. Namely, the constant stream of vicious cursing coming from his right. the light, burbling voice of a Vyphen.
“Sounds like the captain made it,” Agra-Red says as the Whelk emerges next to Sax, hands guiding the heavy miner embedded in its chest.
The slug-like creature slides out of the mod, its red look turning almost pink in the white light. The Whelk moves by shifting its skin around itself, like a tread, and as Agra-Red hits the soil, the dirt sticks to its body so that by the time the Whelk hits the edge of the clearing, it’s a mottled mess
By then, though, Sax and Bas are out of the mod too, carrying a couple of emergency ration packs, along with a pair of small miners holstered by their masks. The masks don’t have real belts, but instead form themselves to the handles of anything pressed against them, sealing the item against their body until Sax or Bas decide to reach for it.
“Who wants to lead?” Agra-Red asks, its two large eyes peering out from its new dirt goggles. “Don’t pick me. I do better when I get a chance to aim.”
Sax lets a hiss loose and steps around the Whelk. Unlike Rathfall, these vines are too thick to cut - not that Sax can’t, he just doesn’t want to spent the time - so instead he climbs over, through, and between. No thorns, at least, and the vines are soft enough so that Sax can grip them. Bas follows his path, occasionally picking up and lifting the Whelk through any areas Agra-Red can’t slime through.
They follow Plake’s loud noises for a few minutes until they come to the second evac mod, only, instead of the Vyphen captain and the pair of Teven, all Sax sees is an empty mod and a deserted clearing. A quick hop to the craft confirms Plake’s voice is coming out of the intercom, and is looping through a recording.
“She’s not here,” Sax says.
“Then why?” Bas says behind him. “What’s the point of making the noise?”
“To draw them out,” the voice matches the continued cursing on the intercom, and Sax looks back towards the edge of the clearing to see Plake perched up on a vine. Now that he’s watching, Sax sees the Teven pair as well, opposite Plake. All of them are holding miners.
“They’re going to be here soon,” Plake says. “I don’t want to fight them on the run.”
Sax doesn’t need to ask who they are - it’s plenty evident from the rising hum that something’s approaching, and odds are low that something’s going to be friendly.
“We can’t fight them all,” Bas calls up to Plake. “We have to run!”
Sax is briefly thankful it’s his pair calling for the retreat - he’s not sure he has such an order in him.
“Not yet,” Plake replies, and Sax catches a sneaking smile on the Vyphen’s face, resting on her folded feathered arms up on the vine. “They don’t know who we are. There won’t be many. We can knock out this force, then disappear before they ca
n call any reinforcements.”
“Not a bad plan,” Sax says, and anyway they’re out of time, so the Oratus breaks for the edge of the clearing.
Bas follows and the two of them climb up to a spot in between Plake and the two Teven, who are nestled together with their miners sticking out like weaponized thorns. Agra-Red, emphatically unable to climb, sludges its way inside the evac mod.
“I think I like the Whelk,” Bas hisses as she settles on the vine next to Sax.
“It’s deadly,” which is the highest praise Sax knows how to offer.
The hum grows louder, then splits into two. A pair of shuttles. Sax and the others came down in a pair of evac mods, so that makes sense, but it means they won’t be fighting the whole Chorus contingent at once. Plake’s plan depends on speed - if they take too long to eliminate the Chorus forces, they’ll be running away under fire. On a planet run by the enemy, finding a hiding spot in that condition would be difficult.
Sax taps his tail against Bas’, and she understands what he’s getting at. The two of them break from the clearing, Sax getting one quick nod towards Plake, and dash through the upper layer of vines back towards their own mod.
The Chorus shuttle hovers over their original clearing, a deep blue vessel bearing the orb-and-lines sigil of its owners. Side slats fold out, giving clear view of the armored Flaum squad dropping down towards the ground. Unlike on more industrial planets, these Flaum don’t have magnetized boots to catch their fall on metal floors. Instead, the boots on the scrawny, furry creature’s small feet pop as they near the soil.
Kinetic packets - they store up energy with motion, release it when called for to provide just enough thrust to break a fall or give a jump the boost to get the Flaum where it needs to go. Crucial for lesser species to keep up with an Oratus.