by A. R. Knight
And Bas doesn’t burn the moment, getting herself up and pulling free her two miners. Aims one at Kah and the second at the mirrored Oratus Sax has just pushed away from her.
“You said it,” Sax hisses towards the Amigga in the suddenly still moment. “Surrender.”
“We will not,” Kah rasps, moving in slow, unsteady steps towards the Amigga. “Either kill us, or let us go, traitors.”
“That’s an easy choice,” Sax says. “End them, Bas.”
“Wait!” the Amigga says, and its voice, for once, isn’t drenched in haughty superiority. “You’re after us for the Oratus, right?”
“She’s inside the station,” Bas says. “We’ll take her back after we take care of you.”
Not that he’s deviating from the conflict at hand, but Sax is picking up some rustling in the air. Vibrations in the ground. Paying slight attention to his peripheral, Sax notices that the Flaum moving around the station have all disappeared - not entirely surprising given that miners were firing constantly moments ago, but to have not a single one venturing to and from the station?
“You won’t find her there,” the Amigga says. “Not yet, anyway.”
Amigga have no facial expressions. No tells, especially when their limbs are grown into their exoskeletons. Sax has no idea if this one’s lying, but the way the mirrored Oratus stay still mean it’s not trying to give them cover for a surprise attack.
“Give me a reason not to fire.” Bas gives a slight shake to her miners.
“Now,” the Amigga begins. “There’s a conversation—”
Bas presses in on the trigger and her left miner fires, scores a deep blast into the lower abdomen of the left, less wounded Oratus. Neither one, to their credit and Sax’s respect, move.
“She’s in the station,” the Amigga blurts. “I was lying. We stunned her and left her there once we saw you coming. Let us go!”
There it is. The cowardice Sax believes sits at the core of the Chorus, of the entire Amigga species. Why else build a species to fight your battles for you? Why else try to remove anything that threatens your power rather than work with them to find a mutual solution?
Bas nods at Sax, who hesitates. He doesn’t want to leave Bas out here with these three. She takes away the choice, though, with a simple touch of her tail, a promise that she’ll be fine.
Though he doesn’t say it, Sax makes a promise of his own - he’ll find and end all three of these monsters if they touch any part of his pair. And with that, he makes a break for the station, looping around the outside of the vine structure towards the entry, which isn’t a door so much as a wide arch without a seal of any kind.
Inside, with cold electric globes providing the light, there’s a large platform for the mag-lev train. Lying on the ground, unconscious, is Evva. Bunches of Flaum occupy the walls, pressing back to get away from Sax as he moves forward, picks Evva up in his claws, and carries her outside.
As he leaves the dome, the rumble he’s been feeling grows, and now it’s accompanied by a shrill whistle. Turning his head, Sax can see the bright purple and blue front of the mag-lev train swing into view. It’s moving fast, and mostly silent, that rumble coming, Sax realizes, from the pumping of power from somewhere deep beneath him up towards the track.
“Let us on that train,” the Amigga’s saying as Sax rejoins Bas, who’s still holding her miners and her targets dead. “It’s the least you can do.”
“They tried to kill us,” Sax hisses. “Do the same to them.”
“Go,” Bas announces. “Get on the train, and get out of here.”
The Amigga and its escorts don’t wait, moving slow and gingerly as Bas guides them towards the train with her miners. The train cars open wide, their entire sides swinging up and letting Flaum come and go, though Sax sees more than a few elect to stay seated rather than get off on the same platform as a quartet of bloodied Oratus and one Amigga who’s looking in dire need of a new suit.
Still, space is made. The mirrored Oratus board and help the Amigga join them. The train cars shut, and with another hissing rumble, the mag-lev shunts into reverse and vanishes down the track.
“Why?” Sax asks, finally. “Why let them go?”
“Because I don’t know if I could have killed them all before they got to me,” Bas says, her eyes tracking the departing train. “You’re holding Evva. We achieved the objective. Why risk it?”
His pair makes sense, and yet…
Sax would’ve taken the shots.
11 Rescued
The platform ends its descent by stopping next to a copy of itself. The two platforms sit flush, the second one angling along a straightline tunnel that follows the white globed lights into the distance.
“Guess the ride doesn’t end here?” Viera says.
We transfer over to the new platform, which is a tricky process when you’ve got a pair of three-meter tall Oratus maneuvering all their limbs in the small space. Apparently the Sevora never expected to use hosts like Gar and Lan for the kind of maintenance work these plain platforms are meant for.
The second platform has a panel like the first, and soon we’re whooshing along the tunnel towards a dark ending that eventually turns into a massive space. It’s as big as the spaceports I saw earlier on Vimelia, but rather than ships buzzing in and out, the giant rectangle populates itself with streams of fresh crops funneling in from one of many openings. Other tunnels with other platforms echo the one we’re on, and all of them connect to a grated catwalk that circles the upper section of the chamber.
“Every time I think we’ve done something right, I see it’s being done bigger,” I say, thinking back to Damantum’s granaries. I thought our storerooms were huge, with enough space to keep our entire city fed for a season. This place, and the amount of food getting shunted into the chamber’s lower level, divided by steel walls to sort the crops, makes our best efforts look feeble. “We have so far to go.”
“Don’t compare yourselves to this place,” Gar says. “It will be erased before too long.”
It’s almost sad, because the sounds of so much plenty pouring in, the sight of so much food that could end so much hunger, shows the Sevora aren’t entirely evil. They clearly care enough to keep their own fed, to invest in constructs that support their civilization.
If you’re going to keep billions prisoner, I suppose you have to feed them somehow.
There’s nothing to our right except more portals to more platforms, and none of them look any different from ours. To our left, the walkway continues a long ways to what looks like a more permanent dividing wall, with an outline of a door. Platforms line the outside this way too, but at least there’s something different at the end.
“As much as I’d like to take more rides,” I say, nodding to the left. “Let’s head that way.”
We make it all of a dozen steps before the door we’re heading towards slides open. A pair of Whelk, both a sickly blue, slither out, miners raised. I’m about to ask them where the prisoners are when they open fire.
Viera dives into one of the open platform tunnels, with Lan following, while Gar takes a leap to the right, using his claws to grip the catwalk railing and scramble towards the Whelk. Before I can move, T’Oli wraps itself around my chest and hardens to its impenetrable self - just in time, too, as a bolt blitzes into the Ooblot a second later, leaving a hard black scar.
“Any time you want to fire back!” T’Oli says.
I’m on it; I yank my main miner from my mask, raise the weapon and pull the trigger. Bright red bolts lance out, stitching a line well above the short Whelks.
“Sorry!” I say, diving towards the left wall, trying to get inside Viera’s tunnel. “I don’t really know how to shoot!”
Bows, yes. Miners? No.
“That’s what I’m here for,” Viera says, reaching out and pulling me into the tunnel.
I’m surprised the Whelk didn’t get me with more than one shot, but after peeking back outside, I suppose I shouldn’t be;
Gar not only drew their attention, the Oratus took care of both Whelk entirely, spreading the sloppy remnants of their bodies all over the catwalk. With a couple of bites, the Oratus snaps their miners into junk.
“It’s what he’s good at,” Lan says as we look at the destruction.
“Apparently.” I say.
Gar didn’t get through the encounter free from harm - his mask is splintered on his legs and in the middle of his chest, where direct miner shots disintegrated the armor, but the Oratus doesn’t seem to care.
We join Gar at the dividing wall, and I take the lead in looking through the door the Whelks opened. On the other side is the reason why those guards were here in the first place; the prisoners we saw on the video are all clustered on the bottom floor of this half. The crop walls have been removed, allowing all of the prisoners to sit on the ground in a giant crowd, along with the dozen guards watching them, miners ready.
There’s another quartet up here, on our level, and they’re watching our doorway. I have to jerk my head back as a couple Flaum send fiery shots at me.
“Prisoners and guards,” I say and describe the setup. “Lan, Gar, you’ve got the most experience with this. What do you think?”
“Attack and devour?” Gar hisses.
“Yeah, except we don’t want to get shot doing it,” Viera says.
“Capture the top level, and the guards below won’t have position.” Lan takes over. “They’ll either surrender or, without cover, we’ll finish them fast. As for how to beat the four guards up here, we’ll need a distraction, and then some sharp shooting.”
Lan finishes the plan with a look at Viera, who nods. “I’ll hit them, don’t worry.”
“Then what’s the distraction?” I ask.
The Oratus points her scaled green foreclaw at T’Oli, still wrapped around me. “The Ooblot should be able to draw fire without risking itself.”
“Just what I like hearing,” T’Oli slaps. “Send the Ooblot out - it’s basically a puddle anyway!”
Lan’s expression doesn’t change. Neither does Gar’s. I glance at Viera and she shrugs.
“T’Oli?” I say.
The Ooblot slithers off of me onto the catwalk, slithers over to the door. Its eyestalks swivel back towards us as we cling to the sides, out of sight.
“If I die for this, I’m holding it against all of you.” T’Oli says, then the Ooblot slithers over and out of sight through the door.
“Now!” Lan hisses at Viera, and my friend quick-steps over to the door.
Watching Viera working is mesmerizing - the Lunare grips a miner in each hand, spins with her shoulder against the dividing wall to look through the doorway, and even though I only see her ash-white hair and the edge of her set face, I know every bolt that leaves her miners hits its target.
After the cascade of flashes, Viera steps through the doorway and we follow. The results of her handiwork are the smoking ruins of the four guards, in addition to the sporadic and rapidly dwindling return fire from down below as Viera continues her cleanup. By the time I reach the railing, my own miner and lack of ability in hand, the five remaining Flaum guards have tossed their weapons to the floor.
“Nice work,” I tell her.
“I know.” Viera doesn’t look over at me, keeps her focus on those guards.
I’m a lucky Empress to have friends like her.
On the far side, against the end wall, there’s another platform that takes us down to the floor level. Viera elects to remain up top and provide cover, so T’Oli - thankfully fine after its decoy duty - and the two Oratus accompany me.
What I see are thirty or forty prisoners, mostly Flaum and Whelk, lined up against the wall to my left. They’re packed against one another, and they all look broken and miserable. Like the remnants I’d met who served in Clarity’s Dawn, but without any spark of hope. Center among them, though, is who we came here to find.
“Malo,” I say his name and there’s more than a bit of disbelief as I do. “You’re alive.”
He looks up slow as I approach, and the damage I noticed during the video is worse up close. Malo’s thin, with cuts and bruises across his body, and he’s clothed in the same rags as the rest of the prisoners. His eyes are red, and though his mouth forms a half-smile at the sight of me, I can barely keep myself from crying at the sight of him.
“Hi, Empress,” Malo says, his voice a whisper.
“What did they do to you?” I ask, and I stretch out my hand, run it along the side of his scruff-covered face.
“Tried to break me,” Malo says.
I shake my head. What would be the point of breaking Malo? He’s not with the Vincere, he wouldn’t know anything useful.
“Humans, we must leave,” Lan hisses from behind me. “These Sevora say they’re the dregs, that all the rest of Jel’s forces are trying to get on the only good ship left on this planet. The ship we need.”
I glance back at the Oratus. “They never expected to trade the prisoners for their lives?”
“I don’t think they believed,” Malo whispers behind me. “They hoped the Vincere might care, but they didn’t believe they would.”
I close my eyes for a second. This might not be the time for politics, for morals. We have to escape the planet. Now. And we’re taking all of them with us. “The prisoners coming too. As long as we made this journey, we may as well save who we can.”
Gar hisses something I don’t catch before Lan cuts her pair off with a twitch from her tail. She doesn’t object, though, and instead points a foreclaw at the five remaining guards, lined up and looking defeated.
“Can one of them lead us?” I ask Lan.
“They will,” Lan says.
“Even though they’re Sevora?”
Lan bares her teeth. “If they get us to that ship, we’ll take them. Ask Kolas to, perhaps, give them a chance.” Lan’s looking at me, so the guards behind her can’t see those yellow eyes, those black slits in her pupils. None of those Sevora are getting off this planet, regardless of what they do.
And I don’t care.
I thought they took Malo from me. I thought he died in that cavern as T’Oli flew us away. Now he’s standing behind me, and if he’s not dead, he’s plenty close to it. Turning away from Malo turns my sadness, the pity and blighted hope at seeing him alive into anger, rage. The bleak force that comes when you failed to save someone you care about.
I walk past Lan to the row of five Sevora guards, all of them Flaum, and all of them wearing the dark blue armor of Jel’s faction, whose name I don’t even remember. I meet each of their eyes, and their beady blacks stare back at me. Of course they don’t know. Of course they weren’t responsible for what happened to Malo that day.
“Viera?” I call, not breaking eye contact with the Sevora.
“Empress?” Viera answers from above.
“If any of these five do anything without my permission, I want you to end them,” I say. “Don’t wait. They get no second chances.”
“You got it.”
I nod towards the Sevora, to let them know I’m talking to them now. “You heard the Oratus. Take us to the ship, so we can leave this miserable world.”
I march at the front, with Viera, T’Oli, and Lan. Gar volunteers to hold the back, hissing that he’ll enjoy eating anyone that falls behind. The Sevora guards point us to a secondary chamber off of the large one, a space packed with terminals monitoring the crop flows and water supply, and that has a single transport tube.
Moving such a large group on one of these seems like it’ll be a problem, until the Sevora use the panel on the side of the tube - at my order - to request a larger transport. We watch as the single pearl platform, which can mold its surface to match our seating needs, is joined by ten more. They don’t sit as separate platforms, but instead form two-meter long white links from one platform to the next.
“Climb on?” I ask the Sevora, and, in particular, a red-brown furred Flaum that’s taken position as their leader.
/> “They’ll all stay together,” the Sevora says. “We should go to the front.”
Viera, with her miners out and aimed, follows me as we climb ahead to the lead platform. The five Sevora cluster with us on the lead platform, with Lan on the one immediately behind, along with the first set of prisoners. I let Malo, who seems increasingly tired, stay with Lan, and he leans on the Oratus like she’s the only reason he’s standing.
I want to talk to him. Want to tell Malo how sorry I am, but there’s no time, so I bite back the words, and focus on the Sevora, on the platform, on getting us to the ship.
The platforms lurch forward, then pick up speed faster and faster until we’re shuttling underneath the ground at a blinding speed. Overhead lights blink by so fast they look like a single white stream amid the gray-black tunnel sides. The stream, though, vanishes in a moment as we shoot out from beneath the ground and into a clear tube that soars through a scorched sky.
12 Quell
The two Oratus stand just outside the station with a third, unconscious, Oratus settled on the ground by their feet. Rescue was the plan, and now that they’ve done that, Sax isn’t sure where to go. The Flaum certainly aren’t helping - most have outright fled, and the ones who haven’t shrink back every time Sax looks towards them as they cling to each other in the station’s corners.
“I don’t think we thought this through,” Bas says.
Sax looks at her and suppresses a smile. She still looks radiant, even after the scuffle with the mirrored Oratus and the Amigga, even after dashing through a dark and grimy jungle. Here, while they court disaster, he’s with her. Bas, and the mission. Nothing else matters.
The mission, though, is currently stunned, and Sax guesses it won’t be long before that Amigga returns with a larger force to reclaim it’s prize.
“Look at these two uglies,” the voice comes from the right, the slimy one of Agra-Red. “They found themselves a prize, too!”