by A. R. Knight
The crimson Whelk nudges its way fully around the station, aiming its embedded miner with its left hand while holding a smaller shooter in its right. Ready to blast anything Agra-Red doesn’t like into molecular oblivion. Behind it, armed and ready, are Plake and the two Teven.
“She’s stunned,” Sax offers when Plake gives Evva a concerned glance, and the Vyphen holds both her feathered hands over Evva’s chest until she feels the Oratus’ vents sucking in air.
“Then we have to get her out of here,” Plake finally says.
“You say that as if we haven’t been thinking of a way to do that,” Bas replies.
“Have you?” Plake rounds on her. “Thought of a way? Or is standing here the best you’ve got?”
“I was thinking we’d carve you up, disguise Evva in your feathers,” Sax offers, coupling the words with his toothy mug.
Engee, the Teven, steps between the bunch of them. “While you were all chasing after them, Nobaa and I talked with Avan some more. Evva’s force had to get to that village somehow, and he says they have skiffs back there. Ones we can use.”
The rest of the group, Sax included, stares at the Teven.
“You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier?” the Whelk says.
“There wasn’t a reason for it, earlier,” Engee replies.
“Skiffs aren’t safe!” Nobaa adds.
“Neither is staying here,” Plake says. “Let’s go.”
There’s no question who gets the joy of carrying Evva’s paralyzed self. Sax starts with it, then hands it off to Bas when his arms go numb from the weight. Together, the two play a weird passing game with Evva until they make it back to the Flaum village.
Avan’s there to meet them, looking better, if still on the wrong end of recovery.
What Avan can do, though is point them in the direction of the vine-runners, small skiffs barely enough for a single Oratus, and that look like sleds coated in microjets. A small windshield curls up from the front, with a pair of microjets on its top to help with sudden drops.
“I suppose that none of you know how to drive one of these?” Avan says as they stand in front of the ten skiffs Evva’s crew used to get to the town.
The Oratus leader is leaning against Sax now, coming into coherence but unable, yet, to stand on her own power or do more than slur a few words at a time. They must have zapped her with a strong blast to keep Evva, a large, red Oratus, stunned for this long. Then again, why take chances with the most wanted creature in the galaxy?
“I can figure it out,” Plake announces.
Engee and Nobaa say the same - and proceed to climb into one of the skiffs, laying down side by side and slotting their small limbs against the edges of the sled. On either side of the sled sit small sticks which go either up or down, allowing for an ascent or a dive as needed. Nobaa takes one, Engee takes the other.
“It’s fine,” Avan hisses when Agra-Red wonders if the Teven will keep themselves in sync. “The two levers are tied to each other. They’ll go wherever the push or pull is strongest.”
That leaves a skiff for each of them, plus a few left over that Avan has no trouble donating to the village. A small repayment for the damage they’ve caused, but Sax agrees it’s better than nothing.
Thinking so much about how others see their actions is frustrating; far easier to carry out the mission with eyes on the results and nothing else.
“Who’s taking Evva?” Sax asks as Avan mounts his own skiff.
“I’ll take her,” Plake says. “I’m the only one small enough.”
The Whelk’s not large either, but Agra-Red’s still carrying that monstrous miner, and together the two would make for a tight fit. Sax and Bas definitely can’t fit a second Oratus on either of their skiffs. So the choice gets made without a struggle, and the group loads up.
The skiff makes for a weird fit, as Sax has to drape his midclaws over the side and then essentially hug the sled with the rest of him. He follows Avan’s example and tucks his tail in by his side, its tip up near his head. A glance at Plake confirms she’s in the worst spot, though; Evva’s bulk is pressing Plake’s feathered limbs hard into the craft, and the Vyphen’s stretching out her neck as far as it can go to keep her eyes where they can see.
“The skiffs are set to follow mine,” Avan announces, his hissing still light from the wounds. “You’ll just need to hang on for the ride.”
Sax is happy to hear that - they don’t train Oratus to be pilots, especially not small skiffs. Bas has spent some time with shuttles and the like, but Sax prefers his knowledge focused on weapons and the ways to use them.
With a synchronized hum, all six skiffs start up with a bit of levitation, rising a meter over the ground. Sax hunkers down on his, peering through the glass windshield at the glowing purple lamps of the village as the microjets spool up.
“Take a deep breath!” Avan shouts above the whine.
A deep breath? Sax opens his vents, sucks in air on instinct, and it’s a good thing he does, because the skiff lurches forward into a blindingly fast launch a moment later. The windshield keeps the air from blowing Sax clean off, but he clamps his claws tight anyway as the vines blow by beneath him.
The warm light of Aspicis’ star proves ideal once Sax gets comfortable with the skiff’s hurtling speed, giving him an easy view across the vast emerald expanse of huge, curling vines. Puffy pearl clouds and drifting wisps of fog break up the cerulean horizon. It’s beautiful, though Sax finds the sheer lack of landscape disorienting; there’s not a single hill or mountain pushing the vines up above each other, no valleys or plateaus. Just a relatively even canopy forming where the vines get too heavy to keep pushing themselves up.
It’s a world tamed entirely to suit the species that owns it.
The skiffs stick true to their programming and they all fly in formation behind Avan for what seems like a long time before the traitor begins to slow. Then, Avan leans his skiff forward and dives towards what looks like a thick cluster of vines. Sax isn’t expecting the shift and thinks about jumping free from the suicide course, until they get close and he realizes it’s light playing tricks on his eyes.
The vines aren’t quite as close as they looked, and Sax, along with the others, shoots through a series of tight gaps, eventually coming through into a burrow lit by the same dangling, colored globes as the Flaum village.
While that place held families and all the pieces of a real, civilized life, this one has the makeup of a military camp. The skiffs settle down in the middle - where plenty of other skiffs rest on the ground - and Sax sees tables carved from vines and random debris covered with weapons, tools, and spare Caches, those all-encompassing bracelets of knowledge.
Terminals are strewn around the place, hanging from slap-dash connections bored into vines. Sax traces the wires and they all slide through to a circular plate - the only true metal section on the ground - which glows ever-so-slightly orange.
Staring at the new arrivals are an assortment of Flaum, of course, but also a variety of other species. None of these wear any Chorus uniforms, and most look like they’ve spent a long time living on the edges of society; patched fur, scars or even missing appendages, mismatched clothes that go hard for function over fashion.
And no fear.
Evva’s found herself a hardened crew, and Sax’s hope for success rises high as he untangles himself from the skiff and takes his first few steps around. Something more delicious than nutrient goop is cooking on a rack of grills off to one side, a lime-green Whelk covered in a dirty brown apron standing guard over what’s presumably dinner.
“Welcome to Quell,” Avan says once the group’s off their skiffs. “It’s as close as you’ll come to a home on this planet.” The traitor - Avan will never be anything else in Sax’s mind - points around the circle, giving basic names to places like the kitchen, showers, and various spaces for mission planning, engineering, and more.
Quell is well organized, which is exactly what Sax would expect fro
m Evva’s camp. What it’s not, though, is exciting enough to keep waves of exhaustion from rolling over him. They’ve been on a non-stop rush since leaping away from Solis what seems like an eternity ago.
Evva still needs to recover, and they don’t seem under any imminent threat, so Sax gets directions from Avan, then he and Bas wind their way along a short trail through more vines to a cluster of hammocks strung up. They come in all sizes, and they’re made out of stiff, woven vine-skin.
“Think they’ll hold our weight?” Bas hisses.
“I’m willing to try,” Sax says. “Or I’ll sleep right on the ground.”
They choose the largest ones that happen to be close to each other, then climb inside and fall asleep - claws touching in the space between - to the slow breeze and steady sounds of a camp moving into its evening meal.
Morning finds Quell and the people within it the same as when Sax vanished to sleep. There’s no change in the light, the temperature, but the smells are different; namely, there’s no hint of cooking food, no ozone-stinging scent of batteries being repaired or plugged into miners. When Sax enters the main clearing - Bas is catching a few more moments of rest - there’s a small cluster of fighters, all of them armed and all of them standing silent.
Evva’s there too, and she raises a single foreclaw to her mouth. It’s a universal signal and one Sax respects, slinking back under the cover of a nearby vine and holding his questions. A moment later there’s a loud buzzing that comes from above, whining like a giant bee and then passing almost as quickly as it arrives. Only when the sound vanishes do the fighters relax, does Quell return to its normal quirks.
“They comb the planet constantly,” Evva says as she meets Sax in the middle of the clearing.
The great red Oratus, all four letters of strength, leadership, and poise looks not too worse for her long stay in the unconscious. Still, Sax notes some of the luster is gone, Evva’s no longer quite as clean, as polished as she was when she stood commander of a Vincere cruiser. Her scales are often scratched, her neck bears a long, puckering gash from her face to the top of her torso, something that could have been healed on a Vincere ship but has instead hardened to a scar.
“They?” Sax says.
“We call them buzzers,” Evva replies, and at Sax’s questioning look, she goes on. “I’ve not seen them used outside of Aspicis. They hunt for irregularities in the vines, in the villages, and catalog anything that stands out.”
Makes sense that the Amigga would devote paranoid resources to keeping their planet as they like it.
“They can’t detect your machines? The power?”
“If they have, we don’t know it,” Evva says, then nods over at a metal plate embedded in the ground. “Power, here, isn’t drawn from a generator. We steal it, like the Amigga do, from Aspicis’ core. This taps into a through-line, and we siphon off what we need.”
“It doesn’t look like you need much,” Sax replies, then gives Evva a hard stare. There’s a question he’s been waiting to ask for a long time. “What did Avan tell you that changed your mind?”
Evva sniffs at the question, then sweeps her claws across the Quell members doing their work. “You understand, now, that the Amigga have no interest in keeping this alive. Us alive. As soon as we’ve played out our usefulness, they’ll replace us with the next creation. You found them already, I believe?”
“The humans?”
“Avan told me the Sevora had sent one of their few remaining seed ships to that space just for Earth. The mind he took had notions of a species made there, one that failed, but came too close to abandon entirely,” Evva says. “One meant to deliver a fatal blow to the Sevora, but also keep the Amigga from our lethal claws should we ever turn against them. I needed to see if Avan was right.”
“So you sent us.”
“I sent the two Oratus I thought I could trust.” Evva says. “When you shared what you discovered of the species, I dug further. Found the order to eliminate the humans, and the analysis recommending a new version, with changes. The Chorus isn’t going to stop, Sax, until we’re all pacified or dead. The Amigga aren’t interested in a shared galaxy - they want it for themselves.”
One of the Quell members, the lime green Whelk who hovers around the stoves like they’re its most treasured possessions, approaches with a pair of browned, thick green circles. It hands one to Sax, and Sax stares at it.
“Vine cakes,” the Whelk burbles. “Get used to’em.”
The creatures slithers away after Evva takes her share, and Sax takes a bite. It’s crunchy, the browning adding some flavor, but otherwise bland filler. Marginally better than nutrient goop, but Sax had hoped for better. Nowhere in this galaxy actually has good food anymore.
“What happens if we win, Evva?” Sax says. “When we take apart the Chorus, destroy the Meridia?”
“First, we convince the Vincere to back us. Then, we push for representatives from every species to come together and draft by-laws, like the Vincere itself uses. Hopefully, from there, we can find some common ground to begin a new civilization.”
“I’ve been to places governed by themselves,” Sax says. “They barely survive, Evva. Their people fight for daily food, they destroy each other for the smallest profit. There’s no higher cause, no grand vision to strive for.”
Scrapper Station and its tangled webs of power, and Rathfall’s delusional blend of hunting, profits, and castes of gas miners and executives stick tough in Sax’s mind.
“At least, this way, we make that choice,” Evva says. “It might not be better than now. It may be worse, but at least it will be ours.”
13 Through the Streets
A ruined city stretches before us across the horizon. Towers that rose once as sparkling diamonds or sharp spears to the sky are broken and burning as the Vincere continue their long bombardment from space. Strikes hit like lightning, blasting down from the sky, breaking into buildings or immolating streets in flash-fires.
Except for one huge structure that stands above the others, a sphere whose bottom vanishes into the ground. We’re speeding towards it now, past interchanges with other tubes where the platforms can twist and swerve to other corners of the city or beyond.
The whole time we’re moving so fast that speech is impossible - aside from the roaring wind, the only thing I can hear are my own thoughts. Around me, the Sevora guards stand straight, the platform molding around our feet to lock us in despite the speed. Their eyes are straight ahead, their arms loose, as if the Sevora have resigned themselves to their fate.
I risk a look back to see how the prisoners are doing, and they’re the opposite of the guards. They’re not composed, but rather squeezing back from the edges as much as the platforms will allow. They’re hugging and holding each other, like mothers and children, even across different species. I suppose the end of the world would be frightening, even if the only world you’ve ever known has been a horrifying one.
Up ahead we’re approaching the edge of the city itself, and those flashes are getting brighter. This close, I can see that the huge sphere isn’t standing because Kolas hasn’t tried to bring it down, but rather because the flashes that do hit it fizzle out against what looks like an invisible bubble; a shield, like what our shuttle used, before the Sevora fighters overwhelmed it.
The thought has me look around for more of those fighters, and while there’s plenty of craft blitzing through the sky, none seem to be on patrol, but rather zipping towards one destination or another. Even as I look, a pair of ships slam into each other as they try to avoid an orbital shot, their debris sprinkling down to the avenues of the city in shrapnel rain.
The platform shudders as we cross into the urban landscape, and I jerk my eyes straight ahead. It’s a straight shot from here to the sphere, and I realize that huge building must be Nasiya’s own headquarters, and what better place to keep your last escape than your home?
I’m ready for it too. Ready for the fight. My mask has two miners on it, two
razor swords I’m far more comfortable with, and I have Viera’s sharpshooting and a pair of very deadly Oratus ready to spill some more blood.
What I’m not ready for is a second, longer shudder. One that pushes me from side to side and makes the whole tube shake before it stabilizes. A building already damaged by blasts ahead and to our right tilts to the side and crumbles. At first, I think it must be an earthquake - something we had from time to time back home - but a shape in the corner of my eye draws a longer look.
Vimelia’s moon is a large, gray blob. My first time to this planet, I noticed it’s circle resembled our own, but now it’s a stretched thing, as if someone’s pulling on its right side, causing it to warp. And it’s stretching towards Vimelia, the distorted part expanding into a ghostly white slate as the moon comes closer to the planet.
Our time is running out.
A bright flash breaks the ice-fear of what a crashing moon means, and the platform’s sudden jerk has me twisting forward, catching myself on the alabaster-white railing as our speed slows. The tube in front of us is ablaze, split apart by a blast from above that’s rent it in two. The platform’s not stopping fast enough either - we’re getting closer and we’re a dozen meters above the ground.
“Viera!” I shout as the roaring wind from our travel dies along with our velocity. “Get off the platform!”
“It would be a good idea if we moved too,” T’Oli says, the Ooblot sealed tight to my back.
But our feet are locked in. I try to move, try to scramble away as the platform skids along the glassy tunnel towards the jagged opening. I’m looking at my feet, trying to pick them up, when a green-scaled claw slashes down and carves me free.
“Go!” Lan hisses as she continues hacking away at the others on our platform, even the Sevora.
I press back, trying to get away, when things shift beneath my feet, when my stomach lurches as gravity takes hold of me.
I’m falling.
The platform drops away beneath me and I jump, reaching for Malo, locked to the second platform, and my warrior, my general, manages to catch my hand with his. I hang for a moment, feeling his warm fingers on mine, his eyes tired and red, mouth creased with the effort of holding me, and then we plummet.