by A. R. Knight
“Who would still be here?” Nasiya hisses in reply, and plenty of wet flows up with the words. “Every Sevora that can fight is already dead, or is flying what few fighters we have left. If my species is dying, what’s the value in protecting me?”
I can concede that point.
“So you were going to fly out of here alone?” I reply. “Leave the rest of your species to die?”
“I was waiting,” Nasiya says. “Some of us know about my ship, I thought they would come. As you can see, they did not make it.”
Lan glances at me. “Human, we need to go.”
I want to ask Nasiya more questions. I want to understand how the Sevora leader came to this, and who did such damage to its host body. But I also want to avoid a moon slamming into me.
“Fine,” I nod at Gar. “Get rid of it. Outside.”
Gar might slaughter Nasiya right here if I don’t specify, and the last thing I want in our small bridge is the remnants of Gar’s favorite pastime. Nasiya, for its part, doesn’t struggle as Gar drags the Sevora out, doesn’t say anything beyond its low hisses. I hear the weight of the bodies on the entrance ramp as Lan goes forward to take the ship’s controls.
“Can I take off?” Lan asks me.
Malo and Viera are in the shuttle. Gar’s going to be coming back soon. Lan could leave now, and we’d ditch all the prisoners and the Sevora guards behind. We would be safe.
Outside the windshield, as if hearing my thoughts, the first set of prisoners bursts into the docking bay, running towards the ship. There’s another rattling shake, harder and longer than any of the others, and I’m forced to catch myself on the side of the bridge’s back wall as my knees buckle. T’Oli catches the struggle, slides down and forms itself around my feet, keeping me in place. Viera, with no such luck, holsters her miners and braces herself against the wall.
“Can we scan them?” I ask Lan. “To see if any are infected?”
Lan blinks at me. “Not here. On one of the cruisers, yes. But going that far is a risk, human. One Kolas would not have us take.”
“Kolas isn’t here.”
There’s a roar from the boarding ramp, and Lan taps at the left monitor, and it shifts from its clear view of the docking bay to a feed of the ramp’s base. Gar’s standing there, his claws wide. I don’t see Nasiya, but the prisoners and Sevora guards are surrounding the Oratus, chittering and yelling for a spot on Nasiya’s ship.
“You must think of the galaxy, human,” Lan replies. “These few dozen are not worth risking everything.”
I look down at T’Oli, but the Ooblot only blinks its eyes at me. Malo’s back in the passenger section of the ship, so I look to Viera.
“Make the call, Empress,” Viera says to me. “But do it fast.”
Do I accept the cost of innocent lives as necessary, or do I fight for every single one? Before, back in the intersection, I’d made the call to leave behind the wounded, those who couldn’t keep up. In the moment, I felt we didn’t have a choice. If we hadn’t made it here, all of us would have died.
Now we do.
“We’re taking them,” I say.
Lan shakes her head, hisses low, then begins to tap away on the two screens. A gentle whine fills the craft, and, in the feed, the ramp beneath Gar begins to recede back into the ship.
“Apologies, Human. I cannot allow that.” Lan says.
I raise my miner, point it at the back of Lan’s sizeable head. “Lower the ramp, Lan.”
Threatening an Oratus. I might be making the worst, and last mistake of my life. Yet as I hold the miner steady, aimed directly at Lan, I don’t regret it. I don’t question it.
Father let Malo and his Charre warriors take me away from my tribe in order to save it from what might have been a bloody extinction. He took the easier way, let me go rather than risk a greater loss.
I am not my father. I will not make his mistake.
“Don’t make me say it again, Lan.”
The Oratus makes no move to tap the terminal and stop the ramp. “Human, these are the creatures that tried to destroy your entire race. You wish to save them?”
“They’re not all Sevora,” I flick my eyes to T’Oli, who’s got its eyestalks split between Lan and I. “T’Oli, stop the ramp.”
“Think she might eat me if I try,” T’Oli replies.
“I’ll shoot her if she does.”
The Oratus stands up from the net, though she has to bend her green neck to keep her head beneath the ship’s low sloping ceiling. As she rises, Lan’s left midclaw taps at the monitor and the ramp pauses, leaving Gar standing just above the shouting crowd. Lan turns all the way towards me, takes a single step my way. T’Oli’s binding keeps me from retreating, but Viera, with her right hand still keeping her stable, aims a miner with her left, backing up my threat with her sharpshooting.
“One more step, Lan,” I say, and I’m impressed at my own voice for being this steady.
“Trillions,” Lan hisses. “Trillions have died due to their efforts. They devour species, they steal freedom. You’re willing to risk their return for a paltry few?”
“I am.”
Lan opens her mouth slightly, the sharp teeth glinting. I know that if she decides I’m not worth keeping alive, I’ll never get more than a shot off. Viera’s probably wouldn’t kill the Oratus either.
“We head straight for the Nunlite, for Kolas,” Lan says finally. “Nobody leaves the ship without a scan. Any with a Sevora inside die. You must tell them. They must agree. Then we must leave.”
I can tell that’s as far as I’m going to get with the Oratus. Lan’s already staring - and breathing - pure disgust at me, so I nudge around her and, with T’Oli guiding me, activate the ship’s external speaker.
“Prisoners and Sevora,” I begin. I’ve never made a speech asking a group to decide which of them ought to live and die, but I don’t have a choice, so I plunge ahead. “We cannot allow any Sevora-hosted species to leave on our craft. If you are free of infection, board. If you are a Sevora, you will be found out and eliminated, so I advise you to seek your survival elsewhere.”
As I say the words, Lan lowers the boarding ramp, so that by the time I finish, Gar’s back on the ground dealing with a flood of bodies. The Oratus steps aside at the push and lets the crowd up the ramp. The tired prisoners manage to move fast, and help those couple that fall making their way up. The only ones that don’t try to board, the ones that turn and run back towards the lift, are the five Sevora guards that came with us all the way from the compound.
“They’re not even trying,” I say as I watch them run on the monitor.
“A sure death at Gar’s claws is more frightening than an unknown chance at life,” Lan says. “They may not yet understand their moon is crashing down on them.”
Once the crush of prisoners finds their way inside, Lan retracts the ramp for a final time, with Gar taking up supervising duty with Viera over the cluster of prisoners clogging up the ship’s main bay.
With the engines primed, her claws on the flight stick, Lan lifts the ship up from the ground. T’Oli locks me into place by the back wall, where I brace myself as we start to move.
“Thanks,” I tell the hard, ceramic-looking mass beneath me.
T’Oli blinks its eyes my way. “Brave thing you did. They’ll thank you. Clarity’s Dawn would be proud.”
“Even Sapphrite?”
The Amigga had lead the rogue faction of un-hosted species beneath Vimelia’s surface. Neither T’Oli nor I have heard anything about their survival after our escape from the planet the first time, which I take to mean Clarity’s Dawn died in doing their final mission.
“Sapphrite would have said it wanted revenge above all else,” T’Oli replies. “But it did all it could to nurture our band, and give us a mission. I think it would be proud of you.”
T’Oli’s words, delivered through the strange slapping of smooth skin against itself, and with all the emotional feeling of a clacking branch, don’t puff
me up with happiness, but they do calm the buzz of nauseating fear that I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Lan taps away at the monitors at her sides and, ahead of us, a gap slides open in the sphere building’s wall, showing a different world from the one we were in moments before. Where a vast city once stood, smoking ruins now exist. As we leave the cover of the docking bay, I see that the fires are only partially caused by Kolas’ bombardment; the now-constant quakes from the moon’s approach makes the ground beneath us appear to ripple. Cracks split open the streets, and break apart batteries, pipes, and whole buildings burst into flame, explode or just collapse into great ash clouds.
Up above, what had been a great white streak of stretched moon has expanded to fill most of the sky. The moon’s shape is still distorted, and plenty of fissures line its surface too, breaking the big ball into different fragments, which drift apart from one another slowly, but nevertheless in motion as I watch. The first, a pointed crescent, begins to make initial contact with Vimelia’s upper atmosphere, igniting in a blue-orange flame across the entirety of its shape.
“Hold on,” Lan says, and I hear the Oratus’ voice echo from behind us as the order gets relayed to our passengers.
The ship bursts forward and up. The acceleration is so hard, so sudden that the air leaves my lungs as my body presses back into the dividing wall behind me. Even though there’s no wind in the ship, my eyes start to water as the force compresses my head.
Beneath us, the city ruins dwindle. I realize we’re not making any evasive maneuvers around Kolas’ big lasers and manage, once I get a breath, to pose the question to Lan.
“They needed to get out of the way,” Lan says. “The moon could damage the fleet as well as the planet. Now they’re watching for anyone trying to escape.”
“Like us?”
“I hope so.” Lan’s voice sounds tight, so I stop my questions and let the Oratus concentrate.
Above us, the cracking moon fragments even further as the fire burns its way through the gray-white surface. Bits and pieces scatter off and begin to tumble towards us as we climb to meet them. Flames burn around the meteors, and smoke trails mark their scars as they slice Vimelia’s dying sky.
“Now we see if the Oratus can really fly,” T’Oli says to me.
I only nod - any words might distract Lan.
The Oratus, though, looks to be in total concentration. She sends Nasiya’s ship to the left around the first fragment, a tower-sized block of rock breaking up into smaller chunks as it slides by. Then Lan swoops the ship up and around, tracing the outline of a larger piece, using the big rock to block faster, smaller boulders blasting through around us. With a quick right cut, Lan pushes us around the outside of the big one, leaving us in the path of a hill-sized ball careening our way.
I can’t help it - I shout. It doesn’t help, but it’s all I can do.
A bright red stream fires out from the point of our ship, striking the ball with pure energy and super-heating it. Coupled with the burn from the atmosphere, the rock melts and bursts, and instead of flying through solid matter, the outside of the ship crackles as thousands of pieces fry in its shield.
“A point for me!” Gar’s hissing laugh comes over the intercom.
On the other side of the debris field - as I gasp for breath - there’s another series of boulders that, thankfully, keep themselves well-spaced enough for Lan to loop her way around. Then we’re in the upper atmosphere, its fires licking at the sides of the ship. Around us, instead of the blue-black of space touching the sky, floats an endless descending minefield of moon rock. Like fruit from a tree, the moon’s fragments take turns succumbing to Vimelia’s pull, dipping out of their gradual decline into sudden bombing.
“We’re going to make it,” Lan says, and the Oratus’ words are the first clue I’ve had that she didn’t think success was assured.
“Thanks to you,” I say.
“This is a good ship,” Lan replies. “The shuttle we flew down here would not have survived that ascent.”
We coast our way through the rest of the moon, until at last we break to the other side. The Vincere fleet, even larger than when we left it, shows itself through the occasional blast and explosion of a Sevora ship attempting a futile, last ditch attempt to get away.
“They have to get far enough away to leap,” T’Oli says as we watch a species go extinct in little pops before our eyes. “Or else, when they try, they could fold part of the planet, or the moon, into their leaping space with them. A very fatal mistake.”
T’Oli explains this matter-of-fact, and I take it in, but what I’m thinking, really, is that we survived. We did it. We made it down to Vimelia’s surface, found Malo, and got off alive.
16 Carry On
Flashes; blinks and moments come and go. Sax gets the impression he’s lying on the ground, the light above carved apart by thick black lines. He breathes, but the rest of him lies at a distance, untouchable, apart, so Sax sleeps.
Oratus dreams are like any other species - fragments of life and wishes spun into visions of futures past. There are endless hours spent with Bas in frenetic missions against Sevora scum, odysseys through jungles of Sax’s distant memory, the neon-lit caves of Earth where the humans lead him to the den of an angry horde of Fassoth.
When the last one fades, Sax opens his eyes again to see a familiar face staring at him, rose-gold and wonderful.
“Found you,” Bas hisses lightly.
“You did,” Sax manages to say. His throat is dry from too little water, his head throbs - no, his entire body aches. “How long?”
“It’s still light, if that helps,” Bas says. “It’s been over thirty hours.”
The announcement prompts a dire laugh from Sax. “Thirty hours? It took you that long to shake the skiffs?”
Bas sighs. “I was overruled.”
Sax, though, is finding his connections to his muscles are still intact. It’s a slow process, standing, but with time and effort Sax gets there. Notices, as he looks up, that there are a number of deep indents on the vines above, marking the passage of his fall.
“Plake?” Sax says.
“The mission,” Bas replies.
“You chose the mission over me?”
“I didn’t want to, my pair,” Bas says, and she uses her claws to help Sax stay upright. “But we couldn’t know if you survived. Agra-Red and Plake drove away the last skiffs, but more were coming. Even if you lived, we had no way to carry you.”
The reasoning makes sense, and it’s impossible for Sax to be angry with Bas. That would be like becoming angry with himself.
“Yet, you came back?”
Bas beckons towards a pathway obviously cut with her own claws. The vines there are torn asunder, their pieces littering the ground as they walk towards a small clearing similarly sliced open, though the charred ends here show a miner’s handiwork.
Sitting in it is a small shuttle, barely larger than the evac mod they took down to Aspicis. Place and Agra-Red wait outside of it.
“Managed to survive?” Agra-Red says as Sax walks into view.
“Looks like you owe me,” Plake says to the Whelk.
“When don’t I?”
“One of these days I’ll collect.”
“And that’s the day you’ll find out I have nothing to give you,” Agra-Red warbles a wet laugh. “All I’ve got is this miner and a bit of loyalty.”
Plake shakes her head, takes a harder look at Sax. “You still able to go on this?”
“The mask shaped most of the fall and the vines did the rest,” Sax says. “I’ll be sore, but still better than you.”
The Whelk laughs again, and Plake just points to the open shuttle bay. Sax creaks in first, expecting cramped quarters and finds it’s even worse than he thought. There’s no actual cockpit inside - there’s only cargo space and it’s already filled with what looks like racks and racks of dead power cells. As it is, squeezing in requires Sax to reassess his flexibility and bend himself
into a mess of limbs.
Bas doesn’t get any better treatment, generally placing herself on top of the path Sax defined between the racks of dark batteries. Plake and Agra-Red get the small open area directly around the bays, the Whelk settling its assault miner so the point aims right out the door.
“Where’s the pilot?” Sax asks once they’re inside.
“Don’t have one,” Plake replies. “Apparently Cavignum has such tight security they don’t let much manned cargo in. Our contact says our only chance is going in by drone shuttle.”
As if to emphasize the point, Plake pulls out a small device and taps a couple of signals on it. The drone begins to power up, rising from the ground on the strength of its microjets.
“How’d you convince them to take us?” Sax asks.
“I used my claws,” Bas replies. “And, we promised the Flaum a position heading all of the power on Aspicis.”
Sax hisses a laugh. “I thought the point of this was to remove corruption?”
“Nah,” Agra-Red says. “We just want to change from corruption that destroys galaxies to the usual, grifting sort.”
There’s not much to say to that, though Sax feels a bit of sadness worm its way into his body as the shuttle flies along. Evva certainly had more noble aspirations than replacing the Chorus with a wheeling-and-dealing set of greedy paws, but what does Sax know about governing? He couldn’t run a planet, couldn’t even run a ship.
So instead he focuses on things he knows; namely, rehearsing the plan of attack. Their mission’s pretty simple, now that they’re on the way to Cavignum. Once they land, the group needs to break in and cause a diversion large enough for Nobaa and Engee to find a way inside. Then, of course, get out alive and, if possible, reconnect with Evva at the Spire.
Simple.
“Have you two ever done anything like this?” Sax asks after they’ve run through the plan twice. “An actual assault on an enemy position?”