Third Don: Ardulum, #3

by J. S. Fields

  A final turn brought them to a round doorway marked with four circles spaced evenly apart. Quarters number four, or so he’d named it. The owner of the mysteriously altered panel. Yorden tapped the entry pad and waited for the round door to slide into the wall. He expected to be underwhelmed. The rest of the ship had been grimy and barely functional. If anything worked in this room, it’d be a small miracle.

  The door beeped and opened. Salice looked to Yorden and took a tentative step towards the entryway.

  “Better let me, just in case,” he said. Salice huffed but stepped back. Frowning at his words—they probably sounded more like a command than concern—Yorden peered into the poorly illuminated space. His wide shoulders and thick torso filled the doorway, but he did not step beyond it. Salice came up behind him to look over his shoulder. Her hot breath tickled his neck hair. He was about to nudge her back, but then stopped, unsure whether she would appreciate the contact.

  He was starting to fill back out again—a few days of biped-appropriate meals supplemented with Mmnnuggl pellet food had taken away that sickly look to his skin. Salice had also prospered, her form rounding into a more feminine shape. The flight suit he’d bought her at Xinar was snug across her chest and hips where before it had hung loosely from her shoulders. Compliment her on it? Yorden chewed on that thought for a moment, but then rejected it. Nah. Who knows what form she values. I’ll get myself disintegrated. Besides, she doesn’t need validation from a Terran.

  After his eyes finished adjusting to the pale lime-green lighting, Yorden blinked furiously as he took in the room’s contents. The walls and ceiling were black, and the floor was slightly jagged and sloped up visibly from the door. A cracked interface panel was built into the far corner. Yorden’s small hope for finding a working panel that he could experiment on evaporated. Smudged fingerprints covered the dull surface. In the other corner, several thick, round, bright-orange cushions were stacked together. Littering the floor were tablets—old tech with metal scaffolds and self-regenerating glass screens. Most interestingly, a flaky, white film coated almost every low surface, and when Yorden reached out to touch it, it disintegrated to dust.

  He jumped back from the room and cursed.

  It was stuk. Dried, old stuk. There was only one species that produced it. Of that species, only one solitary being had left their homeworld.

  Neek. His pilot. His friend.

  Hope flared. It burned through walls of anger Yorden hadn’t realized he had built. It calmed him. Made him hesitant. He’d never been a hesitant man, but he’d never lost a friend like Neek before, either.

  There was a tablet just inside, propped against the closest wall to the right. Yorden thought to reach in and grab it. He dithered. Maybe it was a log recorded by Neek, detailing how she had escaped the Pledge’s destruction. Maybe it had information on where she was now or had details about his contracted Journey youth, Nicholas—or even about Emn, the Ardulan child they’d been harboring.

  Or maybe it contained nothing relevant. Perhaps another Neek had occupied this room. Perhaps someone else had been exiled and he just didn’t know about it. The contents on the tablet might crush the spark of hope that Yorden was protecting. He might not recover from losing Neek a second time.

  A funny pip sound came from behind him. Yorden looked over his shoulder at Salice, whose eyes were unusually focused on him.

  “Hey,” Yorden said nonchalantly, nodding. She couldn’t possibly know what he was thinking, right? Maybe he should bring up the meeting, or the Risalians, but with the way Salice was looking at him, there was something else on her mind.

  Salice nodded in return and then indicated the room.

  “This is where that altered panel is, except it’s broken. Here, take a look.” Yorden turned to the side so she could look within. Would she make the same connection? She’d known Neek briefly, having been around Neek’s body during her miraculous healing. She’d had at least one conversation with Neek as well on the Pledge, before it had been blown apart. Salice might have been sympathetic to his situation, if only he knew how to describe it.

  Salice forced air between tight lips, making a pbb sound. Yorden smiled. She was forming her own language, in a way. Yorden didn’t understand most of it, but he appreciated the effort. Still, her facial expressions were easy to read most of the time, which was really what mattered. This one was questioning, clearly asking about the room. He probably did owe her an explanation.

  “I was thinking of reading one of the tablets,” he explained, pointing to the closest one. “Learning about the pod’s previous owners.” Yorden shrugged and tried to look disinterested. “If we’re going to spend all this time fixing this ship and waiting around for the Nugels’ ruling council or whatever to show up, it might be a fun way to kill time.” It was stupid, but he couldn’t come right out and say it.

  Salice raised an eyebrow.

  It occurred to Yorden, quite suddenly, that telepathy was related to one of the Ardulan Talents. God, if Salice had telepathy, he was really going to have to up his emotional subterfuge game. Of course, if she had that ability, now wouldn’t be the first time she’d used it, either. They’d been together long enough that she had likely already formed an opinion of him, one way or another. It was stupid to stress about it.

  “Could be a Neek was living here a while,” Yorden added evenly. “Lot of stuk on the ground.”

  Salice nodded again, her expression unchanging. Same conclusion, then, as his. That was comforting. Before Yorden could elaborate more, Salice leaned into the room and picked up the nearest tablet. Yorden’s breath caught as the dried stuk lifted from the ground with the movement before slowly settling back. Reacting as if she had disturbed some holy site. It’s just a room, Yorden thought, berating himself. Being an old fart about it would get him no answers.

  Salice held the tablet out to Yorden expectantly. Her face was smug, her lips tensed against what Yorden was certain was a smile.

  “You learn a little too quickly,” he muttered as he snatched the tablet from her hands.

  “Pbb,” returned Salice smartly.

  Yorden flicked the switch at the top and waited. And waited. The tech was so old that he couldn’t make out any cellulose integration—not even xylan. God, the tablet could have been from his adolescence if that was the case. How had some Neek with enough rounds to get a Mmnnuggl pod end up with a truckload of piece-of-shit tablets? A friend of his from the Systems, Hsiou-Lien Chen, had an extensive range of the antiques, but aside from being collectibles, they had no inherent value.

  Finally, the screen flashed. A little square face formed, winked at him, and then flashed off.

  RETURN TO LAST PAGE? The screen asked. YES/NO.

  Yorden chose YES.

  The screen went black for a moment and then filled with Common. Yorden skimmed one paragraph and then the next, the words a jumbled mess of flowery prose and words he didn’t understand. What the hell was a Keft? “Eld” sounded vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t sure from where. He swiped to the next page and read the first sentence.

  The tablet fell from his hands.

  Salice bent and retrieved the unit, before offering it again to Yorden. He wanted to take it, but he was unsure if his next action would be to throw it into the wall, try to break the tablet in two, or just drop it into an incinerator. He was having a hard time controlling his breathing, and his hands were pulling at the sides of his muumuu. Breaking something would have helped.

  Not wanting to scare Salice, Yorden offered a low “excuse me,” backed into the hallway wall, and then rammed his fists into the black paneling repeatedly. The panel cracked, creating a long fissure that ran down the hall. The resulting destruction drove his emotions higher, so Yorden turned to face the wall, pulled back his right arm, and landed his fist right at eye level.

  That was too much for the interface to handle. It shattered around his hand, biometal flakes embedding in his pale skin. Unconcerned for his bare feet, Yorden walked over
the fragments back to Salice and tried to center himself in the pain. It felt real. Tangible. It tempered the pain inside his chest.

  “Tchu?” Salice had forced air against her front teeth, producing the sound while again trying to hand the tablet to Yorden. This time, he took it, using his left hand. He tapped the screen to return to the index and was not surprised when The Book of the Uplifting, Third Edition flashed onto the screen.

  “This was Neek’s ship,” Yorden said. His voice was loud in the metal hall, but he didn’t care. Saying it out loud helped more than breaking the panel did. It grounded him. “Maybe it was Nicholas and Emn’s as well. She made it to the Alliance. Neek is alive.”

  Neek was alive.

  Neek was alive!

  Salice had taken his right hand and was delicately picking biometal out of the wounds. There was pain, but Yorden ignored it. She pulled a square of cloth from her pocket and wrapped his hand, and Yorden watched, detached. The Mmnnuggls had sworn that only he and Salice had survived. Yet, clearly another pod had rescued Neek. The spheres had goddamned telepathic interfaces. There was no way the two pods had not eventually found out about one another’s captives. All this bullshit about wanting his help to protect themselves, about him being some great leader they could look up to, and they’d been lying to him this whole time.

  “Psssshh.” Salice tied the cloth onto Yorden’s hand.

  “If that’s your way of saying we have to find her, then I am in complete agreement. If the Nugels aren’t sharing all the details, then something bigger is going on here than a captive Neek.”

  Salice raised her hand to Emn’s height and made a clicking noise with her tongue that sounded a lot like a duck quack.

  “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Neek has no value to the Nugels, unless it’s in relation to Emn. If Emn came out of metamorphosis while Neek was around, that would have had an impact on the Crippling War.” Yorden snorted. “How much you want to bet me that we’ve been given bad information on the outcome of that, too?”

  Salice huffed in assent.

  Yorden put a cautious foot into the room and then another. Finally, he made it to the middle and turned in a circle, assessing the tablets. “So, let’s conjecture. Emn comes out of metamorphosis some type of badass, microkinetic Ardulan woman. She blows up the Nugel fleets.” Yorden bent down and picked up another tablet, turning it on. “Maybe something goes wrong, or there’s some complication.” The screen flashed and another chunk of text lit up, again, with the word “Keft” highlighted. “Whatever the reason, Neek, Emn, and maybe Nicholas are captured. They steal this pod and, what?” He tapped the glass. “Decide to take a joy ride to the Alliance? Want to eat Keft or find Keft or whatever the hell this thing is?”

  Salice unfastened her flight suit and let the top half slide off her shoulders. Surprised, Yorden averted his eyes. “Salice,” he began, startled. “Whatever you’re doing—”

  A loud tkk made the captain turn back. His eyes skirted over her chest to where she was pointing to her Talent markings—seven hexagons linked from armpit to hip. She stared at him expectantly.

  Yorden tried to figure out her intent. Something about Talents? Emn’s metamorphosis? Her metamorphosis? Risal? Ardulum?

  Ardulum. Of course. If things were unsettled in the Systems, Neek wouldn’t have wanted to stay. She’d have followed Emn anywhere—the two of them had been bound from the moment they’d met—quite literally, at first. Emn no doubt would have wanted answers, and where better to find them than on a planet that existed in the holy books that currently surrounded Yorden’s feet?

  Everything made sense then. Their capture, the tests on Salice, his imprisonment, and the fact that the damn spheres still hadn’t killed either of them, despite being more than capable of it, all fell into place. Neek and Emn might have found Ardulum, which would mean that the Mmnnuggl fears were maybe founded. Considering the Talent level the Risalians must have coded into her, if Emn was on a planet with beings who could teach her how to hone and develop it…

  Yorden shivered. “I get it,” he said, again averting his eyes until Salice had pulled her flight suit back on. “They need you to combat Emn, and they think I control you. It’s not Ardulum they’re terrified of, so much, or the normal Ardulans. It’s Emn, and any others like her. The ones that really could be ‘gods,’ I guess, objectively. And the Nugels, quite rightly, don’t want to be another Neek. They’ve found their independence, and I doubt they want to lose it again.”

  Salice was looking at him like he was a child who had just spelled his name correctly for the first time. Yorden laughed—inappropriately, he knew—but there seemed no better way to release his current emotions.

  “And I just sent them to Risal,” he said in between small chortles. “Back to the Charted Systems to engineer ships that Emn can’t control so they can obliterate her and get Neek killed for real this time. Fuck.”

  Salice took him by his good hand and gestured to the open door.

  “Wait, we’re talking here. Where do you want me to go?”

  When Yorden didn’t move, she looked back and poked the bloody cloth on his right hand. Yorden winced.

  “That. Right.” He took a deep breath and followed Salice from Neek’s former quarters and out of the pod. “There’s a rescue to mount, it seems, and we need to diffuse tensions between the Nugels and Ardulans if I ever want to drink with Neek in my favorite bar on Mars again.” He grinned at Salice. “Maybe tomorrow, you and I can brainstorm on diffusing the upcoming war. We definitely don’t need it spilling over into the Charted Systems again. We’ll have to start by finding Neek, I think. She’s the balance point in all this—and certainly the one who understands Emn the best. We’ll need to pick up Emn and Nick too, obviously, and here’s to hoping they’re all in the same place and alive. The Nugels probably have some idea where to start, though we’re going to have to dig for that information.” Yorden sighed and looked at the remaining intact interface panels that lined the hallway. “Salice, can you use this thing? I want to get some answers. Best to get things sorted out before we hit Risal with a fleet of beach balls and things get really weird.”

  Chapter 7: Outskirts of N’lln, Neek

  “I hate it! I hate being kept inside these walls!”

  “Why, Ekimet? We do not lack for things to do. We do not lack for care. What is so important outside that cannot be accomplished inside?”

  “Well, the trees are outside, aren’t they? Being inside all the time is like living in a mausoleum. The forests are life. This palace, my home, only corpses.”

  “Stark imagery, my friend. Corccinth has taken you out recently, has she not? Perhaps—”

  “I want to go out with you, Savath. I want to go to the forests with you! Grandmother takes me once a week, but you are always outside. To be gatoi means shelter. I’m not a first don. I understand the sacrifices of my gender. I am not, however, willing to sacrifice you, nor any more of our time together. Train me, Savath. Whatever it is you do, I want to be a part of it.”

  —Segment from Eld Ekimet’s personal journal, second month of Arath 18_15

  JANUARY 20TH, 2061 CE

  Ekimet stood behind a firebreak at the edge of the high priest’s land and watched thick smoke choke the sky. Zie tried to swallow, but zir throat burned from the air and the tears zie was holding back. Another hundred hectares reduced to charred remains. Ekimet felt the flames lap at the trees’ bark as if they caressed zir own skin. It itched, it seared, and it made zir want to rip zir flesh from zir bones to make it all just stop.

  Zie could still call the Heaven Guard. Begin full-scale containment. Andal, how Ekimet wanted to do so. To save even just one tree—it would give Ekimet something to focus on, something to protect. But, that was flawed logic.

  The Mmnnuggls had more ships and more power. Ekimet needed to get Ardulum’s attention. Everyone did, and Ekimet didn’t want to keep giving false hope. The Heaven Guard had tried their best to wall off isolated dwellings and sm
all forest towns, but every time they got a section contained, a Mmnnuggl ship appeared and restarted the blaze. It was only evening. Barely a day had passed, yet a quarter of the planet’s forests were on fire.

  The clattering of the firefighters and their machines rang out over the snapping heat of the forest and the cries in Ekimet’s mind. Here, at least, the blaze was contained on one side through a natural shale formation and a steep ravine that held only rocks and a stream at its base.

  Ekimet, save us! the andal cried across the telepathic link. We burn! Our children boil. Our elders collapse. WE ARE NOT ADAPTED!

  Saplings and seedlings withered and crumbled back to the earth, sending every sensation across the mental bridgeway. Their voices were young, shrill, and cut at Ekimet’s heart. The adult trees with thicker trunks were more stoic. They released low moans as their bark seared and the water in their xylem heated. These trees screamed only when they fell, their branches snapping like bones as their crowns rolled about the ground. Still alive even after falling, their pleas for grafting assaulted Ekimet relentlessly.

  A prickling heat rose up on zir skin, which was already warm from the fire. Ekimet took a deep breath and concentrated. The collective screams of the andal would rip zir mind apart if zie let them. Savath had taught zir meditation in what seemed like a lifetime ago. Ekimet followed the instructions now. Breathe. Erect walls. Section your mind.

  The wind changed direction. Ekimet caught a distinct scent in the air. It was something floral mixed with fragrant andal heartwood, entwined with the burning wood smell. Zie hadn’t expected such subtlety of aroma. The rich scent contrasted sharply with the now-tempered mental screams of Ardulum’s gods.