by Tim C Taylor
Indiya appeared to be paying little attention to the Queen, which Arun took to be a calculated insult. No longer even looking into the camera, she peeled back her hood, adjusting her wild purple hair into a more comfortable position, and then pulled the hood back up again, as if this were her only concern in the universe. Perhaps Arun was giving her too much credit; the sleep dust still in her eyes made it clear she had come straight from bed. Perhaps she really had been simply trying to get more comfortable, but he liked to think otherwise. Indiya grimaced against the mounting g-forces, her skin pulling taut.
She turned back towards the screen then, and she was glorious in her defiance. “All right, you slimy newt, we’re going, but mark my words. I’m human, and you know the level of violence we’re capable of Inflicting, so understand this: if you harm any of my kind still on your planet, I will haunt you for the rest of your life and beyond. Trust me on this.”
Arun expected a retort from the Queen, but she was silent. So was the Listener, who held himself rigid, staring at the image of Indiya. That was nothing compared to the reaction of one of the guards. She set down her gun, which had been trained on Arun and Del, and splayed her limbs out with her belly flat to the floor, as if a giant boot had descended from the heavens and squashed her. The other guards looked as if they wanted to follow suit, but their discipline held, for now.
The Queen was mumbling to herself. “Oh, Goddess. Oh, Goddess. Oh, Goddess.”
Indiya had slipped her maneuver hood back on and was rapidly being swallowed by her acceleration station. But she must still have had a good view of the audience chamber because she asked: “Arun, What’s going on?”
“Search me,” was all Arun could think to answer. “That’s why we need alien allies in the Legion. They think differently. Why they need us too, if they’re ever to win their freedom. The Legion… it’s all down to you now, Indiya.” Arun thought of the embryos Pedro had created. For the first time, he was glad of his alien friend’s foresight. “Actually, my role might not be completely over. Pedro will explain. Now get your ass out of this system. Freedom can be won!”
“It’s been a blast, Arun. Indiya out.”
The instant Indiya disappeared from the screens the Queen snapped out of her stupor and stared at Arun before beckoning the disgraced high priest to approach the throne.
“Is this truly happening?” she asked the Listener Prime.
“It is her.” Behind the bland translation in Arun’s ear, he thought the priest’s voice had regained its swagger. “I hear the gods speaking clearly to me,” declared the Listener Prime of all the Littoranes. “She is the unwashed purple warrior. She who was prophesized to be our deliverer.”
The Queen went quiet again. But this time Arun thought she was silently issuing orders rather than succumbing to shock.
“Major McEwan, can you hear me?” Indiya’s voice came over the screens. There was no incoming video feed, probably because the captain would be cocooned in her station by now.
“Still here, Captain.”
“The Littorane orbital platforms have powered down. So have their warboats. They’re just drifting under their own momentum. I have firing solutions. Do I destroy them?”
“Fire upon us,” said the Queen. “Let the blood of our sailors, wash away our insults.”
“Major?”
“Hold your fire, Captain. Keep your weapons trained on the Littoranes, but do not fire unless they power up or I issue fresh orders.”
“Maintaining combat readiness, aye.”
“That order not to fire extends to you too, Your Majesty,” added Arun. The Queen had accepted a gun from the Decurion and was aiming at her own head. At Arun’s words she hesitated but did not drop it. “Are we acting out a prophesized scene, Your Majesty?” Arun guessed.
“We all are.” The Queen fingered her gun’s trigger.
“Which makes Indiya… what? An aspect of your goddess? A messiah?”
“Our chains of bondage will never be lifted,” said the Listener Prime, “until the gods send the unwashed purple warrior to deliver us.”
“Figures,” said Arun. “I’ve some experience of prophecy myself. Except whenever I peer behind the veil of mystery I don’t glimpse a divine being. The puppet masters are mortal, scared, and place no value on life unless it’s their own. You call it prophecy. If I’m right about who is really behind this, it’s not prophecy but tyranny.”
“You dare?” The translation of the Queen’s words was as lifeless as always, but Arun guessed she was seriously pissed. “The prophecy came from the Mouthpiece of the Gods!”
The Listener Prime approached the throne. “Your Majesty, please forgive the humans. It is ignorance rather than insolence. A lesser sin. They are holy instruments of the gods, but they are no more aware of their role than the bacterial film coating the deep sea vents that release vital oxygen into the water. Even the Mouthpiece denies its own heavenly blessing. It insists the gift of foreseeing is not the divine providence of the gods, but rather a pseudo-scientific notion it calls recursive quantum tunneling through near futures of high potential.”
“This Mouthpiece of the Gods,” said Arun. “It isn’t by any chance an orange blob in a life support tank?”
Arun felt a painful clawing at his mind.
This wasn’t the first time he had experienced a Night Hummer’s touch, but familiarity didn’t make the experience any more pleasant. The worst part was that the pain lacked a center, a focus; instead it seemed as if scores of little needles pricked at his thoughts. Never intense enough to be called agony, this was rather a multitude of irritating stings, itches that demanded to be scratched but could never be reached. Arun suspected that prolonged exposure to a Hummer’s unique form of communication would drive him mad.
The chamber’s vast stone doors rumbled open, apparently of their own volition, and a brilliant orange light shone through the widening gap. Arun had to squint, but thought he could make out a darker something at the center of the glow. As the light advanced, so did Arun’s anger. He had enemies aplenty in this universe but doubted any were more dangerous than the Night Hummers, the creatures who claimed to have shaped his destiny.
The glow lessened to the point where the Hummer could clearly be seen, swimming within its orange sphere; a nebulous blue-black mass that dwarfed any human, its shape constantly shifting, as impossible to pin down as the pain of its communication.
Arun wouldn’t have thought that anything could upstage a Hummer, but even as the creature entered, he saw Indiya react: a frown, a grimace, as if she was affected by its presence too.
“Frakk!” she said. “I can’t see what’s going on, but have you got a Hummer down there?”
“Afraid so,” said Arun, trying to keep the anger from his voice. There would be time to explore Indiya’s reaction later.
“And did those fish-faces just call me unwashed?”
Arun laughed. “Captain Indiya, unwashed, I believe, means in this instance the same as the dispossessed, hopeless, the untouchables.” He turned to the Queen. “Am I on the right lines?”
It was the Listener Prime who replied. “That is correct, Major McEwan. Like many in this region of the galaxy, our loyalty to our White Knight masters was bought by the threat of extinction. When we say unwashed, what we mean is… unwashed.”
Arun frowned. Was this a deliberate insult after all?
Del-Marie spoke up. “Listener Prime, I believe the translator system is masking your intent.”
“Thank you,” said the priest. “The word I used to describe the Purple Warrior is a secret word, a rallying cry for rebellion against the White Knights. The word is…” He flicked a control on his collar to turn off his speech synthesizer and used his natural voice. It sounded like his throat was smothered in well-churned mud, but the word was unmistakable.
“Hu-man.”
The half-strangled word echoed around the chamber like the report of a gun.
What was the Hummer up to?
Arun looked back at the screens. What he saw was Xin making an obscene hand gesture unbecoming of an officer.
The Hummer spoke its thoughts.
Arun frowned. What kind of frakked-up apology was that?
Some of Xin’s emotions leaked through the Night Hummer’s link. She was excited and her animation was infectious. What shook him was how much her excitement was tied up with working alongside Arun. The two of them against the galaxy. Somewhere along the way, he’d bought into Springer’s unrelentingly bleak view of Xin, forgetting how he used to dream of Xin every night. Now he could feel that he was no stranger to her dreams. A thrill of excitement ran through him.
The Hummer’s words took a moment to sink in.
Arun felt the Night Hummer brooding in its tank.
Then he noticed Del-Marie mooning at him, and remembered that he was in the audience chamber of a Queen who had just survived a palace coup and then tried to take over the Beowulf.
“I apologize,” Arun told the Queen. “Lieutenant Lee and I were just—”
“Communing with the gods via their Mouthpiece. We know. You could not afford me a courtesy higher than to bring the attention of the heavens to my audience chamber.” The Queen waved at her guards, who hurried away. She rose from her throne and started to follow them. “We shall leave you in peace. When you return to the mundane matters of this plane, we have many arrangements to discuss. There must be no delay.”
“No delay to what, exactly?”
“Why, to our alliance, of course. We had not expected to launch a holy war of liberation throughout the stars, but the divine speak clearly through you and must be obeyed without question. I shall strain every fiber of my being to place my forces at your disposal as soon as possible.”
— Chapter 11 —
“Kreeaghegh!”
To Arun’s right, Admiral Kreippil gave a shout and wriggled his long tongue, colored a lurid orange and extended by thick cables of muscle. The commander of the Littorane Navy had his attention on the thousands of his service personnel parading along the lanes and shallow water channels below, so Arun decided to assume the admiral’s outburst was the correct etiquette to convey enthusiasm.
The other Littorane military dignitaries on the hovering aerial platform made a variety of grunts and clicks to accompany similar tongue waggling. It was a strange sight, made all the more surreal because the Littoranes were wearing the black uniforms of the Human Legion. Arun had only chosen black as a stopgap. Looked like he was stuck with it now.
Kreippil glanced at Arun.
Although he couldn’t read the expression on the rubbery Littorane face with its high, upward-pointing nostrils, Arun suspected Kreippil was not pleased. Arun nudged the slight figure to his left and started to clap. Indiya took the hint and joined in with the applause. As the only two humans on the platform hovering over the parade, they clapped hard enough to hurt.
Satisfied, Kreippil turned his attention to the thousands of Littoranes and humans parading below. Thank frakk he didn’t want us to stick our tongue out too.
With the alien dignitaries happy, Arun tuned his ears into the words that echoed along the dry lanes, and rumbled through the water channels of what in normal times was the largest sporting venue on the planet that wasn’t deep below the sea. He’d been over the prepared text enough times that he knew the human version word for word. Even so, the final statement still chilled him with its significance from the instant Del-Marie’s recorded voice began to speak the words.
In a time of unrest and civil war, our two people shall unite for mutual defense and commercial health until such time as we are able to declare our allegiance to our rightful masters, the White Knights.
“Are you certain we won’t just give up our freedom as soon as the civil war is over, Arun?” Indiya asked. “No one wants to fight a war with the intention of surrendering at the end.”
“If we win big enough,” Arun replied while the next statement was announced in the most commonly used Littorane language, “we can dictate our terms to whoever wins the civil war. Until then we have to continue this charade of loyalty to missing masters.”
On behalf of our absent White Knight overlords, came the human version of the final statement, we name this new alliance the Human Legion.
Arun’s heart skipped a beat. Right on time, the air filled with the prearranged light show. Beowulf shot its zero-point weapon down from orbit. The newly installed ground defense battery shot a similar array of searing beams up through the air.
The techs of both races had tested the weapons extensively beforehand, but Arun still didn’t allow himself to breathe until he was sure the sky hadn’t caught fire.
Then the climax: the Queen herself ascended from the waters in a jeweled bubble.
The stadium rang with cheers.
The underwater Littoranes splashed at the surface of their pools a
nd channels, which probably amounted to the same thing.
Many of those Littoranes would soon be joining with the humans in their crusade for freedom. In exchange for the secret of the zero-point weapon system invented by Beowulf’s specials, the Queen had placed half of the Littorane fleet under Arun’s command. It was a massive step up in responsibility, and the prospect made him nervous as hell. There was also a practical problem that needed addressing…
“You seem to have acquired a fleet, Captain Indiya,” he said. “Does that bother you?”
“Of course not, Major. Although I’d hardly call it a fleet. I prefer flotilla.”
“Flotilla? Not even a squadron? Hell, you’ve a quarter of a megaton carrier in your flotilla.”
“Nonetheless, a flotilla,” she stated firmly. “Of which I am in command, and so I decide how we shall refer to it. And to answer your question, commanding these ships is much easier than you might think due to the excellent assistance of the Littoranes. I’m sure their belief in me personally will grate in time. But for now, they know of my inexperience and are as eager to train me and my senior officers as they are to get out there and take the fight for freedom to the enemy.”
Their glances locked for a moment in silent understanding. The Littorane were caught up in the excitement of setting off on a holy war of liberation, but the humans knew that there was no clear enemy to fight. How was liberating planets any different from conquering them? Who spoke for the wishes of a species? These questions had already sparked many hours of heated debate within the Legion. The morality of this war would get messy at some point, but Arun pushed that quandary away to be faced another day.
“I admire your confidence,” said Arun, “but I have a concern with your leadership of the flotilla, Captain Indiya.”
Indiya’s face hardened. Arun couldn’t resist letting it sour further. It had been too long since he’d teased her.
“As supreme commander of the Human Legion,” he said, “I think it’s inappropriate for a captain to lead the combined naval forces of the entire Legion. A more senior officer is required. Congratulations on your promotion, Commodore Indiya.”
