Nils Oolmena hummed a sharp note through his nose slits. A pair of nearby Hroom looked at him with concern. He fell silent and smoothed his thoughts again before answering.
“I saw a few shovels and picks—not enough for everyone.”
In addition to the tools, there was a little water on the shuttle, less food. Not much room for rations with all the workers packed into the hold.
The Adjudicator’s mech helmet turned slightly toward the shuttle, as if he’d caught the stray thought about food and water. “That is all you need—dig up the top layer and recover the heavy equipment. It is no more than two or three meters to the first vault.”
“It’s hot here. There will be losses.”
“Of course. A penance paid by the wicked to purify the galaxy.”
Even apart from the lack of food and water, they had no barracks—were there plans to build them, or would they sleep in the open? The Adjudicators fully intended to work their labor force to death—that much was a given—but by all the sacred shrines, how many would they lose on this one project?
“More devotees will arrive—all that you need, and more. Do not slow for the dying. Do not slow for anything.”
“Yes, Lord of Life. I will obey.”
The Adjudicator turned to go, signaling that the conversation was at an end. Even among themselves, the aliens were not given to polite language, not even to the human extent, whose short greetings and farewells seemed rude to a Hroom.
The sudden deflating of Nils Oolmena’s joy and pleasure receptors told him the speaker had disconnected from his implant. All that was left was a dull headache, a metallic taste in the mouth, and a desperate craving to hear the voice of his masters, to know their desires and to fulfill them, even though his own death was the reward.
For others—human, Hroom, Cavlee, and presumably other conquered races—that need would drive them mad, but Nils Oolmena had mastered it. Soon enough, the cravings would stop, the need to please his masters would fade, and he would be in full command of his own mind.
That was a secret more carefully guarded than anything else. Not only for his own sanity, but to preserve any others who might be in his same situation. Give one of them away, and the Adjudicators would root them all out.
Meanwhile, he would set out to obey. Be eager to do so, in fact. The Adjudicator was already back on the shuttle, and there was no time to waste.
Nils Oolmena went down the rise to where the workforce had lined up for inspection. His boots kicked up a fine dust as he descended. Radioactive, no doubt. The whole crater was blasted, irradiated to keep out native species, not only for the purity of the site, but for the purity of the planet.
Nils Oolmena let out a piercing whistle, then spoke in clicks and hums and glottal words. The other devotees may have spoken a score of languages and dialects among them, but they all would hear his voice in their head and understand. The implant translated his words into thoughts and impressions in their own tongues, rather than the words of the speaker. Furthermore, the implants would compel them to obey, as if he were an Adjudicator and not merely another devotee.
He pointed to a human and a Hroom. “You, and you. And you, too,” he added to a Cavlee. “Each of you gather ten of your kind—the healthiest you can find—and unload all the tools and supplies you can find as quickly as you can manage. Our master will lift off as soon as it has performed a system check, whether we have our supplies or not.”
More than thirty devotees were soon racing back to the shuttle. Several insectoids, too, though he’d forgotten about them at first, and hadn’t been sure they’d understand. They skittered along on four legs, and reached the shuttle first, emerging moments later rolling barrels that contained the reddish-orange paste they ate to survive.
The rest of the devotees watched the work, and Nils Oolmena studied them in turn, particularly the Hroom and humans. He’d have watched the Cavlee, too, but he didn’t know how to read them. He looked for a spark, a note of suspicion, skepticism, anger—anything. All he saw were blank expressions. Blank minds.
The shuttle engines began to warm, and Nils Oolmena was tempted to send more devotees to speed the work along, but the bay doors were too narrow for more to enter or leave, and he’d only clog the way for the rest. It was happening too fast; they wouldn’t get the shuttle unloaded in time.
Food and water don’t matter. The enemy will replace your devotees faster than they die.
Engines flared—the final signal—and workers stood inside the bay doors, throwing tools, boxes of food, and jugs of water to the dirt. Others ran up to grab what was thrown. And then the shuttle doors were closing, and people threw themselves out, too.
A human woman stumbled and fell. Not one of the initial group, she’d gone to recover goods, and wasn’t able to get to her feet. Her complexion was sallow, and blood trickled from her left nostril. Her hair was thin, falling out from radiation exposure. When they got that sick, the Adjudicators usually dumped them into the void rather than send them out for another work project, but everyone and everything was coming through this time.
Someone grabbed the woman to pull her clear, but had to let go just as quickly because of the heat. Then they were all falling back and shielding themselves as the shuttle lifted skyward with a blast of exhaust. The woman didn’t so much as scream as the burn engulfed her.
The shuttle ascended into the sickly green sky, and the devotees stared until it vanished into the clouds. An arcing trail marked its passage. Nils Oolmena glanced at the charred figure of the human, then looked away.
“Gather around me in a circle,” he said loudly. “Hurry, it is getting hotter by the moment, and I want the excavations to begin at once. We must please the lords.”
Human, Hroom, and Cavlee all gathered together, some muttering, many silent. Only the insectoids stayed among their own kind, and there were more than he’d supposed at first, maybe fifty or sixty in all. They made a chittering sound with their mandibles that sounded like coals crackling and popping in a fire. Unlike the others, they wore no clothes, and none of them seemed to be speaking, only making that strange noise.
“Most of us will die on this world,” he said. “It is an honor and a pleasure to do so.”
A murmur passed through the ranks, more curious than agitated, though some of the humans looked exceptionally grim. Humans obeyed without question—he’d never seen one revolt—but when the Adjudicators weren’t present, they seemed to recognize their plight, and turned miserable and morose.
“When one dies, his companions will stack his body there.” He pointed to a spot next to the landing zone, not far from the charred woman. “And he’ll be either hauled out on the next departing shuttle or burned to ash when we finish here. We will not contaminate this world with the filth of lesser beings. That is the will of the Adjudicators, our lords and masters.
“The work here is sacred. What lies buried beneath our feet will enable our masters to subjugate those who have been judged contemptible. We’ll ration food and water—I’ll set aside small crews to feed each of you according to his own kind.”
He paused to glance at the insectoids, thinking to ask them how they’d ration that paste they consumed, but he was intimidated by the unblinking stare from their multifaceted eyes. Did they even understand? They must, at some rudimentary level, but he wondered if they’d already been a caste-like race before their planet was reduced and they were hauled away by the Adjudicators. Born slaves, unlike the rest of them.
“We all must have food. We all must sleep, as well, and we produce waste. Trenches will be dug for these purposes.” A glance at the green sky before he continued. “I was told that heavy rains fall, so we’ll need to prepare for them. I don’t know if the water that falls is drinkable or not—I hope so. If not, the thirst will be terrible.”
Nils Oolmena kept searching the crowd as he spoke. Looking for a spark. Something, anything. He only saw slaves, sixteen hundred of them, with no hint of the brilliance and ambition that had se
nt their ancestors to the stars. Despair gripped him.
There’s no point. You’ll die on this world, and nobody will know its secret until it’s too late.
And then he spotted her. She stood slightly apart from the others of her kind, a tall, slender Hroom with light pink skin. It was the skin that first caught his eye—that was the sign of a sugar eater—but it was the clear expression in her eyes that made him stare. None of the vacant stupor the others wore, but someone still alert and thinking. There was a working brain inside there—he knew it.
But a sugar eater? Sugar, a human-supplied drug, had brought the Hroom Empire to its knees. She must be recently thawed from stasis, and still fighting those cravings at the same time as the enemy’s brain implant told her to surrender her will to the Adjudicators. An eater—how could he possibly trust her?
Nils Oolmena whistled in her direction and clicked deep in his throat. “You, come closer.”
She glanced around before narrowing her nose slits as she realized he was talking to her. She came forward slowly, and her reluctance told him even more than the clarity in her vision. She didn’t want to be noticed. His skin tingled in anticipation.
“Heavy rains fall at night,” he told her. “You will be charged with excavating our shelter for the evening.”
“I know nothing of that sort of work,” she said. “Anyway, what does it matter?”
Nils Oolmena splayed the long fingers of his right hand and waved at the place where the ground dipped. “The rest of you begin your excavations at the hollow. I will organize you later.”
They set off, some carrying shovels and picks, but the majority with nothing but their hands or insect-like appendages to scrape at the dirt. He was soon alone with the pink-skinned Hroom.
“What is your name?” he asked, and listened for her actual words, instead of relying on the implant to feed him their meaning.
“What does it matter?”
“The lords have anointed me overseer. There is a great war, and the work is urgent. I will organize the excavation as I see fit. Is that understood?”
“My name is Lum Gee.”
She followed this with a series of clan and religious order affiliations that meant nothing to him, even if he’d been paying attention. But he’d been hung up on the second part of her actual name.
He hummed doubt. “Gee? What planet is that?”
She returned the same sound of doubt. “How could you not know? The Great Temple? The Thirteen Sacred Shrines? Rubbish, of course. The filthy beliefs of an unclean race that will soon be reduced.”
There was something strange about her dialect, he noted. Hroom communication was ancestral, programmed at the genetic level—that was how people from one side of the empire to the other spoke the same language—but the sounds changed subtly over time.
“Where is this planet Gee? Tell me, and do not question.”
She explained, and it dawned on him that she was talking about the planet currently known as Hot Barsa. It had gone feral since the end of the last Hroom-human war, but before that it had been divided into vast sugar plantations, the largest run by an infamous human slaver named Lord Malthorne, who’d tried to overthrow the kingdom of Albion. Admiral Drake’s mortal enemy.
Long before that, Barsa had been a center of Hroom culture and civilization, but when had that been? Generations ago, he thought. Then the collapse of the outer systems, endless rebellions and wars. It must have had another name before Barsa.
“How long were you in stasis?” he asked.
“I have no way of knowing. A long time, I suspect. It was the reign of the Third Noble Emperor.”
Nils Oolmena whistled low and long. That was four hundred years ago. Had the Adjudicators been around that long? They must have been, must have captured her ship at some point, since there had been no known contact with the alien race until recently.
A note of concern entered her voice. “Is there a sugar ration? My tongue is three days without the taste.”
“No sugar.”
Her lips thinned. “Good.” And then, as if it were forced, she added, “Our lords will have no rival for my devotion.”
Nils Oolmena was momentarily confused, but he’d spent enough time in the Alliance fleet, surrounded by humans, that he understood rather more quickly than he might have otherwise.
“A Hroom who lies,” he said, marveling. “You didn’t hide your thoughts, you came right out and lied.”
“It isn’t a lie.”
“No?”
“Our lords will have no rival.”
“Not directly, you didn’t. ‘Good’ is one thing, and ‘our lords will have no rival,’ is another statement. They are not connected.”
Lum Gee looked distressed. Nils Oolmena cast a glance at the workers. They were hacking at the ground, which turned to mud just below the dry upper crust. Even with so few tools, a significant mound of dirt was already piling to one side. A few of the weaker ones had already collapsed, but the rest worked at a furious pace.
“You still have your mind,” he said when he was convinced that nobody was listening. “Is it because of the sugar addiction? Tell me, now.”
“Yes.”
“Explain.”
“Please don’t make me.”
“Lum Gee, you will tell me and tell me at once.”
“It’s the cravings. The sugar addiction, the blasted human curse. When it hits me, I can’t hear the lords. I can think . . . if you call this horrible shaking desire thinking.”
Two compelling needs, warring with each other. The Adjudicators had put a brain implant in her head to override her mental circuits and burn out her free will. But the sugar traders who had addicted her had laid down their own tracks.
Lum Gee looked him over. “Are you . . .?”
“An eater? No. Not anymore.”
“But your skin . . .”
“There’s an antidote now. The humans are no longer our enemies. So much has changed. Listen to me.”
Nils Oolmena was so desperate that he wrapped his long, bony fingers around her arms and gave her a shake. A clicking noise stopped him, and he turned, alarmed, to see one of the insectoids behind him. The thing had crept up, walking low to the ground.
He braced himself to be attacked. If it had been one of the other three races, they’d have heard him and sussed out that he was a traitor—the impression of it would go straight into their minds. Treason was punished instantly and lethally.
But the thing was holding up a smear of the jelly-like substance on the tip of one of its front legs. It was one of the smaller of its kind, and missing an antenna. Its carapace had a dull, chipped appearance. Words and impressions entered Nils Oolmena’s mind through the implant.
Eat? Nutrients. Hormones. Must feed. You help?
Nils Oolmena glanced back to see that most of the insectoids were on their backs, their legs and mandibles twitching. Whatever the substance was, they needed it urgently, and they needed his permission to consume it.
“Do what you must to stay alive,” he told it. “But hurry. The work must go on.”
When it was gone, he turned back to Lum Gee, more cautious now, but also more anxious than ever to make an ally. If she betrayed him later, so be it. He would get no better chance.
“Listen to me. I’m like you. Not because of sugar, but because of a damaged brain implant. There was an accident in space, it didn’t kill me, but it disabled certain parts of the device. I can’t resist when they’re here, but when they’re not, I have my mind. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I think so. Can you get me sugar?”
“By all the holy sites, forget the sugar!”
“Yes, but can you get it for me?”
He wanted to lie, but couldn’t think of a proper deception. “The humans have sugar.”
“I hate the humans,” Lum Gee said. “Why do you think we were out here? How do you think we discovered our lords and masters?”
Something roared overhead, and he glan
ced skyward to see another shuttle descending. More devotees, and with them, another Adjudicator, who would expect to see them all working.
“Do you love your ancestors?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“And the holy sites? The gods?”
“You know I do,” Lum Gee said. “I am a Hroom.”
“Then you must trust me. We can’t excavate this site, do you understand? If we do, all the planets will be reduced. They’ll exterminate our civilization, raze our holy sites, and cart away the survivors to spread their war. But I have a plan.”
“I need sugar.” She sounded more solemn now, and he realized it wasn’t just a plea, like the insectoids begging for their paste-like substance. “If I don’t get it, the cravings will eventually pass. And I’ll be a slave like the rest of them.”
“I’ll find your sugar. Will you help me?”
The shuttle descended on a long, slow burn, and workers scattered out of its way. Some of them ran past him to get away from the fire, but a few were caught in the engine wash. Such a short time on the planet, and they’d already lost ten or fifteen devotees.
The two Hroom, one an overseer and the other a sugar eater, dispersed into the crowd. Nils Oolmena lost track of his counterpart briefly, but she reappeared behind his right shoulder, taller than him, humming into his ear.
“Tell me what to do,” she said.
Chapter Two
Captain Jess Tolvern studied the pair of shadowy figures on the viewscreen, unable to believe her luck. Her heart rate kicked into a higher gear, and she licked her lips, anxious and eager.
Nine weeks they’d been strangled in the Castillo System. Nine weeks since the battle, since the jump point collapsed. Nine weeks with nothing to do but lick their wounds and build up a military base that might never be used. Then, a single, ghostly echo from the long-range scanners of a Singaporean war junk, followed by a hunch from her science officer that led Blackbeard to investigate.
When they’d arrived at the outer reaches of the system, Tolvern’s crew discovered a pair of enemy ships, cloaked and hiding. The enemy remained motionless, as if waiting for them to depart.
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