by A. R. Knight
“All this houses the cooling for the Spire,” Dol says as they go up. “Fraykt and I built our little empire behind the scenes, because if we’d gone out in the open, you’d have murdered him. Probably would have killed me right after.”
“Because Fraykt’s a commander.”
“Because you’re all monsters.” Dol changes and flips out a gooey limb towards the encroaching wall as the platform begins its trek between levels.
Sax doesn’t get what the Ooblot is meaning till the tight squeeze becomes clear as the lift goes between the Spire’s outer wall and the supporting floor between levels. Sax has to squeeze tight, draping himself over the Ooblot and curling his tail across his back to fit.
“We are what we are,” Sax attempts to hiss, though he’s having a hard time getting enough air with his vents compressed on the Ooblot, so it comes out as a harsh whisper.
“You’ve got a brain, haven’t you? Or did the Amigga make you all instinct?”
Sax can’t even reply. He wants to get mad, but the awkward position cuts the rage to nothing. The whole thing is too ridiculous. An old Ooblot ranting at him about the state of the galaxy? Why should Sax care?
“When Plake came to us,” Dol says, and Sax twitches at the name. “We thought she’d been captured, that she was leading you and the Vincere right to us out of some trade. Turns out Plake’s still her same sour self.”
The lift finally gets to the next level, and Sax unravels himself off of the Ooblot like a blanket falling on the floor. His vents suck in air as the lift settles into a totally different place than before. One that’s lit in the normal soft whites, that’s marked with clean floors and walls, and that has a pair of Flaum that Sax recognizes from his trickery down below, holding miners, their eyes tight and their little fangs bared at the sight of the Oratus.
“What do you mean, Plake?” Sax manages from the floor. Even there, he’s shifting his legs, getting his talons and tail ready to strike if the Flaum decide torching him is a viable tactic. “She didn’t come back to her own ship.”
“Precautions,” Dol says, easing itself off of the platform. “Don’t worry, they won’t melt your face ‘less I say so.” The Ooblot waits for Sax to right himself, to fall in line behind it. “Plake’s one of us, ex-Vincere you might say. Had to make sure she still holds the right loyalty.”
“By kidnapping her?”
The two Flaum fall into step behind Sax and Dol as they head through another cramped hallway. One that opens, through a second hinged door, into a clean and bright living space. An apartment, going by the solid walled rectangle covered in screens showing what looks like an infinite flowing ocean beneath a clear sapphire sky.
“We live in deadly times, Oratus,” Dol says as it moves into the room. “Trusting the wrong person means you wind up a corpse or worse, an Amigga experiment.”
The Ooblot flattens out here, lets its yellow-creamy self relax in what Sax thinks must be Dol’s home. There’s not much to it - a simple nutrient goop delivery terminal, the image screens, and the wide open floor. But then, Ooblots don’t need much. Even the two sisters running Scrapper Station didn’t seem to know what to do with their luxury garden.
“You want them to lose, don’t you?” Sax says finally. “You want the Amigga to fall.”
“The Chorus are a bunch of overheated mudballs twisting the rest of us to pieces until the galaxy’s theirs.” Dol twitches and the screens shift to a sight Sax hasn’t seen in a long, long time.
The Chorus live in a giant space elevator, a rising spike that lifts up from the surface of the Amigga’s home planet, Aspicis - Sax doesn’t know if that’s where the species actually came from, or if they’ve adopted it. At the very top of the elevator is a round ball as large as a moon, with plenty of tendrils arcing out of it, some bristling with weapons and others with scores of antennae for sending and boosting signals. Further ribbons of red and orange light dance above the structure in what would be a pretty display if anyone else had made it - with the Amigga, the fanciful glimmers stink of calculation, an effort to dazzle the eyes while stealing the soul.
Beneath the elevator, down towards Aspicis’ surface, the screens show the endless forest of thick vines, almost like Rathfall but without the pollen and extracted gasses. The day-night line, which moves ever-so-slowly on the planet, recedes away from the view, shrouding the right edge of the picture in pure dark.
“You can’t mean to attack it,” Sax says, and for the first time he can remember, he’s quiet, in awe of the sheer audacity of what he’s seeing. “You’ll never win.”
“It’s not our idea,” Dol says. “It’s hers.”
The central screen flips away from the Chorus and their technological wonder of a home to a feed - always pre-recorded to be sent across these distances - of a beaten, wounded Oratus who’s nonetheless standing inside a large, decrepit room.
Her red scales stand out even in the low white light, which comes peeking through a hole and not through any globes. Junk scatters around her, torn curtains and broken walls frame her locked golden eyes. The scene is a far cry from every situation he’s ever seen the Oratus in before, but there’s no mistaking Evva.
“She’s alive.” Sax didn’t really think she was, not anymore. Nobody survives an Amigga bounty like hers for long.
“She’s more than alive, Oratus,” Dol says. “She’s fighting. We’re fighting. It’s time you joined in.”
Fraykt waits in what’s obviously another apartment but one that’s devoid of living signs. There’s only a table, too short for Sax, spanning the sole room and its white-washed walls. The walls have screens like Dol’s, but they’re off, leaving them blank and clear.
Fraykt himself, his weathered vyphen feathers clustered in his chair, offers Sax a dour glower as the Oratus follows Dol into the room. The two Whelk from Sax’s evasion earlier stand near the table too, miners ready. Which means there’s now four weapons in the room ready to fire should Sax make the wrong move.
“So Dol told you everything,” Fraykt begins.
“Where is Bas?”
“Gone,” Fraykt says, the holds up a feathered hand. “Not dead, but gone. Evva’s alive, our resistance is moving. We don’t have the luxury of keeping lovers together anymore.”
“She’s my pair,” Sax hisses out the sudden anger. “She’s the other part of me. There is no task worth splitting us for.”
“In your view, perhaps.” Fraykt waves towards the table. “We don’t have many Oratus on our side, so we have to use them well.”
“Use us for what?”
“Sax, you haven’t forgotten how the Vincere preserve their secrets already, have you?” Dol says, its bulk taking up a spot on the table’s left side. “Need to know only, and right now you don’t.”
Sax settles his midclaws on the table. Tests its weight. Rathfall’s not a small planet, and the gravity’s going to provide some resistance, but Sax is pretty confident he can push this table hard and fast enough to smash Fraykt against the wall and splatter the arrogant Vyphen into bits.
“Evva wants you with her,” Fraykt says then, and his words temporarily steal away Sax’s murderous ideas. “They’re coming close to being able to act and, in her words, they could use your talents.”
Evva wants him? His commander?
“How would I even get to her?” Sax asks.
“Plake will take you. On the Mobius.” Fraykt nods at the screen to Sax’s right and it flickers to a camera feed showing Plake directing the unloading of cargo from the Mobius into the docking bay. “She’s a good enough pilot to get you in.”
“But Bas won’t be coming.”
“Like I said, she’s gone,” Fraykt replies.
“She wouldn’t have left without me.”
“Look around you,” Frakyt says, his bulbous eyes tracking to the pair of Whelk and Flaum on either side of Sax. “Do you think we have an army? That we’re ready to fight the Vincere and overwhelm the Chorus with hordes of vengeful species? We
can’t afford to keep you together. There is too much to do. Too many things that could use your pair’s claws.”
Sax is beginning to think this Vyphen won’t actually bring him together with Bas. That no matter how much he pushes for details or presses to get Bas back, they’re going to keep her hidden from him. Which leaves two options:
Believe Fraykt and Dol and go after Evva.
Or tear this whole thing apart.
“Why?” Sax decides to probe. “Why would you capture us? Send me outside if you needed my help?”
Fraykt settles into his chair. He thinks he’s won the battle now. That Sax is coming over and there’s only some formalities. Sax keeps his midclaws ready. One push, and Fraykt is gone.
“Plake promised you would both be ready to join,” Fraykt says slow. “I didn’t think that likely. The Chorus knows we exist. Knows that we would be tempted by a pair of Oratus so eager to help us. So I had to see whether you were true.”
“By throwing me out of the Spire?”
“You were found, were you not? By Plake’s own crew, who thought you would be less likely to attack someone you knew.”
“They wanted me to gather pollen-chaser parts. For money.”
Here Fraykt looks confused, and glances at Dol.
“It happens,” the Ooblot says. “But that wasn’t part of our plan. Silver and Black were to keep you occupied until we had convinced Bas. Plake said Bas was the more reasonable one, and she was right. We would have come for you eventually.”
So the Flaum wanted a bit of money for their efforts. Sax can’t blame them, really. Not that understanding will keep him from issuing a stern, slightly bloody warning to the two furry creatures when he next sees them.
“And the lift? Sending all of these?”
“As we said.” Fraykt takes back control. “There was some concern you’d be aggressive. That you wouldn’t take this well.”
“I’m not.”
Fraykt waves away Sax’s words. “Stunning you first, letting you hear our story without the chance of spontaneous aggression seemed like the better course.”
The room settles around him. It’s time, now, to choose. Trust them, and go to Evva. Or fight them, and find Bas.
She came out of the jungle, down the tall pink flowers and into the forest. She carried Sax when he couldn’t carry himself. Spoke the words he couldn’t say. Gave him his life when he was about to lose it. So, so many times.
Sax pushes the table hard. It slides across the floor, shoves Fraykt back against the wall. The Vyphen chokes, coughs, but Sax didn’t shove it to kill. In the space of that stunned moment, when everyone’s looking to see if Fraykt is still alive, Sax leans right and sweeps his tail through the Flaum’s feet, knocking both to the ground.
The Whelk manage to get their miners up as Sax reaches them, as Sax tears the weapons from their grip with his foreclaws and, getting his midclaws on the triggers, fires them. The miners aren’t designed for Oratus and his shots aren’t accurate, but that hardly matters when he’s centimeters from his targets. The blue bolts flash and both Whelk quiver and slide into mush.
A single shot manages to miss Sax, fired quick by one of the Flaum, and the Oratus makes them pay for their haste with two more blasts, knocking out, in the span of four seconds, all of Fraykt’s guards.
Sax levels the miners at Dol. “Tell me where Bas is, or I’ll end every last one of you.”
Dol doesn’t look the least bit panicked. The Ooblot has a pair of miners leveled at it, and following them, an Oratus with plenty of claws, but the only thing Dol does is shift its bulk to give Sax an even clearer target.
“You can’t threaten people whose lives are already forfeit,” Dol replies. “We’ve been working since the Vincere removed us to overthrow the Chorus. We’re closer now than ever before. You kill us, maybe Evva succeeds anyway. Maybe she doesn’t. We’ve given our lives to this cause, whether it’s now or later.”
“You’ll die to keep me from my pair?”
“Dol,” Fraykt burbles from the back wall, a watery gasp of broken ribs. “Tell him. Tell him where.”
Dol’s hesitation shows whether she’s debating whether Fraykt’s life is worth giving up Bas, which in itself makes Sax even more angry. Not only did they send Bas away from him, they put her in so much danger, in such a secretive, high level mission...
Sax can’t help himself. He pulls the trigger on the miner in his left foreclaw. Sends the bolt into the wall behind Dol.
“You heard him,” Sax hisses.
Ooblots can’t really sigh. Not audibly, anyway. Instead, Dol collapses, spreads out like a melting ball of wax.
“Fine. You want to chase after Bas? You want to jeopardize everything?” Dol says. “She’s going back to your home. To where the Oratus are made.”
“Why?”
“To stop them,” Dol says. “To ruin the hatcheries. To end your species.”
What? Sax doesn’t understand. Can’t understand. Here Sax is, willing to work with those who want to subvert the galaxy’s established order, and they’re saying the first step is to destroy the future of his own species?
“The rest will never change,” Fraykt warbles from the wall, and Sax takes the reminder to drop a miner and pull the table away, letting the Vyphen drop to the floor. “The other Oratus, they’re too loyal. They will fight to stop us.”
“And the Chorus will make more of you once they feel the threat,” Dol adds. “They’ll overwhelm us. Use you to massacre every other species in the galaxy if they have to. The Amigga think they can build a new universe for themselves - they won’t mind destroying this one first.”
“Bas agreed to this?” Sax says for want of other words.
“She’s already gone,” Dol replies. “On a light craft that left the Spire hours ago. You’re supposed to go to Evva, help keep her alive.”
And Sax will, eventually. His pair, though, comes first.
The Mobius is besieged. Sax leaves the lift alone - Fraykt’s followers pulled the Vyphen to the Spire’s only hospital and Dol ditched away as soon as Sax made it clear what he was going to do.
Now he only has to convince Plake to take her ship and crew to a place crawling with angry Oratus who’ll want nothing more than to eviscerate all of them.
Except finding Plake in the stacks of nutrient goop crates and the small army of loader robots shoving them around is hard. It gets even harder when a face Sax never expects to see again pops out of the Mobius’ boarding ramp and scuttles down to meet him.
A single glance explains everything; Nobaa’s wearing the vest Engee crafted for Sax, the one built to control the Mobius so that Sax wouldn’t need to be in the cockpit the entire time. Nobaa’s managed to tangle the thing around himself on hooks and hangers pounded into the sides of his carapace. It looks terrible, but then, Nobaa doesn’t seem like the Teven to care about such things.
“Didn’t think you’d be making it back!” Nobaa exclaims as the reedy creature meets Sax. “Thanks for the vest, by the way. Made it much easier to stake out my spot on the ship!”
“I never gave that to you.”
“You threw it away right outside my apartment! What else was I supposed to think?” the Teven leans towards Sax. “I’m taking the cabin right next to Engee’s.”
“That’s mine. Ours.” Sax’s claws twitch.
“Oh, Plake’s moving you now,” Nobaa says. “You’re getting the cargo bay to yourself. It’s the only space big enough, and, she says, you deserve it.”
Sax takes a heavy breath. Thinks about Bas. Calm thoughts. Nobaa’s not worth his time.
Sax convinces the blabbering Teven to take him to Plake, and Nobaa goes away from the Mobius towards another, larger, freight carrier. The kind that’s designed to shuttle goods from the surface to a massive spaceship. This one’s loading on slats of refined ore into what amounts to a rounded-edge nearly as tall as the docking bay’s level.
These loaders don’t have struts - just a reinforced hull
with embedded jets that rest on the floor. The entire right side of the loader opens up and lays flat, allowing for quick moving of goods into the ship. Plake, for some reason, appears to be arguing with a burly brown Flaum near the small bubble serving as the loader’s cockpit.
“She dashed away as soon as she saw the pilot,” Nobaa’s whispering as they close. “No idea why! But it’s not a fight I want to get into, and Engee might need my help with a project, so, bye!”
The Teven pivots back towards the Mobius and, thankfully, blessedly, disappears. One more crew member for Sax to avoid.
Plake and the Flaum notice Sax coming well before he reaches them so they’ve stopped whatever they were talking about and turn to greet the Oratus with defensive stares. Sax feels like he’s walked into a personal argument, but doesn’t care.
“We need to leave,” Sax says to Plake. “We’re going after Bas.”
“Shut up,” Plake says, nodding towards the Flaum. “Innes doesn’t need to know this.”
“I really don’t,” Innes says, crossing his furry, and huge for a Flaum, arms. “Fact, I’d be thrilled if you took this crazy Vyphen away from me right now.”
Sax catches the way Plake clenches her feathered hands, tenses her arms, and the Oratus steps between the two of them before Plake decides to start a fight. Not that Sax wouldn’t mind getting another brawl going, but he’s got bigger priorities here.
“Plake, what do you need from the Flaum?” Sax hisses. “I will get it. Then we will leave.”
“Whoa there, big guy. You’re not getting anything from me,” Innes says.
“What he owes me,” Plake warbles at the same time, then points at the loader. “How much are you making off this run, Innes? How much?”
“You’re an idealist,” Innes huffs. “Shouldn’t matter to you what I do.”
Sax reaches out with his right foreclaw. Fast. Innes sees it, tries to react, but no matter how strong a Flaum gets, he’s not competing with an Oratus for reaction time. Sax gets the claw up tight against Innes’ throat, a single press away from ending the creature, and Innes freezes.
