by Alex Oliver
"If you don't like them," Yas urged, "Surely it would be better if we took them away?"
"You are extraordinarily contrary," Freya frowned.
Harcrow growled, "Just leave it," at the same moment, and Yas found himself being lowered into the gondola of the train by two guards, not ungently, but emphatically, as if arguing would just get him killed.
The guards accompanied the crew all the way back to where the Raggy hung in the sky. One of them raised a staff he was carrying and struck it on the ground, and it expanded into a spiral staircase, up which they walked through the thinning atmosphere with no sense of cold or breathlessness.
Half way up, Yas tried to take the bracelet from his wrist, but the moment it slipped past his fingers the breath seemed to catch in his throat and his face froze. He shoved it back on again and the air was pleasant with a slight smell of honeysuckle.
Inside Raggy's airlock a gradual shift replaced the warm, floral air with the spaceship's cologne of rust and sweat. The Vikings looked even more ridiculous here, though the blood where their mates had died had not been cleaned from the floor. Two of them positioned themselves outside the airlock, while another two accompanied the rest of the crew up to the bridge.
Yas slipped a datapad into the front of his white jacket as he slid into his station, concealing it from the two guards who had positioned themselves by the exit. It was very strange to go through launch procedures with the golden habitations of the wheel directly below them and the uncomprehending expressions of the Vikings at their back, but the return to honest, functional controls was reassuring, and this was the first time he'd had the chance to watch the economical, practiced movements of the rest of the crew at their stations.
"Show us what we've got," Harcrow instructed.
Yas opened up the sensors and looked for movement. No ships. But there were a trio of comets tumbling through space towards them as if they had been aimed. Behind the Raggy, a swarm of what looked for all the world like riders on horseback had begun to rise from the blue haze of the chariot's atmosphere, their own air-tight forcefields visible against the dark as spheres of soap-bubble radiance.
"We're looking for giants," Lt. Mari pointed out, looking longingly toward the teleport, "Not rocks."
"The rocks could be their ships," Sasara suggested. She should not normally be part of the bridge crew, but she had taken Desultory's station and was reclining with her back to the instruments and her hood down, a smattering of golden stars glinting on her cheek.
"They are altering course," Yas confirmed, looking for drive plumes or life signs. None showed, but the rocks' change in trajectory was undeniable. They were also rotating on their axes. Black rocks, smooth as though they had been formed in magma, with almost an organic curve to them. Funny how that fissure looked like the hollow between a bent up thigh and a tightly tucked calf.
"Oh Hells!" Yas exclaimed, "Look!"
It was clear to everyone now, because the rocks had finished rotating and were now elongating, unfolding. The knees un-bent and the arms which had been folded across their chests flung out as the rough planetoid shapes of the comets expanded, stood up. They weren't rocks at all, but humanoids the size of a small moon. Their hands were empty of weapons, but large enough to curve around Freya's chariot wheels and crush every dwelling on its surface.
Silence fell on Raggy's bridge for a long heartbeat as the crew sat stunned by the sheer impossibility of what they were seeing. The giants were falling, feet first straight at the chariot, obviously intending to ram it with their bodies.
"Gerd," Ruari gasped, reminding Yas he was there, they were being watched. What did he mean? "Gird your loins?" Something like that. He pulled himself together as a collective shake went through the other humans, freeing themselves of their paralysis.
While they had been immobile, the gnat-like swarm of Freya's champions on their artificial horses had flown into the giant's faces. Flashes like the sparkle of old wiring marked where they were firing those spear-weapons directly into the canyons of their eyes. The giants were swiping at their faces, trying to crush the swarm, but it was as fruitless as trying to wave away a cloud of gnats on a summer evening. They seemed to be yelling something on a radiation wavelength the sensors were having difficulty picking up. The closest was now close enough that Yas could see the chasm of his mouth and the red of what looked like rust on his enormous teeth.
"Fly straight down the throat, Lieutenant." Harcrow sounded calm, and Yas latched on to that calm with gratitude.
Lt. Mari flashed the Captain a single startled look, then disengaged the flight computer and grasped the manual controls, giving Raggy all the forward power she had. The mouth loomed closer. Slowly seeing the threat, the giant reached up to brush them aside, but a squad of Freya's horsemen got themselves in the way, drilling a hole in the hand before it connected. Raggy accelerated between the teeth, into the mouth, just as it started to close.
CHAPTER TEN
Enter the giants
The teeth began to close, but Lt. Mari was faster. She jammed the ship all the way up to the back of the mouth and down the long passage of the creature's throat. Walls of what looked like stone drew in around them. This stone was rougher and browner than the outside of the giant, but fortunately not flesh-like enough to give Yas nightmares. He bent back to his sensors.
"There doesn't seem to be a spine," he offered after checking density readings. "Or a brain, or a heart. Just... nodules here and there. It doesn't make any sense."
"There is a star shaped one," Ruari ventured. His voice was subdued and his face, normally all but glowing, was flat as a piece of paper. The effect added up to miserable. "You need to destroy that."
Yas returned to his sensors, and yes. Just beyond the large hollow into which they were flying, through a wall of solid rock, there was a darker mass somewhat in the shape of a star. In comparison with the rest of the giant, it was tiny--he could have held it in his hand. "Really?"
"Yes."
He fed the coordinates over to Mari's console, watched as she flung the ship into a breaking turn that made the inertial dampeners shriek and shudder in the walls. The nose of the ship with her only two plasma cannons was now pointing directly at the wall behind which the nodule seemed to pulse. When Zardari opened fire there came a roar that even they heard, vibrating through the very fabric of the ship. A spot glowed red on the wall and then melted as Zardari fired again. It was just like chiseling through stone.
"I'm going to the engine room," Keva announced, heading to the doors. "This is going to put a hell of a strain on everything. I'll be taping it back together if you need me."
Yas bent back to his screens and suffered another eye-blink of deep confusion. Everything seemed to be shifting around them. They had been in a cavern he took for the giant's stomach, but it was closing up, threatening to squash them, rock seeming to liquefy and flow into the space from every direction. "Guys," he said, passing the readings over to the Captain. "You might want to work faster!"
"All power to the cannons," Captain Harcrow ordered. The lights went out on the bridge, except for the computer screens. "Life support too."
"Aye Captain," came Keva's breathless voice. Yas spared a moment to touch his bracelet--so much more convenient and stylish than a bulky space suit. These 'gods' certainly had some worthwhile tech to trade, if they could be lived with without sacrificing everything that made life worthwhile.
The cannons pulsed out again, more powerfully and the ship drove itself into the magma of the giant's flesh behind it, while the space in which it moved continued to close up.
"They can control their internal structure?" Ambassador Sasara guessed. "I mean, this is the giant actively fighting us off, using its own body as a weapon? Or is it an autonomic reaction?"
"It is deliberate," Ruari nodded. "When they are this large, their thoughts and reaction times are slow, which is why we are still alive at all. But you might wish to move faster before we are all crushed."
"Can we get anything more out of the engines?" Harcrow demanded.
"No sir. Not without powering down the cannons."
"Can you put it in tachyon drive for a short hop," Yas suggested. "We won't have any mass, so we can cut straight through all of this and re-materialize on top of the target."
"Won't that be in the middle of solid rock?" Harcrow asked.
"Well, yes, sir," Yas admitted, the idea burning in him like inspiration. "But the ship has a field it uses to push matter out of its way prior to re-molecularization."
"Which is meant for space dust," Mari pointed out, frowning. "It's not meant to push aside solid rock."
"But it could," Keva's voice came from the comms with a sound of matching certainty. "Give me a five count. I've got to rewire."
Boiling magma was now visible in the cave around them, streaming in from the walls, bubbling up around them. The rate of liquefaction of the giant's insides seemed to have increased. Did they have five minutes? Yas didn't know, and he didn't want to destroy morale by asking.
"It's, uh... coming in pretty fast," Mari said nervously, her knuckles white on the steering rack. "God, I wish I didn't have to die like this. Is there time to get to the teleport?"
"No." Harcrow said firmly. "You sit there and deal with it. You can tweak your gender when we're out of here."
"You know I can't concentrate when it flips."
"You're gonna have to. Ride it out, lieutenant."
"Yes sir."
Ruari seemed to be watching this exchange with astonishment and something like fear. Perhaps they didn't have gender-fluid people in his culture. Yas marked that down as something to ask about if they survived, and fretted that there was nothing else he could do. That rock was getting really close now—
"You're good. Go!" Keva had barely got through the word 'good' before Mari had shoved up all the sliders on the tachyon drive. The world went streaky for an eye-blink and the next thing Yas knew, the ship was moaning around him and the plasma cannons had started up again. They were three miles further through the giant’s insides, firing into a silvery surface that must be the elusive nodule. There was no space outside, only tightening walls of rust-brown rock.
With a burst of white slime the star-shaped nodule split and seemed to implode. The contents turned into ever finer dust and then disappeared altogether. Then the rest of the giant's body followed suit, turning into dust, then mist and whirling away into nothingness. The passage of the fine matter shook the ship like an atmospheric entry, and when it passed Raggy was back in open space, with the chariot burning like a sun next to them, and the two other giants tucked back up into their boulder forms, retreating.
The swarm of horsemen formed up slowly around the outside of the ship, and when Yas narrowed the sensors in on them, he could see them saluting, cheering.
"Can we communicate with them?" Harcrow asked, the side of his mouth actually curving up for once. It was the first smile Yas had ever seen on the man's face and it brought back a ghost of the rugged handsomeness he must have had in the early broadcasts. "We should acknowledge the salute."
"We left our comms officer behind," Yas pointed out, feeling unsettled and guilty at all the celebration. Ruari too looked almost green. His eyes glistened as if he was holding back tears.
"Okay," Harcrow acknowledged, face falling into a more normal expression of sullen endurance, as if the reminder had made him feel guilty too. Good. It had been meant to. "Just bring us back to where we docked, Lieutenant, and then you can put us on auto and get down to the teleport."
"Thank you sir."
Yas swung around on his chair to look more closely at Ruari. "What's up?" he asked, gesturing the alf toward the seat Keva had left free. Come and sit down. You look like you've just seen a ghost."
Ruari licked his lips nervously, but complied. "I knew her," he said as he lowered himself to the seat.
"Her?"
"The giantess. Gerd daughter of Gripp," Ruari said.
"Oh," There hadn't been any indications that the rock person was a woman, but Yas knew better than to assume there should have been.
"She was a friend," Ambassador Sasara said, stating it more as a fact than as an enquiry. The moment she had said it, it became obvious to Yas too. Ruari had said her name before the engagement began and now he was mourning her.
"But I thought the giants were your enemies?"
Ruari dredged a smile out of somewhere. "It's more complicated than that," he sighed. "All of the intelligent races of the nine galaxies have a long history with one another. We have been at war, but we have also had alliances and peace treaties, political marriages, hostage exchanges, trade partnerships and embargoes. No one race is always evil, always in the wrong, and in the old days there was much more flexibility. More uncertainty."
He looked down at his clasped hands, the smile falling. "More instability," he corrected. "It is true that the gods have re-shaped the cosmos for the sake of you humans, to keep you safe and to give you the simplicity in which you thrive. But friendships and alliances have been necessarily lost in the process."
Sasara seemed to be working up to ask more. This was her area of interest - the intertwining of politics between other races, bringing peace and prosperity to all. But Yas had some more urgent questions first. "Why do you all look like us?" he asked. "Why do you speak our language?"
Ruari breathed out, something that was perhaps a laugh. "How highly you think of yourselves! We do not speak your language. We speak the gods’ tongue, which all creatures naturally understand. Nor do we look like you humans. All of us lesser races look like the gods. You, because they influenced your evolution to bring you into mirrors of themselves. We, because they ask us to. It is said that not even all of them have a fixed shape, but they have chosen this, and they enforce it."
"They enforce it?" Sasara jumped back in. "You mean that—like the giants—you are naturally changeable in shape and the gods confine you to this humanoid form?"
"Exactly." Ruari rose as the Raggy's hatch opened from outside and two swan-cloaked women came in, beaming. "Come, these are not matters to discuss now. You should be feted and accept your glory with a good will. I have never known humans with so many questions."
Perhaps the tame humans on board had been raised to be incurious and easily satisfied? Yas found that a worrying thought. When Harcrow and the rest of the crew followed the white cloaked women back to another spiral staircase, Yas lagged behind and made sure he was walking next to Ruari to keep up the conversation. Surprisingly, Sasara joined them, too interested to be easily distracted.
"Are they bad rulers?" she asked bluntly, making Ruari smile.
"Not especially," he said. "And for you humans they are the best possible choice out of the great races. You are by way of being the gods' children and their favorites. The giants, the Dark alfr and the Dead are likely to wipe you out, if given the chance, simply because so much has been given to you, un-earned. You have been spoiled and coddled, or so they say, and it has soured their opinion of your whole race."
"Jealousy?" Yas asked. "But these 'gods' haven't been anywhere near us for the last two and a half thousand years. We've been left to our own devices. It's not the gods' doing that we're out here, meeting you. It's our own."
They reached the ground and were ushered back into the high velocity train, which was now decorated with wreaths of flowers. A small child placed a flower crown on Yas's head even as he sat, and behind him the people of the township were blowing horns and shaking sticks covered in small bells. The din made his head hurt, but the rest of the crew seemed elated with their hero's reception. He'd been hoping that a stint on the bridge would let the brainwashing wear off, but it didn't seem to have helped.
"It is because you are now a spacefaring species that we have returned," Ruari said. He had returned to his usual expression of mild puzzlement. "You were children, and free to entertain yourselves as you would. But now you are grown, and must be integrated in
to the Fellowship of the Light."
"The gods intend to take away our ability to rule ourselves?" Sasara asked. Her hood was down and a wreath of golden marigolds sat on top of her black dreadlocks. For a moment she looked less like a mystical warrior-mage and more like a young woman first encountered in the middle of a party. But her expression was stern.
"They will graciously allow you a semblance of self-rule. Probably," Ruari blinked. "They are an old and dying race, without much interest in administration. Much freedom..." he licked his lips again, uncertain, "can be worked through the cracks. We light alfr were their favorites before you, and we have never been known to complain. Once the borders of your galaxy have been secured and the other races turned away from you once more, there will be time to work out the smaller details."
Yas sat silent after that, watching the wheel go by in a journey that had almost begun to feel familiar. The great swoop down into the hollow of the chariot was not so alarming this time, but the crowd of people waiting to lift them out of the carriage and carry them on their shoulders into Freya's presence embarrassed him. More horns of beer and mead were thrust into his hands than he knew what to do with. He sipped at one and reeled from the strength of it, dropping the rest behind him as they progressed.
"Well done, my champions. Giantkillers all!" Freya rose to welcome them with a gracious smile. "Yet I should not have brought you from your ship, for you may yet be needed again before our day is done. I have received notice that the dark alfr approach. Come, sit and see the face of your enemy."
She took what looked like a gem from her necklace and threw it out into the air. There it hovered and expanded in every direction until it seemed like a hole in the atmosphere of the ship and they were looking out into space.
Drive plumes were arcing in toward the chariot, leaving a residue of white crystals behind them, so that the ships seemed to trace narrow white lines across the void. Beneath the chariot, Yas saw with a jolt of strangeness, lay the planetoid where the Milky Way galaxy's furthest gate lay buried, and above it the spindly shapes of the space docks where Raggy had waited for him. On the surface of the planet he saw the small town of pressurized domes where NXA workers stayed while they were manning the gate, and where scientists must even now be studying the inter-galactic void, looking for answers to the great questions of the universe.
