by Alex Oliver
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On the skull pile
The elvish tractor beam operated with a saw-toothed buzz through the ship's hull that Yas's ears heard like a distant perpetual scream. He dropped his eyes as he felt Ruari's gaze flit from the captain to him. Then he opened up the external sensors again in time to see the surface of the great ship drawing closer. Its sides seemed utterly smooth, devoid of any gaps or protrusions for instruments, weapons or airlocks, but when Raggy seemed certain to smash into it, the metal too liquefied and flowed apart, closing back around them as they were sucked inside.
"You mean to kill yourselves, and us," Ruari said. He had taken a position with Disa and the guards at the back of the bridge when they came on board, and had so far been watching in silence. But this was obviously a step too far. "Our lives belong to Freya, not to you."
Captain Harcrow frowned once more. "Yeah, about that," he said, rubbing a hand through the stubble that had begun to sprout on his chin. "I don't remember signing up to that agreement."
"Stars, I'm glad you said that," Sasara agreed, putting down the comms headset with a click. "I keep remembering what happened these last few days and not recognizing myself. Why would I have suddenly abandoned all my training in skepticism and negotiation to capitulate fully in becoming the weapon of an alien—no matter how powerful? It doesn't make sense."
"We think you were brainwashed," Yas explained. "And by 'we' I mean the doctor, Desultory and me. That was why we were being so awkward when we were on board the chariot—because we weren't affected. Apparently Freya's the goddess of sex and romantic love? We think she was controlling you through that, through some kind of pheromone. And obviously, the doctor's a robot, I'm aroace and Desultory comes from a species that spawns asexually when there's an excess of food around. So we were immune."
On the screens Yas could now see what was obviously the main hangar of Kelkalyn's spaceship. It was full of smaller arrowhead-shaped craft, beautiful in their edged simplicity. He expected Raggy to be settled down there if a space could be found, but no, she was dissolved through another wall and a series of rooms—their inhabitants dissolving out of the way as if suddenly occupying the same space with a ten thousand ton spaceship was no big deal.
"What nonsense is this?" Disa objected, striking her spear hard on the deck plating to punctuate her words. "'Brainwashed?' What does it mean?"
"It means you need a vitamin injection too," Yas offered, prompting a glance of revelation from Sasara and an "Oh damn," from Zardari.
"It is against NXA protocols to interfere in these people's culture," Sasara pointed out. "They have been brought up to their situation. It is their religion and their nationhood as well as a chemical thing for them. We don't know what damage we might do to someone who's been exposed to this agent from birth. Their brains may have formed around it."
"And taking away a person's faith just before they die is kind of cruel, don't you think?" the captain pointed out as Disa's face flooded with angry red blotches.
"You cannot take away my faith. But my patience you have already exhausted. What do you mean?"
Yas faltered, watching as another wall came down and Raggy emerged into an even larger space than the hangar. At first it was utterly dark—only magnetic resonance imagery being able to pick out the walls, but as they descended through the space, Raggy's running lights began to pick out details. Yas wondered what the nodules were that seemed to be piled in the bottom of the cavern. Were they something like the star-shaped nodule they had found inside the giant? He upped the magnification on his scans and they came into sudden, horrific focus. Creamy white globes with-with eye sockets and white enameled teeth, fleshless, the jaw bones scattered beneath them. Picked clean, all of them, and all of them with the bite marks that showed how the flesh had been separated from the bone.
This was the "skull pile" Kelkalyn had mentioned. Yas had not thought he meant it literally.
A spot of blue daylight opened far above as the ship's hull flowed back from itself to make a hole, and a rain of decapitated heads fell. The people of the city were joining the collection.
"Oh my god," Sasara clapped her hand over her mouth at the sight, and the exclamation revealed to Yas how silent the bridge had grown. Even Disa's angry flush had paled, but her eyes still glinted with offense.
"I don't understand what slander you are speaking of my goddess or my people. Nor how you can be so ungrateful after we welcomed you into our hearts and our home. After she spoke to you and rewarded you. But look at this. This is what she protects you from. This is what they will do to all of us if we do not help the gods to fight it. Are you claiming you prefer to go into this fight without us—we who have fought this enemy for thousands of years and know its tricks?"
"We're claiming--" Yas began, not sure what he was going to say and glad to be interrupted by the chime of the engine-room comm.
"We're ready down here," came Keva's voice, slower and more solemn than she normally spoke. "Listen guys, before I get the order, I wanted to say it's been great serving with you. I'm not ashamed of anything, but I'm glad to be able to go out on a high note. God bless you all."
The words turned the bridge's silence into a hallowed place for a moment, but Ruari punctured it. "I tell you again. We did not agree to this."
"Agree to what?" Disa asked him, looking ready to tear her elaborately braided hair out at the conversation.
The light alf smiled at her, and Yas found himself wondering if he too could sport needle-sharp piranha teeth if he wished. Yas was beginning to understand where some of Freya's distaste for shape-shifters came from.
"These outlanders are preparing to blow up their ship within the body of the dark alfr ship. The explosion will tear it apart from within, but we will all die with it."
Yas felt beneath the control panel for the officer's blaster that by regulations should have been there. It was missing. But the vikings were glancing at each other, their faces breaking out in smiles.
"Oh, I thought it was something dishonorable," Disa laughed. She nodded her head to Captain Harcrow as if her faith had been restored. "We swore to die for the goddess when we first began to speak. Let us indeed do it while bringing death to our enemies. Thus shall we be reborn, invincible."
"Invincible!" the guards repeated, flourishing their spears.
Ruari blew out a long, frustrated sigh, then shrugged. "I have nothing either to live or die for," he said in a tone of utter despondency. "So be it."
Harcrow stood, straightened his tunic and smiled, making sure to look at each crew member and pause on each face. He was memorializing them, Yas thought, the idea of death hitting him suddenly and viscerally. Would it hurt? His knees threatened to give way and he clamped his mouth shut, a whimper trying to escape. No, he didn't want this. Didn't want his mother watching this on livestream.
But there would be one less elvish ship to come for her if he did this, and perhaps without their leader the dark alfr would be thrown into confusion and infighting. Perhaps it would be enough to turn the tide.
"Gentlebeings," said the Captain. Yas couldn't look at him, so instead he focused on the scanners where even now he could see another blue hole open high above and a dark-alf soldier look in. This creature looked like a vaguely man-shaped hole in reality, but with no neck and with two white glowing eyes, and Yas hated it more purely than any other being in his life before.
"We've been through some tough times together, and I know serving on this ship was not everything that we hoped for when we signed up. The galaxy has laughed at us, and some of us have despaired and found ourselves in dark places. But this is not one of them. My friends, we have lived humbly, but we deserve to die proud."
Yas breathed in, comforted.
"Okay, lieutenant. Let it blow."
It started like a gentle pop, down in engineering. There was time to hear it as the matter and antimatter began to annihilate each other with an indescribable chime. Then the wavefront hit and Ya
s felt himself blowing apart into atoms. The sensation was light and a cold heat and terror so great it tipped over the edge into joy. Everything sharpened. His skin was super-sensitive. He could feel the movement of blood in his veins, the electric pulses of his nerves, even the pulling tight of the membrane that cradled his brain.
His sight began to tunnel, a radiance rather than a darkness swirled in the corners of his eyes. But in the center of his vision, his very last sight, was the moth-man-looking dark alf soldier with his milky eyes wide. He was clutching at his side.
Yas thought for a moment something had wounded the creature, that he was pressing his hand against the pain. But no, he was reaching into himself and bringing out something round and silver. A grenade of some kind.
Ha, Yas thought. Yes, throw a grenade into the explosion, that will certainly help. And then his thoughts too began to tear themselves apart. It wasn't the last lucid moment that he had hoped for. Something more profound would have been better.
The matter-antimatter explosion seemed to speed up. All his particles were alight, smashing into one another and birthing strange universes of exotic particles. An awareness he couldn't account for cataloged the destruction of the Raggy around him and the storm tearing outward. Nothing could stop it now.
The grenade went off.
Yas's consciousness and every bit of energy and matter in the vicinity seemed to rewind. It was the most peculiar sensation he'd ever had and considering what had happened just before, that was saying something.
The explosion sucked backwards into itself. Yas's atoms de-annihilated. His body built itself again, his vision cleared. His brain struggled with the sense that he was being turned inside out, and a pure, animal, visceral horror shook him as everything in him told him it had reached peak wrong - that the universe didn't work like this and merely to suggest it did was an abomination he couldn't stomach.
He had a stomach again. It wanted to throw up but it couldn't do anything but swallow in a convulsive heave that would have torn his throat if anything was making sense, but in this instance healed it.
It wasn't until his rebuilt eyes managed to focus on the time and date stamp at the top of his readouts that he understood what exactly was happening. Time was running backwards. The explosion and everything in it was literally being erased from having happened at all. He had to hand it to that dark-alf soldier. This was probably the only thing that could have saved its ship and he had to admire it for acting so fast.
Past and future came together with a percussive yet utterly silent shock. It was like the sudden end of vertigo. He clutched at the console, fearing that he would slip to the floor if he let go, forgetting that he was in fact strapped in. For twenty seconds he just breathed, closing his eyes, trying to get past the sensation of being a loosely connected galaxy of atoms that remembered being destroyed.
"What the hell just happened?" Harcrow finally asked.
"Time-bomb, sir," Yas reported. "I'm guessing. One of the alfr dropped a grenade on us and it seemed to reverse time. Uh... we could try again?"
"No we cannot!" came Keva's voice through the comms, sounding as rattled as Yas felt. "The anti-matter core is... I don't know what's happened to it, but it's wildly fluctuating between different states of matter that I've never seen or heard of before. I don't know what would happen if we tried to set it off again. Anything from nothing to the end of the universe."
"Okay," Harcrow had lost his smile. He looked disappointed that he wasn't yet dead. The wall had irised open on the other side of the bone-pit and already a wild hunt of dark alfr in their terrifying battle forms were pouring in, flowing, climbing, scrabbling down the walls like a torrent of nightmares. Being blown up had been cleaner than whatever came next. "Zardari- cannons. Pick off as many as you can before they get to us. Everyone else, arm yourself with whatever you can find. Stunners are fine, but if you need something heavier, I authorize the use of lethal force. Prepare to repel boarders."
"There was a hole, sir," Yas put in. "Up in the hull where they were throwing in the skulls? Maybe we could blast our way out through that?"
"No engine core, remember?" Keva shouted. "We're not flying anywhere until it stabilizes."
Sasara stood abruptly, seizing her staff of office—the gold-plated, six foot high stick through which the adepts were trained to project their psychic abilities.
"You still want to talk to them?" Harcrow asked, and the ambassador laughed.
"Even I think it's gone beyond that now."
He nodded. "Okay. Sundeen? You and Desultory obviously work well together. Get down to the lower airlock, join up with him and hold them off as long as you can. Zardari and Yueh, seal and defend the bridge. Vasto, you're with me, we'll take the upper airlock. Ambassador, as always, you may do exactly as you like. Good hunting."
~
Yas sprinted for the lower airlock, welding equipment on his back. The doctor was behind him carrying the cannisters, and Desultory—now happily free of the spacesuit—was falling behind, unable to move as fast. He had turned the lime-green and orange pattern that said his skin was now secreting toxins. Hopefully any alf who tried to touch him would get a nasty surprise.
Yas reached the airlock door and assembled his kit. He kindled the torch and began to spot weld around the outer door. This was good honest duranium and surely would not melt and reform like whatever the alfr ships was made of.
He had barely got the torch lit when he heard them on the other side—the shrill ululation of war cries and then the screech of nails or claws against the metal. With a sinking feeling he remembered how easily they had simply dug through the city's toughened glass. He carried on welding nevertheless.
The first one came through from beneath his feet. It grabbed his ankle and pulled him into the deck plating which its long nails had shredded. He let out an involuntary scream and dropped the welding torch as Desultory slithered up beside him and dropped his whole weight on the alf's face. With both of them hanging off his ankle, Yas tried desperately to hold on to the edge of the deck and pull himself up, but there was nothing to grip on the smooth metal. His hands sweated and slipped.
Then a second alf joined the first and Yas couldn't hold on. He fell feet first into a seething mass of the invaders. It closed over his head and everything went black.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Conversations with Dark Elves
When Yas came to, he was walking. This sensation was unexpected and took some time for him to understand. His legs seemed to be working on their own. He wasn't trying to hold himself upright, but his arms were gently pumping by his sides even though he wasn't moving them, and the shock of impact went through his feet with each step, though he could have sworn he was still half-conscious and not going anywhere.
He managed to get his eyes open eventually and at first was hit with the searing certainty that he was blind. Everything was black. But as his eyes adapted, he saw that no, this was just a very dark corridor. Bluish-white lights twisted around the occasional dot in the wall, and at the end of the corridor a slightly larger circle was drawing steadily closer.
The floor was seething under him. He squinted down and his skin crawled--the corridor was lined with small scurrying things that he thought at first were cockroaches. But when they drew level with a pale dot on the corridor side there was just enough light to see they were tiny machines with dark carapaces of metal and dozens of legs. Every so often a running light twinkled beneath a belly, or on an antenna, so that the dark pathway would twinkle occasionally, paradoxically beautiful. The scrape of metal claws on metal deck added a constant almost musical murmur of chimes to the audio-backdrop of engines purring.
Now that he had noticed the noises, Yas realized his were not the only footsteps. He was still walking, involuntarily, but other footsteps were with him. They must be behind him, though, because he could see nothing.
He tried to turn to look behind him, and his head would not move. A bruising pain shot through his forehe
ad. He tried to raise a hand and feel for what had hit him, but his arms refused to stop their gentle swinging. It felt as though there was an iron band across his head and across his wrist, restraining them. Rolling his shoulders bruised them against a set of articulated bars across his back. He flexed every muscle and discovered that he was suspended in a cage of tightly-fitting metal restraints, which appeared to be marching him forward under their own power.
"Anyone else there?" he tried to say. The pain in his mouth made sense when he realized his tongue was being held down by another metal bar. The wetness of his cheeks was not tears at all, but drool from the bit between his teeth. The sound that emerged was a garbled groan unrecognizable as words.
He reached the end of the corridor and the circle in the wall melted open so that his prison could step through. The other footsteps followed him into what he recognized as the Dark alfr bridge. Instruments here cast a little more light, enough for him to appreciate the grand scale of the room, like a cathedral's main aisle.
To his left a curving bank of instruments and consoles hugged the room's circular walls. To the right, the hull was transparent. The floor was transparent also, so that Kelkalyn's throne appeared to float above the blue gas giant where the Raggy had been captured. The ship was clearly high up in the stratosphere—curls of white and diamond cloud stroked around the hull—and it was holding position above the city of Ahoa Nda'iilniih. With a flare of hope that was almost painful, Yas saw that the lights were still on down there. Had the bunkers held against the alfr' ground attack? Had the residents managed to beat them back and throw rapid-deployment plugs up to fix the domes? They had been prepared against storm and meteor showers, after all. Perhaps they were not as entirely helpless as he had feared.
He tore his eyes away from the view when Kelkalyn stood up. Technically, Yas supposed, what the creature was sitting in was a command chair, but it certainly looked like a throne. Black stone like an enormous piece of onyx, with silver etchings in the shape of circuit-boards. It too was beautiful, but large enough for three of him, so that he looked like a child next to it, slender and unassuming.
