by Hugh Howey
Bergrisar lowered her shoulders.
I felt lighter. Having my guns meant something. At least I could rely on the tactics I knew best. But I remembered the difficulty my weapons had had even with poor Eld.
Ivy was still worried, but she had no further council for me. Her lids tightened around her eyes in sorrow, and I turned my attention back to the proceedings.
“Very well then,” Gýgr continued. “At the rise of our moons we shall lead them to the arena. Provided he accepts terms.” She turned to me.
“This treaty is too important,” I responded. “While I relish no further bloodshed, I must continue.”
“Then let the combatants adjourn.”
Bergrisar leveled something that might have been a glare at me.
I nodded, and stood to return to Ivy’s shelter.
Seven
I rested fitfully and woke to the smell of something bitter, but with a pleasant edge. Ivy was brewing something over the fire. “Made from carrots,” she said, “and sweetened with fermented carrots.”
She poured two cups, one for each of us, and we drank together. It had a mildly intoxicating effect, so I declined a second cup.
Strange ululations murmured over the city. “It’s time,” Ivy said. She led me toward the arena, but to a different entrance than the one we used before. “I can’t go with you,” she said, and stepped back.
I nodded and proceeded into the arena. The moon wasn’t as bright as I could have hoped, but its light on the snow made me remember a childhood spent sledding and making snow forts. There were no braziers here.
I checked the charge on my rifle. I’d come prepared to defend myself, but not so armed as to cause alarm among the Jötnar. As it was, I wasn’t sure I’d have enough to carry me through, tough as the Jötnar were.
My HUD filtered through the gloom. This area’s ruins were denser, and the HUD seemed to be having a hard time pinging through the stone, metal, and ice. Even the heat sensors couldn’t pinpoint Sjórisar’s location. So I went a short way in and stopped at the first wide clearing I could find. I built snow and rubble walls around me—and I hid. I needed an advantage, and maybe the surprise would be enough.
I waited.
Eventually Sjórisar appeared, scanning just past me. I sighted her in, and as she turned, I fired.
She lashed me with her tail, demolishing my shelter.
The scale I had hit—above her brow—was still intact. I turned up the setting on the rifle as I rolled to avoid a second blow from her tail. She used it like a whip, to cut my legs out, to force me to the ground where she could crush me.
I fired twice more. The first went wide. The second caught her primary arm, where the scaling was thinner, and I could smell the fat frying underneath the plating. “Bloodied insect stamens,” Sjórisar muttered.
I glanced at my rifle charge: half gone already, and I only had one cartridge to replace it with, plus another in the demolished shelter, and then the reserve charge on my pistol.
Sjórisar swiveled around, and I threw myself back to stay away from her tail. It grazed my shoulder with the force of an avalanche, but I managed to keep hold of the gun. I fired again, lining several shots up along her nearly twenty feet of bulk.
She squealed as the shots tore into her, cauterizing flesh and heating her scales until they glowed. But still she came.
Her tail swept my leg, and my ankle twisted and popped. I went sprawling, and she loomed over me, readying for the kill.
I turned my gun to maximum charge. Whittling away at her torso wasn’t going to work. I needed to end this. I fired one more shot—clear through her head. The moon peered at me from the hole as she tipped forward.
I realized, too late, that she was going to fall on top of me, or at least on top of my legs. I scrambled backward, but not fast enough. I screamed as she collapsed onto my knee.
Eight
When I managed to wiggle out from under Sjórisar’s corpse, I made an unpleasant discovery. The edges of her scales had been sharpened to razors. My suit was damaged, and there were a number of cuts across my legs and shoulder. I couldn’t tell how much blood I’d lost.
One of my legs wouldn’t hold my weight. I forced myself to probe the wounds, and I nearly fainted when my finger brushed my shoulder bone.
When the spots cleared from my vision, I brought my hand to my hurt leg. My finger sank into the wound mid-knuckle, and I had no doubt that some of the muscle had torn.
I fought for the tube of first aid goo in the suit, to staunch the bleeding, but at least one of the lines used to administer it had been cut, and even when I cleared the blockage, it wouldn’t push out.
Frozen.
Shouldn’t someone have fixed that shit before plopping me on a subzero planet?
Fuck.
I used Sjórisar’s corpse to get me off the ground and steadied. I measured her arm from the gunshot down. It was about the right length for a crutch. I tried to pry it loose, to no avail.
I decided to use one of my precious remaining shots on the weak spot. If I died here it wouldn’t matter if I’d saved it for later. The cold was already biting me hard, and I had no spare fabric to bandage myself.
Using the severed arm as a makeshift crutch, I forced myself back toward the entrance, but it was slow going, and the Jötnar met me before I’d even left the immediate area. Ivy gathered me into her arms, all four of them, but Bergrisar pushed past to Sjórisar, shrilling her grief in a voice sharp enough to make my HUD warn me of the potential for cochlear damage.
Ivy nodded. “Let her mourn in peace.” She carried me back to her shelter.
She clucked sadly as she laid me out on the floor and examined my wounds. “You’re lucky.”
I raised my eyebrows. “How so?”
“In ancient times, she would have eaten fungus for a month to make her blood poisonous, and then dipped her scales in her droppings, to ensure you died of infection.”
I chuckled. “I’m lucky, then.”
“She was not ready to fight you. We all knew it.”
I remembered the tension in Bergrisar’s face. “Was that Bergrisar’s objection?”
“Yes. She just couldn’t admit it.”
I wanted to ask how Ivy knew, but I let the thought go as she helped me out of my suit, and the chill got ten times worse despite the fire.
“We cannot have fabric in your wounds. I will warm you once they’re bandaged.”
For a moment I pictured Drew in this situation, and people teasing him for getting caught with his pants down with yet another alien species. But then Ivy bent over my leg, pressing flesh into place around a brownish paste, and sealed it with a long, rubbery synthetic fabric.
Though she was being gentle, the spots returned to my vision, and this time I didn’t fight unconsciousness.
I woke up in a moment of suffocated panic. The world was dark, and Ivy’s smell surrounded me, much more so than it ever had before. Tender flesh pulsed against my face, accompanied by a thunderous gurgling that unnerved me. I wiggled and probed, trying to understand what surrounded me.
Supple flesh on one side, the underside of crystalline, rounded plates on the other.
My face felt sticky—likely secretions to keep the plates from grinding on each other. It brought to mind suffocating during sex.
But something about that smell… It was so far from human, but the nuance of its spice pushed into my brain in a way no woman’s perfume ever had.
Ivy’s fingers, their plates rolled back, stroked through my hair, and the gesture calmed me. I realized the gurgling was circulation—her heartbeat.
I tried to remember feeling so completely protected and cared for, but nothing compared. I tried to imagine leaving her cocoon’s embrace, and couldn’t.
Nine
I lost track of the days I spent suspended inside Ivy’s shell. She had to help me to the bucket that collected our wastes for the Jötnars’ farming.
Her body formed around me as though
I had always belonged there—some places loosening, others tightening, to take as much pressure off of me as possible. And strangely, surrounding myself in her soft, fragile flesh felt natural, like lying on a waterbed or floating in a pool. When her heartbeat surrounded me, pushed against my face as I rested, it pushed thoughts of the Nexus, even Louise, out of my head.
I wondered what my crew’s reaction would be if I gave up on the treaty and just stayed with the Jötnar. Perhaps in time the Jötnar would need my help, or our technology, to relocate to a more hospitable home, like the initial report had speculated.
But having known them, I didn’t see them doing that. Surviving their brutal ice age was part of their identity. How could they create lenses without winter-long fires?
I didn’t believe they could rewrite themselves. But I wondered if I might rewrite me.
Days bled together, until at last I could stand again.
I had to speak to Bergrisar, find out how this situation was going to play out.
When Ivy released me, her scales slid away from me, allowing me to pass through the cracks. I fell barely an inch onto my mossy pallet, and I prepared myself for an unpleasant conversation.
“Is Bergrisar still mourning? How many contenders are left?”
Ivy sighed. “You’re determined to jump right back to work.” The reprimand in her inflection was surprisingly human, every bit the harried and peevish mother.
I shrugged. “Not eager, but I have to know.”
Some of the plates around her eyes slid back, loosening the tension in her face. “There is only Bergrisar. No others wished to challenge you. I think she would not, but she feels she owes it to Sjórisar, as one of her brood. We do not bond with our offspring the way some herdbeasts do, but we still have a duty to avenge them.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry it’s come to that. I don’t wish to kill her.”
Ivy made a motion akin to a shrug. “You have followed our customs; there is no reason for sorrow in that.”
“Still.”
There was something in Ivy’s mannerisms that rankled me. A question came to mind.
“Will Bergrisar be the last?” I asked. “Is anyone honor-bound to avenge her?”
Ivy’s eyes flashed up to mine, startled. She clicked in agitation. “Bergrisar has lived long. Most of those gestated with her are long dead.”
“But not all.”
“Not all.” She ducked her gaze, and I filled in the rest.
“You’re of her brood.”
“Yes. The same clutch of eggs, even. Not just the same genetic material.”
“Will you fight for her?”
“I’m no fighter. She would not expect me to avenge her. And I would ask—have asked—her not to fight.” She sighed, almost a whistle. “But we cannot put Bergrisar off any longer. I told her it would be dishonorable to come for you unconscious, wounded. But we have passed that point of grace. Let me get you some snow to bathe yourself.”
I nodded in thanks, and used the armfuls of snow she brought to sponge her fluids from me. Even so, Ivy’s smell clung to my skin, like the expensive hand lotion my mom used.
I glanced at the last remaining cartridge for my rifle. The only way I could get more of a charge for it was to drain my pod battery, trapping myself here.
I didn’t know what I would do if it came to that. I would decide after meeting Bergrisar, seeing if she wanted to meet me in the moonlit ruins.
I put what remained of my suit on and followed Ivy to the court. The rest of the Jötnar awaited me.
Bergrisar growled when she saw me. “Are you happy? You are almost at your victory.” Her voice was a dangerous purr.
“I wish no more bloodshed.” I didn’t know what else that might mean.
“It will fall, regardless; you have not broken all of us.” She flashed a contemptuous glare around the room.
“Tonight, then?” I asked.
“No. You will fight me here. You do not deserve to die on ground nourished with the blood of our ancestors.” Ivy trembled next to me. “Give him his weapons, Iviðja.”
I could see the conflict in her as she passed them to me.
Fear and adrenaline pushed through me as Bergrisar stood and the Jötnar backed away from us.
I turned to Gýgr. “I may not survive this fight. But our two peoples’ friendship shouldn’t die with me.” I opened comms with my ship. “I’m opening up the technologies we offered in the contract. Use them. Help your people.”
I didn’t have a chance to hope it could sway Bergrisar; she was already laughing as I turned. “He thinks he can buy back his blood,” Bergrisar chortled. “It’s mine already. I ache for its moisture on my tongue.”
I glanced at my rifle charge. Shit—with it turned up to the maximum, I had only a handful of shots. Plus whatever was in my sidearm. But Bergrisar was huge, bigger than the last two combined.
She lashed out at me with one of her secondary limbs; this one seemed to be akin to a scorpion tail, and I didn’t want to know what was in the stinger. As it whooshed past, a smell struck me, a familiar one, learned from living with Ivy.
She meant to poison me, even if I could defeat her.
I retreated. It had to come down to the gun, then.
She whipped her tail at me again, but didn’t put as much force behind it as Sjórisar had. It gave her more maneuverability, having less invested in the attack. I ducked, and her tail knocked into the wall behind me. I raised my gun, waiting for a clear shot to her head.
I got it.
When my shot struck, Bergrisar chuckled. The plating around her head was thicker—it had been forged into a single plate since the last time I’d seen her, essentially welded into a helmet. She’d disfigured herself in order to win. The shot dented the plating beside her eye, but not even enough to trust that another shot would do the job, even if I could hit in the exact same spot.
And from her weaving, I might not have the chance to test that.
I cursed myself for not charging my damn rifle when I had the chance.
She turned away from my next shot, but it was going to go wide even if she hadn’t moved. Due to both of our miscalculations, it tore through the limb with the stinger. The carapace there must have been weaker: the stinger fell off, completely severed by the heat of my blast.
That could work. Remove the limbs. It was dicier shooting than center mass, but if it actually got through… I fired again, at one of her smaller arms. She seemed to recognize what I planned at the last moment, and snaked to the side, absorbing the blast with the thickest part of the plating in her chest. I fired again, and again she lurched to absorb the shot harmlessly.
The rifle was dead, and I dropped it. I turned up the charge on the pistol. I had enough shots to try to break through her head plating, or I could stop fighting fate and aim for her chest.
She charged me, and I fired center mass, my training responding before my head could. As I ran to the side and threw myself over her lashing tail, my wounded ankle gave out; I couldn’t count on being able to run or dodge. She turned toward me, whipping a hand ending in a fist, the carapace’s edges sharp and exposed.
The edge caught me, biting into my already injured shoulder and reopening old wounds.
But as I fell back, my hand met Bergrisar’s fallen stinger, and an idea hit me.
When her next attack came, I leaned in to it—twisting my torso so that it skimmed by me—and then I threw myself at her torso, wielding the stinger.
I struck the weak spot in her chest with it, and felt a crazy euphoria as it sank in, deeper, deeper. Her shock rippled through me in her plates’ little trembles. I tore the stinger out, and sections of shell fell away with it. I stabbed it into her again and again, fighting to keep clear of the limbs that reached for me, thrashing around me, defiant even to the last.
Ten
I shivered and fell to my knees as Bergrisar’s twitches subsided. I felt dizzy and raised a hand to my shoulder. The old wound was open, yes, but it
was more than that: the edges of her fist-plates had torn deeply into my neck. I couldn’t tell if she’d hit an artery, but from the shredded meat where my neck met my chest, I didn’t see how she could have not.
The Jötnar washed toward us, seeing that she was dead and I lived. “You shall have your treaty.” It was Gýgr who spoke. “No one else will argue.”
I nodded. The world felt floaty, and I let myself sit, knees to chest, to wait out its motion. Movement out of the corner of my eye drew my attention, and the Jötnar faded away.
Impossibly, Louise sat beside me. She was pure, her eyes’ color saturated beyond anything I’d ever seen.
“I can’t leave,” I said to her, though I was certain my lips weren’t moving. “And I know you couldn’t love me. And that’s all right.” I leaned over to kiss her, and started at the feeling of a mouth without her lips. Then the fragrance sank into me, one I could wake up to every day for the rest of my life.
I hoped to God I wasn’t bleeding out, that I might live my days out here.
Mistake or no, I didn’t pull away. And neither did Ivy.
When we paused for breath, any trace of Louise was gone. Ivy’s fragmented crystalline eyes were on me, and my bloodstained hand held her face.
“How… how am I?” I asked.
She shrugged noncommittally, though I found her smile comforting.
“Will I live?” I returned my hand to my neck. I couldn’t feel where to put pressure, or where I was losing pressure.
“You’ll stay with us.” She tried to mimic my smile. “We’ll find a lens in our pit so your spirits will know where to find you.”
I told myself that that meant I would live, not that she would show them where my grave was. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but it was what I wanted to believe as the darkness overtook me.
A Word from Nicolas Wilson
Although “Trials” is, I hope, a story that stands on its own two feet, it’s also a story set around the events of my book Nexus 2. Readers of that book will have recognized the protagonist of “Trials” as Linus Bogdanovich. It didn’t seem fair to me that so much of Bogdan’s arc happened offstage, and I’m happy to have told his story here.
