by Zara Zenia
"Many," Atropos confirmed. "Though few venture this far out into space. The urge to conquer and explore seems to be a primarily human drive. In my experience, most races tend to stay within their own star systems. But there are a few others who, for any number of reasons, must leave their home lands. Actian has met with representatives from a few of these expatriates and intends to gather them as allies."
"And then what?" Amber asked, anxious. "What's he gathering allies for?"
"He intends to take a portion of the human population back to home world," Atropos explained. "To end the migrations, permanently."
Amber sat back her chair, stomach churning at the realization of what that would mean for the hundreds, maybe thousands of people stolen.
"And what about me?" she asked, her voice a little hoarse with confusion. "Your brother is using me to bribe you, but for what? Get to the point!"
"Actian intends to hold an auction," Atropos explained, his expression grim and reluctant. "His allies will join him here in a week, when the incubation is nearly complete. He ordered me to select several ideal human hosts. Young, healthy, attractive. He will sell them to our allies to ensure their support and to show them the value of the new Human trade he will be creating."
"Oh, my God." Amber felt sick to her stomach. "And that's what I am for you? Some kind of fancy plaything?"
"I did not ask for this," Atropos pleaded. "I would never treat you that way. Actian has never spent time among humans. He doesn't understand you as a people."
"Well then, make him understand!" Amber stood up so sharply the table rocked, steadying it as she slammed her palms down on the surface. "We can't let him do this! This whole thing, the migrations, all of it has to stop!"
"Amber," Atropos said gently. "You're talking about the extinction of my species. The only way to end the migrations is to either let my people die out or go through with Actian's plan. The migrations are still the kindest option."
"They're despicable!" Amber insisted. "You're kidnapping people and impregnating them against their will!"
"No one is hurt," Atropos insisted, talking gently as though to an upset child. "They don't even know they were gone."
"It's still wrong!" Amber shouted, trying to make him understand. "You're using them, using their bodies, without their knowledge or consent! And you have no idea what disappearing for a week might do to their lives. What if they had children depending on them? What if they lose their jobs for disappearing for a week? How do they explain that lost time to their families and all the people who are part of their lives? You could ruin people's lives, get people killed, and yet you keep acting like you're not having any impact! And maybe nobody noticed seventy years ago, but we have the internet and cameras everywhere now, and these people who all lost the same week of their lives will find each other."
Atropos looked a little pale at the last, but Amber still wasn't certain what she was saying was getting through to him.
"You do not understand," he said. "Actian is flight-leader. I cannot go against him, even if I think this decision is wrong. And I cannot ask him to doom our entire species for your sake."
"Then you're as much of a monster as he is," Amber declared, shoving the table as she turned away from it, wishing she had anywhere to storm away to. "And I don't want anything to do with you!"
"Amber," Atropos said, his tone making it clear he thought she was being unreasonable.
"Will that computer thing answer me?" she asked suddenly without turning back to him.
"Well, yes, of course," Atropos replied. "But I don't see why—"
"Computer, wall!" Amber demanded, pointing. At once, and with a satisfyingly final slam, a wall sprang up between her and Atropos, shutting him out. She was certain he could ask for a door if he wanted to, but she didn't think he would.
"Amber," she heard him call through the plastic-plaster material of the wall. "You cannot seriously expect me to do this!"
"I was an idiot for ever even talking to you!" she shouted back. "I can't believe I was so stupid to think a guy like that would be interested in someone like me. I should have guessed you were a monster in disguise from the start!"
"Amber, please—"
"Leave me alone!"
There was a long moment of silence, then she heard his footsteps retreating and the rustle of the curtain as he left. She sighed in relief. She needed time to process everything she'd just learned.
"Computer?" she said hopefully. "Bed?"
The same bed she'd woken in rose from the floor obediently, and she threw herself onto it with relief, dragging the blankets over her head. Her emotions were a mess. Part of her was still elated. She was in space! She'd met aliens! On the other hand, fear and disgust and bitter disappointment raged. She had liked Atropos so much.
To have him turn out to be this thing, bent on using her species as living incubators, content to let his brother enslave humanity . . . she'd never felt so betrayed. And she didn't know how she was going to get out of it. She didn't know how to escape this ship on her own. She wasn't sure she could. She closed her eyes and waited for the storm of feelings to pass.
But that wasn't going to cut it anymore, was it? She couldn't just close her eyes and wait for this to go away as she had when she was a child, cowering from thunderstorms or the neighbor's rowdy sons or any of the other hundred things that used to frighten her.
This was here, this was happening, and if she didn't adapt, God only knew what would happen to her. She was a scientist, damn it. Top of her class, on her way to NASA. She was better than this, cowering under the blankets like a child. And she was going to prove it, one way or another.
Chapter 5
It was some time before Atropos returned. She wasn't sure if they had a concept of night and day considering they had lived on a spaceship since they were hatched and didn't sleep. But it felt like about a night had passed. She heard him tap on the outside of the wall she'd made.
"Amber?" he said, voice muffled through the barrier. "May I speak to you?"
"Computer, door." Amber's voice was clipped, businesslike, focused on her current task. A door appeared in the wall at her command and Atropos stepped through, eyes widening at what he saw.
Amber sat on the bed, wearing a simple white shirt and long pants, not the clothes she'd arrived here in. Panels of light like computer screens floated in the air around her. They were crowded with text which changed as she scrolled through it or swiped to dismiss it, fingers passing through the screen till it dissolved into motes of light and scattered, fluttering like a cloud of moths.
She busily sketched notes in the air with a finger, casually as though she'd been studying this way all her life. She'd talked the computer into providing her with a shower and a change of clothes. The successful shower setup still sat in one corner. But the room was cluttered with failed attempts and experiments, strange abstract shapes, as she learned to use the computer's replication program.
"Oh good, you're back," she said, swiping a few screens out of the way and rubbing at her itching, dark circled eyes. "I have more questions."
"What is all this?" Atropos asked, stepping warily around the mess. He was holding a bouquet. "What have you been doing?"
"Research," Amber replied, becoming distracted by another screen and leaning away for a moment to add something to her notes. "I asked your computer to show me everything it could about your culture, history, biology. You weren't kidding about there being some significant gaps in that information. There's barely anything recorded for the first several million years. What there is, I couldn't access. The computer says it requires the approval of a Grand Fritillary which, as far as I can tell, isn't a rank that exists anymore. It seems like you all went through a militarized phase several thousand years ago, complete with classifying information, but that's collapsed now."
Atropos looked utterly baffled by all of this.
"Perhaps you should leave all of that alone," he said, reaching out to wave away the s
creens, making Amber frown. "I have brought you a gift."
He held out the bouquet, a stunningly beautiful arrangement of bright, exotic blooms from the ship's garden. Amber's frown deepened.
"Thank you, but I don't need flowers," she said brusquely, "I'm more interested in finding a way off this ship for me and the rest of the humans. If you'd like to help me with that, I'd appreciate it."
Atropos sighed a little.
"It would be much easier on you if you would just accept it," he said gently, sitting beside her. "It will not be bad for you here. I will never let you come to any harm. You will be able to see space as you always wanted to, even my home world when we return. I will give you everything you could possibly want."
"What I want is to go home," Amber said and ignored the guilt she felt as she saw his face fall in disappointment.
"I cannot do this for you," he admitted solemnly. "I am sorry. If there is anything else I can do, I will do it."
Amber looked away with a frustrated sigh, but her stomach growled, reminding her how little she'd eaten of the fruit he'd brought her earlier.
"Something to eat would be nice," she admitted. "The computer won't give me anything but that fruit in syrup stuff, and it's so sweet it hurts my teeth. I need something more substantial."
"Then I will get it for you," Atropos said at once, his antennae perking up at the chance to potentially redeem himself. "Wait here. I will return as quickly as I'm able."
Amber watched him go, with no intention of doing as he'd said. She pulled on the cloak he'd given her last time, which resembled brown wings. The hem was edged in white, with orange scallops, not unlike a Brown Argus butterfly. The dark brown of the main color matched her hair. If she kept her head down and no one looked too closely, she could easily be mistaken for one of the Lepidopterix.
"Computer," she said. "Stairs."
She'd spent a good part of the day figuring out how to convince the computer that she couldn't glide or fly. But she'd eventually convinced it that it could create stairs and hallways for her. It seemed like the replicator could do almost anything with specific enough instructions. If you were too vague, it would attempt to fill in the gaps itself in a way similar to neural networks Amber had seen on Earth, guessing by context and whatever material it had been trained on.
She'd played with one for a while that generated random exoplanets based on data collected from known real planets. But occasionally, just context and raw data weren’t enough and the computer would return an entry that was contradictory or nonsensical. Similarly, if you were too vague with the replicator, you got bizarre tangles of plastic that only somewhat resembled what you'd asked for.
Amber pulled the fur ruff of the cloak up around her ears and hurried away down the stairs the computer opened in the wall.
She didn't know where she was going. She didn't know where there was to go. Did this ship have life boats or smaller shuttles? The computer wouldn't tell her, nor would it say if the ship had a place that might hold such things. And she doubted she'd be able to fly them if she found them.
Then again, if she'd learned anything so far about Lepidopterix technology, it was that it seemed quite intentionally designed so that a child might operate it with minimal difficulty. It wasn't just the computer. Everything here was made that way. It fit with what Atropos had told her earlier. None of them understood how any of the technology worked.
She couldn't imagine how much they'd lost, each generation raising the next just barely to the cusp of adulthood, then leaving those half-grown progeny to tend the next, losing a little more of themselves, their knowledge and culture, with each passing generation. It was terrible to think about. She could understand Actian's insistence on changing things. But sacrificing her people was not the way to fix anything.
So she wandered the halls the ship made for her, mostly working her way around the central sphere, which was a massive, thriving community center. There were gathering places, restaurants, even shops, in a way. The Lepidopterix didn't have money or commerce. The computer provided everything for them, breaking down waste and anything they weren't currently using into its constituent molecules to be reconstituted into clothes, furniture, food, whatever was wanted.
But there were still artists among the ship's inhabitants. Painters and sculptors and artisans of all kinds. She watched a designer displaying the clothing they'd made and a curious customer who asked the computer to copy it for them while the designer suggested modifications to the garment to better tailor it to the customer's shape and the color of their wings. Occasionally, artisans exchanged things with one another, but the purpose seemed more to display their work, the only reward praise and popularity.
There were places for entertainment where the Lepidopterix played games, some of them totally alien to Amber, others clearly adapted from human versions. Some watched plays and performances, or films which Amber realized after only a few moments of watching were just human films recast with Lepidopterix actors.
But, she noticed as she explored, large as this place was, that there were not, all things considered, that many aliens here. Compared to a human city like New York, this place wasn't even as densely populated as Queens. It was no wonder their activities hadn't been noticed yet.
Appropriately distanced from one another, even if one human for every Lepidopterix here was kidnapped, it would be hard to notice. Especially when the victims were generally returned within a week or so. But it would be noticed eventually, especially in this age of surveillance and social media. And if Actian got his way and simply abducted that many people permanently, it would definitely cause a panic.
Deeper down Amber went, further and further from the central sphere. The shell of the spherical ship extended around the inhabited core far further than she'd expected. Much of it was storage, or residential spaces, or machinery, but not all of it. The places she wandered now seemed as though they'd last seen use during the Lepidopterix's military phase.
Offices, training spaces, what looked uncomfortably like armories, all thick with dust and dead, dried-out plants, the lights dim, everything stiff with disuse. Interestingly, despite the clear age of everything here, it all seemed at about the same technological level as what she'd seen in the inhabited parts of the ship. It might even have been a little better. She supposed that further confirmed what Atropos had said about them losing the ability to understand or advance their own technology.
She turned a corner, and the computer struggled to turn on the ancient, unmaintained overhead lights, which flickered and sputtered. She paused to watch as one popped, going out entirely. A panel opened in the ceiling almost at once, and a swarm of small robots, only about the size of golf balls, skittered out on many tiny, articulated legs. They hurried directly to the light, taking no notice of her, and repaired it as she watched, taking only a few minutes.
Once finished, they scurried back into the ceiling leaving no trace they had been there. Amber figured that answered her question of how they were keeping the ship operational over all these years. It had automatic repair functions. Presumably, any issues the computer had could be ironed out with an update whenever the ship returned to home world. It was a good system, all things considered.
She was about to proceed when the newly repaired light revealed something she hadn't noticed before. Footsteps in the dust, and drag marks as from sweeping wings, coming from the opposite direction and turning off down another hall just ahead of her. She crouched to run a finger across the footprint, finding it clean. She wasn't the only one who'd been sneaking around here today.
"Amber!"
Amber nearly jumped out of her skin as someone said her name. She turned around, cloak spinning around her heels, to stare at Atropos, who looked more imposing that usual in these grim surroundings, his dark coloration perfect for blending into the shadows here.
"You should not be down here!" Atropos said sharply.
"Shh!" Amber insisted, hurrying toward him to hush him.
"Be quiet!"
"Why?" he asked, clearly having not expected this reaction but lowering his voice anyway.
"Because I'm not the only one down here," she hissed, pointing out the footprints.
Atropos's eyes widened as he saw those.
"We should leave," he said at once, tugging her back the way she'd come. Amber dug in her heels.
"Why?" she asked. "Do you know who's down here?"
"Yes," he replied, pulling harder on her arm. "And that is why we must go. You are not allowed here."
Amber yanked her arm free impatiently.
"No," she said firmly. "What are you keeping down here?"
"Nothing that you want to see," Atropos insisted, reaching for her. "Please, let us leave, now."
Amber just shook her head at him and turned to follow the footprints. Her heart hammered in her chest, afraid of what she would find, thrilled by her own daring. She felt like a character in one of her favorite stories, brave and clever. She would discover the secrets of this ship, escape, and save the human race!
Atropos hurried after her, begging her to come back, but she ignore him, carried away on the waves of her own excitement.
"Do you even know what all of this is?" she asked him as they passed another room crowded with ancient equipment entombed in dust.
"Things of the past, "Atropos said dismissively. "They are unimportant. Nothing down here is of any significance. There are far more interesting things back in the center. I will show them to you if you come back with me."
"But do you know what they are?" Amber pushed. "What were they for? Who used them?"
"I don't know," Atropos said with an impatient sigh. "It was not necessary to know because they are no longer used. Why is it necessary for you to know?"
"Because maybe some of it might help us," Amber replied, exasperated.
"Help us do what?"
"Save your species!" Amber said, stopping for a moment to turn and face him. "To save mine! Maybe the answer to why you can't reproduce on your own is somewhere down here. Maybe someone was working on an artificial womb to replace organic hosts! There's no way to know, because you don't know what any of it is. You don't even care!"
