Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9)

by Mark Wandrey

  He grabbed her and pulled her to him, his nose ramming into her throat, and his lungs working, filling with her scent. Without realizing it, he nipped at her neck.

  “Oh!” she said, and pulled his head back by his ears. Her muzzle opened and their tongues entwined. A second later, their uniforms were coming off. He was quickly losing complete control of himself and couldn’t care less.

  Then Paku shuddered. Someone was pushing against him. He growled and pulled her close. Veska barked an order and hit him in the stomach. Rex whoofed in surprise. The second groaning shudder from Paku actually registered in his higher brain.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, but put your pants back on!”

  He looked down and was surprised to see he was mostly naked, and quite aroused. How he’d gotten into this state was somewhat of a mystery. All except his deep-down feeling of…what, frustration? Then Paku gave another heave, and he felt like he was falling, though they were already in zero G.

  “We just dropped out of hyperspace!” Veska said, her eyes wide in alarm.

  “Huh?” Rex asked and reached for her.

  She slapped his hand away with a growl. “You need to…”

  “What in the name of the Three Songs are you two doing?”

  Veska’s head snapped around, her ears flat against her head. Rex recognized A’kef’s voice without having to look. He suppressed a growl rising from deep in his being.

  “Veska,” A’kef snapped, “it is not for you to Aho-a-Hosh.”

  Rex struggled with the words through the slowly dissipating fog of sexual desire. Only then did he become aware that what he’d been feeling was sexual. How would he know; he’d never felt this before? The only females he’d spent much time around were his own sisters, and awareness of them as such was automatically and completely repressed by some innate response. This. This was pure, animalistic desire, and it felt good.

  “I’m…I was just…”

  “I know full well what you were doing. It doesn’t matter now; we’ve dropped out of hyperspace.”

  “The drive didn’t fail, did it?” Rex asked, suddenly alert enough to feel fear. Of all the things that could happen to a starship in transit, having its hyperspace drive fail was the most terrifying. The Humans had reams of science fiction written about it, and the GalNet said it was catastrophic, likely resulting in the ship being torn apart by dimensional forces nobody fully understood.

  “I don’t know,” A’kef admitted, looking at Rex for the first time. His expression was undecipherable. “Get to your emergency stations, both of you. Now.”

  In a second Veska had gathered up her gear and was gone. A’kef hesitated as though he would speak to Rex, then twitched his head toward the door and left as well, leaving Rex alone, confused, and extremely frustrated. He punched the compartment wall, which only succeeded in sending him rebounding off the opposite wall and banging his head on the wall. “Damn it,” he growled and headed for his duty station.

  * * *

  “What the fuck?” Alan barked as the sensation ripped him out of sleep. He instantly checked the chronometer in his pinplants and verified it had only been an hour since he went to sleep, and it was more than 30 hours before they were scheduled to arrive in P’k’k. He immediately wondered if the hyperspace generator failed. The chill of fear yielded to a logical thought. If that happened you wouldn’t be thinking about it.

  He grabbed his pants and uniform shirt and quickly got dressed. Around him, Paku shuddered to life. He could hear shouts in Zuul and English asking and theorizing what had happened. He wondered how much of it was his own imagination. Sure, others were responding, but maybe it was just some strange movement by the ship. That happened in hyperspace, he tried to convince himself. The effort fell flat.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” Tucker said, floating up next to Alan’s open compartment.

  “You felt it, too?” he asked his XO.

  “Damned right I did. We dropped out of hyperspace.”

  “Impossible,” Alan said. He found the old-fashioned wristwatch he wore on deployment in a zippered compartment in his duffle bag. It operated on a tiny RTG, or radio thermoelectric generator. Basically, decaying radioactive material made heat, which it converted into power. Only a little radiation, which was shielded in the watch, and only a little power. It was enough to run the watch, and even make it glow at night. He confirmed the date and time. “Over a day early,” he said.

  The howling alert to battle stations sounded in Paku’s hallways. Alan cringed; the damned sound reminded him of a dog his dad had run over when he was a kid.

  “All command staff, report to the bridge,” a Zuul voice announced.

  “That tears it,” Alan said. “Not just some weirdness.”

  “Commander!” It was Sergeant Bana of Second Squad.

  “Sergeant, report,” Tucker ordered.

  “I was listening to music in the Phoenix,” the older sergeant explained.

  “What did you see?” Alan asked.

  “We’re in normal space! It wasn’t smooth, either. Everything kinda swirled and resolved. Never seen nuthin’ like it.”

  Alan cursed. “Get the squads assembled and warm up the CASPers,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  * * *

  Isgono sat silently beside him, but Shadow replayed the Sei’s instructions on a loop in an attempt to stay focused.

  Breathe in the scent.

  Deep, regular breaths as Shadow worked to match the older Zuul’s slow tempo.

  Differentiate each component part.

  Shadow had never encountered a scent so complex. He’d grown up in a Human city built against the ocean, and low tide and concentrated Human had provided a sometimes-overwhelming stench, but this…

  Every time he thought he had it, some new, subtler piece would brush past his nose. Each one he chased down had another part, and then another, until his skin jumped at the impossibility of it, and he had to force his breathing back to steadiness.

  Follow the trail.

  In his eagerness to learn, Shadow had always had a high tolerance for instructions that didn’t make initial sense. He trusted in his teachers, believed they had access to wisdom he did not. Certainly Isgono had proven himself already, in sharing information about their clan and their kind that Shadow was only beginning to grasp.

  But this…he’d been at it for hours. Breathe a scent, break it down, follow a trail. The words had become nonsense, the smell endless, the trail nonexistent.

  Perhaps he didn’t have true visions at all, in the way Zuul understood them. He’d learned to dream, somehow, from Humans, so this Zuul approach to entering a space that would allow him to consciously bring one about couldn’t work for him.

  Breathe—

  Isgono was wrong about him.

  Breathe—

  Maybe he’d had the skill, but it couldn’t be controlled or learned like a normal Zuul could control or learn it because he wasn’t a normal Zuul; he and his siblings could never be truly Zuul, and absolutely not Human, and instead they would be some disconnected in between, left to drift through the galaxy and—

  “No,” Isgono said, or maybe Shadow imagined he’d said it, because in his attempt to force focus, everything around him had blurred, and now he was falling…

  The scent twisted around him, and he tried to open his eyes to see how he could be falling in zero G, what had happened to make the air solidify and slash against him, a whip that struck every nerve ending. But he didn’t have eyes to open, only the pain. The scent thickened further, and he plummeted through it, burning.

  Space closed in.

  Three stars rose, their light intensifying and fading in a pattern he couldn’t bring into focus.

  The smell crawled through his nose, worming sharp fingers up his nasal cavity, behind his eyes, scraping the inside of his skull.

  He burned, and the scent Isgono had put in front of him ate his bones. He woul
d die here, falling. He would fall here forever, dying.

  No, someone said, but he could no longer differentiate his own voice from Isgono’s. Couldn’t remember where he was, or how he’d gotten there.

  One of the stars faded, and a sharp bar of light stabbed through him.

  Ships, small enough he could pick them up, if only he could reach, threw more bars of light at each other, and at him. He spun as he fell, but no matter how he turned, the stars and the ships remained in his line of sight.

  But how could he see without eyes? At the thought, space shuddered around him, and the burning pain clenched tighter around him.

  One of the ships exploded, and then the other. Every point of light around him was a ship exploding, the life in them pouring out, everything falling and dying and the burning and the burning and the burning…

  SHADOW.

  Death.

  SHADOW.

  Every point of light was a death, a thousand deaths, a trillion, an impossibility of deaths.

  SHADOW.

  Was the shadow causing the death?

  No, he was the shadow, he was Shadow, this was only a vision, a Zuul way of understanding the universe around him. The universe around him screaming from every cell: death.

  He had eyes again, and he opened them, and he was back. On the Paku, not dying, not burning, though hyper aware of every follicle pushing fur through his skin.

  “Isgono?” he asked, his voice clear and grating on his own ears.

  “Shadow.”

  “What…I…” He needed to see his siblings. The vision clung to his edges, and dread spun in his stomach. Before he could push off from the bench, Isgono’s hand pressed heavily on his shoulder.

  “What did you see?”

  Space twisted around them again, and the dim echo of a howl rose in the back of Shadow’s mind. He braced himself for the burning, and the falling, but then Isgono’s head snapped up and to the side. The Sei had felt it, too, the vision wasn’t climbing up to drag him back inside it again.

  “We…” Isgono breathed, a purposeful cadence, and Shadow unconsciously matched him. “We are no longer in hyperspace.”

  Alerts and announcements sounded around them, but Shadow couldn’t register if they were in Human or Zuul. The words faded, the room of scent boxes coming into overly sharp focus.

  “How?” Shadow managed, the word heavy in his mouth.

  Isgono tilted his head, ears twitching, his eyes never leaving Shadow’s. After a long moment, he shook his head.

  “Tell me what you saw,” the old Zuul said, his expression unreadable.

  Some part of Shadow knew he should find his father, find his siblings, find out what had happened. The aftereffects of what he’d seen twitched through his nerve endings, skin jumping and fur twitching. He should go, and he knew it, but with Isgono’s eyes steady on his, he couldn’t so much as push off from the bench.

  “The three stars again,” he said, “blinking like the lights in Eshtoo. And then a battle…no, one of the stars went out, then everything became small ships exploding, and…” In fits and starts he managed to communicate the vision, almost slipping back into it each time he had to grope for the right words.

  Isgono made him repeat some of it in Zuul, his expression and body language too neutral to offer any cues. When Shadow finished, his chest tight as though he’d completed the obstacle course between levels, they sat in silence for an undefinable length of time.

  Only then did Shadow realize the alarms had stopped, though he couldn’t pinpoint when that had happened. Had they stopped all over the ship, or only in this isolated room of scents and scenes from the Zuul world of origin?

  Shadow decided he should either ask Isgono about the alarms, or tell the Sei that he needed to find his unit, but the moment he opened his mouth, the older Zuul launched away from the bench.

  Shadow tracked his teacher’s trajectory, noticing the subtle motions of tail and limb that directed Isgono to the far corner of the room with minimal points of contact. Again the Earth-raised pup dropped his jaw, and this time Isgono held up a clenched fist, signaling silence.

  For a moment, he allowed himself to wish that Drake were there, knowing his brother would explode, splitting the tension with action or a demand. He tried to summon the same rush of impatience, then registered that Isgono had pulled something new onto the wall screen.

  “An…insignia?” he asked, relieved to be distracted.

  Isgono traced the projected shape, his back to Shadow. Three glowing points in a blue-black background were arranged in a wide triangle. A shock of recognition thrummed through his gut—they were the three stars of both his last visions. Shadow pushed himself off the bench, bouncing off different scent boxes without taking his eyes off the wall display.

  He steadied himself next to Isgono, and noticed the subtle line of a thin, looping filament spiraling between the three points of light, twining them together.

  “Cho’Hosh, Day Song,” Isgono said, ignoring Shadow’s question. “Vo’Hosh, Star Song.” The old Zuul lowered his muzzle for a moment, then lifted it, nose twitching. “Krif’Hosh, Night Song.”

  “Day Song,” Shadow repeated, tearing his eyes from the image to study his teacher’s face. “Your clan. Are these others…family?”

  “Of a sort.” Isgono’s ears flicked rapidly. “And not as you would consider it in Human terms.” He sighed. “The Songs are to Ja and many of the Zuul as the Four Horsemen are to Earth and many of the mercenaries. It is a poor comparison, as the Songs…they go back long before Human history. They are Zuul history. The gods tell us…”

  Something uncomfortable writhed deep in Shadow’s stomach, and he realized the older Zuul was…hesitant. Perhaps even scared?

  “The gods?” he asked eagerly, the words blurting out despite his realization.

  “You said your vision smells of death, and one of the points of light faded before the ships began exploding. Our gods are never entirely clear, but we know the Three Songs are the stable point the Zuul rest on. We hold a balance for the Zuul everywhere, even those who have never seen Ja, and perhaps for the galaxy in its entirety.” The last he added almost casually, the weight of the galaxy nothing compared to the needs of the Zuul.

  Too many questions crowded against Shadow’s skull, and with the dread pooling through him after the vision and the alarms, he couldn’t begin to untangle them before Isgono spoke again.

  “Years ago, one of the Songs ended. The ripples began, the ones that would become waves, become tsunamis to pull the Zuul from their certainty into the chaos of the disconnected. The Seis hoped we could mitigate some damage, save some few before the storm. Without Night Song, Day and Star Song could only do so much. But now, I wonder if we might do more.”

  “Why?” Shadow managed, his heart racing.

  “Because we have not lost Night Song after all.”

  “I…how?”

  “Because I scent it on the wind.” Isgono leaned close, tilting his head and taking a deep breath from Shadow’s neck.

  Shadow froze, uncertain, his clever mind slow to put it together.

  “War comes, with all its chaos, but perhaps we may hold to something more all the same.” Isgono floated away and cleared the wall screen. “We have been pulled from hyperspace. Your people will be looking for you.”

  Isgono turned away, and Shadow vibrated with half a dozen conflicting urges. Demand answers, find out more about Night Song, ask how they could possibly have been ejected from hyperspace and still be alive, find his siblings, find his father, let the clinging edges of the vision reclaim him…

  Then he remembered there had been alarms, and his unit had been ordered to report, which he had not done—

  And Shadow grabbed a handhold, propelling himself from the compartment.

  * * *

  As soon as everything began to feel strange, Ripley knew in the pit of her stomach there was a huge problem. She lived and breathed space, and had since she was a little pup dreami
ng and watching the vast amounts of Human-made sci-fi. Mom had told her she was named after an incredible space pilot. Ripley hadn’t found out her name was sort of an ironic homage until she finally got around to seeing Ghostbusters.

  “The Human name for my species is a joke?” she demanded from her mother.

  “A joke? Not at all,” she’d explained.

  “But you said the original explorers were mostly Japanese.”

  “They were. But that doesn’t mean they never watched American movies, dear. It does mean they hadn’t met the Besquith when they named your race, though.”

  Ripley pushed away from the little desk where she’d been studying her native language in more detail. The Zuul didn’t go in for slates as much as Humans did. They preferred fixed displays to ones you could carry around. Not that there weren’t slates aboard Paku, just not in the profusion she was used to, and she didn’t know why.

  “What’s wrong?” Sonya asked.

  Ripley looked at her sibling and could tell Sonya hadn’t asked the question because she’d seen Ripley felt something, but because Sonya had felt something herself. On the far side of the compartment Drake’s ears were back, and he let out an involuntary snarl. He was looking around in a mixture of confusion and anger.

  Oh, no, Ripley thought, then Paku fell out of hyperspace.

  Someone barked a scream in alarm. It took her a moment to realize it was her. Or maybe it was all three of them; she wasn’t sure. All she knew was, they were many hours prior to emergence, and when a starship fell out of hyperspace prematurely, it was a bad, bad thing.

  “What the fuck was that?” Drake’s harsh growling voice cut through her momentary panic.

  “We dropped out of hyperspace,” Sonya said, looking at Ripley for confirmation. “Right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what it felt like,” Ripley confirmed.

  “That’s not supposed to happen,” Drake said.

  “You think? Don’t be a bloody idiot,” Ripley snapped.

  “You’re supposed to die when you come out of hyperspace too soon,” Sonya said.