Well of Furies

Chapter 1-1

CHAPTER 1

“The whole Galaxy had better be in mortal danger,” Tarkos said, as he and Bria climbed back into their cruiser, a lean, shark-like ship, thirty meters long. Tarkos pulled off his helmet as the ship’s door sighed closed. It was a relief to breathe the ship’s open air, and speak aloud. He ran his hand over his hair, enjoying the weight of the heavy metal-ceramic glove on his itching scalp. “Because nothing else would justify pulling us out, just when we were about to solve this case.”

Bria did not answer him. She rarely did. Instead, she heaved the unconscious Rinneret off her shoulder and dropped it with a thud into their autodoc. The autodoc beeped in protest from the blow. Bria took off her helmet and grunted at their prisoner: the Rinneret was too long. She grabbed the Rinneret’s back legs and roughly folded them into the bed. Tarkos flinched when the Rinneret’s thin limbs made a grinding sound. Bria pulled the glass door down on the Rinneret and leaned forward against it. She shoved until it closed with a crunch.

“Are you sure we should answer this recall request, Bria?” Tarkos asked. “There is another source out there in the Galaxy for symbiont self-replicators. The Rinneret have it, and we don’t even know where it is. What could be more dangerous and important than that?”

The autodoc’s door lit up with vitals information. Immediately, small robots poured out of black slots in the back of the coffin-shaped space. Most of them began to crawl around the Rinneret’s split carapace, preparing to knit the bleeding cracks together. Several of the robots climbed through the Rinneret’s mouth and down its throat, seeking internal injuries to measure and tend. Tarkos shivered—the thought of bots climbing around in his gut always made him squeamish, though he had suffered the experience several times now. He tapped at the glass. “Call us a servant race, will you?” he whispered. Then he followed Bria as she clambered to the front of the cruiser and into the pilot seat.

The ship’s engines hummed in ascending pitch, up and out of Tarkos’s hearing range. Tarkos flopped back in the copilot seat, which seized onto his armor, holding him tightly. The ship lifted from the pale dirt of Qualihout One, stirring up dust that blotted their view until they shot a hundred meters above the ground. They continued on, up into thin clouds and then through to blue sky. In minutes, the blue darkened to black as the cruiser pulled above the atmosphere. Bria swung the craft’s nose toward the outer planets and sped for their rendezvous with the Neelee ship that had carried them to this system. When Bria released control to the autopilot, Tarkos picked up his complaint again.

“That Rinneret was about to talk!” he said, still hoping to get a reaction out of his commander and partner.

“Will talk,” Bria hissed. She leaned forward, an impatient gesture to which Tarkos had grown accustomed: Bria often unconsciously shifted into a running posture when she longed to make the ship move faster. She turned on the inertial dampers and then eased the cruiser up to a bit more than an apparent e-gee. Sinking into his seat as his weight grew to Earth-normal, Tarkos studied her, wondering if Bria knew something he didn’t.

“And we could have taken their ship,” Tarkos said. But his indignation was fading.

“Executive pursues ship.”

Tarkos growled like a Sussurat. “The Executive is good. They fight hard. But they’re slow. And besides, the point is, I feel like we’re the only ones who see the big picture in all this. I’m going to tell whoever issued this emergency call that we have to finish this mission, before we take another. I’m going to tell him, her, it, or they that we have to be allowed to do our job.”

“Preeajitala,” Bria said.

Tarkos’s mouth hung open. “What?”

“Preeajitala.”

Tarkos considered that a moment. “The request came from Preeajitala? The Preeajitala? Acting Special Advisor to the Predators? Breaker of cadets? Terror of The Lost Zone?”

Bria blinked all four of her eyes at once, the Sussurat equivalent of a head nod.

“She’s on the starship?” Tarkos asked. “And she wants us? I mean, she’s the one who sent the request?”

Bria blinked again.

“Oh,” Tarkos said. “Well. Uh. Maybe, you know, I’ll, uh, hear her out, first, before I say anything.”

“Wise,” Bria said. She leaned even farther forward. Reflected command symbols glowed in her four eyes.

_____

Slingshotting over the pole of a blue gas giant of the outer system, the Neelee starship looked like a snowflake the size of a city, gleaming silver and white against the mist of stars. It had a Neelee name which sounded to Tarkos like barking and which meant, in the Neelee language, something like Savannah Runner. Though Tarkos knew the ship harbored immense power, to him nothing could have looked more delicate than this crystal ship. It was like the Neelee themselves: they appeared so fragile in person, and so esoteric, so fixated on diplomacy and ecoforming, that he found it easy to forget that they were the most powerful race in the Alliance. Seeing the Neelee as fierce was like trying to find the audience at an opera intimidating. And yet, such they were, and this delicate-looking ship could transform planets and—though no Neelee would ever want such a thing—it could destroy worlds.

Their cruiser slowed as Savannah Runner filled the view. Bria deftly matched the vast ship’s half e-gee acceleration and moved the cruiser to dock at the end of one tenuous silvery arm. Tarkos fought the impulse to hold his breath, irrationally expecting a sound of shattering glass as Bria performed a lateral docking. But a gentle clang sounded out instead as the doors clasped, followed by a shudder as docking armatures seized onto the cruiser.

They climbed out of their seats and went to the airlock. Hot air flavored with the strong musk of the Neelee flowed over them as the door slid open. The gas mix was Earth-like, except for a bit more oxygen and a higher concentration of noble gasses. Bria and Tarkos could breathe it without effort, though it felt strangely both dry and heavy to Tarkos. And the Neelee liked to keep the temperature tropical hot.

Four robots of the Executive, slim black pillars with four blade-thin arms, waited outside, flanking a silent Neelee in an Executive uniform, with dark fur and brightly green eyes. The Neelee soldier glanced up at Tarkos, then stepped towards Bria and coughed a few quiet words of Galactic that Tarkos could not hear. Bria blinked agreement, and three of the robots entered their cruiser. Tarkos stepped back, giving them a wide berth. He did not like highly autonomous robots, even when they were on his side.

Two of the robots lifted the autodoc stretcher from its shelf. The third lifted the illicit sample box they’d taken from the Rinneret. The robots carried the prisoner and cargo down the hall, servos making a quiet shushing sound as they strained under their loads. The Neelee soldier followed, his delicate legs moving quickly as he slipped past the robots and out of sight.

Bria seemed about to follow, but orders loaded abruptly into her implants, the red symbols streaming also across Tarkos’s visual field: a request that they appear at a formal briefing immediately.

Tarkos cursed under his breath. Tradition required that the Harmonizer uniforms of each species member match the formal dress of their home planet. His uniform was stiff, with thick cloth, in the style of Army dress. The damn collar always pinched his adam’s apple, making conversation uncomfortable. But he issued the command to his armor that made it part open like a shell. He stepped out. Bria did the same. Both suits of armor closed up and walked to their closets, where the ship’s robots would inspect, clean, and repair them.

Tarkos frowned as he dressed, envious of Sussurat customs. Sussurats went around n***d most of the time. Bria just pulled a sash over one shoulder, the gray band emblazoned with the claw insignia of the Harmonizer Corp. Without her armor, Bria resembled even more a polar bear, only with thick, close fur patterned like snake skin, and with four eyes: two small black ones set above two big eyes with triangular green irises. With the white tip of a single claw she pushed below the sash the only jewelry she ever wore—a necklace made of some black metal, with a small black box hanging from it.

Tarkos pointed at the necklace. Normally, he wouldn’t dare ask Bria a personal question. But their limited but still real success against the Rinneret smuggler, and also the rushed excitement of preparing to meet a legendary leader of the Harmonizers, made Tarkos suddenly bold. “What is that necklace that you always wear?”

Bria tilted her head down, and slightly squinted her top eyes. This was the Sussurat expression for you are being such an i***t that I must spare you the shame of looking at you with all four eyes. Tarkos understood the message: Bria thought him stupid to believe such a question was appropriate.

“I always wear a necklace too,” Tarkos said, a lame attempt at justification. He lifted a chain from his neck. From it dangled a glass cylinder in which sat a single olive pit. “See. It came from my Uncle’s lost grove, in Palestine. There’s a long story about this.”

Bria only closed her top eyes a little more. Tarkos sighed and held up his hands, “Right. Sorry. Humans are to be seen and not heard. I get it.”

He pulled on his shirt. Bria stared impatiently now while he fumbled at buttons.

“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying,” Tarkos said. “Tell you what. Let’s go. I can finish on the way up the hall. The Neelee won’t care if I’m unbuttoned. They won’t even know this thing is supposed to be buttoned. For God’s sake, I’m not even shaved. How much worse can I look?”

Bria stepped through the door before it was open all the way, and loped easily up the docking tunnel. Tarkos had to jog to keep up with her. At the end of the tunnel, they turned into a corridor perhaps three meters wide. Tarkos stumbled along, elbows akimbo as he finished buttoning his shirt, looking down at his hands, but he took only a single step into the corridor before he instinctively leapt back.

From wall to wall, Neelee filled the corridor, jumping quickly past each other in both directions. It seemed he had walked into a scattering herd of running deer, and only just missed getting trampled. Tarkos had never seen such a crowd on a Neelee ship. Something was happening. Every crew member was being called to stations.

Bria pushed on without pause, and the Neelee deftly changed course to slip around her. Tarkos swallowed his reluctance, closed his eyes, and stepped into the flow. He felt soft fur touch the back of his hand as a few of the Neelee brushed against him, but no collisions ensued. He opened his eyes and ran to catch up with his partner, cringing repeatedly as he seemed to nearly collide, but never quite impacted, a bounding Neelee crewmember.

Almost all the walls of the ship, including even the floor of this hallway, were translucent. The Neelee had evolved from prairie herbivores, and perhaps because of this they preferred—indeed, seemed to require—long and open views at all times. A closed space usually frightened them, or at least made them feel trapped. But the continual transparency dizzied and disoriented Tarkos. Even the floor let dim shadows cast from the halls below shimmer up through its milky translucence, and on the pale ceiling dark spots appeared and disappeared, as Neelee passed over on the floor above, their footfalls like hoofprints pushing at clouds. During his many travels on Neelee ships, Tarkos never overcame the feeling he wandered in a carnival funhouse, surrounded by long pale views through cloudy glass, many of them spotted with dim and distorted reflections of his frowning face.

Fortunately, he and Bria did not have far to go. After they had walked a few hundred meters, Bria pulled to a stop before an opaque section of wall. Tarkos overshot her and had to back up, his steps in the half e-gee coming as lumbering bounds. The opaque wall meant only one thing: a high-security meeting within. Bria crouched before the narrow door, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through. She sniffed loudly, her four nostrils flaring.