Well of Furies Read online

  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 naked most of the time. Bria just pulled a sash over one shoulder, the gray band emblazoned with the three-triangle symbol 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 idiot 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.

  “Kirt,” Bria hissed. “And Neelee.”

  Tarkos sniffed, but detected no different scent near this do
or. He could sample stray DNA and then use the gene sequencer and the quantum computer embedded in his body to come to the same conclusion as Bria, but he let Bria show off her superior sense of smell.

  The door slid aside. They entered a trapezoidal room suffused with soft light that made the opaqued green walls seem distant and immaterial. The door closed behind them, cutting off the busy sounds of the ship.

  As Bria had predicted, a Neelee and a Kirt waited within. The Neelee, a female, wore a Predator uniform—for the Neelee, Tarkos noted resentfully, this was just a simple vest. Beside her, a Kirt shifted on its eight legs. The crablike Kirt stood up to Tarkos’s chest, but was as wide round as Tarkos was tall. She had smaller mandibles around the mouth, a sure sign of her sex, and the reddish sheen of her shell indicated she was young, probably around Tarkos’s own age. She had a shell tattoo on her back, some kind of emblem of her trade that Tarkos did not recognize. The salty sea smell of the Kirt filled the room. Tarkos liked it. It reminded him of beaches in Palestine and in California. He wondered what humans smelled like to a Kirt. Dry land? Dirt?

  Tarkos and Bria both stamped their feet. This was a traditional show of honor for a Neelee, something between a salute and handshake. In response, the Neelee tapped a hoof in barest recognition of their salutation. Then she waved a small brown hand, and the room’s walls darkened even further to shield their conversation. She stood about average height for a Neelee—a head shorter than Tarkos—but was thin and lean. Something about the tilt of her head, and the way her ears stood up severely but did not quite point at them, seemed to say: you are barely worth noticing. Tarkos felt no surprise. The very name “Neelee” meant self-made. This female was a leader of the race that had founded the Alliance, and that had created the life-centered philosophy that united the species of the spiral arm. They had reason to be proud.

  “I am Special Advisor Preeajitala,” the Neelee fluted in a high, soft voice.

  Tarkos swallowed, making his adam’s apple chafe against his uniform. In the Corp, Preeajitala was legendary for her coldly analytical ruthlessness. He turned on his phonetic translation implants. He didn’t want to miss a word the Special Advisor said, especially given that she spoke very quickly, and Neelee tended to drop lots of ending consonants.

  “Commander Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess,” Bria said, introducing herself. She waved a claw at Tarkos. “Harmonizer Tarkos.”

  “This esteemed being,” the Neelee Special Advisor said, pointing at the Kirt, “is Ki’Ki’Tilish, star scientist, admirable astronomer, from the planet Kirtpau.”

  Both Tarkos and Bria bowed their heads to the Kirt. Tarkos looked her over again. Why would they need to meet with an astronomer? How could anything an astronomer would tell them be more important than the mission they had just aborted? He began to consider again his original plan to voice a protest about the importance of completing their current mission. But he had only just opened his mouth when Preeajitala said, “Ki’Ki’Tilish has discovered evidence that some of the Ulltrians survive.”

  Tarkos held his breath. The Kirt shrunk down a little, reflexively cringing back. The mandibles around her mouth drew tightly together. Bria huffed, and the hair along her back stood erect. Her claws went click, click, click, click as they involuntarily unsheathed and tapped at the hard floor.

  Oh, thought Tarkos, I am definitely not going to insist that we finish the Rinneret mission right now.

  “Where?” Bria hissed.

  Preeajitala turned toward the Kirt. “Esteemed astronomer?”

  The Kirt rose slightly, its mandibles waving at the air. “This one attempts, with little success, to study sunless planets, adrift between stars.” Tarkos was glad he’d turned on his phonetic translation implants, which quickly adapted to Kirt intonations. Most Kirt speech seemed to lack all vowels, turning Galactic into staccato clicks.

  The Kirt lifted a claw and a hologram appeared in the center of the room. “However, an unexpected trove of data recently came to Kirtpau, from a probe that had spent many centuries exploring deep space. This one,” she gestured toward herself with a single claw tip, “had the misfortune to receive the data from the probe.”

  The hologram portrayed a volume of space pricked only with the light of distant stars. Ki’Ki’Tilish spread two legs, and the hologram expanded until it filled the room, putting them all into the dark scene, as if they stood in space. “You will note the black spherical gap in the stars,” the Kirt said. “A miserable lack.”

  Tarkos did see it: a round spot where nothing shone.

  “Two occlusions,” Bria said. She pointed a sharp nail. At the very edge of the image, another dark circle blotted the mist of stars. That likely meant two round bodies, in deep space, far from any star and reflecting no light. Out there, moving incessantly through blackest night, they would be invisible but for what they shadowed.

  “Yes,” the Kirt said. “Unfortunately, as you observe, there are two bodies. The larger occlusion is closer to the probe taking this image. It is the sunless planet. That other occlusion is a brown dwarf star that the planet orbits. Together they wander through the Galaxy. See now. See. See.”

  She waved an arm. The mandibles around her mouth twitched nervously. For a moment nothing happened. Then Tarkos saw some of the stars twinkle. No, not twinkle, but rather, something shifted across the starfield, covering and then uncovering stars. A black irregular shape. As it came closer, their view changed over to an enhanced reconstructed image, revealing what radar and other sensors could find.

  A ship. A ship rose from the nearby planet. But it seemed not so much a ship as some kind of flying nightmare. It had an irregular shape, which Tarkos knew meant the ship likely had interstellar probability drive. But the probability flanges that covered its surface were not the bright thin towers that covered a Neelee or a Kirt interstellar ship. They were hooked black barbs that seemed to claw at space. To Tarkos, the black craft looked like some kind of medieval torture instrument from humanity’s dark ages.

  The monstrous form grew as it moved towards the probe. Then the ship changed shape, seething and pulsing. They watched as a bright line appeared along its underside, a door cracking open on some kind of bay.

  The ship shot forward and swallowed the probe. White and blue light engulfed them. Behind the probe, the bay door began to close. In the featureless glare, something moved nearby, casting columns of pale shadow. It came closer, waving huge black legs in erratic, insectile motions.

  Then, in a flash, they saw nearly all of it, before the bay door clicked fully closed, and the transmission from this lost probe ceased in a hiss of static.

  The Kirt reversed the video a few seconds and then paused the image: before the probe, creeping out of the light, came a scorpion monstrosity that Tarkos had seen only in historical recordings when studying at the Harmonizer Academy: black, the size of a rhinoceros, with a metallic carapace and a festering cluster of fathomless black eyes.

  An Ulltrian. One individual of the warrior race that had nearly destroyed all order in the Galaxy five thousand years before. The race that had been thought extinct since that war, when every known Ulltrian had fought to the death.

  “How can we be seeing this?” Tarkos whispered.

  The Kirt heard him. “The probe had hyper-radio,” she said. “Faster than light communication. It relayed its information to another probe before the bay closed and communication became impossible. The receiving probe has recently returned to us with this recording. Bad news always finds its way.”

  “When?” Bria hissed.

  Ki'Ki'Tilish understood Bria’s question: when had the recording been made? “With dread, this one must report, fifty-four k-years ago. Margin of error: 0.6 k-years. Most of that time passed while the secondary probe returned to Kirtpau with its data.”

  Tarkos did the math in his head. Fifty four Kirtpau years would be about sixty or sixty-one Earth years.

  Bria leaned forward. Her huge fangs flashed white and ominous in the glow
of the hologram. “Where?”

  “Yes,” the Kirt said. She waved several arms in agitation, tapping nervously at the floor. “Bad news only gets worse, as is always the way, this one knows. We can only place the probe within a cone of two degrees from the secondary probe’s location. The resulting area is a conical volume of space eight k-years in diameter at most likely limit of transmission. Margin of error: 1.3 k-years.”

  “Other evidence?” Bria asked.

  The Kirt shifted in place, making all eight legs tap at the floor. “There is the following unfortunate event, which is far too improbable to be other than a wretched portent: nearly all of our deep space probes have fallen silent. No doubt most have been destroyed, in a horrible and painful way.”

  “Most of the Executive ships are searching this volume where the sighting likely occurred,” Preeajitala said, “as are all available Harmonizer teams. The new mission of all Harmonizers is to assist with the task to locate this wandering planet, confirm or disconfirm the presence of Ulltrians, and then determine the Ulltrian intent.”

  The hologram faded. Tarkos felt relief as the lights returned, and the terrifying image of the Ulltrian disappeared. “Special Advisor,” Tarkos said, “that volume of space is huge.”

  Preeajitala turned her great green and brown eyes from Bria to Tarkos. Tarkos could not read her expression, but he imagined it combined disdain with curiosity. “Perhaps that task is too demanding for you? The vastness of space terrorizes?”

  “No, Advisor, but—”

  “You need not fear. You will be spared the difficulty of assisting that most important of missions.”

  Tarkos recognized the Special Advisor’s admonitory tone, but he could not help himself, he still protested, “But to put all our fleet, highly dispersed, in that one volume of space—is that wise?”

  Again Preeajitala stared at him a long time. Now her expression seemed to Tarkos interested, even contemplative. But her ears still pointed slightly away from him, a sign that he did not merit all her attention. Tarkos swallowed and waited. Galactic culture was radically democratic. Every endeavor was cooperative and voluntary. This included even the few police, like the Harmonizer Corp, and the military, known as the Executive. Titles were honorary, and respected, but they were not guarantees of obedience. Yet all citizens knew that these defense institutions were delicately balanced: it was considered a sign of civilization and maturity to understand that debate could impede operational effectiveness. So a very fine line existed between asking tough questions and being seen as an obstacle. Those who were too often an obstacle found themselves untrusted, unsought, uninvited to the most important missions.