3: Clarity is suspicious

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Onward we walked, bravely taming our very own planet, the new masters of Sanctuary. We surveyed our kingdom day by day, and…

Okay, it was super boring. Walking is really, really boring. We did it for days. Slowly. Walk for a day, stop to stock up on food and water for a day, do it again. I lost track of time pretty quickly. My wounds healed, vision returned in my left eye, whatever was in the atmosphere that was making me red and itchy didn’t let up at all. We were moving in a zigzagged path plotted mostly by Kit, although Harlen sometimes insisted on alterations based on where she predicted nearby jellyfish swamps would be. Sometimes I found spiders. I had about enough of Glath to make a full human arm, which was pretty good considering he would’ve been blown all over the place. The spiders still weren’t moving. I was beginning to worry that he really was dead.

One morning, I woke up to the agony of one of my internal organs slowly liquefying and oozing out of my body. This wasn’t particularly remarkable; as about fifty per cent of the population is well aware, you just have to expect this sort of thing every month or so. What was remarkable was that I was in good enough physical shape that the pain and inconvenience was actually worth noting, which was the first time that had happened since my abduction, so… good, I guess? Usually I was too beaten up with actual injuries to pay much attention. Also, it gave me an approximate timeline, based on the last time I’d been at that point in my cycle; we’d been on Sanctuary a bit under one Earth month, probably, if my numbers were right and nothing weird was going on. Maybe. My cycle had never been regular, which was why I hadn’t even considered using it as a yardstick aboard the Stardancer, and sometimes it skipped entirely, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been on Sanctuary for two months, so just under a month would do for an approximation.

My entire concept of time was even more screwed up on Sanctuary than on the Stardancer. On the Stardancer, at least before the ship had been cut in half, I’d set up a fake day/night cycle with the lights in my environmental ring. I’d put it at 25 hours because I felt like it, but it was still pretty close to a human day. A day on Sanctuary… felt longer. I wasn’t sure how much longer. I didn’t have a functional timepiece, and neither the aljik nor the drakes seemed as time-oriented as I was. They didn’t have daily sleep cycles like humans (they did need to rest to replenish energy, but their timing seemed to depend more on the energy they’d expended than on a regular cycle) and seemed mostly confused by my obsession with time. So far as everyone but me was concerned, the only relevant measure of time was whether or not the sun was up, because sunlight directly impacted what we could do; the length of days, number of days, or anything smaller than the amount of time before it was time to stop and eat was simply irrelevant.

We’d been walking for… an amount of time, on… a day into our journey, when Kit, Lln and Kisa all froze and spun to face slightly East.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“Hush!” Lln demanded, concentrating.

“Blood,” Kit said. “It has to be another escape pod crash site. We should check it out.”

“Kit, that’s – ”

“Our duty,” Kit said quickly, cutting off Lln. “I know, Lln, it probably won’t have anything valuable to us, but our crewmates might still be alive there. We have to go and see if they need our help, and if they’re not, do the rites. Everyone, to me.” He took off at a brisk, determined pace.

“Do we really need everyone?” Kerlin mumbled, but followed. Like me, he struggled to keep up with Kit’s suddenly very driven pace. Kerlin’s old injuries did him no favours as we walked. As for me, humans are surprisingly good at constant walking, but we’re not very fast over long stretches, at least not compared to aljik.

Something was on the horizon, shining hazy and golden under the midday sun. I could barely make it out; it was just a kind of… halo to the East. I forced myself to move faster. A change in landscape! After all this time, a change! Something was out there, something different to the root-strewn sands and swamps we’d been wandering over since we’d arrived on Sanctuary. Something new.

I hoped it wasn’t something that would kill us. Our current environment was boring and uncomfortable but we’d managed to squeak out a living in it.

We kept walking. The change on the horizon grew. The aljik didn’t slow their pace, and soon, Harlen was lagging with us, too.

No, not lagging. Holding back.

I glanced between Kerlin and Harlen. “What’s going on?” I asked quietly.

“It’s too far,” Harlen said quietly.

“Whoever it is isn’t going to need our help any more or any less if we take half an hour to rest,” I said. “I’ll get Kit – ”

“She means,” Kerlin clarified just as quietly, “that we’ve already walked further than Kit should’ve been able to smell aljik blood, and there’s no sign of a crash. They didn’t smell anything. They’re lying to us.”

“We have to be very careful with this,” Harlen said. “We need to find out the exact nature of – ”

“Hey Kit,” I called. “Why are you lying to us?”

All three aljik whirled around and froze guiltily. I took the opportunity to catch up. The drakes remained where they were.

“What?” Kit asked.

“We’ve already travelled further than you should be able to smell. There’s nothing here. Where are you taking us?”

Kit hesitated. “Forgive me. I merely didn’t want to cause alarm.”

“Alarm? Oh. Well. That makes me feel way safer, then, a comment like that. Not alarming at all.”

“Everything is completely fine, calm down.”

“Another great phrase for calming people down. You’re on a roll today.”

“It’s a nest beacon,” Kisa said. Kit dipped his mandibles at her, an aljik equivalent of a glare. She shuffled awkwardly.

“I knew it!” Kerlin growled behind me. “You’re leading us into an aljik trap!”

“I was leading you to an aljik nest,” Kit corrected. “We are still a part of the same crew.”

“Don’t you dare give me that kind of nonsense.”

“What,” I said as calmly as I could, “the everloving fuck is going on between you guys? Did some kind of high school clique war start when I wasn’t looking?”

“It would seem that Kerlin is a traitor,” Kit said calmly. “Harlen, where do you stand?”

“I’m sorry? I’m the traitor? You’re trying to sneakily lead us right into the Princess’ mandibles and I’m – ”

“You’d be happy to see her if you weren’t a traitor!” Kit snapped.

“She’s probably dead! Did you think of that? You’re going to find a bunch of abandoned, confused atil there or something, and – ”

“And what? Have a bigger crew to work with? Besides, she’s very much alive. That’s a Princess’ call.”

“Kerlin, we should go,” Harlen said, eyeing the two atil. They hadn’t left Kit’s side, but were both very alert.

“If you won’t come, I won’t spend energy trying to make you,” Kit said, turning again. “All the non-traitors, let’s go.” The aljik started walking again. The two drakes watched me, waiting.

“I still have no idea what the fuck is going on,” I said.

“It’d take too long to explain,” Kerlin said quietly. “Just know that it’s us versus them.”

Harlen cut in urgently. “Be careful, Kerlin, you can’t trust – ”

“We can trust Charlie. This whole thing was her plan.”

“… What?”

“We were on the bridge. Ready to jump. The captain ordered us to green dash to the heart planet. Charlie was translating. She… ‘misinterpreted’ the order. I plotted the course.”

Harlen looked between us. “The pair of you brought us here.”

“Yeah,” I said apologetically.

“You planned this?”

“Yes,” Kerlin cut in. “She planned this.” He was meeting my eyes very intently. I got the message. If he wasn’t going to mention the Escape To Sol plan, neither was I. “She’s been rubbing our wings from the beginning. She’s on our side.”

I opened my mouth to ask why there were suddenly sides, then closed it again. Questions like that could easily get me thrown out of the ‘on our side’ category. Fortunately, I was very used to bullshitting more knowledge than I actually had.

“Sides aside,” I said, “we can’t survive alone out here for long. We’re going to need the atil. We might have no choice but to follow them.”

“The Princess will kill you both on sight for your treachery,” Harlen pointed out.

“Only if she knows,” Kerlin said quietly. “I doubt very much that she noticed who punched in the coordinates. She won’t know it was me.”

“And she couldn’t see my hands when I, uh, misinterpreted the orders,” I said. “I made sure of it. She doesn’t know I had any part in this, either.”

“Would she suspect?” Harlen asked.

“No,” Kerlin said. “She needs an engineer far too much to go digging up problems like that. Charlie’s the closest thing she’s got.”

“So we go, we be cooperative, we act like this unpleasant little political issue has nothing to do with us,” Harlen said. “We can figure out how to find more drakes from there. Think you can play nice, Kerlin?”

“I’m very nice,” Kerlin said. “Ask anyone. I’m the friendliest drake in existence.”

————————-

Fuck this entire planet and fuck everyone on it.

Yes, I know, this entire situation was technically my fault. I couldn’t even blame Charlie, really. I’d seen the plan and made the decision. I’d punched in the coordinates. I could’ve sent us to Earth, or to the heart planet, or out here. I’d chosen out here.

Even by aljik rules, I was the guilty one. Technically, Charlie wasn’t bound by loyalty to the captain; her actions made her, at most, a hostile outer force. She’d never accepted exchange for her services. She’d flat-out refused the currency offered to her. But I’d accepted exchange, so by aljik law I was unequivocally a traitor. And I knew my fellow drake pioneers well enough to know that an awful lot of them would be out there, refusing to come home, refusing to follow the Princess’ orders. Out there, being traitors.

And now Harlen and I had to pretend not to be. We’d have to dip wings and crimp tails and say ‘oh, yes, captain, it’s truly terrible that some traitor crashed us down here, and I can’t believe the gall of those deserters out there, trying to live their own lives and escape the not-at-all unreasonable conditions of your employ, just because you decided to exploit our good nature and destroy any real hope of actually fulfilling the exchange you promised through a legal loophole. How dare they try to scrabble to get their lives together while there’s still a narrow sliver of time.”

Yep. Easy. This was gonna go great. I was sure of it.

I could’ve sworn that I used to be more fun than this. When had I turned into Yarrow?

——————

We walked. The change on the horizon grew to cover more and more of the land before us, until its nature became clear. It was water, shining rose gold in the red midday sun, an ocean stretching on out of view. Light glanced off gentle waves, making it impossible to see much further out under the shifting glare, but other than that the water was almost perfectly clear. The red sand underneath it was perfectly visible close to the shore, revealing a clean, smooth, gentle slope with no hidden rocks or sharp drop-offs.

The aljik were standing, hesitant, at the shore, staring out over the water.

“What’s the hold-up?” I asked.

“They don’t know if it’s safe to cross,” Kerlin said. Kit fluttered his wings at him in irritation, but didn’t deny it.

I looked out over the water. The waves didn’t look that harsh. More like pond ripples than anything. “I’m sure we could make a boat or something,” I shrugged. “It’s just water.”

“How can you tell?” Kerlin asked.

“Hmm?”

“How can you tell that it’s just water? It could have anything in it.”

That was… a good point, actually.

“Okay,” I said, “so we won’t drink any. I’m sure that in a boat we could – ”

“I don’t see anything in it,” Kerlin added. “Even that vegetation that grows over everything isn’t in it. A huge expanse of water on a life-bearing planet, and it’s completely clean? Isn’t that a little bit strange?”

It was a little bit strange. Or more accurately, unbelievably suspicious. I took a careful step back.

“We’ll build a boat,” Kit decided. “Charlie, what materials do you need?”

“Kit, no!” Kisa said. “We have to think this through. Perhaps there’s a way around.”

“We can’t be sure of that. We don’t know what’s dangerous out here; we could run into anything trying to find a way around that might not exist. We can’t risk that.”

“We can’t risk you!” she snapped. “You’re too valuable to the nest! You can’t go over the water if we’re not sure it’s safe!”

Kit dipped a mandible at her. She shrank back, chagrined. But Lln stepped forward.

“She’s right,” she said quietly. “You’re no use to the nest dead.”

“Then one of you try it,” he said impatiently.

“Wouldn’t help,” I cut in. “There could be all kinds of toxic bullshit out there that can kill us, but not right away. I don’t think you should be letting crewmates dunk themselves in mysterious unknown fluids at all, but even if you did, them being fine wouldn’t tell you much.”

“Well,” Kerlin said, not trying very hard to keep a triumphant twist out of his gestures, “I suppose that’s that, then. We’ll have to follow the shore around and hope for the best. And if we can’t get there that way…”

But Kit wasn’t paying him any attention. He was looking at Harlen. Harlen, who had used her knowledge of chemistry to secure us a nontoxic food source and other necessities of life. Harlen, who was being very, very quiet throughout this conversation.

We all turned to look at her. She lifted her wings, awkward.

“Can you find out?” Kit asked her.

“Maybe. Hard to be sure, since I haven’t run the tests yet, how accurate I can be. But…” she glanced at Kerlin, then answered the question that Kit had pointedly not asked. “But I will. Try, I’ll mean. I’ll try to find out if it’s dangerous, and if it is, help to find a safe way across.”

Everyone relaxed slightly. I looked back at the clear water, gently lapping at a smooth shore, practically begging me to go swimming. There was something dark floating on the surface. A small bunch of ambassador colony spiders, clinging together. It was about the size of a fifty cent piece.

I fished them out with a piece of our portable distillery, went to stow them in my bag, and stopped. Instead I cut a piece from the side of my spacesuit, inspected it for holes, and turned it into a little pouch. No point in dropping a bunch of potentially poisoned spiders into the rest of Glath. I put the wet spiders in the pouch, wrapped a suit strip as tightly as I could around the opening to make it as waterproof as possible, and dropped the little pouch into my bag instead.

“We make camp so that Harlen can run tests, then,” Kit said. “No sense in wasting more daylight. How are we for food?”

“No point in getting more,” Harlen said. “We have as much as we can carry easily.”

I celebrated inwardly. No jellyfishing.

We settled into camp a reasonable distance from the shoreline. Kit helped me set up the distillery while Harlen gathered her samples, Kerlin acting as her assistant. Working with Kit wasn’t quite like working with Tyzyth, but if we were both silent, I could sort of pretend it was. They looked similar. Not that I wanted to think about how Tyzyth had looked; it made me uncomfortably aware that I was handling pipes made from his chitin.

I’d used Kakrt’s limbs as makeshift machinery once, too. Maybe we were starting a Stardancer engineering tradition. Maybe someday my skull would be a critical engine component on the ship that took the crew off this damn planet.

A cheery thought, that.

We finished setting up the distillery, and I spent the rest of the day awkwardly avoiding everyone so I didn’t have to get into any tense political conversations. I didn’t see what the problem was – we wanted to get off the planet, and that meant working together, right? I doubted the Princess wanted to be stranded down here. I didn’t like her, but rejoining her increased all our chances of getting back up into space to… uh… do whatever else we were going to do with our lives, I supposed. (I had a long-term plan, but I didn’t know how to execute it. It’d have to wait. Get back into space first, worry about everything else later.) Could the aljik and the drakes save their squabble for after that?

I inspected the distillery for problems to avoid talking to anyone. Then I went off on my own for a bit and inspected my allergy rashes and the couple of wounds that still hadn’t completely closed over from the crash. Nothing seemed infected, or at least, nothing gave any more indications of an infection than an allergy normally did, my skin being already red and swollen. I took stock of what was left of my space suit and inspected all my tools. I looked into my bag of spiders and gently sorted through them, making sure I hadn’t inadvertently crushed them or something. They looked fine. I decided to be extra thorough in my inspection; if I got back to camp late enough, I could go straight to sleep. So I looked through the spiders again.

The whole situation was ridiculousness piled on top of ridiculousness. Screw the majesties of the vast universe, I wished I was back home in my teeny corner of Earth, editing magazine articles and being a terrible photographer while my boys slowly destroyed all my possessions as boys tend to do. But I didn’t have the means to go back, and even if I did, I… couldn’t. My mission was too important. Humanity had a terrible reputation out in the wider Empire, a reputation that’d get me killed on sight by anybody more sensible than the Princess and her ragtag crew. When we finally took our place among the stars, generations in the future, we couldn’t afford to do so with that reputation. Our very presence would incite a war, and we would respond to blood with more blood… no. That couldn’t be our initiation into the universe. We had to start doing better. We had to be what Star Trek thought we were going to be, and somehow, I had to convince the galaxy at large that that was who we were.

Yeah, the galaxy at large that I just said would kill me on sight. It wasn’t an easy mission.

Nevertheless, I was here, so I had to try. I had to –

I froze.

After a little while, I began to feel sort of heavy and sick, a dull ache in my chest. I realised that I’d stopped breathing. I took a breath, then another, and the unpleasantness vanished.

I was packing away Glath, and the little pouch I’d made a couple of hours before was in my hand. It was empty.

I inspected it, heart in my throat. It was still shut tight, but there was a small hole in the bottom. The spiders must have fallen out. Except…

Except I was completely, one hundred per cent sure that there had been no hole when I’d made it. I’d deliberately made it to be as watertight as I could with the supplies on hand. I inspected the hole… yes, it was fresh. Jagged and uneven, but newly cut. I kept staring for several seconds, unable to process what I was seeing, unable to properly commit to the only possible conclusion.

Glath had eaten his way through the bag.

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