Chapter Five: Ashdown

I didn’t even realise I was awake at first. My osmotic fluids felt like glue, slowly forcing its way through my cells, leaving my body with barely enough energy to open my eyes. When I tried to move, the sudden shift almost dizzied me enough to pass out again, forcing me to stay still until the fog finally lifted.

“Are they awake?” I heard Konzor ask through muffled ears.

“Don’t think so,” Dagger’s voice was followed by footsteps growing louder as she approached, “haven’t seen them move.”

“Look at the eyes, I saw the eyes flicker.”

At Konzor’s prompting, I forced my eyes open, only to see Dagger looking right down at me.

“Well hi there,” Dagger smiled, “I guess you are awake after all.”

Konzor bounded into view, arms out for another embrace, but Dagger held him back with one hand.

“Easy big fella. Our hero’s been through a lot.”

“Hero?” I said, the two syllables slurring as my jaw sluggishly twisted into place. I found I could move my fingers, and then my hands. Nothing was broken, or paralysed, just numb. When I tried to move my arms, however, I encountered resistance. They were fastened to some kind of machine, whilst two mechanical limbs each worked to carefully sew up the gashes and cuts across my skin. That’s when I remembered. “There was a monster!” I rasped, feeling chaffed lips run against each other as I spoke. It must’ve been hours at least since I’d last drank. “An Arkolt.”

“And you slew it!” Konzor beamed, “a true warrior.”

“I did, didn’t I?” I remembered how I’d rigged the parked fighters to fire on the intruder, I remembered the explosion that’d thrown me against the wall.

“You probably saved dozens, maybe the whole damn ship,” Dagger put her hand on my shoulder, “you really showed your steel in there, soldier. Expect a medal when we get home.”

“When we get-” I jumped up hard enough to wrench my arms from the machines, which were thankfully just about healed. Konzor steadied me with his arms as I staggered to my feet. “What happened to the fleet?”

“Gone,” Dagger said simply, “accomplished the mission.”

“We destroyed the Arkolt?” It barely felt real saying it, and for good reason.

“No,” she shook her head, “but we accomplished the real mission.”

“The real mission?” I frowned, “what real mission?”

“To sneak a ship down to the surface of Vlissik. The battle was just a distraction.”

“But,” the image of Dreadnaughts exploding filled my mind, “all those lives, just to sneak a single ship?”

“Yep,” Dagger’s nose wrinkled, “sickening, isn’t it? But it was part of our mission, and now it’s done.”

“Okay,” I let my head sink back. I was better, but exhausted. “So, we got a ship to Vlissik?”

“Yup?”

“Why?”

“There’s a briefing about it in a few minutes.”

“A briefing? Why do we need a briefing?”

Dagger and Konzor looked at each other, daring each other to talk.

“Oh,” I realised, fear twisting in my belly like a knife, “oh no.”

“Yeah,” Dagger swallowed, “welcome to Vlissik, Greenie. Place has really gone to the pits.”

Despite the medical bay’s disapproving beeps, Dagger insisted I was fit enough for the meeting, and Konzor seemed personally insulted on my behalf at the very idea that I be too weak to fight. In the end I gave in and found myself sitting on a far-too-hard chair in the Ultimatum’s tiny atrium with most of the crew. There were more people onboard than I’d even known about, at least sixty in all, the majority looking nearly as frightened as myself. Apparently a one-ship mission to Arkolt-territory hadn’t exactly been part of the initial sell.

“We weren’t the first choice for this mission,” said captain Grandar, a portly-looking Plalvian with a Uniform far grander than the ship it commanded, “we were the fourth, as a matter of fact. Our first assault frigate, the Chance of Victory, was onboard the dreadnought Stride into Serenity when the Arkolt destroyed it. Our second and third choices were disabled by that shockwave. We were the fourth, and now we are the first. The rest of the surviving fleet are retreating. They’ve done their job.”

I remembered the communicator buzzing at Dagger’s hip before the intruder arrived, and the horror she’d expressed upon noticing it. Without explanation, I realised what it had been: the signal that they were what remained. The knowledge that we, out of every ship in the fleet, had been conscripted into this quest. I didn’t even feel angry at the lie of omission. The chances of us making it here had been low, one way or another.

“Our job, however, has only just begun,” he sighed, feeling probably little better than I did. The intricacies of military politics escape me, but I could easily imagine him volunteering for this mission, chest puffed proudly in the pretence of a hero, scarcely believing it could be his ship alone to make it this far. Or maybe he’d never volunteered. After all, none of us had. “For our part, the Ultimatum of Infinity is currently parked and cloaked within a cave on the planet’s southern equator, and will remain here until the mission has been completed.” Part of the way he said it emphasised the omission of a deadline. The Ultimatum would stay here until they were done, or until the Arkolt discovered and destroyed them, or until the final star fizzled out and the landing-gear froze to the ground.

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“But Captain!” Konzor roared over the silent crowd, “we know nothing about this mission. No one told us anything!”

The others murmured their agreement. Captain Grandar coughed.

“Quite right, yes. To avoid details of our mission falling to Arkolt intelligence, the exact nature of our task was made unavailable to most ships of the fleet, and only a smattering of command personnel onboard this one.” He tapped the ground with his foot. “To explain it to you now, Commander Vawitte will now take the floor.”

He briskly stepped back against the wall, and Dagger took his place, muttering what I could only assume were swears under her breath.

“Thank you, Captain,” she said in a voice more strained than a shield under Arkolt attack, “for that excellent introduction,” she exhaled through clenched teeth, “when Vlissik was destroyed seven years ago, we lost everything on the planet. People, of course, but also infrastructure and intelligence.” She shrugged, “it looks like a black husk to me too, but apparently High-Command thinks there might be something - Someone – left alive down there. Someone important enough to risk a third of our entire military’s might for the chance of retrieving.

From the ceiling, several beams swirled together into a holographic image of our apparent target. He stood tall on four mantid legs, torso narrow and hunched, with a bug-like head; segmented eyes and mandibles and all. Four cybernetic limbs stuck out from a brace on his carapace, three ending with mechanical hands and one with an interfacing-rod. A Vardak, one of the last few alive. Creatures apparently genetically engineered by humanity aeons ago, only to win their freedom in a rebellion that had long-since ceased to mean anything. This one had white scars all across their body, indicative of old age among his kind, and one of his four mandible teeth were chipped almost beyond recognisability.

“Is that-”

“But I thought-”

“You told us-”

Dagger spoke over the whispers.

“Professor Zanzikai,” she said frankly, “and yes, he is alive. His research grew too important for public knowledge, so his death was faked twelve years ago. In reality he was moved to an underground lab on Vlissik, where his studies could continue.” Her face twitched in barely concealed rage at that. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know what he was studying. I myself was only told this information just yesterday. But I can tell you this: It is assumed that his research, whatever it was, might have been the entire reason for the invasion of Vlissik. That should tell you all you need to know.”

Possibilities swam through my mind. What research conducted by an Enfirnian could be so important that the Arkolt, a mind so much more advanced than ours combined, broke centuries of self-inflicted isolation to obtain it? What research was so important as to risk hundreds of ships and thousands of lives to reclaim? Some kind of super-weapon? An indestructible shield? Engines more efficient than even the Arkolt drives?

It seemed impossible. But so did everything else.

“Our mission is simple,” Dagger said, “we will sneak into the underground lab – we suspect it to be far less effectively guarded than an Arkolt-built station would be – and retrieve Professor Zanzikai along with any of his research. The Infinity contains a single-use warp-drive we can deploy once the professor is onboard. Until then, we remain planet-bound.”

It truly boggled my mind, it did. That a single person, that a single mind could be so important as to bank so many lives and ships and strategies in the course of rescuing them, and only them. It was an utterly foreign concept to me, someone still coming to terms with the concept of ‘mattering’. But it was our mission, and after everything we’d suffered, now was hardly the time to start questioning. To start questioning out loud, that is.

After the meeting we were given a few hours to sleep, talk, eat and otherwise prepare for the times ahead, but it all seemed futile. Sleep seemed impossible, everyone was too nervous to say nearly anything, and as for food, well, I doubted much would stay down if I tried. Only Konzor and a few others seemed merry, still high on the residual adrenaline from the space battle, yet excited for the coming fight. I, for one, was dreading the world beyond this ship, but Konzor and I still had something in common, a pure desire to simply get on with it.

“You were incredible back there, Greenie,” he said to me, or something to that approximation. It was hard to tell what someone meant when they had two mouths, one biting a hard fruit and the other guzzling stew.

“Me?” I asked, still trying to work up the willpower to move a tiny spoon of soup between my teeth, “I just pressed a button. You were out there, fighting that robotic thing.”

“You were out there too! But you alone had the mental fortitude to actually use your surroundings to our advantage! A true warrior!”

“Only because I lost my gun like an idiot.”

“Modest!” He slapped my back so hard I dropped my spoon into my bowl, ending my attempt to get some energy before the fight. “If it wasn’t for you, we’d probably all have died killing that thing.”

“And if it wasn’t for you, then I would’ve.”

“Heroes both of us then!”

Hero.

It was a term that had never entered my people’s vocabulary until Enfirnia. One person, one individual, capable of changing the course of a battle through pure strength of will. The idea made me a little uncomfortable, but at the same time, I had to admit, it wasn’t all bad at all.

I cleared my throat a little.

“What do you want to do after all this?”

“You offering to buy drinks, little Greenie?”

I snorted.

“I meant in general. If we make it off this planet alive. What will you do next?”

“After this? More of the same I suppose. There’ll be more fights for sure. More battles, more glory.”

“So you’ll just keep doing this until you die?”

“The time-honoured Vendorian way!”

I stewed on that for a moment. The Vendorii culture as Konzor described it sounded almost purpose-built for war. They’d have prospered across galaxies, holding entire planets, and always pushing, pushing for more to conquer. Now they were down to a single planet, with almost every race united as one society, it was little wonder they’d reduced in numbers until Konzor was all that remained.

“Does it bother you,” I asked, breaking what many considered an unspoken taboo, “that in the end, this is all for nothing? If the Arkolt wipe us out, they’re only doing what the dark and cold will do to us eventually.”

Konzor stopped eating and put his cutlery down.

“Of course,” he said, “of course it does, how could it ever not? But…”

“But?”

“Well, it always was, wasn’t it? Everything we did, all the empires and kingdoms and legends, none of it brought this moment closer or fought it off. It was always going to come to this, and nothing’s different now. We have at least a few generations left, even if they aren’t Vendorii, and I’ll fight to protect them the same as I would if the universe was brand new.”

“You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

“Who hasn’t? And besides,” his dual grins returned, “this is the only ending for the great Vendorii race. That it’s me that gets to write our ending, it’s such an honour. And as for you, well, you’ll either be the last shout of your own species, or the parent of whoever comes next. You’re special Greenie, and so am I.”

We sat a little longer, desperate for the waiting to end. Funnily enough, I did feel a little better. Emphasis on little, but emphasis on better too.

“What do you think could be so important that we’re all risking our lives for it?” I asked. Konzor shrugged.

“I just kill things. Whatever else this is, it’s beyond my paygrade. Like you said, Greenie, it probably won’t matter in the end.”

“True. I’m still curious though.”

“Yeah. Me too.”