27. And the humans will keep you safe while you sleep
The voice had warned them that something would happen, that it would happen in an instant, less than a heartbeat, and that then they would be safe. They hadn’t been kidding. One moment Yellow had been running with her litter and all the other litters that had escaped together by following the dancers and the canines. The strange metal monsters had been fighting the Others and staying behind periodically, except for two that always kept pace with the Aurealians, no matter how fast or slow they moved.
And then they fell six inches and landed on a soft pad in the center of a large sphere. The impossible part of it, however, was that the gravity was pulling them from the inside of the sphere towards the outside! Everyone knew that wasn’t how gravity worked unless you – oh.
"Gravitic field generators," Yellow said, staring upward. The entire inside of the impossible sphere was visible except for the opposite side of the light source, which was burning in a dim red comfortable to her sensitive eyes. Not at all like the burning yellow light which had come from the dawn as the Aurealians had fed into the daytime.
"That means that we’re on a spacecraft," Purple Dots said, following her logic to the same conclusion that she had.
"You are safe here," their teacher’s voice was singing, although the familiar hologram was gone. "The humans have built this place to make you comfortable. It is like the space stations that the Aurealians built and hide between the stars where the Others cannot find them unless they know just where to look. But it does not look like that from the outside. From the outside it looks like it is dangerous, like it is a tank filled with antimatter. You know what antimatter is, do you not?"
"Of course we do," Yellow and the rest of her litter, and all of the litters in all of the sphere answered, beginning the song of antimatter. But the teacher wasn’t done yet.
"There is water to drink and water to bathe. There are holograms to show you what things are for. If you see a hologram of an Aurealian doing something, that means that what they are doing is safe for you to do as well. If you see a hologram of an Aurealian eating something, that means that it is good to eat that thing. You have all been so very brave in escaping from the dangerous bad place and the (untranslatable) that wanted to hurt you, you must be hungry, thirsty, and tired. Find things to eat and places to drink, and use the bathing places to clean yourselves before you rest, unless you are too tired to do anything but sleep. That is okay too. Be good, Aurealian children, you have been very, very brave today, and the humans will keep you safe while you sleep."
~~~~~~~~~
Simon collapsed. He was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. He knew that he had just saved tens of thousands of lives, but he was too tired to be proud or congratulate himself for his hard work.
He doubted Nathan was so affected. Simon frowned at the holograms in front of him, considering the young marine washout. The boy – Nathan was still shy of his second decade of life, a child in humans when the average life expectancy was seven times that, ignoring the use of things like stasis fields – had shown an alarming level of competency. It had come late, but so suddenly that it had changed a disaster into a resounding success.
He couldn’t have done it without Simon. Simon knew that. Especially because Simon had been the one to spot the emergency in the first place, and the first one to begin working on a solution. But Simon had been grasping at threads while his shirt fell apart when Nathan had reached out to him with a helping hand.
And Simon had almost told him to go bugger a rhinoceros.
Now, apparently, Jon Cassonova, a personal hero to Simon for his long history of advocacy for non-humans, had elevated Nathan to his former position. Simon was a civilian, but he was a civilian contractor serving upon a military vessel belonging to the united armed branch of the UEOSC. While they were on mission, his captain had the power of life and death over him.
And Simon had spent the last six months deliberately antagonizing Nathan at every opportunity.
He began to wonder how likely it was that he was about to find himself being thrown out an airlock in the near future. And whether he would be in a vacuum suit at the time, whether he’d have a retrieval beacon like the last two times, and whether or not someone would actually use it.
At least he had saved the Aurealians. That had to count for something, right?"
~~~~~~~~
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"Lights," Nathan croaked. "Dim the lights forty percent, Athena."
"Sorry," Katherine whispered as she came into his room.
"You don’t have to whisper. It’s light, not sound, that’s hurting right now," he explained.
"You pushed yourself too hard. You know that--"
"I know that if I hadn’t pushed myself beyond my limit today lives might have been lost. I am prepared to sacrifice my well being for the lives of any number of the Aurealians we saved, or the Rodentia who made it possible. Besides, it’s just a migraine. It will pass, I just need an hour or two with the lights dim and I’ll be fine. Happened all the time when I was playing catch-up to the rest of the galaxy. I took some pills, they’re about to start kicking in."
"One hundred Eighty six thousand, one hundred and twenty three," she informed him softly.
"Does that number mean something?" he inquired.
"The number we saved today. We had about nine hundred Rodentia out there. Each squad saved between five hundred and three thousand. Squad Theta was the highest with three thousand three hundred forty two. After that was squad foxtrot, then X-ray. For the number of casualties they suffered, that’s about a one to twenty-five thousand lives saved for every Rodentia corps member we lost. So don’t feel like you failed, because you-"
"I was sitting around with my thumb up my ass while a critical, emergent humanitarian situation was ongoing which required my attention and leadership, Katherine," he rebuked harshly. "Because of a fucking directory error! Because the fucking old man didn’t think to tell anyone his fucking plans, including me! Don’t fucking tell me how I am supposed to feel about that, because you have no fucking comprehension about what those failures mean to me. Thank you for telling me how many lives we saved, that information is very much appreciated. Now, please, my head hurts. You are dismissed."
"You’re right. I’m sorry to presume. Get some rest, Nathan."
Looking back over her shoulder as she left his officers quarters – he hadn’t moved into the captains’ rooms yet – she wondered if he appreciated exactly what he had just accomplished and how few of the trillions of humans in the galaxy could have done the same, given only the resources and information available to him at the time.
Probably not. He would be beating himself up for something which was not his fault for the rest of his life, ignoring that he had taken that failure and turned it into a resounding success. A success which only further strengthened the Theseus’s mission, if her suspicion of Jon’s role in events was correct. She was uncertain, because there were two men in her life whose actions she could never reliably predict. One of them had a migraine, and the other was a brain in a moving doll.
~~~~~~~~~
The place that the humans had brought them was the happiest place she had ever been. She had followed a hologram of a young Aurealian to a pool of water, where the hologram had leaped into the pool and began washing herself. It had felt wonderful to wash the blood out of her fur. Most of the matting had been caused by the Other’s blood, which had splattered upon her from the terrible weapon that she still carried. But there was enough green with the purple to remind her of her own wound, if the lingering pain was not enough.
The cut came open again when she was washing her face, which hurt, but it did not bleed much, and she was used to the pain at this point. After she finally felt clean – it was not just the blood which she washed from her fur, but years of grime – she followed another hologram to a place where shoots of plants were growing from the ground. There were several holograms, eating both the leaves, the shoots, and the tubers of the plants, so she had tried the leaves first. They were delicious. So where the shoots, although they tasted completely different. She was too full from the leaves and the shoots to do more than taste the tubers, but the sweet tangy earth taste of that was pleasant as well, even though she handed the rest of it to Purple Dots, who had followed her.
All of her litter had followed her, she realized. The others from their facility had gotten lost, but their litter followed her. They had washed with her, and ate with her, and now they looked at her to see what she would do next.
"I think it is time to sleep," she sang softly. "I wonder if we will meet any humans when we wake?"
"I think that is a good idea. We are all very tired," Purple Dots agreed. "In the evening, when everyone is rested, we will look for the humans to show our gratitude. But I fear we will have to wait in line, for there are so many of us."
"And if we cannot find them, then we shall simply sing to them and hope they hear," Yellow announced. She looked down at the terrible weapon in her hand. She hoped that she would not need it anymore, but she was reluctant to give it up.
Part of her reluctance was how dangerous it was. She had gotten good at only firing it on purpose, lately, as had Purple Dots with hers. But if another kip picked it up and played with it, the result could be disastrous.
But another part, a part that had opened its eyes in the room where she had opened her eyes, remembered the helplessness of being trapped, of being held by the Other, of the pain as she was maimed. She trusted the humans – she wanted to trust the humans. But she had been helpless once, and never again.