actually intelligent.
The thing’s cool skeletal embrace drew its small mass up close against Caliph’s chest where it adjusted to his panicked movements. It flinched beneath his elbows, swinging its “body” around to his lower back. The creature, or thing, was lightweight and sinewy, hairless and flecked with ferruginous eyes: both on its central thorax and nestled in the deep soft flesh of all four of its “shoulders.”
It was boned like an old woman.
Caliph had no idea what it did or how to use it. Still, the long hairless appendage that sprouted from the top of the weapon’s rib cage, and which ended bizarrely in a single plumose frond, seemed to be the business end. Like the antenna of a moth, it quivered slightly and stayed erect, hovering behind his head. He had to crane his neck to see where it floated, preoccupied, seeming to taste the air.
The hallway he had followed ended here at the weapon locker but there was a wide archway that opened onto the airship’s deck. He could feel the desert heat tonguing through the exit, mixing with the cool air of the hall.
He looked out tentatively. Nothing moved except the shadow of the feathered appendage, which lengthened before him. He watched it slide forward over the smooth metal decking, silently checking the kiln-dry air.
The deck itself was devoid of both weapons and men. Caliph tested its desertion by venturing to the railing and looking down at the wreckage of his former ship. The sound of the alarm faded behind him. He turned and moved toward what he believed was the front of the craft.
Most of the ship’s crew had probably been assigned to the wreck site.
Even so, he stepped quietly into the shadow of an airlock cased in black flaking metal, veined with conduits. On his right, a glass housing flecked with orange water stains glistered from the pastel fluctuations of solvitriol energy inside it. The doors opened automatically, double-startling him, first with their sudden hissing movement and then with the thing behind them, like a person in a sun-sheltered cave. Skin shimmering and silver.
It was a woman with greasy red-brown hair, and the hint of a double chin. She stood there a moment, shorter than he was, staring at him while a single strand of milky saliva stretched between her lips.
Caliph recognized the disease despite its not having eaten her down to the bone yet. She carried a subtle roll around her midsection. What he couldn’t understand was how she had gotten here, aboard the Iycestokian ship. Then he noticed the patch on her tight-fitting uniform sleeve. She was a crew member.
She bleated like an injured animal and walked toward him. Caliph’s instinct was to try and help but when she touched him, when her hands clenched in his shirt, the feathered tail behind his head came down. A slender talon of bone emerged like a dewclaw from a hidden fold near the tentacle’s end and punctured her through the chest. The attack brought the woman to her knees.
She looked into his face without any emotion. He reached out and grabbed her by her soft meaty arms, her shoulders, steadied her and eased her toward the deck.
She came down on her right side with the bone spine still inside her, limbs nerveless, eyes staring as if bewitched by the soul-lights in the glass housing beside the door.
Caliph didn’t know what to feel for her. Partly he was numb as he stood up and watched the spine withdraw, retracting silently into a cartilaginous groove beneath the frond.
The breeze from the desert was hushed enough that Caliph turned his head at the sound of footsteps just inside the airlock. He could feel the frosty coolness of the ship’s interior leaking out into the heat around him. The ghastly shapes of two more crew members with glazed eyes and silver skin were coming out onto the deck.
Caliph backed off, wary.
He looked over his shoulder for a means of escape and at that moment heard a dry brittle sound in the sky.
It came from the direction of Sena’s ship. A crescent formation of hooded Iycestokian vessels flanked her as she sat motionless several miles out. The black hooded warships made a gloomy crackling sound that spread by means of lilting murmurs interspersed with terrifying sizzles and pops and other surprising crescendos. The sound birred out in every direction, then echoed back from the edge of space.
The crackle resonated in Caliph’s body an eternal moment before the Iycestokian guns fired in unison and turned the Pplarian airship into a symbol. Caliph couldn’t even scream.
His voice broke under the force, trailing off into a hoarse croak.
Hands grabbed at him from behind and he heard the tentacle of his weapon whine through the air. The weapon thrashed and stabbed and killed but Caliph’s eyes were not on the silver people trying to maul him. He looked at the Pplarian ship that had opened like a white lotus, ejecting beautiful golden globules of light and giant starfish arms of cream-colored steam. He was listening to the reverberations of the guns. The entire sky warbled.
Caliph felt the hands now. They were hurting, clawing, digging but he still couldn’t look away. Strong thin fingers pulled him, turned him. The white explosion vanished behind a tangle of dark torsos and arms. Why wasn’t his weapon protecting him? He looked down and noticed several bodies. Apparently it had killed five or six crew members while he had been distracted. But now the weapon was sweating great burgundy droplets, as if it was fevered. As if it was sick.
The bone spine clawed feebly at one of his abusers before two grisly shapes pulled it from his torso and hurled it at the deck. Arms were everywhere, faces blocked out the sun.
Caliph still felt drugged. He swung his stitched-up hand at his assailants and felt the wound tear open. He hollered. It didn’t matter. They surged again. A knot of carrion birds squabbling.
Caliph looked through them at the sky. There was a square of light framed by their moving limbs and heads, ever-changing, a triangle, a squashed octagon of stratospheric blue. But at least he could see out, see past them to something beautiful, something pure.
His talk unrolled in his mind, aimed at the blue sublime.
After a few moments he realized that he had lost track of the words and that the small aperture through which he had been looking had expanded. It was not framed by a frenzy of moving bodies anymore. The borders of his vision had stilled. He slid his elbows back along the deck, far enough to prop his head up and look around.
Half a dozen men and women in uniform lay around him, brushed by wind, dripping in milky goo. The sun was a blazing white flare. Too hot. But there was a cool softness on his neck, supporting him. And a tiny bit of shade in the shape of someone’s head. He looked up at Sena’s face, upside down, hovering over him.
For a moment he felt afraid. Terrified of her. Terrified because when she smiled it was not a familiar smile. Her hair was long and coffee-brown and her body was covered with red war paint. It was not Sena. It was Taelin, gooey and crimson and joyous.
* * *
THE dappled silvern bodies fell away from Caliph Howl. Taelin fired one more time at a livid torso still struggling to rise.
Thick creamy strands spewed over the blazing deck and spread a bitter-sour smell. The grisly shape floundered and collapsed as the subtle venom paralyzed it and began its dissolution. Taelin stared unblinkingly at her handiwork. The changed crew reminded her of insects in tree sap; their silver-gold eyes bulged beneath the sun.
She set the velvet gun down and moved around behind Caliph Howl. He was barely conscious. For a moment he seemed to recognize her and smiled faintly. His stitches had opened up and he was bleeding badly.
“You are not going to die out here in the sun.” With great effort, she dragged him up a ramp and into the cockpit where the coolers were blowing through the vents. He had already passed out by the time she got him situated on the floor.
It had taken all of her energy to move him and for a while she rested and listened to the desert howl. The cockpit was tubed with black pipes and glowing solvitriol bulbs. Most everything was written in Ilek with the exception of a chrome-and-brass fire extinguisher.
