Second Don: Ardulum, Book 2 Read online

  The intensity of the connection became uncomfortable, but when Arik tried to pull his hand away, he could not. The gatoi eld had a tight grip on Arik’s wrist. The male eld moved behind Arik in two fluid steps and placed his hands on his shoulders, pushing down to keep Arik in place. The female grabbed his other hand around the wrist, her longer fingernails digging into his skin.

  Time seemed to be slowing. Arik felt his heart rate depress, the blood in his veins decrease in flow rate. His mind became muddled again. Something was wrong, and he needed to speak to the Eld about it. Why couldn’t he speak? Why wouldn’t the words come out?

  Dark spots began to swim before Arik’s vision. His heart didn’t seem to be beating anymore, and Arik thought that was wrong somehow. The blackness increased. Arik slumped. The male eld backed away quickly, and Arik’s body hit the wood floor with a thump, his head bouncing once after the initial impact. Words leaked across the darkness: defective, unsuitable, terminate.

  Terminate?

  Arik opened his mouth to make a sound to indicate his distress, when his brain, starved of oxygen, finally shut down.

  Chapter 2: Mmnnuggl Pod, Risalian Wormhole

  In order to keep the Terran and the altered Risalian Ardulan alive, we need to stop at Xinar Hub on our way back to Mmnn. We will be buying bipedal foodstuffs, drinks, and clothes. We might be a while. Don’t worry though—we will be back soon. Everything is going just fine. Nothing to worry about. Maybe we could bring up ceiling height at the next council meeting.

  —Tightband communication from the small Mmnnuggl pod Bysspp, to the Mmnnuggl president’s office, Third Month of Arath, 26_15

  “THIS TEXT IS impossible!”

  Neek slammed the plastic data pad into the wall. The glass screen shattered in a satisfying crash, and the unit went dark. A moment later, a thin gel secreted from the pad’s scaffold, condensed, and hardened. The unit turned back on.

  It was less satisfying to break things when they could regenerate. Exhaling, Neek bent and picked the pad back up. The text resumed where she had left off, the screen’s backlighting flashing irritably.

  She couldn’t read any more. It had been bad enough having to go through the old Neek holy texts with her uncle during her exile from her homeworld, but at least then it had only been once a month. She might have been branded a heretic for claiming Ardulum was a stupid, religious fairy tale, but she was still niece to the high priest. Now, however, the text seemed more cumbersome than ever. In the past two days alone, she had finished two versions of The Book of the Arrival and was about to start the first version of The Book of the Uplifting. She couldn’t bring herself to open another file. She only had to kill another half an hour until their diminutive Mmnnuggl pod made it to Risal, but Neek couldn’t take one more verse about Ardulan deities or an impossibly traveling planet. She had an actual Ardulan—sort of—onboard the ship. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe in the old texts while still living on her homeworld under her parents’ care. There was no way she could find them even remotely plausible now, despite one of those supposedly mystical beings sitting meters away from her, separated only by thin sheets of biometal and putrid green lighting.

  Ardulum was a planet. A traveling planet. A traveling planet that housed a race of gods or god-like beings that had fundamentally shaped Neek civilization. It was ridiculous and unbelievable, and yet, yet…

  Neek stood as much as she could in the low-ceilinged room and tried to stretch away the cramps from her thighs. She splayed her hands out on the ceiling, letting her mind wander to trivial things, like if her stuk would interact with the paint, or how her life would have been different if she’d been born into one of the older family lines on Neek, the ones with three fingers per hand instead of eight. Had that happened, she would have never been able to pilot the Pledge and its geriatric, piecemeal navigation systems. She wouldn’t be here, on a Mmnnuggl pod, with an Ardulan and—damn it! If the Risalians didn’t have the answers she was looking for or at least some trail of information she could follow, Neek wasn’t certain what they would do. Regardless of the promise she had made to Emn, Neek couldn’t find Ardulum without any leads. If they were lucky, the Risalians wouldn’t shoot them the moment they emerged from the wormhole and would provide some coordinates where they might begin. The Risalians were looking for their Ardulans, after all, and had to have acquired the base genetic stock from somewhere. Armed with coordinates, Neek could stop sifting through mountains of religious text, looking for location clues, and driving herself slowly insane.

  The ache in her thighs wasn’t getting better. With a labored sigh, Neek leaned her head against the wall and cursed the coldness of the metal. She closed her eyes. The white noise was blissful. She counted her heartbeats against the thrum of the ship’s engines and tried to ignore the steady, feathery presence in her mind. The presence wasn’t intrusive, but thinking about it overloaded her brain, blurred her vision, and made her throat feel tight. No matter how many times Neek tried to put the jigsaw pieces of her life into some semblance of order, the pieces kept changing shape. It was hard to focus on anything except the woman in the cockpit—the Ardulan in the cockpit. The god in the cockpit. Maybe. Shit.

  Memories flooded her mind.

  A blood-soaked little girl tumbled from a stasis chamber, one dark triangle under her eye.

  Flotsam from a Risalian cutter.

  Emn’s chrysalis nestled underneath a pyre of Risalian bodies. The smoky smells. The crisp flesh.

  The scattered remains of the Mercy’s Pledge drifting through space, carrying Yorden’s body with them.

  The Ardulan woman who ended the Crippling War, or whatever the news feeds were calling it now. Ended the lives of many Mmnnuggls, Risalians, and her own people.

  The Ardulan woman who was piloting their stolen Mmnnuggl ship. The woman so covered in Talent markings that little of her translucent skin remained.

  The woman she couldn’t be around without her body entering into some sort of primeval panic mode, which did not create an enjoyable atmosphere within the ship. Her Journey youth, Nicholas, had been sure to point that out several times over. Loudly. Usually when they were all together in the cockpit and Neek couldn’t avoid Emn’s stares.

  A soft knock on the door drew Neek away from her memories. The round panel slid into the wall to reveal a gangly, young man with thick, dark curls framing his face and even darker skin. Nicholas brushed the curls from his eyes as he stepped into Neek’s room and smiled lopsidedly, surveying the wreckage.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Neek spat as she launched a small, plastic tablet at his head. Nicholas ducked just in time to avoid impact, and the pad rebounded off the wall, landing at his feet. He shoved his hands into the gaping pockets of his flight suit and stared at her reproachfully. Neek glared in response.

  “No, I still haven’t found any clues for how to find Ardulum. Yes, I’m sure I don’t want to come hang out in the galley or the cockpit or wherever you and Emn have set up camp, and no, we are not going to avoid Risalian space. We have a reasonable chance of not being shot on sight. The ship is valuable, if nothing else.”

  “Neek,” Nicholas interjected, but Neek cut him off.

  “They’re the only species in the Charted Systems to have potentially interacted with the Ardulans, so they’re a logical starting point.” Neek kicked at the nearest pile of pads, this time trying to avoid cracking the screens. “If you really want to steer clear of the Risalians, start reading. There are three main holy books, four revised editions of each, and a small mountain of supplementary text written in the first ten years after the Departure. Oh, and these plastic tablets Chen gave us don’t have the memory or speed of the newer cellulose ones, so each only holds half a holy book. There is a mess of oversized artwork files embedded in the text. Enjoy.”

  “I’m not the one that doesn’t want to go to Risal, Neek, and I don’t have any goals in this Ardulum thing, outside of wanting to help Emn find her people.”
Nicholas dropped to his knees and picked up the pad Neek had thrown at him. “How far into this are you?”

  Neek sighed and tugged at the end of her braid, debating whether it was long enough to strangle Nicholas with. “I’m systematically reading one holy book at a time, starting with the original and working my way through the revisions. I’m about to start the second set of texts.”

  Nicholas eyed her warily. “Emn is afraid…”

  An image of Emn’s mother—her skull shattered, the pieces spinning on the floor—danced across Neek’s vision. She pushed the image away, buried it under a million other memories she didn’t need to see right now. “I understand Emn’s fears. What the Risalians did is unforgivable. We’d be completely remiss, however, if we didn’t at least try to get information from the Risalians. Emn deserves a home. It’s a crazy undertaking, but I made a promise. And this, here, with the Risalians, is the best place to start. Surely she understands that.”

  “She might, if you actually explained it to her in person.” Nicholas nudged Neek’s boot with his bare foot. “It’s been two weeks, Neek, and you’ve spoken to Emn maybe three times.” He put his hand over his nose. “It smells in here. You have to leave. Walk around. Eat something. Talk to her.” Nicholas pressed his hand into the film on the floor and lifted it slowly. A squelching noise followed as the film stretched and then popped loose. “One room can only handle so much stuk. Natural secretion or not, your body can’t possibly have evolved to stay stationary in a tiny room all day.”

  “Get out.”

  Nicholas stared at her, his brown eyes so full of concern that she wanted to vomit. Last week, they’d spent four days on Craston, getting supplies and catching up with Chen, one of the late Captain Yorden Kuebrich’s old contacts. Yorden. Andal help her, she missed that old foul-mouthed Terran and the dilapidated tramp transport she’d piloted with him for a decade. If it hadn’t been sheared in two by a Risalian cutter, Yorden and the adult Ardulan woman they’d rescued from the Risalians would still be alive—and Neek wouldn’t be the one shepherding the remaining crew of the former Mercy’s Pledge through space. Damn Yorden, and damn his death!

  Neek dragged her mind back to the present, before memories threatened to suffocate her. She’d seen Emn every day while in the spaceport, even on the day she’d gotten horrifically lost trying to find someone who could sharpen the strange knife-vegetable peeler thing with the hooked blade she’d gotten from Chen the last time they’d come this way, and for some reason couldn’t manage to just throw away. She’d probably spoken to the young woman too, although she couldn’t recall what she might have said. Nicholas was clearly exaggerating.

  “I’m fine,” Neek managed through gritted teeth. “Are you going to help, or are you going to leave?”

  Nicholas tapped the glass screen of the pad. A chime sounded from the old technology as a start-up screen flashed on. Nicholas grimaced and brought the pad up closer to his face. “I’ll help. Where do you want me to start?”

  Picking up the pad she’d been working on, Neek checked her progress. The first two sentences from The Book of the Uplifting stared back, taunting her with hyperbole. “Tackle the extra material, and we can compare notes when you finish. That way there is no chance we overlap and you have to suffer through the same crap I just read. Also, watch out for mentions of the word ‘Keft.’ It keeps coming up, and I can’t tell if it’s a planet or food or what.”

  Nicholas slumped into a sitting position in the far corner, eyeing her warily. The pad wavered in his hand, moving up to his eyes, down to his lap, and then back up again. On the third iteration, he opened his mouth to speak.

  “Don’t,” Neek warned, hoping to forestall another lecture.

  “Fine.” Nicholas looked down at his pad, running his hands over the plastic scaffold that held the glass screen in place. The pad flashed twice, indicating that the text was ready. Nicholas squinted against the bright backlighting of the device and then groaned. “One hundred and seventy-three books of ‘encounter’ stories and over forty volumes of poetry.” He looked up. “Aw, not the poetry. I tried to go through some of this stuff when we were marooned on your homeworld. It’s excruciating.”

  “Hey, there are technical reports and data from the technology the Ardulans supposedly gifted the Neek with as well. You’re always babbling about how great cellulosic integration is. You should love those sections. The texts describe the whole process in detail, from andal genetic engineering to cellulosic separation and weaving cellulose into biometals.”

  Nicholas huffed and bent back over his pad, grumbling.

  “Hey!” Neek kicked him with a booted foot. “That part is interesting. The Risalian company Cell-Tal is credited with developing all the cellulosic integration techniques, but if you read between the lines of the text, the Ardulans were doing it first.” She tapped the pad against the floor. “Looks like the Neek people weren’t the only ones who were given gifts.”

  Nicholas stared back at her, unconvinced. She watched the youth for another moment, making sure he wasn’t going to pepper her with more questions, before she returned to her own text. The first fifteen pages went quickly, containing only a primer on wood anatomy. After the introduction, the text veered more to Ardulan encounters on the planet Neek. Likely fiction, in Neek’s opinion, although her thoughts on that were certainly evolving. This passage covered sightings of the Eld, the triarchy which ruled Ardulum. Neek slowed her reading. She read the same paragraph once, twice, and then a third time, checking that she wasn’t making up words as a result of eye strain.

  On that day, we were treated to a most holy sight. The Eld had chosen the harvest festival to greet us in person, we who managed the andal forests. Magnificent were they, the Eld of the Ardulans—resplendent in their golden robes, the markings of their many Talents shimmered in the dawn light.

  Many Talents.

  Eld.

  Emn and all her markings.

  Neek had had enough revelations in the past two months. She didn’t need another. Neek tossed the pad to the side, cracking yet another screen, and buried her head in her hands. She could just file this tidbit away, let it simmer and marinate until it was digestible. The texts did change from version to version. That was natural in any revisionist religion. The changes weren’t major, but it was possible this paragraph wasn’t even in any of the revised material. There was no need to overreact. No need to jump to conclusions. Nicholas was likely buried in some bad poetry and hadn’t even looked up when she’d thrown her pad, and Emn was up in the cockpit right now, probably synced with the Mmnnuggl ship’s mental interface and trying to figure out how to work the wormhole generator. Everything was fine.

  In the back of her mind, Emn’s presence stirred, nudged by Neek’s errant thoughts. Their connection tightened, the wispy presence continuing to flicker but making no move to engage. Emn was keeping her distance, which Neek appreciated, but she felt the pressure of a silent question every time she reached for their link.

  Neek didn’t know what to say to her. How was a Neek—a member of a species that gave up their individual names upon adulthood so they could become symbolically closer to a mythical planet—supposed to address an Ardulan? What did one say to someone whom her people worshipped as a god? What was a religious outcast supposed to do when a woman with not one but multiple Talents was stuck with her on a ship? Furthermore, how had she forgotten about the description of the Eld? If Emn really was Ardulan, if that fucking traveling planet did exist, she just…just…

  Neek’s thoughts continued to drift. It took Nicholas clearing his throat for her to realize that her posture had become rigid, her back ramrod straight and arms tight at her sides.

  “Dry reading,” Nicholas ventured. “Looks like yours is more interesting. What’s it about?”

  Neek shrugged her shoulders, picked up another tablet, and made an effort to stare at it. She shoved her emotions down, buried them under other repressed memories, and kept quiet.

  Nich
olas continued to fish. “Find the planet, by any chance? Or did you stumble upon a declaration of non-divinity?” Neek could feel Nicholas’s pointed stare. “That’d be really convenient, because maybe then you’d stop acting like a doofus every time Emn was in the same room as you.”

  A growl bubbled up from Neek’s throat despite her best efforts to squelch it. Nicholas always knew just the right buttons to push. “I have no fucking idea what to believe,” she muttered. “I’m willing to accept that the Risalians tinkered around with some poor species and made very powerful weapons. Are they connected to a traveling planet that maybe shaped Neek civilization? Who knows. It would be nice to find out, sure. Nice to find out, then go back home, and rub it in everyone’s smirking face if it doesn’t exist, which, realistically, it probably does not.”

  “If you don’t think Ardulum really exists, then why are we doing all this?”

  Neek continued avoiding his eyes.

  “Well?” Nicholas demanded. “If you say it out loud, it might actually help.”

  “I’m not talking about this anymore, Nicholas.” Neek’s voice was low and cold. It was enough to shut Nicholas up, but even after Neek raised her head, he was still staring at her, a look she couldn’t place on his face.

  “You can’t avoid her forever.”

  “What am I supposed to say to her?” Her tone came out pleading instead of angry, but it was too late to stop the flood of words. “I don’t know how to act.” Neek swiped her knuckles across the pants of her baggy flight suit. “Mental guide, I could deal with. Protector, I can live with. Whatever I am now…” she trailed off and grabbed her pad again. “I just can’t, Nick. Here. Read this.” Neek tapped the tablet in her hand to bring up The Book of the Uplifting, scrolled to the paragraph on the Eld, and then handed it to Nicholas.