Second Don: Ardulum, Book 2 Read online

  Neek shook off the memory as she and Emn reached the door. It pushed in easily, glass gliding towards the wall. A cool gust of air met them as they stepped in. The building’s layout was entirely open, the space segmented only by rows of display plinths encased in transparent crystal.

  “It’s a museum.” Nicholas said from several rows away. He moved towards the nearest plinth and squinted through the case. “This one has a miniature model of the planet with a bunch of ships speeding around.” He motioned to Neek. “Pretty cool. Come see.”

  “There’s a plaque, too.” Emn moved to the opposite side of the plinth. “This one is labeled ‘Keft, twenty-five years before the Collapse.’ There’s a Common translation at the very bottom.”

  Neek stood next to Emn and read the inscription. “A monument, maybe?” she said when she looked up and peered at the display.

  It was a cityscape of some form, but Neek had seen no skyscrapers or zipping spacecrafts on their approach, which confused her even more. Nicholas put a finger to the glass case and a tiny model skiff flew up to meet him. He chuckled in amusement and traced his finger around tall, glass buildings while Emn did the same with one of her own. Their fingers hit near the top as the ships they were trailing sped past one another. Emn’s ship, which appeared to be made from wood, dove sharply towards the ground. Just as it was about to hit, the ship flattened its course, turned belly-up, and began to wind around a bulbous, glass building.

  “Show-off,” Nicholas snickered.

  Emn bowed. “I learned from the best, you know—she’s the only pilot in the Heaven Guard to find an Ardulan.”

  Neek humphed at the reference to her past. Emn grinned. She put her hand on Neek’s arm, squeezed, and then moved to the next plinth.

  “Neek, come check this one out.” Nicholas had slid over several rows and was pointing to a short, wide plinth. “This one shows the traditional forests of Keft. Totally different from the outside.”

  The living diorama in this display was breathtaking. Featured was a forest with little undergrowth, the trees so old and large that their canopies shaded most of the floor. Brightly colored birds flew overhead, their songs audible through the case. Neek studied the trees, following the roots from stem to crown, remembering the times when she had visited her uncle’s home—only a few kilometers from her parents’ house—near a small patch of old-growth forest. There was no similarity in the trees between the two worlds, but the red and green leaf-littered ground was close enough to remind her of the Neek homeworld.

  Actually, some of the trees did look familiar. Neek put her hands on the sides of the crystal, getting her face as close as she could. Her stuk, instead of sticking her fingertips to the surface, gelled upon contact, preventing the stuk from dripping down the sides of the case. In the far-right corner of the forest stood a tall, thick tree, its crown dominating the canopy. Neek followed its limbs to the trunk, to the curly, black bark growing there. She shivered.

  “Hey, Emn?” Neek asked warily. “Look over here and tell me if you see what I do.”

  “What is it, Neek?” Nicholas pressed his nose against the crystal. “What are we looking at?”

  “I see it,” Emn said. “It…looks like an andal tree.”

  Neek pulled her finger off the crystal, noting as she did so that her stuk mark slowly dissolved until it was no longer visible. As she turned, her eyes caught another display. The next plinth over showed another forest. Instead of multiple tree species, however, Neek saw only andal. The trees were shorter, with epicormic shoots and yellowing leaves. The crowns were lopsided and sparse. The undergrowth looked like a nightmare, with ferns and bushes sprouting chest-high throughout the diorama. Now Neek was certain it was andal. She’d seen the same decline on her homeworld in the plantation trees and in the sapling stock she and Yorden had occasionally hauled for the Risalian Markin. In the places her brother had taken her to, in secret.

  Nicholas followed Neek’s gaze and ran over to the plaque. “Keft, seventy-five years before Collapse. Plantation farming.” He stuck his hands in his flight suit pockets and pursed his lips. “What do you think happened?”

  “A traveling planet happened.”

  Neek jerked around, startled. A biped with short, red hair, deep brown skin, and a thin, willowy frame jogged from the doorway and joined them at the plinth. His long, yellow shirt and black pants were green with pollen dust, and he hastily batted at them, sending particulate into the air. He could have been a Terran or a Neek or an Ardulan, so nondescript was his appearance.

  “I’m Effin. We spoke earlier. Sorry it took me so long to join you. I didn’t realize our customs officer was out, and I had to drop the family and our ship off at Tig Station—our local hub—first and snag a rental. Nothing for them to do here while we chat except gawk at off-worlders. You’re our first visitors in years. We used to get more—even a few from the Systems, which is why there’s Common on the plaques. I can give you the quick version of the tour if you’d like, although it looks like you’ve already made your way around.” He paused and studied each of them in turn. “I’d also love to know why you don’t look anything like Mmnnuggls.”

  “A…a traveling planet,” Neek finally managed. It was supposed to have been a question. There was a hand in hers, gripping tightly. Neek hadn’t even felt Emn move next to her, so overwhelmed was she by the question bubbling in her mind. The comfort was welcome.

  “I’m Nicholas St. John.” Nicholas pushed forward and held his hands out, palms up. “I’m a Terran from Earth, in the Charted Systems.” He pointed first to Neek and then Emn. “Our captain is Neek, from a planet of the same name, also in the Systems, and Emn is… Emn was born on Risal. We got the ship from Nugels, but they gave it to us. It’s legal,” he added awkwardly.

  Neek struggled to form words, ignoring the introductions entirely. “Effin, the planet—did it have a name? Could you describe it?”

  He shook his head and leaned on the crystal casing. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, but I’m afraid we have no pictures. We’ve got an image or two of it in one of these, but I’m afraid the name was scrubbed from the databases.” He pointed to the weeping trees, his finger leaving a wet trail in its wake. “A planet arrives in your solar system unannounced, and it throws all kinds of things out of balance. We were a younger civilization back then, easily influenced. The aliens were really interested in our keft tree—the one you see in here surrounded by the spined liana—named after our homeworld. They taught us monoculture farming, made some genetic upgrades.” Effin spat on the floor. “What you see outside is the result. When things got bad, they left. Just like that. We’ve had to abandon the planet for the most part. The food web is almost entirely gone.”

  Neek, his fingers, Emn sent, but Neek had already noticed. As Effin became more agitated, beads of what Neek thought were sweat had burst from his fingertips. Now, small drops of what looked and smelled exactly like stuk hit the floor in a silent rain, dripping around Effin’s long, purple talons.

  “You…you don’t happen to know where the planet went, do you?” Neek managed to choke out the words while her brain processed the coincidences around them. What had been amusing to consider on the pod was now far too real. Tree decline. Traveling planets. Monoculture plantations of andal. So much stuk. Effin only marginally resembled a Neek, in the way most bipeds she’d encountered had the same basic construction, but stuk was a feature she had never before encountered on another species.

  “It was decades ago. No one knows, and I doubt anyone cares.” Effin held out a hand to Neek, and she quickly counted the fingers—eight per hand. Just like a Neek. “You all right, Captain Neek? You look pale.”

  She wouldn’t be all right for a long time, of that Neek was certain. “Just need some air. Give me a minute.” Neek let Emn lead her back outside. The sun was beginning to set, sending purple light across the landscape. Emn’s grip was firm, and Neek tried to ground herself in the tactile sensation. There could be other traveling planets
, right? Couldn’t others have unlocked that sort of technology? Maybe she had misidentified the tree? Maybe lots of species secreted mucus? Maybe…maybe she’d just been wrong.

  They stopped just outside the door. Neek tightened her grip on Emn’s hand, though what she really wanted was to let her forehead rest on Emn’s shoulder. She tried to sort the possibilities but kept coming to the same conclusion.

  “It’s real,” she murmured, her eyes to the ground. “It’s fucking real.”

  Emn’s arms were around her then, and Neek drowned in the embrace. She pressed into the hot skin of Emn’s neck, inhaling the smell of andal and soap. Neek’s emotions drifted, desperately searching for an anchor. Emn’s hands were on her back, fingers smoothing over the flight suit’s fabric, holding Neek to her. Neek tried to surface.

  “There are still a lot of questions,” Emn whispered into her ear.

  “So, are we going to talk about the weirdness here?” Nicholas asked, breaking through the questions swirling in Neek’s head. She jerked out of Emn’s arms and shoved her hands into her pockets, turning her burning face away from Nicholas and Effin for a moment.

  Nicholas pointed to Neek’s pocket. Momentarily confused, Neek pulled her left hand out and held it up. “What?”

  “Red hair, sixteen fingers, and empathic mucus production all on bipeds of a similar height. No one thinks that is a strange coincidence?”

  Neek glared at Nicholas as Effin barked a laugh. “Tact,” she whispered. The breeze tossed her words, but she was certain Nicholas had heard.

  “Weird,” he whispered back. “Don’t pretend it’s not.”

  “You secrete empathic mucus as well?” Effin’s expression turned quizzical. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility, but still. Not all my people have this number of fingers, or this shade of hair, but we all secrete the mucus.”

  Neek offered her hand to Effin. He ran his own slippery fingertips over hers, his talons scraping her skin. Her stuk had gelled from being in close contact with Emn, but it thinned as Effin’s mixed in. A muddied consciousness skirted Neek’s mind and then slipped away when Effin stepped back, surprised.

  “Nicholas was telling me you also grow keft, although he called it andal, on your homeworld. How interesting. As to our appearance… Convergent evolution? While common, the red hair color is not ubiquitous. It’s mostly in the working class, not so much in the ruling class.” He pointed inside the building. “I can’t explain the trees though, not at all, and certainly not the mucus. We have nothing else in common otherwise, unless you count legs and arms.”

  She hadn’t expected their visit to bring up questions of her own heritage. Neek ran through the people she had known on her homeworld, the families that had red hair, those that didn’t, and where they stood on the social ladder. There were only a few old family lines left, characterized by the red-tinted eyes, pale hair, and bone-white skin that Neek had always assumed was a result of inbreeding. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a genome sequencer available, would you?” Neek asked. “There are a lot of questions here that could be answered pretty quickly.”

  Effin brightened. “Solid idea. The rental has one in the med bay. Let’s go get it.” Effin jogged ahead to the landing platform awash with green pollen and ducked into the bottle-nosed ship. Neek’s boots slipped as she followed, little green clouds puffing up with each step. Their Mmnnuggl pod now had an inadvertent sheen as well, glistening green in the sunset, the pollen sticking to the sphere in pyramidal clumps.

  “Here,” Effin said, walking back down the ramp and handing the small, spherical device to Neek. It was warm in Neek’s hand and thick with cellulose weave. She turned it over, admiring the craftship.

  “Go ahead and scrape your skin with the edge there,” Effin prodded. “I already did mine, and I uploaded your language database as well. Results will read over the front display.” Neek allowed herself one more appreciative glance at Effin’s ship, which the Keft noticed. He grinned. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? The rental company just had the detailing upgraded with the new tech from the Alliance.”

  Neek whistled. “She’s amazing. I’d love to get my hands on one. Would love to ditch this junk too, while I’m at it.” She pointed at the stolen Mmnnuggl pod and then pressed the disc’s edge into her palm, dragging it over the surface. A thin layer of stuk impeded the device before it finally found purchase near the center of her palm. Moments later, the machine beeped, and Neek handed it back to Effin.

  “Here,” she said. “You’re likely a better interpreter than I am.”

  Effin laughed. “If it’s a trade you’re after, there’s a space hub about sixty light-years from here in the Xinar System. They have a shipyard and don’t ask a lot of questions. Mmnnuggl tech is always in demand.” He tossed the analyzer into the air and caught it. “As for this, it is a consumer-grade genetics tool. A titha could use it. Look.”

  He held up the analyzer so that everyone could see. Across its surface, in bright green letters, it read:

  SPECIES 1: KERR SUBTYPE B

  SPECIES 2: KERR SUBTYPE UNKNOWN

  GENETIC MATCH: PROBABLE SUBSPECIES, GENETICALLY COMPATIBLE

  “Shit,” Nicholas breathed.

  Effin turned the screen around. “Let’s just see…” His sentence hung, unfinished. “Well, that is definitely interesting.” He looked up at Neek and smiled widely. “Nice to meet you, cousin.”

  Chapter 9: Mmnn, Ggllot

  The Mmnnuggl population has ceased to be of use. Terminate our contracts immediately. Do not evacuate personnel—the risk of additional hostages is too great. Our time with the Alliance is nearing its conclusion.

  —Encrypted communication from the Eld Council to the Aggression Force Leader, Third Month of Arath, 26_15

  THE TREES WERE dead. Ekimet sat in the remains of an andal forest, the charred, black trunks stark against the once-green landscape. Across from zir sat Corccinth, zir maternal grandmother. The third-don woman dug through the ashen ground, pulling mushrooms to the surface and placing them into the bark bag on her hip. They came to the controlled burns every spring, when the rains brought mushrooms from the duff and a skilled hand could locate the edible fungi with little effort.

  “You’re going, then?” she asked Ekimet as she pulled a pocked, triangular mushroom from the ground. “Big opportunity, Ggllot. The Eld require a steady hand there.”

  Ekimet squinted in the hazy sunlight. Zie had never spoken to zir grandmother about zir Ggllot assignment. Zie had never spoken to anyone about it, save the Eld themselves. No one was to know about Ekimet’s placement—on that the Eld had been quite clear.

  This wasn’t real. Zir surroundings were too sharp to be a dream, yet Ekimet’s inability to ascertain the time of day or zir location did indicate a level of unconsciousness. Curious, zie decided to play along.

  “You’re the one who suggested I pursue diplomacy in the first place, Granny. Do you remember? You had me signed up for international relations training before I even finished my Talent training at the Eld Palace. You made it a point to tell me state secrets at our tea parties. Are you surprised that I chose this path?”

  It hadn’t been what Ekimet had wanted, not at first. Over the course of the first year, however, Ekimet had found things zie enjoyed. Languages, for one, came naturally to zir, as did conflict resolution. The courses in species history—especially the history of seeded-world species—were particularly interesting. A placement on Ggllot, however, had been unexpected. There were many better qualified Hearths for the position—even more better qualified gatois, if a gesture of respect was what the Eld were after.

  Corccinth wiped sweat from her brow, cakey, white makeup rubbing onto the back of her hand. She set her bag down and moved to her knees so she could look Ekimet in the eyes. “There are things for you to do there, Ekimet.” She smacked zir ears with her palms. Ekimet shrank back, confused, as zir ears began to ring. “Pay attention, Ekimet!”
/>   EKIMET AWOKE WITH two blazing earaches. Bright sunlight poured in through the open window near the bed the Hearth lay on, creating an uncomfortable amount of heat on the blankets. Zie shook zir head several times, trying to clear the remains of the dream. Ekimet had not seen zir grandmother in years. What would have brought old Corccinth to the front of zir consciousness now?

  When Ekimet was reasonably certain zie was awake, zie looked around. Zie was surprised to find zirself on a biped bed and wondered if zie and Miketh had left Ggllot and, if so, how the Mmnnuggls had managed to get them off-world without inciting a riot.

  The room certainly indicated an Ardulan presence. Unfortunately, the smell of the rotting janu fruit was faint but still present, indicating they were likely near the city center of the Ggllot capital. Had they been sequestered away in the countryside, the smell would have been overwhelming. Had they been back on Ardulum, it would have been blissfully absent.

  The ostentatiousness of the room, however, was confusing to Ekimet. The bed, wide enough to fit three adult Ardulans, was ornately carved and inlaid with dark andal heartwood. The floor appeared to be highly polished andal as well, an artistic blend of heart and sapwood forming the geometric patterns of each Talent marking. Shimmering tables and chairs, all carved from lone andal trees and embedded with diamonds were artfully arranged throughout the room. There were woven andal bark writing sheets and titha blood pens on the sole desk, and diamond glasses filled with an unknown liquid sat on the dining table. Ekimet was particularly interested in the steaming metal pot placed squarely between the two goblets, the smell of seasoned and cooked andal twigs rising from beneath the lid.