Yindur

[Satori]

“The council has come to a conclusion, and now renders it’s decision. The system known as PCX-661, wherein lies the planet named Yindur, and its life-bearing satellite, is officially declared to be under Imperial Quarantine. No ship of the Imperium is permitted to enter the system, and no persons or mechanisms are to be placed there for any purpose. This order, formally Edict 9066, is to be issued throughout the Rissur Imperium, by the swiftest means possible. This session is now at end.”

Pretis Yvan nodded grimly at the memory of that session of the Quorum, which he’d won the right to sit in on in his own blood. He’d been one of only 14 survivors of the ill-fated “Great Hunt” expedition that had come to an ignoble end at Yindur, and the only Initiate among them. The party had included no less than four, but unlike him, who had signed his name to the emperor’s roll in payment for his initiation, serving out his term as a hyperspatial navigator, the other three had been noble-born, able to command tutors or at least gain apprenticeships rather than attending the Imperial Academy for the Adept of the Art. And like the noble dillentes they were, they had foolishly attempted to match their own fledgling hold on the Power against oulkemi-spawned abominations of the fabled Ithari. They had of course, died horribly to the man, along with their retainers, having never paused to think for a moment that warbeasts bred for battle against the cursed Aedai caste that the Ithari had gone to such desperate and ruinous measures to overthrow would have defenses against the power, for the power-wrought creatures had been created for the very purpose of hunting down and slaying the Power-wielding Amurye warriors of the Aedai. It was well, he thought, that Oulkemi was a lost art, perhaps no longer a strand in the weave of the Power. Those horrors of a war long past were best forgotten.

So Pretis was glad for the ruling, which he he knew was the best he could have hoped for. It would have been better, in his opinion, to cleanse the entire moon of life, but eradication of a habitable world touch too closely to long held sensibilities, and the quarantine would serve well enough to save Rissurians from sharing his fate. He wouldn’t condemn anyone to a ‘visit’ to that void-spawned acid pit, except perhaps that vainglorious fool Hagarlid, and his corpse was rotting in that very pit right now. Self proclaimed ‘Commodore’ Hagarlid had been the one who insisted upon going haring off after the reported sightings of possible ‘oulkemi-born’ beasts, without waiting for a secure base camp to be established or even doing a proper orbital survey of the continent, let alone the entire moon. Honesty forced Pretis to admit, at least to himself, that after 14 hours crammed into a secure-rig as the ship passed through no-space and the rest of a day-cycle pacing his cabin during real-space transit, he’d been none too inclined to follow the proprieties of new-world survey himself. But as much as he liked to breath real atmosphere and stretch his legs on soil, he’d have made sure to secure a base for the hunt - so he’d have a reference point for his map-fix node if he got lost in those star-forsaken forests, if nothing else.

But ‘Commodore’ Hagarlid, that ambitiously myopic eccentric who insisted that his funding of the mission gave him the remit to meddle in its every detail, was like a kak hound on the trail; baying at the scent of his prize and not willing to wait a moment. So I’d been off on the hunt for every save the bare half dozen Pretis had managed to convince his erstwhile ‘superior’ to leave behind to tend to their landing shuttle. He knew damn well that the self-aggrandizing waste of air would expect a ready camp and quite possibly a warm bath drawn and dinner on the table when he came back, even if his own stupidity in leaving no one behind to see to such things made it impossible. And be insufferably loud in complaining and blaming everyone but himself about it, too, to appease his own wounded ego when he failed to immediately capture the Oulkemi he no doubt believed he was owed.. So Pretis had made damn sure that one of the junior ship’s officers had remained behind, and four servants, who if they worked like madmen, might just be able to lay out enough of the camp to satisfy that grandiose fool by the time they came back, tired and no doubt empty handed. The last stay-behind was there of her own choosing. He’d initially figured Lal Endeev for one of Hagarlid’s hanger-ons; a woman of purely ornamental purpose to the commodore, a social climber. But the casual yet competent way she handled the long-barred Spaht Rifle, no easy weapon to learn, had quickly disabused him of that notion. She was, he’d realized, quite possibly the only member of Hagarlid’s coterie with anything resembling a functioning brain. With her in a hook-rig on a massive tree that overlooked the campsite, toting that powerful, if unconventional, weapon, he’d felt safe enough about the prospect of leaving the base camp so empty.

He really should have considered that his own prejudices might be as misplaced as Hagarlid’s. For all that he found the man despicable in many ways, he must have been a first rate business man to amass the fortune that would allow him to make a play for entry to the nobility, And he had to have been a capable scholar - or at least able to find and gain the services of competent scholars, to put together the information that had pointed to Yindur as the place where the Ithari’s Oulkemi-raised creations might still remain, waiting like obedient kak-pups for their long departed masters. Of course, kak-pups didn’t have the habit of attempting to devour things bigger than them, or disperse hallucinogenic dusts into the air that made any who inhaled them susceptible to outright mind control. Pretis hadn’t thought that such complete mental domination was possible even with the Power; the mind-bending strings he’d witnessed before were merely nudges, influencing a person’s mind, even forcing him to decide one way instead of another. But sustained, complete usurpation of one’s mind, such that one would turn one’s weapons on one’s comrades... The memory of that, alone, was enough to make Pretis shudder, even now, and not only because of the sheer horror of seeing someone he knew suddenly become a stranger, wearing the same skin, but with no soul behind the eyes, and with nothing on the mind but slaughter. No, the truly terrifying thought, seeing the taken move in tandem and wield their blazers proficiently, was that oh, stars, the void-struck insane Ithari made some of these monsters sentient. What the starless deep were they thinking? And what the hell had Hagaarlid, who presumably had turned up descriptions of just how monstrous the the things truly were in his insane quest, been smoking, to think he could drop in with no more of a party than could fit on his own starliner and capture one of these abominations?

And that particular horror, terrible as it has been, hadn’t even been the most horrible thing he’d witnessed in those star-forsaken forests. Things- he wasn’t sure that they could be dignified with the title of ‘creatures’ - that drank in the strings of the Power woven by an Initiate and keep drinking, till the very dregs of Kitari’s soul were gone and nothing remained of him but a withered husk. Pretis had never liked the arrogant, boisterous, unable-to-stop-talking-even-with-his-mouth-full-of-shribread young fool, but not even Haagarlid deserved something like that. Though none of the survivors would say that Haagarlid didn’t deserve his ultimate end, at the hands of the deceptively childlike Wakk aborigines most, including Pretis himself, had initially dismissed as mostly harmless savages.

They’d encountered the Wakk no more than an hour after setting out - a foraging party of the small, arboreal, creatures had already been shadowing them, probably for some time, by the time Niun, the most tolerable of the nobles, and himself an initiate, had noticed them and pointed them out. Fortunately, he was well past adolescence, even that extended version males of the nobility seemed to stay perpetually stuck in, and had the presence of mind to call out to the spear wielding and obviously intelligent natives rather than simply open fire. One of the creatures had dropped to the forest floor in front of them, weapons tucked away and with an arm raised, clearly wanting to parley. Haagarlid found the whole thing amusing, and delegated Amira and Kousel, two of the scholarly members of the expedition, who had looked entirely out of place on a hunting trip, to speak to the ‘little person’. But then, he’d already known that Haagarlid has massive blindspots and little habit of thought outside his limited sphere of interest. Delegating the vital task of talking to those who could easily make the difference in the success or failure of his wild gambit to win fame, favor and title to two people who had every reason to resent him for treating them like dirt, for dragging them on a long, uncomfortable trip, and especially for forgetting that one was a historian and the other a xenobiologist, neither well schooled in linguistics or diplomacy but well regarded in their own fields... it didn’t take a hyperspatial scientist to realize that subpar results would ensue. How subpar, he hadn’t even imagined then, but he’d been busy kicking himself for not thinking to make sure that a aboriginal species specialist had been included. After all, hadn’t there been hints in the tantalizing glimpses of the reconstructed records Haagarlid had doled out that the Ithari had been known to use slaves taken from primitive cultures as handlers for their valuable but dangerous pets?

He’d never really thought about what it must have been like, for some poor barbarian in that position, snatched away from all that he knew to tend to a beast who he must keep alive - a beast with no such compunctions towards him. The survivors of such an experience would be culled to the toughest, fastest, cleverest - Small wonder the Waak, presumably the descendents of such survivors, had barely faltered when the Russurians had demonstrated their advanced weapons - powerful yes, but what was one more pack of powerful, otherwordly predators with uncanny abiities to a tribe that had faced such for centuries, and survived? Still, for a people who lived on the edge of terror, for whom there was no hyperspatial escape from the monsters in the night, the Waak were, in retrospect surprisingly willing to talk to strangers. Then again, they had good reason to be confident of their own martial prowess, and they hadn’t been trusting enough to reveal the presence of their own power-wielders.

Hunting was apparently easy enough of an idea to convey to the Waak - he’d wondered, several times, if that had been their downfall - if they’d waited to communicate more, until the Waak understood just what it was they proposed to hunt... But every time, he’d come to the same conclusion: Haagarlid, damn the man, would have insisted on pressing on, whether or not the natives approved - or permitted. The party would have fallen to the Waak rather than the Oulkemi beasts; the little arboreals were fiendishly devious in constructing hides and blinds from which to ambush foes with their simple but still deadly spears, something they had latter demonstrated aptly when they had blunted, then turned aside the mad rush of Oulkemi-born pursuing the remnants of the hunting party. They had likely only done so because Pretis and the others had been running in the direction of their village; once the monsters had backed off, the Waak had made it clear -through their power-adept shaman, since both Amira and Kousel had perished in the retreat- that the Rissurians had best go back to where they came from as well. They didn’t need to threaten; Yleni was already dead of a Waak warrior’s slingstone, which had unforgivingly struck her when she stumbled and fell behind the party -and into the killzone of the missile weapons the Waak were volleying, and the survivors held no illusions about what would happen if they didn’t run. Looking back, he could hardly blame them. If there were monsters in the dark outside his hometown, he’d probably have been far harsher on outsiders foolish enough to stir them up.

He didn’t realize he was no longer drinking alone at the bar, until the bartender was sliding Lal a Lloni Ale. When had she slipped into the seat next to him. He started to greet her, but the fury on his face made it clear that she was not here to commiserate. “Pretis, you unmitigated bastard. I thought you were worth more than a poodun pile, but apparently I was wrong.”

He blinked at her - surely he wasn’t drunk yet. “What did I do Endeev, aside from prevent any poor foo from sharing the fate of our fellows on Yindur?”

“You argued for razing the planetary surface!” she all but screamed. “How could you- How could anyone argue for what amounts to the genocide of a sophont species!”

“Please,” he snapped back, alcohol having dulled his capacity fr diplomatic answers, “we’d have been doing the Waak a favor, removing them from that starless pit of an existence. If i had to live surrounded by Oulkemi abominations, I’d hope someone would put me out of my misery.”

“You’re a blind fool, Pretis Yvan!” Her tone had not softened in the least. “You had no right to make such a decision for them. And what could possibly make you think that a society willing to fight those horrors with hand weapons - nothing more than muscle and grit, would ever want to roll over and die. The Waak are survivors. They carved out a life for themselves on that planet, literally cut from the stiff branches and trunks of that unyielding forest. What right have you to try and take it from them.”

“The right of a man who fought hard for a life of his own. Do you think I learned the strings of the Power from some noble tutor? I clawed my way out of poverty to scrape into the Academy. I, too am a survivor. I know all too well the contempt a survivor feels for those who had it easy.” He stared at her, seeing confusion in her eyes as she realized that he had not chosen his position carelessly. “Like you said, they are a tenacious, hardy people. And a clever one. We taught the Waak that there is an escape from that mudball of theirs, from that life of terror and struggle. Go back in a century or two and you doubtless will see gliders in the air, if not powered flight - them, imitating us. Finding the refuge the skies and the stars beyond have to offer. In a millenium, they may well have starships. They will not be cute little primitives forever.” He saw her try to speak but have her no opportunity. “What will they see, when they sail among the stars? They will see other races, soft and untested, weaker in resolve than them because we have not had to rise to civilization with monsters ever encroaching on our settlements. They will ask why they were left to suffer so long ago by the Ithari, why we were allowed to spread among the stars in leisure while they fought for every patch of land and speck of food. And we will have no answer to satisfy them.”

She gaped at him now. He continued, giving her no chance to recover her mental equilibrium. “We will be dead by then. Like as not, the Rissur Imperium will be but a memory by then - we are in decline already, if you listen carefully to what the holocasts don’t say. But some of our people, our descendants, may be be there when, if, the Waak attain the stars. Be glad, Lal, that we won’t be there for it.” She shook her head, unbelievingly, and left him, but he hardly notices, gripped in visions of that terrible future he had predicted. He saw a flight of spears descending in a barrage, thrown by Waak warriors, only to morph in flight, becoming the silvery lines of kinetic bombardment weapons, diving towards a planet. He saw that Waak shaman, with his ridiculous feathered headdress, hold up his hands as Power-wrought lightning danced between them, only for that flickering energy to resolve into a plasma strike on a already crippled warship. He saw Rissur square, the buildings that bounded it no more than jagged ruins, as furry bodies huddled in massed ranks, chanting their war cry: iWaak kaharun’ool! Yaw’b! Yaw’b!

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If you don't get it, try reading it out loud. If you do - pleasedon'tkillme.