Crudrat Read online

  Maura knew their pattern. They locked you up, mucked you about for a few hours, and then let you alone. That last, by far the scab end of a bad lot. Solitary brought out the worst in the spaceborn. Places where folk could up and live in all the vacuumed vastness came few, far between, and tight fitting. People got accustomed to one another. A couple spins in solitary and most spaceborn would just about do anything the armigers asked. But armigers liked to a do a thing right and proper, so they generally started with torture anyway, for form’s sake.

  Maura listened at the vent a bit, while the latest batch of armigers tried their questions out on the alien below.

  He answered them, regardless of the question, with roars and violence.

  I wager solid rations that he’s playing them.

  Maura hung about a moment longer, while they tried their tortures on that thick white fur. Up though the vent came the dull buzz of shockers, the beep of electrical devices, and the thud of weapon against pelt-covered flesh. The alien seemed impervious to whatever they could muster up, advanced tech or planetside basics. Not that it was at all clear that if he talked, he’d speak space-tongue, or saying anything of value.

  Then a group of sequensors turned their unwelcome selves up.

  Even though she couldn’t see, Maura could tell from their highbrow talk and assumption of command what Spoke they sat on. She could imagine those white robes, swishing about heavy boots and hard attitudes. White as the alien’s fur. And all tied up in their own purity and righteousness.

  “What’s been done here?” asked one of them, imperious and nasal.

  “Just some light electroshock, and basic application of force, no permanent damage – we think.” The armiger who answered sounded sullen.

  “Oh, is that all,” the response was full sarcasm.

  “Why is it the military must be so perpetually lacking in subtlety?” A different sequensor wanted to know.

  “Now, wait just a tick... !” That was an armiger.

  “Enough. We will take over the inquiry from here.”

  “Enemy infiltration is our jurisdiction,” a different armiger objected.

  “And any clear threat to the integrity of the Wheel is ours. This creature is a danger to all we believe and hold sacred — an abomination, a chipless barbarian from heretic space. Aliens are, by the very definition of the word, sequensor provenance. Now, all of you — out.”

  The sound of rustling and the clang of the cell door indicated the guns had departed. Maura could imagine their expressions. But even the military bent under sequensor authority.

  “There now, isn’t that better? We can have a proper talk,” said nasal sequensor.

  The alien growled low in his throat. It was not a nice noise. It made Maura’s spine cringe.

  “No need to act the beast with me,” said the sequensor, all kindness absent from his tone. “The Wheel has little outside contact as a general rule of spiritual mandate, but I’m from alien tech special investigations branch. We know of the outside universe. The study of aliens is sometimes necessary.” The voice paused. “Disgusting, but necessary.”

  The alien growled again.

  There was a long drawn out silence. Maura could hear a low hissing. She did not know its cause, but it resulted in the alien letting out a small, low, whimper. It was a sad tiny sound from such a large creature.

  The sequensor continued. “Your kind calls itself the Kill’ki, and you’re a perfectly sentient polymorph of the master genotype, entirely capable of speaking space-tongue. So talk!”

  The alien said nothing.

  The low hiss sounded again.

  Maura shuddered as the imprisoned creature let out another baby whimper. It may be sequensors playing their game below her but it was the same pattern as that of the armigers — talk, torture, talk. The pain was just quieter.

  Maura was feeling oddly disconnected. The problem with the Wheel and its ways, she thought – not for the first time, is how little imagination or originality runs along its Spokes. Even torture is mundane.

  More time passed and still the alien would speak nothing more coherent than a growl or a whimper. Stubborn.

  Finally, after what seemed an interminable age, the sequensors appeared to give up. Opting for isolation, they decided to leave the alien on his lonesome for a few ticks. Maura heard the door clang and quiet descend.

  They’ll cover over the door of the cell with blacking plastic and turn off all the lights. Leave the poor creature to rot in darkness and silence, until he thinks better on his stubbornness and makes with speech.

  Maura groped about the edge of the air vent below her, feeling for how it was attached. Then she pulled out the flat metal card the alien had given her, flicking her nail against it to test its stiffness. Strong enough.

  Using one sharp corner, she began to unscrew the fasteners that held the vent cover in place. It took careful precise work in the darkness, the card kept slipping, but it was ridged and thin enough for the job. As she undid the last screw, she expected the vent cap to fall down into the alien’s prison with a clang.

  Instead, it was lifted away by a large white paw.

  The cell below was very dimly lit, but less dark than Maura’s tunnel. Her vision took a tick to adjust. She found herself looking down through the small round opening, into the impossibly dark eyes of the alien. That nothingness of space without stars again. But one of them had winked at her. This gave Maura courage.

  “Ah,” said the alien with satisfaction, in perfect well rounded space-tongue, “’tis you. Good.”

  5

  The only thing less friendly than spaceborn folk is spaceborn talk.

  ~ Proverb

  So he speaks all ear-easy and proper-normal in the end. And he’s considerable less fuzzy-then I thought.

  Face to face the alien wasnt covered in a pelt of fur per say, more a fine sheen of teeny-tiny hairs. It reminded Maura of those pile cloth rugs the highstocks had outside their fancy hole-ups in the upmarket section of spaceport. ‘Cept these hairs grew out skin instead of floor. Maura stared, figuring the alien wouldn’t take offense at close inspection from a reject, being pretty much reject himself. She could make out that each impossibly thin hair wasn’t white at all but clear. And his skin underneath was black. Strange that he looked so very white under beltway lights. She gave a little mental shrug. Guess that’s what makes him alien.

  The cell they’d put him in was small enough for Maura to think it restrictive – and she was used to spending her ticks in tunnels and other tiny places. He, bigger than any citizen of the Wheel, brushed the ceiling of the cell with the top of his head. All he had to do was tilt his neck and look up, and they were eye to eye though the vent hole.

  “You can talk,” said Maura, inanely.

  “Yes, brilliance, this one eats and sleeps, too.” His voice was a deep growling rumble.

  Ah, thought Maura, that kind of alien. She could play verbal games as well as the next outcast. After all, she had Rees as a friend.

  She said, with just enough exasperation, “Whoa there, Fuzzy. We’re not knowing each other well enough yet for sarcasm. First we talk, then maybe we eat, a bit of escape action, some tunnel time, then you can put on mean speech.”

  The alien grumbled. “This one has siblings, non-enemy. This one must stay in practice.”

  Maura sniffed. “It ain’t a necessity for me to be helping. You are realizing that, non-human? I could be…”

  The alien interrupted her, offended. “This one is as human as you, Wheel-child!”

  Oh, really? Maura looked skeptically at the black eyes and fur-covered body.

  “Just fuzzy?” she suggested.

  The alien grinned. Or Maura thought he grinned, his eyes crinkled up, but that was all she could see of him.

  “Ice planet seeding will do that to the genome,” he explained.

  “Right.” Maura wasn’t particularly interested in his groundside origins. “Look here, Fuzzy. I could turn myself right around, well, squirm myself right around, and inch on back up this here duct and get moving with my sad little life. I ain’t doing this for fun, you understanding me? So you treat me straight-up ’til I done got the spin of it, then we’ll see who’s better at cheap talk.”

  Those shiny black eyes blinked at her. “Galactic common is but one of four different languages this one speaks, non-enemy. And it was certainly not the most difficult to learn. This one did not mean to offend your odd blue-haired ways.”

  “No offense taken,” Maura brushed all apologies aside, “’tis merely causing a breach in efficiency.”

  The black eyes narrowed. “Ah, we are under battle orders?”

  Maura did not understand.

  “You are wari, a professional fighter, non-enemy?” The alien seemed to also be confused. “You move like wari, you fall like wari. Perhaps not a domina, your ways are more of a scout, all slick and stealth. This one is not so young he has not seen your kind amongst my people.”

  “Wheel born blue-haired crudrats be running rampant amongst the fuzzies down ice planet-ways?” Maura felt a spike of hope. Is there some refuge to be found amongst white furred aliens?

  The alien clicked his tongue. “Not your outside look, non-enemy, your inside feel. This one has seen your kind of person within my own people.”

  Maura shook her head. “I be no warrior Spoke, what we call armiger. I be reject any way you turn it. I was crudrat until yesterday.”

  “These words are Wheel words?”

  Maura scrabbled for a way space-tongue might convey the right kind of rejection. “I be having no implant. I be outcast, chipless, beneath notice... non-citizen.”

  “Ah. You are free.”

  Maura blinked. How to get an alien to understand? “But I have no rig
hts, no money, no stock, no purpose. There be no role for me to play in the Wheel’s turning. Not on any Spoke.”

  “It is a strange kind of freedom, but freedom nonetheless.” The alien was obtuse.

  Maura gave up. “You be having any kind of useable name there, Fuzzy?”

  The alien reared back. “Now who is rude, asking this one his name!”

  “Ah. Your kind don’t go in for the giving out of names?”

  “Yours do?”

  Maura smiled. “I be Maura.” Then she remembered the progenetor bucks in the armiger docking area, and added, to test the taste of it in her mouth, “Maura Am Vern.” Here I go giving out my full name for the first time in all my turns, and to an alien that don’t want it. Odd way for the universe to arrange itself.

  The alien gasped. Then he closed his black eyes as though in pain. “Your trust humbles me, non-enemy.”

  “My name means nothing to me.”

  The alien looked truly troubled by that. “But what of your gens, your family, little blue? Now that this one knows your name, this one knows your kin, your line, your allegiances.” She noticed he deliberately continued not to use her name.

  “Ah, I see the source of the misunderstanding. I have no family. Those of us without the implants, we get rejected in every way from the Wheel. Including family.”

  The alien was flabbergasted. “But the way you move. You would make a fine fighter, perhaps a little scrawny, but good for specialty work and perhaps…” He left off that statement, whatever it was. “They turn you out simply because your body will not accept that abomination mod of sequensor making? This one begins to think there is much our anthropologists neglected to report in their studies of your culture.” The alien spoke as though he were no alien at all. As though the Wheel were all over alien instead. “We know of the rejects, of course. But we didn’t know the extent to which they were rejected for not taking on that cyborg implant. What happens to you?”

  “Some of us become crudrats.”

  The alien nodded. “Sometime you must explain that term further. This one has never before heard the word crudrat. And the others without kin?”

  Maura shrugged. "Spaced, starved, imprisoned, left out to die. Regardless, I’ll be needing to call you somewhat. Unless you be liking Fuzzy.”

  The alien paused as though he was actually entertaining this suggestion.

  “It is odd to pick one’s own talk-name. Especially when you have gifted your real name, little blue.” A pause. “Quoin,” he said at last. “It is, how you might say, a ranking. This one will respond to that, well enough.”

  “And do you be an armiger, quoin? A wari." Maura tried wrapping her tongue around the alien words.

  “In training, little blue.”

  “Just Maura will do well enough. And that there training brings you floating ‘round Wheel space, does it?”

  The alien snorted. “There was a bit of an upset. A nasty spit of bad luck and things got out of hand. Thus this one finds himself in a muddle. One should, of course, be able to extract oneself from all difficulties. However, in this instance, a little assistance might be desirable.”

  “I should say so,” agreed Maura. “Why you pick me for a helper?”

  He looked at her as though she were insane. “Because you are free.” He paused as though consciously stopping himself from saying something more. “This one saw you running above me, outside the range of those damnable implant readers. This one can pay. Mine is a strong line, with plentiful kinship ties.”

  Maura blinked. “Pay?”

  “In the currency of my own kind or that of those outside Wheel space. This one does not have a Wheel implant nor its interlinking credit system. But there are other kinds of payment.”

  Maura scratched her nose thoughtfully. “What kinds in particular?” She was thinking fondly of extra ration cubes.

  “Hard currency, soft currency, trade goods.” He would have continued but Maura interrupted him. Rees’s ideas bounced around in her brain.

  “Safe passage?”

  The alien cocked his head. “To where, little blue?”

  Maura considered a moment. She knew nothing of the worlds outside the Wheel. So far as the sequensors were concerned, no one ever left the Wheel and no one ever joined it. It spun its solitary way through the universe. True citizens stuck to the Spokes in every way, through implant and choice and beyond. Progenetors learned somewhat of the enemies that abounded and surrounded Wheel space, and armigers learned a little more for fighting purposes, but Maura turned reject well before her teaching drone got on to those particular threats. To leave the Wheel had never before really been an option, despite Rees’s overactive imagination.

  “It might be nice to visit an ice planet.”

  The alien paused. “You want to come home with this one?”

  He made it sound like she was some sort of murmel, a pet he was being forced to adopt.

  Maura decided she liked this new scheme almost as much as she disliked his tone. “You want my help, quoin Fuzzy, or not?”

  The alien sighed. “The domina will have this one’s pelt for supper. Very well.” He gave a funny nod and then blew a puff of breath up at her. “Bonded.”

  Maura shrugged, and pursing her lips, blew breath back at him. “Bonded,” she said, liking the sound of the word.

  “Right,” said the alien, “here’s what this one is thinking might be the best approach.”

  A good while later, Maura squirmed back up the tight air duct. Her brain was a-buzz with instructions, ideas, and half formed plans. Not for the first time she wished she had the implant if only to help her mind process the excess information. She held tight to the little metal card. Fuzzy hadn’t wanted it back. Much good it would do, he’d said, without freedom. A keycard, he called it. Now Maura knew what it was meant to do, she was determined to be even more careful with its safety. In fact, what she had to do immediately was hide it in a secure place.

  She crawled into the duct hub and considered for a moment. Then with a sigh she swung herself across. She was exhausted, but the keycard was a weight of responsibility she’d as soon not carry further in space or time. So instead of heading home to her nest, she took the largest of the many silver-blue tunnels towards engineering.

  It was sleep shift. Only a skeleton crew occupied the scyther bay. Back-up tunnels were whirring and four sleepy foremen ran small groups of crudrats through their paces at the far end of the long row of scythers. This kept enough scythers running to maintain orbit, which was all they need bother with during nighttime ticks.

  Maura crouched at the edge of an air duct and looked down at the lay of space. She waited for the perfect moment. Like breathing along with the swish of blades, there was a pattern to the movement of people about their allocated tasks. Everyone had their route to walk, their motions to execute, their interactions with others to chart: a practiced dance. Eventually, most of the subgenetor ground crew moved towards their break area – half way through shift. At that same time, several crudrats tumbled from tunnels and carried their murmels over for weighing. The foremen followed, and the waiting ‘rats looked on with interest – wondering who’d get the bonus that shift. With everyone occupied, Maura slid out of the duct and sauntered casually over to the nearest scyther. No one yelled for her to stop. No one even noticed her presence. It was hard to move around engineering without tripping over a 'rat somewhere. They lowered the caliber of the whole bay but were a necessary disfiguration.

  Maura took a deep breath, measuring the weight of the air in her lungs, calming her mind of everything. Then she leapt inside the scyther.

  The blades were dangerously clean. Maura took a split second to look around the blue tinged metal interior. It must have been one of the last scythers run previous shift. Blades moved that much faster when they were clean, but they also moved more predictably.

  Shink.

  Maura ducked and twisted. Her body remembered what to do, like she’d stopped only yesterday.

  Oh, wait, I did stop only yesterday.

  The blade came in at her side, chopping toward her ribs. Maura sprang up the opposite tunnel wall, running with her body almost parallel to the floor. She sprang away at the last, back flipping over a lower blade to land soft and silent on the opposite side of the tunnel. If only she’d run so tidy when she'd been a ‘rat, things might be different. But then again, this time she was under no time constraints, and she had only her own skin to think on.