To call the mood on board the Merriment ‘tense’ would be a generous understatement. Boarding trams with mangled ram-shields rumbled back into the hangar on what thrusters still worked. Their landings were little more than controlled crashes, each craft collapsed into an undignified heap as the life left their failing systems. Smoke from the ships’ dying gasps filled the landing bay as irate jolters tore themselves out of the wrecked remains.
Sour moods replaced the fervor of battle, not one among them did not wear a scowl or a grimace. Some walked uninjured, some limped or hobbled, and others still were carried by their comrades. Samuine had called a retreat of the highest urgency without stated cause. The bitterness of a victory robbed from them after paying triumph’s bloody toll festered in them. Many of their seriously injured or dead were left behind on the Auric Wind due to the urgency of the retreat.
Morale among the kartorim was little better. Thenrothyne had sprinted out of the hangar as soon as his craft landed, only briefly passing a weighty glare to Illati as he passed her by. Illati met his gaze with icy hostility of her own, holding eye contact until the unspeaking kartorim passed from view. Sathiar directed medical teams racing out onto the hangar deck, jumping into one craft’s burning wreckage as it caught fire to carry the wounded inside out to safety. Firemen rushed to the trams and sprayed a thicker-than-water fluid over the fires from hoses they trailed behind them.
Samuine barely registered the chaos unfolding around him. He paced from his own craft absently, Voy’s broken and bloodied visage refused to leave his mind. It haunted him, not just the visual of his oldest friend broken by his hand but the satisfaction he’d felt inflicting it. Before he knew it was Voy he’d been eager to make him suffer, drawing out the fight and avoiding a clean kill for his own satisfaction. His left wing sparked and shuddered involuntarily. That behavior had cost him a wing jet.
Kartorim didn’t feel nausea in the usual manner, but right now he felt he could throw up. Whether or not he was happy Voy was alive he couldn’t decide. Voy was alive, but he wasn’t ascended. Voy was alive, but he was with traitors. Were they traitors if he had handwritten orders from Avaron? If they weren’t... did that make Caldion’s orders treason? His hands trembled in front of him, Voy’s blood still coated the white-gold gauntlets.
Freedom from the cage of his despair arrived in the form of a blue and green blur grabbing him by the plate over his collar bone and yanking his face down to eye level. Illati’s helm was on, but her eyes burned with anger like he’d never seen. She was favoring her right leg and the left cheek on her faceplate was crushed in.
“Why,” she pleaded, “Did you call a retreat?” her voice wavered against a tidal wave of forming resentment. Only the possibility of justification kept her civil. Samuine stammered incomplete words for a moment as he tried to fabricate the most diplomatic way to deliver the news. In this he failed, gave up, and spoke plainly.
“Voy is alive,” Samuine’s eyes drifted off Illati and down to his hands once more, “at least, he was. He’s on the Auric.” Illati recoiled back, releasing her grip and scoffed.
“You’ve lost it,” she shook her head incredulously, “How is this, a simple boarding action, what puts you over?” instead of being offended Samuine extracted the scroll tube from his back where he’d mag-locked it between his wings.
“I swear on every fiber of my being he was there,” he offered her the scroll, which she snatched from his hand and opened greedily. She unfurled the scroll and held it close to her face, her eyes flicked rapidly down the lines as she read. Her arms fell to her sides when she finished, the scroll hung carelessly from her hand. Illati placed a gentler hand back on Samuine’s shoulder.
“How?” she managed finally. Samuine met her eyes, seeing a variant of the same joyful terror he felt reflected now in her.
“How what?” he croaked.
“How is he alive?”
“I have no clue,” Samuine shook his head slowly, “We hand-shook before I called the retreat.” Two blood red blips hovered in the edge of Samuine’s vision. One for Fenrothyne, and one for Voy. “If he recovers I’ll ask him. Whatever is going on, we need answers.”
If. Samuine’s heart hung on the word. His failure on Nimbus Sands would be nothing if he got murder-reds, no chance in hell Avaron would forgive him for killing his scion. Not that it mattered much, if Samuine was the cause of Voy’s death he’d never forgive himself. Samuine slumped and dropped to one knee, no longer meeting Illati’s gaze.
“What do we tell the crew? The other kartorim?” Samuine asked without lifting from his slump. Illati squeezed his shoulder in reassurance.
“The truth. Voy was, is, the scion of Avaron. He had had written orders. We pulled back or risked interfering in the affairs of the High Marshall.” Illati snapped back into focus quickly. “Our personal history with Voy doesn’t have to come up. If it does, we’re in charge and the crew can get over it.” Simple, straightforward, a House Caldion approach if ever there was one. “But right now this ship needs leadership, and I’m about to collapse into a regen coma. Put your feelings to the side and focus on action.” Samuine nodded and rose to his feet.
“Get some rest. Once you and Fenro are upright again we’ll convene to break the news. Crew finds out after that.” With a curt nod, Illati removed her hand from Samuine’s shoulder and set about limping to the infirmary. Thank you, Samuine thought without voicing. Shaking off the last tendrils of his haze Samuine took control of the hangar crisis response, easily rolling into action with Sathiar directing the emergency teams and helping to get the wounded jolters to safety.
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Hours passed Samuine by before he stopped to catch his breath. The hangar bay was at last becalmed, its wreckage fires sequestered and its injured triaged elsewhere on the ship. Clean crews were beginning their work in clearing the fire suppressant grease and debris from the floors. Samuine and Sathiar were both standing at the hangar’s side now, close enough to help if needed but far enough removed to not be in the way.
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Both of their carapaces were coated in soot from addressing the burning wrecks the boarding trams became. Neither yet spoke, each still reeled from the last twenty four hours. Dread began to well up in Samuine as the post-battle panic on the Merriment subsided. Like Illati before him Sathiar radiated a potent aura of inquisitive rage that made Samuine’s heart sink to his boots. Stellar job maintaining morale Sammy ma-boy, he thought to himself in Braem’s voice. If only his mentor’s advice was as easy to mimic as his jovial chastisements. Samuine clenched and unclenched his fists while he watched the clean up crews hard at work before him.
Their cold stand off was broken by the return of Thenrothyne to the hangar bay. At a glance there was no evidence he’d participated in the battle. His carapace was scrubbed clean and polished to a parade shine. Sathiar leapt at the opportunity to break the silence without having to acknowledge Samuine’s presence.
“How is he?” Sathiar asked sincerely, arms folded across his chest. Thenrothyne shrugged and shook his head as his gaze fell to the floor. “That bad? Damn. I’ll give him a visit once we’re wrapped up here,” Sathiar paused for a moment, his helm eyes focused on Thenrothyne as if he were solving a puzzle, “What about you?”
The blue glow in Thenrothyne’s eyes wavered in intensity. He shook his head and paced aimlessly for a moment, searching for something, before finally walking up to one of the wrecked boarding trams and front on kicking it as hard as he could. Debris went flying away from him, clattering across the bay and undoing an hour of the clean up crew’s work. Thenrothyne raised his hands as if to start tearing into the ruined craft some more before he deflated and fell to his knees, his arms limp by his sides.
He stilled himself on the ground, his only motion the silent heaving of his chest from unheard breath. Sathiar calmly walked over and knelt down, joining him in silence. Samuine cautious moved to do the same before a sharp look from Sathiar slew the impulse. Contempt poured from Sathiar’s amber eyes, warning and condemnation he was unwilling to speak but unable to conceal.
Samuine scoffed and made for the corridor out of the hangar. Fenrothyne’s injuries couldn’t be that bad, but Samuine would one up Sathiar and check in on him now. Sudden tranquility washed over him as he left the hangar behind as if the Merriment itself finally granted him the right to settle down now that it was no longer in any danger. Blued steel corridors welcomed the kartorim as he made his way to the check up on his wounded comrades.
Haggard looking crew shambled around him as he walked, sidestepping and shimmying to avoid colliding with him. Most avoided acknowledging him but the handful that did could scarcely mask their displeasure with him as a commander. Given the circumstances Samuine opted to overlook their disrespect rather than waste time chastising them. After a few minutes of walking Samuine came upon the one onboard infirmary with the equipment to handle kartorim treatment. Most notably this included larger beds and higher ceilings, but there were subsets of pharmaceutical products that were useless for regular humans that kartorim considered vital.
With a single sharp inhale as his preamble Samuine stepped through the med-bay door as it slid open, retracting his helm into the metallic patches on the back of his neck. Sweat glued his long hair to the back of his head and neck, a byproduct of a helm that was not suited to accommodate hair longer than around an inch. Increasingly he understood why House Bolund kept their hair tied up in a bun on duty.
To that end, Fenrothyne’s hair was still maintained in a slight bun even as he lay charred and broken in a medical stall. It was worse than Samuine could have imagined. His carapace had been melted into a sludgy shell around him, cooling into a solid thing that neither bent or retracted easily. Where he wasn’t entombed in his armor turned prison charred to black flesh cracked and bled. A team of surgeons and doctors scurried around him.
Kartorim medicine was less complicated than it was for regular humans, the regenerative ability afforded them by their ascension made obsolete most forms of traditional medical remedy. Instead nearly all procedure boiled down to removing debris and dead flesh before applying an ultra high nutrient salve to the affected area to help speed along the natural healing process.
There were only two situations where this approach wasn’t essentially guaranteed to lead to full recovery of the wound in question, instances where the affected individual was catastrophically wounded to the extreme that their body just didn’t have enough good mass left to stage its own recovery from, and situations where the wound couldn’t be accessed to apply the salve.
By Samuine’s quick observation, Fenrothyne had been nearly cooked inside his armor as it melted. Medics were applying the translucent blue goo wherever his flesh was exposed after stripping away carbon buildup, but much of him was unreachable. His face, or what remained of it, was exposed to the air. So this was what the ‘red’ status indicator means, nausea briefly welled up in Samuine once again. Voy’s indicator, though fading as the Auric Wind put distance between them, was the same foreboding shade of crimson as Fenrothyne’s.
Fenrothyne was not remotely conscious, even for a kartorim it was something of a miracle he survived at all. Samuine would have to check in regularly if he wanted to have the satisfaction of ‘winning’ against Sathiar’s politicking.
“Who did this?” Sitting up on her own medical bed in the stall across from Fenrothyne, Illati watched the doctors as they performed their work. Her carapace was entirely retracted and a slim brace held her left leg straight. Doctors had cut away her slip-suit’s left leg from the mid-thigh down and applied a coating of the same blue gel that they were treating Fenrothyne with over her knee. Her jaw was swollen, but only a little. Samuine got the impression a small sponge-like implant was fixed between her teeth on one side of her mouth, but her jaw was clenched enough that it wasn’t immediately apparent.
“I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware it was this bad…” the words nearly caused him to choke as he spoke them. Fenrothyne’s last words before he was cut off had been about a ‘grey bastard’.
“Was it Voy?” Illati asked quickly, firing a question she’d chambered before Samuine ever set foot in the med-bay. Samuine didn’t have an answer. Small power tools whirred and sparked as the doctors tried to pry off more of the ruined carapace from Fenrothyne’s body.
“This was beyond pacification. If this ‘Voy’ is willing to risk breaking with the Iyallat how likely is it that he is actually acting on Avaron’s order?” Samuine remained silent for moment more. Simultaneously he mapped out the implications of Voy being alive and apostate to the Iyallat against how much he considered killing Fenrothyne that much of a crime. Perhaps it was divine providence that Voy, or whatever else might’ve done this, was solving the Fenrothyne problem for him.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it,” Samuine answered finally, cementing his lack of resolution on the matter. Samuine turned to face Illati and raised and furrowed his brow. “Shouldn’t you be resting right now? If they are going to save him it won’t be anytime soon.” Illati tensed before letting out a long withheld breath.
“Can’t,” she closed her eyes before continuing. Her tone fell to a whisper. “This stays between us. Stopping the torchbearers is not my primary objective. Its a convenient secondary,” she looked regretful of the admission almost instantly, but appeared to shimmy off the sensation just as quickly as it arose. “My sister is on the Auric Wind. I’m supposed to get her back, whether she wants to come home or not,” she clenched her jaw again, “and until that retreat was called, I had her. I had her right in front of me.” Unlike her helm’s eyes, her natural ones could betray the moment tears threatened to force their way out. Her anger was not so callous as it appeared in the hangar. “I left my sister on a ship with a kartorim killer and a doomsday cult madman. I don’t deserve to rest until she’s safe.”
Guilt was not a feeling Samuine often acquainted himself with before today. Perhaps the Redeemer had a sense of humor that involved his misfortune. Had he not called the retreat Illati would have recovered her sister. Justified or not, his actions prevented that, meaning he’d managed to pull of the miraculous feat of betraying both of his friends entirely by mistake with the span of an hour. Settin’ the wrong kinds of record lad, he could almost hear Braem stifling a laugh at his blunder. Of course had Braem been there nothing could’ve stopped him from stepping in to help. The phantom his mind conjured up to berate him was altogether less helpful.
“It’s not your fault,” Samuine offered his fist out to her, “I’ve got your back, you’ve got mine. We’ll get your sister back. I promise.” Illati softened her expression, if only slightly, and met Samuine’s gauntleted fist with her unarmored hand.
Her eyes closed as she laid back on her bed on top of the covers. Taking the hint Samuine left her to rest while the doctors worked to save the brute across from her. There were other tasks that demanded his attention, but they could wait. Right now he needed a few hours alone in his quarters for a long shower and a nap.
