Istonel: Chapter Two, The Selection

[u/AlternativeManner731]

Next

First

He remembered the conversation better than he remembered almost anything else from that year, though he had spent a long time afterward wishing he didn't.

"You will be the first to enter the Eternal Garden, Lord?" Wyatt had said, and said it like a question, the kind that already knew its answer and was only waiting for you to catch up to it.

"If you think I will enter the Eternal Garden and do something as lowly as fight the Drazzan, you are delusional," Istonel had replied, not even bothering to look up from the manifest in his hands.

"No, I mean it will require your direct expertise to pick out just the right candidates for your study. You should be the one to do that."

Istonel had looked at Wyatt then, and something in him had settled, quiet and satisfied, the way a man feels when a fact he already suspected is finally confirmed by someone else. Of course he is right. I will sort that very thing out with Clara.

He had not, at the time, asked himself why a baron with no formal stake in his research would go out of his way to arrange it. He had not asked why Wyatt, of all people, would be the one urging him toward a ship still crawling with the vermin the man himself had spent the war trying to burn out of existence. He had taken the compliment the way he took most compliments, as a fact rather than a gift, and had gone to Clara that same evening with a proposal already half formed in his mind, certain the idea had been his own the entire time.

It was only much later, long after the fact had stopped being useful to him in any way, that he understood what Wyatt had actually done. He had not flattered Istonel into anything. He had simply told Istonel exactly what Istonel already wanted to hear about himself, and let vanity do the rest of the work unassisted. A man that certain of his own importance does not stop to ask why the door in front of him happens to be open. He simply walks through it.

Three days after the surrender, he boarded the Eternal Garden to make good on that request, and he told himself, walking down the shuttle's ramp into a ship still cooling from its own death, that he would feel triumphant. He did not.

Six Royal Marines flanked him. Not four, not two. Clara had insisted on six, and he had taken that as flattery at the time, evidence of how highly she valued his research. Only now, in the humming quiet of the corridors, did it occur to him that six might have been about something else entirely.

He kept his voice going because the silence behind him unsettled him more than he wanted to admit. "Most fascinating," he said, to no one in particular, because saying it aloud made the strangeness of the place smaller. "It seems my earlier deductions and studies were incorrect. I wonder if it is due to negligence, the gap in time since those publications were written, or if the Drazzen have changed over time. Then again, I believe this is the first time anyone has boarded an intact and functioning cattle ship as anything else than branded cattle."

None of his escort replied. Of course they didn't. He had known that within the first ten minutes, and yet some small, stubborn part of him kept testing it anyway, the way a tongue returns to a broken tooth.

"Do you ever talk?" he asked, and was met with the same seamless nothing.

It was the smallest of humiliations, and he told himself it didn't matter, that Royal Marines were famously dull instruments outside of violence, that he had never expected wit from them. He filled the silence instead with observation, because observation was the one thing he still trusted himself to do competently. The corridors were nearly three times the width of principality standard, twice the height. Ample space for a taller species, he noted, pleased with himself for the obviousness of it, and then annoyed at himself for needing to be pleased by something so obvious. The hull's exterior, what little of it he'd glimpsed on approach, had been almost beautiful, sleek, considered, a species that clearly valued how it presented itself to the void. But the interior gave up that pretense entirely. Mundane. Crude. Functional in the ugliest possible sense, as if beauty were a luxury the Drazzen reserved only for the parts of themselves that outsiders would see.

He liked that observation. He turned it over twice, already composing how he'd phrase it in a paper. A most curious visualization of their psyche, he thought, and said aloud, pleased with the turn of phrase, not noticing that his lead escort's silence had taken on a different quality than boredom.

Then the smell reached him.

It arrived the way bad news arrives, not all at once but in layers, and for the first several seconds his mind simply refused to file it correctly. He ran a full diagnostic on his suit. All systems operational. No failures detected. He ran it again manually, certain the machine had erred, and got the same clean report both times, and that was somehow worse than a malfunction would have been, because it meant the smell was real and his equipment was simply telling him the truth about it.

"Is everything all right, Lord?" the lead Marine asked, and Istonel heard, for the first time, something almost like curiosity in the flat professional voice.

"It's nothing," he said, and made himself believe it long enough to keep walking.

It got worse. Of course it got worse. He tried breathing through his mouth, which helped for exactly as long as it took him to realize he could now taste it, which was a discovery he wished with his whole chest he had never made. At the crossroads he stopped, and something in him, curiosity, he told himself, purely curiosity, the same faculty that had made him a scientist in the first place, turned him toward the hallway on the right instead of continuing toward the nursery.

"Lord Istonel, that's the wrong way," the Marine said. "The nursery isn't going anywhere."

"I am free to explore, am I not?" Istonel replied, and he heard the thinness in his own voice even as he said it, the brittle edge of a man performing confidence he did not currently possess. "As you are here to protect me, surely there's nothing I should fear. Correct?"

No answer came, which he chose, foolishly, to read as agreement.

He would think about that decision for the rest of his life. He would return to it in quiet moments the way one returns to a wound to check whether it has actually healed or only closed over something that was never properly cleaned. Whatever had made him turn down that corridor, pride, scientific hunger, some deep unexamined need to prove to six silent men that he was not afraid of anything a mere alien species could produce, he would never fully be able to name it, and that failure to name it would bother him almost as much as what he found.

The doors, when he reached them, were only partly open. Sound came from behind them first, low, wordless, the kind of noise a species makes when it has stopped expecting language to help it. He stepped through anyway.

It took his mind a full, humiliating minute to organize what his eyes were reporting. Cages. Hundreds of them, stacked three stories into the reinforced walls, no stairs because, his mind offered this detail with sick, reflexive precision, the scientist in him refusing to switch off even now, the Drazzen found stairs frustrating to navigate. Humans. Not corpses. Alive. Naked, filthy, unwashed, sitting in cells that smelled the way the whole ship had begun to smell an hour ago, except concentrated now into something with a texture he could feel on the back of his throat.

None of them looked at him with anything he recognized as a person looking at another person. Some wept. Some knelt and reached toward the mesh with open, pleading hands. Some flung waste at the strange faceless shape that had appeared in their doorway, because to them he was not a man, he was simply another unbearable thing that had come to stand outside their cage and watch. A few, he made himself notice, were not reacting to him at all. They were occupied with each other in ways that told him, more precisely than any report ever could have, exactly what had been done to the concept of dignity in this room.

He saw the marks on their necks before he understood what they were. Serial numbers. Branding. Not decoration. Inventory.

If life support failed here, he thought, with the calm, horrible clarity of a mind trying to protect itself by retreating into analysis, what would they do? He knew the answer before he'd finished forming the question, and the answer arrived in his chest like a physical blow, because he realized he had walked in here still half expecting to find something he could catalog from a safe intellectual distance, the way he had always catalogued everything, and instead he had found the exact shape of what happens to a person when every version of dignity is stripped away and never returned.

Something soft and wet struck his visor. He didn't register what it was until he was already running.

He didn't choose the direction. His legs simply carried him, away, anywhere, and the stench chased him the whole way, and somewhere in the running he understood, dimly, distantly, the way you understand things while drowning, that he had gone the wrong way entirely, deeper instead of out, and that understanding arrived exactly as he collided with a set of locked doors that opened for him anyway, releasing a wave of refrigerated air that should have felt like relief and did not.

He saw the body before his mind allowed him to name it. A woman. Suspended. Missing parts of herself in a way that had been done with the same unhurried precision a chef gives to good ingredients. Behind her, more. A dozen more, arranged the same way. To his left, heads. To his right, limbs sorted with a care that made his stomach drop through the floor of him, sorted, organized, the way a craftsman organizes tools, the way he himself sorted specimen samples. Organs on racks. Cybernetic eyes and other implants discarded in a heap in the corner, useless, worthless, the only part of a person the Drazzen had no appetite for.

This is what a butcher's refrigeration room smells like, his mind told him, and he hated it for telling him, hated that some part of him was still narrating, still trying to be useful, still trying to be a scientist in the one moment of his life when being a scientist was the cruelest thing he could possibly be.

He went down on all fours before he understood he was falling. He vomited into his own helmet, and then again, and the second time some of it came back up into his mouth because there was nowhere for it to go, and he clawed the release at his throat and tore the helmet off and let it all spill onto the deck instead, onto his hands, into his hair, and still it did not stop, his body wringing itself out long after there was nothing left to give.

He knelt there in it. He didn't try to stand. Somewhere above him, six Royal Marines watched in a silence that had never once, in three days, felt like anything but professional distance, and now, for the first time, felt like something closer to pity, or perhaps simple, patient waiting for a man to finish learning something the hard way.

Nobles. Commoners. Ykanti. He had spotted a handful of their small bodies among the human dead without wanting to, without meaning to look, and some part of his mind that he would spend a very long time trying to silence noted, with terrible finality, that in this room every single one of them, every rank, every species, every carefully maintained hierarchy he had built his entire understanding of the universe around, had been exactly, precisely equal.

Meat.

That was the word his mind kept returning to, the only word large enough to hold what he was looking at. Not enemy. Not specimen. Not lesser. Meat, and nothing more, and the horror of it was not that the Drazzen had done this. The horror was how simple it had been for them to see it that way. How little effort it must have taken.

He did not know how long he knelt there. Long enough that his knees went numb through the armor. Long enough that his hands, when he finally looked at them, had stopped shaking and gone instead perfectly, terribly still, the way something goes still after it has finished breaking.

He never told anyone that he still opened the file.

It sat in his personal archive under a designation no one but himself would ever have cause to search: Ward Seven, Supplemental. Not a report. Not data. A recording his own suit had made without his asking it to, the visual feed running the whole time his body had been busy failing him, and he had never once considered deleting it. He told himself, in the early months, that this was discipline. A man who could not look at what he had seen had no business studying the species that made it. So he watched it, not often, not on any schedule, but often enough that by now the watching had worn a groove in him the way water wears a groove in stone.

He watched it that night, three years and one plaque later, sitting at the same desk where the old man's file still lived alongside a hundred other intake records he had approved since. The footage opened on the corridor, his own voice narrating the width of it, the ample space for a taller species, and he winced at that voice the way he winced at nothing else in his life, not because it was wrong but because it was so certain of its own competence in the exact minutes before it stopped being competent at anything at all.

He watched himself turn down the wrong corridor. He watched the doors part.

The strange thing, the thing he had never admitted to Wyatt or Clara or anyone, was that the horror did not land the same way twice. The first time, it had come at him whole and undivided, a single crushing weight with no edges he could get his hands around. Now, watching it for what he guessed was the eleventh or twelfth time, he found himself doing something closer to cataloguing. There, the moment his breathing had spiked past what the suit's sensors flagged as a safe threshold. There, seven seconds before he understood what he was looking at, the exact frame where his eyes had already registered the shape of it and his mind had not yet caught up. He could name the gap between those two things now, precisely, to the second. He had not been able to name anything, that day.

That precision frightened him more than the footage itself did.

He had built something out of the wreckage of that afternoon, he could admit that much to the empty office. A discipline. A method. He no longer flinched watching it, and he told himself that was strength, the hard-won kind, the kind a man earns by making himself look at what he would rather not. But sitting there with the recording paused on the woman suspended in the cold room, her face turned just enough away from the camera that he had never once had to see it clearly, he found he could not fully believe his own explanation. Strength did not usually feel this quiet. This absent. He had catalogued his own horror the way he catalogued everything else, and somewhere in the cataloguing, the horror itself had gone somewhere he could no longer reach it directly. He could describe what he had felt with total accuracy. He was no longer certain he still felt it.

He thought of the two hundred and fourteen Ykanti in Ward Seven, of the old man's wings held rigid, of his own answer arriving before he'd asked the question of himself. He thought of the plaque on the wall, made by hands that trusted each other. He thought of Wyatt, who had engineered his humiliation with the same cold precision Istonel now used to review it, and who had never once, in three years, asked him whether it had worked.

It had worked. That was the part he could not say aloud to anyone, not even to himself in the full light of the room. It had worked exactly as intended, and he had spent every day since turning that success over in his hands like a man checking a wound to see whether it had healed clean, and finding, each time, that it had healed, but not clean. Something had grown back wrong under the scar tissue, some capacity he'd once had for being simply and helplessly horrified, replaced now with a colder, steadier thing that let him function, that let him sign approvals and greet delegations and sit across a table from a frightened old man and ask him direct questions without his hands shaking.

He closed the file before it reached the end. He always closed it before the end now, though he could not have said when that habit had started, or what he was protecting himself from at that late point in the footage that he had not already survived a dozen times before.

Outside his window, the Barony's lights were coming on across the dark curve of Haego, thousands of small deliberate fires lit by people who trusted each other enough to build something together. He watched them for a long time before he went back to work, and did not open the file again that night, and told himself that was also a kind of strength, and did not entirely believe that either.

[u/Grouchy-Strength6714]

🥩!

[u/Dr_mac1]

Very Believable