After Kvec returned Blue to her tank, he came back for the comatose Khal and carried him back to his room, as no one was sure what else to do with him. The Nyorai simply wasn’t built to take care of injured people, beyond its store of nanites. And poor Kvec got all the shit jobs since he was the strong one that wasn’t squeamish: after taking care of Khal, he was left to drag the bodies of the Tk’Tk’Skree to the airlock so they could be jettisoned out into space. There wasn’t much else they could do with them.

In the meantime, she, Gen, and Skr’Takk were debating over what to do with the Tk’Tk’Skree ship. Dar felt it was best left behind, it could do them no good, but Gen wanted to go over and take a quick look around before they abandoned it, on the off chance there was something “useful” over there (meaning something they could sell on the black market), while Skr’Takk thought she could neutralize the transponder and take the ship for herself. The debate was pointless, mostly because no one intended to concede the sense (if there was any) in each other’s position.

Vani stayed in Khal’s room, hovering over him, monitoring his coma, although there was nothing she could do. Vani didn’t like feeling useless, so she was starting to show rare signs of distress. Mainly scale molting, although she also developed an eye twitch.

They had just reached the end of the system when Khal woke up.

To say he looked pale was to say that space was black: a statement of the obvious, and yet inadequate. He was the color of curdled milk, his lips bloodless, his eyes still angry red with broken blood vessels. Vani seemed startled that he was awake already, but before she could say anything, Khal sat up, and said, “I know what happened.”

He proceeded to tell them what had happened on that moon, how MoSys were trying to utilize technology that the Tk’Tk’Skree didn’t want them to have, and how MoSys had found a perfect code in the “songs” of the Cryers; it was a language that didn’t actually sound like a language, and was almost impossible to translate without an actual Cryer there to do it. The deal MoSys broke was simply a case of overreaching their bounds, bounds imposed on them by the Tk’Tk’Skree. It sounded plausible and logical, and jibed with what little evidence they had. But there was one thing wrong with all of it. “How do you know this?” Dar wondered.

He made a noise that could have been a scoff, but was too anemic. He slid his legs off the bed and sat on the edge, looking like a reanimated corpse. “I honestly have no fucking clue. My powers just seemed to go nuclear on me.”

“We did notice that part. How long have you had powers like that?”

“I assume I was made with them, they just aren’t easy to access.” He stood up with the pained carefulness of an elderly man introduced to gravity after a time away from it.

“You sshould ssit,” Vani suggested so politely it was difficult to tell it was an order.

He shook his head, but it was clearly making him dizzy so he stopped. He found a shirt and pulled it on, then grabbed a pair of pants, but rather then risk his precarious balance he sat back down to wrestle them on. “I’m sorry, but there’s something I have to do.”

Dar assumed he was delirious, but his medical readings were incredibly steady. “What is it you think you have to do?”

“I have to let MoSys know that they can’t use us like this. We’re people, not property.” He struggled his pants on, and almost fell off the edge of the bed while doing so. It would have been amusing - in a pathetic sort of way - if he hadn’t been so serious about it all.

“Uh huh. And how do you plan to do this?”

He looked up at one of her sensor nodes, scowling. “You think I’m full of shit.”

“No, it’s just that you’re not well Khal.”

That earned a scoff. “I know. I’m a bomb, I went off. But I think I have another blast in me.”

Vani glanced up at the node, clearly concerned he was rambling like a crazy person. Was there any way to talk to a person in his state that didn’t come off as patronizing? It was a conundrum. “I’m not understanding this. Could you explain this to me?”

He rolled his bloodshot eyes, as if he knew what she was doing. “I’m dying, Dar, I don’t really have the time to sit and chat. Just do me a favor and head towards the far colonies or the mine reaches. I’m going to buy you some time, so use it, stay under the radar. And tell Kvec I’m sorry, okay?”

How wonderfully ominous. “Sorry about what?”

“Abandoning him.”

She wanted to press on, but the strangest thing happened - Khal stared up at her sensor node, and suddenly everything went black.

****

She came to with the ship streaking onward at full speed, the solar wind caressing the hull of the ship, her skin, as it moved like a bullet towards the nearest transit gate.

“Bruno,” she asked, replaying her last recorded memory. “What the hell happened?” The replay wasn’t at all illuminating.

“Technically? Fuck if I know.”

“Bruno.”

“Well, it’s like this - everybody fell asleep, except Khal and Blue, and he told me that I had to get everyone as far from MoSys space as possible as fast as possible, and you’d all wake up as soon as we were outta their range. Can’t say it made a lotta sense t’me, but he said that was just how it was gonna work. Then he had me grapple the Tk’Tk’Skree ship in, and he an’ Blue took off in it.”

She would have asked him to repeat that, but she got it; it just didn’t make that much sense. “Since when does Khal have the power to put us all to sleep?”

“Since when does he have the power to kill a bunch of bugs?”

Fair enough. She quickly accessed all her eyes across the ship, and discovered that Gen and Skr’Takk were still sleeping, but Kvec and Vani were starting to wake up, and looked just as confused as Dar felt.

Vani had fallen asleep on the floor of Khal’s quarters. As she looked around and shoved herself to her feet, she asked, “Are thhings ass bad ass I thhink thhey are?”

“Undoubtedly.”

What the hell did Khal think he was doing?

***

The alerts started coming in at twenty hundred hours median.

The automated sentinels reported a Tk’Tk’Skree warship headed not just into MoSys federated space, but headed straight towards corporate headquarters. All ships that went out to intercept fell oddly silent without firing a shot, although they still existed and hadn’t disappeared inside their own micro singularity. Someone at HQ assumed this was a further power play on the Tk’Tk’Skree’s part, a show of force, and rather than engage dialogue was attempted by the negotiators. All negotiators who attempted to make contact fell almost instantly into a deep sleep without saying a word. When the automated weapons system went live, they were quickly neutralized by the Tk’Tk’Skree weapons, although the micro-singularity weapon was not deployed. It was impossible to say if that was good news or bad.

There was no one MoSys centrality, but the Hub was considered the heart of the corporation, its main headquarters. It was a triumph of MoSys engineering, a space station roughly the size of the old Earth country Japan, but with a rather meager population, made up of CEOs, bureaucrats, higher level functionaries and the support staff that took care of them. It was also home to the main gengineering complex, although by now they had scattered the modifying tanks into the rim worlds and the settled territories. Top of the line MoSys warships guarded the Hub, but before the word to engage them even came down, ship’s crews started dropping into the same near comas that had hit the negotiators. Even with superior Tk’Tk’Skree technology, one ship wasn’t believed to be enough to be considered a declaration of war, so in good faith - and what was believed to be a public relations first strike - the way was ordered clear, with no one to make any further hostile moves on the ship. (It wasn’t doing any good anyways.)

It stopped just outside the Hub’s gravity well, and finally sent a message, but it wasn’t what anyone was expecting. The view screen showed an Adar model negotiator, much too pale for his genome, bleeding from his nose, with some weird bulbous alien perched on his shoulder like a bizarre deep space parrot. It was blue, with huge eyes on swiveling stalks above its head, and it had a tentacle wrapped around his back and neck. There would be long and hard debate over whether it was controlling him. “The secret is now officially out,” he proclaimed, and the message was being broadcast to all within range of the Tk’Tk’Skree transmission. “Negotiators are actually suicide bombers when things go completely to shit. As if it’s not bad enough that we spend our short lives feeling everyone else’s pain. I don’t think MoSys feels enough pain.” His eyes were now bleeding, leaving thick red lines down his cheeks that could have been tear tracks. “Let’s change that, shall we?”

The recordings left behind were not quite sufficient in explaining what exactly happened. After his threat he cut transmission, and everyone on the Hub save for a single group fell into comas.

The single group untouched were the gengineered fresh from the tanks, awaiting training, or awaiting assignment. They reported hearing screaming, but by the time they emerged into the station proper, all was quiet, and everyone seemed to be unconscious.

And no one would wake up.

Epilogue

It was funny how could you could spend such a long time with a person and yet never really know them.

Kvec liked to come and sit in Khal’s room, stare at Blue’s empty tank, and wonder what happened.

It was six months ago when the corporate population of MoSys Hub fell into comas - they were still there as far as he knew, alive but totally unreachable - and Khal apparently died of what was called a “terminal cranial event”, some kind of code for the brain tissue meltdown that killed many a Negotiator. It wasn’t clear what killed Blue, although it was assumed she had simply been out of water too long.

Debate had raged about what Negotiators were, and it continued unresolved. MoSys claimed they were simply negotiation and communication “tools”, not weapons, but what Khal had accomplished proved otherwise, and MoSys were having great difficulty spinning it into something benign. That didn’t keep them from trying.

The situation between MoSys and the Tk’Tk’Skree was precarious. War hadn’t been declared, but mainly because each side wasn’t completely certain about the other side’s weapons. It was an uncomfortable stand off, and any day it could erupt into something nasty and irreversible. But doubts about the abilities of the negotiators were keeping the Tk’Tk’Skree from killing them all … for now. How long that would last was unknown.

Life had gone on for them, and Khal had been right - they had dropped far below MoSys’s radar, namely because they had a billion more worrisome problems than a stolen ship with a rogue crew. Someday they might care again, but the heat was currently off, and they managed to enjoy it for a while.

Running scams were a bit harder without him, but so far they managed. Gen still didn’t get how the “junkie squid fucker” turned into a weapon of galactic destruction, but no one talked too much about Khal anymore; it was just too uncomfortable, and no one knew what to say.

He did miss him, possibly more than most. He - and Kvec always felt weird thinking of himself as a “he”, a soft meat term that just didn’t apply to his people - could talk to Khal like no one else. Oh, he could communicate with the others, send them messages and see responses in return, but it wasn’t the same.

He had some hope, though. Khal was one of a type, and there were other types like Khal out there, just with different names. And different abilities? Perhaps; perhaps not. It was that doubt that was holding an uneasy truce, that was keeping people from engaging in mass extermination of negotiators. They were also going rogue in record numbers, although MoSys officially denied this - but even they were afraid to bring the hammer down on their own creations. They’d created something that scared even them, and they weren’t sure they could contain it.

They were in the far colonies now, and Kvec had some hope they’d run into a rogue negotiator of Khal’s genotype. They wouldn’t be the same, but it would still be nice to have someone he could really “talk” to.

Dar’s voice came to life over the comm. “Gen and Skr’Takk are arguing again. Can you break them up before they maul each other ?”

Kvec nodded and gave a thumb’s up gesture to Dar’s embedded eyes. Skr’Takk was still with them, still planning to assassinate her traitorous sister, but right now it seemed like a pipe dream. Mainly she seemed to be waiting to see if the Tk’Tk’Skree declared war on MoSys; she seemed to believe her sister would be vulnerable if this occurred, but Kvec couldn’t follow the logic. The funny thing was, when Gen and Skr’Takk weren’t arguing, they got on fabulously, and Gen seemed interested in becoming the mercenary leader of Skr’Takk’s army. It was the best of both worlds to Gen apparently - violence and money.

Kvec left Khal’s quarters, and mused over the fact that as unsettled as things were on a universal scale, things had never been better for those on the Nyorai.

He just wondered why it didn’t make him feel any better.

The End

He was luxuriating in the peace and quiet of alien emotions, not so sordid and intrusive as others of his own kind, when a voice said in his head: “What did they do to you?”

He opened his eyes, expecting to see an alien sky over him, black velvet and diamond dust, but instead it was the saffron colored ceiling of a recovery tank, its translucent side letting him see the techs beyond, arguing and thinking he couldn’t hear them. But he could; he could feel the pulse of their emotions, raw and angry, lava pouring down his neural pathways, their words simply imprints in the molten stone. “ - freak, we put them out of their misery,” the female said. She was tall and slender, Asian physiotype, wearing the pale green smock of a gengineer first class. Her name was Lala Sumi, and she didn’t like people. She did like working with cells and clusters, the building blocks and rough materials of people, but not the finished product; the finished product was messy and intrusive, traitorous and disappointing. She resented being here, with a finished project gone so horribly, monstrously wrong, a failure bleeding into her time.

“They want him alive,” the man replied, his voice as sharp as it was cold. He was wearing the grey coat of a MoSys “efficiency officer“, one of those specialized bureaucrats who rode the line between the people who were the government and the ones who kept things functioning. They usually lived in their own stratospheres, unable to cross atmospheric lines into either’s territory. His name was Gren Ercott, shorter and more solid, of Northern European physiotype, and he hated engineers, complainers who didn’t seem to understand the first thing about how you had to bend laws to suit their will, even if it was a law of physics. People were simply commodities, and if they didn’t give out more than they took, they had no reason to exist; they could easily be replaced with a more efficient unit. So he and Lala were quite the team to draw to - if they had scalpels, they would have sliced each other to ribbons, and never even felt bad about it, except for the fact that the blood was bound to stain their suits. “They think he can survive.”

Lala slapped her hand on a diagnostic table, the sound like a small explosion, and Khal would have flinched if he wasn’t so drugged that he felt totally detached from his body. It was a soft prison with flimsy borders, a horizon dissolving into a puddle of nutrient fluid. “What do those fucks in planning fail to understand? If a circuit overloads, it ceases to work.”

“A brain isn’t a circuit.”

“In this case it is very much equivalent. What happened to the others of this genetic line will happen to him; he will melt down brutally, messily, and it’s impossible to say how many people he’ll take with him.”

“As long as they’re the right people, who cares?”

Khal found himself back in the cave of that unnamed moon, the laser carved dome of rock arching over his head. He watched the cyber-techs with their mechanical interfaces glinting in the light chem lights as they attempted to mesh MoSys tech with what was clearly an alien technology. The metal looked almost like black glass, and Khal realized it was almost the same stuff that made up Skr’Takk’s prison; it was Tk’Tk’Skree technology. And suddenly, just like that, he knew what had happened on that moon, why they had found bloody body parts inside the rock walls.

“You’re messing with their transporter technology,” he said to the metal side of the tech’s head. Of course they couldn’t hear him. “Either they booby-trapped it, or it was just so far over your heads you fucked up royal without realizing it. Either way, you’re dead. You were torn into pieces and rematerialized in solid rock.” He wandered down the stone corridor, out onto the flat expanse of the moon where a handful of Cryers stood standing guard around a field projector, surrounding the cave with a force field that would dampen emanations and any explosions, if there were any, and enhance a carrier wave if necessary. Overheard, in very low orbit, a cargo skiff hovered waiting for the test cargo to materialize.

“You broke the deal,” he muttered, aware of what the Tk’Tk’ Skree had sent before they destroyed the MoSys ship. The Cryers stood by emotionlessly, humanoid shaped mounds of crystal, unaware they were about to die.

He looked around, strangely thinking he could feel the electrical field raising the hair on his arms. “The transporter failure will cause a feedback loop in these emitters, and you will all be shattered in the shockwave, too close to ground zero. It probably was deliberate sabotage on the Tk’Tk’Skree part - that’s how they’ll know you broke the deal. MoSys messed with technology of theirs you said you wouldn’t, probably illegally acquired. The skiff is far enough away that it will survive, and as it flees orbit, it will send a distress signal made of Cryer chimes, an unexpected message that will have no meaning to the Tk’Tk’Skree, but will to the MoSys people who designed it. They’ll know that’s the high sign of catastrophic failure. It was a distress call, but not for you poor things, like we thought. It’ll be for your stupid MoSys masters.”

Khal sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes, no longer wanting to see this frozen moment in time before the world changed, before his life started sliding away like so much sand through his fingers. “I can’t know this,” he muttered to himself. “There’s no way I can fucking know this.”

“You’ve always known it, you just don’t want to,” a woman’s voice said. It was the same one that had asked what had they done to him.

He looked up, to find himself sitting on the white sands of the planet Xentropha, the mica sprinkled within the grains glittering like silver, the night sky the velvet cover with gleaming shards of stars like ice he had been anticipating before. Standing several feet away from him was a woman as blue as the morning sky, her clothes as much a part of her as her skin and just as blue, her scalp bald and her ears small whorls, almost like afterthoughts. Her eyes were yellow, and that told him who this was. “Blue?” he asked, rubbing his neck. Something in him ached, but oddly enough, he wasn’t sure what or where. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes it does. You hide behind chemical walls because you’d rather not deal with anything. But you have to at some point, Khal, and that time is now.”

He shook his head, aware that his was a mindscape, where anything could happen and things rarely made a great deal of sense. “I know I’m special to your people, Blue, but among the humanoids I’m just another commodity.”

“You think we think you’re special simply because you’re one of the few savages who can speak our language?” she replied, her voice dripping with disdain. “There was great power in you, locked away. We thought you knew about it, but clearly we were wrong. You didn’t want to know about it.”

He really didn’t know what she was talking about … or did he? Oh, fuck it, he was tired. “Look, whatever, I just want to sleep.” He collapsed back on the powdery sand and looked up at the sky. Xentropha was really a very peaceful planet; he hoped MoSys didn’t ruin it, like they ruined nearly everything else.

“If you sleep, you die.”

“So?”

He felt a sharp pain in his leg. “Ow!” He sat up to rub his calf, which Blue had somehow kicked, even though she hadn’t moved from where the purple-blue water lapped at her ankles. Still, mindscape - if you knew how they worked, you could do anything. “Do you have to be so fucking bossy?”

“You don’t have to give in to death just like that. Yes, you’re going to die, but you can make it count.”

He glared at her. “Maybe I don’t want to make it count. Maybe I don’t care.”

“Do you know what you did?”

“When?”

“Before you came here.”

He had to think about it for a moment, but it was a curious thing - he had no memories beyond being in the water. He thought there was something about the ship, but he couldn’t say what, any more than he could pinpoint the dull ache somewhere deep inside his body, as insistent as a toothache. “No. What did I do?”

She gave him a hard look with her pupil-less yellow eyes. “If I knew for sure, I wouldn’t ask. But I believe you projected the pain you absorb outward.”

He just stared at her, pretty sure that entire sentence made no sense at all. “Huh?”

“The Tk’Tk’Skree attacked the ship. I think you gave the pain back, and it overloaded their central nervous systems, causing them to shut down.”

“Okay, first, central nervous systems don’t shut down; if they did, everyone would die. Second, I can’t “project” pain, I can only take it in.”

“Every entrance has an exit,” she replied cryptically. “There has to be a release valve for the pressure, even if it’s psychic pressure. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And everybody did die.”

Something twisted hard in his gut, making his stomach feel like it had just turned to stone. He’d have accused her of making a sick joke, but Blue didn’t joke; he didn’t think she actually had a sense of humor. “What?”

“The Tk’Tk’Skree. You didn’t kill that one on the ship already, Skr’Takk. Why I don’t know; she seems like an odious creature.”

He just sat there, mouth agape, feeling the rest of his insides ice over and turn to stone. So he was a killer now. He wished he was surprised, but no, he wasn’t. He felt that there was always something in him that would be, if he could only get past the fact that he felt everyone else’s pain. Finally he’d found a way around that. “But … that doesn’t make sense. I can’t do that. Also, I’m a lazy dick.”

The look she gave him was equal parts weary and scolding, like she was his mother all of a sudden. “No, Khal, what you are is a coward. It’s always been inside you, you’ve just been afraid to touch it. You took on too much pain, and a switch tripped; it made the decision for you. A self-destruct sequence started in your head, some kind of failsafe I imagine, but it’s been stopped. You’re still dying, Khal, but I think we have one last shot.”

He shook his head, wondering if he could be actively delusional in a mindscape. “Blue … this doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

She huffed out an exasperated sigh, her grasp of humanity and its odd noises greatly improved since she first thought a burp was some kind of Human compliment. “I’m telling you that you can stop them, possibly you alone. But you have to act as soon as you can. I don’t know much time you have.”

Impending death might explain the constant but otherwise indefinable ache that seemed to radiate from somewhere deep inside him. Now this was proof of just what a lazy dick he was, because he honestly didn’t care that he was dying. It didn’t seem worth raising a fuss about. “How did you stop my “self-destruct”?”

“I didn’t. I told you to.”

That made no sense at all. But since arguing with Blue was like … well, arguing with an alien squid, there really was no point in pursuing this further. “Fine, whatever. Who are we stopping and why? The Tk’Tk’Skree?”

“It’s not the Tk’Tk’Skree we’ve been running from.”

“Oh, okay. A revenge thing.”

“If you wish, but I don’t think of it that way. They damned you; is it not right to damn them back?”

“But what’s the point? I can’t stop them. They won’t stop trying to make people like me. It’s a nice idea - well, in a bloody minded sort of way - but it seems pointless.”

“You deserve better.”

“Says who?” he replied, although he appreciated the sentiment. At least someone in this universe had cared about him. But that wasn’t fair, was it? Kvec probably did too, and maybe Dar, somewhere in her tin can heart, felt some smidgen of duty to him …

And that’s when he realized any revenge done for him would be pointless, but it wouldn’t necessarily be for anyone else. He could buy the others time, let them get as far from MoSys as possible. At best, he could simply delay MoSys creating more people like him, and not for long - they always thought they’d “worked the kinks out” when they really hadn’t done anything but rearranged the same old troublesome genes - but he could put the others off the radar for a while. “Are you coming with me?” he wondered.

She stiffened, as if that had been offensive. “Of course. Where else would I go?”

“Home?”

The look she gave him was slightly bewildering. “I left with you. I go where you go. I also believe I can help.”

Maybe she could. There was a special solace in the alien rhythm of her emotions, in the way they transformed into colors and the way colors transformed into them. It was all a language, and yet so few could speak it. Now it was his chance to speak for those who couldn’t, to turn on the beast tracking them and stalk it instead.

They would never see it coming. And how stupid - they should have. Betrayal was the lingua franca everyone could speak.

Okay, so maybe he was dying, and maybe he had somehow unleashed the monster that MoSys had planted inside him. On a cosmic scale it was so small as to be ultimately meaningless.