Title: Mutable: Chapter Three, Part Two
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Chapter Three, Part
Two
Imperians, Cas thought to himself for the dozenth time since
setting out, were arrogant.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t realized that before, but he hadn’t
really understood it. Now he was beginning to see just how far their arrogance
extended, and it would have made him shake his head if it wasn’t working so
well in his favor.
He moved around the encampment like a wraith, sticking to
the shadows and the obscuring rain, even when he began to shiver from the cold.
There were regular patrols, but the people performing them were fast and
perfunctory with their duties. It was clear that they didn’t have the slightest
concern for their camp being infiltrated. And why should they? Imperians were
the technological marvel-makers, the ones who had pulled themselves out of
planetary solitude and obscurity first and gone on to create a new system-wide hierarchy
as they saw fit. They were at the top—other trade planets were in the middle—Leelangers
were at the very bottom. And Delacoeurians? Ha, they didn’t even make the
graph.
It took about an hour to get the layout of the camp. The
troop barracks and mess halls were close to the front gate, along with the
administration tents. Further in were officer’s quarters, as well as the
dedicated space dock where Imperian ships squatted like giant silver toads,
waiting to leap into the air and croak their way into space. For a people who valued
appearances so highly, Cas was surprised they didn’t do more to enhance the
beauty of their ships.
He didn’t find any weapons, but that was only to be
expected. Besides, anything could be
a weapon. He did find the central
generator, which was guarded by a simple camera and alarm system that a child
could work around. If things went badly for Cas tonight, he could probably still
manipulate Captain Basinti into letting him stay a little longer. Another
opportunity to get outside meant he could disrupt the generators and delay the
Imperians’ exit for days, possibly weeks. There was leeway here, and Cas knew
how to turn the tiniest bit of leeway into a lever to open an entire cavern. Almost
anything could be an advantage if you approached it the right way.
“If you think you might lose, then you’ve already lost,” his
mentor, Ozeda, had told his pupils. Cas hadn’t been the only person of his
generation to take on a phage. Ten had tried, seven had succeeded, and two
remained alive. The other had already left the planet. She was the primary
target on Cas’s list.
Christala. I’m coming
for you.
First he had to make it off of Leelinge, though.
By the end of the second hour, Cas knew he should be heading
back. He needed to break back in, after all. Shaking with cold, he made his way
along the outer edge of one of the smaller barracks, a blocky, artless building
that had probably been thrown together by a bot in under an hour. No
aesthetics, no sense of beauty. Another chink in their Imperian armor.
Voices sounded from inside, braying with laughter so loudly
that, despite himself, Cas was drawn to the sound. He hadn’t heard laughter in
a long time. Should he…would it be wise to…
He had his ear to the edge of the door in a moment, eyes
trained through the window to see what was happening inside. Two men and two
women sat at a table, drinking what was probably alcohol, and also probably against
regulations while they were in potentially hostile territory. Sloppy. So sloppy.
“But truly,” one of the men was expounding to the little
crowd, “the fact that we’ve wasted so much time on this backwater irritates me.
How hard is it to get the Leelangers to agree to our terms? Even cockroaches
can be trained to eat from your hand.”
“Stiff necks,” one of the women, whose curly hair kept
falling into her face, said. “Too much pride. And what do they have to be proud
of, anyhow? Managing to survive on a swampy wasteland like this? Being better
than the inhabitants of the unluckiest ship in the system? It’s ludicrous.”
“This whole fucking situation is ludicrous,” another man
grumbled. “We should have been off this rock a week ago, not coddling a bunch
of refugees destined to become our asteroid miners and toilet bowl cleaners. I
blame Basinti. He’s too soft.”
“Watch it,” the first man cautioned him. “I admit that it’s
inconvenient, but the captain is a hero of the conquest. He wouldn’t get a
command like this if everything was exactly as it seems. There’s got to be some
delicate diplomacy happening.”
“Fuck their diplomacy, Aleks,” the other man grumbled,
taking another drink. “They don’t deserve diplomacy. We should have come in
here, pointed our guns at their heads and said, ‘Give us what we want.’”
“I feel sorry for them,” the second woman spoke up.
Belatedly, Cas recognized her—it was the soldier who had been dispatched to
deliver his meal. “Not the Leelangers so much—the Delacoeurians. Imagine
landing on the planet you’ve been traveling to for centuries and finding it so…awful.
And then they got here and things were just as bad, if not worse. We’re doing
the right thing by taking them away with us.”
“You’re a soft heart,” the loudmouthed man scoffed. “Too soft for this sort of work, Fillie. Lower planetary people are like stray wrakkens—feed them too much and they’ll cling like burrs, even when you try to burn them off. We shouldn’t be encouraging them to rely on better people to take care of them.” The door on the other side of the small building slid open, but the man didn’t notice. “Basinti should have told the Leelangers to take our crumbs and be grateful, and he should have told those fucking Dela-whatevers to make peace with their gods, because—”
“Because what,
Private?”
The way the four of them jumped to their feet was
gratifying. The one who’d been drinking the steadiest lost control of his flask,
too. It fell to the floor with a clang as he wheeled around to desperately
salute the officer who’d crept in like an unexpected storm. Darven, Cas
remembered. First name or last?
“Commander Hije!” the drunk soldier gasped.
Ah. First name, then.
“Because what?” Darven pressed. “Because you think you’d
like to go out there and dispense a little indiscriminate cleansing, is that what you’re thinking? Because you think, what, you’re
so much better than people who’ve not only managed to live in some of the worst
conditions imaginable for decades, but to almost take over the fucking planet
while doing it? People with next to nothing build a civilization underground
that rivals anything we could have done when we first arrived on Imperia. And lucky
them, when they gave birth to dumbasses like you, those dumbasses didn’t survive
long enough to make it into the military, where they could shame their
commanding officers with their idiocy.”
The soldier looked about a moment away from throwing up with
panic. “Sir, I—I didn’t, I’m so—I apologize.”
“I don’t give a damn about your apology,” Darven snapped. “What
I give a damn about is you mouthing off in such a disrespectful manner. And the
rest of you?” The three other soldiers seemed to shrink inside of their
uniforms. “You should have cut your friend here off at the pass. I don’t care
what you say when you’re on your own time, but on away missions like this, you have no time of your own. Your time is my time, it is Captain Basinti’s time,
it is Imperia’s time, and you are disgracing
all of us with your behavior. Next time I catch word of this sort of talk going
around, I’ll have the four of you buried so deep in shit work that your eyes go
brown. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir!”
He singled out one of the women. “Private Fillie, the
captain wants the Delacoeurian in Delta Two brought to his tent. Take Jarves
with you.” He glared at the loudmouth. “And when you’re both done with that, Jarves,
you come find me. Your night’s only just beginning.”
“Yes, sir!” The exited the tent double-time, and Cas swore.
How was he supposed to get in around both of them? He sprinted around the outer
edge of the camp to beat them back to his building, racking his brain for a way
to get inside. He couldn’t out-maneuver two of them, not without—
Ah, but Jarves had been drinking, and heavily. That could be
his in.
Cas beat them to their destination by a comfortable margin,
and watching Private Jarves stagger along, he knew he had a chance. He sidled
as close as he could, the rain mirrored against his bare skin, waiting for them
to get close enough. Jarves was complaining—softly, so at least he could learn—and
Fillie was trying to ignore him. He slouched up behind her as she scanned her
wrist, made to follow her inside—
Cas stuck his foot out, and Jarves tripped over it and fell
right into Fillie, knocking both of them to the ground. Cas darted in around
them and went straight for the showers, letting the phage turn its efforts back
to changing his face as he—very quickly—washed off under the spray, then dried and
got dressed. By the time he came out, the soldiers had righted themselves,
although both were rather red in the face.
“You must have really enjoyed that shower!” Fillie said
brightly. “You’ve been in it for hours!”
Cas smiled sheepishly. “It’s the first hot water I’ve had
access to for months.”
She nodded understandingly. “I see. But you didn’t eat
anything. Weren’t you hungry?”
He was starving, actually—the phage took a great deal of
energy to maintain. “I lost track of time,” he said apologetically.
“That’s all right. Why don’t you eat some real quick, before
we go?”
“Fillie,” Jarves grumbled. “We’re on a timer here…”
“I’ll be fast,” Cas said. He bolted the food down—noodles in
a salty sauce, some sort of spongy vegetable casserole, a square pretending to
be chocolate cake, and a glass of diluted juice. It all tasted heavenly. He
wiped his mouth and stood up from the cot. “Thank you so much,” he told her
honestly. “I’m ready to go now.”
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