colonized
Elru had been an island, when its people lived and it had not yet become bare scorched earth hemmed in by ocean. That was one reason Solaris had never treated with the Elru as it had with all the other surface-dwellers of the world; not because Solarian forces had any technological difficulty with crossing a few hundred miles of ocean, of course, but simply because the Elru were so separate and isolated -- by customs and culture as well as by water -- from the remainder of the world that it seemed like too much trouble to even bother with them. The Elru, a proud race of warriors and elemental-Ether shaman, would have had mixed feelings over this categorization, had they, unlike any other surface-dwellers, remembered Solaris's existence. Always irksome to be beneath consideration, of course, but they were not so proud that they were foolish, either.
Dominia was at the far end of the island the day that Solaris changed its mind, the one that faced toward ocean rather than toward distant inhabited lands; she was hunting in the forest, poised on a tree-branch and watching a bit of fresh-water stream where she had seen fresh zwer-tracks in the mud around its bank. Something had glinted in the sky, and she had stood up straight on the branch, frowning up at the ragged patches of blue that shone through the trees with hand visoring her forehead from the afternoon sun. She had seen bright wisps of cloud, and a V of dark birds winging and zigzagging in and out of the gaps she could see... and then metal. The underbelly of the battleship.
It was premonition more than knowledge. She dropped to the ground, left her spear stuck shaft-up in the earth, and sprinted for the city.
Dark was coming on by the time she arrived, winded and nearly doubled up with the pain in her side. She smelled the smoky beginnings of forest fire with about twelve miles to go, and superstitious dread churned up from her stomach and slimed the back of her throat; the Elru were terrified of fires, they lived in elaborate cliff-dwellings among the mountains to the west, but the woods were dry, ancient, and their means of supporting their lives. But it was when she first started seeing bodies, about ten miles out, that she began to realize that it no longer mattered.
It was over by the time she came. Whatever monsters had done this, they had retreated, and the cliffside stank of corpses and smoke. Some of them had died in battle, with their swords in hand, but hundreds more had been blasted apart before they could even face their enemy. There were ragged, gaping holes in the side of the mountain, where the interconnected, delicate dwellings had been blasted open, their inner walls exposed and fire-holes leaking soot. They looked like cut-open honeycombs. There were dead everywhere, and most were unrecognizable not only as themselves but as once-living creatures at all. They were red smears, black chars, dismantled pieces. Her breath squealed in and out of her in hysterical sobs as she ran to the ladder to her dwelling, her hand sealed over her mouth to try to keep the ashes of her friends and family out of her lungs; she took up her sword, choking on smoke and smells, her eyes streaming until she could hardly see, and she ran for where she could see the battleship, now nestled with its spread wings on the ground.
There was ever only so much time for grief.
At the time it didn't really register with her how frightened the Solarian troops looked as they were rushing back into their battleship, or the way their captains kept checking the sky as they called directions to the few remaining soldiers, or the fact that many of these were badly injured. At the time nothing really registered, not even how many she killed. When she woke up in restraints in a cell in the belly of the battleship, unable to open one of her eyes and spitting blood, she only knew that it hadn't been enough.
A man in an important-looking uniform came down once or twice during her journey, who unlocked her restraints from a panel outside the cell and pushed a tray of food through the semitransparent forcefield that nothing living could cross. She could barely move enough to get across the cell, anyway, but she wouldn't have eaten even if she could. You killed my people, she said, in a thick mushy approximation of her own language. Her tongue felt three sizes too big for her mouth, and slippery with her blood. The man said nothing.
You kill me, she continued, after a moment, making a halting shift to the surface common tongue, which few Elru had ever bothered to learn very well. Or when you set me free I kill you all.
The man looked at her for a long time, and then spoke, in Solarian. She didn't know the words, but she understood the set of his expression and the tilt of his head. No, was what he was saying, at the heart of whatever the words might mean.
No. Neither one.
*
They lost two more men in the process of trying to unload her from the battleship, and she severely injured at least seven more before a nervous-looking scientist had appeared with a syringe full of sedative. This time she woke in the laboratories, in her own tiny pen mostly filled by a cot and a latrine. Later she imagined they had been afraid she would injure the other test subjects, and probably they were right.
The scientists gave up quickly on the idea of experimenting on her; with so many other, better Lamb subjects to go around, using her was far too dangerous to be justified. In those first months she was a caged animal, her growing madness fueled by the rage that occupied every moment of her time and every thought she had. She rarely held still, hardly ever slept, did nothing but stalk the confines of her cage and fly into fits of wrath if a Solarian so much as approached its outer wall; she hurled her body against the bars, screaming, baring her teeth, spitting and biting and clawing nothing as if she could hurt them with the sheer force of her will. They electrified the bars, and she continued as she always had and hardly seemed to notice. They drugged her food, but she did not eat. She seemed to need nothing but hate to sustain her.
Eventually they decided it would be necessary to recondition her. Safer to put her down, of course, but that would require too much paperwork, and perhaps she could still be salvaged as a subject.
Keeping her under heavy sedation and restraints, they set to work on her mind. Information -- particularly about her own past and her life as one of the Elru -- was removed; new information -- about the proper behavior of a Solarian citizen -- was put in. They took away her ability to speak her own language, left lower-class Solarian in its place. Her rages, however, they could not seem to extract digitally, as they were far more autonomic than deliberate. Perhaps the Elru had been berserkers of some kind? A shame to have lost such valuable test subjects. But, well, everyone knew that hiring that thing had been beyond foolish. A real black eye for Gebler, and no mistake.
A hypnotist was brought in, and with the terrible patience of a torturer he fought her into a mildly suggestible state, in which she was incited to rage at Solarians and Solaris in general again and again, and each time punished with increasingly excruciating tortures. Expressions of anger or frustration at other, neutral things, however, were not punished, and if she expressed any of the disdain for the surface that they had attempted to implant in her mind, she was actually rewarded. This conditioning continued for months, and left her in the end incapable of expressing the anger that had devoured any traces of the person she had once been, the anger that was the only thing that had kept her alive long enough to survive their experiments, against those to whom it properly belonged. She still raged, but her rage turned inward; she became infuriated with her confinement, or with small, inconsequential irritations, or far more often, with her own impure, Lamb-born self. If she flew into rages now, it was mostly to cause herself injury. There were times when she attacked herself so severely she had to be restrained again.
This was how Ramsus found her, when he came to her cell and knelt down in front of her cot to offer her the sword the soldiers had taken from her, a Ramsus who was now a small and insecure man that he had not always been who did not know why there were gaps in his memory and sometimes woke up screaming. A tall, high-cheekboned and once muscular woman who had wasted to almost nothing, one of whose ears had a deep snarled scar in it where it tapered to a point as though she had tried to rip it off, and whose arms were laced with oozing scratches from her own fingernails, huddled at the corner of her cot and staring at him with wide incomprehending eyes. I've come to offer you a position, he said, looking at the slender blade balanced across his hands rather than at her. But whether you accept or refuse, we're leaving here today. His eyes flickered around the cell and back toward the scientist who had trailed him in here with feeble protests, with what probably meant to be disdain and only got halfway there from unease. A warrior of your caliber deserves more respect.
And she had not spoken, but only sat and stared at the sword that she was trying to remember had once been hers.
Nor could she remember, later, when he stood against the wall of the salle and watched with kind eyes that she thought of as being like a father's (if she could remember her father and if he hadn't undoubtedly been a filthy Lamb), when she found that her body could remember what had been erased from her mind and her sword sang in her hand the same as it ever had; nor could she understand, as she moved slowly through the balletic basic battle positions of the only language of her people that she still knew, why her vision should be obscured by tears.