Page 7 of Mutiny

"Large Vaurelcar ships have to have on-board farms like this," he continued, his words still calm and slow. "It is standard Calicium policy to force-feed them until they grow to a minimum size required to be fully outfitted. Caloric matter is all that is deemed important."

"You mean built," I said, staring out at the farm. "Ships can't grow."

"It is alive," he said. "The ship is a large biological organism with a centralized core that controls the rest of its body. When you humans have made statements about taking over the ship, you are implying you intend to enslave it."

"It's alive?" I gasped. "Is it unable to communicate? Why hasn't it said anything?"

"It doesn't want to talk to us," he said.

I fell silent, looking out at the farm as dread grew in me. I didn't want to hear what came next. I already knew what he was going to say. I knew it from the moment I heard the official term for us was dross, from the moment I saw the room Sara commandeered and understood its purpose.

"Why doesn't it want to talk to us?" I said softly.

I didn't want to think about it, but I had to. Horrible things didn’t just go away if you ignored them. There was one major reason I could think that a living monster that could fly through space wouldn't want to speak to the small creatures it carried around. Back on Earth, I didn't talk to the protein bars I kept in my purse either.

Fear churned in my gut.

"I don't know, but it deserves to have its boundaries respected. It is important that you understand," he said. "No matter how trapped you feel, this ship is not the one to blame."

"Maybe it doesn't want to talk to us because it doesn't see us as people," I said. "Are we just cattle to it?"

"No." Bulwark put his hands on my shoulders, turning me to face him as he looked at me intently. "If he saw you as food, you would be dead already. The care and work he's put into adapting to make you more comfortable show he sees you as guests; he's even labeled you as such in the limited system he's given us access to. He does not see you that way."

I didn't know why he switched from calling the ship "it" to calling it "he," but it didn't matter enough to ask. All that mattered was knowing if I was going to be devoured in the belly of this whale. If it were going to eat us, then I would cut it open from the inside out.

"Then why?" I asked. "Why doesn't he just tell us what is going on? Why doesn't he tell us where we are going? Why doesn't he give you that information so that you can reassure us? Why don't you demand it?"

"I don't have the right to demand that. Vaurelcar ships are viewed as tools, not people," he said. "He has not been allowed to speak since he was captured. He was taken at an immature age and is now a fully grown adult of his species. My brothers and I, whom you humans have saved, none of us will attack, pressure, or do anything to make this ship do anything that he does not wish to do, even if we were capable of it. We owe you a debt, but we will not repay that debt with cruelty towards the one who deserves it the least."

"The others need to know that," I said.

He paused, his eyes going distant.

"The ship does not want that," he said. "He requests privacy."

"Is he talking to you now?" I asked.

"Not exactly," Bulwark said. "There is a type of picture-code that we used to communicate between units without being flagged by our control chips and triggering a hard memory reset. He has sent me a message that way. Please respect his wishes."

I turned back toward the vast, empty field and Bulwark's hands fell from my shoulders without any attempt to restrain me.

My mind raced. All this time, I'd been planning a mutiny against a ship that was just as much a prisoner as I was. Back on Earth, the empire survived by pitting victims against each other, building a battlefield out of the desperate while the architects watched safely from above.

Bulwark was right to bring me here, to show me this space and make me understand that this ship, this world, was so much larger than the small boxes I had been confined inside of. My mind was creative, my energy boundless, but even with all of that, this new space showed me clearly that I needed something that I hadn't been getting.

I needed a valid target for my rage.

"He's listening though, right?" I said, my eye catching on a strange mural in the distance on the far wall. It looked like an artist's rendition of Frankenstein, but instead of a drowned girl, the monster lifted a laughing woman out of the water, daisies falling from her hair as her eyes sparkled with delight.

That wasn't the work of the ship. Everything I'd seen on board had been stark and lifeless, sterile steel dedicated to pure functionality. The only expressions of creativity were in the human sections: our common area, our private areas, the outfits being shaped by women taking sharp objects to dull, ugly fabric to form difference out of uniformity.

That painting on the wall was the work of a human.

"He is listening," Bulwark confirmed.

I took a deep breath, grounding myself against the dirt, and spoke to the empty air.

"Listen up," I said. "I'm willing to commit to you, here and now, that you help us, you give us the tools and the education, you take us where we need to go, and we will do everything in our power to take down the Calicium empire and ensure that anyone else they are holding captive is set free. I don't fully know what that means or what we can do, but we will figure it out, and we will do it. Humans are phenomenal at working together to take down organizations of evil; we celebrate stories about it in all of our cultures, in our traditions and in our ancient stories. We just need to be pointed in the right direction."