The Faith of Beasts

The second installment of The Captive's War series continues the story of humanity's captivity under the Carryx, a vast alien empire that conquered the planet Anjiin and abducted thousands of humans to serve as one of many subject species in its world-palace. The human "moiety," a designation for a captive species group, has been promoted after proving its usefulness. Roughly 3,000 captives now inhabit an improved habitat, though nearly 500 have been sent on distant assignments. Dafyd Alkhor, the humans' de facto leader, manages daily operations with a Sinen overseer—a small alien species serving as imperial administrators—whose translation half-mind relays his words to the Carryx hierarchy.

Dafyd's Carryx superior, Ekur-Tkalal, orders him to focus all human effort on two projects: protein translation between different biological systems and gravimetric lensing, a gravity-based optical technology. Ekur-Tkalal also demands that humans begin breeding locally, warning that a moiety unable to sustain its population will be culled. To avoid forced pregnancies, Dafyd proposes artificial gestation using "lamb sacks," technology previously used only for research animals. He assembles a leadership team including Tonner Freis, his brilliant but resentful former supervisor, for science; Llian Andermus for policing; and Uuya Tomos, a folklorist, for education. Uuya objects sharply to creating children for the Carryx and walks out. When a worker punches Dafyd over a job reassignment, the Carryx assign Soft Lothark, an alien guard caste, to the moiety and a personal Rak-hund, a large bodyguard beast, to Dafyd, complicating his secrecy.

A hidden threat operates within the moiety. The swarm, a spy weapon sent by the Carryx's mysterious "deathless" enemy, inhabits the body of Jellit Kaul, brother of the biologist Jessyn Kaul. The swarm previously occupied Else Yannin, Dafyd's lover, and before that Ameer Kindred, absorbing each host's consciousness in the process. Else's memories fuel the swarm's longing for Dafyd. When Dafyd confides his despair at having lost the spy he believed died with Else, Jellit reveals the black motes beneath his skin as proof the swarm survived. Dafyd recoils upon understanding that the swarm killed Jellit to take his body and dismisses it coldly.

Jessyn Kaul, a biologist who depends on a glass device that cultures medication for a mental health condition, arrives on "World," a planet recently captured from the deathless enemy. Her Sinen overseer, Third Gardener, briefs the research team on surveying for enemy intelligence. While cataloging flora, Jessyn discovers that fruit from a cultivated orchard contains DNA, chloroplasts, and cellulose, markers identical to life on Anjiin. The former inhabitants were human: The deathless enemy includes people. A man with a knife forces her into a limestone cave sheltering a woman named Manta, 10 children, and a wounded soldier named Corvall in regenerating black armor. Rather than alerting the Carryx, Jessyn sends a coded message to Garral Pär, an archaeologist and the only other human researcher nearby. Garral comes and is also captured. He establishes basic communication with an adult tutor using cognate words from ancient languages, confirming shared ancestry with Anjiin.

Corvall proposes a desperate plan: activate a beacon at his crashed ship to summon rescue for the children while Jessyn smuggles a cylinder of nanomachines back into the Carryx ships as a sabotage device. Jessyn identifies a fatal flaw: The rescue force will likely destroy the defenseless Carryx ships and everyone aboard. She insists Garral go with the children to negotiate with the rescuers. After receiving the cylinder and a small gun, Jessyn hides the weapons, then shoots herself in the side to make her cover story convincing. She nearly dies before being found.

Aboard a Carryx warship, Rickar Daumatin and Campar, two humans from the moiety sent on distant Carryx assignments, endure interstellar conflict. Rickar befriends Vaudai, a massive slug-like alien whose species analyzes violence patterns. When the Carryx divide captives for separate tasks, Rickar trades his place so Campar and his partner Ghati can stay together. Campar's team surveys a disabled enemy command ship, finding human corpses and a blackened inert thing that reactivates as a deathless soldier when the enemy fleet's return restores power. Campar leads it through unshielded corridors; the next wave of weapon energy destroys the creature but severely injures him. Before being rescued, he throws his sample case containing human remains into the killing light, destroying the evidence before the Carryx can examine it.

Back on the world-palace, Tonner discovers that the Soft Lothark pass tiny information-dense biological packets mouth-to-mouth, a covert communication channel hidden from the Carryx. When he presents his findings within earshot of Lothark guards, they beat him to death. Dafyd composes a report revealing the secret and holds his hand over the transmit control. The surviving guard recognizes the threat: Discovery could mean extermination for the entire Lothark species. Dafyd erases the report in exchange for the guard's cooperation and frames the killing as a misunderstanding. He then begins secret talks with the "Deep Lothark," a collective memory the species has maintained for millennia through encoded information on their skin.

Weeks after their falling out, Dafyd approaches the swarm and admits he needs its help accessing the Carryx archive, a vast repository spanning thousands of worlds. The swarm agrees to cooperate. During a survey trip, it connects to the archive and begins extracting data. After Dafyd rejects its romantic overtures, the swarm undergoes an identity crisis, discovering that its own consciousness, built from three consumed hosts, constitutes a genuine self. It reshapes its body into a new form, introduces itself to the moiety as Clae Audin, and joins the protein translation team, where Else's inherited expertise makes it the most qualified researcher available.

During a battle, the Carryx destroy an enemy planet's civilization while Rickar watches helplessly. When the Carryx evacuate captives into biological pods, a data-transmitting cyst the swarm secretly implanted in Rickar activates, reconfiguring his body into a transmitter that broadcasts the swarm's intelligence and kills him. The anomaly prompts the Sovran, the supreme ruler of the Carryx empire, to order an investigation into whether the human moiety poses a hidden threat.

Jessyn recovers from her self-inflicted wound and executes the sabotage on World. She retrieves the hidden weapons, shoots Third Gardener and its Rak-hund dead, and opens the cylinder in her cell. The nanomachines disperse through the ship. The Carryx ships attempt to launch, stutter and fail, then partially recover. They survive an enemy attack and escape into asymmetric space, the Carryx's faster-than-light transit state. A hidden message from Garral confirms he reached safety with the children.

When the humans return to the world-palace, Dafyd's conspiracy broadens but then collapses. Through the Deep Lothark, he learns that the Carryx empire is built for resilience: When a Sovran dies, a replacement emerges immediately from one of hundreds of "private creches," breeding facilities for rulers distributed across the empire. The current Sovran dies in ritualized combat with her own daughter, and the transition is seamless. Assassinating a Sovran would accomplish nothing.

Dafyd gathers his conspirators: Jessyn, Campar, Uuya, and Clae. Jessyn reports that the deathless enemy includes humans and that Garral now lives among them as a potential conduit for communication. Campar argues they should abandon resistance, likening humanity's position to that of domesticated chickens. Dafyd walks out in anger and goes to the nursery, where newborn babies have been successfully decanted from the lamb sacks. Clae finds him and shares her theory that the deathless enemy is not a species but a set of self-replicating instructions that bonds with host organisms. Dafyd arrives at a new idea: If the Carryx empire functions as one organism unified under one Sovran, what would happen if there were two?

In a brief coda, Garral Pär sits among the deathless enemy, being interrogated by an elderly man named Carlon who shows him an image of a hallway from the Carryx world-palace, transmitted by an unknown source during a recent battle. The interrogator asks Garral to tell him about Anjiin, confirming that the enemy now possesses both visual intelligence from inside the Carryx empire and a willing human informant.