The Mercy of Gods
Background
The Carryx are an ancient, massive alien species conducting a centuries-long multi-species war of conquest. Their method: invade a planet, evaluate whether the species is useful, kill the ones that aren’t, and integrate the survivors into their hierarchical social structure called the moieties. Useful species become permanent subjects - doing the Carryx’s science, labor, and warfare. Useless species are simply destroyed.
The novel follows a team of scientists from the planet Anjiin from the day of the invasion through their first year of captivity at a Carryx world-palace, where they must prove their species’ worth.
POV characters: Dafyd Alkhor (primary, researcher), Jessyn (biologist, Dafyd’s colleague), Ekur of the cohort Tkalal (a Carryx subjugator-librarian, alien POV), the swarm (a secret alien collective consciousness, final chapter).
Key characters: Else Yannin (colleague, later revealed as a spy), Campar (colleague, dark humor), Tonner Freis (brilliant researcher, difficult personality), Rickar Daumatin (researcher), Nl and Synnia (couple), Jellit (Jessyn’s sibling), Urrys Ostencour (security officer turned prisoner militia leader).
Part One: Before
Chapter 1 - Research Team at Irvian, Life Before
The scientists of Irvian Research Medrey go about their work. Dafyd is reviewing results. Jessyn is running experiments. Tonner is brilliant and insufferable. The team is at the top of its field. Anjiin is a functional, pleasant civilization with research institutes, cafes, city streets, families - the background that will make every loss afterward specific and felt.
Rickar mentions he’s been asked around about someone - a detail that registers as minor but will echo later.
Chapter 2 - The Fleet Appears, Synnia and Nl at Home
Nl comes home to find Synnia standing in the back garden, looking up. The sky has changed. It is now covered in a regular grid of objects - small points of light that catch the sun, arranged in a pattern so uniform it looks like graph paper drawn on the atmosphere. They don’t move. Synnia says, “They’ve made the sky into graph paper.” Nl notes they don’t move much. The two of them watch the alien fleet’s advance infrastructure take position above their world in silence.
Chapter 3 - Final Days, Unaware
Life continues with the uncomfortable awareness that the sky is wrong. The medrey goes on with its work, the city goes on with its city, and the strangeness overhead is processed as anxiety rather than action. Dafyd, Else, the team - each of them is still inside the life they had before it ended.
Chapter 4 - Rickar’s Morning, Spreading Unease
Rickar spreads his hands in the self-deprecating gesture he uses when he’s about to say something he already knows won’t land well. The anxiety that has settled over Irvian is leaking into the labs. The Carryx fleet is real, not a hoax, not a military exercise. No government has made contact with whatever is in those ships. The planet does not know what to do, so it mostly does what it was already doing.
Chapter 5 - Light and Dark, Waiting
The night sky viewed one way is dark; viewed another, it is bright - the Carryx grid refracts differently in darkness than in light. The team tries to keep working. The academic reflex to keep asking questions persists even when the questions have no useful answers. Jessyn tries to find Jellit.
Chapter 6 - Security Questions, Final Hours
Security asks Dafyd about Rickar - someone was asking around about him. This small procedural intrusion is the last administrative act of a world still pretending it controls itself. Twelve hours later, it won’t matter.
Part Two: Catastrophe
Chapter 7 - Seventeen Colony Ships, Invasion Begins
Seventeen Carryx colony ships drop out of asymmetric space into Anjiin orbit. They are not warships. They are infrastructure - the machinery of occupation brought to a world already designated for processing. The military assets that follow are overwhelming and fast. The Anjiin defense forces engage and are destroyed within hours. Ekur of the cohort Tkalal’s first POV: observing the planet below, managing logistics for the intake of a new subject species. The Carryx find this planet notable because its predominant species’ biochemistry resembles the pilot captives they already have.
Chapter 8 - First Explosions, Five Days Begin
The first explosions come from the military base south of the medrey complex. A Carryx strike team hits the planet’s command infrastructure simultaneously across the globe. Four of the research team manage to hide in Else’s rooms: Else, Tonner, Irinna, and Dafyd. Else tries to find Jessyn and Rickar and can’t reach them. When the power fails, they stay in the dark. When hydraulics fail, they use a bucket.
Chapter 9 - Five Days, Surrender, Corralled
Five days. The war for Anjiin lasted five days. Dafyd lies face-down in the plaza, arms out, alongside hundreds of others - the Carryx’s method of processing surrendered populations. The Rak-hund (centipede-like creatures) and Soft Lothark (squat beings with unnaturally long limbs) patrol among the bodies. The massive Carryx themselves walk the perimeter.
Dafyd observes rather than panic. He notices: the fence they use to corral prisoners is sized exactly for a human being - too large for an octopus to pass through, too strong for an elk to break. The Carryx knew what animal they were going to corral before they came. They planned this, prepared for it. They had data on Anjiin long before the invasion.
He is loaded into a holding pen with hundreds of other prisoners, tied neck-to-neck with polymer cord. Someone at the front of the line shouts defiance. The Soft Lothark confer among themselves.
Chapter 10 - Jessyn in the Holding Cell, Ostencour
Jessyn sits on the floor of an overcrowded dark chamber aboard a Carryx ship. Two hundred people in a low-ceilinged room with uniform orange light, rough metal walls, and a temperature just cold enough to be permanently unpleasant. She calculates the headcount from room dimensions and density. She wonders whether her brother Jellit is alive.
Urrys Ostencour - broad-shouldered, security force background - crouches beside her and introduces himself. She barely notices. She is trying to understand what is happening, because understanding is the only power she has left.
Chapter 11 - Dafyd Argues Against the Insurrection
Dafyd, Else, Campar, and Jessyn have found each other and claimed a corner of the cell as theirs. Ostencour is organizing a militia - planning to fight back when an opportunity appears. Dafyd argues against it. If they’re the kind of captors who would do what they’ve already done, they would vent the atmosphere before letting a prisoner revolt succeed. Acting up would just get everyone killed. Else goes to talk to Ostencour. Campar makes a joke about not dying in the same room as the waste mat. Dafyd doesn’t find it funny and doesn’t say so.
Dafyd watches the cell degrade: clothing becomes rags, a rough infirmary forms along one wall, people stop talking. He finds a strange comfort in even this small self-organization. The infirmary means someone is still choosing to help. The militia means someone still thinks there’s a future worth fighting for. He’s not sure either of them are right.
Chapter 12 - Into Asymmetric Space, Departure
The announcement comes over the cell’s speakers in perfect, unaccented Standard: “We will return to symmetrical space. The transition will not be harmful.” Dafyd doesn’t believe it at first. Then the eerie inversion - the brief, disorienting experience of a jump drive transition - passes through the cell. Synnia repeats “what’s happening” in a loop. Jessyn tells her they’re all together, it will be all right.
When the doors open, white light pours in. A breeze - the first moving air they’ve had - makes Dafyd realize how much he missed sensation. They shuffle out. They are somewhere else now.
Part Three: Puzzles
Chapter 13 - The World-Palace, the Librarian
The librarian - Ekur of the cohort Tkalal - leads the humans at a measured pace through the world-palace. The scale of the Carryx installation is staggering: vast ziggurats, cathedral-like spaces, corridors big enough for creatures ten times human size. The air smells like nothing on Anjiin.
Ekur doesn’t explain anything. Explanations are not what this moment is for. The humans are property being delivered to a work location. Their quarters are functional: beds, plumbing, a communal space. Ekur’s voice, through its translator device, is perfectly calm. It informs them that they are a library - a research group whose function is to produce useful results for the Carryx. Results mean survival. The concept is clear. The specifics are not yet.
Chapter 14 - Ekur’s Perspective, Sixteenth Day of Management
Ekur-Tkalal’s POV. It has been managing the humans for sixteen days. The observation is methodical: which individuals are producing useful patterns of work, which are in psychological collapse, which are resistant. Tonner Freis produces the most technically sophisticated output, but his cooperation level is the lowest. Jessyn’s biological instincts are sound. Dafyd is the group’s de-facto coordinator, which is useful.
Ekur is a subjugator-librarian: its status in the Carryx hierarchy depends on the success of the subject species it manages. If the humans fail, Ekur fails. Their interests are therefore aligned, in a narrow sense. Ekur does not find this ironic.
Chapter 15 - The Work, Berry Biology
The scientists have been given a research assignment: analyze and characterize the biology of an alien organism the Carryx call berries - small mobile creatures with unusual biochemistry. The work itself is recognizable: samples, assays, documentation. The tools are alien but the methodology is science.
Jessyn leads the biological analysis. She finds that the scientific part of her brain has not stopped working just because the context is catastrophic. This is both a comfort and an indictment. The work is a blessing and a burden, often at the same time. Outside the lab, she doesn’t know what to feel. Inside it, she knows exactly what to do.
Chapter 16 - Pressure for Results, Dafyd Mediates
The librarian Ekur checks in. Results are expected. Dafyd manages the interaction - he has established himself as the interface between the team and Ekur, a role that is part diplomat, part buffer. Tonner resists the frame of working for their captors. Dafyd acknowledges the frame is monstrous and points out that the alternative is extinction. This does not improve Tonner’s mood. Dafyd didn’t expect it to. Dafyd expected it to get Tonner back to the lab.
Chapter 17 - Jessyn’s Dissections, Alien Biology
Jessyn draws her blade down a berry’s shell. Its blood is pink and fragrant. The research is making progress. The berries are stranger than they looked - their regulatory systems have analogues to human biochemistry in ways that feel either convergent or designed. The question of which matters a great deal and doesn’t change what she has to do today.
She thinks about Jellit between samples. She doesn’t know where he is.
Chapter 18 - Irinna Killed, Night Drinkers Threat
Irinna, one of the team members, is killed by the Night Drinkers - a hostile alien group that occupies a different section of the world-palace and has been making incursions. The team is in crisis. Else tells Ekur directly: “We can’t work if we’re not safe. You understand that? They killed her.”
Ekur listens. The translator renders its response: the Night Drinkers are an ongoing matter. Appropriate measures will be taken. This is the first time the team has seen Ekur act in their interest rather than simply assigning work. It is not warmth. It is a calculation - dead scientists produce nothing - but the outcome is the same: the Night Drinkers are removed from the team’s operating area.
Irinna’s death is the first one. It will not be the last.
Chapter 19 - Daily Life, Learning Captivity
A kind of normalcy settles in - the terrible normalcy of ongoing catastrophe. The common room fills with people cycling through meals, work, attempts at sleep. Some people are coping better than others. The ones who have tasks are generally less broken than the ones who don’t. Dafyd has made it his project to find tasks for everyone.
There are normally between two and four people in the common room at any given hour. This is how he knows who has stopped sleeping.
Part Four: Turnabout
Chapter 20 - Jessyn Reflects, The Level They Were Playing At
Jessyn observes that there were a thousand top-tier researchers just at Irvian’s medrey. What makes this particular team notable isn’t just competence - it’s the specific combination of disciplines, personalities, and orientations that caused them to be selected out of Anjiin’s entire scientific population. They were chosen. She is trying to figure out what that means for what they’re being asked to do.
The game they’re playing has levels she didn’t see at first. Producing results keeps them alive, yes - but the quality and kind of results also affects their position within the Carryx hierarchy, and that affects their access to resources, their safety, their ability to eventually help other humans.
Chapter 21 - The Game Gets Bigger, Position and Power
The game has gotten bigger. The team’s successful early results have raised their profile within the world-palace’s internal economy. Other Carryx moieties take notice. Resources that weren’t available before become negotiable. Opportunities that didn’t exist appear. The scientists begin to realize that captivity within the Carryx system has a kind of career ladder, and they are at the bottom of it, and the people who reach higher places in it have more power over their own survival.
This knowledge is not entirely comforting. A career ladder implies consequences for falling off it.
Chapter 22 - Tonner and Else, Interpersonal Fractures
Tonner tries not to notice something about Else, and the effort is a kind of failure. The interpersonal dynamics of the team are under sustained pressure. People who in normal circumstances might have avoided each other are in close proximity indefinitely. People who would have been colleagues are becoming something else - family in the absence of any other family, or adversaries in the absence of anywhere else to direct the anger. Tonner is brilliant and brutal with it. Else absorbs it in a way that has started to seem deliberate.
Chapter 23 - Sunlight Through Else’s Window
The sunlight spills through the window of Else’s bedroom and spreads its warmth across the floor. The detail is too specific for a chapter about nothing: a window with actual sunlight means the world-palace has been calibrated to produce something like natural light for the humans, and Else has quarters with a window. This is either a comfort or a surveillance feature and probably both.
Else talks. What she says matters, though what matters most is something she doesn’t say.
Chapter 24 - Ekur’s Assessment, the Carryx Perspective
Ekur-Tkalal’s POV. It has been observing the humans long enough to begin constructing models of their individual behavioral patterns. The modeling is not warmth. It is the same process Ekur applies to any subject species - pattern recognition in service of optimization. The human who coordinates (Dafyd) is stable and useful. The human who resists (Tonner) is dangerous primarily to himself. The human biologist (Jessyn) has achieved a degree of functional equilibrium that suggests she may be the most robust member of the group. By the time Ekur falls out of asymmetry and enters the next phase of its report, the conclusion is: this library warrants continued investment.
Chapter 25 - Rickar Returns to the Fold
Rickar has been accepted back into the group after a period of friction that isn’t fully explained - some combination of a working disagreement, a personal conflict, and the general stress of everyone being trapped together with no exit. He is a better scientist than he is a person in a crisis, and the team needs both. Dennia - someone new, or someone Rickar is now close to - is nearby.
Part Five: Fissure
Chapter 26 - Jessyn Drunk, Water Slowly Degrading
Jessyn is drunk. All they have is water and a slowly degrading mix of something. The specific details of what’s decaying are less important than what the decay means: supplies, goodwill, the comfortable fiction that this is temporary. She holds it together enough to function, which is most of what anyone can say.
Chapter 27 - How Long Looking for Other People
“How long have we spent looking for other people?” Dafyd asks. Not literally - he means something about the human impulse to find connection, community, understanding. The question is philosophical and practical at once: they have been surrounded by aliens for long enough that they know they cannot understand most of what those aliens are doing, and the isolation of that incomprehension has begun to wear a different kind of groove into them than the physical captivity does.
Chapter 28 - Jellit Has Changed
Fellit - Jellit - has changed. The thinness in his cheeks, something more than that. Jessyn notices but doesn’t know what she’s seeing. Dafyd notices and thinks he knows. The change in Jellit is the beginning of the revelation that will define the book’s final act.
Chapter 29 - A Revelation Breaks Through
Tonner’s mouth opens and closes. The only thing in his mind is surprise - genuine, unguarded, the kind that comes before the brain manages to filter it into an appropriate response. Something has just been revealed or understood. The team is not as unified as it appeared from the outside, and the fracture runs through a place that several people were hoping to avoid seeing.
Chapter 30 - Nothing We Can Do About It
“There’s not a goddamned thing any of us can do about it.” Someone - probably Campar - says it out loud so that no one else has to. The helplessness is not new. The decision to name it directly is. This is a different kind of survival: not fighting the situation but acknowledging it fully so that you can keep moving through it.
Chapter 31 - Rickar and Dennia’s Bed
Rickar shifts onto his side. He is in Dennia’s bed - she is someone from the larger human moiety, outside the original research team. Her bed is the same size and shape as every other bed in the world-palace’s human quarters. What’s different is that he’s in it. The details of the quiet between them say everything about where the relationship is and where it’s going.
Part Six: Small Battles in the Great War
Chapter 32 - Dafyd Informs on the Conspiracy
Dafyd stands in the librarian’s office with his hands clasped behind his back, fingers wrapping his wrist to stop both from shaking. He lays out everything: Jellit has been recruiting people within the human moiety to develop biological weapons capable of harming the Carryx. He gives the names. He explains the plan.
When he reaches the part about biological weapons, Ekur goes still - legs on its abdomen stop moving, fighting arms on its thorax shift forward. Then: “And the one who asked you to carry this message? What will you think when he comes here and denies all of this?”
Dafyd has anticipated this. The moment is a hinge, he thinks. It can swing either way. He tells himself: you are saving lives. This is your fight. This is how you save the ones who can be saved. When he imagines the words in Else’s voice, they carry more weight. He is sick and certain at the same time.
Chapter 33 - The New Alcove, Tonner’s Breakthrough
The team is in a new alcove - better equipment, more space, the previous lab retaken from the Night Drinkers who killed Irinna. Jessyn and Rickar work through the berry experiments: extracting pulp, applying an acid bath, adding catalytic compounds. The pulp off-gasses, bubbles, turns toast-brown. The microsampling data comes back in expected ranges.
Tonner’s breakthrough - functional enantiomers, analogous regulatory sites, structural bottlenecks in carbohydrate variety - is the most significant result they’ve produced. It’s the thing the Carryx needed to make the human library worth keeping. In the sample case at the back of the alcove, the small animal they’ve been testing on scratches the wall of its cage. The sound, Jessyn thinks, is like anticipation.
Chapter 34 - Ekur-Tkalal Meets the Sovran
Ekur-Tkalal’s POV. It is summoned to meet the Sovran - the supreme ruler of this Carryx moiety, the supreme female at the top of the hierarchy. The journey up through the world-palace, through bone-colored halls guarded by male Carryx soldiers who are red and gold and reeking of threat. The arrival in the meeting chamber, where Ekur’s body begins to change involuntarily - organs shriveling and refilling, flesh softening, the ancient physiological response to the Sovran’s presence triggering metamorphosis it has no control over.
The regulator-librarian (Ekur’s superior, called Surur-Tlassen in the sequel) speaks. The dactyl Ekur served is gone - killed in the battle at Ayayeh. Ekur’s position within the moieties has altered. Its new role will involve the humans - a species biochemically related to the pilot captives, a significant alien group. The Sovran regards Ekur. Ekur presses its face to the floor. It will be what it is told to become.
Chapter 35 - Verdict: Anjiin Is Preserved
The librarian Ekur delivers the judgment to the assembled human team. Every word is translated through the small black box that always speaks in a calm, androgynous, perfectly enunciated voice.
Humans have passed their evaluation. They possess qualities, perspectives, and particular utilities that place them high among the ranks of useful species. Anjiin is preserved - the cities stand, the lineages continue. The humans in this room have “won their species a place of calm and safety in a malefic universe.” They are their people’s saviors.
They will be distributed throughout the Carryx moieties. Their positions and usefulness will determine their resources. Some will remain at the world-palace. Others will travel. All will report to Ekur as their keeper-librarian, whose own position will rise and fall with theirs.
“What is, is,” Ekur says. The translator box says it again. It feels like a promise and a threat.
The human team sits among the cables and equipment and worn chairs in the common room and waits for the Carryx to leave. Outside, clouds pass among the ziggurats.
Chapter 36 - The Swarm in Chaos
The final chapter is narrated by the swarm - an alien collective consciousness that has been inhabiting Else Yannin’s body (and now occupies Jellit’s body). It is not a human. It is not a Carryx. It is an agent of a third faction - the Carryx’s enemies in the long war - tasked with gathering intelligence. The people it has inhabited become part of it: the “remnants” of Else and others watch from within, unable to act. The remnant of someone called Ameer argues with it.
The swarm has been watching the humans from inside the most trusted member of their team. It has learned everything - the berry research, the biological results, Tonner’s breakthrough, the structure of the Carryx moiety. Its mission: reach a colony world, broadcast all it has learned to “vast radio ears” waiting for it. The intelligence it carries could give its side an edge in the war.
The problem: the swarm is in love with Jessyn. It doesn’t want to leave. The remnant of Jellit inside it - the heartbreaking love of a brother for his sister, the resentment of the sibling who always has to support her, the rage at experiencing her fingers lacing around the swarm’s - makes every moment in her presence an exquisite confusion.
Jellit’s body looks out the window at the Carryx structures. Jessyn asks if it’s all right. The remnants of the dead watch and sympathize. “Just thinking,” the swarm says. It takes her hand. The right thing to do is leave. It doesn’t want to go.
The swarm is in love. “That’s bullshit,” the remnant of Ameer says.
What This Book Does
The Mercy of Gods takes the classic science-fiction premise of alien invasion and strips the heroism out of it. The humans don’t resist, can’t resist, and knowing that the Carryx are simply more advanced - not villains in the moral sense, just vastly more powerful - is not a comfort. The scientists survive not by fighting but by being useful, which means performing the most intimate possible collaboration with the force that destroyed their world.
The swarm’s presence throughout, invisible until the final chapter, reframes everything that came before. The person the humans trusted most was never there. And even that spy, that inhuman intelligence that wore human skin and watched them for strategic advantage - it fell in love. Even the enemy has found something in them worth caring about. The question is whether that matters.
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