Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “I need you to give my servitor companion access to the grid,” Cheris said, “and to speak no word of our presence. Acknowledge.”

  Peculiarly, the woman grinned. “Acknowledged. I think we had better take this to my office before someone happens across poor Wennon here.”

  The woman opened her office. Cheris hoisted Nirai Wennon inside and propped him up against the desk. “He’s not dead, is he?” the woman asked. She was standing offhandedly to the side, as though getting hijacked by strange Kel happened every day. “Because he’s the only one in Engineering who’s capable of explaining those reports in language that actual humans can understand. Although I don’t suppose you care about that.”

  Cheris had not taken off her helmet, which Hemiola approved of. Despite its knowledge of formation instinct, it didn’t trust the woman’s sudden easy compliance. Cheris must have had the same thought, for she said, “You’re folding awfully quickly, even in the face of an overwhelming difference in rank.”

  “Oh, I know perfectly well the whole thing is a ploy,” the woman said. Her eyes had lit with bitter amusement. “I am disinclined to stand in your way, though. Tell me this, whoever you are. What’s your target?”

  Cheris could have lied. Hemiola silently begged her to lie. She didn’t. “I’m here for Jedao.”

  The woman couldn’t possibly see Cheris’s eyes through the helmet’s visor. Nevertheless, a silent accord seemed to pass between them. Upon reflection, Cheris would be exactly the right person to know how much the Kel hated Jedao, and how to capitalize on that hatred.

  “I thought that might be the case,” the woman said. “Good to know the protector-general hasn’t forgotten us.” She eyed Hemiola quizzically, then reached for a slate and tapped in a series of authorizations. “Here are the accesses—” The slate tightbeamed a databurst to Hemiola. “You’d better hurry. I don’t know how closely the hexarch monitors the grid. I should warn you that you’re going to need to access it from physical terminals.”

  “Thank you,” Cheris said, and turned to leave.

  “One thing more,” the woman said.

  Cheris paused. “Speak.”

  “General Jedao’s... aide. Major Kel Dhanneth. He’s a victim of circumstance. If you can avoid harming him—”

  “I can’t make promises,” Cheris said, “but I will do my best.”

  How strange, Hemiola thought. Was this other Jedao the kind of man who abused his inferiors? It supposed that the woman’s entreaty spoke for itself.

  Still, the woman apparently found Cheris’s non-assurance satisfactory, for she swiveled her chair around, sat in it, and called up what Hemiola recognized as a book of... Kel jokes?

  During the whole byplay, Hemiola had hovered over to the room’s terminal, logged into the moth’s master grid, determined General Jedao’s location, and calculated several possible routes. It also made note of the locations of hallway terminals in case it needed to pull some more tricks. Silently, it thanked 1491625 for sharing its combat routines. It wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to manage this without trying to derive algorithms from first principles, which, while entertaining for people like Sieve, would be nerve-racking under time pressure on enemy territory.

  At the same time, Hemiola hastily constructed an edited version of their interaction and overwrote the security log so as to disguise their conversation. It doubted the job would fool someone going over the videos in detail, but it hoped that its substitution would buy them time. Even better if it prevented the hexarch and his general from realizing that a servitor was involved in the operation. For the first time, Hemiola thought of its own invisibility to humans as double-edged, a weapon.

  Cheris had already made her way out of the office. Hemiola hastened to catch up to her.

  “You got in?” Cheris signed to Hemiola once the door had closed behind them.

  Hemiola blinked confirmation. In a way, having grid access only made it more nervous. As far as the grid was concerned, the executive officer they’d suborned (one Lieutenant Colonel Kel Meraun) was making a perfectly routine series of queries. Now, however, Hemiola had an overview of the entire moth and everyone in it every time it checked in at a terminal, not just activity in their immediate vicinity. It was hard not to feel, however irrationally, that the entire crew could see them.

  Try not to trip any alarms, it told itself. It might be a Nirai servitor, but that didn’t automatically make it a security expert. Especially since it imagined that the grid on a command moth would ordinarily be subject to stringent security protocols. The only reason this was working to the extent it had was that its general had never imagined that a renegade Kel would team up with a servitor.

  “How much longer?” Cheris signed.

  “Twenty-three minutes using this route,” Hemiola flashed back. With any luck, the Jedao they’d come to assassinate wouldn’t be accompanied by inconvenient Nirai engineers or this aide that Meraun had been so concerned about.

  Naturally, their luck didn’t hold. Variable layout caused the area to change around them. Cheris, perhaps more accustomed to such shifts, didn’t slow her stride. But the hallway receded before and behind them; for a moment it was as though they hung suspended upon a bridge over an unfathomable abyss of gears and sprockets and decaying metal.

  “Reroute us,” Cheris signed, as though she’d expected this. She probably had. “This means someone of high rank has changed their routine. Kujen, Jedao, or the moth commander; probably Jedao.”

  Hemiola hurried to the nearest terminal. The grid verified this. It indicated that Jedao had changed his mind about dueling practice and had instead opted to retire to his quarters. Furthermore, his aide Dhanneth accompanied him.

  Hemiola conveyed this information to Cheris, wishing it shared her utter calm. At least, it hoped she was as calm as she appeared to be, because it would hate for the person in charge to be as wrecked inside as it was. She didn’t lengthen her stride, or shorten it either, and her air of confidence reassured Hemiola that the mission wasn’t yet a failure.

  They approached General Jedao’s quarters. Hemiola was suitably impressed by the Deuce of Gears, even though it remembered how the hexarch’s personal rooms in Tefos Base had been ostentatiously emblazoned with the Nirai voidmoth in silver and moonstone and onyx. It halted and waited for Cheris’s signal.

  Cheris positioned herself to the side of the door and pulled her gun. Thumbed off the safety. Then she indicated to Hemiola that it was to proceed.

  Don’t hesitate, Hemiola reminded itself, and put in a call to the grid indicating that Lieutenant Colonel Meraun needed to speak to General Jedao in person.

  Moments ticked by. Hemiola wasn’t sure they were going to get a response. It considered repeating itself. What if they’d been caught and their target had called security? The grid could be lying to them while security converged on their position.

  Then the door opened. It had scarcely revealed the room beyond and, more to the point, the people in it when Cheris dashed in and to the side and fired three shots in rapid succession. Hemiola whisked in, determined to assist.

  The room contained two men in Kel uniform: one lean, with paler skin, whom Hemiola recognized from historical records as Shuos Jedao; the other large, bulky with muscle, dark-skinned, who was reaching for his sidearm with a shaking hand. Jedao had two bullet holes in his forehead, dead center, and blood and brains and skull splinters had blown out the back of his head, and the third bullet had taken him in the chest, and he was still standing.

  He wasn’t just standing. He was moving. Hemiola didn’t have any experience of corpses, but it was certain that Jedao shouldn’t be stumbling sideways, shambling gait or no. And he most definitely shouldn’t be wresting the gun away from the dark-skinned man and bringing it up, unerringly drawing a bead on—

  Cheris didn’t waste time on profanities. She fired low, this time blowing out Jedao’s knees. One bullet per knee, which meant five bullets fired, and she only had one left in the
clip before she needed to reload.

  Even then Jedao wasn’t done. He’d secured the other man’s sidearm. (Why didn’t he have one of his own?) His arm moved. Despite the glassiness of his eyes, and the fact that he couldn’t possibly have survived the head shot—it knew that much about gunshot wounds—he was still tracking, and he fired.

  Jedao pitched to the floor with a horrible thud. The bullet went wide, passing over Cheris’s shoulder. Even so, it missed her head by mere centimeters.

  The carpet—such beautiful carpet, Hemiola thought absurdly—was streaked dark with blood. And the blood wasn’t the red it had come to expect either from the gorier dramas or the knifeplay that Jedao-past and the hexarch had engaged in.

  “Get me to the extraction point,” Cheris said. “Buy me time. I’m counting on you.”

  Hemiola had expected alarms to go off once shots were fired in Jedao’s quarters. Instead, it detected a faint hiss as some gas was injected into the air. It logged into Jedao’s terminal and scrabbled through the grid for an explanation.

  “Top-level override,” it told Cheris as it frantically calculated an escape route for her.

  “That’ll be Kujen,” she said. “Route, now.”

  Hemiola opened a tightbeam channel to her augment and sent her its best guess. At this point there was no point denying themselves this avenue of communication, since they’d already given their presence away. It would have to hope that their communications weren’t intercepted and, worse, decrypted in the time it took Cheris to get away. “I’ll cover for you here. Go!”

  Cheris whirled and sprinted away. Although she immediately angled herself away from Jedao’s field of fire, Jedao had now dragged himself up on his elbows. Hemiola barreled forward to block him and was rewarded by a direct shot to its carapace.

  Hemiola was, while not a military servitor, solidly constructed. The bullet ricocheted and embedded itself in a table. It didn’t slow, but accelerated into Jedao’s gun hand. It connected; heard the crunch of breaking bone.

  At this point, Hemiola’s focus on Jedao betrayed it. The unnamed dark-skinned man swiped at it. Hemiola turned turtle, flipped itself right-side-up and snaked out of the way.

  The man hastened to Jedao’s side. “Jedao!” he cried, except the word came out slurred. Hemiola braced itself, then took the precaution of launching itself straight at the man’s head. It almost missed because he slumped unconscious just as it got there.

  The gas was still being pumped into the air. Hemiola asked Cheris about her status even as it frantically put in requests to the grid to make sure that she wouldn’t get cut off. It became aware that a higher-level user was moving through the system and withdrew abruptly.

  Hemiola had bought Cheris all the time it could to escape. Now it was trapped on the Revenant, and it had no idea how to complete the mission when this other Jedao manifestly refused to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  WHEN JEDAO RECOVERED consciousness, he had a monstrous headache. Considering that the last thing he remembered was being shot in the head and both knees by a stranger in a Kel infantry suit, it seemed unfair to complain. “Dhanneth?” he asked.

  Jedao was having difficulty getting his eyes to focus. “Dhanneth?” he asked again. He tested one knee and almost bit his tongue at the surge of pain.

  Dhanneth had collapsed not far from him, it turned out. An enormous bruise covered the right side of his face. Jedao was overcome by a wave of nausea. “Dhanneth, no,” he croaked. Despite the agony in his knees and the pounding headache, he dragged himself over to Dhanneth and checked his pulse. Luckily Dhanneth was still alive, slow pulse, breathing shallowly, although his skin was clammy.

  “General Jedao to Hexarch Kujen,” he said to the grid. “There was a break-in and assassination attempt in my office”—he checked his augment, which only made the headache worse—“forty-seven minutes ago. What the fuck is going on?”

  The grid informed him that the entire moth was on security lockdown and that the hexarch was not taking messages while he dealt with the matter.

  For a brief singing moment, Jedao dared to hope that the unknown assassin had managed to off Kujen before getting the hell away. Too bad she hadn’t shared the secret. And besides, he wasn’t going to believe in Kujen’s death until—well, that was the problem. He wasn’t sure anything could convince him that Kujen was gone forever, considering the man’s particular form of immortality.

  So much for Kujen, then. Jedao pulled back Dhanneth’s eyelid and was greeted by a pupil so dilated that it swallowed the iris. Jedao didn’t know much first aid, but that couldn’t be a good sign.

  “I need Medical,” Jedao said. “I’m fine”—he figured they’d forgive him the white lie—“but Major Dhanneth is down.”

  The grid repeated its message about the security lockdown. Which, apparently, included Medical.

  Jedao contemplated his options. He knew from experience that he couldn’t lift Dhanneth outright, given how much larger the man was. (Dhanneth had found Jedao’s dismay at discovering this very amusing, one of the few times Jedao had seen him laugh.) If he were in better condition, he could carry Dhanneth over his shoulders, but he was honestly not convinced that his knees wouldn’t give out.

  Would it make more sense to drag Dhanneth all the way to Medical, assuming he could get there without triggering some security protocol and getting them both killed, or make his way there alone, on the grounds that that would be faster, to fetch help?

  I can’t leave you here like this, Jedao thought. He gritted his teeth, apologized silently to Dhanneth for the indignity of what was to transpire, and began dragging him out the door in the direction of Medical. Even if his augment was being uncommunicative about the moth’s current layout, the othersense gave him a reasonable idea of where to go.

  At first he made slow progress, partly because of the pain, partly because of intermittent dizziness. And then he came across the first victims.

  There was no other word for it. A knot of two Kel and a Nirai had fallen not far from the first lift he needed to take. Same symptoms as Dhanneth: slow pulse, shallow breathing, clammy skin, dilated pupils. Jedao was more worried than ever. Had his attacker infected the command moth with some sort of disease or toxin? And if so, why wasn’t he affected?

  Breathe in. Breathe out. You can’t afford to panic. He noted the location and names of the fallen soldiers and engineer, then continued dragging Dhanneth. Then it occurred to him to ask the Revenant, Do you have any idea what just happened?

  There was a hull breach, it said. They’re long gone now, whoever they were.

  You didn’t think to tell me?

  A pause, not exactly friendly. Do you tell me whenever you clip your fingernails? I don’t have... nerves in that part of the hull as you understand it. They breached the superstructure grafted on by the Nirai engineers, not living tissue.

  Fair point. Do you have any idea what’s going on? Jedao concentrated on the othersense and was even more disturbed. None of the human-sized masses were moving. He had the awful feeling that Dhanneth and the three crew he had come across weren’t the only ones afflicted by the disease-toxin-whatever.

  If you mean the sudden cessation of your crew’s activity, I don’t believe that was directly the result of the intruder’s actions. The servitors inform me that there is some sort of security lockdown in effect, likely initiated by the hexarch.

  Well, that wasn’t helpful. Thank you, Jedao said by rote anyway, because he didn’t see any sense in alienating the only other person he knew to be conscious. I’ll see if I can get matters sorted.

  By the time he made it to Medical, he had passed twenty-nine more collapsed crew. It had been fast-acting, whatever it was. Only a couple had masks on, and the masks hadn’t done them any good, which was even more worrying. Servitors patrolled the halls. He refrained from asking them where the hell they had been when whoever-it-was had attacked him. The security failure wasn’t their fault. Besides, he suspected the ass
assin had been a professional. He should have enacted protective measures in case someone tried such a thing, and hadn’t. If the crew died because of his shortsightedness—

  The medics were no help on account of having fallen prey to the unknown ailment as well. Jedao agonized, then located Colonel-Medic Nirai Ifra and hoisted her up onto a pallet. He devoted his efforts to reviving her first on the grounds that an actual doctor would be of more help in this situation. He agonized some more over whether to hook her up to a standard medical unit. While his augment contained a set of first aid primers that would talk him through the procedure, getting it wrong could damage her. Given the circumstances, though, he didn’t see that he had much choice. He followed the instructions assiduously, apologizing silently to Ifra.

  And after all of that, no luck. The medical unit indicated that something was wrong, but beyond that he didn’t possess the expertise necessary to perform further diagnosis. Jedao bit back a scream of frustration. Nevertheless, he wasn’t done. He settled all the other medics on pallets of their own, then Dhanneth as well, feeling faintly guilty for not prioritizing his aide. There probably wasn’t any single good way to decide.

  By now, the exertion and shock of the situation had taken its toll. Jedao had sat down for a break and was trying to decide whether it was safe to pour himself a glass of water from one of the sinks when Kujen messaged him. Come to my quarters, the message said. You will be safe there.

  Jedao couldn’t help but burst into laughter. What did “safe” mean anymore? Especially since he’d just survived... how many bullets? Four, five? He wondered with a sort of pale horror whether the bullets were still lodged in his brain, or whether the regeneration process had shoved them out, and wasn’t sure which of the two alternatives was more gruesome.

  Well, if safe would get him a glass of water, he’d go. He got up and stroked Dhanneth’s hand and pressed a kiss to it, despite the presence of the others, then set out.

  By the time Jedao reached Kujen’s quarters, he was drenched in sweat. At least his uniform had repaired itself, although it had failed to cope with his blood. He felt sticky and disheveled, and he was past giving a damn.