Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  “I’m an arithmancer, not an artificer. But yes. If Char’s willing to let me try, I think I can repair their hexwork.”

  “If Char’s willing.” Tobin’s face said he’d never thought about asking riev anything before. Then his expression twisted into something like shame’s younger cousin. “Then we’ll ask them.”

  Gaer wasn’t sure what’d just happened, what shift in Tobin’s worldview had occurred. But whatever it was, it wasn’t making his stare any more comfortable when it returned back to Gaer. “What about internal defenses? Do you think you can work something up for Char and Brisk Array against whatever the chip does to riev?”

  “Char said a riev would need to consent to the chip’s installation, which they and Brisk Array have not. Although, sss. If someone re-establishes Oversight, that might not matter, if they can hack straight into the riev collectively across a quantum hex. Which means no, I can’t work anything up. Not without access to a great deal more proprietary data than I think you have, Knight-Marshal. I understand the wichu don’t part with their secrets.”

  “No. They do not.” Tobin’s jaw flexed, the first crack in his near-vakari mask. “I can’t order you to do anything. Let’s be clear on that. All I can do is trust you and believe that you share a mutual interest with us in preventing whatever’s happening out there from spreading.”

  “I won’t betray you, Knight-Marshal. Not Lieutenant Iari. Not the Aedis, in this matter.” Gaer bared his teeth. Tribe, mother, everything in those blue etchings. Tobin couldn’t read them (probably couldn’t); but he would understand what the gesture meant. Templars swore by the Elements and the ideals of the Aedis, not family lineage, but the effect was the same.

  Tobin and Iari traded a look that was really a whole conversation. Then Tobin rummaged around on his desk. He found a blank chit and stuffed it into the side of his turing. He struck a sequence of keys, and caught a faint ozone smell, accompanied by an even fainter hiss, followed by the chit’s ejection.

  Tobin pushed it across the desk. “This pass will get you into the warehouse. Give this to whichever of Peshwari’s people is on duty. Those are my orders to let you down to examine the altar. And whatever you find—”

  “I report to you first. Yes.” Gaer started to reach for the chit. Stopped when Tobin’s finger showed no signs of moving. “Knight-Marshal? Is there something else?”

  But Tobin was looking at Iari. “Lieutenant,” Tobin said softly, reluctantly. “I’m sorry to ask, but I need you to act as the ambassador’s escort. You’re familiar with the situation. Anyone else at this point would not be, and I want to keep knowledge of this altar as limited as possible. Therefore, I’m going to authorize a temporary replacement for your battle-rig and clear the medical hold on your records.”

  A medical hold? And the Knight-Marshal overriding that. Gaer failed to control his surprise. Hissed, then stopped breath altogether. Tobin ignored him. Iari did not. Shot him a don’t setatir say anything glare diluted by fear.

  Iari’s lip curled around that capped tusk. “I understand, sir.”

  Tobin slid the chit across the desk toward Gaer. “All right. Be careful. Both of you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “You can stop pacing.” Gaer’s voice leaked from beneath the altar, muffled and distorted by depth and angle. “You think I’d be down here on the floor if I thought Brood might crawl up out of the drain?”

  Iari didn’t bother answering with the obvious: that all the arithmantic optics in Five Tribes territory—of which there was one here already, strapped into a certain vakar’s face—wouldn’t detect Brood incoming unless they were pointing at the source, and Gaer wasn’t looking at the drain.

  She stopped beside him and stared down at his lower half. It looked like the altar had fallen on him, not like he’d crawled underneath it. Disturbing idea. “So what is under there?”

  “I’m not sure. Every setatir scrap of this surface is marked. Most of it looks like k’bal script, but I’m also seeing fragments of other languages mixed in. I am scanning those into this tablet, in hopes that your mighty Aedian turings can help translate. Or, failing that, your library might be of use. There are also some equations, mysterious and likely dangerous and definitely out of place here.”

  “Equations, what, like arithmancy?”

  “Yes. No.” He made one of those overheated-plasma seal noises. “Shall I explain the nuances of the Ringelt Mean to you?”

  “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  “No, because you wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand. It’s obscure theory having to do with quantum properties and tesser-hexing, and what that is doing on a dirtside chunk of metal, I have no idea—setat!”

  There came a hollow bang, the sort a vakar’s bony skull might make bouncing off iron.

  Iari sighed and squatted, arms balanced on her knees. It felt like breathing knives. “You all right?”

  Gaer had his nose damn near pressed to the metal, the glow from his optic bouncing blue off the iron. “This thing has an interior. It’s hollow. I can see the seam, but I can’t find a latch or any way to open it.”

  Iari imagined an unvisored Gaer getting a faceful of violated wards. “Don’t touch it.”

  “Sss. Of course not. I am entirely certain I don’t want to open this without more than just you in attendance, particularly since you aren’t entirely well.” He began extracting himself from beneath the altar without actually touching the metal, until he was clear and as flat on his back as vakari spines permitted. The glow off his tablet dusted his chin and jaw-plates with silver, like frost. “What’s wrong with you, exactly? The medical hold.”

  “My nanomecha are being a little sluggish doing their repairs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  That Diran was furious, mostly. And: “I’m not healing fast as I should be, and I don’t have the syn right now. So don’t start any fights.”

  Gaer turned far enough to see her square in his optic. Bet he was reading her aura, and seeing whatever color scared was. She braced for some clever remark.

  But all Gaer said was, “Understood,” in a quiet voice, and then went back to making notes on his tablet.

  He was SPERE, she reminded herself. Five Tribes special ops. The chattery scatter-wit arithmancer-ambassador had to be an act, or at least partly so. That made her feel better and not at the same time. He’d backed her in a fight. That was something.

  And still. She was an Aedian templar. She should have, oh, other Aedian templars at her back. Instead she had a pair of decommissioned riev and a vakar commando. Fortunately she also had nothing to do except watch Gaer root around under a piece of metal. It was a little like being on nightwatch again, both wishing for something interesting to happen, and dreading that something might.

  Her comms beeped. “Lieutenant Iari. Go ahead.”

  Peshwari’s unit had set up a relay just outside the warehouse, with a little transmitter booster to banish any claims of dead comms next time Tobin tried to call her.

  “Lieutenant?” The voice wasn’t Tobin. Someone young and male and probably spacer-born and human, from the depth and pitch of his Comspek. “Someone named Corso Risar called for you. Wants to be patched through. Said it’s urgent.”

  Oh, blessed Elements. Saved from Gaer’s curiosity by Corso, of all people.

  “Do it.”

  The comms clicked. “Iari?”

  “Corso. You find Tzcansi?”

  “I did.” His tone sounded like a man talking through a locked jaw.

  Iari’s guts did a dive-and-roll. “What?”

  “She’s—you’ll want to see this. How soon can you get here?”

  “Where are you?”

  He gave her an address farther up the hill, almost to Hightown. Mostly residential, post-war reconstruction projects that didn’t defy fire codes and rely on Chaama’s mercy to stay standing
.

  “Understood. Give me ten. Iari out.”

  Gaer got to his feet and came and stood beside her. Iari got a noseful of warm vakar, less burnt sugar this time, more like scorched metal. “Well? Where are we going? I didn’t quite hear the address.”

  “Corso’s found Tzcansi. Not far from where we found Pinjat.” Hrok’s breath, two nights ago. Only two. “You’re not coming. I’ll take Brisk Array with me. Leave Char here with you.”

  “Sss. Don’t be stupid.”

  “No. Whatever that means”—she stabbed a finger at the altar—“is important, and you’re the closest thing we’ve got to an expert. You stay. Figure it out. Don’t think it’s going to help, dealing with some ganglord, if I bring a vakar with me.”

  * * *

  —

  The address turned out to be a row house in the middle of a street of row houses that looked like a post-surge reconstruction initiative. Everything with the same basic hinged doors and latching windows, the same steps, same facade. The ones on this side of the street were shuttered against the sunlight slanting into the street. On the other side, where the houses sat in shadow, the window stared like vakari eyes, black and blank.

  Her needle-socket ached. This borrowed rig felt like someone else’s skin, all of it just a little too large, the proportions just a little bit off, and there was chafing in three places, one of which made her grimly grateful that she was currently celibate. The voidspit thing was still default settings, not battle primed, not adjusted to her particular nanomecha frequencies because they were voidspit offline.

  Iari stopped at the foot of the front steps. The front door hung just a little ajar, scratches in the wood of the lintel. The edge of the lock was blackened, like someone had overloaded the electronics and fried their way inside.

  Corso wouldn’t be that stupid, please Ptah and Hrok. Someone else had been here first.

  She glanced at Brisk Array. The riev stood behind her, sensor array stiff and pointing every direction. He didn’t seem alarmed. (How would alarm look, on a riev?) Just alert.

  Brisk Array noticed her looking at him. Two, three, five stalks canted her direction. “Lieutenant?”

  She considered leaving him outside for less than a heartbeat. “With me. Stay close.”

  Iari made a fist of her left hand. The tesla’s steady glow in the gauntlet said her (borrowed) shield was ready to deploy. She used that hand to push the door open. Dark inside, except where the sun leaked around the shutters: bars of dust-beam brightness that turned the whole room to twilight.

  It looked like a post-surge project floorplan inside, too. Square front room, stairs to the second floor at the back, adjacent to the hallway that led to a kitchen. There were rugs on the floor, not especially clean. Tables. A pair of chairs, a wide sofa, a vidscreen mounted on the wall with a small array of electronics beneath it. A console 2D player, a bulkier, older-model 3D player. A lingering odor of grease hung in the air. Someone had been using the kitchen recently. The coldbox whined, audible all the way out here. Probably a motor on its way out.

  She took a careful step into the living room while Brisk Array filled the doorway. The room went dimmer with the riev blocking the light. Iari waited, listening past her own breath. Trusting Brisk Array’s augmented audio-visuals. Trusting her own gut, which tensed up at a house this quiet, this empty.

  “Brisk Array. Anything?”

  “A person at the top of the stairs, Lieutenant.”

  A floorboard creaked. Iari snapped her shield out, marked with one part of her brain the fractional delay between crackle and actual shield (the rig relying on physical signals, nerves firing through her implants, rather than a nano boost) and the faint ozone smell that came with it. Then a familiar silhouette bled out of the shadows at the top of the stairs.

  “Corso,” she snapped, for Brisk Array’s benefit. She shook her wrist and sucked the shield back into her gauntlet.

  “Took your time,” he snapped back. “I thought you were the fucking PKs.”

  “Those your scorch marks on the front door?”

  “What? No.” Iari could just make out the glint of a tusk as he smiled, the flutter of movement as he pointed. “I came in through the kitchen window. Over the garden wall,” he added, when she stared. “This district, all the labor—grounds, domestics—is tenju. Shuffle around like you belong, people look, no one sees. Not like you two. Probably a hundred posts on the local grid by now about the templar and the riev walking around the neighborhood.”

  Iari moved to the bottom of the steps. From this angle she could see Corso more clearly. He wore the shapeless coveralls of a day-laborer, unmarked by any brand or logo. He slid a jacta into one of the pockets as she watched. The way his arm moved, the shoulder, the way the coveralls creased, said he had more under that plain grey canvas than just himself.

  Ungentle Ptah. No wonder Corso was nervous about the PKs. Bigger wonder he’d gotten through a window at all. “That armor you’re wearing is illegal.”

  “Rather pay the fine than have a bolt in my chest.”

  “That something you worry about a lot? Bolts in your chest?”

  “When I’m hunting ganglords, it is. We don’t all get fancy battle-rigs when we go to war. You remember.”

  She did. Army standard-issue field armor was a lot like templar uniforms. All physical armor panels, no needle-sockets, no hexwork. Cheap to make in large quantities, like this rowhouse. Like the soldiers.

  “We’re not at war anymore.”

  “Huh.” He straightened. A stray band of sunlight glanced off the beads of sweat on his cheekbones. Yeah. Standard armor was hot. She remembered that, too. “You come up here and tell me that.”

  “Yeah? What’ll I see?—Stay here,” she told Brisk Array. She took the stairs faster than her ribs liked. “Whose house is this? Not Tzcansi’s.”

  “No. Belongs to her sister. She’s got kids, two of them. Tzcansi bought them the house, so I figured she’d know where I could find her. Only I get here, and—no sister. No sister’s kids. Only one I found is Tzcansi.” Corso laughed without humor or air and started down the hallway. “Good thing, I guess.”

  And then the smell hit, stronger than the grease or dust, right in the base of her skull. Thick and metallic and clinging to the back of her throat as she breathed. There was something sour under that, something rancid, that her brain remembered before her rig lit up with Brood alert. She killed the alarm before it got a chance to start howling.

  Corso was watching her, eyes flat and knowing. His jaw was knotted again, screwed tight. Fresh sweat dotted his forehead. Nerves, not heat. “Your shell says it smells Brood? Well.” He gestured through what looked like a bedroom door. “I already knew that.”

  “You didn’t say over comms.”

  “I wanted you, not the whole fucking garrison.”

  “You go in there?” Iari asked, and poked her head around the jamb before he answered.

  Oh, blessed Four.

  Tzcansi hung half on and half off of the bed, over there under the window. Her hips were still on the mattress, one leg partway up the wall. Her torso spilled over the side, twisted and bent in a way that suggested many broken bones. Her arms stretched overhead, wrists on the floor, head dangling. She had several massive wounds to her torso. Iari guessed they went all the way through, given the amount of blood on the bed, and the spattering up on the walls and the ceiling. Bone poked up. Sternum, ribs.

  The rug underfoot had been rucked up to show long, visible gouges in the floorboards. Iari could think of at least three types of Brood that could’ve dealt this kind of damage. Not swarm, though. Big ones.

  Brisk Array’s voice floated up from the foot of the stairs. “Lieutenant? Do you require assistance?”

  “Found evidence of Brood up here. You sense any?”

  “Negative.”

  “No,” Cor
so said, and Iari threw him a the hell? look, before she realized he was answering her earlier question, not Brisk Array’s.

  “You asked,” he said. His eyes were glassy and screwed down to slits. “No, I didn’t go in.”

  “Right.” Iari made herself look around at something other than Tzcansi. Kid’s room, looked like. A shelf had come off the wall, spilled trinkets onto the desk, and from there to the floor. Some stuffed animal, a set of little army figures, a pair of model voidships (Protectorate cruiser, Sissten-class, she noted. And a Confederate corsair. Expansion war models). There were 2Ds on the walls, a model of the local solar system on the ceiling, nudged in its orbit by vagrant drafts from the—yes. The vent. Or rather, the hole in the wall above the door, conspicuously empty and black and not covered by a metal grate.

  Gaer would’ve been able to stretch up on his stupid-long toes and unbend those extra joints and get himself nose-to-grate, tell her if there was any residue or indication Brood might’ve escaped that way. But lacking Gaer, well. She sealed her visor. Banished the redflash alarm and upped the magnification instead.

  “What is it?” Corso had edged over the threshold. “What do you see?”

  “An open grate on the heating duct. What looks like slime on the edges. Like something a little too fat squeezed through that opening.” She retracted the visor. The world retreated to its proper distances. She turned her attention to the floor and poked along the rucked-up edge of the rug with her boot—aha. The vent cover. “I’m guessing,” she said, because Corso seemed to be waiting for her to say something, “that it was a boneless that did this. That kind of damage to Tzcansi, it sure as voidspit wasn’t swarm. And boneless would be able to get through the ducts.”

  Corso made a little noise in the back of his throat. Iari looked over her shoulder. Tzcansi was a mess, sure, but she wasn’t guts-coming-back-up awful. They’d seen worse, she and Corso, in their army years. A dozen Tzcansis in a slagging morning during the worst days, people whose names they’d known.