by K. Eason
Yeah. Everything had been easier when it was just skin between them. It was the rest of the time, the majority of the time, they had trouble.
Diran sat back on her heels and drilled Iari with a glare. Color crawled up her cheeks. Nothing as elaborate as Gaer’s chromatophores, no blues and pinks and yellows. Just good old-fashioned mammalian blush, which turned Diran’s tawny skin almost bronze.
“Any pain, Lieutenant?”
“No.” Another aura-combusting lie.
Which Dee recognized for the neefa-shit that it was. She was a senior healer. She’d heard variations on I’m fine a thousand times before. She pretended to read over the tablet, frowning and poking at the screen with a stylus.
Iari hung her gaze just past Diran’s shoulder, on the dangling med-mecha (which blinked its panel of teslas at her, almost like a wink), and endured until Diran made a frustrated noise. “All right. You may return to active duty, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, Sister.” Iari stood up, nose to nose with Diran, chest to chest. They were of a height, the pair of them. But Iari had tenju breadth, while Diran was human-slender, despite her mixed heritage.
Iari held her breath and walked out. Mishka’s tears, it hurt. Little bolts of lightning and plasma shot along nerve-channels without warning, sudden and terrible and gone before she could draw breath to swear.
Just as well. One good voidspit and Diran would drag her back into the hospice and this time, Iari might just fail Jareth’s test of sapience.
Iari aimed herself toward the courtyard rather than deeper into the Aedis. The outer hospice doors were a double-wide, automated modernity of metal and sliding tracks, hexed to respond to motion from both sides. They also had a panel of transparent polymer in the center, through which Iari could see the coming sunset. Sky gone streaky, shadows spreading liquid across the courtyard. She could also see Char, standing just far enough to one side that they wouldn’t trigger the motion-hex. Char saw Iari coming and squared up. Their teslas got brighter, blue verging on white.
Jorvik had been busy. Char had part of a new arm, all exposed metal framework, bolted to their shoulder, though that arm’s elbow was fused at ninety degrees, the hand partly crooked. There might be servos coming, or—blessed Elements, how did you repair lost riev limbs? A graft, probably, which meant somebody else’s part, and no, better not to think about that.
Char saluted, left-handed, as the doors rolled open.
But it was Luki who said, “Welcome back, Lieutenant,” and levered off the wall, where she’d been waiting out of sight. She saluted, while her dark eyes flicked over Iari and then past her.
“No one followed me, Corporal.”
“Making sure, sir.” Luki made eyelock and grinned, sharp as Gaer’s talons. “Sister Iffy wasn’t certain you’d escape. Not her words, sir. She just said there might be a delay with your discharge, and if there was, I should send Char in to get you.”
Mishka’s tears, that was a sense of humor. “I escaped without incident. Char. How are the repairs?”
“Adequate.” Char lifted their shoulder. The arm lifted with it. “Brother Jorvik says this immobility is temporary until he and the ambassador can agree on the hexwork required for animation.”
“I’m sorry about Brisk Array.”
Char’s teslas dimmed. “Yes.”
And Elements, what did you say to that? Iari looked north, up near the top of the wall, where a rounded corner apartment stuck out like an afterthought over the courtyard. The window glowed like a warm yellow eye in the deepening shadow.
“I’ll go speak to Gaer about the hexwork now, then.”
“Yes sir,” said Luki. Because what the hell else could she say? New assignment, new squadmate—who was riev—and a new officer who referred to the Five Tribes ambassador by name, not title.
Iari glanced toward her own window, barely visible across the courtyard. She wanted a shower, her armor, her uniform. She estimated how long it would take, there and back. If she could do it before the prayer bells rang, or if she’d put herself back in the hospice (or collapse in a corridor and lie there, on Chaama’s cold bones, until things stopped hurting).
“Sir?” Luki peered up at her face. “Is everything all right?”
There were glib answers to that. Casual ones. Instead, Iari said, “Did the Knight-Marshal brief you on our current assignment?”
“Only that it requires the utmost discretion, sir.”
Which Tobin evidently expected from Luki. Or he’d just had no one else to assign.
Wish for Gaer, Ptah’s eye, she did, with his intrusive optic and his ill-gotten insight. Luki looked discreet enough: not as young as Iari’d first thought, either, when the failing sunlight hit her just so. There were lines around her eyes. Around her mouth. Though age didn’t guarantee wisdom, only experience (Corso was proof of that). And, truth, Iari just didn’t know her, except as a fellow exile to nightwatch. Only the templars who didn’t have a formal unit got nightwatch rotation. Iari’d gotten a sideways promotion to Gaer’s security detail. Luki was just someone else Peshwari hadn’t picked for his unit. Maybe that was her best recommendation.
Of the two templars standing in front of her, ungentle Ptah, it was Char that Iari knew. So she looked at Char, tried to read them: tenju mask of a face, tesla eyes. Cracked chestplate, twice patched, with a templar initiate’s badge in fresh paint on the upper right and on both shoulders. That framework arm, still gutless, still needing a limb, flesh or mecha, to fill it and a hexwork patch to Char’s neurochemistry to make it work. Luki, Iari noted, seemed perfectly at ease with a massive, broken riev at her shoulder. And Char, looming beside a human woman, seemed, well, relaxed, which should’ve been impossible for someone who could neither slouch nor stand hipshot. But Char wasn’t watching Luki, wasn’t angled toward her like Char always angled toward anything they read as a threat.
So that was something, too.
Iari eyelocked Luki and nodded. “All right. I owe you a briefing, then.” She hesitated on after prayers, because void and dust, she wanted to talk to Gaer first, see where they were on everything, but that might send the wrong message to her new corporal. You come after the vakar.
The bells saved Iari and damned her at once: pealed out their summons and cracked the echoing quiet of the courtyard, ricocheted off the walls. Luki looked that way reflexively, expectantly. Maybe with a little relief. This was Mishka’s time, the liquid fluidity of twilight, and a dozen other pretty poetic notions. It was also one of the most popular services, being most chronologically convenient, positioned just before evening meal: the end of the daywatch, the first gathering for nightwatch, when just about everyone was in the same room (Hrok’s dawn services were equally convenient, for the same reasons). Luki had been nightwatch until, oh, some thirty hours ago. She’d have friends in there, probably full up with questions about her promotion.
Because by now everyone knew about Brood in B-town, the explosion, whatever had Peshwari’s unit on full-duty rotation, walking street-patrols like it was the surge again. By now everyone knew Iari’d been in the middle of all of it. So walk in there now, she’d have a lot of curious faces. Maybe questions, before and after the service. Probably a half-dozen dinner invitations, too, when most times it was cordial nods and a benign indifference to where she sat, with whom, whether she said anything at all.
She did not want to face a temple sanctum full of curiosity. She also didn’t want to walk up and hand Tobin his copy of Meditations in front of everyone. And truth, she didn’t want to kneel on the voidspit stones (sorry, Chaama) on a leg fresh out of a boneset.
Virtue must be an act of choice. If one acts from compulsion—out of fear of the consequences, or fear of shame—then that is not virtue.
Jareth hadn’t had a lot of patience for indulging desires. You made choices based on right, once you figured out what that was. Not out of reflex, o
r habit. Not even out of duty, because that was another kind of yielding up of choice.
She imagined Jareth’s face—human, male, cold as the space that’d spawned him. All angles and icy eyes. An ascetic’s face.
The person who faces that which inspires fear, but yet lies within her strength, may be called brave.
Jareth would not count fear of discomfort (kneeling on stone) as worthy of fear, or of courage; but Jareth hadn’t ever been smashed by a tunneler either, because Jareth had never met Brood. He’d written Meditations in the middle of the Expansion war, before the Schism that spawned the Five Tribes and before the Protectorate cock-up that’d made the Weep. To him, the vakari were the ultimate enemy. That which should be feared and faced anyway, for virtue’s sake.
So Jareth might have an opinion about templars and vakari being—what, exactly? What was she, to Gaer? Allies, but that was a political word. What made a vakar (anyone, really) run toward trouble for the sake of someone else? SPERE oaths, whatever they were, wouldn’t say run face-first into Brood without armor for a templar. Templar oaths did require running at Brood, and Iari had always assumed that applied to everyone; but Jareth might not’ve agreed. Jareth might’ve said, let the Brood take the vakari. (Other Confederate voices had, during negotiations for the Accord. Wichu voices most loudly.)
Damn sure Jareth had never known any vakari personally, never listened to them go on about third-rate bands and the minutiae of arithmancy. Much less fought beside them. Or for them. Or, or, had them fight for him.
Say she and Gaer were friends, then.
Jareth might have (would have) disapproved of that. Tobin—also human, spacer, ascetic, who read Jareth and lived Jareth—did not seem to mind. Or maybe he just trusted Iari’s discretion here, too. He was giving her wide latitude with this investigation. Hrok’s breath, he’d given her a command and all the responsibilities that went with it.
Iari cast one last look up at Gaer’s window. Willed him come to the glass, look out, swear at the bells he always complained about. He didn’t. But—oh voidspit. There was something coming over the wall, a glittering pattern too bright and too early to be stars, too regular.
That was the keel of an aethership.
Barely, barely, Iari could make out the masts jutting up, and the tilt of flat-paneled sails catching the last spangling of sunlight as they steered the ship over the courtyard. Aethership was a poetic inaccuracy; it was plasma coils and physics and hexwork that battled gravity, just like a hopper, no sailing at all. Gaer would be able to see the emissions from the plasma ports, with that optic of his. See the equations describing the lift, the momentum, the force required to keep several tons of polysteel and amalgam from smashing into the courtyard. Iari saw only faint rings of bruise-black blue.
The ship swung around, maneuvering over one of the two docking slips. Then it hovered, patient, until the tesla floodlamps illuminated that slip, marked out a target for the aethership’s pilot and nav-turing. Those floodlamps blasted the courtyard white, bleached and leached of color and shadow. They lit the ship’s hull from below, too, splashed over the dark holes of the plasma ports, over the painted registry. Rishi 1701-A-TNC.
Aedian protocol said once you were in temple for prayers, you stayed there, barring Brood alerts or emergencies. But there were faces at the temple doors now, peering up at the aethership. Priests in robes, templars in armor, people in off-duty skinsuits, and civs. Alwar and human and tenju features, curiosity and excitement laid bare by the floods. An aethership might be an emergency, except the temple bells were still tolling business as usual, get your ass in for prayers. If something was really wrong, the bells would change their song.
But. But. Aetherships didn’t just make casual visits. If there was an aethership here, it meant cargo or passengers or information too sensitive for the comm tower dispatch officer. Arrival during prayer guaranteed fewer witnesses. This arrival looked deliberate, planned, which meant—almost certainly—that Tobin had known it was coming, and he hadn’t told her.
He was coming out of the temple now, never mind protocol and custom. Easy to spot him, even among all the other bits of uniform armor and Aedian red, even though he wasn’t the tallest person, or the widest. Everyone got out of Tobin’s way when he moved like that. Like a bolt from a jacta. He aimed for the aethership and marched, almost no limp, almost like Saichi hadn’t happened. He didn’t look Iari’s direction, no reason he should, no reason he’d even know she was over there by the wall; but her guts tightened anyway, and her chest, her whole body locking up like a malfunctioning battle-rig. Void and dust, she wanted to be where he was, following him to that aethership to meet whoever was here.
She also—more practically, more coldly—wanted to know who was on it, and why, and where it had come from. As a rule, Iari didn’t concern herself much with the Aedis superiors in Seawall. She liked to think it was above her pay grade, and it was, because those people—Senior Knight-Marshals, Mother Superiors—dealt in decisions that went wider than B-town. They oversaw a whole Weep-fractured planet. They sat on the Synod—back bench, maybe, but still lending a voice to the governing of the whole Aedis, and by extension, the Confederation.
But if Tobin had mentioned Brood in a report—and he’d have to, wouldn’t he?—and if Mother Quellis had mentioned the altar—or if Peshwari had, because Peshwari came from old money in Seawall, and had friends in the Seawall Aedis—they’d have to send someone to investigate, and that someone might object to Gaer’s involvement. It might even be Five Tribes embassy people on that aethership.
Hrok’s breath. Ptah’s eye. Stop. Templars—or regular troops, for that matter—weren’t supposed to worry about what the Up Aboves thought. Execute orders, mind your own duty.
And Tobin had given her a command, and a mission, and until his orders changed, her duty was clear. Prayer right now would be not a virtue, but a misplaced priority. A comfort.
“Corporal,” she murmured to Luki. “I need you and Char to go to my quarters and get me a uniform and armor. Use the override gamma-three-five-three-six on the door panel. Don’t close the window. I’m going to find Gaer. Meet me at his apartment.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ironic fact of the multiverse: a man could maneuver his career into an assignment on a planet with a Weep fissure, spend eleven months watching that Weep fissure do nothing, spend eleven months writing versions of the same reports to SPERE command (no changes to the fissure, no sign of Brood), and then suddenly, in the space of a day, have a dead wichu artificer, two Brood sightings, evidence of riev corruption by Brood, an altar covered in impossible equations, and a damned-to-the-fifth-hell stack of k’bal script. None of which he could report (no: none of which he would), all of which demanded his time, all of which needed to be handled right now.
Access to the library, Tobin had said, in trade for watching Iari’s back when she went to talk to the riev. A fair offer, except that Iari had a tendency to dive face-first into Brood and fights she couldn’t win, and granted, Gaer had made a mess of the last job of back-watching; but on balance, he thought he’d kept his side of things. He’d crawled around under that altar, scanned its surfaces, brought all that information back and fed it to the Aedis turing—and it gave him exactly nothing back.
There just wasn’t much out there on k’bal, that was truth; they’d been gone since the Expansion, and the people—his people, vakari—who knew the most about them (as much as patrons knew about clients, which obviously didn’t count for much; the wichu had changed sides, after all) lived on the vakari sides (Protectorate, Five Tribes) of the Confederate border. So because he was the only vakar in B-town, he must be an expert, and he simply wasn’t. Arithmancy and special ops wasn’t history and languages. Gaer knew there were better k’bal resources at home, but he couldn’t just ask SPERE command to send along a few dictionaries, unless he was willing to break promises to Tobin and report everything, which he wasn
’t.
Tobin was trying to help. The Aedian library had actual, physical books from before the Confederation, in paper and hard covers made with what looked like leather, in languages human and alwar and both native tenju and spacer-clans. There were even facsimiles of pre-Landing Tanisian tenju texts, in their crabbed and jagged script. Left to right, top to bottom, rows mashed together. Languages for which Gaer had no aptitude or knowledge. There were Comspek dictionaries that tried to make sense of the linguistic drift across seedworlds. K’bal dictionaries, too, such as the Confederation had compiled. He needed a setatir linguist. He needed Yinal’i’ljat, but—Gaer glanced at his tablet—there was still no word from Corso. B-town wasn’t that big. There weren’t a lot of wichu. And Corso had let slip he had a contact in the PKs, someone with authority, with all the efficiency that would imply.
Two days with no report seemed excessive. Maybe Corso was looking for a corpse, and Yinal’i’ljat was dead already. That arithmancer, the phlogiston-igniting setat-m’rri, might’ve gotten her.
Maybe Corso just didn’t want to report that. And really, so what. If Corso said come now, I found her, Gaer couldn’t. He’d need templar escort, and Iari was still in the setatir hospice.
The door chimed, followed by a meat-hollow thud.
“Gaer. Open the voidspit door.”
No. Iari was right outside his quarters.
Gaer crossed the room in one talons-scraping-furrows-in-the-floor bound and yanked the door open.
“Iari!” he said, like a damned idiot.
She stared up at him. Her eye, he noted, was only a little pinkish now, and only in the corner. Ferocious tea-green otherwise, and locked onto his. “I’m fine, thanks for asking. Let me in.”
He did. Truth: she looked not at all fine. A skinsuit was aptly named, thin as skin, everything visible. The bunch and glide of muscle over bone (so much bone). Knobs at the top of her hips, knobs all the way down her back. Every setatir rib. The book folded into her elbow looked like it had more padding than she did.
