Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Iari squinted past her HUD at Hvidjatte. At Gaer, who’d gone back to staring at the wichu, plates flared, photopigments controlled to dead black. “Gaer’s sure.”

  “Acknowledged. I’ll need to file a request for information through the Synod, if we want access—”

  Keawe’s voice rose in the background. “Let me ask Su’seri what he knows. We won’t need a slagging RFI.”

  “—to wichu records in more detail. I’ll inform the peacekeepers we’ll be assuming this investigation as well. Can you bring this Hvidjatte up for questioning?”

  “Yes sir. Stand by.” The comm tesla blinked incoming. Iari flicked between channels.

  “Sorry,” said dispatch. “Still can’t raise anyone. Can’t raise the local patrols, either. Too much interference.” Dispatch laughed weakly. “Just a bad night, Lieutenant.”

  “Copy that. Thanks. Iari out.” She switched channels again. “Sorry, sir. I can’t bring Hvidjatte up yet. Dispatch says Peshwari’s not responding at the warehouse. Could be storm. Might be something else. I think we need to check it out.”

  Tobin took a sharp inhale, and let it go. “Acknowledged. If conditions allow, keep me updated. We’ll send someone down to pick up Hvidjatte.”

  “Yes sir. Iari out.”

  She pivoted, eyes on Gaer. “We’re moving out. Corporal! You and Char take point. We’re going to the warehouse.”

  Gaer had not moved. He was still staring at Hvidjatte. “We’re just leaving him here?”

  “We are. Templars will be down to collect you for questioning at the Aedis,” she told Hvidjatte. “You should be here when they arrive. If you’re not, they’ll find you, and then there’ll be charges. Understood?”

  Hvidjatte nodded.

  Iari stepped around Gaer. The rain might be letting up a little. She could see the stubby little streetlamp at the end of the block. There was a monument to wichu political influence: they’d gotten a waiver from the (mostly alwar and human) city council to make the lamps in their district a half meter shorter. She sealed her visor in prep for stepping outside. Her HUD showed green blips for Luki, for Char.

  The blip that was Gaer, on her HUD, wasn’t moving.

  “This is a mistake,” he said so flatly, so furiously, that her syn tingled. That was anger, beyond Gaer’s usual, typical vakari prejudices.

  She made a face entirely wasted on the wrong side of her faceplate. “Now, Ambassador. Or stay here.” Then she spun on her heel and started walking. Let him follow or not. (He would; she was sure of it.) Let him seal his visor, get him on comms, she’d explain. Gaer was usually susceptible to reason.

  And there, yes: her HUD showed his rig moving, coming up fast on her flank.

  The click of plates clamping tight. “Can we take this to a private channel?”

  “A moment, Corporal,” she said, and did as he asked.

  “All right, Gaer. What?”

  “You are making a mistake, leaving him.”

  “We can’t raise the templars in the warehouse. You know, the ones guarding the altar you just said might be a portal. That seems more pressing than keeping Hvidjatte in custody.”

  Silence from Gaer, for just long enough that Iari thought she might’ve won. They turned onto Main, heading toward Lowtown, and the streetlamps reverted to standard dimensions. So did the buildings, the doorways, the gutters. Hrok’s breath, imagine what it must have been like, wichu and vakari living together before the defection. Damn sure the vakari wouldn’t’ve issued any exceptions to building codes. Iari looked again at Char as she passed under one of those standard-sized tesla lamps. No matter the base-frame, riev were massive. Armored. Resistant to arithmancy. The perfect anti-vakari weapons. The perfect revenge, maybe, from a client-species to their overlords.

  “Listen,” Gaer said, and she sighed.

  “What?”

  “There are several separatist groups—Wichu First, Seven Strike, The Eyes of A’am, and names more pretentious from there. Mostly they’re all neefa-shit, but sometimes they do more than post inflammatory manifestos on public networks. They go after vakari ships or stations, or hack the turings. Sometimes there are actual explosives and people die. They’re a nuisance, mostly, but they’re a nuisance with a body count, so vakari intelligence tracks them. Five Tribes and Protectorate. It’s one of the few areas in which we cooperate painlessly, us. And you, too,” Gaer added, in that same down-a-long-hallway voice: “The Confederation works with us on this. No one likes a terrorist.”

  You could argue (which historians did) that without the wichu defection, the Expansion would’ve ended far differently. That without artificing, the Confederation and the infant Aedis—pre-syn, the priest-alchemy in its earliest stages, only a handful of people carrying the proto-nanomecha—would’ve lost the war with the Protectorate outright. Wichu had made the riev (don’t ask for the alchemical hows) to combat vakari. (From the bodies of their new allies. You didn’t see wichu riev. That was something to think about.) They’d helped streamline the Aedis implants, adapting the nanomecha for interface with a battle-rig. Customizing them for the Elements, for priests. No one ever said wichu hated vakari, but it was implied.

  So was the reverse.

  Iari turned her head. Gaer had drawn even with her. She stared hard at the contours of his visor, of his rig: extra joints and accommodations for spikes and that oilslick armor plating.

  “You knew about these separatists before?”

  “Sss. Everyone in SPERE knows. But I didn’t know they were here. This is Tanis. There’s nothing here for them. Or there shouldn’t be. They work on the fringes of our territory, not yours, and I never got any warnings in my briefings about them.”

  There were things Iari wanted to throw at him (some spy you are, Gaer), things that did not need to be said at all, things that might make her feel temporarily better. She was frustrated, and Peshwari wasn’t answering, and her gut had knotted around a certainty that there was trouble at that warehouse, and she still didn’t know what was going on, except Gaer had more in his bone-plated head than he was likely to share with her, ever.

  But then, it wasn’t like knowledge rained down from above in the Aedis, either. No one had told her about wichu separatists. You knew what you needed to know, when you needed it, and you managed the rest of the time. So yelling at Gaer, temper, that was all noise. Distraction.

  What mattered here (deep breath, center): “Char said Pinjat was trying to reconnect Oversight among the riev. That sound like something your wichu separatists would want? How would they use that?”

  Gaer’s response carried that peculiar distortion of syllables that meant his lips drawn back flat, teeth bared, behind an indifferent visor. “I’m a SPERE arithmancer and Weep specialist, not counter-terrorism. I have no idea what they want. I’m sure they could use it, but I can’t tell you how.”

  Well. That made two of them, then, left in the no-one-tells-me-voidspit dark. She threw Gaer a look he couldn’t see, through layers of battle-rig helmets. Filled in his profile from memory. Imagined his pigments charcoal-neutral, the wink of his optic as it snagged on the light. Aimed her voice at the ridges that ran from temple to skull-spike, under which lurked vakari ears.

  “Jich’e’enfe wants to kill vakari. Fine. And she wants to somehow reconnect the riev to each other and control them. Great. Control the riev, maybe use them on the vakari? Still making sense. But she hasn’t been doing that. She’s been hacking the riev and infecting them with Brood. And she’s been using Brood to prop up a voidspit local ganglord on a planet in the Confederate hinterlands, and using some altar with k’bal script to do something. Open a tesser-hex to the Brood layer of the void? That’s a very circuitous way to commit genocide. I don’t think she’s a separatist at all. I think she’s something else. And I think you, we, better figure out what.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Iari stoppe
d talking after that. Gaer still had the green light in his HUD, she hadn’t cut him off, but—all he could see, when he looked, was her battle-rig, the visor striped silver with rain.

  Possibly, probably, Iari was angry with him. Fair enough. He was angry, too. He’d never suspected Yinal’i’ljat wasn’t who she claimed to be. Never suspected she was Jich’e’enfe, never thought about wichu separatists on Tanis until Hvidjatte had sworn in Sisstish that’s what he wasn’t, but that he’d been more afraid of Jich’e’enfe than Aedian displeasure. (But not more, in the end, than he feared Gaer.)

  If he had not been so obsessed with the contaminated riev chip and the arithmancy and the mystery of it, if he had reported the Pinjat incident to his superiors, maybe he’d’ve gotten some advisement, some note of oh, yes, the separatists are doing this sort of thing now. Maybe he would have connected riev with reactivated Oversight with wichu, and he might not be trotting through a setatir storm in the middle of the setatir night with Iari’s silence. Maybe she wasn’t angry at all. Maybe she had other things to think about than his perceived failures.

  He looked ahead, at her back. Jorvik had put a new graft on her armor. A bright polysteel square in an otherwise scuffed, scarred landscape. If he shifted his rig sensors one notch into the aether, he’d be able to see seamless hexwork.

  Char’s repairs were not so seamless. He and Jorvik together had managed to armor-hex their prosthetic arm with a hybrid tangle of Aedian alchemy and vakari arithmancy, to (mostly) match the effects of the original artificing. They had been less successful patching those two sets of hexes together. It wasn’t seamless, it was ugly, but it would hold under combat. Probably.

  Ahead, Char had slowed down a little bit. Gaer recognized this pattern of streets and buildings. This was the same route they’d taken into Lowtown the day they’d found the warehouse and the swarm, at the beginning of this whole business. The day they’d walked Brisk Array into a riev trap. He supposed that Char remembered that, too. The riev’s plasma-blue teslas winked like stars as they swept their gaze back and forth, up and down.

  They. That was apt choice for pronoun. Char might’ve started as tenju, might still be mostly tenju under that armor; but they were not necessarily the same tenju anymore. What Gaer had learned about riev construction had come in the past several days, and would fuel nightmares the rest of his life.

  Which might be a very short life, if he didn’t, as Iari had admonished, figure this out.

  Gaer considered asking Char their opinion. Maybe a riev would have the best insight into how another riev could be—not repurposed, exactly, their purpose had always been weapon—used to achieve Jich’e’enfe’s ends.

  Which, truth, they didn’t really understand. Iari was right: there was no reason for a wichu separatist to be propping up some local ganglord and using riev (and Brood?) to do it. There had to be some heretofore undiscovered reason why the chip in Sawtooth’s head had allowed—no, invited!—Brood contamination. Contaminating riev seemed like a rather large mistake, otherwise, in Jich’e’enfe’s meticulous and brilliant hexwork. Of course one made mistakes when one was innovating with hexes; but Gaer was beginning to think the Brood contamination was the setatir point of the exercise. Not a side effect. The goal.

  That would put Jich’e’enfe on Tanis explicitly for the Weep fissure. There were fissures all through Protectorate and Five Tribes space, a whole border of Weep. But the primary border—populated, massive seedworlds on either side—was patrolled, guarded, always watched. Tanis was a tactically insignificant planet, its fissure a little splinter of the Weep in a single continent watched by a scattering of Aedis compounds and a couple of Confederate military units.

  But think it through—Jich’e’enfe wanted to reconnect the riev to some version of Oversight, and riev existed on just about every Confederate outpost, ship, base, settlement. And if somehow that reconnection also contaminated them, then every Confederate outpost, ship, base, settlement would have riev infected with Brood.

  Dear five dark lords, the damage they could do.

  That was a long chain of supposition, for which he had limited evidence. Iari might call it paranoia, but she’d want to hear it.

  Gaer jog-stepped until he pulled even with Iari again. Hesitated, and then keyed the comms on the open channel.

  “You’re right. Jich’e’enfe’s not a separatist. I think she’s a nihilist. I think she’s going to reconnect Oversight in order to infect every riev, all at the same time, with Brood.”

  Char stopped abruptly. Iari stopped too, and then Luki. Iari put out her left hand, like she wanted him to stop, to wait. But then the shield deployed out of her gauntlet like an exploding flower: whitefire frame first, marking the edges, and then the faster-than-blink sheet of hexwork before the shield filled in solid. Aedian red, the black and white crest in the center, the whole thing glowing but somehow still giving off no light at all.

  He looked beyond the shield’s rim. His HUD compensated for the rain-glare flash and ruinous brightness of streetlamps. The last time they’d come through these streets, it had been daylight. There had been people in the windows, looking out; there’d been that alwar gang with their substandard riev trap challenging them in the streets.

  Now the only thing up there was Char, who had stopped statue-still in the middle of the street.

  Oh, dark lords of the void.

  “Hold here,” Iari murmured. Then she walked toward Char, cautious but not hesitant. “Char. Report.”

  “There is something in this alley. I cannot say what.”

  To the naked, unarithmantic eye, it was just an empty street. Puddles, noxious and rainbow-slick even in this light, collected in corners, in the cracks of the pavement. Rain was supposed to wash things clean; but in Lowtown, it just pushed all the filth to the edges.

  “Gaer,” said Iari. “What do you see?”

  Presumably that meant get up here. He approached with more hesitation than Iari had shown. Char would go for him first, if they turned bad.

  Filtered through visor and optic, the alley was a wash of hexwork, shards of code glowing and throbbing where they’d landed.

  “There was some kind of arithmancy,” Gaer said. “Wards of some sort. Broken, now.”

  Iari’s faceplate flashed in reflected light like a mirror. “Riev trap?”

  “Hard to tell. If it was, it’s in pieces, now, and the riev inside has moved on.”

  Iari angled around Char, shield first. “Char, Luki, fall back. Gaer and I will take point. In case there are more traps.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” Char said promptly.

  A beat later—a portentous beat, leaden with unspoken opinion—Luki said, “Yes, sir.”

  It was because he knew Iari so well that Gaer noticed the briefest hitch in her movement. He filled in the grimace behind her visor. Convinced himself he heard the faint sigh on his comms.

  “Gaer’s got different scanners on his rig. He sees hexwork. That’s why I want him on point with me. Last time we came through this neighborhood, there were gangs and black-market riev traps, and we don’t need Char walking into one.”

  “I understand,” Luki said. Then, in a rush, “But sir. Riev trap means riev. Why would they even come here? Tzcansi was using them as enforcers—I read the report, sir—but she’s dead. So is someone else using them?”

  “Or it wasn’t a riev trap at all, but some other ward,” Gaer said. “Or Jich’e’enfe managed to reconnect Oversight, and she’s called all the riev down here.”

  Iari edged a little bit more forward. Her headlamp swept up the walls, over windows shuttered and dark on the edges. Now she turned back and spot-lighted Char. “Templar-Initiate? Thoughts on that?”

  Char’s head turned. Those plasma-blue teslas drilled not into Luki, no. Into Gaer, straight through his visor. “I am not subject to Oversight. The damage to my frame destroyed my connection bef
ore my formal decommissioning, and my repairs since then have been nonstandard.”

  Gaer blinked. He’d been there when Char had asked Jorvik to build the prosthetic, when they said they did not want a graft. Then Char had explained to him what that actually meant, graft, in a detail he thought they’d enjoyed. He hadn’t asked then why they’d made that choice. He’d assumed some conflict between the Aedis Catechism and using traditional riev repair methods. A shortage of limbs, perhaps.

  And now it sounded like Char had refused tradition because they didn’t want to be reconnected. No more Oversight.

  “If Jich’e’enfe has reconnected Oversight,” Gaer said, “can she issue orders? I mean, would you have any say in it? Char? Can riev refuse?”

  “With the proper protocols, she could issue orders. The riev would obey.”

  “And then she could, one imagines, order the riev to accept chip implants in their heads, like Sawtooth.”

  “Perhaps. That would require overriding other protocols. Brood have replaced vakari as the primary enemy. But if she has the command codes, she could.”

  It was hard to see Iari’s expression through a battle-rig, impossible to read auras; there was something about the attitude, the cant of head and helmet, that said she was thinking hard. Then she turned, without saying anything. She unclipped her axe, deployed it, and got back to prowling the street, shield raised as if she thought a riev might come leaping out of the dark.

  It wasn’t an illegitimate fear, really, except that in Gaer’s experience, riev didn’t do ambush especially well. They tended to crash into things, or through them.

  Iari paused at an alley mouth, and stabbed into the shadows with her headlamp. “Gaer. Something down here.”

  Yes, something: one of the large, steel-sided refuse containers that dotted B-town sat partway down, set crossways. It, like every other one of its kind Gaer had ever seen, was piled to overflowing. Beside it, what looked like a sack of wet rags and wasn’t. Blood, viscera, a lot of a man’s insides on the outside. But the face was intact.