In Extremis

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  His lover nodded and turned his attention to the tablet. After a moment, he said, “Was it Laniis?”

  “It was.” The Emperor glanced at him. “How did you know?”

  The Ambassador only smiled, a sad and complicated and very alien smile, and yet, the Emperor understood it. And smiled back.

  A little while later, Lisinthir said, “I’m done here. Would you like to sign your portion?”

  The Emperor canted his head, then extended a hand for the tablet. Taking it, he scanned his message, wondering how the Worldlord would receive it. With the tip of a talon, he wrote:

  —by my hand, Emperor Kauvauc

  “You keep your name,” the Ambassador observed.

  “It is the name I was given.” The Emperor surprised himself by chuckling. “An ally to aliens should be open to accommodating their customs.”

  The Ambassador laughed. “Change comes to the Empire.”

  “Hopefully not too late.”

  “So long as there is breath in us, we fight the good fight, Exalted. And if you are done with your mail...?”

  The Emperor sent the last of it to Uuvek. “Yes.”

  “Then send mine as well, and bring my data tablet—and yourself—nigh.”

  Sliding over the Eldritch, the Emperor said, “Is it not a little early to be rejoicing?”

  Lisinthir wound his pale fingers through the Emperor’s dark mane and tugged him down by it. “Only if we doubt the outcome. Do you?”

  “Yes,” the Emperor said, smiling without happiness. No one had told him how much love could hurt. That accepting love could cut sharper than any talon when that love felt undeserved. “Yes, I doubt it. What else anymore?”

  “Then,” the Ambassador said, biting his jaw, “we make love against the sure day that we will die. Either way.”

  “Either way,” the Emperor murmured and allowed himself this. But the Seersa was waiting under his skin, and it roiled like a storm on the rim of the world.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “A D-per,” Sediryl repeated, fighting the sudden acceleration of her heart. “Here?”

  “Sort of,” Maia replied. “He’s only on the network part of the time. The rest of the time, Kamaney’s got him trapped in a datawand.”

  Vasiht’h saved Sediryl the trouble of asking the question. “Wait, how is that possible? You can trap a D-per? I thought you lived everywhere the network reached.”

  “Can she trap you?” Sediryl added.

  Maia’s sigh sounded tired and worried. Sediryl wished she could see her friend’s face. “You remember when I told you about our history, arii? About how we used to serve indentured contracts when we were first created?”

  “Yes?”

  “They had to have a way to enforce that indenture,” Maia said. “So, yes. D-pers can be trapped, Vasiht’h-alet. Kamaney is using the protocols that were created to limit our abilities. Which, I might add, are no longer available because they’ve been judged inhumane.”

  “A form of slavery,” Sediryl guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they even have that to begin with?” Vasiht’h asked, paws pressed into the carpet in a way Sediryl found disturbing. Something about the way his toes were spread? “They made you and immediately chained you down?”

  “They didn’t know what they were making,” Maia said. “And they worried that we might overrun the system. The network that connects the worlds of the Alliance makes the Alliance possible, alet. Until they were certain we wouldn’t pose a danger to it they didn’t want us running loose without any way to stop us.”

  “So, this D-per of Kamaney’s,” Sediryl said, steering the conversation back to the point. “A potential ally?”

  “That’s... not an easy question to answer.” Maia sounded pained. “The particular D-per Kamaney’s got is a convict.”

  “There are D-per criminals?” Vasiht’h asked, ears sagging.

  “Only one. This one. And it’s not so much Crispin’s fault as there was an... unfortunate incident.”

  “Just give us the whole story at once,” Sediryl said. She rubbed her temple.

  “Crispin was the first D-per to be assigned to a Fleet ship. A survey vessel, small crew. Lots of long distance missions, few stops back at civilization. And the captain of that ship...” Maia paused, sighed. “The captain of that ship became obsessed with him, and died trying to convert himself into a digital person so he could ‘be with’ Crispin.”

  Even Sediryl couldn’t find a flippant enough reply to divert the horror of that.

  “The court that convicted him said Crispin should have stopped him,” Maia said heavily. “But the man was his commanding officer. He was trapped between following his captain’s orders—and allowing him to suicide—or stopping him, and then he would have been up on an entirely separate charge.”

  “Mutiny?” Sediryl guessed.

  “Right.”

  “That’s insane!” Vasiht’h exclaimed. “How can that possibly have been this D-per’s fault? Did he do anything to encourage the behavior?”

  “The records show nothing like that,” Maia said. “And we have them in full, every conversation. They’re still available if you dig in the right databases. But Crispin… we assumed he suicided too, because he vanished.”

  “D-pers can suicide?” Vasiht’h said, eyes wide.

  “How’d he end up here?” Sediryl asked.

  “Yes. And I don’t know. All I do know is that Kamaney’s got his reins. He’s allowed limited access at specific times; those rush ‘uploads’ I kept dodging are him flooding the network after release. He executes whatever commands she’s given him, and then she throttles him again.”

  “And by throttle you mean… remove him from the base,” Sediryl said, trying and failing to visualize.

  “Sort of. His higher functions—what you would call his personality—are barred from expression. The rest of him remains distributed throughout the system network, and by system here I mean the solar system. The ships, the base, the sensor platforms, all of that. Those lower level functions are still beating away, sort of like your heart does while you’re in a coma. When he wakes up he can access the records of what went on while he was ‘down’, but he can’t see it realtime. Which is why I’m using these speakers. He’s throttled now, and I can munge the sensor data while he’s not looking so that when he does, there’s nothing to see.”

  “But back to the part where he’s working with a pirate?” Vasiht’h said. “Why isn’t he on our side?”

  “Why would he be if Fleet convicted him of a crime he didn’t commit?” Sediryl murmured.

  “Because even someone falsely accused of a crime can decide that consorting with furriers and slavers is a bridge too far?”

  “Vasiht’h’s right,” Maia said, low. “I don’t think Crispin wants to be here. But what we have to remember is that it doesn’t matter. Kamaney dictates what he can and can’t do. If he finds out about me, he might feel remorse about wiping my localcopy but he won’t hesitate either.”

  “Can we take these controls away from her?” Sediryl asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maia said, and for the first time in their aquaintance she sounded miserable. “Most indentures are locked to a specific individual’s bio-signature, and their death doesn’t result in release. The indenture just freezes until the next person on the allowed permissions list comes along and takes over. It might be keyed generically to whomever’s got the datawand. Or it might be specific to Kamaney, at which point it’ll default to checking for authorizations.”

  “So if we don’t get onto that list…”

  “Then Crispin’s stuck forever, or at least until we can find someone with a master code. For that we’d need a link back to the Alliance.”

  “Which we don’t have,” Sediryl muttered.

  “On the bright side,” Maia said, “And there is one—he’s the source of the protective shield that kept the gun from killing Kamaney, Sediryl. That means he can only prot
ect her in the parts of the base he has access to.”

  “And where doesn’t he have access?” Vasiht’h asked.

  “Her bedroom and her bathroom.”

  A long pause. Vasiht’h said, caustic, “That’s a bright side?”

  “No,” Sediryl said. “Maia’s right. It’s far better than discovering she doesn’t have any weaknesses at all.” She sighed and pulled at her pinned hair, bringing the braids down. “You’re still certain you can get information out to the Empire.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Kamaney is on her flagship, and the D-per locked.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can ask the Queen about a contact in the palace…?”

  A faint, tired smile could be heard in the reply. “Already on it, arii.”

  The tingling never left her. She slept to escape it but it chased her into dreams, where she flowed from shape to shape without the intervention of her Chatcaavan form. She became in those dreams everyspecies, until their flaws and virtues mingled and she lost cohesion, and she woke panting and terrified. She had not yet found herself partially Changed, but she dreaded the possibility. Could she become trapped between shapes? Perhaps this was a function of too frequent Touches? It would subside, surely. It had to.

  Knowing that the Change was responsible for her current troubles should have made the prospect of learning more patterns and becoming more aliens distressing, and it did. Sometimes. Other times she thirsted for the experience of those unlike selves, as if she was dying. Chatcaava did not live as long as Eldritch, but they did live longer than the Pelted. Could she be several people in that draconic lifetime? Experience the life of a Phoenix, and then decide to be human for a decade or two?

  What was she becoming?

  She dreaded her newest keeper’s summons, and craved it. How jealous her former Chatcaavan masters would have been to witness how poor their attempts at mastery had been, in comparison with this.

  “Milady?”

  The title, reminding her powerfully of the Ambassador, jerked her head from her pillow where she’d rested it in the futile hope that she could nap. “Yes? You come again.”

  “I do. Alet, we have an open channel to the Empire, but not the Alliance. Is there someone in the Empire we can talk to about the pirates’ intentions? Someone who would help our cause?”

  Now, she thought, closing her eyes. Now it was his time. “Yes. The males who maintain the palace… they use their computer access to order supplies, food, to send messages for the males they are serving. They are our allies, and among them you should ask for Oviin.”

  “Oviin.”

  “Of palace maintenance. He was the one who delivered my message to the Ambassador and Emperor when the Twelveworld Lord was preparing to send me away.”

  “I understand, milady. Thank you.”

  “It is why we are here.”

  “It is.” A pause. “Sediryl wants me to ask if there’s anything we can do for you.”

  Her… sister. She would ask. The Queen smiled faintly. “Tell her…”

  “Yes?”

  What? ‘Rescue me?’ Why was she relying on someone else? If Sediryl’s plan had worked, then the pirate must still consider her an ally, not a product. No, not an ally. As the Eldritch’s pretty kept thing. Something owned, but by an ally. “Tell her I’m coming,” the Queen said, and pushed herself off the bed. She drew on the wing silks and pinned the cloth to her hips, ignoring the clumsiness of her fingers, and then padded to the door. One pause to assess herself, and to gather her courage, and she stepped through.

  Her guards spun to face her.

  “I go to see the Eldritch, who is also the Admiral’s companion,” the Queen said. “The Admiral said I was not to go elsewhere without escort to my destination. Will you please follow me there?”

  “Follow you… across the hall?” the first guard said. He sounded confused by her courtesy—perhaps he was used to being ordered.

  “Please. I would not wish to fail in my adherence to the Admiral’s wishes.”

  “Smart of you,” the second guard muttered. Then grinned. “So, you want to take her all the way over, Mattingly, or should I?”

  The first guard snorted. “You hating exercise so much, why don’t I do the honors.” He gestured grandly. “After you.”

  The Chatcaavan followed him across the hall, where the guards at the Eldritch’s doors had been watching with incredulity. Her guard stopped and said, “Here’s the Chatcaavan, to see the Eldritch.”

  The guard at Sediryl’s door rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Go on.”

  She nodded to her escort and said, “Thank you,” before passing through the door and into the antechamber, where the Eldritch, the Glaseah, and another alien were all awaiting her.

  “It worked,” Sediryl said, wide-eyed.

  “I think,” the Queen said, “I should stay here.” And stumbled. Someone caught her—the alien, she thought, and how had he moved so quickly? His skin trembled under hers, promising knowledge, and the burn in her intensified. She hissed and hid her face against a furry shoulder, seeking comfort and finding instead sibilant promises, beckoning.

  “What’s wrong?” The Eldritch, sounding worried. “Sister mine?” A hesitant touch on her shoulder, not as energizing as the alien’s who held her. “Do you need a healer?”

  “I don’t know.” The Queen shivered. “I have never Touched so many people, and now I feel strange in my own skin. But… I do not think I wish to be alone.”

  “Kamaney’s gone off-base,” said the voice that had visited the Queen in her chamber. “I don’t see why anyone’s going to care where her guests are as long as they don’t try to leave the bloc.”

  “Right,” Sediryl said. “Qora-alet, would you help the Queen to the sofa?”

  “Pardon me,” the alien said to her, and lifted her as if she weighed nothing. She felt like she weighed nothing. As he deposited her on the couch, she said, “You were going to send a message to Oviin?”

  “Yes,” the Eldritch said. “So we’re glad you’re here to help. We need to make sure he trusts the data source. Can you give us something to pass along to him that’ll help?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Tell him this is my creased lily.”

  “Sound appropriately code-wordish,” the disembodied female voice opined.

  “All we can do is try,” the Eldritch said firmly. “So let’s get together everything we know and make sure it gets to this Oviin. If he can pass it on to my cousin and his allies…”

  “Can we get information back?” the Glaseah asked, sounding pained. “I’d… I’d like to know. One way or the other. About Jahir.”

  “We’ll ask.”

  The Queen still felt wrong in her skin, but at least she would not die alone, if die she did. As the aliens decided what to include in their first message, she thought about asking them to tell the Ambassador and the Emperor that she loved them, in case she did not live through this. But then… they knew already. She closed her eyes and relaxed, until the conversation became a murmur that followed her into a fevered dream of shapes.

  It became routine: the guards brought Jahir from the interior room, fed, watered, and prepared him, and hung him on the wall for the day. After serving as decorative tapestry, he was taken down, remanded to Oviin for washing and care, and returned to the interior room to sleep before beginning the routine anew. He’d become accustomed to sleeping in the large and empty room, rolled in his blanket, conserving his strength in silence.

  The Usurper entering this haven did not feel like a violation, but rather an opportunity. Jahir watched him hesitate at the door, silhouetted by the moonlight in the bathroom behind him. Willed him to enter, but carefully so as not to inadvertently exert his talent. He was already using up too much energy surviving. Besides, if something had prompted the Usurper to seek him, best he come of his own accord, propelled by whatever froth of anxiety and unease might be fomenting unassisted.

  These new abilities were f
raught, particularly twined with his healer’s vow and the roquelaure’s cruel chains.

  At last, the Usurper forged into the room and stopped before him. “You. Alien.”

  Jahir looked up at him.

  “The Surgeon claims you are underfed. Is your attendant neglecting you?”

  “No,” Jahir said.

  “Your guards, then. They are supposed to be feeding you during the day.”

  “Not them, either.”

  The Usurper hissed. “What then? Are you diseased? You are not to die until I am ready to dispose of you.”

  “I would prefer not to die at all,” Jahir said. And amended, “Before time, anyway.”

  The Usurper’s eyes narrowed. “You do not seem fearful enough to me.”

  “Fearful… that you will kill me?” Jahir considered his reply, and again something whispered through him, used his mouth. “If I die here, it will not be at your hand.”

  “Your bravado will not serve you, alien. If I decide to kill you, you will die.”

  “But you are not like other males,” Jahir said. “And so I don’t think you’ll kill me. You don’t even like to touch me.”

  “I find touch disagreeable.” The Usurper folded his arms. “It confounds me that so many males lose themselves in distractions of the flesh. You ensnared the former Emperor that way, but that tactic will not work on me.”

  “No,” Jahir agreed, wondering. The longer the Chatcaavan stayed, the more he tinted the air around him with his emotional state: with its rigidity, which manifested as a compact fog shot through with glinting gray lines that occasionally pulsed a red bead of agitation or contempt.

  “The only proper challenges are the challenges of the intellect,” the Usurper continued, beginning to pace. “And yet so many males fail to see this is a truer test of Fitness than the sordid games they insist on playing with their claws and teeth.”

  “You have shown them their error,” Jahir said, holding very still. So hard not to be a healer. But had he not come to fight a war? “Have you not ascended to the highest height a Chatcaavan may? Your philosophy has prevailed.”