by K. Eason
“My resources are somewhat stretched,” she said, very softly. “And so I find myself in the unpleasant situation of needing your help, Rory Thorne. Our destination is through this hatch. There is atmosphere on the other side, so that is good. There is also a hex of human origin on the mechanism to prevent access, which suggests there are also invaders inside who have placed it. I can break the hex, but that will be occupying my immediate attention when the hatch opens, to our mutual detriment if there is a skilled arithmancer waiting on the other side.”
Or a few soldiers with ’slingers, whose bolts Koto-rek could not divert if her attention was wrapped up in de-hexing a doorpad. “So you want me to break the hex on the door.”
“If it is within your power.”
Such a subtle weight on the if. Rory set her jaw. “I thought you said if the Tadeshi had engineering, we would be dead.”
“We may yet be, if you fail.”
“I see. Then I won’t fail.”
Rory’s HUD advised of rising heart rate, of rapid breathing. At least the sweat on her palms did not matter in hardsuit gloves. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and slid into the aether.
The hex on the pad was the standard sort a military arithmancer in the field might use, pre-scribed code meant to overwhelm, and overwrite, an existing system. Hexes like this worked by isolation, excising the target mechanism from its larger network, and then convincing both network and mechanism that nothing had changed. It was a variant of hexes that Rory had deployed on Urse during the many months of her confinement. Then, she had had her harp to facilitate the mathematics, and the stakes had been fooling the surveillance ’bots. Here . . . here she had two bleeding vakari looking over her shoulder and royalists on the other side of the hatch, which, if she succeeded, would open and permit an exchange of fire and place her in the crossfire.
Well. It would not be the first time today that had happened. And if she wanted to make peace with the Protectorate, her chance to prove both worth and trustworthiness started now.
Rory wormed into the hex, cracked it wide, and, as the hatch spiraled open, ducked sideways and down, as small a silhouette as the hardsuit would permit.
There was a moment of silence, pregnant and swollen with surprise and probabilities and the roiling cloud of dread from Vigat. Then Koto-rek deployed a skein of battle-hexes, visible to Rory only on her periphery. She fancied she could feel them pass over her, snaking through her hardsuit’s material and sliding over her skin like she was a rock in a fast-moving stream of arithmantic malice.
Then, having hexed, Koto-rek stepped over the threshold and let loose a stream from that not-quite-plasma rifle. Bolts came from inside the hatch in the same instance, and Rory poked her ’slinger around the lip of the hatch and squeezed out a bolt. From her angle, Rory could see clearly the split in Koto-rek’s armor. That was vakar flesh underneath, blasted visible in her headlamp.
A childhood pithiness about how everyone is the same inside flickered through Rory’s mind, and she strangled an inappropriate, stress-driven laugh. The sentiment was meant to engender compassion by teaching empathy. Perhaps a biological approach would have been more successful: everyone’s guts are red, so let’s keep them inside our bodies.
(Except everyone’s guts weren’t red. Mirri didn’t have discrete internal organs at all, and k’bal blood was a strange greenish-blue. Vakari, at least, shared some physiological similarities with humanity. They certainly shared the proclivity to violence.)
The firefight did not take long. Koto-rek proved more than sufficient to dispatch the invaders. Rory followed her through the hatch and found herself in a large chamber. She had been expecting engineering to be larger, more open. It was certainly the former: at least two levels higher, and one below, all threaded together with narrow metal ladders and, farther into the room, a lattice of metal platforms, around what had to be the engine core. The deck was lined with banks of what looked like turings and the strange, broken hulks of mecha designed by xeno minds to xeno aesthetics and destroyed by human ingenuity: some of the mecha had been disassembled deliberately, all their parts laid out on the deck in neat rows. The original vakari defenders, all unarmored, were stacked to the side with considerably less care than had been taken with the disabled mecha. Rory could not count from her vantage the number of Tadeshi soldiers, but she could tell that none of them remained upright.
One of the surviving (prone) soldiers gurgled, and Koto-rek’s plasma rifle coughed another, final shot. A second soldier began pleading for mercy.
Rory should protest the execution. She should, oh, help somehow. Of course the Tadeshi would kill her, if they caught her, but they were both human, and Koto-rek was a pitiless, spikey, extra-jointed—
Not monster. Not animal. Rory stopped herself short of thinking it, in part because her gaze fell on Vigat, who had limped into the room now. She was leaning hard on a railing, jaw-plates fluttering like wings, and staring at the dead vakari. Grief and fury had replaced the despair in her aura.
Rory’s guilt twisted into a new coil. It was their ship. The Tadeshi didn’t belong here: they had breached the hull and they’d killed vakari crew—
Koto-rek shot a second time, and the pleading ceased.
—and that soldier had sounded very young, there at the end. Rory drifted toward one of the dismantled mecha. Guilt, or perhaps nausea, wormed through her stomach. She had enabled this. She was responsible for the dead. It was not a logical conclusion: the Tadeshi had boarded Sissten in the first place, had certainly accounted for the vakari dead in engineering. The fight for possession of this chamber had been brutal. There was a great deal of blood. One might perhaps argue the Tadeshi deserved what they got. But then Rory recalled the slaughter on G. Stein. Untangling who deserved what at this point was a matter for politicians and philosophers. (Or princesses, came the thought, unbidden and unwelcome. She quashed it.)
“Rory Thorne. Come here, please.” The courtesy, the please, reminded Rory suddenly of Messer Rupert, in his former role as Vizier and Thorne Consortium ambassador to the Free Worlds of Tadesh. From Koto-rek, the courtesy was somewhat unexpected, and so was that association.
Rory obeyed the summons, and ventured out onto one of the steel-mesh catwalks, approaching the central column that must be the core—
Oh.
Rory forgot about guilt and essential humanity and stared. She was no engineer. Her knowledge of engine cores was limited to “they use plasma,” with the finer details falling into the same category as arithmancy and alchemy did for Thorsdottir. But Rory had seen engines before—Vagabond’s small plasma coil, at least from the maintenance bay of SAM-1, and a diagram or two from a textbook. There would be two poles, and between them, a stream of blue-white plasma, all contained and shielded by alchemical hexes, all controlled by turing, wrapped up in an opaque cylinder, sometimes with transparent (alchemically altered) panels for viewing. An engine of the sort with which she was familiar was a horizontal affair, most of the length of a room, and massive.
This was something else. This was alchemy, arithmancy, advanced physics and engineering and, well, magic was as good a word as any. It hung vertically, suspended, perhaps stretched, between what looked like the poles on a standard engine core, with machines and wires meant to transfer the power, convert it (work magic on it) for other systems. The area between the poles was purple and flickering black on the edges. It looked like someone had pulled apart the fabric of the multiverse and this was what lay inside.
Koto-rek watched Rory. The vakar had raised her visor. It wasn’t exactly a glow, coming out of the rift, so much as an ooze of residual light, like a cut weeping fluid after the proper bleeding has stopped. That residual weep dusted Koto-rek’s features vaguely violet, while at the same time draining all variation out of her skin until she looked like a two-dimensional representation of herself.
Rory glanced down at her own ha
nds. They, too, seemed oddly flat in the weep from the engine rift. Engine gash. Whatever that purple thing was.
“Did they—do something to it? Are we dead, after all?” Surely that violet hole must be something gone terribly wrong with vakari physics. Some . . . inversion of plasma, or a corruption. (Inversion? Plasma didn’t invert. Or corrupt.)
“They’ve done nothing I can detect.” Koto-rek’s gaze diverted, a quick reconnaissance past Rory’s shoulder. “Vigat will know better.”
Rory heard, now, the wounded vakar’s tread on the metal grate, and felt the vibration through her soles. Vigat hissed out a string of imprecatory syllables which ended only when she ran out of breath.
Koto-rek’s plates flared and flattened. “She objects to your presence here. You’re not authorized to see this.”
“Assure her I don’t know what I’m seeing.”
But Rory did. Or she was beginning to. She peered at the gash. It was not, as she had thought, uniformly violet inside. There seemed to be fluctuation—wait. Were those things moving around in there? Physical, solid shapes? Alive? Surely not solid, certainly not alive. Nothing could live in void. Except this wasn’t void of the same sort that hung about outside of ships and stations, home to stars and planets. This was the void between layers of aether, or perhaps a very deep, lateral layer of the aether. Rory wished for Messer Rupert with an intensity that surprised her, not in the least because it had nothing to do with comfort and rescue and everything to do with he’d want to see this. As an afterthought, she added Jaed to that list. He wouldn’t know any more than she did, but he’d at least gape at it like a landed fish along with her.
Vigat left off hissing and (Rory supposed) recommending Rory’s execution and busied herself with a nearby terminal. Inside the engine chamber, a tiny arachnoid mecha detached itself from its rack on the bulkhead and crawled along the perimeter of the engine-rift, examining the various connections and mechanisms.
“The drive is intact,” Koto-rek said finally, after Rory had come to that same conclusion, based on the shifting shades of Vigat’s aura. “We are not dead, for the moment.”
“What is it, exactly? The drive. I ask, because it looks like an open rift into a layer of the aether. It’s like void, but void should be empty.”
Koto-rek had been leaning heavily on a flimsy-looking rail beside Vigat’s terminal, over which one could look if one wished to more closely examine the engine. Now she pushed herself off. The rifle hung in her hand, looking impossibly heavy. The edges of the hole in her armor looked freshly wet, to Rory’s quick glance.
Koto-rek noticed the look. She clamped her elbow back in place and said, as sharp as her talons, “Do not ask. Come with me.” She limped along the gantry, following the engine’s perimeter.
Rory glanced again at the wriggling things inside the rift. In her childhood, she had loved feeding the koi in the courtyard pond; they had looked like that when she dropped bits of food into the water. A riot of scales and moving bodies, impossible to tell apart except by color and the occasional mouth. She wondered if she looked long enough at the engine if she would see mouths or—oh. She blinked. Limbs?
Don’t ask. Right. Rory turned her shoulder to the engine and went after Koto-rek, who had neither turned nor paused, assuming (correctly) that Rory would follow, or perhaps hoping for enough of a head start that her limpingly slow pace might go unremarked.
Rory did not, indeed, remark on it. She adjusted her own steps to match the vakar’s, and (feeling a bit foolish) maneuvered to keep Koto-rek between her and the engine and its writhing, limb-y, impossible residents.
“You didn’t bring me here to admire vakari engineering. Or,” she added, “to kill me for having seen it.”
“This is not mere engineering. But no: I said we were going to the auxiliary bridge, and that is what we have done. Now let us see if anyone is still alive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Grytt and Rupert met Vagabond at the aetherlock with only a pair of lightly armed escorts, and they made it clear they had come to escort Crow, who, with Zhang, was the first off the ship. The alwar did not quite draw their weapons, but there were some hovering hands and threatening eyebrows.
Crow scoffed, but did not otherwise argue.
“You’re not taking him prisoner, are you?” Zhang demanded. When the alwar escort blinked at her, she turned sharply to Messer Rupert. “They’re not taking him prisoner.” This time it sounded like a declaration, possibly to be backed up with force.
“No,” said the foremost alw, who was slightly taller than her fellows, and therefore came just past Zhang’s shoulder. “But Battlechief Crow—”
“No,” said Crow, interrupting. He scowled at the alwar, his mouth working as if he’d bitten something unpleasant and could find no appropriate way to spit it out. “Not a prisoner. This is a precaution. If I were the captain, I wouldn’t let me walk around by myself. On my ship, she’d be surrounded.”
“At least you will be able to see over our heads,” said the alw with a tight smile. “Please, Battlechief. We’ll take you to quarters with your people.”
“Battlechief?” Zhang stared.
Crow shrugged. He might have been smiling; with tenju, it can be difficult to tell. “Fly with you anytime. Any of you.” Then he turned and did not so much go with the alwar escort as he did sweep them along in his wake.
“Battlechief?” said Grytt, looking thoughtful.
Messer Rupert embraced Zhang gently, formally, his hands on her shoulders. Grytt folded her arms and scowled, which Jaed knew meant the same thing.
Then Messer Rupert looked at him. “Jaed?”
It was both invitation—please come out here—and query—are you all right. Jaed, who had been lingering in Vagabond’s aetherlock, emerged at Messer Rupert’s invitation. Thorsdottir came with him, leaning on him while pretending she wasn’t. Jaed was glad of the hardsuit’s support, and the proximity and sturdiness of the hatch, and not at all sure how the whole walking business would proceed once they left the narrow space.
Zhang looked at Grytt. “Where’s our escort?”
“We don’t have one.” Grytt lifted her organic shoulder in a gesture that was both shrug and dismissal. “Rupert asked for a little privacy, and as the Vizier of the Confederation of Liberated Worlds, he was granted that courtesy.”
Privacy. Jaed bounced a conspicuous and suspicious stare off the creases of bulkhead and overhead.
Rupert, who had noticed Jaed’s suspicion, offered a faint smile. “I thought we might take this conversation back onto Vagabond.”
Jaed felt Thorsdottir’s dread as a hitch in the deliberate, measured breaths by which she’d gotten off the ship. But all she said aloud was, “Of course,” as if Rupert had asked for a cup of tea.
Jaed thought of Thorsdottir walking back inside, and then having to come out again, because of course they would be expected to debark eventually. He thought of their carefully negotiated agreement—that information about Rose was fine, even the documentation; but actually producing any physical evidence was not, and how that would be much harder to conceal if Rupert and Grytt laid eyes on Thorsdottir’s burned suit.
Rupert, who had one foot on the ramp, paused when Jaed did not make a move to retreat. “Jaed? Is there a difficulty?”
“We just got out here, is all. Vagabond’s really small.”
“It’s fine,” said Thorsdottir. She turned and, pushing off Jaed, retreated into the ship.
Grytt’s human eye narrowed. Both of Rupert’s did, as well.
Zhang made her face carefully blank and followed Rupert onto the ramp. “Thorsdottir sustained an injury in her escape from Sissten,” she said quietly. “She’s in some discomfort.”
“Which you failed to mention earlier.” Grytt’s quiet was far more menacing.
“There did not seem to be a good time to mention it,” Zha
ng said. “It was not something a whole ship of strangers needed to know.”
Jaed came partway down the ramp so that he could inject himself into the conversation without shouting, and because Zhang was looking rather outnumbered. “Thorsdottir’s fine, and besides, we didn’t want anyone hauling her off to some xeno sickbay.”
Rupert’s disapproval radiated. “These xenos have been extremely accommodating so far, and skilled.”
“Because they want a new weapon, right? Or something else. They’re not here for charity.”
“Move this inside, please.” Grytt stomped up the ramp.
At least, Jaed thought, he’d secured enough time with his arguing for Thorsdottir to find her way to a chair, and to arrange herself so that her right arm was safely concealed between body and bulkhead. He was fairly sure Grytt wasn’t fooled. He was also sure she was immune to his meaningful, pleading stare, but he tried it anyway.
Grytt was, indeed, immune. She crossed the cabin, reached over and, without so much as a pardon me or may I, hooked her mecha hand around Thorsdottir’s chair and wrenched it around.
“The hell happened to you?”
“I took a hit from one of the vakari weapons. It’s fine.”
Jaed sighed inwardly. Thorsdottir was the absolute worst at lying. Which made sense, because Thorsdottir was so used to Rory, and Rory always seemed to know when people weren’t telling the truth, but even so, she could try.
“Thorsdottir’s fine,” Jaed said. “I’m more interested in how you got here.”
The look Grytt turned on him, and the subsequent heat that crawled up Jaed’s cheeks, reminded him he wasn’t good at lying, either.
“On orders from the Confederation,” said Grytt, whose expression said she had only tabled her questions for Thorsdottir, and meant to come back to them. She side-eyed her companion. “Rupert here hacked a console in Dame Maggie’s office. Arithmanced himself the authorization. Our new xeno friends volunteered to take us. We thought it was a favor to Merchants League allies, but now Rupert thinks they had an ulterior motive anyway, and we were a good excuse.”
