Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Abandoned, hell. If not for him, she wouldn’t be in this fix. The least he could do was get her out of it, even if he didn’t like her.

  Cheris had informed him that Kujen’s base would open its outer sanctum to anyone, since Kujen needed to be able to access it in whatever body he chose. Jedao had doubts born of a short lifetime serving Kujen, but he was also out of options. He might be able to recover from whatever weaponry slammed down onto the surface, but Cheris needed shelter now.

  The door ground open before him. With little atmosphere on the moon, there wasn’t sound as such, and Jedao didn’t think he had hearing left anyway; the agony in his skull suggested he’d done something bad to his eardrums. The vibrations rumbled against his soles, however—and for fuck’s sake, he didn’t need the reminder that the bones in his feet throbbed as though they were starting to splinter or whatever his body did after abuse like this.

  Jedao would have liked nothing better than to flop to the ground and wheeze in agony while waiting for his body to knit itself back together. But that would mean conceding victory to the Shuos. Close, close, close, there are hostiles out there. The door seemed to be in no hurry, so instead he hastened deeper into the throat of the base, as though he were a sacrifice begging to be eaten.

  Bad thought; remembered hunger twinged at the pit of his stomach. He gagged as the airlock cycled, tasted the air with its sweet oxygen, and the slight fragrant hint of perfume, how like Kujen to care about things like that. (Had he never considered that one of his anchors might have a heretofore unknown allergy?) I’m not hungry, he told himself. He couldn’t be that badly hurt. Wouldn’t allow himself to be.

  Still, there had better be a stockpile of food in this base—even Kel ration bars—just in case.

  Too bad he didn’t have the luxury of slumping with Cheris in his arms, awkwardly webbed to him as she was, and enjoying the simple fact of breathing. Now that he’d entered the base—

  The transmission arrived on schedule. His nerves jangled and for a moment he wondered if he’d caught on fire. It would serve him right. But no: it was a burst transmission to his augment, specifically of a number. A very, very large composite number.

  Cheris was supposed to deal with Kujen’s fucking math problem. She had sounded so enthusiastic as she explained the principles of the calendrical lock to him, and even more enthusiastic, momentarily forgetting that she disliked him, when he revealed that he knew what prime factorization was. Too bad she had despised Kujen, because Jedao could imagine the two of them discussing disgustingly incomprehensible mathematics for fun over milk tea and custard buns. In his haste to escape the hostiles, however, Jedao had accelerated too fast and the knocked Cheris out.

  One step at a time. Panicking over the enormity of what he was about to try didn’t help. He broke it down to easily digestible steps (ha, ha). He couldn’t give up this close to achieving his goal.

  Jedao retrieved the knife he had pocketed earlier and slashed Cheris free of the webcord. Then, cradling her head so he didn’t cause her further trauma, he set her down near the wall. He wished he could offer a softer surface than the floor, but it couldn’t be helped.

  He backed up two steps, turned his back to her, and stared at the knife. The hole in his chest had healed shut; he could even feel the familiar map of scars that reconstituted itself every time. It’s only pain, Jedao reminded himself. It doesn’t matter.

  Even so, he bit down on a hiss as he cut himself open. It’s only pain. For the first time, he wondered how warmoths felt when they sustained injuries in the course of battle. He’d never thought to ask one.

  Cheris kept her tools sharp, considerate of her. The knife didn’t snag on his flesh, or what passed for flesh. Jedao wiped the blade clean, then shoved it into his belt.

  Next Jedao reached into the wound and dug out the device, grimacing at the squelching as he tore it free of the tendrils inside himself. He wiped the case as clean as he could on his clothes, then cut through the skinseal and opened it. To his relief, the device nestled within appeared undamaged.

  The number in his augment sizzled against his awareness, as though he’d been poured full of lightning. The augment had interfaced with the local grid. It informed him that he had three minutes and sixteen seconds left to disarm the security system.

  Next time I piss off a near-immortal with secret bases, Jedao thought, I’m going to make sure it’s a thug who uses regular locks and not a fucking mathematician.

  Even as he entertained the happy fantasy of a lock he could simply cut his way around, or even better, an unlocked door, Jedao transmitted the composite number with its staggering number of digits to the device using his augment. His head ached, which was partly due to the changes to the augment’s contents. He had some peripheral awareness that the base’s initial transmission had simply erased a large amount of data, from interface functions to backed-up memories of irrelevant trivia about dueling competitions. (Jedao hadn’t trusted a device to keep his secrets from the Shuos.)

  Time for the hard part. Jedao heard the Shuos moths singing as they fought, although he wasn’t going to give himself away by attempting to address them. Did moths of different factions object to fighting others of their own kind? Something to ask Harmony later if it survived. He was tempted to call out to it, but he didn’t want to distract it. For all he knew, it blamed him for the hit it had taken.

  With any luck, the crews on those shadowmoths were distant enough that Jedao wouldn’t have to account for them when he attempted to modify the local calendar to a heretical one in which the factorization device could function. Kujen’s weakness had been his extreme attachment to the high calendar; he’d never anticipated that someone using a heretical device would try to break into his base, or he’d believed that by that point the base would be compromised anyway. Cheris was unconscious, and therefore of no help, but at least she would be—how did they say it in math?—a constant factor.

  Jedao accessed his augment and set up the initial computations for the ritual despite the screaming pain in his chest. It’s only pain. As far as he could tell, Cheris would have been able to do the math in her head, lucky her. He was just a runaway, not the savant who had almost single-handedly wrecked the hexarchate. He needed a computer algebra system.

  Dimly, Jedao sensed the shadowmoths treeing the Harmony. It had landed, and the particular dense mass that was Cheris’s servitor friend had wedged itself... in the cargo hold? It must be hiding from search parties.

  The device tracked fluctuations in the local calendar. Unfortunately, its readouts hadn’t been designed for the sightless. Jedao growled and wasted precious seconds piping them to his augment so he could interpret the raw data. While he’d heard of people blinding themselves to avoid Andan enthrallment or Rahal scrying, usually in the context of dramas or specialized pornography, the hexarchate only thought about the unsighted in a military sort of way, such as Shuos infantry operating in the dark, or computers providing voice access to people who were waiting to have replacement eyes grown and installed after trauma. Whoever had designed the device hadn’t thought about the needs of temporarily blinded individuals who couldn’t regrow their eyes fast enough to beat what was probably a self-destruct countdown.

  Jedao oriented himself amid the numbers and figures, visualizing them against the performance space. Had Kujen ever danced the doors open, here?

  The clock continued its countdown, as relentless as a knife-thrust.

  Too bad he wasn’t a Nirai. A Nirai would have known the local calendar, like perfect pitch except it applied to matters of time and government. But the stupid hack worked, even if it strained the limits of his augment’s processing ability, and that was what mattered.

  Human shapes approached. He had to hurry this up. Jedao bowed to the corners of an imaginary nonagon, thought with alarm of ninefoxes and tricksters and schemes in the scudding dark. Granted, there might be light in the room, but since he couldn’t see, it was entirely academic.

 
Jedao dredged up memories of ritual phrases from various feasts and remembrances, everything from the old blessing pronounced by the Liozh heptarch for the New Year’s gift exchange to verses-of-praise and verses-of-war, some of the latter allegedly penned by the great General Andan Zhe Navo. His tongue scraped against his dry mouth and the ridged surfaces of his teeth, which felt too sharp for anyone’s comfort.

  As the words poured from him in a frenzy of desperation, the hunger nagged at him again. Maybe cutting himself hadn’t been the brightest idea, especially since the only “food” was Cheris and he was not going to chomp on her. Despite his fear, he forced himself to breathe evenly and continue the recitations.

  Numbers slid, shifted, realigned. The device remained obdurately silent. What the hell was he doing wrong?

  Aha. The problem was the encroaching Shuos operatives. He needed to compensate for the effect they had on the local calendar and hurry up before they got closer. Fuck my life, Jedao thought, suddenly hyper-aware of the warm slimy dampness that caused his pants to cling to his body. Blood. He was tracking blood all over Kujen’s (presumably) shiny base floor. At least he hadn’t slid in it and knocked himself out, which would be a hilarious if undignified way to meet his end.

  Jedao agonized: he could calculate the necessary modifications to the ritual, but he wasn’t sure he had enough processing power to spare, especially since he didn’t dare cut his connection to the device’s monitoring routines. Despite the splitting headache it gave him, he sliced out a number of security functions on the grounds that getting hacked by a Shuos was now a secondary concern, and fed the augment the systems of congruences he needed solved. He asked as well for the geometrical conversions.

  He fancied he heard footsteps, even though the operatives were still some distance away—about thirteen minutes at a dead run. Cheris continued to breathe shallowly. The moths sang war-hymns to each other.

  The factorization device thrummed. Jedao heard it only subliminally. He started to hold his breath, as if it made any difference to a machine, then let it out.

  The device transmitted the prime factors to his augment, which relayed them to the base.

  For an agonizing second, nothing happened.

  Then the countdown stopped. The inner door gaped open. Jedao halted the recitations and knelt to hoist Cheris over his shoulder. He continued to leak blood not just all over the floor—fox and hound, he could feel the thick puddles of it underfoot—but Cheris’s lower body. How much blood did he contain? How much more could he afford to lose?

  Jedao hurried through the door. His hearing was starting to return, and he heard the door whisking shut. He could see a little, too, although his eye sockets stung and everything was a red-black haze.

  Someone was talking to him.

  Jedao twisted to put as much of his body between himself and his interlocutor as possible. “I’m sorry,” he said, wincing at the way his voice rasped in his throat. “I didn’t understand that.” Was he too late? Had the Shuos beaten him here, and if so, why was he still (temporarily) alive?

  The voice repeated itself. His hearing rendered it as a contralto buzzing.

  He wasn’t about to relinquish Cheris, which made signing awkward. In any case, he had no guarantee that whoever he was talking to understood the Shuos sign language. “She’s injured,” he said, nodding toward Cheris’s slumped weight and wishing that the motion didn’t aggravate the pain in his chest.

  The voice’s owner seemed to decide that he was deaf; it occurred to Jedao that maybe he was. This time it spoke so loudly that Jedao could, with difficulty, distinguish the words: “Put her down, step backwards, and put your hands in the air. If you move after that, we’ll kill you both.”

  CHERIS AWOKE A prisoner.

  Muzzy as she was, she assumed at first that she was still a junior lieutenant, that she’d offended her captain somehow (fouled up a ritual at high table? failed to shine her boots? gotten drunk on duty?), and been tossed in the brig. Granted, spider restraints on top of that suggested petty vindictiveness as well. And her head was throbbing. How drunk had she gotten? It must have been one hell of a party. She was sorry she couldn’t remember the good parts.

  I never went out drinking that recklessly, one part of her mind insisted, while the other said, Yes, you did—there was that time you and Ruo stole unlabeled confiscated bottles of “enhanced liquors” from Security and stayed up all night in a drinking contest.

  “Ruo?” she said aloud, and looked around despite the screaming pain in her neck and the attendant tension headache.

  Silence.

  Her voice was wrong—no. It was her voice, hers. Paradoxically, the pain cleared the confusion. She was still wearing her suit, although the lower half of it was smeared with a black gore that she recognized as Jedao’s blood. Not that the suit did her much good, as someone had removed both the helmet and her air supply. There might be breathable air in the room now, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be taken away.

  Her captors had stashed her on a cushiony bed in a ridiculously luxurious room. If it hadn’t been for the restraints, she would have thought herself an honored guest. The room sported dark gray wallpaper covered with paintings on silk: cavalcades of butterflies, sprays of budding blossoms evoked by expert brushstrokes. She didn’t recognize the decor, but the expensive tastes were pure Kujen, to say nothing of the immense jade statue of a nude youth, in a style she’d never seen in the hexarchate, that dominated one corner.

  First things first. She checked herself over for injuries. Aside from the neck-ache and headache, she was intact. Despite the brief encroachment of the original Jedao’s rambunctious past, she felt reasonably clear-headed.

  Exits: three obvious doors. Cheris struggled upright, moving just slowly enough to cause the restraints not to tighten painfully. There was a trick to it, which she’d learned as a Kel cadet; spider restraints had been invented after Jedao’s physical lifetime so he had no experience with them. Flexibility helped, as well as muscular control.

  She’d inched her way toward the most promising of the doors when she heard a voice.

  “Stop right there,” it said in a forbidding contralto. It spoke in the high language, with a slight accent a couple centuries out of date. Kujen had once told her that the high language changed slowly thanks to modern communications.

  “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?” Cheris asked.

  “Let me clarify the situation,” the voice said, sounding unimpressed. “If you attempt to open the door you’re heading toward, I will kill you. You are being monitored. Of the doors behind you, the one to the left leads to a bathroom where you can clean yourself up or not, it’s up to you. The one to the right contains enough food to keep you alive for the next several years, assuming I don’t tire of you. Nod if you understand me.”

  Cheris nodded, thinking furiously. The only people here should be servitors. She had no evidence that the contralto didn’t belong to a servitor. As far as she knew, most of them could speak the high language, even if Kel servitors, with which she had the most familiarity, generally chose not to. She’d learned Simplified Machine Universal as a child on a beach with a servitor whose nominal job was to clean it of debris and litter. (Only as an adult had she realized that the servitor had been indulging her “teaching” it math.) Whatever the means of communication, however, all her previous encounters with servitors had been neutral or friendly.

  The owner of the contralto voice didn’t sound friendly in the least.

  “Very good,” it said. “If you have any clever ideas for escape, keep them to yourself. Try anything suspicious and we’ll vent all the air in these rooms. Or poison you. Really, there are so many options.”

  This is good, Cheris thought, not because she relished the prospect of asphyxiation, but because the voice was chatty. The more it spoke, the better the odds that it might give away some crucial clue.

  “There was a man with me,” Cheris said cautiously, since it hadn’t forbidden he
r from asking questions. “Where is he?”

  The voice didn’t answer.

  Cheris waited six minutes, although she couldn’t necessarily rely on her augment’s chronometer for accurate timekeeping. Then she backed away from the door she’d originally been investigating. She might as well take her captor at their word.

  She inventoried the room, starting with the magnificent dressers with their abalone inlay. Empty. So, too, were the equally beautiful matching cabinets, although the faintest of marks suggested that they had once contained treasures of some sort.

  Only then did she investigate the bathroom. Testing revealed that the water was lukewarm. Tempting as it was to bathe, she checked the other room next. As promised, it contained food: prepackaged Andan meals, in theory a step up from Kel ration bars. In practice, she’d heard almost as many jokes about them as the ration bars. But food was food, and while she wasn’t yet hungry, she didn’t know how long she was going to be here. She’d have to ration just in case.

  Finally Cheris allowed herself to rinse some of the reeking blood from her suit. Since the water supply was also bound to be limited, she used the bathtub’s stopper and limited herself to a shallow pool. As much as she longed for a bath, she didn’t dare get caught without the suit’s protection.

  What had become of Jedao? She couldn’t attempt to contact his augment with her own. Her captors had made it clear that any suspicious behavior invited retaliation. If they were in fact hostile servitors, they could detect augment transmissions. They might not be able to read an encrypted message, but she didn’t want to gamble on that either. Besides, how could she send Jedao a coded or encrypted message that he and not their listeners would understand?

  She’d paused in her scrubbing when the pooled water formed waves that didn’t make sense. Cheris had grown up observing the sea, and she’d studied fluid dynamics. Scowling, she stepped out of the water and picked at some of the blackened goop on her legs.