by Ada Hoffmann
Elu smiled fondly. Akavi never would admit weakness, not even at a time like this.
“Can you feel your ansible uplink?”
“I– hm.” His brow furrowed again, and he was lost in thought for six and a half seconds, long enough that Elu started to wonder if he’d fallen back asleep. “No. It’s not just dormant but gone. Cleanly, it seems.”
Elu let out about half of a relieved breath. “Are you feeling well enough to run diagnostics? Are any other systems affected?”
“Stand by.” A longer pause this time. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. “No, everything else appears normal.” The corner of Akavi’s mouth quirked, something that might have been a smile if he’d had more energy. “You are competent, as ever.”
Elu sighed out the rest of his breath.
It had been several weeks since the Plague. For most of that time they’d been on the run from the Gods in a stolen God-built spaceship. The Gods had expected Akavi to prevent the Plague, then They’d expected him to solve it, and then They’d ordered him terminated for failing at both. It had been Elu’s idea, not Akavi’s, to escape.
A stray bit of magic from an encounter with Evianna Talirr had given them the head start they needed. She’d meant to hide Akavi from the Gods long enough to reckon with him herself. But that attempt had failed, and, when she left, her magic stayed behind. For an unknown period they’d been hidden from all the Gods’ sensors. And they’d used that time to run.
It was anyone’s guess how long that magic would hold up. So Elu, who had some facility with cybernetics, had been making his own arrangements. He’d removed and disabled everything that connected the Talon to the ansible nets, and all the failsafes that might allow the Gods to override its controls. He’d used bots and printers to modify the ship’s exterior so that it resembled a small civilian transport, not the sleek God-built marvel that remained within. And he’d planned, painstakingly, a neurosurgery that would make the corresponding modifications to him and Akavi. The ansible connections in their brains would be removed, leaving them crippled by the standards of angels, cut off from the network where they’d stored so much of their knowledge and community, but safely anonymous for that very reason. They could go where they wanted to, once they’d recovered from a surgery like that.
Well, almost. The titanium plates at Elu’s forehead, marking where his circuitry went in, would still be there. Even aside from being an angel, Elu looked distinctive – frozen by angelic anti-aging treatments at nineteen, when most angels joined the corps in their thirties or forties. With an order out for his and Akavi’s arrest, that would be the first thing everyone would know to look for. He’d have to stay on the ship or hide his face completely. Akavi was luckier, but he’d still have to watch that his shapeshifting abilities and his more-than-mortal intelligence didn’t give him away.
Elu had wanted to go under first. If there was a bug in the software, let it be him who suffered the consequences and not Akavi. But Akavi, uncharacteristically, had insisted otherwise. Elu was the one who understood medical software; he needed to watch the first surgery with all his faculties intact. That way, if something did go wrong, he’d have a fighting chance at setting it right.
The surgery had mostly involved the inorganic part of Akavi’s brain, but recovery from such a procedure could be nearly as complicated as the organic version, as mind and soul struggled to accommodate the changed shape they inhabited. Exhaustion, confusion and incredible headaches could be expected for the next several weeks. And, for the next few hours, there’d still be the leftovers from general anesthesia.
“Let me get you some water,” Elu said. Akavi murmured something in acknowledgment. It was the work of only a few seconds to grab a glass of clear, pure water from the food printer. By the time Elu returned with it, Akavi had already fallen back asleep.
“I want revenge,” Akavi said to Elu later. He was sitting up now, looking out the Talon’s window at the stars. They were in his quarters. Akavi sat on a chair that had been folded out into a stretcher and covered with a sterile sheet. There was no bed. Angels rarely needed to sleep; they had other means of maintaining neurological homeostasis. It was only when profoundly exhausted, in the wake of surgery, illness, or injury, that the biological version overcame them.
“I know, sir,” said Elu. They’d talked about it before.
“Yasira betrayed me. Irimiru betrayed me. Nemesis betrayed me.” He hissed out that last name: the name of a God. It was blasphemous to speak a God’s name in anger this way, but Akavi was already slated for termination and damnation. He could say whatever he liked. “The guilty must be punished, and that is our nature.”
Elu tugged nervously at his long black hair, which he kept carefully brushed out of his face. He understood Akavi’s argument. He was hardly going to object on moral grounds; he and Akavi had done many things more terrible than seeking revenge. It was just…
He’d had a vague hope, maybe, that life on the run would be different. They’d find some different things to do, on their own terms.
But he wanted to be with Akavi much more than he wanted those vague, half-formed things. Elu had happily followed Akavi’s orders for fifty years.
“I don’t know how you can punish a God,” said Elu.
Akavi frowned slightly. His gaze was still glassily fixed on the stars. He hadn’t recovered from the anesthetic yet, but with his straight spine and sharp words, he was trying very hard to pretend he had. “No, I haven’t found a promising avenue yet. We’ll start with Yasira; she’s an easier target. A broken heretic on the run, without support.”
Elu would have quibbled about the without support part. Yasira had taken her girlfriend with her when she escaped. And she had Outside abilities whose precise nature remained unknown. But he knew what Akavi meant. Irimiru was a powerful, high-ranking angel protected by a massive divine apparatus, and Nemesis Herself was even more so. Yasira didn’t have those things. Like him and Akavi, she was making do as best she could.
“What about Talirr?” Elu asked carefully. “Did she betray us?”
He liked the idea of keeping up the search for Talirr, much more than he wanted to hunt Yasira down. He wasn’t sure how they’d do it; they’d tried before, with the full resources of an Inquisitor in good standing, and still failed. He knew they couldn’t work their way back into Nemesis’ good graces. Forgiveness wasn’t what Nemesis did. But Talirr had hurt hundreds of millions of people, and making her pay for those crimes still felt like a good thing to do. The right thing to do.
Elu had seen what serving Nemesis, the God of punishment, was really about. But there was still a childish part of him, deep down, that just wanted to catch all the bad guys and make the world safe.
Akavi flicked a hand. “We’ll add her to the list with Irimiru, if you like. We’ll – ugh.” His face contorted slightly. Elu rummaged in his supplies for another painkiller. “What did you say was the estimated recovery time for this procedure?”
“It’s hard to say, sir,” Elu replied, as he found the appropriate bottle and shook out two small tablets. It still felt natural to call Akavi sir, but should he? Akavi wasn’t technically his commanding officer anymore. They were outside that whole structure, but that didn’t make them equals. Maybe he should ask.
He didn’t quite want to, though. Not while Akavi was still in recovery. The question was too big, too connected to too many other things.
“My simulations indicated a few days to basic functionality,” he continued, refocusing. Akavi took the tablets and the glass of water by his bed and easily swallowed them. “A couple more weeks for any lingering pain, mental unease, or disorientation. But we won’t really know until we’re through it. A slower recovery isn’t necessarily a warning sign. What would be more worrying is if you display any symptoms that aren’t on the predicted list, so we’ll be monitoring that carefully.”
Akavi made a small hmph sound, looking away from him.
“Where do you think Yasira is?” Elu asked.
“We won’t need a full recovery just to start looking.”
“She’ll be on Jai. Or near it. That much is obvious.”
“Is it? I almost think she’d run off and hide somewhere. Have a bit of a rest.” Yasira had been traumatized and exhausted the last time Elu saw her. And the Chaos Zone of Jai wasn’t going to be a restful place for anyone.
Akavi gave him a contemptuous glance. “Of course she’ll rest at first. But Yasira Shien rebelled against us precisely because of her desire to help. She’ll keep that desire, no matter how exhausted. That’s doubly true if her lover is with her. When we’re sufficiently recovered, we’ll go to the Chaos Zone. We’ll take stock of the current situation and of who’s being helped, in mysterious ways, against the Gods’ orders. That’s where we’ll find Yasira, rest assured. And when we find her, then the fun begins.”
Elu gave him a doubtful look. “Fun, sir?”
Akavi smiled sharply; his gaze had already returned, out the window, to the stars. “That’s when we destroy her.”
A line of warrior angels, wearing the red-and-black active-duty livery of Nemesis and the bronze-and-white uniform of Arete, stood at attention in front of Enga Afonbataw Konum, marshal of Nemesis. Most held God-built firearms, sleek and heavy, in their hands; a few, like Enga, were modified so heavily that they did not need them. Some dragged larger weapons behind them in the training field, a rectangular area of short dry grass not far from the angels’ encampment. Border Camp 342-6J, this was called, one of an irritatingly long line of makeshift stops all around the edge of the Chaos Zone. All devoted to the same purposes: to keep the Plague-ridden area from expanding, and to serve as a home base for missions further in.
Enga stood as straight as the rest of the warriors, with the alien Spider known as Sispirinithas waiting at her side, and an ungainly makeshift target just behind her. Enga was a distinctive-looking angel, easily picked out even if she hadn’t worn the elaborate piping of her recent promotion. Enga was tall, muscular, dark-skinned, and silent. Where most angels had arms, Enga sported the most elaborate customized prosthetics in the angelic corps, a tangle of muzzles and manipulators sprouting from her shoulders, which compactly contained dozens of deadly weapons along with nearly any other tool she might require.
Her new rank of marshal was as high as she could go without vaulting all the way into administration: as prestigious, in its way, as the rank of Inquisitor. She’d been racking up commendations for decades, and her performance during the Plague, combined with her previous supervisor’s failure, had finally pushed her all the way up here. She had been the first angel to demonstrate that Jai’s largest monsters could be killed. She had been one of a very small number to survive field placement in the Chaos Zone at all, back when it was still cut off from off-planet communication and support, and she’d directly saved the lives of half a dozen other angels on the return journey. Now that the Chaos Zone was opened, she’d been given the role of training the rest of the infantry who served here.
Enga did not feel proud, the way she had a right to feel, being granted all these honors. Enga felt lonely and bored. She could see all the angels in front of her, not only with her eyes, but with her circuitry, which picked them all out as bright points of light in the surrounding network, living nodes temporarily suborned to hers. But grunts were just grunts. Enga didn’t like any of them. She was lonely for something else.
She wanted Elu and Akavi, but they were gone, and they were never coming back except as corpses.
READY, she text-sent to the line of infantry, and she watched them shoulder their weapons with precise efficiency. No one form of weapon could be guaranteed to work on every Outside monster. Each was unique. A heavy armor-piercing missile would do the job in a pinch, but those were cumbersome to carry around, and they were in many cases overkill.
AIM, she text-sent, and the angels pointed their weapons in unison at the practice target. Just a black circle cobbled together from scraps, at about the height of one of the medium-large Outside monsters. It bobbed slowly in the air, imitating movement patterns that had been extracted from Enga’s own sensory videos.
She paced the ranks, examining the way each angel scoped out the target, the way they kept their eyes half-averted. She paused meaningfully by one, a curly-haired man in Nemesis’ colors, who was staring too directly at the stupid black circle, too focused. She telescoped an appendage out to grab that one by the chin.
DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THEM, IT CAN FUCK UP YOUR VISUAL CIRCUITS, she instructed.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” said the recruit.
Enga let go, and watched him snap back to attention, nearly losing his balance. TEN, she ordered, before walking away down the line.
The man obligingly dropped to the ground and began a short set of pushups.
Enga didn’t care about honors and ranks, but there was something satisfying about being addressed as “sir” in that frightened way. Getting to dole out punishments, even in these small ways, as she saw fit.
“Sir,” said another of the angels, also of Nemesis, a woman almost as large and strong as Enga. Enga could have looked up her name on the network if she’d wanted to. “Question.”
MAKE IT GOOD, said Enga, who did not like being questioned. Long ago, before she was an angel, Enga had worked as a fitness instructor. There was enough of her old self left that she faintly remembered what that was like, and why responding to questions was important. But she didn’t enjoy the process anymore. Being an angel wasn’t like doing martial arts for fun. When you were an angel, it was safer to obey without thinking.
“Sir, why are we bothering to do it like this, to go out into enemy territory and pick off the monsters one by one? Why bother shooting carefully at what we think is their head? We have the weaponry to do better. We could burn out a whole district at once, the monsters and the heretics alike.”
Enga glowered, because she actually agreed. She would much rather bomb the whole place into oblivion. Not long ago, Nemesis had come very close to doing it Herself: orbiting the planet with a convoy of Ha-Mashhit-class warships and melting every square foot of affected land back to magma. Starting again clean.
But there were reasons why She hadn’t gone through with it. Gods relied on human worship. They consumed human souls to keep Themselves alive; without that process, They would only be very advanced machines. They could do it without individual humans’ consent, but if humans ever did rebel – if they started a second Morlock War – they could force the Gods to destroy them in Their own defense. And the Gods would be diminished afterwards, with only a remnant of the human population to give them sustenance. It would take hundreds of years to recover.
So the Gods could only use Their power in certain ways. The most brutal acts were done in secret – or to targets that could be painstakingly justified. Worse than any individual heretic going unpunished was the risk of crossing some moral line and becoming, in mortal humanity’s eyes, an enemy.
Some of the Gods, like Nemesis, restrained Themselves for that reason alone. Other Gods had more complicated feelings. Arete, who fought so often at Nemesis’ side, didn’t like to dirty Her hands; Arete genuinely wanted to be a benevolent master. Enga could see some of Arete’s angels in the group, shifting slightly, giving uncomfortable looks to the angel who’d asked.
So bombing out whole cities at once, in the Chaos Zone, was something the Gods had decided They couldn’t do. But Enga wasn’t impressed. Everybody in the Chaos Zone was a heretic, right? The Gods were already busy elsewhere, carefully crafting propaganda vids that showed why the Chaos Zone couldn’t be saved. They were either building up to a large-scale bombing eventually, or They were stupid. And in the meantime, angels like Enga were having to waste their time pretending that individual fights with monsters even mattered. Enga did not like wasting time.
Another problem was that Nemesis’ forces were spread thin. The Keres, the Gods’ ancient enemy, had scented blood here. She was beginning to make Her own forays in
to the area. Nemesis’ forces on the ground often had to shrink their own efforts because personnel were needed to fend the Keres off.
But Enga didn’t like that argument either. Personnel would be less of an issue with a different approach; it didn’t take a lot of angels to just bomb the shit out of something. It did take a lot of angels to do what she was doing – recruit and train endless troops to patrol an area, dealing with threats one at a time.
But the third argument, the one Enga was least able to dispute, was that bombing the shit out of the Chaos Zone wouldn’t solve anything. Not until they’d found Evianna Talirr. She was the one who’d done this to the planet. And she could do it again. Clean up Jai’s Chaos Zone too quickly and neatly, and Talirr would only make another one somewhere else. There were only a few dozen populated planets in human space; pretty soon they’d start to run out. The Gods had to find Talirr, along with Yasira Shien, who was capable of something similar. Then, maybe, They could bomb what remained.
But that meant that Enga and the troops in her care were only buying time. Spinning their wheels uselessly until some other part of the angelic corps got its act together. Pretending what they did here, until then, mattered.
Enga hated feeling useless. And she hated having to explain things she hated to subordinates who hated them as much as she did. Having to pretend – because protocol demanded it – that she thought those things were good.
WE ARE KEEPING ORDER IN THE CHAOS ZONE, Enga replied, NOT BURNING IT. THAT IS NEMESIS’ COMMAND.
But the junior angels could probably feel the frustrated rage under her text-sending. She couldn’t help it; she’d never learned to filter her feelings out completely, as the most skilled angels could. And that was going to make everyone question more, not less. She was fucking it up.
