by Ada Hoffmann
NO MORE QUESTIONS, said Enga, and she turned on her heel and walked away.
She heard Sispirinithas, behind her, picking up the slack by diving into a lecture. “The maddening quality of Outside monsters isn’t solely conveyed through the visual system,” said the characteristic whispery voice from his translator. Sispirinithas was an alien, one of the vanishingly rare non-humans who worked for human Gods. He wasn’t literally a giant spider, but he looked like one, with ten spindly legs radiating from a rounded, many-eyed, heavy-jawed body. “If you don’t have sensory filters installed – hm, raise your hand if you don’t have sensory filters installed? No one? Good. You might notice those filters apply to all your senses. That’s because you can be driven mad with any of them. Even species who don’t share any specific human sensory faculties can be driven mad by Outside. The filters prevent that, but if you focus too intently on the worst kinds of Outside monster, the filters’ processing capabilities can overload and glitch, causing a general loss of vision or of whatever other sense. By the way, I believe the field commander is asking for a short break.”
Enga had asked for no such thing, but Sispirinithas knew how to pick up on her patterns. They’d worked together a long time. When Enga was promoted, Irimiru had some concerns about how she would fare in her new rank, given her neurological oddities, so she’d assigned Sispirinithas to her as a minder. It was an unusual assignment, especially since Sispirinithas wasn’t a military expert. He was a folklorist with some minor background in cross-species linguistics. But Enga didn’t like to talk much, even over text, and Sispirinithas was happy to take over the talking when necessary.
Now he pranced back and forth with his ten-legged gait, while Enga stood in the corner of the field, trying to pull herself together. Occasionally he veered too close to a recruit, mandibles clacking, as if by accident. Sispirinithas found it very funny when humans – mortal or angelic – flinched.
“Anyway,” he said, “as the marshal was saying, you shouldn’t look too closely at Outside monsters, and your sensory filters will block you from seeing anything useful if you try. You might think that this puts you at a disadvantage, not being able to tell one part of their anatomy from another. Where’s the head, for instance? Where are the vital organs? What you’ve got to remember is that no one else can answer that question either. Outside monsters don’t have a sensible anatomy. That’s why you can’t be too clever with your aim. Just hit them with the biggest thing available, as close to the center as you can. I have a very informative slideshow prepared to illustrate this point. Let’s go indoors a bit, shall we, morsels?”
The grunts followed him, and even Enga, standing in the corner, did not miss the looks they gave each other. Sispirinithas was happy to cover for Enga as much as she liked, but even his skills were beginning to slip. Enga was ninety-five percent sure he’d shown them this slideshow before. If she’d bothered to search through her sensory recordings, she could have checked and made it a hundred. If she actually cared.
She began to hit her head, lightly and rhythmically, against the makeshift wall.
The loss of Akavi and Elu reverberated in her like a hollow-point bullet, but that wasn’t the only reason why Enga was failing. There was something about teaching that did not suit Enga anymore, even on days when her mood was good. She could wade through a hellscape of enemy fire and mud, she could fight as long and as hard as she had to; that was a stress her body understood. She couldn’t always face all these able-bodied angels in a peaceful field, looking at her skeptically and expectantly, like they wanted her to prove what the marshal’s livery implied. To make them strong.
Enga was alone. She was too stupid to do the job she’d been assigned, and too swayed by useless emotions to focus. She hit her head harder, twice, against the wall. She couldn’t even pull herself together.
Attention, said a pop-up notification inside her brain. Minor self-inflicted bruising detected. Please desist before incurring further injury, or your Overseer will be informed.
Enga paused, and then pushed herself away from the wall with a venomous, directionless FINE.
When Enga had still been in training, she’d had an off switch. Akavi had installed a restraint program in her because of her neurodivergence and the heavy, deadly weaponry she carried around. If she had a meltdown like this, if she was about to be violent to herself or others, then the restraint program would have detected it automatically, frozen her body, and numbed her senses to the point of blindness until she calmed down. Enga had always hated that program, and she was glad not to have it anymore. Her systems still monitored her, like any angel’s, but they couldn’t shut her down that way. They could only give warnings like these, both to her and, if necessary, to her superiors. Enga’s superiors placed a lot of trust in her, giving her authority and violent power.
She had a feeling she was going to make them regret it.
Enga sent a request in Irimiru’s direction and then stalked through the field, past the building where Sispirinithas was helpfully showing his stupid slides. Past everything, through the portal at the heart of Border Encampment 342-6J, and into the throne room on a spaceship millions of miles away.
Irimiru Kaule, Overseer of Nemesis, was a Vaurian shapeshifter like Akavi. At the moment Irimiru looked like a tall, gaunt woman with long twists of black hair hanging down her ragged body. She had been taking forms like this more often since the Plague, forms with off-putting or sinister features, as if to better express a general displeasure with everything. She sat on a throne of twisted metal, and her metal-plated fingertips danced up and down its arms, coursing visibly with electricity as unfathomable amounts of information passed into and out of her organizing mind. A swarm of tiny, flying bots, like bees, filled the air around her, carrying auxiliary processing space between them.
Just as Enga’s body was altered to make her better at her job, overseers were altered in their minds. Overseers’ souls no longer resided solely within their skulls, but in an interplay of thought distributed through the network: the throne, the bots, the face-bearing body almost an afterthought. The promotion process to Overseer, in which the soul was coaxed to adjust to this state, was correspondingly excruciating. Enga didn’t want that one yet.
Overseers still had physical bodies, unlike the ranks above them. And so Irimiru was able to glare directly at Enga in greeting.
MY LADY, said Enga, genuflecting. I WANT TO BE DEMOTED.
Irimiru crossed one leg over the other and leaned back, becoming a languid, bearded man, the kind who might lounge around in an old-fashioned fiefdom listening to the peasants’ disputes. “That’s the thirteenth time you’ve asked in the past three weeks. The answer is still no. You know what is required of you.”
WHAT IS REQUIRED OF ME IS STUPID AND I AM FAILING. DEMOTE ME. OR KILL ME FOR FAILING. OR PUT ME ON THE NEMESIS-DAMNED SEARCH FOR AKAVI AND ELU WHERE I BELONG.
She had, in fact, asked this basic question twelve times before, but not as strongly. This version was suicidal for several reasons, not just the “kill me” part. The blasphemy was unacceptable. The word “fail” was never said aloud, by an angel of Nemesis, in reference to themselves. It was a show of weakness, and it would inevitably lead to whatever punishment one’s superiors thought was funny at the time.
Unless, of course, one’s superiors thought it was funniest to keep one right where one was.
Irimiru raised one hand from the buzzing arm of the throne and examined his metal-plated nails with seeming idleness. “After Akavi’s failure, it took a good deal of work to keep the punishments contained to him and not to literally everyone else on my team. Your good performance helped. You are an asset to me, and I need to be seen using you as your accomplishments demand. Putting you on yet another search team, all signals analysis and no shooting, would waste you. Then my superiors would ask why I am wasting you. The assignment that you have been given is prestigious, and will lead to yet more honors and awards for you as soon as you stop pouting and a
ctually do it.”
I CANNOT DO IT, I AM STUPID, said Enga.
Irimiru raised his eyebrows, and, with a smooth shift, he became the type of person who might have taught kindergarten on Enga’s home planet; dark-skinned, soft and somehow motherly-looking despite an indeterminate gender. Their penetrating gaze didn’t soften to match.
“I’m not going to make soothing sounds,” they said, “and tell you that you can do whatever you put your mind to. Maybe you can’t. You are brain-damaged, after all. But, based on the video files I’ve reviewed, you haven’t actually tried. You’ve done a passable job for an hour or two at a time, and then stormed off and had your little sulks. That’s not incapability. It’s insubordination.”
THEN TERMINATE ME, said Enga.
She half-meant it. She really wanted Akavi and Elu, not death. But right now everything felt gray and heavy and intolerable. She wanted to shoot and destroy everything, anything she could, even herself.
Irimiru sighed out some odd, wistful emotion, bringing their free hand to their mouth. “You know I love to hear my subordinates begging for death. But I’ll refer you to what I just said. The archangels want to know that I’m handling my part of this competently. If an angel of your talents is not playing a leading role in our development of Chaos Zone-appropriate skills for our infantry, they’re going to ask me why.”
Enga, against her own better judgment, took a step towards Irimiru. She let her arms whir a little, slightly unfolding and resettling themselves into a different configuration, the way she did when she wanted to unsettle mortals.
Akavi and Elu had always described Irimiru as somehow terrifying, which was very funny to Enga. Elu was afraid of everything anyway, and Akavi normally preferred to be the one who terrified everyone else. But Enga wasn’t afraid. Maybe because she wasn’t good at reading faces and bodies the way the two of them were. She could turn on programs to help her interpret them, but, maybe on some visceral level, Irimiru’s intimidation tactics were based on little facial and vocal signs that went right over Enga’s head.
Or maybe it was something much simpler. She’d often suspected that Irimiru had a soft spot for angry women. Maybe Irimiru saw that in Enga and liked her.
YOU MEAN YOU NEED ME, she said.
Irimiru narrowed their eyes. “Hardly.”
But the damage had been done; they’d said it. They’d told Enga that Enga’s good performance was one of the things keeping Irimiru safe.
GIVE ME WHAT I WANT, said Enga. PUT ME ON THE SEARCH FOR AKAVI AND ELU. OR TERMINATE ME. OR ELSE I WILL GO BACK TO THE BORDER ENCAMPMENT, SHOOT EVERY OTHER ANGEL IN RANGE, DESTROY THE ENTIRE FACILITY AND LET THE MONSTERS OUT. AND THEN YOU CAN EXPLAIN TO THE ARCHANGELS WHY THAT HAPPENED.
She was half-convinced Irimiru would terminate her for real for making such a threat. Instead, Irimiru paused, then let out a long, low, appreciative laugh.
“You’re feisty,” they said. “But it wouldn’t work. All I’d have to say is that you were tragically driven mad by all your close encounters with those Outside monsters.” They sat up a little straighter, regarding her carefully. “I’m going to throw you a bone, though. Only because I like you. And because I really would like you to actually train my infantry rather than having increasingly vivid fantasies of murdering them, or delegating the work to an unqualified Spider. I’m going to tell the team tracking Akavi and Elu that, when we locate them – and not an instant sooner – you’ll have the first crack at bringing them in. That’s as much as I can offer.”
Enga heaved a sigh and squared her shoulders. This was not as much of a relief as it should have been. She still itched to shoot something that wasn’t a dummy made of scraps. THANK YOU, MY LADY.
Irimiru shifted again, becoming an eerily exact likeness of Elu. The long hair, the gangly limbs, the soft facial expression. Even his eyes looked gentle and kind like Elu’s. Only the voice – Elu’s in timbre, but Irimiru’s in tone, sharp, mocking – gave it away.
“Go, then,” he said. “But I’ve made my offer. And if you don’t quickly begin to do your actual work, I can take it away.”
Four Months Ago
Akavi’s recovery had gone rougher than expected. The effects on his soul, from an alteration as simple as removing an ansible uplink, should have been mild. But there were aspects of angelic medicine, key details about how the connection between brain and soul and circuitry functioned, that were hidden even from angels like Elu. To discourage exactly this kind of illicit tampering, no doubt.
It didn’t surprise him, then, when Akavi periodically doubled over with cluster headaches, strong enough to crack even the former Inquisitor’s careful control. Or when he slept, exhausted by pain and medicine, only to wake in a night terror. Elu knew it would pass, the way the symptoms of their long-ago ascensions had gradually passed. But he didn’t know how long that would take. All he could do was treat the symptoms and wait. Analgesics, nerve agonists, anxiolytics, sedatives.
He steered the Talon closer to the surface of Jai. Now that the ship was disguised it was not difficult to fall into the civilian transport lanes, to print the kinds of identification codes that would get them waved through Jai’s local portals as traveling merchants. And, from there, to surreptitiously take sensor readings of the area. He studied the Chaos Zone’s current state and the movements of its populace, and drew up charts, which Akavi examined, on his good days, with a thoughtful frown. Eventually he found a place for the ship to settle – a calm and out-of-the-way area, not far from the city of Büata, where it could hide among mossy crags. On a suitable day, when it was foggy and the sky was aurora-filled enough to confuse the Gods’ sensors, he navigated down there and landed.
Akavi was doing better by now, active and impatient, only occasionally falling into his spasms of pain. And the Outside magic – as far as Elu could tell – was beginning to flicker. The protective aura around the Talon’s sensors and transmitters had been faintly visible to him, a black mist that activated his sensory filters, and he could see it gradually thinning and shifting as the days wore on.
“Do you think you can handle it?” he asked Akavi, indicating the medical setup. The bots, equipped with Elu’s program, would do the most delicate work on their own, but it still took mental focus and emotional fortitude to supervise. To wait and make sure Elu woke up properly, to check his symptoms and do all the other small tasks of recovery.
Akavi gave the bots and the stretcher an unimpressed look. “I can, but do you believe it’s wise? You haven’t worked out how to correct for the side effects.”
Elu sighed. He’d been trying. But he had yet to come up with a change to his procedure that he felt confident about. And if he dithered much longer, their protection would fail.
“It’s our only option at this point anyway,” he said. “I’ll live.”
He came out of anesthesia in a haze of blue; he’d decorated his personal quarters in light, cool colors, and that was the first thing he was able to focus on, the sky-blue of the ceiling. The subtle copper filigree that ran across it, in an abstract pattern like a rippling stream over smooth stones. He liked the color. His vision swam; his head pounded with something that wasn’t quite pain yet, only a disorienting pressure, a sense that something wasn’t right.
He felt the surgery’s wrongness deep in his bones, on a level no anesthesia could touch. The same way he’d felt it, so many decades ago, after his ascension. Something about him had been irrevocably changed, and some part of him even deeper than his physical body wanted to fight it.
Akavi said something, but that felt wrong, too. He didn’t know what was wrong, how a voice that had been his anchor for over half a century could feel harsh and unwelcome in his ears. He was so preoccupied trying to figure it out that he missed the actual words. By the time he thought to ask Akavi to repeat himself, he’d fallen back asleep.
When he woke up again, Akavi’s form had changed. She was a Riayin woman now. Average height, average build. Elegant and poised, like most
of Akavi’s forms, but without any specific qualities to make her stand out from a crowd. Her clothes were the kind of shabby that suggested once-well-made garments subjected to months of harrowing strain.
This was the kind of body Akavi would use for undercover work down here. Which meant–
Which meant Akavi was leaving. Soon.
Elu tried to form a question, but it came out as a vague groan. Akavi turned and looked down at him with a calm, disinterested expression. “You’re awake.”
Elu nnghed in agreement. He liked the way Akavi looked, no matter what form she was in. He always liked it. He probably shouldn’t stare up admiringly like this, but he was very tired and fuzzy-headed, and he could either focus on this or fall back into the pain that was rapidly growing behind his eyes. Real pain now, oh dear. He didn’t suppose it would wear off any quicker for him than it had for Akavi.
“I’ve been monitoring your vital signs,” said Akavi. “So far you’re recovering at about the same rate I did. I’ve ensured the bots are equipped with all the fluids and medicines you might require. I believe they can take it from here.”
Elu tried to thrash upright, and immediately regretted it, as a wracking pain bloomed all down his head and neck. Was she leaving? She couldn’t leave. He wasn’t even well enough to move or speak yet.
Akavi sighed slightly, looking down at him. “I’m sorry, Elu, but we’ve wasted enough time already. Yasira is still out there, doing Gods know what to this planet, while we sit and do nothing. I need to be out there. Scouting, making contacts, lining up the kinds of resources I can use. The longer I wait, the more we’ll both fall behind. I’ll be back later and keep you updated, I promise. And you’ll be safe here.”
Elu lay back on his pillows, hating himself. Akavi was a proper angel of Nemesis, even now. Akavi could not tolerate weakness, and Elu was being weak. Clinging like a child, wanting to be fussed over and cared for, when there was nothing medical Akavi could do for him that the bots couldn’t.
