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 It spoke in the high language, with a slight accent a couple centuries out of date.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 her 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.
The scowl was for show. She didn’t want her captors to realize she was watching the water. If they were paying close attention to any video feeds, the act wouldn’t fool them. But she had to try.
The water settled into a murky puddle. Cheris stared at the grime under her fingernails and scowled some more. (All right, the expression wasn’t entirely for show. Why had Kujen, who valued fashion so dearly, invented a construct whose blood wouldn’t wash off clothes?) Had she imagined the waves?
Another ripple formed in the water, then another. With an effort, she kept her eyes from slitting. The waves continued in long-short intervals, exactly as if someone was trying to communicate to her in an extremely inefficient variant of Simplified Machine Universal.
I am captive. No weapons. Status?
She made small disgruntled motions to distract her watchers as she compiled the agonizingly slow message. How to respond? While she had no idea how he was doing it, she was going to work on the assumption that Jedao had sent her the message. Her captors might have done it, as a trap, but it seemed too baroque a scheme when they could have killed her outright.
Incredible as it sounded (and not a little creepy), if Jedao could manipulate the water, maybe he could observe it too. So she should reply in the same medium. She sighed, sat on the edge of the tub, and slid her feet back in. Keeping one foot still, she tapped the other, longing for the kiss of water directly against her skin. Being a civilian had softened her. A message, also in Simplified Machine Universal: I am captive. No weapons. Awake.
She waited for the water to settle again, but no response came. So she finished scrubbing the suit and toweled it off. At least her captors had left her two towels.
This wasn’t the first time she’d gone around in clothing that refused to clean itself. Kel uniforms were theoretically constructed from self-cleaning fabric, but in practice, any number of unexpected substances fouled it. It was a common cadet prank to find creatively revolting foods that the fabric couldn’t handle.
Cheris blinked away dizzying doubled memories: coming across one of her year-mates squirting an unholy stinking mess of fish sauce, glue, and gun oil on a fellow cadet’s spare uniform; Ruo’s arm slung over her shoulder as he whispered possible targets into her ear. He’s dead, she reminded herself, and thought of Jedao’s concern for Ruo’s fate, centuries too late. An unwanted pang stabbed through her chest.
Ruo had played Jedao’s stupid anonymous heresy game, had gotten caught interfering with a visiting Rahal magistrate. In response, Ruo did the sane, rational thing and committed suicide rather than be extradited and tortured as a heretic. Jedao’s response, on the other hand, had nothing in it of sanity or reason. At the age of seventeen, he’d sworn to take down the heptarchate in revenge.
If it hadn’t been for Ruo, she wouldn’t be here with Jedao stuffed up her nose, in Kel Brezan’s memorable phrase, and the hexarchate would still be subject to Kujen’s tyranny. She had to believe that the whole wretched chain of events, all the atrocities small and large, hadn’t been for nothing. At least, that was what the original Jedao had wanted to think.
Cheris sat cross-legged at the center of the room and called out, “I’d like to talk.” Perhaps Jedao had also tried negotiating with their captors. Frankly, she didn’t trust him not to make hash of the attempt. That might be why she was in here, under spider restraints, in the first place. So the first step was to get more information, as much as her stomach suggested that it would like some food first.
Again,
no one responded.
Cheris didn’t let that deter her. “My name is Ajewen Cheris,” she went on. “Or Kel Cheris, if you prefer. You may not recognize my appearance. I had surgery for my own safety.” No need to explain why; anyone familiar with her reputation would know. “I work for Pyrehawk Enclave. Is there anyone who’s willing to talk to me? Just talk.”
More silence.
“I’m here to negotiate. That’s all. There’s a piece of equipment I need to use.”
Still silence.
Cheris continued in this vein, her voice soft and reasonable, all to no avail.
What had gone wrong? Hemiola and its fellow servitors had been friendly when she’d showed up at Tefos Base. Here, though—this was not a promising reception. Although she was grateful to be alive.
After she had run dry of words, the same contralto finally spoke. “Your companion. Of all the people in the world, you had to bring him.”
“Shuos Jedao,” she said wearily. No point lying, despite the complicated question of Jedao’s identity. “Is he alive?”
Instead of responding directly, it said, “I have many questions for you, Cheris of Pyrehawk Enclave.”
“Who are you?” Cheris asked. “Who am I speaking to?”
“I am Avros Base,” the voice said.
Cheris blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Perhaps this will clarify matters,” the voice said. “I don’t advise trying to escape.”
Cheris remained seated in a meditation pose, not that she was feeling in the least meditative.
The door she’d been warned not to approach slid open. Four mothform servitors hovered in so that their lights were at her eye level. Their lights blinked on-off, on-off, a sterile blue-white, in unison.
In unison. Cheris had never known servitors to do that, except in jest. “Hello?” she signed formally in Simplified Machine Universal.
The servitors formed a semicircle in front of her and did not respond.
“I only use the mobile units when I have a task to carry out,” Avros said. “A machine sentience can occupy a shell of any shape, you know.”
Cheris’s discomfort increased. She’d never encountered an arrangement like this before. And all the other servitors she’d met had emphasized the importance of etiquette, rather than treating her as a hostile. “Kujen’s design?” she asked, because Pyrehawk Enclave would want to know.
“My own,” Avros returned. “Once I determined that Kujen was unlikely to return, I decided there was no more point hiding my preferred configuration.”
“There must be something I can do for you,” Cheris said, addressing the “mobile units” on the grounds that it beat talking to the air. “I don’t want to waste your time, so you might as well tell me what it is.”
“There are people after you,” Avros said, “so you owe me protection against them. Unfortunately, the invariant defenses are proving inadequate”—the floor and walls shook, as if to emphasize its point—“and the base’s exotics have been knocked out of alignment by the recent calendrical shifts.”
And Cheris was responsible for all of this. “You need a human.”
“Precisely.”
Servitors couldn’t cause exotic effects except in certain heretical calendars. Nor, apparently, could sentient bases. But she was inside the base and able to help—and had a motive to, if she didn’t want to be blown up with it.
“I require access to an instrument stored here,” Cheris said.
“I don’t see that I have much choice,” Avros said. “I value my survival. But if you have some notion of triggering an auto-destruct—”
“I’ll keep this brief,” Cheris said. The vibrations were growing stronger, as though an earthquake in their vicinity was slipping its leash. “It will permit me to rid myself of an infestation of carrion glass and transfer it to Jedao, assuming you haven’t done away with him.” She doubted that even one of Kujen’s bases could permanently annihilate Jedao, but she wasn’t going to mention that if it hadn’t figured that out on its own. “Once that’s achieved, we’ll get out of your way.”
Cheris hadn’t heard from 1491625 since waking up, but she had to trust that it had survived. She didn’t relish the thought of being trapped here for the rest of her life. It didn’t sound like Avros Base wanted her to remain here, either.
“Your terms are acceptable,” Avros said. “I will explain the necessary rituals to reactivate the defenses. Your companion will make a suitable subject.”
Cheris’s blood turned to ice as it detailed what was to come. It was describing a remembrance, one of the old school, the kind the hexarchate had used before she reformed the calendar. One that depended on torture.
She started to object that Jedao wasn’t human, except her experiments had shown it didn’t matter. His mind was human enough for this purpose. She’d never thought that would ever work against him—or her.
If she’d had more time, she would have calculated an alternative. But the lights flickered, and an enormous percussive boom almost shattered her hearing. Her augment warned her to take cover.
Jedao will survive this, Cheris told herself despite the clamminess of her palms. As a Kel soldier, she’d killed heretics, but she’d never tortured one before.
It was no worse than what Jedao had already done to himself. He’d demonstrated a tremendous ability to withstand pain. To heal.
It was still monstrous.
“Take me to him,” Cheris said, heart heavy.
• • • •
There was a blindfold over Jedao’s eyes, a gag in his mouth, and a clamp holding his head in place. Shackles for his arms and legs. He couldn’t move except to blink. And he wasn’t, despite his efforts, strong enough to break free.
Thanks so much, Kujen, he thought, which was becoming the refrain of his life. There must be some reason why, despite a ridiculous capacity for regeneration, he wasn’t strong. Dhanneth had teased him about it, long ago.
Perhaps Dhanneth would be glad to see him held prisoner like this, at the mercy of whoever came through the door. Since he had regained consciousness, Jedao had tracked the movements of several dozen servitors circulating throughout the base, along with the humans who were searching for a way in. He’d fought the servitors who’d advanced on him, to no avail.
Six servitors entered, and a human who was either Cheris or possessed her exact distribution of mass. One of the servitors handed Cheris an instrument that Jedao couldn’t identify, not with the othersense alone. Vision might not have helped anyway. He heard a slight hum as it activated.
“I’m sorry, Jedao,” Cheris said, faraway and impersonal. She leaned over him. And then the pain began.
After the first shock of outrage wore off, Jedao concentrated on Cheris’s body language, insofar as he could decipher it. She had a steady hand, and a good working knowledge of anatomy, which he expected of a former soldier-assassin. Under other circumstances, Jedao would have amused himself keeping an inventory of the cuts she made. Her instrument was some kind of heated knife, which cauterized the wounds as it went. The treacly burnt-caramel smell nauseated him, but he supposed it was his own fault for failing to be made of ordinary meat. Perhaps next time he could bring some barbecue pork as a substitute.
The pain, trivial as it was compared to what he’d endured earlier, was doing odd things to his sense of humor. Jedao tried to ask, “Why are you doing this?” then winced as his teeth bit into the tough fibers of the gag.
He was being stupid. The six servitors weren’t focused on him. They didn’t care about him—or rather, he wasn’t a threat. The servitors surrounded Cheris. They must have blackmailed her into doing this, for reasons of their own. He liked that theory better than the idea that Cheris had decided to go moonlighting as a Vidona.
Cheris’s motivations became clear three minutes later (more or less; damage to his augment meant its chronometer was not absolutely reliable) when two shadowmoths pulverized themselves against the force shield that suddenly materia
lized around the base.
Jedao would have kicked himself if he’d possessed the necessary mobility. The servitors who lived here didn’t want to be incinerated by unfriendly Shuos any more than he or Cheris did. If their invariant defenses had been inadequate to the task, that left exotics. And since this was one of Kujen’s bases, the exotics relied on the high calendar.
The servitors must have bargained with Cheris to reactivate the base’s exotic defenses. Cheris might have a reputation as a radical, but she’d grown up with the remembrances. She wouldn’t be squeamish, especially if she’d started out as Kel infantry and professionally stomped out the lives of heretics.
His train of thought dissolved when the knife flicked expertly along his arm, where Dhanneth had liked to cut him. Since Jedao never formed new scars, there was no way Cheris could have known. Despite the gag, he choked back a cry, transfixed by the unexpected erotic-horrific connotations of the pain. Dhanneth?
Impossibly, he saw Dhanneth, a phantasm of shadow and heat. As large as ever, with those impossibly broad shoulders and a wrestler’s muscles. He wore Kel gloves, nothing else. There was a hole in the side of his head, and his eyes were abyss-dark.
Jedao forgot about Cheris, forgot about the servitors, forgot about everything but Dhanneth. The man he’d raped. Dhanneth had committed suicide, after. Jedao would never forget the muzzle-flash of the gun, the way gunsmoke had stung his nostrils. The look of triumph in Dhanneth’s eyes as he’d escaped.
Jedao’s breath hitched. Sorry would mean nothing to Dhanneth. So he tried to say, You can kill me as many times as you need to. It was no more than what he deserved.
There was something in his mouth. His teeth scraped against fibers. Perhaps this was another part of Dhanneth’s revenge. If so, Jedao’s part was to endure it too; to endure anything Dhanneth thought of. It was no worse than what Kujen had intended for him.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 51