“But that’s what the harnesses are—” Cheris stopped. Except the needlemoth had been damaged. The membrane and foam still sealed the carapace breach, but their fragility made her nervous. She wanted that remedied as soon as possible.
More importantly, assuming Jedao wasn’t delusional, the moth had talked to him through some heretofore unknown channel. Which meant it was sentient. It might have its own ideas about what it wanted to do with its life.
Cheris’s legs folded underneath her. She caught herself against the wall and staggered to a bunk to sit. She’d taken voidmoth transportation for granted her whole life. Even as a child, before she’d ever set foot on one, she’d assumed that the moths were like flitters or hoverers, mere vehicles for traveling between two points, except in space rather than on a planet or in a starbase.
The Kel swarms, with all their warmoths, from the massive cindermoths to the bannermoths, from the boxmoth transports to the scoutmoths: she’d never given them a second thought. Even though she’d had some dim awareness that the Nirai used biological components to build them, she’d never suspected them of being people. People with opinions of their own, like the servitors, or herself.
“You can talk to them?” Cheris asked Jedao.
He had located a helmet and was checking it over. “I think so,” he said. He met her eyes squarely. {I miscalculated. It’s like playing jeng-zai only to discover that the cards are intelligent—and they’ve been playing me all along.}
She stared wildly around her, then scrambled to her feet. “1491625!”
To her relief, the servitor emerged from the hold. Aside from some dents in its carapace, it looked intact. “Our ride’s a rogue,” it flashed at her in glum blues. “And congratulations, the regenerating menace from outer space knows about servitors now, doesn’t he?”
Jedao signed back, in Simplified Machine Universal, “I’ve known for a while now.”
Cheris stared at him. How long had he—? “It’s time for everyone to show their hands,” she said. “As long as we’re going with card game metaphors.”
1491625’s lights flickered a distinctly hostile red-orange.
“Yes,” Jedao said, unsmiling.
“I’ll start,” Cheris said. “First of all, the year is 1263…”
• • • •
Hexarch Shuos Mikodez’s day had started well, with a meditation, an unexpectedly optimistic meeting with Financial, and a delightful new type of hawthorn candy. He’d carved out some time amid all the meetings to pet Jedao the Calico Cat, who had matured from a typically scatterbrained, over-energetic nuisance of a kitten to a lazy ball of fur whose ambition in life was to be a throw pillow. Mikodez still didn’t like cats that much, but petting their cats put him in the good graces of his assistant Zehun.
He’d gone to bed, marveling at the possibility of a rare full night’s sleep, only to be woken in the middle of the night by a Code Red Nine. Swearing, Mikodez scrambled out of bed and to the terminal in the adjacent office. “What is it now?” he demanded.
Zehun’s image blazed to life. One of their two black cats—Mikodez couldn’t tell which—was draped over their shoulders. “The fishing expedition succeeded,” Zehun said. “You’d better have a listen. This is not like the time with the foxforsaken hours of incoherent screaming. Listen to it—under lockdown.”
Mikodez raised his eyebrows.
Zehun shook their head and, to Mikodez’s frustration, signed off.
Still, Mikodez trusted Zehun enough to put his office on full lockdown, as if the Citadel had been compromised and he expected imminent attack on his person.
By “fishing expedition” Zehun meant the elaborate scheme both of them had cooked up to shoo Jedao out of the Citadel. Over the past two years, it had become increasingly clear that Jedao was hiding something that explained why Kujen’s command moth, crewed by Kel no less, had deserted at the Battle of Terebeg, instead of surrendering with the rest of the swarm. The only other escapee from that moth, Commander Kel Talaw, had been badly poisoned, and had proven unable to offer an explanation due to damage to their memory. And Jedao showed no inclination to talk.
So Mikodez and Zehun had, in fine Shuos tradition, given Jedao a length of rope and watched to see how he hanged himself with it.
One of the precautions Mikodez had taken when Jedao first came into his care was to have him fitted with transmitters. Multiple transmitters, state of the art technology, and hideously expensive. But it had paid off. Jedao had only discovered and ditched one of the transmitters. The rest remained intact, especially the ones threaded into his augment. Why Jedao hadn’t had his augment removed out of paranoia was an interesting question, and one Mikodez was going to have to resolve later.
The transmitter brought up a distorted Jedao’s-eye view of the conversation that Zehun wanted him to listen in on. Mikodez assessed the surroundings: a small moth whose carapace breach was messily mended with sealant. He hoped they planned on a more permanent fix soon.
There was a single woman in the moth, Kel Cheris or Dzannis Paral or whatever she was calling herself these days. A servitor, who flashed lights at intervals. And of course there was Jedao himself.
“…didn’t realize there were hostile servitors,” Cheris was saying.
“Hemiola told me they were rogues,” Jedao said. “But if there’s one group of rogues, there could be others.”
The servitor blinked orange lights in a rippling pattern.
“I would have appreciated knowing that earlier,” Cheris said, turning her head in the servitor’s direction.
Mikodez froze. Did I just see what I thought I saw?
The conversation continued. It happened again.
Cheris was talking to the servitor. So, sometimes, did Jedao.
The servitor was talking back. In those flashes of light.
Hostile servitors.
Mikodez continued recording the conversation and glanced around his office. Servitors came and went freely in the Citadel of Eyes. Everywhere in the hexarchate, in fact. They handled everything from childcare to manufacturing; whatever menial tasks humans didn’t want to do. No one thought twice about servitors vacuuming up cat hairs or helping out in the kitchens.
Servitors had security clearances, after a fashion, to allow them access to restricted areas. After all, no one wanted hostiles to hijack them or use them to carry bugs. But Mikodez hadn’t thought through the possibility of servitors having minds—and agendas—of their own.
There were no servitors in his office at present. That didn’t, however, mean that his office was secure. He was stifling a comprehensive flutter of panic over the implications of a galloping security meltdown that he hadn’t even known about when the conversation caught his attention again.
“…two voidmoths,” Jedao was saying in a brisk tone at odds with the drawl. “One was the Revenant, my command moth under Nirai-zho, which either started hostile or turned that way after I failed to save the mothlings at Isteia Mothyard. The other is—well.” He gestured eloquently at the walls.
Cheris looked around. “…Hello?”
“For ease of human pronunciation, I call it the Harmony,” Jedao said. “It doesn’t hear you as such, but I have been conveying the gist of this discussion to it.”
The servitor flashed livid red.
Jedao’s mouth quirked, then: “It says hello and sorry about the mess and it promises to be a better host once we get it some repairs. Besides, we’re dependent upon it for our transportation, so I wouldn’t offend it if I were you.”
“That,” Cheris added, “and its people deserve a say in their own governance. It’s the same principle.”
Mikodez was sure that the chalky pallor of Cheris’s face was not, in fact, an artifact of the transmission. She didn’t like the implications either.
Cheris wasn’t done speaking. “If the moths revolt against the hexarchate,” she said slowly, “it will fall into ruin. We have unfriendly foreigners on every side. But the alternative is t
o continue using them as enslaved transportation. Which is untenable.”
“The Harmony observes that factions among its kind have been forming, just as humans have factions and servitors have enclaves,” Jedao said. “Despite the construction of this body, I’m afraid my insight into the motivations of aliens is necessarily limited.” He cocked his head, then continued, “The Harmony believes that an interspecies war is imminent if a solution isn’t reached.”
“But people don’t even know how to talk to voidmoths,” Cheris protested, “and if you offer yourself as an interpreter, there will be riots across the stars.”
The servitor said something in a particularly vituperative orange.
“Sticky problem, isn’t it?” Jedao agreed. He was doing something with his hands out of sight. Mikodez hoped he wasn’t the only one who wanted to smack Jedao.
Cheris’s mouth crimped. “I thought I could retire. Instead it turns out the work’s just beginning.”
The servitor flashed yellow, and Cheris rolled her eyes at it.
“What are you doing with that?” Cheris asked Jedao a moment later, then, in response to something Mikodez couldn’t hear (how? the transmitter should have picked up even subvocals) or else Jedao’s expression: “You’re right—this once. But from now on, we do it my way.”
“You brought down the hexarchs where I failed,” Jedao said with what Mikodez interpreted as real respect. “Now and forever, I’m your gun.” Mikodez’s stomach knotted at the further implications of someone as unpredictable as Cheris commanding Jedao’s loyalty.
The field of view shifted fast enough to cause Mikodez’s temples to throb with an impending headache, not helped by stress over the enormity of what he’d just stumbled onto. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.
“Just taking care of business,” Jedao said easily. And then, so softly it had to be subvocals, he added, “Hope you were paying attention, Shuos-zho, because I’d hate to repeat myself. Have fun with the real crisis, rather than pissing off small fry like us, and call off your hounds before I have to kill them.” With that, there was a piercing shriek, and then the connection fizzed dead: he must have removed and destroyed the last transmitter.
Mikodez stared down at his shaking hands and said to the air, “We are fucked.”
* * *
Yoon Ha Lee's debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were finalists for the Hugo. His middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller and won the Locus Award for best YA novel. His latest novel, Phoenix Extravagant, is set in a fantasy version of Korea under the Japanese occupation, and involves a nonbinary painter, a pacifist mecha dragon, and revolution. Lee's fiction has appeared in venues such as Audubon Magazine, Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed Magazine. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone who have continued to make this series possible! Those who backed and spread the word about the Kickstarter campaign, the authors who entrusted me with publishing their words, Amanda Makepeace for the original illustration, Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout, Ziv Wities for his help with various things including helping with rewards and organizing author contact information, and Polgarus Studio for the interior layout.
Thank you all, so much.
—David Steffen—
About the Editor
David Steffen is an editor, writer, publisher, and professional web developer. He has edited and written for the Diabolical Plots zine (http://www.diabolicalplots.com) since its launch in 2008, and which started publishing new fiction in 2015. He is most well-known for co-founding and administering The Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com), a free web tool that helps writers find markets for their fiction and to find response time statistics about those markets, as well as for the previous volumes of the Long List Anthology. His fiction has been published in many great venues, including Escape Pod, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, Drabblecast, Podcastle, AE, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders.
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The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 54