Absence of Blade

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  The second room was almost the same as the first, though furnished: a low silver table dominated the small space, its spindly legs growing directly out of the floor. Mounted in its surface was a holofoil screen.

  And this room was occupied.

  General Shanazkowitz sat behind the table, enthroned in a black leather office chair that contrasted starkly with the blinding silver floor and walls. She rested her elbows on the table as she fiddled with a stylus held in both hands, her flat, compact face turned toward the wall. Even as the slab came to a stop before the table, Shanazkowitz did not turn to look at him. In an Osk, that turned-away expression would have indicated extreme chagrin, but in her it could only be the nonchalance of complete control.

  Mose waited as seconds stretched into minutes, drops of sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. Just as he felt the first nervous tremor snake through him, Shanazkowitz put the stylus down on the table and swiveled to look at him. He started in reflex, straining at the tendrils around his wrists as his guts leapt inside him. With an effort, he unclenched muscles that had tightened to flee and met the woman’s gaze.

  “I’ll be blunt,” she said. “I suppose you’ve been wondering why you’re here. I scheduled this appointment to give you the answer.”

  He glanced down at the living manacles around his wrists. An appointment? In faltering but competent English, he replied, “Can I . . . ask you some questions first?”

  “Yes.” She added, “Within limits, of course.”

  Of course. He nodded Terran-style. “The door outside was inscribed with the letters ‘P.S.S.’ What is that?”

  She pushed back her office chair, removed a remote from beneath the table, and switched off the lights. Calming darkness enfolded them in the moments before the holofoil in the table turned itself on, palely illuminating the room.

  He blinked against the new light and opened his eyes on his own image, projected from below onto the holofoil’s flat surface. It was a head-on shot: Mose’s image looked straight into the camera, helmetless but dressed in his dark seph armor. He wondered where that armor had gone now that he needed it.

  “To answer: you are. P.S.S. stands for Project ShadowStalker, a program I devised during the war—though it turned out the war had to end before we could execute it. Success made us reshuffle our priorities; that’s part of why I haven’t gotten to you until now.”

  The apprehension that had begun to rise in Mose upon his entrance ratcheted higher. He felt as if the liquefied nourishment seeping through his veins was beginning to sour; a bad taste crept to the back of his mouth.

  “Why am I here?”

  Shanazkowitz reached over and tapped the holofoil. Mose’s picture vanished, replaced by a grainy long-range photo of another Osk. Despite the poor quality, the Osk’s slight build and the grim set of his features made his identity unmistakable. His expression was cold even in the photo.

  “Gau Shesharrim?” Mose exclaimed. “What does he have to do with all this?”

  “It’s a question of justice,” the general replied calmly. “He has killed far too many Terran citizens during his miserable existence on Olios 3. I want to make him pay for his crimes.”

  He chuckled bitterly. “You and just about everyone else in this part of the galaxy. He is wanted on extradition charges—”

  “In twenty-five Terran solar systems, mostly for that little dalliance of his on Aival, yes,” she finished. “I am aware of that. This is different. Once it’s complete, Project ShadowStalker will give us an edge no other government hunting for Shesharrim has. Which brings us to why you’re here.” Mose could feel icy fingers running up and down his spine. He tried to return her even gaze, but a panic that had been late in arriving was making up for it by gnawing ferociously at his insides.

  “You have been in this medical complex for around six or seven standard months. It took you three months just to wake up after we rescued you from Za. The effects of Fate’s Shears were . . . more extensive than we’d predicted.” For a moment, he thought he saw a small shudder pass through the woman across from him, but he brushed the notion away.

  “Much time was spent simply repairing your body from the damage our virus caused.” Shanazkowitz tapped the holofoil screen again and Gau’s image dissolved, replaced by what looked like a close-up of a burnt slab of meat: wet, greenish-teal tissue streaked by black, charred-looking flesh that traced its way across the meat in concentric rings.

  “This is what the doctors found on the inside of your lungs when they operated. It seems our virus got a little carried away, destroying some actual lung tissue as well as the reconstruction nodes of your alveoli net. There was no way our doctors could regrow that tissue . . . they’re good, but we simply didn’t have enough data on Osk physiology to engineer a functional growth pathway.

  “But we do have extremely advanced nanotech facilities. Using those resources, I had the doctors rebuild much of your lung structure from the ground up.” She pressed the holofoil again, and the picture of Mose’s scarred and shattered lungs changed before his eyes.

  In fast motion, glittering dark bands of nanotubes laid themselves over the strips of scarred flesh. Glimmers of multicolored light illuminated the concentric onyx bands from within, revealing the intricate framework underneath. Once the foundation of nanotubes was in place, other structures began to spring up. Silvery filaments coated the upper walls of his lungs and stretched across his trachea. Strange spherical structures ripened like grotesque fruit in the thickets of silver web, sagging down into each lung cavity, fibrous ropes of matter anchoring each orb in place. By the end of the recording, his lungs had become a hive of mysterious orbs coated in sickly, glistening strands of web.

  Mose felt like he was going to be sick. All that . . . stuff . . . could it really be inside his lungs, keeping him alive? He swallowed the bile that had risen at the back of his throat and said, “I think you and I both know that your government didn’t save my life on a whim, or out of some abstract notion of kindness. Why did you have the doctors rebuild my lungs? Where do I come into play in this Project ShadowStalker? What do you want from me?”

  “We saved your life because I saw that it could be of use to us, even after Za’s defeat. You were a seph. How many of my colleagues would you say you killed over the course of the war?”

  Her tone was calm, pleasant even—but the content of the question made Mose tense for the hidden blow that had to be coming. He dipped his torso in a noncommittal shrug, not meeting the general’s eyes as he muttered, “Seven at least . . . maybe eight. The last one was done by remote, never confirmed.”

  “Then let me confirm it for you,” she answered smoothly. If there was anger there, he couldn’t see it. If anything, her calm was making him more nervous. Shanazkowitz was building to something. “That’s an impressive track record for one seph. Almost as good as Gau’s.”

  “Shesharrim was far more accomplished,” he protested reflexively. “His prewar track record—”

  “Cut the crap, Attarish.” The first prickle of anger had entered the general’s voice, and it silenced him more strongly than her words. “You were a good seph. You can plan and execute a mission with the best of them. When it comes down to it, you’re a good killer. And those are exactly the kinds of skills I had in mind when I conceived the objective of Project ShadowStalker.”

  “To capture a seph,” said Mose. The words came out in a dry hiss.

  Shanazkowitz arched her fingers and smiled tightly. “My . . . colleagues . . . fucked up on Aival. They tried to contain the Osk enclave as a threat without knowing the first thing about your culture or society. Certainly nothing about your political beliefs. I was determined not to make the same mistake on Olios 3. The Project was designed to provide us with an informant. Ideally, a seph, who would be able to access information an ordinary Osk citizen would not be privy to, cover his tracks, and report back to u
s in secret.”

  “A spy,” he said. She stared back at him and did not deny it. “But there’s no point now, is there? You smashed Za to gray dust. It didn’t matter if you knew anything about us or not.” He didn’t bother to contain the bitterness in his voice; she must surely have picked it up in his scent—until Mose remembered that Terrans were effectively blind to scents. The creature across from him suddenly seemed oppressively alien, with her weak eyes, non-existent nose, too few limbs . . .

  Shanazkowitz shook her head. “I’ve invested too much time and resources into the Project to shut it down now. Its priorities have changed, however.”

  “To what?”

  “Salvage,” she said blandly. “Under the old Project regime, the ShadowStalker would have been sent on information-gathering missions. Now that the war’s over, we’re just going to send you on a different kind of mission.” The general took a deep breath. “You’re going to hunt down the Osk assassins that our virus didn’t take care of, and kill them.”

  Mose leapt up from the slab on a surge of fury that washed away his weakness. He would have been across the table with his blades buried to the sheaths in her body had it not been for the tendrils that shackled him. Now he fought them wildly, lunging forward again and again, his teeth snapping shut centimeters from the general’s face, until finally—almost mercifully—a sharp pain in his chest forced him to stop. He sank down on his slab, gasping for breath. After an incredibly long time, he got his wind back.

  “What makes you think,” Mose asked, raising his head to face her, “that I would ever do as you ask?”

  She fixed him with a stare that almost stopped his breath in his nano-engineered lungs. “Let me be perfectly clear: there is one huge difference between the nanotech devices inside your lungs and the bio-engineered concoctions they replaced, and that’s that these implants can be turned off.

  “Personally, I don’t believe Gau Shesharrim perished with the release of Fate’s Shears, and I have the evidence to back it up. Someday, God willing, you will hunt him down. You will hunt them all down. You will kill for us. I know all this for a fact, because if you don’t follow my orders, you’ll be signing your own death certificate. I hold your life in my hands now. We’ll be sending you on missions, but you’ll still be tethered to us; if I think you’re making a run for it, I will deactivate those implants in your lungs and leave you just as we found you. Dying.”

  Shanazkowitz wasn’t bluffing; as he locked his gaze with hers, Mose knew she meant every word.

  “I could run anyway,” he said as calmly as he could. “Though it would mean death, that would have to be better than being a slave to your government.”

  “You won’t,” she replied just as calmly. “I know sephs put death before capture, but I get the sense you’re a survivor type. You would endure anything to stay alive and have a chance.”

  Mose said nothing as she ended their little interview with a tap to a tabletop control. He held the armor of his silence to him as the slab glided into the antechamber and the doctors took him back to his room.

  Lying in the modified hospital bed once more, Mose allowed himself to reflect on her words. You would endure anything to stay alive and have a chance.

  Mose knew at his core that she’d spoken the truth then, or at least part of it. Because it was not just chance that arose only to the grasp of the living, but also choice. He’d been prepared for death that day, suffocating on the street in dying Za . . . but he had been kept alive, and he had to know if the life that remained was still his own. He could still choose what to do with it, couldn’t he, as long as he was still breathing?

  Mose turned the question over in his head even as he sank into a despairing, exhausted sleep. He thought the answer was yes … but a more rational part of his mind told him a lot of things would probably have to happen first.

  PART TWO

  13

  The lenticular courier ship dropped into Skraal’s orbit and eased into the nearest parking swarm on the white exhalations of braking jets. It was Osk in shape and design, though smaller than couriers usually were; where a name would normally be inscribed in sinuous O’o Nezz glyphs, its gray sides were blank. As a rule, sephs did not make a habit of advertising the names of their ships.

  Gau had been running the camouflage and radar jamming functions on the Carnivore continuously long after he left Olios 3’s local space for the ’stream gate at the edge of the system. Caution had made him drift whenever he could, activating the ship’s propulsion only for short bursts, hoping to look like a tumbling piece of debris to any systems that might be scanning the vicinity. An excess of caution: in its dying, Za had drawn the forces of the Expansion like carrion worms to a corpse, even as the city breathed its last in gasps of bitter air. Gau hadn’t picked up anything remotely like a Terran ship on his own scanners since leaving Olios 3’s orbit.

  Gau avoided his own forces as much as the Terrans. He’d followed the Fleet a light-day behind, passively listening to the comms channels between the war cruisers, couriers, and civilian transports—the last O’o Nezz he was likely to hear outside his own head for a long time. He’d allowed himself a brief stab of melancholy at the thought. After he was certain the last of the Fleet had limped through the hyperstream gate, he waited another full day-cycle, then went through alone. It had been so easy—to decouple his fate from the rest of Za’s survivors. To choose a different path. The ease with which he’d done it gave him hope.

  Gau flipped off the Carnivore’s radar jamming, unmasking his presence to the parking swarm’s automated transit authority. Immediately a metallic chime echoed inside his cabin. A polite verbal request for his craft’s authentication codes followed, in robotic-sounding Bask. He sent authentication codes that would pass a routine scan as belonging to an Osk courier ship. They were actually the Carnivore’s own codes, with a few key lines changed to mask its true class as a seph’s light cruiser. It wasn’t a difficult hack—not nearly on the level of what Gau would soon require to achieve the mobility he needed.

  The transit authority signaled Gau to proceed. Tilting the control nodules under his fingers, he glided out of the parking swarm and banked toward Skraal’s roiling, green-tinged clouds. The planet swallowed up his view with deceptive speed, though Gau knew it would take him at least an hour to reach his destination.

  Time enough to make a quick call downside.

  Grayish rain sluiced down the narrow glass tunnel arching over the public arcade, reducing the sky beyond to a shimmer. Gau kept to the side out of the flow of traffic, the hood of his cloak drawn up. Kept his gaze straight ahead. The storefronts and clubs embedded into the walls of the arcade at intervals seemed to float by in a haze of watery light and a babble of different languages. He heard snatches of Bask, Urdeki, Russian, English, even caught a bit of the multicolored dapple of Rul lightspeech. The strange miasmas of cooking spices and fragrant intoxicants scratched past his nostrils.

  Gau closed his mind to it all. On his first visit to Skraal-Teklan, the planet’s capital had overwhelmed him with its noise and activity. He had never seen so many species in one place—all of them conversing, haggling, playing games, buying and selling. His Baskar escort had had to take him by the shoulders and steer him through the crowds to the spaceport and the last leg of his journey to Olios 3.

  Skraal was a true multispecies world. Run by the Baskar, yes, but their shrewd trading instincts had led them to open the colony up soon after its foundation to any races who wanted to claim a place there. A real place, not a false citizenship relegating them to the edges of the nest. Skraal was where Gau had glimpsed a shadow of what the Chii Ril enclave wanted on Aival.

  But by then, it was too late for him to care what they wanted.

  In several places the glass hallways branched off like the fronds of a fern, ending in little cul-de-sacs of businesses that catered to highly specialized interests. Gau left t
he main thoroughfare for one of these tributaries and stopped before an unmarked metal door. A high slit of polarized glass served as a window, with a speaker grille below. He pressed the button to one side of the door.

  Scratchy Bask syllables emanated from the grille: “Does the caller have an appointment?”

  “I’m here to see”—he cleared his throat before attempting the long Baskar name—“Paljarittihressenoormenashke. He’s expecting me.”

  The com clicked off, and a moment later the door slid up in a whisper of hydraulics. The room beyond was a flattened golden ovoid whose walls curved seamlessly into the floor. The ceiling was a reflective mirror; Gau guessed it concealed surveillance equipment. For an instant Gau thought the room was empty as he stepped in. He tightened muscles in anticipation of some trick—then realized the Baskar he’d come to see was simply hidden inside the large circular tank squatting in the center of the room. The lip of the massive metal cylinder was at Gau’s eye level; a set of metal mesh steps led in a spiral up the outside to a curved platform attached to the tank’s edge. A console and two generic block chairs were mounted to the platform.

  So this was how Baskar conducted business deals. On the edge of a lounging tank. And what do they do if the offer is unsatisfactory, he wondered. Push the seller in and devour them? It was not entirely out of the question.

  “The young warrior has returned,” bubbled a voice from the tank, sibilant and liquid at once. Gau winced at the spray of water that misted the air as a scaly blue head rose from the tank like the wedge of a blunt spear. “I didn’t expect to see you again,” Pal said. His teeth showed, but Gau didn’t think the Baskar was smiling.

  “I imagine you didn’t.” Gau lifted off his hood and met the Baskar’s yellow eyes. Eye contact was a sign of directness that translated between their species. “I won’t take much of your time, either. There is something I require that the Directive may be of help with. And I have something to trade that I believe will be of interest.”