Absence of Blade

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Mose tried to keep his mind empty, alert to everything but expecting nothing. Stakeouts like this had been routine in his service to Za: he would shape his mind into a still pool, waiting for the moment when his target stepped into his ambush. But those had been Terrans. This was only the third time Mose had lain in wait for another Osk.

  Rain began to curl down from the sky in misty shrouds, chilling the exposed skin of his snout, though the armor under his cloak kept most of the damp off. He blinked the mist out of his eyes, both worried he would miss his target’s appearance and terrified he wouldn’t. A sick apprehension reached blades into Mose’s stomach, sawing on nerves strung tight as dried sinew. Only the possibility that his target might detect the smell had prevented him from leaning over and vomiting onto the trash bags beside him.

  The cold droplets of water fell faster, but Mose didn’t move into the shelter of the overhang. Something about the rain calmed him in a way his training no longer could. Light-years might separate him from home, but the rain felt just the same as it had there. Crouching in the alley, surrounded by filth, Mose remembered a very different day.

  Anmerresh is a city of mirrors after the storm. Pearly light reflects from the windows of buildings and the slick cobbled streets lining the canal, pooling in puddles of rainwater. Even Teluk’s dull sky takes on a limpid sheen like the inside of a shell.

  Mose pulls clean air into his lungs as he leans on the forward bow of the barge. It’s a working ship, not a pleasure craft: piles of rough netting and traps squat on the decking behind him, and harpoons hang on the walls of the pilot’s cabin. He imagines the occupants of smaller schooners and subs throwing annoyed glances at the barge as they bob in the wake of the larger ship. Fishing boats don’t normally ply Anmerresh’s grand canal, but the recent storm washed tonnes of silt into the city’s waterways, and with them, kilos of tasty sea creatures.

  Here’s one, Selnes calls from the stern. Mose ambles over to where two Osk haul in nets clotted with sand and seaweed. Selnes crouches by the rail, dividing the jetsam from the spoils. She stands as he comes over. Beside her is a small mound of dull gray and brown shells, stubbornly closed. But the mollusc Selnes holds is already dead; the feeder cilia around the rim of its three-lobed shell have gone slack.

  This is what you wanted to show me? Mose asks. I’ve seen that kind before. Now, if you’re offering to let me sample your catch . . . He grins and reaches for the mollusc, but Selnes holds it above her head. She’s as tall as Mose but wiry, with long arms even for an Osk.

  In due time, she says. But first, have you ever been pearl fishing before?

  Mose cuts the air with the side of his palm. No.

  How many pearls would you say molluscs usually form in their lives? She hefts the tripartite shell.

  Mose dips his upper body in an Osk shrug. Maybe . . . three, he says, though the number feels generous.

  His friend opens the shell. Its walls are lined with the lambent nubs of pearls, marching away from the fleshy body in the center. There must be three dozen pearls inside.

  Grit and sand get caught in its shell all the time. With a blade tip, Selnes levers the mollusc out of its shell and begins to cut it in half. Sometimes the water will flush it out, but many times not. So the mollusc protects itself by encasing the irritant in a pearl.

  Mose takes his half from her. The mollusc’s flesh is briny and sweet and perfect. It’s almost like a record of its life, he muses.

  Selnes laughs around her portion of mollusc. I suppose, for as much life as molluscs can be said to have.

  Mose jabs in agreement. Though you have to admit it would be nice, he says, to seal your troubles away like that.

  The long profile of an Osk emerging into the square tore Mose away from the memory. His heartbeat seemed to fill his ears as he studied the arrival. A wave of disappointment, familiar now, broke over him as he saw it wasn’t Gau this time, either. Then a shock raced down his spine as he realized he knew the Osk waiting in the square, tapping a boot on the stones. It was still half an hour before the meeting time agreed on in the message, but Vorl Yureshenka had always been impatient.

  Oskaran, no. Mose was already a murderer twice over, but neither of them had been sephs he knew. Those had been quick ambushes from cover; they hadn’t gotten a look at their killer. And he hadn’t looked too closely at them.

  He debated what to do: wait and see who Vorl was here to meet, or approach him now? Part of him clung to the possibility Gau had posted that message; he’d tracked down leads suggesting Gau had passed through Skraal-Teklan and might even be here still. On the other hand, Mose knew two sephs would be more than a match for him. If Vorl met his contact, whoever it was, Mose would have no choice but to let them both go. Return to the Project empty-handed.

  The sick hollowness twisted in his stomach again. Mose bit it down and silently looped back the way he’d come. He emerged onto one of the thoroughfares where it bent out of sight of the square. Composing his face, Mose walked into the open.

  Vorl’s eyes widened as Mose stepped into the square. His scent turned sharp with surprise. “Mose? The message . . . that was you?”

  Mose managed a nod. His throat was packed too tight to speak.

  Vorl ripped back his hood, shaking loose his long brown mane. “You have no idea what a relief it is to see a familiar face. I’d heard some of us escaped Za, but I had no way to get in contact with anyone.” He grinned. “I should’ve known you’d make it out, Mose, if anyone could.”

  Mose made the corners of his mouth turn up in an approximation of a smile. It felt like a wound hacked into the mask of his face. “It is good to see you too, Vorl.”

  “Come, let’s go somewhere warm. This suns-cursed rain is making my blades ache.”

  “Follow me,” Mose said, hating every word. “I know a place.”

  He let himself lag half a body length behind Vorl as they entered the alley “shortcut” Mose pointed out. Hiding his right arm with his cloak, he extended its blade to quarter length. Vorl wore no helmet, but an armored suit drew angular lines under his cloak. Mose would have one chance: a stab to the base of the brain, just above the neck plate. Vorl would die instantly. Mose could do that much for him.

  The younger seph trudged on, chatting about some exploit of his during the war: “. . . only my third mission, but it was probably the closest I came to getting killed. Overconfident, I suppose; Daikar always said I needed more caution, but it took losing the war for me to understand.”

  Now. Mose raised his right arm and struck. The blade drove through the fabric of Vorl’s hood—

  Then grated against something hard and glanced off with a bone-jouncing reverberation. Vorl stumbled forward under the blow, almost fell, then automatically turned it into a roll. He regained his feet in less than a second and backed away, horror and disbelief twisting his expression.

  “What are you doing?” Vorl shouted. Mose stared back in numb shock. The cloak had ripped partially away from Vorl’s chest, revealing the armor plating beneath. Steel plates, not woven carbon, and ill-fitting: the neck plate had ridden up in back. Mose’s strike had been too low.

  There was no going back. On legs that felt made of stone, Mose lunged forward and thrust toward Vorl’s throat. Vorl dodged, the impaling move striking only his mane. Mose slashed his blade in toward Vorl’s neck, but his opponent ducked under the blow, crossed his wrists above his head and caught Mose’s blade in the defensive cross. Vorl shoved up and forward, forcing Mose to dance backward to keep his balance.

  But Vorl didn’t press the attack. Instead he backed farther down the alley, blades pointing forward in a low guard to keep as much distance between him and Mose as possible.

  “Why are you doing this?” he shouted. “We both served the Surarch of Za. We’re on the same side! Unless . . .” His lips curled in a snarl. “Unless you were never on our side at all!”
/>   Vorl dropped the guard and launched a diagonal cut at Mose’s head. Stunned, Mose barely dodged it—and realized too late it was a feint. The younger seph drove a metal-clad shoulder into Mose’s side and slammed him into the alley wall. His breath fled, lights exploding before his eyes as his back cracked against the stone. He crumpled to the pavement, tried to turn his momentum into a roll that became a clumsy scramble to his feet. A blur of gray and white shot past his face, so close a few of his own red hairs floated down in its wake.

  With a shearing sound, Vorl’s blade cleaved through Mose’s chest plate. White agony split Mose in two. His lungs hollowed out around a scream as he slipped to his knees. A gash, red from the nanites in his blood, wept from his shoulder to flank, soaking his cloak; it blurred in and out of focus as the pain began to make his head swim. He had to get away, get distance from Vorl, but he couldn’t move. All his seph training was a roaring blank in his mind. He was going to die.

  He was going to die, and leave Gau alive.

  Some reflex ingrained deeper than his training made Mose shield his face with his right blade as both of Vorl’s crashed onto it in a parallel downward slice. He locked the muscles in his arm, the effort twisting a hot wire in his wound. Behind his back, he retracted his left blade into its sheath.

  Vorl’s face was a mask of fury and anguish. “You knew all along, didn’t you?” he hissed. “You knew about Fate’s Shears. That’s how you escaped. By betraying Za!”

  “I’m doing this for Za!” Mose shouted. A flicker of confusion crossed Vorl’s face.

  Mose punched him in the gut. His blade shot out, piercing Vorl’s stomach plate into the living flesh beneath. He felt a jarring wrench as Vorl’s abdominal muscles clenched around the blade, dragging the gash wider. His victim’s eyes went wide with surprise and pain, then he sagged onto Mose’s shoulder, streams of teal blood leaking from his mouth.

  Mose let their combined weight press them to the pavement. He turned Vorl gently onto his side. The younger seph labored to take in air, his eyes glazing with death.

  Blood was soaking the knees of his armor. Mose ignored it. “Vorl, I—I wanted . . .” He covered his eyes briefly. “I wanted to tell you why—”

  But Vorl had gone still. Mose’s hand leapt to his mouth as a keening wail burst between his gritted teeth. It seemed to go on and on independent of him, as though the wound he’d punched through Vorl had made a sucking hole in his own chest.

  After what felt like hours, Mose picked himself up from beside the body and limped down the alley. A few minutes later, sirens rose behind him.

  The tiny bathroom was cold. Mose shrugged his robe onto his shoulders again, closed it up. The fastenings felt like tiny shells in his hands as he remembered that day on Teluk. Warm meat in his mouth. The fresh, clean air after the storm. Pellucid light flowing over rows of pearls in the mollusc’s shell.

  It had been a happy memory once. One he’d carried within him, like a pearl itself, protected from time. Before Vorl, Mose thought he could seal away what he’d done, seal it in a hard pit that only hurt until he buried it deep enough. He knew now it didn’t work like that. Each murder was not a grain of sand to be smoothed over, incorporated into something he could still call a life, however harsh. Each death punched another hole through him. Hollowed him out a little more. There would be nothing left of Mose long before he stopped breathing.

  A chime rang. Mose stumbled out of the bathroom on legs that felt half asleep and switched on the vidscreen beside the door. A long, bearded Terran face projected professional concern into the camera: his physician and therapist, Alex Vernsky, come to check up on Mose the night before his departure for the next mission. Mose pressed the intercom.

  “Hey, Mose,” Vernsky said. “Can I come in?” A courtesy only: Vernsky and other high-level Project staff had total access to Mose’s room, but this script was meant to give Mose the illusion of privacy and choice.

  Mose buzzed him in, but Vernsky stopped in the doorway. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m alive,” said Mose. “So you can stop worrying about that.” Vernsky grimaced but let the comment lie between them. Though he had no way to confirm it, Mose suspected the surveillance he was under intensified in the days leading up to and after a mission, an unofficial suicide watch.

  Vernsky tried a different tack. “Is there anything you want to talk about? I know right before a mission is a difficult time for you . . .”

  A mission. Not the mission—directed toward an end goal after which he wouldn’t have to fight anymore. Just an endless cycle, a series of holes waiting to open inside him. Mose felt something break in him, some tiny supporting strut he hadn’t known still stood finally giving way.

  “When is this going to end?” he asked.

  Vernsky ran a hand through his short brown hair; fatigue lines Mose had seen all too often appeared on his face. “I don’t know, Mose. I’m sorry.”

  It was the answer he’d expected. “Then I have nothing to talk about.” Mose shut the door.

  18

  Darkness, light. Darkness, light. His body was a fuzzy absence limned by the firm lines of the hibernation capsule. Its contours held him down. It had been filled with liquid earlier, but now there was air. A clear plate was before his face. Through the smeared pane, he could see the lights in the hallway ceiling passing over him in steady bands that made his head throb.

  Someone had collected him this time. That was new, a change from the solitary drop through an alien atmosphere. A Terran world, then; he briefly wondered which one.

  A door whispered open, and his capsule was wheeled through into a dimmer room, blank gray walls indicating embedded holofoil circuits. A black rectangular desk provided the only furnishing. There was the outline of a door in the wall behind it.

  With a wet crack, the plate before his face lifted away, and a rush of sour air invaded his capsule. Or maybe it was just the air inside escaping. Latex-gloved fingers fumbled vaguely at his arm; a needle slid into his elbow with a red flare of pain that cut through the static. He heard the click of shoes crossing linoleum, the swish of the door closing.

  Gradually the gray walls came down. He relearned the shape of his body as he had dozens of times before, the last of the hibernation fog slipping away as the stimulant shot asserted its dominance. By the time the door behind the desk slid open, Mose was almost himself again.

  The man who entered was no one Mose had ever seen before. Not particularly tall for a Terran, but solidly built under his bland gray suit. The lightest fuzz of hair topped his round skull in a style Mose found particularly off-putting; perhaps it was the way it made his deep brown eyes stand out against his paler skin.

  He recognized those eyes as they locked with his. Terran and Osk studied each other for a few long moments.

  “They said there was a new director,” Mose said at last.

  The man walked to the desk and leaned against it. “My name is Jan Shanazkowitz,” he replied. “I’m here to give you your mission.”

  In the spirit of knowing what the hell he was getting himself into, Jan had already reviewed reams of footage in the Project’s archive: debriefs and psychological assessments of the ShadowStalker, surveillance footage of his living quarters. Even brushed up on his flimsy O’o Nezz, though Jun had assured him Mose Attarish spoke excellent English.

  But he wasn’t prepared for the way the Osk stared through him as he entered the room; slits of bone embedded in onyx tracking him with the cool readiness of a bird of prey. Jan remembered reading that a layer of photoabsorbent cells in Osk eyes reflected the light to produce that effect, the way a cat’s eyes sometimes shone green in the dark. The overall effect sent a shiver through him.

  Mose’s head and torso stayed completely immobile, the rest of the alien’s body hidden by the ovoid capsule craft in which he had fallen through Aival’s atmosphere. Jan could make out t
he slightest hint of silvery lines—ruler-straight lines—webbing the darker gray skin of his chest and arms. Scars. A red mane flowed around his shoulders, its color like dried blood in the dim light.

  There was a chair behind the desk, but Jan stepped around to the front, leaning against the desk edge. He groped behind him until his hand curled around the remote for the holofoil walls. It was silly—but part of him didn’t want to turn his back on the Osk.

  As he pressed a button, the blank wall behind Jan shivered to life with a buzz of electricity. He didn’t bother to turn around. He knew the picture that would be projected onto it. Attarish’s eyes had never left his face, but now they flicked to the screen, taking in the images of carnage.

  “Six months ago there was an attack here on Aival,” said Jan. “The steps of Neo-Chicago’s city hall were blown up, along with fifty-three Terran citizens.” He waited a beat. “Senator Diane Shanazkowitz was killed in the attack.”

  He found himself scanning the Osk for a response, but Attarish’s face stayed impassive long enough for Jan to wonder if the hibernation drugs were still wearing off. Then, with a slight ripple of his lips that might have been a sneer, the Osk nodded the way a human would.

  “I am aware of Diane Shanazkowitz’s death. I am allowed news feeds.”

  “What I’m about to tell you won’t be in any news feed.” That got a flicker of interest; Attarish tipped his snout up in the gesture Jan had been told meant attention in Osk. As if he was scenting the air.

  He switched slides to a closeup shot of the blast radius, its circumference outlined in red. “Aival Civil Sec has been kind enough to share crime scene details with the Project,” he said. “Our intelligence department came at the evidence with our own hypothesis. Based on the evidence—shape of the blast, materials used, and the, ah, target—there is a high probability the bombing was the work of seph.”