Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Meanwhile, Sieve, who had finally taken note of the discussion, drifted in. “I hope he brought some proper food,” Sieve said. “We don’t have anything good to offer him.”

  “At least there’s no guest this time,” Hemiola said, diverted.

  “That’s fine by me,” Rhombus said, always the most opinionated. “Jedao always made me feel like my exoskeleton was about to corrode.”

  “Maybe this time we’ll have better luck with our algorithms,” Sieve said. “No matter how often I benchmark the ones I have, I can’t seem to beat that lock.”

  Privately, Hemiola thought that sitting around trying to defeat the hexarch’s lock was even more boring than keeping an eye on scan. Then again, Sieve had a very orthodox attachment to the mathematical disciplines. Hemiola had given up trying to engage it on more interesting topics, like procedural counterpoint generation. Sieve was about as musical as a cabbage.

  The base had already existed when the hexarch brought Hemiola, Rhombus, and Sieve with him 280 years ago. The hexarch meant them to maintain the facility in his absence and wait upon him during his periodic visits. Like most humans, he didn’t pay attention to their individual quirks or assign them names. Then again, he had less reason than most to care. As hexarch, he had other matters on his mind.

  “This individual is walking with a manform’s stride,” Rhombus was saying. “That’s got to be uncomfortable with those short legs. And didn’t Kujen say once that he was going to stick to tall bodies? The one out there is rather short.”

  The figure was making good time down the stairs. Lights came on as it approached, and faded as it passed, giving the impression of a glowing snake winding its way ever deeper. Shadows ghosted along the crevasse’s walls.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t be looking to our defenses?” Rhombus asked. It gestured with two of its grippers at the descending figure’s equipment. “Not to impugn Kujen’s abilities, but does he even know how to use rappelling gear?”

  “Maybe that’s a fashion statement too,” Hemiola said. “Or he’s taken up a hobby. Or he’s not sure how safe the stairs are.”

  “He’s moving pretty quickly if so,” Sieve said.

  Hemiola had no answer. Instead, it checked the infrared sub-display against the one for the ordinary human visual spectrum. Besides the staircase’s lights, the figure was wearing a headlamp, although it hadn’t turned it on. Preserving battery power, presumably. The stairs wound around and beneath the lip of the crevasse, taking the figure beyond sight of the sky.

  “Another eight minutes and it’ll reach the outer door,” Sieve said.

  “Wonderful,” Rhombus said, bobbing up and down in the air in a clear display of nerves.

  “I don’t see why you’re so tense,” Hemiola said. “The calendrical lock will settle matters one way or another.”

  Rhombus glowered at it in a distinctly asymmetrical pattern. “By vaporizing this moon and everything on it if that isn’t Kujen!”

  “It won’t come to that,” Hemiola said.

  The figure’s pace hadn’t slowed. Another three minutes before it reached the outer door.

  “You’re so sanctimonious it makes my heuristics seize up,” Rhombus said.

  Sanctimony had nothing to do with it. The hexarch stored notes on his top-secret projects here. He couldn’t risk them falling into his enemies’ hands. So he came here every century to deposit updates, bringing only Jedao with him. From listening in on the conversations between the two, Hemiola gathered that the hexarch had many enemies.

  “There it goes,” Sieve said.

  Now Sieve was bobbing up and down, too. Hemiola resisted the urge to follow suit.

  The figure opened the outer door without any trouble. No surprise there; the outer door wasn’t meant to be the barrier. It stepped into the airlock. The outer door closed behind it. The figure waited for the inner door to open, then continued into the next chamber.

  This one was hexagonal, with alcoves in each wall. Within each alcove rested a plaque depicting the emblem of one of the hexarchate’s six factions: the Rahal scrywolf, the Nirai voidmoth, the Shuos ninefox, the Kel ashhawk, the Andan kniferose, and the Vidona stingray. Hemiola couldn’t help a surge of affection at the sight of the voidmoth.

  A terminal rose from the center of the room. Its display brightened when the figure stepped before it. The figure rested its hand against the display. A countdown flared up. Twelve minutes to open the calendrical lock, or the base would self-destruct.

  The three servitors had, without the hexarch’s authorization, contrived a way to listen in on the very large number that the terminal had transmitted to the figure’s augment. (Strictly speaking, the hexarch hadn’t forbidden it.) At least scan verified that the figure did, in fact, possess an augment, or everyone would have been doomed.

  Hemiola knew the principle of the calendrical lock, which the hexarch had explained to Jedao in distressingly small words.

  “Look,” the hexarch had said during that first voyage to Tefos, “why don’t you take a break from playing solitaire so I can tell you about this.”

  That time, the hexarch was a young man with middling dark skin and dark curls, his broad chest tapering to a slender waist. Although he affected a simple Nirai uniform, black with silver buttons, an ocean’s bounty of black pearls dripped from his ears, his wrists, his ankles.

  Jedao looked up from his card game. His body was even younger than the hexarch’s, slim and unscarred, with blond hair and green eyes declaring its foreign origins. When he wasn’t playing card games, he exercised, as if by sheer effort he could overcome his thorough clumsiness. Kujen had let slip that the body had originally belonged to a Hafn prisoner of war.

  “Whatever you like,” Jedao said, his face inquiring.

  “How good are you at prime factorization?” the hexarch said.

  “How big are the numbers,” Jedao said with unmistakable wariness, “and am I allowed to use a calculator or not?”

  “You shouldn’t need a calculator for this,” the hexarch said, “unless you’re much worse at multiplication tables than I think you are. Try factoring seventy-two, just for practice.”

  Jedao tapped one of the cards, frowning. “If you insist, Nirai-zho. That’s nine times eight, which becomes three times three times eight, but then you have to deal with the eight, which is four times two, which becomes two times two times two, so... three times three times two times two times two?” His fingers twitched as he counted up all the prime factors.

  “You’re never going to win any prizes for speed,” the hexarch said, “but at least you got there.”

  Jedao leaned back and smiled a tilted smile at him. “I thought the point of this arrangement was that you did the math bits and I did the walloping bits. Two is prime despite being even, right?”

  The hexarch made a long-suffering noise. “You’re fucking with me, right?”

  Jedao’s expression remained innocent.

  “Saying this in a mathematical context makes me cringe, but will you take my word that with very, very large numbers, it’s very, very difficult to factor them, even using a computer?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Don’t try my patience,” the hexarch said. “I’m explaining this to you so you don’t try some foxbrained scheme to get in by yourself and blow the whole archive to particles. Once you try to enter the archive, you’ll set off a timer. You have twelve minutes to not only factor the very, very large number the system presents to your augment, but to use the factors to perform a ritual that will align the local calendar in a particular manner. When the calendrical lock detects the necessary alignments, it will disarm the self-destruct and let you in.”

  “Let me guess,” Jedao said. “You’re the only one fast enough to do it.”

  “That’s the gamble, yes.”

  “Why the additional ritual?” Jedao said. “Why not just disarm the system once the correct prime factors are regurgitated to it?”

  “To prev
ent someone from hacking the lock remotely,” the hexarch said patiently. “It takes a human presence to affect the local calendar, so it’s an additional precaution.”

  Hemiola could have added another reason, if the hexarch had ever thought of it: to prevent enemy servitors from breaking in. The three of them tried to crack the prime factorization problem out of curiosity, but they wouldn’t have dreamed of disarming it for real. In any case, even Sieve hadn’t had any luck with its factorization algorithm. It couldn’t reliably carry out the task in the necessary minutes. Even if one of them had figured it out, the fact that servitors did not generate formation effects under the high calendar meant that a fast algorithm did them no good. They couldn’t affect the lock one way or another.

  Jedao had gathered up his cards and began shuffling them. He almost dropped the deck twice. The hexarch observed this with a curious mixture of exasperation and pleasure. “Consider me warned,” Jedao said pleasantly.

  Consider me warned. Surely Jedao wouldn’t be suicidal enough to attempt to breach the base after the hexarch himself had warned him? Because if the figure out there wasn’t the hexarch, Jedao was the next likely candidate. At least, Hemiola hoped that no one else knew about Tefos’s location, or what was the point of a secret base?

  “This person’s thermal signature doesn’t indicate any anxiety,” Hemiola said. “Surely that’s a good sign?”

  “Shut up,” Rhombus said, “I’m factoring.”

  “Me too,” Sieve said. “Want to help?”

  Hemiola suppressed a flicker. Instead, it wondered what the intruder was doing. Like most servitors, it could track visuals in multiple directions at once. Its attempt at further conversation dimmed when it returned its primary focus to the monitor.

  The figure had brought out a complicated device, all loops and wires and semiprime circuits, with a small panel displaying an unfamiliar user interface. Unbothered by the countdown, the figure fiddled with some controls, then set the device down. The figure began a meditation in front of the ashhawk alcove.

  “We should intervene,” Hemiola said, suddenly concerned. “Look at the calendrical gradient. It’s shifting away from high calendar norms, and not in a way that’s doing anything for the lock.”

  “If you distract Kujen and he messes up,” Rhombus said, “we’ll all get killed even faster! In what universe is this a good idea?”

  “I have to agree,” Sieve said.

  Hemiola gave up on speaking to them and returned to unpuzzling what the figure was up to. If it was going to perish, it might as well learn something in its last—Don’t be morbid.

  The figure was reciting chants in an older form of the high language, one that survived in ritual use. The hexarch had lapsed into it from time to time during his stays. The chant came from a litany for one of the festivals devoted to chocolates.

  Four minutes left.

  Even stranger than the choice of festival were the calibration readings in the chamber. Because of the figure’s observance—it hadn’t escaped Hemiola’s notice that it was timing all its recitations to the clock’s downward count—the local calendar was deviating even further, almost to heretical degrees.

  And the change was propagating throughout the base. The grid flashed red with a belated alert, warning Hemiola of the calendrical rot.

  Three minutes left.

  For someone concerned about its impending death, Rhombus was arguing passionately with Sieve about—how had they gotten on the topic of landscaping anyway? Especially since they only ventured outside every century, during the hexarch’s visits?

  The figure straightened and slammed a hand down on the terminal. Hemiola presumed it was answering the grid using its augment. Inputting large prime factors manually wouldn’t be practical, not with slow human fingers.

  Two minutes left.

  The device blinked. Hemiola longed to take it apart and find out what it did. Something to do with factorization or otherwise bypassing the lock, surely.

  “Don’t scare me like that, Kujen,” Rhombus muttered in a frantic magenta.

  “He’s not done yet,” Sieve reminded it.

  The figure rapidly executed three meditations, orienting itself at precise angles with respect to the chamber’s walls. The local calendar shifted yet again.

  The lock disengaged. The timer went dark. Hemiola chided itself for having doubted the hexarch, and never mind his unusual choice of body, or his gear.

  “Well, we should see to his needs,” Hemiola said, unable to keep from tinting blue-green in relief.

  Rhombus flashed rudely. “As if Kujen ever hesitated to summon us for whatever manual task he needed an extra pair of grippers for. You just want to gawk.”

  Hemiola didn’t deign to respond. Instead, it hovered out of the control room at a decorous speed. Around it, the base came alive in response to the hexarch’s arrival. Human-breathable air circulated through the rest of the complex and lights turned on. Hemiola remembered the rock garden that it and Sieve had arranged during the last visit, when they’d surfaced to see to the hexarch’s voidmoth. It wondered, not a little wistfully, if the hexarch would take notice of the garden this time.

  The hexarch had removed his suit by the time Hemiola arrived to greet him. He was indeed a womanform, his hair cropped short in a disconcertingly military style that framed a yellow-pale oval face with dark eyes. His clothes were of plain dark fabric. No lace, no scarves, no jewelry except a pendant tucked under his shirt. He’d already unzipped his jacket and folded it over a spare chair.

  Hemiola was considerably surprised when the hexarch addressed him directly. “Hello there,” he said. “What would you like me to call you?”

  Flustered, Hemiola went dark. How was it supposed to respond to that?

  More importantly, why was the hexarch speaking not in his accustomed dialect, but in a drawl? It knew that drawl—

  “Let me guess,” the hexarch said, his speech forms uncharacteristically informal. Not impolite, just informal. “There’s confusion about who I am.”

  Deciding that it didn’t want to risk offending the hexarch, or whoever it was, Hemiola flashed a simple acknowledgment, then waited.

  “The hexarch is busy with other matters,” said the not-hexarch. “I’m Shuos Jedao.”

  Shuos Jedao. The Immolation Fox, and the hexarch’s sometime lover. Why was he here without the hexarch?

  “You must have a lot of questions,” Jedao said, “but it’s been a long voyage. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

  Hemiola emitted a mortified gleep. Surely it should be serving tea, or wine-of-roses, or whiskey.

  Jedao smiled the tilted smile that Hemiola remembered so well, constant across every body he’d appeared in. “No, really, whatever you have.”

  Over the servitors’ channel, Hemiola explained the situation. “Help?” Hemiola asked. Sieve acknowledged.

  “Someone’s coming with a glass of water,” Hemiola told Jedao, unthinkingly using Machine Universal.

  “Thank you, much appreciated,” Jedao said.

  Hemiola colored pink in mortification when it realized what it had done.

  “I can understand your language if it doesn’t go by too quickly,” Jedao said with a series of finger-taps in Simplified Machine Universal. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  True, the absence of color and the geometrical placement of lights flattened the language’s nuances. But Hemiola was disinclined to quibble. It hadn’t expected to be addressed in its own language at all.

  Just then, Sieve entered with a tray containing the requested glass of water and, even more mortifyingly, a ration bar. In the past, the hexarch had always brought his own food. He’d replenished the store of ration bars each visit—the bars were rated for up to 240 years under standard conditions, whatever that meant—in case of emergency. Nevertheless, Hemiola couldn’t help but feel responsible for the lack of decent edibles.

  “Thank you,” Jedao said to Sieve. “If you don’t mind—?�
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  Sieve bobbed a nod.

  “He asked what I wanted him to call me,” Hemiola said privately to Sieve.

  “What did you tell him?” Sieve said, with aggravating reasonableness.

  “I haven’t answered yet.”

  If the ration bar displeased Jedao, he gave no sign. At last he wiped the crumbs from his mouth and folded up the wrapper on a corner of the tray. Sieve whisked it away, leaving Hemiola alone with him. Thanks so much, Hemiola thought.

  “How else can we serve you?” Hemiola said at last.

  “I was hoping to look something up in the archives,” Jedao said. “You’re in charge of safekeeping the records, correct?”

  “Yes,” Hemiola said. “I hope you know where to look, though, because we’ve never read through the records ourselves.”

  “What if I made a copy to take with me?”

  Hemiola hesitated just long enough to ask the others what to do.

  “He’s the hexarch’s lover, doesn’t matter to me,” was Rhombus’s response.

  “Use your judgment,” Sieve said, equally unhelpful.

  Jedao lifted an eyebrow.

  “We shouldn’t let the records out of our sight,” Hemiola said. “Metaphorically speaking.”

  “I can’t stay long,” Jedao said. “That would limit the amount of research I could do. Unless—”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless one of you came with me to ensure that the records weren’t misused.”

  Hemiola thought this over. The proposal was tempting—too tempting. But it couldn’t resist asking for more details. “How long would this journey be?”

  “That I can’t say with any certainty,” Jedao said. “But if at any point you need to return home, I have friends who can arrange for transport.”

  Hemiola flickered doubtfully.

  “Well, you don’t have to decide right this moment,” Jedao said. “I saw a rock garden on my way in, by the way. Some evidence of micrometeorites over the past decades, but still, very nice. Your work?”

  “Yes,” Hemiola said. “Mine and the other servitor you met just now.” It didn’t know how to react to Jedao’s casual interest. Resentment that he’d noticed, even though the hexarch never had? Gratitude? Embarrassment that such an inconsequential act of decoration had come to a human’s attention after all?