Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Dhanneth’s hand moved again. He used the other one to brace Jedao against the wall. Jedao gasped, head thrown back. His hips canted, unavoidable angles.

  “This isn’t real,” Jedao said, half a groan, not sure when this had stopped being a cover story. “You don’t really, it’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s formation instinct. You wouldn’t want this if—”

  Shit. Was that what was going on? Except how could that be the case when only Dhanneth reacted to him like this, while all the other Kel hated him?

  Dhanneth closed his fingers around Jedao’s cock. Words fled. “Jedao,” Dhanneth said, amused, “no one chooses who they love. It’s no different.”

  Jedao’s counterargument dissolved in the rush of sensation as Dhanneth began to stroke him with his thumb. Jedao struggled to still himself. Failed. “Dhanneth, no—” He grabbed Dhanneth’s wrist and tried to wrench his hand away.

  Dhanneth’s mouth brushed the lobe of Jedao’s ear, and Jedao’s grip loosened. “Let me please you,” Dhanneth said. “If you cry out too loud, they’ll hear you. No one will do anything about it. Who are they going to complain to, after all? Their commander? Their general? The hexarch they never see?”

  For once someone wanted him. Jedao’s control dissolved. He bit down and bloodied the inside of his mouth. “Cut me,” he said, hardly hearing himself. “Burn me up.”

  Dhanneth turned him around and forced him to face the wall. He reached around and undid Jedao’s buttons, one-handed, with remarkable dexterity. Helped him undress. Jedao shivered as the cool air hit his skin. Dhanneth traced his scars. “You’ve been hurt.”

  “Then you know what I like,” Jedao said. A dangerous thing to suggest. When had he stopped caring what people did to him? He might once have propositioned Kujen-Inhyeng, but that didn’t mean he had a good idea of what people did when they coupled. He should have spent more of the intervening time researching pornography of the sort that every soldier had access to.

  Dhanneth left him standing pressed to the wall. Jedao wondered if he had misapprehended the situation. Then he heard Dhanneth’s footsteps and craned his head. Dhanneth had returned with a stoppered vial and a length of yellow cord. “Yes,” Jedao said before Dhanneth could tell him what either was for. The specifics did not interest him, although this was a hazardous frame of mind. “Do whatever you want to me.”

  Dhanneth made no attempt to hide his arousal. “You are very young,” he said, not coldly, not warmly either, but with a hint of wildness. Kujen had not tamed him as completely as he thought.

  Jedao submitted to having his wrists bound. He tried to figure out what knots were being used, an impossible task when he couldn’t see what was going on behind him. The cord held him like spider-steel and silk-promise. He did not ask Dhanneth why he kept it ready to hand. Maybe all Kel did and he’d never thought to ask. As Dhanneth adjusted the knots, Jedao fantasized about being forgotten here, the Kel swarm going into battle without him as the years advanced, until even the threadbare legend of his crimes was nothing more than a breath in the halls.

  Later, Dhanneth unbound him and took him into the water closet so they could clean up. It wasn’t any more inappropriate than what they had already done to each other. Jedao splashed his face with cold water and tried not to think about all the places where he was sore. Dhanneth had been very discreet about where he had cut Jedao, even if the cuts were already healed over.

  Jedao shivered at the prickle of circulation returning to his arms, his legs, the taut ache running from shoulders through spine to the juncture between his legs. “Do you have some unnatural fondness for aliens?” he asked.

  Dhanneth’s calm expression didn’t alter. “Is that something you want getting around?”

  “It can hardly be a secret after I got shot up in the command center and failed to die.”

  “There are so many legends about you that no one is quite sure what to make of you.”

  “I imagine so.” Jedao admired the tattoo on Dhanneth’s back as the other man washed himself clean. Instead of a bird of any type, which he would have expected of a Kel, it depicted a tiger rampant.

  Dhanneth looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, that,” he said. “I got it as a much younger man. I was married, once. My spouse wanted me to get it removed, but I was stubborn about it. It was a stupid thing to quarrel over.”

  Jedao remembered the notation in Dhanneth’s profile. He’d once been married to an alt diplomat. One adult child. He’d never mentioned either, for understandable reasons. “Do you miss them?” he asked.

  “This is my life now,” Dhanneth said.

  Jedao accepted the non-answer for the rebuke it was. Everyone from the past was inaccessible, not just Ruo, dust-words in too many histories to read. But he wasn’t the only one thus severed. All the Kel in his swarm had been torn from their comrades, families, friends. What they had left was each other.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHERIS’S NEEDLEMOTH CAUGHT up with Kujen’s swarm by dint of it stopping for provisioning and upgrades. The first view that Hemiola had of it was through the lightest feather-touch that 1491625 could wrangle out of the needlemoth’s scan suite. The moths had docked at an immense facility and had upgrade vessels crawling over them like maggots. (It had seen maggots in the last drama it had watched, and Cheris had had to explain to it why humans reacted to them with such disgust.) It didn’t escape Hemiola’s notice that the vessels’ crews included larger industrial servitors like the one it had met at Ayong Primary, who appeared to be mostly, but not solely, responsible for the work in vacuum.

  1491625 had mated the needlemoth to Kujen’s command moth, whatever it was called. Hemiola had fretted all through the approach, even though it knew by now that 1491625 was an excellent pilot. Fortunately, 1491625 didn’t take offense at Hemiola’s obvious nerves.

  “The good thing is they show every sign of being parked here for a bit,” Cheris remarked. At the moment she was in the cargo hold checking over their burrower eggs. “We’ve only got one batch of these, and there won’t be any margin for foul-ups.”

  Hemiola hadn’t known what to expect of the eggs. They were large, ovoid, and leathery black in appearance. A single egg was the size of Cheris’s torso, although much denser than human flesh. A batch consisted of a mere four eggs. Each one was marked with a quality control/lineage code and, amusingly, a colorful yellow butterfly-in-circle logo that indicated the facility that had bred them. Still, Hemiola didn’t like the way they pulsed faintly on scan.

  “None of them seems to have been stillborn,” Cheris said, “or whatever the correct term is for eggs.” Her eyes softened. “Jedao should have known, but he grew up speaking a completely different language. I don’t know how much of that old Shparoi farm terminology transfers into the modern high language.”

  Hemiola blinked its lights inquiringly. “Farm?” It had an unsettling vision of Jedao hoeing a row of plants from which tiny voidmoths budded.

  “He was raised on an agricultural research facility,” Cheris said. “His mother ran it. Spent his childhood looking in on vicious geese and running around the countryside and learning how to use a gun, the usual.”

  Hemiola had seen some dramas about Jedao, but none of them had made use of this interesting morsel of background. Spurred by curiosity, it asked, “What are we going to do with the burrower after it’s done its work?”

  “What do you mean?” Cheris said.

  “They’re alive, aren’t they?”

  Cheris considered that. “I suppose they are, but they don’t have a long life cycle. They hatch, they gorge as they gnaw their way through whatever you want to breach, they go into hibernation. I don’t think they’re sentient in any meaningful sense of the word.”

  “Where do they come from, anyway?” Hemiola had consulted the records it had received from Ayong Primary, but most of those didn’t deal with engineering matters.

  “An offshoot of the moth breeding program,” 1491625 replied. “To be more prec
ise, burrowers are descended from moth parasites.”

  “You’re full of the most interesting facts,” Cheris said.

  “There’s nothing to do on layovers but talk to Nirai servitors,” 1491625 said. “I met one once that was all too willing to discuss the maintenance it was doing and learned a lot from it in exchange for my helping it with its work.”

  Cheris arched an eyebrow as she carefully laid the last of the eggs back after her inspection. “And what work were you supposed to be doing instead?”

  “Weapons inventory,” 1491625 said, “which I’d finished early. In case you were wondering.”

  Hemiola resisted the urge to flutter its lights. Stay calm, it told itself. It would just have to trust that Cheris knew what she was about. “It feels like such a long wait,” it said.

  “The waiting’s never fun,” Cheris agreed. “And I don’t like the upgrades, even if I can’t figure out what they are exactly. It’s the principle of the thing. It does give us time to gather information, even if we daren’t use scan at full capacity.”

  “Don’t say things like that,” Hemiola said faintly. It imagined alerting the entire swarm and being blown up in short order by angry warmoths. Or, alternately, being boarded by large, angry Kel soldiers. Cheris might be convinced that she could waltz through a moth full of heavily armed Kel, and Hemiola had no doubt that she could, but Hemiola itself expected to go down easily.

  “You’ll do fine,” Cheris said. “Are you ready for more drill?”

  Rationally, Hemiola knew that no one on Kujen’s command moth could hear or see them speaking inside the needlemoth. In practice, it wished Cheris would speak more softly. “Ready,” it said.

  EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER the needlemoth attached itself to the command moth, whose name appeared to be Revenant, the swarm set out. By then, Hemiola had memorized what the three of them had been able to deduce of the command moth’s layout. Cheris had explained to Hemiola that she’d especially need its help due to the complication of variable layout. “Infiltrating things was much easier before the Nirai invented that,” she’d said wistfully.

  “People like you make ordinary citizens clutch their pillows at night,” 1491625 said snidely.

  Hemiola thought that the situation would improve once they were underway. Instead, it only became more jittery. Servitors didn’t sleep, but it found itself obsessively tracing maps and layouts and movement patterns in its mind. 1491625 paid it little heed, caught up in its own duties.

  However, Hemiola couldn’t fool Cheris for long. She took it aside a few days after that. “I know I’m asking a hard thing of you,” she said. “I appreciate it very much. But I can’t carry out the mission without you. We have to do this together.”

  “It’s different from the dramas,” Hemiola said dolefully. “At least then the music tells you when the bad guys are about to sneak up on you.”

  “In the dramas, we’d be the bad guys,” 1491625 pointed out.

  “Not helping,” Cheris said.

  “Someone has to be a realist,” 1491625 said.

  Hemiola was silently grateful for 1491625’s callousness. They’d never be friends, exactly, but the other servitor’s matter-of-factness helped it focus on the stakes. “I can do it,” Hemiola said.

  Cheris smiled at it and took up her exercise regimen. Hemiola knew enough about humans to recognize that Cheris was in excellent condition. Her devotion to staying fit reassured it. In the meantime, it distracted itself by reviewing footage of assassination attempts from its least favorite dramas and replacing the existing scores (and sometimes the dialogue) with its own creations.

  Afterwards, Hemiola wondered what had led Cheris to choose this particular day, as opposed to another, for her assassination attempt. The hexarchate and its successor states were about dates, times, irreplaceable moments. Accustomed to small but distinctly ritualized celebrations, if you could call the hexarch’s observances that, Hemiola didn’t know what to make of what they were doing here. At the time, however, Hemiola was merely grateful that the wait was over.

  “It’s time,” Cheris said as she unwebbed herself. The suit she pulled out this time was not the one she had worn into Ayong Primary. This one was Kel infantry issue, less sleek, and once she had finished the checks and suited up, it made her resemble a predatory insect. The suit was dull gray in color, even the hands. It was then that Hemiola realized that it had never seen Cheris in Kel gloves, or even the gray gloves of seconded officers. Jedao had, in his various guises, affected the antiquated fingerless gloves, even though Kujen had provided him with an elaborate and not at all regulation wardrobe.

  Hemiola blinked its acquiescence. If they survived, it could ask Cheris about the gloves later: surely a thorough rejection of the Kel, for all that they claimed her still. The official records still listed her name as Kel Cheris.

  Together they entered the airlock. Cheris selected one of the burrower eggs, then loaded it into the gear that would induce its hatching and attach it to the Revenant. The process seemed to take forever. In reality, only eight minutes and five seconds elapsed before the mechanism’s interface indicated that the burrower had emerged from the egg.

  Hemiola imagined that it heard a soft gnawing. Pure imagination, of course. Cheris had assured it that no vibrations would pass from the burrower to the needlemoth, or indeed to the Revenant itself.

  After another eleven minutes, more or less, Cheris signed that the burrower had completed its job and that it had exuded a blister over the entry point so as to prevent the breach from leaking atmosphere into raw vacuum. They squeezed into the blister, which had two compartments that cycled similarly to an airlock. It was a tight fit for Cheris, who was by no means large. Hemiola, rather smaller, had no trouble hovering through the pulsing passage.

  Hemiola listened intently for signs of activity in their vicinity. It wouldn’t do for them to emerge into the command moth right in front of some trigger-happy Kel. While it would have liked the certainty of active scan, it didn’t dare alert any of the command moth’s servitors to their presence; other servitors would find it suspicious if a stranger-servitor showed up flinging tendrils of scan around.

  Once the burrower had finished the tedious business of chewing its way through the Revenant’s hull, they emerged in a storage room full of cleaning supplies. All well and good. There had always existed the small chance that some tumble of variable layout would land them instead in the dining hall for high table or some much-frequented gymnasium. But they’d inferred what they could of the duty roster—not difficult, considering the Kel fondness for routines—and hoped that no one of high rank would decide to take a jaunt that necessitated turning the moth topsy-turvy.

  Cheris landed lightly on her feet and scanned their surroundings. She whispered a command using the codes that Brezan had obtained from Protector-General Inesser. Her suit darkened to Kel black with gold seams, the equivalent of full formal. Most importantly, it displayed the insignia of a high general.

  “This feels like cheating,” Cheris had remarked to Hemiola when she first explained the scheme to it, “but it doesn’t need to work for long. They’ll cashier me right after the op, anyway.”

  Cheris gestured for Hemiola to proceed. It damped its lights, partly nerves, partly an irrational conviction that shining them would draw attention. From now on, Hemiola was responsible for leading Cheris to the desired target without interruptions.

  Hemiola shuddered inside when the door to the storage room whooshed shut behind them. No turning back.

  Under other circumstances, Hemiola would have paused to admire Kel decor, which it had previously only known through dramas. Cheris scarcely glanced at the elaborate tapestries and paintings. Then again, there was no reason she should; as a former Kel, she would have seen her fill of them in the past.

  Hemiola had never before appreciated how vast a warmoth was. Studying the schematics was one thing; hovering through the hallways, increasingly worried that someone would evade passive scan an
d ambush them, was another. Cheris walked briskly, but did not run. Hemiola wished it could urge her to run, except that would make her look suspicious.

  After several long hallways, two lifts, and a small eternity of glaring ashhawk paintings, they reached a row of offices. Hemiola confirmed that no one lurked inside the one they wanted, which belonged to the executive officer. It conveyed this information to Cheris in Simplified Machine Universal, reflecting that it was just as well that she was fluent in its language.

  They waited for another small eternity. Hemiola stilled itself, trying to stay alert without giving way to its anxiety. I am not cut out to be a special operative, it decided. Although it consoled itself that someday this would make an excellent tale to tell Sieve and Rhombus, who wouldn’t believe a word of it.

  As luck would have it, the executive officer didn’t come alone. Hemiola alerted Cheris that two humans were approaching. No servitors. Unbidden, it risked a moment’s active scan. “One Kel,” it said in hurried flashes, “one Nirai.”

  Cheris flattened herself against the wall, coiled and ready. When the two humans rounded the corner, she lashed out and struck the Nirai. He went down in a tangle of limbs.

  Critically, the executive officer, a tall, broad Kel woman, had frozen for a second. That was long enough for Cheris to shove her up against the wall in some kind of joint lock. “Listen,” Cheris said, her voice muffled by her helmet. “I’m here by authority of Protector-General Kel Inesser, to whom you owe your true allegiance.”

  The woman’s eyes flicked down to Cheris’s high general insignia, flicked back up to her face. “I’m listening. Sir.”

  Hemiola could tell from Cheris’s body language that she was satisfied, although she had not let down her guard either. Presumably that reluctant “sir” was a positive sign.