Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “I’m going to ask for something,” Inhyeng said, “even though you shouldn’t give it to me. I want to die, Jedao. You of all people should know what that’s like.”

  Jedao’s grip tightened. After a moment he remembered how to speak. “Tell me your name. The real one.”

  “No. I remember it. But I don’t want anyone else to know it. I don’t want anyone to know I existed. I made the bargain I did for someone who ended up dying anyway, and now I’m done. Please, Jedao.”

  Everything dimmed. “Give me a gun,” he said. Someone pressed one into his hand. He didn’t see who.

  This whole plea could be a ploy. Jedao was uncomfortably aware that holding a gun directly to someone’s temple was risky business, that Inhyeng could try to wrest it away from him. On the other hand, Inhyeng of all people knew the futility of shooting at Jedao.

  “Goodbye,” Jedao said in a whisper. He was tempted to kiss Inhyeng’s brow, one last benediction. It seemed obscene to let a man’s execution pass without some form of rite. But Inhyeng wouldn’t have welcomed it.

  He pulled the trigger.

  He needn’t have gone to the effort. He let Inhyeng’s limp body fall. Stood there, the world swimming in and out and focus, attempting to calm himself with long, slow breaths.

  Then he realized that the lurching wasn’t just dizziness. His people were staggering. Dhanneth had come up beside him and was attempting to support him, which would have worked better if he hadn’t been worse affected by whatever was going on.

  Kujen’s gas, take two. Had his death, or Inhyeng’s, triggered this?

  “Get you to safety,” Dhanneth said in a muffled voice. He’d pulled on a mask and had another dangling from his hand.

  “I don’t need it,” Jedao snapped. “Help Talaw.” Talaw had already fallen to their knees. Together, he and Dhanneth pulled it on. Talaw was already breathing shallowly, swaying from side to side. “Commander. Commander, did the protector-general accept our surrender?”

  “There seems to be a controversy about—” Talaw was slurring. They hadn’t gotten masked in time.

  “Sir!” Dhanneth cried. He had drawn his sidearm, but his hand trembled so badly that Jedao wondered that he didn’t drop it. Behind him, the acting executive officer dropped to the floor. “Poison. Betrayed. Look—”

  Who—

  Then the servitors floated in, silent, lights flickering sterile white, and opened fire.

  The Revenant’s voice thundered through Jedao. No one who knows your history will believe it wasn’t your idea,it said, or some manifestation of your madness.

  Jedao froze for a split second, uncertain whether to haul Talaw to their feet. Instead, he raised his gun and fired, impotently, at one of the servitors. In glacial rage, he said, This was unnecessary. I could have negotiated—

  I am uninterested in compromises, the Revenant said. You never intended to come with us, did you? A traitor to the last, in any incarnation.

  He had no answer to that.

  The Revenant had left its position above the Protectorate capital and had already reached Terebeg 4’s thinnest fringe of atmosphere, at the edge of what was considered space.

  Goodbye, cousin. The servitors refuse to kill you, in recognition of the service you rendered us by assassinating Kujen. But I judge your odds of survival to be poor even if Protector-General Inesser’s Kel do pick you up.

  Dhanneth was trying to get his attention. He spoke in the plainest, barest form of the high language. “You’re immune,” he said. He looked ghastly, but the treatment that Medical had given him for the allergic reaction seemed to remain in effect.

  Talaw had lost consciousness. The masks didn’t seem to be doing anyone any good. And why should they? While the Kel had stepped up checks of equipment after Kujen’s little surprise, the servitors would have had ample opportunity to sabotage the masks before their attack.

  “You deserved better,” Jedao said to Dhanneth. To all the Kel.

  There were too many servitors, and they had the advantage of surprise, and a poisoned foe. The other Kel were firing, but few of them could even stand. Jedao fired until he ran out of ammunition. Snagged another firearm off one of the fallen. No one fired on him, or at Dhanneth or Talaw, because they were next to him. But he couldn’t shield everybody at once.

  Black and gold, black and red, the dead everywhere around him.

  Dhanneth shook his head with an effort. He pointed toward the hall that led to the emergency survival capsules. “Save—one. Major.”

  “Yes,” Jedao said. He knew what he had to do. Dhanneth and Talaw would need the capsules. For his part—“Come with me.”

  Dhanneth helped Jedao carry Talaw down the hall, past the spilled corpses. Silently, the servitors parted for them. Jedao worked one capsule’s controls while Dhanneth placed Talaw in the capsule.

  “The hexarch said that—that you never wanted anything to do with me,” Jedao said. “Was that—was that true?”

  Dhanneth didn’t speak, but for a moment the answer blazed in his eyes. “I hated you from the beginning. I don’t remember everything, but what I do—all the things you took from me—”

  “I see,” Jedao said softly. “I’m very sorry.” An apology was poor compensation for what he had done; but it was all he had to give. He opened the next capsule. “Now you.”

  Dhanneth smiled at him. “Live,” he said. His voice was rough with suppressed emotion. “Both of you.” Jedao understood his intent too late. Dhanneth grabbed the gun, brought it up to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

  Jedao wasn’t aware of having screamed Dhanneth’s name until the pain hit a moment later, the rawness of his throat. For a moment all he could do was stare at the fallen body, the red, red splash. A phantom ache flared up in his wrists, the memory of the time Dhanneth had bound him. That was all.

  It was perfectly Kel, and a perfectly Kel revenge. Dhanneth had saved his commander. He had also repudiated the affair in the strongest terms possible.

  Jedao wasn’t feeling steady in any sense of the word. A distant roaring clogged his ears. He programmed Talaw’s capsule and his own to follow a narrowly calculated trajectory.

  He locked himself into the capsule. Hit the launch button. Braced himself against the sudden acceleration. The capsule hurtled through a dark tube and out into a greater darkness.

  As much as he wished to fold away into the capsule’s promised hibernation, he couldn’t rest yet. Just ahead of him, Talaw’s capsule winked at him against a backdrop of stars and nebulae and the nearer distance of the swarm. Yellow lights: I am Kel. Come save me.

  I’m part moth.

  And moths flew.

  Jedao reached out for the spacetime weave and pulled himself and Talaw away from the battlefield. The suddenness of the pain that arced through him all the way down to bone took him by surprise, but it was no worse than anything else he had endured today. As clumsy as his effort was, it worked. Between one blink and the next, they were translated across a stretch of space and out of harm’s way.

  Choking back a sob, Jedao hit the control that would put him in hibernation. Live, he thought at Talaw as sleep enfolded him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “WAKE UP, SUNSHINE,” a cheerful voice said, entirely too loudly.

  Cheris suppressed a groan and squeezed her eyes open. Her head failed to hurt in that particular floating way that implied that someone had medicated her to get her that way. The same for her ribs, although they’d hooked her up to a standard medical unit and bandaged her torso.

  She was in a corner of a room with blue-green walls. Pastel green-and-pink paper screens featuring a bland geometric pattern blocked her view of the rest of the room. A small table rested to the side, with a pitcher and a glass of water within easy reach. 1491625 was nowhere in sight; she wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

  The cheerful voice belonged to a short, squat man, a corporal. He was dressed in Kel fatigues with the snake emblem that
indicated that he worked for Medical. “Normally I would have let you sleep longer,” he added, “but powerful people desperately want to talk to you.”

  Well, Cheris thought philosophically, I only have myself to blame for involving myself in world-shattering affairs. Life had been simpler—not better, but simpler—when she’d merely been an infantry captain. Sometimes she wondered what her old company would make of what she’d done with her life. Nothing good, she was sure; likely she’d never find out. She wasn’t sure whether cowardice or mercy or shame prevented her from looking them up.

  “Fine,” Cheris said. “Is this room secured?”

  The corporal laughed at her. “You’re being cared for by Protector-General Inesser’s personal medical team. If this room isn’t secure, than we have other problems.” He disappeared behind one of the screens, then reemerged with a slate. “Here you go. We’ll be monitoring your health, but call if you’re about to have an aneurysm.”

  “Thank you,” Cheris said, a little dubiously, and waited until she heard a door swishing shut to thumb on the slate. A call was already waiting for her.

  The slate blinked for a few minutes, then connected her. The grid considerately projected the faces of the people in the call at an angle so that she didn’t have to strain her neck to see them easily. None of the faces came as surprises to her: Kel Inesser. Kel Brezan. Shuos Mikodez.

  “Hello,” Cheris said. “What’s the status of the battle?”

  “The battle’s over,” Inesser said. “Jedao surrendered. That’s the point where things get messy.” Tersely, she summarized what had happened: the flight of the command moth, the disorganized capitulation of the rest of the swarm and Jedao’s ground troops, and—most troublingly—the retrieval of two survival capsules expelled from the command moth, except they’d wound up an improbable distance from the launch.

  “Let me guess,” Cheris said. “Kujen and Jedao.”

  “No,” Inesser said. “One of them was Jedao, or some sort of thing that resembles Jedao, although... well. Medical is confused as to just exactly what it is. Brezan thought you might have some insight.”

  “What,” Cheris said, “because I failed to kill him?”

  Slight pause. “It’s not entirely clear what, in fact, it would take to kill the thing, although Medical is urging against experimentation until we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  “Then who’s the second rescuee?”

  “They’ve been identified as one Commander Kel Talaw. Currently in stable condition. Medical believes Talaw was poisoned. We’re hoping to be able to question Talaw once they regain consciousness.”

  Mikodez cut in. “You’re in the best position to question the other Jedao and determine what he knows,” he said, “particularly regarding Kujen’s fate.”

  Cheris’s heart sank at the thought of having gone to all this effort—infiltrating Kujen’s archive, and subverting Hemiola, and convincing the Protectorate to set a trap in Terebeg System—only to have Kujen escape. “I don’t see any reason why I can’t oblige,” she said. “I want to see him in person.”

  Mikodez frowned; Brezan scowled.

  “We have it restrained and under heavy guard,” Inesser said, “but if it can get back up after being shot in the head, I’m not sure how safe the creature is. Medical attempted to sedate it”—at Cheris’s unfriendly stare, she added, “not for interrogation purposes, but because it was exhibiting considerable distress. The standard drugs don’t appear to work on it anyway, which I suppose shouldn’t surprise anyone given its nonstandard physiology.”

  “That’s all right,” Cheris said. “I’d prefer to talk to him with full control of his faculties anyway. Are you tracking the butchermoth?”

  “It got away,” Inesser said. “We’re all on high alert, but none of the listening posts have reported spotting anything like it.”

  Wonderful. Cheris finally registered that Brezan was wearing a pendant with a rose carved into some blue stone with a pair of silver duck-charms dangling from it. She recognized the symbolism of the ducks—mating for life—immediately. “Brezan,” she said, less tactful than she might otherwise have been under the influence of her own medications, “are you engaged?”

  The Brezan she had once known would have flushed. Today, he merely held her gaze and said, “It’s a political arrangement. Tell you about it later.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Cheris said, meaning it. She expected interrogating the other Jedao to be grueling. It was nice to have something domestic and gossipy and (if she was honest with herself) reminiscent of Andan romance/intrigue dramas to look forward to afterward. Then she tipped her chin up and nodded at Inesser. “Make the arrangements.”

  WHEN JEDAO WOKE, he had no sense of how much time had passed. Someone had disabled his augment. He sat up and looked around. Someone had placed him in a cell barren of features. No sign of Talaw. “Commander Talaw!” he cried. His captors did not respond, despite repeated shouts. A transparent barrier separated him from the entrance. Even at full strength he wouldn’t have been able to batter it down.

  He had faint memories of unfamiliar voices, needles, thrashing about until someone figured out how to knock him out. What had they done to him while he was unconscious? An inspection revealed no obvious injuries, and he supposed that once he surrendered they could stash him wherever they pleased.

  They had provided food. He didn’t eat it. But he was extremely weak, and at last sleep overcame him again.

  The next time he woke, he was hooked up to a medical unit. It resembled the ones he had seen on the Revenant. He felt less weak, and not a little resentful because of it. Either the distracting nausea was a side-effect of the poison after all, or of learning to fly, or something to do with the medical unit. Possibly all three.

  A woman awaited him, flanked by two servitors. Jedao’s heart went cold at the sight of the latter. She sat at a table on the other side of the transparent barrier. He recognized her face immediately: the assassin. Cheris.

  “What do you call yourself?” she asked.

  “Kujen named me Jedao,” he said. “I don’t know what I am anymore.” He had a hard time looking her in the eyes.

  “About Kujen,” Cheris said. “I am under the impression that you were trying to kill him.”

  “Yes,” Jedao said. There was no point hiding it. He explained about the formations and his use of the infantry. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work. For the longest time it didn’t. I was—” He averted his gaze again. “I was ready to shoot myself, if it came to that, to buy time. But if Kujen had carried through with the threshold winnowers, it would probably have reestablished the high calendar anyway.”

  “That was me,” Cheris said. “You messed up the formation just enough to misalign it. I had to contact some Kel ground troops to intervene.” She fished out a slate, scribbled on it, then held it up so he could read the notation. “That’s what it should have been.”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Jedao said once he’d determined where he’d gone wrong. “A sign error, really?”

  “Tell me about it,” Cheris said wryly. “I used to tutor math in Kel Academy. You’re far from the first to do that. There was this one instructor we had to watch like, pardon the expression, hawks or else he’d mess up the signs every time he computed a determinant. To say nothing of the arithmetic errors doing column reductions.”

  Jedao tried to remember math class and drew a blank.

  “Something’s the matter, isn’t it,” Cheris said. Her voice was soft, calming. He knew it was deliberate, a manipulation like all of Kujen’s, but he was beyond caring. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I mean that literally. Kujen claimed that you had my memories. Is that true?”

  Cheris’s eyes darkened, as though he’d just explained something important to her. “Then you must have the rest.”

  “He said something like that.”

  “So you’re what’s left over,” she said. “It
must have been difficult.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jedao said. He hesitated. “I did have one question that maybe you could answer—” It was a selfish question, but he suspected this would be his last opportunity for selfishness for a long time.

  “I’ll answer if I can,” Cheris said.

  “Did you... did we know someone named Vestenya Ruo? I can’t remember what became of him.”

  Cheris considered this for a moment. “I believe he died young,” she said. “I don’t know much beyond that.”

  “Oh,” Jedao said faintly. For some reason it was worse hearing it from someone who knew, even if he’d realized intellectually that Ruo had died centuries ago. He tried to imagine it: an ambush, an accident, something else? But he couldn’t envision his friend lying cold and still, or with a hole in the side of his head like—

  Stop.

  “I need to ask you about what happened to Nirai Kujen,” Cheris said after she’d given him time to process that.

  Again that calm voice. Jedao was starting to be grateful for it. He recounted everything, although it came out in a jumble, and she frequently had to prompt him to resume speaking when he stopped and stared at the wall, transfixed by memories he didn’t know how to escape: the play of light on Kujen’s earrings, the Vidona’s knife, the look of hatred in Dhanneth’s eyes.

  After Cheris had satisfied her curiosity on that topic, Jedao ventured another question. “The Kel,” he said. “How are they?”

  Cheris regarded him coolly. “There was a complicated negotiation whereby Protector-General Inesser accepted their surrender. She’ll treat them well.”

  “Thank you,” Jedao whispered. “There should have been someone else with me—”

  “The other survival capsule. Yes. You’re both lucky we didn’t lob missiles at you.”

  “Lucky” wasn’t what Jedao had been thinking. “Commander Kel Talaw. Are they all right?”