Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  Then her visor snapped up. Her headlamp chipped out her features, casting them as bone and shadow. Gaer’s gaze snagged on her capped tusk. He stared hard at it. His concentration felt . . . leaky. Like if he didn’t stare, he’d dissolve, bone and flesh and everything, into a puddle beside the Brood-slime.

  Iari crouched beside him. She should have been firing off questions, where did Jich’e’enfe go? Where is the altar? What happened? Instead she said his name, “Gaer,” like I’m sorry.

  So he was in bad shape, then. Well. He knew that already. What he did not know, what he needed to know, was: “What was that? What did you do?”

  Because he had seen footage of templars in battle, and priests, and had never seen something like what she’d done, ever, not even in fiction’s imaginings.

  “Don’t know.” Her voice came out level, cool. Only a little rough on the edges. Her features were stark in the headlamp’s backsplash. “Killed the Brood, though. That’s what matters.”

  “More than that.” Corso sounded a lot like Gaer felt. “You closed the fissure. You turned into fucking lightning.”

  She glanced at him. “Gaer closed the fissure.”

  “No,” Gaer said. “I didn’t.”

  Iari’s jaw flexed. Now there was fear, just the littlest raggedy bit of it, eroding the edge of her calm. Now she asked the obvious question: “Where’s Jich’e’enfe? Did she escape?”

  “She’s dead.” Please, five dark lords, that was true. A tesser-hex needed stupid amounts of power. Usually that meant a ship’s plasma core; if she’d been using herself, like she had with the altar, she’d be nothing but ashes. And even if that hadn’t killed her: “She opened a tesser-hex into the Weep. She couldn’t survive in there.” Please, dark lords, that was true, too. Jich’e’enfe, twice dead.

  “And the altar? Did she take it with her?”

  Oh, excellent question. “Destination stored in the optic. And the rig. Numbers.” Gaer tried to lift a hand and point, for emphasis, and almost fell on his face.

  Iari caught his arm, just below the spike-concealing fin. “Great. Now shut up. Can you stand? Don’t answer. Just nod.”

  Nodding would hurt worse than speaking. He was sure of that. He clamped his teeth, defiant. “Ss. Yes.”

  He thought so. Maybe. He clawed himself steady on her gauntlet and let her haul him upright. Hung there, while he found (while his rig found) balance.

  Which was how he heard Luki’s voice, breathless, leaking through the comms in Iari’s rig.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “We’re alive. How’s your fissure?”

  “Gone. But sir. The riev are here. All of them.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Iari’s syn rallied. Tried to, anyway: sparks instead of lightning, stuttering along her nerves. “Coming.” She ached, bone to skin and back again, and still she wanted to drop Gaer and sprint up there. Except drop him now, he might stay down. And Corso was in no condition to help anyone—

  Corso. Huh. He materialized beside her, hands on her rig, trying to grip and pull and slipping from the blood. There was blood on his face, too, and the shattered root of a tusk jutting up. “Iari, listen. That wichu called ’em. Said she controlled ’em now. Said Oversight.”

  Wonderful. “Luki. What’re they doing? They hostile?”

  “No. Not . . . yet?” A gulp of air. “They’re just standing there. Lieutenant?”

  “Right.—Here. Take Gaer.”

  “No, no.” Gaer rolled his naked eye at her. “I can hex riev traps.”

  That seemed optimistic. He couldn’t fight off a wet neefa kit at this point. What remained of his left jaw-plate dangled on strands of raw meat. It looked worse (please, Ptah) than it was, in the blast-blue of her headlamps. It didn’t seem like someone should be able to talk with that kind of jaw damage, but this was Gaer.

  “Default setting for riev is kill vakari. You stay with Corso.”

  She pelted up the rest of the stairs and burst out into the warehouse—dim-normal, and absence of light instead of void-bleed from a fissure. Which was, yes, closed, thank the Four.

  “Luki,” she started to say; but then she got clear of the dead tunneler, of dead Peshwari, and her voice dried up.

  Char stood alone, puddles of melted ice and the last tendrils of fissure-fog curling around their legs, all their hexwork lit up and glowing. And beyond them: the rest of B-town’s riev, a hedge of glowing tesla eyes, blues and greens and one lone, startling purple. They’d come in hard. The doors looked like Gaer’s visor. Peshwari’s barrier of crates was just splinters. The riev ranged the width of the warehouse, curved in a half-circle around Char. They hadn’t come a step beyond them, like they’d drawn a line across the floor. Might’ve been crates themselves, except for the slow glowing throb of their hexwork.

  “Why’d they stop?” Luki had her voice mostly under control.

  At a guess: “Riev don’t kill riev.”

  Riev had always been on the same side, always linked, always moving as one. And now there was Char, standing alone. It had to be habit stopping them, or confusion. Or, Blessed Four, loyalty to another one of their kind.

  Iari heard scraping behind her: the hard clang of polyalloy as Gaer shambled and staggered, the softer rasp of Corso’s boots.

  The riev didn’t move, exactly; but their focus shifted, and their intent with it. From neutrally menacing to hostile.

  “Char,” said Iari. “Can they hear me?”

  “Yes,” said Char, and at the same instant:

  “Yes,” from twenty-odd vocal apparatuses, same cadence, same pitch.

  Iari brought her shield arm around, raised it—deployed the shield, in a crackle and flash of officialdom. Templars held rank on the field. “Why are you here? Report.”

  “Oversight commanded.”

  “Setatir Jich’e’enfe.”

  “Gaer, shut up.” Iari’s heart rattled harder than anything the syn had ever managed. “What did Oversight command?”

  That awful chorus again: “Oversight said come here.”

  “And now?”

  “Oversight is silent.”

  Oh, ungentle Ptah, let that mean Jich’e’enfe was dead. “Good. Then you can stand down.” Iari jabbed her axe-shaft at the decomposing tunneler. “Fissure’s closed. Brood are dead.”

  The riev rippled like a field of lethal wheat in a sudden breeze. “There is a vakar.”

  Char shifted. “Vakari are not the enemy.”

  Silence. Take that as riev disagreement.

  Iari stepped even with Char. The rig’s visor resealed itself: rig-reflex, guided by implant nanomecha, because that’s what a battle-rig did when surrounded by enemies. Her syn was sure she was in danger. Her arms-turing was more ambivalent: it found the riev, and mapped them to her HUD, but their icons remained stubbornly green-lit. Riev were friends.

  Please, gentle Mishka, that was still true.

  “Vakari are not the enemy,” Char repeated, as if there were exactly one enemy at any time. Maybe there was, for riev. “Check protocols.”

  And again, the riev chorus: “Code incomplete.”

  Which meant—what? Jich’e’enfe had been rewriting command codes to make riev kill vakari again? Void and dust. If they got through this, if, she’d make Gaer teach her basic theory just so she could follow along in the fucking conversations.

  Not a templar’s job, though. Conversations. Negotiations. And yet, here she was. “Riev. Stand down. The vakar is no threat. That’s an order.”

  “Ss. They can’t stand down. They don’t get choice. They’re weapons.”

  Half his face hanging off, and he still wouldn’t shut up. Iari raised her voice for the riev audience. “Char can choose.”

  “I am a templar initiate.” Char’s voice rolled like distant thunder.

  The pronoun caused
consternation: a buzz among the riev, like twenty-two processors whirring into overdrive. Iari half expected curling smoke, sparks from the hexwork.

  “Stand down,” Iari repeated. “You have been decommissioned. The command codes you’ve got are false orders. Oversight has been compromised. Acknowledge.”

  Silence. A few of the riev shifted position. One of them—mid-sized, features stylized human and sexless and oddly beautiful—leaned the barest fraction forward, as though trying to get a better look at Gaer. It was surreal, like a scene from the end of a heroic drama. Argue with riev. Persuade things that were maybe people but maybe not that they didn’t need to do what they’d been made for.

  The alternative was, what, fight? So choose surrealism.

  “Hrok’s breath, you saw the ambassador, this vakar, with me already in the city. You know he’s a, a friend.”

  The humanoid riev tilted its head a fraction. “Oversight identifies all vakari as enemy.”

  “And what does Oversight say about Brood?”

  “Corso, shut him up.”

  “You want me to rip the rest of his jaw off?”

  “Maybe.” But it was a good question. “Riev—the one in front. You. Yes. What’s your designation?”

  The humanoid riev lifted its chin a fraction. “This one is Winter Bite.”

  “All right, Winter Bite. What does this unauthorized Oversight code say about Brood?”

  Winter Bite hesitated. “That Brood are not.” A pause, where something with lungs would’ve drawn breath. “The command code is not complete.”

  “Extrapolate the code. Guess.” Gaer sounded worse. Weaker, threadier. Wetter. His face was bad, all right; but he might have damage she couldn’t see, too. Might be filling that battle-rig with blood. Or his lungs.

  Winter Bite tilted its face toward Gaer. The barest adjustment, which echoed through twenty-one other riev after a beat.

  They had moved simultaneously, just a minute (three-point-two seconds, said her HUD) ago. They were dropping out of sync. Or, happy thought, developing twenty-two separate desires to kill Gaer.

  Winter Bite dropped each word out, with a beat in between. “Extrapolation: that Brood are no longer the enemy.”

  Gaer made a sloppy hissing sound. Laughter. Pain. The last gasp of a dying vakar.

  “That’s fucking neefa-shit.” Corso was not laughing. “Fucking fissure. Fucking, what is it, a tunneler over there? Dead templars all the fuck over? You think the Brood are your fucking friends?”

  “Sss’s what Jich’e’enfe wants them to think.” Gaer got the words out. Somehow. “The chip. This is what it was for. Make riev into vessels for Brood. With Oversight, she could make them take it.”

  Ptah’s left fucking eye. Iari risked a glance back, at Corso, at Gaer draped over him like a battle-rigged cloak. At Char, who did not turn their head—being wiser, perhaps, about what their fellow riev might attempt.

  One of the riev on the periphery—smallish, bipedal, the top of its skull a faceted sensor array like a crystal tear—took a half step out of formation, back and sideways. “Brood are hostile.”

  “Concur,” said a second riev.

  “Concur,” said a third.

  And then they were all saying it, overlapping syllables that died, finally, with Winter Bite’s final, bitten-off r.

  “Brood are the enemy,” Winter Bite repeated. “Templars are allies.”

  “And vakari? This vakar?”

  Winter Bite said nothing. Oh ungentle Ptah, let them defy their command lines one more time. Let them choose.

  Then, then Iari heard it: the bone-deep thrum of an inbound hopper engine. A blinding-bright circle of light stabbed down into the alley. The riev turned toward the alley, all of them, pointing with whatever optical attachments they had. And then, ragged as a new line of recruits, they peeled back and opened a corridor to the warehouse doors just as the hopper finished its descent.

  The hatch opened before it touched pavement, and Keawe dropped out: scarred rig, massive, visor raised. She aimed for Iari, with barely a sidelong glance at the riev. More templars came spilling out in her wake, Windscar insignia painted on armor almost as battered as Keawe’s. They focused on the riev: deployed shields and weapons forming a barrier as inspiring as it would be useless.

  Keawe walked down that templar corridor and stopped in front of Iari.

  “Lieutenant. We heard there was trouble. Seems like you’ve handled it.”

  Iari raised her visor. Should feel relief, felt reluctance instead, like cold corrosion in her belly. “Yes sir. But the ambassador’s in bad shape. You bring a priest?”

  “Sister Iphigenia is with us.” Keawe’s stare speared past Iari. Her lip curled. “And who’s that?”

  “Corso Risar,” Corso snapped. “Private reconnaissance and investigat—”

  “My contractor, sir. Jich’e’enfe abducted him. He needs help, too.”

  Corso made a choking noise. Iari ignored him. “Jich’e’enfe was impersonating Yinal’i’ljat. She was using the altar to control Brood, and she opened a fissure. Which closed, sir. The wichu, the altar, the Brood—everything gone. No other survivors.”

  Keawe’s gaze came back, bleak and black as any fissure. “Understood. What are the riev doing here?”

  “Oversight, sir. Apparently Jich’e’enfe turned it back on, but she hadn’t finished rewriting the code.”

  “Huh.” Keawe’s spacer-stiff features softened, just around the eyes. “You did good, Lieutenant. Get yourself and your people onto the hopper. We’ve got it from here.” Her visor dropped. Comms and commands must’ve happened, closed-channel, because three more templars detached from riev-watching and trotted into the warehouse. Keawe followed them.

  So that was it, then. Mission complete. Not accomplished, because this wasn’t a victory. It was the same hollowed-out feeling Iari had felt at Saichi, except her syn was still sputtering, sending little jolts through her limbs, her skull, across her vision. Part of her wasn’t sure the fight was over.

  Not sure that part wasn’t wrong, but even so. Iari willed the syn to stand down, be at least as reasonable as the riev. A pair of Windscar templars broke ranks to take hold of Gaer, and began helping (dragging) him toward the hopper. Iari beckoned to Corso. “Come on.”

  He rolled his eyes at her, but he went. Iari could see Iffy waiting at the top of the hopper’s ramp, bouncing from foot to foot. Keawe must’ve given her orders to stay on board.

  “Luki. Char.” Iari gestured them to follow. She took a last look at the warehouse—the tunneler, Peshwari, the riev waiting behind a hedge of templars.

  One of Keawe’s larger templars (tenju, bet on it) detached from the barricade line and moved to intercept Char before they could walk through the door. He thrust his axe between Luki’s back and Char’s chest and just missed, barely. Char’s hexwork flared up and threw sparks, it was that close.

  Char stopped. Luki got another step before she noticed and turned back.

  And by then Iari had closed the distance, riding a spike of syn and temper. She retained enough sense—just—to retract her axe and clip it to her rig en route, so that when she struck the Windscar templar’s weapon aside she used just her empty gauntlet. One hit for his arm, to knock his axe out of line. A second hit with her fist, syn-quick and syn-hard, in the middle of his chestplate.

  “Corporal”—she could just read the battle-rig’s insignia through her syn-red haze—“stand down.” It was becoming a voidspit mantra. “The hell are you doing?”

  “Orders, sir. Detain the riev.”

  “Char’s a templar. My templar. So stand aside.”

  The corporal’s visor was down. No telling his expression; but her voice said, “Sir,” after a moment. There should’ve been a sorry.

  The syn wanted (blood, violence) further conflict. Iari settled for crowding the cor
poral aside so that Char could get past. Iari stared at herself in the other templar’s visor: capped tusk, scar, narrow eyes.

  Then, when Luki said, “Sir, we’re on board,” she turned and went up the ramp.

  Iffy was already working on Gaer. Iari made herself busy with Corso, who’d scrunched into the furthest corner of bench farthest from the hatch and ramp.

  “I think that templar got orders from Keawe,” he said, as Iari grabbed a roll of polymesh from Iffy’s kit and knelt in front of him.

  “Of course he did. Give me your hands.”

  “You hear me? What happened out there, on the ramp with Char. That was orders. They’ve got comms in those helmets.”

  “I know how battle-rigs work.” The damage to his hands looked skin-deep, mostly; but it was burn-ugly, and wrapping them would be too fine for battle-rig gauntlets. Iari started to strip hers off: triggered the seals, got the breach warnings all over her HUD. Her syn was still online. There were protocols against removing battle-rigs in those conditions.

  Settle, she wished the syn. She couldn’t override until her nanomecha stood down and they, like everyone else, seemed to be having trouble with that.

  Corso jerked his hand back. “Leave me for the priest.”

  “Now you don’t object to the Aedis?”

  His gaze skidded off her face. “She’s the healer, and you’re not, and that Knight-Marshal’s going to fire on the riev, soon as we’re all clear. Blow this whole warehouse.”

  Iari stared at him. “What? You can’t’ve heard that on their comms.”

  Corso leaned forward. He smelled battle-sour, sweat and fear and fury. “Look at the pilot’s station. Tell me what you see.”

  Hrok’s breath, that’s why he’d come all the way forward in the cabin. So he could spy into the cockpit. Iari bit back a paranoid neefa comment and shifted sideways and looked.

  And blinked. The hopper’s arms-turing was active, expected and normal in these conditions; but there was a target-lock engaged, and the targets were all in the warehouse, clumped together. Twenty-two of them. The hopper had whitefire cannons. It could level the warehouse and, with containment hexes, avoid taking the whole block with it. But it would obliterate the riev.