by K. Eason
Jaed did not enlighten her, and Thorsdottir decided that it did not matter. Jaed was upset, she was upset, everyone was upset. It would be better when they got to Favored Daughter and reunited with Messer Rupert and Grytt.
In that, Thorsdottir was wrong.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Much ink, both literal and, post-turing, pixelated, has been dedicated to describing battle. There are entire genres of fiction dedicated to its depictions in lovingly lurid detail, to convey a sense of verisimilitude to a reader who will experience battle only vicariously, but who may, after reading a particularly exciting account, regret that they cannot smell the hot metal themselves, or feel the tingle of adrenaline in their fingertips. Some of those readers then seek the experience through gameplay. Rory herself had played Duty Calls extensively in her teen years for that very reason. And while she had told herself that a set of three-dimensional game-goggles did not convey reality, she was disappointed in hindsight by how very inaccurate the game had been. Games, after all, are meant to be fun. War, by its nature, is not.
Neither Duty Calls nor fiction express a nostalgia for how slippery blood can render deckplate, or the way one’s nose can itch inside a visor, or how the flashing reports of a HUD can bewilder and frustrate a person trying to see past them and focus on the people who are trying to shoot her, while neglecting to place a red indicator of enemy over individuals for whom that designation is appropriate. At least in Rory’s current context, anyone coming at her who was not a distinctive vakari silhouette qualified as an enemy, and thus removed ambiguity.
Rory resolved, if she survived this adventure, to write an accurate, unromantic account of battle. She had not attempted another dip into the aether to check probabilities of that survival, having her attention fully occupied with handling the ’slinger, which was larger and more unwieldy than she had imagined, and with maintaining her balance on the aforementioned blood-slick deck. The ex-comms, both regrettably and fortunately, were sensitive enough that she could detect the squelch of Koto-rek’s boots through human remains.
They had worked their way through the corridors successfully so far, mostly because Tadeshi troops were not quiet, and Koto-rek knew her ship: where to hide, where to lay ambushes. Rory had watched the vakar scribe what she supposed were battle-hex traps: a flurry of equations flickering between the first layer of aether, easily visible even when one was reloading a ’slinger clip and thus paying only partial attention, and the next, slightly deeper layers, as if the vakar’s hexwork stitched through several at once. Subsequent encounters with the Tadeshi, after such preparation, involved misfired ’slingers and what appeared to be malfunctioning battle-suits. Rory suspected an attack on the suits’ arms-turings, which would render the soldiers inside dependent on manual aim and perhaps even disable their HUDs. As her hardsuit possessed neither armor nor arms-turing, she concentrated on staying somewhat behind Koto-rek and, when afforded an opportunity, aiming at the seams in Tadeshi armor and pretending (without much success) that she was playing an upgrade of Duty Calls.
As a strategy, it worked well, until it did not.
The final skirmish went badly precisely because it came upon them suddenly. A hatch unspiraled with the abruptness of malfunction or coercion. Behind it, the vakari crewpeople who had been on the other side spilled into the corridor. Only one of them armed, neither armored (nor with the limited protection of hardsuits), both injured. There was a moment of hurried communication during which Koto-rek inserted herself both verbally and physically between Rory and the business end of the armed vakar’s weapon, and then pursuing Tadeshi came boiling around the bend of the corridor like an infestation of hostile insects, and instead of finding two unprepared vakari, found Koto-rek instead.
From the ensuing firefight Rory learned that one could empty an entire clip of ’slinger bolts, and manage a competent reload, and still feel extraneous to the battle’s outcome. Simple probability (barely a glance to check) assured her that at least some of her bolts had hit their targets. Rory assumed the same for the unarmored vakar who crouched over their fallen companion, making a shield of their own body, while firing at the Tadeshi. But it was Koto-rek who turned the battle, and not with skill at arms.
Rory’s experience of battle-arithmancy, until now, had been raw fantasy, the stuff of genre fiction and media, in which arithmancers could, in real-time, manipulate the language of the multiverse: bend light, or turn projectiles aside, strip the phlogiston from a room or fill and ignite it. Messer Rupert had been at pains, when Rory was a child and convinced of the possibility of all things, to tell her that arithmancy wasn’t like that. It couldn’t do that. A diligent practitioner (he said, hoping to instill that diligence) might be able to, oh, read an aura, or hack her way past a turing, or, if she was not the princess of Thorne, perhaps specialize in battle-hexes, which were inscribed on the surfaces of warships and weapons. But in no way, he was clear, would she be able to fight with arithmancy the way people fought with ’slingers or ships fired missiles.
Koto-rek, however, could use her arithmancy that way. And she did. Rory could not spare the attention to watch closely, much less to peer into the aether and ascertain on which layer Koto-rek operated, or what her equations looked like, but she could see the effects clearly enough. The Tadeshi’s bolts slewed aside, ricocheting off the bulkhead and overhead and sometimes, most improbably, striking the person who’d shot it. Light from the corridor teslas transformed into tightly focused beams that did not quite become lasers, but which did disorient, perhaps even blind, the sensors on a battle-suit’s helmet. (That was a guess only; Rory had no way to test the theory, but she could see flailing from the troopers when a beam struck them). And there was a suspicious explosion, complete with visible flames, in the corridor behind the Tadeshi, which imbalanced several of them, and which sent a wave of heat rolling over Rory’s hardsuit, alarming its sensors, and which triggered Sissten’s fire-safety protocols and pinched the hatch closed, dividing the Tadeshi forces in general and one unfortunate soldier in particular.
When it was over, Rory beheld the scorched, bloody deck, and, having raised her visor, smelled hot metal (and less happily, the burned flesh of two species), and learned that Koto-rek’s competence did not guarantee her invulnerability. The vakar had taken fire despite her bolt-turning prowess. New scoring and scorches appeared on her armor, and when Koto-rek raised her visor, she revealed a scowl of especially prickly proportions.
“Are you all right?” Rory asked.
“Yesss.” Koto-rek peeled off a fraction of her scowl, and donated it to Rory. “I do not see any hexes on that hardsuit to account for your good fortune.”
Rory offered a tepid smile. “I stayed down,” she said. “And behind you.”
“A princess who follows orders. The nine dark lords smile upon us all.”
Rory declined to comment on the temporal appropriateness of Koto-rek’s sarcasm, and filed nine dark lords away for later research.
“What about them?” She indicated the other two vakari, one of whom lay prone on the deck, and unmoving, in a pool of blood which was ominously wide. The other vakar crouched over the wounded one. Now, hearing Rory’s voice, they turned toward her, hissing and clicking out a series of angry-sounding syllables, which Rory took as rejection with emphatic embellishments. She wished she had time to deploy a translation hex, but the outburst was over before she could even begin the equations.
Koto-rek turned her void-cold stare at the angry vakar.
“Show respect,” she said in GalSpek. “This is a princess.” Then she spat out a stream of hisses and clicks.
Whatever she said, it did not ameliorate the other vakar’s concerns. A small battle ensued, waged in locked eyes and bared teeth. The other vakar’s were etched in shades of green, so that it looked like they had a mouthful of vines. Whatever the conflict, Koto-rek triumphed. The subordinate vakar flattened their jaw-plates and ducked the
ir head as if expecting a swat on the skull. Then they thrust their wounded arm at Rory and looked resolutely elsewhere.
This vakar was a little lighter skinned than Koto-rek, a little smoother, smoky greyish brown instead of pebbled charcoal and a yellow-green wash through her chromatophores. They wore a variant of the Protectorate military uniform, though without any armor. The large, triangular panel on the elbow of one sleeve had been torn away. A set of spikes gleamed underneath, sweeping back from the vakar’s elbow in a graduated ridge. Blood leaked from a gash just below the joint.
A very sharp people, these vakari.
“Well,” said Koto-rek. “Help her, Rory Thorne.”
“Ah. How do I do that?”
“Apply pressure,” Koto-rek suggested. “And then cover the wound with something to soak up the blood. Is it not the same with your species?”
“It is.” And so Rory did so, using a bit of uniform from the fallen (oh, just say dead) vakar. That earned her a flared-jaw, red-cheeked reaction from her unwilling patient. More interestingly, contact with the vakar’s blood on her gloves made her HUD flare up and advise her of the presence of a mild, irritating toxin, and to keep her suit firmly sealed. Rory wished for time and opportunity for a closer examination.
The wounded vakar neither spoke nor struck and, when Rory had finished binding the wound, ground out a passable “thank you,” in a more heavily accented GalSpek.
“You’re welcome,” said Rory. Then, because it seemed only polite, “I’m Rory. What’s your name?”
The other vakar stared at her. Then she bared her mouthful of vines.
“This is Assistant Engineer Vigat,” Koto-rek said, when it was clear that green-toothed grin was to be Rory’s only answer. “She was on her way to the engine core, attempting to take her post when—well. You saw. This complicates matters for us. The auxiliary bridge is only accessible through engineering.”
“Surely there’s another way in.”
“There is. But the engine core is in the engine room, and it is apparently the invaders’ goal. If the Tadeshi compromise that, we are all dead, Rory Thorne. Seal your visor. Vigat,” and then Koto-rek produced more of the bitten-off clicks, and Vigat withdrew to the rear of their trio. Koto-rek touched a gloved talon to the hatch controls, tracing the perimeter of the sensor pad in what Rory supposed was some kind of hexwork override.
The hatch opened onto a corridor scorched black by a combustion which should have been impossible, because voidship safety protocols scrubbed phlogiston from the atmosphere. It looked as if, instead of scrubbing, the filtering hexes had reversed themselves and transmuted benignly breathable aether into phlogiston. Which, Rory supposed, is exactly what they had done, at Koto-rek’s arithmantic request.
Rory walked past the scorched hulks of Tadeshi armor without looking: chin up, eyes forward, exactly as if she were back on Thorne and trapped in some formal event where performance was everything. If she looked, she might gag, and there was no place for vomit in a hardsuit. This was war, wasn’t it? Not what she had played at in Duty Calls. Not even what she had watched on G. Stein’s recording. This was real, and ugly, and awful, and as much as she disliked the Tadeshi ideology and everything Vernor Moss had stood for, she just wanted it over, right then, whatever it took, so that no one else had to die in a puddle of blood and fire. Of course she knew that the royalist government would have other opinions on ending the war. The Confederation of Liberated Worlds might, too; Dame Maggie would never surrender, nor return to the old status quo. And the royalists would stop at nothing less. And where the vakari Protectorate fit into that—
Rory looked at Koto-rek, striding up the corridor, and back at Assistant Engineer Vigat trying to keep pace, with the bandage dangling damply from her arm like a sodden flag. The Protectorate was involved now, at least with the royalists, in a combative capacity. Perhaps peace lay in alliance: the Tadeshi and the Confederation might declare a truce in the face of a common enemy. Or the Protectorate might ally with the Confederation against the Tadeshi.
In no scenario that she could imagine did Rory see everyone sitting down and working out a treaty. Peace was simple in concept, but difficult to achieve. History said as much. Human history, limited to the Merchants League and the Consortium and the Free Worlds (and the unaffiliated worlds, too numerous to list here), was a chronicle of conflicts. She had no idea what Protectorate history was like, but she suspected peace was no simpler for them. Perhaps it was not even desirable. The vakari were losing this particular battle, but it was clear that they possessed superior arithmancy and weaponry, and that a long-term conflict—assuming they had the resources—would tilt in their favor.
The royalists had to know that already. If they were inclined to peace with the Confederation, they should have already made overtures. (Perhaps they had. Perhaps Maggie had declined to negotiate.) Vernor Moss had been arrogance incarnate, but Rory didn’t think him so proud he’d prefer extinction to compromise.
Genocide, however: the Tadeshi royalists, which Moss still commanded (last Rory had checked), had commissioned Rose from somewhere, so it was clear he didn’t mind obliterating whole planets.
Her steps faltered. She turned to look back at the dead human soldiers in the corridor. The Tadeshi command knew about vakari and the Protectorate. So what if Moss and his commanders had commissioned Rose not for the Confederation’s annihilation, but for the Protectorate’s? Then achieving peace might be as simple as handing that weapon over to the vakari—dead, sterilized, because no live nanomechanical bioweapons could change hands—to end all this. That meant getting back to Vagabond, then, and reacquiring Rose . . . and convincing Thorsdottir to hand them over. (But Rory thought that would not be impossible. Thorsdottir was reasonable, and Rory had never met any real resistance to her wishes except from her younger brother).
She did not realize she’d stopped walking entirely until Koto-rek said her name.
Rory trotted to catch up, past Vigat’s withering stare and an aura so bright with contempt that she did not need to blink into the aether to see it (though she did, because Vigat was not hexed against observation; and here Rory found that Vigat’s aura matched her chromatophores, which settled another uncertainty and, Rory thought, must make concealing one’s feelings a bit frustrating for a vakar). If Vigat was typical of her people—intensely emotional, hostile to humans—peace with the Protectorate would be well-nigh impossible.
Koto-rek, if she shared Vigat’s sentiments, kept them shuttered behind hexes as blank and impersonal as her visor. She waited, unspeaking, as Rory drew even with her. “You should not fall behind. There are likely stray soldiers from our side and theirs. You would not be safe.”
“I’m sorry,” Rory said. “I was—” She cast about for something to say to excuse her lapse. Then she settled on truth, which was not the best choice for diplomacy, or for protecting her pride, but which was at the moment just easier. “I was just looking at all the dead. How did this start? Between the Protectorate and the Tadeshi?”
Koto-rek’s faceplate gleamed as she looked back at the carnage. Her hand flexed in a gesture that might have been a dismissal, or a vakari shrug, or just a stretching of long-jointed fingers. “How these things always start, I suppose.”
“You don’t know?”
“I know what I was told. What have you heard?”
“Nothing. Uh. I’ve been avoiding politics.”
Koto-rek ground out a laugh, powdered and lethal as glass crushed between two stones. “That never works.”
It had, Rory thought, until very recently, though she was no longer certain if that success could be counted a good thing. Her ignorance, which she had mistaken for comfort, had offered no defense against an encroaching reality, particularly one both armed and aggressive.
They passed through another corridor intersection without speech or incident. Rory divided her attention between surreptitious
glances back at the trailing Vigat (bleeding mostly stopped, clearly in pain) and at the bulkheads, trying to identify signage or labels or some indication of what glyph meant engineering, this way. There were no more soldiers, nor any ambushes, nor any vakari, wounded or otherwise.
The next intersection, however, was blocked. The hatch showed no signs of damage on this side, but Koto-rek spent some few minutes running her fingers over the metal. In that time, Vigat caught up. She leaned against the bulkhead and let her eyes slit halfway shut.
Rory refrained from offering sympathy out loud, or any observation about Vigat’s degenerating physical condition. Instead, she sneaked a look into the aether, where Vigat’s aura throbbed with despair.
“Is this engineering?” Rory asked.
Koto-rek hissed, or sighed, or swore; it was impossible to ascertain which, behind the bullet-shaped faceplate. “It is. You say you are a human arithmancer. Are you skilled?”
Rory chose to ignore the faint emphasis on human, and the faint ring of contempt that went with it. “I am proficient in passive scans. I can get past most security measures, with some time. I don’t know much about battle-hexes. Why?”
Koto-rek said nothing. Then, after a quick jabbing check toward Vigat, she turned and flashed her right side, against which she had been bracing her weapon.
There was a crack in Koto-rek’s armor, following the edge of a pair of conjoining plates. There was nothing visibly liquid leaking out of it, and the corridor’s illumination made it difficult to ascertain if the darker patches around the breach were blood or scorched metal. Koto-rek waited for a beat, then replaced her elbow and its concealing fin. The weapon she cradled in that arm did not tremble.