How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge

by K. Eason

  Koto-rek became very still and quiet, the way cats do before leaping on some unfortunate creature, or the way bombs do before they explode. “Are you saying this weapon

  contaminated

  chose to render aid? That it was

  abomination

  sentient?”

  Jaed peeled the vakar a look of contempt. “They were. Now they’re dead.”

  “But the nanomecha themselves. Do any remain?”

  Rory’s heart dropped. “I think what my associate means to say is—the sentience is gone? Right, Jaed?”

  “Right.”

  Truth. Rory’s chest ached, not for her own grief, but for Jaed’s. She felt only a guilty relief. To hand Rose over to what would likely be their own execution had been an unsavory proposition. But if they were already dead—

  “You said that the weapon repaired this Thorsdottir,” said Koto-rek. “Unless the nanomecha are entirely gone, they may still infest her. Whether or not they are sentient any longer, whether or not they are a weapon, they remain Protectorate property. Therefore, because there is no way to completely extract nanomecha, we will require her, as well.”

  “The hell,” Jaed said. “No.”

  “We could arrange for a biological sample,” said Rory. Thorsdottir might object, but—

  “Are you serious?”

  —Jaed certainly was objecting.

  “I am,” she said, and pinned him with a stare. “Be quiet.”

  “Because Thorsdottir—”

  “Will do what she’s told,” Rory snapped, in her best princess voice. She would ask, of course she would ask, but in the end, Thorsdottir would have to agree. This was a matter of preventing war.

  Jaed stared at her, and in that moment, something broke. Rory saw it: a shattering, like a glass dropped from a great height onto stone.

  Inside her chest, something similar happened, but smaller, quieter.

  “No,” Koto-rek repeated. “The agreement was the return of physical material, and copies of all stolen data. We offer this compromise: the Empire may keep the samples it has already extracted. But the rest, this Thorsdottir and whatever nanomecha remain in her, belongs to us.”

  Jaed took a step back, two, and pointed the rifle at Koto-rek. “Thorsdottir belongs to no one.”

  Koto-rek ignored him, though her pigments spangled an uneasy yellow. “Princess Rory Thorne,” she said. “Control your subordinate.”

  I’m not sure I can. I’m not sure I want to. Negotiation. Reason. Jaed might be beyond both, but Koto-rek was not. “Sub-Commander, please. Jaed was telling the truth. The sentience is dead. Whether or not there are any remaining nanomecha is immaterial. The weapon is gone.”

  “And yet,” said Koto-rek, “potential remains. The Empire adepts could find a way to recreate it. Perhaps its flexibility of purpose means it can be adapted into weaponry again, or into something worse.”

  A rose by any other name is still nanomecha meant to alter biological matter to new forms on a genetic level. And a rose by any other name was also Thorsdottir.

  “You don’t believe that the Empire is capable of harnessing that level of arithmancy.” Rory let a small, Rupert-shaped smile fall onto her lips. “I know you don’t believe that.”

  “Zaraer does. And Zaraer is not the only one who will. And I could be mistaken, Rory Thorne, about what the alwar adepts can manage.”

  Truth.

  “Then if we return every bit of Rose to you, including what remains in Thorsdottir—you will what? Destroy her as an abomination?”

  Perhaps that was sympathy on the vakar’s face. Perhaps a trick of the teslas, refracting on the oilslick pigments. “One contaminated individual, Princess. Let the Empire keep what data it has; but surrender the rest to us, and maintain this truce.”

  Rory looked down the corridor, where her friends waited with their tenju and alwar allies. There was a conference, Zhang and Grytt and Thorsdottir together, conducting what Rory supposed was an argument waged too quietly to carry. But then Thorsdottir stepped clear, and started walking up the corridor. Zhang and Grytt let her go. Trusting Thorsdottir’s judgment. Allowing her sacrifice. They were good at sacrifice, Grytt and Zhang and Thorsdottir. (Not Jaed. Not anymore. Somehow, when she wasn’t looking, Jaed Moss had decided to fight.)

  One woman’s life, for peace. For the potential thousands of lives, millions. Rory did not yet know details about the Expansion, how many k’bal were dead in the Verge. She knew no details of wichu clientage, what happened when a people surrendered to the Protectorate.

  She did know the Free Worlds of Tadesh would not last much longer, waging a war on two fronts. It might be a year, two, three, but the Protectorate would finish them, or the Confederation would accept their surrender. And either way, then the Protectorate would be down to one front to their Expansion.

  She thought about what she’d seen in the morgue, and what might be contained in the Writ, and the words abomination and contamination. She thought about a very sharp people, inclined to violence.

  She thought about whether, even if she could reason with Koto-rek, any agreement they made would hold once it got to Zaraer, or others like Zaraer.

  “Rory,” said Jaed. Pleading with her.

  Oh, it would be easy to let Thorsdottir walk into vakari hands, and say but she chose it. Except sometimes a woman could not choose only for herself. Sometimes she had to choose for many people. That’s what being a princess meant. Being a leader.

  Rory drew a lungful of breath, and of courage, and pitched her voice to carry. “No. I’m sorry, Sub-Commander. We will transmit the information we collected, so that you and the Empire have that, and we will return what remains of the inert sample. We will not part with Thorsdottir.”

  Down the corridor, Thorsdottir stopped. Perhaps she felt relief. Perhaps pride. Perhaps grief. But she did not protest.

  Koto-rek tilted her head, first one way, then the other. Her cheeks cycled through a spectrum of disbelief, distress, outrage, fear. She looked at Jaed, and past the leveled menace of Jaed’s rifle at Thorsdottir. Something passed over her face, a ripple of blue, deepening into cobalt, then violet. Her talons spasmed on Rory’s shoulder, and the hardsuit wailed a breach warning.

  “Then I am afraid, Princess, that you will stay here.”

  “No,” Rory said, softly, as Jaed’s finger tightened on his rifle. No wars started in the corridor.

  Not another one, because of her choices.

  “I’ll go with the sub-commander, Jaed. Those are the terms we agreed to.”

  “The hell. We are not leaving you behind.”

  truth, said the fairy gift.

  Then Grytt’s visor sealed, and Zhang’s. Thorsdottir, face still bare, watched her with steady, burning eyes. Or perhaps it was Koto-rek she looked at.

  Then, sudden as catastrophe, the vakar released Rory and stepped back, so quickly the hardsuit chirped an alert. Koto-rek raised her hand—ignoring Jaed’s indrawn breath and the twitch that said he’d almost fired on her—to touch something on her helmet.

  The comms, Rory thought. She just cut the comms in her suit.

  “So we see the worth of the Confederation’s word.” Koto-rek’s voice carried the corridor’s length. “There will be war because of your decision.”

  “It’s not the first war I’ve caused,” said Rory, though the words cut her like slivers of glass to say aloud. Truth was, is, can be—a painful thing.

  “Not because of you, Rory Thorne. Because of them.”

  Grytt, who had just drawn even with Thorsdottir, stopped, and Zhang with her. Grytt raised her visor. “What did we do, exactly?”

  “You are—” Koto-rek groped for the word.

  Rory came to her aid, a combination of the fairy gift and prior experience. “An abomination.”

  “Grytt.” Jaed included Rory
in his generalized outrage. “Her name is Grytt.”

  “Not just . . . Grytt.” Koto-rek flicked her too-few, too-jointed fingers. “That one, Thorsdottir, is contaminated with nanomecha. I can see what has happened, in the aether. The wichu weapon is dead, Rory Thorne, that is true. But what it has become, what remains in that person, can spread. Will spread. The Protectorate will not tolerate that. Can never tolerate.”

  “Maybe the Protectorate needs to try.” Jaed bared his teeth, white and unmarked and, to a vakar, ominous in their blankness, offering no hint of heritage, of who this person was.

  Koto-rek’s own lips lifted, baring her gleaming blue testament to a lineage and tradition so very different. So very alien. “Perhaps it does. Perhaps it may yet have the opportunity. But now, you need to leave. Quickly, before Zaraer sends troops to investigate my silence. Withdraw and return to the alwar ship.”

  “Why?” Rory asked. “Why are you letting me go? Letting us go?”

  Koto-rek ground out a laugh. “How could I stop you, one vakar against so many?”

  “I think you could stop me.”

  “I could. But I still do not think you deserve to die, and your death today will not stop anything that is coming.”

  Rory set her teeth against nausea and despair rising bitter in the back of her throat. “You mean, war was always inevitable with the Empire. With us. No matter what happened here.”

  Koto-rek’s cheeks darkened to ashy black. “The Expansion does not recognize borders. But today, I am tired of death, Princess Rory Thorne.”

  Rory shook her head, not because Koto-rek was wrong, or because she disbelieved her, but because she wished she did. “What will Zaraer do to you?”

  “Sss. Not what you imagine. We are not tenju, to kill our rivals without trial or process. I will survive today.”

  Rory swallowed her own throatful of razors. “Then I should thank you.”

  “No. You shouldn’t. I have done neither of us any favors.” Koto-rek began to retreat, backing down the corridor one step at a time, hands raised, empty, open and weaponless. It was a symbolic gesture—arithmancers did not need hands to hex—but symbols are sometimes enough. She flung a look at Rory like an entire clipful of ’slinger bolts. “This war will be the end of your Confederation, of your species—and it will be a slow, unkind ending. It will cost many lives, ours and yours. Let us delay it as long as we can.”

  Then the vakar turned and strode briskly away, back bare to Jaed’s rifle, to Grytt’s, to an array of hostile xenos clustered at the aetherlock. The gesture was equal parts you cannot harm me and you don’t scare me at all. An arrogant people, the vakari, to go with their sharpness.

  Rory heard Jaed’s indrawn breath—not unlike a vakar’s hiss—and supposed he was reading that arrogance, and reacting to it. Perhaps that had been Koto-rek’s intention: to provoke, and thus keep her enemies (because that is what we are now, and maybe always were) reacting, instead of acting. It was a Protectorate strategy, and it was something the xeno and human alliance would need to learn to counter.

  Rory opened her mouth to tell Jaed not to shoot, however tempting a target. Then she looked and saw that he wasn’t pointing a weapon, nor looking at her—that he was, in fact, gazing after the vakar with a stubborn-jawed thoughtfulness she hadn’t seen before.

  The corner of his mouth twisted like a wet rag wrung out. “Great. Like the multiverse needs another war.”

  Rory took a bite of air. “I couldn’t give them Thorsdottir.” It was not an apology.

  He shifted that thoughtful, furious gaze to her and his lips leveled. “I wouldn’t’ve let you, so I’m glad you didn’t try.”

  He gestured with the rifle as if it were an extra hand. Rory looked where he pointed: at Thorsdottir and Grytt and Zhang, back to a waiting knot of xenos with whom her friends, and therefore she, were now aligned, both circumstantially and apparently politically.

  “What do we do now?”

  “I figure out how to fight vakari,” said Jaed. “You—I don’t know. You’re a princess, Rory.”

  “I don’t know if there’s any place for princesses in the Confederation.”

  Jaed cocked an eyebrow. His eyes were very blue, and much older than Rory remembered. “Then be something else. You’re good at deciding things. At getting other people to decide things.”

  She laughed, a little hysterically. “Does the multiverse really need more politicians?”

  Jaed was not laughing. He wasn’t even smiling. “It needs you.”

  And the thirteenth fairy’s gift said, truth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Confederation corsair Never Take Our Freedom took four hours, twenty-seven minutes to travel from the Samtalet void-gate to the place where Favored Daughter, Bane, and the remains of G. Stein waited. When it drew close enough to hail Favored Daughter without obnoxious time-delays, it did so, with a greeting and subsequent demand (barely framed as a request) for the remanding of the Vizier into Confederation custody, which the captain promptly withdrew upon learning of a formal alliance between Empire and Confederation. The presence of the Princess Rory Thorne (whom the captain had only seen in person during the very early days of the Confederation, and then at formal events and in the company of Dame Maggie) added to the captain’s conviction that whatever orders she might’ve left Lanscot with, the situation had changed radically, and until Dame Maggie confirmed that yes, she was to arrest what was clearly the negotiator of an advantageous alliance, and possibly run afoul of one of the heroes of the rebellion, she was content to accept the Vizier’s word and authority. The whole business smacked of politics far above her pay-grade.

  Thus did Rupert avoid immediate arrest. He did eventually acquire his title legitimately, though accompanied by a dressing-down behind closed doors that left metaphorical blisters, and a permanent cooling of relations between himself and Dame Maggie, which would have been more of a problem if Maggie herself had not been replaced as head of the Confederation shortly after the Tadeshi surrender and before the Expansion war’s formal declaration.

  The astute reader may be wondering what became of Sissten and the dreadnought. The latter, after re-acquiring its hoppers, spent an hour or so making everyone wonder if it meant to start a fight despite being outnumbered (and despite multiple attempts to communicate, all ignored) before it accelerated away and passed there out of the system and this chronicle.

  Sissten departed shortly thereafter, also with no further communication, retreating toward the nearest gas giant behind which, presumably, it meant to shelter until it solved its wobbling and could depart. It must have succeeded, because the name Sissten does not reappear in battle reports until several standard years in the future, when the first wave of Expansion crashed into the Confederation’s shores.

  Although the first actual exchange of what would be called the Expansion War—whitefire lancebeams from the Protectorate vessel, mass-driven metal shards from a Confederation ship, which swiftly and decisively lost that battle—did not take place for almost a year, and happened in a system far from the k’bal Verge, this chronicler contends, and believes that you, reader, will agree, that the war had already begun.

  * * *

  —

  Rory met the green fairy for the second time in her life in a lavish, if diminutively proportioned, guest cabin on the Empire warship Favored Daughter. She had just returned from a meeting with Messer Rupert, Adept Kesk, Grytt, and Battlechief Crow, and upon entering, found a small, green woman seated on the settee, legs crossed, hands in her lap.

  Rory knew exactly who and what she was, despite having been an infant at their first and only prior meeting. But knowing in no way ameliorated the shock, nor in any way kept her heart from lurching up into her throat. She slapped one hand on her chest to remind that rebel organ of its proper location, and hit the door controls with the other before a passing alwar crewperson
chanced to look inside.

  “Hello,” Rory said, because that seemed polite.

  “Huh,” said the fairy. She did not seem concerned with etiquette. “Princess Rory Thorne.”

  Rory had accepted that her days of untitled anonymity had ended, but she had not made friends with that knowledge. She grimaced at the word princess. “Green fairy. May I inquire the reason for your visit?”

  The fairy peered at Rory through narrow, verdigris eyes. “I came to tell you that you have well and truly

  destroyed the multiverse

  broken things this time.”

  Rory blinked. The fairy gift had seemed unusually loud. “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re not. That’s the irony of it. Even though you keep telling yourself that you are.”

  It had been exactly two days since Rory’s ordeal on Sissten, and only a little less since Never Take Our Freedom’s arrival, and she had already spent several (too many) hours on quantum-hex conference with Lanscot and Dame Maggie, both reporting on her experiences and the alliance, and arguing for Messer Rupert’s retention as the Vizier, and also, please, don’t arrest him. She had succeeded, but in so doing, she had talked herself nearly hoarse. Rory wanted a cup of hot tea, a little solitude, and some sleep. The sooner the fairy finished whatever she meant to say, the sooner she might get all three.

  One did not expel a fairy from one’s (borrowed) quarters because of a little exhaustion, however. There were not many places to sit in the cabin—the fairy occupied the primary location already, and seemed disinclined to share—and so Rory sat instead on the edge of the small table in front of the settee, meant to hold beverages or handheld tablets or, if one was untidy, plates absconded with from the mess hall and not quite returned.

  Rory pushed those plates to one side and sat down, mindful of any creaking or tipping that might indicate alwar tables might not bear the weight of a human woman.

  The fairy watched this, silently. She did not seem angry, exactly (though Rory knew herself no expert on fairy expressions). Resigned, perhaps. A little aggrieved.