Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Narcissus drone. That is its name, or it will be. A little machine that can look like anything, a nanoconstruct with a Relativity Defiant engine at its heart. A one-shot, programmed to self-destruct. RD tech is what allows the Terrans to send information instantly, through substrates whose electrons are entangled in defiance of the physical distances that separate them. Alter one half of the loop, and it results in a correspond-ing change in the other half of the entangled system. At its heart, entanglement hides many more possibilities. The Narcissus drone is one of them.

  Lorsk watches the plaza of the Arrow through his binoculars. He could have released the thing at any time, after they’d collected enough of the woman’s substance, but he’s chosen this day as a statement of the Djandjer-Pralsh’s strength and legitimacy. Above all, of their legitimacy. Their triumph has to mean something.

  Dania Huascaro has begun speaking; he can tell by the stillness of the crowd in the square. One hand on the slender spar of Thicket stuff, Lorsk glances down.

  Five minutes, Geks signs up at him. Huascaro has given this speech, or a version of it, many times on her tour. It runs to fifteen local minutes, and of those, the device will need ten to reach the square if it is not to attract attention. It can cover continents in minutes at full power, but they have programmed it to look like a bird, and for that it must fly as a bird would.

  Once released it will track its target for years if necessary, pulled on by the entanglement that binds them together. Operators armed with RD transceivers can observe and even control it remotely, watching through the drone’s eyes as it closes on its prey. Though if Pal was telling the truth, these features amount to a comfort for the paranoid—assurance that the job has been completed. In theory, Narcissus drones can kill their targets from anywhere in the universe: detonating themselves provokes an equal and fatal reaction in the subject with whom they’re entangled.

  Mulling the theory of entanglement, Pal had been contemplative. All matter is a conduit, squeezed between the panes of space and time. Separated by an illusion of perspective. If we could collapse that perspective, we would see that all matter is really one. That’s the theory, at least.

  A nice theory. Perhaps Lorsk will believe it after today, but he’s entrusted enough to chance by using this unblooded Terran tech.

  The branch shakes. Adrenalin courses through him as he grips it, looks down. Geks lets the trunk go and signs a word.

  Now.

  He cradles the sphere in the crook of his arm and pricks his finger with a canine. Drips the blood onto the invisible seal found by touch, setting the weapon free.

  The egg cracks open, hemispheres dividing along a straight line. There is a feathered shape inside. Lorsk holds the sphere away from his body as the thing crawls out, feathers stiff with nutrient fluid that dries and sloughs off quickly in the sun. A bird with white-and-gray plumage.

  He thinks of his seph-advisor, long dead. Would his plan meet with her approval? Is this something a seph would do to win?

  “I have no seph anymore,” Lorsk says out loud. To the bird, “ You must be my seph.”

  The bird hops onto the branch, cocks its head at him, and arrows off toward the center of the city.

  Dania is still standing. There was hardly a cough during her address. She stood before an audience of thousands in a public square and preached with the conviction of her faith. The Siblings in Exile must have known this was coming. But from their quarter, silence—not even a whisper of an attempt on her life.

  Dania Huascaro almost can’t believe it.

  She gazes upon the cheering crowd, arms outspread in benediction as she soaks in their adulation, their love. Grins for all she’s worth. Maybe they’ll get through this after all.

  That’s when she sees it high up in the sky, fluttering on a gentle downdraft toward her. Dania watches the bird descend from heaven to earth, and her own heart soars as she recognizes it for a sign from the universe. A blessing on their cause.

  It’s a dove.

  The blast is like a hole in reality. A small one at first, a pinpoint of pure white light, piercing the universe to the void on the other side. Lorsk pictures the bird flapping, eating vacuum energy out of the air, unleashing the power in the bonds of its molecules. An energy so pure not even ash will be left behind. He’s surprised at first by the smallness of the explosion. A millisecond later, the big one hits.

  It stabs his eyes with blades of light, pure white needles tattooing the image onto his retinae. “Krenkyr!” Lorsk swears, slapping his palms over his ravaged eyes, then cries out in alarm as the spasm sends him sliding around the curve of the branch. Only his lashings save him from falling to the Thicket below. He hears a dull thud as the emptied Terran egg drops from his grasp, lands on fungal matter.

  Lorsk feels a film of tears budding under his eyelids, trying to wash the pain away. He can still see the explosion in the darkness behind his eyes. A fountaining mass of white light, swallowing the robed woman whole. The RD engine would have gone a moment before, crumpling into itself as the dissolution reached it and the tiny entangled pieces of Grand Minister Dania Huascaro at its heart, ferrying a highly localized explosion into her cells. Taking her apart at a molecular level.

  “Commander! Lorsk!” He hears Geks pacing below him, her voice tight with worry. “Are you all right?”

  Conscious of security even now, he signs her upside down. Fine. Bright blast. Eyes hurt.

  “I don’t doubt it. I could see it shining even through this red muck. Stay there, I’ll help you down.” Lorsk waits, cultivating calm as she climbs toward him. He can’t see her of course, but he feels her progress as the slender limb shakes and weaves back and forth. He folds his limbs across his body and sets his jaw, biting off panic at the thought of all that empty air below him. That and his blindness would set a lesser Osk to trembling.

  At last Geks is close enough to scent: her primary smell newish like green wood, underlaid with wet leaves and the rich beginnings of decay. The sharp tang of exertion adds a third note. Lorsk feels scrabbling at his ropes and sets his limbs to the branch, helping her pull him onto its upper surface. He grips her arms and turns his head toward the remembered location of the Arrow.

  “Take the binoculars.” They’ve fallen around his neck; by some miracle Lorsk didn’t lose them when he went sliding around his perch. She pulls them off and balances with a hand on his shoulder.

  “What’s happening out there?” Have we won?

  “The crowd’s too thick . . . and there’s troops all around the stage . . . wait, it’s clearing.” Geks’s hand is very still on his shoulder. He can hear her shallow breathing. Shock? Dismay? Has the Terran weapon failed them in their finest hour?

  “Oskaran . . . she’s gone. There’s nothing.” Her voice is flat, emanating from a numb territory beyond shock. “ Mother of us all, there’s nothing left.”

  Lorsk cracks his eyes open. For a moment, the pain and the height nauseate him, and he grips the branch tighter. He sees things through a rainbow caul. Geks is some image from a holo-negative, dark skin waning pale over and over again, a purple halo around her edges. She holds out the binoculars and he, fumbling, takes them. He has to know.

  The square is a distant chaos of milling, screaming primates, many stumbling around blinded like him or just in shock. Lost in a reality that has stopped making sense. The white-clad soldiers and drones are more purposeful dots in the swarming sea as they press the crowds back, form a perimeter, exchange orders over their comm units. But they’re just going through the motions. In their way, they are lost too. Their function has been taken from them.

  A gap in the Terran wall around the stage, and Lorsk sees it at last. All that is left of Grand Minister Dania Huascaro, in a small huddled pile to the side of her podium. Her white and gold robe is on fire, and what lies beneath looks disjointed. Bits and pieces, scraps of flesh spared by chance from the explosion. Most of her is indeed gone, consumed in light.

  “We did it. We won
. We did it.” If he sounds as rattled as Geks it is not from shock, but from a triumph so huge his mind cannot grasp it all at once.

  Calm, Lorsk must be calm. They can’t celebrate yet, not while he’s still lashed here, a beacon for any passing cruisers or drones that care to look. Lorsk is confident the controllers of this city will bow in the face of their success, but not yet. The Terrans will need a few days to calm down, to exercise their monkey outrage in paroxysms of debate and denunciation, of protests spilling onto the wealthiest streets. This has been their reaction to the Djandjer-Pralsh’s success so far. A week or so of highly visible anger and indignation, smoothing toward wary complacency like the tides of the sea. And once the Terrans have come to accept his new Surarchy, Lorsk is confident that in time they will come to value it.

  Now is not that time. “Help me,” he says softly, and Geks bends to the ropes. She works each piton free of the Thicket tentacle, clambering all around the branch in a way that makes his own legs weak.

  “Where did you learn to climb like this?” Lorsk asks faintly. Geks is on the curving underside of the branch, gripping it with all six limbs. She pokes her head over the red horizon, grins almost insolently, and slides out of his view. Lorsk risks a look down and sees her corkscrewing around the branch, her hexapedal embrace slowing her descent. Her nails leave grooves in the Thicket limb’s soft flesh.

  At the bottom, she looks up. “You know where.” Lorsk does know, of course: when she was walking point in their ill-fated Rreluush-Tren campaign, Geks disarmed some traps she could not have reached without climbing. And he has seen the scars on her body, where she barely escaped a venomvine burst or was grazed by the piercing missiles of a spinetree. He thinks of them every time they come together as kaneshi .

  Lorsk tosses the collapsed architecture of ropes and pitons to the Thicket floor and makes his own descent, hugging the branch and sliding as Geks had. It is no less harrowing for his mimicry, and Lorsk is grateful when all four feet are firmly on the spongy ground again.

  “And now?” Geks asks.

  “Now we let the Thicket do the work.” He grins. “And savor our victory.” Their plan is to stay here a few days, until the city outside its red walls has calmed enough for them to make for Chii Ril. The Narcissus drone may have been a prototype, but it will still have left a trail if the Terran authorities know what to look for. They will trace it to the Thicket, to this very spot—but then they will be lost. He and Geks will be long gone, hidden elsewhere in this red ring that squeezes the city in two. They’ll keep away from the major corridors through the Thicket’s flesh until they are ready to leave, then find a pore that opens onto Los Gatos. The fungus will protect them with its very indifference; the Thicket takes no part in the wars of the city.

  Days pass. From cracks in the Thicket’s canopy, the two Osk watch the city hunt them. Contrails cross the sky, scarring white across the golden haze as aircraft perform a fruitless aerial reconnaissance; searchlights spear through the nearest districts at dusk; sounds echo to them through the Thicket’s open throats, the tromp of Terran feet and the scissoring gait of drones. They find nothing. The two Djandjer-Pralsh are clever, and they’ve survived much crueler jungles than this.

  Trapdoor nests dug into the crimson matter conceal them when the Terran patrols are near. Even the drones’ heat vision is useless, for the matter of the Thicket they hide in is warm like flesh.

  And flesh warms flesh as he and Geks couple on a Los Gatos rooftop, brazen in the moonlight. Slithering over the deep moss of the roof, cupping one another in coils of their bodies. When they’ve had everything they could of each other, they drop to the street. Silent as shadows, the two Osk slip into an open sewer grate. Beyond the dividing line of the Thicket, the Djandjer-Pralsh own the sewers: every complex from Los Gatos to Tarbreak is littered with illicit portals, culs-de-sac, and safe houses. Lorsk could run the entire operation from underground if need be; it would be totally decentralized if not for their base of operations at the enclave.

  Lorsk’s heart swells with love toward Chii Ril, the proprietary love of a father toward his hatchling. His hands have made the Osk a nest on this alien world, and now the blades of his soldiers and his political acumen have shaped it into a new Surarchy. His Surarchy. Lorsk breaks into a gallop down sewer paths he could trace in his sleep, spurred by the familiar faces and the welcoming scents awaiting him, Geks keeping pace at his side. Of all his midnight returns to Chii Ril, this is the one he has looked forward to the longest.

  The return that will finally feel like coming home.

  Lorsk Edrasshii woke hard, his snout shoved into stinking blankets on a cold floor. He tossed them aside and curled his body away on the thin cot. His nostrils quested for that other scent, that green fertile smell he knew so well, as his hands groped for her over the mattress.

  Emptiness. Lorsk opened his eyes, squinting at the harsh daylight that leapt into them. Clenched his fist on a handful of cloth. He curled into a crouch, running hands through his shaggy red and black mane. Shaking his head to rid it of the dream. He looked around the sparse room; the whole thing was his, and he was alone, of course. Lorsk was living here and now, and Geks was gone.

  And he still had a war to fight. He rose to all four feet and performed his morning exercises as he had every day for the past thirty-five standard years of his active combat life. Lorsk took no pleasure in the routine as he had when he was younger, reveling in his strength and speed. Now it reminded him of the flaccidity of his muscles, the growing stiffness of his joints. Age and hiding had taken much from Lorsk Edrasshii.

  His mission was not one of those things. Lorsk padded up the stairs from his apartment, collecting soldiers and civilians along the way. There would be a gathering today in a midlevel apartment, a meeting of all the surviving members of the enclave. Lorsk had decided it was time for them all to hear what he planned to do next.

  A river of darkest gray surrounded Lorsk by the time he reached the appointed meeting room. Curious Osk heads bobbed around him, their scents thorny with complex flavors, olfactory questions. Lorsk took a stance near the draped doors leading to the apartment’s balcony and surveyed the room.

  Djandjer-Pralsh layered the chamber maybe five deep, with the few civilians mixed in.

  All the important ones were near the front. Of Lorsk’s original cadre of loyal officers, only two survived. Herask Illimersk, his expression blandly inviting as he met Lorsk’s gaze. Grizzled Jarn Urevezzin was whispering something into his adopted daughter’s ear. As both of them sank to a comfortable crouch, Ariveth Illission hissed in easy laughter and nuzzled him under the mane.

  A brief moment of stomach-clenching anger seized Lorsk, wondering if they were talking about him. He dismissed the idea at once. It was petty, beneath his notice even if it was true. All that had happened years ago.

  Gau Shesharrim was the latecomer that morning, but not by much. Lorsk saw the thin, wiry seph slip in through the door at the back of the room just as the other Osk had settled themselves. He hid a frown as he noted that Gau was dressed in his dark cloak and carried his blue-tinted goggles in one hand, as though he was about to venture into the city. Or perhaps he had just returned. Gau might explain it away as reconnaissance, but Lorsk was beginning to wonder.

  It might be time to put limits on his freedom; there was too much at stake to let Gau leave the base unsupervised. They all had to sacrifice for the good of the faction, more than ever now that they were close to victory. Gau would thank him when he became the commander sitting at Lorsk’s right blade.

  When all their snouts were facing him, Lorsk began. It would not be a long speech, puffed up with the rhetoric he’d favored in their earlier campaign. Their work had been simple this time around.

  “Djandjer-Pralsh. Osk of Chii Ril. You have done well. Few things give me the pleasure I feel at knowing this: we have made the White Arrows fear us.”

  He saw teeth crack in fierce grins around the dim room, dark eyes flashing as Osk
darted their heads forward in approval. Their satisfaction was mostly non-verbal in the manner of their species . . . though Lorsk heard scattered whispers of sibling, and exiles, and especially Chii Ril, the name of their enclave spoken like the solemn oath it was.

  “I would like to think we’ve learned from our mistakes,” Lorsk continued. “It is not enough to eliminate the leader of the Universal Church or the White Arrows. Not with Terrans. They are herd animals—they hide behind each other and gain their strength in numbers. Individuals can be replaced. It is their organizations that are powerful.”

  “Soon there won’t be enough White Arrows in Diego Two to form an organization,” put in Gau languidly, picking his teeth with a nail.

  Lorsk indulged the interruption with a wave. “And we could make that a reality, if we had years. But we know from the last time that they will not suffer this assault on their city quietly. The White Arrows must be moving against us, slowly perhaps. It is not in their interest for this war to become public. They’ve hidden their responsibility for Chii Ril’s demise all this time; they will not risk that lie being exposed to public scrutiny.

  “That is why now is the time for us to make it public. We’ve all learned much and more about the sources of Terran power from our years in hiding. Like everything the Terrans design, their power is multifarious; it rarely rests in individuals alone. But sometimes it rests in symbols.” Lorsk let the moment stretch. “All of us know what the White Arrows are capable of. But they have not yet guessed what we are capable of.”

  Jarn made as if to rise, the full measure of his gaze fixed on Lorsk. “What are you saying, commander? What is our next target?”

  Had they rehearsed it, the timing would have been no better. Lorsk answered to the room at large. “The Arrow,” he said, “is a blade driven into the Terran body of the city. One they don’t even know is killing them.”

  He drew apart the faded curtains separating their room from the balcony, and pointed over the rail.