“Does danger,” Anoushka whispers, “excite you?”
Savita trembles, mute. Her pupils are dilated. Fear and desire, Anoushka thinks, a heady alchemy. She runs her fingernail over Savita’s clavicles and the princess jolts as though grazed by the tip of a knife. Those enormous eyes with their peacock lenses flutter shut. “Please,” the princess says.
“Please what, Your Highness? Did you imagine yourself in Xuejiao’s place as I toyed with her?” Anoushka flexes her hand, makes the pressure felt on the thin skin of the throat. “Did you visualize yourself at the end of a leash so I may lead you across your little garden, command you to lie down in the grass and open yourself for my pleasure? You’re a princess. It must be difficult to find a partner who’d help you achieve such fantasies.”
The princess’ hands grip the armrests, fingers clawing into them as though this is her single line to life. “Admiral.” Her exhalation whistles through her teeth. Her voice is low and hitched, almost hypnotized. “Yes.”
Anoushka abruptly lets go of Savita. “Perhaps one day you’ll find just such a person to master you, one who’ll deem your begging sufficient and who’ll have you the way you want. Sadly I find my wives most satisfactory, most exquisite, and have no need for a plaything as fragile and unseasoned as you are.”
Savita bolts upright, eyes and mouth wide open. She begins to speak—to snarl, to vent her outrage at this spurning.
Anoushka’s overlays snap offline.
Or rather her non-local connections do. Everything beyond the immediate digital vicinity is gone: no Amaryllis channels, no secure lines, no public broadcast from nearby major polities. From Xuejiao’s expression, her overlays have just been subjected to the same. “Lieutenant,” she says.
“Admiral.” Her lieutenant has extended her armor, is in the process of checking her ammunition. “I stuck a panoptic swarm into the leviathan’s orbit when we docked. Unless it’s completely broken, it just reported to me that Vishnu’s Leviathan has entered lacunal space. In a region that’s not networked, too.”
Anoushka straightens, activating her own armor. “Princess, was that supposed to happen?”
“No. No, it’s not . . . ” She stands and sways. Catches herself, with effort. “This shouldn’t be happening, the queen didn’t—why would she? This would trap us here with our enemy and cut us off from help or evacuation.”
“Sudden madness,” Anoushka suggests as she extends the reach of the harrier’s sensors, sweeping the dock and the adjacent corridor. Nothing amiss, for now. “She’s quite senior in years, as I understand. Cognitive functions can begin declining at that age despite anti-agathic treatments.”
“You will not disrespect my mother.”
“You will find I may do whatever I please.” Up to and including bombarding this place. “Xuejiao, restrain the princess and put her in containment. We’re moving out.”
They make their way out of One of Sunder’s docking berth, back into the leviathan’s corridors. No alerts have been activated and no emergency measures have been triggered: the queen’s spiritual tableaus continue to shimmer, saturating the air with iconography. Synthesized voices murmur smoothly into Anoushka’s overlays, giving her directions and schedules for meals, repeating parts of Nirupa’s welcome speech. Automated and, by now, meaningless.
That the leviathan has entered lacunal space is difficult to miss; every outsider aboard has noticed the fact. The guest’s network is flaring like fast-blooming flowers, seething with confusion. Demands that Queen Nirupa explain the situation are met with silence from the queen herself, her staff, and from Princess Rajathi.
“Once we get to the more organic parts,” Anoushka tells Xuejiao, “we’ll need to mind spots where leviathan tissue is especially thick, where there isn’t much artificial reinforcement. There are emergency measures that’ll open the walls up to members of the royal family or high-ranking staff, make pathways for them to a lift, another deck, another room. Built-in means of egress. If Erisant’s seized that, ey will be able to place eir troops anywhere.”
Xuejiao, taking point, throws Anoushka a look. “That wasn’t in the dossier, commander. I read it back to front.”
“It’s not widely known, no.” They reach a juncture where metal melds into tissue. The configuration has changed significantly since Anoushka’s time, but Benzaiten’s imaging was surgical and the schematics xe gave her should be as exact as any. They ought to be close to a maintenance point, from which passage they will be able to traverse the decks without needing the tram car. Those would almost certainly be under Erisant’s yoke: seizing the transport is the obvious. “Rajathi, would you say she’s hungry enough to ally with Erisant?”
“Oh yes. She’s a bilious little beast. She’d make friends with whoever can give her a leg up on her sister.” The lieutenant levels her gun as they turn a corner, its barrel glinting blue-black. “I don’t know enough about Erisant to tell whether ey’d deliver. Do you think ey’s really waging this campaign just to avenge emself and eir, what was it, husband?”
“Strange fires burn within us all. If you or Numadesi were to fall, I would scorch a hundred worlds in retribution.”
Xuejiao laughs, the sound like bells. “You were always a romantic, Admiral.”
Anoushka finds an access point and uses a set of credentials Benzaiten pilfered for her benefit, then applies a smokescreen that’ll obfuscate her network footprints. A service door opens and they step in. The corridor is claustrophobically narrow, to the point she has to crab along sideways, the walls close and alive. That deep, slick green peculiar to the leviathan, swollen at points with black capillaries. Once she would have moved easily through; lower-deck servants are etiolated, bred to be small exactly so they would be able to reach narrow recesses, traverse these hidden spaces like vermin. She remembers being an emaciated thing, almost dwarfish: certainly dwarfed by her current stature. Later she would understand that the ventral phenotype is designed to elicit revulsion and contempt, to reinforce and justify the thought This is subhuman, this is beneath attention, this deserves brutalizing. She sought the body she has now so eagerly that she did not think of what it means to be less.
“Commander?” Xuejiao says from ahead of her. “This is a dead end.”
So it is, when according to Benzaiten’s imaging this should run parallel with the tram cars. She checks and finds the smokescreen still in place. There are no surveillance symbiotes she can detect in the passage. Off to Xuejiao’s left, the path bends in a direction it shouldn’t, but even if Erisant can manipulate leviathan structure, ey shouldn’t able to see where Anoushka is.
“Proceed,” she says. The public corridors or trams are riskier by far if she wants to reach Nirupa and the leviathan’s cortex.
The passage slopes down steeply, and familiarity lets Anoushka know that they are descending down the decks—she counts three before the passage evens out and stops at another access point.
It opens to a stench of meat left to spoil.
A large chamber, some hundred square meters in size. The ground is yielding and wet with mucus, leviathan tissue carpeted in carrion feeders—creatures that are little more than open clattering mouths and digestive systems, toothless and long-throated. The area is empty of anything else, but then it would be. Anoushka knows this well, or at least a place like this further down the decks, a room for disposal. Servants too sick to continue, too defiant for their own good, all can be disabled and sent here for the feeders to break down and nourish the leviathan with: recycled proteins, entirely efficient. Nothing goes to waste.
Experience alone saves her.
She throws herself backward, so far that she almost loses her balance, and rights herself as she gains distance from Xuejiao.
Her lieutenant stands with feet planted apart, one hand retracted and replaced by a gleaming blade. She is smiling. “I really should have used a gun, but I wanted you to know. A bullet would’ve robbed me of the satisfaction, of watching your expression change. My c
ommander. Admiral Anoushka. The most powerful woman in the universe, or so she believes.”
Something not just in the words but in the cadence, the way Admiral Anoushka is enunciated. “Xuejiao,” she says slowly, adrenaline spiking high. “Or should I say Captain Erisant?”
“Oh, you’re quick. But not so quick you knew from the beginning. Not so quick you could tell even as I stayed by your side and fucked you for ten years, so really you are shockingly slow. Every time I was in your bed, I thought of killing you; I thought of taking my vengeance then and there.” Erisant’s smile widens. “You really couldn’t tell, could you?”
She does not allow herself to be paralyzed by shock, to be paralyzed by the weight of what this means. This is not the time to leave her heart naked; this is not the time to be any other than impregnable. “I did not anticipate that the Seven-Sung captain would reinvent emself and obtain a whole new body so that I’d court em for a wife, that’s true. Is it a fetish of yours, Erisant?” Over and over she will say it, the name Erisant, to separate what was and what now is: to separate the artifice from the truth, to reinforce that Xuejiao never existed and thus to forget.
A sneer. “Everything’s a fetish with you, Admiral. Power. Flesh. Genocide. Do you ever think about the blood on your hands?”
“Do you? In our profession, measuring blood by the liter seems pointlessly obsessive; where is the use? All that plasma is long evaporated.” She is control—limitless calculation, perfect result. Time and space bend to her desires, and planets and people. That has ever been true; it will be true now. “And perhaps I knew, or began to notice. Why do you think there are things I tell only Numadesi?”
“You’re not bluffing your way out of this. You forget how well I’ve gotten to know you. Learned your behavior, studied you inside and out.”
Anoushka smiles. She makes it unpleasant, a grotesque mask. “You’re correct that power pleases me, and what could be more piquant than to have my enemy facedown in bed while I make em beg for what I can give? It did surprise me, that you’d debase yourself so, to surrender to me utterly. To the point you let me remove your limbs and make you a doll for my gratification. I will say this much—you were a fine lover, a most delightful treat in bed, and your husband must have enjoyed you very well. A shame he’s not around to do so anymore, but I should like to think I was able to take up the slack—”
Erisant charges. She lets her gauntlet overflow and thicken around her hand, and swings her fist into eir midsection. Ey staggers but does not fold—armored torso; Anoushka’s overlays provide the calculation of how much force connected and how much was dispersed—and kicks out at her. She dodges, diagonal, and slams her foot into the small of eir back. Again it does less damage than she would like.
Ey leaps away, adjusting eir stance. Wary now, less gloating.
Anoushka unsheathes an ischemic knife, the type she’s had custom-made a few years ago after learning what Krissana became, that haruspices might soon range beyond the confines of Shenzhen Sphere. Erisant would not recognize what it is; even from her wives she has kept a few secrets. “I thought,” she goes on, “that I could bend your will, bind your body. For despite our dispute, you were a worthy soldier, one I could turn into my asset. And your performance was most convincing in that regard, I was convinced that you’d acceded to be mine, a creature whose desire was leashed and biddable to my requirements. That much you did fool me, I will concede.”
“Fuck you.”
“Yes,” Anoushka says softly, “we did that rather often, didn’t we?”
She blocks eir blade with her arm—she knows her enemy’s augments intimately, and her overlays yield numbers that suggest none were concealed from her; as Xuejiao, ey had to submit to a full body scan periodically. When she first met Xuejiao she always thought the way the lieutenant moved was odd, as though she was used to having a taller frame and broader physique, and was not yet used to the shift in sacroiliac joint, the lower center of gravity. Back then she did not pry; she let her recruit have this privacy. She understood the need and the process well, the skinning and flensing, the wholesale unmaking so that muscles can be snipped and rewired, ribcage and tibia rearranged. The sacrifice of oneself to the divinity that lies within.
Erisant has adjusted long since. Ey slashes at her with precision, as used to her patterns as she is used to eirs, defense and offense matched by deep familiarity.
“So,” she says, breathing even, “I have an idea, Erisant. I understand you lost many loved ones when I charred your world and crushed your fleet, but that can be remedied. Word is that some Mandate AIs are experimenting with a new enterprise where you send them a memorial of your beloved and they lease you one of their proxies, who will behave and adore you just like the genuine article. The price is high, the practice contentious within Shenzhen. Nevertheless I’ll foot the bill. Call it blood compensation, though to be perfectly forthright with you, I can’t recall your husband’s name or the names of your lieutenants . . . ”
She sidesteps another slash, judges again, is satisfied with her assessment of what Erisant can and can’t do. Next is the test of what damage Erisant can absorb, a test of whether her knowledge of Xuejiao—who does not exist, who never did—holds true. She gets close, reverses her grip, stabs down. Serrated alloy opens a seam in cobalt armor.
Erisant pulls away, alarmed. Eir eyes focus on the ischemic knife.
“I did say,” Anoushka murmurs, “that you don’t know everything about me.”
They exchange blows, their shadows like puppets in frenetic performance, darting and distorting across the floor. Adrenaline replaces emotion. In times like this she can fight forever, moving like divine choreography, the bonfire of her unconstrained by mortal limits. Pain is a secondary concern; in this seductive state she does not feel. Still she keeps an eye on the data that flowers in a corner of her vision, counting and forecasting and calibrating.
Erisant feigns right, low. She pays it no heed: she is a large target, ey is much smaller, there is no point in attacking her flank or hip. She waits. When eir foot comes up she has her blade in position and it sinks, clean and sweet as fire through wax, into eir ankle. Xuejiao has never shielded this spot as well as she shields her torso, her arms. Ankles have small profiles, are unlikely targets.
Ey regains eir balance, barely stumbling and hardly acknowledging the pain. Shock jabs eir features as eir overlays report the intrusion, the plague-payload that spreads and seeks the augment-to-organ links, a cascade of logic fluxes and gibbercrypt. Erisant freezes: stupefied, stunned at this breach.
Then ey braces emself against the ground and rips off eir knee. A gyroscope falls free.
Anoushka draws her gun but by then Erisant has hurled emself into the wall, which has yawned wide and swallowed em whole. Her bullets bite deep into leviathan tissue, bead on the surface as the beast rejects it, then clatter off harmlessly. The carrion feeders close their mouths around the wasted ammunition.
She waits until the wall is seamless. The ischemic knife glistens with coolant—Erisant has more of that than blood. The blade has slimmed down, tiny crescents bitten out from where it discharged its contagion nanites: it is smoothing over, restoring its shape. She’ll need to recharge it, though it is good for many uses yet. Experimental still, but it has advantages over a gun—the blade’s core provides structure that stabilizes the anti-cyborg nanites better than a bullet, and there’s no risk of ricochet in close quarters.
Anoushka sheathes the weapon. The intoxicant that is battle drains away, the soldier’s ataraxia receding. She was invulnerable a moment ago, untouched by the truth. She no longer is and now revelation worms into her stomach like a gut wound, piercing her just as she pierced what was once her wife. What she believed was her wife, what she loved, what she might have already killed if Erisant cannot purge the viral disruption in time. Her spring song.
I want to belong to you forever.
For long minutes she half-expects the wall to reopen and disgorge Xueji
ao. But it remains smooth and mute. The leviathan stinks of rot and she is alone.
Chapter Seven
The AI Seung Ngo has come modestly: two proxies rather than a small battalion, a show of numbers. Both proxies are tall with impractically long hair—down to the back of their thighs—and have the poreless skin that makes Numadesi think of Xuejiao, ivory lightly swirled through with strands of aquamarine, peridot, turquoise. One body has honeycombed eyes in bright gold, the other has rippling eyes in lavender and harsh fuchsia.
“I apologize for the short notice,” they say in a voice like velvet and cryogenic fumes. “But the Amaryllis has long been a friend of ours, and as ever the commission I have in mind is sensitive.”
For prudence’s sake Numadesi has chosen to receive Seung Ngo on a different ship, a frigate detached from the rest of the fleet, designated Four of Razors. The AI has not objected that this is not Seven of Divide. In truth she doubts it will do much good—if Seung Ngo wants to look for Benzaiten in Autumn, they can find traces of xer whether they’re here or on Seven of Divide. But Numadesi assumes xe can erase xer presence, logs and evidence that xe has ever boarded an Amaryllis ship or interacted with the Amaryllis network. The least she can do is stall, give xer time.
The boardroom she’s picked is airy, furnished in pastel tones that again steer her thoughts to Xuejiao—she thinks of that one bead of red pearl. How could she not tell. How could she not realize. But she bows and applies herself to the veneer of a perfect hostess, a votary dedicated entirely to her duty. “The admiral is presently preoccupied, but it is always my delight to welcome the Mandate. I don’t recall if we have met before, Ambassador?”
One of the proxies regards her with shifting, mobile eyes. “We have, Lady Numadesi. You were there when the Alabaster Admiral accepted the Pax Americana commission. I’m sure you remember, though I wore a different proxy then.”
Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast Page 8