Ey wrenches emself free, thin membrane rupturing behind em. Leviathan lymph crusts eir upper lip and ey spits dark saliva onto the ground. “And how have you been, my wife?” Ey bares teeth stained gray and pink. “I’ve thought a lot on my role, Anoushka. Lying in the dark beside you, in idle moments I had to myself. I built contingency plans, anticipated when you might uncover me, and made myself as appealing to you as I could. No person is such a perfect fortress that they cannot be disassembled and their gate breached, the heart of them punctured and pinned down at the point of a spear. You’re made of soft parts, the same as everyone else.”
She unsheathes her knife. The blade thrums in her hand, nanite resonance. “What did your charade cost you?”
“Everything.” Erisant closes eir hand and extends eir blade. “But I would do it again. To see you cast down. To see you wounded. I would do it a thousand times.”
Ey charges low—the advantage of a slighter build. She keeps her blade at her waist level, moving fast, faster: she meets each blow with just enough force, not overexerting herself, remembering well how long Xuejiao could fight. In strength and reach she has the advantage, but Xuejiao—Erisant—was seasoned in compensating for both, in making the most of being slight.
The tip of eir blade grazes across her armor, glancing off. She swats away the flat of the blade, meeting more resistance than expected; ey must have taken enhancers while being reconstructed. Drugs or short-term augments, made stronger either way. Ey grins at her, a trickle of black oozing down eir nose.
“Don’t worry, commander,” ey whispers, “I’ll keep you alive and conscious—your brain, your head, your spinal cord. I’ll carry you around everywhere. What would be the point of humiliating you before the entire universe if you aren’t there to see the result?”
She says nothing. Above them the leviathan’s enormous organ beats on, heedless of what is happening beneath it. A world might begin, a dynasty might end, and the beast will continue swimming through the lacunal gray or the colorless black. Once she wished it was a knowing creature, an entity that participated in cruelty—the indifference, the brute stupidity, offended her more somehow. That the animal was mindless when she was not, and yet held dominion over her.
Anoushka misjudges a step. The clean, elegant curve of Erisant’s blade bites past armor and deep into her thigh. She staggers back, anesthetizing agents flooding her system, coagulant flowing to the wound. Even so it burns—not a femoral artery but close.
“When I built my persona, I wondered if it was too false, too obvious. A nubile, mercurial beauty who loved you unconditionally, who killed for you and devoted herself to your every pleasure. You never thought it was too good to be true? That I adapted myself wholly and thoroughly to your cause?” Ey whips eir blade through the air, shaking off her blood. “How easy you were to dupe. All those years I could have unmade you in an instant.”
She sucks air through her teeth: the copper of her blood mingles with the stenches of the beast. “Yet you didn’t. Why did you wait? Wouldn’t killing me in bed have amounted to the same?”
“Why did you not track Vishnu’s Leviathan and bombard it from a distance? You’re a fool for love but you’re also a fool for vengeance.” Erisant plants eir feet apart, eir balance firm despite the fleshy ground. “Even you can’t keep up with the damage, Anoushka.”
Another inhalation. Her throat is far drier than it should be—her overlays identify a contact toxin. One whose composition her filters and immune system can impede, but not nullify outright. Naturally ey would know what she can neutralize and what she can’t. The same way she knows em inside and out. “We will see about that, won’t we? My second wife.”
Her muscles spasm as she parries and answers Erisant blow for blow. She has fought in non-ideal conditions before, under too much or too little gravity or while wounded, but the toxin acts fast and her responses fall out of rhythm with her will. A few milliseconds behind, a few degrees off true, the latency of a compromised engine.
Erisant’s next slash carves into her flank. It meets the resistance of reinforced ribcage and stops. Anoushka knees em in the face. A crunch of cartilage—ey reels back, momentarily blinded.
She tries to stand. A muscle in her knee seizes, giving in at last to the toxin. Paralytic, according to her overlays, rather than fatal. Ey means to make good on the promise to capture her alive.
Ey regains eir feet, clutching at eir face and blinking away the blood. Ey draws in lungfuls of hot, leviathan-scented air as ey strides toward her, mouth drawn back in a shark’s grin. “I realize you won’t feel pain—you must’ve disabled most stimuli to your nervous system by now—but I shall take pleasure in the act, in removing your hand finger by finger, and then your limb one by one. I intend to travel light, and when you’re just a torso you will be so much more . . . compact.”
Erisant kneels and slaps a patch onto her bicep. Warnings blare across Anoushka’s vision: foreign substances exceeding thresholds for toxicity, a countdown to a point where she loses all motor control.
“I will enjoy this,” ey murmurs into her ear, lips brushing her earlobe. “Admiral.”
She licks her mouth. Swallows. “You said you’d do this again even if it cost you everything.”
“When you destroyed my fleet, you destroyed most of what I had. And what little remained, I poured into bringing about your devastation. Your anguish is my ecstasy. Yes, I’d do it again. Had I failed I would have come back, over and over until you were a ruin.”
Anoushka steels herself, marshaling all the discipline she still has over her body. “And I would wed you again. Each and every time I would have courted you, made of you my treasure and my wife. I loved you—that was not false.”
Eir eyes widen and ey draws back, then ey laughs. “Is that how you plan to beg for mercy? That’s pitiful, Anoushka.”
She seizes the nearest of eir wrists—thinking for an instant how familiar it is, how familiarly delicate—and wrenches em off eir feet. Every muscle in her is tremulous and her bones gelatinous but she pushes herself upright and slams her boot down on Erisant’s shoulder. Her breath searing her mouth, she grips eir wrist tighter and pulls. The limb tears off with a snarl of connective cables and synthetic joints.
Below her Erisant screams. Ey was never one for anesthetic agents in eir system. Bent toward feeling all that life has to offer, the sharpest agony and the headiest pleasure.
She attempts the same thing with the other arm but finds she no longer has the strength—her own hands are going numb—so she stomps on the shoulder joined to the blade arm, again and again, putting her mass behind it each time. A part of her thinks how fortunate it is that the leviathan’s gravity is standard, that it lends her blows the necessary weight.
By the time she is spent, Erisant is no longer moving or making noise. One arm dismembered, the other shattered beyond use. Anoushka breathes slowly and tries to control her descent but the toxin is rising in her like a tide. Her strength ebbs, and ebbs again. She drops to her knees and then topples entirely, the leviathan’s flesh supple against her cheek. Soft and alive, as ever it has been. Outlasting them all in the end—Nirupa, Erisant, her.
Admiral? Benzaiten’s message unfurls in her overlays. It seems impossibly distant.
Yes, she replies, only half-certain that she’s returning a legible communique. From somewhere on Erisant’s body a single red pearl has rolled to a stop, nestling within leviathan folds.
Seung Ngo’s been dealt with; I infiltrated and assimilated them into myself. We won. Your vital signs look terrible. Would you like a little help?
I would not mind it. Her lips are numb and unresponsive, as if they have been welded shut. When she tries to move her arm, only her thumb twitches. All she has is her breath. Even reaching for Erisant is beyond her. I wish to bring my wife home.
Chapter Nine
In the end, little trace of what happened remains.
Seung Ngo—the primary instance—leaves one of Anoushka’s s
hips without ceremony. The armada does not receive a visit from the Mandate to demand negotiation or reparation, and as far as anyone knows what happened on Vishnu’s Leviathan was a struggle between two mercenary commanders. Ruinous, as such things tend toward, though this time there were few casualties outside the citizens of the leviathan itself: regrettable but, ultimately, not the business of the Vatican or Da Nang or any of Nirupa’s other guests. Their only bone of contention is that the leviathan larvae have been ceded to the Armada of Amaryllis, but most are glad to have escaped with their lives and few are eager to contest an Alabaster Admiral they assume are fresh from the fight and hungry for blood.
Benzaiten comes to meet her once, giving her thanks and promising her both thorough recompense and a leviathan larva of her own. She gives the AI a timeframe to deliver it. “I expect it to come to me a clean slate,” she says, to which the AI laughs, saying such a condition is impossible of any living thing. Publicly Vishnu’s Leviathan is now administered by Queen Savita, whose mother and sister were tragically lost during the strife between the Seven-Sung and the Amaryllis. Privately, Benzaiten has embedded an instance of xerself there, having arrived at a deal with Savita. An unfair one, balanced in Benzaiten’s favor, but with xer assistance Vishnu’s Leviathan can survive at least another century.
The rest is a matter of purging Erisant’s personnel.
There are fewer than Anoushka would expect—a credit to her intelligence chiefs and Numadesi—and as she oversees gathering them in one place she thinks of making Erisant watch, but she is past spite, past being vindictive. There is no point, and she wants to get it over with.
These soldiers are not offered a choice in the method of execution. She walks down the line of them, firing and thinking of her predecessor—the previous Amaryllis commander hewed to the wisdom of installing kill switches in all her troops. It would have made things faster, more efficient, though when Anoushka meets the clear-eyed gazes of Erisant’s agents she does not think the threat would have deterred them. Dedication can lend a person courage that defies the survival instinct, and kill switches have their limits. Range, latency, requiring soldiers to always report back within a certain timeframe. She’s never seen their use, has preferred instead to secure loyalty if not by love then by greed.
Not an infallible approach, as it transpires.
She arrives on the containment deck where the light is a dim mentholated blue and the air is frigid, fanged. Silent entirely, proofed even to engine hum. In here prisoners are cut off from all things, even the awareness of whether the ship is moving or inert, between relays or docked.
Gates whisper open that would unlock only for her. This far in, the barriers answer to accesses that Anoushka alone holds. Ones that she does not share even with Numadesi, and never with Xuejiao, before.
From the outside, the isolation cell resembles a suspension cage. A display lets her know its occupant is sedated; she initiates the sequence that will wake em up. When she enters, she changes the blank walls to a projection of a Mahakala prairie. The grass grows blue-green and high, softened here and there by feathery brush, by lanky flowers shaped like anglerfish lures. Above them spreads a sky of spun gold, cloudless and remote.
Erisant stirs in eir narrow seat, strapped into the restraints that keep em upright and nodes that inject or flush neurological agents from eir system. A thin patina of frost covers the instruments, though the nodes also regulate eir body temperature—normally in uncomfortable ranges, but Anoushka has chosen to keep it at thirty-five to thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Eir arms are absent—she has let Doctor Saamiye see to em but not to reconstruct the limbs, leaving em with only one good leg. What remains is nearly a dismembered torso. The way Xuejiao liked to be during coitus.
“I despise you,” ey hisses. Those ornamental roses in eir irises are folded, tight unyielding buds. Red pinpricks.
“I’ve come to give you a choice.”
A laugh. “Poison or bullet, isn’t that right? I fantasized about this sometimes; I was almost impatient. It never did come—well, now it has. At last the suspense is over.”
“No.” She drops into a chair that has bloomed out of the floor, as blue as the grass. “I’m offering you the choice of execution or continuing to be Xuejiao and remaining at my side.”
Erisant parts eir mouth. A trickle of maintenance drones slips between eir lips, serpentine, filling eir throat with clear, warm water. “Are you having a stroke, Admiral? Or is the idea to keep me as a bound pet to humiliate me for the rest of my days?”
“You’re capable. You’re intelligent. Xuejiao was an asset and performed her duties superbly, apart from the treachery.” Anoushka rests her hands in her lap. Her breath curls in white wisps, despite the illusion that they are surrounded by summer. “I’ll need to keep you in my sight and limit your movement. To most you’ll be understood to have returned with the Alabaster Admiral in victory. A small price to pay, wouldn’t you agree.”
“Why,” ey says, “would you do this?”
Because you kept the pearl Numadesi gave you, she might say. It rests in Anoushka’s jacket even now, crimson and pristine. “Does my reasoning matter? It gives you another chance to try to kill me. We shall test each other’s boast—yours that you’d do all this again, mine that I would woo and wed you once more. We will retrace our steps and remake our maps, and you may whet your knives and hone yourself for another effort.”
For a long time Erisant says nothing. The drones swim back out of eir mouth, shaking themselves off, and meld back into the restraints. The image of Mahakala shines on, a single day that hangs like a perfect jewel in the dark. “What is my time limit?” Eir voice is soft.
“There’s none. Territory takes a long time to chart. Your life and mine are as complex as any.”
Ey meets her eyes. She will never quite forget that look: its serrated edges, its finality. Eir smile like thorns. “I’m making a choice. Kill me. Make it with your bare hands—I’m owed that. You destroyed me and all I held dear. My world, my people, my husband. I tried to do the same to you. There’s no coming back from that and there’s no falling back into the shape that is Xuejiao. The fairytale’s finished.”
Anoushka imagines—will always imagine—another life where she’s able to persuade Erisant, where they continue, build upon what is true after what is false has been sloughed away. But that is delusion: she is too soft, often too naïve. “Very well. What would you like done with your body?”
“I will be dead and won’t care.” Eir smile widens. “You’ll remember me; I will be a wound within you forever. Your flesh will be my cenotaph.”
She stands and takes off her gloves; she makes it slow. The false grass wavers in an unseen wind but she is steady. Her hands are firm and true.
She lowers herself until she is face to face with the person she once believed was her wife. Erisant strains against eir fetters and pushes until eir mouth meets hers with bruising strength. Ey bites hard, teeth like needlepoints, and draws blood. The taste of rust congeals in Anoushka’s mouth, commingling with eir breath.
Anoushka cups eir chin, then curves her hand around that avian throat. Eir pulse leaps against her and then it is time. She tenses her grip. She clenches. In no time at all there is that familiar noise, the crunch of bone, the snap of life letting go.
Ey lolls in the restraints, eir head limp.
She brings the pearl from her jacket and tucks it into Erisant’s collar, where it will roll past clavicle to rest against a still-warm breast; where it will, eventually, grow as cold as the rest of the cell.
For the night, Numadesi has perfumed and painted herself in silver and gold, sunrays that radiate across her chest, stars that wheel slowly across her thighs and hips: she is bare otherwise, save for a gold circlet around her throat and a rose-gold chain that she has looped around her shoulders. She considered wearing the pearls in her hair, then thought better of it.
When she enters the bath, her lord is already there, waist-deep in wate
r and obscured by steam. The pool’s rim is copper, half of it craggy in the way of stone lapped and sculpted by the sea’s attentions.
Anoushka raises her head, her eyes half-lidded. “Come join me, my wife.”
She does, displaying herself as she glides: she makes every step count, the sway of the hips, the shifting of the breasts and the glint of precious metals. She watches Anoushka watch her, the slow-burning hunger that has its own heft, like a gauntleted hand on a naked belly. Numadesi kneels by the pool’s edge, combing her fingers through the admiral’s hair, brushing stray droplets off Anoushka’s full, long eyelashes. “You are splendor made flesh,” she murmurs, putting her lips to the whorled shell of an ear. “The incandescence of you—to touch you is to be seared and cleansed, to be forged anew.”
The slightest fragment of a smile. “But you’re already perfect. My treasure. My jewel.”
Her lord brings down the bath’s heat and draws her by the chain into the fast-cooling water, touching her, cupping her—first tender, then urgent. She is propped against the pool’s edge, laid out as a feast: sampled piece by piece, morsels for her lord’s mouth, for the hard sharp teeth. When Anoushka climbs out of the water she is treated to the spectacle of a god rising from the waves. That physique of surpassing beauty, that synthetic length glistening like dark metal between hard thighs.
Anoushka bends down and kisses her, a benediction that consumes.
When they break apart, Numadesi is breathless. She strokes up her wife’s flank, clenches her hand around one firm, small breast. “Use me, my lord.”
“I’ll anoint you as a gardener anoints the seedbed,” Anoushka growls against her neck, and then lifts her up—all of her, as though the gilded ampleness of her is as light as a fistful of feathers.
Numadesi gasps as she is pressed against the bathroom wall: it is icy and smooth against her spine, against the back of her hips. Her feet are off the ground—her lord is that tall, that strong. The chain pours and clinks between them.
Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast Page 12