by Yoon Ha Lee
The voice comes back without warning. You almost shoot the wall. “You made it, good,” it says. This time it’s communicating through your augment. “You’re there, right? Can you get in?” And then: “I think the senior staff—well, it doesn’t matter. You’re what’s available.”
The way the voice wavers makes you grind your teeth. “Firefight,” you say, identifying the weapons by the percussion they make as you let the augment transmit your subvocals. “Just got here, haven’t had time to scout.”
“I’ve been working the grid,” the voice says. “I can get in overrides, but you’ll have to work fast to take advantage before they freeze me out. And you’ll need physical access.”
Obviously, or they would have been able to handle matters remotely. “Servitor passages for maintenance?”
“Yes. I can open one of those. Tight squeeze, though.”
The voice has the presence of mind to send you a newer, declassified map. At this point it’s not like either of you cares about getting into trouble with higher-ups. “Listen,” you say, determined not to give in to the awful mixture of pain and nausea despite the medical assists. “How bad is it, if the senior staff are...?”
Brief silence. “I haven’t heard from Mikodez or any of the senior staff since the alert began,” the voice says. “I’m lying low right now. They didn’t hire me to be brave.” Not the most inspiring thing to say, but you appreciate the honesty. “I’m hoping the other stabilizers are all right, but they’re still attempting to secure this one.”
“I’ll do what I can,” you say.
The next moves happen in a blur.
Scorch blasts.
Narrow passage. Claustrophobia and bruised elbows are the least of your worries.
You approach the hatch. The firefight sounds like it’s died down. You’re not optimistic about the survival of your Shuos comrades. It’s hard to see through the slits and you don’t dare query local scan lest you be detected.
You pry the hatch open, wishing it didn’t creak so much. Most of the bodies in the control center wear Shuos red-and-gold. A few have violet eyes and are dressed in the strange articulated suits.
The voice again. “Are you in?”
“Yes. They didn’t stick around, though.”
“That’s not good,” it says. “One moment.” Then: “The good news is that they couldn’t crack the stabilizer’s control system. The bad news is that there’s—there’s more of them. A lot more of them. Their swarm, fleet, horde, whatever their term is. They’ve all arrived. They’re taking out the orbital defenses before they make a move planetside, I guess.”
It’s growing harder and harder to think, just when it’s most important. “We can use the stabilizer against them—”
“Too many of them and not enough time. Unless—”
You know exactly what they’re thinking of. Unmoor the stabilizer and aim it at the Citadel’s heart, where the power cores are. Turn space inside-out. The whole thing would go up in a tumult of fire. It’d also scorch a significant portion of the planet, but the explosion would hurt the Taurag invaders and buy time for a defense to be mustered elsewhere.
Just to make sure that you and the voice understand each other, you outline the idea.
“Yes,” the voice says. “I’ll talk you through the procedure.”
It takes you several minutes to figure out the control system even so, because the voice only has access to an outdated version of the manual, and the system interface was overhauled at some point.
You think about orbital mechanics. If you set off the power cores right now, the conflagration will singe Shuos Academy’s main campus on the planet’s second-largest continent.
Shuos Academy comes to mind because you just graduated, naturally, but there are a lot of population centers that would be affected. It’s easy enough to access a map of the planet and the associated census, start adding up the numbers. How high would the kill count get?
After a moment, the voice interrupts. “Have you done it? Is there a technical issue? Of all the times—”
“I’m not doing it,” you say over the dull roar in your ears. Your hands have started shaking violently. You right the nearest chair and sink into it before your knees can give out.
The voice’s silence is distinctly baffled.
“Open a line to the Taurags,” you say. “Talk to them or something. The Taurags won’t hit nonmilitary targets down there. They insist on that kind of thing. If our enemy wouldn’t do it, I’m fucked if I’ll hit the button myself.”
“Are you out of your mind? That invasion force isn’t going to stop here!” The voice suddenly becomes frantic. “Or is it that you’re scared to die when we all go up in flames? I don’t enjoy the idea any more than you do, but we’ve got a duty—”
“That’s not it,” you say. “I mean, I don’t want to die. But that isn’t the reason. There are better ways to win than toasting a bunch of civilians. We’ve learned that much from our enemy. Maybe it’s too late for us here to find a new strategy, but someone else will.”
The voice drops silent, and you wonder if it’s given up on you, but after a while it resumes. “We don’t have much time left,” it says, low and fierce. “There’s another squad headed your way, they’re almost there. If you’re going to do something, you have to do it now. And—” Silence again.
Getting up hurts. You’re sure that something’s bleeding inside. The augment confirms this, although it’s being awfully unhelpful about the nature of the injury. Under the circumstances it’s not like it matters.
You’ve had time to survey the room, consider its layout. You settle on a position and lower yourself painfully into place. If the pistol gets any heavier you’re going to drop it.
Footsteps. They’re attempting to be quiet, but the slither-scale sound of that articulated stuff can’t be silenced entirely. You’ve never been more awake.
There’s only one of you, but you might as well take out as many as you can on the way out.
THERE’S A SHUOS joke that isn’t shared often, although most people have heard it.
What’s the difference between a Shuos and a bullet to the back of the head?
You might survive the bullet.
It’s not especially funny (as opposed to Kel jokes, which everyone but the Kel agree are hilarious). But then, depending on how you measure these things, the deadliest general in Kel history was a Shuos.
YOU WAKE WITH a memory of shadows cutting across the door, of your jacket’s unexpected injection, of toppling sideways and the taste of blood in your mouth. You’re hooked up to a medical unit that someone has decorated with knitted lace. The sight is so unexpected (and the russet lace so hideous) that it keeps you from doing the obvious thing and accosting the instructor, who is standing subtly out of reach, with a dancer’s awareness of space.
You’re pretty sure that if not for whatever they drugged you with, you’d be in a lot of pain right now. As it stands, your thoughts feel as clear as ice in spite of the weird disconnected feeling that your mind is only attached to your body by a few silk strands.
“The ‘Taurag attack’ was still part of the game, wasn’t it?” you ask in a scratched-up voice. “Some of those people actually died.” You weren’t in a simulator for the second half. The smells, the hot, sticky blood, the staring eye.
“The performers were volunteers,” the instructor says, which only makes you want to shoot him more, if only you had a gun. “I had to apply to Mikodez for special permission to recruit them, because if there’s anything Mikodez hates, it’s inefficiency. But the exercise had to be real because that was the only way to make it feel real.”
“You had me kill people for a test. You killed people for a test.”
“You’re not the first person to call me a monster.” The instructor smiles; his eyes are very dark. “I didn’t lie about the destructive potential of the weapon that we’re concerned with. It can devastate planetary populations, and they say I was known fo
r overkill. But it isn’t a Taurag weapon. It’s our weapon. We’re building new battlemoths to make use of it even as we speak. I hear they’ll be ready by year’s end.
“The next step will be to take the fight to the Taurag Republic. There’s a lot of potential for the war to go genocidal, for us to get locked into back-and-forth invasions until one or both of us is obliterated. We have to look beyond that. We can’t escape the fact of war—there’s too much history of distrust for that—but we can lay the foundation for whatever accord we reach afterwards, because no war, however terrible, lasts forever.”
You’re not liking the fact that you agree with this one point, because it means you’re agreeing with him.
“I refuse to let this weapon fall into the hands of people who can use it without blinking at the deaths it will cause, or who think only of revenge,” the instructor says. “I would rather spend a few deaths now, to identify people who understand restraint—who care about the lives of civilians—than find out during the invasion proper by reading about the inevitable massacres.”
“Tell me,” you say sarcastically. “If I’d decided to blow the Citadel up, would you have let that go through, too?”
“No, you were only playing with a dummy system by that point,” he says, “even if you had to believe it was real. If you’d hit the button, we’d still be here, only I’d be debriefing you on why you’d failed.”
He rubs the back of one hand, as if in memory of scars, although you see none there. “You did well,” he adds, as if that could make up for the people you killed, that he put into harm’s way. “You passed. I hope you continue to pass. Because this is one test you don’t stop taking.”
“You wouldn’t have passed,” you say, because someone has to.
“No,” he says. For a moment you glimpse the shadows he lives with, all of them self-inflicted. “I’ve always been an excellent killer. It’s not too late for you to do more with your career than I did with mine. You’ll make an excellent officer. I’m recommending you for the invasion swarm.”
You inhale sharply, and regret it when pain stabs through your side in spite of the painkillers. “I’m not sure you should”—more candor than is safe, but you’re beyond caring. “Because after we deal with the Taurags, I’m coming for you.”
The instructor salutes you Kel-style, with just a touch of irony. You don’t return the gesture. “I look forward to it,” he says.
Author’s Note
Second person is frequently controversial. I am perhaps fonder of it than I have any right to be, because my first story sale (“The Hundredth Question,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1999) was written in second person. A lifetime of reading Choose Your Own Adventure books and gamebooks probably exacerbated the tendency.
Mikodez’s lace knitting comes from my brief flirtation with lace knitting. Unfortunately, I am both prone to dropping stitches and unable to read my own knitting, a combination that led to me acrimoniously divorcing knitting a few years back. Maybe I should go back to cross-stitch (a hobby I assigned to Inesser) or tatting?
Glass Cannon
I AM A Shuos.
Jedao didn’t remember most of Shuos Academy, let alone graduating from it. He couldn’t help thinking of himself as a cadet, only nineteen years old, despite the fact that his body was middle-aged in appearance. While Hexarch Shuos Mikodez had assured him that the courses he was taking at the Citadel of Eyes were equivalent to the education he would have gotten at the modern academy, Jedao didn’t believe him. Jedao had spent the past two years and change as a “guest” of the hexarch, or, more accurately, a prisoner. The hexarch might have unbent enough to allow him to catch up with best practices in social engineering and how to wrangle the state of the art bath facilities. That didn’t mean he was likely to allow Jedao to extract classified information from the grid.
Naturally, that was precisely what Jedao intended to do.
I am a Shuos.
Jedao had hoped that repeating the phrase in his head, like a mantra, would magically grant him access to the memories of his older, other self. Useful memories, like how do I hack into the Shuos hexarch’s private files? Never mind that he had no idea whether Jedao One (as he’d labeled the other man, who was and wasn’t dead) would have been able to manage the feat.
At the moment, Jedao was sitting in his suite of rooms watching a poetry recital livestream. The hexarch had invited him to the performance, put on by a Shuos agent whose job it was to pretend to be an Andan. Jedao had declined, claiming that crowds made him jittery. No one had challenged the lie.
The truth was other. Jedao had not redecorated the suite since he had moved into it. The wallpaper remained tranquil green. Furniture in wood—real wood, to which he responded with unwanted atavistic delight. He shifted the chairs around from time to time, just to prove he could, and also because he wondered if it bothered his watchers. (He had no delusions of privacy in the heart of Shuos headquarters.) He watered the potted green onion plant, the same one he’d been given two years ago, with great diligence. The hexarch asked after it every time they met, although Jedao hadn’t figured out why Mikodez cared so much about container gardening. None of this did anything to ameliorate the vast emptiness in his heart, the fact that he had no human friends here, and never would.
The colors in the Citadel were wrong. In place of the stark blacks and golds of the Kel, the Citadel was dominated by Mikodez’s favorite color, that transparently soothing shade of green. A few offices sported the garish Shuos red-and-gold, complete with ink paintings of ninefoxes with their staring tails. (“We have to uphold a few clichés,” Mikodez had said.)
Gone were the ashhawks, the tapestries woven (as Dhanneth had told Jedao once upon a bed) from the uniforms of the dead, and decorated with beads smelted from ruined guns or spent ammunition. Gone was the cup he had shared with the Kel officers at high table. Gone was the life, however much a lie, that he had woken to with Hexarch Nirai Kujen, dead by Jedao’s own hand.
Increasingly, Jedao retreated to the few memories he had left, and the question that haunted him increasingly. He’d had one friend, during that vanished lifetime four centuries ago. Vestenya Ruo, fellow cadet, whom he’d had an embarrassing crush on, and who, as far as he knew, had never shown any indication of interest in Jedao. Not that way.
Sometimes Jedao caught himself daydreaming that he’d find Ruo, and—and what? He was already a rapist; Dhanneth had committed suicide to drive that point home. That didn’t, however, sway Jedao in his desire to find out what Ruo’s fate had been. He had become irrationally convinced that if Ruo had lived a long and happy life, it would prove that Jedao himself wasn’t poison to everyone he touched.
It was odd that he needed the highest level of access, available only to Mikodez and select members of his senior staff, to answer a simple question about a Shuos cadet. True, Ruo had died sometime four centuries ago; would have died no matter what, given the finiteness of human lives. But what had been so special about his death that the truth was locked away like this?
Cheris had told him only that Ruo had died young. Jedao wondered, sometimes, what details she had omitted. And there was only one way to find out.
I am a Shuos.
Jedao took a steadying breath, trying to pretend that he cared about the poetry recital. The poet had said something about peacocks. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a real one. Jedao One would have known; but that was the problem.
Right on schedule, a snakeform servitor levitated down from one of the vents in the ceiling: Hemiola. It had once tried to explain its name to Jedao, and established that Jedao had no ability at music, or understanding of its theory, other than being able to find a beat to dance to. Hemiola flashed the lights along its articulated metal carapace in a friendly green of greeting.
Jedao leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers. It wasn’t impatience. Rather, he tapped in Simplified Machine Universal: Safe?
“Safe,” Hemiola flashed b
ack, even more green, if possible. Not for the first time, Jedao envied it its ability to jinx the Citadel’s surveillance system, which it used when the two of them wanted to talk, or, as now, when Jedao wanted to hide his activities from his watchers.
Too bad Kujen never thought to install me in a servitor body, Jedao thought. He’d asked Hemiola about it. After all, people already offloaded some of their memories into their augments. Hemiola had said that, as far as it could tell, the process by which Kujen had created Jedao had worked through a different, more complex mechanism involving exotic effects. So much for that.
Thank you for covering for me, Jedao said.
“It’s no problem,” Hemiola said. It didn’t emphasize that he needed to be quick, that every time it screwed with surveillance, it was running a risk. They both knew that.
Ordinarily the two of them met here, Jedao because he could only endure so much of his self-imposed isolation, Hemiola because it, too, was far from home. What went unspoken was that they were, aside from Mikodez, the last people who remembered Nirai Kujen with any fondness, however complicated.
Jedao wasted no time on apologies and called up a separate subdisplay, this one of pornography—a plausible reason for a man to want some time alone, surely?—leaving the poet-performer to declaim verses about more birds. Mocking the Kel, probably; he wasn’t clear on the nuances. Using the techniques that Hemiola had taught him, he began hacking, grid-diving, whatever they called it these days.
This should be harder, Jedao thought, bemused, as the system opened itself to him like a flower. (Great, now he was thinking in poetic symbols too.) But then, “hard” was relative. Thanks to Hemiola’s spying, and that of the other servitors that it had made arrangements with, Jedao had a detailed understanding of the hexarch’s security measures.
Access to the files he wanted should have required him to log in from Mikodez’s personal terminal. (“He must be certain no one can spoof it,” Hemiola had remarked.) Over the years, however, the servitors had mapped the system down to every flicker that passed through the hardware, down to the very molecules. And Jedao himself had an advantage that he had done his best to keep from his captors.