Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Giving you Jedao’s memories—the first Jedao’s memories—will mean giving them to you,” Cheris said. She was starting to sweat, although it wasn’t particularly warm, even in the suit. “It’s not like copying a drama onto another data solid. If my understanding of Kujen’s research is correct, all that I’ll have left is a shadow of those four hundred years.”

  Jedao wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why didn’t you get rid of them earlier?”

  “Because as long as they’re in me,” Cheris said, “I can keep them safe.” She’d thought about expelling them earlier; couldn’t deny that she’d been tempted. But when it came right down to it, she didn’t trust anyone else in the hexarchate with Jedao’s remnants.

  Cheris had complex emotions about housing the mind of the hexarchate’s most notorious mass murderer. She’d ingested Jedao’s memories eleven years ago, in the wake of the Siege of Scattered Needles and the destruction of her swarm, because it had been a matter of survival. There had been no other way to obtain the information she needed to prevail in the hexarchs’ game—or Jedao’s, for that matter.

  If the situation hadn’t reached that crisis point, she wouldn’t have done it. She knew herself that well. Jedao himself had endured unwritten trauma. She remembered how much it had pierced her when she discovered the old tragedy of Ruo’s suicide, which had driven Jedao to vengeance against the heptarchate. The effect on the Jedao in front of her had to have been similar. Except he had experienced the shock at a remove, by reading whatever records he’d unearthed, rather than having the memory spearing directly into his mind.

  Jedao’s experience had kept her alive. Cheris had missed him in those early days after his death. She would not have expected to grow attached to someone with his reputation. But they’d depended on each other, toward the end, even if they’d never precisely achieved friendship.

  She couldn’t entirely explain her dislike of this other, inhuman Jedao and his obnoxious habit of surviving fatal gunshot wounds. Oh, she’d known that Kujen could have manufactured himself a thousand Jedao-alikes if he’d been so inclined, in appearance if nothing else. Kujen had thought nothing of “disciplining” unlucky Nirai for incompetence or insubordination: resculpting their bodies to make them uncannily beautiful, reprogramming their minds to make them pleasing bed-companions or servants. On occasion he’d also appropriated prisoners of war, heretics, condemned criminals. And the hexarchate had let him, because nobody cared what happened to those people, and Kujen offered such excellent gifts of technology.

  Even now it was hard to conceal how she felt about this hawkfucking Jedao-other. (What was she supposed to call him? His name tasted sour in her mouth.) The unpleasant shock that ran through her every time she saw his face would never go away. It was almost, but not quite, the face she had seen in the mirror while the original Jedao had been anchored to her; left and right reversed, so subtle that she doubted anyone else would have been able to tell the difference.

  He was afraid of her. She could smell it on him, for all that he wasn’t human. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She’d leveraged Jedao’s reputation before; had used the fact that people were afraid that she’d snap and slaughter them at the slightest provocation. She hadn’t taken it personally, just as Jedao hadn’t. After 409 years as a ghost, he’d come to rely on it.

  But this Jedao’s fear rankled, even though it made perfect sense. She’d tried to assassinate him when he was Kujen’s pet general, although he’d failed to die. Then she’d emptied her gun into his head while he was a prisoner, unarmed, in violation of any rule of law, because he’d confessed to raping a Kel under his command. Given all that, she was impressed that he’d walked up to her door and stood there while she shot him again.

  While she puzzled through her reactions, Jedao stood hugging himself, looking more like an awkward teenager than a grown man in body language, although his physique matched hers exactly at the time of her execution at the age of forty-five. At least he didn’t look like a starvation victim this time, as he had under Kujen’s command.

  (Strange. Why hadn’t Kujen been feeding him? The Kujen she remembered had loved feeding people, even people he didn’t like, something she’d never understood. Someday she’d unbend enough to ask what had transpired.)

  “What did you bring with you?” Cheris said at last, because the silence was grating on her nerves. Jedao’s instincts told her to hold her tongue and wait to see if the awkwardness persuaded this other self to reveal anything useful, but at the moment, she had little patience for Shuos games, including her own.

  Jedao swallowed convulsively. “Not much. The clothes on my back. I have two ration bars in my pocket because a... friend insisted, and a water bottle beneath my jacket. No weapons. I didn’t think you’d react well if I showed up with a gun.”

  She conceded that much was true and was about to ask him why he thought two ration bars and a water bottle were the most essential things he could bring with him. Was the water bottle even full? She doubted his ability to manage everyday practical tasks.

  Jedao stiffened, almost as if he’d heard her thought, but his head was cocked and he held up his hand. Cheris nodded once, just enough to acknowledge the signal. It was possible that his senses were better than hers. Too bad Mikodez had never seen fit to brief her on his captive’s capabilities, even if she and Mikodez didn’t trust each other. She couldn’t imagine that Mikodez wouldn’t have studied Jedao exhaustively.

  His expression didn’t change, but Jedao began signing to her in the Shuos hand language, slowly at first, then more rapidly when she nodded again to indicate that she understood. His signs struck her as oddly inflected. That could be because he’d learned a more modern form of the language; her knowledge was some centuries out of date.

  Fourteen people incoming. Two vehicles. Presumed hostile.

  Fourteen meant two squads, if Shuos infantry still worked by the same organizational principles. Cheris doubted it was anything other than Shuos infantry. She was grateful that their commander hadn’t simply ordered a bomb strike. At the same time, she didn’t trust restraint, especially if it appeared to work in her favor.

  Estimated time until contact? she signed to Jedao. It was a single sign, given Shuos proclivities. Situations like this—special operations—were what the sign language had evolved to deal with. Back when she’d been in academy four centuries ago, it had been a standing joke that you could order a tactical strike against the nearest city with a single sign, but it took three minutes to ask, Where did you put the cookies this time?

  Jedao’s brow wrinkled as he considered something she couldn’t see or hear. Under twelve minutes.

  Fast enough to cause trouble. Besides, she didn’t want to rely too much on Jedao’s figure and be caught unawares. Whatever his mode of detection was, the possibility remained that they were being stalked by other groups and that this attack was a feint.

  Follow my instructions, Cheris signed. While she didn’t precisely consider Jedao an ally, he had a strong incentive to keep her alive. That would suffice.

  Jedao signed an acknowledgment.

  They had to last until pickup came. She’d been promised that the needlemoth had been upgraded. The servitors for whom she worked had told her that since she and 1491625 had busted the thing to hell and gone, it was time to fix it up better than before. She hoped that meant it would be able to evade whatever Shuos defense forces orbited the world.

  None of that meant anything, however, if she and Jedao didn’t survive the incoming assault. Jedao might be able to regenerate from anything short of a fury bomb, and maybe even from that; but Cheris had to be more careful with her ordinary human body.

  On the other hand, she’d once been Kel, and she was determined to teach the Shuos not to underestimate her.

  She assessed the asymmetries of the situation. Most of them favored her attackers. Numbers, for one. She’d outthought and outfought larger groups before, but in real life she preferred to be the one with the adva
ntage. Too bad she rarely got it.

  Numbers alone wouldn’t have bothered her so much. But the difference in equipment was going to aggravate the situation. All she possessed was one lousy handgun, not even a decent rifle, and the survival knife she’d stuffed into her belt.

  The Shuos might have disguised themselves more or less (often less) as ordinary inhabitants of the settlement, but they would come fully equipped. Whether “fully equipped” meant state-of-the-art weaponry or hand-me-downs due to the budgetary constraints that Mikodez might or might not have been lying about was immaterial. Cheris was sure that even if they were using older equipment, they outgunned her and Jedao.

  Her best asset, aside from her own wits, was Jedao himself. She was human, and their attackers were too, but Jedao wasn’t. She had to use that. Of course, the attackers might have been briefed about Jedao’s capabilities. But that didn’t make those capabilities go away, if she and Jedao used them carefully.

  You’re going to be the distraction, she told Jedao. I want you to wade in the middle of the largest group and fuck them up (there was a specific sign for fuck them up). I will take care of the rest.

  For a second she wasn’t sure he’d go for it. She wouldn’t have blamed him for having reservations. Even someone who could repeatedly return from the dead didn’t have to like it.

  Then Jedao nodded. I will buy you as much time as I can, he signed. And, more hesitantly: I don’t know the limits of my regenerative abilities. He had to cobble together a sign for regenerative using a couple of medical terms. “Regeneration” didn’t usually indicate an ability to come back from the dead, but given the context, she knew what he meant.

  I’ll keep that in mind, Cheris replied. Go.

  He went, slipping away into the shadows of the trees with uncanny quietness.

  Cheris was already in motion. Two years of teaching bright-eyed children, however adorable, slipped away. She’d missed life as a soldier. It was time to get to work.

  SHE’S USING YOU, a soft voice whispered at the back of Jedao’s head. While you’re busy figuring out how to take on fourteen people by yourself, she’ll get away.

  Jedao told his paranoia to shut up. Of course she was using him. He’d come to her as a supplicant and disrupted her life, so he owed her, at least until it became clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver. And she was the one with centuries of experience being him. He couldn’t see her taking his orders.

  The trees loomed around him. This deep in the wood, most of them were tall, like stately sentinels. He didn’t have any idea how old they were—not like he knew anything about trees or terraforming protocols—but several of them had cores that felt weak and spongy, less dense than the surrounding wood, to his othersense. Rot of some sort, he guessed.

  The Shuos coming for them presumably had some idea of the local terrain, whether due to prior familiarity or good maps. But they might not be prepared for him to have a better one. For example, he doubted that they kept track of rotting trees. That gave him an idea.

  Five minutes until contact. They were moving at a steady rate, which helped, and now they’d dispersed. No point clustering up just in case Cheris (or, he supposed, Jedao himself) had smuggled out bombs or set up traps.

  Jedao didn’t plan on dropping trees on them, although it would have been funny, for certain values of funny. Thanks so much, Kujen, he thought at a man he’d killed two years ago. Kujen could have built Jedao’s body in any number of ways; and what had he gone for? Immortality. Jedao was sure that the other properties of being a moth-derived construct were side-effects.

  Those side-effects were going to save him. Or else he was going to make for some exciting footnotes in some poor Shuos operative’s mission report.

  Both vehicles had disgorged their loads of personnel. One of them was parked deeper in the woods. He didn’t care about that one, other than avoiding it; while he wasn’t an expert on current Shuos personnel carriers, if it wasn’t armed head-to-toe he would eat Mikodez’s entire annual supply of chocolate. (He hated chocolate, which Mikodez refused to believe. They’d had multiple arguments about it. Life in the Citadel of Eyes was strange in unpredictable ways.) More to the point, if it was back there, it wasn’t relevant to the instructions that Cheris had given him.

  The other personnel carrier, on the other hand—

  Jedao located a sturdy tree. Its lowest branch was three times his height. Entertaining as the action scenes in dramas were, he couldn’t jump that high. But jumping wasn’t how he intended to get up there.

  Jedao steeled himself for the inevitable agony, then grabbed the space-time weave and pulled himself up, almost as though he were levitating. He bit down against a scream as the pain set in. Whether that was because he wasn’t a proper moth, or because he was an immature one (as the Revenant had once hinted), or some other reason entirely, he had no idea. It felt as though someone was boiling his marrow from the inside out.

  On the other hand, Jedao was growing inured to pain. It wasn’t healthy to be blasé about getting shot, boiled, or otherwise mutilated, but since he had a job to do, he’d worry about that later.

  A new source of pain made itself known to him when he miscalculated and a protruding twig, with thorns, raked through his arm. Jedao hissed as he dripped blood and made himself concentrate before he fucked up again. Damned if he was going to let Cheris down by wimping out over a trivial injury; and by his standards it was trivial.

  He paused for a second when he reached a high limb that felt like it would support his weight and clung precariously to it. It gave him a reasonable view of his surroundings, not that he could tell one kind of leafy nuisance from another. No one had yet tracked him here. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to dally, either. He didn’t want to underestimate Shuos operatives.

  The two squads continued to approach by circuitous routes, still spreading out. Their movements were coordinated, cautious. He would have expected no less. He was going to have to get their attention.

  The second personnel vehicle had, after dropping its passengers off, returned to the air. That was a mistake, although its pilot didn’t realize it yet. Anything short of teleporting out of the area would have been a mistake, and if teleportation existed in the hexarchate it was news to him.

  The personnel vehicle was moving fast—but Jedao had previously pulled himself across interplanetary distances and lived to regret it. He braced himself for the pain to get worse, because why would his life ever get easier. Then he calculated an interception path and launched himself at the vehicle.

  This time the agony wasn’t just the sensation of his marrow boiling. The air itself burned him thanks to the speed of his passage. Jedao had time to think, Why couldn’t you have made me a more aerodynamic shape, Kujen? and contort himself sideways so his head wouldn’t pop on impact before he slammed into the rear of the vehicle.

  He felt as though he’d broken all his bones, except he could still feel some of his fingers and toes, so it couldn’t be that bad, could it? The world went black, and he thought he might be losing consciousness. Then the blackness cleared, and he found himself clinging, by felicitous and not entirely calculated juxtaposition of forces, to the rear of the craft.

  Jedao was no mechanic, but there were only so many places you could usefully put the levitation units. He massed a lot less than the vehicle, but the other half of momentum was velocity. He’d knocked it significantly off-course, and the damage he’d done was causing it to list worryingly.

  While Jedao could (probably) survive an uncontrolled fall as long as the carrier didn’t land on top of him, that wasn’t his plan. He had a use for it. He’d been telling the truth when he’d said to Cheris that he’d come unarmed—up to a point. She’d probably been thinking of firearms and grenades, conventional weapons. He had neglected to bring a gun in any form that she’d recognized, but all a gun was was a means of throwing a projectile fast enough to hurt people. I’m your gun, indeed.

  There were two people
still aboard the carrier. He’d only shocked them for a couple of moments. The carrier began firing back at him, although it was hampered by the fact that he was hanging on to the rear and it was programmed not to shoot holes in itself. Still, he wasn’t out of trouble yet. It vomited out several drones, which began peppering him with laser fire.

  Time for the next phase. He’d lost track of Cheris, not intentionally, thanks to the pain. It would have helped if he knew where she was, because he didn’t want to corpse her by accident. He couldn’t take the time to locate her amid the dizzying group of human-sized masses, however. Besides, she knew what instructions she’d given him. She’d get herself to safety, even if she wasn’t privy to the details of his plan. It wasn’t trust, exactly; it still made his heart (well, whatever he had) ache with ambivalent gratitude.

  Jedao slipped several hair-raising centimeters at the same time that a laser singed his side. He caught a whiff of the charred, sickly sweet smell before the wind whipped it away. Stay focused, he told himself, and shoved the personnel carrier, this time angling down toward the largest concentration of hostiles on the ground.

  The drones had trouble keeping up. His acceleration in the past two-and-a-fraction seconds had sufficed for outrunning them. Of course, he’d lost all surface sensation, which implied bad things about the state of his skin, or the nerves beneath.

  I’m going to be a very good mothdrive when I grow up! Jedao thought, with borderline hysterical cheer. Too bad he wasn’t really a mothdrive, or he’d be comfortably shielded inside a metal carapace and not subject to yet more atmospheric friction. With his luck, he was probably trailing smoke.