by Yoon Ha Lee
“Jedao,” she said. “We’ve arrived. Come with me.”
Jedao didn’t argue. Didn’t speak, either. Instead, he levered himself up and stood, watching her with dead eyes.
She’d endured long stretches of time in the black cradle with only Kujen for company. Even that had been intermittent. Kujen had enjoyed leaving her in the darkness so that she’d be grateful when he let her out. She’d known exactly what he was doing and why; had been pierced by the unwelcome sting of gratitude anyway. Still, she hadn’t expected this other Jedao’s quietness to bother her so much.
Cheris led the way to what passed for the galley: a small counter where two people could sit and eat if they didn’t mind bumping elbows.
“Great job,” 1491625 flashed at her from the cockpit. “He’s being so cooperative.” She ignored it, wondering, not for the first time, if Jedao understood Machine Universal. He’d never shown any reaction to 1491625’s speech, but she knew better than to assume.
Jedao took his accustomed seat, scrunched up so as to avoid touching her. Cheris was seized by the sudden desire to slap him, to get some reaction out of that unresponsive face. She was starting to feel, superstitiously, that through some mirror-sorcery, like in the Mwennin folktales she’d learned in her childhood, anything that happened to him would eventually happen to her.
Cheris retrieved her factorization instrument from the locker she’d carefully stowed it in two years before. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.
No answer, but his shoulders tensed. She was afraid for a moment that he would smash the instrument. She’d stop him, of course. It was at least as valuable as she was, and because of the tolerances in its manufacture, she couldn’t produce a new one from the small matter printer she had on board.
Tersely, as if she had his full attention, Cheris explained Kujen’s security, which demanded fast factorization of a very large composite number. The instrument would allow them to defeat the system. The catch: it only worked in certain heretical calendars.
Jedao flexed his hands. She couldn’t help staring. He looked so odd without his half-gloves. “I’ll cooperate,” he said. “Whatever you need.”
The high language, which they both spoke to each other, divided its pronouns into animate and inanimate classes. Jedao had used the inanimate version of I. That didn’t imply great things about his state of mind.
This is for you as much as it is for me, Cheris stopped herself from saying. No point in quarreling this close to their goal. “We’re here,” she said, and turned toward the airlock.
Jedao tackled her. Cheris bit down a yelp. Fought him, breaking one arm with a sickening crack before realizing he was hissing in her ear, “Stay down, there are hostiles—”
She went limp despite all her instincts screaming at her to disable Jedao while she had the chance, as if breaking bones did any good against someone who healed as rapidly as he did. Jedao covered her, which she interpreted as calculation rather than honor or mercy—that inhuman regeneration made him the better shield.
1491625 was saying something in livid frantic flashes of light. Cheris had interpreted part of it—The base is active—when the explosion hit.
Heat. Fire. Jedao’s weight atop her. The side of the needlemoth tore open and formed tormented flanges of metal. The meat reek of scorched flesh, except with that peculiar cloying undertone that she associated with Jedao’s black blood.
The attack wasn’t over. Why should it be? Always follow up an advantage, and so on; lessons from a lifetime of soldiering. The needlemoth rolled as something hit it, a hammer-blow like a giant’s fist. Jedao clutched at her, his face twisting as he landed on the broken arm. Cheris had enough time to feel sorry for him before smashing into the far wall. At least the chairs were bolted down or one would have landed on her.
Jedao scrambled back to a low crouch only to be knocked down again by the next round of explosions. He struggled upright, scrabbled for a mask and air tank, thrust both at her. His face was ghastly pale, and blood ran down from a cut at his temple.
Cheris accepted the mask and tank. Her lungs didn’t hurt—yet—but a faint edge of panic threatened to overcome her, the body’s insistence on breathing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glistening membrane stretching over most of the blown-out carapace as the automated repair system sealed the breach. The membrane was perilously thin, and wouldn’t withstand much of a barrage.
“Knife,” Jedao mouthed at her, signing the word as well for emphasis. Then: “You—sealant.”
A knife was a peculiar weapon to demand when they were under missile fire. Cheris could only guess at the reason they hadn’t been destroyed yet: the needlemoth’s primary defense was stealth, and its carapace couldn’t withstand a determined assault. Nevertheless, she pointed out the location of the survival kit, hoping he understood her.
At least sealant she understood the need for. She reckoned it more urgent than the knife, although surely he had his reasons. She wasn’t sure they had enough sealant on board to reinforce the membrane. But better to try than give up. She crawled, bracing for each new impact, to the cabinet of emergency canisters. Clawed at the hatch until rational thought reasserted itself and she was able to toggle it open.
Bright hell-flashes sizzled through the debris and smoke in the air. It took Cheris several abstracted moments to figure out that 1491625 was signaling her. She clung to one of the hand/footholds like an awkward spider, shouted at Jedao, quite unnecessarily, to get out of the way, pointed the canister at the breach, and opened the nozzle.
Foam gushed from the nozzle, expanding like an immense hungry fungus. (Like many Kel, Cheris had a horror of fungus—specifically the dreaded weapon known as the fungal canister—even if she’d only seen it used once during her original life, and that from an unimaginable distance.) For a second she thought she had gone blind, that everything would forever be swallowed up in a rush of bubbling murky gray.
Then the foam clung and shrank, setting as it made contact with the carapace and walls and membrane. Cheris was glad she hadn’t gotten any on herself. She’d heard of people getting cemented to foam sealant and having to be extricated with cutters and stinging solvent. Or worse, being entombed in the foam, suffocating as the foam forced itself down your throat and blossomed grotesquely in the lungs—
Cheris shook off the gruesome vision and slithered over to Jedao, where she received a shock of an entirely different sort. He had retrieved the knife—good—except he had buried it hilt-deep in his chest and was carving himself like a demented roast. Cheris stared in frank astonishment as he yanked the knife out and pulled out a chunk of flesh oozing the familiar black blood.
“Jedao,” she wheezed as the needlemoth lifted off—thankfully, they still had a maneuver drive left for 1491625 to work with—“what in the name of fire and ash?” At least she thought that was what she said; the particulates in the air caused her to hack and cough. The acrid metallic stench mingling with the alien reek of Jedao’s blood didn’t help.
He shook his head without meeting her eyes, as if that meant anything in the haze of smoke and foam off-gas and stinging metallic fibers. Cheris glimpsed a pulsing nest of maggot-like tendrils knotting and unknotting where he should have had a heart. He reached into the wound with his fingers, grimaced, and twisted, then removed his hand. “Got it,” he mouthed.
Drenched by dripping gore was a small device of metal and crystal. Cheris’s heart clenched. A bug or a tracking device.
“It must have been in one of the bullets,” Jedao said. “I should have noticed it earlier, but its density is such a close match—” He brought the device up to his mouth, placed it between two molars, bit down hard. There was a crackling noise and a pungent spark as it combusted. He spat it out; Cheris didn’t see where it went.
“Who?” Cheris asked. But she already knew.
“The Shuos,” Jedao said, bitter.
All that time flying stealthed and it hadn’t made a difference. The Shuos had followe
d them here in their shadowmoths—surely more than one—and now they might die before either of them achieved their goal. “’25,” she called out, because in her haste she didn’t have time to pronounce the servitor’s full name, “status?”
She didn’t like drawing attention to it; Pyrehawk Enclave’s protocols forbade it. But she needed to communicate with it, and she suspected that Jedao had already guessed 1491625’s sentience.
It spoke at the same time, hijacking the needlemoth’s own imaging systems to warn them. Cheris had never known it to do that in the past. Servitors were generally discreet about the degree to which they could nose around in grid systems. The emergency couldn’t be denied, however.
Under fire, 1491625 sent to them in hell-red flashes, the world lighting up in gory crimson. At least two shadowmoths, probably more still stealthed.
Cheris’s heart sank even as a part of her thought, not a little snidely, Great, two Jedaos and we’ve finally met a scenario we can’t fox our way out of?
“We need to parley,” she said. They couldn’t win a battle of attrition. The question was, would their attackers be willing to talk? Especially after Jedao had attempted to eat one of their comrades?
Only one way to find out.
“Fuck, no,” Jedao said. He grabbed for her arm, missed. She twisted past him and squeezed by the disgusting mess of sealant, shuddering from the rubbery texture against her cheek, then hurried toward the cockpit.
1491625 didn’t have to be told to slam the cockpit door in Jedao’s face. Cheris told herself she wasn’t being spiteful. Shuos operatives wouldn’t react positively to Jedao running around loose, and never mind that they were unlikely to think kindly of her, either.
Jedao immediately began banging on the door. Cheris suppressed a growl. Why couldn’t he ever be convenient? Even when he’d been a ghost stapled to her shadow, as opposed to a regenerating menace with a teenager’s moods and memories, he’d never been convenient.
“Comm channel’s open,” 1491625 flashed at Cheris. “Have fun.”
It would have been nice if someone around here had any faith in her. “This is Ajewen Cheris,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the thumping. At least it was only (only?) thumping and not more explosions. “Request parley.”
The response came immediately. Good: they’d been expecting her. Importunate of them to blow a hole in her vehicle just to get a response, but in their position she’d have done the same.
“Cheris,” a vicious soprano purred her name back at her—and pronounced it with the correct Mwen-dal pitch accent. The connection was audio-only. “Or should I call you Jedao? This is Agent Shuos Nija, pleased to see you’re still the hexarchate’s worst trouble magnet.”
Shit. Nija was the girl whom Hexarch Mikodez had, for inexplicable reasons, adopted after saving her from the hexarchs’ purge of the Mwennin. By now she’d be a woman grown.
“You will power down your maneuver drive and land for an in-person parley,” Nija continued. “Otherwise I will take great satisfaction in blowing your needlemoth and everyone on it, including yourself, into nameless particles. Your friend might be able to recover from that, but I’m pretty sure you’re no longer immortal except in reputation. And for saints’ sake”—she said the oath in flawless Mwen-dal, like twisting a knife that had already penetrated a vital organ—“I don’t know if that’s your engine making those horrible knocking noises, but you should look into that. Which you’ll be able to do if you persuade me to stop firing.”
Fuck you too, Cheris thought in a friendly manner, then cursed herself for slipping. The reminder of her Mwennin heritage, and the fact that she’d abandoned the new life she’d tried to make for herself, cut deeply. Retreating into Jedao’s persona was, however, not going to improve the situation. Mikodez’s agents were unlikely to be much impressed by—
“It’s you,” Cheris said aloud, to test Nija’s reaction. How much time could she buy if she dragged out the interpersonal melodrama?
Moroish Nija, the Mwennin survivor who had been a teenager when Cheris first encountered her. Mikodez had scooped Nija up and adopted her. Nija hated Cheris to begin with, and who could blame her? After all, Cheris’s revolution, however well-intentioned, had resulted in the purge of the Mwennin people. And the man who swept in to save some few thousand Mwennin from the other hexarchs had been none other than Mikodez himself.
“Yes,” Nija agreed, “it’s me. Are you going to do it, or am I going to have to shoot you down in pursuit of my mission? Because I have been waiting over a decade to take you down.”
Cheris wasn’t concerned, despite the threats. Mikodez had sent Nija, and Mikodez wasn’t stupid. He would have selected his strike force for this mission carefully. If he thought there existed the least chance that Nija would go rogue and indulge a personal vendetta rather than his orders, he would never have sent her. Nija, for her part, would be loyal—personally loyal—to the man who had defied the other hexarchs to save her and her people.
No: Nija was baiting Cheris, with a pretext that sounded plausible. But Cheris was an expert in the art of plausible lies, and she recognized one when she heard it.
“We’re landing,” Cheris said, reinforcing the order in Simplified Machine Universal to 1491625. The servitor’s lights shaded muddy orange in dissatisfaction, but it complied.
While Cheris continued to bait Nija, certain that Nija’s spite was as feigned as her own, Cheris signed rapid instructions to 1491625. “Pretend to be me,” she signed to it. “Buy time for me and Jedao to carry out the ritual.” It was too bad she couldn’t send Jedao alone, but both of them had to be present for this to work.
Servitors disliked revealing the extent of their ability to hack into computer systems or fake video/audio shenanigans. Cheris herself hadn’t thought of it as a possibility until she’d met Hemiola. 1491625, for its part, hadn’t forgiven her for subjecting it to fan videos made to popular dance tunes; the two of them had wildly divergent tastes in music. In this case, however, 1491625 didn’t quibble. It opened the cockpit door.
Jedao stopped beating against the door the instant it began to move. 1491625 was already playing back a carefully altered version of the sound to make it seem like the background noise hadn’t changed. Cheris wished she could linger to see what else it came up with—1491625 had an odd sense of humor and a low opinion of Shuos, which might combine in interesting ways—but there was no time for that.
Cheris pressed her head against Jedao’s in a parody of affection so that he could hear her murmurs through the vibrations in the helmet. “You remember the map?”
He nodded.
“If you’re moth-derived”—she remembered how he’d launched himself at the Shuos personnel carrier—“can you carry me to the base?”
Another nod.
“The factoring device,” she said.
He backed away from her so she could retrieve it. Miracle of miracles, it was intact; it had not been sucked out of the wound in the needlemoth. Without the factoring device, none of this mattered. “We need to protect this—”
Inspired, Cheris emptied out the first aid kit, stuffed the device inside, and sprayed the container with skinseal for good measure. Would that offer enough protection, though?
Jedao held his hand out. She gave it to him. He bit his lip, then shoved the device into the hole in his chest, causing fresh blood to ooze out. Cheris had seen a lot of revolting things in the past four hundred years, but this was new. He grinned sardonically at her, his eyes bloodshot and his jaw taut with suppressed pain.
She pressed her helmet to his head again. “Through the membrane,” she said, indicating an area where the sealant was not as thick. 1491625 certainly had no need for atmospheric pressure, or oxygen.
They didn’t have time for a more elaborate plan, or a better one. But she remembered the old Kel truism: better a mediocre plan now than a perfect one too late. Jedao gestured sharply: Wait. He dug webcord out of its place in the toolkit, good for him for
memorizing its location, and pocketed the utility knife as well.
Cheris stood immobile while he webbed her to his torso. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly in an embrace that made her shudder, more due to distaste than physical discomfort. His hands trembled, stilled. Pain, he signed to her.
At first she didn’t understand. Had he gotten so injured that his abilities were compromised? Then it came to her: he was warning her that she was about to be hurt.
Scarcely had she indicated her understanding when the pain, as promised, hit her. Jedao had curled himself around her like a possessive lover. Love had nothing to do with it. He was shielding her, as he had earlier; and through the hell-bloom of the pain, the sudden sharding impact as they flew through the foam and membrane patch, Cheris had a moment to recognize that the cushioning of his body had saved her from death or serious harm.
Then all thought fled as he accelerated, and she blacked out.
YOU CAN’T DIE yet, Jedao thought at Cheris as he dragged himself, and her, toward the maw of Kujen’s base. I need Jedao One’s memories. Don’t die.
Cheris had given him a dossier of the base’s particulars two days ago and told him to read it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have stood a chance. The combination of sudden passage through vacuum and bursting through a ship had robbed Jedao of vision. At least he had the othersense to guide him. The ground shook intermittently, indicating explosions or projectile impacts. He crouched small, made himself an insectine scurrying creature dashing across the plain with the ancient pit-marks of pattering micrometeorites. Only the suspicious smoothed areas in the dust told him that the moon had known visitors or inhabitants, servitors if no one else.
Kujen had built the base cunningly, but not cunningly enough to fool moth-senses. And why should he? No one was going to chat up a moth to ask it where the base was.
Jedao sensed the break in the surface, the artificial mechanism hidden beneath layers of rock. Was Cheris still breathing? Jedao looked inside her, detected the minute fluctuations of pressure and density in her lungs, and was reassured that she hadn’t abandoned him yet.