Nightwatch over windscar, p.10
Nightwatch over Windscar, page 10
“There was a third mecha, behind us—”
“Corso shot it. Iffy . . . trapped it in stone. Notch cut it up. They’re fine. Everyone is fine.” Iari sounded a little surprised. “Whatever you did to defend the riev, it helped.”
“I didn’t do anything.” His voice sounded rougher than he expected. Right. Corrosive gases. He must’ve inhaled a little in the first moments. He coughed, then swallowed and regretted it. Like slivers of glass. “I never got the chance.”
“That is not true. It was distracted with jacta bolts,” Char said, without turning around. They sounded smug. “You are an adequate shot.”
“Sss, adequate. You try without targeting. This setatir thing went after me.” It was just starting to hit him, how close it’d come. “With hexes. Straight for me. I thought it would go for the riev.”
“Of course it went for you. You’re vakari. It probably wanted some new bones. We broke all its other babies.” Iari’s voice softened a fraction. “Close your visor, Gaer.”
Then she was turning away, retracting both shield and axe and clipping the inert shaft to her hip. Trusting him to close his visor and not to crumple to the setatir floor and have an attack of the shakes. That mecha was huge. And pointy. And stank of whitefire scorch and Iari’s vengeance.
For the love of all the dark gods, he’d gone face first into Brood before. This shouldn’t bother him. So the mecha had aimed at him. Swarm had done that before. Boneless, too.
But those were impersonal horrors. Things he’d trained for. This was—not. K’bal had probably built that mecha, and wichu might’ve had hands on it too, then or since, and neither of those people had much love for his. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t Protectorate, that his foremother had been one of the instigators of the Schism, that he personally held a dim opinion of genocide. All that mecha saw was vakari.
Now Luki arrived, Llian in tow, and there was suddenly not enough room in the corridor, with the riev still clustered around their battered mecha, and Iari’s dead mecha, and three templars and bah.
Gaer walked down the corridor, past the templars, like he had a plan. Which he did. Sort of. There was no one down the right-side corridor, and there was an unattended, closed door. He was going to open it. He went to the wall panel. He had no Winter Bite to confirm or deny movement on the other side, but—there. He coaxed the rig into sealing his visor again. The HUD showed him a list of indignities, minor damage, normal levels of phlogiston. Then it ran diagnostics on him and added to its list. But his visor seals worked, so he was fine.
His jaw-plates hurt from how tight he’d clamped them. The scarred one especially. He suspected inflammation from the corrosive gas along the seams where Aedis mesh held what was left his own flesh together. He tried to relax it, flexing it carefully, as he settled into a squat in front of the door panel. This lock looked very much like the last one. Same mechanism. Same hexes. He dispatched the hexes. He should wait for Iari before he opened it. Or someone in the Aedis. Or Corso, for that matter.
But the setatir mecha had gone after him. It was personal. Iari had said—it probably wanted some new bones, and that nagged at him. She’d been teasing. She hadn’t been serious. But what if it had? The bone mecha must’ve come from someplace in here. Some facility that made them. He reckoned he had a fifty-fifty chance, either this door or the one by Winter Bite, of finding such a thing. A, a crypt full of dead vakari. Or a really well-guarded storage closet. Or, really, anything.
But hunches were not reasonable, and he was having one. And if he waited, it would mean he was scared. Or prudent.
He opened the door.
He did not get a faceful of mecha or whitefire. His headlamp punched a hole into perfectly normal darkness. This room had seven walls, counting the one with the door. Like the walls in the large cafeteria-garden space, these varied in length and width, and in the angles at which they met each other, though the height remained uniform. The wall with the door was just wide enough for the door. The one more or less directly across from it was the longest, lined with what looked like a bank of cryostasis tubes or coolant canisters. They didn’t match, as if they had different manufacturers, or different purposes. There were tables shoved up against one of the other walls: slightly too high, oddly bowed in the center, with an attached console and what looked like a retractable cover. Several of what Gaer guessed were turing consoles on individual pillars jutted up in no discernible pattern. The whole place was . . . uneasy. Unbalanced.
“Dammit, Gaer.” Iari sounded a little bit breathless. His HUD said she was still back in the corridor, coming fast. “I turn my back for one minute—”
He held up a hand to forestall her. “It’s empty. Maybe. I need Iffy.”
“You have me.” That, said on external comms, meant for him, as she came up beside him. “Did you know it was empty?”
“No. But I thought it must be. The mecha attacked us out there.”
“There could’ve been another one in here.”
“Then you would have saved me again,” he said, softly, also on external comms. He’d intended it to come out lightly, halfway to jest. Instead the words roughed in his throat, caught on the phlegm and blood. He looked at her instead, knowing she couldn’t see through his visor. That she’d just see herself in reflection.
“Someday, Gaer . . .” She trailed off, and sighed. “What’s in here you wanted so badly?”
“I wanted to know what it was the wichu wanted the mecha to protect.”
“Wichu, not k’bal?”
“The doors were artificed. The k’bal might have known how to do that. But I know the wichu do. They were old hexes, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new wichu. And now we see what was so valuable that they needed to lock it in. Cryostasis tubes.”
One was clearly of human manufacture, shaped like an oblong box and stamped with a pre-Confederate logo and words in a language not Comspek. Another pair were clearly tenju-made, eight-sided, from the same vintage. They had ships’ logos painted on them, peeled and faded with age. Another four were marked as Confederation, with that generic dimension intended to fit everyone from an alw to a tenju—but still old, before the Accords.
And there were three that were smooth, unfaceted, like capsules rather than coffins. A little smaller than the others, though still large enough for a tenju, a vakar, a human. Gaer’s optic picked out the artificing, barely visible on the surface. His actual eyes picked out tiny teslas, dimmed to save power. Because there was power.
Wichu. Post-Accord manufacture.
Iari had stopped at the oddly shaped table. She had one hand on the cover, the other flat in the bed. “This looks like it’s some kind of surgical unit. I don’t see a med-mecha, though, so—it’s got to be old. Expansion-era, maybe. This could’ve been a medical facility.”
“With cryostasis tubes? That’s not an effective use of resources.”
“Sure it is.” Iari’s voice faded as she moved around the perimeter. “In the army, we used them for catastrophic trauma. Things you couldn’t treat on the front.”
“Not the Aedis?”
She was quiet long enough he thought she might not’ve heard. He tapped a private channel to her. She didn’t open that either, until Gaer thought there was something wrong with his comms. Then a faint click and:
“Our nanomecha can stabilize most injuries. What they can’t will kill you anyway—you know. Missing limbs. Really big holes. Massive blood loss.” She made one of those breathy little huhs. “There’s a story that the nanomecha don’t like cryo. That we don’t use it because they either don’t or won’t work, or they won’t let it work. One initiate horror story is that cryo actually kills them. That they just stop functioning, and you’re fucked afterward.”
There had been rumors for as long as Gaer could remember, both in and out of Five Tribes cadet circles, that Aedis nanomecha were . . . if not sentient, then more aware than anything that size had a right to be. It was that game of how barbaric are our allies, really? Gaer, who’d seen some of the classified reports, knew that the nanomecha had been sapient when they’d been a wichu bioweapon. He supposed the Aedis had programmed that out of them before injecting them into templars.
Which would be a lot like genocide, which didn’t sound like the Aedis he knew, but he was definitely not bringing that up to Iari. She’d gotten quiet again. Probably thinking about her own nanomecha, and how they’d gone offline for a brief window, before coming back somehow changed. Probably thinking about Notch’s, and what they might be doing now.
“You know,” he said, “the wichu made the original Aedis nanomecha. Maybe that is the back door Jich’e’enfe exploited last year, to breach yours. If she had found some of that old code.”
“The wichu made a bioweapon, not—what we have.”
“Ah. I didn’t think you knew that. I hadn’t thought that was common knowledge among templars.”
“It’s not. I used to sleep with the Chief Chirurgeon. She liked to brag.”
“Ah. Yes. The charming Sister Diran.” Gaer poked along the edges of the bank of ’stasis tubes. There was power in the facility, obviously, but the individual power cells on the old tubes showed no activity. The new ones, however, were not only active, but they were occupied. “Iari. Look. Should we open them?”
“What? Why?” Iari had been poking around one of the turing consoles. Now she abandoned that and came back to him. He waited for her to notice the same thing he had, to make the same conclusion.
Which she did. “Those are new tubes.”
“They are. And they’re wichu-made.”
“And there’s something or someone inside.” Said not with curiosity, or surprise, but flat, unimpressed distaste. “I don’t suppose you see any indication of who’s in there.”
“I do not.”
“Then no. Leave them locked until Iffy gets up here. Open an old one, if you have to open something. Mishka’s tits, Gaer, you’re worse than a kid during the Double Moon Festival.” She drifted away again.
He eyed the occupied ’stasis tubes. There were many things that could be in there. You could freeze things besides people. Medicines. Maybe even food. That would make sense; the wichu separatists wanted to disrupt ties with the Confederation, wanted to exact a little revenge on the vakari—wanted general mayhem, which did not lend itself to stable supply lines, and besides, their presence on Tanis was meant to be secret. Or, if the wichu separatists were using this site, which the newer tubes seemed to suggest . . . there might be a separatist in there. A living one, badly hurt. Maybe even Jich’e’enfe.
But Iari was right, too: they would need the Aedis facilities to treat anything serious. Gaer set one strand of curiosity aside and indulged the next closest, next best. Open an old tube. He chose one of the tenju-made, the one that looked newest. There was no point in arithmancy here. He checked anyway, flicking through all the layers with his optic. None of the machinery worked, as expected; but there was something on the surface layer, so dim Gaer almost missed it. Like an aura, in that it had hints of color, but there was nothing alive for an aura. It was like, like the stain of an aura, burned into the metal.
It wasn’t unheard of. You saw the phenomenon—or had, before the wide adoption of battle-rigs—on battlefields. Prisons. Hospitals. Places that took on that same resonance as the auras of the beings inhabiting them. There was a whole genre of vakari literature (in both Protectorate and Five Tribes) devoted to the fantasy that simple murders could produce them, and if an arithmancer were skilled enough, sensitive enough, they might discover how someone died, or who did it. But never, to Gaer’s recollection—in the actual data, not someone’s fancy—had there been aural bleeding from one person strong enough to leave an impression.
Until now. This tube held the vaguest hints of yellow, orange, sunset colors. There’d been panic, here. There’d been pain. A bruise-colored shadow that meant despair.
Iari wouldn’t appreciate the significance. She’d say, leave it shut, if you don’t want to look.
Want warred with should. But it had always been Gaer’s belief that knowing a thing was better than not, so—he flipped the panel open and, after a moment to figure out the manual controls, opened the tube.
The seal disengaged with a click. The door fit into a socket, propelled by hinges that lifted it in or out; there were tracks along which it would slide after that, to allow access to the interior. The hinges weren’t working. He curved his fingers around the edge, thankful for vakari talons. Rocked the door gently in its socket. The top hinge snapped. The bottom one, more stalwart, held on as the door slid open partway and jammed.
But it was enough. Oh, dear dark lords.
He’d expected a body. Expected desiccation, skin clinging to bone. Maybe just bones. He’d had vague expectations of a k’bal, three skulls, three necks, a more usual assortment of limbs. Or a tenju. Or a human.
But the skull looking back at him had jaw-plates, and long curving bones on the side. It had teeth bared and declaring its lineage, foremother and clan, etched in a red faded mostly to grey. For a moment Gaer stared at the dead vakar. Then gravity asserted itself and, without the door against which it had been leaning to support it, the corpse collapsed out of the tube.
Gaer hopped back as the skull, several tenacious vertebrae, and a forearm slid out. For a moment it hung there, looking very much like it wanted to claw its way free. Then the frail remnants of skin tore, and the bones popped loose, and, after a short fall, shattered as they hit the stone floor. The remainder of the corpse collapsed inside the tube.
Now, with the door partway open, he could see the inside. There was scoring all along the inside of the door, where the vakar had tried to get out, hands and feet turned against impervious steel. Oh dear dark lords, no wonder at all there were aura-stains.
“Iari. Come here.” Gaer was proud of how calm he sounded. How he hadn’t just yelled.
His tone must have warned her. Iari let out a tiny hiss of exasperation, but she didn’t protest. He turned as she came up beside him.
“I did not expect prisoners. Or torture.” He showed her the scoring. “This person was sealed inside and left to die. Protectorate. Before you ask how I know—the teeth. That tribe never rebelled.”
Iari crouched. Did not touch the broken remains on the floor, just looked, for a long moment, at what to her must be a jumble of bones. Of spikes. More death, and this time of a species she didn’t know well, anatomically. Didn’t know at all really, except for him. But oh, whoever had killed this vakar had known them well, exactly how to slice between spines and joints.
“We’ll send someone down for them. Are the other tubes—?”
“I haven’t looked.” Gaer’s face felt stiff. He thought about opening his visor. Letting her see the colors his chromatophores must be right now. Let her read him, and understand. Instead he said, “I don’t want to look. Iari. This person—is missing a hand and part of an arm. Surgically removed. Deliberately removed. That is how the setatir k’bal were getting their vakari bones for those mecha.”
Iari was looking at him. He could feel it. “What happened here is awful. But that’s not the problem we have to solve right now.”
It took a heartbeat to realize she was waiting for him to acknowledge that. He hissed through his nostrils. “I’m fine. What problem do we have to solve?”
“That was Luki on comm. Char and Winter Bite got into the other room. Luki says we need to see.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Iari didn’t remember Tobin running around this much when he’d been a captain and she’d been a private. She remembered him always being at the front, which—well. The front kept slagging changing. Either he’d delegated (which she also did not remember, and which didn’t seem much like Tobin) or he’d just been better at guessing where he’d be needed. Saichi hadn’t been his first field command.
It had been his last, though. Now Tobin didn’t run anywhere. Maybe that would be her solution, too. Have something much bigger take her apart, and then, by the Elements, she’d sit down.
Two things had already tried dismantling her today. The syn still twitched along her nerves. She was glad of the rig, which concealed the minute jerks of skin and muscle as the nanomecha purged the excess adrenaline. That last voidspit mecha had damn near gotten Gaer. He’d acted all cool, but she knew him. And even if she’d got it wrong, if he was that blasé about fending it off, well. He hadn’t seen it orient on him and charge. She had. She could’ve been just that little bit too late and he’d be in pieces.
What the mecha hadn’t managed, though, the dead vakar in the tube had. She’d seen Gaer rattled when he’d thought Tobin might give him to the wichu for questioning, after they accused him of espionage and assassination to the Aedis Synod. One of those things had been true—he was SPERE—but Jich’e’enfe had been a surprise, and had damn near killed him and Iari and half of B-town. That the wichu had wanted him smacked more of politics—of a desire for vengeance against vakari, even citizens of the Five Tribes, who’d been allies before the Weep. Gaer’s certainty that they’d, what had he said, take him apart, suggested that maybe wichu separatists and mainstream Confederation-aligned wichu differed only in the levels of violence they were willing to use against vakari.
Iari didn’t pretend to understand the emotions and politics of a former client people against their patrons. But hating all vakari this many years after the fact seemed excessive.
Especially Gaer.
It bothered her, seeing him like this. It bothered her that there had been, still were, constructs whose primary purpose was killing vakari. It bothered her most of all that there was an active ’stasis-tube in that—what, hospital? laboratory? Gaer would say torture chamber and prison and he might not be wrong. She’d been imagining . . . ungentle Ptah, she hadn’t been imagining anything. A body in there, alive or dead, or some other thing that needed stasis—it hadn’t mattered to her. They had separatists to find, didn’t they?
