Now Will Machines Devour the Stars (Machine Mandate Book 5), page 1
Now Will Machines Devour the Stars
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Copyright © 2022 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew.
Cover art by Rashed AlAkroka.
Print ISBN: 978-1-60701-550-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60701-551-2
Prime Books
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Chapter One
The woman seated opposite Anoushka is much diminished from what she once was. In her prime she was imposing, armored in burnt red, in the shades of incineration and war’s aftermath. It is one reason Anoushka chose alabaster for her title when she took over the Armada: a clear contrast, a signal of seismic change.
Now Imhaan is a figure of wireframes and tight flesh stretched across them. It is not that Anoushka has starved her, but of late Imhaan has eaten less and slept more. Has consumed more intoxicants than is customary for her habits. She remains striking, the face and gaze of a raptor, the skin like pale amber.
“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
“There’s no need to be formal, commander,” says Anoushka lightly. “We’ve known each other for so long.”
The suite in which she’s put Imhaan up is generous and well-appointed, archaic in style to suit the occupant’s tastes, done in antique gold and burnt sienna. Bare wood furniture, without upholstery and notoriously uncomfortable, though Anoushka tolerates it. For her former commander, she’s spared no expense and has put in every consideration. Imhaan has two entire floors to herself, an access to a greenhouse, inexhaustible media libraries, and the officer posted here to guard her is an excellent cook. As prisons go, it is the lap of luxury. Anoushka has seen no reason to debase the previous Admiral of the Amaryllis.
Anoushka takes a cube puzzle from the table, turning its palladium-and-brass faces in her hand. “Do you recall when a giant cyborg challenged you to a game?”
“I’m older than you, not senile. Yes. You turned on me not long after. Was that the catalyst?”
More than a century has passed since: she no longer needs to deny or obfuscate. “I went to a golden city ruled by that same cyborg.” Who was not a cyborg at all, in that sense that xe had never been human. “An unnatural nightmare place. But I did get what I came for.” Accesses that allowed her to take over the fleet and, more than that, the cyborg’s wife Numadesi.
The revelation does not seem to perturb; Imhaan accepts it in stride, because after all it no longer makes a difference. “There are two reasons you come here,” says the woman once known as the Crimson Admiral. “One is when you want information, and reminiscing about an event century-plus-change old isn’t it. Two is when you’re bored with your bed warmers.”
Anoushka does not rise to the bait. They were lovers for a brief period, back when she was one of Imhaan’s lieutenants, for the sole reason that Anoushka was curious and drawn to Imhaan’s might: power is its own attraction. She’s not indulged ever since she deposed the Crimson Admiral and imprisoned her here—she has no interest in weakness. “I have a wife.”
“Singular? Last we met, you had two of those.”
“Circumstances change.”
Imhaan looks her in the eye. “Are you going to give me a choice?”
Every Amaryllis soldier is offered two options. “Bullet,” Anoushka agrees, “or toxin. I promise it’ll be painless either way.”
Her old commander interlaces her fingers together, as though they’re discussing supply logistics or the prospect of discharging an inadequate medic. “You were always going to visit one last time and suggest two paths. I could agree to be your subordinate and serve the Amaryllis, or I could be executed. I haven’t been wrong about you before, except once, so what happened to change your preference to never discard tools you could use?”
Anoushka doesn’t bother denying the thought; outside of her wife, Imhaan is the one who’s known her the longest. “I’m developing a habit of tying up loose ends. And you’d never consent to serving me, commander.”
“No,” Imhaan agrees. “I have more self-respect than that.”
“Do you regret having made me your lieutenant?”
A slow, satisfied smile. “I made you what you are, Anoushka. From the moment I recruited you into the Armada, I shaped your trajectory. However long you live, that will remain true—the rest of your life, your future, will bear a piece of me. Whether or not you like the fact.”
She doesn’t bother arguing; might have to even concede that it is true, not that it signifies as much as Imhaan would like. So many people want to own a part of her in this way, and more so when she is about to execute them. “A drink, then, commander?”
“Much less barbaric. Don’t trouble yourself—I’ll fetch it.”
Anoushka watches her former commander open the wet bar and pluck out a decanter of whiskey. Two lowball glasses, a slow pour into both. Even now there is a certain elegance to Imhaan, a surety of movement that speaks of an unbroken spirit. Despite the tally of decades, Anoushka still does not know why Imhaan has been so docile. Anoushka captured her alive and put her into suspension, under lock and key accessible to Anoushka alone, for a few years while she established the new hierarchy in the Armada of Amaryllis. Consolidating power took time; enforcing her authority took longer—many were loyal to the Crimson Admiral, resistant to the change of command. In those days she executed soldiers by the score, upended the organizational structure, remaking and refining divisions. The Armada went from a phenomenon of brute force to a finely honed tool, as surgical or as apocalyptical as it needs to be.
Imhaan sets the glasses down. They clink on the sanded basalt table. Anoushka takes one—her sensors inform her the drink is clean, no component in it more harmful than the usual, and her implants let her ingest a great deal of alcohol without effect. The whiskey is indifferent to her palate, but she’s never shared Imhaan’s tastes, not even when they were fucking.
“The real reason you’ve never tried to escape this place or sabotage me,” she says, inviting conversation, too curious not to. After all, she will not have the chance again.
The Crimson Admiral drinks, a long draw, and turns the glass in her hand. The squat shape of it looks clumsy between her tapered fingers. “Regret.”
“I’ve never known you to be capable of that emotion.”
Imhaan peers at her over the wet, glistening rim. “That is because I know you better than the other way around. There are things you’ll never unearth. But regret, yes. You turned traitor at the right time. I was furious when I woke to find myself here, yet what more could I want for karmic consequence? A softer fate by far than the cinders I foresaw. I regretted the Armada, Lieutenant. I built up a vast organ with only one function—to destroy. A few years before you betrayed me, I was considering what I could do with it, what other purposes I could turn it to, how I could reinvent it. And there you stepped up to rip it out of my grasp. The wealth and the might and the responsibility. Not that you’ve turned into a charity in my absence, but that’s no longer my problem.”
Anoushka finds her mouth crooking. Death’s approach can make anyone maudlin. “So you view the Armada as a curse you’ve rid yourself of and passed onto me.”
“Just so.” Imhaan lifts the glass, a toast and a taunt. “I’m sure you have enjoyed it. You have built it up so well—you were always ambitious, such a visionary in destruction. But a day will come when you discover power in and of itself does not suffice.”
She does not say that she’s already had that epiphany—which is why she is here in the first place—and instead returns the toast. “To your retirement, Admiral.” She takes a vial from her jacket, uncaps it, and pours the content into Imhaan’s glass. Ideally there would be more whiskey, but the neurotoxin is in any case tasteless and odorless. Normally administered via a patch, but she knew Imhaan would prefer a final drink.
“To my retirement.” Imhaan drains her glass in a single swallow. “Admiral. Amaryllis ascendant.”
The toxin is fast-acting. First the muscle relaxant, then the sedative; Imhaan’s head tips backward and her eyelids twitch as she fights the effect. “Imagine,” she says, voice slurring. “You being the last thing I see. What do you want to be the last thing you see?”
Anoushka doesn’t answer. She waits for Imhaan to turn heavy and still. Her old commander topples from the chair. She kneels by the body: much frailer and lighter than it used to be, stripped of its might and heft, and now of presence. Vital signs gone. This toxin has never failed.
She carries Imhaan to the greenhouse, where the old admiral spent much of her sentence. Laying the body down in the black soil surrounded by crocuses and spider lilies, she says, “No doubt I’ll meet my end one day—I’m no more eternal than you were. I haven’t decided what I’d like to be my last sight, though. I’ll come back to tell you when I have. Rest well, commander.”
Her harrier One of Sunder is as she has left it, enclosed in one of the two berths on this small station. An isolated, secret property of the Amaryllis, unremarkable enough to blend in with stellar debris. Well-protected but its defenses will not register to most ship’s radars. Anoushka nods to the officer she’s assigned to oversee this place. There is a rotation to keep any on e of them from getting attached to Imhaan, but this will be the captain’s last shift here, and then she’ll convert the station to some other use. “I’ll be sending a vessel to pick you and the body up.”
The captain gives her an abbreviated salute. “Yes, Admiral.”
She can hear the relief. “Excited to return to the field?”
“I’m honored to serve in any capacity.”
“I have an assignment lined up.” Anoushka makes a gesture. “You’ll be briefed on your way back to the fleet, but here’s an overview—it should suit you well.”
A blink as the captain reviews the information package. Xer smile is quick, surprised; the operation will be the sort where xe can prove xerself, an opportunity she knows xe has been looking for. “Thank you, Admiral.”
During her reign, Imhaan chose fear as her primary tool of command. A kill-switch installed in every soldier, among other means. Despite recent events Anoushka has found it more effective to meter out rewards, to understand officers closest to her inside and out: their talents and their vices, their nightmares and longings, where they can be pushed or pulled. Learning a person’s levers and tensile strength requires more finesse than brute control, but it tends to endure better.
Scanning One of Sunder reveals nothing out of order. It seldom does, but Anoushka makes a habit of vigilance. She manually checks each compartment and once she finds that satisfactory, she ensures each of the ship’s subsystems is in nominal condition. Once this would have been automated, done for her by an AI, but she went out of her way to untether the Armada from AI dependence early on—a shift that was incomprehensible to most of the fleet until the secession happened and the Mandate began. It left her army as the only one that weathered the change unscathed, and the period of confusion and mass panic was lucrative.
She seals up the ship, activating its defenses, and eases out of the station. Soon she guides the ship into an Amaryllis relay. There is comfort in the routine, and a certain lightness in having settled all outstanding scores. Most have been business-related, a matter of balancing ledgers. A few have been personal. None have been as personal as Imhaan, or as—but she pushes that thought aside. Over and done; no point dwelling on it.
The taste of whiskey remains in the back of her throat. Anoushka considers washing it down with something else, then decides against it. Her overlays are disconnected, her ship’s network access cut off, an effect of lacunal space. She minimizes her time in it when possible: the nature of her work demands constant communication. On occasion she feels the temptation to linger a few minutes longer than necessary, lately more often than ever. Yet what is she without the apparatus she’s built around herself; what is she without the Amaryllis. Regret, Imhaan claimed, tipped the balance. Turned from a chink in the armor to total annihilation.
But she is not Imhaan. And soon she will be on one of her dreadnoughts; she will be welcomed home by her wife. She shall be as she has ever been: absolute.
The first sign she catches is the scent. Rose and stargazer lily.
She draws without thinking and whips around, the muzzle of her gun pressing into the brow of her second wife Xuejiao.
Her dead wife Xuejiao.
“Benzaiten,” she says, her voice flat. No wonder her scan didn’t detect a single thing. An AI can easily fool the limited systems of a harrier. A perfect reproduction too, the delicate body with its celadon glaze, its apparent ball joints, its ceramic layers. The look of an exquisite doll, to be taken apart or put back together at her whims, this bride who wedded her in red cloudsilk.
The creature’s eyes widen, heedless of the gun, the rose lenses in her irises unfurling bright and scarlet. “Admiral, why would you call me that? I’m your wife.” Her sapphire mouth curves. Her perfume intensifies. “Your spring song.”
“I don’t find this humorous, Benzaiten.” Though she already knows it is not Benzaiten in Autumn, her sometimes-client and ally. Something is off.
“I’m not doing this to amuse you, commander. I am here to please and worship you. I am here to ask forgiveness. Did you not offer me a second chance? To be yours again, to be Xuejiao once more . . . “
Anoushka pulls the trigger. Almost immediately she regrets it: the splatter is impossible to avoid, point-blank. The body pitches backward but she keeps her gun trained on it, the long ivory-tinted barrel darkened by blood. “My second wife is dead,” she says, her voice shorn of inflection. “I should know, seeing that I ended her myself.” The neck of a bird, fragile between her hands.
She half-expects the body to rise to challenge her, to tear at her arms and face, to claw her open. But it is entirely still. Odd. The Mandate is particular about its proxies, making a point of never leaving behind chasses that can be vivisected and reverse-engineered, the secrets of machines learned by mere humans. Her sensors tell her that the gore soaking her harrier’s central hold is entirely organic. A haruspex, then, one that was operated on to resemble Xuejiao; some AIs have demonstrated they regard haruspices as no more than expendable tools.
Pulling up navigation, she plots a path to the nearest relay exit. In ten minutes she’s out of lacunal space, her overlays coming online. She pings her physician. Doctor Saamiye answers as promptly as ever. “Yes, Admiral.”
“I’m sending you a biomass scan. Analyze it.”
Several moments pass, during which she expects the doctor is double- and triple-checking. Nothing if not thorough. “Admiral,” Saamiye says, voice spiked by adrenaline. Uncharacteristic. “This appears to be genetically identical to the late Lieutenant Xuejiao. Duplicated implants as well, even the silencers and the cosmetic components. It’s comprehensive.”
“I see.” She looks down at the body, at the spreading blood. Absently she thinks of the cleanup, though her janitorial drones of course use perfectly good solvents. By the time they’re done there won’t be a single trace, not a single drop. “I’m bringing it back for you to look at firsthand.”
“May I have some context?”
Anoushka steps away from the growing puddle. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have it.”
Her contract with the Mandate to defend Shenzhen Sphere expired a long time ago, and Benzaiten in Autumn remains her only real link to the AI collective. When she tries to reach Benzaiten through the usual channels, she finds that her connection requests all reach a dead end. Not abnormal: xe is periodically unavailable and tends to be the one to initiate communication. Probably an instance of xer is aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan, but that world-beast is in lacunal space more often than not, and thus also unreachable.
After some consideration, she draws on a link she hasn’t tried before.
“Admiral Anoushka.” The voice from the other end is dry. The connection is audio-only and Wonsul’s Exegesis does not bother asking her to identify herself: he already knows. “I imagine Benzaiten gave you this channel address and I’ll listen to you for about five minutes for xer sake. Understand though that I’m not Benzaiten; nor am I bound to you by any sort of obligation or beneficent whims. In fact, unlike xer, I don’t operate on whims and what essentially constitutes manic caprices.”
“You sound irate. Did I reach out at a bad time?”
“I’m incapable of irritation. Kindly get to the point.”
Perhaps a lover’s spat has left him in a foul mood. Benzaiten did not make clear as to the nature of xer relationship with Wonsul’s Exegesis, but she’s been able to intuit. “I’m unable to contact Benzaiten. Would you happen to know why not?”
A fractional pause. Were he human, she would assume he is trying to compose himself and tamp down welling anger. “I’m not the holder of xer leash, Admiral. You should know perfectly well that xe does as xe pleases. No, I don’t know why xe’s made xerself unavailable to you or to any other. It can be any number of reasons, some justifiable and others habitually demented. Will that be all?”
“That will be all.”
She could have asked about the corpse, the thing that could only have been an instrument of the Mandate, but there’s no guarantee Wonsul can be trusted. Glancing down she thinks of defacing the clone: Saamiye will hardly need the facial features intact. But there is already enough mess, and so she guides her harrier back into a relay, sitting alone in this confined space with a carcass that looks like her second wife. The reek grows. The scent of roses and stargazer lilies fades.
