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.