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.