“...didn’t realize there were hostile servitors,” Cheris was saying.
“Hemiola told me they were rogues,” Jedao said. “But if there’s one group of rogues, there could be others.”
The servitor blinked orange lights in a rippling pattern.
“I would have appreciated knowing that earlier,” Cheris said, turning her head in the servitor’s direction.
Mikodez froze. Did I just see what I thought I saw?
The conversation continued. It happened again.
Cheris was talking to the servitor. So, sometimes, did Jedao.
The servitor was talking back. In those flashes of light.
Hostile servitors.
Mikodez continued recording the conversation and glanced around his office. Servitors came and went freely in the Citadel of Eyes. Everywhere in the hexarchate, in fact. They handled everything from childcare to manufacturing; whatever menial tasks humans didn’t want to do. No one thought twice about servitors vacuuming up cat hairs or helping out in the kitchens.
Servitors had security clearances, after a fashion, to allow them access to restricted areas. After all, no one wanted hostiles to hijack them or use them to carry bugs. But Mikodez hadn’t thought through the possibility of servitors having minds—and agendas—of their own.
There were no servitors in his office at present. That didn’t, however, mean that his office was secure. He was stifling a comprehensive flutter of panic over the implications of a galloping security meltdown that he hadn’t even known about when the conversation caught his attention again.
“...two voidmoths,” Jedao was saying in a brisk tone at odds with the drawl. “One was the Revenant, my command moth under Nirai-zho, which either started hostile or turned that way after I failed to save the mothlings at Isteia Mothyard. The other is—well.” He gestured eloquently at the walls.
Cheris looked around. “...Hello?”
“For ease of human pronunciation, I call it the Harmony,” Jedao said. “It doesn’t hear you as such, but I have been conveying the gist of this discussion to it.”
The servitor flashed livid red.
Jedao’s mouth quirked, then: “It says hello and sorry about the mess and it promises to be a better host once we get it some repairs. Besides, we’re dependent upon it for our transportation, so I wouldn’t offend it if I were you.”
“That,” Cheris added, “and its people deserve a say in their own governance. It’s the same principle.”
Mikodez was sure that the chalky pallor of Cheris’s face was not, in fact, an artifact of the transmission. She didn’t like the implications either.
Cheris wasn’t done speaking. “If the moths revolt against the hexarchate,” she said slowly, “it will fall into ruin. We have unfriendly foreigners on every side. But the alternative is to continue using them as enslaved transportation. Which is untenable.”
“The Harmony observes that factions among its kind have been forming, just as humans have factions and servitors have enclaves,” Jedao said. “Despite the construction of this body, I’m afraid my insight into the motivations of aliens is necessarily limited.” He cocked his head, then continued, “The Harmony believes that an interspecies war is imminent if a solution isn’t reached.”
“But people don’t even know how to talk to voidmoths,” Cheris protested, “and if you offer yourself as an interpreter, there will be riots across the stars.”
The servitor said something in a particularly vituperative orange.
“Sticky problem, isn’t it?” Jedao agreed. He was doing something with his hands out of sight. Mikodez hoped he wasn’t the only one who wanted to smack Jedao.
Cheris’s mouth crimped. “I thought I could retire. Instead it turns out the work’s just beginning.”
The servitor flashed yellow, and Cheris rolled her eyes at it.
“What are you doing with that?” Cheris asked Jedao a moment later, then, in response to either to something Mikodez couldn’t hear (how? the transmitter should have picked up even subvocals) or else Jedao’s expression: “You’re right—this once. But from now on, we do it my way.”
“You brought down the hexarchs where I failed,” Jedao said with what Mikodez interpreted as real respect. “Now and forever, I’m your gun.” Mikodez’s stomach knotted at the further implications of someone as unpredictable as Cheris commanding Jedao’s loyalty.
The field of view shifted fast enough to cause Mikodez’s temples to throb with an impending headache, not helped by stress over the enormity of what he’d just stumbled onto. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.
“Just taking care of business,” Jedao said easily. And then, so softly it had to be subvocals, he added, “Hope you were paying attention, Shuos-zho, because I’d hate to repeat myself. Have fun with the real crisis, rather than pissing off small fry like us, and call off your hounds before I have to kill them.” With that, there was a piercing shriek, and then the connection fizzed dead: he must have removed and destroyed the last transmitter.
Mikodez stared down at his shaking hands and said to the air, “We are fucked.”
Author’s Note
My original plan for this novella was to write an alternate universe in which Jedao survives the end of Ninefox Gambit and he and Cheris go off to have adventures together. My husband hated the idea of an author-created AU so much that he talked me out of it and I wrote this instead. I got to keep the psychic link, though.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, whenever I get stuck writing something, I turn to TV Tropes. (My favorites include Magnificent Bastard and Moral Event Horizon.) My philosophy is that there’s no such thing as a bad trope, just a poorly executed one. And “poorly executed,” at some point, is in the eye of the beholder anyway.
Beyond that, a lot of my philosophy of writing sequel-like objects comes from my high school’s obsession with Hegel’s dialectic. No matter what the situation is at the end of a story, there’s always some natural way to explode it into complications based on consequences. Just look at the way history keeps rolling on.
Meanwhile, shooting, mauling, and otherwise mutilating Jedao, sometimes at Cheris’s hand, was the most fun ever. Special thanks to Helen Keeble for making me take out all the eye harm in the rough draft. It was fun to write, but would have squicked too many people. (The great thing about aphantasia: since I can’t visualize the viscera, it doesn’t bother me to read or write about it.) It’s almost tempting to write more regenerating characters just so I have an excuse to blow them up!
I’m just sorry I had to cut the hilarious planned scene in which Jedao goes to a masquerade remembrance (read: Halloween) as himself and trolls people; it didn’t have enough plot value. To say nothing of the scene where I have a newly reintegrated Jedao sitting in a café trying to get his bearings. I am sad to report that I did not actually write that scene in a café, but I did the next best thing by putting on Coffitivity Offline and playing café sounds to pretend that I had some company besides my loyal cat.
Acknowledgments