The woman opened her office. Cheris hoisted Nirai Wennon inside and propped him up against the desk. “He’s not dead, is he?” the woman asked. She was standing offhandedly to the side, as though getting hijacked by strange Kel happened every day. “Because he’s the only one in Engineering who’s capable of explaining those reports in language that actual humans can understand. Although I don’t suppose you care about that.”
Cheris had not taken off her helmet, which Hemiola approved of. Despite its knowledge of formation instinct, it didn’t trust the woman’s sudden easy compliance. Cheris must have had the same thought, for she said, “You’re folding awfully quickly, even in the face of an overwhelming difference in rank.”
“Oh, I know perfectly well the whole thing is a ploy,” the woman said. Her eyes had lit with bitter amusement. “I am disinclined to stand in your way, though. Tell me this, whoever you are. What’s your target?”
Cheris could have lied. Hemiola silently begged her to lie. She didn’t. “I’m here for Jedao.”
The woman couldn’t possibly see Cheris’s eyes through the helmet’s visor. Nevertheless, a silent accord seemed to pass between them. Upon reflection, Cheris would be exactly the right person to know how much the Kel hated Jedao, and how to capitalize on that hatred.
“I thought that might be the case,” the woman said. “Good to know the protector-general hasn’t forgotten us.” She eyed Hemiola quizzically, then reached for a slate and tapped in a series of authorizations. “Here are the accesses—” The slate tightbeamed a databurst to Hemiola. “You’d better hurry. I don’t know how closely the hexarch monitors the grid. I should warn you that you’re going to need to access it from physical terminals.”
“Thank you,” Cheris said, and turned to leave.
“One thing more,” the woman said.
Cheris paused. “Speak.”
“General Jedao’s... aide. Major Kel Dhanneth. He’s a victim of circumstance. If you can avoid harming him—”
“I can’t make promises,” Cheris said, “but I will do my best.”
How strange, Hemiola thought. Was this other Jedao the kind of man who abused his inferiors? It supposed that the woman’s entreaty spoke for itself.
Still, the woman apparently found Cheris’s non-assurance satisfactory, for she swiveled her chair around, sat in it, and called up what Hemiola recognized as a book of... Kel jokes?
During the whole byplay, Hemiola had hovered over to the room’s terminal, logged into the moth’s master grid, determined General Jedao’s location, and calculated several possible routes. It also made note of the locations of hallway terminals in case it needed to pull some more tricks. Silently, it thanked 1491625 for sharing its combat routines. It wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to manage this without trying to derive algorithms from first principles, which, while entertaining for people like Sieve, would be nerve-racking under time pressure on enemy territory.
At the same time, Hemiola hastily constructed an edited version of their interaction and overwrote the security log so as to disguise their conversation. It doubted the job would fool someone going over the videos in detail, but it hoped that its substitution would buy them time. Even better if it prevented the hexarch and his general from realizing that a servitor was involved in the operation. For the first time, Hemiola thought of its own invisibility to humans as double-edged, a weapon.
Cheris had already made her way out of the office. Hemiola hastened to catch up to her.
“You got in?” Cheris signed to Hemiola once the door had closed behind them.
Hemiola blinked confirmation. In a way, having grid access only made it more nervous. As far as the grid was concerned, the executive officer they’d suborned (one Lieutenant Colonel Kel Meraun) was making a perfectly routine series of queries. Now, however, Hemiola had an overview of the entire moth and everyone in it every time it checked in at a terminal, not just activity in their immediate vicinity. It was hard not to feel, however irrationally, that the entire crew could see them.
Try not to trip any alarms, it told itself. It might be a Nirai servitor, but that didn’t automatically make it a security expert. Especially since it imagined that the grid on a command moth would ordinarily be subject to stringent security protocols. The only reason this was working to the extent it had was that its general had never imagined that a renegade Kel would team up with a servitor.
“How much longer?” Cheris signed.
“Twenty-three minutes using this route,” Hemiola flashed back. With any luck, the Jedao they’d come to assassinate wouldn’t be accompanied by inconvenient Nirai engineers or this aide that Meraun had been so concerned about.
Naturally, their luck didn’t hold. Variable layout caused the area to change around them. Cheris, perhaps more accustomed to such shifts, didn’t slow her stride. But the hallway receded before and behind them; for a moment it was as though they hung suspended upon a bridge over an unfathomable abyss of gears and sprockets and decaying metal.
“Reroute us,” Cheris signed, as though she’d expected this. She probably had. “This means someone of high rank has changed their routine. Kujen, Jedao, or the moth commander; probably Jedao.”
Hemiola hurried to the nearest terminal. The grid verified this. It indicated that Jedao had changed his mind about dueling practice and had instead opted to retire to his quarters. Furthermore, his aide Dhanneth accompanied him.
Hemiola conveyed this information to Cheris, wishing it shared her utter calm. At least, it hoped she was as calm as she appeared to be, because it would hate for the person in charge to be as wrecked inside as it was. She didn’t lengthen her stride, or shorten it either, and her air of confidence reassured Hemiola that the mission wasn’t yet a failure.
They approached General Jedao’s quarters. Hemiola was suitably impressed by the Deuce of Gears, even though it remembered how the hexarch’s personal rooms in Tefos Base had been ostentatiously emblazoned with the Nirai voidmoth in silver and moonstone and onyx. It halted and waited for Cheris’s signal.
Cheris positioned herself to the side of the door and pulled her gun. Thumbed off the safety. Then she indicated to Hemiola that it was to proceed.
Don’t hesitate, Hemiola reminded itself, and put in a call to the grid indicating that Lieutenant Colonel Meraun needed to speak to General Jedao in person.
Moments ticked by. Hemiola wasn’t sure they were going to get a response. It considered repeating itself. What if they’d been caught and their target had called security? The grid could be lying to them while security converged on their position.
Then the door opened. It had scarcely revealed the room beyond and, more to the point, the people in it when Cheris dashed in and to the side and fired three shots in rapid succession. Hemiola whisked in, determined to assist.
The room contained two men in Kel uniform: one lean, with paler skin, whom Hemiola recognized from historical records as Shuos Jedao; the other large, bulky with muscle, dark-skinned, who was reaching for his sidearm with a shaking hand. Jedao had two bullet holes in his forehead, dead center, and blood and brains and skull splinters had blown out the back of his head, and the third bullet had taken him in the chest, and he was still standing.
He wasn’t just standing. He was moving. Hemiola didn’t have any experience of corpses, but it was certain that Jedao shouldn’t be stumbling sideways, shambling gait or no. And he most definitely shouldn’t be wresting the gun away from the dark-skinned man and bringing it up, unerringly drawing a bead on—