Iari stopped talking after that. Gaer still had the green light in his HUD, she hadn’t cut him off, but—all he could see, when he looked, was her battle-rig, the visor striped silver with rain.
Possibly, probably, Iari was angry with him. Fair enough. He was angry, too. He’d never suspected Yinal’i’ljat wasn’t who she claimed to be. Never suspected she was Jich’e’enfe, never thought about wichu separatists on Tanis until Hvidjatte had sworn in Sisstish that’s what he wasn’t, but that he’d been more afraid of Jich’e’enfe than Aedian displeasure. (But not more, in the end, than he feared Gaer.)
If he had not been so obsessed with the contaminated riev chip and the arithmancy and the mystery of it, if he had reported the Pinjat incident to his superiors, maybe he’d’ve gotten some advisement, some note of oh, yes, the separatists are doing this sort of thing now. Maybe he would have connected riev with reactivated Oversight with wichu, and he might not be trotting through a setatir storm in the middle of the setatir night with Iari’s silence. Maybe she wasn’t angry at all. Maybe she had other things to think about than his perceived failures.
He looked ahead, at her back. Jorvik had put a new graft on her armor. A bright polysteel square in an otherwise scuffed, scarred landscape. If he shifted his rig sensors one notch into the aether, he’d be able to see seamless hexwork.
Char’s repairs were not so seamless. He and Jorvik together had managed to armor-hex their prosthetic arm with a hybrid tangle of Aedian alchemy and vakari arithmancy, to (mostly) match the effects of the original artificing. They had been less successful patching those two sets of hexes together. It wasn’t seamless, it was ugly, but it would hold under combat. Probably.
Ahead, Char had slowed down a little bit. Gaer recognized this pattern of streets and buildings. This was the same route they’d taken into Lowtown the day they’d found the warehouse and the swarm, at the beginning of this whole business. The day they’d walked Brisk Array into a riev trap. He supposed that Char remembered that, too. The riev’s plasma-blue teslas winked like stars as they swept their gaze back and forth, up and down.
They. That was apt choice for pronoun. Char might’ve started as tenju, might still be mostly tenju under that armor; but they were not necessarily the same tenju anymore. What Gaer had learned about riev construction had come in the past several days, and would fuel nightmares the rest of his life.
Which might be a very short life, if he didn’t, as Iari had admonished, figure this out.
Gaer considered asking Char their opinion. Maybe a riev would have the best insight into how another riev could be—not repurposed, exactly, their purpose had always been weapon—used to achieve Jich’e’enfe’s ends.
Which, truth, they didn’t really understand. Iari was right: there was no reason for a wichu separatist to be propping up some local ganglord and using riev (and Brood?) to do it. There had to be some heretofore undiscovered reason why the chip in Sawtooth’s head had allowed—no, invited!—Brood contamination. Contaminating riev seemed like a rather large mistake, otherwise, in Jich’e’enfe’s meticulous and brilliant hexwork. Of course one made mistakes when one was innovating with hexes; but Gaer was beginning to think the Brood contamination was the setatir point of the exercise. Not a side effect. The goal.
That would put Jich’e’enfe on Tanis explicitly for the Weep fissure. There were fissures all through Protectorate and Five Tribes space, a whole border of Weep. But the primary border—populated, massive seedworlds on either side—was patrolled, guarded, always watched. Tanis was a tactically insignificant planet, its fissure a little splinter of the Weep in a single continent watched by a scattering of Aedis compounds and a couple of Confederate military units.
But think it through—Jich’e’enfe wanted to reconnect the riev to some version of Oversight, and riev existed on just about every Confederate outpost, ship, base, settlement. And if somehow that reconnection also contaminated them, then every Confederate outpost, ship, base, settlement would have riev infected with Brood.
Dear five dark lords, the damage they could do.
That was a long chain of supposition, for which he had limited evidence. Iari might call it paranoia, but she’d want to hear it.
Gaer jog-stepped until he pulled even with Iari again. Hesitated, and then keyed the comms on the open channel.
“You’re right. Jich’e’enfe’s not a separatist. I think she’s a nihilist. I think she’s going to reconnect Oversight in order to infect every riev, all at the same time, with Brood.”
Char stopped abruptly. Iari stopped too, and then Luki. Iari put out her left hand, like she wanted him to stop, to wait. But then the shield deployed out of her gauntlet like an exploding flower: whitefire frame first, marking the edges, and then the faster-than-blink sheet of hexwork before the shield filled in solid. Aedian red, the black and white crest in the center, the whole thing glowing but somehow still giving off no light at all.
He looked beyond the shield’s rim. His HUD compensated for the rain-glare flash and ruinous brightness of streetlamps. The last time they’d come through these streets, it had been daylight. There had been people in the windows, looking out; there’d been that alwar gang with their substandard riev trap challenging them in the streets.
Now the only thing up there was Char, who had stopped statue-still in the middle of the street.
Oh, dark lords of the void.
“Hold here,” Iari murmured. Then she walked toward Char, cautious but not hesitant. “Char. Report.”
“There is something in this alley. I cannot say what.”
To the naked, unarithmantic eye, it was just an empty street. Puddles, noxious and rainbow-slick even in this light, collected in corners, in the cracks of the pavement. Rain was supposed to wash things clean; but in Lowtown, it just pushed all the filth to the edges.
“Gaer,” said Iari. “What do you see?”
Presumably that meant get up here. He approached with more hesitation than Iari had shown. Char would go for him first, if they turned bad.
Filtered through visor and optic, the alley was a wash of hexwork, shards of code glowing and throbbing where they’d landed.
“There was some kind of arithmancy,” Gaer said. “Wards of some sort. Broken, now.”
Iari’s faceplate flashed in reflected light like a mirror. “Riev trap?”
“Hard to tell. If it was, it’s in pieces, now, and the riev inside has moved on.”
Iari angled around Char, shield first. “Char, Luki, fall back. Gaer and I will take point. In case there are more traps.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Char said promptly.
A beat later—a portentous beat, leaden with unspoken opinion—Luki said, “Yes, sir.”
It was because he knew Iari so well that Gaer noticed the briefest hitch in her movement. He filled in the grimace behind her visor. Convinced himself he heard the faint sigh on his comms.
“Gaer’s got different scanners on his rig. He sees hexwork. That’s why I want him on point with me. Last time we came through this neighborhood, there were gangs and black-market riev traps, and we don’t need Char walking into one.”
“I understand,” Luki said. Then, in a rush, “But sir. Riev trap means riev. Why would they even come here? Tzcansi was using them as enforcers—I read the report, sir—but she’s dead. So is someone else using them?”
“Or it wasn’t a riev trap at all, but some other ward,” Gaer said. “Or Jich’e’enfe managed to reconnect Oversight, and she’s called all the riev down here.”
Iari edged a little bit more forward. Her headlamp swept up the walls, over windows shuttered and dark on the edges. Now she turned back and spot-lighted Char. “Templar-Initiate? Thoughts on that?”
Char’s head turned. Those plasma-blue teslas drilled not into Luki, no. Into Gaer, straight through his visor. “I am not subject to Oversight. The damage to my frame destroyed my connection before my formal decommissioning, and my repairs since then have been nonstandard.”
Gaer blinked. He’d been there when Char had asked Jorvik to build the prosthetic, when they said they did not want a graft. Then Char had explained to him what that actually meant, graft, in a detail he thought they’d enjoyed. He hadn’t asked then why they’d made that choice. He’d assumed some conflict between the Aedis Catechism and using traditional riev repair methods. A shortage of limbs, perhaps.
And now it sounded like Char had refused tradition because they didn’t want to be reconnected. No more Oversight.
“If Jich’e’enfe has reconnected Oversight,” Gaer said, “can she issue orders? I mean, would you have any say in it? Char? Can riev refuse?”
“With the proper protocols, she could issue orders. The riev would obey.”
“And then she could, one imagines, order the riev to accept chip implants in their heads, like Sawtooth.”
“Perhaps. That would require overriding other protocols. Brood have replaced vakari as the primary enemy. But if she has the command codes, she could.”
It was hard to see Iari’s expression through a battle-rig, impossible to read auras; there was something about the attitude, the cant of head and helmet, that said she was thinking hard. Then she turned, without saying anything. She unclipped her axe, deployed it, and got back to prowling the street, shield raised as if she thought a riev might come leaping out of the dark.
It wasn’t an illegitimate fear, really, except that in Gaer’s experience, riev didn’t do ambush especially well. They tended to crash into things, or through them.
Iari paused at an alley mouth, and stabbed into the shadows with her headlamp. “Gaer. Something down here.”
Yes, something: one of the large, steel-sided refuse containers that dotted B-town sat partway down, set crossways. It, like every other one of its kind Gaer had ever seen, was piled to overflowing. Beside it, what looked like a sack of wet rags and wasn’t. Blood, viscera, a lot of a man’s insides on the outside. But the face was intact.
Luki sounded a little pale, behind her visor. “What happened to him? I mean, ah.” Her voice steadied. “That doesn’t look like a normal murder.”
“Well, it’s certainly not riev. Looking at how shredded he is, I’d say—”
“He looks like Tzcansi. Boneless did that.” Iari’s voice was as bleak and pitiless as her headlamp, blasting the body into stark relief.
“Except I’m not getting any Brood readings on my rig. Are you?”
“No.”
“No,” Char echoed. The riev had drifted—how did something that big move so quietly?—into the alley mouth.
“Is this some new voidspit hexwork?” Iari retracted her faceplate. Her aura spilled out: a resolved cobalt marbled with crimson, only barely flecked with a queasy chartreuse. “Maybe something off that altar, Gaer? Some reason our rigs are blind?”
“Maybe.” He cycled his optic through the aetheric layers. “There are more fragments here, made of the same hexwork as I saw on the street last time we were here. Amateur, black-market arithmancy. I can say, though, that these fragments weren’t part of a riev-trap. It was definitely a shield of some kind, probably personal, meant to turn aside impacts. Presumably that means jacta bolts. I’m not sure this one would’ve turned a well-thrown stone. But it shattered because something hit this man with a great deal of force.”
Iari’s voice was cold as the corpse, and as ragged. “That fits. Boneless attacks come fast and hard.”
“Not this hard, unless someone threw the boneless at him, or otherwise propelled it at very high velocity. Or dropped it.” He looked up. Got a faceful of rain before he remembered he’d raised his visor. He blinked and blew water out of his plates. “Truth, Iari, I don’t know how this happened.”
“Thrown, dropped. The boneless still tore this guy apart.”
“There is something across the street, in the lee of that building,” Char murmured. “I do not sense any Brood, and I cannot see anything moving, but I am certain there is something there.”
Gaer avoided—narrowly, fortunately—the edge of Iari’s shield as she whipped around. She was as fast as any SPERE op he’d ever trained with. As fast, damn near, as the riev.
Synning. Bet she was synning.
“Gaer? How many?”
Gaer bit back a how the setat should I know that because, well, he already had an idea. He pointed his rig where Iari wanted and sifted through the aetheric layer. As far as he knew, no one had ever bothered to check whether Brood had auras. No one had needed to . . . but in fact, yes, now that he was looking—they did. Or something did, back in that alley. The colors were . . . wrong. Off in their texture, their intensity, as if they’d been diluted with petroleum, colors breaking down on the edges.
“Got one something,” he said, “and it’s angry. It’s also scared.”
“Good.” Iari stepped into the alley mouth and raised her shield.
For a moment the boneless hesitated. Then its aura flared bloody fury, and it covered the width of the street in one liquid leap. Touched down with three of six limbs (the center three, one of them folded almost in half) and leaped, this time into an arc meant to bring it over Iari’s shield.
Which was low, too low, she had to know better—
Iari tilted the shield at the last moment, came up under the boneless and caught it solidly on the shield. For a split second—point-seven-three seconds on the chrono on Gaer’s HUD—the boneless paused there. Then the shield’s hexwork flared, recognizing what was in contact with it. Equations flooded Gaer’s optic.
The boneless, realizing where it had landed, bunched its limbs, turned that five-eyed head back the way it had come, tried to jump. Iari yielded, knees flexing, and the boneless slipped on the shield instead. Sparks and Brood effluvia sprayed onto her rig, onto the pavement. Then she brought her axe around, one hard slice, and the boneless came off the shield. Came off four of its six legs, too (all the biggest ones); they slid straight to the pavement. The boneless tried to catch itself on its remaining limbs. Crashed onto its . . . did they have chins? Onto its face, then. The part with the eyes and the mouth. Iari came after it, syn-quick.
And then it was over. Iari chopped down one more time and stood over the smoking puddle.
Luki, who had been charging forward, lowered her (full-length, double-edged, interspecies-universal-shape-for-a) sword, having almost gotten close enough for a strike. Gaer imagined she looked somewhat chagrined behind her faceplate. He did.
Iari prodded the boneless with her axe. “My rig’s still not saying it’s real. But it is, right? Not some voidspit hologram?”
“No.” Gaer dragged the word out. “My optic registers something recently dead—auras sort of smoke when something dies. And I can see that there’s non-native material on the pavement. Organic, almost.”
“Same. Luki?”
“Nothing, sir, on my HUD.”
“Char?”
“No.” Char, Gaer noted, had not even moved from their post on the corner of the alley. Either they had a great deal of faith in Iari’s warfare skills, or—
“Char,” Gaer asked. “Did you see the boneless?”
The riev paused. “No.”
Iari retracted her visor again. Squinted at Char as if her plain biological eyes could see more than battle-rig sensors. “Something wrong with your hexes?”
“Unknown. But it is likely the same phenomenon affecting templar battle-rigs.”
Char’s aura was laced with fear; Iari’s was a vivid blend of vigilance and trailing anger.
“Dispatch. This is Lieutenant—oh, Hrok’s fucking breath. Luki, your comms dead?”
A breathless moment, behind Luki’s visor. Two, three—“Yes sir.”
Iari flicked a look sideways. “Gaer?”
He tried, even knowing, from the grey little tesla, how useful that try would be. “Dead as that boneless.”
“Right. So no backup. No way to detect Brood except by looking with our fucking eyes,” Iari said. For Luki’s sake, Gaer thought. Certainly she was looking that way, as if she could see through her corporal’s faceplate.
“Maybe not,” said Gaer, and both Aedian headlamps turned on him like malevolent suns. “Char knew there was something down here.”
“I did not know. I suspected. With no evidence.”
“That’s called intuition. Congratulations. You’re the first of your kind to develop it, that we know of.” Gaer stepped around the boneless, around Iari, into wide open, rain-slashed streets. “I don’t know what the setat this effect is, but it’s affecting everyone’s technology. Let’s suppose it’s working either by alteration of natural law, or—well, this isn’t necessarily not that same thing—some kind of hexwork I’ve never seen. Something Char’s never seen. Something the priest-alchemists who designed your templar battle-rig never imagined. What fits that description?”
“The altar,” said Iari. “And if it’s working, then Jich’e’enfe’s already there and so much for your wards.”
“My wards might be working. You don’t know. Perhaps we should be buried in boneless right now. Or a small family of tunnelers. My wards might be all that stands between us and the void itself.” Pure neefa-shit, that; templar weapons, templar shields, and Char were far more likely to be their saviors.
“Well,” said Iari, after a considered moment. “If it’s the altar causing all this, we know where it is. Come on.”