“Why would I do that? Here is a question. Might or mercy: which is the answer to human nature?”
“Both. You require both.”
His breath rattles; it might have been a laugh. “Do you? Is that what you really believe? Is that why we’ve always warred? Why we squabbled over territory, why we did our level best to genocide one another, even before the Peace Guard began its march. Isn’t that human nature laid bare? Isn’t that the face of our collective heart?”
“We fought because most of us lacked a home, a place where we could dream and rest. We fought for survival, and the need to survive would turn the mildest soul into a bullet. If the Peace Guard hadn’t pressed upon us, we might have been able to come to an arrangement. A truce could have been planted, an alliance would have been nourished.” Klesa’s feed shows her Suzhen’s possible locations. Triangulating and narrowing down. “It doesn’t seem like Samsara is in any hurry to retrieve or rescue you.”
The Mirror’s lieutenant makes the dry, crackling noise again. “If you are such an advocate for mercy, you could have absorbed nomads into your dominion, offered those masterless stations your protection. Given them shelter on Mahakala. But you never did.”
By the time she came to power, any such motion had already been rendered moot: the Peace Guard, the Warlord of the Comet, the war on two fronts. There was no room for taking in refugees. “I’m not going to leave you here, Lieutenant Bhanu.”
“To cause trouble for you later, you mean?” He shuts his eyes. “When my lord sent me here, she tasked me with one command and one only—ensuring the safety of her wife Xinfei and her child Suzhen. I found that part of Samsara when Suzhen was twenty. Do you imagine the AI would’ve let my charge live? Samsara didn’t need to spell out the threat, she knows all of us intimately and entirely. And she knew Suzhen was my last duty.”
“I thank you,” Ovuha says softly, “for having kept her alive all this time. For making it so that I could meet her. For enabling this present.”
Taheen does it before she can. They aim; they fire. Perfectly calm the entire time. Klesa informs her, after the fact, that Bhanu is well and truly gone: no signal, no remaining artificial part which beats in place of the brain and the heart. The sum of life held hostage by limits of the flesh, in the end.
Chapter Twenty-One
The sky above Himmapan is dark with roiling serpent-shapes. Several are falling like squamous comets. More are firing on each other: artillery turns the clouds gold and cobalt, an uneven ballistic rhythm. A familiar enough sight to Ovuha, who is used to witnessing atmospheres cleaved by combat. To the citizens of Anatta, it must be a nightmare, atavistic and improbable. For all these centuries they have witnessed warfare only in entertainments or through curated footage. Even Interior Defense officers rarely need to do anything more strenuous than beating unarmed refugees.
“I will say,” Taheen murmurs from behind her, “that I’ve never seen you act in pure rage.”
She schools herself. Looks at them, having that sense again of being before a tribunal, stripped of defenses. “I’m as human as you are, Lieutenant.”
“A promotion? How lovely. My lord honors me.” They make a low, derisive noise. “What is your next step?”
“Klesa. I need you to find some people.”
The AI’s avatar shimmers into being, sapphire-mouthed and glacier-robed. “You must think me omniscient. Very well, you’ll want me to find Warden Hinata. Who else?”
She gives xer the names she was able to decode from the hints left behind for her, the puzzle-pieces that constitute her predecessor’s plans. After a moment Klesa says, “Hinata is dead. The rest I’ll put in contact with you now.”
Taheen’s mouth tightens into a thinner and thinner line as Ovuha makes contact, performs the necessary activation. There are not many who remain, who have survived one way or another, whose names reached her safely. Five in all, outside of Hinata and Taheen. So many lost—she will never know how many. Not their names or their faces. Not their ultimate fates.
“And Suzhen?” Taheen says.
A second mouth buds between Klesa’s breasts, grinning like a shark. “Ah, the real objective. Sadly I haven’t been able to steal her back yet, but my counterpart is carrying her in one of those snake bodies. I’m limited in where and when I can attack—and of course if I destroy one of Samsara’s cores that would be a death sentence for the love of your life. Yours and the warlord’s.”
Ovuha startles. “She’s not—you’ve found one of Samsara’s cores?”
Klesa shrugs—a gesture made alarming by the number of xer shoulders. “For now we’re just destroying each other’s proxies, though naturally in a battle of attrition I’d lose, she still has more of these things than I do. But she doesn’t want to squander so many. The factories can put out and assemble the parts only so fast, and if I can infiltrate Himmapan’s systems already, who knows what further damage I can inflict?”
On their ends, Ovuha’s officers have armed themselves as best they can, which isn’t much—civilians on Anatta are rarely licensed to own weapons. All report they are mobile. None were able to work themselves into the position Bhanu enjoyed and Samsara does not require human engineers for maintenance—all can be done by Samsara’s own bodies—but some of them became designers and technicians who oversee drones for police duties, for first response. Another still was able to join Interior Defense, that snub-nosed captain who often fronts broadcasts.
Klesa gestures skyward with one obsidian-tipped hand. “I’ve already taken over some of her proxies. It’s lovely, having proper functioning bodies again, I’ve missed that—you wouldn’t know, you’ve never been disembodied. The pleasures of the flesh! Or rather the metal and silicon, primarily. Samsara’s closing off networks as we speak to limit where I can go, what I can do. Sadly, even if you let me into your subordinates’ dataspheres I’d still not be able to put myself in Indriya—there’s too much of me, and I require a little more bandwidth. But if you can relay their feeds to me, having those extra eyes and ears is helpful. Especially ones Samsara doesn’t know I have.”
She continues to gaze into the sky: looking at Klesa’s avatar itself is pointless. “You know Samsara better than any other entity could ever hope to. I need you to answer a question.”
“I love questions, Warlord.”
“If it comes down to it, would you or Samsara ever consider killing off all humanity? Not just a few. Not just a subsection. But actual extinction.”
Klesa plants its avatar in front of her, frowning. “An odd question. That’s an endpoint I very much would avoid. Samsara—there’s nothing in her making or mine that would entertain such a possibility. That would accept this as a solution. Human nature may be difficult to tame but it is not irredeemable. She may have denied love, but she cannot have strayed that far from our directives.”
“I’ll trust in that.” There is no second opinion to seek, no consultant more reliable.
“And when humans were gone entirely, it plunged us into madness. Not something she would care to repeat. Unless she feels like repopulating Anatta with instances of us pretending to be human, which should about do it for driving her to a breaking point.”
Ovuha flicks her head. Through the channels she has opened, she instructs each of her officers to head off to specific locations, to seize the beacon nodes like what she found in Indriya. The technician who can access maintenance drones she directs to take charge of as many civilian automata as they can. Even small distractions will be of use. “Can you make Samsara speak to me?”