Her hands flexed. She looked at him, then looked away.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sereset said. His voice shook. “Do it.”
“I can’t,” Cheris said, closing her eyes in shame. “You have a chance.”
“I’ll be a cripple even if I make it,” Sereset said. “And life’s cheap anyway—”
“Don’t say that,” Cheris said violently, “it’s not true. It’s never true.”
“Besides,” Sereset said over Lharis’s repeated message, “you have a plan. Hell of a long shot, but you never know. Go topple the heptarchate for me. Make my death mean something. Hurry, before the lieutenant strands you here.” His voice sounded very weak.
“I won’t forget,” Cheris said. She kissed his forehead.
Then, in a single quick, decisive motion, she snatched up the coat and covered Sereset’s face.
After Sereset stopped struggling to breathe, she said into the relay, “Shuos Jedao, shouter team five, to Lieutenant Lharis. One for pickup.”
“What happened to the other?” Lharis said.
“Stray Kel bullet. He didn’t make it.”
“Pity,” Lharis said. “All right. Two hours and forty-six minutes until I can come get you. Stay put.”
For the first time since Ruo’s suicide, Cheris had found a moment’s furtive camaraderie, and because of it, she had had to murder. Because she had been weak; because she had wanted to talk. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Never forgive me, Cheris thought to Sereset as she put her coat back on. The two hours and forty-six minutes until the hoverer’s arrival stretched forever.
Commit to fire, as the Kel would say.
No looking back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
VAHENZ HAD TO admit that, in her long career as an agent-at-large, she had encountered any number of organizations with the gift of stabbing one hand with the other during important operations. The Taurags had their oversight officers, the Haussen had separate bureaus with overlapping purviews, the Hafn had petty squabbles between aristocrats. Kel Command was pretty good at this trick, too. She hadn’t imagined that they had anything pleasant in mind for the fox general once they were done with him, but it was anyone’s guess as to why they hadn’t just sent someone both competent and trustworthy to do the job in the first place. The combination had to exist even among Kel generals. What she was really looking at was an excellent argument against making your high command a hivemind, especially in the wake of a high-profile massacre.
Kel Command’s willingness to blow up a swarm just to get rid of Jedao wasn’t precisely surprising, although Vahenz found it interesting that they had put a cindermoth out of action during a major invasion. They wouldn’t have blinked at killing the soldiers, naturally. Vahenz sometimes wondered how the hexarchate’s history would have played out differently if the first Kel formation discovered hadn’t been a suicide formation. Courage and last stands against desperate odds were one thing. Casual suicide, on the other hand, was just wasteful.
Still, Vahenz found the situation deplorable. It was sheer stupid luck that she’d escaped the bomb’s area of effect, and even then the fringe of the blast had knocked half her systems offline, frying her box of sweet bean pastries in the process. The saving grace was that her needlemoth’s stealth systems had been spared, so the Fortress didn’t shoot her down while she was making emergency repairs.
Vahenz had an intimate familiarity with the Fortress’s scan suites and their limitations. So when she repaired her own scan and it told her there was a single surviving life form on the Unspoken Law, not only was she sure who the survivor had to be, she was also sure that the Fortress had no idea anyone was wandering around the hulk of what had once been a perfectly functional cindermoth.
She could have dealt with the situation a few different ways. Not by leaving, although her superiors would probably have preferred that she report to them sooner rather than later. What news of the mess was public was no doubt giving them ulcers. She couldn’t simply shoot up the cindermoth, either. The needlemoth was good at stealth, but not good enough to disguise a serious display of fireworks even if it had had the necessary firepower.
She had considered tipping off the Kel that their target was still alive and letting them deal with the problem. Of course, she couldn’t be absolutely certain that that hadn’t been the intent. No: she was going to have to take out Jedao herself. More fun this way, anyhow. She always enjoyed the chance to take out an interesting opponent herself, instead of relying on underlings to do it for her.
The carrion bomb was intended to wipe out people rather than inorganic structures. In particular, it had clearly not been designed to destroy something the size of a cindermoth, not in one hit. Which wasn’t to say that the cindermoth was undamaged, and she knew for a fact that the rest of the swarm wasn’t in great shape either. The cindermoth’s upper surface looked like someone had made a jigsaw of it with the help of a glassblower’s mad fantasias, but life-support still functioned, and artificial gravity looked like it wasn’t trying to do anything innovative. With a sufficiently good team of Nirai, you might even be able to get it to fly in a few days.
Vahenz slipped the needlemoth next to one of the hopper bays and got to work with its burrowers. This was exactly the kind of dead time that she had brought the pastries for, and instead she was reduced to staring at her scan suites while she waited to penetrate the Unspoken Law. If any of its food stores had survived, it was probably Kel food. The Kel had a displeasing fascination with vegetables. To say nothing of the dreadful pickles.
Scan gave her a pretty good idea of what the internals looked like, a mess of passages and cracked walls. She loaded the maps into her augment and memorized as much as she could the old-fashioned way, just in case. You never knew when stray exotic effects would interfere with your personal tech. And while she doubted Jedao had emerged from the bombing unscathed, she expected that he would be far from an easy target.
She suited up no earlier than she had to, and brought along a torchknife and scorch pistol. It was a pity that she had no handheld scanner that could pinpoint a life form’s location. She was going to have to leave the needlemoth’s scanner running and rely on its grid to update her through the link. Setting up an ambush under these conditions was going to be an interesting challenge.
From the moment Vahenz stepped into the cindermoth, glass fibers drifted in the air, loosened by the intrusion. Her suit’s filters would protect her, but she couldn’t escape the sensation of ashes on the roof of her mouth, as though she were walking through a forest a scant hour after the inferno sputtered out. Her light, ordinarily a clear white, turned the color of broken steel in the dark passages.
The single life-sign had been moving slowly and erratically in the command center since Vahenz picked it up on scan. Wounded, she imagined, and trying to figure out his situation.
Vahenz watched it on the overlay map for a few minutes, then headed toward the command center. The acting commander apparently hadn’t been doing anything fancy with variable layout when the bomb hit. Even so, it was hard not to look askance at the skewed angles, the walls bowed outward, the pitted floors. If she had been more imaginative, she would have fancied that she saw crumpled eyes staring up out of the holes.
Here the game picked up. Jedao’s movements changed, became more purposeful. Hard to tell, though: had he detected her, or was this coincidental? Most of the cindermoth’s systems were blown to hell and gone, but it wasn’t impossible that he had managed to revive enough to figure out that he wasn’t alone anymore. She kept watching without looking for explicit cues: intuition, she judged, would give her the best sense of his awareness of her.