Deep in the belly of our ship the engines start, and the deck beneath our feet begins to shudder. One of the vessels ahead of us is having trouble. A dull thud announces that its engine is turning over but refuses to fire.
One of their officers says something to an NCO. We hear the engine start about three minutes later, and when the NCO returns he’s rubbing his fist.
“Belowdecks,” an enemy corporal tell us.
The others look at me.
“Do what he says.”
Behind me someone laughs, so I turn to face him. It’s a Death’s Head captain I don’t recognize, wearing full combat ribbons.
“Got a problem?”
“I outrank you,” he says.
“So fucking what?” asks Neen, and the others laugh.
Part of me is appalled; part of me knows it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d have said at Neen’s age, although my insubordination was confined to sergeants. Mind you, back then I still believed lieutenants were godlike.
Belowdecks the bulkhead is clean and the grating over which we’re led is freshly scrubbed. Inset lights indicate routes for escape and entry, and the crew move from job to job with cold efficiency. This is a military vessel. Probably armed to the teeth and undoubtedly crewed by professionals.
“In there,” orders the guard.
Seven clicks follow as electronic locks engage. It’s time to ask if anyone else has a weapon, and if the enemy are listening in on us, then that’s just too bad.
Blank faces greet my question.
“Come on,” I say. “Who’s carrying?”
At a nod from Neen, first Shil and then Franc put up their hands. He’s learning fast. As I told Shil way back, the boy’s a natural.
“What have you got?”
Shil produces a dagger and Franc reaches into her top, palming a blade. It’s only when Rachel produces another dagger that I realize Franc has been carrying her weapon all along.
“Let me see.”
It’s my Death’s Head dagger, still oiled and razor-sharp.
Turning her back, one of the younger women reaches under her skirt and produces a blade. It’s crude and cut from cheap steel, but she’s ground the edge as fine as it can go and the point is vicious enough to pierce everything but body armor.
Four knives.
“Anyone else?”
“I’ve got this.” It’s one of the militia sergeants with a flip-out cosh. “But it’s not going to be enough. We need a gun, at least.”
His eyes widen as my hand dips into a pocket and I produce the pistol Rachel stole from the Silver Fist on the quayside.
“Very pretty,” says the captain. “But we’ve still got a locked door. And why would they follow you anyway? If you hadn’t killed the seven-braid, Colonel Nuevo could have negotiated a proper withdrawal.”
“OctoV kills people who retreat.” My voice is matter-of-fact.
“Our dear emperor is three crystals short of an Uplift.”
The captain is upset, that much is obvious. Too upset, it seems to me. And how the fuck does he know it was a seven-braid anyway? It’s not like Colonel Nuevo advertised the fact widely. And then there are those medals. You can’t have ribbons for two battles fought the same week on opposite sides of the spiral arm, it’s just not possible…
“Traitor,” I say, stepping forward.
His neck snaps so easily that I’m lowering his body to the ground before most people have come to grips with the fact that I’ve moved.
“God bless OctoV,” I tell the room.
Whatever Haze sees on my face is not what everyone else sees, because he smiles. “We need to talk,” he suggests.
My conversation with Haze is brief and to the point. The kyp in my throat is dying, but because symbionts are hard to kill, its death is eating up my body’s resources and leaching power where it can. I can embrace the soft tech or die myself: Those are the only two choices open to me.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Didn’t know you well enough,” says Haze, and I realize how private a person he really is.
It seems my metabolism is at war with something that has already tuned itself to my mental frequency and grown suckers that now reach into my brain and wrap my spinal cord like ivy.
Haze doesn’t call them suckers, he calls them dendritic spurs, but they sound like suckers to me. “These things,” I say. “How are they captured?”
“Sven,” he says.
Haze shouldn’t be calling me Sven, but I let it go.
“They’re grown. Kyps combine a viral matrix with a gene-spliced leech. They’re not alive in any sense you’d understand.”
“It sounds like Uplifted technology.”
“Yes,” says Haze. “It is.”
A dozen people are watching our intense, half-whispered conversation, so I wait while Haze takes a deep breath to steady himself. “OctoV,” he says. “You know what he is?”
I give our beloved leader his titles, rolling the words off my tongue as newscasts always give them, a long list of grandiose phrases stripped of meaning by overuse. Haze checks to see if I’m serious.
“OctoV is an Uplifted,” he says.
It comes as less of a surprise than it should.
“We’re soldiers in a war fought by machines,” says Haze. “Well, augmented hive mind composites.” Seeing from my face that he’s lost me, he simplifies. “OctoV is the rebel; the Uplifted are original. They began as machines for the Enlightened, but things changed.”
I should have known this from the fleeting visit OctoV paid my mind in Farlight. So cold, so distant, so obviously not the heroic child emperor of his own homespun legend.
My decision makes itself.
We’re here; we need to be somewhere else. OctoV or the Uplifted, it’s not much of a choice, but it’s the only choice we have, because the great and the good of the U/Free are not about to take us in. And since we’re already on OctoV’s side, we might as well stay there.
“The kyp,” I say. “What do I need to do?”
“Stop trying to kill it.”
“That’s my body,” I tell him.
Haze shakes his head. “It’s your mind.” His smile is sour, and in his gaze I can see the man behind the boy; the power he will become if he lives that long. Haze is no more human than I am…
And as I stumble over that thought, light floods through my skull and Haze locks me down so hard and so fast that I stumble, both hands clutching my head. Shil is moving toward me before I can wave her away, but Haze does it for me.
“Leave him,” Haze says.
My mind is a circular wall collapsing under the waves that suddenly hit it: readouts from my own body, levels of tiredness, stamina, and battle damage. Apparently I’m in a lot better shape than I thought, and half my danger levels haven’t even been approached, ever.
And then, as my thoughts stabilize, the wall fades and there’s another in its place, only this time the wall is mine, and the wall Haze originally erected tightens to enclose only him, and then it’s gone. Although Haze still stands in front of me, his hand under my elbow as I struggle to stand.
“Lock it down,” says Haze.
So I do. It’s odd taking orders from someone who takes orders from me, but he’s right and I need to be invisible to anybody searching for wave echoes in whatever dimension it is I now inhabit.
“What the fuck just happened?” Shil demands.
“He became a god,” Haze tells her. The boy’s only half joking.
I shake my head, realizing something. “Angel, maybe…demon, possibly. But we’re not gods; none of us comes close to that level.”
“You became an angel?” says Rachel.
“Not really,” I say. “I just became a better fighting machine.”
“Speaking of which,” says Haze. “I’ve got a present for you.” Turning his back on the room, he undoes his jacket and shirt, then untapes a package wrapped in strange silver cloth from his chest.
“This is yours,” he says, untying it.
“Too right,” says my gun. “Try not to lose me again.”