Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (e books free to read txt) 📗

beaks. They hurry past the gardeners and put the swan into the waters. This time there is no obvious tell but something about this person, this supervisor, does not belong. They look up from the muddy shore, from the swan. An embed glints in their neck, no bigger than five millimeters across. She can’t confirm at this distance but she’s almost certain it is a network augment, the kind that enhances a user’s overlays and signal receiving range. Peculiar.

The supervisor does nothing remarkable—they bring more swans from a cage out of view and release them into the lake, their motions as sure and practiced as if they’ve been handling half-feral birds all their life. Swan cries resound in the air, resounding between the artificial canopies like wind instruments, unevenly played and badly tuned. The false sky glistens. The lake ripples to the rhythm of the leviathan’s pulse.

For a second Anoushka feels estranged from the present. Ensnared by the impression that this is not quite real, that she is not quite here, on a deck of the leviathan on which she was birthed: that either she has never left and her last century was a convoluted delirium, or she is still aboard an Amaryllis ship and never arrived here. Mirage upon mirage.

“Admiral?”

Xuejiao has slid down to the grass, resting her head against Anoushka’s knee. That more than anything returns her to the here and now, grounds her to what is rather than what was. “I was wondering, Your Highness, whether the auction will continue at all. It is a difficult juncture, to be sure, and you and your mother must root out this perfidy.”

“The auction will resume shortly,” the princess says. “We will not waste your time or that of our other guests. As soon as things have calmed down a little—”

The skybox goes out.

What is left behind—the auxiliary lighting—is anemic, exposing the ceiling as a cavern crisscrossed by nests of symbiotes. Sacs that throb wetly, perspiring from their stems. Small winged rodents that drape themselves across branches of reinforcement, their bodies flat, nearly two-dimensional. Patches of fluorescent flora that flutter gently in the way of anemones. In an instant the illusion of jungle and orchards is gone.

Beside her, Xuejiao has stood up and detached her leash. She draws a small blade. There are faint clicks as the mannequin dermals that cover her limbs spread in a fine web of mesh armor, extending until she is a figure of moonstone radiance, liquid and shimmering.

A heavy mass drops from above, landing with loud, bone-shattering force. Dense alloys and actuators. Motion flashes in Anoushka’s peripheral vision, nearly too rapid to track. Her overlays catch it all the same, interpreting visuals into analysis into numbers: speed and trajectory, impact and material composition. With a thought her armor pours over her limb and she catches the strike on her gauntlet, its ablative weave cushioning the impact to her arm.

The assault drone falls back, servos humming behind plated chassis. Two angular heads, eyeless, and a quadrupedal body lined with sensors along the flanks. It rears up for another attack.

She kicks it in the midsection, sending it crashing into a banyan tree: wood splinters and behind her Savita screams. One of the drone’s heads twitches in the princess’ direction—interesting, Anoushka thinks before she fires. The drone drops. Two more emerge from the lake, dripping, their chasses slick with water and a layer of camouflage coating. It explains why her overlays never detected them.

They leap. She shoots them out of the air, a fulmination of ruptured armatures and starburst shock reactors.

From behind her, Xuejiao throws a disruptor grenade. Heatless, soundless lightning ignites the grove.

Anoushka’s optical implants normalize her vision within milliseconds. Six hound-drones lie limp on the grass, their cores forced into shutdown, their network functions neutralized. She searches the shore and the ceiling, but no more are forthcoming.

Savita has collapsed to her knees, hand over her mouth. At a nod from Anoushka, Xuejiao glides over to keep a hold on the princess. Far off, the swans shriek.

Anoushka nudges one of the assault drones with the toe of her boot. “A little too industrial to belong to the queen—the leviathan doesn’t have its own robotics lab, does it, Princess Savita? Ah.” She rotates one mechanical leg. “Let’s see. The mark of the Nova Legion is emblazoned right here. Very convenient. Whoever sent this must think me a fool. What’s your opinion, Your Highness?”

“I don’t know anything of this.” Savita’s voice is high. “I don’t.”

“Please send your mother a request for an audience, princess. I’d like to talk.”

The princess looks from Xuejiao to her, her lower lip trembling, her eyes dilated. In the limited light she looks cadaver-gray. Terror has sapped her of dignity, reduced her swiftly. For the moment she is no greater than any of her servants. “Your grenade disabled my network implants. I can’t. Not until we’re clear of the area.”

Anoushka pulls her lips back—her grin must be enormous, a skull’s, a predator bird’s. Slowly she kneels until she is level with the girl. She draws close enough that her breath would cut across Savita’s skin, raising the fine hairs on her cheeks. “On Vishnu’s Leviathan there is a biomechanical suite, Your Highness, that only you and your family can access. It utilizes the symbiotes as signal repeaters, sends those to a different symbiote that acts as a communication nexus, which then transmits it to the intended recipient who’s hopefully in physical contact with the appropriate receiver. As long as you’re touching the ground or the wall, you should be able to do this—those parasites are everywhere, aren’t they, so small and inconspicuous—even if your overlays are offline. You can direct the leviathan itself, this way, even if all digital channels have been disrupted or jammed.”

Savita’s mouth is ajar. Her face has gone ashen. “Why did—how did you . . . ”

“It is prudent to research adversarial territory, princess. Your mother should teach you that, but then you don’t plan to go far from here, do you? For your