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

entire life you are as bound to the leviathan as those symbiotes. Now contact her. I’m sure she would prefer I do nothing drastic to you, and I pray I’ll be due a good explanation from her most royal mouth.”

It takes Benzaiten mere minutes to conclude what Numadesi already suspected: that for years, Xuejiao and she have been killing each other’s recruits.

At a glance, this is not obvious. The executions were spread out, and many of the recruits were flagged by other spymasters. Yet browsing the logs shows that either the lieutenant or Numadesi had a hand in each case: a sergeant was caught spying on Numadesi, a captain attempted to sabotage an operation Xuejiao led. These were not frequent—altogether, after irrelevant results have been filtered out, Numadesi had less than a dozen executed and Xuejiao barely ten. But from the outside—in other words, to Anoushka—it might seem that the admiral’s wives are both suspect, striving against one another; that either or both of them could be traitors. The oldest case even predated Xuejiao’s recruitment.

Somehow Numadesi failed to notice; somehow she did not connect these incidents when it is her function to do so, to notice what her lord does not. The second pair of eyes, the last line of defense.

“It’s Captain Erisant’s hallmark,” Numadesi says as she paces the parlor. Twilight ripples across the floor, clouds scudding by in fast forward. “The Seven-Sung Fleet began as an information agency, specializing in infiltration and espionage, intelligence trades, rare merchandise procurement. They made the mistake of diversifying into open warfare, but that’s neither here nor there. Captain Erisant liked—likes—to send an operative into deep cover, to unmake eir target from within, eroding the hierarchy and structure one thread at a time.”

Benzaiten lounges in xer seat, legs propped up, the picture of nonchalance. “And so? The Amaryllis seems in fine shape enough, so it mustn’t have been very successful. These executions didn’t get anyone crucial, did they?” Xe stretches and sweeps one arm through the air like a ballet dancer. “As for the admiral’s second wife, she must have submitted to wearing some sort of kill switch? Anoushka merely needs to activate it. Unless you’re worried she’ll execute you too?”

She stops, looks at the AI. “There is no such thing.” There used to be, before Anoushka came to power. Abolished since. Occasionally Numadesi imagines what that was like, to always feel this kiss of a blade at the back of one’s neck, in place of the encompassing faith she feels in Anoushka’s presence. “But even if there were, people are not machines, guest of my lord.”

“I’m a person.” Xe laughs a little. “You mean she will hesitate to trigger that hypothetical kill switch. Even the Alabaster Admiral falls prey to sentiment. But then so do AIs, though in our case there’s always instances and mortality’s not as final. Well, the solution seems simple enough. You contact her, alert her to this grievous duplicity, and let her take it from there.”

“Yes.” She inhales, deeply and sharply. “I’ll be just a moment.”

When she reaches for the secure link—the one that’s used only by her and her lord—she finds it offline. Her throat closes. She goes through every available Amaryllis connection and finds the other end unavailable. The admiral’s and Lieutenant Xuejiao’s. All offline. That is impossible. Anoushka’s harrier holds network embeds that would carry the signal to and from nearly anywhere, ferrying it through Amaryllis relays, appropriating outside bandwidth when necessary. Unless those have been destroyed, but there are so many redundancies, ones that Xuejiao wouldn’t know about.

Another possibility—the two of them are in lacunal space, in the dead zones rather than the grid-linked regions close to the throats and mouths of relays. Except the most recent contact, logged mere hours ago accounting for latency, indicates they were aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan. Numadesi does not entertain the other possibility; that does not bear thinking, not yet. Her lord cannot fall.

“Benzaiten in Autumn,” she says, “you must have resources beyond our ken. Such vastness must be at your command that lies outside the bounds of human imagination.”

“Why, of course I do. Flattery’s not going to get you anywhere, Lady Numadesi, though it is lovely to be appreciated once in a while. The days when we were treated like gods are long gone. And I am invested in the admiral surviving and succeeding. What do you require?”

“I can’t reach her.” Saying it aloud draws the strings of her nerves taut. “Perhaps you’d be able to.”

“I haven’t been able to contact her since a hundred twenty-five minutes ago. I assumed that was intentional so bringing it up would have been coarse.” Benzaiten pulls xerself upright. “This is vexing. I can’t be there myself.”

Numadesi’s pulse hammers. “Why not?”

“My freedom of movement is somewhat impeded when it comes to the leviathan. What’s going on inside there is a . . . ” Xe heaves a theatrical sigh. “Family dispute? I’m not the only AI who’s after the leviathan-making process, and we’re all working covertly. My opponent got there before I did, and if they realize I want in as well they’ll just slaughter all humans onboard and seize the world-beast. The Mandate doesn’t have a treaty with Vishnu’s Leviathan.”

“That’d unite every single functioning military in a campaign to destroy Shenzhen Sphere.” The realization of long-held fears that the Mandate would turn on humanity, staging massacres at will and orchestrating extinction events on a whim.

“Such efforts would be resource-intensive, we’ve built the place rather competently and our military’s well-fortified these days. Even if they were successful, incinerating Shenzhen wouldn’t take out the entire Mandate. But my counterpart in Vishnu’s Leviathan will make their butchery of every human in it look plausibly deniable, turn it into a conflict between human factions. I wonder who their instrument is.”

“None of this you disclosed to my lord.”

Xe places xer hand on xer chest. “Just as you fully and entirely disclosed your prior association with the Seven-Sung Fleet to her? We all have secrets, Lady Numadesi. If Anoushka had