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

“She wouldn’t be objective—though neither are you.” Benzaiten does not touch any panel, does not move at all. Xe is not even strapped in and has remained somehow stable in xer seat. On a monitor, the corvette’s aegis has sprung into being, tightly layered amber petals like a dahlia’s. “Exceptional humans fascinate me because I want to know how to reproduce them, the qualities that make one a leader, a ruler of nations. The acuity and the solidity, the mind that does not falter. I wonder if I could influence the human half of a haruspex into such a creature.”

“To what purpose?”

“I don’t know yet.” Xe snaps xer fingers. The corvette’s aegis sparks as it absorbs and dissipates the swarm. “Krissana is perfectly fine in that she’s capable and intelligent, but she’s no Anoushka. Her partner is fine, about the same, and again no Anoushka. Some humans have greater drive, greater reserves, and numinous qualities that translate into magnetism. It’d be interesting to have someone like that as my other half. Do you reckon your lord might let me make a copy of her cerebrum? Properly compensated for, naturally, I’ll even pay percentages on the license.”

She holds onto her seat as the corvette heaves, from impact or evasive maneuver. “You could just purchase a planet, set yourself up as its monarch. Pretend to be human if you want.”

“How do you know I haven’t tried that already? It’s not the same thing. I’d like it to happen naturally. I wish to raise a human half from nothing and see them grow great.”

The corvette’s warhead blows apart the blue aegis that robes One of Pierce as though One of Pierce is protected by nothing more than stardust and wishful thoughts. The harrier blazes, a miniature supernova as the engine core bursts free from its moderators.

“That’s that,” Benzaiten says, satisfied. “My relay is just around the corner. Shall we get in? I’d hate to have to destroy more of Anoushka’s property. It’s very important to maintain cordial relations with one’s allies and I still plan to ask her for a cerebral sample in a century or so.”

In Anoushka’s overlays, a trail of leopard ghosts unspools, leading her on like a thread of black gold. Benzaiten did not keep xer communication up long, presumably to prevent xer enemy Seung Ngo from tracing xer exact position. Instead xe left a navigation route, appearing and disappearing when she turns a corner, more rough guideline than a map. Savita follows her, mute and compliant; she knows Anoushka is her sole chance at survival.

Anoushka keeps a brisk pace; to her surprise the princess does not lag far behind as she strides down another service corridor and toward a maintenance lift—the kind operated through the bionetwork alone. The carriage resembles a seedpod, succulent and glistening, and the shaft resembles the inside of an esophagus. Savita does not require instruction: she makes it open and waits for Anoushka to step in.

“We need to descend four decks down,” Anoushka says.

The princess presses her palm to a twitching mass. It turns inert once she establishes control, one cilia slipping inside Savita’s palm. “How do you do it? All this.”

“Do what, princess?”

“Manage.” Savita presses her lips together. Breathes out. “Act like this is nothing. That you’ll emerge from it unscathed and return to your business as usual—whatever passes for business as usual for the Alabaster Admiral.”

“This is business as usual for me.” The absence of Xuejiao. The great charade that she failed to see through. “As for the rest, age will lesson you well enough. By the time you’re a hundred or so you should have some idea of how to deal with crises, how to not only survive but thrive, how to grasp circumstances that have slipped through your fingers and mold them to a shape of your liking. Age will teach you to master the world or else to submit to it. You’ll be forged until you’re fine and gleaming and strong, or you’ll be shattered and left in brittle ruin.”

The princess makes a huff. “Easy for you to speak in binary absolutes.”

Easy because that is what Savita now sees, but Anoushka does not say that; neither does she say that if she’d been born with Savita’s advantages, she would have ruled the universe by the time she was fifty.

The lift drops at a sluggish pace, like a piece of prey being swallowed down a long gullet. Anoushka passes her gloved hand over the pod’s lining. Yielding almost to the point she could sink her hand into it wrist-deep, not that it’d do anything lasting. She spent so much time in the beast’s belly trying to damage it, but bare-handed she could never do anything it couldn’t repair within minutes. It brings her back: the dark, the leviathan’s pulse. In the ventral decks there were servants who worshiped the beast, addressed it as divine and created dilapidated shrines to it—for all she knows they still do, if any remains that was grown with intelligence, with the capacity to flagellate spirituality out of their own flesh and make prayer. They all starved down there, but some would dedicate their misery to the leviathan itself, believing that it scourged their souls clean. That beyond death they’d open like anemones and float up into glory, a paradise without pain or famishment. Thinking about it she still doesn’t know what fueled this strength of imagination, this involved imagery; it wasn’t as if they were educated beyond the basics of operating and maintaining the leviathan, or as if they were instructed to revere anything but the queen. But perhaps an overseer or medic took pity, taught one of the experimental batch stories, showed them entertainments, and from there the ideas spread like contagion.

She used to absorb what she could, every morsel of information, every hint that a world existed beyond not just the ventral decks but beyond Vishnu’s Leviathan: that there were stars and planets, that there were lacunal tunnels that folded