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

thin membrane rupturing behind em. Leviathan lymph crusts eir upper lip and ey spits dark saliva onto the ground. “And how have you been, my wife?” Ey bares teeth stained gray and pink. “I’ve thought a lot on my role, Anoushka. Lying in the dark beside you, in idle moments I had to myself. I built contingency plans, anticipated when you might uncover me, and made myself as appealing to you as I could. No person is such a perfect fortress that they cannot be disassembled and their gate breached, the heart of them punctured and pinned down at the point of a spear. You’re made of soft parts, the same as everyone else.”

She unsheathes her knife. The blade thrums in her hand, nanite resonance. “What did your charade cost you?”

“Everything.” Erisant closes eir hand and extends eir blade. “But I would do it again. To see you cast down. To see you wounded. I would do it a thousand times.”

Ey charges low—the advantage of a slighter build. She keeps her blade at her waist level, moving fast, faster: she meets each blow with just enough force, not overexerting herself, remembering well how long Xuejiao could fight. In strength and reach she has the advantage, but Xuejiao—Erisant—was seasoned in compensating for both, in making the most of being slight.

The tip of eir blade grazes across her armor, glancing off. She swats away the flat of the blade, meeting more resistance than expected; ey must have taken enhancers while being reconstructed. Drugs or short-term augments, made stronger either way. Ey grins at her, a trickle of black oozing down eir nose.

“Don’t worry, commander,” ey whispers, “I’ll keep you alive and conscious—your brain, your head, your spinal cord. I’ll carry you around everywhere. What would be the point of humiliating you before the entire universe if you aren’t there to see the result?”

She says nothing. Above them the leviathan’s enormous organ beats on, heedless of what is happening beneath it. A world might begin, a dynasty might end, and the beast will continue swimming through the lacunal gray or the colorless black. Once she wished it was a knowing creature, an entity that participated in cruelty—the indifference, the brute stupidity, offended her more somehow. That the animal was mindless when she was not, and yet held dominion over her.

Anoushka misjudges a step. The clean, elegant curve of Erisant’s blade bites past armor and deep into her thigh. She staggers back, anesthetizing agents flooding her system, coagulant flowing to the wound. Even so it burns—not a femoral artery but close.

“When I built my persona, I wondered if it was too false, too obvious. A nubile, mercurial beauty who loved you unconditionally, who killed for you and devoted herself to your every pleasure. You never thought it was too good to be true? That I adapted myself wholly and thoroughly to your cause?” Ey whips eir blade through the air, shaking off her blood. “How easy you were to dupe. All those years I could have unmade you in an instant.”

She sucks air through her teeth: the copper of her blood mingles with the stenches of the beast. “Yet you didn’t. Why did you wait? Wouldn’t killing me in bed have amounted to the same?”

“Why did you not track Vishnu’s Leviathan and bombard it from a distance? You’re a fool for love but you’re also a fool for vengeance.” Erisant plants eir feet apart, eir balance firm despite the fleshy ground. “Even you can’t keep up with the damage, Anoushka.”

Another inhalation. Her throat is far drier than it should be—her overlays identify a contact toxin. One whose composition her filters and immune system can impede, but not nullify outright. Naturally ey would know what she can neutralize and what she can’t. The same way she knows em inside and out. “We will see about that, won’t we? My second wife.”

Her muscles spasm as she parries and answers Erisant blow for blow. She has fought in non-ideal conditions before, under too much or too little gravity or while wounded, but the toxin acts fast and her responses fall out of rhythm with her will. A few milliseconds behind, a few degrees off true, the latency of a compromised engine.

Erisant’s next slash carves into her flank. It meets the resistance of reinforced ribcage and stops. Anoushka knees em in the face. A crunch of cartilage—ey reels back, momentarily blinded.

She tries to stand. A muscle in her knee seizes, giving in at last to the toxin. Paralytic, according to her overlays, rather than fatal. Ey means to make good on the promise to capture her alive.

Ey regains eir feet, clutching at eir face and blinking away the blood. Ey draws in lungfuls of hot, leviathan-scented air as ey strides toward her, mouth drawn back in a shark’s grin. “I realize you won’t feel pain—you must’ve disabled most stimuli to your nervous system by now—but I shall take pleasure in the act, in removing your hand finger by finger, and then your limb one by one. I intend to travel light, and when you’re just a torso you will be so much more . . . compact.”

Erisant kneels and slaps a patch onto her bicep. Warnings blare across Anoushka’s vision: foreign substances exceeding thresholds for toxicity, a countdown to a point where she loses all motor control.

“I will enjoy this,” ey murmurs into her ear, lips brushing her earlobe. “Admiral.”

She licks her mouth. Swallows. “You said you’d do this again even if it cost you everything.”

“When you destroyed my fleet, you destroyed most of what I had. And what little remained, I poured into bringing about your devastation. Your anguish is my ecstasy. Yes, I’d do it again. Had I failed I would have come back, over and over until you were a ruin.”

Anoushka steels herself, marshaling all the discipline she still has over her body. “And I would wed you again. Each and every time I would have courted you, made of you my treasure and my wife. I loved