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

Eir eyes widen and ey draws back, then ey laughs. “Is that how you plan to beg for mercy? That’s pitiful, Anoushka.”

She seizes the nearest of eir wrists—thinking for an instant how familiar it is, how familiarly delicate—and wrenches em off eir feet. Every muscle in her is tremulous and her bones gelatinous but she pushes herself upright and slams her boot down on Erisant’s shoulder. Her breath searing her mouth, she grips eir wrist tighter and pulls. The limb tears off with a snarl of connective cables and synthetic joints.

Below her Erisant screams. Ey was never one for anesthetic agents in eir system. Bent toward feeling all that life has to offer, the sharpest agony and the headiest pleasure.

She attempts the same thing with the other arm but finds she no longer has the strength—her own hands are going numb—so she stomps on the shoulder joined to the blade arm, again and again, putting her mass behind it each time. A part of her thinks how fortunate it is that the leviathan’s gravity is standard, that it lends her blows the necessary weight.

By the time she is spent, Erisant is no longer moving or making noise. One arm dismembered, the other shattered beyond use. Anoushka breathes slowly and tries to control her descent but the toxin is rising in her like a tide. Her strength ebbs, and ebbs again. She drops to her knees and then topples entirely, the leviathan’s flesh supple against her cheek. Soft and alive, as ever it has been. Outlasting them all in the end—Nirupa, Erisant, her.

Admiral? Benzaiten’s message unfurls in her overlays. It seems impossibly distant.

Yes, she replies, only half-certain that she’s returning a legible communique. From somewhere on Erisant’s body a single red pearl has rolled to a stop, nestling within leviathan folds.

Seung Ngo’s been dealt with; I infiltrated and assimilated them into myself. We won. Your vital signs look terrible. Would you like a little help?

I would not mind it. Her lips are numb and unresponsive, as if they have been welded shut. When she tries to move her arm, only her thumb twitches. All she has is her breath. Even reaching for Erisant is beyond her. I wish to bring my wife home.

Chapter Nine

In the end, little trace of what happened remains.

Seung Ngo—the primary instance—leaves one of Anoushka’s ships without ceremony. The armada does not receive a visit from the Mandate to demand negotiation or reparation, and as far as anyone knows what happened on Vishnu’s Leviathan was a struggle between two mercenary commanders. Ruinous, as such things tend toward, though this time there were few casualties outside the citizens of the leviathan itself: regrettable but, ultimately, not the business of the Vatican or Da Nang or any of Nirupa’s other guests. Their only bone of contention is that the leviathan larvae have been ceded to the Armada of Amaryllis, but most are glad to have escaped with their lives and few are eager to contest an Alabaster Admiral they assume are fresh from the fight and hungry for blood.

Benzaiten comes to meet her once, giving her thanks and promising her both thorough recompense and a leviathan larva of her own. She gives the AI a timeframe to deliver it. “I expect it to come to me a clean slate,” she says, to which the AI laughs, saying such a condition is impossible of any living thing. Publicly Vishnu’s Leviathan is now administered by Queen Savita, whose mother and sister were tragically lost during the strife between the Seven-Sung and the Amaryllis. Privately, Benzaiten has embedded an instance of xerself there, having arrived at a deal with Savita. An unfair one, balanced in Benzaiten’s favor, but with xer assistance Vishnu’s Leviathan can survive at least another century.

The rest is a matter of purging Erisant’s personnel.

There are fewer than Anoushka would expect—a credit to her intelligence chiefs and Numadesi—and as she oversees gathering them in one place she thinks of making Erisant watch, but she is past spite, past being vindictive. There is no point, and she wants to get it over with.

These soldiers are not offered a choice in the method of execution. She walks down the line of them, firing and thinking of her predecessor—the previous Amaryllis commander hewed to the wisdom of installing kill switches in all her troops. It would have made things faster, more efficient, though when Anoushka meets the clear-eyed gazes of Erisant’s agents she does not think the threat would have deterred them. Dedication can lend a person courage that defies the survival instinct, and kill switches have their limits. Range, latency, requiring soldiers to always report back within a certain timeframe. She’s never seen their use, has preferred instead to secure loyalty if not by love then by greed.

Not an infallible approach, as it transpires.

She arrives on the containment deck where the light is a dim mentholated blue and the air is frigid, fanged. Silent entirely, proofed even to engine hum. In here prisoners are cut off from all things, even the awareness of whether the ship is moving or inert, between relays or docked.

Gates whisper open that would unlock only for her. This far in, the barriers answer to accesses that Anoushka alone holds. Ones that she does not share even with Numadesi, and never with Xuejiao, before.

From the outside, the isolation cell resembles a suspension cage. A display lets her know its occupant is sedated; she initiates the sequence that will wake em up. When she enters, she changes the blank walls to a projection of a Mahakala prairie. The grass grows blue-green and high, softened here and there by feathery brush, by lanky flowers shaped like anglerfish lures. Above them spreads a sky of spun gold, cloudless and remote.

Erisant stirs in eir narrow seat, strapped into the restraints that keep em upright and nodes that inject or flush neurological agents from eir system. A thin patina of frost covers the instruments, though the nodes