Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast, Benjanun Sriduangkaew [top novels TXT] 📗

known, she’d be acting differently and thereby alerting my opponent. For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’s been killed.”

“That’s not a reassurance.” She is already spinning out possible courses of action. The obvious: to send in the reinforcements stationed two relays from where Anoushka is and assault the leviathan. Dangerous if the leviathan has been made anechoic and communication is impossible, but physical proximity might allow the reinforcement to establish a link to the admiral. Unless those troops have already been suborned, but she tries not to think of that. In crisis, caution can too easily transmute into the cliff’s edge of paranoia.

“It isn’t,” Benzaiten agrees. “I may find a way to operate without attracting undue attention, though past a certain point it’ll careen into brute force regardless. Leave it to me.”

Enticing as the thought is, she knows she will not. “I’ll do my part as I can. I trust you’ll not hinder me.”

The AI spreads xer hands. “Keep me posted, in case our ploys come into conflict.”

Numadesi leaves the parlor for her private room, where she sits on the bed that Anoushka shared with her not so long ago. She runs her hand over where her lord has been, the densely made body whose every plane and angle signals strength—as capable of absolute tenderness as savage violence. The indentations creasing the mattress have smoothed out since.

For a time she watches the leopards, the way dusk cascades down their long-backed frames, the silence with which they traverse their world. She often thinks her lord a little like them, carelessly beautiful and preternaturally at ease. A predator among predators, finer and more splendid than any other, and far deadlier.

She pulls up Xuejiao’s profile, delving into the background check segments on the off chance that she has been wrong. A recruit is screened not only for their abilities but also their past: their former associates, allegiance, family and lovers. When Xuejiao arrived, she came with a complete history—two mothers on the planet-ship One Thousand Erhus, acquaintances and colleagues from when she worked as a holy assassin; all were investigated when Xuejiao got her promotions, and again when she was courted to be Anoushka’s bride. Numadesi remembers that day with utter clarity—Xuejiao in her red cloudsilk and anklets, swirling, dancing her way into Anoushka’s arms. A private ceremony, attended only by a handful of officers. My little red bird, Anoushka called her new bride, my cardinal.

How exquisite her lord’s new treasure was, Numadesi thought, how fitting a jewel. Xuejiao’s past looked real then: both parents alive and reachable, an old mentor sending in congratulations. Every care was taken, every social component verified and double-verified, every attack vector preempted.

When she tries to contact the mothers and the mentor now, she finds exactly what she expected: all three are dead. Her search for more reveals the same—an old lover, a cousin, a childhood friend. Obituaries indicate they passed at various points within the last decade, having outlived their use or else having outlived their roles. By now they could be anywhere, buried or cremated or given new faces and new identities. Agents that have gone fallow or who have spread throughout the universe, acting in small subtle ways against the Amaryllis—against the admiral. Or who have, themselves, infiltrated the Armada. Awaiting the right moment, the right command.

That gorgeous wedding dress with its diaphanous veil, its silver trims glinting in the ship-light. That young, guileless face. Numadesi touches the red pearls in her hair, touches the absence of what she has given away. Her fingertips are frigid. Her pulse gallops. She should have known—should have divined the truth of Xuejiao’s identity from the lines of the false skull, the geometry of the artificial body, the ceramic patina that she thought so charming.

A priority request blinks in her overlays. For a second, she does not quite comprehend it. It is a request to board an Amaryllis ship and to meet with her or the Alabaster Admiral. But there is no pending business—Anoushka cleared the slate before she left—and even existing clients would not, at this time, be entertained.

Then she sees exactly which client it is and the choice to turn them away at once extinguishes. Has, indeed, never been a possibility.

“A gracious greeting to you, Lady Numadesi of the Amaryllis,” says the speaker on the other end. “I’m Seung Ngo, an AI ambassador from the Mandate. May I board Seven of Divide?”

Chapter Six

Another meeting, under a domed roof that looks out to the leviathan’s orbit: the glow of ships like a besieging army and the more distant light of a red dwarf, commingling like a solar storm. Anoushka surveys the tableau of vessels, calculating the possible paths of bombardment and the firepower of each ship. This group of corvettes should be able to damage aegis ring generators if they act in concert. That harrier would be able to intercept five percent of the leviathan’s mobile defenses. Those deceptively small phalanxes could penetrate the aegis rings. No large craft is allowed within orbiting distance of Vishnu’s Leviathan, but combined these small ships could do real damage, if they weren’t commanded by radically differing interests who are far more prone to firing on each other than on the leviathan. Still it is a careless arrangement.

Almost certainly the queen has secured the protection of one of the bidding parties, if not several. She reexamines the guest list, knowing multiple groups are too secretive to be included on the official roster. There is only a handful she can think of who possess the military might to contest this number of hostiles. And they would have to hide their ships, keep them on standby a relay or two away. Much as she does. Much as, she imagines, half the guests do. The more she thinks about it, the less sense it makes that Nirupa is holding the auction aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan—anywhere else would have been safer for the leviathan itself and less fraught. All this could have