Memento Youri - Pyrrhic

[deuceoftears]

You had just unwebbed to lunge for Dhanneth’s gun when the entire command center sheened white and silver. Splinters and pale streaking light arced through the walls. Alarms howled.

Kujen-Inhyeng yelped as you pivoted and tackled him, slamming him to the floor. You pinned him there. A strike with the blade of your hand caused Kujen’s head to snap back. The blow didn’t kill.

You hadn’t meant it to. You heard Talaw’s voice and Dhanneth’s, a commotion of panicked Kel. None of the words meant anything. All that mattered was holding Kujen in place so the formation attack, now active, could sever Kujen from his anchor and destroy him forever.

Then it happened. A sudden overbearing weight in your mind. Moths, stars, a surfeit of shadows. You would have screamed if ou'd been able to. He couldn’t, though; couldn’t stop your body from releasing Inhyeng’s.

Your body stood. Your mouth smiled. “Major Dhanneth,” your voice said. “Kneel.”

Dhanneth knelt directly before you in a parody of the exchange of pleasure they’d once known.

“Dhanneth, no—” You knew you were speaking only in the arena of the mind, that only Kujen could hear you. Yet the words tore out of you anyway.

He couldn’t tell whether the ugly swollen triumph that thrilled through you were yours or Kujen’s.

“Is this so different from the things you had him do for you in bed?” Kujen said, in a voice that only you could hear.

“Don’t hurt him,” you said. Pleas wouldn’t move Kujen. He tried anyway.

“He never wanted this, you know.”

“What do you mean?” you asked, even though you knew the answer would hurt you.

“I programmed him to be loyal to you,” Kujen said. “I thought you might need a friend. Or a lover, as it turned out. But somewhere in a corner of his mind he remembers who he was, and what’s been done to him, and that he hates you.”

Dhanneth was still kneeling, his eyes hot with mingled fear and desire.

“No,” you whispered.

The Revenant was roaring fit to slaughter stars. Imprisoned in your own body, you heard it more clearly than ever before, and other things besides. The humming of the moons and planets in their orbits, and the litanies of the stars. The songweave of moths and more than moths: other creatures besides, whole ecologies that dwelled in gate-space and intersected with invariant space, where humans lived, only when monstrous engines like the threshold winnower invited them in. Two of the winnowers yet survived Inesser’s assaults: monstrosities crouched near them, waiting.

Kujen’s shadow-of-moths existed simultaneously in gate-space. And it was inside you. Kujen was inside you, manifesting in your dreamspace. He appeared as the man he must have been once upon a lifetime. In that place dominated by the carcasses of stars, he rounded on you.

Your heart split down the middle at how beautiful he was. You had assumed that Inhyeng had been modded into Kujen’s old shape, but whatever the reason, the two men, while both extraordinary, could never have been mistaken for each other. Kujen—the real Kujen—had a dancer’s build, and curly brown hair framing a face of such subtle angles it was almost feminine, and eyes the color of amber, the one point of similarity with Inhyeng.

Everything came to you in double vision. Equations you had once puzzled over revealed themselves to you in lattices of starfire clarity. Peoplediminished to flicker-motes in the tapestry of years. You could have lingered forever, entranced by the world as Kujen saw it; would have given anything to share it forever, except—

Kujen rose in a fury, despite the silver lances piercing him. “How did you do it?” he demanded, except you knew better than to answer. “Submit to me,” he said, “and I may yet forgive a great many things. It’s nothing that can’t be repaired. Your predecessor, too, had a taste for treachery.” Nevertheless, he spoke rapidly; he had to be aware of how little time he had left.

“Fuck you,” you said in the language of moths, even as you yearned toward that vision, the crystalline precision of a mind vaster and older than his.

Kujen heard you. “That could also be arranged,” he said with sweet malice. “If you want to beg for it, if you want to be made so you enjoy begging for it—hell, if you want me to beg for it, I’m flexible. There’s nothing I haven’t seen, and nothing I won’t do.”

The lances brightened; Kujen’s face twisted.

All I have to do is endure, you thought, in agony yourself. Was the pain a side-effect, or an echo, of whatever Kujen was feeling from the formation attack? A promising sign if so.

“You won’t have another chance. I can give you what no one else can give you. If you turn me down, if you let me die, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life—”

You heard someone cry out in rage. His throat hurt as though an animal had scratched its way out. “I’m your gun, Kujen, but that’s not all I am!”

(You knew it was a lie. In all the quicksand years remaining to you, you were never going to be anything more than another of Kujen’s dolls.)

The lances finished their work. The chain that bound Kujen to you, his current anchor, was severed. With it went the life Kujen had clung to for so long.

Even then Kujen wasn’t done. “Oh, child,” he said. His voice was so matter-of-fact that your hackles rose. “No one else will ever love you.” After that he was gone.





Then you realized that the lurching wasn’t just dizziness. His people were staggering. Dhanneth had come up beside you and was attempting to support you, which would have worked better if he hadn’t been worse affected by whatever was going on.

Kujen’s gas, take two. Had his death, or Inhyeng’s, triggered this?

“Get you to safety,” Dhanneth said in a muffled voice. He’d pulled on a mask and had another dangling from his hand.

“I don’t need it,” you snapped. “Help Talaw.” Talaw had already fallen to their knees. Together, you and Dhanneth pulled it on. Talaw was already breathing shallowly, swaying from side to side. “Commander. Commander, did the protector-general accept our surrender?”

“There seems to be a controversy about—” Talaw was slurring. They hadn’t gotten masked in time.

“Sir!” Dhanneth cried. He had drawn his sidearm, but his hand trembled so badly that you wondered that he didn’t drop it. Behind you, the acting executive officer dropped to the floor. “Poison. Betrayed. Look—”

Who— Then the servitors floated in, silent, lights flickering sterile white, and opened fire.

The Revenant’s voice thundered through you. No one who knows your history will believe it wasn’t your idea, it said, or some manifestation of your madness.

You froze for a split second, uncertain whether to haul Talaw to their feet. Instead, you raised your gun and fired, impotently, at one of the servitors. In glacial rage, you said, This was unnecessary. I could have negotiated—

I am uninterested in compromises, the Revenant said. You never intended to come with us, did you? A traitor to the last, in any incarnation.

You had no answer to that.

The Revenant had left its position above the Protectorate capital and had already reached Terebeg 4’s thinnest fringe of atmosphere, at the edge of what was considered space.

Goodbye, cousin. The servitors refuse to kill you, in recognition of the service you rendered us by assassinating Kujen. But I judge your odds of survival to be poor even if Protector-General Inesser’s Kel do pick you up.

Dhanneth was trying to get your attention. He spoke in the plainest, barest form of the high language. “You’re immune,” he said. He looked ghastly, but the treatment that Medical had given him for the allergic reaction seemed to remain in effect.

Talaw had lost consciousness. The masks didn’t seem to be doing anyone any good. And why should they? While the Kel had stepped up checks of equipment after Kujen’s little surprise, the servitors would have had ample opportunity to sabotage the masks before their attack.

“You deserved better,” you said to Dhanneth. To all the Kel.

There were too many servitors, and they had the advantage of surprise, and a poisoned foe. The other Kel were firing, but few of them could even stand. You fired until you ran out of ammunition. Snagged another firearm off one of the fallen. No one fired on you, or at Dhanneth or Talaw, because they were next to you. But you couldn’t shield everybody at once.

Black and gold, black and red, the dead everywhere around you.

Dhanneth shook his head with an effort. He pointed toward the hall that led to the emergency survival capsules. “Save—one. Major.”

“Yes,” you said. You knew what you had to do. Dhanneth and Talaw would need the capsules. For your part—“Come with me.”

Dhanneth helped you carry Talaw down the hall, past the spilled corpses. Silently, the servitors parted for them. You worked one capsule’s controls while Dhanneth placed Talaw in the capsule.

“The hexarch said that—that you never wanted anything to do with me,” you said. “Was that—was that true?”

Dhanneth didn’t speak, but for a moment the answer blazed in his eyes. “I hated you from the beginning. I don’t remember everything, but what I do—all the things you took from me—”

“I see,” you said softly. “I’m very sorry.” An apology was poor compensation for what you had
done; but it was all you had to give. He opened the next capsule. “Now you.”

Dhanneth smiled at you. “Live,” he said. His voice was rough with suppressed emotion. “Both of you.” you understood his intent too late. Dhanneth grabbed the gun, brought it up to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

You wasn’t aware of having screamed Dhanneth’s name until the pain hit a moment later, the rawness of your throat. For a moment all you could do was stare at the fallen body, the red, red splash. A phantom ache flared up in your wrists, the memory of the time Dhanneth had bound you. That was all.

It was perfectly Kel, and a perfectly Kel revenge. Dhanneth had saved his commander. He had also repudiated the affair in the strongest terms possible.

You wasn’t feeling steady in any sense of the word. A distant roaring clogged your ears. He programmed Talaw’s capsule and your own to follow a narrowly calculated trajectory.

You locked yourself into the capsule. Hit the launch button. Braced yourself against the sudden acceleration. The capsule hurtled through a dark tube and out into a greater darkness.