Lancer 2.44 (Patreon)

They’d only posted one Oathkeeper tonight.  She was hanging out on the south wall, right next to Roel’s bedroom.  I could handle one Oathkeeper.  If I saved the cloak until I got close, it’d limit the time they had to respond with their stupid little dowsing rod.

Think things through.

It wouldn’t work, would it?

They definitely had the Lilith detector on the premises.  That meant it was either with the lady outside of Roel’s window, or they had a second person inside.  If the window guard had it, that meant a fight, and Roel would book it.  If the window guard didn’t have it, I could sneak past her.

But the guy on the inside would detect the cloak.  Then they’d raise the alarm.  I’d be stuck inside Roel’s room before I had a chance to…

She wasn’t going to hear me out, was she.

I slumped against the alley wall.  The tactical situation didn’t matter.  I’d already fucked up the strategic situation.

“Commander,” I said.  My voice was rough.  “I’m… not going to make the attempt.”

“Understood,” she said, as if receiving a routine report.

It was a kind of compassion, as Veleans understood it.  Some weaknesses you probed; others you made a point of ignoring.  That, too, was a message.  It meant they were treating me as an adult; it meant they trusted me to deal with my wounds without help.  It meant respect.  It meant I was one of them.

It was hard to care right now.

“Returning to base.”

*

The shower didn’t feel weird anymore.  I’d been doing baths for thessi—for months, but the old routines were coming unstuck from the rust.  I let the hot water wash off the sweat from the humid nighttime air.

My psych professor said people who felt a lot of guilt took longer showers.  It was supposed to be this symbolic thing, washing away your sins or something.  I guess that kind of made sense, but my comm didn’t pick up any symbolism when I scanned for it.  After about fifteen minutes I got restless and sent the command to shut the shower down.

The Ragnar’s translation engines sucked the wetness from the room and pumped it back as temperature, leaving the air perfectly warm.  That included the water in my hair, but I still ended up looking for a towel until the lack of dampness registered.  I let my hair fall down my back, the sensation somehow making me feel more naked than my current lack of clothes.

I’d changed.

How had the commander put it?  ‘We are built up and torn down every day.’  I had become Ajarel Vitares; I had put her to death.

It wasn’t even the first time I’d done this, I realized.  I’d been Morgan, years ago, before I’d taken the name Lilith.  Morgan was dead now.  I’d left her back on Earth so I could become… I wanted to say ‘Lilith,’ but that didn’t seem right.  That was probably going to take some meditation to figure out.

I pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of sweats.  The fit was at once familiar and strange.  I felt an urge to at least put my hair in a ponytail, but I held myself back.  I wasn’t Ajarel anymore.  Let the weird Estheni hair norms die with her.

When I entered the lounge, Abby was waiting for me.  Oh, she had plausible deniability.  There was a movie playing on the wall screen and it was just a coincidence that the good couch seated more than one.

“Liar,” I murmured affectionately.

She was too still.  There was no way she was actually watching the movie—she was fucking meditating.

I accepted the implicit offer, dropping heavily on the couch and snuggling up against her.  Her arm lazily snaked around me, tracing her thumb in circles on the base of my scalp.

“Lilith barak,” she whispered to me.

My breath caught in my throat, but I shoved the reaction down.  “Your eyes aren’t even on.”

She chuckled softly at my deflection.  “I’m practicing an ancient technique, handed down over generations.”

“You’ve seen the movie before.”

“Oh good, you’ve heard of it.”

I laughed despite myself.

We both fell silent, but the conversation didn’t stop.  It was the words I didn’t say, the questions she didn’t ask me.  It was the way she held me anyway; the warmth of it, the fingers combing through my hair.  It was the way she ignored the tears that fell on her jumpsuit.

She grieved with me until the tears had run their course.  Neither of us said anything to gainsay the fiction we Veleans needed to perform: that my dalliance with the Vitares family was simply part of the mission.  A matter of honor, at most—my gift to those who had helped me accomplish my goals.

I was a warrior of Veles.  War was my creed; victory my birthright.  It was time to leave childish things behind.

*

The Kabidiad would be held in Bulcephine, the capital city of the Imperial Coalition.  Markus—Darwin knows how he talked his way out of suspicion—would be hitching a ride on the same caravan as Cades and two of the other qualifiers.

Apparently there had been a third, but his wife had forbidden him from competing.  That would have been the end of it for him, given the whole obedience thing that formed the backbone of Kabiadesian honor.  I guess some people just didn’t like sharing with the Empress.

“You’re not going,” Abby told me as we briefed for the next stage of our divine wetwork.  “You’ve been burned, and if anyone recognizes your face it could lead to further blowback for Markus.  I want you on the Ragnar practicing ak ha var.  We may not have another opportunity once we reach the capital.”

“No argument here,” I said.  “Who’s backing up Markus?”

“Markus can back up himself,” Markus quipped.

“I’ll go,” Val said, not looking up from his screen.  “Abby can stay to pass on her antiquated hobby.”

“Spoken like a man who lost his last sparring bout,” Abby said.

“I’m positive the Old Ways have something to say about gloating over empty victories.”

“Yeah,” I cut in with a smirk.  “‘Glory lieth in the claiming.’”

Val’s baleful green stare promised vengeance as Abby proudly squeezed my shoulder.

“Oh great,” Markus said.  “Now there are two of them.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said.

Even Val smiled.  “Welcome back, Lilith.  I assume you remember your name.”

A joking insult on the surface, a jab at my loyalties hidden below.  The me of a year ago would have tried to spit out a comeback and answered him on one level at most.

The me of now merely rolled her eyes.  I could tell he approved.

Estheni nobility at war were nothing compared to the rigors of Velean friendship.  It was familiar now, even comfortable.  My heart still ached to hell, but there was also pride in there.  Pride at what I’d accomplished, who I was becoming.

“The mission’s not done,” said the commander.  “We’ve got about a month to prepare.  Most of that will be travel time.  Markus, I’ll need you to continue your association with Cades.  Your primary objective will be to investigate any experience he has with previous Kabidiads.  Secondly, anything you can get on his encounters with the Cult of Silence will be useful when we move on Meris.”

“Speaking of which,” I said.  “Val, did you ever end up using the blood sample I got from Lirian?  That seems useful now that she’s out of jail.”

He gave me a thin smile.  “I have a direct connection through the Ragnar, which we can access as long as she’s in signal range.  The process proved to be more complicated than I anticipated; Meris protected her very well.”  The smile twisted into a smirk.  “Unfortunately for Meris, gods can’t adapt, and I can.”

“Now who’s gloating over unworthy foes?” the commander laughed.

Whatever mood had possessed Val receded.  “Operationally, I recommend using the connection sparingly.  She tends to instinctively activate her cloak when her soul is manipulated, and the structure of Meris’s blessing indicates that it makes her aware of outside attention, which would seem to include us.”

“So,” I said, “she constantly feels like she’s being watched?”

“Presumably.”

“Awesome!  Fuck her!  Let’s do it in shifts.  I call the middle of the night.”

They laughed at that.  I laughed along, like I was joking.

I wasn’t joking.

“Lilith, you’ll be on ops,” said the commander.  “Bulcephine is reported to have a higher level of divine activity, so we don’t know what security measures are waiting for us.  Without knowing the nature of the enemy’s defenses, we have to assume your stint as Ajarel will increase your exposure risk.”

“Understood.  I can handle ops.”

The commander nodded.  “The rest of us will need to gather information quickly.  To that end, we’ll reposition the Ragnar as soon as Markus and Val leave Vitareas.  This is a deathblow.  I am authorizing any and all measures to secure the influence we need to put Markus on that podium.”

“What about Kives?” Markus said.  “There was that contact with Lilith during the Voranetes op.”

The commander turned silver eyes on me.  “Lilith, give me your analysis.”

“Kives wants me to grow up,” I reported matter-of-factly.  “In her way.  Over the course of the op, she made multiple attempts to exploit my family trauma, with the apparent objective of creating an emotional commitment to House Vitares.  The incident where she railroaded me into sacrificing to her may have been an attempt to get me to bargain with her.  I can’t speculate on her objectives, but maybe Val has some ideas.”

“A few—and all of them conjecture.”  Val synced his touchpad to the wall screen, displaying a bunch of equations he had to know I couldn’t read.  “She would see you as the weak link of the team.  The rest of us have already become who we are.”

“Although some philosophers say that we eternally become who we are.”

Val scoffed.  “Those philosophers have never solved a Valdleif system.  The strategic objective for targeting Lilith is either full indoctrination or an attempt to steer her off course from a pivotal moment.”  He turned to me.  “You’ll need to be prepared to resist when the moment comes.  Remember that you have a choice.”

“That’s not super comforting,” I said.  “Back on Earth, there’s a story about this dude named Oedipus who did everything he could to avoid a prophecy, but ended up fulfilling it anyways.  That’s kind of how it goes.  If you tell me I have a choice against a goddess of fate, I’m going to assume every choice I make plays into her hands.”

“Fate will mold you like butter if you let her,” said Abby.  “But you choose who you become.  Fate only rules the unthinking.”

“Huh,” I said.  “Is that why we’re doing the ak ha var stuff and everything?”

“Lilith,” Val chided me.  “You’re a Velean.  We were fighting fate long before we learned it had a stomach.”

There was something of a feral cast to his face.  Behind my answering smile, there was a snarl rising in my throat.  A distant memory of cataclysm and triumph.

“They fall,” I said.

My team answered me.  “They die.”

*

I manned the guns for the duration of the Ragnar’s flight to Bulcephine.  Part of me hoped for an angel attack or something, but our enemy didn’t send so much as a gvodim after us, even when we dropped a relay satellite to maintain contact with the boys.

The capital was larger than Vitareas by at least an order of magnitude, massive stone edifices standing guard over endless miles of farmland.  Bulcephine was a coastal city, concrete dams stretching into the ocean to protect its harbor.

Bulcephine’s guards were more active than the slackers in Vitareas.  With the full moon shining, a Ragnar-sized hole in a wheat field might be visible from the walls.  The ship was projecting absence; they wouldn’t see a ship vanishing into a hole in the earth, they’d see nothing vanishing into a hole in the earth.  That was still a problem for us.  After some brainstorming, Abby took us to the coast.

We quickly determined that there wasn’t enough room to set down inside the harbor, and Abby vetoed the plan where we tunneled under the seawall sheltering it from Horcutio’s domain.  We were limited by the translation engines; we’d need to submerge the ship about a mile away and slowly tunnel under the farmland.

“Holding position,” Abby said.

“Copy,” I said, punching out of my console and hoisting Val’s moirascope over my shoulder.  “Gunnery controls are yours.  Pop the hatch in twenty.”

“Understood.”

I lugged the device down the hall to the starboard airlock.  The door opened right as I reached it.  I plonked the tripod down first, securing it to the floor emplacement before sliding the moirascope on top.  I grabbed two safety lines out of paranoia, clipping one to my belt and the other to the moirascope.  Satisfied with my preparations, I slammed my fist on the cycle button.

Warm, salty ocean air washed over me as the exterior door opened.

“Scanning now,” I said.

It’s harder to detect dyadic entanglements in an area than with a specific object.  Sure, for some momentous events—“this is the street where JFK got shot!”—you might end up with an etheric connection, but on a random patch of ocean?  It’d have to be pretty big.

Fortunately, this was one of those cases where a moirascope caused the good kind of self-fulfilling prophecies.  Anything big enough to show up on a moirascope was big enough that we weren’t going to mess with it.  So, in a convoluted kind of way, scanning the area for unwanted events directly prevented them from happening.

I flipped through the filter settings.  I didn’t pick up any disasters or miracles.  No one made a world-altering discovery here or faced a momentous enemy.  I tried Val’s patchwork approximation of the Estheni “Calamity” construct and didn’t get anything, although he’d been careful to hedge his bets on the accuracy for that one.

Most importantly, there weren’t going to be any ships destroyed here.

“All clear,” I said, cycling the airlock again.

Abby waited until I was back on the gunnery controls to take us in.  We slipped into the water nose-first, guns at the ready.  Just because the moirascope had eliminated the obvious possibilities didn’t mean Kives had a non-obvious one lined up for us.

“I’m starting translation on the tunnel,” said Abby.  “It’s going to be a long night.  I’m authorizing exhaustion blockers.”

“Copy,” I said, flipping between the various sensors I had available.  “Huh.  Commander, can you double-check thermal for me?  The area seems warm.”

“I’m getting the same readings,” said Abby.  “Translation is proceeding on schedule.”

“So, Val’s not here,” I said leadingly.

Abby laughed.  “Authorized.”

The ship was picking up signs of life all around us, but that’s kind of what you expect on an ocean coast.  I scanned for divine blessings and got a couple hits, but they were all in the direction of the city.  Nothing like Lobsterzilla.

I checked night vision, but the translation process was kicking up a lot of silt and visibility was shit.

“Do you think we can risk the floodlights?” I said.

The commander weighed it for a moment.  “Briefly,” she concluded.

“Here goes,” I said, flipping a switch.  Four floodlights—two on the bow, one on each of the side batteries—blazed into the chthonic darkness, illuminating a sandbar and not much else.

The sandbar opened its eyes.

“Holy shit!” I yelled, scrabbling for the joystick.

The eyes blinked once, gelatinous flesh shifting as a leviathan shifted its tentacles, sand-white skin becoming mottled brown.  Even that shift sent shockwaves through the water that jostled the Ragnar against the will of her stabilizers.  My mind boggled at the sheer scale of this thing.

The biggest goddamn fucking octopus I’d ever imagined opened a beak that could fit entire ships and whipped its tentacles toward the Ragnar.

My finger found the trigger.

Thud-thud-thud-thud.

The fusion cannons’ roar was muted, the sound carrying differently through the water.  Seawater instantly heated to plasma.  Even underwater, the glare of the fusion rounds whited out my display.

Ragnar rocked back with the shockwave as the high-energy rounds annihilated the stretch of ocean between us and the Gigantopus.  They sunk into its body and released the last of their energy.  For the first and last time, I had the extremely specific experience of listening to thousands of tons of flesh explosively tear itself apart underwater.

It was kind of a giant “blorpschlrp,” in case you’re curious.

“Target neutralized,” Abby said with a tinge of irony.

“This,” I declared, “is the happiest day of my life.”