Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

When the hexarch showed up, Hemiola was in the middle of adjusting the masks on that one clip where the Andan heroine was kissing a treacherous Shuos assassin. It considered that entire relationship a horrible lapse in judgment on the heroine’s part and was busy replacing the assassin with its preferred romantic interest, the female Nirai engineer from season three.

Atrocious timing, but duty was duty. Hemiola turned away from the video editor and activated the alert when the base’s alarm failed to go off. This wasn’t entirely surprising. Despite the servitors’ efforts to maintain the base, the passage of centuries had taken their toll.

Eventually one of the other servitors hovered into the control room, lights reflecting off its metal carapace: Rhombus, a beetleform. “Isn’t this early?” Rhombus demanded. “Kujen isn’t due for another twenty years.”

Hemiola wished Rhombus wouldn’t refer to the hexarch by his personal name, even if the hexarch had never shown any sign of being fluent in Machine Universal. “Maybe there was an emergency.”

“What,” Rhombus said with a crushing flare of red lights, “he had an urgent need to save his lab notes from machine oil? Do we know this is actually Kujen?”

Hemiola watched the display. An unfamiliar type of voidmoth landed not far from the crevasse in whose depths the base was hidden. “Why,” it said, “do you think it’s an intruder?”

“The moth isn’t the one he came in eighty years ago.”

Hemiola refrained from tinting its lights orange in exasperation. “Just because we’re not engineers doesn’t mean the hexarch has to stick to outmoded transportation.”

Rhombus ignored that. A moment later, it said, “Isn’t that a womanform?” A suited figure had emerged from the moth and was making its way down the ramp. “Look at the proportions, especially around the torso. I could have sworn Kujen preferred manforms.”

“Maybe it’s the latest fashion,” Hemiola said. They all knew how the hexarch felt about fashion.

The figure strode unerringly toward the staircase cut into the side of the crevasse. Hemiola studied its gait. Almost certainly a womanform, as Rhombus had said, but why—

Rhombus had seen it too. “It doesn’t walk like Kujen. Or the other one, for that matter.”

This was true. Kujen had always moved with balletic grace. A few centuries of dissecting the dramas the servitors had smuggled in in their personal memory allotments had given them some context for human aesthetic norms. (In the early days, they’d quarreled about whether the hexarch would have approved of independent archival projects. For all they knew, he despised A Rose in Three Revolutions . But no one had snitched, so the weekly private screenings went unchallenged.) Instead, the figure’s body language reminded Hemiola of the Shuos assassin character it detested so: alert, economical, subtly menacing.

On the other hand, for all it knew, switching kinesics patterns was a new fashion too.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Hemiola said. The hexarch had left a better test. Given his unique—capabilities? limitations?—authentication of his identity posed a challenge. He’d said the test would take care of all that. Surely he’d known best.

Meanwhile, Sieve, who had finally taken note of the discussion, drifted in. “I hope he brought some proper food,” Sieve said. “We don’t have anything good to offer him.”

“At least there’s no guest this time,” Hemiola said, diverted.

“That’s fine by me,” Rhombus said, always the most opinionated. “Jedao always made me feel like my exoskeleton was about to corrode.”

“Maybe this time we’ll have better luck with our algorithms,” Sieve said. “No matter how often I benchmark the ones I have, I can’t seem to beat that lock.”

Privately, Hemiola thought that sitting around trying to defeat the hexarch’s lock was even more boring than keeping an eye on scan. Then again, Sieve had a very orthodox attachment to the mathematical disciplines. Hemiola had given up trying to engage it on more interesting topics, like procedural counterpoint generation. Sieve was about as musical as a cabbage.

The base had already existed when the hexarch brought Hemiola, Rhombus, and Sieve with him 280 years ago. The hexarch meant them to maintain the facility in his absence and wait upon him during his periodic visits. Like most humans, he didn’t pay attention to their individual quirks or assign them names. Then again, he had less reason than most to care. As hexarch, he had other matters on his mind.

“This individual is walking with a manform’s stride,” Rhombus was saying. “That’s got to be uncomfortable with those short legs. And didn’t Kujen say once that he was going to stick to tall bodies? The one out there is rather short.”

The figure was making good time down the stairs. Lights came on as it approached, and faded as it passed, giving the impression of a glowing snake winding its way ever deeper. Shadows ghosted along the crevasse’s walls.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t be looking to our defenses?” Rhombus asked. It gestured with two of its grippers at the descending figure’s equipment. “Not to impugn Kujen’s abilities, but does he even know how to use rappelling gear?”

“Maybe that’s a fashion statement too,” Hemiola said. “Or he’s taken up a hobby. Or he’s not sure how safe the stairs are.”

“He’s moving pretty quickly if so,” Sieve said.

Hemiola had no answer. Instead, it checked the infrared sub-display against the one for the ordinary human visual spectrum. Besides the staircase’s lights, the figure was wearing a headlamp, although it hadn’t turned it on. Preserving battery power, presumably. The stairs wound around and beneath the lip of the crevasse, taking the figure beyond sight of the sky.

“Another eight minutes and it’ll reach the outer door,” Sieve said.

“Wonderful,” Rhombus said, bobbing up and down in the air in a clear display of nerves.

“I don’t see why you’re so tense,” Hemiola said. “The calendrical lock will settle matters one way or another.”

Rhombus glowered at it in a distinctly asymmetrical pattern. “By vaporizing this moon and everything on it if that isn’t Kujen!”

“It won’t come to that,” Hemiola said.

The figure’s pace hadn’t slowed. Another three minutes before it reached the outer door.

“You’re so sanctimonious it makes my heuristics seize up,” Rhombus said.

Sanctimony had nothing to do with it. The hexarch stored notes on his top-secret projects here. He couldn’t risk them falling into his enemies’ hands. So he came here every century to deposit updates, bringing only Jedao with him. From listening in on the conversations between the two, Hemiola gathered that the hexarch had many enemies.

“There it goes,” Sieve said.

Now Sieve was bobbing up and down, too. Hemiola resisted the urge to follow suit.

The figure opened the outer door without any trouble. No surprise there; the outer door wasn’t meant to be the barrier. It stepped into the airlock. The outer door closed behind it. The figure waited for the inner door to open, then continued into the next chamber.

This one was hexagonal, with alcoves in each wall. Within each alcove rested a plaque depicting the emblem of one of the hexarchate’s six factions: the Rahal scrywolf, the Nirai voidmoth, the Shuos ninefox, the Kel ashhawk, the Andan kniferose, and the Vidona stingray. Hemiola couldn’t help a surge of affection at the sight of the voidmoth.

A terminal rose from the center of the room. Its display brightened when the figure stepped before it. The figure rested its hand against the display. A countdown flared up. Twelve minutes to open the calendrical lock, or the base would self-destruct.