Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (read me a book .TXT) 📕

They make their way out of One of Sunder’s docking berth, back into the leviathan’s corridors. No alerts have been activated and no emergency measures have been triggered: the queen’s spiritual tableaus continue to shimmer, saturating the air with iconography. Synthesized voices murmur smoothly into Anoushka’s overlays, giving her directions and schedules for meals, repeating parts of Nirupa’s welcome speech. Automated and, by now, meaningless.

That the leviathan has entered lacunal space is difficult to miss; every outsider aboard has noticed the fact. The guest’s network is flaring like fast-blooming flowers, seething with confusion. Demands that Queen Nirupa explain the situation are met with silence from the queen herself, her staff, and from Princess Rajathi.

“Once we get to the more organic parts,” Anoushka tells Xuejiao, “we’ll need to mind spots where leviathan tissue is especially thick, where there isn’t much artificial reinforcement. There are emergency measures that’ll open the walls up to members of the royal family or high-ranking staff, make pathways for them to a lift, another deck, another room. Built-in means of egress. If Erisant’s seized that, ey will be able to place eir troops anywhere.”

Xuejiao, taking point, throws Anoushka a look. “That wasn’t in the dossier, commander. I read it back to front.”

“It’s not widely known, no.” They reach a juncture where metal melds into tissue. The configuration has changed significantly since Anoushka’s time, but Benzaiten’s imaging was surgical and the schematics xe gave her should be as exact as any. They ought to be close to a maintenance point, from which passage they will be able to traverse the decks without needing the tram car. Those would almost certainly be under Erisant’s yoke: seizing the transport is the obvious. “Rajathi, would you say she’s hungry enough to ally with Erisant?”

“Oh yes. She’s a bilious little beast. She’d make friends with whoever can give her a leg up on her sister.” The lieutenant levels her gun as they turn a corner, its barrel glinting blue-black. “I don’t know enough about Erisant to tell whether ey’d deliver. Do you think ey’s really waging this campaign just to avenge emself and eir, what was it, husband?”

“Strange fires burn within us all. If you or Numadesi were to fall, I would scorch a hundred worlds in retribution.”

Xuejiao laughs, the sound like bells. “You were always a romantic, Admiral.”

Anoushka finds an access point and uses a set of credentials Benzaiten pilfered for her benefit, then applies a smokescreen that’ll obfuscate her network footprints. A service door opens and they step in. The corridor is claustrophobically narrow, to the point she has to crab along sideways, the walls close and alive. That deep, slick green peculiar to the leviathan, swollen at points with black capillaries. Once she would have moved easily through; lower-deck servants are etiolated, bred to be small exactly so they would be able to reach narrow recesses, traverse these hidden spaces like vermin. She remembers being an emaciated thing, almost dwarfish: certainly dwarfed by her current stature. Later she would understand that the ventral phenotype is designed to elicit revulsion and contempt, to reinforce and justify the thought This is subhuman, this is beneath attention, this deserves brutalizing. She sought the body she has now so eagerly that she did not think of what it means to be less.

“Commander?” Xuejiao says from ahead of her. “This is a dead end.”

So it is, when according to Benzaiten’s imaging this should run parallel with the tram cars. She checks and finds the smokescreen still in place. There are no surveillance symbiotes she can detect in the passage. Off to Xuejiao’s left, the path bends in a direction it shouldn’t, but even if Erisant can manipulate leviathan structure, ey shouldn’t able to see where Anoushka is.

“Proceed,” she says. The public corridors or trams are riskier by far if she wants to reach Nirupa and the leviathan’s cortex.

The passage slopes down steeply, and familiarity lets Anoushka know that they are descending down the decks—she counts three before the passage evens out and stops at another access point.

It opens to a stench of meat left to spoil.

A large chamber, some hundred square meters in size. The ground is yielding and wet with mucus, leviathan tissue carpeted in carrion feeders—creatures that are little more than open clattering mouths and digestive systems, toothless and long-throated. The area is empty of anything else, but then it would be. Anoushka knows this well, or at least a place like this further down the decks, a room for disposal. Servants too sick to continue, too defiant for their own good, all can be disabled and sent here for the feeders to break down and nourish the leviathan with: recycled proteins, entirely efficient. Nothing goes to waste.

Experience alone saves her.

She throws herself backward, so far that she almost loses her balance, and rights herself as she gains distance from Xuejiao.

Her lieutenant stands with feet planted apart, one hand retracted and replaced by a gleaming blade. She is smiling. “I really should have used a gun, but I wanted you to know. A bullet would’ve robbed me of the satisfaction, of watching your expression change. My commander. Admiral Anoushka. The most powerful woman in the universe, or so she believes.”

Something not just in the words but in the cadence, the way Admiral Anoushka is enunciated. “Xuejiao,” she says slowly, adrenaline spiking high. “Or should I say Captain Erisant?”

“Oh, you’re quick. But not so quick you knew from the beginning. Not so quick you could tell even as I stayed by your side and fucked you for ten years, so really you are shockingly slow. Every time I was in your bed, I thought of killing you; I thought of taking my vengeance then and there.” Erisant’s smile widens. “You really couldn’t tell, could you?”

She does not allow herself to be paralyzed by shock, to be paralyzed by the weight of what this means. This is