The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016 Page 9

  “What do you think?” Mi Hiep asked, to her ancestors.

  Around her, holograms flickered to life: emperors and empresses in old-fashioned court dresses, from the five-panels after the Exodus to the more elaborate, baroque style of clothing made possible by the accuracy of bots.

  The first ancestor, the Righteously Martial Emperor—hoary, wizened without the benefit of rejuv treatments—was the one who spoke. “This much is clear, child: they’re not here to be friends with you.”

  The twenty-third ancestor, the Friend of Reform Emperor—named after an Old Earth emperor who had died in exile—frowned as he studied the map. “Assuming they can move through deep spaces”—he frowned at the map—“I suspect their target is the Imperial shipyards.”

  “It makes sense,” Lady Linh said, slowly, carefully. She looked older than any of the emperors around her, and the twenty-second emperor, who stood by her side, had once imprisoned her for treason. Mi Hiep knew well that none of them made her comfortable. “It would enable them to capture mindships—”

  “Who wouldn’t serve them,” Mi Hiep said, more sharply than she’d intended. “They would still remember their families.”

  “Yes,” Lady Linh said, weighing every word. She looked at Mi Hiep, a little uncertainly: an expression Mi Hiep recognized as reluctance. It had to be something serious, then; Lady Linh had never been shy about her opinions—indeed, a misplaced memorial had been the cause of her thirty-year imprisonment.

  “Go on,” Mi Hiep said, inclining her head. She braced herself for the worst.

  Lady Linh reached out to the screen. There was a brief lag while her implants synchronized with it—a brief flowering of color, the red seal of an agent of the Embroidered Guard clearly visible—and then something else appeared on the screen.

  It was a mindship—looking almost ordinary, innocuous at first sight. There was an odd protuberance on the hull, near the head, and a few more scattered here and there, like pustules. Then the ship started moving, and it became clear something was very, very wrong with it. No deadly grace, no ageless elegance, but the zigzagging, tottering course of a drunkard; curves that turned into unexpectedly sharp lines, movements that started closing back on themselves.

  What had they done? Oh Ancestors, what had they done?

  “It’s a hijack,” Lady Linh said, curtly. “Plug in a few modules at key points, and you can influence what the ship sees and thinks. Then it’s just a matter of . . . fine manipulation.”

  There was silence, for a while. Then a snort from the first emperor, who had taken the reign name Righteously Martial after ascending to the throne over the ruins of his rivals. “That doesn’t look like fine movements to me. If that’s all they have against us . . . ”

  “That,” Lady Linh said, gently, almost apologetically, “is almost a full year old. We’ve had reports that the technology has evolved, but no pictures or vids. It has been harder and harder to get Embroidered Guard undercover. The Nam Federation are suspicious.”

  Suspicious. Mi Hiep massaged her forehead. Vast movements of troops. A technology to turn their own mindships against them. The Imperial shipyards. It didn’t take a Master of Wind and Water to know which way things lay.

  “I see,” she said. The envoys of the Nam Federation were not due for another two hours, but she already knew what they would say. They would make pretty excuses and tell her about military maneuvers and the necessity to maintain the peace on their fractious borders. And she would smile and nod, and not believe a word of it.

  The twenty-second emperor turned, a ghostly shape against the metal paneling. “Someone is coming,” he said.

  The sixteenth empress raised her head, like a hound sniffing the wind. “Suu Nuoc. The child is in a hurry. He is arguing with the guards at the entrance. You had left orders not to be disturbed?”

  “Yes,” Mi Hiep said, disguising a sigh. None of the ancestors liked Suu Nuoc—it wasn’t clear if they thought he had been an inappropriate lover for an empress, or if they resented his lower-class origins. Mi Hiep was no fool: she had not promoted her former lover to the Board of Military Affairs. She had promoted a smart, resourceful man with utter loyalty to her, and that was what mattered. The ancestors could talk and talk and disapprove, but she was long since inured to being shamed by a mere look or stern talking-to.

  Sometimes, she wondered what it would be like to be truly alone—not to be the last descendent of a line of twenty-four emperors and empresses, her ancestors embodied into simulations so detailed they needed an entire wing of the palace to run. Sacrilege, of course; and the ancestors were useful, but still . . .

  Of course, in truth, she was lonely all the time.

  “Let him in,” she sent to her bodyguards.

  Suu Nuoc entered, out of breath, followed by the small, fist-sized avatar of The Turtle’s Golden Claw. He took one quick glance around the room, and slowly lowered himself to the floor, his head touching the slats of the parquet.

  “Your Highnesses,” he said. The emperors and empresses frowned, the temperature in the room lowered by their disapproval. “Empress.”

  “General.” Mi Hiep gestured at him to rise, but he remained where he was, his gaze stubbornly fixed on the floor. “Something bad?” she asked. The disapproval of the ancestors passed to her—her choice of words too familiar for a relationship between empress and general.

  Lady Linh used the commotion caused by Suu Nuoc’s arrival to slowly and discreetly slide out of the room—correctly judging Mi Hiep’s desire to be alone, or as alone as one could be, with twenty-four ancestors in her thoughts.

  Suu Nuoc was in the mindset she’d jokingly called “the arrow”—clear and focused, with little time for propriety or respect. “Grand Master Bach Cuc has disappeared,” he said. “The ship here says she had found the trail of the Citadel.”

  Oh.

  “Close the door,” Mi Hiep said to the guards outside. She waited for them to comply, and then turned her vision back into the room. She, too, was deadly focused, instantly aware of every single implication of his words. “You mean she found my daughter. And her Citadel.”

  Suu Nuoc was still staring at the floor—all she could see of him was an impeccably manicured topknot, with not a grey hair in sight. How young he was; thirty-five full years younger than her at least—even younger than Ngoc Minh. A lover to remind her of life and youth, which she’d lost such a long time ago; a caprice, to sleep with someone who was not one of her concubines—one of the few impulses she could allow herself.

  “Did she leave of her own volition?” Mi Hiep asked.

  Suu Nuoc said nothing for a while. “I—don’t think so. The timing is convenient. Too convenient.”

  “Then you think someone abducted her. Who?” Mi Hiep asked.

  “I don’t know,” Suu Nuoc said. “I judged it pertinent to inform you ahead of every other consideration.” She probably didn’t imagine the faint sarcasm in his voice—he had never been one for common courtesies. Without her support, he would not have risen far at court.

  “I see.” There were many reasons people disapproved of Grand Master Bach Cuc and The Turtle’s Golden Claw—thinking it unnatural that Bach Cuc should create a mindship who was part of the Imperial Family; fearing the return of Bright Princess Ngoc Minh and what it would mean to court life; even disapproving of her policy of war against the Nam Federation. Some advocated passionately for peace as the only way to survival.

  She didn’t begrudge them their opinion; the court would think as it desired, in a multiplicity of cliques and alliances that kept the scholars busy at each other’s throats. But acting against Grand Master Bach Cuc . . .

  “You will find her,” she said to Suu Nuoc. “Her, or her corpse. And punish whoever has done this.”

  Suu Nuoc bowed, and left the room. The Turtle’s Golden Claw didn’t; it hovered closer and said, in a calm and dispassionate voice, “Grandmother.”

  Mi Hiep nodded, noting with a sharp pang of perverse pleasure th
e discomfort of the gathered Ancestors at this acknowledgement of their relationship. “You are sure of what you told the General Who Read the Book of Heaven?”

  The ship bobbed from side to side, thoughtfully. “Bach Cuc sounded confident enough. And she usually—”

  Never sounded confident until it actually worked. Grand Master Bach Cuc had been cautious, unlikely to give in to fancies or announce results ahead of time solely to please an empress or the Board of Military Affairs. Everything Mi Hiep valued in a research scientist. “I see,” she said. And, more softly, “How are you?”

  Bach Cuc had been her Grand Master of Design Harmony, after all, the other grandmother The Turtle’s Golden Claw could count on—the only family that would accept her and trust her. Mi Hiep’s other children had not been so welcoming. Even Thousand-Heart Princess Ngoc Ha, who had carried The Turtle’s Golden Claw in her womb, was not affectionate.

  “I will be fine,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, slowly, carefully. “She is alive, isn’t she?”

  Mi Hiep could have lied. She could have nodded with the same conviction she’d bring into her interview with the envoys of the Nam Federation; but it wouldn’t have been fair, or kind, to her granddaughter. “I hope she is.”

  “I see,” The Turtle’s Golden Claw said, stiffly. “I will help Book of Heaven in his investigations, then.”

  “It will be fine,” Mi Hiep said—she only had an avatar, nothing she could hold or kiss for reassurance. Mindships were machines and blood and flesh, and they felt things as keenly as humans. “We will find her.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother.”

  Mi Hiep watched the ship go—she moved as smoothly as ever, but of course with an avatar it was difficult to determine what she truly felt, wasn’t it? How hurt or screaming the ship could be, inside?

  She thought again of the picture Lady Linh had presented; the crippled ship tricked into believing lies: hijacked, Lady Linh had said. Blinded until their only purpose was to serve their new masters—and she felt a fresh stab of anger at this. This wasn’t the way to treat anyone, whether human or mindship.

  But, if she couldn’t halt the progress of the Nam Federation, this would happen. They would take ships and twist them into emotionless tools with forced loyalties.

  Her people needed weapons: not merely war mindships, but something more potent, more advanced; something to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts and dissuade them from ever entering Dai Viet space.

  They needed Ngoc Minh’s weapons—and Grand Master Bach Cuc and The Turtle’s Golden Claw had been meant to find them for her.

  The Citadel of Weeping Pearls had gone down in history as a refuge of peace; as a place that taught its denizens the serenity that came from not fearing anything—not bandits, or corrupt officials, or apathetic scholars. But such things—the serenity, the lack of fear—did not happen unless one had powerful means of defense.

  Mi Hiep remembered visiting Ngoc Minh in her room once—not yet the Bright Princess, but merely a gangly girl on the cusp of adulthood, always in discussion with a group of hermits she’d found on Heaven knew what forsaken planet or station. Her daughter had looked up from her conversation and smiled at her: a smile that she’d always wonder about later, about whether it was loving or forced, fearful or genuinely serene. “You haven’t come to your lessons,” Mi Hiep had said.

  “No,” Ngoc Minh had said. “I was learning things here.”

  Mi Hiep had turned a jaded eye on the horde of hermits—all of them lying prostrate in obedience. As if obedience could make them respectable—their dresses varied from torn robes to rags, and some of them were so withdrawn from public life they were all but invisible on the communal network, with no information beyond their planet of birth showing up on her implants. “You will be Empress of Dai Viet one day, daughter; not an itinerant monk. The Grand Secretary’s lessons are on statecraft and the rituals that keep us all safe.”

  “We are safe, Mother. Look.” Ngoc Minh took a vase from a lacquered table: a beautiful piece of celadon with a network of cracks like a fragile eggshell. She pressed something to it—a lump that was no bigger than a grain of rice—and gestured to one of the monks, who bowed and took it out into the adjoining courtyard.

  What in Heaven?

  “This is pointless,” Mi Hiep said. “You will go to your lessons now, child.” She used the sternest voice of authority she could think of; the one she’d reserved for her children as toddlers, and for sentencing prisoners to death.

  Ngoc Minh’s face was serene. “Look, Mother.” She was looking at the vase, too, frowning; some Buddhist meditation exercise, focusing her will on it or something similar—not that Mi Hiep had anything against Buddhism, but its philosophy of peace and acceptance was not what an emperor needed. The empire needed to fight every day for its survival, and an emperor needed to choose the hard answers, rather than the most serene ones.

  “If you think I have time for your nonsense—”

  And then the vase winked out of existence.

  There was no other word for it. It seemed to fracture along the seams of the cracks first, even as a soft radiance flowed from within it as if it had held the pure, bottled light of late afternoon—but then the pieces themselves fractured and fractured into ever-smaller pieces, until nothing but a faint, colorless dust filled the courtyard; a dust that a rising wind carried upward, into the empty space between the pagoda spires.

  That was . . . Mi Hiep looked again at the courtyard: still empty and desolate, with the dust still rising in a fine, almost invisible whirlwind. “That’s impossible,” she said, sharply.

  Ngoc Minh smiled; serene and utterly frightening. “Everything is possible, if you listen to the right people.”

  Looking back, that was when she’d started to be scared of her daughter. Scared of what she might do; of what she was thinking, which was clearly so different than what moved Mi Hiep. When Ngoc Minh had married her commoner wife, they’d fallen out; but the root of this last, explosive quarrel lay much earlier, in that tranquil afternoon scene where her small, quiet world bounded by ritual and habit had been utterly shattered.

  She’d been a scared fool. Ngoc Minh had been right: anything that could safeguard the empire in its hour of need was a boon. What did it matter where it came from?

  It was time for war—and, if anyone had dared to harm her Grand Master of Design Harmony, they would feel the full weight of her fury.

  The Younger Sister

  Thousand-Heart Princess Ngoc Ha found Suu Nuoc and her daughter The Turtle’s Golden Claw in the laboratory, at the tail end of what looked to be a long and grueling series of interviews with everyone who had worked with Grand Master Bach Cuc. By his look, the Supervisor of Military Research was not having a good day.

  Suu Nuoc acknowledged her with a brief nod. He was in one of his moods where he would eschew ritual in favor of efficiency, a frequent source of complaints and memorials against him. Normally, Ngoc Ha would have forced him to provide proper respect: she knew the importance of appearances, and the need to remind people of her place, as an Imperial Princess who was not the heir and only had honorary postions. But today she needed to see something else.

  The laboratory had been cleanly swept. The only virtual notes attached to objects were the ones with the seal of the army, officially warning people of the penalty attached to tinkering with an ongoing investigation. The shielded chamber with its harmonization arch was swarming with bots, supervised in a bored fashion by an old technician with a withered hand. Ngoc Ha walked closer to the arch, but saw nothing that spoke to her.

  “Mother!”

  Of course, it was inevitable that The Turtle’s Golden Claw would see her, and churlish of her, really, to ignore the ship. “Hello, daughter.”

  Ngoc Ha knew she was being irrational when she saw the ship and didn’t feel an ounce of maternal love—merely a faint sense of repulsion, a memory of Mother overwhelming her objections to the implantation of the Mind in her; the scare
d, sick feeling she’d had during most of the pregnancy; and the sense of exhausted dread when she realized that having delivered the Mind merely meant she was now the mother, stuck in that role until the day she died.

  And, if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t the pregnancy, or motherhood, or even the Mind that was the issue—it was that, seeing The Turtle’s Golden Claw, she remembered, once again, that everything in her life had been twisted out of shape for her elder sister’s benefit. Thirty years since Ngoc Minh had disappeared, and still she haunted Ngoc Ha’s life. Even the name bestowed on Ngoc Ha by the court—the Thousand-Heart—was not entirely hers: she was named that way because she’d been filial and dutiful, unlike Ngoc Minh; because she had set up proper spousal quarters and regularly slept with her concubines—even though none of them brought her much comfort, or alleviated the taste of ashes that had been in her mouth for thirty years.

  “I’m sorry about Grand Master Bach Cuc,” Ngoc Ha said to The Turtle’s Golden Claw. “I’m sure General Suu Nuoc will find her. He’s good at what he does.”

  “I’m sure he is,” the ship said. Her avatar turned, taking in the laboratory. “Mother . . . ”

  Ngoc Ha braced herself—surely that sick feeling of panic in her belly wasn’t what one was meant to feel when one’s child came to them with problems? “Yes, child?”

  “I’m scared.” The Turtle’s Golden Claw’s voice was barely audible. “This is too large. How could the Grand Master disappear like that—with no warning, in the heart of the Purple Forbidden City?”

  Meaning inside influence. Meaning court intrigues; the same ones Ngoc Ha stepped away from after Ngoc Minh’s disappearance. “I don’t know,” she said. “But not everyone wanted Ngoc Minh to come back.” Including herself. She was glad to be rid of her sister the Bright Princess; to never have to be compared to her again; to never look at her and realize they had so little in common—not even Mother’s love. But she wasn’t the only one. Lady Linh was loyal to Mother; but the rest of the scholars weren’t, not so much. Huu Tam, Mother’s choice of heir, was dutiful and wise: not wild, not incomprehensibly attractive like Bright Princess Ngoc Minh, but safe. “Not everyone likes their little worlds overturned.”