Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies through the years of a long, dangerous career with the infamous Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy, at least before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her diverse team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade … but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. The highly evolved AI of the galaxy have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from ever regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all. Welcome to The All-Consuming World, the debut novel of acclaimed writer Cassandra Khaw. With this explosive and introspective exploration of humans and machines, life and death, Khaw takes their rightful place next to such science fiction luminaries as Ann Leckie, Ursula Le Guin, and Kameron Hurley.
Release date:
September 7, 2021
Publisher:
Erewhon Books
Print pages:
288
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Her voice is the boreal wash of moonlight upon the bulwark of their ship-in-orbit: a reduction of the fantastic, tepid when it could have been of a devouring temperature. It is modulated, disinterested. But like fuck Maya is going to complain. Any contact with Rita is superior to the absence of such.
“Getting Ayane home.”
“Home?” Maya grins like a hunting dog, all peeled-back lips and a shine of teeth. For a joke, she’d had the points of her canines filed about three years ago, when there’d been nothing to do but mug retirees, those poor fucks who’d wanted nothing but to jolt their marriages out of hospice with a hit of no-gravity space. Instead, what they got was Maya, Rita, and their tin-can private liners cleaned out of valuables. “You’re getting soft.”
A hiss of static. “You’re getting distracted.”
“Fair,” says Maya. Don’t want to have this party cleared out before it even gets started. She looks over the tableau. Cross her dollar-store heart, there’s nothing Maya loathes more than this shoulder of rock she’s ascending, which is saying a lot given her sentiments about the asteroid itself. She recalls when this place was moondust and noxious ice-melt, inhospitable by every interpretation of the adjective. But no one cares when it’s just clones on ground zero. Work, die, mulch the corpses, brine the proteins in the appropriate solution, bring them back. Rinse, repeat in the name of capitalism, amen and all that crap.
“Wish we still had Johanna,” says Maya. “She could have walked Ayane right into the ship and none of us would have had to lift a fucking finger.”
Usually, Maya has a laugh like something that needs to be put down. Today, though, it arrives in a casket, a few little croaks escaping the lid. No, no thinking about Johanna, Maya tells herself. Easy to let the memory of Johanna—she of the “don’t even fucking worry about this,” the “I got this,” the “no need to take risks when we could just sit back and settle this from afar, let’s just get a drink, y’all,” “I’ve got this”—effervescing through their lives burn away to the image branded on the backs of Maya’s eyelids. Easy to see meat instead of a smile.
No, no. Fuck that .
And still:
“Fuck. Do you miss her? I do.”
No answer.
“I’m fucking talking to you here. Say something.”
But Rita doesn’t answer.
Well, fuck her, Maya thinks, walking her attention away. No need to defibrillate that dead horse. She studies her environment. This place was better when it was a refinery, when it was still being reworked for human occupation. At least, it had been honest. Now? The slope she is standing on is leprous with non-union brothels, casinos, back-alley chop shops, tenements so thick with the unloved and the underserved, their laundry drips from thin windows like foam along the maw of a rabid animal.
“Fuck you,” Maya mutters.
Light—blue-white, like the pith of a neutron star, like hope, like the halogen eye of a surgical lamp glaring into the wet nook where Maya’s heart is housed—suddenly flares through her overlay, searing patterns into her retinas. Maya ducks around a pillar before the cerebellum attempts to strategize. Half a second later, a surveillance bot lopes past, Doberman ears astride a trumpet of a muzzle, no teeth or tongue in sight, only a violent light belling from an octagonal aperture. Maya locks her breath in place until the clicking of its needle-point feet evanesces.
“The first rule is you never talk about it,” giggles a man’s voice, so close to the curve of Maya’s voice, she almost jumps.
“Fuck. Right. Off.”
Maya snarls, propels herself from the wall, the cracked masonry flaking under the impact of her palms. Fuck Rita and fuck the ghost she’d saddled Maya with. Explosives don’t need personalities. Least of all when they come with such baggage. But there he was anyway. Same fucking smile with one corner craned unnaturally high. Same eyes, gleaming jellyfish-blue-green. Same heft, same shoulders. Same as the day that Maya found him in Rita’s quarters, grinning like a cat. Fuck everything, Maya thinks to herself. Her fingers find her holsters, thumbs cocking the safety back, fists closing over enameled grips.
There we go.
Breathe, Maya.
Can’t believe that bot almost got the jump on her while she was caroling her grievances, blathering at Rita like the two of them were gene-patented starlets sitting pretty for the camera. If Maya had just gotten the mods Rita offered her, traded up from her repository of wetware, this wouldn’t ever have happened. The somatosensory implants were triple-tested, lab-approved, and it’s not like Rita would have installed bottom-of-the-barrel shit in her brain. They need each other. Mad scientist and mad-dog mercenary. Like jam and cheese, guns and their holsters, god and glory. Forget that it would mean Rita acquiring unmitigated access to her grey matter. It’s not like Maya can hide anything from her.
Onward she goes, Maya practically somnambulating down the narrow lanes. How many times had she died in one of these alleys? How many times had she been jumped, carved open, split open so someone could harvest organs for the rich and the sick? She keeps her fingers at the triggers as she strolls along up until she halts in front of a door six feet wide and twice as high. Maya lets go of the hand-cannons and digs the heel of a palm into the door, considers being discreet for about half a second, before she laughs coyote-shrill and goes fuck it. She kicks the door in.
Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck everything for the umpteenth time.
A man, massive like an iceberg and twice as cool, looks calmly up from his terminal. He drums a finger against the plastiglass screen. Loose windows melt—holo-vid playlist, a two-for-one pizza advertisement—together into a plain, cold, ivory payment app. He takes no notice of Maya’s ghost, just makes a moue of his thin mouth. Maya wonders about the shit he’d seen. Those eyes are deader than hers.
“Sixty bucks for latecomers.”
Johanna would have had him fight for us, Maya exposits through a private com-link. Rita doesn’t take the bait, but that’s okay. Behind Maya, her crypto-geist keeps gibbering, unperturbed, hotfixed to ignore all interruptions. His image lightbleeds for a second, stutters, then stops: an infinitesimal failure that nonetheless curls Maya’s lips in simpatico. You can’t trust tech these days.
“If this is your first night,” says manifest destruction, “you always have to fight.”
Rita and Maya sitting on a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. If there was a schoolyard, that’d be what the kids would be singing. It’s fortunate that this day and age has surrendered homophobia to the firing squad of basic human decency, because Maya would have had to gun down the bigots otherwise. Not that she wouldn’t have shot them up anyway for being terminally wrong.
Rita and her, they don’t have that kind of relationship. Never did. In another place and world, where the air isn’t spuming poison and toddlers aren’t bar-coded, who knows? Not in this life, though. Not even close. Maya has never been that kind of anything and Rita can’t stand being touched.
But the two are tight as thieves on death row, knife and vein, gun and bullet. Maya will do anything for Rita, and she’s reasonably certain that Rita will break at least a few cardinal laws for her in return.
Which is more than anything Maya deserves right now, and they both know it. That’s why Maya is strutting into the bobbit worm’s jaws, with nothing but a ghost for backup, riding on a wing, a prayer, and enough combat know-how to win all four world wars.
“Next contender!” an announcer howls.
Maya grins like a shark. Oh, she thinks, the sound unspooling between neurons like a tendon snagged on the tooth of a Great White. Oh, yes. That she can do.
But it is still so strange to her that they built this chapel to archaic media, to offer their sweat and their worship to a fictional credo, an analogy for poison, no more sacrosanct than the urine crusting on the walls outside. Men can sail through constellations, for fuck’s sake. Do they need a god cobbled from lobotomized debris of retro cinema?
She tosses her head like a bull. The venue stinks of piss and blood and sour sweat, of mutual admiration expressed by men who’d never been taught how to love. A wound dug into irradiated basalt, the place is seven kinds of building violations, with only one way in and out. No accoutrements. No fire exits. Just a vending machine pregnant with ancient soda and naked bulbs snaking across the ceiling, bleeding black wires over their heads.
Maya remembers when they grew vat-kids here, the inflorescence of viscera; arms and legs fruiting along wire; skin like sails closing over naked skeleton. The ones who didn’t make it would be clumped in the corner, waiting to be reprocessed. She remembers waiting, watching with her nose compacted against cold glass, wanting, hoping, yearning; sick with prayer as she counted each attosecond, dead fucking certain such vigils weren’t worth shit, but what else was she supposed to do? Back then, her emotional health was the only currency she possessed, and she would have bankrupted herself to make sure Rita came back for another round of living.
“Quick and easy,” comes Rita’s voice again. “Just like we planned.”
Crack.
Maya hears the sound of a jaw being broken, seconds before the crowd detonates into screaming. She prowls closer, already squirming out of her jacket and kicking off her shoes, a grin cocked like a loaded shotgun. Her data banks wake up at the influx of noradrenaline in her bloodstream, presenting options, triangulating opportunities. That grin of hers swells until it is like the last church standing at the end of days and inside, the parish is worshipping war. Maya smooths both hands over the velvet of her skull.
“Yeah?” she says under her breath.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” says Rita, proving she doesn’t really know Maya at all.
She’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Maya dismisses her overlays, sets her notifications on silent as Rita’s messages began to pile like a six-car crash. Oh, she’s pissed. Maya can tell. But she doesn’t care. All she can hear right now is the holy-holy-on-high hymn of violence singing through the strings of her being. All she can process is its siren invocation. It has its hook in her, pulling her onward, and she is so okay with where they’re going.
Since she’s here, she might as well have some fun.
The light drags fingers along Maya’s muscled frame, reads out a scripture of scars and stitches, the places that only Rita has touched, scalpel carving sonnets into sinew. Illuminated by bloodlust, Maya shoulders past two skinheads and out into the ring. The men—they’re always men, she thinks with a scream of a laugh—go quiet.
“Well?” Maya says, slamming a fist into the square of an open palm.
“No shirt.” The guy who speaks up is a pot-bellied twerp with jeans that don’t fit his ass, goggles welded to cherub-cheeked face.
Maya spreads her arms wide. “You want to see my tits? Is that it? That what you’re saying? You wanna see my tits? You want to motorboat that mess?”
She knows it’s not, but she loves taunting shitheads like him. No one ever knows what to do when she shows up, avenging angel constructed in the micro. Five feet two when she deigns to have good posture, all tight lines and a helmet of black hair cropped close to the skull, face like a veteran’s tall tale. Maya’s countenance is a gossip reel of cicatrices, indentations where the skull stoved in and was shoddily rebuilt: you repair what you can when you can’t justify buying new.
Sometimes, Maya wonders if she’s ever been “conventionally beautiful,” ever had a shot at the fantasy of domesticity, the white picket fences on a blue sky–tumbled planet, a kid who wouldn’t mind a clone for a parent, but fuck that and fuck this especially.
The man—someone’s dad, Maya is so sure of it, someone’s dad looking to reinvigorate his middle-aged spirit—exchanges looks with his peers, nervous. “I meant the guns.”
“You want them?” She doesn’t give him warning. She doesn’t charge exactly, but she does accelerate, going from zero to fifty in three strides, closing the gap before he can process what’s about to hit him. She winds a punch, biosynthetic muscles bunching in a hallelujah of intent, and slams reinforced knuckles into the man’s nose. “Come and get them.”
Maya turns as the man drops first to one knee and then the next, hands over his face, blood ribboning down his front. She slaps her chest a few times, like some unmodified ape, some babyfresh human without a security protocol in the world, and walks a winner’s swagger around the circle of waiting faces.
“Come on. Who the fuck is next?!”
The fourth rule is simple: only two guys to a fight.
And yeah, okay, maybe old cinema isn’t that bad because hand to mass-market heart, this is Maya’s favorite rule in the world.
Maya is wiping the detritus of someone’s face from her hands when she walks in, the click-click of her stilettos as familiar as that old ventricular jingle.
“What the fuck, Maya?”
“Needed to get your attention somehow,” Maya grins through bloodied teeth. Someone’s gotten lucky. But Maya heals fast enough that it doesn’t matter and fuck, does it feel good to feel. Letting go like that is a blessed act. It’s been years now since she could chart a room in blood and broken bodies, groaning heaps of meat all around. Maya’s missed this so much, crypto-geist bearing witness or not.
Ayane looks like the last cold gulp of water before the sun goes supernova, taller and leaner even than Rita, so pretty that it actually hurts to look at her. Every inch of her is federally sanctioned, independently purchased. She could stop a truck with a punch. She has. But you couldn’t tell. Not with that dress filigreeing her curves, the material a gold so pale it is practically ice, diamantine along the hems and where the fabric sits along the small of her perfect back.
“You could have called,” says Ayane in her exquisite contralto; woman couldn’t do ugly even if you paid her in hope.
Two hundred twenty-five point three seconds, a notification tells her. Two hundred twenty-five point three seconds until the dogs come howling. Guess Rita didn’t care for the silent treatment.
Good. Maya’s got time to kill then. She grinds her heel into the back of a man’s hand, enjoys his groan, the way the metacarpals sag under the pressure. She adjusts the set of her feet. Crunch. Phalanges pop from the palm. “You wouldn’t have answered.”
“No.” Ayane flips a curl of dark hair over her shoulder, her smile gone savage. The light doesn’t just love her, it obsesses. How else to explain the way it wraps her up in a champagne nimbus so she, for one shining moment, looks like some goddess come to salvage the day.
Either way, Maya knows better, and Ayane knows better, and anyone who has ever heard of the Dirty Dozen knows better than to pray to Ayane, Badass Bitch-Goddess of Automated Ballistics, because sure as hell, the only thing she holds holy is metal.
The two meet eyes.
“Probably not,” says Ayane, as though Maya needed the clarification. “Get the fuck out of here, Maya. I’m just trying to run a business.”
“This really what you want?” A staccato gesture at the night’s losers. “MCing for paunchy old men, keeping them entertained for the rest of your life. I remember when you were retro-fitting ageships, Ayane.”
“That never happened.”
“Fine. Okay. Technically, it didn’t happen. But you’re probably the closest anyone’s ever gotten to doing such. Why give up glory for these middle-aged freaks?”
“It’s a life,” counters Ayane. Her casual numinosity is frankly offensive. It is empirical, how stunning she is, a fact that exists external to the hypothesis that beauty is qualified by the beholder. Maya had not consented to having her breath shanked from her by something as egregious as Ayane retreating into a halo of artificial light, and she is pissed at this misstep by the universe, pissed she hasn’t become inoculated to such bodily treason, that Ayane after all these years still could have such an effect.
No wonder Audra picked her.
“Fuck that.”
“Fuck you,” says Ayane.
“You really going to be a bitch to me without fucking asking why I’m here? You know I wouldn’t fucking be here unless it’s important.” Her gesticulations are no longer modulated, broad and cartoonish. Maya exerts just that much more pressure on the man’s limp wrist: the bones might be dust but there are still nerves to grind. “You know that. You know I don’t get up in the morning unless it’s paid in planets.”
“Or if Rita said so.”
“Yeah.” A shrug. “So?”
“Is she alive?”
“The fuck you think?”
“If she is, then whatever you gotta say is fucking worthless,” says Ayane, beginning to leave, her postural language clear: Maya and her mission have already been dismissed. “If she’s alive, I know she’s got you on a leash and I am done, Maya. I don’t want to have anything to do with that fucking junk-cunt.”
“Not even if I told you we know the Minds are coming after ex-con—”
“I don’t want to hear it. What do you not get about that? I don’t fucking care anymore. Fuck them. Let them take down the club. Let them blow me up. As long as it doesn’t involve you and that little psychopath, I’m fine with it. I’m done, Maya. I’m done with your bullshit. After everything that has happened? After what fucking happened to Johanna? How the fuck do you expect me to be anything but done?” Ayane flashes a look sleeved in more hurt than Maya’s ever seen in her life. That pain. It distends in her, a broken rib harpooning the angry riposte that she meant to come out.
Instead, Maya says: “What happened to Johanna was a freak accident.”
“You could have saved her.”
“It was her or the rest of us. If I’d tried, we’d have all died.”
“I don’t fucking care what Rita said about this. I know you could have saved her but you didn’t.”
“And what if Rita wasn’t wrong about what she said? What if she was right about the rest of us dying if I had tried? What the fuck then? Would you trade all of our lives for Johanna’s?”
Ayane says nothing at first, gaze raised to the roof. The light bleaches nuance from her face, elides the fine lines and faint shadows which taxonomize one as human, leaves her architectural and alien.
“Yes. Shit. Absolutely. In a fucking heartbeat.”
“Good thing it wasn’t your fucking call then.”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” she says and turns her back on Maya. “Because I’d still trade all of you for her.”
“And you go off on Rita for being pragmatic. Jesus fuck, Ayane.”
“We’re done talking.”
“No, we’re fucking not. Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
Ayane doesn’t answer, just keeps with her goddamned trajectory. Bad fucking idea. Snarling, Maya wades out from the patch of groaning bodies, kicking aside an asshole who had the audacity to be in her route. Bone snaps from the impact and he gurgles an objection, and still Maya does not give a shit. She’s only got eyes for Ayane as the latter slinks on, long legs and ruined dreams poured into a candleglow-gold dress, not even a revolver in sight, can you believe this fucking mess.
“Ayane.” Thock of hammers pulled back, so sudden that Maya doesn’t have time to register that she’s the one who has both guns out and is sighting down the muzzles, aim-algorithms fritzing from proximity to Ayane’s jammers. Like it matters, though. Maya can shoot the tongue off a mouse at one hundred paces. “Do not fucking walk away from me.”
Take the high road, Rita had said. Be kind. Be polite. Be mindful of accreted trauma. Don’t pull out weapons, pull out examples. Tell Ayane all the things you think Johanna might have said about this. For once in your life, be subtle. Because if you aren’t, we’re fucked. Ayane hates you, but she wants me dead on arrival.
All that advice, all of Maya’s resolve to do it right for Rita, unfortunately sleets away like cheap paint at the audacity on display. How fucking dare she?
“Or what?” Ayane tilts a cool look over her shoulder, visible eye irising wide so the halogen catches red in its heart. Maya can’t hear it, but she can sense the machinery around them working, calibrating distance and trajectory, a theory of future motion. “What will you do? Are you going to shoot me? Gun me down like every single one of your problems?”
“The first rule—the first rule—” Maya’s pet poltergeist giggles itself into a static-squeal, a broken record stuck on a loop, just like everyone else in this piece-of-shit world, Maya included. The amount of time Maya has to escape is attenuating to nothing, but who gives a shit? Her rage stampedes over common sense.
She spits a noise at Ayane, not a curse, nothing intelligible, a little yowl that is all the way animal, kicked-puppy hurt grown big and savage on a lifetime of disappointments. “I saved your life, and this is how you repay me?”
Maya is torn between shooting Ayane between the eyes and shouting for her to listen, binary impulses clawing at the halves of her soul. Rita is the one that should be here. Not Maya. Maya’s just the muscle. It doesn’t make sense that she’s standing here, yammering through a minefield full of broken dreams, trying to figure out what words go where instead of how many bullets to pump into bone, and not standing six inches behind Rita’s shoulder, like the good guard mutt she is.
“Why won’t you just fucking listen?”
“Because you can’t say anything that will change my mind.” Pne. . .
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