Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Oh, we stole that from the Andan,” Mikodez said. “First Contact has a large body of research on how to transition governments and sociocultural structures. The problem is, all of it goes in the wrong direction—taking salvageable heretics and integrating them into the hexarchate. We want to go in the opposite direction, and in an opposite direction toward something that’s never existed in our realm before. I imagine a lot of people will revolt or flee or die before it’s all settled.”

  Brezan gave him a hard look. “You say that so cavalierly.”

  “I’m not the only one who made this world, Brezan.”

  Brezan flushed. He couldn’t deny the charge. After all, he’d had his chance to turn Cheris over to Kel Command. Instead he’d joined up with her. Not for the first time, he thought about Tseya, the Andan agent whom he’d accompanied to assassinate Cheris, who’d once been his lover. At the time the two of them had thought Cheris was Jedao. Cheris herself had done everything possible to confuse people on that point.

  Cheris had offered Brezan the prospect of a better world, one in which people didn’t have to be ritually tortured to death to preserve the high calendar’s workings. He’d believed her. And he’d betrayed Kel Command, and his family, and his lover Tseya, on the strength of that belief. He was already starting to wonder if he’d messed up.

  “Someone’s going to have to take charge of the provisional government,” Brezan said. “I’d hoped it was going to be Cheris. But I see now that that wouldn’t have worked.”

  Even so, he was angry, bitterly angry, that Cheris hadn’t stuck around to help unfuck the revolution she’d instigated. He stared down at his hand and saw that it had balled into a fist. With an effort, he unclenched his fingers.

  “She wouldn’t have done you much good,” Mikodez said briskly. “What she and Jedao have in common is that their vocabulary for fixing problems is mainly limited to shooting them. That’s all very well when you’re on the battlefield. It’s not very useful in the rest of the real world.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from a Shuos.”

  “There are a lot of problems that can be solved more fruitfully by not shooting things.”

  “I’ll take that under consideration,” Brezan said. “So. I can’t rely on Cheris, and considering that she’s more of a crashhawk than I am, it might be just as well that she’s gone away. What else do I need to know?”

  “Three things for now,” Mikodez said. “First, Kel Inesser”—the hexarchate’s senior field general—“is going to be a problem.” He explained that she’d rallied a not insignificant number of Kel swarms to her banner and had declared herself Protector-General. “I give her points for creativity. Presumably she didn’t claim the hexarch’s seat because of, well, you.”

  Brezan barked a laugh. “Like I’m a threat to Inesser.” A general who’d been generaling since before his parents’ births? And Brezan had no field command experience himself. Until recently, his job had involved sitting on his ass in Personnel. “So you want me to convince people that a complete unknown is a better leader?”

  “You’re a complete unknown representing a change in regime,” Mikodez said. “Inesser is sticking to the high calendar. For some people, that means a lot, if you can back it up with guns.”

  “Yes, about that,” Brezan said. “I’ve only got the one swarm, and General Khiruev is, as I assume you’ve heard, still not in the best of health. Unless you’re offering.”

  “I am,” Mikodez said. “Because your second problem is that with Kel Command obliterated, nobody’s providing strategic guidance to anyone’s swarms anymore. It’s not going to take long for all the foreigners to take advantage of the situation.”

  Brezan had thought of that for himself. It was impossible not to. Kel swarms customarily received their orders from Kel Command, which had taken care of analyzing the broader strategic picture. Even General Inesser—Protector-General Inesser, whatever—was going to have issues reorganizing her forces to deal with the sudden lack of command and control.

  “You have a solution to that, don’t you?” Brezan said, giving Mikodez a hard look. “Because it hasn’t escaped my attention that the Shuos are the only faction who have made it out of this whole disaster intact.”

  “Very good,” Mikodez said. “There may be some hope for you after all. Yes, I’m offering the services of the Shuos. We have most of the Kel listening posts bugged anyway as a precaution.”

  Precaution my ass, Brezan thought, but he didn’t interrupt.

  “With your leave, High General, we could perform the function that Kel Command used to. I already have a bunch of analysts hanging around here doing this work anyway.”

  The fact the Mikodez had suddenly resumed addressing Brezan by his erstwhile title didn’t escape him. Perhaps Mikodez fancied himself a puppet-master; thought that crashhawks were easily manipulated. Brezan hoped to prove him wrong, not out of spite, but because interstellar government was too important to hand over out of naivety. While Brezan didn’t have much leverage at the moment, he could do something with the fact that Mikodez had just made himself almost as notorious as Jedao.

  “I accept,” Brezan said, because he wanted to preserve the idea that he had choices. “So what’s the third problem?”

  Mikodez fiddled with an earring, the first sign of nerves he’d shown. “One of the hexarchs isn’t dead.”

  Brezan frowned. “Cheris’s—sources were convinced that you were the only one who’d gotten away.” How much did Mikodez know about the servitors’ role as spies, anyway? “Another double?”

  “No,” Mikodez said after a long moment. “It wasn’t a double. Not in the way you’re thinking.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Nirai Faian was a false hexarch,” Mikodez said. “Something like a senior administrator, while the real hexarch went about his business elsewhere.”

  “Sounds paranoid,” Brezan said. “Do we need to assassinate the real one, then?” He meant it as a joke.

  He should have known not to joke about assassination around a Shuos. “I’ve been trying to figure out how since I learned of his existence,” Mikodez said seriously. “His name is Nirai Kujen. You won’t have heard of him”—Brezan made an assenting gesture—“but in a way, everything you know depends on him. He invented the modern mothdrive almost nine centuries ago. The high calendar is his creation. And so is the black cradle.”

  Brezan stared at Mikodez, appalled. But his mind was already racing. “Immortal, then,” he said. “Like Jedao.”

  “Like Jedao,” Mikodez said, “except without some of the limitations that made it possible to control Jedao. Well, to the extent that Jedao was ever controllable, which is an open question. But that argument is moot.”

  “Is he a danger to you?” Brezan said. Because he could think of only one reason why someone like Mikodez would care.

  “He’s a danger to everyone.”

  “Nine hundred years, you say, and he’s not the one who exploded the hexarchate. If he invented the mothdrive—”

  Mikodez shook his head. “Kujen has always been good at buying people’s favor. Don’t get drawn in. He’s brilliant, but the hexarchate is a big place. Even if revolutions aren’t friendly to research divisions, you’ll eventually be able to find other technicians who can offer useful innovations without requiring you to sell your conscience down the river.”

  Brezan couldn’t help it. He choked with laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said when he was done, “a Shuos hexarch with a conscience?”

  “Oh, I don’t have any such thing,” Mikodez said, taking Brezan’s outburst calmly. “But it’s clear that you do. And you’re going to be the face of the operation.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of this Kujen before now, anyway?”

  “Because he’s a secretive bastard,” Mikodez said. “If you think about it, that’s a great way to survive when you’re almost a millennium old. Bravery has never been Kujen’s strong point, which he himself would be the first
to admit. Here—”

  The terminal indicated that it had received a databurst from Mikodez. Brezan opened up the profile contained therein. Nirai Kujen: not just a secretive bastard, but an extraordinarily handsome one. A note cautioned him not to take physical appearances too literally, since, like Jedao, Kujen was a ghost who possessed different bodies as the occasion suited him. Fortunately, the profile also included data on movement patterns, which were much more reliable. As a former Personnel officer, Brezan had a lot of experience looking for nuances in body language.

  “So you’re saying he engineered the remembrances into the high calendar on purpose?” Brezan said, not bothering to hide his repugnance. “What evidence do you have for this?”

  Mikodez shrugged. “He told me so. Check the file. I recorded that whole conversation, but I’ve had the whole thing transcribed with timestamps of the key bits so you don’t have to sit through it all.”

  “How considerate of you.”

  “Don’t thank me, thank my staff.” Mikodez tapped his fingers against something just out of sight. “I have reason to believe that Kujen is personally attached to the hexarchate as it used to be. He dropped out of sight just before that business at the Fortress of Spinshot Coins, almost as if he knew which way the wind was blowing. I don’t like that, and I don’t like the fact that I don’t know what he’s up to.”

  “You were colleagues for decades,” Brezan said slowly. “You couldn’t do anything about him earlier?”

  Mikodez’s smile was self-mocking. “What, like oust him? I’m a bureaucrat, not a genius mathematician. You were probably too young to remember, but I was in my twenties when I took the seat. At the time my life expectancy was measured in days, and the Shuos were extremely weak after the previous leadership squandered resources in useless petty squabbles with the Andan and Vidona. I wasn’t spoiling for a fight, and Kujen happened to agree with me about the value of stability.”

  It was the second time this conversation Mikodez had mentioned the word. Brezan didn’t think that was a coincidence. He didn’t harbor any illusions that he could challenge Mikodez in his own seat of power, but he didn’t intend to become a mere puppet for the man, either.

  “I’ll read through the file,” Brezan said. “But the immediate problem is the first one: keeping the hexarchate from exploding. I’ll work with you on that. If you get more information on Kujen’s whereabouts and latest hobbies, we can discuss those then.”

  “Fair enough.” Mikodez pursed his lips. “One thing more.”

  “Oh?”

  “You need to disentangle yourself from Khiruev’s swarm as soon as possible,” Mikodez said. “For one thing, you’re going to be needing it to put out fires, and to form the core of the new government’s forces. You don’t want to be on the front lines. You’re too important for that now.”

  Brezan gave him a disbelieving look.

  “You’re used to thinking of yourself as no one very important. I can tell. Modesty is going to have to become a thing of the past, I’m afraid.”

  “My sisters would be laughing their asses off hearing you call me ‘modest,’” Brezan said.

  “I’m quite serious,” Mikodez said. “Half of leadership is prancing around looking like you know what you’re doing, whether or not you actually do. The other half, well, that’s what allies and delegation to gifted subordinates are for. Might I make a recommendation while I’m at it?”

  “I don’t think I can stop you.”

  “One Colonel Kel Ragath appears to have survived the devastation at Scattered Needles and is still trying to get in contact with Cheris, without much luck,” Mikodez said. “I advise you to give him a call and promote him immediately, unless General Khiruev has a crushing objection.”

  “I’ll check with her,” Brezan said automatically, “although I doubt she will. Why, what is the colonel up to these days?” Like a lot of Kel, he’d heard of Ragath, who’d enjoyed a well-regarded career only to run into a ceiling at his present rank because of his secondary specialty in history. Ragath’s scathingly critical papers about Kel policy hadn’t earned him many friends in high places.

  Mikodez smiled. “He raised a military force of his own in a system in the Stabglass March and is currently mucking about with gory logistical details. If you approach him and drop Cheris’s name hintingly, I think you’ll find him willing to work with you.”

  “Which is good,” Brezan said, dismayed all over again by the sheer scope of the task before him, “because even the people who appear to be willing to work with me might be spies, or saboteurs, or sycophants.”

  “Ah,” Mikodez said, and his smile turned sad. “You’re learning already.”

  “I have anger management issues,” Brezan said, remembering the old notations in his profile, “but I’m not stupid.”

  “Well,” Mikodez said, “that’s a start. My instinct is to ferret you away in the Citadel of Eyes behind my security. Unfortunately, this one time, my instinct is wrong. You’re going to be a public figure, High General, and that means going where the public can see you. This will also make you one hell of a target, so I’m going to assign you some of my security.”

  “I suppose your security will quietly disappear me if I get too many ideas of my own,” Brezan said.

  “Don’t be crass,” Mikodez said. “I already have enough public relations problems without being seen to be assassinating more people. As it stands, I’m getting blamed for all sorts of petty theft that my agents had nothing to do with. Which is a crying shame, because my budget could use any revenue streams that happen to be lying about.”

  “And you wonder why the Shuos have such a terrible reputation,” Brezan said sardonically.

  “I’m going to have the reputation no matter what,” Mikodez said. “I might as well do something useful with it. You, now—people know so much less about you. You only get one chance to make a first impression, you know. Don’t waste it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON A MOON called Tefos in a distant system, Servitor Hemiola, a snakeform, was the first to notice that the hexarch had arrived. Its two comrades avoided overseeing the base’s control room because they considered it one of the more boring duties. Hemiola had volunteered because it liked using the time to make videos. The other two servitors who made up their tiny enclave tolerated this because they had their own guilty hobbies.

  During this particular occasion, Hemiola was rewatching the seventeenth episode of A Rose in Three Revolutions, its favorite drama. A Rose in Three Revolutions supposedly had six seasons of twenty-four episodes each, except it had still been airing when the hexarch transported the servitors to Tefos. Unfortunately, the hexarch had not seen fit to bring the last two seasons with him on his subsequent visits. Hemiola amused itself sometimes by cutting up and altering the existing episodes and making miniature videos to music of its own devising so it could speculate on how the whole thing ended. Too bad it couldn’t leave Tefos so it could find and watch the rest.

  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 a
n 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.