by Yoon Ha Lee
“It’s Jedao,” he said to the door. “Let me in or I’ll fall over, not to spite you but because this has not been the best day for me.”
The door opened. Jedao would have limped in if he hadn’t been injured in both knees. Couldn’t you have made me with four legs, Kujen, like some kind of chimera-beast? he wondered. Of course, then the assassin would have shot him in four knees and he’d be in twice as much pain.
The secondary function of Kujen’s outer rooms became clear: they functioned as partitions, cycling like an internal airlock. By the time he reached Kujen in one of the inner rooms, this one decorated with fantastic curtains of lace, Jedao was fed up with the whole enterprise. Too bad he wasn’t still bleeding or he would have enjoyed dripping all over the carpet.
By way of contrast, Kujen didn’t have a hair out of place, and he was perfectly poised in a jacket of dark gray velvet over a silken robe. Jedao hated himself for noticing Kujen’s clothes, although admittedly on a moth full of people in uniform, Kujen’s decidedly civilian clothes stood out. “General,” Kujen said, very gravely. “Have a seat. You look terrible.”
“Nice to know you won’t coddle me,” Jedao said. He hobbled over to the nearest chair and sank down into it, cringing at the way his knees complained when he bent them. Surreptitiously, he experimented with different angles to see if he could find one that hurt less, which only made matters worse. “What the fuck happened to the crew?”
“Security protocol. One I save for emergencies, which this was.”
It took a second for the words to penetrate. “That was you?”
“Don’t stand up. You can shout at me while sitting down.”
“This isn’t funny, Kujen.” Jedao shut his eyes for a moment, thinking with a sick heart of the sprawled soldiers and technicians and medics, of Dhanneth keeling over while trying to defend him. When he opened them, Kujen’s unruffled expression had not changed. Jedao was sorely tempted to get up and hit him, except Kujen was the only one who knew what was going on, and besides, it wouldn’t do any good.
“There is a problem with formation instinct,” Kujen said, as if delivering a lecture to a trapped schoolchild, “which is that if someone manages to subvert an individual of sufficiently advanced rank, the whole thing goes down like a house of cards.”
“I can imagine,” Jedao said bleakly. “So what, somebody stole a uniform and dressed up as a Kel general?”
“It’s not quite that simple. If anyone could hack the uniforms that easily, the system would be useless. Uniforms are keyed to authorization codes that ultimately go all the way back to Kel Command.” Kujen grimaced. “Normally you don’t have to think about this because the augment handles all the crypto.”
Jedao gave Kujen a hard look. “And you just happened to have mine on hand?”
Kujen didn’t answer that. “The intruder managed to get by us by subverting someone. I’ve been going through the security footage and I’ve figured out who gave her the accesses she needed.” He brought up a video on his slate.
The executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Meraun, stopped to talk to a Nirai engineer outside her office. Then she invited him in and they continued talking. Jedao couldn’t make heads or tails of their conversation, but then, he wasn’t an engineer.
Kujen shook his head impatiently and stabbed the slate in a rare display of temper. “That entire conversation is hash.”
“Maybe it was a joke,” Jedao said despite his unease.
“No, you don’t get it,” Kujen said. “It’s recycled verbatim from an episode of one of my least favorite dramas, which features a plucky Kel adventurer and her Nirai companion. Specifically the episode where they fuck up the engineering so much it’s not even wrong. Someone constructed this footage. If I had more time I could probably even identify the software used to do it.”
Jedao wondered cynically how it could be Kujen’s least favorite drama if he knew the words by heart, but he didn’t want to distract Kujen with a side issue. “You’re sure Meraun and that Nirai weren’t just quoting from their favorite show?”
Kujen snorted. “Don’t be naive.”
“Fine,” Jedao said, “for the sake of argument, Meraun was subverted. How do we know she was the only one?”
“We don’t,” Kujen said grimly. “The silver lining is that only Kel would have been affected. If Lieutenant-engineer Nirai Wennon is still alive, he may be able to shed some light on what happened. The intruder can’t have been unaware of that, but she must have been pressed for time, and she must have decided that the executive officer’s credentials were the best she was going to get.”
If anything, Jedao’s headache had gotten worse. “We’re going to have to question everyone on the whole foxfucking moth?”
“It’s not as bad as all that. I can find evidence of tampering.” Kujen glanced down at the slate, then set it aside. “I’m not a psych surgeon for nothing. But it will be tedious at an inconvenient time. You will have to stay alert. You do realize what the intruder’s goal might have been, don’t you?”
Jedao nodded. Localized calendrical spike. “Are you sure it couldn’t have just been a simple assassination?”
Kujen rolled his eyes. “Don’t be naive. If the assassin is who I think she is, she wouldn’t stop there. No; she would calculate everything through the lens of calendrical warfare.”
For a horrifying moment, Jedao wished to live in a world where an assassination attempt could “just” be a simple assassination attempt. Of course, he supposed that, in such a world, Kujen would be long dead and he wouldn’t be here, but that didn’t strike him as such a bad thing.
“Who do you think it was, then?” Jedao said.
“Three guesses.”
“That Cheris person you warned me about ages ago,” Jedao said.
“It’s not definite,” Kujen said, “but none of the evidence I have on hand rules it out, either. In the interests of paranoia, I’m going to assume the worst.”
“At least,” Jedao said, “she doesn’t know everything about the swarm. If she’d had intel about the last time someone had me shot”—Kujen made an irritable gesture—“she wouldn’t have bothered with the assassination attempt.”
What Jedao regretted, now that the initial surge of panic was wearing off, was firing back; failing to die. Rationally, he knew that he hadn’t chosen it. His damn alien body had repaired itself from what should have been fatal damage regardless of anything he might or might not have decided.
Still, all hope wasn’t lost. If the assassin knew more than he did—if she’d embarked on her mission against crazy odds—maybe her ultimate target had been Kujen. Maybe a way existed to get rid of Kujen after all. Even if Jedao himself had interfered with the attempt. At the time, his only thought had been to protect Dhanneth.
“The assassin’s long gone?” Jedao asked.
“Of a certainty,” Kujen said. “I’ve even located the hull breach. However she located us, my best guess is that she either flew in with a specially modified needlemoth or, possibly, one of the smaller shadowmoths. I always knew those fucking stealth systems would be the death of me one of these days.”
“What,” Jedao drawled, “not your invention?”
Kujen shot him an annoyed look. “Believe it or not, I’m not personally responsible for every piece of tech that gets stapled to these moths. You can blame the Shuos for that one.”
Jedao didn’t know why that surprised him, considering the reputation of the Shuos. He supposed it would even be prudent for the Shuos to have engineers of their own, or suborn someone else’s, instead of remaining wholly dependent on another faction.
“Which brings me to what you remember,” Kujen said. “Did you get a good sight of the intruder?”
Jedao made a split-second decision to lie to Kujen. Not about the assassin, because that was a lost cause, but about the anomaly, now that he thought about it—about the servitor accompanying the assassin, who had broken his gun hand. He’d never before considered
that a servitor might offer him harm, which was pure shortsightedness on his part. He had even known, by then, that servitors had minds of their own. He’d just failed to think through the implications.
“A woman or womanform, I think,” Jedao said. “It’s hard to say, because she was in one of the bulkier Kel infantry suits.” He closed his eyes and concentrated on the image. “She was fast, astonishing reflexes. Didn’t really move like a Kel, although I can’t tell how much of that was the limitations of the suit?”
“They’re not all that limited,” Kujen said. “If you’d ever watched people drilling suit maneuvers you’d know that. What did she move like?”
Jedao waved his hands in frustration and regretted it immediately, although at least his right hand wasn’t as troublesome as the damnable knees. “An assassin, I guess, the fuck would I know? Let me guess, you don’t have video of the attack, either?”
“What do you think?”
Kujen could be holding information back, too, but Jedao didn’t think so. Admittedly, he was gambling a hell of a lot on his ability to read the man. “She shot me four... no, five times. In the head and chest. Both knees.” He continued to give a carefully edited account, focusing mainly on the assassin and omitting all mention of the servitor who had accompanied her.
If Kujen knew Jedao was lying, he decided not to call Jedao out on it. “All right,” Kujen said at last. “At least we’re on high alert, as is the rest of the swarm. None of the other commanders have reported incursions, but I would be surprised if there were other incidents. I would expect this to have been a surgical strike.”
Jedao looked down at his gloves, feeling impotent. “How soon before people revive?”
“I’ve already introduced the antitoxin to the moth’s air system,” Kujen said. “Of course, people are going to feel like hell for the next week, but it can’t be helped.”
Of course not, Jedao thought, careful to keep his expression neutral.
CHAPTER THIRTY
JEDAO NEVER DID find out what Kujen’s interrogation sessions were like. In one sense, this was a blessing. He suspected that the truth would only have infuriated him.
He scarcely had time to think during the hours that followed. People recovered at different rates. At least most of them did recover. Five people had drowned in their baths before the servitors could rescue them. What an ignominious way to die. Every time Jedao closed his eyes, he could imagine the bodies being dragged out of the tubs, hair soaked and dripping, undignified in death. Had the assassin considered that she’d be leaving behind a trail of, what did they call it, secondary casualties?
Then again, assassins and soldiers were both in the business of killing people. Considering what he’d enabled at Isteia, what he was hurtling toward at Terebeg and the Fortress of Pearled Hopes, who was he to criticize?
Once Commander Talaw recovered, Jedao made a point of meeting with them to discuss the situation. He didn’t like forcing Talaw to come all the way to his office, but it couldn’t be helped. For their part, Talaw’s skin had a greenish tinge, and they moved stiffly.
“General,” Talaw said after they’d gotten the business of saluting out of the way. Talaw’s face was shuttered, their eyes cold. “On behalf of the crew, I must object to the... interrogations.”
Jedao swallowed his nausea and said, “The investigations are necessary to ensure that we’re not harboring another turncoat.”
Talaw must have heard the rumors. “You mean that Meraun wasn’t the only one.”
“We don’t know yet. Still,” and Jedao made himself return Talaw’s chilly gaze, “we have to take precautions. Particularly since Meraun herself hasn’t yet cracked.”
He knew even then what would become of Meraun; but he didn’t want to think about that, not here.
“What do you require of me, General?” Talaw’s lips pressed thin.
“It hasn’t escaped my notice that the crew is shaken,” Jedao said. “As you may have noticed, I’m not good at reassuring people.”
Talaw grimaced their agreement, not without a certain irony.
“But the crew trusts you,” Jedao went on. “Panic will do no one good. It will be a fine balance, remaining alert without devolving into paranoia. Can I count on you...?”
“Of course you may,” Talaw said bitterly. “I can’t even disagree with your reasoning.”
“I have never expected you to like me,” Jedao said. “But you are a vital figure in the chain of command, and I intend to use you as such.” He paused then, wondering if Talaw had any particular response to that.
Talaw merely nodded. “All right,” they said. “Is there anything else?”
“Is there anything else that I should be aware of?” Jedao said.
“Not, I think, that you don’t already know. You can read the morale indices just as well as I can.” Talaw hesitated, then added, “I will inform you if anything comes up.”
“Thank you,” Jedao said. “Dismissed.”
A couple hours later, after tunneling through the hectic mass of reports by the department heads and acting department heads, Jedao ordered himself some hot broth. In particular, he’d had to talk down the acting head of Doctrine from a nervous breakdown. He looked forward to a quiet evening staring at the wall—in all fairness, Kujen or Kujen’s interior decorator had provided him with an unusually pretty wall—or, possibly, having a nervous breakdown of his own. Too bad he couldn’t afford one.
After a servitor had delivered him a cup of broth, Jedao settled in at his desk to drink it in tiny sips. Taking tiny sips didn’t help with the aftertaste, but it let him savor the warmth. It also distracted him from worrying about Dhanneth. Medical had reassured him that Dhanneth was doing as well as could be expected. Apparently he’d had some rare allergic reaction to whatever Kujen had introduced into the air, necessitating additional monitoring. Left to his own devices, Jedao would have been hovering by Dhanneth’s bedside, but he had duties of his own.
Jedao was entirely unprepared, then, when the door opened without warning. His hand reached automatically for the sidearm that wasn’t there, which was just as well, even though he halfway wished that Kujen would let him go armed. It did, however, save him from raising the alarm by starting yet another firefight in his own quarters.
The intruder was either the same snakeform servitor who had accompanied the assassin or its... did servitors have twins? Jedao took a deep breath in spite of his accelerating pulse and said, once the door had closed behind it, “If you’re here to finish the job, I hope you have better tools. Throwing me into a furnace might do it, but I have this critical shortage of furnaces in my quarters.”
For a long moment the servitor hovered at eyes-to-sensors level, blinking its lights in a subdued blue-green pattern. Jedao didn’t know how to interpret the colors. He found them soothing, but that didn’t mean they meant the same thing to a servitor.
“I don’t speak your language,” Jedao added, wondering now how many servitor languages there were. “For that matter, I’m not sure I’m fluent in anything besides high language, so if you don’t understand me, we’re sort of stuck. Although I guess we could try miming at each other.” How exactly did you mime Are you here to kill the hexarch? successfully, anyway?
“I speak the high language,” the servitor said. It spoke softly but clearly, in an alto of smooth timbre. “I have been watching you for the past days. It should be safe to speak for the moment.”
Well, if that wasn’t the case, it was too late anyway. He might as well talk to it. “You broke my hand,” Jedao said, remembering.
The servitor fluttered pink-orange lights. “I owe you an apology. My original mission failed. But I think it’s not a complete loss. Why didn’t you tell the hexarch about my presence?”
Jedao’s heart soared. Don’t get your hopes up yet, he told himself, but it was hard to resist. “Because I’m not convinced we’re enemies,” he said. Inescapable truth: if he expected any candor from this new servitor, then he wa
s going to have to reveal some of his own motives. A dangerous proposition. On the other hand, it would be a relief to level with someone at last.
This is everything, Jedao thought. If I fail here, worlds upon worlds cascade into fire and ruin.
“I have been looking for a way to kill the hexarch,” Jedao said. “I had been investigating formations as a way of generating an exotic that would do the trick, but I don’t have enough facility with the math.” He omitted mention of the Revenant or its servitor conspirators, although for all he knew this snakeform was acquainted with them. “After the attack, I thought—I hoped—that another means existed. That killing me was only a means to an end, and that the hexarch himself was the ultimate target.” He clenched his hands. “If I have to fling myself into a power core to make it possible, then fine. I’m willing.”
Jedao looked at the snakeform servitor, awaiting a response. Its lights had shifted red-orange as he spoke. Good sign? Bad sign? Too bad he couldn’t consult the grid for a guide to servitor languages without drawing attention.
“The original plan was to kill you, then to take advantage of the calendrical shift to assassinate the hexarch himself,” the servitor said. “I’m only telling you this because it obviously didn’t work.”
Jedao caught his breath. Don’t hope. And yet here he was...
“But you mentioned formations,” the servitor went on. “That was an avenue not available to my friend, because any Kel she brought into the vicinity of your swarm would get slaughtered before they got close enough—assuming you didn’t just run. But if you’re involved, as the general...” It paused, lights flickering in what Jedao assumed was doubt or calculation.
“Go on,” Jedao said. He discovered he was leaning forward, fingers digging into his thighs, and forced himself to let go.
“There are formations that can do what you want them to do,” the servitor said. “If you’re willing to use them. I know how they work.” It paused again, then added, “What I don’t see is how you could get them past the hexarch’s attention. I can’t imagine him letting you get away with that.”