by Yoon Ha Lee
“There’s a way,” Jedao said. “I’m willing to stake everything on it.”
The servitor tilted its head quizzically. “Even supposing that’s true,” it said, “why are you willing to do this? Are you not his general?”
Jedao told it about the deaths at Isteia. The remembrance he’d interrupted, the flash of the Vidona’s blade as she plunged it into the heretic’s heart. How Kujen had acknowledged that he wasn’t just letting the system perpetuate itself, but that he’d come up with it in the first place. About his own complicity, and the gradual corrosive awareness that the man he served was willing to destroy uncounted lives in exchange for his own immortality.
“There are moments when he’s almost human,” Jedao said, struggling for adequate words. “He’s spoken of enduring terrible things. Assuming that’s true, and not a bid for my sympathy. But that can’t possibly excuse what he’s done—what he’s still doing.” He raised his head. “And you—what about you?”
The servitor’s lights dimmed. “I used to work for him.”
“Really,” Jedao said in fascination. “You must tell me the story sometime.”
“I will,” the servitor said, brightening, “but at the moment, I think it’s more urgent that I tell you about the formation mathematics that you will need to implement. However you plan to do that.”
Jedao bowed formally to the servitor. “If we’re working together, you should tell me your name. I’m Shuos Jedao.”
The servitor dipped in the air, its version of a bow. “I’m Hemiola.”
TWENTY-SIX DAYSREMAINED before the swarm arrived at Terebeg System. Jedao did not trust Kujen about many things—a lesson he should have figured out earlier—but for logistical purposes, at this point, Kujen would not lie about that.
The calendar’s countdown beat against his awareness. Most of the crew had recovered. Jedao showed up for staff meetings and asked questions that made people nervous. He made more surprise inspections, not just in the infantry barracks, but in Medical, in Engineering, in the dueling hall. If anyone figured out that he homed in on targets by watching everyone else’s body language, they were kind enough not to say so.
He made the fumble-fingered corporal repeat the exercise with the scorch pistol. This time she performed the job without dropping anything, although she was a little slow. From Muyyed’s expression, he could tell she thought he was going to upbraid the corporal, and that if he did so, she would disapprove. He held his tongue.
The infantry drills, whose elements were informed by Jedao’s covert sessions with Hemiola, confused Muyyed’s Kel. From the reports, they were also confusing the moth Kel in the rest of the swarm. Kujen invited Jedao to tea right when he was due to attend one of the drills, which Jedao wished he could decline, but refusing would have aroused suspicion. He went and endured Kujen fussing over an impractical confection of spun sugar and gold leaf, with bonus lecture.
“I approve your renewed interest in preparation,” Kujen said, “but there’s such a thing as winding up your people too tight. For that matter, you could use a break yourself. You’ve dropped weight again.”
Jedao wished Kujen would stop telling him to eat. And every time a servitor brought him food, he could feel it looking at him. Food continued to taste odd. He assumed it was because he wasn’t human.
“I don’t want to disappoint the colonel,” Jedao said, which was true as far as it went. “I’ve been looking at the morale reports. The infantry are disappointed by the fact that they haven’t seen action, irrational as it is. I’m doing what I can to alleviate that.”
Kujen shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He didn’t bother Jedao again for the next two days.
Dhanneth regained consciousness shortly afterward. Jedao went to Medical as soon as he heard. Dhanneth was sitting up when he arrived, and made as if to salute.
“Don’t,” Jedao said.
He had agonized over what, if anything, he could bring as a gesture. In his investigations of how relationships worked, he had discovered over a century’s worth of archives of an advice column for active duty Kel. It was addictive reading. It also made him despair of ever measuring up. The advice to fete your lover with fancy chocolates, or whatever he liked to eat, for instance. Where on a warmoth was he going to locate fancy chocolates? (A surreptitious check had confirmed that Dhanneth liked chocolate all right, although he had a guilty fondness for candied rose petals. Not that that was any better from Jedao’s standpoint.) And how was he supposed to give Dhanneth fancy chocolates, or candied rose petals, or anything else, without betraying the fact that they were in a completely illegal affair?
In the end he’d come empty-handed and hated himself for it. “How are you?” he asked awkwardly.
Dhanneth’s smile came out as more of a grimace. “I’ve felt better. Your paperwork—”
“Hush,” Jedao said. Dhanneth’s illness had made him all the more aware of how much he had depended on the other man for the necessary small tasks that filled his days. “Just concentrate on getting better.”
“Your attacker—”
How much did Dhanneth remember of the whole incident? Jedao grasped one of Dhanneth’s hands and said in the drum code, Speak to no one else of what happened. “I’m fine,” he said. He suppressed the transient urge to press a kiss to Dhanneth’s brow, satisfying himself instead with a simple squeeze of Dhanneth’s hand before releasing it.
I hadn’t thought the mating urge would take you so strongly, the Revenant remarked.
Jedao kept from recoiling and hoped that the flush at the back of his neck wasn’t visible to any of the medics. I thought he would like to know I was thinking of him. All of a sudden he wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing, but Dhanneth was looking at him with a certain quiet gratitude.
He was a worthy general once, the Revenant added, with deep regret. That’s gone now. I had not expected you to have any interest in people, not in that way. Moths sex according to the circumstances, when the instinct takes us, so that we are guaranteed a chance of egglings when we find each other in the night. The instinct has been suppressed in me, or I would not be a good weapon. I thought the same would be the case for you, but then, the hexarch has always had certain predilections.
Jedao murmured reassurances to Dhanneth. Although he would have liked to linger, he couldn’t stay for long. For an inconvenient moment he flashed on the memory of Dhanneth’s broad, muscled back, the tiger tattoo.
The Revenant’s unkind laughter shook his bones. No matter, it said. Moth or human, you’re sterile either way.
Jedao was taken aback at the pang that went through him, even though children were an abstraction to him. Kujen had never mentioned having any. Jedao couldn’t imagine him being interested in any of the trappings of parenthood. At high table, the Kel rarely discussed their families, for understandable reasons.
Besides, the Revenant added sardonically, you’d make a terrible parent.
That much Jedao had to concede was true. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting him for a father.
Kujen invited Jedao to breakfast the morning after that. Jedao accepted on the grounds that it wouldn’t do to alienate him, especially if he was pretending reconciliation.
“Kujen,” Jedao said in the middle of a conversation meandering around the topic of ecoscrubber failures, “do you have children?”
Kujen’s silence was absolute but thankfully brief. Then he burst out laughing. “Sweetheart,” he said, “sweetheart. Why, is it something you’re interested in trying? The results cry all the time and leak at both ends.”
Jedao wasn’t deterred. “It has taken me so long,” he said, since simple truths would work best, “to realize how little I know about you.”
Kujen put his chin in his hands. It made him look like an unusually thoughtful cat. “Halash didn’t care if his pets screwed the girls. I tried it a few times, but my business was pleasuring the warlord, not founding a dynasty. It’s possible I left a by-blow or two.”
Jedao
’s throat almost closed up. “You didn’t keep them, after?”
Kujen’s eyes widened. “When the Kel swept in, they weren’t meticulous about preserving family units. Much luck they would have had, anyway, since everyone was sleeping with everyone else for political reasons, or else some quest for comfort. He was too smart for the former to affect him, anyway.”
Kujen’s voice turned vehement. “He was a good master, as masters went. I always knew where I stood with him. You’ll never endure that, you know. You will always have whatever you want to eat. You won’t have to fight off dogs in the streets to find a safe corner to sleep in. You will have everything you could possibly desire. I have made sure of it.”
Jedao returned Kujen’s smile and hated himself for understanding, at last, what drove Kujen to entomb himself in luxuries.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
INESSER RECEIVED WORD of the enemy swarm’s approach in the middle of the night. This didn’t take her by surprise, and wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t received Brezan’s warning earlier in the month, while she was still aboard his moth. According to some law of fuckery and bad luck, enemies always arrived at the most inconvenient time, by chance if not by design. Her favorite example—funny now, although it hadn’t been then—involved the time raiders showed up and they’d scrambled defenses in the middle of her promotion party. Not only had her aide taken the incident personally, they’d had to shoo out a terrifying number of disappointed courtesans, entertainers, and (that particular aide’s quirk) rented goats. Inesser’s hopes for very fresh goat curry had been dashed when she learned that the goats were there to be petted. They’d had extraordinarily soft, lush fur and comically long-lashed, trusting eyes. All things considered, the goats had taken the disruption to their routine better than her soldiers had.
Her office on the Fortress of Pearled Hopes lit up as she entered it. She’d been sleeping in the next room, with one of her wives beside her. Although she would have liked to send her two wives out-system for safety, to say nothing of the rest of her family, it would have demoralized her people. She couldn’t surrender to personal weakness.
Inesser snatched a slate from her desk in passing, then exited the office and turned left. Straight down the hall was her favorite conference room. One of the nice things about having survived both to old age and advanced rank: choosing where to hold your meetings. To say nothing of monopolizing the most comfortable chairs. Younger, more masochistic Kel could compete against each other to show off their ability to endure poorly designed furniture. In Inesser’s experience, being distracted by shooting pains in your ass never improved your decision-making ability.
When she entered, three people already occupied the conference room: Andan Tseya, Colonel Kel Miuzan, and a harried-looking enlisted Kel whose job was to take notes. Of the three, Tseya looked the most composed. Her fine robes and glittering jewelry made Inesser wonder in passing just what she’d been dressed for at this hour.
“Protector-General,” Tseya said as the other two saluted smartly. “You’re not going to like this.”
Inesser bared her teeth. “Details.”
“Incoming swarm of around a hundred bannermoths detected by the picket scoutmoths,” Miuzan said. She waved at the conference table. The grid imaged a map of Terebeg System for their benefit. Protectorate forces and installations were marked in gold. The incoming swarm was marked in red.
Miuzan gestured again. A subdisplay enlarged the swarm and showed the formation in detail. Correction: formations. The enemy was alternating between two shield-generating formations to maximize their defenses. Inesser had once asked the Nirai false hexarch if there weren’t any way to create a shield formation whose effects didn’t decay within minutes. The false hexarch had replied with a long list of papers and studies, and a note saying, “The short version is no.”
“That one”—Miuzan pointed—“is either the butchermoth we ran into, or its near cousin.”
“We have got to come up with a less morale-crushing name for the damn thing,” Inesser said. She wondered what Kujen called his creation. At least, she assumed it was one of Kujen’s, given his record as a warmoth designer. She felt decidedly ambivalent about the fact that her late lamented cindermoth had also come from Kujen. He’d sent her a gift to commemorate the moth’s naming-ceremony, an exquisite wooden sculpture of a kestrel gripping a silver orchid in its talons. It rested on a table next to her bed in the Fortress, an uneasy reminder.
Miuzan grimaced. “Wouldn’t matter at this point, sir.” Everyone had been calling it that since Isteia. They both knew the futility of regulating language, especially among nervous soldiers.
Inesser leaned in to examine the map. If the invasion swarm’s current trajectory held, it would arrive in fifty-eight hours and twelve minutes. “Well,” Inesser said, “we can only hope there isn’t a stealthed swarm coming in from the opposite direction.”
“I’m so glad you don’t say things like that in public,” Miuzan muttered. “Orders?”
Inesser had hoped all those evacuation drills would prove irrelevant, but better safe than sorry. “All military on high alert. Notify the civilian authorities. Civilians dirtside should evacuate to the underground bunkers.” Some of them wouldn’t obey—there were always holdouts—but she had to make the effort.
Miuzan put the orders through without comment.
As Inesser had expected, the governor of Terebeg 4, one of Tseya’s numerous relatives, called. “Put them through,” she said wearily. Best to get this out of the way now.
Governor Andan Viendris resembled Tseya to a disturbing degree, except they were, if possible, even more beautiful. Two features helped Inesser tell them apart: Viendris kept their hair in the coils favored by many nonmilitary alts, and a shimmering tattoo of silver, blue, and black covered half their face. Inesser had once asked Tseya what the tattoo represented. Tseya had made a face and said, “It’s their signifier. One of my brothers always thought the tattoo artist got drunk for the job. Impressive work if so.”
“Protector-General,” Viendris said, with an unsubtle emphasis on “Protector,” “might I ask what is going on?”
Inesser sketched a bow to Viendris, on the grounds that it harmed her nothing to appeal to the alt’s fussy sense of vanity. Viendris’s eyes glinted, not without humor; they weren’t fooled. Oh well, worth a try. “You’ve received the alert, I trust?”
Viendris brushed an imaginary speck from their wrist. “It’ll be nice to know that all those drills weren’t for nothing. I can at least assure you that we are continuing to enforce the high calendar per your instructions.”
“Good to hear,” Inesser said. “As for the drills, it would be vastly preferable if everyone was scurrying below-ground for no reason at all.” Come out with it, she thought. I have the defense of an entire system to see to.
But the defense of the system depended in part on Viendris’s cooperation. Not only was Viendris responsible for the largest inhabited planet, they maintained ties with the administrators of the other planets, moons, stations. If Inesser could soothe Viendris’s anxieties, Viendris would in turn persuade the others to fall in line.
“I take your point,” Viendris said after a slight pause. Then, unexpectedly: “What can I do to smooth things for you?”
Ash and fire, Inesser thought, all those dinners with Viendris weren’t wasted after all. In all fairness, Viendris always had the best wines, so she’d enjoyed herself. “You know all those emergency preparedness bulletins? Make sure that your people adhere to them. If the fighting gets to your planet, it’ll be ugly. I’ll try to prevent it from coming to that—”
Viendris waved a hand. “My dear Inesser, you don’t have to explain to me that war is about uncertainties.”
As if they’d previously experienced an invasion of their home. Tseya hadn’t either, but Tseya was the one of her mother’s brood who had opted for special forces training. It was one of the reasons Inesser got along so well with her. If Viendris had any
firsthand knowledge of combat, it was news to Inesser. But she wasn’t going to quibble about niceties of phrasing.
“In that case,” Inesser said, “I’ll count on you to keep the others calm.”
“But of course.” With that, Viendris signed off.
Tseya was too well-bred to say anything impolite about her cousin. (Inesser had never figured out the exact relationship, not least because three gene-donors and a surrogate were involved in the mix, on top of the usual modding.) But her fingers relaxed slightly when Viendris was no longer on the line.
“I’m so glad you’re the one attached to my staff and not them,” Inesser murmured.
Tseya half-smiled.
Next call, for which she couldn’t help bracing herself: Commandant Kel Mishke, who held the Fortress of Pearled Hopes. Inesser had never liked him, which was immaterial because he excelled at his job. “Open the line,” she said, because she didn’t believe in delaying the inevitable.
Mishke’s face appeared before her. She winced inside every time she had to look at it. His older sister had been one of her wives, once upon a time. At certain angles they resembled each other strongly, even though Lyoshke had been dead these past twenty years. That wasn’t why they didn’t get along, but it didn’t help.
“General,” Mishke said. He refused to use her new title. Inesser tolerated it because he was family. “Thanks so much for bringing your diplomatic initiatives home with you.”
“Fuck you too,” Inesser said amiably. Family only went so far.
Mishke sneered at her. “Told you going to that crashhawk boy with your speeches and concessions would go nowhere good.”
Inesser suppressed a growl. “I’m so glad your viewpoint has been vindicated,” Inesser said sarcastically, “but did you have anything important to tell me?”