by Yoon Ha Lee
“You were right to bring this to me,” Mikodez said to Zehun, “although I’m not sure what we can do beyond monitoring the situation. The part that bothers me the most is the timing. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“When is anything a coincidence?” Zehun said. “I can only assume that Kujen insisted on the new, especially excessive retrieval protocols for General Jedao and his anchor to make us think that he was especially invested in sticking around to look at the test results.”
“He must have taken exception to the fact that Iruja and Faian are almost ready to seize immortality for themselves,” Mikodez said. For all the hexarchs. He planned on opting out—as much as he enjoyed chatting with Kujen about everything from Kel-shopping to budget management, he wasn’t convinced that immortality improved anyone’s psyche—but they didn’t need to know that.
“Even if he hasn’t hacked your contingency files,” Zehun said, “he has to have guessed that you’re the one responsible for offing him on the others’ behalf.”
“Well, yes,” Mikodez said. “It makes our conversations all the more entertaining. Still, he hates leaving his home station, and I don’t like the thought that he’s out of sight. Iruja will expect me to drag him back, if only to make sure that he won’t drop some crazy new superweapon before she can have her shot at immortality.” Never mind that Faian claimed that she could prevent aging, but a well-placed bullet would still kill you dead. Mikodez had long ago stopped expecting Iruja to be rational on the topic.
He frowned at the report. “Schedule a meeting with the relevant analysts in half an hour. That damn thing with the financial irregularities will have to wait until tomorrow morning.”
“I was hoping you’d seen this coming.”
“Since when do I anticipate things that you don’t?”
Zehun gave him that don’t play innocent cadet look he remembered so vividly from academy.
Mikodez grimaced. “I will be disappointed if you haven’t adequately pillaged my worst-case scenario files on the matter. The question is, will Faian break the news to the other hexarchs first, or should I preempt her? I almost wish it were a bomb. Kujen might be a splendid weapons designer, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have the requisite experience launching surprise attacks without getting caught.”
“No, you have him confused with the other, much less dangerous sociopath in the hexarchate’s arsenal,” Zehun said, with the merest trace of sarcasm.
“Please,” Mikodez said. “Which do you think is more dangerous, the mathematician our entire way of life is chained to, or a mere general with a gift for self-destruction?”
“As if ‘dangerous’ is something you can measure on a single axis,” Zehun returned, then leaned down. The cat, with perfect foresight, sprang for a table, missed, and landed ungracefully on the nearby chair. Zehun was forced to hunt Jienji around the office until they cornered her by a shelf. (It was the same shelf every time. Jienji was stupid even for a cat. Mikodez had asked Zehun if this was a comment on the intelligence of Shuos assassins—a matter of particular interest, considering how they had met—and Zehun had smiled unhelpfully.)
“At least Jedao’s out of the way,” Mikodez said. “If Kujen has left the picture too, maybe I have a chance of convincing Kel Command to stop fielding Jedao. And then you’ll be free to name that adorable black kitten after him.”
“Not on your life,” Zehun said. “Superstition is irrational, but a little irrationality is perfectly justified where that man is concerned.”
Mikodez would have plenty of opportunity to reflect on those words in the days to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
KHIRUEV COULD THINK of good reasons why General Jedao might not want to corral her after the latest staff meeting, none of which implied any trust on the general’s part. Eleven days had elapsed since Jedao had claimed the swarm. Jedao had divided that time between meetings and drilling the swarm on unusual formations. For the past four days—lucky unlucky four, she couldn’t help thinking, Kel superstition—Jedao had been inviting staff officers singly to his quarters for meetings that averaged an hour and thirty-seven minutes. Khiruev was reminded of the bedtime stories of ravenous fox-spirits that Mother Allu had liked to tell. And it couldn’t be a coincidence that Jedao had ordered composite wiring shut down. Khiruev’s best guess was that he didn’t want to risk the Kel conspiring against him over a channel he couldn’t monitor, since Jedao’s body was not wired for composite work. She couldn’t blame Jedao for not wanting to risk the necessary operation.
But all the staff came out intact. Major Arvikoi, who looked terribly young even in a society where most people chose to look young, emerged with a disconcertingly pleased expression. Lieutenant Colonel Riozu’s smile was downright predatory. And Colonel Stsan, who had been Khiruev’s chief of staff, went around politely blank. She almost certainly knew that Khiruev had authored the assassination attempt.
Khiruev could trust no one, having helped get rid of the lone Kel who had stood up to Jedao. She reflected on this fact daily.
“Here we are,” Jedao said as they approached his quarters, as if nothing was wrong. Two servitors awaited them inside, sleek metal and blinking lights, a birdform and a spiderform. If Khiruev hadn’t known better, she would have said they looked sheepish. “Don’t suppose you mind playing jeng-zai with a couple servitors, General?”
“I don’t see why I should, sir,” Khiruev said. She hadn’t realized servitors had any interest in card games, but who knew what they did in their spare time?
Khiruev’s eyes were caught by a painting imaged over the table. To be fair, it was hard to miss. Jedao took one look at her face and burst out laughing. “All right, General,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
Since she had been asked for candor—“It looks like a rainbow vomited over a fragmentation grenade.”
“I like colors,” Jedao said, and the soft yearning in his voice made Khiruev shudder inside. “There are so many of them. But I won’t torture you with this any longer.” He waved a hand and the visual flicked out. “Anyway, the servitors are very firm that they don’t want me to give them money for proper betting, which is good because I’m flat broke.” He smiled suddenly. “Imagine how Kel Command would react if I asked for my back pay.”
Khiruev took the seat indicated, across from Jedao. The servitors blinked their lights at her, a friendly yellow-orange. She nodded at each in turn, feeling odd—but why not.
The spiderform passed out tokens. “Standard rules, sir?” Khiruev said. She knew better than to ask why they were wasting time on a card game. Jedao was sure to have some twisty Shuos lesson to convey. Khiruev sometimes thought that Kel-Shuos relations would improve if someone sat the Shuos down and taught them to make presentations with easy-to-read captions like normal people.
“Standard suits me fine,” Jedao said. He looked at the servitors. “You two know the rules?”
Both servitors made subdued acquiescent noises.
“If I may ask, sir,” Khiruev said, “why servitors?”
(Much later it occurred to her to wonder what the servitors themselves had made of the entire business.)
Jedao blinked. “Well, why not? We didn’t have machine sentiences when I was alive. I asked them if they had pressing duties elsewhere, and they said no.”
Servitors might not be human, but after centuries among the Kel, they must recognize commanding officer for ‘or else’ as well as anyone else. They turned out to be well-behaved jeng-zai opponents. The spiderform made no attempt to bluff. Khiruev couldn’t tell for certain, but the birdform seemed to be using a pseudorandom generator to guide its raises. Jedao, on the other hand—
Khiruev shook her head as Jedao flipped over the latest card to reveal a Four of Roses. It was just as well that they were playing with tokens. “Sir,” she said, “the odds of you drawing to an inner Splendor of Flowers three times in a row are—”
“—some number so tiny you can’t inscribe it with a needle, yes,” Jedao s
aid, leaning back and smiling crookedly.
The birdform made a small cheeping sound. The spiderform drew its legs in.
“I’m glad somebody finally called me on it,” Jedao said. “I was starting to wonder what the hell I’d have to do to get a Kel to crack. Anyway, bad form to cheat when no real money’s involved. Not that that stopped some of my classmates. You have my apologies.”
“That’s not necessary, sir.”
“Of course it’s necessary.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because,” Jedao said, gathering all the cards up and squaring them in his hands, “we’re not fighting Kel. We’re fighting people whose only interest in Kel rules of engagement is to tie us in knots with them. They’re going to cheat. Which means we have to cheat better.”
Jedao laid the deck down. “I have a certain personal interest that you may not be aware of,” he added. “It was long ago and no one has any reason to remember it, but my world-of-birth was conquered by the Hafn a long time ago, and it passed out of the heptarchate’s control.”
“I don’t think I ever knew that,” Khiruev said.
“As I said, no reason you should.” Jedao’s voice held no sentiment, but Khiruev wondered. “Anyway, if the records aren’t lying about your victory at Wicker’s End, you don’t need me to explain the value of unconventional warfare to you.”
“Surely you didn’t miss the part where they reprimanded me for my actions,” Khiruev said. She had taken a reduction to half-pay for four years, and had barely escaped a demotion.
“You won.”
“My methods didn’t sufficiently conform to Doctrine. Kel Command had every right to—”
Jedao laughed shortly. “Kel Command would rather pin medals on corpses than on people who survived by doing the sensible thing. Still, I’m crazy, so who am I to talk?”
“There’s no point in saving the hexarchate’s citizens if they’re going to fall prey to heresy,” Khiruev said carefully.
“Where in Doctrine does it say that it’s wrong to teach people to organize themselves against an insurrection instead of waiting for the people in pretty uniforms to show up and do the hard work?”
“The isolation of Wicker’s End made it an unusual case, sir. If there had been another way—”
“As they used to say at Shuos Academy, ‘Counterfactuals never feed the children’. Which is hilarious coming from us, but never mind.” Jedao slammed his hand on the table, causing some of the cards to slide down from the pile, and got up. “I’ve poked about the mothgrid and I’ve quizzed your staff heads and I’ve been putting in calls to the moth commanders and driving them to distraction, and now I’m asking you. Where the fuck is our intelligence on the Hafn?”
“Sir,” Khiruev said, bracing herself, “we’re telling you very little because very little is all we know.”
“That’s remarkably unfunny.”
“It’s the truth.” She would have liked to produce a file for Jedao’s delectation, if only to have Jedao’s attention on an actual enemy. “All we have are old scraps of history—” She remembered what Jedao had revealed, but Jedao only shrugged. “—and a few notes that the Andan deigned to share from a cultural exchange several years back. If you read between the lines, the Andan are pretty baffled themselves.”
“I saw those fascinating treatises on the Hafn reverence for the agrarian lifestyle, not to mention all the pastoral poetry. Fucking peculiar for spacefarers, not to mention their descriptions of milking machines are bizarre—who writes poetry about milking machines?—but I agree that the Andan are no help. Which is a shame, because they’re the ones with the contact specialists and if they’re stuck, we’re not likely to do much better.”
Khiruev tried to remember if she’d read anything about milking machines.
Her question must have been evident, because Jedao said deprecatingly, “The descriptions can’t be anything else. My mother made me learn to milk cows the old-fashioned way even though the research facility had perfectly good machines for it. You would be surprised how many ridiculous footnotes there are in my life.”
This is not the strangest thing I have ever heard, Khiruev told herself, not with a whole deal of conviction.
Jedao was grinning at her. “I should tell you more about my mother sometime. She was something of an eccentric. She liked to watch those dramas where giant things with tentacles invade from gate-space and the only survivors are stalwart country people with big guns and loyal, delicious farm animals. I’m hoping the Hafn aren’t like my mother. That would be disturbing.”
Too bad the servitors seemed disinclined to rescue them from this line of thought. “Sir,” Khiruev said, “if you think any of us are withholding vital information from you, then you may as well shoot us all. We’ve told you all we know.”
“You’ve got to get over that Kel thing where you offer to commit suicide just to make a point,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t looking at Khiruev. “The Hafn are technically human, so I wish I could assume some basic motivations, but ‘human’ covers a lot of ground. What I do know is that their attack on the Fortress of Scattered Needles almost succeeded. We want to blow them up before they unleash the next awful thing, but to do that we need more information. Which means getting them to talk to us.”
“Crescendo 2,” Khiruev said flatly. “Crescendo 3. Knifer.”
Khiruev had seen a great deal of war in her career. It wasn’t a secret that the hexarchate was perennially one rebellion away from sputtering into pieces. Even heretics’ weapons, however, tended to fall into well-understood classifications. Between Rahal regulations and the work of the Vidona, heresies rarely had the opportunity to metastasize into truly degenerate forms.
The Hafn had an entire society based on an alien calendar, and their worlds must be likewise alien. The Andan had spoken of delegates who cared a great deal about etiquette, but the delegates had been aristocrats, and who knew what the rest of the culture looked like.
The first time Khiruev had seen the videos of the attack on Crescendo 3, she had thought they must have been concocted by a dramatist. Towers upon towers of crystal, great jagged spires and spiraling steps held up only by glittering webs. Vast singing storms and rains that left charred spatter marks on rocks. Red-blue trees that writhed upright, then collapsed, crawling into frenzies with their fellows. The analysts had concluded that the tree-things with their ugly chambered hearts had once been people. Which begged the question: did non-aristocratic Hafn resemble people as they existed in the hexarchate? While the Shuos and Andan went in for body-modding, even they acknowledged certain boundaries.
“I watched everything I could drag out of the mothgrid, yes,” Jedao said.
“People who launch unprovoked attacks without making any attempt to communicate are unlikely to be interested in negotiation.”
Jedao was pacing. There was an odd hitch in his stride, as though he hadn’t gotten used to the length of his legs. Entirely possible, given the circumstances. “I agree with you there. But guns talk. Moths talk. Everything has something to say if you know how to—”
“Command center to General Jedao,” Communications’ voice said from the terminal. “Hafn contact. Commander Janaia requests your presence.”
“General Khiruev and I are on our way,” Jedao said. “You two,” he said to the servitors, “thanks for humoring me. See you some other time if we all live?”
It must be nice not to have to respond to jokes like that. Khiruev followed Jedao out. The servitors blinked respectfully, then began cleaning up the cards that had been spilled.
The cindermoth had rearranged its corridors so their route to the command center was short and direct. Khiruev disliked the accompanying sense of vertigo. In her dreams she was always convinced that the floors would gnash open to reveal the teeth of eager gears, but Jedao gave no sign of discomfort.
Commander Janaia saluted them on behalf of the command center’s crew. “Hafn outriders of some sort, sir. Scoutmoth 7 is stayin
g at maximum scan. Formants are a mess. Hard to tell whether they’ve spotted us.”
“All moths on combat alert,” Jedao said. Red light washed from all the terminal boundaries. He took the command chair and studied the scan readings while the webbing secured him. Khiruev took her place to the general’s right, feeling redundant.
“Oh, don’t look like that,” Jedao murmured. “I have every intention of making use of you.”
How serious was he? “If you want information from the Hafn,” Khiruev said, “now’s the time. It’s not any secret to them that they have an enemy swarm incoming. Assume they’ve spotted us and probe them for their capabilities.”
“Agreed,” Jedao said, half-smiling. “Communications, get me Commander Kavinte.”
That was the commander of Singe the Hour, lead bannermoth of Tactical Group Five. “I should warn you that she’s argumentative, sir,” Khiruev said.
“Yes, I saw that in her profile.”
“Singe the Hour responding, sir,” Communications said, and forwarded the call to Jedao’s terminal.
Commander Kavinte had an overly pretty face, all symmetry and graceful nuance, until you got to her eyes. The intimation of casual ruthlessness in her eyes reminded Khiruev of Jedao, now that she thought about it. “General,” Kavinte said.
“We have no idea how many Hafn are out there because their mothdrives fuck up our readings,” Jedao said with cheerful bluntness, “and for that matter who knows the range on their scan, either. Want to help me figure it out?”
“Sir,” Kavinte said crushingly, “you’re our general. You don’t have to put it to a vote. Just give the order already before the Hafn notice we’re dithering and call their friends.”
“Oh, I never put anything to votes,” Jedao said, “but your brain is a resource and I intend to use it as one. You want to prove to me how good Tactical Five is at Lexicon Secondary?”