by Yoon Ha Lee
Khiruev had reservations about the reliability of intuition when it came to people so alien that they made scouts out of child-bird-insect-flower composites. The thought must have shown on her face. Jedao raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment.
The long hours of their circuitous approach to the Fortress passed by like trickling water. Jedao occasionally asked for Khiruev’s opinions and implemented them directly as orders. The Kel in the command center had noticed what was going on. They sneaked glances at Khiruev with the same deadened anxiety that they had formerly reserved for Jedao. They knew, even if they hadn’t guessed the true story behind the assassination attempt, that Khiruev could not offer them any protection from the traitor.
The Hafn were expecting to fight Khiruev, so they would fight Khiruev. Right up until the point when Jedao intervened. Too much to hope that Hafn intelligence was inept, after all.
When Jedao didn’t require her presence, Khiruev distracted herself by organizing her boxes of gadgets. Surprisingly, Jedao hadn’t ordered the lot vaporized. On the other hand, Khiruev was hung up on whether gears should be sorted by radius or number of teeth instead of manufacturing more assassination drones, so maybe Jedao was on to something.
Khiruev had given up sorting and was reading the rambling memoirs of a courtesan when the advance scouts made scan contact with the main Hafn swarm. The courtesan’s escapades evaporated out of her head on the way to the command center. Red lights everywhere, low voices. Jedao was already seated, posture perfect, looking damnably relaxed.
After taking her place next to Jedao, Khiruev saw that they would reach combat distance in about four hours if everyone continued moving along the projected trajectories, which was unlikely.
“All right, General,” Jedao said, very clearly. “For your purposes, I’m not here. Deal with the Hafn.”
Khiruev shivered, but an order was an order.
“Communications,” she said. “Message for Commandant Mazeret of the Fortress of Spinshot Coins. Inform her that we’re about to engage the Hafn swarm and that she may see some fireworks.” She hesitated over how much detail to give her, then left it at that. Best not to risk fouling up Jedao’s plans. Still, no reason not to take advantage of the Fortress’s defenses if they could convince the Hafn to get within range during the encounter.
“Fortress acknowledges,” Communications said after a while. And after that: “Commander Gherion reports that Tactical Two is in formation to minimize scan shadow and is headed for the rendezvous point as ordered.”
Not that anyone was positive that Hafn scan worked like the hexarchate’s, but the precaution couldn’t hurt. Khiruev adjusted the scale on the tactical display, then rotated it while she considered the available geometries. Jedao watched, his face tranquil.
“Order for the swarm,” Khiruev said. “All units assume formation Thunder of Horses.” She tapped out the pivot assignments. “Tactical Three and Four, you’ll be tripping the nearby outriders.” She had almost said ‘geese.’ “Destroy them at your discretion.” No sense chancing that these outriders had defenses the earlier ones hadn’t employed.
The moths, represented on the tactical display by flattened gold wedges, began moving into position relative to each other. She could hear Janaia giving orders to Navigation: it was customary for the command moth to hold the formation’s primary pivot. Muris was speaking tersely to Doctrine.
The Hafn showed up as smudges, location probability clouds. Scan reported that the scouts, which had pulled back, still had trouble getting coherent formant readings from the foreign mothdrives. Reports from the Eyespike swarm, which had been destroyed delaying the Hafn, had put the enemy at eighty Lilacs, roughly equivalent to bannermoths in size and armament, and ten Magnolias, larger than the Lilacs although not as formidable as cindermoths. Forty-eight years ago, Kel Command had switched to flowers for designating enemy moth types after a spat with the Andan. Sometimes Khiruev wondered about Kel Command’s priorities.
Even after a few decades of doing this, Khiruev found the apparent slowness of the moths’ motion aggravating. It made her want to reach through the display to the moths themselves and yank them into place. She recognized the ugliness of this impulse. No doubt something like it was how Kel Command had come up with formation instinct in the first place.
She missed, too, the thrumming ease of working as part of a composite. Being the general in charge of a composite was not quite as thrummingly easeful, but it had afforded her the illusion of subsuming herself in a single will, which was the point. Jedao would have seen even that illusion as threatening. Besides, if the calendricals tilted in the Hafn’s favor suddenly, composite technology would fail. Every Kel with half a brain knew that compositing was required mainly for reasons of internal discipline between missions, rather than being a useful coordinating tool in battle against heretics.
“Doctrine,” Khiruev said, “what do you have for calendrical fluctuations?”
To the side, Jedao was looking at Doctrine measurements of calendrical values and laboriously putting together a query for the grid. Was this some issue of getting accustomed to a modern interface? Khiruev itched to show him how, but she had other matters to attend to, and it would cause Jedao to lose face. A puzzle for later.
“Effects must be localized, sir,” Doctrine said in a subdued voice. “We should be seeing the effects of the heretic calendar’s intrusion and there’s still nothing.”
This was consistent with earlier reports, but worrying nonetheless. Khiruev would have felt better if they had some idea how the Hafn could use their exotics in hexarchate space without skewing calendrical terrain. The fact that they had an interest in the Fortress suggested that this ability came at a price and that they’d rather be on home terrain, or at least, flipping the Fortress would enable them to project their native calendar in the surrounding space and deny the hexarchate that advantage. A pity that Jedao had ditched all their Nirai, who would have had the best shot at cracking the mystery.
The Hafn had spotted the Kel. Their moths wheeled to form what looked like a three-petaled flower. Each petal elongated in its approach to the Kel’s Thunder of Horses.
“All units banner the Swanknot,” Khiruev said flatly.
“Sir—” Janaia protested.
Khiruev narrowed her eyes at Janaia. Jedao had moved on to some other system of congruences and was ignoring the two of them. “The order stands,” Khiruev said.
She wasn’t the swarm’s ranking officer anymore. Jedao was. The banner defied Kel protocol. But Jedao had said that he wasn’t here. Khiruev’s emblem was the only one available, and it would have been worse not to banner.
The Hafn seemed to understand what bannering meant now. In the first engagement, according to the records, they hadn’t responded, and the Kel had—disastrously—taken it as an insult. Here, the Magnolias transmitted the Hafn government’s emblem. It was an antiquated-looking shield with a plain gold band across the top and a hectic tangled mass of vines, fruits, and insects beneath the band, overlaid for good measure by gold curlicues. Atrocious graphic design if it had originated anywhere in the hexarchate, but looking at the tangles, Khiruev thought of the boy with the cat’s cradle string whom they had retrieved from the outrider. Her hands clenched.
“The Hafn are twenty-one minutes out of dire cannon range,” Weapons said.
“We’re about to find out about their long-range weapons,” Khiruev said.
The Hafn approach slowed. The three petals had become three concave dishes facing the Kel. The dishes had to be their equivalent of formations. The geese had used it, and the Hafn swarm had used it against General Kel Chrenka’s Four-Eyed Shrike swarm. Unlike a formation, however, it seemed to have no consistent set of effects.
Khiruev made the mistake of glancing over to check what Jedao was up to. Jedao was smiling sardonically as he played jeng-zai against a grid opponent. He didn’t meet Khiruev’s eyes, but this was clearly mad tactical prodigy for ‘pay attention to your job, f
ledge.’
“Hafn maintaining distance, sir,” Scan said.
At this point, a few things were clear. First, the Hafn were staying almost exactly sixty-four of their minutes out of range of the formation’s kinetic lances, which were currently inactive and which were controlled by modulating three component formations. Second, the fact that the Hafn general could read Kel formations meant they could potentially be manipulated that way. Third, said general had read the particular placements of the component formations, suggesting that the main swarm might have longer-range scan than the geese, whose virtue must be in their numbers and expendability.
The problem with the kinetic lances was that they telegraphed themselves. Their sideways raking motion could only be hurried along so much by precise execution of the subformations. Certainly the lances would maul what they hit, and they had better range than anything the Hafn had yet to reveal, or the Kel swarm would have seen incoming fire already. But Khiruev looked at those waiting dish-shapes and sensed that the other side wasn’t worried yet. She also remembered that the Hafn had annihilated Kel swarms already, by means yet unclear, and they had successfully infiltrated a nexus fortress before. It wouldn’t do to get overconfident.
Time to test how well the Hafn had studied up on the Kel. “General Khiruev to all units, maneuvers on my mark,” she said, setting up trajectories on the subdisplays. “Give me Wildfire Over the Aerie with Pivots One, Two, and Three refused as shown.” She passed the Pivot One parameters to Janaia separately. “Do not, repeat, do not fill Pivots Two or Three without my direct order. Mark.”
Janaia blanched, but she only gave Khiruev one questioning look before she executed her part of the order. Communications reported that four moth commanders wished to speak to Khiruev. She turned them all down.
Wildfire Over the Aerie was both a grand formation and a suicide formation, a rare combination. It had only been tested once in battle. Two hundred ninety-eight years ago, General Kel Dessenet had used it to blow up an invading swarm. Kel Command had put it on the proscribed list because, as a side-effect, it filled the affected region of space with long-lasting calendrical dead zones, some of which still existed today. In any case, the question was, how well did the Hafn know formation mechanics?
Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Jedao pausing at his card game to note the development. Nice that he was paying attention.
As it turned out, the Hafn didn’t do research by halves. Partway into the Kel’s formation modulation—messier than she would have liked, but it wasn’t as if they’d had any reason to drill this—the Hafn reacted by peeling away. They headed straight for the Fortress.
“They think we’re serious,” Janaia said, blackly amused. “Terrible trade just based on the numbers, don’t you think?”
“Not like they haven’t figured out that we’re Kel,” Khiruev said. “For all they know, we haven’t met our daily suicide quota. Communications, advise Commandant Mazeret of the situation. All units maintain formation in present state and pursue.”
She knew what the Hafn were thinking. If they retreated to the Fortress’s environs, the Kel wouldn’t dare activate Wildfire because it would take out the Fortress as well. This was true as far as it went. None of the Fortress’s defenses would protect it from that particular conflagration.
The scoutmoths alerted her that unfamiliar formants were showing up in the Hafn swarm’s wake, small and rapid.
“Change course,” Khiruev said, and indicated the correction. It would slow them down reaching the Fortress, which was a problem, but getting obliterated would also be a problem. There were too many of the things to sweep with the scatterguns in a reasonable amount of time. Best to go around.
“Sir,” Communications said. “Six bannermoths in Tactical Three are taking some kind of corrosion damage.”
Khiruev frowned at the display and put in another course correction.
Communications spoke again: “Tactical reports that bannermoths Scratching Shadows, Beyond the Ocean, Two Books Bound Together, and Snakeskin Drum have been lost, sir.” After a few moments, she added the other two.
“General Khiruev to Commander Nazhan,” Khiruev said. Tactical Three’s commander. “What the hell happened out there?”
“Those spiderfucking web-looking Hafn things effloresced at us, sir,” Nazhan said thinly. “One moment.” Voices in the background; red washing over his face. “Engineering thinks their weapon did something to cause the moths’ biotech innards to rupture. Best readings suggest that everything’s messed up with parasites or an infection of some kind”—he didn’t mention Kel fungal canisters, although everyone was thinking of them—”but we can’t very well send a decontamination team in there right now.”
The swarm detoured farther. The Hafn were well ahead of them now. Jedao still gave no sign that he was about to take over.
“The Fortress has activated phantom terrain,” Scan said.
The terrain manifested as dizzying blue swirls on the tactical displays, with inclusions that resembled waving strands of kelp, like a captive mantle of ocean. The Fortress’s defenses were beginning to fire on the Hafn, with shifts in the terrain coordinated to permit the guns to speak through momentary windows.
“Forty-six minutes until we’re in dire cannon range,” Weapons said.
Muris looked up. “Telescoping formation to bring them into range, sir?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Khiruev said. For someone otherwise so conservative, Muris was fixated on that class of formation. Most of the telescoping formations had serious drawbacks. “They’ll see the formation and zip out of range anyway.”
The Hafn had to have some way of dealing with phantom terrain. Its existence was no secret. While certain details of the technology were classified, that wouldn’t necessarily have stopped Hafn intelligence. And whatever they did know might not bother people who had alien weapons to begin with.
Khiruev considered sacrificing an arm to make the swarm go faster. It was just as well that that wouldn’t work. She would have run out of arms as a much younger woman.
Jedao had thrashed the grid opponent at jeng-zai and had moved on to pattern-stones. Khiruev almost felt sorry for the grid. It looked like Jedao was using a subdisplay to write up a tactical critique at the same time. Wonderful.
Twenty-six minutes out of dire cannon range, Scan gave Khiruev the bad news. “Sir,” she said, “look at this.”
The Hafn were now arrayed in a rough dumbbell shape, except each end was an outward-facing concave dish. One dish faced the Fortress. The other was swinging around toward the Kel. The bar was bending so the dishes stayed connected. Khiruev doubted it meant anything good for them.
Sensors had sent her the forward scouts’ close-range readings of the terrain gradient, along with Doctrine’s notes on what it should have looked like under normal operating conditions. Phantom terrain behaved like a dense but manipulable fluid. As a moth commander, Khiruev had participated in a couple training exercises that demonstrated its properties. Her tactical group commander had described it as ‘space mud that’s out to get you.’ (All right, she had been a little coarser than that.) Khiruev remembered how aggravating it had been to have her moth’s motion slowed to a crawl, to be unable to rely on scan to behave properly.
The Hafn weren’t afraid of phantom terrain because, incredibly, their weapons had some way of degrading it in a fashion that the hexarchate’s own exotics couldn’t. Scan showed the terrain developing further inclusions in the shapes of fantastic trees, ferns, vines all tangled together. Something tickled at the back of Khiruev’s mind, a warning, but she couldn’t figure out how the threat worked—
The Hafn attack hit the entirety of Tactical Four as they swung around. They were still too far away for the dire cannons to respond. Khiruev’s display hemorrhaged red and orange light. “All units withdraw out of range now!” she said sharply. “That’s a direct order.”
The dying moths sent databursts almost as one. Crystal fibers. A c
avalcade of pale-lipped flowers. The cries of flightless birds pecking their way up through the floors. Walls grown over with mouths breathing wetly.
Jedao was still jotting something down in that critique.
We’re doomed, Khiruev thought.
Flowers and birds. The plant-like shapes growing in the fluid. The Hafn were degrading the phantom terrain. That bizarre not-formation of theirs looked like they were funneling something from one dish to the other. And then she knew.
“Communications,” Khiruev said, “urgent order for Commandant fucking Mazeret. Tell her to turn off the fucking terrain. All of it. Now.”
The Kel were in disarray due to the retreat, although at least they weren’t losing moths in all directions anymore, and they were attempting to form up again.
“Call request from Commandant Mazeret,” Communications said, very neutrally.
“What part of ‘order’ doesn’t she understand?” Khiruev snapped, although in her position Khiruev would have done the same thing. “Tell her that the Hafn can draw power for long-range attacks from the phantom terrain itself. Her Doctrine analysts should get on the problem. That’s all she needs to know.”
From a Kel standpoint, phantom terrain was just another exotic technology. But they had every indication that the Hafn had a peculiar reverence for worlds—for planets and their ecosystems. Enough that their scouts were sewn to the representations of faraway homeworlds. From a Hafn standpoint, phantom terrain was an unclaimed world, and they had some way of linking themselves to it, sourcing power from it the way the Kel sourced power from formations and loyalty. Khiruev scrawled this observation down and passed it on to Doctrine.
The tactical display’s blue swirls and ripples went black as the phantom terrain shut off.
“Good,” Jedao said, “you figured it out with a couple minutes to spare.”