by Yoon Ha Lee
Jedao had passed a document over to Khiruev’s terminal with the READ IMMEDIATELY indicator. Thankfully, it was short. Jedao had figured out the Hafn trick three minutes before Khiruev had. The timestamp was unmistakable.
He hadn’t said a word.
Khiruev contemplated shooting Jedao.
Jedao wasn’t paying any attention to Khiruev, which was just as well, because Khiruev’s vision was shorting out, predictable effect of formation instinct. “This is General Jedao,” he said. “All units continue to reform by tactical group. Banner the Deuce of Gears. Engineering, I understand we’re carrying twelve threshold winnowers. Lob the lot at the Hafn and put them into dispersed orbits around the Fortress at the conventional 90% limit of phantom terrain, will you?”
Captain-engineer Miugo called the command center. “General,” he said, “we don’t have enough personnel to safely crew all the winnowers.” Because we ditched the Nirai, he didn’t say. “Recommend we step down to eight.”
“Yes, I should have figured,” Jedao said. “My apologies for being unclear. Launch all twelve uncrewed. I understand they’re fitted with remote triggers for emergencies?”
The temperature in the command center plummeted.
Threshold winnowers were indiscriminately destructive of lives, although they did not damage nonliving objects. They were also finicky to operate, hence Miugo’s concern. Jedao had notoriously used them at the massacre at Hellspin Fortress.
“We’ll waste time if we disable them first,” Jedao said, as if he hadn’t picked up on the sudden tension. “But if the Hafn are any good, they’ll spot the winnowers on scan, and they’ll know about the remote option. They’ll even know that I’m willing to pull the trigger, even if Kel Command wouldn’t be.” The corner of his mouth pulled up. “And this will go much better if they believe it’s me, not some cocked-up desperate impostor.”
The command center fell horribly quiet as they waited for Engineering to comply. Khiruev recognized, from the clipped tone of Miugo’s status reports and their frequency, that he was upset, and was hoping that Jedao would change his mind. She couldn’t imagine that Jedao himself was unaware of Miugo’s reaction. But Jedao did not seem inclined to change his mind.
The Hierarchy of Feasts launched the winnowers. Khiruev could tell to the second when the Hafn figured out what they were. The Hafn abandoned their funnel and began a rapid, well-organized withdrawal.
Jedao had put together movement orders for Tactical One, which had been the first to regain a semblance of its assigned formation. “Ah, there you are,” he said to himself.
Commander Gherion had arrived with Tactical Two. “Commander,” Jedao said, “do me a favor and bite the Hafn’s heels, will you?” He accompanied this with a transmission of more specific instructions, which Khiruev studied to calm herself. “You should be safe from that really nasty attack you just saw.” He didn’t elaborate. “Modulate formation as you deem fit.”
“We’re on it, sir,” Gherion said. The tactical group narrowed and reshaped into Black Lens, which telescoped distance. Its effects were short-lived and it damaged the moths’ drives, which made it risky, but the dire cannon barrage swooped out and raked a cluster of fleeing Hafn. Tactical Two slowed immediately afterward and modulated into a shield formation.
More orders. Jedao was giving them in a steady stream, with brief pauses to adjust to the situation as it developed. Tactical One joined the pursuit. The Hafn continued to retreat. They left shattered moths behind them, and more of the web-mines, but not so many as before.
When the final Hafn units were out of the effective range of phantom terrain, not to mention the Fortress’s guns, the Fortress switched the terrain back on. Khiruev stiffened. She could guess what was going through Commandant Mazeret’s mind. Tactical Two and most of Tactical One were clear, but the rest of Jedao’s swarm was suddenly mired.
“Tactical Three through Seven, get your asses out of there,” Jedao said. “Abandon formation if necessary. That’s a direct order. You don’t want to be stuck here if the Hafn rally. I’d better have a chat with the commandant. Communications, raise her for me.”
The cindermoth, with its more powerful drive, was having reasonable luck getting clear of the terrain. Khiruev noted with relief that the plant-growths had dissipated. However, the other, smaller moths were less fortunate. Their tactical groups had dissolved out of formation, and probably would have even without Jedao’s permission.
Commandant Mazeret was a sturdy, pasty-skinned woman who held her shoulders stiffly. Khiruev could see the image from where she was sitting. Her expression was obstinate. “I don’t recognize you,” she said curtly, “but I assume from the Deuce of Gears that you’re claiming to be General Jedao.” Insultingly, she used the inanimate form of the second person pronoun. The high language had two, inanimate and animate, although it might be argued that the former applied to a general who was listed as a part of the Kel Arsenal—a weapon—rather than as a human officer.
“That’s me,” Jedao said, smiling his tilted smile at her, “had to take the first body available.” He couldn’t be unaware of the effect that this statement had on the crew, even if it wasn’t anything that they didn’t already know. “Commandant, I appreciate that the Fortress feels naked without any clothes on, but would you mind terribly switching the terrain off again, or clearing us a path? You’re interfering with our pursuit of the enemy.”
“Damn straight I mind,” Mazeret said, biting every word off. “This is General Khiruev’s swarm, not yours.” Touching that she was using the high language’s present/future tense. “Kel Command would have informed me if you’d been deployed.”
“Commandant,” Jedao said, no longer genial, “snuff the fucking defenses already. We can kill the Hafn, but not if we can’t catch the snakefuckers.”
“Then let General Khiruev do it.”
Jedao drummed his fingers, then said to Communications, “Recall Tactical One and Two. I don’t want them to get into trouble ahead of the main swarm.” To Mazeret: “I’m awaiting an explanation, fledge.”
Mazeret’s eyes slitted. “I see two threats here. One of them is already in flight. I’m dealing with the bigger predator.”
Jedao glowered at her, then laughed. “All right,” he said, “I suppose I deserved that. Hell of a way to let an enemy slink off, though. I don’t envy you the paperwork you’re going to have to submit to Kel Command.”
Khiruev looked at him in astonishment, although Mazeret’s obstinacy should have surprised her more.
“I advise you to surrender the swarm to its appointed general before you dig yourself in any further,” Mazeret said.
“Seriously, you’re not afraid of standing in my way?”
“You might be able to sieve the Fortress,” Mazeret said, not sounding any less hostile, “but I guarantee we will make you work for it. I know my duty.”
“You could be a crashhawk,” Jedao said, scrutinizing her, “but I don’t think that’s it. Tell me, Commandant, how long have you had Kel Command fooled?”
“Still digging,” Mazeret said icily.
“I’m going to have to send the Shuos hexarch an apology with candies for making one of his operatives blow their cover,” Jedao said. “What do you suppose his favorite flavor is?”
It was a preposterous accusation, but Khiruev had to wonder. Some Shuos infiltrators, especially the ones who could change their signifiers at will, were supposedly that good. Mazeret’s subordinates might be wondering, too. If she wasn’t a Shuos who had faked her way through a Kel career, or replaced the real Mazeret, the fact that she was defying Jedao meant that she was a crashhawk. Kel Command would never tolerate a crashhawk in charge of a nexus fortress.
Crashhawks weren’t automatically disloyal. Take Lieutenant Colonel Brezan, for instance. (Khiruev was almost certain that Brezan hadn’t known himself until Jedao showed up.) The only difference between an obedient crashhawk and an ordinary Kel was that the crashhawk had a choice, and Kel
Command had better things to do than test the levels of formation instinct in personnel all the time, mostly for reasons of cost. Even so, crashhawks rarely survived to any position of prominence.
The Hierarchy of Feasts had worked free of the phantom terrain and was now orbiting the Fortress at a respectful distance from its guns’ effective range. The other Kel moths straggled after it, resuming formation as they came clear. The Fortress hadn’t opened fire on the bannermoths and scoutmoths. Probably even a crashhawk Shuos agent had second thoughts about a contest of guns with the Immolation Fox. Besides, it must have occurred to her that Jedao could have rigged the winnowers to go off if something happened to him.
“Are we going to fight about this?” Mazeret said.
“No,” Jedao said after a telling pause. “I came to fight the Hafn. You’re in the way, but you’re not my target.”
“Kel Command should have destroyed you after Hellspin Fortress.”
Khiruev had to admire the commandant for speaking so bluntly to somebody with Jedao’s kill count.
“It’s not an uncommon opinion,” Jedao said.
The Hafn were now out of scan range.
“I’ll have to get them another way,” Jedao said. “Good luck with Kel Command.” He signed off before Mazeret could answer.
Khiruev looked at him and couldn’t help thinking that for someone who had lost an opportunity to smash nails into the enemy, Jedao’s smile was worryingly pleased.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ACCORDING TO HIS augment, Mikodez had two minutes before the conference started. He had watered his green onion in the morning, just when his schedule said to, and was resisting the temptation to do so again because he didn’t want to kill it. He was also resisting the temptation, in advance, to suggest container gardening as a hobby for the Kel hexarch, even if it would be a good idea for Tsoro to learn to relax. Even—especially—given the latest news.
Forty-two years ago, Mikodez had become the youngest Shuos hexarch in almost three centuries. No one had taken him seriously then. Shuos hexarchs regularly backstabbed their way to the top. As a result, few of them lasted longer than a decade, if that. Two decades if they were particularly good. People took Mikodez more seriously now, but they still disregarded his advice on the salutary effects of a few well-chosen hobbies. Their loss, really.
“Incoming call on Line 6, top priority,” the grid informed him.
Mikodez leaned back and smiled. “Put it through.”
The other five hexarchs’ faces appeared in the subdisplays with their emblems below them, as if he hadn’t learned those as a toddler. Rahal with its scrywolf above Nirai’s voidmoth, Andan’s kniferose above Vidona’s stingray, Shuos’s ninefox with its staring tails above Kel’s ashhawk.
Rahal Iruja spoke first, her right by tradition. She was a dark woman with coiled gray hair cropped short, and would have been beautiful if not for the severity of her eyes, the absolute lack of humor. He liked that about her. “We all know what this is about,” she said. “General Shuos Jedao survived an assassination attempt that Andan, Vidona, and I were assured he couldn’t escape.”
“I can’t believe you let him run off with a swarm,” Vidona Psa, a large, pale man with incongruous hunched shoulders, said to Kel Tsoro. Psa wasn’t bothering to conceal his scorn. “Jedao walked right in and your general let him pull rank.”
Tsoro’s scarred face was impassive. The scars were an affectation, but no more so than the face: Tsoro spoke for the entire hivemind that formed Kel Command. “We don’t make a practice of stripping the dead of rank, Vidona,” she said. “He served after his own fashion. We had no reason to believe that he could survive the carrion bomb.”
Psa harrumphed. “Well, he clearly did.”
“Jedao has been discharged, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether any of the Kel in that swarm will be allowed to receive the bulletin we’ve been transmitting. We tend to doubt it.”
“What I don’t understand is how he got off the Unspoken Law,” Nirai Faian said. She had been promoted from false hexarch to actual hexarch in an emergency meeting after convincing everyone that Nirai Kujen had, in fact, vanished, but she had trouble getting the others to give her the respect due her rank. She was a quiet woman with wavy shoulder-length hair framing a face like fine ivory, usually mild. There was no mildness in it now. “It’s unfortunate that he convinced Cheris to let him possess her. We should have had the cindermoth destroyed with invariant explosives as well to get rid of her.”
“Yes,” Andan Shandal Yeng said sourly. She was fidgeting with her sapphire rings, all of which were the exact sultry blue of her satin dress with its embroidered seed pearls and smoke-colored diamonds. “Except we only have so many cindermoths, and the Kel keep complaining they can’t afford to build another six.” Not least because of certain Andan monopolies; Tsoro’s face remained impassive. “I’m honestly surprised that Kujen was lying about wanting to retrieve that anchor for dissection or mathematical foreplay or whatever it is that he does.”
Faian wasn’t interested in discussing Kujen’s extracurricular activities. “All the hoppers and transports on the Unspoken Law were accounted for, so how—?”
“I checked the analysis,” Mikodez said. “Wasn’t there that suggestion that one might have gone astray? Looked like it was hard to piece everything together, given all the damage.”
“That’s a dissent among my analysts,” Faian said. “And even so, either Cheris or Jedao would have had to repair the hopper and fly it all the way to the Swanknot swarm, or rendezvous with a conspirator. Neither is known for being an engineer. Too much doesn’t add up.”
“We can figure that out later,” Shandal Yeng said. “We have to deal with the reality that we have a vengeful madman loose with a Kel swarm at his disposal.”
“Jedao won’t have taken the assassination attempt personally,” Mikodez said. “Appeals to his extravagant death wish and all that. He’ll be pissed that we blew up his soldiers. Delicious, really.”
About 8,000 soldiers, in point of fact. Nirai Kujen had wanted to be sure of catching Jedao with one of the few weapons that could kill him, and had insisted on blowing up the swarm, too, for good measure. Mikodez hadn’t pushed back too hard because by then he had acknowledged that Jedao’s victory at the Fortress of Scattered Needles had dangerous repercussions. You had to admire Jedao for coming out ahead. Upgrading to a bigger swarm, even.
Psa scowled. Like many drawn to the Vidona, he was obsessed with rules and as flexible as a pane of glass. Most people in the hexarchate feared the Vidona, who served as a police force against low-level heresy, but Mikodez found it boringly easy to finesse his way around Psa. “I’m sorry, Mikodez,” Psa said, “but you do remember Hellspin Fortress?”
Mikodez suppressed a sigh. At least Kujen, who did remember, wasn’t around to make snide remarks. Actually, Mikodez wouldn’t have minded the snide remarks. It was just bad form to show it.
“Let’s not retread ancient history,” Shandal Yeng said. “We still have to decide what to do about Jedao and his submissive army of Kel.” She must be rattled. No matter how much she disliked Tsoro, she was generally better at tact than this. Unless—hmm. Maybe that wasn’t Shandal Yeng after all. Mikodez paid closer attention to her face.
“We have to concede that he put a good scare into the main Hafn force,” Tsoro said dryly.
“If your agent hadn’t intervened, Mikodez,” Iruja said, “we’d have one less threat operating in hexarchate space.”
“I stand by Mazeret’s decision,” Mikodez said. “She had her choice of targets and she knows as well as everyone how dangerous Jedao is. For love of fox and hound, he had threshold winnowers in orbit around the Fortress with who knows what modifications. We’re lucky we didn’t have a replay of Hellspin.”
“We need to discuss why you felt the need to plant a spy in our fortress,” Tsoro said, her tone wintry. “As the commandant. What were you trying to prove, Shuos?”
Mikodez gave h
er an equally chilly smile. “Yes, about that,” he said. “Let’s talk extradition.”
“Need I remind you that we’re facing a madman who has the unsavory habit of winning all his battles?” Shandal Yeng said. “This is hardly the time—”
“This is exactly the time,” Mikodez said. “I’m not in the habit of letting loyal agents rot in detention. Talk to me, Tsoro.”
“We can deal with this later,” Tsoro said.
“We’re hashing this out now. You’re going to have a fun time chasing Jedao and the Hafn when your listening posts start going deaf.”
“Shuos—”
“Look, I get that individual Kel are as expendable as tinder and you can use formation instinct to yank them in whatever direction your strategy requires, but I don’t have that option. If I operated that way, no one would want to work for me anymore. Mazeret belongs to me, Tsoro. Your quarrel’s with me, not the agent. Give.”
Iruja looked faintly irritated by the exchange. “Is it worth throwing a tantrum over one agent, Mikodez? Unless you’re planning on mass-assassinating the Hafn all by yourself.”
“Oh, I don’t intend to try anything of the sort,” Mikodez said respectfully. “But I can take down a scary number of Kel listening posts in an amount of time you’re happier not knowing, and the agent is important to me.”
“Tsoro,” Iruja said after a considering moment, “I realize that, like everyone here at some point, you’re fantasizing about running Mikodez through with a bamboo pole for his latest caprice. But let him have the agent as a favor to me. The Rahal will reckon with him later.”
“As you desire, Rahal,” Tsoro said, inclining her head.
Mikodez decided it would be better not to smirk at Tsoro. Why couldn’t one of the Kel with a sense of humor be hexarch? “Tsoro’s earlier remark brings up an interesting possibility,” he said. “If Jedao’s so hell-bent on exchanging bullets with the Hafn, why not let him wear himself out that way?”