by Yoon Ha Lee
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Shiang said. “Try anything and some fangmoths will blow your precious equipment into radioactive little pieces. You know us Kel, we’re great at breaking shit. Anyway, I believe I’ve made Kel Command’s requirements clear, Nirai-zho, or do I need to repeat myself?”
“No, you’re perfectly clear,” Kujen said. He had gotten what he wanted.
“NIRAI-ZHO,” JEDAO said after the eighth round of jeng-zai, “what’s troubling you?”
It took a ridiculous set of accommodations to enable Jedao to play the game without an anchor, but Kujen remembered how much Jedao liked it. Unsurprisingly, Jedao’s little box affected his skill at gambling. Right now he was terrible at it. Kujen was good at jeng-zai himself, but he shouldn’t have been winning so easily. Between moves, his anchor was doing a logic puzzle, since revenants could talk to each other directly.
“How do you feel, Jedao?” Kujen asked.
A bemused pause. “Correct me if I’m mistaken, Nirai-zho, but aren’t you sitting on top of a bunch of instruments that tell you more about what I feel than I know myself? I’d remind you what they’re called, but I can’t pronounce the names.”
“Don’t give me that,” Kujen said. “I know how good your memory is, too.” Except the pieces he had locked down as a security measure. It wouldn’t do for Jedao to let something slip to the Kel while he was still vulnerable. “You know what every last one is called.”
“Still flunk the math,” Jedao said cheerfully.
That was true. While Jedao had excellent geometric and spatial intuition, he had never developed better than scrape-by competency at the algebraic underpinnings of calendrical mechanics. Kujen had considered fixing the dyscalculia, but it was more convenient not to.
Kujen inspected the primary display. He had certain instruments that the Rahal didn’t know about. In his readings, the central signifier, Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, never changed. It suggested that Jedao was not just more intact than he was letting on, but that he was manipulating the entire situation. Kujen hadn’t yet caught him at it, though.
The weighted network of secondary signifiers had taken more work. Kujen had done a lot of jiggering to replace the problematic Immolation Fox in the motivational vertices with the more tractable Rose Chalice, that-which-receives. “Jedao,” Kujen said, “I have to dismantle you. It will hurt.”
Kujen knew how to give High General Shiang half of what she wanted. To make Jedao sane and functional, to give him back the ability he had had in life. Kujen would have to build around the latter because he didn’t understand it well enough to mess with it, but it could be done. He could transmute that all-consuming guilt into a desire to make amends. The hard part would be giving Jedao some sense of proportion. The man had a judgmental streak a planet wide.
Of course, that was only half of what Shiang had demanded. If Kujen wanted the Kel to think he was in bed with them, he was also going to have to pretend to be hostage to their desires.
“Nirai-zho,” Jedao said, “I was made to serve. If this is the service I am to give, then it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.”
The sad side-effect of making Jedao like this was that he was no longer an entertaining conversationalist. Thank goodness it was temporary. “I wish you’d shut up about service,” Kujen said.
Slight pause. “What would you rather talk about?”
“Aren’t you even going to ask me why I have to take you apart?”
“It doesn’t matter, Nirai-zho, unless you’d like to tell me. I expect you have a good reason for it.”
If Kujen wasn’t mistaken, Jedao was trying to comfort him.
“There’s one thing I can do for you,” Kujen said, because it was easier to work with a calm subject and after a certain point Jedao wouldn’t realize he’d been deceived. “I’m not saying you’re much more than a doll as it stands, even if you have no idea what I’m talking about, but you’re not out of your mind with the desire to commit suicide, either. I can take away your memory of this time. You’ll be broken but you won’t remember once having been patched up. It might hurt less that way.”
“If it makes you happy, Nirai-zho—”
Jedao used to understand that this was a very risky line of thought. “I’m asking what you would prefer.”
“I want to remember,” Jedao said, his voice suddenly steady.
So Jedao hadn’t entirely lost his understanding of pain or pride or ugly bargains after all. Good to know. “Fine,” Kujen said. “We’ll begin now.”
He flipped the switch, leaving Jedao trapped in the black cradle’s sensory deprivation.
Over the next week, Kujen modified the setup so he could hear Jedao without Jedao hearing him. Jedao turned out to be good about not talking to himself, unlike Esfarel. If it hadn’t been for the readings, Kujen would have wondered if Jedao had died in there.
He started dismantling the work he’d done to stabilize Jedao so he could reinstall the death wish.
After seven months and three days in utter isolation, Jedao broke his silence. “Nirai-zho? Are you there? Please—” His voice was brittle.
Kujen didn’t answer. Instead, he started the finicky work of suppressing more of Jedao’s memories now that Jedao had cracked. If Kujen was going to spend eternity with someone, he might as well guarantee that that someone would be pleasant company. Esfarel had gone mad in the black cradle, but Kujen had figured out better techniques since then. Jedao was more resilient to begin with if he’d lasted this long.
Sixteen days after Jedao spoke, Kujen noticed the thrashing. The instruments didn’t pick up on it, but as a revenant himself he could feel it. Esfarel had done that when he was newly undead and trying to figure out how to kill himself.
Eighty-three days after that, just as Kujen thought he’d be able to move on to the next phase, Jedao spoke again, very quietly. “Kujen, please. I miss you. It’s so dark. Are you—are you there?”
That wasn’t fear.
It was loneliness.
Kujen happened to know that even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway. “Shut up,” he said, suddenly irritated. The only reason they were in this situation to begin with was Jedao’s ridiculous grand strategy. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Jedao still couldn’t hear him. Hear anything, really.
Kujen returned to work.
KUJEN CONTEMPLATED MAHAR. He’d taken a brilliant young student and ruined him utterly, done him a favor no one else could have done, promised him luxury and power and his brother’s life in exchange for the use of his body. The anchor lived a restrained lifestyle, given that, but that was his affair.
Kujen had laid out the terms clearly. It worked best when he was up-front; he had figured that out early on. In a just universe, he should be a lonely pile of cinders beneath some rock, rather than hanging around to parasitize his own people, but he had never cared for justice anyhow.
A long time ago, one of his mentors had told him of the good he could do with his astonishing versatility in the technical fields. Restorative psych surgery on refugees and veterans. Better mothdrives. The occasional paper on algebraic topology. He could have done any of it, had eventually done all of it, except none of it changed the fact that he would die someday.
As it turned out, you could fix the calendar to cheat death. Even the Rahal couldn’t fix calendars the way Kujen could. Granted, this didn’t come without its cost. The calendar had made remembrances even more pervasive than they had been during Kujen’s childhood.
Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were. He could have warned his fellow hexarchs, but it was going to be more fun to watch them discover it for themselves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
KHIRUEV RESISTED THE urge to stare at the door to the command center. Jedao’s continued absence during an engagement was a problem, but Khiruev freezing up would be a worse one. Besides, Jedao’s instructions to Khiruev, while requ
iring a great deal of faith, were unambiguous.
Hafn Swarm One (as the tactical display now tagged it) was still headed for them from Cobweb. They would be curving toward Minang Tower on the way. Hafn Swarm Two was still in disarray after the bombs that had taken out part of their lower left flank (relative to the swarm’s orientation and axis of motion), but she couldn’t count on that state of affairs to last.
For its part, Minang had the standard defenses for a wolf tower. The good news was that they were solidly in hexarchate territory, with friendly terrain. The irritating Hafn ability to use their native exotics in the hexarchate did not deny Minang the use of high calendar defenses. The bad news was that those defenses had never been meant for extended activation. No one had expected an invader to penetrate so deeply into hexarchate space, even in a border march.
“Shall we engage, General?” Janaia said.
“All units banner the Deuce of Gears,” Khiruev said, keeping her voice unemotional. “Activate the primary pivot and close, but carefully.” She specified the parameters. Like most shield formations, Knives Are Our Walls offered only short-lived protection, but it beat letting the Hafn pummel them at will. “Scan, what is going on out there?”
“Estimated thirty Hafn moths dead or disabled out of eighty-two,” Scan said. “I’m distinguishing four types of mothdrives, two of them unfamiliar.” The familiar ones belonged to the Lilacs and the Magnolias. “Guessing they’re support vessels of some type, given their placement well back of the combat moths.”
Weapons, usually reticent, spoke up abruptly. “Sir, more are coming. Look at the way they’re regrouping to clear the area.”
Khiruev concurred. Hafn Swarm Two wasn’t gathering into the familiar dish-and-funnel configuration. Rather, its warmoths were forming a half-shell around a cluster of slower-moving moths.
The Hierarchy of Feasts reached the formation’s pivot, and the formation’s shield effect activated. It didn’t show in human-normal visuals, which had made Khiruev anxious when she was younger, but the scan overlay showed that nothing was wrong. The Hafn could apparently detect the shield as well. After an initial barrage of missiles, like a stutter of wayward stars, they held their fire.
“Sir!” Scan cried. “Here they come.”
More Hafn juddered into existence near Hafn Swarm Two. One group had the misfortune to arrive practically on top of a moth that had been damaged earlier. It went out in a horrible sudden sizzle, torching two other moths near it.
There were 105 warmoths in the Kel swarm. Over 150 Hafn had joined the battle, and that wasn’t even counting the 71 from Hafn Swarm One that were dashing back toward them and which would be able to hit them with known exotics in twenty-four minutes at current accelerations.
The command center was everywhere awash with light, red and gold, gold and red. Sometimes Khiruev thought that the Kel had an institutionalized horror of dying in the dark, with not even a candle for your pyre.
Deal with it, Jedao had said. This meant, if you regarded the whole situation as a particularly lethal training exercise, that he believed Khiruev had both the knowledge and resources necessary to prevail. Ordinarily Khiruev didn’t believe in applying this kind of meta-analysis to real life, but Jedao had a known tendency to think of everything in terms of games.
Khiruev had no idea what Jedao was so busy with. However, she did know what to do about the Hafn. Swarm One had done their damnedest to lead the Kel away from Swarm Two’s arrival point, and she didn’t think it was a feint. They had only turned back when it became clear the Kel weren’t falling for it. Swarm Two couldn’t just be reinforcements. It contained something vital to the Hafn. Khiruev had no intention of obliging them.
They had only another six minutes of shield protection left. Khiruev had set up new waypoints and handed them over to Janaia and Navigation. “Communications,” she said, “get me Commander Gherion.” Tactical Group Two.
Gherion responded immediately. “Sir,” he said, unable to hide his worry.
I don’t know what the fox is up to, either, Khiruev thought. There was no point offering an explanation she didn’t have; it wasn’t her place. “Commander,” she said, “I’m detaching Tactical Two. I’ve tagged the moths Hafn Swarm Two appears to be guarding. Your job is to put pressure on them, including shooting them to cinders if you can get through. I believe the tagged units are auxiliaries, but your approach will undoubtedly bring you under heavy fire. Take whatever measures you deem necessary and don’t concern yourself with the rest of our swarm until I recall you.”
Gherion saluted. “Naturally, sir.”
“Go to it,” Khiruev said, coldly aware that if there were any ugly surprises out there, Tactical Two would run into them first. But someone always had to go in first.
“Sir,” Weapons said, “shields going down in three minutes.” Indeed, the shields’ decay was manifesting as a lace of silver-blue light, like fractures in a hollow ellipsoid containing the swarm.
The Hafn had not been idle. Scan was reporting a storm of incoming kinetics, which blistered the shields at the points of impact. Slugs of dead metal hammered themselves into hot coins, ricocheted. Hafn Swarm Two’s configuration had, if anything, flattened. Khiruev wasn’t sure what that meant, nor did Doctrine have anything for her.
Khiruev said, “All tactical groups”—Gherion would know this excluded him—“reform into Mountains Never Whisper. Time the modulation to allow Tactical Two to pass through.”
Tactical Two was breaking formation. The rest of the Kel moths were maneuvering to reposition themselves in compensation. Judging from the pyramidal leading element, Khiruev guessed that Gherion was going to use Winter’s Eyes to punch his way into the enemy.
“Our turn,” Khiruev said.
“Over or under, sir?” Janaia asked.
A trap either way, but she couldn’t go in head-on. She’d run the calculations. That Hafn rupture attack would spit them if they did it that way.
“Under,” Khiruev said. More waypoints. Janaia suggested an adjustment. She accepted it.
Hafn Swarm Two reacted with dismaying alacrity when they saw the cindermoth angling itself down in relation to the plane of their own movement. The Hafn moths performed a beautiful maneuver, splitting diagonally to either side in two lattices, each headed by a projecting spike. If you drew rays from the two spikes, they would intersect at a point just ahead of the Hierarchy of Feasts.
“Cancel!” Khiruev said. “Wheel the swarm—” She didn’t have time to work out exact coordinates. Instead, she traced out the curve on tactical. Janaia translated this into the necessary evasive maneuver. The moth commanders’ acknowledgment lights flickered on the panel. “Doctrine,” she added, “hurry up and stab some equations until they tell us what that thing does.”
Doctrine had a harried look. “Yes, sir,” she said without looking up from her terminal.
Tactical Two had peeled away safely. Khiruev wished them well, but she had more immediate concerns.
Hafn Swarm One was practically breathing down Minang Tower’s neck. Scan confirmed that the tower had ignited its shields. The issue was not the shields’ fuel source but the fact that they would decay rapidly under any sustained barrage. A small note on one of Khiruev’s subdisplays informed her that Minang Tower was continuing to forward its scan observations, not that it had a whole lot to add about the current situation. The tower’s magistrate had not called for assistance, but this was consistent with her earlier behavior. Khiruev appreciated that she wasn’t making a distraction of herself in the middle of a battle. Khiruev didn’t think Minang was in serious danger anyway. Hafn One was going to swipe at them in passing, a last attempt to draw the Kel away from Hafn Two, then give it up and move in for real.
The Kel were partway through the wheel when Khiruev had the sudden rattling intuition that she’d done exactly as the Hafn general desired. She was just as convinced that she didn’t want to stay where the spikes were pointed. That was the proper way to pin an opponent
anyway, with equally terrible options.
Later, when she reviewed the combat logs, she figured out that she hadn’t realized that the trap had snapped shut until nine seconds afterward.
“Formation break,” Scan said sharply, while Communications reported the same alert from the commanders of Tactical Three and Tactical Five.
Khiruev knew that from the sudden disintegration of the formation’s protection. Doctrine was saying something after the fact. Moot point.
“Following units are not responding to orders—” Communications, with the list. Khiruev checked it for numbers. Fourteen bannermoths were now lit up on the tactical display, marked with the crashhawk glyph. She’d never seen so many of them at once, even in a training exercise.
It would have been one thing if the Hafn attack had knocked those moths out and the interface had glitched the representation. But those moths had rolled and were now flying directly toward the Hierarchy of Feasts. Moreover, the crashhawks had organized themselves into what resembled a Hafn configuration, not a Kel formation.
“All moths,” Khiruev said, forwarding the list Communications had handed her. “The following units are to be regarded as hostiles. Tactical Five, prioritize their destruction.” They were now down to a skeleton formation. Any more losses and she’d have to step down to a formation with a smaller number of keys. “Other units assist as opportunity permits.”
Tactical Five interposed itself between the crashhawks and the command moth, and opened fire.
Considering how bad it was to have fourteen Kel commanders go rogue on you (irony aside), Khiruev felt dreadfully calm. It wasn’t fair. She was dying anyway. It was one thing for her to be unperturbed, but she should at least have some reaction on the swarm’s behalf.
Khiruev’s attention was caught by Janaia’s hands clenching and unclenching, by the rigid way she held her head. Khiruev would not have expected it of her. Usually Janaia was hard to rattle. “Commander,” Khiruev said quietly, and when she didn’t respond, “Commander.”