by Yoon Ha Lee
During their journey, Tseya had assiduously studied their target. They had viewed a number of the records together. At Kel Academy, Brezan had become familiar with the notorious bits, such as Hellspin Fortress and Heptarch Shuos Khiaz signing Jedao over to Kel Command, repudiating him utterly. One video had even shown him being awarded some medal, very discomfiting. That had happened nearly a decade before the massacre.
As Brezan had learned, these records accounted for a fraction of the available material. For instance, Tseya had dug up a clip of some state dinner where they seated Jedao next to a Liozh poet who took a dim view of his sister’s verses. Brezan had had no idea that Jedao ever had a sister, let alone one who was a poet. Irrelevantly, he wondered if she had ever annoyed Jedao as much as Miuzan annoyed him. Tseya had also found a note Jedao had written to one of his lovers, a magistrate. The letter was brief and formal, and concerned a keycard. Brezan would have considered the phrasing terribly cold, except Tseya had explained to him that this was what protocol expected back then. Even so, Brezan hated thinking of Jedao as a living man rather than an overpowered game piece. It was too disturbing thinking that someone would knowingly do the things Jedao had done.
Tseya was looking contemplative. “There’s a lot on the Immolation Fox,” she said, “and only so much of it was reasonably expected to be relevant to a Kel officer, I imagine. It’s only a pity that the most useful piece is missing.”
The question of what had caused Jedao’s madness. “I doubt he was ever crazy,” Brezan said, remembering Jedao standing there in the body he had stolen, perfectly relaxed.
“Well,” Tseya said, “I wish I could tell you that I hope to figure it out, but if they couldn’t get anything out of him back then, my chances aren’t better. Damnable Shuos.”
Brezan fed the second bird a treat. It bobbed its head almost as though in thanks. “Don’t these pets of yours ever fatten up?” he demanded. They showed no signs of diminished appetite.
Tseya laughed helplessly. “You’re hopeless. Since my plan to relax you is a dismal failure, why don’t we try something else? We can sit in the command center and depress ourselves with what we’re up against by reviewing some of Jedao’s old duels.”
“Sure, rub it in,” Brezan said. He’d told her at some point that Miuzan always thrashed him at the sport. On the bright side, being in the command center beat being pestered by unnaturally ribbony birds. “Well, since you offered, sure.”
Tseya flung a last treat toward two artistically entwined potted trees. The birds strode after it. “Come on,” she said.
Brezan found it alarming that Tseya went around everywhere in her bare feet. It was as though, having made the obligatory show of being an Andan, she no longer felt she had to keep up appearances. When he mentioned this, she only smiled and said, “The point of protocol is to make an impression, one way or another. Maybe I’m lulling you into a false sense of security?”
Her words reminded Brezan that when most people worried about being stabbed in the back, tangled up in an intrigue, or otherwise outmaneuvered, they didn’t just worry about the Shuos. If they had any sense, they also kept an eye on the Andan. “I’m the least useful Kel general in history if you’re looking for a pawn on the cheap,” Brezan said. “And if you’re bored, well, you’re already bedding me.”
Tseya snorted, but didn’t respond to the jab.
They entered the command center with its aquarium. The terminals were bright with status reports. As she sat, Tseya said carelessly, “I’m sure you could kill me pretty easily if you had to.”
Brezan stiffened. “Don’t,” he said. “That’s not funny.”
Tseya opened her mouth, saw his face, closed her mouth. “What’s your family like, Brezan?” she said out of nowhere.
“My what?” He glanced over a status report because it was something he understood and right now he needed that. Unluckily for him, the reports revealed nothing more untoward than swarms maneuvering. The Swanknot swarm seemed disinclined to chase the Hafn, but who knew what baroque plan Jedao was executing. If it meant less chasing, he was all for it.
“Your family.” Tseya had her hands on her knees and was leaning slightly forward.
He wondered why it mattered to her. I am not devious enough for this assignment, Brezan thought. “I’m sure we’d bore you,” he said, especially since she had to have access to all the juicy bits already. “My oldest father was retired from active service by the time I was old enough to be sentient, although my younger two fathers still did most of the parental work. One of them restores antique guns, which explains his partnering with a Kel. The other does paper-cut illustrations for children’s books. I once got yelled at for ruining his best pair of scissors.”
He had told her about his siblings before, but she was still looking at him expectantly. “My oldest sister is Keryezan. I hardly see her anymore, and I didn’t see a whole lot of her growing up, either, which automatically made her more appealing than the twins. She’s rather older and she has two kids. I think she was planning on a third. As for the twins, Miuzan is the one who never lets anything rest. I could have got on with Ganazan by herself, she’s pretty easygoing, but she was always on Miuzan’s side by default.”
Tseya continued to say nothing. Feeling hounded, Brezan said, “We fought over stupid things like who had to clean the guns and who chose what dramas to watch together. My oldest father believed that we should all watch them together, no idea why. Honestly, we’re very ordinary. It’s just me who’s the disgrace. If crashhawks were so easy to predict, I—I’d never have made it into Kel Academy at all.”
Come to that, he had no idea what, if anything, Kel Command had told his parents. He hadn’t dared to ask. If he was lucky, Kel Command had said nothing. His family had probably assumed he was dead or under Jedao’s control. The truth wasn’t much better.
“Your family sounds very different from mine,” Tseya said. “Please don’t think all Andan families are about poison and platitudes. Some are and some aren’t.”
Brezan wondered if she meant to elaborate, and wasn’t sure whether he was more worried or relieved when she didn’t. Maybe she wanted a distraction. “You wanted to watch some duels?” he said, eyeing the status indicators. Still nothing useful.
“Yes, let’s pick one at random,” Tseya said, reviving a little.
The grid was happy to select one for them: Jedao, back when he was the commander of a tactical group, against some whippy-looking long-haired Shuos who had taken offense over a point of etiquette that Tseya undoubtedly understood but Brezan sure as hell didn’t. It was strange to examine Jedao in his own body, a lean man whose face was unremarkable until he smiled; but Brezan recognized the way that Jedao-as-Cheris had moved during the takeover of the Swanknot swarm, smile included. It was also bizarre seeing Jedao with the star-and-flame tactical group commander’s insignia rather than a general’s wings. Brezan reminded himself that Kel Command had finally discharged Jedao, anyway.
Jedao and his opponent, Shuos Magrach, were sizing each other up in a way that made them look like siblings. “Magrach was an assassin, so they would have had similar training,” Tseya said when Brezan remarked on it. “There was speculation that she was trying to injure or kill Jedao for reasons of her own.”
Brezan had thought he’d had a handle on the timeline. “I thought this was when people still liked Jedao.”
Tseya shrugged. “That’s complicated. A lot of the Kel who served with him liked him, but others thought he was just lucky and resented how rapidly he got promoted. The Shuos considered him an eccentric. Look at it from their point of view. He was fast-tracked to his heptarch’s own office straight out of academy, brilliant early career as an assassin, does some work with small units and is even more brilliant there. Then, as far as anyone can tell, he lets the military stuff get to his head and he abandons everything to chase after the Kel. Inexplicably, Heptarch Khiaz let him go. Maybe she concluded he was no good to her after all. Imagine how much t
rouble she could have saved everyone if she’d just sat on him until he settled down.”
The match was underway, best of seven. Brezan could only follow what had happened in the slowed-down replays. He had already known about Jedao’s extraordinary reflexes, but Magrach was just as fast. “I feel inadequate like you wouldn’t believe,” Brezan said.
Tseya kicked his shin. “I don’t think you’d enjoy being an assassin.”
“If I’d had an assassin’s skills, I might have been able to shoot Jedao before he got this far.”
“There’s more to life than being able to shoot your problems,” Tseya said. “We’ll just have to get it right this time around. For a man so good at hitting things, Jedao has a lot of weaknesses. No; I’m more worried about getting within enthrallment range than about Jedao fighting back.”
“I’m not sure this is an attitude conducive to our long-term survival,” Brezan said.
She smiled at him with the side of her mouth. “One of us has to be the optimist.”
The mothgrid interrupted them with a notification: Jedao’s swarm had bannered the Deuce of Gears.
“We’d better get ready,” Tseya said.
Brezan turned off the duel recording, noting in passing that the score was 2-2 and wondering if he was paranoid for thinking Jedao might have engineered it that way. He averted his face. More than anything he yearned to be part of the battle, yearned to fight.
“Brezan,” Tseya said, “Brezan. We’re fighting in our own way.”
Hopeless to explain to her that being a Kel wasn’t about fighting in your own way, as he had done during Exercise Purple 53. It was about fighting the same way as all the other Kel. Of course, as a crashhawk, he was in no position to lecture Tseya about Kel doctrine. Instead, he said, “I will do my duty,” because that was always unobjectionable.
Tseya had an imitation Kel uniform for the operation. He didn’t watch her put it on, couldn’t bear to, but he had to concede that she would stick out on a Kel moth if she wore anything else, especially since Jedao had booted all the seconded personnel. The two of them suited up quietly. Brezan knew that the Andan cared about the aesthetics of even utilitarian objects like suits, but it was different when you had to wear one yourself. Oh well, given how his year was going, tasteful scrollwork was the least of his problems.
Of the two of them, Tseya was the better pilot. Brezan had observed her long enough to know that this wasn’t just a matter of specific familiarity with the silkmoth’s handling characteristics. Fortunately, she was on his side, or anyway more on his side for the moment than against it.
He was tempted to whisper as they made the approach, as if the Kel in the swarm could overhear them across vacuum. Tseya, intent on her task, seemed to feel no such impulse. Her toe was tapping loudly against the side of the terminal.
The agony of waiting didn’t get any better aboard a silkmoth. Brezan was watching the Kel and Hafn swarms on scan and fretting when another Hafn swarm blinked into existence. He had no other word for it, and he didn’t think that many formants, even glitchy foreign formants, could be a malfunction in their scan. “Tseya—”
“I see them,” Tseya said. She wasn’t changing their approach, mainly because the main body of Jedao’s swarm was obdurate in threatening the newcomers. How Jedao had known they would show up there, Brezan had no idea. No one had ever said that Jedao had the ability to get extra information out of scan, but it wasn’t impossible that he knew some tricks.
Brezan had difficulty not staring at the highlighted triangle in the display that represented the Hierarchy of Feasts. We’re going to free you from the Immolation Fox, he thought savagely, trying not to wonder whether General Khiruev had survived. And then I will personally kill Jedao into so many pieces you can’t even burn what’s left.
One of Brezan’s former lovers, a perfumer, had asked what he found so attractive about the violence of his profession. Never mind that as a staffer he didn’t personally see to the violence. Brezan didn’t like admitting it, but there was a certain satisfaction to kicking down obstacles.
Focus, he reminded himself. They weren’t in position yet, and Jedao was still a threat. He glanced at Tseya. Still engrossed in her task. Good.
The battle was unfolding very oddly. He worked out that the Hafn had somehow taken control of fourteen Kel bannermoths. Jedao had caught on before Brezan did and had condensed the grand formation dangerously to release a tactical group to deal with the crashhawk units. Brezan took long, even breaths to deal with the nausea at the thought of the Kel forced to turn traitor again, something they had to be sick of—
No. That wasn’t it. He remembered the shattering devotion in General Khiruev’s eyes, in Commander Janaia’s. Brezan himself only felt horrified because he had no formation instinct to assure him that the world was ticking along as it was supposed to. The Kel hexarch had warned him, but he hadn’t been ready to heed her.
“That detached group, it’s burning up?”
Brezan realized Tseya had addressed him and looked at the tactical display. “Yes,” he said flatly. Which unlucky commander had Jedao sacrificed? Rationally, any commander had to send people to die. But he couldn’t help the way he felt. “That group looks like it’s putting pressure on the units the Hafn are trying to shield.”
“I see,” Tseya said. She was guiding them past the fireworks now.
They had discussed how they wanted to handle this, given that battle would complicate matters. In this case, it would harm the swarm’s chances of survival to remove Jedao during the engagement. If Jedao continued to aim himself at the Hafn, they might as well allow him to complete the battle. Brezan had served under General Khiruev long enough to have faith in the woman’s ability, but they had no guarantee that Khiruev still lived. For his part, Brezan didn’t have the training for the task.
Instead, they were going to board the command moth and ambush Jedao when he headed back to his quarters to rest. Presumably having a body, even the wrong body, meant the bastard had to sleep once in a while. And there was a chance, however small, that Jedao would let down his guard enough to give the two of them a shot.
One thing Brezan had always hated about space combat, despite having been a moth Kel for half his career, was the illusory sense of insulation. You could almost imagine that the vast-eyed darkness was a protective shroud; you could mistake the intermittent silences for an indication that the enemy would pass you by. As it happened, the universe was very good at suckering Kel who got too cocky. During his first bannermoth posting, in an engagement against Taurag raiders, railgun shot had punched through the fading formation shields and through the moth, and sheared the woman next to him in two.
“There we go,” Tseya crooned. Brezan startled, but she was talking to the moth. They were in the midst of the battle now. Tseya clearly knew more about formation mechanics than she usually let on. She had to in order to anticipate what Jedao was doing so she didn’t get them shot down on the way in. Already she’d pushed them through the shields by exploiting the modulation gaps and the silkmoth’s capacity for bursts of rapid acceleration.
Brezan enlarged the subdisplay devoted to optics. At this distance, only the gold paint, glimmering irregularly in the light of shield effects and incoming fire, distinguished the cindermoth from the rest of the void.
“I’ll be able to mate the moths soon,” Tseya said. “Ready? You’ll hate it. I always do.”
Both of them double-checked their webbing, and Brezan nodded. He was glad something was finally happening, even though he knew he would feel quite the opposite in a matter of minutes.
Tseya was right. For all her deftness as a pilot, the mating maneuver made Brezan’s bones feel like they were going to vibrate out of his flesh. The silkmoth cobwebbed itself to the insertion point and juddered slowly closer and closer to the Hierarchy of Feasts. Then it released eggs that hatched to create a bridge of metalweave, and a burrower to gnaw its way through the cindermoth’s hull.
The burr
ower laboriously extruded a blister over itself and the breach point, then got to work. They waited in silence. Brezan had the irrational urge to hit the progress indicators. Tseya showed no sign of impatience. “Everything’s as good as it’s going to get,” she said at last, and he concurred. “Let’s move.”
After the silkmoth’s profusion of birds and disquieting fish and graceful trees, it was almost disappointing that the airlock was strictly utilitarian. Tseya’s mouth quirked when she caught Brezan’s expression, but she didn’t say anything. The distance between Beneath the Orchid and Hierarchy of Feasts was not large, but it was also perilous. Tethers aside, if you were careless, you might tumble through some of the openings in the imperfectly-braided metalweave. Still, it was a danger Brezan had faced before, and he completed the crossing quickly, making it onto the metalfoam blister.
Tseya hesitated for a long moment, and Brezan wondered if she had spotted something wrong. Then she, too, made the crossing. The blister opened for them, and they entered it together, forced close to each other by its small size. It closed behind them, and then the breach in the hall gaped open to admit them.
They emerged in a corridor. Brezan looked sharply around but saw no one coming. He had expected to feel something more than this knifing sense of alienation. “I’m locked out of the grid,” he said in a low voice. He hadn’t expected any differently. But if Jedao had gotten careless, they could at least have found out what the moth’s current layout was.
Tseya’s only response was a curt nod. She was breathing shallowly, and her face was too pale.
“Tseya?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” she said in a faint voice.
He should have asked her about any inconvenient phobias, the kind of thing he used to vet for the general, except he hadn’t been the one who selected Tseya for this mission. Plus, he’d never been allowed to see her profile, although he bet she had seen his. After all, he answered to her, not the other way around.