Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  “Do you expect the lens vessels to be combat-capable?” the magistrate asked without any trace of sarcasm.

  “I need them to sit there and look pretty in imitation of a Kel formation,” Jedao said. “They’ll get the heretics’ attention, and if they can shift some of the calendrical terrain in our favor, even better.” Unlikely, he’d had the Kel run the numbers for him, but it sounded nice. “Are volunteers available?”

  Also unlikely. The advantage of going to the Rahal rather than some other faction, besides their susceptibility to the plea, was that the Rahal were disciplined. Even if they weren’t going to be volunteers. If he gave instructions, the instructions would be rigorously carried out.

  The magistrate raised an eyebrow. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “I’m aware of your skill at tactics, General. I assume you will spare the lenses’ crews from unnecessary harm.”

  Touching. “I am grateful for your assistance, Magistrate,” Jedao said.

  “Serve well, General. The lenses will join your force at—” He named a time, which was probably going to be adhered to, then ended the communication.

  The lenses joined within eight minutes and nineteen seconds of the given time. Jedao wished there were some way to minimize their scan shadow, but Kel moths did that with formations, and the Rahal couldn’t generate Kel formation effects.

  Jedao joined Menowen at the command center even though he should have rested. Menowen’s mouth had a disapproving set. The rest of the Kel looked grim. “Sir,” Menowen said. “Move orders?”

  He took his chair and pulled up the orders on the computer. “False formation for the Rahal as shown. Follow the given movement plan,” he said. “Communications, please convey the orders to all Rahal vessels.” It was going to take extra time for the Rahal to sort themselves out, since they weren’t accustomed to traveling in a fake formation, but he wasn’t going to insult them by saying so.

  Menowen opened her mouth. Jedao stared at her. She closed her mouth, looking pensive.

  “Communications,” Jedao said, “address to all units. Exclude the Rahal.”

  It wasn’t the first speech he’d given on the journey, but the time had come to tell his commanders what they were up to and brace them for the action to come.

  The Communications officer said, “It’s open, sir.”

  “This is General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” he said. “It’s not a secret that we’re being pursued by a Lanterner swarm. We’re going to engage them at Candle Arc. Due to the Lanterners’ recent victory, cascading effects have shifted the calendrical terrain there. The Lanterners are going to be smart and take one of the channels with a friendly gradient to their tech most of the way in. Ordinarily, a force this small wouldn’t be worth their time. But because of the way the numbers have rolled, Candle Arc is a calendrical choke: we’re arriving on the Day of Broken Feet. Whoever wins there will shift the calendar in their favor. When we offer battle, they’ll take us up on it.”

  He consoled himself that, if the Lanterners lost, their soldiers would fall to fire and metal, honest deaths in battle, and not as calendrical foci, by having filaments needled into their feet to wind their way up into the brain.

  “You are Kel,” Jedao went on. “You have been hurt. I promise you we will hurt them back. But my orders will be exact, and I expect them to be followed exactly. Our chances of victory depend on this. I am not unaware of the numbers. But battle isn’t just about numbers. It’s about will. And you are Kel; in this matter you will prevail.”

  The panel lit up with each moth commander’s acknowledgment. Kel gold against Kel black.

  They didn’t believe him, not yet. But they would follow orders, and that was all he needed.

  Commander Menowen asked to see him in private afterward, as Jedao had thought she might. Her mouth was expressive. Around him she was usually expressing discontent. But it was discontent for the right reasons.

  “Sir,” Menowen said. “Permission to discuss the battle plan.”

  “You can discuss it all you like,” Jedao said. “I’ll say something if I have something to say.”

  “Perhaps you had some difficulties with the computer algebra system,” she said. “I’ve run the numbers. We’re arriving 4.2 hours before the terrain flips in our favor.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Jedao said.

  The near side of the choke locus was obstructed by a null region where no exotic technologies would function. But other regions around the null shifted according to a schedule. The far side of the choke periodically favored the high calendar. With Najhera’s defeat, the far side would also shift sometimes toward the Lanterners’ calendar.

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve,” Menowen said.

  “If you don’t see it,” Jedao said, pleased, “the Lanterners won’t see it either.”

  To her credit, she didn’t ask if this was based on an injury-induced delusion, although she clearly wanted to. “I expect Kel Command thinks you’ll pull off a miracle,” she said.

  Jedao’s mouth twisted. “No, Kel Command thinks a miracle would be very nice, but they’re not holding their breath, and as a Shuos I’m kind of expendable. The trouble is that I keep refusing to die.”

  It was like the advice for learning the game of pattern-stones: the best way to get good was to play difficult opponents, over and over. The trouble with war was that practicing required people to die.

  “You’ve done well for your armies, sir. But the enemy general is also good at using calendrical terrain, and they’ve demonstrated their ruthlessness. I don’t see why you would pass up a terrain advantage.”

  Jedao cocked an eyebrow at her. “We’re not. Everyone gets hypnotized by the high fucking calendar. Just because it enables our exotics doesn’t mean that the corresponding terrain is the most favorable to our purpose. I’ve been reading the intel on Lanterner engineering. Our invariant drives are better than theirs by a good margin. Anyway, why the hell would they be so stupid as to engage us in terrain that favors us? I picked the timing for a reason. You keep trying to beat the numbers, Commander, when the point is to beat the people.”

  Menowen considered that. “You are being very patient with my objections,” she said.

  “I need you not to freeze up in the middle of the battle,” Jedao said. “Although I would prefer for you to achieve that without my having to explain basics to you.”

  The insult had the desired effect. “I understand my duty,” she said. “Do you understand yours?”

  He wondered if he could keep her. Moth commanders who were willing to question him were becoming harder to find. His usual commanders would have had no doubts about his plan no matter how much he refused to explain in advance.

  “As I see it,” Jedao said, “my duty is to carry out the orders. See? We’re not so different after all. If that’s it, Commander, you should get back to work.”

  Menowen saluted him and headed for the door, then swung around. “Sir,” she said, “why did you choose to serve with the Kel? I assume it was a choice.” The Shuos were ordinarily seconded to the Kel as intelligence officers.

  “Maybe,” Jedao said, “it was because I wanted to know what honor looked like when it wasn’t a triumphal statue.”

  Her eyes went cold. “That’s not funny,” she said.

  “I wasn’t being funny,” he said quietly. “I will never be a Kel. I don’t think like one of you. But sometimes that’s an advantage.”

  She drew in a breath. “Sir,” she said, “I just want to know that this isn’t some Shuos game to you.” That he wasn’t being clever for the sake of being clever; that he wouldn’t throw his soldiers’ lives away because he was overeager to fight.

  Jedao’s smile was not meant to reassure her. “Oh, it’s to your advantage if it’s a game,” he said. “I am very good at winning games.”

  He wasn’t going to earn her loyalty by hiding his nature, so he wasn’t going to try.

  It was even easier to win games
if you designed the game yourself, instead of playing someone else’s, but that was a Shuos sort of discussion and he didn’t think she wanted to hear it yet.

  The eleven fangmoths and seventy-three calendrical lenses approached Candle Arc only 1.3 hours behind schedule. Jedao was recovering the ability to read his watch, but the command center had a display that someone had enlarged for his benefit, so he didn’t look at it. Especially since he had the sneaking feeling that his watch was off by a fraction of a second. If he drew attention to it, Captain-magistrate Korais was going to recalibrate it to the high calendar when they all had more important things to deal with.

  The crews on the lenses had figured out how to simulate formations. No one would mistake them for Kel from close range, but Jedao wasn’t going to let the Lanterners get that close.

  “Word from the listening posts is that the Lanterners are still in pursuit,” Communications informed them.

  “How accommodating of them,” Jedao said. “All right. Orders for the Rahal: The lenses are to maintain formation and head through the indicated channel”—he passed over the waypoint coordinates from his computer station—”to the choke locus. You are to pass the locus, then circle back toward it. Don’t call us under any circumstances, we’ll call you. And stick to the given formation and don’t try any fancy modulations.”

  It was unlikely that the Rahal would try, but it was worth saying. The Rahal were going to be most convincing as a fake Kel swarm if they stayed in one formation because there wasn’t time to teach them to get the modulation to look right. The formation that Jedao had chosen for them was Senner’s Lash, partly because its visible effects were very short-range. When the Rahal failed to produce the force-lash, it wouldn’t look suspicious because the Lanterners wouldn’t expect to see anything from a distance.

  “Also,” Jedao said, still addressing the Rahal. “The instant you see something, anything on scan, you’re to banner the Deuce of Gears.”

  The Deuce was his personal emblem, and it connoted “cog in the machine.” Everyone had expected him to register some form of fox when he made brigadier general, but he had preferred a show of humility. The Deuce would let the Lanterners know who they were facing. It might not be entirely sporting for the Rahal to transmit it, but since they were under his command, he didn’t feel too bad about it.

  “The Rahal acknowledge,” Communications said. Jedao’s subdisplay showed them moving off. They would soon pass through the calendrical null, and at that point they would become harder to find on scan.

  Commander Menowen was drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair, her first sign of nervousness. “They have no defenses,” she said, almost to herself.

  It mattered that this mattered to her. “We won’t let the Lanterners reach them,” Jedao said. “If only because I would prefer to spend my career not having the Rahal mad at me.”

  Her sideways glance was only slightly irritated. “Where are we going, sir?”

  “Cut the mothdrives,” Jedao said. He sent the coordinates to Menowen, Communications, and Navigation. “We’re heading there by invariant drive only.” This would probably prevent a long-range scan from seeing them. “Transmit orders to all moths. I want acknowledgments from the moth commanders.”

  “There” referred to some battledrift, all sharp edges and ash-scarred fragments and wrecked silverglass shards, near the mouth of what Jedao had designated the Yellow Passage. He expected the Lanterners to take it toward the choke. Its calendrical gradient started in the Lanterners’ favor, then zeroed out as it neared the null.

  Depending on the Lanterners’ invariant drives, it would take them two to three hours (high calendar) to cross the null region and reach the choke. This was, due to the periodic shifts, still faster than going around the null, because the detours would be through space hostile to their exotics for the next six hours.

  Reports had put the Lanterners at anywhere from sixty to one hundred twenty combat moths. The key was going to be splitting them up to fight a few at a time.

  Jedao’s moth commanders acknowledged less quickly than he would have liked, gold lights coming on one by one.

  “Formation?” Menowen prompted him.

  There weren’t a lot of choices when you had eleven moths. Jedao brought up a formation, which was putting it kindly because it didn’t belong to Lexicon Primary for tactical groups, or even Lexicon Secondary, which contained all the obsolete formations and parade effects. He wanted the moths in a concave configuration so they could focus lateral fire on the first hostiles to emerge from the Yellow Passage.

  “That’s the idea,” Jedao said, “but we’re using the battledrift as cover. Some big chunks of dead stuff floating out there, we might as well blend in and snipe the hell out of the Lanterners with the invariant weapons.” At least they had a good supply of missiles and ammunition, as Najhera had attempted to fight solely with exotic effects.

  The Kel didn’t like the word “snipe,” but they were just going to have to deal. “Transmit orders,” Jedao said.

  The acknowledgments lit up again, about as fast as they had earlier.

  The Fortune Comes in Fours switched into invariant mode as they crossed into the null. The lights became less white-gold and more rust-gold, giving everything a corroded appearance. The hum of the moth’s systems changed to a deeper, grittier whisper. The moth’s acceleration became noticeable, mostly in the form of pain. Jedao wished he had thought to take an extra dose of painkillers, but he couldn’t risk getting muddled.

  Menowen picked out a chunk of coruscating metals that had probably once been some inexplicable engine component on that long-ago space fortress and parked the Fortune behind it. She glanced at him to see if he would have any objections. He nodded at her. No sense in getting in the way when she was doing her job fine.

  Time passed. Jedao avoided checking his watch every minute thanks to long practice, although he met Captain-magistrate Korais’s eyes once and saw a wry acknowledgment of shared impatience.

  They had an excellent view of the bridgelights even on passive sensors. The lights were red and violet, like absurd petals, and their flickering would, under other circumstances, have been restful.

  “We won’t see hostiles until they’re on top of us,” Menowen said.

  More nerves. “It’ll be mutual,” Jedao said, loudly enough so the command center’s crew could hear him. “They’ll see us when they get that close, but they’ll be paying attention to the decoy swarm.”

  She wasn’t going to question his certainty in front of everyone, so he rewarded her by telling her. “I am sure of this,” he said, looking at her, “because of how the Lanterner general destroyed Najhera. They were extremely aggressive in exploiting calendrical terrain and, I’m sorry to say, they made a spectacle of the whole thing. I don’t imagine the Lanterners had time to swap out generals for the hell of it, especially one who had already performed well, so I’m assuming we’re dealing with the same individual. So if the Lanterner wants calendrical terrain and a big shiny target, fine. There it is.”

  More time passed. There was something wrong about the high calendar when it ticked off seconds cleanly and precisely and didn’t account for the way time crawled when you were waiting for battle. Among the many things wrong with the high calendar, but that one he could own to without getting called out as a heretic.

  “The far terrain is going to shift in our favor in five hours, sir,” Korais said.

  “Thank you, good to know,” Jedao said.

  To distract himself from the pain, he was thinking about the bridgelights and their resemblance to falling petals when Scan alerted him that the Lanterners had shown up. “Thirty-some moths in the van,” the officer said in a commendably steady voice. “Readings suggest more are behind them. They’re moving rapidly, vector suggests they’re headed down the Yellow Passage toward the choke locus, and they’re using a blast wave to clear mines.”

  As if he’d had the time to plant mines down a hostile corridor. Go
od of them to think of it, though.

  Menowen’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Our banner—”

  His emblem. The Kel transmitted their general’s emblem before battle. “No,” Jedao said. “We’re not bannering. The Lanterners are going to be receiving the Deuce of Gears from over there,” where the Rahal were.

  “But the protocol, sir. The Rahal aren’t part of your force,” Menowen said, “they don’t fight—”

  That got his attention. “Fledge,” Jedao said sharply, which brought her up short, “what the hell do you mean they’re not fighting? Just because they’re not sitting on a mass of things that go boom? They’re fighting what’s in the enemy’s head.“

  He studied the enemy dispositions. The Yellow Passage narrowed as it approached the null, and the first group consisted of eight hellmoths, smaller than fangmoths, but well-armed if they were in terrain friendly to their own calendar, which was not going to be the case at the passage’s mouth. The rest of the groups would probably consist of eight to twelve hellmoths each. Taken piecemeal, entirely doable.

  “They fell for it,” Menowen breathed, then wisely shut up.

  “General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” Jedao said. “Coordinated strike on incoming units with missiles and railguns.” Hellmoths didn’t have good side weapons, so he wasn’t as concerned about return fire. “After the first hits, move into the Yellow Passage to engage. Repeat, move into the Yellow Passage.”

  The fangmoths’ backs would be to that damned null, no good way to retreat, but that would only motivate them to fight harder.

  If the Lanterners wanted a chance at the choke, they’d have to choose between shooting their way through when the geometry didn’t permit them to bring their numbers to bear in the passage, or else leaving the passage and taking their chances with terrain that shaded toward the high calendar. If they chose the latter, they risked being hit by Kel formation effects, anything from force lances to scatterbursts, on top of the fangmoths’ exotic weapons.

  The display was soon a mess of red lights and gold, damage reports. The computer kept making the dry, metallic click that indicated hits made by the Kel. Say what you liked about the Kel, they did fine with weapons.