by Yoon Ha Lee
“There will be backup teams,” the Nirai said, “because it would be stupid not to. But it would be best for you to handle it yourself.” He tapped a table, and a dull gray-green gun dislodged from some unseen compartment. Cheris had never seen one of that type before, which took some doing around a Kel, but she presumed a Nirai could manage it. “This is the preferred weapon. It’s a chrysalis gun, and it’ll prepare him to be shoved back into the black cradle for his next deployment.”
Cheris tried to form a question. It came out on the third try. “What defenses does the general have, sir?”
“He can talk to you,” the Nirai said sardonically. “No, don’t laugh. He’s very good at it. When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger. No offense, Jedao.”
“It’s not news that I’m a madman,” Jedao said, still ironic.
The Nirai held the gun out. “It’s on the lowest setting and won’t damage him permanently,” he said, showing her the slider. “Cheris, I want you to shoot Jedao.”
Cheris took the gun. The Nirai might be lying to her, even if she didn’t see the purpose of such a lie. “Where do I aim, sir?”
“Shadow or reflection,” he said. “Aiming it at yourself also works, but according to my sources, the hangover’s terrible. I don’t recommend it.”
Cheris pointed the chrysalis gun at her shadow. She was sweating inside her gloves; sweat trickled down her back. But she had orders, however informally given, which steadied her. Before she could talk herself out of it, she squeezed the trigger.
A great pain seized her, and she dropped the gun. She had been trained never to drop a weapon.
Jedao was swearing in a language she didn’t recognize. At least, it sounded like swearing.
Jedao? she thought.
Her thought came in his voice.
But the formation instinct was ebbing. She could think more clearly now.
“That’s better,” Jedao said. Was that genuine relief? “Pick up the gun and keep it with you always. The holster’s right there.”
She did as instructed.
“You might as well get to work, then,” the Nirai said briskly. “I’ve prepared more comfortable surroundings. Six circuits and kick down the door. I was going to replace the door with something more interesting, but my attention wandered.” A door opened right next to him, and he walked out of it without any further farewell.
“‘My attention wandered’?” Cheris said, remembering his smile when she had fallen off the treadmill.
“The Nirai has peculiar ideas about entertainment,” Jedao said without any particular inflection. “Two people survived being put into the black cradle. He’s one of them, the other is me, and now you know why the hexarchate hasn’t been shoving more people into it. Anyway, I assume we have a war to win, or you wouldn’t have taken me out of the freezer.”
“Is it cold where you are?” Sometimes Kel literalism was useful.
“It’s just a figure of speech.”
Cheris walked out of the treadmill room. They made the outer circuit six times, each iteration identical except for the sickening jolt of nausea once per circuit. Toward the end, the hall swallowed Cheris’s footsteps and gave back echoes after a delay that was too long. The walls were black, and so were the floor and ceiling. If you looked too long at the ceiling, which Cheris did once, you started to see stars, faintly at first, then closer and closer, faster and faster, the luminous smears of nebulae resolving into individual jewels of light, and even the velvety darkness admitted cracks behind which great gears groaned – but she stopped looking. She’d always heard that Nirai stations were peculiar, but this was the first time she’d seen anything like this.
The door at the end of the hall looked like it had been carved with a torchknife. Cheris half-expected the edges to hiss and seethe white-red. She decided more Kel literalism was called for, and kicked it. It opened.
The room was quietly furnished. Everything was aligned with the walls to a degree that even Cheris, who was neat, found oppressive. On a desk were four vases arranged upon a red-and-gold table runner. Shuos red-and-gold, fox colors: in Jedao’s honor? But she wasn’t about to ask. Each vase held a flower in a different phase of life, from bud to bloom, from drooping petals to tufted seedcase. Cheris couldn’t help thinking that one good tug on the runner would destroy the arrangement.
“How much have they told you?” Cheris said.
“About this outing?” Jedao said. “Nothing. Information is a weapon like any other. I can’t be trusted with weapons.”
“I’m not sure how to interpret that.”
“The people I betrayed are a matter of historical record. You can’t afford to take the chance that I’ll figure out a way to do the same to you.”
Cheris frowned. Something didn’t add up. “I appreciate your concern, sir.” The word slipped out: habit.
“You weren’t at the Siege of Hellspin Fortress,” Jedao said. For the first time, his voice went completely flat.
She had to ask, although he must have heard the question hundreds of times. “Why did you do it?”
Like every Kel and every Shuos, she had studied accounts of the siege. There was no doubting the deliberateness of the massacre.
“If you think you’re going to cure me,” Jedao said, “the best Nirai technicians for hundreds of years haven’t found the trigger. They’ve poked around inside my dreams – which takes some doing when I never sleep – and they’ve made me take those ridiculous associational tests that involve different fruits, and they’ve made me play every card game known to the hexarchate. Besides, it’s too late. They would have had to catch it before all the deaths.” A pause. “So tell me why I’m here, Captain.”
Cheris was thinking furiously. He sounded rational, but he could still be planning to betray her. His apparent frankness wasn’t to be trusted, either. On the other hand, there was no point having him around if she wasn’t going to make use of him. All the accounts agreed on his excellence as a tactician, and tactics began with an understanding of people. Cheris wasn’t under any illusions that she could parry a trained fox’s regard. She was developing the dangerous idea that her best bet was to deal with him honestly and see what happened.
“Calendrical rot,” Cheris said. She explained everything she knew as it had been presented to her. As she spoke, she called up maps. The grid brought up others that she hadn’t previously had access to. The rot was more advanced than it had been before, and it was possible to trace regions of outflowing rot to the Fortress’s corruption.
“This is winnable, with the right resources,” Jedao said slowly, “but I wouldn’t call it easy.”
She didn’t know whether to feel better or worse at his assessment.
One of the terminals explained the resources available to them within a six-day transportation radius. Cheris read the message twice. “I’m not complaining about the guns,” she said, “but guns change minds, not hearts. And calendrical rot is a matter of hearts.”
“It depends on what you shoot,” Jedao said dryly. “Pull that display into three dimensions, will you?”
Cheris unfurled the display in contours of burning color. She rotated it about the vertical axis so they could take a closer look at the regions worst afflicted by the rot, colored an unpleasantly textured pale gray.
The Fortress was located in a stretch of empty space for calendrical reasons and was nearest the Footbreak system. The notation indicated that a lensmoth had already been stationed there, but all it could do was staunch the bleeding as long as the Fortress itself was afflicted.
“I see two viable approaches here,” Jedao said. “Three, actually, but if the hexarchate intended to scour the region, neither of us would be necessary.”
She read the relevant part of their orders out loud: “Economically inadvisable.” The rot already touched on inhabited planets in Footbreak, whose ecosystems were too valuable to destroy casually.
Jedao was sile
nt for a while. “All right. We can either try to stabilize Footbreak and use it as a launching point for a larger assault later, or spear straight toward the Fortress from the beginning and hope that backwash from Footbreak doesn’t hit us at the wrong time. What’s your preference?”
Cheris knew about the Fortress. She knew, in outline, the most prestigious low languages and the distribution of wealth among their classes. She knew how many citizens the Fortress sent to the academies and the breakdowns by individual academy as well. And she knew about the fabled shields that ran on invariant ice, but everyone knew that.
She knew many things, and she knew nothing. She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures. Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.
“We’re going to have to confront the Fortress sooner or later,” Cheris said. “It might as well be sooner. With any luck, fewer people will die this way.”
“Good,” Jedao said crisply. “I’m glad we care about the same things.”
It was an odd thing for a mass murderer to say, and she wouldn’t figure out its significance until much later.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ROOM CHERIS was provided with was decorated with vases filled with the bones of small animals wired into the shapes of flowers. Cheris was wondering just what else the Nirai did when he got bored, but she knew more than she cared to already.
“First things first,” Jedao said. “Ask the grid for the New Anchor Orientation Packet.”
With a name like that, it had to have been written by committee. Nevertheless, Cheris queried the grid. First she was pleasantly surprised by how short it was. Then she was worried.
“If you have any questions,” Jedao said, “ask, but I have to warn you that there are whole sections that I can’t tell you anything about.”
Cheris was torn between the urge to read it as quickly as she could so they could go on to planning the siege, and trying to commit everything to memory. She settled for something in between. Most of the instructions were elaborations on what she had already been told, but Cheris frowned when she hit the section on carrion glass.
After retrieval, the general shall be extracted for reuse using a carrion gun, the Orientation Packet said. And a footnote: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.
“‘Volunteer’?” Cheris said. The Nirai definition of “volunteer” was undoubtedly the same as the Kel definition.
“I don’t think they can force-feed someone a ghost corpse,” Jedao said, “but to my knowledge it’s never been tried. I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. The Nirai believes that having pieces of my brain inside you would drive you crazy even if I weren’t crazy myself.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cheris said, trying not to think about the fact that this wasn’t very different from her current situation. She looked up from the Orientation Packet. “I’m ready.”
“All right,” Jedao said. “Setup. First display: the Fortress of Scattered Needles and whatever’s on file about its defenses. Second display: reports on its population and the origin of the heresy. Third: data on this specific regime of rot and how rapidly it’s metastasizing. We’re going to have to ask the Nirai to loan us a mathematical analyst –”
“I can handle that,” Cheris said.
Sharp interest: “You’re Nirai-trained?”
“My specialty was mathematics,” Cheris said. She was used to this. “The recruiters advised me to apply to Nirai Academy, but I declined.”
“And the Kel took you anyway.”
“After advising me to apply to Nirai Academy instead, yes.”
“I want to make sure I understand this,” Jedao said. “You had a choice and a noteworthy aptitude for math, and you decided to become a hawk anyway. Was it family pressure?”
“I can request my profile for your perusal,” she said.
“I’d like that, yes, but I want to hear it from you as well.”
Cheris brought up her profile – the part of it she was allowed to see, anyway – and wondered which sections were inviting particular scrutiny. Should she be embarrassed about her taste in dramas, under “leisure activities”? Or the fact that she was an enthusiastic but mediocre duelist? What did undead generals do in their spare time anyway?
“My family wanted me to stay home,” she said. “They don’t approve of the military.” Or the hexarchate, really. She didn’t say that she had wanted to fit in for once, and that the Kel with their conformism had seemed a good place to do that.
“Fine,” Jedao said after a disquieting silence. “Fourth display: review of available resources. Fifth: I want a look at tech advances over the last four decades. Maybe the state of the art is better than it used to be. Leave the sixth blank for now.”
“You’ve been thinking about this,” Cheris said as she set up the displays.
“I don’t like wasting time,” Jedao said. “This whole regime is about time, isn’t it? Let’s go in reverse order.”
The hexarchate dealt with low-level calendrical degradation on a daily basis. Outbreaks of full-scale rot were comparatively uncommon, but all the same the necessity of invariant weapons that didn’t rely on the high calendar had been realized a long time ago.
Cheris and Jedao went through the fifth display together. “No breakthroughs,” Jedao said after they had perused the summary. “With the exception of the fungal cocoon, most of the military stuff is similar to before. And we don’t want to resort to the cocoon because cleanup would cost a fortune. It’s nice to see that war never changes.”
Cheris glanced sharply at the shadow, but the eyes were unrevealing. “The heretics will know what to expect from us,” she said.
“I wasn’t planning on zapping them with a secret weapon anyway,” Jedao said. “Of course, it’s possible that they have nasty new exotics. The only way to find out is to get close enough to see what they throw at us.”
When they turned to the fourth display, there were two rapid taps at the door. The Nirai technician entered without waiting for any acknowledgment. “I am a mirror in your hands, but I break at your kiss,” the Nirai said with a wicked smile.
“Water,” Jedao said blandly. “That riddle is older than the hexarchate. Cheris, could you reset five to show power allocations? Thank you.”
“A riddle should never admit its own age,” the Nirai said. He found himself a chair, sat down, and started a solitaire game with jeng-zai cards.
“Ignore him,” Jedao said to Cheris. “Tell me about the class 22-5 mothdrives. If the Pale Fracture weren’t a calendrical dead zone, they would almost be good enough to fuel a whole new wave of expansion.”
“Don’t get cocky,” the Nirai said without looking up, “you have enough problems already.”
“One could hope for some variety in opponents,” Jedao said.
Cheris blinked. She didn’t think she had imagined the chill in his voice. But the Nirai’s expression was serene, as if he hadn’t heard it at all.
“About the swarm,” Jedao went on. “I have to admit that the new – sorry, not new to you – cindermoth class is impressive, but I have no intuition for its performance just looking at the numbers, and you’ve never served on one yourself.”
As if. “No,” Cheris said. There were only six cindermoths in the hexarchate, and it astonished her that two of them, the Sincere Greeting and Unspoken Law, were available for their use. Cheris wasn’t sure how their commanders would react to the situation. “I do have a question about protocol.”
“Ask.”
“How is your rank going to be handled? Especially since n
o one else can hear you?”
“Once we assemble the swarm, they’ll brevet you to general on my behalf.”
Cheris tried not to look appalled.
“If you sneeze wrong, they’ll shoot you first and sort it out later. Kel Command insists I can’t be stripped of rank until they put everyone through the appropriate ceremony, but they never seem to get around to it.”
Because they wanted to retain him for their use, and they could presumably kill him at any time. But she didn’t say that.
After a moment, Jedao added, “There’s a very short list of exotic weapons that will kill both of us. Most exotics will kill me first without damaging you permanently, but once I’m out of the way, you’re just as vulnerable as anyone else. And you’ll still have to be careful around invariants. Let’s have the list of exotics on the sixth display after all. Yes, that search should bring it up.”
When Jedao said the list was very short, he meant it. There were only two weapons on it, the genial gun and the snakescratch dart. “Other than that,” Jedao said, “you don’t have anything to fear from the first shot. If they resort to an exotic, they want to recover you alive, so you’re probably safe. Not that the Nirai would ever want to run tests.”
“I heard that,” the Nirai said. “I’ll think of some especially for you, if you like.”
“Oh, good,” Jedao said, with considerably less deference than earlier, “I was beginning to think your imagination was running out. More seriously, tell me about the cindermoths’ capabilities. Your design, I’m guessing?”
“Mostly,” the Nirai said, “but why don’t you ask your anchor? Find out how good she is at numbers.” He didn’t just mean the dimensions, or how many dire cannons the moth carried, but the importance of those numbers and their interrelations in the context of the high calendar as a system of belief.
Cheris reflexively tried to read the expression Jedao wasn’t capable of having.
Jedao noticed. “I can make some estimates,” he said, “but I used computational tools to check them, or I consulted specialists. I couldn’t build a moth even if you gave me blueprints and a box of nails” – the Nirai was smirking – “but I can make them sing in battle. You’re going to be my specialist, Cheris. Tell me.”