by Yoon Ha Lee
Suddenly Jedao’s erection felt enormous. It seemed impossible that he’d be able to control himself. “Sir?”
“Put them on, fledge.”
Jedao faltered. “I’m not—”
Kio slapped him full across the face with his free hand. Jedao tasted blood. It was all he could do to keep from coming right then and there, fully clothed except for his hands.
“Fledge.”
“Yes, sir,” Jedao said, dizzy, and pulled on Kio’s gloves. He bit back a whimper at the way the charmeuse silk clung to his fingers. With the half-gloves he was used to being able to feel every chance current of air. No longer.
Kio hauled Jedao to his feet. Despite his slender build, he was surprisingly strong. “Jack yourself off,” he said. “With the gloves on. I want to watch.”
Jedao’s first two attempts to undo his fly failed because his hands were shaking violently. Kio slapped him again, which had the paradoxical effect of steadying him. He hissed between his teeth as he pulled his cock out and closed his fingers around it. Silk; the whisper of fabric against his overheated skin.
Kio’s eyes were hot and merciless. Jedao began stroking his shaft, up and down, up and down, torn between savoring the sensation and the urgency already building in his balls. I’m not seventeen anymore, he thought wildly. How—? But thinking was too difficult, and he focused again on masturbating so Kio could watch.
The air in the room was hot and cold at once, kaleidoscopic with the promise of unbearable pleasure. Jedao choked back a cry when Kio closed the distance between them and gathered him into a completely unmilitary embrace. Kio’s kisses were brutal, and involved teeth. He left marks all the way down the side of Jedao’s face. When he reached the scar at the base of Jedao’s neck, Jedao’s control gave way completely, and he began to come.
Even then Kio wasn’t done. He disengaged neatly and knelt so that Jedao’s come landed in white, sticky spurts all over the black silk, the golden chains. Jedao staggered. He’d dirtied the beautiful ersatz uniform. He looked down and saw that he’d also gotten stains on the silk gloves. Despite the fact that he’d just climaxed, his cock stirred at the sight.
“We’re going to do this all night,” Kio said directly into his ear. Jedao’s heart thumped painfully. He had forgotten that he had paid for all night.
IN THE MORNING, after Jedao had left, Kio retrieved a slate from under the bed and made a call. No one spoke on the other end; he did not give his name. He said only, “Shuos-zho was right about his tastes.” Then he closed the line, put the slate away, and went to clean up for the next client.
Author’s Note
For someone who likes to think of himself as being very smart, Jedao is terrible at a lot of things, and not just distinguishing perfume notes. Or maybe it’s just that I think it’s hilarious to write the archetypal high-Intelligence, low-Wisdom character. I’m pretty convinced that Wisdom was Jedao’s dump stat.
I originally wrote this to blow off steam: some nice PWP (“Plot? What plot?” as fandom likes to call it) instead of unknotting the latest snarl of intrigue. This grew out of the thought that Jedao’s inconvenient uniform kink could have been much less of a weakness if he’d just visited some accommodating prostitutes (I’m sure they’ve seen weirder things). But of course, nothing’s ever that simple.
Hunting Trip
“ZOO?” HIGH GENERAL Garit said. “Really, Jedao?”
Jedao, who was driving the car, glanced over to assess Garit’s expression, although the high general’s tone of voice told him everything he needed to know. Garit had invited him along on this damned trip to a hunting preserve because Garit was desperate to bag a gray tiger. Alongside his record with firearms, Jedao had made the mistake of letting drop that he had grown up hunting. He had tried to point out that going after pesky deer and jackalopes was not the same as gray tigers, but Garit had merely clapped him on the back and told him not to be so modest. Modesty had nothing to do with it. On top of the stupid expense per round, the recoil on the ammo that Jedao was going to have to use was proportionate to something with its stopping power, and he wasn’t looking forward to the ache in his shoulder.
“Just for an hour or two,” Jedao said coaxingly. “My mom and my siblings wanted me to send home some vacation photos. And I promised my nieces that I would bring them some souvenirs. Maybe the zoo’s shop will have some mounted skeletons or the like.”
“You spoil those kids rotten,” Garit said with a snort.
“What are uncles for?” Jedao said. One of the great regrets of his life was that his job kept him away from his family for long periods of time. The girls grew so fast. “Besides, the folks down at the shop might have some tips for hunters.”
Garit shook his head, amused. “You’re transparent, but all right.”
The zoo was not particularly busy. The two of them were off-duty, and the young woman who told them about the zoo regulations either didn’t recognize them or didn’t care, which Jedao found congenial. Jedao then persuaded Garit to come with him into the zoo proper so Jedao could snap some photos.
Jedao fiddled with the manual exposure, trying to get the black panther to show up in its cave. The camera had been a gift from his brother, and was practically an antique. Jedao was not especially gifted at taking pictures that pleased his family (“These look like reconnaissance photos,” his sister had once complained, “who cares about all this kill zone stuff when you’re snapping pics of an engagement party?”) so he had resolved to do better.
“That’s the oddest damned fox I’ve ever seen,” Garit said, pointing.
Jedao gave up on the exposure and settled for a muddled silhouette in the shadows. “Beg pardon?” he asked.
They strolled closer to the enclosure Garit had indicated to take a look. A reddish, bushy-tailed creature was taking a nap in the branches of a tree. Bamboo shoots sprouted not far away. Some of them looked like they’d been gnawed on.
“That’s not a fox,” Jedao said, reading the enclosure’s label. “Red panda. Apparently they eat bamboo. And sometimes birds and things.”
“It’s kind of cute,” Garit said grudgingly. “Doesn’t look like much of a challenge, though.”
Jedao thought that coddled zoo creatures were unlikely to be much challenge in general, but he didn’t say anything that would give Garit the idea of adding another kind of animal to his wishlist for this trip. “My nieces will like it,” he said, and raised his camera.
“We should catch you one to take home to them,” Garit said.
Jedao made a face. “Have you ever looked at the customs forms for importing wildlife? I’m pretty sure those critters don’t exist on my homeworld.”
“Well, I’ll look into expediting it as a favor to you if you can help me with my tiger problem,” Garit said.
“That’s very kind of you,” Jedao said, as diplomatically as he could, “but my nieces are notoriously good at killing goldfish. Let’s leave the red pandas alone and hit up the shop so I can buy bat skeletons or fox-eared hats or something, and we can head to the hunting grounds.”
Author’s Note
In most regards, Jedao and I are complete opposites (I am rock stone stupid at tactics and games and he’s supposed to be good at tactics, I have perfect pitch and compose orchestral music for fun while he sucks at music, etc.), but he and I are both hapless at cameras. One of my uncles was a photographer at one point, and my dad used to be a pretty good amateur up until the point someone stole his analog SLR, but I regret to report that it’s not genetic. I stick to cat pics because my cat is innately photogenic and leave it at that.
The bat skeleton is a nod to the bat skeleton from Paxton Gate in San Francisco, which sells ethically sourced taxidermy, that my sister bought for my daughter for one of her birthdays. It was one of the treasures that survived the 2016 flood and she still has it today.
The Battle of Candle Arc
GENERAL SHUOS JEDAO was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrat
e Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.
Next time, Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better, I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.
The assassin had been a Lanterner, and she had used a shattergun. She had caught him at a conference, of all places. The shattergun had almost sharded Jedao into a hundred hundred pieces of ghostwrack. Now, as Jedao looked at the icelight that served as a meditation focus, he saw anywhere from three to eight of them. The effect would have been charming if it hadn’t been accompanied by stabbing pains in his head.
Korais was speaking to him.
“Say again?” Jedao said. He kept from looking at his wristwatch.
“I’ll recite the next verses for you, sir, if that doesn’t offend you,” Korais said.
Korais was being diplomatic. Jedao couldn’t remember where in the litany they were. Under better circumstances he would have claimed that he was distracted by the fact that his force of eleven fangmoths was being pursued by the Lanterners who had mauled the rest of the swarm, but it came down to the injuries.
“I’d be much obliged, Captain,” Jedao said.
This remembrance was called the Feast of Drownings. The Rahal heptarch, whose faction maintained the high calendar and who set Doctrine, had declared it three years back, in response to a heresy in one of the heptarchate’s larger marches. Jedao would have called the heresy a benign one: people who wanted the freedom to build shrines to their ancestors, for pity’s sake. But the Rahal had claimed that this would upset the high calendar’s master equations, and so the heretics had had to be put down.
There were worse ways to die than by having your lungs slowly filled with caustic fluid. That still didn’t make it a good way to die.
Korais had begun his recital. Jedao looked at the icelight on the table in front of them. It had translucent lobes and bronchi and alveoli, and light trickled downward through them like fluid, pale and blue and inexorable.
The heptarchate’s exotic technologies depended on the high calendar’s configurations: the numerical concordances, the feasts and remembrances, the associated system of belief. The mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems was an exotic technology. Few people advocated a switch in calendars. Too much would have to be given up, and invariant technologies, which worked under any calendar, never seemed to keep up. Besides, any new calendar would be subject to the same problems of lock-in; any new calendar would be regulated by the Rahal, or by people like the Rahal, as rigorously as the current one.
It was a facile argument, and one that Jedao had always disliked.
“Sir,” Korais said, breaking off at the end of a phrase, “you should sit.”
“I’m supposed to be standing for this,” Jedao said dryly.
“I don’t think your meditations during the next nineteen minutes are going to help if you fall unconscious.”
He must look dreadful if Doctrine was telling him how long until the ordeal was over. Not that he was going to rest afterward. He had to figure out what to do about the Lanterners.
It wasn’t that Jedao minded being recalled from medical leave to fight a battle. It wasn’t even that he minded being handed this sad force of eleven fangmoths, whose morale was shredded after General Kel Najhera had gotten herself killed. It was that the heptarchate had kept the Lanterners as clients for as long as he remembered. Now the Lanterners were demanding regional representation, and they were at war with the heptarchate.
The Lanterner assassin had targeted Jedao during the Feast of Falcon’s Eye. If she had succeeded, the event would have spiked the high calendar in the Lanterners’ favor. Then they would have declared a remembrance in their own, competing calendar. The irony was that Jedao wasn’t sure he disagreed with the Lanterners’ grievances against the heptarchate, which they had broadcast everywhere after their victory over Najhera.
Korais was still looking at him. Jedao went to sit down, which was difficult because walking in a straight line took all his concentration. Sitting down also took concentration. It wasn’t worth pretending that he heard the last remembrance verses.
“It’s over, sir,” Korais said. “I’ll leave you to your duties.” He saluted and let himself out.
Jedao looked at his watch after the door hissed shut. Everything on it was too tiny to read, the way his vision was. He made his computer enlarge its time display. Korais had left at least seven minutes early; an astonishing concession, considering his job.
Jedao waited until the latest wave of pain receded, then brought up a visual of Candle Arc, a battledrift site nine days out from their present position and eleven days out from the Lanterners’ last reported position. The battle had taken place 177 years ago, between two powers that had since been conquered. The heptarchate called the battle Candle Arc because of the bridge of lights that wheeled through the scatter-hell of what had once been a fortress built from desiccated suns, and the remnants of warmoths. The two powers had probably called their battle something else, and their moths wouldn’t have been called moths either, and their calendars were dead except in records held locked by the Rahal.
Some genius had done up the image in shades of Kel gold; a notation gave the spectrum shift for anyone who cared. Jedao was fond of the Kel, who were the heptarchate’s military faction. For nearly twenty years he had been seconded to their service, and they had many virtues, but their taste in ornamentation was gaudy. Their faction emblem was the ashhawk, the bird that burned in its own glory, all fire and ferocity. The Shuos emblem was the ninefox, shapeshifter and trickster. The Kel called him the fox general, but they weren’t always being complimentary.
The bridgelights swam in and out of focus. Damnation. This was going to take forever. After pulling up maps of the calendrical terrain, he got the computer algebra system to tell him what the estimated shifts looked like in pictures. Then he sent a summons to the moth commander.
He knew how long it took to get from the moth’s command center to his quarters. The door chimed at him with commendable promptness.
“Come in,” Jedao said.
The door opened. “You wished to see me, sir,” said Kel Menowen, commander of the Fortune Comes in Fours. She was a stocky woman with swan-black hair and unsmiling eyes. Like all Kel, she wore black gloves; Jedao himself wore fingerless gloves. Her salute was so correct that he found himself trying to find an imperfection in her fist, or the angle of her arm.
Jedao had chosen the Fortune as his command moth not because it was the least damaged after Najhera’s death, which it wasn’t, but because Menowen had a grudge against the Shuos. She was going to be the hardest commander to win over, so he wanted to do it in person.
The tired joke about the Kel was that they were strong, loyal, and stupid, although they weren’t any more prone to stupidity than the other factions.
The tired joke about the Shuos, who specialized in information operations, was that they had backstabbing quotas. Most of the other factions had reasonable succession policies for their heptarchs: the Rahal heptarch appointed a successor from one of the senior magistrates; with the Kel, it was rank and seniority. The Shuos policy was that if you could keep the heptarch’s seat, it was yours. The other tired joke was that the infighting was the only reason the Shuos weren’t running the heptarchate.
One of Menowen’s aunts had died in a Shuos scheme, an assassin getting careless with secondary casualties. Jedao had already been in Kel service at the time, but it was in his public record that he had once been Shuos infantry, where “Shuos infantry” was a euphemism for “probably an assassin.” In his case, he had been a very good assassin.
Menowen was still standing there. Jedao approximated a return salute. “At ease,” he said. “I’d say ‘stand easy,’ but ‘up’ and �
��down’ are difficult concepts, which is distressing when you have to think in three dimensions.”
Menowen’s version of at ease looked stiff. “What do you require, sir?”
They had exchanged few words since he boarded her moth because he had barely been functional. She wasn’t stupid. She knew he was on her moth to make sure she behaved, and he had no doubt her behavior would be exemplary. She also probably wanted to know what the plan was.
“What do you think I require?” Jedao asked. Sometimes it helped to be direct.
Menowen’s posture became more stiff. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you only gave move orders as far as the Haussen system,” she said. “But that won’t take us near any useful support, and I thought our orders were to retreat.” She was overenunciating on top of telling him things he knew, which meant that at some point she was going to tell him he wasn’t fit for duty. Some Kel knew how to do subtlety. Menowen had an excellent service record, but she didn’t strike him as a subtle Kel.
“You’re reading the sane, sensible thing into our orders,” Jedao said. “Kel Command was explicit. They didn’t use the word ‘retreat’ anywhere.” An interesting oversight on their part. The orders had directed him to ensure that the border shell guarding the Glover Marches was secured by any means possible.
“Retreat is the only logical response,” Menowen said. “Catch repairs if possible, link up with Twin Axes.” The Twin Axes swarm was on patrol along the Taurag border, and was the nearest Kel force of any size. “Then we’d have a chance against the heretics.”
“You’re discounting some alternatives,” Jedao said.
Menowen lifted her chin and glared at him, or possibly at his insignia, or at the ink painting over his shoulder. “Sir,” she said, “if you’re contemplating fighting them with our present resources—” She stopped, tried again. The second try was blunter. “Your injuries have impaired your judgment and you ought to—”