Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Kujen was still speaking. “Kel Inesser already had the loyalty of most Kel and invented a new title for herself. She must have thought that declaring herself hexarch was too much. High General Brezan should have succeeded to hexarch on a technicality, but he too refused to claim the position since he attained his rank by an irregular route. This left a lot of Kel to make an awkward decision.”

“Who knocked out Kel Command, then?” Jedao asked. “That was notably not in your briefing materials.”

“That’s because I don’t know,” Kujen said, grim for the first time. “I have agents on the problem, but not much hard evidence.”

“Why wasn’t Kel Command dispersed?” Jedao said. “You’d think they’d have stashed away a spare high general—a real one, if this Brezan didn’t suit—on the other side of the hexarchate in case something like this happened.”

“Composite technology,” Kujen said. “They were too dependent on the hivemind to survive without it. I told them it was a bad idea, but... well, it’s done now. You can look up the details in the grid some other time. You’ve got an augment now, no reason not to, so you can query it that way too if you’d rather. We’re not using composite tech—bad idea, as I said—but the enemy might be, because stars forbid the Kel ever give up a tradition.”

Kujen folded up his napkin into a moth-shape and grinned at Jedao’s look of distaste. Shape-folding was a distinctly Vidona art, and he was surprised that Kujen knew how to do it. “You and the major might as well go to it,” Kujen said. “I have some matters to go over with my assistant. There are some drinks and snacks in the fridge. I picked out a good fridge for you. If you need something more nourishing, call up a menu and make an order.”

A good fridge? Jedao wondered. Why, was there a hierarchy of refrigerators? Then again, a Nirai might have some atavistic fondness for appliances.

Kujen added, “The servitors will clear the dishes, Jedao. You needn’t worry about chores as if you still lived on a farm. I’ll fetch you when it comes time to address the Kel.”

Jedao tried to bring up memories of this farm, but everything was hazy. He watched Kujen make his way unhurriedly out of the room.

Once Kujen was gone, Jedao turned to Dhanneth. “I assume we’re being monitored because that’s how I’d do it”—Dhanneth didn’t disagree—“but there are things I need to know. Will you answer my questions?”

He hated putting Dhanneth on the spot like this. But Kujen had put a swarm into his care. He had to do right by them, to say nothing of the people on whose behalf he was fighting.

“I have no choice but to answer,” Dhanneth said with a bitter edge.

Formation instinct. It would not do to belabor the realities of the situation, which Dhanneth surely understand better than he did. “All right,” Jedao said. “What happened to the swarm’s original general? The details, if you please.”

Dhanneth’s shoulders pulled back. “He resisted the hexarch. He’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“He’s dead,” Dhanneth said in a scoured-out voice.

“Was he important to you?”

Dhanneth smiled humorlessly. “Not anymore.”

Formation instinct again, or something more personal? Jedao didn’t know how hard to press. He didn’t want to alienate the man further. “Tell me something else, then,” Jedao said. “The hexarch talked about successor states and despots and protector-generals in what’s left of the hexarchate. What are they like? Are any of them honorable?”

“No,” Dhanneth said with chilling conviction. “It’s the same all over. Anyone could tell you that.”

A quiet cold ran through Jedao’s bones. It was a bad situation, but he might be able to talk himself through it if he treated it like a game. The first rule of any game was to assume you could win, even if you had to hunt through the universe’s cracks for a strategy, even if you had to turn the pieces inside-out, even if you had to tell so many lies to the opponent that they couldn’t figure out which way was up.

Jedao had to win this war for Kujen because otherwise Kujen would turn to someone else. Kujen seemed to like him. That gave him a little leeway—if he was careful. Besides, if the hexarch needed him, it was Jedao’s duty to do his best, for the hexarchate’s sake, if nothing else.

IN THE END, Brezan chose a base of operations based on the fact that no one there had tried to shoot his supporters in the last two weeks (eight-day, per local practice). He didn’t expect this state of affairs to last. Among other things, the local Shuos who were supposed to serve as makeshift riot police had suffered a schism. Maybe more than one schism. It was hard to tell.

He’d ended up on Krauwer 5, one of the more recently terraformed planets. “Recently” meant two centuries ago, in this case, but there was some ecological complication that meant that the planetary governor was a Nirai instead of the more usual Andan or, perhaps, a Rahal appointee. More to the point, said Nirai, a rotund woman named Lozhoi whose hair had been styled in loose curls, had contacted Brezan and bluntly asked for his protection. Although she wore Nirai ceremonial clothes, robes of gray and black, they looked as if she’d slept in them.

“Why me?” Brezan asked, just as bluntly.

“You’re here,” Lozhoi said, “and you have a swarm. More importantly, I’ve been paying attention to your body language in your bulletins. You strike me as honest.”

Brezan flushed. He’d been imprinted with standardized kinesics as part of the formation instinct injection back in Kel Academy, but he wouldn’t be surprised if those had decayed too. The joys of being the hexarchate’s second-most-notorious crashhawk , he thought.

Lozhoi wasn’t done. “Honest is as honest does, of course, when it comes to government,” she went on. Brezan was starting to get the idea that, despite her owlish face and rumpled appearance, Lozhoi had gotten her position because she was competent. “But if you’re sincere about reforming government, and I think you are, then you’re going to need allies from the ground up. That’s where I can help.”

“What’s in it for you?” Brezan said.

Lozhoi squinted at him as if he’d asked a particularly naive question. “When I first came here twenty-four years ago,” she said, “the previous governor had left things in shambles. One large coalition of workers was on the verge of being declared heretics. Like that would have helped.”

“What did you do about it?”

She said, with disarming modesty, “I went down to their meeting places and asked to have tea with them. Four months passed before anyone would take me up on the offer. Granted, I don’t even like tea. But eventually they figured out that I wanted as few people to be handed over to the Vidona as possible.”

“Must have made you popular with the local Vidona,” Brezan said.

“Oh, at first I was told I absolutely couldn’t do what I was doing. But you know what, every day my invitation to tea was declined, I went over to the Vidona overseer’s office and sat myself down right in her doorway. Stared at her as she went about her day. She hated that. She cracked much faster than the workers did.”

Brezan resolved on the spot never to piss Lozhoi off.

When Brezan and his honor guard landed in Tauvit, the capital of Krauwer 5, Lozhoi greeted him not with soldiers but an assistant who scarcely looked up from his slate. Brezan suppressed a sigh of relief. Emio had pointed out that it wasn’t impossible that Lozhoi was luring him into an ambush, as if he hadn’t thought of that for himself.