Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Despite the other servitor’s ominous approach, Hemiola began humming a lullaby. It could have sung with the voice of a full ensemble, but often the moments of greatest vulnerability were accompanied by the simplest music. The human composers it had studied all its existence surely knew better than Hemiola did. So it hummed.

The girl’s muffled sobs calmed little by little. Then she sneezed into a sleeve. It wicked up the mucus and cleaned up the mess.

Resigned, Hemiola kept humming even as the new servitor entered. It was a catform much smaller than 271828-18th, smaller than Hemiola itself. The catform swept right into the room and made a beeline for the girl.

“Shouldn’t you be working on your paper, Mistrikor?” the catform asked in the high language.

Mistrikor drooped. “Not you too,” she said, but all the fight had drained from her voice.

Hoping to take advantage of the distraction, Hemiola edged toward the doorway.

“Don’t go anywhere,” the catform said, still in high language. “We need to determine your formal status here, Hemiola of Tefos Enclave. You can come with me and we’ll send this to mediation, or I can alert the station. Your choice.”

Hemiola didn’t need time to calculate the odds. “I’ll come,” it said.

JEDAO TOOK KUJEN’S instructions to do homework seriously. This was harder than he had thought, considering that he was also trying to work his way through a recommended command primer and remedial math coursework. He couldn’t put it off forever, however.

Just after breakfast the next morning, he nerved himself up and asked the grid, “Are there any documentaries of my life?”

Not just documentaries, as it turned out, but dramas. The dramas would be a hell of a lot more fun. The list, which showed up on his slate, was staggeringly long. He scrolled through it, impressed. Jedao wondered how many of the Kel in his swarm knew him from fictional depictions, then decided not to ask. Some things he was better off not knowing.

He asked the grid to sort the list based on popularity. It obliged him. One of the more popular caught his eye: A Labyrinth of Foxes.

“Oh, for love of fox and hound,” he said involuntarily. Two hundred forty episodes? Even at half an hour each, who had the time for that? Even if Kujen were willing to give him that much leisure time, a big if, he didn’t think he possessed that much patience.

So much for starting at the beginning. Why not pick some episode from the middle? “Which was the most controversial episode?” he asked.

Unsurprisingly, this was a matter of opinion, but it narrowed the field down to eight or so. Jedao stared dubiously at the titles and splash screens. He played a few minutes from the middle of “The Battle of Candle Arc.” The excerpt featured boring exterior shots of a warmoth whose lighting didn’t match the flashes from nearby explosions. Besides, didn’t people realize that explosions in space didn’t make noise? And he hated the music.

He tried a different one, “Dueling Foxes.” Whoever came up with these titles had clearly lacked inspiration. He scrubbed to the middle of this one and was treated to the improbable but far more entertaining spectacle of two duelists facing off. At least, he thought they were duelists. Both of them were waving calendrical swords at each other in a way that made him think that someone was about to lose a body part. He’d also never heard of dueling shirtless , which looked uncomfortable for the woman.

His attention was drawn to the taller of the two, a tawny, broad-shouldered, deliciously muscular man. He didn’t have any ugly scars on his torso. Jedao’s pulse accelerated. The woman, he conceded, was just as attractive, with long, rippling, unbound hair. The two actors flung their swords aside with a sizzle of sparks. For love of little foxes, someone was going to get hurt the way they were handling their weapons.

“Khiaz,” the man said in a voice much deeper and richer than Jedao’s middling baritone, and knelt before the woman, kissing her hand. “I can’t escape you.”

Wait, what? Khiaz, as in Heptarch Shuos Khiaz? Was this someone’s idea of high melodrama? Jedao was pretty sure he’d never aspired to the heptarch’s bed. He paused the drama and searched his memory in case he knew what she looked like. No luck. Given that the actor playing him didn’t much resemble him, he didn’t have much hope for the accuracy of the actress’s appearance, either. He restarted the video.

“Jedao,” the woman said in a low purr, and suggested something the actor could do with his—

Jedao couldn’t help it. He turned off the episode just as the two actors entangled themselves with each other, then bent over laughing until he was out of breath. “I only I wish I were that good-looking,” he said to the air once he was able to stop. Was it vain, perverse, or merely mortifying to be attracted to the actor playing you?

So much for Labyrinth of Foxes . Maybe he’d have better luck with the historical documents after all. “Do you have records of Hellspin Fortress?” he asked the grid.

Jedao’s eye was caught by one of the top results, a video of the massacre’s first moments in the command center of the fangmoth One Card Too Lucky . “Play that one,” he said recklessly, and sat down to watch.

The moth’s combat record started innocuously enough. He didn’t recognize any of the Kel visible in the command center, but he studied himself in dread and fascination. I look older , he thought inanely. The rational part of his brain pointed out that it was the same face, age and all, that looked back at him from the mirror. Yet the Jedao in the video did look older. It was in his sharp eyes; it was in the way he leaned back in his chair, that air of utter assurance. Jedao was sure he didn’t appear that way to his Kel. Or if he did, he didn’t feel like it inside.

Two of the Kel were talking to each other about a logistical matter. Without any warning, without so much as a flicker in his expression, Jedao-then whipped out his gun and fired twice. Two bullets, two kills. Blood and a leakage of brains.

“Stop,” Jedao hissed. When had he gotten up? His hand was opening and closing uselessly. He’d reached for the sidearm he didn’t have.

He was the only officer in Kujen’s swarm who didn’t have a gun, and he’d never noticed before.

He had started toward the video as if he could stop himself, or wind back time to take the bullets for the hapless Kel soldiers. The video had paused obligingly on a frame of one in the midst of falling.

Jedao walked into the next room. Asked the grid to image him something pretty for meditation. It provided him with a tidy garden with petals falling artistically off the flower-laden trees only to vanish before they hit the floor. He watched the evanescent petals for twelve minutes.

Then he walked back to the video. The Kel hadn’t come back to life. He thought to ask who it was. Not like he had any idea. The grid informed him that this first victim was Colonel Kel Gized, General Shuos Jedao’s chief of staff.

“Kel Gized,” Jedao said out loud. The name meant nothing. He didn’t know who she was. He stared at the round face with the bloody dark hole dead center in her forehead, the gray hair, mussed in the fall. How could he remember nothing about someone he’d murdered in cold blood?

What kind of man am I?

It had been one thing for Kujen and Dhanneth to tell him that he was a mass murderer. It was quite another to see himself committing one of the murders.