Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

“No, that’s unlikely.”

“So what’s wrong with assassins? Is this one of those situations where that would touch off a general war we’re too broke to fight?”

Kujen shook his head. “We need to take and hold territory. Besides, I know you’re up to fighting Red because you’re also Red. That eight-to-one thing was the Battle of Candle Arc, by the way. Very famous. The Kel put it in all their textbooks.”

Jedao’s marrow froze. The fuck? How could he possibly be Red, let alone “also Red,” whatever that meant? Or, for that matter, old enough to have carried out a feat that had gotten into textbooks? Were the Kel in the habit of handing their swarms over to teenagers?

“All right,” Jedao said, “you win. I don’t have any useful arguments against the insane. If this is a training exercise, you can fail me on it.” Which was going to suck, because he’d been having difficulty with his math classes. “I will have to work hard for the rest of the term to make up for it, but I’m not afraid of hard work.”

Kujen looked fascinated. “I need to clear something up for you. You really think you’re a cadet?”

Jedao was silent.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Jedao said reluctantly, even though he was starting to wonder.

“Take off your shirt.”

Jedao hesitated, then fumbled with the closures.

Kujen rolled his eyes. “I won’t look if it makes you feel better, although it’s not as if it’s anything I haven’t seen before.” He sauntered to the other side of the room, then pointedly turned his back.

Jedao resisted the urge to glare at Kujen’s shoulder blades. Kujen sighed theatrically. Jedao took off the shirt and folded it over his arm, then stood there uncertainly.

“Shirt too,” Kujen said.

Jedao bit back a retort and settled the tunic over the back of a chair. After he’d yanked the shirt over his head, he froze. He’d thought the older physique was bad enough. Beyond that, his torso was riddled with scars. Most of them looked dreadful. Hell, one of his nipples had been completely obliterated. He had no idea where the scars had come from. He prodded one. It didn’t hurt. He almost wished it did.

“Even the Shuos don’t do that to their cadets,” Kujen said. “Grenade took off half your face once, back when you were a tactical group commander. The surgeons did an excellent reconstruction. You can’t even tell unless you do a deep scan at the bone level. Anyway, do you believe me now when I tell you you’re a soldier?”

Jedao put his clothes back on. “How many years?” Get the facts. Panic later.

“You’re forty-four.”

Shit. “I had a friend...” Jedao said, then trailed off because he wasn’t sure where he was going with the thought. Why would the hexarch keep track of another random Shuos cadet, after all? Ruo probably had gone off to make a name for himself as a celebrated assassin. And at this point Ruo would be twenty-seven years older.

Interesting. He used to write down all his arithmetic, and he’d just done that in his head. But Kujen had resumed talking, so he filed away the discrepancy to puzzle over later.

“Your abilities ought to be intact,” Kujen went on, “but we’re going to have to catch you up on the holes in your declarative memory.”

“Yes, about that,” Jedao said. “Is there a cure? Because it’s very disturbing.”

“Your opponent made off with most of your memories,” Kujen said. “That’s why she’s potentially your worst matchup, and why we have to be careful. I retrieved the rest, but owing to circumstances there was some degradation. I’m sorry.”

“Are you telling me I was attacked by a memory vampire?” Jedao said incredulously.

Kujen snorted. “You have a way with words sometimes... Exotic technology, and an experimental procedure besides. We could try to duplicate the circumstances if we capture her, but odds are it would drive you crazy.”

“Why didn’t it drive this memory vampire crazy?”

“Who says it didn’t?” Kujen sighed. “I don’t suppose you remember any of those Andan jokes?”

The bizarreness of this question made Jedao’s mind go blank. He couldn’t think of any jokes whatsoever, and besides, the entire situation struck him as decidedly unfunny.

“You used to have the most extraordinary collection of filthy Andan jokes,” Kujen said wistfully.

“You could tell them to me and I could tell them back to you.”

“No,” Kujen said, “it wouldn’t be the same.”

That didn’t make Jedao feel better, so he moved on to the next question. “Why the Kel?”

“You had an excellent career seconded to the Kel,” Kujen said. “They promoted the hell out of you.”

“Why can’t you hire someone who doesn’t have defective memories?”

“You’ve never lost a battle,” Kujen said. “Plus, outnumbered eight to one. Crushing victory. Even I could tell.” His voice was lightly teasing.

Jedao closed his eyes. Thanks for the pressure. “There’s no guarantee I could do that again.” More like no way ever .

“You could see how it was done in the playback, couldn’t you?”

Did Kujen have no idea? “That’s on a tidy spiderfucking three-dimensional diagram where you can see all the units arrayed neatly and everything has labels and there are helpful colored arrows for the vectors. As opposed to being there when somebody’s warmoth has an inconvenient drive failure while it’s sitting in a key pivot because the mechanics at the last layover half-assed the repairs, and you can’t read half the hostile formants on scan because the enemy has a fancy new jammer, and one of your brilliant hothead commanders decides the best thing she can do with her tactical group is creatively misinterpret her orders and—”

Jedao shut up. He had no idea where the rant had come from, just like the scars. He couldn’t tell if any of those things had happened or if he was being hypothetical. It was like listening to a stranger who had his voice and who talked exactly like he did. And who knew a lot more about warfare.

Who the hell am I? Am I a clone? He had the impression you couldn’t give clones even dubious memories of battles, but then, he already had amnesia. How was he supposed to tell?

Kujen caught his arm and steered him to a chair. “Sit,” he said, and tugged gently.

Jedao sank into the chair. Any more of this and his knees would dissolve.

“I’m not a military practitioner,” Kujen said. “But I have experience dealing with the military, and the Kel think highly of your ability. In this matter I defer to their judgment.”

“Am I some kind of expendable copy?”

“You’re not expendable,” Kujen said unhelpfully.

He hadn’t denied it. “Fine,” Jedao said. “What resources do we have?” With any luck this question would generate a concrete answer and not alarming creations like memory vampires. He would have to investigate the matter of clones on his own time, since Kujen was being closemouthed.

“The good news is that you will be pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of your warmoths,” Kujen said.

Jedao imagined so, because all he knew about warmoth statistics came from video games. It didn’t seem politic to mention that, however.

“Also good is that we have a supply of loyal Kel for those moths. The bad news is numbers. No matter what we do, we’re massively outnumbered by any one of our enemies.”

“We’re talking about how many moths and crew on our side?”

“We have 108 bannermoths,” Kujen said, “with crew of approximately 450 each. You also have two infantry regiments that you can distribute among the bannermoths and the accompanying boxmoth transports as you see fit. I would have obtained more moth Kel for you if that had been an option.”