Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

“Excellent,” Kujen said. “I shan’t interfere further.”

“General Jedao to Commander Nihara Keru,” he said, trusting the grid would patch him through.

The response came promptly. “General,” she said. Obligingly, the grid imaged her face for him, although due to some glitch in the system the left third of the visual was staticky. He’d have to get someone to look into that.

“I’m detaching Tactical Two on special duty,” he said. “The Dissevered Hand will shortly be receiving a shuttle with the hexarch on board. Your first priority is safeguarding him. I understand you may be disappointed to miss the action—”

She took it well, as he had known she would. “I’ve always wondered what hexarchs do in their spare time,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll find out while you’re busy destroying the enemy, sir.”

“Good,” Jedao said. “Use your discretion. If you run into any emergencies and need backup, call me. As I said: first priority.”

“Don’t worry, sir,” Nihara said. “I’m not going to stand on Kel bluster when it comes to a hexarch’s welfare.”

“That’s all, then. General Jedao out.” He also notified the rest of the swarm on the grounds that it wouldn’t do for the other commanders to wonder if one of the tactical groups had gone renegade.

Then, despite his impatience to return to the task at hand, Jedao stood at attention while Kujen boarded the shuttle. That was it. He was in charge of the swarm until Kujen returned. It should have been a heady moment. Instead, he wanted something for the incipient headache. No time to stop by Medical for a painkiller, but if it got bad, he could grab something out of the kit at his seat in the command center. Dhanneth had showed it to him along with the emergency stashes of ration bars. (“If it comes to that, sir,” he had said, “the honey-sesame ones are the most tolerable. In my opinion.”)

Thanks to variable layout, he didn’t need to sprint to the command center. All Jedao had to do was round a corner and it was there. Red and amber lights washed from the terminals, pooling in the crew’s eyes. People relaxed when he showed up, even though they still didn’t like him, because they expected him to deal with the problem.

Naturally, Commander Talaw apprised him of yet another complication. They saluted him crisply. “Sir,” Talaw said, “the scan summary is available for your perusal. There are three swarms in the system, not two. I have halted the advance.”

“Good,” Jedao said as he strode toward his seat. No sense galloping toward trouble. “Pass me the details.” He should have spent more time on the literature that dealt with reading scan, which had grown technical. He’d been fascinated by the tutorials he’d wheedled out of the grid, except he’d also been trying to brush up on calendrical mechanics and a lot of other things at the same time. For all the topics he understood instinctively, he lacked a built-in index. Trying to compile one by cramming had been only partly successful.

From Jedao’s side, Dhanneth cleared his throat. “Do you require assistance, sir?”

Jedao had gotten used to the way the crew tautened whenever Dhanneth drew attention to himself, even if he hadn’t had any luck figuring out why. “Pipe the scan summary to subdisplay two, please.”

The two expected swarms were Major General Hoiran’s Shattering Bridge and Brigadier General Ebenin’s Circle of Quills. The former lurked close to the all-important Isteia Mothyard. The latter swung out farther on patrol.

Shattering Bridge contained approximately eighty bannermoths; Circle of Quills, about fifty. A troublesome number, since Jedao preferred to overwhelm his opponent, but he’d known ahead of time that he wouldn’t be afforded that luxury. So he was going to rely on the shear cannon after all.

“Who’s the third swarm?” he asked. The third swarm, which, if Scan was to be believed, included at least 200 bannermoths, possibly more. More worryingly, the loudest formant belonged to a cindermoth or he’d eat his boots. The dismaying thing about having sat through a refresher on reading scan was that even he could identify the sizzle-sharp waveform of the cindermoth’s mothdrive.

What was more, when he closed his eyes he could sense the positions of the swarms. Whatever the othersense was, it gave him a more precise idea of each moth’s location. Warmoths were large and, as a corollary, massive. Assuming it was accurate and not some kind of hallucination. He hoped he wouldn’t have to put that to the test.

How does this work? he asked the voice that had talked to him earlier. Why am I “seeing” distributions different from what Scan is giving me?

Scan detects mothdrive emissions , the voice replied, disarmingly obliging. You and I hear spacetime ripples. It’s like the difference between seeing and hearing: two different media.

Why are you being so helpful? he asked, wondering if directness would get him anything.

You’re about to destroy a mothyard. Don’t do it. Find a way to save it.

Jedao hesitated. I need a reason.

The mothlings will die , it said, if you carry out the hexarch’s plan. They are young. Some of them very young, even as humans count time.

They’d fight us if they could, wouldn’t they? he asked.

Yes.

I’ll do what I can , Jedao said, but I have to put this swarm first.

Meanwhile, Scan was looking harried as his fingers poked at the interface. “Running pattern match,” Scan said.

This part the othersense couldn’t help him with, because it was based on the formants and not the mere fact of masses. Mothdrive formants altered over time. This was a consequence not just of the moths’ biological foundations, which grew and warped as they aged, but of damage taken, repairs made, upgrades installed. The Kel used to keep a database of their warmoths’ drive signatures. Since neither the Protectorate nor the Compact was currently talking to Kujen, his databases were slowly but inevitably falling out of date.

Jedao didn’t see any point in harassing Scan about working faster. If the man stared any more intently at his terminal, his eyes would sublimate. Instead, with Dhanneth’s aid, he poked through Strategy’s overviews of the intelligence they’d yanked out of Kujen’s people. Strategy had hoped that the Compact’s generalized shortage of reliable Kel, combined with the number of targets, would mean that they would leave a manageable defense force at Isteia. The lesson was that you should never base your strategies on hope.

Even so, Jedao wasn’t worried. The calm confidence that had settled over him perturbed him more than the situation itself. Kujen might like to go on about how many battles he’d won, but since he didn’t remember any of them, this was effectively his first one. Then again, whether or not his confidence was justified, he didn’t want to spook his crew.

The problem? His crew was already halfway there. What am I missing?

Scan swallowed before swinging around to look at him. “Sir,” Scan said. “Pattern match complete. The cindermoth is Three Kestrels Three Suns .”

“Inesser,” breathed Meraun, the executive officer, in a tone of longing. It was hard not to hear our rightful leader .

All his crew were watching him.

He knew what that meant. His opponent wasn’t just a Kel general. It was the old hexarchate’s senior field general, and the leader of the Protectorate. And she’d brought the cindermoth named in her honor.

“Let me guess,” Jedao said. “Are they bannering yet?”

“If we get any closer they will,” Talaw said. So far Talaw was doing a reasonable job of checking their distaste for Jedao when the swarm was about to enter combat, which Jedao appreciated.