Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Jedao wished he could tell her to cheer up. It wouldn’t help, so he refrained.

“Shear cannon charged,” Weapons said after that.

Don’t do this. The tarnished voice again.

Give me one reason why not , Jedao thought, on the grounds that it would be best if his crew didn’t find out he was hearing voices. He’d seen no evidence that anyone else heard the Revenant . I can try to spare the moths —if nothing else, captured moths might make for useful assets, which was how he planned to sell the idea to Kujen— but I still need to overcome the hostiles.

You can win without it. You have a history of improbable victories.

Great, now it was paying him backhanded compliments by way of incredibly stupid tactical advice. The whole point of the shear cannon was that he could use it to attack into hostile calendrical terrain. Certainly he had no intention of advancing into the Compact’s space.

It added, reluctantly, The cannon hurts me.

I don’t have a lot of options , Jedao said.

Inesser’s immense swarm didn’t advance far; didn’t have to. Jedao had studied the meticulous, beautifully formatted reports on the shear cannon’s performance characteristics. He waited until the enemy tripped the virtual wire he’d determined beforehand, then said, “Mark.”

The Revenant hummed as it sprinted toward the Three Kestrels Three Suns . The vibrations transmitted themselves throughout the entire seat despite the webbing holding Jedao in place. Talaw was leaning forward, scrutinizing one of their subdisplays. Meraun, for her part, had an air of callous cheer. Jedao got the impression that not much fazed her.

“On my mark,” Jedao said, “fire the shear cannon.” He thanked whoever had given him his augment. The inner ticking awareness of passing time would enable him to time this more precisely than if he had to stare at a watch.

Inesser’s swarm was coalescing, the pivots moving into place. Closer, closer, closer—

“Mark,” Jedao said.

Weapons grimaced and jabbed one of the controls. “Shear cannon fired.”

No explosions; no fireworks. But Jedao bit his tongue involuntarily at the sudden agonizing static in his head. The cloying taste of blood flooded his mouth. He could hear the Revenant screaming. “Shut it off!” Or at least that was what he tried to say.

“Sir?” Talaw said grudgingly. “Could you be more specific?” Their voice came as from a distance spun from cobwebs.

The Revenant’s voice ground out, I tried to warn you.

That only aggravated the pain that filled Jedao’s skull. If it got any worse, his head would fall off. And if that made it stop hurting, he would welcome it.

The roaring dimmed, and with it the pain. Everyone in the command center was staring at him as though he’d sprouted gills, with the exception of Doctrine, who was hunched trying to look inconspicuous. That answered the question of whether anyone else could hear the static, or the Revenant .

More to the point, his reaction had disrupted operations in the command moth. Unforgivable. Talaw’s face was drawn tight with distaste as they wrestled with some inner decision.

“Commander,” Jedao rasped, “ignore that. Scan, Protector-General Inesser’s status?”

“Complete formation collapse,” Scan said, awed. “Everything’s jumbled out of place like that time with my baby cousin and the cats and my brother’s yarn stash.”

Dhanneth had already zoomed in on the relevant area of the tactical subdisplay for Jedao’s benefit. The swarm moths were in disarray, disrupting the necessary geometry. To be more precise, the shear cannon had stretched the underlying weave of spacetime. The moths had moved accordingly.

Jedao wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and sleep for a year, or until the pain was gone. But he wasn’t finished. “Communications.” He wasn’t sure the words had clawed out of his throat until the man straightened, awaiting his orders. “Tell General Inesser that she can agree to a meeting to discuss terms, or—”

Communications wasn’t paying attention. He gulped. “Sir, message from the hexarch .”

Jedao kept speaking. “—she can watch me dissect her swarm into pieces so tiny you’d need tweezers to put it back together. Her choice.” With any luck, she would discuss terms. He didn’t want to kill more people than absolutely necessary.

Wrong move. Communications, thwarted of Jedao’s attention, played the message for Commander Talaw instead. Kujen’s image flared into life before Talaw, almost in the middle of the command center. “Countermand,” Kujen said in a voice like black ice. “Commander Talaw, relieve General Jedao of command. You hold the swarm for the duration. You are to take advantage of the enemy’s disarray to destroy Isteia Mothyard to complete the calendrical spike. Once you have achieved your objective, you will retire and rendezvous with Tactical Two. At no point are you to make further contact with the protector-general. Are my instructions clear?”

Talaw nodded sharply. “Absolutely clear, Hexarch.” Then they smiled. “Doctrine, have someone escort Shuos Jedao from the command center. The hexarch’s instructions take priority.”

Jedao , the Revenant said, but its voice was weak.

I could fight this , Jedao thought. But he didn’t think he could take down the entire command center. Instead, he sat and watched until two Doctrine officers entered. It didn’t escape his notice that both of them topped him by a head, and outmassed him correspondingly, as if they expected him to wrestle them on the way out.

Jedao unwebbed himself and stood. “I’m ready,” he said. “Fight well, Commander.”

Talaw disdained to answer.

As Jedao exited the command center, he heard Talaw give the order to bomb Isteia Mothyard.

THE CELL CONTAINED a bench that provided both a place to sit and a place to sleep, and a commode. A see-through barrier separated Jedao from the rest of the word. Across from him was another cell. A Kel in low formal napped on her own bench. She’d kicked her boots into the corner in a display either of slovenliness or defiance. That, or the boots pinched.

He occupied himself for the first half-hour (was it a half-hour? They’d disabled his augment and, by extension, its chronometer) inspecting the cells for possible ways out as he concocted stories about how the Kel soldier had ended up in the brig. Maybe she’d smuggled a pet into barracks, and they’d caught her sneaking morsels of rice to her ferret/scorpion/monkey/snake. Maybe she’d showed up to drill wearing her shirt inside-out. Or napped on duty, or mixed up the lubricants for the gun mounts, or—

She had woken and was staring at him. More accurately, she’d scrunched herself up in a corner of her own cell as if she thought he could kill her with a look.

“Hello,” Jedao said, hoping he sounded friendly. “What’d you do to get yourself locked up?”

She startled when he addressed her. “Sir?” Her voice was muffled by the barrier, which meant his was as well.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

Her eyes were still white-rimmed, but she answered. “I like to sleep in. Sir. It doesn’t mix real well with soldiering. Every so often I miss the reveille and end up here. They say there’s some kind of fault in my augment, but it’s cheaper to toss me back here for fucking up than to fix it.” She bit her lip, then burst out, “I’ll try to do better, sir, I swear! Please don’t—please don’t—” She shut up.