Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

“You can’t recruit more?”

Kujen made a moue. “A number of Kel are confused about who to follow. While I have the loyalty of a small number of bases—”

“You’d better show me that map,” Jedao said, “so I can visualize the situation.” Pretend it’s a video game , he thought, despite his unease at treating something as serious as war as a game.

Kujen called up a three-dimensional map, neatly labeled. The Protectorate appeared in gold. While some of its boundaries looked more extensive than the heptarchate Jedao remembered, chunks of it had been bitten off. The second-largest polity, as Kujen had mentioned, was called the Compact. The map showed it in red.

“Red for Shuos?” Jedao said. Kujen had said the Shuos hexarch had thrown in with the Compact.

“Yes,” Kujen said.

“Is Khiaz-zho still head of the Shuos?”

Kujen’s eyes widened. Then he started to laugh.

Jedao didn’t see what was so funny. “Well?”

“She’s been gone for quite some time,” Kujen said. “It’s Shuos Mikodez now. You don’t remember much of Khiaz, do you?”

“No,” Jedao said. Just her name. “Why?”

“Why indeed,” Kujen said. He zoomed in on the border space between the Protectorate and the Compact. “What do you think?”

A number of smaller states had sprouted up there. Jedao imagined that none of them enjoyed the situation. “Why haven’t they been gobbled up?”

“Another good question,” Kujen said. “The answer is that, after the assassination that took out the hexarchs other than myself and Mikodez, calendrical destabilization was so strong that the borders remain precarious even now. There are large regions of space where the old exotic technologies no longer work. They’re most reliable in the Protectorate, but the Protectorate is overextended. It’s exactly the kind of situation that attracts opportunist potentates and despots and governmental experimentalists of every kind.”

“How did you escape the assassinations?”

Kujen shrugged. “Mikodez and I were more paranoid than the others.”

Jedao sensed he wouldn’t get more of an answer and returned to the map. “You said earlier that the Kel were divided.”

“Yes. Protector-General Inesser seized power and is running the Protectorate. The other factions caved on the grounds that she was the one with the guns. In the Compact, there’s a nascent democratic state backed by High General Kel Brezan. The Kel are having fits trying to figure out the mess.”

“‘Democratic’?” Jedao said. “What’s that?”

“They vote on everything from their leaders to their laws,” Kujen said.

Jedao mulled that over. “It sounds dreadfully impractical,” he said, “but all right. What about your Kel? Who do they support?”

“I can guarantee their loyalty.”

“Oh?” Jedao said neutrally.

“There were some morale issues earlier,” Kujen said with a suspicious lack of specificity. “You’ll see when you meet them.”

“What kind of—”

“I want to see how you handle it.”

A test. Jedao didn’t like that either, but he’d manage. “What about the name of this memory vampire who has it in for me?”

Kujen relented. “Her name is Kel Cheris.”

The name didn’t spark any recognition in him. “Is she anyone I should know?”

“You, no,” Kujen said with a trace of annoyance. “As far as you’re concerned, she’s only a low officer with a talent for math. I’m the one who should have predicted that she’d grow up to be a radical crashhawk.”

Crashhawk? Jedao wondered. He would have asked, except Kujen was still speaking.

“We won’t confront her straight off,” Kujen said. “You’re at a disadvantage right now. Later, with better resources, perhaps. But not yet.”

“I don’t want to go after her,” Jedao said. Avoiding her sounded like good sense. If she was more him than he was, and unstable on top of it, she might be able to repeat the eight-to-one trick. He was betting that, as impressive as 108 bannermoths sounded, he didn’t outnumber her eight to one. What would that leave her with, 13.5 moths? “I want to know where she is so I can run like hell if I see her coming.”

“My agents are doing their best,” Kujen said. “Unfortunately, she hasn’t been sighted in the last nine years.”

Great, she was lurking out there in stealth mode, so he wouldn’t see her coming, either.

“Let me cheer you up,” Kujen said, rather callously. “I’ll show you your command moth.” He picked up the slate and tapped at it. Jedao was impressed that the lace at his wrists didn’t get in the way.

“It’s triplets?” Jedao said, peering at the images of three moths that now hovered in front of him, a large one flanked by two smaller ones. All three moths had the characteristic triangular profile of Kel warmoths. The largest featured a spinally mounted gun along with the expected arrays of turrets and missile ports.

“No, the smaller two are for scale reference,” Kujen said. “The one to your left is a fangmoth. You used to be fond of those. The one to your right is a—”

“—bannermoth,” Jedao said, then stopped.

Kujen arched an eyebrow at him. “See, you haven’t forgotten everything.” His hands moved again. He had beautiful hands, with fingers tapering gracefully.

A fourth moth appeared above the central moth. It was broader and longer, and also had a spinal main gun.

“Cindermoth,” Kujen said. “There used to be six of them. Now only four remain, and they’re under Protector-General Inesser’s control. No one currently has a mothyard capable of building new ones, which buys us a little time. Anyway, that central one is a shearmoth, and it’s yours. I made an assistant name it, which was a mistake, but I hate naming things. Don’t look at me like that, I just design them.”

Kujen zeroed in on the spinal gun. “That’s the shear cannon,” he said. “It only functions in high calendar terrain, which is its main disadvantage, especially since you’re going to be fighting radicals and rebels and heretics.”

“So why bother with it at all?” Jedao said.

“It generates a pulse that warps spacetime,” Kujen said patiently. “Creating the pulse is an exotic effect. Once that’s done, however, it will continue to travel into any sort of terrain until it dissipates. I got the idea because of the way the mothdrive works, by grabbing onto spacetime and pulling itself along. Breeding the modification into the moth lineage took some time. But I think you’ll find it worthwhile.”

Jedao figured it out. “So you can fire it from our side of the border into theirs.”

“Yes.”

“I hope there are still conventional weapons,” Jedao said, giving Kujen a hard look. “Because if it’s a gravitational wave, it might yank formations out of place, but it’s just going to pass through the moths themselves. I can’t destroy them directly with it.”

Great , he thought. He’d just said “I,” as if he were going along with this.

Kujen made a pacifying gesture. “I wouldn’t stint on that. And it’s not entirely useless on that front—try it on a planet with oceans or atmosphere sometime, and you’ll get some interesting turbulence. Check the other statistics—”

The readout appeared in front of the images. Jedao went through all the listed weapons as well as the numbers of missiles and mines, plus the amount of space it had for necessaries like foam sealant and pickles. Apparently the Kel love of spiced cabbage pickles hadn’t changed. He gestured at the slate. Kujen handed it over so he could run his own queries. It took Jedao a few moments to work out the interface, but after a while he was able to call up some explanatory diagrams.