Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Fourth was General Kel Ragath. The Compact had raised him to general shortly after the assassinations that had sundered the old hexarchate. He held a high position in the Compact’s hierarchy, although other generals had served longer. Ragath’s background as a historian made him valuable, and he did a stellar job managing the Compact’s operations. Inesser considered him a dangerous opponent. Either Brezan had earned his respect—no small thing—or the other way around.

One person was missing from the roster, however. “What about Cheris?” Inesser said. She didn’t like the crashhawk radical, but the crashhawk radical had demonstrated an ability to turn worlds upon worlds upside down. It would be nice to have some of that working for her side. Whichever that was.

Brezan tipped his chin up and looked sardonically at her. “She’s not available.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She’s missing. She’s been missing since the assassinations.”

Inesser favored him with a skeptical glare. “We’re talking about someone who’s running around with the hexarchate’s most notorious mass murderer inside her head”—she was old enough, and of high enough rank, that she knew how the black cradle worked—“and you’ve been letting her run around loose ?”

“Not ‘letting,’” Brezan said. “She left. I don’t know why.”

“I have a guess,” Mikodez said, leaning forward. “She knew that if she stayed, everyone would expect her to lead. And she didn’t want that for herself, or for you.”

Tseya was regarding Mikodez with that particular blankness of expression that Inesser associated with people who were both incandescently angry and too well-bred to show it. “Yes, well,” she said, “never mind Cheris. Who for thorn’s sake was leading the swarm we just fought, if not Cheris?”

“If it is Cheris—” said Miuzan, who had been silent until now.

“No,” Brezan said. Miuzan’s gaze swung to him, and he met it squarely. “It can’t be Cheris.”

“How do you expect to prove that,” Inesser said, “when you can’t produce her?”

“I realize Cheris has no reason to think of you as a friend,” Brezan said, “but why would she blow me up? Or a mothyard that could produce perfectly good cindermoths for her to waltz in and take over?”

Khiruev winced. “That wouldn’t work again anyway. Kel Command dishonorably discharged her and Jedao.”

Inesser shrugged. “She incinerated Kel Command, remember? To say nothing of being in bed with a certain child-killing hexarch-assassinating backstabber.” No sense hiding her opinion of Mikodez. He already knew.

Mikodez waved a hand loftily. “All in a day’s work.” Not even ashamed, the wormfucker.

“The point is, she’s betrayed people before. She’ll do it again.”

“No,” Brezan said. “That’s not the kind of person she is.”

“Funny,” Miuzan said, very softly. “I would have said that of you, once.”

Brezan’s fingers flexed. “If you have something to say, Colonel, why don’t you get it over with.”

Miuzan opened her mouth.

“ Colonel ,” Inesser said. She recognized that particular mulish set of Miuzan’s shoulders. While baiting her staffers was fun over drinks, they had more important matters to deal with.

Miuzan subsided.

Mikodez toyed with one of his earrings, then said, “We don’t like each other, Protector-General Inesser, but Brezan is correct. That wasn’t Cheris. That was a new player entirely.”

Inesser said, “That was someone controlled by a new player. Or, more accurately, a very old one.”

“I concur,” Mikodez said. Inesser hated it when he agreed with her. It never implied healthy things about the future.

Brezan picked up on the byplay. “How can you tell it’s Nirai Kujen,” he said, “and not Jedao—a new Jedao—freelancing?”

“Because you told me about the remembrances,” Mikodez said. “Jedao wouldn’t have prioritized them. He didn’t even like remembrances, although he kept his mouth shut about that to preserve his hide. No; this is Kujen or I’ll eat Zehun’s cats. Which would, by the way, be an automatic death sentence. My aide likes their cats far more than they like me.”

The only person in the conference who looked happy was General Ragath. “I never thought I’d have the security clearance for this conversation, back when,” he said. “It was impossible not to guess, given the paper trail on the black cradle. But I decided to leave that one alone.”

Inesser hid a smile. The Kel knew Ragath for his stalled career. Despite his reputation as one of their best colonels, Kel Command had neglected to promote him due to the disruptive opinions expressed in some of his papers.

General Khiruev cleared her throat. “I can shed some light on Cheris’s whereabouts.”

Brezan’s eyes thinned. “You’ve heard from her?”

“She’s hunting Hexarch Kujen.”

A very loud silence. Then he said, “How long have you known?”

Miuzan caught Inesser’s eye and mouthed, “Divide and conquer?”

Inesser returned a tiny headshake. As much as she enjoyed watching adversaries turn on each other, she couldn’t afford to think of Brezan and his compatriots as enemies anymore. The sooner Miuzan got that through her head, the better.

The big problem wasn’t Brezan or his Kel. She could outfight his generals if it came to that, although considering that he’d rescued her from certain torture and death on Isteia, she preferred not to. Fighting was usually the stupid way to win anyway. Why fight when she could secure his cooperation? All she needed to do was give up the foundation of her world.

But then, that foundation had proved itself flawed nine years ago. Inesser didn’t believe in dwelling on might-have-beens. And Brezan was only part of the problem. The person whose help she needed, despite a lifetime dealing as little with him as practical, was Shuos Mikodez. Brezan was only a means to an end.

Brezan and Khiruev were in the middle of heated mutual recriminations. Inesser couldn’t figure out what they were talking around, which bothered her. She set her augment to record the conversation for later review and turned her attention instead to Mikodez.

“Do you have any idea what that butchermoth was?” Inesser asked him, on the grounds that if she had a spymaster on the line, however untrustworthy, she might as well get what she could out of him.

Mikodez grinned at her as if he’d deduced her thought, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Is that what your soldiers are calling it?”

“That was certainly the effect it had.” Her heart clenched again at the thought of Isteia Mothyard, the soldiers lost, the inevitable remembrances. And worse than the mothyard—for in her long career she had seen her share of destruction—the lurid sight of the inverted Deuce of Gears, the madman loosed once again.

“No data on anything like it,” Mikodez said. “It must be a prototype. Having gotten some idea of its capabilities, I can guarantee you that at this point only one of Kujen’s facilities would have the ability to manufacture something like that.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share your list.”

“I will,” he said, surprising her. “Brezan has asked me to. But it’s incomplete. And bombing all of Kujen’s bases, even if you could manage the logistics, will only delay the inevitable if you don’t get rid of Kujen himself.”

“Were you the one who loosed Cheris to assassinate him?” She frowned at him. “And why does it matter to you?” She could trace only part of the logic. Mikodez might control legions of Shuos infantry, but Jedao had been one of the best, and Cheris was infused with his training. More importantly, Cheris had Jedao’s memories of Kujen, centuries’ worth.