Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Kujen’s voice turned vehement. “He was a good master, as masters went. I always knew where I stood with him. You’ll never endure that, you know. You will always have whatever you want to eat. You won’t have to fight off dogs in the streets to find a safe corner to sleep in. You will have everything you could possibly desire. I have made sure of it.”

Jedao returned Kujen’s smile and hated himself for understanding, at last, what drove Kujen to entomb himself in luxuries.

INESSER RECEIVED WORD of the enemy swarm’s approach in the middle of the night. This didn’t take her by surprise, and wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t received Brezan’s warning earlier in the month, while she was still aboard his moth. According to some law of fuckery and bad luck, enemies always arrived at the most inconvenient time, by chance if not by design. Her favorite example—funny now, although it hadn’t been then—involved the time raiders showed up and they’d scrambled defenses in the middle of her promotion party. Not only had her aide taken the incident personally, they’d had to shoo out a terrifying number of disappointed courtesans, entertainers, and (that particular aide’s quirk) rented goats. Inesser’s hopes for very fresh goat curry had been dashed when she learned that the goats were there to be petted. They’d had extraordinarily soft, lush fur and comically long-lashed, trusting eyes. All things considered, the goats had taken the disruption to their routine better than her soldiers had.

Her office on the Fortress of Pearled Hopes lit up as she entered it. She’d been sleeping in the next room, with one of her wives beside her. Although she would have liked to send her two wives out-system for safety, to say nothing of the rest of her family, it would have demoralized her people. She couldn’t surrender to personal weakness.

Inesser snatched a slate from her desk in passing, then exited the office and turned left. Straight down the hall was her favorite conference room. One of the nice things about having survived both to old age and advanced rank: choosing where to hold your meetings. To say nothing of monopolizing the most comfortable chairs. Younger, more masochistic Kel could compete against each other to show off their ability to endure poorly designed furniture. In Inesser’s experience, being distracted by shooting pains in your ass never improved your decision-making ability.

When she entered, three people already occupied the conference room: Andan Tseya, Colonel Kel Miuzan, and a harried-looking enlisted Kel whose job was to take notes. Of the three, Tseya looked the most composed. Her fine robes and glittering jewelry made Inesser wonder in passing just what she’d been dressed for at this hour.

“Protector-General,” Tseya said as the other two saluted smartly. “You’re not going to like this.”

Inesser bared her teeth. “Details.”

“Incoming swarm of around a hundred bannermoths detected by the picket scoutmoths,” Miuzan said. She waved at the conference table. The grid imaged a map of Terebeg System for their benefit. Protectorate forces and installations were marked in gold. The incoming swarm was marked in red.

Miuzan gestured again. A subdisplay enlarged the swarm and showed the formation in detail. Correction: formations. The enemy was alternating between two shield-generating formations to maximize their defenses. Inesser had once asked the Nirai false hexarch if there weren’t any way to create a shield formation whose effects didn’t decay within minutes. The false hexarch had replied with a long list of papers and studies, and a note saying, “The short version is no.”

“That one”—Miuzan pointed—“is either the butchermoth we ran into, or its near cousin.”

“We have got to come up with a less morale-crushing name for the damn thing,” Inesser said. She wondered what Kujen called his creation. At least, she assumed it was one of Kujen’s, given his record as a warmoth designer. She felt decidedly ambivalent about the fact that her late lamented cindermoth had also come from Kujen. He’d sent her a gift to commemorate the moth’s naming-ceremony, an exquisite wooden sculpture of a kestrel gripping a silver orchid in its talons. It rested on a table next to her bed in the Fortress, an uneasy reminder.

Miuzan grimaced. “Wouldn’t matter at this point, sir.” Everyone had been calling it that since Isteia. They both knew the futility of regulating language, especially among nervous soldiers.

Inesser leaned in to examine the map. If the invasion swarm’s current trajectory held, it would arrive in fifty-eight hours and twelve minutes. “Well,” Inesser said, “we can only hope there isn’t a stealthed swarm coming in from the opposite direction.”

“I’m so glad you don’t say things like that in public,” Miuzan muttered. “Orders?”

Inesser had hoped all those evacuation drills would prove irrelevant, but better safe than sorry. “All military on high alert. Notify the civilian authorities. Civilians dirtside should evacuate to the underground bunkers.” Some of them wouldn’t obey—there were always holdouts—but she had to make the effort.

Miuzan put the orders through without comment.

As Inesser had expected, the governor of Terebeg 4, one of Tseya’s numerous relatives, called. “Put them through,” she said wearily. Best to get this out of the way now.

Governor Andan Viendris resembled Tseya to a disturbing degree, except they were, if possible, even more beautiful. Two features helped Inesser tell them apart: Viendris kept their hair in the coils favored by many nonmilitary alts, and a shimmering tattoo of silver, blue, and black covered half their face. Inesser had once asked Tseya what the tattoo represented. Tseya had made a face and said, “It’s their signifier. One of my brothers always thought the tattoo artist got drunk for the job. Impressive work if so.”

“Protector-General,” Viendris said, with an unsubtle emphasis on “Protector,” “might I ask what is going on?”

Inesser sketched a bow to Viendris, on the grounds that it harmed her nothing to appeal to the alt’s fussy sense of vanity. Viendris’s eyes glinted, not without humor; they weren’t fooled. Oh well, worth a try. “You’ve received the alert, I trust?”

Viendris brushed an imaginary speck from their wrist. “It’ll be nice to know that all those drills weren’t for nothing. I can at least assure you that we are continuing to enforce the high calendar per your instructions.”

“Good to hear,” Inesser said. “As for the drills, it would be vastly preferable if everyone was scurrying below-ground for no reason at all.” Come out with it , she thought. I have the defense of an entire system to see to.

But the defense of the system depended in part on Viendris’s cooperation. Not only was Viendris responsible for the largest inhabited planet, they maintained ties with the administrators of the other planets, moons, stations. If Inesser could soothe Viendris’s anxieties, Viendris would in turn persuade the others to fall in line.

“I take your point,” Viendris said after a slight pause. Then, unexpectedly: “What can I do to smooth things for you?”

Ash and fire , Inesser thought, all those dinners with Viendris weren’t wasted after all. In all fairness, Viendris always had the best wines, so she’d enjoyed herself. “You know all those emergency preparedness bulletins? Make sure that your people adhere to them. If the fighting gets to your planet, it’ll be ugly. I’ll try to prevent it from coming to that—”