Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

Brezan couldn’t help it. He choked with laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said when he was done, “a Shuos hexarch with a conscience?”

“Oh, I don’t have any such thing,” Mikodez said, taking Brezan’s outburst calmly. “But it’s clear that you do. And you’re going to be the face of the operation.”

“Why haven’t I heard of this Kujen before now, anyway?”

“Because he’s a secretive bastard,” Mikodez said. “If you think about it, that’s a great way to survive when you’re almost a millennium old. Bravery has never been Kujen’s strong point, which he himself would be the first to admit. Here—”

The terminal indicated that it had received a databurst from Mikodez. Brezan opened up the profile contained therein. Nirai Kujen: not just a secretive bastard, but an extraordinarily handsome one. A note cautioned him not to take physical appearances too literally, since, like Jedao, Kujen was a ghost who possessed different bodies as the occasion suited him. Fortunately, the profile also included data on movement patterns, which were much more reliable. As a former Personnel officer, Brezan had a lot of experience looking for nuances in body language.

“So you’re saying he engineered the remembrances into the high calendar on purpose?” Brezan said, not bothering to hide his repugnance. “What evidence do you have for this?”

Mikodez shrugged. “He told me so. Check the file. I recorded that whole conversation, but I’ve had the whole thing transcribed with timestamps of the key bits so you don’t have to sit through it all.”

“How considerate of you.”

“Don’t thank me, thank my staff.” Mikodez tapped his fingers against something just out of sight. “I have reason to believe that Kujen is personally attached to the hexarchate as it used to be. He dropped out of sight just before that business at the Fortress of Spinshot Coins, almost as if he knew which way the wind was blowing. I don’t like that, and I don’t like the fact that I don’t know what he’s up to.”

“You were colleagues for decades,” Brezan said slowly. “You couldn’t do anything about him earlier?”

Mikodez’s smile was self-mocking. “What, like oust him? I’m a bureaucrat, not a genius mathematician. You were probably too young to remember, but I was in my twenties when I took the seat. At the time my life expectancy was measured in days, and the Shuos were extremely weak after the previous leadership squandered resources in useless petty squabbles with the Andan and Vidona. I wasn’t spoiling for a fight, and Kujen happened to agree with me about the value of stability.”

It was the second time this conversation Mikodez had mentioned the word. Brezan didn’t think that was a coincidence. He didn’t harbor any illusions that he could challenge Mikodez in his own seat of power, but he didn’t intend to become a mere puppet for the man, either.

“I’ll read through the file,” Brezan said. “But the immediate problem is the first one: keeping the hexarchate from exploding. I’ll work with you on that. If you get more information on Kujen’s whereabouts and latest hobbies, we can discuss those then.”

“Fair enough.” Mikodez pursed his lips. “One thing more.”

“Oh?”

“You need to disentangle yourself from Khiruev’s swarm as soon as possible,” Mikodez said. “For one thing, you’re going to be needing it to put out fires, and to form the core of the new government’s forces. You don’t want to be on the front lines. You’re too important for that now.”

Brezan gave him a disbelieving look.

“You’re used to thinking of yourself as no one very important. I can tell. Modesty is going to have to become a thing of the past, I’m afraid.”

“My sisters would be laughing their asses off hearing you call me ‘modest,’” Brezan said.

“I’m quite serious,” Mikodez said. “Half of leadership is prancing around looking like you know what you’re doing, whether or not you actually do. The other half, well, that’s what allies and delegation to gifted subordinates are for. Might I make a recommendation while I’m at it?”

“I don’t think I can stop you.”

“One Colonel Kel Ragath appears to have survived the devastation at Scattered Needles and is still trying to get in contact with Cheris, without much luck,” Mikodez said. “I advise you to give him a call and promote him immediately, unless General Khiruev has a crushing objection.”

“I’ll check with her,” Brezan said automatically, “although I doubt she will. Why, what is the colonel up to these days?” Like a lot of Kel, he’d heard of Ragath, who’d enjoyed a well-regarded career only to run into a ceiling at his present rank because of his secondary specialty in history. Ragath’s scathingly critical papers about Kel policy hadn’t earned him many friends in high places.

Mikodez smiled. “He raised a military force of his own in a system in the Stabglass March and is currently mucking about with gory logistical details. If you approach him and drop Cheris’s name hintingly, I think you’ll find him willing to work with you.”

“Which is good,” Brezan said, dismayed all over again by the sheer scope of the task before him, “because even the people who appear to be willing to work with me might be spies, or saboteurs, or sycophants.”

“Ah,” Mikodez said, and his smile turned sad. “You’re learning already.”

“I have anger management issues,” Brezan said, remembering the old notations in his profile, “but I’m not stupid.”

“Well,” Mikodez said, “that’s a start. My instinct is to ferret you away in the Citadel of Eyes behind my security. Unfortunately, this one time, my instinct is wrong. You’re going to be a public figure, High General, and that means going where the public can see you. This will also make you one hell of a target, so I’m going to assign you some of my security.”

“I suppose your security will quietly disappear me if I get too many ideas of my own,” Brezan said.

“Don’t be crass,” Mikodez said. “I already have enough public relations problems without being seen to be assassinating more people. As it stands, I’m getting blamed for all sorts of petty theft that my agents had nothing to do with. Which is a crying shame, because my budget could use any revenue streams that happen to be lying about.”

“And you wonder why the Shuos have such a terrible reputation,” Brezan said sardonically.

“I’m going to have the reputation no matter what,” Mikodez said. “I might as well do something useful with it. You, now—people know so much less about you. You only get one chance to make a first impression, you know. Don’t waste it.”

ON A MOON called Tefos in a distant system, Servitor Hemiola, a snakeform, was the first to notice that the hexarch had arrived. Its two comrades avoided overseeing the base’s control room because they considered it one of the more boring duties. Hemiola had volunteered because it liked using the time to make videos. The other two servitors who made up their tiny enclave tolerated this because they had their own guilty hobbies.

During this particular occasion, Hemiola was rewatching the seventeenth episode of A Rose in Three Revolutions , its favorite drama. A Rose in Three Revolutions supposedly had six seasons of twenty-four episodes each, except it had still been airing when the hexarch transported the servitors to Tefos. Unfortunately, the hexarch had not seen fit to bring the last two seasons with him on his subsequent visits. Hemiola amused itself sometimes by cutting up and altering the existing episodes and making miniature videos to music of its own devising so it could speculate on how the whole thing ended. Too bad it couldn’t leave Tefos so it could find and watch the rest.