Jedao (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deuceoftears) wrote2023-04-16 01:51 am
deuceoftears) wrote2023-04-16 01:51 am
Entry tags:
Memento Youri - Awakening
YOU WAKE UP in a luxuriously appointed suite, all ink painting scrolls and curious asymmetrical chairs and translucent tables. The last thing you remembered was being sprawled on a bed in a much smaller room wrestling your friend Ruo for a game controller. This had better not be a hotel, you thought, wondering if Ruo had persuaded you to do something regrettable again. You couldn’t afford anything like this.
Not trusting the situation, you ducked down behind the chair you’d found yourself in, and listened. No sound. After a while, you peered around, careful to stay silent. There was a closed door, and across from it, an open entrance to another room. No windows or viewports, unless they were concealed.
Ruo, you thought, if this is another one of your pranks—
A hint of breeze passed through the suite, and you shivered. You thought to look down. They’d done something to your clothes. You were wearing a thin, off-white tunic and undershorts. Maybe someone from Shuos Academy was hazing you?
No one had shot at you yet, so you risked standing up. Paradoxically, that made you warier. You know what to do about bullets and fire and smoke.
That bothered you the more you thought about it. The most immediate memory told you that you’d last been a first-year in academy, but you were sure that even the Shuos didn’t put first-years into live-fire exercises. How did you know this stuff, anyway?
You searched the first room, then grew bolder and tried the rest of the suite. There were six rooms, not seven, which made you frown. Surely the heptarchate still insisted on sevens for everything? Lots of objets d’art, too; no people to question. And no sign of Ruo.
A dresser occupied one wall of the bedroom, as luxurious as the rest of the furniture. Only the top drawer contained anything. Unfortunately, the anything was a Kel uniform. At least, you presumed it was a Kel uniform, black with gold braid, the correct colors. You searched for pins or medals, turned the pockets inside out, anything to tell you more about the uniform’s owner. No luck, although the double bands on the cuffs indicated that it belonged to a high officer. The style looked odd, too. The left panel of the coat wrapped around, and instead of buttons it had toggles, with hook-and-eye fasteners to keep the whole affair closed.
Next to the uniform, tucked in a corner, rested a pair of silken black half-gloves. That suggested the uniform belonged to someone seconded to the Kel, rather than an actual Kel soldier.
“All right,” you said, trying to ignore the sick feeling in your stomach, “this isn’t funny anymore. You can come out now, Ruo.”
No response.
You considered the possibility that someone had forgotten their uniform by accident. You picked up the shirt and unfolded it again. Then the pants. They looked like they would fit you rather well—wait a second. You narrowed your eyes at your arms, then your legs, then considered your torso. When had you put on all this muscle? Not that you were complaining, exactly, but the last you’d checked you’d been rather slimmer.
You were starting to think that Ruo didn’t have anything to do with this after all. At least, you couldn’t think of any reason Ruo would pass up an overnight muscle-enhancing treatment. In that case, what the fuck was going on?
Even if the uniform would fit you, you knew better than to put it on. Too bad you didn’t have other clothes. But being shot for impersonating an officer didn’t sound fun.
The door opened.
Ruo? you thought; but no.
A man came in, pale and tall and extraordinarily beautiful. His amber-flecked eyes with their smoky lashes were emphasized by silver-dark eyeshadow. While the man wore Nirai black-and-silver, you had never imagined one in clothes with such decadent ruffles, to say nothing of the lace that drowned his wrists.
your new theory involved Nirai experimentation that you didn’t recall agreeing to. Of course, in the heptarchate they didn’t need to ask your permission. You backed up two steps.
The Nirai’s gaze swept right to your hands, which were in plain sight and not doing anything threatening. The Nirai’s eyebrows shot up. “I hate to break it to you,” he said, ignoring your hostile body language, “but you’re going to start panics going around with naked hands.” He had a low, cultured voice, as beautiful as the rest of him. “I advise you to put on the gloves, although those will start panics, too. Still, it’s the better of two bad alternatives. And you ought to get dressed.”
Was the man a guest instructor? And if so, why wasn’t he wearing insignia to indicate it? “Excuse me,” you said. “I’d rather not go around in Kel drag. If there are civilian clothes somewhere, I’ll put those on instead. Who are you, anyway?”
“My name’s Nirai Kujen,” the man said. He strode forward until he’d backed you into a corner. “Tell me your name.”
That seemed harmless enough. “Garach Jedao Shkan.”
Kujen frowned. “Interesting... that far back, hmm? Well, it’s close enough for my purposes. Do you know why you’re here?”
“Look,” you said, starting to be more irritated than frightened, “who are you and what is your authority anyway?” Granted that you was only a Shuos cadet, but even a cadet should be afforded some small protection from interference by random members of other factions.
Kujen laughed softly. “Look at my shadow and tell me what you see.”
You had taken it for an ordinary shadow. As you examined it more closely, though, you saw that it was made of the shapes of fluttering captive moths. The longer you stared at it, the more you saw the darkness giving way to a vast crevasse of gears and cams and silver chrysalises from which more moths flew free. You raised your head and waited for an answer to the question you couldn’t figure out how to formulate.
“Yes,” Kujen said. “I’m the Nirai hexarch.”
You revised your speech mode to the most formal one. “Hexarch? Not heptarch?” The name didn’t sound familiar. You scrabbled in your memory for the names of any of the heptarchs and could only remember Khiaz, who led the Shuos. What kind of experiments had they been running on you anyway to mess up your knowledge of basics?
“It’s complicated. Anyway, you’re here to lead an army.”
That made even less sense. The Nirai faction dealt in technology, including weapons, but they weren’t soldiers; that was the realm of the Kel. Besides which—“I’m not a soldier,” you said. Not yet, anyway. Besides which, didn’t you have to serve for years and years to get from grunt to general?
Except you had a soldier’s body, and you’d listened for gunfire first thing.
Kujen’s mouth quirked at whatever he saw on your face. “A real army,” Kujen said, “not a simulated one. Potentially against the hexarchate’s best generals.”
You were going to have to start asking questions and hope that some of the answers started making sense. “‘Hexarchate’?” you asked. “Which faction blew up?”
“The Liozh, if you must know. The situation grew complicated very rapidly. The two major successor states are the Protectorate, which styles itself the heir to the old hexarchate, and the Compact, which was founded by radicals. Plus any number of independent systems trying to avoid getting swallowed by them or by foreign powers. I’ll show you the map, if you like. You’re to conquer the pieces so we can put the realm back together.”
You stared Kujen down, difficult because of the height difference, to say nothing of the distractingly pretty eyes. You were already certain that Kujen had to be leaving out great swathes of detail. “How in the name of fox and hound did all of that happen?”
“You don’t remember?” A hint of dismay touched Kujen’s voice.
“Clearly not,” you said, and felt the cold plunge of fear.
“I am in urgent need of a general,” Kujen said. “You’re available.”
Uh-oh. “Do you want to lose, Nirai-zho?” you said. “I’m not a general.” So why had you gone for cover in this decidedly unthreatening setting? Admittedly, you imagined most generals spent time on their asses far from the front lines. “Playing games doesn’t prepare you to wage war.”
This must be a test for rabid megalomania.
“Well, get dressed anyway, and I’ll show you what you’re up against,” Kujen said. “And use my name. No one uses that honorific anymore.”
You stared at him in desperation, wondering what to do. It was taboo to wear another faction’s colors. Spies did it in the line of duty, but that didn’t make it a good idea for you. On the other hand, defying a heptarch—hexarch—also struck you as a lousy idea.
“You earned the right to wear that uniform,” Kujen said. “Do it.”
Time to counterattack. “What’s a Nirai doing messing around with military affairs anyway?” you demanded. Maybe that would distract Kujen from the uniform.
“I’m the last legitimate hexarch standing,” Kujen said. “The Protectorate is under the influence of an upstart Kel. The Compact, despite their pretensions of democracy, is under the sway of another upstart Kel. As I said, it’s complicated. And I’m sorry to inform you that the Shuos hexarch turned traitor and joined the Compact.”
As he spoke, Kujen retrieved the uniform and held it out to you. “Come on,” he said coaxingly. “Unless you really mean to go around half-naked.”
Reluctantly, you took the clothes and pulled them on. Then you stared at Kujen some more.
“I have some battle transcripts so you’ll have an idea of what to expect.”
“Are you sure you can’t scare up a competent general?” you said. “Or a mercenary commander?” Mercenaries had been illegal in the heptarchate, but maybe the regulations had changed. Or Kujen, being a hexarch, could bend the rules. Companies sometimes operated around the borders. “I don’t—” You looked helplessly down at your hands. “Whatever you think I am, I can’t do this. My memories seem to be muddled. If you really, truly need a general, you ought to get one who knows what they’re doing.”
Kujen smiled crookedly. “I have strong reason to believe that you’re the only one who can help me.”
That was all very well in the dramas, but a bad sign when people talked to you like that in real life. You had a brief, disorienting memory of sitting in a room watching one with—an oval-faced Kel woman and several robots? Except you didn’t seem to have a body, and you could see in all directions at once, which made no sense because you were pretty sure you only came with the standard-issue two eyes in front. Just as quickly as it had come, the memory dissipated.
Still, he might as well glean what information he could. “All right, Nir—Kujen, show me.”
Kujen drew you into a sitting room and snagged a slate off one of the tables. Then he played back a sequence of battles in three dimensions, which took some time. The first were land battles on a variety of maps, including an ambitious amphibious assault. The later ones occurred in space, some involving large swarms. One side was represented by blue, the other by red. It became obvious that Red was the same commander each time, and was the adversary Kujen should worry about: aggressive, devious, and good at dragging the opponent about by the heels.
“Well?” Kujen said.
“We’re fighting Red, right?”
Why did Kujen’s mouth twist like that? “Yes,” he said, without elaborating.
“We’re fucked,” you said. “I don’t know if you can tell, but you have to have noticed that in that last battle, Red gouged Blue into pieces while outnumbered eight to one. I have a better idea. This enemy you’re so worried about? Invest in some good assassins.” There you went, sounding like a stereotypical Shuos, but it was good advice, dammit. “Unless you’re going to tell me that everyone in Red’s chain of succession is also that good.”
“No, that’s unlikely.”
“So what’s wrong with assassins? Is this one of those situations where that would touch off a general war we’re too broke to fight?”
Kujen shook his head. “We need to take and hold territory. Besides, I know you’re up to fighting Red because you’re also Red. That eight-to-one thing was the Battle of Candle Arc, by the way. Very famous. The Kel put it in all their textbooks.”
Your marrow froze. The fuck? How could you possibly be Red, let alone “also Red,” whatever that meant? Or, for that matter, old enough to have carried out a feat that had gotten into textbooks? Were the Kel in the habit of handing their swarms over to teenagers?
“All right,” you said, “you win. I don’t have any useful arguments against the insane. If this is a training exercise, you can fail me on it.” Which was going to suck, because you’d been having difficulty with your math classes. “I will have to work hard for the rest of the term to make up for it, but I’m not afraid of hard work.”
Kujen looked fascinated. “I need to clear something up for you. You really think you’re a cadet?”
You were silent.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” you said reluctantly, even though you was starting to wonder.
“Take off your shirt.”
You hesitated, then fumbled with the closures.
Kujen rolled his eyes. “I won’t look if it makes you feel better, although it’s not as if it’s anything I haven’t seen before.” He sauntered to the other side of the room, then pointedly turned his back.
You resisted the urge to glare at Kujen’s shoulder blades. Kujen sighed theatrically. You took off the tunic and folded it over you arm, then stood there uncertainly.
“Shirt too,” Kujen said.
You bit back a retort and settled the tunic over the back of a chair. After you’d yanked the shirt over your head, you froze. You’d thought the older physique was bad enough. Beyond that, your torso was riddled with scars. Most of them looked dreadful. Hell, one of your nipples had been completely obliterated. You had no idea where the scars had come from. You prodded one. It didn’t hurt. You almost wished it did.
“Even the Shuos don’t do that to their cadets,” Kujen said. “Grenade took off half your face once, back when you were a tactical group commander. The surgeons did an excellent reconstruction. You can’t even tell unless you do a deep scan at the bone level. Anyway, do you believe me now when I tell you you’re a soldier?”
You put your clothes back on. “How many years?” Get the facts. Panic later.
“You’re forty-four.”
Shit. “I had a friend...” you said, then trailed off because you weren't sure where you was going with the thought. Why would the hexarch keep track of another random Shuos cadet, after all? Ruo probably had gone off to make a name for himself as a celebrated assassin. And at this point Ruo would be twenty-seven years older.
Interesting. You used to write down all your arithmetic, and you’d just done that in his head. But Kujen had resumed talking, so you filed away the discrepancy to puzzle over later.
“Your abilities ought to be intact,” Kujen went on, “but we’re going to have to catch you up on the holes in your declarative memory.”
“Yes, about that,” you said. “Is there a cure? Because it’s very disturbing.”
“Your opponent made off with most of your memories,” Kujen said. “That’s why she’s potentially your worst matchup, and why we have to be careful. I retrieved the rest, but owing to circumstances there was some degradation. I’m sorry.”
“Are you telling me I was attacked by a memory vampire?” you said incredulously.
Kujen snorted. “You have a way with words sometimes... Exotic technology, and an experimental procedure besides. We could try to duplicate the circumstances if we capture her, but odds are it would drive you crazy.”
“Why didn’t it drive this memory vampire crazy?”
“Who says it didn’t?” Kujen sighed. “I don’t suppose you remember any of those Andan jokes?”
The bizarreness of this question made your mind go blank. You couldn’t think of any jokes whatsoever, and besides, the entire situation struck you as decidedly unfunny.
“You used to have the most extraordinary collection of filthy Andan jokes,” Kujen said wistfully.
“You could tell them to me and I could tell them back to you.”
“No,” Kujen said, “it wouldn’t be the same.”
That didn’t make you feel better, so you moved on to the next question. “Why the Kel?”
“You had an excellent career seconded to the Kel,” Kujen said. “They promoted the hell out of you.”
“Why can’t you hire someone who doesn’t have defective memories?”
“You’ve never lost a battle,” Kujen said. “Plus, outnumbered eight to one. Crushing victory. Even I could tell.” His voice was lightly teasing.
You closed you eyes. Thanks for the pressure. “There’s no guarantee I could do that again.” More like no way ever.
“You could see how it was done in the playback, couldn’t you?”
Did Kujen have no idea? “That’s on a tidy spiderfucking three-dimensional diagram where you can see all the units arrayed neatly and everything has labels and there are helpful colored arrows for the vectors. As opposed to being there when somebody’s warmoth has an inconvenient drive failure while it’s sitting in a key pivot because the mechanics at the last layover half-assed the repairs, and you can’t read half the hostile formants on scan because the enemy has a fancy new jammer, and one of your brilliant hothead commanders decides the best thing she can do with her tactical group is creatively misinterpret her orders and—”
You shut up. You had no idea where the rant had come from, just like the scars. You couldn’t tell if any of those things had happened or if you was being hypothetical. It was like listening to a stranger who had you voice and who talked exactly like you did. And who knew a lot more about warfare.
Who the hell am I? Am I a clone? You had the impression you couldn’t give clones even dubious memories of battles, but then, you already had amnesia. How were you supposed to tell?
Kujen caught your arm and steered you to a chair. “Sit,” he said, and tugged gently.
You sank into the chair. Any more of this and your knees would dissolve.
“I’m not a military practitioner,” Kujen said. “But I have experience dealing with the military, and the Kel think highly of your ability. In this matter I defer to their judgment.”
“Am I some kind of expendable copy?”
“You’re not expendable,” Kujen said unhelpfully.
He hadn’t denied it. “Fine,” you said. “What resources do we have?” With any luck this question would generate a concrete answer and not alarming creations like memory vampires. You would have to investigate the matter of clones on your own time, since Kujen was being closemouthed.
“The good news is that you will be pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of your warmoths,” Kujen said.
You magined so, because all you knew about warmoth statistics came from video games. It didn’t seem politic to mention that, however.
“Also good is that we have a supply of loyal Kel for those moths. The bad news is numbers. No matter what we do, we’re massively outnumbered by any one of our enemies.”
“We’re talking about how many moths and crew on our side?” “We have 108 bannermoths,” Kujen said, “with crew of approximately 450 each. You also have two infantry regiments that you can distribute among the bannermoths and the accompanying boxmoth transports as you see fit. I would have obtained more moth Kel for you if that had been an option.”
“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,” you said, “so I can visualize the situation.” Pretend it’s a video game, you thought, despite your 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 you 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?” you 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,” you 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. you 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.”
You 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’?” you said. “What’s that?”
“They vote on everything from their leaders to their laws,” Kujen said.
You mulled that over. “It sounds dreadfully impractical,” you said, “but all right. What about your Kel? Who do they support?”
“I can guarantee their loyalty.”
“Oh?” you 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. You didn’t like that either, but you’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 you. “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? you wondered. You 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,” you said. Avoiding her sounded like good sense. If she was more you than you were, and unstable on top of it, she might be able to repeat the eight-to-one trick. You were betting that, as impressive as 108 bannermoths sounded, you 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 you 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. You were impressed that the lace at his wrists didn’t get in the way.
“It’s triplets?” you 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,” you 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?” you 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.”
You figured it out. “So you can fire it from our side of the border into theirs.”
“Yes.”
“I hope there are still conventional weapons,” you 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, you thought. You’d just said “I,” as if you 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. You 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. You gestured at the slate. Kujen handed it over so he could run his own queries. It took you a few moments to work out the interface, but after a while you were able to call up some explanatory diagrams.
At first the numbers didn’t mean much. With some thought, however, you could see the shearmoth’s capabilities in your head; you could visualize the maneuvers it was capable of, how it would dance at his command.
“How many of these do you have?” you asked, although you had already guessed the answer.
“Just the one,” Kujen said with what you interpreted as real regret. “You don’t know what I had to do to source the materials needed to grow the mothdrive components. You’ll have to keep in mind that the shearmoth’s mothdrive and maneuver drives have better power to mass ratios than your bannermoths do, even if it’s larger. Don’t outrun them.”
Obligingly, you looked up the profiles for both drives and was impressed by the differences. You ran some computations to compare the power draw over a spread of different accelerations. After a while you became aware of Kujen’s narrowed eyes. “Did I get something wrong?” you asked.
“No,” Kujen said after a subtle pause. “You homed right in on the intersection of those curves.”
You had done that part in your head. Curious, but if the past years had magically fixed that part of your brain, you weren't going to say no to that either. “It had to be there somewhere,” you said. “If you assume the curves are approximated by—” You demonstrated.
“So I see,” Kujen said in a voice so dry that you were reminded that you were lecturing the Nirai hexarch on mathematics elementary enough that he had probably figured it out as a small child. “Well, while the Kel have always preferred to throw you at strategic problems, it won’t hurt to round out your education. Considering the number of calendrical heresies flourishing out there, it can only help to develop your mathematical skills.”
“I would like that,” you said, and were rewarded by Kujen’s half-laugh, half-smile.
“In the meantime,” Kujen said, “let’s deal with the practicalities. Set your uniform insignia. I had thought you’d remember, but since you don’t—the Kel like everything to be done according to protocol.”
“Set? Shouldn’t there be pins for this stuff?”
“I really wish I’d had a better way to check what you do and don’t remember,” Kujen muttered. “The uniform will respond to your voice. Just tell it your name and rank and it will read the rest from your profile.”
You did, and were surprised by the general’s wings above the Shuos eye, two things you didn’t remember earning. A full general, at that. Would that have made Ruo envious?
“Even if I’m forty-four,” you said, incredulous and not a little regretful about the lost years, “that’s rather young.” The idea of appearing before the Kel in this uniform was daunting enough. Appearing before them while claiming to be a general—their general—seemed like it would invite them to put holes in you. You heard they had good aim.
“The Kel respect rank,” Kujen said. “They’ll respect yours.”
Will they now, you thought. Only one way to find out. “These are real Kel,” he said, “serving on real moths, fighting a real war. And you’ve decided that for this to work, I have to be a real general for you.”
“That sums it up, yes.”
A bad situation. Nevertheless, you needed to stay alive long enough to figure out how to tilt the odds not only in you favor, but in favor of the Kel who would be coming into you care. “I don’t care how hacked up this hept—hexarchate of yours has become,” you said, “or how good this shearmoth is. A swarm of 108 moths, however impressive, doesn’t leave us room for error. The only way this is possible is if I get good fast and we fight dirty.”
On impulse, you saluted Kujen. The motion came disturbingly naturally. You said, in formal Kel fashion, “I’m your gun.” You felt he ought to commemorate the occasion somehow, even if the occasion was not remotely sane.
Kujen’s eyes lit. “I knew you’d come back to me,” he said.
Not trusting the situation, you ducked down behind the chair you’d found yourself in, and listened. No sound. After a while, you peered around, careful to stay silent. There was a closed door, and across from it, an open entrance to another room. No windows or viewports, unless they were concealed.
Ruo, you thought, if this is another one of your pranks—
A hint of breeze passed through the suite, and you shivered. You thought to look down. They’d done something to your clothes. You were wearing a thin, off-white tunic and undershorts. Maybe someone from Shuos Academy was hazing you?
No one had shot at you yet, so you risked standing up. Paradoxically, that made you warier. You know what to do about bullets and fire and smoke.
That bothered you the more you thought about it. The most immediate memory told you that you’d last been a first-year in academy, but you were sure that even the Shuos didn’t put first-years into live-fire exercises. How did you know this stuff, anyway?
You searched the first room, then grew bolder and tried the rest of the suite. There were six rooms, not seven, which made you frown. Surely the heptarchate still insisted on sevens for everything? Lots of objets d’art, too; no people to question. And no sign of Ruo.
A dresser occupied one wall of the bedroom, as luxurious as the rest of the furniture. Only the top drawer contained anything. Unfortunately, the anything was a Kel uniform. At least, you presumed it was a Kel uniform, black with gold braid, the correct colors. You searched for pins or medals, turned the pockets inside out, anything to tell you more about the uniform’s owner. No luck, although the double bands on the cuffs indicated that it belonged to a high officer. The style looked odd, too. The left panel of the coat wrapped around, and instead of buttons it had toggles, with hook-and-eye fasteners to keep the whole affair closed.
Next to the uniform, tucked in a corner, rested a pair of silken black half-gloves. That suggested the uniform belonged to someone seconded to the Kel, rather than an actual Kel soldier.
“All right,” you said, trying to ignore the sick feeling in your stomach, “this isn’t funny anymore. You can come out now, Ruo.”
No response.
You considered the possibility that someone had forgotten their uniform by accident. You picked up the shirt and unfolded it again. Then the pants. They looked like they would fit you rather well—wait a second. You narrowed your eyes at your arms, then your legs, then considered your torso. When had you put on all this muscle? Not that you were complaining, exactly, but the last you’d checked you’d been rather slimmer.
You were starting to think that Ruo didn’t have anything to do with this after all. At least, you couldn’t think of any reason Ruo would pass up an overnight muscle-enhancing treatment. In that case, what the fuck was going on?
Even if the uniform would fit you, you knew better than to put it on. Too bad you didn’t have other clothes. But being shot for impersonating an officer didn’t sound fun.
The door opened.
Ruo? you thought; but no.
A man came in, pale and tall and extraordinarily beautiful. His amber-flecked eyes with their smoky lashes were emphasized by silver-dark eyeshadow. While the man wore Nirai black-and-silver, you had never imagined one in clothes with such decadent ruffles, to say nothing of the lace that drowned his wrists.
your new theory involved Nirai experimentation that you didn’t recall agreeing to. Of course, in the heptarchate they didn’t need to ask your permission. You backed up two steps.
The Nirai’s gaze swept right to your hands, which were in plain sight and not doing anything threatening. The Nirai’s eyebrows shot up. “I hate to break it to you,” he said, ignoring your hostile body language, “but you’re going to start panics going around with naked hands.” He had a low, cultured voice, as beautiful as the rest of him. “I advise you to put on the gloves, although those will start panics, too. Still, it’s the better of two bad alternatives. And you ought to get dressed.”
Was the man a guest instructor? And if so, why wasn’t he wearing insignia to indicate it? “Excuse me,” you said. “I’d rather not go around in Kel drag. If there are civilian clothes somewhere, I’ll put those on instead. Who are you, anyway?”
“My name’s Nirai Kujen,” the man said. He strode forward until he’d backed you into a corner. “Tell me your name.”
That seemed harmless enough. “Garach Jedao Shkan.”
Kujen frowned. “Interesting... that far back, hmm? Well, it’s close enough for my purposes. Do you know why you’re here?”
“Look,” you said, starting to be more irritated than frightened, “who are you and what is your authority anyway?” Granted that you was only a Shuos cadet, but even a cadet should be afforded some small protection from interference by random members of other factions.
Kujen laughed softly. “Look at my shadow and tell me what you see.”
You had taken it for an ordinary shadow. As you examined it more closely, though, you saw that it was made of the shapes of fluttering captive moths. The longer you stared at it, the more you saw the darkness giving way to a vast crevasse of gears and cams and silver chrysalises from which more moths flew free. You raised your head and waited for an answer to the question you couldn’t figure out how to formulate.
“Yes,” Kujen said. “I’m the Nirai hexarch.”
You revised your speech mode to the most formal one. “Hexarch? Not heptarch?” The name didn’t sound familiar. You scrabbled in your memory for the names of any of the heptarchs and could only remember Khiaz, who led the Shuos. What kind of experiments had they been running on you anyway to mess up your knowledge of basics?
“It’s complicated. Anyway, you’re here to lead an army.”
That made even less sense. The Nirai faction dealt in technology, including weapons, but they weren’t soldiers; that was the realm of the Kel. Besides which—“I’m not a soldier,” you said. Not yet, anyway. Besides which, didn’t you have to serve for years and years to get from grunt to general?
Except you had a soldier’s body, and you’d listened for gunfire first thing.
Kujen’s mouth quirked at whatever he saw on your face. “A real army,” Kujen said, “not a simulated one. Potentially against the hexarchate’s best generals.”
You were going to have to start asking questions and hope that some of the answers started making sense. “‘Hexarchate’?” you asked. “Which faction blew up?”
“The Liozh, if you must know. The situation grew complicated very rapidly. The two major successor states are the Protectorate, which styles itself the heir to the old hexarchate, and the Compact, which was founded by radicals. Plus any number of independent systems trying to avoid getting swallowed by them or by foreign powers. I’ll show you the map, if you like. You’re to conquer the pieces so we can put the realm back together.”
You stared Kujen down, difficult because of the height difference, to say nothing of the distractingly pretty eyes. You were already certain that Kujen had to be leaving out great swathes of detail. “How in the name of fox and hound did all of that happen?”
“You don’t remember?” A hint of dismay touched Kujen’s voice.
“Clearly not,” you said, and felt the cold plunge of fear.
“I am in urgent need of a general,” Kujen said. “You’re available.”
Uh-oh. “Do you want to lose, Nirai-zho?” you said. “I’m not a general.” So why had you gone for cover in this decidedly unthreatening setting? Admittedly, you imagined most generals spent time on their asses far from the front lines. “Playing games doesn’t prepare you to wage war.”
This must be a test for rabid megalomania.
“Well, get dressed anyway, and I’ll show you what you’re up against,” Kujen said. “And use my name. No one uses that honorific anymore.”
You stared at him in desperation, wondering what to do. It was taboo to wear another faction’s colors. Spies did it in the line of duty, but that didn’t make it a good idea for you. On the other hand, defying a heptarch—hexarch—also struck you as a lousy idea.
“You earned the right to wear that uniform,” Kujen said. “Do it.”
Time to counterattack. “What’s a Nirai doing messing around with military affairs anyway?” you demanded. Maybe that would distract Kujen from the uniform.
“I’m the last legitimate hexarch standing,” Kujen said. “The Protectorate is under the influence of an upstart Kel. The Compact, despite their pretensions of democracy, is under the sway of another upstart Kel. As I said, it’s complicated. And I’m sorry to inform you that the Shuos hexarch turned traitor and joined the Compact.”
As he spoke, Kujen retrieved the uniform and held it out to you. “Come on,” he said coaxingly. “Unless you really mean to go around half-naked.”
Reluctantly, you took the clothes and pulled them on. Then you stared at Kujen some more.
“I have some battle transcripts so you’ll have an idea of what to expect.”
“Are you sure you can’t scare up a competent general?” you said. “Or a mercenary commander?” Mercenaries had been illegal in the heptarchate, but maybe the regulations had changed. Or Kujen, being a hexarch, could bend the rules. Companies sometimes operated around the borders. “I don’t—” You looked helplessly down at your hands. “Whatever you think I am, I can’t do this. My memories seem to be muddled. If you really, truly need a general, you ought to get one who knows what they’re doing.”
Kujen smiled crookedly. “I have strong reason to believe that you’re the only one who can help me.”
That was all very well in the dramas, but a bad sign when people talked to you like that in real life. You had a brief, disorienting memory of sitting in a room watching one with—an oval-faced Kel woman and several robots? Except you didn’t seem to have a body, and you could see in all directions at once, which made no sense because you were pretty sure you only came with the standard-issue two eyes in front. Just as quickly as it had come, the memory dissipated.
Still, he might as well glean what information he could. “All right, Nir—Kujen, show me.”
Kujen drew you into a sitting room and snagged a slate off one of the tables. Then he played back a sequence of battles in three dimensions, which took some time. The first were land battles on a variety of maps, including an ambitious amphibious assault. The later ones occurred in space, some involving large swarms. One side was represented by blue, the other by red. It became obvious that Red was the same commander each time, and was the adversary Kujen should worry about: aggressive, devious, and good at dragging the opponent about by the heels.
“Well?” Kujen said.
“We’re fighting Red, right?”
Why did Kujen’s mouth twist like that? “Yes,” he said, without elaborating.
“We’re fucked,” you said. “I don’t know if you can tell, but you have to have noticed that in that last battle, Red gouged Blue into pieces while outnumbered eight to one. I have a better idea. This enemy you’re so worried about? Invest in some good assassins.” There you went, sounding like a stereotypical Shuos, but it was good advice, dammit. “Unless you’re going to tell me that everyone in Red’s chain of succession is also that good.”
“No, that’s unlikely.”
“So what’s wrong with assassins? Is this one of those situations where that would touch off a general war we’re too broke to fight?”
Kujen shook his head. “We need to take and hold territory. Besides, I know you’re up to fighting Red because you’re also Red. That eight-to-one thing was the Battle of Candle Arc, by the way. Very famous. The Kel put it in all their textbooks.”
Your marrow froze. The fuck? How could you possibly be Red, let alone “also Red,” whatever that meant? Or, for that matter, old enough to have carried out a feat that had gotten into textbooks? Were the Kel in the habit of handing their swarms over to teenagers?
“All right,” you said, “you win. I don’t have any useful arguments against the insane. If this is a training exercise, you can fail me on it.” Which was going to suck, because you’d been having difficulty with your math classes. “I will have to work hard for the rest of the term to make up for it, but I’m not afraid of hard work.”
Kujen looked fascinated. “I need to clear something up for you. You really think you’re a cadet?”
You were silent.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” you said reluctantly, even though you was starting to wonder.
“Take off your shirt.”
You hesitated, then fumbled with the closures.
Kujen rolled his eyes. “I won’t look if it makes you feel better, although it’s not as if it’s anything I haven’t seen before.” He sauntered to the other side of the room, then pointedly turned his back.
You resisted the urge to glare at Kujen’s shoulder blades. Kujen sighed theatrically. You took off the tunic and folded it over you arm, then stood there uncertainly.
“Shirt too,” Kujen said.
You bit back a retort and settled the tunic over the back of a chair. After you’d yanked the shirt over your head, you froze. You’d thought the older physique was bad enough. Beyond that, your torso was riddled with scars. Most of them looked dreadful. Hell, one of your nipples had been completely obliterated. You had no idea where the scars had come from. You prodded one. It didn’t hurt. You almost wished it did.
“Even the Shuos don’t do that to their cadets,” Kujen said. “Grenade took off half your face once, back when you were a tactical group commander. The surgeons did an excellent reconstruction. You can’t even tell unless you do a deep scan at the bone level. Anyway, do you believe me now when I tell you you’re a soldier?”
You put your clothes back on. “How many years?” Get the facts. Panic later.
“You’re forty-four.”
Shit. “I had a friend...” you said, then trailed off because you weren't sure where you was going with the thought. Why would the hexarch keep track of another random Shuos cadet, after all? Ruo probably had gone off to make a name for himself as a celebrated assassin. And at this point Ruo would be twenty-seven years older.
Interesting. You used to write down all your arithmetic, and you’d just done that in his head. But Kujen had resumed talking, so you filed away the discrepancy to puzzle over later.
“Your abilities ought to be intact,” Kujen went on, “but we’re going to have to catch you up on the holes in your declarative memory.”
“Yes, about that,” you said. “Is there a cure? Because it’s very disturbing.”
“Your opponent made off with most of your memories,” Kujen said. “That’s why she’s potentially your worst matchup, and why we have to be careful. I retrieved the rest, but owing to circumstances there was some degradation. I’m sorry.”
“Are you telling me I was attacked by a memory vampire?” you said incredulously.
Kujen snorted. “You have a way with words sometimes... Exotic technology, and an experimental procedure besides. We could try to duplicate the circumstances if we capture her, but odds are it would drive you crazy.”
“Why didn’t it drive this memory vampire crazy?”
“Who says it didn’t?” Kujen sighed. “I don’t suppose you remember any of those Andan jokes?”
The bizarreness of this question made your mind go blank. You couldn’t think of any jokes whatsoever, and besides, the entire situation struck you as decidedly unfunny.
“You used to have the most extraordinary collection of filthy Andan jokes,” Kujen said wistfully.
“You could tell them to me and I could tell them back to you.”
“No,” Kujen said, “it wouldn’t be the same.”
That didn’t make you feel better, so you moved on to the next question. “Why the Kel?”
“You had an excellent career seconded to the Kel,” Kujen said. “They promoted the hell out of you.”
“Why can’t you hire someone who doesn’t have defective memories?”
“You’ve never lost a battle,” Kujen said. “Plus, outnumbered eight to one. Crushing victory. Even I could tell.” His voice was lightly teasing.
You closed you eyes. Thanks for the pressure. “There’s no guarantee I could do that again.” More like no way ever.
“You could see how it was done in the playback, couldn’t you?”
Did Kujen have no idea? “That’s on a tidy spiderfucking three-dimensional diagram where you can see all the units arrayed neatly and everything has labels and there are helpful colored arrows for the vectors. As opposed to being there when somebody’s warmoth has an inconvenient drive failure while it’s sitting in a key pivot because the mechanics at the last layover half-assed the repairs, and you can’t read half the hostile formants on scan because the enemy has a fancy new jammer, and one of your brilliant hothead commanders decides the best thing she can do with her tactical group is creatively misinterpret her orders and—”
You shut up. You had no idea where the rant had come from, just like the scars. You couldn’t tell if any of those things had happened or if you was being hypothetical. It was like listening to a stranger who had you voice and who talked exactly like you did. And who knew a lot more about warfare.
Who the hell am I? Am I a clone? You had the impression you couldn’t give clones even dubious memories of battles, but then, you already had amnesia. How were you supposed to tell?
Kujen caught your arm and steered you to a chair. “Sit,” he said, and tugged gently.
You sank into the chair. Any more of this and your knees would dissolve.
“I’m not a military practitioner,” Kujen said. “But I have experience dealing with the military, and the Kel think highly of your ability. In this matter I defer to their judgment.”
“Am I some kind of expendable copy?”
“You’re not expendable,” Kujen said unhelpfully.
He hadn’t denied it. “Fine,” you said. “What resources do we have?” With any luck this question would generate a concrete answer and not alarming creations like memory vampires. You would have to investigate the matter of clones on your own time, since Kujen was being closemouthed.
“The good news is that you will be pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of your warmoths,” Kujen said.
You magined so, because all you knew about warmoth statistics came from video games. It didn’t seem politic to mention that, however.
“Also good is that we have a supply of loyal Kel for those moths. The bad news is numbers. No matter what we do, we’re massively outnumbered by any one of our enemies.”
“We’re talking about how many moths and crew on our side?” “We have 108 bannermoths,” Kujen said, “with crew of approximately 450 each. You also have two infantry regiments that you can distribute among the bannermoths and the accompanying boxmoth transports as you see fit. I would have obtained more moth Kel for you if that had been an option.”
“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,” you said, “so I can visualize the situation.” Pretend it’s a video game, you thought, despite your 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 you 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?” you 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,” you 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. you 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.”
You 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’?” you said. “What’s that?”
“They vote on everything from their leaders to their laws,” Kujen said.
You mulled that over. “It sounds dreadfully impractical,” you said, “but all right. What about your Kel? Who do they support?”
“I can guarantee their loyalty.”
“Oh?” you 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. You didn’t like that either, but you’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 you. “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? you wondered. You 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,” you said. Avoiding her sounded like good sense. If she was more you than you were, and unstable on top of it, she might be able to repeat the eight-to-one trick. You were betting that, as impressive as 108 bannermoths sounded, you 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 you 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. You were impressed that the lace at his wrists didn’t get in the way.
“It’s triplets?” you 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,” you 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?” you 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.”
You figured it out. “So you can fire it from our side of the border into theirs.”
“Yes.”
“I hope there are still conventional weapons,” you 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, you thought. You’d just said “I,” as if you 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. You 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. You gestured at the slate. Kujen handed it over so he could run his own queries. It took you a few moments to work out the interface, but after a while you were able to call up some explanatory diagrams.
At first the numbers didn’t mean much. With some thought, however, you could see the shearmoth’s capabilities in your head; you could visualize the maneuvers it was capable of, how it would dance at his command.
“How many of these do you have?” you asked, although you had already guessed the answer.
“Just the one,” Kujen said with what you interpreted as real regret. “You don’t know what I had to do to source the materials needed to grow the mothdrive components. You’ll have to keep in mind that the shearmoth’s mothdrive and maneuver drives have better power to mass ratios than your bannermoths do, even if it’s larger. Don’t outrun them.”
Obligingly, you looked up the profiles for both drives and was impressed by the differences. You ran some computations to compare the power draw over a spread of different accelerations. After a while you became aware of Kujen’s narrowed eyes. “Did I get something wrong?” you asked.
“No,” Kujen said after a subtle pause. “You homed right in on the intersection of those curves.”
You had done that part in your head. Curious, but if the past years had magically fixed that part of your brain, you weren't going to say no to that either. “It had to be there somewhere,” you said. “If you assume the curves are approximated by—” You demonstrated.
“So I see,” Kujen said in a voice so dry that you were reminded that you were lecturing the Nirai hexarch on mathematics elementary enough that he had probably figured it out as a small child. “Well, while the Kel have always preferred to throw you at strategic problems, it won’t hurt to round out your education. Considering the number of calendrical heresies flourishing out there, it can only help to develop your mathematical skills.”
“I would like that,” you said, and were rewarded by Kujen’s half-laugh, half-smile.
“In the meantime,” Kujen said, “let’s deal with the practicalities. Set your uniform insignia. I had thought you’d remember, but since you don’t—the Kel like everything to be done according to protocol.”
“Set? Shouldn’t there be pins for this stuff?”
“I really wish I’d had a better way to check what you do and don’t remember,” Kujen muttered. “The uniform will respond to your voice. Just tell it your name and rank and it will read the rest from your profile.”
You did, and were surprised by the general’s wings above the Shuos eye, two things you didn’t remember earning. A full general, at that. Would that have made Ruo envious?
“Even if I’m forty-four,” you said, incredulous and not a little regretful about the lost years, “that’s rather young.” The idea of appearing before the Kel in this uniform was daunting enough. Appearing before them while claiming to be a general—their general—seemed like it would invite them to put holes in you. You heard they had good aim.
“The Kel respect rank,” Kujen said. “They’ll respect yours.”
Will they now, you thought. Only one way to find out. “These are real Kel,” he said, “serving on real moths, fighting a real war. And you’ve decided that for this to work, I have to be a real general for you.”
“That sums it up, yes.”
A bad situation. Nevertheless, you needed to stay alive long enough to figure out how to tilt the odds not only in you favor, but in favor of the Kel who would be coming into you care. “I don’t care how hacked up this hept—hexarchate of yours has become,” you said, “or how good this shearmoth is. A swarm of 108 moths, however impressive, doesn’t leave us room for error. The only way this is possible is if I get good fast and we fight dirty.”
On impulse, you saluted Kujen. The motion came disturbingly naturally. You said, in formal Kel fashion, “I’m your gun.” You felt he ought to commemorate the occasion somehow, even if the occasion was not remotely sane.
Kujen’s eyes lit. “I knew you’d come back to me,” he said.