Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  For the call, Miuzan had made a point of wearing her Kel uniform in full formal. The only reason Brezan’s uniform had more braid, to say nothing of the chains descending from one epaulet that jingled irritatingly whenever he moved, was because Emio had called in a fashion designer to do him up a whole new one for the purposes of impressing people. He doubted it was going to work on his sister of all people.

  “Hi, little brother,” Miuzan said, her voice hard. “Take my eyes off you for a second and this is what you get up to.”

  “Good to see you too,” Brezan said, determined to be polite. She’d addressed him in the high language, so he answered her in the same, although they’d grown up speaking one of the low languages. It wasn’t, in fact, entirely clear what etiquette called for. In military terms he outranked her; she was a colonel on General Kel Inesser’s staff, while Kel Command had vaulted him to the not exactly wanted position of high general in a desperation gambit. Of course, people had questioned his legitimacy as soon as he announced himself temporary head of state.

  Beyond that, Miuzan was older than he was by six years. She remembered overseeing the servitors changing his diapers. (Their three fathers had been paranoid about diaper-changing.) And she’d helped him with his homework when the oldest, Keryezan, was too busy to. So talking to her at a low formality level would just have been bizarre.

  “Brezan,” Miuzan said, brows drawing low, “just what in fire’s name do you think you’re doing?”

  He knew from the particular emphasis she gave his name that this conversation wouldn’t go well. The sane thing to do would be to hang up on her and go get some sleep the way Emio had told him to, because there was no way he’d be able to talk her around. But she was family, dammit, and he hadn’t seen her in person for years. He had to try.

  “Trying to put the hexarchate back together,” Brezan said. “Except better than before.”

  “‘Better’ my ass,” Miuzan said. “I’m trying to figure out any version of this story where my annoying little brother”—Thank you so much, Brezan thought—“didn’t go crashhawk and team up with the Immolation fucking Fox to become hexarch. You’re not helping me much.”

  Brezan successfully bit down his instinctive response, which was to say, But I haven’t declared myself hexarch. Among other things, while technically true, it didn’t address her anger. “Why,” he said, “because the old system was so great?”

  The moment the words left his mouth he knew he’d said a different wrong thing, not the right thing. Assuming there even was a right thing. His formation instinct might be broken, but Miuzan’s most assuredly was not. While not all Kel served with equal enthusiasm, he’d never had any doubts about Miuzan’s beliefs.

  Sure enough, Miuzan recoiled as though he’d sprouted a second head. “This is my fault, isn’t it,” she said.

  That took him by surprise.

  “I ragged on you too much when you were a kid,” she continued, “and it did things to your head. I should have realized—”

  She went on in this vein while Brezan gaped at her. “Miuzan,” he said at last, interrupting the stream of self-recriminations, “it has nothing to do with you.” Granted, he must be getting better at lying because this was not completely true. Half the reason he’d gone into the Kel in the first place was so he could live up to Miuzan. As much as she aggravated him, he’d looked up to her as a child. He wrestled with the uncomfortable awareness that maybe he did, in fact, like showing her up for once. “Miuzan.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe,” Brezan said, a safe, bland statement to launch from. “Will you at least let me tell you why I thought this was a good idea?”

  “Yes,” Miuzan said, diverted. “Make it good.”

  Nothing he said would be good enough to persuade her. But that wasn’t why he was going to try. All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture. He’d been one of them once, or liked to think he was. Those were the people he had to reach. He might as well start with the hardest audience of all.

  “Do you remember the first time you told me about the Day of Shallow Knives?” Brezan said. It had come around two days ago, high calendar. Naturally, it wasn’t observed anymore among his people.

  Brezan remembered that first time distinctly, although it was also accompanied by irrelevancies like his dislike of the feather-patterned wallpaper and the whining of a mosquito that the ecoscrubbers hadn’t been able to get rid of. His youngest father had stopped working on a commissioned painting and hurriedly rinsed his hands in a basin of water, although it didn’t do much for the ink stains further up his arms or daubed on his shirt. Brezan had been playing with a toy voidmoth and pretending it didn’t bother him that one of the wingtips had broken off. He’d had an awareness that the calendar was full of special days, but not why it mattered; had never thought to question it. As a child, why would he have?

  Miuzan was frowning at him as though she could already see where he was going to go with this line of thought. “Not really.”

  Oh.

  She added, “There are a lot of remembrances, Brezan. They all sort of blur together after a while. I show up and I do what the bulletins tell me to.”

  Brezan blinked, regrouped. He’d always thought of his sister as taking the remembrances very seriously. Certainly she and his oldest sister, Keryezan, had led him through the required meditations until he was old enough to manage for himself. He’d never questioned her sense of devotion.

  “There was a lot of blood,” Brezan said, thinking back to the video broadcast.

  The Vidona who’d led their local observance had worn the traditional robes of green lined with bronze, and bronze jewelry in the shape of stingray spines. Her knife, too, had had a bronze hilt, with an edge that winked brightly. Brezan had been fascinated by the deftness with which she used it to slice up her victim. The heretic hadn’t screamed only because his mouth had been sutured shut. This wasn’t the case for all remembrances, something that Brezan had learned rapidly.

  Miuzan’s face had that stony expression he knew so well. “They’re heretics, Brezan. Are you trying to argue for some kind of clemency? You know how much trouble they cause. Even if they weren’t all bad in themselves”—she said this as though the thought had just occurred to her—“we can’t allow calendrical rot.”

  “Yes,” Brezan said bleakly, “I used to think the same thing.” Or anyway, he’d thought it just enough to reconcile himself to it, which he imagined was the same thing from the luckless heretic’s viewpoint. Then he’d signed on to be a Kel like his oldest father, like Miuzan after that. He’d been both relieved and disappointed when he’d ended up in Personnel rather than as a field officer.

  “Well,” Miuzan said, with less condescension than usual, “I suppose you were only trying to do as you saw best in a chaotic situation.” She had never thought well of his ability, a fact she didn’t make any effort to hide. “But that’s not why I called.”

  “Really,” Brezan said. “Why, then?” His stomach knotted up. Stop that, he told himself. Given the impressive number of fires he was trying to put out all across the hexarchate, he didn’t need to borrow trouble.

  Miuzan leaned forward, eyes brightening, and he knew he was in for it. “General Inesser asked that I contact you.”

  That didn’t help the state of his stomach. General Inesser, the Kel’s senior field general. The only general who had been honored by having a cindermoth, one of the hexarchate’s six greatest warmoths, named after her personal emblem. Inesser, known for her courage and cleverness, to say nothing of a lineage that went back into some of the great Andan families. Normally that last fact wouldn’t have been an advantage. Unlike the Andan (because of them, even), the Kel had strong feelings about nepotism, largely negative, although that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. But by t
he time she reached her current rank, Inesser had developed a reputation for unswerving honor.

  Miuzan had landed a position on Inesser’s staff several years ago, quite a feat. It had also made her more insufferable than ever. He didn’t want her to take him seriously because he’d gone revolutionary, but since that was the world they lived in...

  “The general has my attention any time she wants it,” Brezan said, quite truthfully. Among other things, he doubted Inesser was contacting him because she wanted to throw her support to the regime he proposed. While he’d never met her, she also had a reputation for old-fashioned Kel conservatism of the kind he’d once aspired to even as it made his teeth ache. If Inesser was speaking to him through his sister, it meant that she was feeling him out for a proposal of her own.

  “That’s good to hear,” Miuzan said, although she eyed him as if she suspected sarcasm. For which he couldn’t blame her; their relationship had not been sarcasm-free, these past years. “She may have an offer for you.”

  “Do tell.”

  “The hexarchate needs a strong hand to hold it together after the broadcast of that heretical calendar,” Miuzan said. Brezan wondered if she realized that she was speaking just a little more loudly, a little more quickly, than usual. He wasn’t used to thinking of his sister as someone who could be swept up by fervor, even fervor in her general’s service. “General Inesser intends to be that person.”

  He’d thought as much. Inesser was going to be a formidable rival.

  “Don’t answer yet,” Miuzan said rapidly, responding to whatever she saw in his face. “The foreigners, not least the Hafn, don’t care about our internal divisions except as weaknesses they can exploit. The hexarchate needs a united Kel to hold them off and to enforce the calendar so that the stardrives can keep working. General Inesser is the best candidate for the job.”

  “You said calendar,” Brezan said, going directly for the part he cared most about. “By which you mean the high calendar, I presume.” The one that he and Cheris had blown up Kel Command to overthrow.

  “Of course,” Miuzan said, puzzled. “How could the Kel function otherwise?”

  How indeed. Brezan searched for a response. The Kel military depended on formation instinct to yank around its soldiers. As a crashhawk, Brezan’s own formation instinct was defective, something he’d been in denial of for the longest time. After all, you didn’t need formation instinct to obey orders. It just made doing so easier, if by “easier” you meant “unavoidable.”

  Cheris’s new calendar, which she’d broadcast throughout the hexarchate for the use of anyone who could make it stick, changed exotic effects so that they only affected those who wanted to be affected. It wasn’t hard to see how this would jeopardize Kel hierarchy. The Kel hadn’t always used formation instinct, but once instituted, they’d grown dependent on it.

  “There’s something else you should be aware of,” Miuzan said.

  Brezan’s stomach knotted up even more. Next time I get a personal call, Brezan thought, I’m going to take some anti-anxiety medications first.

  “I assume you’ve heard,” Miuzan said carefully, “but in case you haven’t, there are reports of difficulties with mothdrives. So far they correlate rather disturbingly with regions of calendrical rot. I can send you the databurst if you want it. Call it the general’s gift to you, for your contemplation. But this is all to say that we need to stabilize the hexarchate sooner rather than later, before all our defenses and intersystem trade shut down.”

  How had he missed this? Unless it had been buried in the piles of reports and dispatches that he struggled to make it through every day. Considering he hadn’t been doing the job for long, he was already impressively behind.

  “Let me guess,” Brezan said. While he was no engineer, he knew about the fundamentals of mothdrive technology. “The harnesses aren’t working properly anymore.”

  Obvious once she brought it up, really. Voidmoths were biological in origin, hatched at mothyards and then fitted with technological implants to make them suitable conveyances or weapons of war. Calendrical rot had always threatened the efficacy of the harnesses that controlled the mothdrives. Voidmoths were additionally fitted with invariant maneuver drives for a reason.

  Miuzan’s mouth twisted. “Surprised you didn’t see this coming, little brother.”

  “It’s been a busy few weeks,” Brezan said. He swallowed his pride and added, “You’re right, though. It’s inexcusable to lose sight of a detail this important.”

  “Well,” Miuzan said, “that’s settled.”

  Wait, how had she—“Excuse me,” Brezan said, tamping down on a flare of anger. “I haven’t agreed to anything. Tell General Inesser I appreciate her warning.” He did, sincerely. “But I can’t support her.”

  For once Miuzan was at a loss for words. Her nostrils flared, and she slitted her eyes at him for several long moments.

  “It’s simple,” Brezan said despite the stabbing in his heart. “If the general is bothering with me at all, it’s because she thinks I’m a threat. Maybe not much of a threat, but that means I have a chance. And I have to do this—not for myself, but for all the people who can be saved from the Vidona.”

  “You—” Miuzan breathed in, expelled it in an angry huff. “You’re putting your ego and a bunch of heretics before the safety of a lot of innocent people.”

  “Once upon a time, some of those heretics were ‘innocent people’ themselves,” Brezan shot back. “How many times have we seen it, Miuzan? Some group of people who’d been going about their lives for decades, longer even, and then overnight they’re the new heretics because the Vidona have come up with some new fiddly regulation just for the purpose of scaring up new victims? I don’t want to be a part of that anymore.”

  “All right.” Miuzan’s voice had gone dead soft, never a good sign. “I wasn’t going to say this to you, but you’re not leaving me much choice.”

  There’s always a choice, Brezan thought. Still, he might as well let her have her say. She wouldn’t leave him alone until she got everything out.

  “You are setting the lives of a handful of people over those of everyone in the whole hexarchate. So maybe the old government had spots of corruption. That doesn’t mean the solution is to burn everything down.”

  “That’s already done and over with,” Brezan said, because he couldn’t help himself.

  Miuzan continued speaking over him so that he had to strain to hear her. Which was the intended effect, no doubt. “The hexarchate’s worlds are already bleeding because of you. By the time you’re done with this, this—” She searched for a word; found one. “—temper tantrum of yours, they’re going to be drenched. I hope that makes you happy.”

  Brezan’s temper, always precarious, got the better of him. “Thank you for thinking so well of me,” he said in a cold, flat voice. “Because I don’t see that what your precious general is trying to do is so different, except she doesn’t care about anything but restoring the old order. Tell me, when the two of you stopped to observe the Day of Shallow Knives recently and watched the cuts being made, and all the blood, did you even wonder about the name of the poor fucker who was tortured to death for you?”

  “It was a heretic,” Miuzan snapped back. “I see this entire call has been a waste of time. I shouldn’t have suggested it to the general in the first place. I would never have guessed that you’d pick some crazed personal ambition over honor and loyalty and family, but it seems you’re capable of surprising me after all.”

  “Fuck off,” Brezan said.

  Miuzan’s face shuttered. Then she severed the connection.

  It was the last communication Brezan was to have with anyone in his family for the next nine years.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SAYING FAREWELL TO Rhombus and Sieve only took Hemiola a few minutes. “Keep out of trouble,” Rhombus said, as if Hemiola hadn’t yet experienced its first neural flowering. That was all.

  Sieve, on the other hand, presen
ted Hemiola with a touching and entirely impractical sculpture of bent wires and other scraps. “In case the real hexarch wants some extra decorations once you find him,” it said.

  “If we catch up to him, I’ll put it where he can see it,” Hemiola said tactfully.

  Hemiola had already presented Jedao with the archive, copied to a data solid the size of his hand. It approved of how carefully Jedao handled it. Just because it was a copy didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable.

  It accompanied Jedao outside of Tefos Base with trepidation. The staircase had scarcely changed in all that time. Jedao had added his footsteps to the multiple sets in the layer of dust upon the stairs. Tefos had little in the way of atmosphere. Down here, sheltered from the slow patter of micrometeorites, the footsteps would endure for a long time. Some of them dated back to when the hexarch had first brought the three servitors with him.

  When they emerged from the crevasse, two of the system’s other moons rode high in a sky sprinkled with stars and the glow-swirl of the local nebulae. Tefos’s surface, ordinarily a dull bluish gray, was desaturated further in the low light. Jedao switched on his headlamp. Hemiola brightened its lights as well, in case he needed the extra help seeing his way.

  They passed the rock garden on the way. After eighty years, the carefully raked sand had eroded just a little. Guiltily, Hemiola found it liked the effect. But Sieve would want to fix it up so it looked just as it had eighty years ago. By the time Hemiola returned, the garden would no doubt be restored to its original state.

  Jedao’s voidmoth rested on a ridge a short walk from the garden. Its elongated shadow stretched away from them, disappearing off the back of the ridge. The moth itself formed a narrow triangular wedge with its apex tilted slightly skyward, as though it yearned to fly again. While the moth was an unpitted matte black, its landing gear gleamed with a sheen as of mirrors. Promisingly, the moth’s power core was properly shielded. Like many servitors, even servitors not of particularly technical bent, Hemiola had strong feelings about shielding. Maybe this meant that Jedao took good care of his transportation.