Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Inesser’s smile widened in a way that indicated that she recognized the delaying tactic for what it was. “You don’t have anything alcoholic on hand, do you? I’m tired of tea and water.”

  Was he supposed to take that as a challenge?

  “As it so happens,” Fiamonor said, and redirected Inesser’s attention to a cabinet stocked with an assortment of rice wines, whiskeys, and brandies. Inesser unerringly homed in on the most expensive liquor available. Brezan consulted his augment about the food budget and winced. Oh well, they only had two bottles of the stuff anyway, which limited the amount of damage she could do. And maybe she was a gullible drunk.

  “Would you like seats?” Brezan said to Miuzan and Tseya, directing his words to a point midway between the two. Fine, Inesser had brought along the two people in the whole galaxy best capable of unsettling him. He wasn’t going to let her get to him.

  At times like this he missed Cheris more than ever. But he’d finally come to the acceptance that Cheris was gone—permanently gone. With his luck, she’d gotten smashed by a meteorite on some planet no one had ever heard of, and they’d never find out what had become of her.

  Fiamonor had earlier set up the circular conference table with painstaking attention to symmetry. Even the flower-shaped candles floating in a bowl of water at the table’s center featured radial symmetry. The candles were wired into place so they wouldn’t drift out of alignment.

  “Thank you, High General,” Tseya murmured to Brezan when it became clear that Miuzan had no intention of speaking to him. “Shall we, Colonel?”

  As a courtesy, a cloth printed with Inesser’s Three Kestrels Three Suns was draped over the back of her chair. Brezan hoped that she wouldn’t take it amiss that they’d ordered one up from a matter printer instead of already possessing one hand-woven by dedicated artisans. Unblinking, Miuzan took a seat to the right of that one. Tseya took the one to the left, her expression wry.

  “You’re going to say no anyway, Colonel,” Inesser said, “but I don’t suppose you’re interested in anything?”

  “No, thank you,” Miuzan said. “High General?”

  There wasn’t any tactful way of telling her how bizarre the title still sounded in her mouth, so he settled for a headshake. He’d gotten used to it from other people—just not his older sister. Besides, he didn’t want to be at any chemical disadvantage while dealing with Inesser. Fiamonor had fed him detox drugs ahead of time as a precaution, but he was paranoid that they’d pick this particular occasion to fail on him.

  Inesser swanned over to her seat with a glass in hand, drank deeply, then handed the cloth to Miuzan before sitting. Wordlessly, Miuzan folded the cloth and set it to the side. “High General,” Inesser said, “let’s get to the point. I don’t imagine your time is any less valuable than my own.”

  “By all means, Protector-General,” Brezan said. “You have some proposal regarding Isteia?” He couldn’t think of any other reason they were both here. One of the planets in the system was a major source of raw materials necessary for the manufacture of mothdrive harnesses. The Protectorate and the Compact had been jockeying over control of Isteia, each desperate to be the first to regain the capacity to produce new cindermoths.

  Inesser snorted. “Not just Isteia,” she said. “You’re thinking about details, High General. Admittedly, mothyards are very large details. But in our line of work”—nice how she was almost speaking to him as though he were an equal—“we can’t afford to get distracted from the larger picture. No. I have an offer for you.”

  “Larger picture” could mean any of sixty million different things depending on context. Brezan smiled coldly at her. “What could be so urgent that it forced you to acknowledge my existence after our last contact went so poorly?”

  Nine years of what General Ragath referred to, in a rare instance of euphemism, as “putting out fires.” Not only had the Protectorate and the Compact chewed each other’s borders into ragged edges, the only thing that had caused them to pause hostilities was the knowledge that foreign powers wouldn’t hesitate to swallow them both if they let down their guard. Everyone from the Hafn to the Taurags had gnawed off chunks of border territory. The Hafn had only gotten distracted by an internal crisis, but there were others. And even then the armistice had almost come too late.

  “We’re never going to be friends,” Inesser said. “But we could make excellent allies.”

  “Bullshit,” Brezan said, unmoved. “Allies how?” He was starting to be entertained that his old career interviewing dubious officer candidates, now honed by extra practice dealing with even more dubious politicians and potentates, came in handy at times like this.

  “This is my proposal.” Inesser’s mouth curved upward in sudden dangerous humor. “Unite our realms under a single banner. It’ll keep us safe from the wormfucking foreigners.”

  “Like hell,” Brezan said. “Because that ‘single banner’ is going to be yours.”

  “I was never under the impression that you sought out this job.” Inesser’s gaze didn’t waver, but Miuzan stiffened. Brezan saw it out of the corner of his eye. Inesser would have grilled his sister for everything she knew about him. Knowing Miuzan, she would have spilled every embarrassing detail of his childhood without hesitation. After all, he remembered how proud she’d been when Inesser picked her for her staff. And beyond that, she was a proper Kel, not a crashhawk.

  “Maybe not,” Brezan said, ignoring Fiamonor’s subtle eyebrow-twitch of No, don’t admit that! “But I’m Kel enough to do my duty. I doubt you can offer me anything so good that I’ll roll over and surrender my people to yours.”

  “How often do you play jeng-zai?” Inesser said.

  Why did everyone who met him for the first time ask him that same fucking question? He smiled at her. If she wasn’t going to play nice, he didn’t see why he should either. “I don’t. I send Hexarch Mikodez to do it for me.”

  “Ha.” She grinned back, completely unintimidated. “You’re about to lose this one.”

  Her Andan heritage was showing. “Get to the point,” Brezan said.

  “Yes,” Inesser said. “I want the Compact to acknowledge the Three Kestrels Three Suns.”

  Interesting. She wasn’t making a pretense of continuity with the old regime. This was a naked personal power grab. Brezan slammed his hands down on the table and stood. The candlelight shivered; water slopped over the edge of the bowl. “No,” he said.

  She continued speaking over him. “In exchange,” Inesser said, “the Protectorate will adopt your calendar.”

  Brezan froze. “That’s a very interesting offer.”

  “Interesting” was an understatement. More like unprecedented.

  Inesser rose so her head was level with his, although the movement was controlled, graceful. “You heard me,” she said. With great care, she pulled off her left glove, then the right one, and held them out to him.

  He stared at her gloves as though they’d turned into slugs, then at her naked hands. “You can’t be serious.”

  “She’s serious,” Tseya said quietly, ignoring the fact that Brezan had just offered Inesser a mortal insult. No one with any sense questioned the word of an ungloved Kel. (It happened all the time in dramas and theater.)

  Inesser, either better at keeping control of her temper or used to being insulted by random crashhawks, grinned again. “You’ll have a place in my government. Your premier, too. There’s plenty of work for everyone, fire knows. If you want it. I think even if you don’t want to be involved, your followers will insist on it.”

  It was a spectacular offer. Why, then, had she brought along two people guaranteed to distract him? He gestured at Tseya and Miuzan. “And their role?”

  “An earnest of good faith,” Inesser said. “And a reminder that what has been divided can be brought back together.”

  A telling hit. He knew not to let it show on his face. Follow up with another question. Don’t let her scent blood. “How did you talk the Rahal i
nto going along with this?”

  “Rahal, hell,” Inesser said. “As far as most Rahal are concerned, one set of rules for Doctrine isn’t all that different from another, even if they have to update all their forms. It’s the Andan and the Vidona who are having difficulty falling into line.”

  Tseya made a moue. “Yes, well,” she said, “Andan infighting must be very entertaining to the Shuos about now.” Knowing what he did about her family, Brezan could only imagine.

  “Really,” Inesser said, “it’s not so difficult when you have all the guns.”

  Something didn’t add up. “You could have tendered this selfsame offer—oh, maybe not nine years ago exactly,” Brezan said. Even if the majority of the Kel had gravitated toward Inesser, with her infuriatingly immaculate reputation, she’d had to consolidate power just like he had. He’d read the reports of the demonstrations, the protests, the occasional blotted massacre, some provided by Mikodez, some by his own agents. “Even if your initial contact made you hesitant”—he nodded at Miuzan, although she didn’t return the gesture—“you should have thought it up before the foreigners moved on us both. So what changed? Why now?”

  “Are you saying no?” Inesser said.

  “I’m not saying anything until I understand what’s in it for you,” Brezan said, “including the timing.”

  “You’re not wrong to be concerned,” Inesser said with no trace of human emotions like shame or self-consciousness. Brezan was starting to wonder if some team of engineers had constructed her from fire and gunsmoke and metal uncrushed from the hearts of dead stars. “There is, in fact, the matter of timing. I thought there was a chance that Hexarch Nirai Kujen had died along with the others. But I recently received word that he escaped—and that he is intent on remaking the hexarchate. The old one, before Jedao broke loose of Kel Command and did his best to smash the old order by fighting the Hafn. It is urgent that we stand against the parasite.”

  He’d gotten two pieces of information from this. The first, and less useful, was that Inesser knew about Kujen. Given Inesser’s rank and seniority, that didn’t surprise him. The second was that she had intelligence on Kujen. Assuming it could be relied on, which was a big if. “Sources, please,” he said.

  Miuzan scowled at him, because he’d again called Inesser’s trustworthiness into question. Inesser quelled her with a glance. “You’re right to want to check,” she said. “I’ll tell you—if you agree.”

  Stalemate. Mikodez would want to know, so he’d follow up on that later. But first—“What is it you have against Kujen?”

  “So you do know of him.”

  Brezan shrugged. “I was briefed.”

  “Why,” Inesser said, an edge to her voice, “do I strike you as a natural ally of his?”

  “You’ve been serving the hexarchate for longer than my parents have been alive,” Brezan said mildly. “If you were going to do something about Kujen, why not before?”

  “Because when I was much younger,” Inesser said, “and intent on making a name for myself, Kel Command assigned me special duty guarding him. I saw the things he did to his subjects.”

  “I can’t see how a hexarch could last long treating his people poorly,” Brezan said. Fishing for information.

  The wry set of her mouth told him she knew what he was up to, but she gave him more details anyway. “Not the technicians and researchers. The research subjects. I remember thinking that he had such a collection of beautiful courtesans, better even than the Andan could have provided him. But they weren’t courtesans at all. Or anyway, they hadn’t started that way. He just liked being surrounded by beautiful things. Most of them had started out as spare heretics. Some of them were prisoners of war who were never going home again.”

  “Well,” Brezan said, “it’s rare that Kel Command ever sent anyone home, period.” He remembered that much. Taking prisoners of war was also rare, but he didn’t need to mention that to Inesser of all people.

  Inesser closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her face was haunted. “I stood by,” she said, “and let him do the things he did to his pets. Because those were my orders. Even so... they deserved better than that.”

  Brezan weighed her words. So that was why she thought she could work with a crashhawk. Because she remembered a time when she wished she’d been one herself. “Fine,” Brezan said, reaching for Inesser’s gloves and folding them reverently. “I’m in. Tell me everything.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JEDAO’S PLANS FOR Isteia went wrong from an unexpected quarter. He’d been trying, futilely, to schedule unsupervised time at a firing range without getting in the way of his soldiers’ training. He wanted to know how good he was at firearms without having everyone watch him fail to figure out how to load a service pistol. No such luck. Eventually he gave up and set out for the command center in preparation for the approach when his augment flared up in a spectacular burst of pain: The hexarch requires your presence.

  Now of all times? If Kujen was having second thoughts, this was terrible timing. But he couldn’t say no to a hexarch, either. Gritting his teeth, Jedao turned around and made his way not to Kujen’s quarters or to a conference room, but to one of the shuttle bays.

  Kujen awaited him, dressed in the most practical outfit Jedao had yet seen from him: a simple black-and-silver Nirai uniform, complete with gray gloves, as if he were pretending to be an ordinary technician. Only the non-regulation jewelry, which included dangling silver earrings and a necklace of polished jet, betrayed him. Foxes forbid that Kujen give up all personal decoration.

  Jedao’s eyes slitted as he came out of the lift. One of the shuttles was being prepared for launch by a mixed group of Kel and Nirai. He’d given no such orders, which meant Kujen had. Just as tellingly, nobody saluted him when he showed up.

  “Small change in plans,” Kujen said.

  Abandoning the moth already? Jedao kept himself from saying. “Do tell.”

  Kujen smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle in his right glove. “You don’t need me to carry out the battle. Besides, I dislike being caught near calendrical rot. I will be observing from a safe distance.”

  “Why?” Jedao said. “Afraid you’ll be in your beautiful prototype when I get it shot up?”

  “You won’t,” Kujen said. “You’re going to do fine. But you’ll do even better if you don’t have to worry about me. I will, however, borrow one of your tactical groups for my personal protection.”

  Jedao wasn’t concerned yet. Whatever advantage in numbers the Compact had, the shear cannon would make up for it. “Then take Tactical Two,” he said. “If her combat record is to be believed, Nihara Keru is the best commander available.” Also a consideration, although he didn’t say it out loud, was that he trusted Nihara to argue with Kujen if he tried to do something militarily stupid. “I’ll inform the commander of her new orders, and tell the Dissevered Hand to expect you.”

  “Excellent,” Kujen said. “I shan’t interfere further.”

  “General Jedao to Commander Nihara Keru,” he said, trusting the grid would patch him through.

  The response came promptly. “General,” she said. Obligingly, the grid imaged her face for him, although due to some glitch in the system the left third of the visual was staticky. He’d have to get someone to look into that.

  “I’m detaching Tactical Two on special duty,” he said. “The Dissevered Hand will shortly be receiving a shuttle with the hexarch on board. Your first priority is safeguarding him. I understand you may be disappointed to miss the action—”

  She took it well, as he had known she would. “I’ve always wondered what hexarchs do in their spare time,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll find out while you’re busy destroying the enemy, sir.”

  “Good,” Jedao said. “Use your discretion. If you run into any emergencies and need backup, call me. As I said: first priority.”

  “Don’t worry, sir,” Nihara said. “I’m not going to stand on Kel bluster when it comes to a hexarch�
��s welfare.”

  “That’s all, then. General Jedao out.” He also notified the rest of the swarm on the grounds that it wouldn’t do for the other commanders to wonder if one of the tactical groups had gone renegade.

  Then, despite his impatience to return to the task at hand, Jedao stood at attention while Kujen boarded the shuttle. That was it. He was in charge of the swarm until Kujen returned. It should have been a heady moment. Instead, he wanted something for the incipient headache. No time to stop by Medical for a painkiller, but if it got bad, he could grab something out of the kit at his seat in the command center. Dhanneth had showed it to him along with the emergency stashes of ration bars. (“If it comes to that, sir,” he had said, “the honey-sesame ones are the most tolerable. In my opinion.”)

  Thanks to variable layout, he didn’t need to sprint to the command center. All Jedao had to do was round a corner and it was there. Red and amber lights washed from the terminals, pooling in the crew’s eyes. People relaxed when he showed up, even though they still didn’t like him, because they expected him to deal with the problem.

  Naturally, Commander Talaw apprised him of yet another complication. They saluted him crisply. “Sir,” Talaw said, “the scan summary is available for your perusal. There are three swarms in the system, not two. I have halted the advance.”

  “Good,” Jedao said as he strode toward his seat. No sense galloping toward trouble. “Pass me the details.” He should have spent more time on the literature that dealt with reading scan, which had grown technical. He’d been fascinated by the tutorials he’d wheedled out of the grid, except he’d also been trying to brush up on calendrical mechanics and a lot of other things at the same time. For all the topics he understood instinctively, he lacked a built-in index. Trying to compile one by cramming had been only partly successful.