Revenant Gun

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Nine years of playing politician had inured Brezan to receiving people’s demands. “I’m listening,” Brezan said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  JEDAO SPENT THE next eleven days in his quarters contemplating his options. Kujen had already proven that he was willing to have Jedao removed for disobedience. Anything he wanted to do to stop the remembrances would have to take that into account.

  During that time Jedao barely ate. Dhanneth stopped by with broth and insisted on trying to feed him. The metallic aftertaste had grown worse, however, and the torture he’d witnessed left Jedao with little appetite. He only tried because Dhanneth seemed agitated if he refused food.

  The number of guards increased from four to six. Jedao suspected reinforcements lurked nearby, just in case. It was what he would do.

  On the twelfth day, Kujen came to see him. Dhanneth startled, then prostrated himself. Jedao did as well. He had to play this carefully.

  Kujen arranged himself on a chair, although Jedao caught the subtle crimp of his mouth. Inhyeng, Jedao thought.

  “You may rise,” Kujen said, as though nothing had passed between them. “You’ll find this interesting, General.” He pulled out a small slate and called up an image of a star system. Calendrical gradients were clearly marked in different colors. “That’s to scale,” he added, “so naturally it’s impossible for you to make out the details you care about.”

  “And what would those be?” Jedao said warily.

  Several labels flared up like pins of fire. The image shifted, compressed. Tiny flickers expanded into the standard symbols for orbital defense platforms, stations of varying capabilities, even a wolf tower. Of most interest was the great fortress built into the largest moon of the fourth planet, Terebeg 4.

  “It’s not a nexus fortress, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Kujen said. “The Fortress of Pearled Hopes, something of a throwback.” His mouth pulled up in a sudden wry smile. “I don’t think even the archaeologists remember anymore. Pearled Hopes was built on the ruins of an earlier civilization’s colony. At least, it’s always been clear to me that someone a lot more determined than we are dragged the damn ‘moon’ to its present orbit from somewhere else. There’s no way it originated in-system, and back when I was young, you could read up on the artifacts people used to find on it.”

  “Fine,” Jedao said, since someone with amnesia was in no position to criticize anyone else’s memory, archaeological or otherwise. “That’s the next target?” If Kujen had an urgent need to conquer artifact worlds, things could be worse. Maybe he could use the travel time to persuade Kujen otherwise on the matter of remembrances.

  Maybe pushing the issue would get him killed, which would do no one any good. He needed to bide his time until he could come up with a better plan of resistance.

  “Most of that’s of no concern to you,” Kujen said, confoundingly. “The part you care about is where the Compact has made the fourth planet their center of government. That will be our next target.”

  “Does their leadership reside there?”

  “Well,” Kujen said, “their ‘official’ head of government does. An elected person of no consequence. Alas, the real adversary is Shuos Mikodez. I’m not going to ask you to take on the Citadel of Eyes, as nice as it would be to eliminate him. But the elected premier plus High General Kel Brezan and their staffs will make approachable targets.”

  Even then Jedao didn’t see the trap. “What are their military capabilities? And when do you want this assault to take place?”

  Kujen told him: the anniversary of the massacre at Hellspin Fortress.

  “I have a gift for you,” Kujen said. Then Jedao knew things had not stopped getting worse. “Major—”

  Dhanneth presented Jedao with a report on Terebeg System and the fortress’s defenses. “They’ll see us coming, sir,” Dhanneth said, referring him to a larger map relating their present location to the target’s. In a colorless voice, he detailed their current intelligence on the defense swarms, reports compiled by Jedao’s staff.

  “You will need weapons capable of handling the fortress,” Dhanneth said, then looked at Kujen.

  It’s a loyalty test. “What,” Jedao said, on the grounds that he couldn’t let Kujen know how much this bothered him, “you don’t trust me to make do with what you’ve already given me?”

  “You’ve already proved capable of independent thinking,” Kujen said sardonically. “I’m giving you another chance.”

  This made no sense. Kujen didn’t strike Jedao as the type of man to tolerate any chance of failure. Unless—Hellspin Fortress.

  It was a calendrical attack. For the attack to have the impact Kujen desired, he needed Jedao. Specifically Jedao, and not some other general. Which meant—

  Kujen confirmed it with his next words. “You will be using threshold winnowers,” he said. “I’ve increased their range.”

  “You can stop being coy and give me specifics,” Jedao said past the sudden dryness of his mouth. “I can’t make good use of a weapon I don’t understand.”

  “Let me show you how winnowers work,” Kujen said. He brought up a series of equations, a schematic, a stylized animation. “We can go into the math if you want, but gate mechanics gets very technical.”

  Jedao watched, unwillingly fascinated, as the simulated winnower caused eyes and gashes to open in pixel rats. “Why rats?” he asked. The real question he wanted to ask was, Why such ugly deaths? He couldn’t imagine death by winnower being anything but excruciatingly painful.

  “Nostalgia,” Kujen said with such great affection that Jedao opted not to inquire further. Kujen told him anyway. “I went through a lot of them earlier in my career.”

  “Is that the size of a typical winnower crew?” Jedao asked, pointing at the relevant figure.

  “In Kel practice, yes,” Kujen said. “Mostly issues related to transport and calibration. It’s a finicky design, which I’ve never been happy about, but I was in a hurry—”

  The world grayed around Jedao. I’m just as culpable, he thought. He had used Kujen’s shear cannon not that long ago, without asking what the cost would be for those he used it on. It was hypocritical of him to feel this sudden rush of horror.

  He couldn’t afford to get distracted. Kujen had finished his digression on interface design and safety precautions, and had brought up a new animation. “You’ll like this,” he said.

  Will I? Jedao thought.

  He almost missed it the first time. “Again,” he said, just to be sure. Kujen obliged him.

  The new threshold winnower was composed of two separate generators, not one as before. Each projected a line of effect into the space before it, cutting and precise. Where the lines intersected, they punched open a hole into gate-space. From there the winnower’s effect, outflung from the generators, propagated outwards. This increased the effective range and put the winnower’s crews well out of harm’s way. Jedao studied the equations with interest: a clever use of the refactoring implicit in the math.

  “Same effect?” Jedao asked.

  “At least on animated rats.”

  Jedao shot him an annoyed look.

  Kujen relented. “It’s been field tested. Spare heretics.” Despite his casual tone, he looked at Jedao sharply. Jedao kept his face bland. “All of them died. I am always thorough, Jedao. I have been doing this for a long time.”

  Jedao imagined this was true. He also imagined what it must feel like to have mouths opening in your very flesh, gaping in a tongueless susurrus. When the eyes boiled out of the gashes, could you see what they saw? Did they give you a new appreciation of the lethality of light? His experience of pain was limited. Perhaps everyone’s was, confronted with deaths like these.

  “It’ll work in the Compact?” Jedao said. You always had to check, with exotic weapons.

  “Of course,” Kujen said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I’m not unappreciative,” Jedao said, “but besides socking the Compact, what
’s your goal for this specific battle? Not like I know enough about the political conditions, which change every time I blink. But I assume they’re not going to roll over and die because we decapitate them. Based on the way people react to me, I’d assume the opposite. Especially if we reenact Hellspin Fortress.”

  There. He’d said it.

  “A simple victory in battle isn’t good enough for you?” Kujen said.

  Dhanneth’s eyes flicked to Kujen at the mockery in his voice.

  “You said it earlier,” Jedao said. “It’s one thing for us to run around blowing things up. Another entirely to take and hold territory. We’ve barely consolidated our hold in Isteia System.”

  “Even an impossible task becomes possible if you approach it step by step.”

  Jedao wasn’t persuaded. “You’ll have to clear up one detail for me. What made Hellspin so memorable, if I understand the history lessons correctly, isn’t that the battle was ‘won.’ No one would remember one more heresy in a parade of heresies, one more battle in a parade of battles, if that was all there was to it. Isn’t the part that made it unforgettable the small matter of my incinerating my own army?”

  Jedao didn’t look directly at Dhanneth. Nevertheless, Dhanneth’s reaction was impossible to miss. Jedao’s peripheral vision wasn’t that bad.

  Dhanneth couldn’t tell where he was going with this. He might as well have been shouting it with the desperate blankness of his face.

  “Feel free to take your train of thought to its natural conclusion,” Kujen said, his demeanor unruffled.

  Jedao’s heart was racing. Don’t let him see he’s rattled you. “This isn’t going to be much of a decapitation strike if it also takes out our means of occupation.” What a terrible, bloodless euphemism for killing all our own soldiers. “It’s not like we have that much infantry. There’s no point burning up all your pawns without getting something for them, Hexarch. So what is it? What are you getting out of this?”

  “Oh,” Kujen said, “we won’t need the infantry. Once we get rid of the inconveniences, Protector-General Inesser will do the work of government and stabilization for us. Because as much as she hates me, she values duty more.” He raised a hand slowly and sketched the curve of Jedao’s jaw millimeters away from contact. Jedao held his breath, hating himself for the transient impulse to lean into the touch. “Once that’s settled, once the hexarchate is restored, you’ll have all eternity to do whatever pleases you. I mean that quite literally.”

  I can’t do this, Jedao thought. The room darkened all around him, as though all the lights had fissured into the distance. “What do you mean, all eternity?”

  “I mean,” Kujen said, “that you will live forever, unless you do something catastrophically stupid, like diving into the heart of a star. I constructed a body for you that will repair itself naturally, that will never age. If you want to look younger, that too can be arranged, although I don’t advise going quite as far back as seventeen. In any case, that’s just aesthetics.” He was smiling at Jedao as if this was supposed to make him happy.

  Ruo, Jedao thought, what do I do? Except he knew perfectly well what Ruo would have done. Ruo had never been one to deny himself opportunity or pleasure.

  When did I grow away from my best friend?

  In the split second that followed, Jedao contemplated his options. Ordering Dhanneth to hand over his sidearm would just alert the hexarch’s security and get him punched full of holes. Besides which, if Kujen had given Jedao a miraculous self-repairing body, he couldn’t imagine that Kujen had neglected to do the same for himself, which would make him hard to assassinate.

  Kujen seemed to consider Jedao a key pawn in his plan. Could he commit suicide and stay dead long enough to keep from taking part? Considering his recovery from the bullets, he didn’t think so.

  It all came back to this: playing along, and looking for a way to resist. He didn’t see a way yet. But he had to delay until the last possible moment, in case something came to him.

  JEDAO SPENT THE next two days determining that he could not, in fact, sabotage the threshold winnowers. Smiling technicians greeted him when he attempted to access them by walking in on them in full formal, as if they needed the reminder of his rank. The smiling technicians were backed up by unsmiling Vidona officers. Not wanting to arouse Kujen’s suspicions, Jedao didn’t press the issue.

  Next he studied the mathematics of the winnowers, as if that did him any good. The best primer he found on the topic was not a paper or a textbook but, of all things, a biography of Academician Sayyad Reth in graphic novel format. Reth had done her theoretical work during a time when the Nirai allowed non-faction members to teach at their academies based on their achievements. A footnote informed him that the practice had been discontinued fifty-eight years ago.

  The biography spent a whole chapter explaining not the actual mathematics, which its author/illustrator had deemed too technical for a general audience, but a simpler analogy. The actual mathematics either wasn’t as terrifying as the author/illustrator thought it was, or some of the education Jedao couldn’t remember receiving had included very good teaching. Jedao silently apologized to whoever the teacher had been.

  Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower’s effect was painfully affected by the linearization. (More footnotes explained hypersurfaces, tangent spaces, and linearizations.)

  At that point Jedao caught himself stabbing the margins of the panels with his stylus and made himself stop. He brought up the winnower’s specifications and scowled at them. What am I missing?

  He was looking at the problem from the wrong angle. In spite of Kujen’s assurances that the winnower would work in Compact territory, the design would only function in high calendar terrain.

  Why would he give me a weapon that doesn’t—

  Kujen didn’t think much of Jedao’s technical ability or mathematical acumen. Which, fair enough, he wasn’t a mathematician. But he could follow the mathematics curriculum required by Kel Academy, and then some.

  Was Kujen lying to Jedao about the math? Thinking, perhaps, that Jedao wouldn’t think to check? Surely Kujen wasn’t so willfully malicious as to give him a weapon that had no hope of functioning.

  Which meant Kujen was lying about the terrain. They weren’t attacking the Compact after all. They were attacking the Protectorate. After all, when had Jedao had the opportunity to scout for himself? He relied on the information that Kujen gave him, or that people dominated by Kujen presented to him.

  I have to stop this.

  Too bad stealing high explosives and blowing himself up with the command moth and its freight of winnowers wouldn’t do the trick. Now, more than ever, it was imperative that he stop Kujen. And to do that, he needed more allies.

  “EXPLAIN IT TO me again,” Jedao said to Dhanneth after the staff officers had left.

  The table was full of demolished platters, each one shaped like a leaf or a moth’s wing, lacquerware with abalone inlay. Jedao had eaten so the others didn’t feel inhibited.

  Dhanneth reviewed the logistical tables and the calendrical terrain gradients with him. Not for the first time, Jedao wondered what had prevented Dhanneth from being promoted long ago. Despite his subdued manner, he spoke as knowledgeably about the machineries of war as the staffers. “There’s a reason you didn’t ask this earlier,” Dhanneth said.

  When Kujen had granted Jedao access to the staff officers, Jedao had hoped to use the opportunity to examine formation mechanics in a natural setting. He’d gotten the opportunity, all right. It hadn’t done any good.

  Jedao was studying formations out of desperation, because they were the one weapon he had access to. Privately, he doubted Kujen would have given all the Kel a way to hurt him, yet he rememb
ered the oddity of Kujen refusing to attend infantry drill. An ordinary precaution? But why, when he claimed he had nothing to fear from death?

  In his spare time he read instructional texts on formation mechanics, on the pretext that he wanted to understand swarm tactics better. He didn’t know if Kujen was falling for it. In all likelihood, it was a dead end and Kujen knew he had nothing to fear.

  No help for it. He couldn’t ask Dhanneth about the subject openly, so he changed the subject. “I want to ask you about a Kel,” he said. “High General Kel Brezan.”

  “Crashhawk,” Dhanneth said. “Our target.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  Dhanneth glowered. “He’s the enemy, sir.”

  Dhanneth’s profile claimed he had no personal connection to Brezan. But Jedao also suspected Dhanneth’s profile of having large gaps in it. He narrowed his eyes.

  Dhanneth yielded too quickly. “I know what it is to disobey,” he said, which was peculiar. Jedao had never known Dhanneth to be anything but perfectly obedient.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I quarreled with the hexarch once.”

  That Jedao hadn’t expected. “About what?”

  “We had a disagreement. I am Kel, sir. He is not, but he is a hexarch. I was in error.”

  Well, that shed approximately zero light on the subject. He rephrased. “Do you remember the specifics?”

  “A little,” Dhanneth said slowly.

  Shit. What if Jedao wasn’t the only one running around with amnesia? He’d never stopped to consider that. “Did you have an encounter with Cheris the memory vampire?”

  Dhanneth shook his head. “No. The hexarch decided that I would perform my duties more adequately if I didn’t remember.”

  Jedao’s heart dropped. Dhanneth was wrong, of course. Presumably even Kujen had come to the same conclusion. If there was any time- or cost-effective way to churn out amnesiac, obedient, self-effacing, useful soldiers, Kujen would be manufacturing them by the millions. Except, it seemed, the process broke the victims.