Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

The terrain manifested as dizzying blue swirls on the tactical displays, with inclusions that resembled waving strands of kelp, like a captive mantle of ocean. The Fortress’s defenses were beginning to fire on the Hafn, with shifts in the terrain coordinated to permit the guns to speak through momentary windows.

“Forty-six minutes until we’re in dire cannon range,” Weapons said.

Muris looked up. “Telescoping formation to bring them into range, sir?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Khiruev said. For someone otherwise so conservative, Muris was fixated on that class of formation. Most of the telescoping formations had serious drawbacks. “They’ll see the formation and zip out of range anyway.”

The Hafn had to have some way of dealing with phantom terrain. Its existence was no secret. While certain details of the technology were classified, that wouldn’t necessarily have stopped Hafn intelligence. And whatever they did know might not bother people who had alien weapons to begin with.

Khiruev considered sacrificing an arm to make the swarm go faster. It was just as well that that wouldn’t work. She would have run out of arms as a much younger woman.

Jedao had thrashed the grid opponent at jeng-zai and had moved on to pattern-stones. Khiruev almost felt sorry for the grid. It looked like Jedao was using a subdisplay to write up a tactical critique at the same time. Wonderful.

Twenty-six minutes out of dire cannon range, Scan gave Khiruev the bad news. “Sir,” she said, “look at this.”

The Hafn were now arrayed in a rough dumbbell shape, except each end was an outward-facing concave dish. One dish faced the Fortress. The other was swinging around toward the Kel. The bar was bending so the dishes stayed connected. Khiruev doubted it meant anything good for them.

Sensors had sent her the forward scouts’ close-range readings of the terrain gradient, along with Doctrine’s notes on what it should have looked like under normal operating conditions. Phantom terrain behaved like a dense but manipulable fluid. As a moth commander, Khiruev had participated in a couple training exercises that demonstrated its properties. Her tactical group commander had described it as ‘space mud that’s out to get you.’ (All right, she had been a little coarser than that.) Khiruev remembered how aggravating it had been to have her moth’s motion slowed to a crawl, to be unable to rely on scan to behave properly.

The Hafn weren’t afraid of phantom terrain because, incredibly, their weapons had some way of degrading it in a fashion that the hexarchate’s own exotics couldn’t. Scan showed the terrain developing further inclusions in the shapes of fantastic trees, ferns, vines all tangled together. Something tickled at the back of Khiruev’s mind, a warning, but she couldn’t figure out how the threat worked—

The Hafn attack hit the entirety of Tactical Four as they swung around. They were still too far away for the dire cannons to respond. Khiruev’s display hemorrhaged red and orange light. “All units withdraw out of range now!” she said sharply. “That’s a direct order.”

The dying moths sent databursts almost as one. Crystal fibers. A cavalcade of pale-lipped flowers. The cries of flightless birds pecking their way up through the floors. Walls grown over with mouths breathing wetly.

Jedao was still jotting something down in that critique.

We’re doomed, Khiruev thought.

Flowers and birds. The plant-like shapes growing in the fluid. The Hafn were degrading the phantom terrain. That bizarre not-formation of theirs looked like they were funneling something from one dish to the other. And then she knew.

“Communications,” Khiruev said, “urgent order for Commandant fucking Mazeret. Tell her to turn off the fucking terrain. All of it. Now.”

The Kel were in disarray due to the retreat, although at least they weren’t losing moths in all directions anymore, and they were attempting to form up again.

“Call request from Commandant Mazeret,” Communications said, very neutrally.

“What part of ‘order’ doesn’t she understand?” Khiruev snapped, although in her position Khiruev would have done the same thing. “Tell her that the Hafn can draw power for long-range attacks from the phantom terrain itself. Her Doctrine analysts should get on the problem. That’s all she needs to know.”

From a Kel standpoint, phantom terrain was just another exotic technology. But they had every indication that the Hafn had a peculiar reverence for worlds—for planets and their ecosystems. Enough that their scouts were sewn to the representations of faraway homeworlds. From a Hafn standpoint, phantom terrain was an unclaimed world, and they had some way of linking themselves to it, sourcing power from it the way the Kel sourced power from formations and loyalty. Khiruev scrawled this observation down and passed it on to Doctrine.

The tactical display’s blue swirls and ripples went black as the phantom terrain shut off.

“Good,” Jedao said, “you figured it out with a couple minutes to spare.”

Jedao had passed a document over to Khiruev’s terminal with the READ IMMEDIATELY indicator. Thankfully, it was short. Jedao had figured out the Hafn trick three minutes before Khiruev had. The timestamp was unmistakable.

He hadn’t said a word.

Khiruev contemplated shooting Jedao.

Jedao wasn’t paying any attention to Khiruev, which was just as well, because Khiruev’s vision was shorting out, predictable effect of formation instinct. “This is General Jedao,” he said. “All units continue to reform by tactical group. Banner the Deuce of Gears. Engineering, I understand we’re carrying twelve threshold winnowers. Lob the lot at the Hafn and put them into dispersed orbits around the Fortress at the conventional 90% limit of phantom terrain, will you?”

Captain-engineer Miugo called the command center. “General,” he said, “we don’t have enough personnel to safely crew all the winnowers.” Because we ditched the Nirai, he didn’t say. “Recommend we step down to eight.”

“Yes, I should have figured,” Jedao said. “My apologies for being unclear. Launch all twelve uncrewed. I understand they’re fitted with remote triggers for emergencies?”

The temperature in the command center plummeted.

Threshold winnowers were indiscriminately destructive of lives, although they did not damage nonliving objects. They were also finicky to operate, hence Miugo’s concern. Jedao had notoriously used them at the massacre at Hellspin Fortress.

“We’ll waste time if we disable them first,” Jedao said, as if he hadn’t picked up on the sudden tension. “But if the Hafn are any good, they’ll spot the winnowers on scan, and they’ll know about the remote option. They’ll even know that I’m willing to pull the trigger, even if Kel Command wouldn’t be.” The corner of his mouth pulled up. “And this will go much better if they believe it’s me, not some cocked-up desperate impostor.”

The command center fell horribly quiet as they waited for Engineering to comply. Khiruev recognized, from the clipped tone of Miugo’s status reports and their frequency, that he was upset, and was hoping that Jedao would change his mind. She couldn’t imagine that Jedao himself was unaware of Miugo’s reaction. But Jedao did not seem inclined to change his mind.

The Hierarchy of Feasts launched the winnowers. Khiruev could tell to the second when the Hafn figured out what they were. The Hafn abandoned their funnel and began a rapid, well-organized withdrawal.

Jedao had put together movement orders for Tactical One, which had been the first to regain a semblance of its assigned formation. “Ah, there you are,” he said to himself.

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