“Who says I’m not reacting?” Khiruev said. Her knees felt watery. She selected a chair and sat.
“You look terrible, at that,” Jedao said. “What’s it like, having formation instinct?”
“It’s been sufficiently long that I don’t remember what it was like before I was injected,” Khiruev said. She wanted to close her eyes and await the inevitable bullet. By now she was old enough to realize that not all bullets were made of metal, or fired from guns. “Sir, I ought to warn you. I said I’d hold the swarm for you, and I will, but I’ll only be useful to you for so long.” Coming out and saying it was proving to be remarkably difficult. “The timer has already begun.”
“Timer?” Jedao said sharply.
He didn’t know after all. That was genuinely funny.
“General, if there’s something I need to know, you’d better be the one to tell me. Now.”
“Sir,” Khiruev said, “are you aware of the Vrae Tala clause?”
“Never heard of it in my life.”
“Then you don’t know about Lieutenant General Vrae Tala, either.”
“I assume you’re winding around to some kind of point.”
Khiruev smiled grimly. Her heartbeat felt sluggish, but this early it was only her imagination. “The general was assigned to the Fire Grasses campaign 281 years ago. Due to a breakdown in communications, she was left with orders for a full frontal assault on a heavily defended enemy stronghold, with the arrival of enemy reinforcements imminent, and none of her own support in sight due to logistical failures. You should take a look at the official account sometime. The Kel historians are unusually scathing.”
“What, did Vrae Tala fail in the face of terrible odds? That’s not a new story in the history of warfare.”
“Vrae Tala was a good general. I’ve looked at the account. She did her best with those orders. The real issue is that Kel Command would never have stuck her with them if they’d had current information about what was going on.”
Jedao’s mouth pressed thin. “By ‘timer’ do you mean what I think you mean?”
“It only applies to general officers,” Khiruev said, “and we don’t discuss it much, but yes. If I think my orders have put me in an untenable situation, I can suspend formation instinct to get the job done. There’s a price, of course. They wouldn’t have relinquished control that easily, or allowed the clause to be abused, so invoking the clause is invariably fatal. I have one hundred days. We have a saying: every general is a clock. Well.”
“You ratfucking idiot,” Jedao said. “You had no call to—”
“It was inevitable that Kel Command would hear you were still alive,” Khiruev said, squaring her shoulders. “At that point, they were obviously going to shred your commission into little pixels. But they weren’t going to denude the swarm of all its officers because that would get ridiculous, especially if they wanted the swarm to remain functional on short notice. They must have someone on the way to take over, but until that person gets here, I haven’t been discharged and I can give orders on your behalf. You’ll have to figure out what to do once I drop dead. Then again, you’re a fox. I imagine you’ll work something out.”
For once Jedao was speechless.
“You asked for my life, sir,” Khiruev said. “This is the best I can give you.”
“This does beg the question of why you didn’t invoke this earlier. Your assassination attempt might have gone better.”
Khiruev met his eyes. “I wasn’t willing to commit suicide for Kel Command,” she said. “Not even to stop you.”
“I didn’t want this for you,” Jedao said after a moment.
“I know,” Khiruev said. “That’s why I did it.”
They lingered in silence for a while. Then Jedao dismissed Khiruev, looking troubled. Khiruev headed out. She noted in passing that Jedao must have palmed the mysterious polished rock while pacing earlier, but she didn’t think about it again until much later.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BREZAN WASN’T SURE what he had expected from a silkmoth, but ‘dainty’ wasn’t it, even if the Andan went in for that sort of thing. Currently he was on a transport set to rendezvous with the silkmoth Beneath the Orchid. Kel Command had offered him an honor guard. At first he had thought they were joking. Then he argued them out of it. The composite he had dealt with had seemed baffled by his insistence, but damned if he was going to let a promotion they’d cooked up for a one-off special mission get to his head.
“Almost there, sir,” the pilot’s voice said from the wall. “I’ll get you a good view of it.”
“Thank you,” Brezan said automatically.
The confounding thing about the silkmoth was that it didn’t share the wedge profile common to Kel warmoths, but it also didn’t resemble the other Andan moths he had seen, with their scrolled finials and etched flower motifs, close-up details no one had any practical use for. Instead, Beneath the Orchid looked like a stellate glory of silver-blue lace suspended in the void. He had to squint to reassure himself that the starfield wasn’t visible in the holes of the lace.
“We’re cleared for a shuttle to ferry you over, sir,” the pilot said after a while. Brezan had been so busy gawking at the silkmoth that he had forgotten to keep track of passing time. “Follow the gold markers and you’ll be right there.”
Brezan unwebbed himself, then his duffel bag. “I appreciate it,” he said.
The shuttle hop was uneventful. He had expected landing on a silkmoth to feel different, and he laughed at himself. Stepping off the shuttle was another story. When the hatch opened, he had the unshakable impression that he had disembarked into a garden, if gardens came hung around with lights like floating crests and falling petals and—was that a miniature waterfall? While he’d previously encountered a couple of Andan moths, none of them had been this extravagant. He should have remembered that the Andan often entertained guests, sometimes from outside the hexarchate. Presenting the appearance of power and luxury would be important.
Andan Tseya was standing atop a sculpted hill, flanked by three birdform servitors on each side. Trust an Andan to seize the high ground. It was one of those tactical principles you could count on even very unmilitary Andan to have internalized.
Tseya was a tall woman, almost as tall as he was. Long black hair rippled down to her waist. Her skin was porcelain-pale, and she had the kind of face that was calculated to stop hearts if you forgot what she was, which Brezan had no intention of doing. Her eyes were currently brown—he checked—although he looked away as soon as he could, just in case.
Her blue silk blouse had been tailored very precisely. On someone less poised it would have looked stiff and uncomfortable. Her slacks were a darker blue, and her shoes had been dyed dark. A blue gem glittered from the brooch at her throat. He assumed it was a sapphire.
Brezan bowed deeply to her, remembering his etiquette class. “Agent,” he said, using a very polite honorific. Andan hierarchies confused him, but you couldn’t go wrong by erring on the side of flattery. “I am at your service by order of Kel Command.”
“I honestly didn’t think they’d send me my very own high general,” Tseya said. She had a warm, wry voice, an alto, and it made him want to trust her. “I’m Andan Tseya, as you already know. I have to be frank, General. Your people and mine haven’t been notable for playing nicely with each other in recent years. Is this mission going to be a problem for you?”
What was she reading in his body language? General Khiruev had once told him, with an amused glint in her eye, that he looked perpetually irascible. “Look,” Brezan said, “the Kel may be strong, loyal, and stupid, but none of those is synonymous with ‘bigoted.’”