“There we go,” Tseya crooned. Brezan startled, but she was talking to the moth. They were in the midst of the battle now. Tseya clearly knew more about formation mechanics than she usually let on. She had to in order to anticipate what Jedao was doing so she didn’t get them shot down on the way in. Already she’d pushed them through the shields by exploiting the modulation gaps and the silkmoth’s capacity for bursts of rapid acceleration.
Brezan enlarged the subdisplay devoted to optics. At this distance, only the gold paint, glimmering irregularly in the light of shield effects and incoming fire, distinguished the cindermoth from the rest of the void.
“I’ll be able to mate the moths soon,” Tseya said. “Ready? You’ll hate it. I always do.”
Both of them double-checked their webbing, and Brezan nodded. He was glad something was finally happening, even though he knew he would feel quite the opposite in a matter of minutes.
Tseya was right. For all her deftness as a pilot, the mating maneuver made Brezan’s bones feel like they were going to vibrate out of his flesh. The silkmoth cobwebbed itself to the insertion point and juddered slowly closer and closer to the Hierarchy of Feasts. Then it released eggs that hatched to create a bridge of metalweave, and a burrower to gnaw its way through the cindermoth’s hull.
The burrower laboriously extruded a blister over itself and the breach point, then got to work. They waited in silence. Brezan had the irrational urge to hit the progress indicators. Tseya showed no sign of impatience. “Everything’s as good as it’s going to get,” she said at last, and he concurred. “Let’s move.”
After the silkmoth’s profusion of birds and disquieting fish and graceful trees, it was almost disappointing that the airlock was strictly utilitarian. Tseya’s mouth quirked when she caught Brezan’s expression, but she didn’t say anything. The distance between Beneath the Orchid and Hierarchy of Feasts was not large, but it was also perilous. Tethers aside, if you were careless, you might tumble through some of the openings in the imperfectly-braided metalweave. Still, it was a danger Brezan had faced before, and he completed the crossing quickly, making it onto the metalfoam blister.
Tseya hesitated for a long moment, and Brezan wondered if she had spotted something wrong. Then she, too, made the crossing. The blister opened for them, and they entered it together, forced close to each other by its small size. It closed behind them, and then the breach in the hall gaped open to admit them.
They emerged in a corridor. Brezan looked sharply around but saw no one coming. He had expected to feel something more than this knifing sense of alienation. “I’m locked out of the grid,” he said in a low voice. He hadn’t expected any differently. But if Jedao had gotten careless, they could at least have found out what the moth’s current layout was.
Tseya’s only response was a curt nod. She was breathing shallowly, and her face was too pale.
“Tseya?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” she said in a faint voice.
He should have asked her about any inconvenient phobias, the kind of thing he used to vet for the general, except he hadn’t been the one who selected Tseya for this mission. Plus, he’d never been allowed to see her profile, although he bet she had seen his. After all, he answered to her, not the other way around.
“We should keep moving,” Tseya said, more strongly. Good: so what if she had problems with wide-open spaces or vacuum. She had made it across and they had an arch-traitor to shoot.
They shed their suits, then tucked them into the breach. If someone found the breach before they located Jedao, they were done for anyway. It was still grating seeing Tseya in the Kel uniform. As for himself, it felt as though the fucking high general’s insignia was transmitting their position to the entire cindermoth.
His best guess as to Jedao’s quarters took them through nerve-wrackingly identical passageways. It was hard not to read a certain smugness into the expressions of the ubiquitous painted ashhawks. If someone ever lets me decorate a moth, Brezan thought, I’ll have it done in a boring solid color. More seriously, he was used to taking variable layout for granted. Being locked out of the master map’s shortcuts disturbed him in ways he didn’t want to name.
A clitter-clatter made them both tense, but it was only a servitor bearing a toolbox, carrying out routine maintenance of the sort that didn’t require the approval of a human technician. The servitor, a deltaform, took no more notice of them than Brezan would have taken of a floor-tile. Tseya’s eyes were considering, but he gestured for her to keep up, and she did. Other than the crossing, she was doing fine. He only hoped he was handling himself as well.
They ran into their first Kel outside of what had to be the dueling hall; Jedao hadn’t bothered to change the painted ashhawks clutching swords. The two Kel, a soldier and a corporal, had the bleary expressions of people who just wanted to sleep. They almost walked right by Brezan and Tseya.
“I can see discipline has gone to hell around here,” Brezan said caustically. He recognized them: Kel Osara and Corporal Merez. Neither was likely to give them trouble unless they were stupid enough to challenge Merez to a drinking contest. He had heard a sergeant swear that it wasn’t possible to get the man drunk without resorting to additives.
The two jumped. Osara, quicker-witted, thumped a salute, her face going blank. Very Kel, and frankly the best thing she could do for herself. She could work out that something had gone seriously wrong for Brezan to be here, let alone with the rank he was claiming, but he hadn’t required her to think so she wasn’t going to.
Merez, on the other hand, was trying to make sense of the situation. He stared at the wings-and-flame insignia, then saluted much more slowly.
Before Merez could formulate a question, Brezan said sharply, “Is General Khiruev still alive?”
“Yes, sir,” both Kel said.
He wanted to be happy about the answer, but he didn’t have any guarantees as to the general’s condition. “Is she well?”
Hesitation. “She’s alive, sir,” the corporal said.
Wonderful. He wanted to pursue this, but they had a fox to kill. “Jedao?”
No hesitation this time: “Alive, sir.”
Damn. “I need directions to wherever Jedao is holed up,” Brezan said, “then to the general.”
Merez gave the directions. As it so happened, Jedao had given Khiruev quarters just next to his. Brezan hated what that implied.
“All right,” Brezan said to the two. “Head directly to barracks and stay there. Do not speak to anyone until I countermand this order. Go.”
The two Kel marched off. For a moment Osara’s eyes lit with bemusement. Tseya murmured, after the Kel had rounded the corner, “We’d better hope they don’t run into anyone on the way.”
“Not much we can do about it,” Brezan said.
They reached Jedao’s quarters without further incident, even if it didn’t feel that way. Brezan glanced down the hall at the doors that led to Khiruev’s quarters, as though the general would come out to greet them. Hardly likely. He nodded at Tseya.
A lot could go wrong when you messed with a full-fledged mothgrid, especially if a Shuos was monitoring it, which was why neither of them had tried it earlier. But they had to make the attempt now. Tseya had grid-diving experience. She pulled out a hacking device in the shape of a ring with an egregiously large opal cabochon surrounded by diamonds, which she had previously described as ‘my mother’s idea of fashionable,’ and cocked her head, listening to something only she could hear.
Brezan was worrying that someone would show up at either end of the corridor when the door whispered open. Tseya straightened and nodded at him. Brezan had already drawn his gun. He checked the interior from where he was, then sprinted through and broke left, sweeping the room once again. There was nothing of interest except a jeng-zai deck and some tokens on a table. “Clear,” he said in a low voice.