Khiruev marked the swarms’ trajectories converging on a point in a stretch of space she had thought unremarkable, except Cheris insisted it was the Aerie’s location and the high general believed her. Of the six emblems, the one Khiruev kept returning to was General Inesser’s Three Kestrels Three Suns.
Cheris and Brezan weren’t the only ones having a discussion. There were four servitors: three deltaforms and a birdform. The deltaforms kept flashing rapid lights at each other. The fact that the lights were in the human visible spectrum was almost certainly a matter of courtesy. Khiruev had learned that servitors cared a great deal about courtesy, and had endeavored to revise her behavior accordingly, since the high general hadn’t forbidden it. The birdform either approved of this or had decided that dying generals made a good hobby. Whichever was the case, it hovered companionably by Khiruev, periodically refilling her teacup from the kettle that Cheris and Brezan were ignoring.
“If I’m understanding this correctly,” Brezan said, “the servitors prefer not to take action with so many observers around who might figure out they were responsible?”
Khiruev wondered if Brezan had realized that he tended to direct his speech toward empty expanses of wall whenever he mentioned the servitors, or even when he was supposedly addressing them.
Two of the deltaforms, whom Khiruev had tagged Two and Three because she was tired, exchanged a heated flurry of lights and dissonant chords. Then Three said something in very red lights to Cheris.
Cheris frowned, then said, “That’s basically it. They’ve already evacuated as many servitors as they could, but even so—”
Brezan bit his lip. “Cheris,” he said, “if there are servitors on those defense swarms as well—” He stopped.
“You may as well come out and say it,” she said.
“If they can reduce Kel Command to radioactive static, then surely a bunch of moths—”
Cheris’s hands tensed, untensed. “Brezan,” she said, “that’s a lot of moths. Crew on the order of 300,000 altogether. Even if we had definite information that all six generals were irredeemably corrupt, which we don’t, I’d rather kill as few people as we can get away with. Besides which, those aren’t small swarms, and the hexarchate’s enemies haven’t gone away. Do you really want to do away with that chunk of the hexarchate’s forces? Its senior generals?”
“That’s an interesting argument from someone who’s dead-set on tearing the realm apart,” Brezan said.
“I’m not entirely Jedao,” Cheris said, although Khiruev wondered sometimes. “The point of the exercise isn’t to maximize the death toll. It’s to change the system so ordinary people have a chance. People will die, yes. A lot of them. But we don’t have to go out of our way to kill even more.”
“I want to know how you came to this philosophy after having a mass murderer stuffed up your nose,” Brezan said.
“I’m trying to fix the things he broke,” Cheris said, “because I remember breaking them.”
Brezan slumped. “So we wait? You’re not tempted to sweep in and rescue Kel Command from the Hafn?”
Khiruev roused enough to say, “Sir, not only would they not thank us, General Inesser should be more than adequate to the task anyway.”
“By ‘not thank us’ you mean they’d blow themselves up just to get rid of us,” Cheris said wryly. “Don’t they teach us to avoid full frontal assaults anyway?”
Brezan groaned, clearly thinking of any one of four hundred Kel jokes. “Fine,” he said. “We wait for a better opportunity. But what if one doesn’t come?”
“Then we reassess the plan,” Cheris said. “What concerns me is that we haven’t been able to figure out the Hafn vector of approach. The coverage of the detectors and listening posts is hardly universal, so we’re going to have to wait and see.”
Brezan and Cheris turned their attention to a bannermoth that was having engine problems. Khiruev was disturbed, although not surprised, that she had difficulty following the details. The gnawing cold made it hard to concentrate. The birdform chirped at her, possibly thinking that tea, even if it wasn’t a sovereign remedy, would at least warm her. She smiled wanly at it and took a sip.
“I don’t claim to understand you,” Khiruev said to the birdform, “but considering the length of your service, I hope there’s something in this for you. And I’m sorry I’ve never learned your language.”
The birdform tapped encouragingly on the nearest wall. Cheris looked up briefly, then returned to running through drive harmonic diagnostics with Brezan. The birdform repeated the tapping, and Khiruev realized it was in the Kel drum code: You don’t have to die.
Khiruev blinked.
You can choose not to die.
She couldn’t remember why she had invoked Vrae Tala, except when she could. Her father crumpling into corpse-paper, the clanking bells, her mothers clutching each other afterward while she stood frozen trying not to see what was right in front of her. The cutting disappointment every time she survived a battle. She’d learned to hide it, but it never evaporated entirely.
“I am Kel,” Khiruev said painfully. “Even assuming all of this works, in order to free myself of Vrae Tala I would have to free myself of formation instinct. The clause is part of the whole.”
The birdform mulled this over. More tapping: My people have served without formation instinct. Is our service not service?
“It’s not for me to make that judgment,” Khiruev said.
Would your general deny you this?
You chose Vrae Tala, Brezan had said to her just days ago, trying to explain something as distant as smoke. Would the high general want her to give up what made her Kel?
It was barely possible that you could be Kel without formation instinct. Hard not to notice that Brezan was a crashhawk, after all. But this led inevitably to the question of whether it was desirable to be Kel in the first place.
“I will learn to choose,” Khiruev said, “if the high general desires it of me.”
The servitor’s chirr might have been a sigh. It gestured toward the tea with one of its gripping limbs. Obligingly, Khiruev took another sip. The warmth wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t have to.
SIX KEL SWARMS reached the Aerie and waited to banner.
Cheris and Brezan started arguing about what was going to become of the Kel afterward, especially once Cheris pointed out that a successful decapitation strike would leave Brezan the senior Kel officer.
“I’ll resign,” Brezan said.
“That will leave the Kel leaderless,” Cheris said. “Is that what you want to do?”
“I hate it when you open your mouth,” Brezan said. “The things you say never make the situation better.”
Khiruev took to playing card games with the servitors, on the grounds that no one expected her to function anymore. The servitors usually won. She appreciated that they didn’t throw the games to make her feel better.
Shuos Mikodez finished knitting his scarf. The first two people he offered it to were unable to hide their suspicion that it would come alive and strangle them. With modern fibers it was hard to tell.
Three hexarchs, Rahal, Andan, and Vidona, set out for Nirai Station Mavi 514-11. Nirai Faian was already there.
Thirty-eight days after Mikodez alerted Kel Tsoro of an imminent Hafn raid, Kel listening posts near four large moth construction yards reported Hafn moth formants incoming. Three of those construction yards exploded shortly afterward. Kel Command concluded that the construction yards had been the real targets, as two of them had been the only ones capable of building cindermoths. It dispatched four of its defense swarms to repulse the invaders. Disconcertingly, the listening posts lost sight of the formants.
Cheris and Brezan, upon receiving word of further Kel movements, held an emergency meeting and determined that this would be their best opportunity to strike. Khiruev was not present for the discussion. She had collapsed two days earlier, seventy-nine days after she invoked Vrae Tala, and had been removed to Medical.