The drone, when she finished it, wasn’t one of her better efforts. It looked like nothing so much as a sickly cockroach. She rigged the needler unit using seven- and nineteen-circuits scavenged from a music box, of all things, instead of the preferred semiprime circuit, but it couldn’t be helped.
The next step was programming the drone to recognize its target. Triggering it manually would have been better, but if she’d had the ability to do that, she would have been able to shoot Jedao in the back in the first place. The drone had a basic optic system. She’d cribbed from the mothgrid for the leanest pattern recognition routine she could load into its processor and given it the videos from Captain Cheris’s profile. She had a bad several moments when her own vision shorted out while she was feeding the drone the data. Luckily, the process didn’t require much more intervention on her part. By the time it was done, she was drenched in sweat, but her vision had mostly returned.
No wonder the Shuos had never gone in for formation instinct. Not being able to assassinate their own hexarchs, historically a popular Shuos pastime, would have driven them up the wall.
Khiruev gritted her teeth and shoved the drone into her boot. With any luck it wouldn’t shoot her foot by accident. Only forty-nine minutes until high table. Had it really taken her that long? But she knew the answer to that question. She spent fourteen of those minutes taking a shower, which did not relax her at all, and twenty-nine minutes putting everything away. The shelves looked like a war zone, but that was normal.
Her left boot felt disproportionately heavy all the way to the high hall, even though she knew the drone’s mass to an improbable number of significant figures. She arrived six minutes early, no more and no less. It didn’t reassure her that she arrived within sixteen seconds of General Jedao. Commander Janaia showed up two minutes after that, but she had always been slightly lackadaisical.
“Good to see you, General,” Jedao said, as though a normal working relationship was possible. “Shall we?”
Jedao took his seat at the head table. Khiruev sat at his right hand, Janaia at his left, Stsan at the other end of the table. The senior staff officers arranged themselves after a moment’s hesitation.
Servitors were bringing out the food in trays. Janaia wasn’t paying any attention to them, instead casting surreptitious glances at the cup Jedao had brought to high table, even though one had been provided for him, after modern tradition. The fact that Jedao had remembered the tradition was more important than the cup itself, a plain metal affair. Morbidly, Khiruev wondered if the cup had belonged to Captain Cheris.
Jedao inclined his head to the servitor that delivered his chopsticks and spoon. Curious: Khiruev had never seen an officer do that before. Or anyone, for that matter. The servitor, a birdform with extra limbs, made a cautious quizzical sound. It probably knew as much about Hellspin Fortress as any of the humans, although it had never before occurred to Khiruev to wonder how much machine sentiences cared about history. Jedao cocked an eyebrow at it. The servitor chirred thoughtfully and went on with its work.
“All right,” Jedao said in a voice that was clearly audible without being too loud, “this didn’t matter aboard the needlemoth, but I’d be much obliged if someone would tell me if there are any crashingly important rules for how to eat this stuff. Especially the rolled-up seaweed things. Do I use my fingers or what?”
Janaia was startled into a laugh. “We’re not Andan, sir. Getting it into your mouth without dropping it is the important part.”
“The ‘rolled-up seaweed things’ are mostly vegetables and fish inside,” Khiruev felt obliged to add, “unless the servitors are feeling experimental.”
“Good to know,” Jedao said. “At least you can’t do creative experimental things to chopsticks. I recognize those.” He took the water pitcher, filled his cup, and sipped. All the Kel watched him intently. He had to be aware of it, but his expression was serene.
Khiruev had the urge to fish the drone out of her boot and confess everything. Jedao, however, was passing the cup her way. The cup felt like an ordinary object in her hand, and the water was the same clear, sweet water she was used to drinking. In a just world it would burn out her throat—Stop that, she told herself. She passed the cup to her right, her fingers numb.
Janaia persisted in trying to make small talk. “I don’t suppose military food was any better in your day.”
Jedao’s mouth quirked. “You were made a moth Kel directly, weren’t you, Commander?”
“That’s correct, sir,” Janaia said. “I got lucky. Don’t care for dirtside all that much. Flowers are nice, but you don’t need a whole planet to grow them.”
Khiruev couldn’t fault Janaia. The Kel in the high hall were terrified. Hardly anyone was talking, and everyone was fixated on Jedao’s table. Janaia knew as well as anyone what kind of threat Jedao posed. She was also doing her best, by acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary, to keep people from panicking entirely. Khiruev should have been doing the same, no matter how rattled she was.
“I ate some awful things when I started in the infantry,” Jedao said. “When I was a lieutenant, we were once trapped behind enemy lines. Eventually I had to shoot two people for fighting over who got to eat the maggots.”
“We don’t have maggots that we know of,” Stsan said, “but some of the servitors enjoy hunting. Captain-engineer Miugo tells me that they sometimes leave their kills at her door, like a cat might. Thankfully Miugo has a strong stomach.”
“Point them out to me?” Jedao said.
“Rakish-looking man over there,” Janaia said, waving her spoon, “hair pinned up in braids.”
“Ah, I see him.” Jedao turned to the rest of the table and invited the staff to introduce the rest of themselves more fully. He learned that Lieutenant Colonel Najjad of Logistics had three children, and either found it genuinely interesting that the middle child was a researcher in comparative linguistics, or was faking it very well. The acting head of Intelligence, Major Lyu, was drawn into a friendly debate on some opening gambit in an obscure Shuos board game. Only Operations remained uncommunicative, but Jedao seemed amused rather than offended.
For her part, Khiruev wondered how the history lessons that had gone into such loving detail on the tactics that had won the Battle of Candle Arc could have failed to mention how chatty Jedao was, to say nothing of the astonishingly filthy Andan jokes he knew. Upon reflection, Khiruev realized she had only the haziest notion of how the black cradle provided immortality. It had always been rumored that the device acted more as a prison than anything else. Maybe Jedao was starved for conversation after centuries.
The high hall became, if anything, more tense over the course of the meal. The Kel were waiting to find out just how Jedao meant to massacre them. I’m going to fight the Hafn, Jedao had said. How serious was he? Even if he had good intentions, an unlikely proposition, he had to know that Kel Command was unlikely to allow him to run around unmolested.
Jedao had only eaten half his rice by the end of high table. He set his chopsticks down and said, “We may as well head straight to the meeting. I trust you all know what to do.” He drained his cup, stood, and nodded to the officers at the table before heading out of the high hall with the cup hooked to his belt.
The Kel watched him go in silence. “Commander,” Khiruev said politely to Janaia before filing out of the hall with the staff heads. She had to admit she had no idea what Jedao intended for her specifically. It hadn’t escaped her attention that Jedao had fished for little of her personal history, although there had been no other sign of disfavor, and Khiruev didn’t like talking about her family anyway. Even so, she ached with the desire to make herself useful to her superior.