A long time ago, one of his mentors had told him of the good he could do with his astonishing versatility in the technical fields. Restorative psych surgery on refugees and veterans. Better mothdrives. The occasional paper on algebraic topology. He could have done any of it, had eventually done all of it, except none of it changed the fact that he would die someday.
As it turned out, you could fix the calendar to cheat death. Even the Rahal couldn’t fix calendars the way Kujen could. Granted, this didn’t come without its cost. The calendar had made remembrances even more pervasive than they had been during Kujen’s childhood.
Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were. He could have warned his fellow hexarchs, but it was going to be more fun to watch them discover it for themselves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
KHIRUEV RESISTED THE urge to stare at the door to the command center. Jedao’s continued absence during an engagement was a problem, but Khiruev freezing up would be a worse one. Besides, Jedao’s instructions to Khiruev, while requiring a great deal of faith, were unambiguous.
Hafn Swarm One (as the tactical display now tagged it) was still headed for them from Cobweb. They would be curving toward Minang Tower on the way. Hafn Swarm Two was still in disarray after the bombs that had taken out part of their lower left flank (relative to the swarm’s orientation and axis of motion), but she couldn’t count on that state of affairs to last.
For its part, Minang had the standard defenses for a wolf tower. The good news was that they were solidly in hexarchate territory, with friendly terrain. The irritating Hafn ability to use their native exotics in the hexarchate did not deny Minang the use of high calendar defenses. The bad news was that those defenses had never been meant for extended activation. No one had expected an invader to penetrate so deeply into hexarchate space, even in a border march.
“Shall we engage, General?” Janaia said.
“All units banner the Deuce of Gears,” Khiruev said, keeping her voice unemotional. “Activate the primary pivot and close, but carefully.” She specified the parameters. Like most shield formations, Knives Are Our Walls offered only short-lived protection, but it beat letting the Hafn pummel them at will. “Scan, what is going on out there?”
“Estimated thirty Hafn moths dead or disabled out of eighty-two,” Scan said. “I’m distinguishing four types of mothdrives, two of them unfamiliar.” The familiar ones belonged to the Lilacs and the Magnolias. “Guessing they’re support vessels of some type, given their placement well back of the combat moths.”
Weapons, usually reticent, spoke up abruptly. “Sir, more are coming. Look at the way they’re regrouping to clear the area.”
Khiruev concurred. Hafn Swarm Two wasn’t gathering into the familiar dish-and-funnel configuration. Rather, its warmoths were forming a half-shell around a cluster of slower-moving moths.
The Hierarchy of Feasts reached the formation’s pivot, and the formation’s shield effect activated. It didn’t show in human-normal visuals, which had made Khiruev anxious when she was younger, but the scan overlay showed that nothing was wrong. The Hafn could apparently detect the shield as well. After an initial barrage of missiles, like a stutter of wayward stars, they held their fire.
“Sir!” Scan cried. “Here they come.”
More Hafn juddered into existence near Hafn Swarm Two. One group had the misfortune to arrive practically on top of a moth that had been damaged earlier. It went out in a horrible sudden sizzle, torching two other moths near it.
There were 105 warmoths in the Kel swarm. Over 150 Hafn had joined the battle, and that wasn’t even counting the 71 from Hafn Swarm One that were dashing back toward them and which would be able to hit them with known exotics in twenty-four minutes at current accelerations.
The command center was everywhere awash with light, red and gold, gold and red. Sometimes Khiruev thought that the Kel had an institutionalized horror of dying in the dark, with not even a candle for your pyre.
Deal with it, Jedao had said. This meant, if you regarded the whole situation as a particularly lethal training exercise, that he believed Khiruev had both the knowledge and resources necessary to prevail. Ordinarily Khiruev didn’t believe in applying this kind of meta-analysis to real life, but Jedao had a known tendency to think of everything in terms of games.
Khiruev had no idea what Jedao was so busy with. However, she did know what to do about the Hafn. Swarm One had done their damnedest to lead the Kel away from Swarm Two’s arrival point, and she didn’t think it was a feint. They had only turned back when it became clear the Kel weren’t falling for it. Swarm Two couldn’t just be reinforcements. It contained something vital to the Hafn. Khiruev had no intention of obliging them.
They had only another six minutes of shield protection left. Khiruev had set up new waypoints and handed them over to Janaia and Navigation. “Communications,” she said, “get me Commander Gherion.” Tactical Group Two.
Gherion responded immediately. “Sir,” he said, unable to hide his worry.
I don’t know what the fox is up to, either, Khiruev thought. There was no point offering an explanation she didn’t have; it wasn’t her place. “Commander,” she said, “I’m detaching Tactical Two. I’ve tagged the moths Hafn Swarm Two appears to be guarding. Your job is to put pressure on them, including shooting them to cinders if you can get through. I believe the tagged units are auxiliaries, but your approach will undoubtedly bring you under heavy fire. Take whatever measures you deem necessary and don’t concern yourself with the rest of our swarm until I recall you.”
Gherion saluted. “Naturally, sir.”
“Go to it,” Khiruev said, coldly aware that if there were any ugly surprises out there, Tactical Two would run into them first. But someone always had to go in first.
“Sir,” Weapons said, “shields going down in three minutes.” Indeed, the shields’ decay was manifesting as a lace of silver-blue light, like fractures in a hollow ellipsoid containing the swarm.
The Hafn had not been idle. Scan was reporting a storm of incoming kinetics, which blistered the shields at the points of impact. Slugs of dead metal hammered themselves into hot coins, ricocheted. Hafn Swarm Two’s configuration had, if anything, flattened. Khiruev wasn’t sure what that meant, nor did Doctrine have anything for her.
Khiruev said, “All tactical groups”—Gherion would know this excluded him—“reform into Mountains Never Whisper. Time the modulation to allow Tactical Two to pass through.”
Tactical Two was breaking formation. The rest of the Kel moths were maneuvering to reposition themselves in compensation. Judging from the pyramidal leading element, Khiruev guessed that Gherion was going to use Winter’s Eyes to punch his way into the enemy.
“Our turn,” Khiruev said.
“Over or under, sir?” Janaia asked.
A trap either way, but she couldn’t go in head-on. She’d run the calculations. That Hafn rupture attack would spit them if they did it that way.
“Under,” Khiruev said. More waypoints. Janaia suggested an adjustment. She accepted it.
Hafn Swarm Two reacted with dismaying alacrity when they saw the cindermoth angling itself down in relation to the plane of their own movement. The Hafn moths performed a beautiful maneuver, splitting diagonally to either side in two lattices, each headed by a projecting spike. If you drew rays from the two spikes, they would intersect at a point just ahead of the Hierarchy of Feasts.