“Cancel!” Khiruev said. “Wheel the swarm—” She didn’t have time to work out exact coordinates. Instead, she traced out the curve on tactical. Janaia translated this into the necessary evasive maneuver. The moth commanders’ acknowledgment lights flickered on the panel. “Doctrine,” she added, “hurry up and stab some equations until they tell us what that thing does.”
Doctrine had a harried look. “Yes, sir,” she said without looking up from her terminal.
Tactical Two had peeled away safely. Khiruev wished them well, but she had more immediate concerns.
Hafn Swarm One was practically breathing down Minang Tower’s neck. Scan confirmed that the tower had ignited its shields. The issue was not the shields’ fuel source but the fact that they would decay rapidly under any sustained barrage. A small note on one of Khiruev’s subdisplays informed her that Minang Tower was continuing to forward its scan observations, not that it had a whole lot to add about the current situation. The tower’s magistrate had not called for assistance, but this was consistent with her earlier behavior. Khiruev appreciated that she wasn’t making a distraction of herself in the middle of a battle. Khiruev didn’t think Minang was in serious danger anyway. Hafn One was going to swipe at them in passing, a last attempt to draw the Kel away from Hafn Two, then give it up and move in for real.
The Kel were partway through the wheel when Khiruev had the sudden rattling intuition that she’d done exactly as the Hafn general desired. She was just as convinced that she didn’t want to stay where the spikes were pointed. That was the proper way to pin an opponent anyway, with equally terrible options.
Later, when she reviewed the combat logs, she figured out that she hadn’t realized that the trap had snapped shut until nine seconds afterward.
“Formation break,” Scan said sharply, while Communications reported the same alert from the commanders of Tactical Three and Tactical Five.
Khiruev knew that from the sudden disintegration of the formation’s protection. Doctrine was saying something after the fact. Moot point.
“Following units are not responding to orders—” Communications, with the list. Khiruev checked it for numbers. Fourteen bannermoths were now lit up on the tactical display, marked with the crashhawk glyph. She’d never seen so many of them at once, even in a training exercise.
It would have been one thing if the Hafn attack had knocked those moths out and the interface had glitched the representation. But those moths had rolled and were now flying directly toward the Hierarchy of Feasts. Moreover, the crashhawks had organized themselves into what resembled a Hafn configuration, not a Kel formation.
“All moths,” Khiruev said, forwarding the list Communications had handed her. “The following units are to be regarded as hostiles. Tactical Five, prioritize their destruction.” They were now down to a skeleton formation. Any more losses and she’d have to step down to a formation with a smaller number of keys. “Other units assist as opportunity permits.”
Tactical Five interposed itself between the crashhawks and the command moth, and opened fire.
Considering how bad it was to have fourteen Kel commanders go rogue on you (irony aside), Khiruev felt dreadfully calm. It wasn’t fair. She was dying anyway. It was one thing for her to be unperturbed, but she should at least have some reaction on the swarm’s behalf.
Khiruev’s attention was caught by Janaia’s hands clenching and unclenching, by the rigid way she held her head. Khiruev would not have expected it of her. Usually Janaia was hard to rattle. “Commander,” Khiruev said quietly, and when she didn’t respond, “Commander.”
Janaia wouldn’t meet Khiruev’s eyes. “What if they can do it again, sir?” The edge of panic in her voice was unmistakable.
Khiruev barely escaped hissing an oath through her teeth. Everyone was thinking it, and the question of how to avoid another such hit was important, but that was no reason to speak your fear out loud. Janaia should know better. Even a common soldier should know better. Of all the fucking times for the cindermoth’s commander to have a fucking breakdown.
“Pull yourself together, Commander,” Khiruev said. If Janaia could be calmed quickly—
“Sir,” she said, her voice rising in pitch, “they’re coming after us again, none of us are safe—”
No luck. Khiruev’s fault for misgauging her: always proper, always the perfect Kel, of course she’d be the most vulnerable to a breakdown. “Commander Janaia,” Khiruev said, willing Janaia to meet her eyes even though she needed to be watching the scan and tactical readouts, “you are relieved of duty. Colonel Muris, you have command for the duration.”
For a suspended second, Khiruev was afraid that Janaia would freeze and that she’d have to have someone escort her out of the command center. Then Janaia rose, saluted, and walked out, her face white.
Khiruev couldn’t expend more attention on her, although she would have to reevaluate her fitness as an officer if they survived this. They had served together a long time. She had not realized how much she had come to rely on Janaia. While Muris took Janaia’s place, Khiruev assessed Tactical Two’s position.
“Sir,” Scan said, interrupting her attempt to figure out just what Gherion was hoping to accomplish with Black Lens, “you should review the crashhawks’ formants. Look at the comparisons—”
Khiruev didn’t have to be prompted twice. She had learned to read scan under one of Kel Academy’s most notoriously exacting (not to say boring) instructors, and she had a reasonable knowledge of common shapes a Kel military mothdrive formant might take. The crashhawks’ formants had changed. They looked eerily like Hafn drives on scan.
“Does Tactical Five have visuals?” she asked curtly.
Tactical Five obliged. A collation of videos arrived half a minute later. The group leader’s scan officer had tagged the most telling items, captured by a bannermoth that had sent out drones for a closer look.
One video frame was especially clear. The bannermoth Tempest Countdown should have been black painted with gold, from its name along the spine to the fire-and-bird motifs of the Kel. Instead, great swathes of the visible wing surfaces had gone green with a luster as of poisoned pearls. More worryingly, translucent veins had grown over the green area. The video showed them pulsing. Khiruev remembered the boy sewn up with birds and flowers, the endless procession of red spiders crawling through the crystalline veins that connected him to his casket. She couldn’t tell if red anything crawled through the infected moth’s veins. At least she hadn’t wasted time on Override Aerie Primary trying to slave the rogues’ mothgrids to that of the Hierarchy of Feasts. She had a fair idea it wouldn’t have worked.
Khiruev ordered the swarm into a formation from Lexicon Secondary. The modulation was as rough as she’d thought it would be, but she kept her face impassive. The Kel ordinarily tried to avoid having hostile units materialize inside a formation.
Updates blinked at her, demanding her attention. What interested her most was a report from Tactical Four’s Commander Gehmet and the accompanying list of units destroyed. Dragonfly Thunder. Three Gears Spinning. Song of Blackened Stones. Stag’s Blood.
She tapped out more orders, managing swarm geometry with more grid assistance than usual. Ordinarily Khiruev relied on Janaia to fill in the blanks, but she didn’t work with Muris like this often. She wanted to leave some margin for error.
“Sir, you’ll want to see this,” Doctrine said into one of the rare lulls. The loudness of her voice was like a hammer. “We think we’ve isolated the Hafn configuration.”