“I’m not sure this is an attitude conducive to our long-term survival,” Brezan said.
She smiled at him with the side of her mouth. “One of us has to be the optimist.”
The mothgrid interrupted them with a notification: Jedao’s swarm had bannered the Deuce of Gears.
“We’d better get ready,” Tseya said.
Brezan turned off the duel recording, noting in passing that the score was 2-2 and wondering if he was paranoid for thinking Jedao might have engineered it that way. He averted his face. More than anything he yearned to be part of the battle, yearned to fight.
“Brezan,” Tseya said, “Brezan. We’re fighting in our own way.”
Hopeless to explain to her that being a Kel wasn’t about fighting in your own way, as he had done during Exercise Purple 53. It was about fighting the same way as all the other Kel. Of course, as a crashhawk, he was in no position to lecture Tseya about Kel doctrine. Instead, he said, “I will do my duty,” because that was always unobjectionable.
Tseya had an imitation Kel uniform for the operation. He didn’t watch her put it on, couldn’t bear to, but he had to concede that she would stick out on a Kel moth if she wore anything else, especially since Jedao had booted all the seconded personnel. The two of them suited up quietly. Brezan knew that the Andan cared about the aesthetics of even utilitarian objects like suits, but it was different when you had to wear one yourself. Oh well, given how his year was going, tasteful scrollwork was the least of his problems.
Of the two of them, Tseya was the better pilot. Brezan had observed her long enough to know that this wasn’t just a matter of specific familiarity with the silkmoth’s handling characteristics. Fortunately, she was on his side, or anyway more on his side for the moment than against it.
He was tempted to whisper as they made the approach, as if the Kel in the swarm could overhear them across vacuum. Tseya, intent on her task, seemed to feel no such impulse. Her toe was tapping loudly against the side of the terminal.
The agony of waiting didn’t get any better aboard a silkmoth. Brezan was watching the Kel and Hafn swarms on scan and fretting when another Hafn swarm blinked into existence. He had no other word for it, and he didn’t think that many formants, even glitchy foreign formants, could be a malfunction in their scan. “Tseya—”
“I see them,” Tseya said. She wasn’t changing their approach, mainly because the main body of Jedao’s swarm was obdurate in threatening the newcomers. How Jedao had known they would show up there, Brezan had no idea. No one had ever said that Jedao had the ability to get extra information out of scan, but it wasn’t impossible that he knew some tricks.
Brezan had difficulty not staring at the highlighted triangle in the display that represented the Hierarchy of Feasts. We’re going to free you from the Immolation Fox, he thought savagely, trying not to wonder whether General Khiruev had survived. And then I will personally kill Jedao into so many pieces you can’t even burn what’s left.
One of Brezan’s former lovers, a perfumer, had asked what he found so attractive about the violence of his profession. Never mind that as a staffer he didn’t personally see to the violence. Brezan didn’t like admitting it, but there was a certain satisfaction to kicking down obstacles.
Focus, he reminded himself. They weren’t in position yet, and Jedao was still a threat. He glanced at Tseya. Still engrossed in her task. Good.
The battle was unfolding very oddly. He worked out that the Hafn had somehow taken control of fourteen Kel bannermoths. Jedao had caught on before Brezan did and had condensed the grand formation dangerously to release a tactical group to deal with the crashhawk units. Brezan took long, even breaths to deal with the nausea at the thought of the Kel forced to turn traitor again, something they had to be sick of—
No. That wasn’t it. He remembered the shattering devotion in General Khiruev’s eyes, in Commander Janaia’s. Brezan himself only felt horrified because he had no formation instinct to assure him that the world was ticking along as it was supposed to. The Kel hexarch had warned him, but he hadn’t been ready to heed her.
“That detached group, it’s burning up?”
Brezan realized Tseya had addressed him and looked at the tactical display. “Yes,” he said flatly. Which unlucky commander had Jedao sacrificed? Rationally, any commander had to send people to die. But he couldn’t help the way he felt. “That group looks like it’s putting pressure on the units the Hafn are trying to shield.”
“I see,” Tseya said. She was guiding them past the fireworks now.
They had discussed how they wanted to handle this, given that battle would complicate matters. In this case, it would harm the swarm’s chances of survival to remove Jedao during the engagement. If Jedao continued to aim himself at the Hafn, they might as well allow him to complete the battle. Brezan had served under General Khiruev long enough to have faith in the woman’s ability, but they had no guarantee that Khiruev still lived. For his part, Brezan didn’t have the training for the task.
Instead, they were going to board the command moth and ambush Jedao when he headed back to his quarters to rest. Presumably having a body, even the wrong body, meant the bastard had to sleep once in a while. And there was a chance, however small, that Jedao would let down his guard enough to give the two of them a shot.
One thing Brezan had always hated about space combat, despite having been a moth Kel for half his career, was the illusory sense of insulation. You could almost imagine that the vast-eyed darkness was a protective shroud; you could mistake the intermittent silences for an indication that the enemy would pass you by. As it happened, the universe was very good at suckering Kel who got too cocky. During his first bannermoth posting, in an engagement against Taurag raiders, railgun shot had punched through the fading formation shields and through the moth, and sheared the woman next to him in two.
“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.”