Naturally, mid-meal Emio stuck her head in the room without knocking. “Hate to interrupt,” she said, “but you need to take this call. Supersedes even the strike business.”
Irimi drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very, and stared at Emio. “Do the Shuos have no manners?”
“Not in my line of work,” Emio said. Brezan had never quite been able to figure out how Emio and Irimi related to each other, a confusing combination of obligatory faction rivalry and camaraderie. Shuos-Andan feuding had been going on for centuries; no reason why it should stop now. “You probably want to take this one from your office. Unless your relationship with General Khiruev is much closer than I thought it was.”
Brezan made a face at her. He wouldn’t have tolerated snide jokes about hawkfucking from anyone else. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” He pulled on his socks and shoes, even though no one else was going to see them, and followed Emio out.
Governor Lozhoi had set Brezan up in a hastily emptied wing of one of her administration buildings. Brezan had made sure to send her a thank-you note in the nicest calligraphy he could produce. He needed her cooperation and he knew it. Her support hadn’t smoothed all the problems in setting up a base of operations on Krauwer 5, but it had helped. They were down to student demonstrations and workers’ protests only every other week, as Emio liked to say. After all, this latest business with the doctors wasn’t Lozhoi’s fault.
Brezan’s so-called residence used to be two adjoining guest rooms. After getting used to variable layout while serving on Kel warmoths, it was still disconcerting to take stairs and walk down hallways to get to the office. There was a lift, but it was still on the list for repairs after a saboteur had jinxed the damn thing.
For a governor, Lozhoi had remarkably good taste in decor. Brezan was used to Kel ostentation and had told her so during his first week here. Lozhoi had looked at him thoughtfully, then said, “Well, it’s true that it’s useful to impress people with glitter once in a while, but sometimes asceticism has its uses too.” As far as he could tell, she meant it. He’d seen her office, which was modestly outfitted, the only indulgence a carved wooden good-luck charm on the wall.
Lozhoi had not, however, stinted on Brezan’s own office. High-quality furniture, well-made without being ostentatious; good lighting from a profusion of candlevines. The view wasn’t great, but she hadn’t had to explain to Brezan that this was for security reasons. After the time someone had thrown a homemade incendiary at him during one of his outings, he’d been twitchy around windows.
The guards greeted him with sober nods. He would never get used to the way they stiffened to attention whenever they saw him. It’s just me, he wanted to say. I’m no one special. Except he’d chosen otherwise, and they’d never see him as just another Kel officer.
Emio preceded Brezan into the office and did a quick sweep. “Looks fine,” she said. Brezan knew perfectly well that she wasn’t so much worried about his safety as her professional reputation, but he appreciated her attentiveness all the same.
His desk was already piled with selected correspondence, paper correspondence, from concerned citizens who believed in the old-fashioned methods of petitioning officials. He had to recycle a terrifying quantity of letters every day, although he kept the nicer specimens of calligraphy just to look at. He’d have to go through the pile later. In the meantime, he logged into the secured terminal and said, “I’m told I have a call?”
“Connecting,” the grid said blandly.
Moments later, it imaged the face of General Kel Khiruev. She was, at present, Brezan’s senior general, a hilarious and not entirely comfortable turn of events. Brezan had once served as one of Khiruev’s staffers. He hadn’t intentionally wound up as her head of state cum superior officer.
The intervening years had treated Khiruev as well as could be expected, considering that she’d aged rapidly during the Hafn invasion two years ago. The dueling scars on her face stood out more lividly than ever against her brown skin, and she hadn’t done anything about her shock of white hair. Then again, Khiruev had never been particularly vain of her appearance.
“High General,” Khiruev said, not without humor.
“Don’t you start,” Brezan said. He had to avoid the temptation to treat her as though she would shatter. For a while there, formation instinct had made her brittle. But Cheris’s calendar had changed that, he hoped for the better. The Kel in his government, which people had started calling the Compact, could choose to obey or disobey. It made all the difference. “What’s going on now?”
“I wanted to update you on the Vonner Salient,” Khiruev said.
Brezan closed his eyes. His augment coopted his proprioception to show him a map, completely unnecessarily. He knew about the Vonner Salient; had been reading briefings about it for the past several months. One of the systems in the Salient was a rich source of materials necessary to nurture growing voidmoths. One of his generals had been contesting the Salient, and losing. General Inesser—now Protector-General Inesser—wasn’t stupid. She wanted those resources for her own realm, which styled itself the Protectorate.
The Vonner Salient wasn’t the only place where such a conflict was playing out. Both the Compact and the Protectorate were in a race to build more warmoths to defend themselves. Brezan had fewer Kel, because most of them had found Inesser’s traditionalism more attractive. His main advantage was that the Compact’s less stringently regulated economy had already overtaken the Protectorate’s in terms of production capacity even despite the hiccups in trade routes due to mothdrive malfunctions. Brezan had relaxed the regulations on the advice of the historian-soldier Devenay Ragath, who’d made a study of the economies of neighboring realms.
“Fine,” Brezan said. “Give me the bad news.”
“General Peo wants to know if he should cede the Salient,” Khiruev said. “I have a databurst with his latest report—”
Brezan received the databurst in silence. Glanced over the highlighted sections. He already knew. Peo was, as far as Brezan could tell, a good and loyal Kel. Peo was also losing. And good and loyal Kel, especially ones with any modicum of tactical experience, weren’t so common that Brezan could afford to throw away their service. He was impressed that Peo was consulting him at all. Habits of obedience, perhaps, even if Brezan was hardly in a position to stand in for Kel Command. He relied on Khiruev and, at Khiruev’s suggestion, Ragath for strategic advice.
If the question was coming to him, though, it meant they’d gone beyond strategy to policy.
“You must have an opinion,” Brezan said.
Khiruev shrugged. “My opinion, and Ragath concurs, is that we can’t hold the Vonner Salient. The question is—” She smiled bitterly. “The question is, do we deny the key system to the Protectorate?”
“You don’t mean—” But she wouldn’t be demanding his time unless she did. “You want to blow it up.”
“Well, not literally. But our swarm in the area does have a supply of fungal canisters.”
“Oh,” Brezan said.
Fungal canisters were one of the more recent and reviled additions to the Kel’s arsenal of nasty weapons. “Fungus” was not, strictly speaking, accurate. Nirai researchers had derived the organism from creatures that dwelled beyond the ordinary world, in gate-space. Brezan was no engineer, but he had a basic familiarity with the canisters’ capabilities. They could contaminate an entire world, causing ecological damage that would take centuries to repair.