As he spoke, Kujen retrieved the uniform and held it out to Jedao. “Come on,” he said coaxingly. “Unless you really mean to go around half-naked.”
Reluctantly, Jedao took the clothes and pulled them on. Then he stared at Kujen some more.
“I have some battle transcripts so you’ll have an idea of what to expect.”
“Are you sure you can’t scare up a competent general?” Jedao said. “Or a mercenary commander?” Mercenaries had been illegal in the heptarchate, but maybe the regulations had changed. Or Kujen, being a hexarch, could bend the rules. Companies sometimes operated around the borders. “I don’t—” He looked helplessly down at his hands. “Whatever you think I am, I can’t do this. My memories seem to be muddled. If you really, truly need a general, you ought to get one who knows what they’re doing.”
Kujen smiled crookedly. “I have strong reason to believe that you’re the only one who can help me.”
That was all very well in the dramas, but a bad sign when people talked to you like that in real life. Jedao had a brief, disorienting memory of sitting in a room watching one with—an oval-faced Kel woman and several robots? Except he didn’t seem to have a body, and he could see in all directions at once, which made no sense because he was pretty sure he only came with the standard-issue two eyes in front. Just as quickly as it had come, the memory dissipated.
Still, he might as well glean what information he could. “All right, Nir—Kujen, show me.”
Kujen drew him into a sitting room and snagged a slate off one of the tables. Then he played back a sequence of battles in three dimensions, which took some time. The first were land battles on a variety of maps, including an ambitious amphibious assault. The later ones occurred in space, some involving large swarms. One side was represented by blue, the other by red. It became obvious that Red was the same commander each time, and was the adversary Kujen should worry about: aggressive, devious, and good at dragging the opponent about by the heels.
“Well?” Kujen said.
“We’re fighting Red, right?”
Why did Kujen’s mouth twist like that? “Yes,” he said, without elaborating.
“We’re fucked,” Jedao said. “I don’t know if you can tell, but you have to have noticed that in that last battle, Red gouged Blue into pieces while outnumbered eight to one. I have a better idea. This enemy you’re so worried about? Invest in some good assassins.” There he went, sounding like a stereotypical Shuos, but it was good advice, dammit. “Unless you’re going to tell me that everyone in Red’s chain of succession is also that good.”
“No, that’s unlikely.”
“So what’s wrong with assassins? Is this one of those situations where that would touch off a general war we’re too broke to fight?”
Kujen shook his head. “We need to take and hold territory. Besides, I know you’re up to fighting Red because you’re also Red. That eight-to-one thing was the Battle of Candle Arc, by the way. Very famous. The Kel put it in all their textbooks.”
Jedao’s marrow froze. The fuck? How could he possibly be Red, let alone “also Red,” whatever that meant? Or, for that matter, old enough to have carried out a feat that had gotten into textbooks? Were the Kel in the habit of handing their swarms over to teenagers?
“All right,” Jedao said, “you win. I don’t have any useful arguments against the insane. If this is a training exercise, you can fail me on it.” Which was going to suck, because he’d been having difficulty with his math classes. “I will have to work hard for the rest of the term to make up for it, but I’m not afraid of hard work.”
Kujen looked fascinated. “I need to clear something up for you. You really think you’re a cadet?”
Jedao was silent.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Jedao said reluctantly, even though he was starting to wonder.
“Take off your shirt.”
Jedao hesitated, then fumbled with the closures.
Kujen rolled his eyes. “I won’t look if it makes you feel better, although it’s not as if it’s anything I haven’t seen before.” He sauntered to the other side of the room, then pointedly turned his back.
Jedao resisted the urge to glare at Kujen’s shoulder blades. Kujen sighed theatrically. Jedao took off the shirt and folded it over his arm, then stood there uncertainly.
“Shirt too,” Kujen said.
Jedao bit back a retort and settled the tunic over the back of a chair. After he’d yanked the shirt over his head, he froze. He’d thought the older physique was bad enough. Beyond that, his torso was riddled with scars. Most of them looked dreadful. Hell, one of his nipples had been completely obliterated. He had no idea where the scars had come from. He prodded one. It didn’t hurt. He almost wished it did.
“Even the Shuos don’t do that to their cadets,” Kujen said. “Grenade took off half your face once, back when you were a tactical group commander. The surgeons did an excellent reconstruction. You can’t even tell unless you do a deep scan at the bone level. Anyway, do you believe me now when I tell you you’re a soldier?”
Jedao put his clothes back on. “How many years?” Get the facts. Panic later.
“You’re forty-four.”
Shit. “I had a friend...” Jedao said, then trailed off because he wasn’t sure where he was going with the thought. Why would the hexarch keep track of another random Shuos cadet, after all? Ruo probably had gone off to make a name for himself as a celebrated assassin. And at this point Ruo would be twenty-seven years older.
Interesting. He used to write down all his arithmetic, and he’d just done that in his head. But Kujen had resumed talking, so he filed away the discrepancy to puzzle over later.
“Your abilities ought to be intact,” Kujen went on, “but we’re going to have to catch you up on the holes in your declarative memory.”
“Yes, about that,” Jedao said. “Is there a cure? Because it’s very disturbing.”
“Your opponent made off with most of your memories,” Kujen said. “That’s why she’s potentially your worst matchup, and why we have to be careful. I retrieved the rest, but owing to circumstances there was some degradation. I’m sorry.”
“Are you telling me I was attacked by a memory vampire?” Jedao said incredulously.
Kujen snorted. “You have a way with words sometimes... Exotic technology, and an experimental procedure besides. We could try to duplicate the circumstances if we capture her, but odds are it would drive you crazy.”
“Why didn’t it drive this memory vampire crazy?”
“Who says it didn’t?” Kujen sighed. “I don’t suppose you remember any of those Andan jokes?”
The bizarreness of this question made Jedao’s mind go blank. He couldn’t think of any jokes whatsoever, and besides, the entire situation struck him as decidedly unfunny.
“You used to have the most extraordinary collection of filthy Andan jokes,” Kujen said wistfully.
“You could tell them to me and I could tell them back to you.”
“No,” Kujen said, “it wouldn’t be the same.”
That didn’t make Jedao feel better, so he moved on to the next question. “Why the Kel?”
“You had an excellent career seconded to the Kel,” Kujen said. “They promoted the hell out of you.”
“Why can’t you hire someone who doesn’t have defective memories?”
“You’ve never lost a battle,” Kujen said. “Plus, outnumbered eight to one. Crushing victory. Even I could tell.” His voice was lightly teasing.