“It’s triplets?” Jedao said, peering at the images of three moths that now hovered in front of him, a large one flanked by two smaller ones. All three moths had the characteristic triangular profile of Kel warmoths. The largest featured a spinally mounted gun along with the expected arrays of turrets and missile ports.
“No, the smaller two are for scale reference,” Kujen said. “The one to your left is a fangmoth. You used to be fond of those. The one to your right is a—”
“—bannermoth,” Jedao said, then stopped.
Kujen arched an eyebrow at him. “See, you haven’t forgotten everything.” His hands moved again. He had beautiful hands, with fingers tapering gracefully.
A fourth moth appeared above the central moth. It was broader and longer, and also had a spinal main gun.
“Cindermoth,” Kujen said. “There used to be six of them. Now only four remain, and they’re under Protector-General Inesser’s control. No one currently has a mothyard capable of building new ones, which buys us a little time. Anyway, that central one is a shearmoth, and it’s yours. I made an assistant name it, which was a mistake, but I hate naming things. Don’t look at me like that, I just design them.”
Kujen zeroed in on the spinal gun. “That’s the shear cannon,” he said. “It only functions in high calendar terrain, which is its main disadvantage, especially since you’re going to be fighting radicals and rebels and heretics.”
“So why bother with it at all?” Jedao said.
“It generates a pulse that warps spacetime,” Kujen said patiently. “Creating the pulse is an exotic effect. Once that’s done, however, it will continue to travel into any sort of terrain until it dissipates. I got the idea because of the way the mothdrive works, by grabbing onto spacetime and pulling itself along. Breeding the modification into the moth lineage took some time. But I think you’ll find it worthwhile.”
Jedao figured it out. “So you can fire it from our side of the border into theirs.”
“Yes.”
“I hope there are still conventional weapons,” Jedao said, giving Kujen a hard look. “Because if it’s a gravitational wave, it might yank formations out of place, but it’s just going to pass through the moths themselves. I can’t destroy them directly with it.”
Great, he thought. He’d just said “I,” as if he were going along with this.
Kujen made a pacifying gesture. “I wouldn’t stint on that. And it’s not entirely useless on that front—try it on a planet with oceans or atmosphere sometime, and you’ll get some interesting turbulence. Check the other statistics—”
The readout appeared in front of the images. Jedao went through all the listed weapons as well as the numbers of missiles and mines, plus the amount of space it had for necessaries like foam sealant and pickles. Apparently the Kel love of spiced cabbage pickles hadn’t changed. He gestured at the slate. Kujen handed it over so he could run his own queries. It took Jedao a few moments to work out the interface, but after a while he was able to call up some explanatory diagrams.
At first the numbers didn’t mean much. With some thought, however, he could see the shearmoth’s capabilities in his head; he could visualize the maneuvers it was capable of, how it would dance at his command. “How many of these do you have?” he asked, although he had already guessed the answer.
“Just the one,” Kujen said with what Jedao interpreted as real regret. “You don’t know what I had to do to source the materials needed to grow the mothdrive components. You’ll have to keep in mind that the shearmoth’s mothdrive and maneuver drives have better power to mass ratios than your bannermoths do, even if it’s larger. Don’t outrun them.”
Obligingly, Jedao looked up the profiles for both drives and was impressed by the differences. He ran some computations to compare the power draw over a spread of different accelerations. After a while he became aware of Kujen’s narrowed eyes. “Did I get something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” Kujen said after a subtle pause. “You homed right in on the intersection of those curves.”
Jedao had done that part in his head. Curious, but if the past years had magically fixed that part of his brain, he wasn’t going to say no to that either. “It had to be there somewhere,” he said. “If you assume the curves are approximated by—” He demonstrated.
“So I see,” Kujen said in a voice so dry that Jedao was reminded that he was lecturing the Nirai hexarch on mathematics elementary enough that he had probably figured it out as a small child. “Well, while the Kel have always preferred to throw you at strategic problems, it won’t hurt to round out your education. Considering the number of calendrical heresies flourishing out there, it can only help to develop your mathematical skills.”
“I would like that,” Jedao said, and was rewarded by Kujen’s half-laugh, half-smile.
“In the meantime,” Kujen said, “let’s deal with the practicalities. Set your uniform insignia. I had thought you’d remember, but since you don’t—the Kel like everything to be done according to protocol.”
“Set? Shouldn’t there be pins for this stuff?”
“I really wish I’d had a better way to check what you do and don’t remember,” Kujen muttered. “The uniform will respond to your voice. Just tell it your name and rank and it will read the rest from your profile.”
Jedao did, and was surprised by the general’s wings above the Shuos eye, two things he didn’t remember earning. A full general, at that. Would that have made Ruo envious?
“Even if I’m forty-four,” Jedao said, incredulous and not a little regretful about the lost years, “that’s rather young.” The idea of appearing before the Kel in this uniform was daunting enough. Appearing before them while claiming to be a general—their general—seemed like it would invite them to put holes in him. He heard they had good aim.
“The Kel respect rank,” Kujen said. “They’ll respect yours.”
Will they now, Jedao thought. Only one way to find out. “These are real Kel,” he said, “serving on real moths, fighting a real war. And you’ve decided that for this to work, I have to be a real general for you.”
“That sums it up, yes.”
A bad situation. Nevertheless, he needed to stay alive long enough to figure out how to tilt the odds not only in his favor, but in favor of the Kel who would be coming into his care. “I don’t care how hacked up this hept—hexarchate of yours has become,” Jedao said, “or how good this shearmoth is. A swarm of 108 moths, however impressive, doesn’t leave us room for error. The only way this is possible is if I get good fast and we fight dirty.”
On impulse, Jedao saluted Kujen. The motion came disturbingly naturally. He said, in formal Kel fashion, “I’m your gun.” He felt he ought to commemorate the occasion somehow, even if the occasion was not remotely sane.
Kujen’s eyes lit. “I knew you’d come back to me,” he said. It wasn’t until much later that Jedao figured out what he meant by that.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MORNING AFTER Cheris disappeared, taking the needlemoth with her, High General Kel Brezan was woken by a stranger in his bedroom on the cindermoth Hierarchy of Feasts. At first he thought a servitor had gotten confused about the time, because who in the name of fire and ash served tea at this hour? He’d made use of his uncomfortable new rank for once and ordered that no one disturb him for anything other than an emergency, because he needed a good night’s sleep before tackling the world’s problems.