“Nostalgia,” Kujen said with such great affection that Jedao opted not to inquire further. Kujen told him anyway. “I went through a lot of them earlier in my career.”
“Is that the size of a typical winnower crew?” Jedao asked, pointing at the relevant figure.
“In Kel practice, yes,” Kujen said. “Mostly issues related to transport and calibration. It’s a finicky design, which I’ve never been happy about, but I was in a hurry—”
The world grayed around Jedao. I’m just as culpable, he thought. He had used Kujen’s shear cannon not that long ago, without asking what the cost would be for those he used it on. It was hypocritical of him to feel this sudden rush of horror.
He couldn’t afford to get distracted. Kujen had finished his digression on interface design and safety precautions, and had brought up a new animation. “You’ll like this,” he said.
Will I? Jedao thought.
He almost missed it the first time. “Again,” he said, just to be sure. Kujen obliged him.
The new threshold winnower was composed of two separate generators, not one as before. Each projected a line of effect into the space before it, cutting and precise. Where the lines intersected, they punched open a hole into gate-space. From there the winnower’s effect, outflung from the generators, propagated outwards. This increased the effective range and put the winnower’s crews well out of harm’s way. Jedao studied the equations with interest: a clever use of the refactoring implicit in the math.
“Same effect?” Jedao asked.
“At least on animated rats.”
Jedao shot him an annoyed look.
Kujen relented. “It’s been field tested. Spare heretics.” Despite his casual tone, he looked at Jedao sharply. Jedao kept his face bland. “All of them died. I am always thorough, Jedao. I have been doing this for a long time.”
Jedao imagined this was true. He also imagined what it must feel like to have mouths opening in your very flesh, gaping in a tongueless susurrus. When the eyes boiled out of the gashes, could you see what they saw? Did they give you a new appreciation of the lethality of light? His experience of pain was limited. Perhaps everyone’s was, confronted with deaths like these.
“It’ll work in the Compact?” Jedao said. You always had to check, with exotic weapons.
“Of course,” Kujen said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m not unappreciative,” Jedao said, “but besides socking the Compact, what’s your goal for this specific battle? Not like I know enough about the political conditions, which change every time I blink. But I assume they’re not going to roll over and die because we decapitate them. Based on the way people react to me, I’d assume the opposite. Especially if we reenact Hellspin Fortress.”
There. He’d said it.
“A simple victory in battle isn’t good enough for you?” Kujen said.
Dhanneth’s eyes flicked to Kujen at the mockery in his voice.
“You said it earlier,” Jedao said. “It’s one thing for us to run around blowing things up. Another entirely to take and hold territory. We’ve barely consolidated our hold in Isteia System.”
“Even an impossible task becomes possible if you approach it step by step.”
Jedao wasn’t persuaded. “You’ll have to clear up one detail for me. What made Hellspin so memorable, if I understand the history lessons correctly, isn’t that the battle was ‘won.’ No one would remember one more heresy in a parade of heresies, one more battle in a parade of battles, if that was all there was to it. Isn’t the part that made it unforgettable the small matter of my incinerating my own army?”
Jedao didn’t look directly at Dhanneth. Nevertheless, Dhanneth’s reaction was impossible to miss. Jedao’s peripheral vision wasn’t that bad.
Dhanneth couldn’t tell where he was going with this. He might as well have been shouting it with the desperate blankness of his face.
“Feel free to take your train of thought to its natural conclusion,” Kujen said, his demeanor unruffled.
Jedao’s heart was racing. Don’t let him see he’s rattled you. “This isn’t going to be much of a decapitation strike if it also takes out our means of occupation.” What a terrible, bloodless euphemism for killing all our own soldiers. “It’s not like we have that much infantry. There’s no point burning up all your pawns without getting something for them, Hexarch. So what is it? What are you getting out of this?”
“Oh,” Kujen said, “we won’t need the infantry. Once we get rid of the inconveniences, Protector-General Inesser will do the work of government and stabilization for us. Because as much as she hates me, she values duty more.” He raised a hand slowly and sketched the curve of Jedao’s jaw millimeters away from contact. Jedao held his breath, hating himself for the transient impulse to lean into the touch. “Once that’s settled, once the hexarchate is restored, you’ll have all eternity to do whatever pleases you. I mean that quite literally.”
I can’t do this, Jedao thought. The room darkened all around him, as though all the lights had fissured into the distance. “What do you mean, all eternity?”
“I mean,” Kujen said, “that you will live forever, unless you do something catastrophically stupid, like diving into the heart of a star. I constructed a body for you that will repair itself naturally, that will never age. If you want to look younger, that too can be arranged, although I don’t advise going quite as far back as seventeen. In any case, that’s just aesthetics.” He was smiling at Jedao as if this was supposed to make him happy.
Ruo, Jedao thought, what do I do? Except he knew perfectly well what Ruo would have done. Ruo had never been one to deny himself opportunity or pleasure.
When did I grow away from my best friend?
In the split second that followed, Jedao contemplated his options. Ordering Dhanneth to hand over his sidearm would just alert the hexarch’s security and get him punched full of holes. Besides which, if Kujen had given Jedao a miraculous self-repairing body, he couldn’t imagine that Kujen had neglected to do the same for himself, which would make him hard to assassinate.
Kujen seemed to consider Jedao a key pawn in his plan. Could he commit suicide and stay dead long enough to keep from taking part? Considering his recovery from the bullets, he didn’t think so.
It all came back to this: playing along, and looking for a way to resist. He didn’t see a way yet. But he had to delay until the last possible moment, in case something came to him.
JEDAO SPENT THE next two days determining that he could not, in fact, sabotage the threshold winnowers. Smiling technicians greeted him when he attempted to access them by walking in on them in full formal, as if they needed the reminder of his rank. The smiling technicians were backed up by unsmiling Vidona officers. Not wanting to arouse Kujen’s suspicions, Jedao didn’t press the issue.
Next he studied the mathematics of the winnowers, as if that did him any good. The best primer he found on the topic was not a paper or a textbook but, of all things, a biography of Academician Sayyad Reth in graphic novel format. Reth had done her theoretical work during a time when the Nirai allowed non-faction members to teach at their academies based on their achievements. A footnote informed him that the practice had been discontinued fifty-eight years ago.