How good it is that you think so little of me, Jedao thought, and called Muyyed.
Jedao had memorized the high officers’ duty rosters. There wasn’t a lot to Muyyed’s life at the moment but routines. Her signifier was the Ashhawk Roosting, not normally favored in field officers unless you were in Medical, but she had done well enough for herself if not for the minor matter of serving in a swarm that had run afoul of Kujen.
“Message for Colonel Muyyed,” Jedao said to the grid. “I will be conducting a surprise review. Take advantage of whatever moments you can scrounge between getting this and my arrival to prepare your soldiers. I will start with barracks.”
The surprise review was as much a surprise to him as it was to them, which made it the best kind. Jedao set his uniform to full formal. The uniform’s elaborations of braid, the shimmering brocaded richness of the fabric, no longer struck him as ridiculous. Appearances mattered. The use of full formal would reassure Muyyed’s infantry of his seriousness. He set up a suitable hash of formation elements with the help of the grid’s tactical calculator and saved them to his slate.
This time he used the anonymity of his guards as a shield, smiling at them without permitting them any identity beyond that of their role. They could tell the difference. It was well that they were afraid. For his part, he took solace in the fact that they understood the threat he posed.
The barracks occupied a special level of the Revenant. It wasn’t specific to the Revenant. He had examined the layouts of the cindermoths and bannermoths as well. Jedao got the distinct impression that moth Kel and infantry Kel did not regard each other with affection. The separation of the services had some basis in maintaining their identities as units. A certain competitiveness was the natural result.
“Garden Kel,” one of the officers had called the infantry complement at high table. He remembered Opaira introducing him to the term. “Garden” referred not only to dirtside and planets and gravity wells, but to the much-derided Andan with their love of flowers and distaste for open combat. Having never met an Andan, Jedao had no opinion.
From every spark a fire. The Kel snapped to attention when he arrived. Meanwhile, the black deadened wings of the ashhawks rose from the woven yellow-orange of tapestry-flames.
Colonel Muyyed stomped up to greet him. Her tread would never have any delicacy, nor was there anything but forthright eagerness in the eyes she raised to him. “General Jedao, sir,” she said. Full formal looked good on her, not because she was beautiful—his acquaintance with Kujen was making him jaded about beauty—but because it reinforced the impression of her as an officer who lived within the boundaries of her duty, and nowhere else.
“Show me what you have,” Jedao said.
He selected portions of the barracks to walk through, taking his time. The Kel stood stiff and hushed. He could have heard the dropping of a moth’s wing. Sharp-eyed, he pointed out scuffed shoes, slouched postures, people out of position. The scuffed shoes impressed him, given the ability of modern materials to heal themselves. But it wouldn’t be the first time army boots were deficient in some way.
Jedao found other problems, although he exercised judgment about what he dressed the Kel down for. He made a fumble-fingered corporal disassemble and reassemble her scorch pistol in front of him. Her eyes went hot with mixed humiliation and hatred. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She would remember the lesson. While he didn’t imagine that people worried about doing push-ups for a mass murderer, he needed them to be ready. The success of his plan depended on these people as much as it did on the math.
His back prickled when he and Muyyed exited the last of the barracks. “Your office,” he said, mildly enough.
Her face sobered even more, which he hadn’t thought possible. “Naturally, sir.”
No one shot Jedao in the back on the way out, always a plus. Perhaps word had gotten around that it wouldn’t do any good.
Muyyed’s office was on an administrative level above the barracks level. Did people ever think of taking power tools and opening up holes in Muyyed’s floor? On second thought, Muyyed wasn’t the one he’d fear if he damaged the moth. Kujen probably did nasty things to people who messed with his handiwork.
Muyyed’s office had decor in restrained good taste. This included an icon of the hexarchate’s wheel on a corner of the desk. It was a simple carved disc of wood, the grain showing through the finish where handling had worn it through. Upon the other side of the desk rested a statuette of four interlocked figures. They looked as though they were locked in battle, or copulating, or possibly inventing a new kind of macrame.
“Foci for meditations during the remembrances,” Muyyed said. She sounded reverent. “It’s an excellent reminder of the world the way it ought to be.”
Jedao confined himself to a nod despite a flash of unwelcome memory of the prisoner of war the Vidona had killed in front of him. If Kujen represented the world the way it ought to be, then the world was a terrible place, but that was no surprise. He would achieve nothing by alienating the colonel.
“Anything to drink?” Muyyed named several possibilities that he didn’t recognize.
Jedao demurred. Let her draw what conclusions she wanted.
Muyyed looked wistful, but she wasn’t about to pour herself a drink if he wasn’t having one.
“What was your most memorable experience groundside?” he asked abruptly. He didn’t want to give her time to think, especially since she had revealed that she was fundamentally sympathetic to the hexarch’s cause, if not his methods.
She answered immediately, which he liked. “You wouldn’t find it remarkable. I was a junior lieutenant, second assignment out. Not even heretics. We were loaned out to the Andan for police work, something they didn’t trust the local Vidona with. The rumor was there had been a row between the local Andan and Vidona governors. I never found out the story and at this end of time it doesn’t matter.
“Anyway, I ended up in a deserted street by one of the smaller city colleges.” She meant one of the civilian institutions, rather than a faction academy. “They taught architecture, graphic design, things like that. I figured they’d be harmless. But they had definite opinions. Not heretical opinions so much as a certain flavor of, hmm, civic involvement. I spent that evening getting drunk and discovering that architects are much better at debate than I am.”
Jedao tried to picture her as a young officer, pulled into the dramatics of local politics out of boredom or frustration or even sincerity. He couldn’t get there.
“You thought it was going to be some horrible moment in a trench, or someone dying in my arms, didn’t you?” Muyyed said. “No. It was the surreal experience of being a Kel with a gun that I wasn’t going to use. As it turned out, most of my life was spent hanging around not using my gun, but as an excitable young Kel you never think about that.”
He couldn’t picture Muyyed as ever having been excitable, either, with or without the help of alcohol. “Tell me about a battle, then,” Jedao said. “What it was like your first time.”
“It was different from the textbooks,” Muyyed said. She smoothed an infinitesimal wrinkle in one glove. Not smiling, not unsmiling either. “You expect there to be mud, or to have to spend weeks in rehabilitation after having your eyes regrown. But it’s not real until you’re there. Just like everything else in life.”