“Calendrical rot,” Cheris said. She explained everything she knew as it had been presented to her. As she spoke, she called up maps. The grid brought up others that she hadn’t previously had access to. The rot was more advanced than it had been before, and it was possible to trace regions of outflowing rot to the Fortress’s corruption.
“This is winnable, with the right resources,” Jedao said slowly, “but I wouldn’t call it easy.”
She didn’t know whether to feel better or worse at his assessment.
One of the terminals explained the resources available to them within a six-day transportation radius. Cheris read the message twice. “I’m not complaining about the guns,” she said, “but guns change minds, not hearts. And calendrical rot is a matter of hearts.”
“It depends on what you shoot,” Jedao said dryly. “Pull that display into three dimensions, will you?”
Cheris unfurled the display in contours of burning color. She rotated it about the vertical axis so they could take a closer look at the regions worst afflicted by the rot, colored an unpleasantly textured pale gray.
The Fortress was located in a stretch of empty space for calendrical reasons and was nearest the Footbreak system. The notation indicated that a lensmoth had already been stationed there, but all it could do was staunch the bleeding as long as the Fortress itself was afflicted.
“I see two viable approaches here,” Jedao said. “Three, actually, but if the hexarchate intended to scour the region, neither of us would be necessary.”
She read the relevant part of their orders out loud: “Economically inadvisable.” The rot already touched on inhabited planets in Footbreak, whose ecosystems were too valuable to destroy casually.
Jedao was silent for a while. “All right. We can either try to stabilize Footbreak and use it as a launching point for a larger assault later, or spear straight toward the Fortress from the beginning and hope that backwash from Footbreak doesn’t hit us at the wrong time. What’s your preference?”
Cheris knew about the Fortress. She knew, in outline, the most prestigious low languages and the distribution of wealth among their classes. She knew how many citizens the Fortress sent to the academies and the breakdowns by individual academy as well. And she knew about the fabled shields that ran on invariant ice, but everyone knew that.
She knew many things, and she knew nothing. She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures. Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.
“We’re going to have to confront the Fortress sooner or later,” Cheris said. “It might as well be sooner. With any luck, fewer people will die this way.”
“Good,” Jedao said crisply. “I’m glad we care about the same things.”
It was an odd thing for a mass murderer to say, and she wouldn’t figure out its significance until much later.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ROOM CHERIS was provided with was decorated with vases filled with the bones of small animals wired into the shapes of flowers. Cheris was wondering just what else the Nirai did when he got bored, but she knew more than she cared to already.
“First things first,” Jedao said. “Ask the grid for the New Anchor Orientation Packet.”
With a name like that, it had to have been written by committee. Nevertheless, Cheris queried the grid. First she was pleasantly surprised by how short it was. Then she was worried.
“If you have any questions,” Jedao said, “ask, but I have to warn you that there are whole sections that I can’t tell you anything about.”
Cheris was torn between the urge to read it as quickly as she could so they could go on to planning the siege, and trying to commit everything to memory. She settled for something in between. Most of the instructions were elaborations on what she had already been told, but Cheris frowned when she hit the section on carrion glass.
After retrieval, the general shall be extracted for reuse using a carrion gun, the Orientation Packet said. And a footnote: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.
“‘Volunteer’?” Cheris said. The Nirai definition of “volunteer” was undoubtedly the same as the Kel definition.
“I don’t think they can force-feed someone a ghost corpse,” Jedao said, “but to my knowledge it’s never been tried. I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. The Nirai believes that having pieces of my brain inside you would drive you crazy even if I weren’t crazy myself.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cheris said, trying not to think about the fact that this wasn’t very different from her current situation. She looked up from the Orientation Packet. “I’m ready.”
“All right,” Jedao said. “Setup. First display: the Fortress of Scattered Needles and whatever’s on file about its defenses. Second display: reports on its population and the origin of the heresy. Third: data on this specific regime of rot and how rapidly it’s metastasizing. We’re going to have to ask the Nirai to loan us a mathematical analyst—”
“I can handle that,” Cheris said.
Sharp interest: “You’re Nirai-trained?”
“My specialty was mathematics,” Cheris said. She was used to this. “The recruiters advised me to apply to Nirai Academy, but I declined.”
“And the Kel took you anyway.”
“After advising me to apply to Nirai Academy instead, yes.”
“I want to make sure I understand this,” Jedao said. “You had a choice and a noteworthy aptitude for math, and you decided to become a hawk anyway. Was it family pressure?”
“I can request my profile for your perusal,” she said.
“I’d like that, yes, but I want to hear it from you as well.”
Cheris brought up her profile – the part of it she was allowed to see, anyway – and wondered which sections were inviting particular scrutiny. Should she be embarrassed about her taste in dramas, under “leisure activities”? Or the fact that she was an enthusiastic but mediocre duelist? What did undead generals do in their spare time anyway?
“My family wanted me to stay home,” she said. “They don’t approve of the military.” Or the hexarchate, really. She didn’t say that she had wanted to fit in for once, and that the Kel with their conformism had seemed a good place to do that.
“Fine,” Jedao said after a disquieting silence. “Fourth display: review of available resources. Fifth: I want a look at tech advances over the last four decades. Maybe the state of the art is better than it used to be. Leave the sixth blank for now.”
“You’ve been thinking about this,” Cheris said as she set up the displays.
“I don’t like wasting time,” Jedao said. “This whole regime is about time, isn’t it? Let’s go in reverse order.”
The hexarchate dealt with low-level calendrical degradation on a daily basis. Outbreaks of full-scale rot were comparatively uncommon, but all the same the necessity of invariant weapons that didn’t rely on the high calendar had been realized a long time ago.
Cheris and Jedao went through the fifth display together. “No breakthroughs,” Jedao said after they had perused the summary. “With the exception of the fungal cocoon, most of the military stuff is similar to before. And we don’t want to resort to the cocoon because cleanup would cost a fortune. It’s nice to see that war never changes.”