Cheris directed the swarm to focus fire on One. The Kel swarm compacted itself. The guns spoke again.
Two was next. Kel Paizan’s Sincere Greeting took it out, opening a precise, narrow hole through the shield to fire through. The erasure cannon’s kinetic projectile punched horrifyingly through Two’s drive array. One of the bannermoths, Auspicious Glass, took damage from return fire before Sincere Greeting could close the hole, but Glass reported itself functional.
Jedao’s hunch was correct: Three, Four, and Five ceased fire when One and Two went down.
Communications informed Cheris that Two had sent a final transmission toward the Fortress, based on trace emissions. Unfortunately, they hadn’t intercepted the transmission proper.
To Cheris’s dismay, the phantom moths didn’t vanish, but they stopped firing when their sources fell silent.
“I don’t recommend boarding, sir,” Kel Nerevor said, scowling at the scan data. “Rigged to blow, like as not.”
“Cinder them completely, except Four,” Cheris said. “If scan can’t go in or out of the shields, let’s deafen them.”
They carried this out cautiously, just in case, but nothing untoward happened.
“Sir, I have an incoming transmission from the Fortress of Scattered Needles,” Communications said. “It’s text-only.”
“Go ahead and read it,” Cheris said.
“‘Very impressive, General Jedao. If that’s who you are. Prove yourself by penetrating the shield by 25:14 on the first day of the Month of the Moth.’ They gave us the conversion to our calendar.” Communications read that off too. The high calendar day was 1.21 of the heretics’ days. They had set the deadline for four of their days from now.
“Send a bannermoth out of range,” Jedao said. “Do it now. And send this message back to whoever it is: That bannermoth has orders to broadcast the trick of defeating the shields in the clear in all directions if anyone fires on us once we’re in. If you have any more tests, direct them to Shuos Academy. I’m sure they’re bored over there.”
Cheris selected Kel Koroe’s Unenclosed by Fear and gave it the necessary instructions. Koroe was supposed to be unimaginative but reliable.
“Let them think about that,” Cheris said, agonizingly aware of Nerevor’s worried expression. First things first. She sent a commendation to Sincere Greeting for its precise shooting.
Paizan responded almost immediately. “I don’t like being at such close range, General,” he said. “It makes the whole concept of distance weapons ridiculous. But in this situation there was no help for it.”
“You did well,” Cheris said.
Nerevor raised an eyebrow, and Cheris nodded at her. She expected that the cindermoth commanders would consider each other peers. “Next time I hope to take part in some dismemberment too,” Nerevor said to Paizan. “That Vidona ended things too quickly, and against orders.”
“You always were bloodthirsty, Nerevor,” Paizan said, with what might have been affection, and signed off.
“Get me the cryptology team,” Cheris said to Communications.
“General,” Nerevor said, “you should be aware that crypto doesn’t use composite work. They’re more efficient working as individuals.” Since she was discussing Nirai, this meant that the team’s members were too cantankerous to composite effectively. “Do you want to address the whole team, or just Captain-analyst Nirai Damiod?”
“Just Captain Damiod. Are they working with the Shuos team?”
“I had given no such orders, sir.”
“Give them now. If we have Shuos, we might as well get some use out of them.”
“Ha,” Jedao said.
Nirai Damiod’s face appeared to the left of Cheris’s display, with Captain Shuos Ko’s just below it. Damiod was a thin, nervous-looking man with pale brown eyes in a darker face. Ko looked, if anything, more imperturbably bland.
Before Cheris even asked him to explain anything, Damiod said, with the air of a man used to simplifying explanations, “It’s standard military encryption, usually called 67 Snake, based on a certain class of functions—”
“What class?” Cheris wondered just what kind of conversations he was used to having with Nerevor.
He peered at her. “Machiva-Ju quasiknot polynomials, to be precise. Ah – you have background in this field?”
“I have some general familiarity,” Cheris said. Unfortunately, as with all good cryptosystems, knowing the specific system in use didn’t, by itself, help them crack the ciphertexts. “You don’t think there’s hope.”
“There’s always hope, General,” Damiod said, “but even if we hooked together the swarm’s grid resources, we couldn’t crack it by brute force. It’d be a weak system if it yielded that easily. No, our best bet is seeing if whoever encrypted the message made some kind of amateur’s mistake or ran it on the wrong hardware or left some kind of fingerprint. Stupider things have happened.”
“Cooperate with Captain Ko in your work,” Cheris said.
“Easy enough,” Damiod said.
“Sir,” Ko said with a genial nod.
“Good luck,” she said, and ended the conversation.
Cheris called up the gradient map and grimaced at it. “We’re going to have to be more careful once we exit the transition zone,” she said. “We have no idea how well any formations will work under the heretical calendar. Look at that sector. The Fortress’s projections are remarkably stable. I don’t like that.”
“At least I trust there will be no more fungus,” Kel Nerevor said. She was looking at the damage to Four. The fungus in question was lethal to humans if you were lucky, and caused unappetizing mutations otherwise. It would take a full Nirai decontamination team to deal with the afflicted bannermoth. “Waste of a good moth. With that junk all over it, it’d be cheaper to ram it into a star and build a new one from scratch.”
“That’s Kel Command’s decision,” Cheris said. “Doctrine, I want you to look at the data from the engagement and see what you can get me on the heretics’ calendar.”
“Of course, sir,” Rahal Gara said.
Cheris closed her eyes for a moment. “Everyone switch over to invariant propulsion.” Giving up the luxuries that went with the high calendar’s exotics was going to be irritating. “We have to continue toward the Fortress.”
“The shields, General?” Nerevor asked, as Cheris had known she would.
“There will be a briefing,” Cheris said unemotionally. “Alert me if anything happens.”
She left the command center before they could see her hands start to shake.
Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis
Priority: Normal
From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum
To: Heptarch Liozh Zai
Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, make it Day of the Goose. I’ve always loved goose.
My dear Zai, don’t pace holes into the floor with that scowl you always get, you’ll give yourself wrinkles, but we might be in more trouble than I had figured. Not to be an alarmist, mind you! Still, it’s best to be prepared. Sorry I missed you earlier – I thought I’d catch you at the firing range, but it appears I have terrible timing. You might be amused that Pioro still can’t beat my scores, though. A little humility will be good for him.
The speed with which the kaleidoscope swarm was dispatched isn’t the real issue, whatever those incompetents on Team Two claim. All the Kel would have had to do is wire some fancy composite work with Nirai specialists brought along for the purpose. I don’t know about you, but if I were headed into a heretical calendrical regime, the first thing I’d do is round up some nice meek Nirai to crunch numbers for me.