Nerevor wasn’t sure what Shuos Jedao had to do with the situation, but she made a note of the mention in case it became useful later.
“He said nothing about wanting her back,” the woman said. “Probably got all he wanted out of her or he wouldn’t have dumped her on us.”
“Don’t get ideas.” The man’s voice was still impersonal. “We can get the technicians on the problem and see if they can work her out of fledge-null. There’s a small chance useful information’s buried behind those glassy eyes. We can hold her as long as it takes.”
The woman had been thinking about something else. “Doesn’t a high officer have to authorize fledge-null in the first place? Who the hell did the Immolation Fox subvert up there?”
“Subvert or bribe or coerce,” the man said. “We don’t know which.”
“I’m surprised you wanted to talk in front of her. You’re normally obsessed with discretion.”
“I wanted to see if there’d be a reaction. Depending on where in the calendrical zones he wiped her, the fledge-state might have chinks. A problem for the technicians, as I said.” The man tapped on the door. “Anything you want to say, fledge?”
Nerevor didn’t like being called “fledge” by this stranger, but it didn’t matter. He was not Kel. She did not have to answer.
After they were gone, she listened for gunfire, footsteps. If the Kel meant for her to die here, then she would die here. But she could not help but comfort herself with the idea that her people would come for her if she was brave enough, if she endured enough, if she proved herself worthy of the Kel name.
Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis
Priority: Urgent
From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum
To: Heptarch Liozh Zai
Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, Day of the Hedgehog, I need to program some macros, and fuck the hour.
My dear Zai, I don’t care how hypnotized you are with Jedao’s potential usefulness, and I don’t care how everyone voted, although it’s nice that you’re practicing. Assuming it is Jedao, which seems more plausible now, he behaved nicely for Kel Command up until Hellspin Fortress, and he behaved nicely for Kel Command up until now. You’d be better off trying to befriend a fungal canister. It might have a sense of loyalty.
I understand that you’re rattled by the continued delay of the Hafn swarm, but do remember they have to get past General Cherkad. I assure you that Hafn commitment to the Fortress’s liberation is real, but they need time to achieve miracles. The timing is unfortunate, but if we’d waited any longer to take over, the Rahal would have caught us.
At least we have something in common with the fox general, which is that we both prefer the Fortress to stay intact, or he would have lobbed a few thousand bombs at us once the shields cracked. As it is, we could hold off bannermoths for a while, but the cindermoths change the equation.
Unfortunately, you allowed Jedao to land troops. We knew this hostage – one Commander Kel Nerevor, formerly of the cindermoth Unspoken Law – was going to bring us little immediate advantage. It was expensive to retrieve her from the Anemone Ward, and we didn’t even get her intact because that goon of Stoghan’s roughed her up.
The communications post in the Anemone Ward is back in our hands and Jedao’s troops even handed over the loyalists, but I’m bothered by Jedao’s resources. I threatened some videos out of Stoghan’s lackeys, and those aren’t just infantry he landed, those are Kel. I don’t care if they were wearing brown instead of black-and-gold, those are Kel.
You know the joke, right? If you have a choice between sending a three-year-old to do covert ops and a Kel, you pick the three-year-old because the Kel is too stupid to lie?
Anyway, where did Jedao get these Kel? If we’re dealing with a legitimate Kel swarm, if Kel Command gave Jedao command – but how did he convince the Kel to surrender one of their high officers? Any other general would be able to rely on formation instinct to shove the order through, but I’m not sure Jedao would inspire that kind of obedience unless he explicitly got Kel Command’s blessing. Yet this seems more likely than the other possibility, which is that the least trustworthy general in Kel history convinced at least one Kel high officer to join him. That’s the problem with formation instinct: if he turned the right individual, he could have taken down the rest.
The thing is, Jedao isn’t just a traitor, even if people’s brains short out around that fact. He’s also a Shuos. The two aren’t equivalent, despite the Shuos jokes. He was a Shuos assassin before he switched tracks, and there’s circumstantial evidence he did some analyst work as well.
Anyway, his career with the Kel was unobjectionable. He kept that up for almost twenty years. As if he were under deep cover. All the way up to Hellspin Fortress.
Hellspin Fortress wasn’t a Kel assault. The Kel wave banners at you before they join battle. You can always see them coming.
Setting up a deathtrap for not one but two armies – that’s not a psychotic break. That’s a plan with a twenty-year setup. A Shuos plan, to be precise. Ambushes, computer systems going haywire, contradictory orders, weapons failing. To say nothing of the infamous threshold winnowers. Too much fancy shooting with his staff, but it worked.
No wonder the Nirai have made no progress. They’ve been trying to cure Jedao, but he was never mad to begin with.
I’ll go you one better. He’s exactly where he wants to be. He’s immortal and he has all the time in the world to carry out his plot, whatever it is. I don’t know why he slaughtered his way into the black cradle. But I will bet you my last sweet bean pastry that even the incomprehensible slaughter served some purpose.
And we’re the next step in his plan.
Zai, we’ve got to stop him. We’ve got to destroy him because I don’t care how many Kel swarms we have incoming, he’s the real threat.
I haven’t felt this alive in ages.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
CHERIS PACED THE perimeter of her quarters, determined not to get used to their size; determined to remember what she really was. Then she asked for a slate because she wanted something solid in her hands. A deltaform servitor brought her one: a black slab just thick enough to feel substantial, gold-rimmed so that it winked as she tilted it. The servitor made a worried noise. “I’ll be all right,” Cheris said, and it left after an unconvinced pause.
“You could have asked me about the hostage idea earlier,” Cheris said, “while there was time to come up with alternatives.”
“You could have anticipated the issue,” Jedao said. “The landing problem shouldn’t have taken you by surprise. You had the same time that I did to come up with a solution. Do you have a better one now?”
Her eyes stung. She had relied on him instead of thinking for herself. “You have the advantage of being an observer,” she said sharply. “But no. I don’t have a better plan now.”
“Cheris.”
She closed her eyes, thinking of Nerevor’s bravery. Jedao had told her that the Kel reacted better when given no time to object to a plan. Fair warning.