The moths, represented on the tactical display by flattened gold wedges, began moving into position relative to each other. She could hear Janaia giving orders to Navigation: it was customary for the command moth to hold the formation’s primary pivot. Muris was speaking tersely to Doctrine.
The Hafn showed up as smudges, location probability clouds. Scan reported that the scouts, which had pulled back, still had trouble getting coherent formant readings from the foreign mothdrives. Reports from the Eyespike swarm, which had been destroyed delaying the Hafn, had put the enemy at eighty Lilacs, roughly equivalent to bannermoths in size and armament, and ten Magnolias, larger than the Lilacs although not as formidable as cindermoths. Forty-eight years ago, Kel Command had switched to flowers for designating enemy moth types after a spat with the Andan. Sometimes Khiruev wondered about Kel Command’s priorities.
Even after a few decades of doing this, Khiruev found the apparent slowness of the moths’ motion aggravating. It made her want to reach through the display to the moths themselves and yank them into place. She recognized the ugliness of this impulse. No doubt something like it was how Kel Command had come up with formation instinct in the first place.
She missed, too, the thrumming ease of working as part of a composite. Being the general in charge of a composite was not quite as thrummingly easeful, but it had afforded her the illusion of subsuming herself in a single will, which was the point. Jedao would have seen even that illusion as threatening. Besides, if the calendricals tilted in the Hafn’s favor suddenly, composite technology would fail. Every Kel with half a brain knew that compositing was required mainly for reasons of internal discipline between missions, rather than being a useful coordinating tool in battle against heretics.
“Doctrine,” Khiruev said, “what do you have for calendrical fluctuations?”
To the side, Jedao was looking at Doctrine measurements of calendrical values and laboriously putting together a query for the grid. Was this some issue of getting accustomed to a modern interface? Khiruev itched to show him how, but she had other matters to attend to, and it would cause Jedao to lose face. A puzzle for later.
“Effects must be localized, sir,” Doctrine said in a subdued voice. “We should be seeing the effects of the heretic calendar’s intrusion and there’s still nothing.”
This was consistent with earlier reports, but worrying nonetheless. Khiruev would have felt better if they had some idea how the Hafn could use their exotics in hexarchate space without skewing calendrical terrain. The fact that they had an interest in the Fortress suggested that this ability came at a price and that they’d rather be on home terrain, or at least, flipping the Fortress would enable them to project their native calendar in the surrounding space and deny the hexarchate that advantage. A pity that Jedao had ditched all their Nirai, who would have had the best shot at cracking the mystery.
The Hafn had spotted the Kel. Their moths wheeled to form what looked like a three-petaled flower. Each petal elongated in its approach to the Kel’s Thunder of Horses.
“All units banner the Swanknot,” Khiruev said flatly.
“Sir—” Janaia protested.
Khiruev narrowed her eyes at Janaia. Jedao had moved on to some other system of congruences and was ignoring the two of them. “The order stands,” Khiruev said.
She wasn’t the swarm’s ranking officer anymore. Jedao was. The banner defied Kel protocol. But Jedao had said that he wasn’t here. Khiruev’s emblem was the only one available, and it would have been worse not to banner.
The Hafn seemed to understand what bannering meant now. In the first engagement, according to the records, they hadn’t responded, and the Kel had—disastrously—taken it as an insult. Here, the Magnolias transmitted the Hafn government’s emblem. It was an antiquated-looking shield with a plain gold band across the top and a hectic tangled mass of vines, fruits, and insects beneath the band, overlaid for good measure by gold curlicues. Atrocious graphic design if it had originated anywhere in the hexarchate, but looking at the tangles, Khiruev thought of the boy with the cat’s cradle string whom they had retrieved from the outrider. Her hands clenched.
“The Hafn are twenty-one minutes out of dire cannon range,” Weapons said.
“We’re about to find out about their long-range weapons,” Khiruev said.
The Hafn approach slowed. The three petals had become three concave dishes facing the Kel. The dishes had to be their equivalent of formations. The geese had used it, and the Hafn swarm had used it against General Kel Chrenka’s Four-Eyed Shrike swarm. Unlike a formation, however, it seemed to have no consistent set of effects.
Khiruev made the mistake of glancing over to check what Jedao was up to. Jedao was smiling sardonically as he played jeng-zai against a grid opponent. He didn’t meet Khiruev’s eyes, but this was clearly mad tactical prodigy for ‘pay attention to your job, fledge.’
“Hafn maintaining distance, sir,” Scan said.
At this point, a few things were clear. First, the Hafn were staying almost exactly sixty-four of their minutes out of range of the formation’s kinetic lances, which were currently inactive and which were controlled by modulating three component formations. Second, the fact that the Hafn general could read Kel formations meant they could potentially be manipulated that way. Third, said general had read the particular placements of the component formations, suggesting that the main swarm might have longer-range scan than the geese, whose virtue must be in their numbers and expendability.
The problem with the kinetic lances was that they telegraphed themselves. Their sideways raking motion could only be hurried along so much by precise execution of the subformations. Certainly the lances would maul what they hit, and they had better range than anything the Hafn had yet to reveal, or the Kel swarm would have seen incoming fire already. But Khiruev looked at those waiting dish-shapes and sensed that the other side wasn’t worried yet. She also remembered that the Hafn had annihilated Kel swarms already, by means yet unclear, and they had successfully infiltrated a nexus fortress before. It wouldn’t do to get overconfident.
Time to test how well the Hafn had studied up on the Kel. “General Khiruev to all units, maneuvers on my mark,” she said, setting up trajectories on the subdisplays. “Give me Wildfire Over the Aerie with Pivots One, Two, and Three refused as shown.” She passed the Pivot One parameters to Janaia separately. “Do not, repeat, do not fill Pivots Two or Three without my direct order. Mark.”
Janaia blanched, but she only gave Khiruev one questioning look before she executed her part of the order. Communications reported that four moth commanders wished to speak to Khiruev. She turned them all down.
Wildfire Over the Aerie was both a grand formation and a suicide formation, a rare combination. It had only been tested once in battle. Two hundred ninety-eight years ago, General Kel Dessenet had used it to blow up an invading swarm. Kel Command had put it on the proscribed list because, as a side-effect, it filled the affected region of space with long-lasting calendrical dead zones, some of which still existed today. In any case, the question was, how well did the Hafn know formation mechanics?
Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Jedao pausing at his card game to note the development. Nice that he was paying attention.
As it turned out, the Hafn didn’t do research by halves. Partway into the Kel’s formation modulation—messier than she would have liked, but it wasn’t as if they’d had any reason to drill this—the Hafn reacted by peeling away. They headed straight for the Fortress.