“They think we’re serious,” Janaia said, blackly amused. “Terrible trade just based on the numbers, don’t you think?”
“Not like they haven’t figured out that we’re Kel,” Khiruev said. “For all they know, we haven’t met our daily suicide quota. Communications, advise Commandant Mazeret of the situation. All units maintain formation in present state and pursue.”
She knew what the Hafn were thinking. If they retreated to the Fortress’s environs, the Kel wouldn’t dare activate Wildfire because it would take out the Fortress as well. This was true as far as it went. None of the Fortress’s defenses would protect it from that particular conflagration.
The scoutmoths alerted her that unfamiliar formants were showing up in the Hafn swarm’s wake, small and rapid.
“Change course,” Khiruev said, and indicated the correction. It would slow them down reaching the Fortress, which was a problem, but getting obliterated would also be a problem. There were too many of the things to sweep with the scatterguns in a reasonable amount of time. Best to go around.
“Sir,” Communications said. “Six bannermoths in Tactical Three are taking some kind of corrosion damage.”
Khiruev frowned at the display and put in another course correction.
Communications spoke again: “Tactical reports that bannermoths Scratching Shadows, Beyond the Ocean, Two Books Bound Together, and Snakeskin Drum have been lost, sir.” After a few moments, she added the other two.
“General Khiruev to Commander Nazhan,” Khiruev said. Tactical Three’s commander. “What the hell happened out there?”
“Those spiderfucking web-looking Hafn things effloresced at us, sir,” Nazhan said thinly. “One moment.” Voices in the background; red washing over his face. “Engineering thinks their weapon did something to cause the moths’ biotech innards to rupture. Best readings suggest that everything’s messed up with parasites or an infection of some kind”—he didn’t mention Kel fungal canisters, although everyone was thinking of them—”but we can’t very well send a decontamination team in there right now.”
The swarm detoured farther. The Hafn were well ahead of them now. Jedao still gave no sign that he was about to take over.
“The Fortress has activated phantom terrain,” Scan said.
The terrain manifested as dizzying blue swirls on the tactical displays, with inclusions that resembled waving strands of kelp, like a captive mantle of ocean. The Fortress’s defenses were beginning to fire on the Hafn, with shifts in the terrain coordinated to permit the guns to speak through momentary windows.
“Forty-six minutes until we’re in dire cannon range,” Weapons said.
Muris looked up. “Telescoping formation to bring them into range, sir?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Khiruev said. For someone otherwise so conservative, Muris was fixated on that class of formation. Most of the telescoping formations had serious drawbacks. “They’ll see the formation and zip out of range anyway.”
The Hafn had to have some way of dealing with phantom terrain. Its existence was no secret. While certain details of the technology were classified, that wouldn’t necessarily have stopped Hafn intelligence. And whatever they did know might not bother people who had alien weapons to begin with.
Khiruev considered sacrificing an arm to make the swarm go faster. It was just as well that that wouldn’t work. She would have run out of arms as a much younger woman.
Jedao had thrashed the grid opponent at jeng-zai and had moved on to pattern-stones. Khiruev almost felt sorry for the grid. It looked like Jedao was using a subdisplay to write up a tactical critique at the same time. Wonderful.
Twenty-six minutes out of dire cannon range, Scan gave Khiruev the bad news. “Sir,” she said, “look at this.”
The Hafn were now arrayed in a rough dumbbell shape, except each end was an outward-facing concave dish. One dish faced the Fortress. The other was swinging around toward the Kel. The bar was bending so the dishes stayed connected. Khiruev doubted it meant anything good for them.
Sensors had sent her the forward scouts’ close-range readings of the terrain gradient, along with Doctrine’s notes on what it should have looked like under normal operating conditions. Phantom terrain behaved like a dense but manipulable fluid. As a moth commander, Khiruev had participated in a couple training exercises that demonstrated its properties. Her tactical group commander had described it as ‘space mud that’s out to get you.’ (All right, she had been a little coarser than that.) Khiruev remembered how aggravating it had been to have her moth’s motion slowed to a crawl, to be unable to rely on scan to behave properly.
The Hafn weren’t afraid of phantom terrain because, incredibly, their weapons had some way of degrading it in a fashion that the hexarchate’s own exotics couldn’t. Scan showed the terrain developing further inclusions in the shapes of fantastic trees, ferns, vines all tangled together. Something tickled at the back of Khiruev’s mind, a warning, but she couldn’t figure out how the threat worked—
The Hafn attack hit the entirety of Tactical Four as they swung around. They were still too far away for the dire cannons to respond. Khiruev’s display hemorrhaged red and orange light. “All units withdraw out of range now!” she said sharply. “That’s a direct order.”
The dying moths sent databursts almost as one. Crystal fibers. A cavalcade of pale-lipped flowers. The cries of flightless birds pecking their way up through the floors. Walls grown over with mouths breathing wetly.
Jedao was still jotting something down in that critique.
We’re doomed, Khiruev thought.
Flowers and birds. The plant-like shapes growing in the fluid. The Hafn were degrading the phantom terrain. That bizarre not-formation of theirs looked like they were funneling something from one dish to the other. And then she knew.
“Communications,” Khiruev said, “urgent order for Commandant fucking Mazeret. Tell her to turn off the fucking terrain. All of it. Now.”
The Kel were in disarray due to the retreat, although at least they weren’t losing moths in all directions anymore, and they were attempting to form up again.
“Call request from Commandant Mazeret,” Communications said, very neutrally.
“What part of ‘order’ doesn’t she understand?” Khiruev snapped, although in her position Khiruev would have done the same thing. “Tell her that the Hafn can draw power for long-range attacks from the phantom terrain itself. Her Doctrine analysts should get on the problem. That’s all she needs to know.”
From a Kel standpoint, phantom terrain was just another exotic technology. But they had every indication that the Hafn had a peculiar reverence for worlds—for planets and their ecosystems. Enough that their scouts were sewn to the representations of faraway homeworlds. From a Hafn standpoint, phantom terrain was an unclaimed world, and they had some way of linking themselves to it, sourcing power from it the way the Kel sourced power from formations and loyalty. Khiruev scrawled this observation down and passed it on to Doctrine.
The tactical display’s blue swirls and ripples went black as the phantom terrain shut off.
“Good,” Jedao said, “you figured it out with a couple minutes to spare.”
Jedao had passed a document over to Khiruev’s terminal with the READ IMMEDIATELY indicator. Thankfully, it was short. Jedao had figured out the Hafn trick three minutes before Khiruev had. The timestamp was unmistakable.