She laughed without humor. “Good to know. Not that I’m interested in putting this to some kind of vote, but this endeavor will go better if we coordinate.”
“I do appreciate that, Iruja.”
“Well.” Iruja exhaled slowly. “We’re going to send Jedao an ultimatum. The important thing is recovering the swarm. The precedent can’t be allowed to stand. What do you suppose the odds are that General Khiruev is still alive?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tsoro said. “Khiruev’s already been compromised even if she survived. We don’t want her in charge of that swarm after Jedao’s had a chance to mess with her mind.”
“I assume you have an alternate.”
“We’ve recalled General Kel Inesser from the High Glass border. If Jedao can be persuaded to turn himself in, she’s more than capable of handling the Hafn.”
Inesser, the Kel’s senior general, and one of their most respected. Mikodez snorted. “Isn’t that the woman you’ve been holding at arm’s length for the last two decades?” He’d met her a few times at official functions: a woman vainglorious about her hair, with a disarming fondness for talking about her cross-stitch projects. It hadn’t escaped him how adroit she was at manipulating conversations while pretending to be a typical blunt Kel. “I peeked at some of the evaluations. I’m surprised you wouldn’t rather assimilate her already.”
Tsoro gave him a look. “Inesser may be one of the best strategists we’ve seen in two hundred years, and she’s an excellent logistician, but we’d prefer that she not end as another Jedao.” She didn’t elaborate on the evaluation, which she’d discussed with Mikodez, reluctantly, in the past. The textbook Kel opinion of Jedao was that Jedao’s battlefield successes added up to him never thinking far into the future, since he always assumed he could fight his way out of whatever fix he landed in, instead of asking whether the battle was worth fighting in the first place. Mikodez had preferred the much more succinct words of a Kel instructor who had spoken off the record: “Brilliant tactician, shit strategist.” Presumably Kel Command was supposed to think about the big picture for him.
“I realize that you’re saddled with almost four centuries of condensed prejudices,” Mikodez said, “but don’t you think it’s time to stop letting Jedao dictate everything you do? You’ll turn Inesser into an entirely different kind of enemy at this rate.”
“Shuos,” Tsoro said, “when you feel the need to pull stunts like assassinating your own cadets, we don’t send you memos telling you how to run your faction.”
Mikodez fiddled with one of the leaves of his green onion. “Fine,” he said, “but never say I didn’t give you good advice.”
“If you two are quite finished,” Iruja said without raising her voice. “Mikodez, I’ll need you to monitor the situation. Don’t intervene as long as Jedao makes no play against us, and especially leave him alone if he’s fighting the Hafn.”
“I have a useful number of shadowmoths moving into position,” Mikodez said. “Trust me, their commanders have as little interest in getting into a firefight with Jedao as I do.”
Psa grunted. “I’ve seen you at the firing range, Mikodez. I’d give you even odds.”
“Very flattering,” Mikodez said demurely, “but while Jedao has demonstrated that his solution to a man with a gun is shoot it out of his hand—the kind of idiot stunt I tell my operatives to avoid attempting—my solution is not to be in the same damn room to begin with.”
Andan Shandal Yeng was smiling. “I’m glad we have a course of action, regardless.”
Mikodez kept his expression noncommittal. He’d caught Kel Tsoro’s eyes flickering several times. She and Shandal Yeng had definitely been holding that side conversation. Both used kinesics and protocol programs to smooth things like that, but Mikodez had bypassed them ages ago. Both hexarchs would have been better served lying the old-fashioned way, not that he was about to inform them.
“One last thing,” Iruja said. “Faian, how’s progress on the immortality process?”
“Kujen’s notes are a mess,” Faian said. She meant the ones she had stolen from him, on the grounds that she would rather not accidentally recreate something as unappetizing as the black cradle that had once caged Jedao. It wasn’t so much that Kujen was disorganized—quite the contrary. The man was meticulous about everything. The reports that he sent to the other hexarchs, before he’d vanished, were flawlessly organized and proofread, models of clarity. But his private notes, on projects that he didn’t mean to share with anyone else, took a great deal of decoding because he recorded them in a personal shorthand and his genius made it difficult (so Faian had explained once) to follow the odd jagged leaps of intuition.
Faian went over some of the recent technical difficulties, addressing herself mostly to Iruja, who had the background necessary to follow her. Mikodez simply recorded the details to run by his staff later. Watching everyone else tie themselves up in knots about the prospect of living forever had its entertainment value, not that he meant to let on.
The conference wrapped up after that. Soon Mikodez was left alone with his green onion. It was clear that the other hexarchs were going to make hash of their attempts to control Jedao. Mikodez supposed that no one had been thinking clearly after Hellspin Fortress, but the long-dead Kel and Shuos heptarchs had a lot to answer for. In what universe was keeping an insane undead general as an attack dog a good idea?
On the other hand, wrangling hexarchs had grown tedious. The fact that Jedao had slipped his leash gave Mikodez a new challenge. While he went over the transcript of Tsoro and Shandal Yeng’s conversation, he called up a set of files he had poached from Nirai Kujen, back when. He’d be reviewing those next.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BREZAN CAME AWAKE in snatches, like a puzzle assembling itself out of a junk heap. “What?” he said, then grimaced at the furry, sour, metallic taste of his mouth. Gradually, he took in his surroundings. Walls of warm gray, with a single abstract painting where he could see it without lifting his head. After that, it occurred to him that he was lying on a pallet, hooked up to a standard medical unit. Spider restraints held him fast.
All right, this was an improvement over the fucking sleeper unit that Jedao had had him stuffed in. “Hello?” Brezan called out. It emerged as a croak. He tried again, without much better results.
Around this time he discovered that someone had shut down his augment, which either implied a very good technician or someone with the overrides or both. Bad news, either way. He assumed there was a local grid, but even if it wouldn’t talk to him, it would have been nice to be able to access his internal chronometer and basic diagnostics. How long had he been out of it? And where the hell was he, anyway?
Brezan waited some more. Infuriatingly, despite the lingering pain when he breathed, he developed an itch behind his left knee. Which he couldn’t reach to scratch.
Just when he decided to have a go at the spider restraints anyway, a very pale, smiling woman with an elaborate shimmering tattoo over her right cheek came in. She wore a purple half-jacket over lavender clothes liberally decorated with aquamarine tassels, and silver jewelry chimed from her throat and wrists. The fluttering slits at her neck suggested that she had gills. The only useful hint as to her identity was the clashing gold pin over her left breast: the Shuos eye.
“Hello there,” she said. “Give me a moment and I’ll get you out of those.”