“One Colonel Kel Ragath appears to have survived the devastation at Scattered Needles and is still trying to get in contact with Cheris, without much luck,” Mikodez said. “I advise you to give him a call and promote him immediately, unless General Khiruev has a crushing objection.”
“I’ll check with her,” Brezan said automatically, “although I doubt she will. Why, what is the colonel up to these days?” Like a lot of Kel, he’d heard of Ragath, who’d enjoyed a well-regarded career only to run into a ceiling at his present rank because of his secondary specialty in history. Ragath’s scathingly critical papers about Kel policy hadn’t earned him many friends in high places.
Mikodez smiled. “He raised a military force of his own in a system in the Stabglass March and is currently mucking about with gory logistical details. If you approach him and drop Cheris’s name hintingly, I think you’ll find him willing to work with you.”
“Which is good,” Brezan said, dismayed all over again by the sheer scope of the task before him, “because even the people who appear to be willing to work with me might be spies, or saboteurs, or sycophants.”
“Ah,” Mikodez said, and his smile turned sad. “You’re learning already.”
“I have anger management issues,” Brezan said, remembering the old notations in his profile, “but I’m not stupid.”
“Well,” Mikodez said, “that’s a start. My instinct is to ferret you away in the Citadel of Eyes behind my security. Unfortunately, this one time, my instinct is wrong. You’re going to be a public figure, High General, and that means going where the public can see you. This will also make you one hell of a target, so I’m going to assign you some of my security.”
“I suppose your security will quietly disappear me if I get too many ideas of my own,” Brezan said.
“Don’t be crass,” Mikodez said. “I already have enough public relations problems without being seen to be assassinating more people. As it stands, I’m getting blamed for all sorts of petty theft that my agents had nothing to do with. Which is a crying shame, because my budget could use any revenue streams that happen to be lying about.”
“And you wonder why the Shuos have such a terrible reputation,” Brezan said sardonically.
“I’m going to have the reputation no matter what,” Mikodez said. “I might as well do something useful with it. You, now—people know so much less about you. You only get one chance to make a first impression, you know. Don’t waste it.”
CHAPTER THREE
ON A MOON called Tefos in a distant system, Servitor Hemiola, a snakeform, was the first to notice that the hexarch had arrived. Its two comrades avoided overseeing the base’s control room because they considered it one of the more boring duties. Hemiola had volunteered because it liked using the time to make videos. The other two servitors who made up their tiny enclave tolerated this because they had their own guilty hobbies.
During this particular occasion, Hemiola was rewatching the seventeenth episode of A Rose in Three Revolutions, its favorite drama. A Rose in Three Revolutions supposedly had six seasons of twenty-four episodes each, except it had still been airing when the hexarch transported the servitors to Tefos. Unfortunately, the hexarch had not seen fit to bring the last two seasons with him on his subsequent visits. Hemiola amused itself sometimes by cutting up and altering the existing episodes and making miniature videos to music of its own devising so it could speculate on how the whole thing ended. Too bad it couldn’t leave Tefos so it could find and watch the rest.
When the hexarch showed up, Hemiola was in the middle of adjusting the masks on that one clip where the Andan heroine was kissing a treacherous Shuos assassin. It considered that entire relationship a horrible lapse in judgment on the heroine’s part and was busy replacing the assassin with its preferred romantic interest, the female Nirai engineer from season three.
Atrocious timing, but duty was duty. Hemiola turned away from the video editor and activated the alert when the base’s alarm failed to go off. This wasn’t entirely surprising. Despite the servitors’ efforts to maintain the base, the passage of centuries had taken their toll.
Eventually one of the other servitors hovered into the control room, lights reflecting off its metal carapace: Rhombus, a beetleform. “Isn’t this early?” Rhombus demanded. “Kujen isn’t due for another twenty years.”
Hemiola wished Rhombus wouldn’t refer to the hexarch by his personal name, even if the hexarch had never shown any sign of being fluent in Machine Universal. “Maybe there was an emergency.”
“What,” Rhombus said with a crushing flare of red lights, “he had an urgent need to save his lab notes from machine oil? Do we know this is actually Kujen?”
Hemiola watched the display. An unfamiliar type of voidmoth landed not far from the crevasse in whose depths the base was hidden. “Why,” it said, “do you think it’s an intruder?”
“The moth isn’t the one he came in eighty years ago.”
Hemiola refrained from tinting its lights orange in exasperation. “Just because we’re not engineers doesn’t mean the hexarch has to stick to outmoded transportation.”
Rhombus ignored that. A moment later, it said, “Isn’t that a womanform?” A suited figure had emerged from the moth and was making its way down the ramp. “Look at the proportions, especially around the torso. I could have sworn Kujen preferred manforms.”
“Maybe it’s the latest fashion,” Hemiola said. They all knew how the hexarch felt about fashion.
The figure strode unerringly toward the staircase cut into the side of the crevasse. Hemiola studied its gait. Almost certainly a womanform, as Rhombus had said, but why—
Rhombus had seen it too. “It doesn’t walk like Kujen. Or the other one, for that matter.”
This was true. Kujen had always moved with balletic grace. A few centuries of dissecting the dramas the servitors had smuggled in in their personal memory allotments had given them some context for human aesthetic norms. (In the early days, they’d quarreled about whether the hexarch would have approved of independent archival projects. For all they knew, he despised A Rose in Three Revolutions. But no one had snitched, so the weekly private screenings went unchallenged.) Instead, the figure’s body language reminded Hemiola of the Shuos assassin character it detested so: alert, economical, subtly menacing.
On the other hand, for all it knew, switching kinesics patterns was a new fashion too.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Hemiola said. The hexarch had left a better test. Given his unique—capabilities? limitations?—authentication of his identity posed a challenge. He’d said the test would take care of all that. Surely he’d known best.
Meanwhile, Sieve, who had finally taken note of the discussion, drifted in. “I hope he brought some proper food,” Sieve said. “We don’t have anything good to offer him.”
“At least there’s no guest this time,” Hemiola said, diverted.
“That’s fine by me,” Rhombus said, always the most opinionated. “Jedao always made me feel like my exoskeleton was about to corrode.”
“Maybe this time we’ll have better luck with our algorithms,” Sieve said. “No matter how often I benchmark the ones I have, I can’t seem to beat that lock.”
Privately, Hemiola thought that sitting around trying to defeat the hexarch’s lock was even more boring than keeping an eye on scan. Then again, Sieve had a very orthodox attachment to the mathematical disciplines. Hemiola had given up trying to engage it on more interesting topics, like procedural counterpoint generation. Sieve was about as musical as a cabbage.