“No,” Dhanneth said with chilling conviction. “It’s the same all over. Anyone could tell you that.”
A quiet cold ran through Jedao’s bones. It was a bad situation, but he might be able to talk himself through it if he treated it like a game. The first rule of any game was to assume you could win, even if you had to hunt through the universe’s cracks for a strategy, even if you had to turn the pieces inside-out, even if you had to tell so many lies to the opponent that they couldn’t figure out which way was up.
Jedao had to win this war for Kujen because otherwise Kujen would turn to someone else. Kujen seemed to like him. That gave him a little leeway—if he was careful. Besides, if the hexarch needed him, it was Jedao’s duty to do his best, for the hexarchate’s sake, if nothing else.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN THE END, Brezan chose a base of operations based on the fact that no one there had tried to shoot his supporters in the last two weeks (eight-day, per local practice). He didn’t expect this state of affairs to last. Among other things, the local Shuos who were supposed to serve as makeshift riot police had suffered a schism. Maybe more than one schism. It was hard to tell.
He’d ended up on Krauwer 5, one of the more recently terraformed planets. “Recently” meant two centuries ago, in this case, but there was some ecological complication that meant that the planetary governor was a Nirai instead of the more usual Andan or, perhaps, a Rahal appointee. More to the point, said Nirai, a rotund woman named Lozhoi whose hair had been styled in loose curls, had contacted Brezan and bluntly asked for his protection. Although she wore Nirai ceremonial clothes, robes of gray and black, they looked as if she’d slept in them.
“Why me?” Brezan asked, just as bluntly.
“You’re here,” Lozhoi said, “and you have a swarm. More importantly, I’ve been paying attention to your body language in your bulletins. You strike me as honest.”
Brezan flushed. He’d been imprinted with standardized kinesics as part of the formation instinct injection back in Kel Academy, but he wouldn’t be surprised if those had decayed too. The joys of being the hexarchate’s second-most-notorious crashhawk, he thought.
Lozhoi wasn’t done. “Honest is as honest does, of course, when it comes to government,” she went on. Brezan was starting to get the idea that, despite her owlish face and rumpled appearance, Lozhoi had gotten her position because she was competent. “But if you’re sincere about reforming government, and I think you are, then you’re going to need allies from the ground up. That’s where I can help.”
“What’s in it for you?” Brezan said.
Lozhoi squinted at him as if he’d asked a particularly naive question. “When I first came here twenty-four years ago,” she said, “the previous governor had left things in shambles. One large coalition of workers was on the verge of being declared heretics. Like that would have helped.”
“What did you do about it?”
She said, with disarming modesty, “I went down to their meeting places and asked to have tea with them. Four months passed before anyone would take me up on the offer. Granted, I don’t even like tea. But eventually they figured out that I wanted as few people to be handed over to the Vidona as possible.”
“Must have made you popular with the local Vidona,” Brezan said.
“Oh, at first I was told I absolutely couldn’t do what I was doing. But you know what, every day my invitation to tea was declined, I went over to the Vidona overseer’s office and sat myself down right in her doorway. Stared at her as she went about her day. She hated that. She cracked much faster than the workers did.”
Brezan resolved on the spot never to piss Lozhoi off.
When Brezan and his honor guard landed in Tauvit, the capital of Krauwer 5, Lozhoi greeted him not with soldiers but an assistant who scarcely looked up from his slate. Brezan suppressed a sigh of relief. Emio had pointed out that it wasn’t impossible that Lozhoi was luring him into an ambush, as if he hadn’t thought of that for himself.
One of the first things Brezan had discovered was that he needed replacements for the official news service that he’d taken for granted all his life. Even worse, he had no idea how to tell reliable news from unreliable news. The gossipy networks used by citizens without faction allegiance took on a sudden and not always appetizing prominence.
At the moment, Brezan relied on Lozhoi for local news, and had a hastily appointed assistant keep an eye on events in Tauvit. For the rest of the hexarchate, or more accurately the shattering remnants of it, he was dependent on Hexarch Mikodez’s dispatches. He was painfully aware of how much those dispatches must be eliding. Thousands upon thousands of worlds, how was he supposed to keep track of them all? The sad answer was that he couldn’t.
Emio had stayed on to serve as Brezan’s liaison with what she termed “all right-thinking Shuos.” Brezan assumed that she had orders to shoot him and stuff him into a recycling chute if he proved troublesome.
At the moment, Brezan was proofreading a pamphlet on the latest regulations that he’d scheduled to go out tomorrow morning (revised calendar), where “morning” meant midday according to planetary time. But Cheris’s new calendar wouldn’t do him any good if he didn’t start adhering to it in matters small and large, so midday it was. At least it wouldn’t be going out in the middle of Tauvit’s night.
Brezan set his slate down and rubbed his eyes. “I wish I had some idea whether these were having an effect,” he muttered to Emio.
Emio obligingly poured him a glass of water without being asked. He hated that. “Propaganda has vetted them,” she said. “There’s no point in retaining experts if you’re not going to make use of them.”
Brezan scowled. “It feels like cheating.”
“You have got to get over your squeamishness,” Emio said without any trace of sympathy.
Brezan shook his head, remembering the argument they’d had over the use of Shuos instigators: agents hidden in the general populace, seeding rumors and opinions favorable to the new regime. Emio had won. Brezan still hated himself for giving way, especially since it was impossible to tell with any certainty whether the instigators were having the desired effect.
“Well, that’s it,” Brezan said. “I’m going to—”
Just then the grid said, “Call for High General Kel Brezan on line 10-1.”
“The hell?” Brezan said. 10-1 was reserved for personal calls.
“Get some sleep,” Emio told him. “If it’s important they’ll call again, as my grandmother always used to say.”
“No, I want to know.” Brezan made a shooing motion at her. “Pretend that you’re going to give me some privacy, even if I know your hexarch has this office bugged to hell and gone?”
Emio refused to take the bait. “If you insist. Just promise me you’ll get sleep at some point.”
“What is it with all you Shuos and healthy living habits, anyway?”
“Someday you’re going to meet Shuos Zehun,” Emio said, clearly unaware that Brezan already had, “and then you’ll understand.”
After the door had shut behind her, Brezan said to the room, “Someday I’m going to meet Zehun again, and eat an entire cake in front of them, just to annoy them.” In real life he knew he’d never dare to do any such thing.