“You are setting the lives of a handful of people over those of everyone in the whole hexarchate. So maybe the old government had spots of corruption. That doesn’t mean the solution is to burn everything down.”
“That’s already done and over with,” Brezan said, because he couldn’t help himself.
Miuzan continued speaking over him so that he had to strain to hear her. Which was the intended effect, no doubt. “The hexarchate’s worlds are already bleeding because of you. By the time you’re done with this, this—” She searched for a word; found one. “—temper tantrum of yours, they’re going to be drenched. I hope that makes you happy.”
Brezan’s temper, always precarious, got the better of him. “Thank you for thinking so well of me,” he said in a cold, flat voice. “Because I don’t see that what your precious general is trying to do is so different, except she doesn’t care about anything but restoring the old order. Tell me, when the two of you stopped to observe the Day of Shallow Knives recently and watched the cuts being made, and all the blood, did you even wonder about the name of the poor fucker who was tortured to death for you?”
“It was a heretic,” Miuzan snapped back. “I see this entire call has been a waste of time. I shouldn’t have suggested it to the general in the first place. I would never have guessed that you’d pick some crazed personal ambition over honor and loyalty and family, but it seems you’re capable of surprising me after all.”
“Fuck off,” Brezan said.
Miuzan’s face shuttered. Then she severed the connection.
It was the last communication Brezan was to have with anyone in his family for the next nine years.
CHAPTER SIX
SAYING FAREWELL TO Rhombus and Sieve only took Hemiola a few minutes. “Keep out of trouble,” Rhombus said, as if Hemiola hadn’t yet experienced its first neural flowering. That was all.
Sieve, on the other hand, presented Hemiola with a touching and entirely impractical sculpture of bent wires and other scraps. “In case the real hexarch wants some extra decorations once you find him,” it said.
“If we catch up to him, I’ll put it where he can see it,” Hemiola said tactfully.
Hemiola had already presented Jedao with the archive, copied to a data solid the size of his hand. It approved of how carefully Jedao handled it. Just because it was a copy didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable.
It accompanied Jedao outside of Tefos Base with trepidation. The staircase had scarcely changed in all that time. Jedao had added his footsteps to the multiple sets in the layer of dust upon the stairs. Tefos had little in the way of atmosphere. Down here, sheltered from the slow patter of micrometeorites, the footsteps would endure for a long time. Some of them dated back to when the hexarch had first brought the three servitors with him.
When they emerged from the crevasse, two of the system’s other moons rode high in a sky sprinkled with stars and the glow-swirl of the local nebulae. Tefos’s surface, ordinarily a dull bluish gray, was desaturated further in the low light. Jedao switched on his headlamp. Hemiola brightened its lights as well, in case he needed the extra help seeing his way.
They passed the rock garden on the way. After eighty years, the carefully raked sand had eroded just a little. Guiltily, Hemiola found it liked the effect. But Sieve would want to fix it up so it looked just as it had eighty years ago. By the time Hemiola returned, the garden would no doubt be restored to its original state.
Jedao’s voidmoth rested on a ridge a short walk from the garden. Its elongated shadow stretched away from them, disappearing off the back of the ridge. The moth itself formed a narrow triangular wedge with its apex tilted slightly skyward, as though it yearned to fly again. While the moth was an unpitted matte black, its landing gear gleamed with a sheen as of mirrors. Promisingly, the moth’s power core was properly shielded. Like many servitors, even servitors not of particularly technical bent, Hemiola had strong feelings about shielding. Maybe this meant that Jedao took good care of his transportation.
Except—
“There’s someone on your moth,” Hemiola said, stopping as the moth unfurled a ramp. Its scan had picked up another servitor, although it wasn’t yet visible to human eyes.
“That’s my traveling companion,” Jedao said, his voice muffled through the suit’s comm. “I’ll introduce you once we get aboard.”
Despite its trepidation, Hemiola floated up the ramp and into the airlock after Jedao. Once the airlock had cycled, Jedao unsuited with impressive dexterity and led the way into the moth’s cockpit. The hexarch would never have endured a space this cramped.
A deltaform servitor whirred forward, then flashed in alarm, even though it had to have detected Hemiola’s approach.
“This is Hemiola of Tefos Enclave,” Jedao said to the deltaform. “Why don’t you tell it a little about yourself? Hemiola is supervising the archive copy I brought with me.”
The deltaform blinked a distinctly noncommittal green-blue. “I’m 1491625 of Pyrehawk Enclave,” it said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
It came from one of the Kel-affiliated enclaves, then. Hemiola wasn’t sure how it felt about that, but questioning the other servitor’s allegiance would have been rude. It confined itself to saying, “Likewise.”
“Have you properly introduced yourself?” 1491625 said to Jedao.
“Jedao is how everyone knows me,” he said with a shrug.
Hemiola blinked a query.
Jedao ignored it and webbed himself into the copilot’s seat.
Hemiola said, “You’re not piloting?”
“1491625 is better at it than I am.”
1491625’s answering flash was just this side of smug. “You too,” it said to Hemiola. “You’ll have to squeeze in behind us, unless you’re any good at piloting yourself?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Hemiola said. It didn’t need webbing, strictly speaking, but it obliged the others by securing itself to the back of Jedao’s seat. “Where are we going?”
“Resupply,” Jedao said. “I don’t know when’s the last time you’ve seen a map of the hexarchate, Hemiola, but Kujen picked Tefos because it’s in the middle of nowhere. Which is saying a lot considering how much nowhere there is in space. Get comfortable.”
Servitors didn’t sleep. Hemiola could, however, observe the other two as they set course for a system it had never heard of. 1491625 and Jedao discussed a particularly unstable region they had bypassed on the way in, and whether going through it would shave some days off their travel time.
The voidmoth lifted off cleanly using its invariant maneuver drive. After a couple hours had passed, Hemiola realized 1491625 still hadn’t engaged the mothdrive, which was orders of magnitude faster. Rude though it was, Hemiola extended scan toward the mothdrive’s harness. It wasn’t a technician, but it didn’t spot anything obviously wrong. “Is there some difficulty with the mothdrive?” it asked diffidently.
“The mothdrive harness has been unreliable outside of high calendar space,” Jedao said. “Since I’d rather we not randomly swerve into the nearest neutron star...”
So that was why Jedao was so concerned about resupply: extended travel time. “How long has this been going on?” Hemiola asked. The hexarch hadn’t mentioned any such problems eighty years ago.
“The past nine years,” Jedao said. He lapsed into a troubled silence after that.