Talaw again. “Do you intend an infantry assault in this first engagement, sir?” Skepticism.
“No,” Jedao said, “but it doesn’t do to get out of practice, just in case.” At some point they might have to take and hold territory; messy business if so. He’d rather deal with a fast raid than a protracted siege, or worse, planetary warfare. But the infantry were Kel, too. Giving them something to do would help them feel involved. “Anything else?”
No one else had any questions they wanted to admit to.
“Hexarch,” Jedao said, and bowed. People stiffened. He must have picked the wrong bow, but if Kujen wasn’t going to behead him for it, he didn’t much care. “I’m done.”
Kujen said, “I have no objections to the timetable you’ve laid out. If anyone has other questions, submit them through the usual channels.”
Jedao had no idea how “the usual channels” worked. Presumably Dhanneth could help him with that. Kujen was already striding toward the doors. Jedao remembered to salute the Kel, feeling horrible for them, then followed. Dhanneth hurried after him.
They could have been walking back through the same bizarre endless hallway with its extravagant ink paintings, except the walls suddenly opened up into an antechamber. The pale light revealed people working at terminals or banks of mysterious instruments. All of the people wore Nirai black-and-silver, in inconsistent styles of clothing: here a dress enlivened by a silver-mesh wrap, there a sleek tunic over trousers with a staggering number of pockets. A few of the Nirai glanced up at Kujen’s entrance, but no one bowed, or spoke to him, or did much to acknowledge that a hexarch had entered. In fact, several of them were arguing loudly over anomalies on a contour graph.
Kujen eyed Jedao, then snorted. “I’m not a Rahal, Jedao. I don’t feel this pressing emotional need to scrape people off the floor wherever I go.”
“I don’t believe you,” Jedao muttered.
Kujen had good hearing. “No one would get anything done around here if I insisted on that,” he said. “We have a schedule. Anyway, I wanted to show you your command moth.” Kujen made a gesture Jedao thought he could replicate with practice, and part of the far wall ceased to be visible.
The wall had either become a window or a massive display. The shearmoth hung there against a backdrop of stars. Knowing Kujen, the fact that it was attractively framed between two nebulae, a small blue-violet one and a larger one with interesting pink swirls, was deliberate. It looked even more impressive at this level of detail than it had when Kujen had shown him the original image: swept-back wings and careful curves, a triangular profile reminiscent of those of the bannermoths. He recognized the array of frontal protrusions that projected the shearmoth’s deadliest weapon, and the one for which it had been named, the shear cannon. Jedao longed to reach through the void and touch one of the protrusions, except he was afraid he’d leave smudges on the pristine surface.
Jedao thought to look up at Kujen. Kujen was smiling at whatever he saw in Jedao’s face. For once a soft light almost made the beautiful eyes human.
Of course he cares, Jedao thought, kicking himself for not realizing something so elementary. Kujen must have become a moth engineer for a reason. He was proud of the moth he had designed. And it made sense that Kujen didn’t want to interfere with his technicians. It wasn’t that the technicians mattered in themselves. It was the work they enabled him to do.
“You still haven’t named it, have you?” Kujen said.
“Kujen, I couldn’t,” Jedao said. “It’s your design.”
This was the right response. “I built it for you,” Kujen said wryly. “I can rattle off all the specifications and draw the blueprints with my teeth. I could even drive it somewhere if Navigation went into cardiac arrest, but that’s it. This moth was made to fight. That’s your domain.”
“Your mysterious assistant doesn’t want to name it?”
“Aside from the fact that my mysterious assistant comes up with the worst names ever, he refused to do anything of the sort.”
“What’s his name, anyway?”
Kujen startled. “He’ll tell you someday, maybe.” But Kujen sounded doubtful. “Since we’re on the topic of names, you should come up with something for the moth.”
Jedao couldn’t demur. That might offend Kujen. But he might be able to get information out of this—“Revenant,” he said.
Kujen grinned at him. “Feeling self-conscious, are we? Revenant it is.”
So much for that.
Dhanneth was studying the moth with great interest.
“Walk me through the specs again,” Jedao said. “I’m not even sure I know what questions to ask.”
“Some officers have a strong technical background,” Kujen said, “but it’s true that that wasn’t your particular specialty.” He looked like he was about to add something, then called up a diagram instead. Columns of text listed all the moth’s armaments. “I tried to label it clearly, but let me know if I got it wrong. I read all the analyses of Candle Arc I could find and most of them mentioned that you used superior invariant resources against the Lanterners, so I directed our research accordingly. Considering the fractured nature of the calendar at this time, it’s just as well.”
“I expected you to start with the mothdrive,” Jedao said, grateful that the diagram told him how many railguns there were. The number impressed him.
Kujen shook his head in amusement. “Force of habit. I always assume that Kel want to know about things that smash things before anything else. Here we go.”
Another diagram came up, including a graph with a bright silver curve and fainter ones in shades of gold and blue and red. “The silver is the shearmoth. Kel cindermoth, Kel bannermoth, Andan silkmoth just for hilarity, and that red is the last reliable data I have on Shuos shadowmoths.”
“Shadowmoths?”
“Stealth vessels. Traditionally, with a shadowmoth it’s the first surprise attack you have to worry about. Once dropped, recharging stealth used to take ages. But the technology could have improved in the past nine years, so don’t make too many assumptions.”
“Good to know,” Jedao said. “I wish I remembered more of this.”
Kujen didn’t answer that directly. “Pay attention to that highlighted zone in the associated acceleration curve. You can outrun anything out there except the Taurags in their native calendrical terrain, but the power drain has implications for your biggest weapon.”
The shear cannon. It caused ripples in spacetime, displacing objects caught in the area of effect. Not precise enough to yank moths into the path of fire, but good enough to disrupt Kel formations, which depended on precise geometries. Jedao almost looked forward to trying it out.
“The shear cannon is a prototype, correct?” Jedao said.
Kujen’s nostrils flared. “It has been thoroughly tested,” he said, in a voice so mild that Jedao recognized it as dangerous.
They spent the next two hours going over the specifications in detail, including simulator time. Jedao was getting better at using his augment to transmit commands to the local grid, even if it disoriented him when it tapped directly into his kinesthetic sense to provide him with a map or diagram. He wondered if he’d ever get used to it.
“All right,” Kujen said finally. “My assistant needs me. Have the major escort you back to your quarters. Remember, if you get truly fucked up, call for me and I’ll sort it out.”