Jedao closed his eyes. Thanks for the pressure. “There’s no guarantee I could do that again.” More like no way ever.
“You could see how it was done in the playback, couldn’t you?”
Did Kujen have no idea? “That’s on a tidy spiderfucking three-dimensional diagram where you can see all the units arrayed neatly and everything has labels and there are helpful colored arrows for the vectors. As opposed to being there when somebody’s warmoth has an inconvenient drive failure while it’s sitting in a key pivot because the mechanics at the last layover half-assed the repairs, and you can’t read half the hostile formants on scan because the enemy has a fancy new jammer, and one of your brilliant hothead commanders decides the best thing she can do with her tactical group is creatively misinterpret her orders and—”
Jedao shut up. He had no idea where the rant had come from, just like the scars. He couldn’t tell if any of those things had happened or if he was being hypothetical. It was like listening to a stranger who had his voice and who talked exactly like he did. And who knew a lot more about warfare.
Who the hell am I? Am I a clone? He had the impression you couldn’t give clones even dubious memories of battles, but then, he already had amnesia. How was he supposed to tell?
Kujen caught his arm and steered him to a chair. “Sit,” he said, and tugged gently.
Jedao sank into the chair. Any more of this and his knees would dissolve.
“I’m not a military practitioner,” Kujen said. “But I have experience dealing with the military, and the Kel think highly of your ability. In this matter I defer to their judgment.”
“Am I some kind of expendable copy?”
“You’re not expendable,” Kujen said unhelpfully.
He hadn’t denied it. “Fine,” Jedao said. “What resources do we have?” With any luck this question would generate a concrete answer and not alarming creations like memory vampires. He would have to investigate the matter of clones on his own time, since Kujen was being closemouthed.
“The good news is that you will be pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of your warmoths,” Kujen said.
Jedao imagined so, because all he knew about warmoth statistics came from video games. It didn’t seem politic to mention that, however.
“Also good is that we have a supply of loyal Kel for those moths. The bad news is numbers. No matter what we do, we’re massively outnumbered by any one of our enemies.”
“We’re talking about how many moths and crew on our side?”
“We have 108 bannermoths,” Kujen said, “with crew of approximately 450 each. You also have two infantry regiments that you can distribute among the bannermoths and the accompanying boxmoth transports as you see fit. I would have obtained more moth Kel for you if that had been an option.”
“You can’t recruit more?”
Kujen made a moue. “A number of Kel are confused about who to follow. While I have the loyalty of a small number of bases—”
“You’d better show me that map,” Jedao said, “so I can visualize the situation.” Pretend it’s a video game, he thought, despite his unease at treating something as serious as war as a game.
Kujen called up a three-dimensional map, neatly labeled. The Protectorate appeared in gold. While some of its boundaries looked more extensive than the heptarchate Jedao remembered, chunks of it had been bitten off. The second-largest polity, as Kujen had mentioned, was called the Compact. The map showed it in red.
“Red for Shuos?” Jedao said. Kujen had said the Shuos hexarch had thrown in with the Compact.
“Yes,” Kujen said.
“Is Khiaz-zho still head of the Shuos?”
Kujen’s eyes widened. Then he started to laugh.
Jedao didn’t see what was so funny. “Well?”
“She’s been gone for quite some time,” Kujen said. “It’s Shuos Mikodez now. You don’t remember much of Khiaz, do you?”
“No,” Jedao said. Just her name. “Why?”
“Why indeed,” Kujen said. He zoomed in on the border space between the Protectorate and the Compact. “What do you think?”
A number of smaller states had sprouted up there. Jedao imagined that none of them enjoyed the situation. “Why haven’t they been gobbled up?”
“Another good question,” Kujen said. “The answer is that, after the assassination that took out the hexarchs other than myself and Mikodez, calendrical destabilization was so strong that the borders remain precarious even now. There are large regions of space where the old exotic technologies no longer work. They’re most reliable in the Protectorate, but the Protectorate is overextended. It’s exactly the kind of situation that attracts opportunist potentates and despots and governmental experimentalists of every kind.”
“How did you escape the assassinations?”
Kujen shrugged. “Mikodez and I were more paranoid than the others.”
Jedao sensed he wouldn’t get more of an answer and returned to the map. “You said earlier that the Kel were divided.”
“Yes. Protector-General Inesser seized power and is running the Protectorate. The other factions caved on the grounds that she was the one with the guns. In the Compact, there’s a nascent democratic state backed by High General Kel Brezan. The Kel are having fits trying to figure out the mess.”
“‘Democratic’?” Jedao said. “What’s that?”
“They vote on everything from their leaders to their laws,” Kujen said.
Jedao mulled that over. “It sounds dreadfully impractical,” he said, “but all right. What about your Kel? Who do they support?”
“I can guarantee their loyalty.”
“Oh?” Jedao said neutrally.
“There were some morale issues earlier,” Kujen said with a suspicious lack of specificity. “You’ll see when you meet them.”
“What kind of—”
“I want to see how you handle it.”
A test. Jedao didn’t like that either, but he’d manage. “What about the name of this memory vampire who has it in for me?”
Kujen relented. “Her name is Kel Cheris.”
The name didn’t spark any recognition in him. “Is she anyone I should know?”
“You, no,” Kujen said with a trace of annoyance. “As far as you’re concerned, she’s only a low officer with a talent for math. I’m the one who should have predicted that she’d grow up to be a radical crashhawk.”
Crashhawk? Jedao wondered. He would have asked, except Kujen was still speaking.
“We won’t confront her straight off,” Kujen said. “You’re at a disadvantage right now. Later, with better resources, perhaps. But not yet.”
“I don’t want to go after her,” Jedao said. Avoiding her sounded like good sense. If she was more him than he was, and unstable on top of it, she might be able to repeat the eight-to-one trick. He was betting that, as impressive as 108 bannermoths sounded, he didn’t outnumber her eight to one. What would that leave her with, 13.5 moths? “I want to know where she is so I can run like hell if I see her coming.”
“My agents are doing their best,” Kujen said. “Unfortunately, she hasn’t been sighted in the last nine years.”
Great, she was lurking out there in stealth mode, so he wouldn’t see her coming, either.
“Let me cheer you up,” Kujen said, rather callously. “I’ll show you your command moth.” He picked up the slate and tapped at it. Jedao was impressed that the lace at his wrists didn’t get in the way.