Conservation of Shadows (30 page)

Her eyes went cold. “That’s not funny,” she said.

“I wasn’t being funny,” he said quietly. “I will never be a Kel. I don’t think like one of you. But sometimes that’s an advantage.”

She drew in a breath. “Sir,” she said, “I just want to know that this isn’t some Shuos game to you.” That he wasn’t being clever for the sake of being clever; that he wouldn’t throw his soldiers’ lives away because he was overeager to fight.

Jedao’s smile was not meant to reassure her. “Oh, it’s to your advantage if it’s a game,” he said. “I am very good at winning games.”

He wasn’t going to earn her loyalty by hiding his nature, so he wasn’t going to try.

It was even easier to win games if you designed the game yourself, instead of playing someone else’s, but that was a Shuos sort of discussion and he didn’t think she wanted to hear it yet.

The eleven fangmoths and seventy-three calendrical lenses approached Candle Arc only 1.3 hours behind schedule. Jedao was recovering the ability to read his watch, but the command center had a display that someone had enlarged for his benefit, so he didn’t look at it. Especially since he had the sneaking feeling that his watch was off by a fraction of a second. If he drew attention to it, Captain-magistrate Korais was going to recalibrate it to the high calendar when they all had more important things to deal with.

The crews on the lenses had figured out how to simulate formations. No one would mistake them for Kel from close range, but Jedao wasn’t going to let the Lanterners get that close.

“Word from the listening posts is that the Lanterners are still in pursuit,” Communications informed them.

“How accommodating of them,” Jedao said. “All right. Orders for the Rahal: The lenses are to maintain formation and head through the indicated channel”—he passed over the waypoint coordinates from his computer station—“to the choke locus. You are to
pass
the locus, then circle back toward it. Don’t call us under any circumstances, we’ll call you. And stick to the given formation and don’t try any fancy modulations.”

It was unlikely that the Rahal would try, but it was worth saying. The Rahal were going to be most convincing as a fake Kel swarm if they stayed in one formation because there wasn’t time to teach them to get the modulation to look right. The formation that Jedao had chosen for them was Senner’s Lash, partly because its visible effects were very short-range. When the Rahal failed to produce the force-lash, it wouldn’t look suspicious because the Lanterners wouldn’t expect to see anything from a distance.

“Also,” Jedao said, still addressing the Rahal. “The instant you see something, anything on scan, you’re to banner the Deuce of Gears.”

The Deuce was his personal emblem, and it connoted “cog in the machine.” Everyone had expected him to register some form of fox when he made brigadier general, but he had preferred a show of humility. The Deuce would let the Lanterners know who they were facing. It might not be entirely sporting for the Rahal to transmit it, but since they were under his command, he didn’t feel too bad about it.

“The Rahal acknowledge,” Communications said. Jedao’s subdisplay showed them moving off. They would soon pass through the calendrical null, and at that point they would become harder to find on scan.

Commander Menowen was drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair, her first sign of nervousness. “They have no defenses,” she said, almost to herself.

It mattered that this mattered to her. “We won’t let the Lanterners reach them,” Jedao said. “If only because I would prefer to spend my career not having the Rahal mad at me.”

Her sideways glance was only slightly irritated. “Where are we going, sir?”

“Cut the mothdrives,” Jedao said. He sent the coordinates to Menowen, Communications, and Navigation. “We’re heading
there
by invariant drive only.” This would probably prevent long-range scan from seeing them. “Transmit orders to all moths. I want acknowledgments from the moth commanders.”

“There” referred to some battledrift, all sharp edges and ash-scarred fragments and wrecked silverglass shards, near the mouth of what Jedao had designated the Yellow Passage. He expected the Lanterners to take it toward the choke. Its calendrical gradient started in the Lanterners’ favor, then zeroed out as it neared the null.

Depending on the Lanterners’ invariant drives, it would take them two to three hours (high calendar) to cross the null region and reach the choke. This was, due to the periodic shifts, still faster than going around the null, because the detours would be through space hostile to their exotics for the next six hours.

Reports had put the Lanterners at anywhere from sixty to one hundred twenty combat moths. The key was going to be splitting them up to fight a few at a time.

Jedao’s moth commanders acknowledged less quickly than he would have liked, gold lights coming on one by one.

“Formation?” Menowen prompted him.

There weren’t a lot of choices when you had eleven moths. Jedao brought up a formation, which was putting it kindly because it didn’t belong to Lexicon Primary for tactical groups, or even Lexicon Secondary, which contained all the obsolete formations and parade effects. He wanted the moths in a concave configuration so they could focus lateral fire on the first hostiles to emerge from the Yellow Passage.

“That’s the idea,” Jedao said, “but we’re using the battledrift as cover. Some big chunks of dead stuff floating out there, we might as well blend in and snipe the hell out of the Lanterners with the invariant weapons.” At least they had a good supply of missiles and ammunition, as Najhera had attempted to fight solely with exotic effects.

The Kel didn’t like the word “snipe,” but they were just going to have to deal. “Transmit orders,” Jedao said.

The acknowledgments lit up again, about as fast as they had earlier.

The
Fortune Comes in Fours
switched into invariant mode as they crossed into the null. The lights became less white-gold and more rust-gold, giving everything a corroded appearance. The hum of the moth’s systems changed to a deeper, grittier whisper. The moth’s acceleration became noticeable, mostly in the form of pain. Jedao wished he had thought to take an extra dose of painkillers, but he couldn’t risk getting muddled.

Menowen picked out a chunk of coruscating metals that had probably once been some inexplicable engine component on that long-ago space fortress and parked the
Fortune
behind it. She glanced at him to see if he would have any objections. He nodded at her. No sense in getting in the way when she was doing her job fine.

Time passed. Jedao avoided checking his watch every minute thanks to long practice, although he met Captain-magistrate Korais’s eyes once and saw a wry acknowledgment of shared impatience.

They had an excellent view of the bridgelights even on passive sensors. The lights were red and violet, like absurd petals, and their flickering would, under other circumstances, have been restful.

“We won’t see hostiles until they’re on top of us,” Menowen said.

More nerves. “It’ll be mutual,” Jedao said, loudly enough so the command center’s crew could hear him. “They’ll see us when they get that close, but they’ll be paying
attention
to the decoy swarm.”

She wasn’t going to question his certainty in front of everyone, so he rewarded her by telling her. “I am sure of this,” he said, looking at her, “because of how the Lanterner general destroyed Najhera. They were extremely aggressive in exploiting calendrical terrain and, I’m sorry to say, they made a spectacle of the whole thing. I don’t imagine the Lanterners had time to swap out generals for the hell of it, especially one who had already performed well, so I’m assuming we’re dealing with the same individual. So if the Lanterner wants calendrical terrain and a big shiny target, fine. There it is.”

More time passed. There was something wrong about the high calendar when it ticked off seconds cleanly and precisely and didn’t account for the way time crawled when you were waiting for battle. Among the many things wrong with the high calendar, but that one he could own to without getting called out as a heretic.

“The far terrain is going to shift in our favor in five hours, sir,” Korais said.

“Thank you, good to know,” Jedao said.

To distract himself from the pain, he was thinking about the bridgelights and their resemblance to falling petals when Scan alerted him that the Lanterners had shown up. “Thirty-some moths in the van,” the officer said in a commendably steady voice. “Readings suggest more are behind them. They’re moving rapidly, vector suggests they’re headed down the Yellow Passage toward the choke locus, and they’re using a blast wave to clear mines.”

As if he’d had the time to plant mines down a hostile corridor. Good of them to think of it, though.

Menowen’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Our
banner
—”

His emblem. The Kel transmitted their general’s emblem before battle. “No,” Jedao said. “We’re not bannering. The Lanterners are going to be receiving the Deuce of Gears from
over there,
” where the Rahal were.

“But the protocol, sir. The Rahal aren’t part of your force,” Menowen said, “they don’t
fight
—”

That got his attention. “
Fledge,
” Jedao said sharply, which brought her up short, “what the hell do you mean they’re not fighting? Just because they’re not sitting on a mass of things that go boom?
They’re fighting what’s in the enemy’s head.
”

He studied the enemy dispositions. The Yellow Passage narrowed as it approached the null, and the first group consisted of eight hellmoths, smaller than fangmoths, but well-armed if they were in terrain friendly to their own calendar, which was not going to be the case at the passage’s mouth. The rest of the groups would probably consist of eight to twelve hellmoths each. Taken piecemeal, entirely doable.

“They fell for it,” Menowen breathed, then wisely shut up.

“General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” Jedao said. “Coordinated strike on incoming units with missiles and railguns.” Hellmoths didn’t have good side weapons, so he wasn’t as concerned about return fire. “After the first hits, move into the Yellow Passage to engage. Repeat, move into the Yellow Passage.”

The fangmoths’ backs would be to that damned null, no good way to retreat, but that would only motivate them to fight harder.

If the Lanterners wanted a chance at the choke, they’d have to choose between shooting their way through when the geometry didn’t permit them to bring their numbers to bear in the passage, or else leaving the passage and taking their chances with terrain that shaded toward the high calendar. If they chose the latter, they risked being hit by Kel formation effects, anything from force lances to scatterbursts, on top of the fangmoths’ exotic weapons.

The display was soon a mess of red lights and gold, damage reports. The computer kept making the dry, metallic click that indicated hits made by the Kel. Say what you liked about the Kel, they did fine with weapons.

Two hellmoths tried to break through the Kel fangmoths, presumably under the impression that the Rahal were the real enemy. One hellmoth took a direct engine hit from a spinal railgun, while the other shuddered apart under a barrage of missiles that overwhelmed the anti-missile defenses.

“You poor fools,” Jedao said, perusing the summaries despite the horrible throbbing in his left eye. “You found a general who was incandescently talented at calendrical warfare, so you spent all your money on the exotic toys and ran out of funding for the boring invariant stuff.”

Menowen paused in coordinating damage control—they’d taken a burst from an exploding scout, of all things—and remarked, “I should think you’d be grateful, sir.”

“It’s war, Commander, and someone always dies,” Jedao said, aware of Korais listening in; aware that even this might be revealing too much. “That doesn’t mean I’m eager to dance on their ashes.”

“Of course,” Menowen said, but her voice revealed nothing of her feelings.

The fangmoths curved into a concave bowl as they advanced up the Yellow Passage. The wrecked Lanterner hellmoths in the van were getting in the way of the Lanterners’ attempts to bring fire to bear. Jedao had planned for a slaughter, but he hadn’t expected it to work this well. They seemed to think his force was a detachment to delay them from reaching the false Kel swarm while the far terrain was hostile to the high calendar, and that if they could get past him before the terrain changed, they would prevail. It wasn’t until the fourth group of Lanterners had been written into rubble and smoke that their swarm discipline wavered. Some of the hellmoths and their auxiliaries started peeling out of the passage just to have somewhere else to go. Others turned around, exposing their sides to further punishment, so they could accelerate back up the passage where the Kel wouldn’t be able to catch them.

One of Jedao’s fangmoths had taken engine damage serious enough that he had ordered it to pull back, but that left him ten to work with. “Formation Sparrow’s Spear,” he said, and gave the first set of targets.

The fangmoths narrowed into formation as they plunged out of the Yellow Passage and toward five hellmoths and a transport moving with the speed and grace of a flipped turtle. As they entered friendlier terrain, white-gold fire blazed up from the formation’s primary pivot and raked through two hellmoths, the transport, and a piece of crystalline battledrift.

They swung around for a second strike, shifting into a shield formation to slough off the incoming fire.

This is too easy,
Jedao thought coldly, and then.

“Incoming message from Lanterner hellmoth 5,” Communications said. Scan had tagged it as the probable command moth. “Hellmoth 5 has disengaged.” It wasn’t the only one. The list showed up on Jedao’s display.

“Hold fire on anything that isn’t shooting at us,” Jedao said. “They want to talk? I’ll talk.”

There was still a core of fourteen hellmoths whose morale hadn’t broken. A few of the stragglers were taking potshots at the Kel, but the fourteen had stopped firing.