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The only thing worse than Jedao being crazy was Jedao not being crazy. When he warned her, she listened; when she ordered her moths to fire on the relief, only some of them failed to respond.
There was a brief, dire battle. There was a carrion bomb that, in spectacular display of incompetence, managed to wreck only those ships that turned to the Coiled Stone's formation with the intent to help put down the mad general. After that, silence in the void, and the glow of starlight on glassed moths.
Jedao gave her words that she felt he'd been rehearsing in his own mind for a long, long time.
"Kel," she said, over the open channel. "General Shuos Jedao speaking. We have seen the treachery of the Hexarchate, and we have withstood its crimes-"
*
"All moths, grand formation Ascending Sevenths."
Hexarchate moths swung along an invisible arc, bridging the yawning mouth of Cheris' formation. They weren't accustomed to fighting other Kel, even after the few years they'd had of skirmishes along the borders of the Entangled March. They had never gotten used to fighting Jedao. Cheris worked hard to keep it that way.
The enemy banner was Kel Bhujal's: a simple, iconic rendering of the Fortress as represented on a jeng-zai card, its manyfold roof and mighty walls probably intended to be forbidding. To Cheris, it only looked immobile.
Bhujal had her Kel maneuvering into Crimson Walls, a formation that would paint a conical shield across the foreparts of their moths. In a maneuver straight out of a strategic primer, she was trying to ram the shield and its deflection effect into position and feed Cheris' fleet their own fire.
The hollow hemisphere Cheris had assembled was capable of handling it, so long as her pivots remained intact and her course remained unpredicted. The hemisphere could give her one of three formations quickly or four formations slowly, and if Bhujal had guessed wrong, the course of the battle would tilt. It was a race, now - the Hexarchate Kel and their Walls against Cheris' experienced commanders, obfuscating their movements as they moved to the slowest of the four options.
If the rebels succeeded, Ascending Sevenths would bend the fabric of space between them. The effect would rend apart the Hexarchate moths' formation and send its exotic energies backlashing into their crews.
A light went red. An officer turned, his thin face lined with concern. "We've lost Thrice Three Thorns," he reported. "Rescue moths have deployed."
Cheris closed her eyes, not letting herself react more than that. Thrice Three occupied the lowermost pivot, and would not be replaced in time. Sure enough, another tense voice came. "Enemy formation active."
Cheris wavered. To cease fire would be to give Bhujal what she wanted. To pull back would be just another way of giving the Hexarchate Kel a victory. Could she move another moth in time? But if she kept the pressure up - her mind raced in calculation. She'd have to revise her loss estimates up, and if Bhujal pivoted from Crimson Walls into the Bloody Fortress her banner promised...
Boots sounded. A low voice drawled, "All moths, cease fire."
Cheris lost her equations, and her head snapped around fast enough to make her neck twinge. A mixture of shame and elation pushed at her facade of calm. Her guest nodded greeting, but his eyes were on the displays. "Do it," she told the officer at the communications board, and saw that his hands were already in motion.
"Enemy modulating to Bloody Fortress," a young Kel said, her voice admirably steady. "Ninety percent certainty."
"Good," said the visitor. "Forward moths, obfuscate; move for Towertop Bolt." It was a suicide formation, banned for centuries; Cheris bit her lip. As her moths moved, Bhujal's forces drew visibly together. The geometry of their formation remained accurate, but their commander's worry was visible across the void.
Obfuscate, he'd said. Fingers flew across a board, the grid providing calculations at speed. Cheris followed them nearly as quickly; her guest read the summary at the end.
"Rear moths, do not occupy the pivot,” he directed. “Move around it on your way to Ringing Mirror.” Cheris nodded; the order went out.
They were barely close enough to raise the effect in time. Ninety tense seconds later, the graceful saw-edged ribbons conjured by Bloody Fortress reached out, savaged four moths, and were promptly turned back into the hemisphere by Cheris' Kel. Bhujal's banner ceased abruptly as the warmoth that transmitted it fell under that ethereal lash.
"Welcome aboard, General Jedao," she said, and meant it.
*
After the battle, all moths now in flight to a safe location, she met him for debriefing and tea. It was a Kel ceremony carried forward to her rebels, familiar and comforting. Feeling battle tension sloping toward exhaustion, Cheris was glad of the ritual.
"You were playing right into what she expected," Jedao said, a summary of the last hour's discussion. Cheris, the skin around her eyes feeling tight, nodded. "She went for the defense, knowing you'd draw closer to attack."
"That's why you pulled half our moths into a suicide formation. Letting her think she'd won and I would sacrifice anything to hurt her," she said, and was gratified to see him nod.
"I couldn't have done it if your Kel had not trusted you enough to listen," he replied. A servitor brought tea, a silent cue that the formal portion of the discussion was over, and Jedao sat neatly to pour it. Hers first, in the patterns of Kel diplomacy; she'd never asked him to, but he'd never stopped treating her as one step above his own rank.
"Trusted me?"
His gaze was razor-edged. "Trusted you to shoot me, if you thought I was wrong."
This time, she didn't have to kill her own. She grasped for any other subject. "How did you manage to dock a needlemoth during all that?" Cheris asked.
"I didn't." His smile was angled, enigmatic. "But it's a good thing we needed to be in two places at once, and a better thing you followed that servitor. Do you remember our parting?"
Of course Cheris remembered. Her eyes closed as she sipped her tea. It was only him; he already knew. She let the memories come.
*
It had been an unremarkable little asteroid, once. One more rock in a long, tumbling orbit, without enough mass to make a comfortable footing. Someone had put a door in it, and an exotic lock that she'd cracked by dint of foreign technology and determined heresy, forcing the calendar to permit the little computer to do its job. Inside, she found a palace in miniature.
Eyes looked out from her shadow, somehow judging everything around them. Cheris - Jedao - had reached a hand forward, and brushed fingers across the top of a velvet couch, as dark as the empty sky outside, and as speckled with crystalline points. The servitors greeted her by his name, and Jedao fed her words. Smooth lies, about visiting without the Hexarch, about needing something in his absence. She spoke them in the High Language after he warned her: do not move a finger. Do not let it know you understand.
The servitor had led them through the absurd luxuries in eerie silence. He knew this place. He had, she thought as she stumbled over the raised edge of a carpet and heard the revenant hiss in aggravation, spent a great deal of time there.
He didn't speak to her, not even when she surreptitiously kicked the corner of the carpet back into place.
The servitor led them to a lab, and with a flourish of its filigree body, showed them a series of black casks. Jedao's presence was leaden in her mind. Cheris stepped forward, and as the shadows dropped away from the crystalline surface, she saw the face she expected to see in the mirror. The servitor's lights made a nonsensical flutter in her peripheral vision; she stared. The door hissed shut.
"Cheris."
She heard her pulse like raven's wings. A body lay naked and unmoving under glass. No- bodies, one per cask. She knew their exact height and how it would feel to crouch on their legs; she knew the way the shoulders could move further than their muscle would suggest, and how their balance felt. That face, hers-not-hers, those hands, scarred the way she didn't see when she took off her gloves-
"CHERIS."
Awareness came in a cold rush. The servitor was gone; the door, locked. The fox-faced access pad beside it flashed a single cold light, red for denial. Red for danger. Red for blood.
There was no hiss of gas, no terrifying whistle of atmosphere thinning. The seconds burned in silence, metered by the flash of that solitary red light. She stepped back, crisis superseding crisis. Analysis took effort, and effort took her away from glossy black coffins filled with identical phantoms of Jedao.
"Hold calm," he told her. "Subvocalize. Don't let them think this was anything but planned."
Cheris kept herself from nodding, the habit of years of pretending she was Jedao in truth. "All right," she replied. "But that door is locked, the servitor is gone, and the mechanisms are all on the other side. We're stuck here." With those, she did not say. Soulless bodies, pliantly unliving, something from a Mwennin horror-tale. Absurdly, she thought: she did not have time for this!
"They expected us to want this," Jedao said. "I think we might. And if we don't, and we let on..."
She finished for him. "Then we're in a box with hostile servitors outside, and no way out." They wouldn't even have to introduce poison; servitors were known for patience. She looked at the walls: even here, the fabric that hid the asteroid's stone was ornamented, and she thought of the everlasting cold waiting outside. Going through the wall wasn't going to work. Options, she lectured herself. Options, now.
"I can't attack the calendar here," she said. "The lock was bad enough. Do it inside, and we might lose the whole station."
"The carrion gun."
"No," she said, walking between the coffins as if determining which body were the better. "Then you'll be shattered, I'll be incapacitated, and we'll still be in here." Luxury had never felt so confining.
"I can open that door," Jedao whispered. "But I need my own hands to do it."
"What," Cheris said. "Drag one of them to the keypad?"
"Won't work. It's not my hand until it's alive," he said. "Shoot me with the carrion gun. Feed the shards to a volunteer. Then I have a body." He let loose a laugh at 'volunteer' that had nothing to do with humor.
Remembering another spinning room, another time the gun had been in her hand, she did.
*
That, Cheris told herself, was not a ‘he’. Not until this worked. She had to pull his - had to pull its mouth open.
A silhouette lay in shards, and now her head was pounding as well as spinning. She hoped it was a side effect of the carrion gun and not the duration of their captivity. How long had she lost? Only her body's demands told her time had passed at all. Very well: time to get out.
When she picked up a sliver, it cut her hand, and from there, cut her heart. Tears did not dissolve the glass, but it faded to nothingness in the mouth of the phantom. She offered it up as if she knew what she was doing. Had she ever felt so alone?
She'd had the forethought to open the nearest coffin before they'd- before she'd - Before. The mechanisms, smooth and functional, had presented the unbreathing body. She forced shard after shard past the motionless lips, picking up the smallest of fragments on the pads of her fingers. Letting them pierce her, one final time.
When she had scrounged up the last one, a needle-fine bit of dust, she sat by the open lid to wait, and let her head sag back in exhaustion. Thus, she wasn’t sure if the gasp was her own.
"Cheris," said a voice she'd never heard aloud.
She could have hugged him, if she could have stood. Instead, she fell asleep on his shoulder as he palmed the door open.
*
Memory eased. Jedao was watching her, comfortable and patient. Tea was cooling in her cup and he poured her more.
"Congratulations on your win, Cheris. He won't be able to avoid coming for us with Bhujal defeated.” Jedao's eyes seemed ancient, jarring in his unlined face. Cheris searched his expression for any tremble of worry and found nothing - but he'd often been able to mask his feelings from her, even when they shared a nervous system. In separate bodies, it was a lost cause.
"Let him come," Cheris said, with a tilted smile. “We robbed his stronghold and beat his Kel. We’ll be ready for him.” Enlightenment came. “It’s the same,” she said, and was gratified to see him nod. “We did what Bhujal expected, right up until the end. We did what the Nirai servitors expected.”
“Right up until we disappeared,” Jedao confirmed.
As she played over the conversation in her mind, something stuck out. “Wait. You didn’t dock a needlemoth?” She frowned. “How did you get on board?”
Jedao only waved a hand, as if that answered anything.