Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)(18)
“The isolation of Wicker’s End made it an unusual case, sir. If there had been another way—”
“As they used to say at Shuos Academy, ‘Counterfactuals never feed the children’. Which is hilarious coming from us, but never mind.” Jedao slammed his hand on the table, causing some of the cards to slide down from the pile, and got up. “I’ve poked about the mothgrid and I’ve quizzed your staff heads and I’ve been putting in calls to the moth commanders and driving them to distraction, and now I’m asking you. Where the fuck is our intelligence on the Hafn?”
“Sir,” Khiruev said, bracing herself, “we’re telling you very little because very little is all we know.”
“That’s remarkably unfunny.”
“It’s the truth.” She would have liked to produce a file for Jedao’s delectation, if only to have Jedao’s attention on an actual enemy. “All we have are old scraps of history—” She remembered what Jedao had revealed, but Jedao only shrugged. “—and a few notes that the Andan deigned to share from a cultural exchange several years back. If you read between the lines, the Andan are pretty baffled themselves.”
“I saw those fascinating treatises on the Hafn reverence for the agrarian lifestyle, not to mention all the pastoral poetry. Fucking peculiar for spacefarers, not to mention their descriptions of milking machines are bizarre—who writes poetry about milking machines?—but I agree that the Andan are no help. Which is a shame, because they’re the ones with the contact specialists and if they’re stuck, we’re not likely to do much better.”
Khiruev tried to remember if she’d read anything about milking machines.
Her question must have been evident, because Jedao said deprecatingly, “The descriptions can’t be anything else. My mother made me learn to milk cows the old-fashioned way even though the research facility had perfectly good machines for it. You would be surprised how many ridiculous footnotes there are in my life.”
This is not the strangest thing I have ever heard, Khiruev told herself, not with a whole deal of conviction.
Jedao was grinning at her. “I should tell you more about my mother sometime. She was something of an eccentric. She liked to watch those dramas where giant things with tentacles invade from gate-space and the only survivors are stalwart country people with big guns and loyal, delicious farm animals. I’m hoping the Hafn aren’t like my mother. That would be disturbing.”
Too bad the servitors seemed disinclined to rescue them from this line of thought. “Sir,” Khiruev said, “if you think any of us are withholding vital information from you, then you may as well shoot us all. We’ve told you all we know.”
“You’ve got to get over that Kel thing where you offer to commit suicide just to make a point,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t looking at Khiruev. “The Hafn are technically human, so I wish I could assume some basic motivations, but ‘human’ covers a lot of ground. What I do know is that their attack on the Fortress of Scattered Needles almost succeeded. We want to blow them up before they unleash the next awful thing, but to do that we need more information. Which means getting them to talk to us.”
“Crescendo 2,” Khiruev said flatly. “Crescendo 3. Knifer.”
Khiruev had seen a great deal of war in her career. It wasn’t a secret that the hexarchate was perennially one rebellion away from sputtering into pieces. Even heretics’ weapons, however, tended to fall into well-understood classifications. Between Rahal regulations and the work of the Vidona, heresies rarely had the opportunity to metastasize into truly degenerate forms.
The Hafn had an entire society based on an alien calendar, and their worlds must be likewise alien. The Andan had spoken of delegates who cared a great deal about etiquette, but the delegates had been aristocrats, and who knew what the rest of the culture looked like.
The first time Khiruev had seen the videos of the attack on Crescendo 3, she had thought they must have been concocted by a dramatist. Towers upon towers of crystal, great jagged spires and spiraling steps held up only by glittering webs. Vast singing storms and rains that left charred spatter marks on rocks. Red-blue trees that writhed upright, then collapsed, crawling into frenzies with their fellows. The analysts had concluded that the tree-things with their ugly chambered hearts had once been people. Which begged the question: did non-aristocratic Hafn resemble people as they existed in the hexarchate? While the Shuos and Andan went in for body-modding, even they acknowledged certain boundaries.
“I watched everything I could drag out of the mothgrid, yes,” Jedao said.
“People who launch unprovoked attacks without making any attempt to communicate are unlikely to be interested in negotiation.”
Jedao was pacing. There was an odd hitch in his stride, as though he hadn’t gotten used to the length of his legs. Entirely possible, given the circumstances. “I agree with you there. But guns talk. Moths talk. Everything has something to say if you know how to—”
“Command center to General Jedao,” Communications’ voice said from the terminal. “Hafn contact. Commander Janaia requests your presence.”
“General Khiruev and I are on our way,” Jedao said. “You two,” he said to the servitors, “thanks for humoring me. See you some other time if we all live?”