Master of Formalities Read online

  I’d rather not tell you about my life since we parted, but you asked, and we swore that we’d never keep secrets.

  The war is not as I’d been led to believe, at least not anymore. While it is true that all hostilities are restricted to the surface of one world, Ophion 6, I’d believed it was a war in name only. Because of the huge fortifications that have been built and the power of the weapons both sides have placed in orbit to neutralize those fortifications, I’d thought any organized military action would guarantee unacceptable mutual losses. I was told, as were we all, that until something drastic changed, neither side would dare make a move.

  When I arrived at my battalion’s outpost everything was as I’d expected. This planet is a scorched, uninhabitable waste, save for the twin lines of entrenched fortifications—one Jakabitus, one Hahn—that run parallel to each other and encircle the planet like a belt.

  My new home started long ago as a trench on the border of no-man’s-land, but over decades of warfare, it has been widened, deepened, roofed, reinforced, and eventually, carpeted. I was shown to the mess hall, which has wood paneling and a shelf where all of the soldiers in the battalion have their own handcrafted metal cups, engraved with their names. The cups were made out of spent bulk-ammo containers, the very same kind of containers they had bent and welded in their off hours to make the statue of Lady Jakabitus that had won them her favor . . . and my services. A few of the soldiers seemed embarrassed. They merely took up sculpture to pass the time. They didn’t expect it to get Her Ladyship’s attention, and certainly didn’t expect her to be touched enough to send one of her kitchen staff to cook for them. They seem like good people, all in all, but they make me terribly uncomfortable. Of course most of them are much taller than me (most people are taller than me), and all of them outweigh me, more because of my lack of muscle then their surplus of it.

  I mentioned that they seemed to go through a lot of bulk-ammo. I think my commander could tell I was nervous. She explained that the cups were made from containers of ammo that had become too old to use.

  The next day I supervised my first full dinner service for the platoon. I used recipes that Barsparse taught me, and the troops all seemed pleased. I was enthusiastically welcomed and given my own engraved cup, which was kept full of the strongest liquor available until late in the evening.

  Then, the Hahn attacked.

  I’ve since learned that our commanders thought we’d be obliterated from orbit if we were ever attacked. They never expected a hundred Hahn soldiers would walk across no-man’s-land, enter our trench through the front door, and start beating us physically. They caught us unaware, drunk, and full of heavy food. Those swine had a field day until we finally snapped out of our stupor and mounted a defense.

  I’m ashamed to admit that my first instinct was to run, not for cover, but to the kitchen, where I feel like I know what I’m doing. Several of the brutes pursued and cornered me, though luckily it was near the meat carving station. The Hahn didn’t know the mistake they’d made. Most military outposts, like most households, rely entirely on bulkfabs for their sustenance. Only the wealthy, the lucky, or their servants, have ever seen an actual kitchen full of kitchen tools, and these men were none of those things.

  Please thank Barsparse for encouraging me to work on my knife skills. Ghastly as that sounds, they saved my life.

  By the time I had dispatched my attackers, the soldiers out in the mess hall had driven those Hahn jackals back out into no-man’s-land. We found no call for celebration though. Several of our number were killed, some apparently beaten to death with their own cups.

  That was three days ago, and we have had precious little peace since. The Hahn continue to attack at irregular intervals, but always by the same means. We are overrun by foot soldiers. They use heavy weapons to breach our walls, but they never use them to attack us personally, so our leaders insist that good form prevents us from firing our weapon as a means of defense. The attacks are never enough to destroy us outright. They just weaken us and prevent us from resting. Our commander believes that they are softening us up for a big attack that will wipe us off the map, but that’s madness, as such an attack would surely elicit an equally deadly response from Her Ladyship. Indeed, we are told that reinforcements are on their way now. None of us see any sanity in the Hahn’s conduct, which is the most frightening part.

  Try not to worry about me, Umily. Just know that I long to see you again. I want to spend my life with you, but for now my only goal is to return to you in one piece.

  Love always,

  Gint

  Umily watched the words scroll slowly up the page until they stopped at the end of the letter. When she was done crying, she put her papers away and went back to work.

  2.

  Wollard walked at his fastest pace, which was barely discernable from his slowest pace. He lived by the rule: Walk as if you have somewhere to go.

  It was not the only rule he lived by, but it was one of them.

  He didn’t run, because to run gave the impression that one was running from something, and as such, was a form of negativity. Negativity was bad form, for which Wollard had no tolerance.

  The daily staff meeting was held in the servants’ hall, on the ground floor in what was called the New Palace. It was as grand and ornate as any other part of the palace, but was built only a thousand years prior, and as such, it felt immature and inelegant to Wollard compared to the Old Palace, where the briefing was to be held in Lady Jakabitus’s offices. The Old Palace was essentially a three-hundred-foot-tall cylindrical atrium, with various rooms dispersed around its outer circumference in four rings, spread equally along the four levels of the towering space.

  The grand gallery through which Wollard walked was on the ground floor. He navigated around the columns that supported the upper levels like an ant weaving through tree trunks, emerging into the empty expanse in the center of the gallery, pointedly not looking up to see the sunlight streaming in through the rows of ancient windows that towered above his head. To do so might slow his stride, and with Her Ladyship waiting, that would be very bad form indeed.

  He mounted the grand escalator, a graceful line of ponderous, polished stone slabs the size of dinner tables. They moved swiftly and silently, via no obvious mechanical means, floating upwards in a lazy spiral, transporting Wollard through the full, dizzying height of the atrium, pausing at each of the three upper levels. To the uninitiated, riding the grand escalator was terrifying. This was a deliberate design decision on the part of the long-dead Jakabitus ancestor who’d ordered its construction. Once you learned to trust that the same invisible forces that moved the slabs also prevented any passengers from falling off, it became a bit easier to relax and enjoy the ride.

  Wollard disembarked on the fourth level, near the top of the atrium. After he stepped off the stone slab, it followed a similar lazy spiral, this time descending back to the Grand Gallery below.

  He walked past the empty meeting rooms and lesser offices before entering the antechamber to Her Ladyship’s primary office. He found his protégée, Phee, awaiting his arrival. Her posture was impeccable, and she was wearing a slim, high-collared black suit with distinctive narrow lapels and cuffs, identical to his. One might expect it to look odd on a woman of her youth, but she seemed utterly relaxed, as if she had been born in her uniform. This pleased Wollard greatly. If the Master of Formalities were to look uncomfortable, it would affect everyone with whom he or she interacted, and to make people uncomfortable was always bad form.

  Phee smiled slightly and bowed her head. She was slim, but not tall, so when she bowed she gave Wollard a fine view of the back of her head. Her blonde hair was slicked down exactly like the hair of every other Master of Formalities galaxy-wide. She said, “Wollard. I greeted Her Ladyship and her guest as you requested. They’ve been inside for less than five minutes. I suspect the briefing has only just begun.
”

  “Splendid, Phee. Thank you,” Wollard said, returning her nod. He glanced at the wallpaper.

  An undetectable coating of nano-engineered machines called utilitics coated every surface of the palace, both inside and out. Each utilitic was designed to perform a specific task, but all bore limited computational power. As they were mixed so evenly, cooperated so effectively, and coated the palace so thoroughly, they made the palace, essentially, a gigantic self-maintaining computer. The utilitics’ ability to clean surfaces and repair microscopic damage to the structures they covered was one of the principal reasons for the palace’s greatly streamlined maintenance staff. The coating also ensured that every flat surface in the palace was usable as a display, meaning that such details as the wallpaper patterns could change, not only to reflect the changing seasons and time of day, but (thanks to the intervention of a skilled artist who worked somewhere in the palace’s new addition) the fluctuations of Her Ladyship’s mood. Most importantly to Wollard, the décor in this antechamber was tied to the décor in Her Ladyship’s office suite, allowing him to judge Her Ladyship’s mental state before entering.

  This morning, the wallpaper was a repeating pattern of flowers, stippled with what appeared to be rampant birds of prey.

  All in all, a mixed bag, he thought.

  Wollard paused in front of the office door and glanced back at Phee, who was waiting for him to ask her a question before offering the answer, which was usually good form, but not in this case. This was excusable. She was young, and the Formalities were complex.

  Wollard turned, his hands still on the door, and looked at Phee. “With whom is Her Ladyship meeting?”

  Phee shrank, realizing she should have offered the information. “I’m sorry, Wollard. Her Ladyship is with The Weeper.”

  Wollard stiffened. He didn’t want to delay joining the briefing, but this infraction made it necessary. Phee shrank even more and looked at her feet. To her credit, she said nothing.

  “Who is with Her Ladyship?”

  Phee winced and said, “The supreme commander of Her Ladyship’s armed forces, General Kriz.”

  Wollard said, “Better. I know that you are from off-world, as am I. And I know that on other worlds, and even in the less respectful quarters of this world, certain members of the ruling class are called by names their parents never intended, but we who tend to the Formalities do not use those other names. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Wollard.”

  “Good, and while we’re discussing it, the fact that General Kriz was with Her Ladyship is information one might have chosen to offer, rather than waiting to be asked. After all, if I hadn’t known that Her Ladyship was meeting with a representative of her military, and thought to ask which representative it was, his presence might have come as a complete surprise.”

  “Yes, Wollard. I see that.”

  “Good.” Wollard turned back to the door, made sure his suit was straight, then added, “Now come along. As always, stand behind me and have your papers ready. You may need to refer to them or take notes.”

  As Phee was standing behind Wollard, she did not bother to hide her relief. As Wollard’s back was to Phee, he did not bother to hide his smile.

  Without any additional delay, he pushed the doors open and entered.

  As was befitting of her post as the sole ruler of one of the galaxy’s more influential planets, Lady Jakabitus’s office was larger than many entire buildings. Just beyond the center of the room stood Lady Jakabitus’s desk, which itself was larger than most offices. Behind the desk, Lady Jakabitus stood across from a general who was larger than most desks. The general was a precariously balanced slab of muscle and scar tissue draped with a dizzying tangle of medals, braids, and buttons. Lady Jakabitus herself was petite but solid. Her jet-black hair was pulled back in a style that somehow managed to look elaborate despite being, essentially, a bun. Because of the early start and short notice, she was dressed for work in her least formal uniform. Her shoulders bore the barest hints of golden epaulets. The front of her jacket was cunningly designed to suggest aglets and brass hardware without any of those items actually being present. She was, in truth, the least ornamented thing in the room, as the truly important things usually are. That said, she was always dressed well, because she understood that certain standards needed to be upheld. Even her most impromptu and informal meeting was still an audience with the ruler of a planet.

  Behind her, a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows offered a stunning view of the capital city of Koa, as seen from the very tip of the Old Palace tower. The walls on either side of the office were usually decorated with immense framed paintings depicting great moments in the history of the planet Apios, as well as notable members of the Jakabitus family, stretching all the way back to the original Terran Jakabituses, who had cemented the family’s claim to rule Apios by funding the initial colonists. For this briefing the frames had been repurposed through the use of utilitics to display real-time feeds of Her Ladyship’s generals and ministers, all who might have information to share, or a need to hear that information. The surface of the desk displayed a tactical map of the disputed world, Ophion 6.

  The war had been a fact of life for generations—so long that few people could say why it had started in the first place and even fewer held out hope that it would end within their lifetime. Lady Jakabitus and her generals did not have the luxury of such pessimism. They were in charge of the war effort, which meant they worked each day to bring it infinitesimally closer to a successful end, or at least to keep an ignominious end at bay.

  “Conventional wisdom holds that our orbital weapon platforms and automated defenses have rendered direct, manual violence obsolete,” General Kriz said. “As such, it is the one form of military action for which we are not prepared.”

  “And the Hahn have exploited that weakness,” Lady Jakabitus said, nodding to Wollard as he approached the desk, followed by Phee.

  “Yes. They breached the frontier zones in numerous places, infiltrating our forward installations unannounced and engaging our soldiers in undignified close-quarters combat.”

  Lady Jakabitus studied the general for a moment, then asked, “And what have we done to eliminate that weakness? Surely our defenses have been recalibrated to fend off these incursions.”

  General Kriz said, “That approach has certain challenges. Our airborne weapons can level buildings and render large areas uninhabitable. Our ground-based weapon systems are designed to repel an air attack. Neither is effective against a small group of unarmed soldiers, unless those soldiers are launched through the air somehow. We weren’t prepared for the Hahn to simply walk over and physically attack us man to man. In a sense, the war has grown too civilized for that.”

  Lady Jakabitus frowned at the tactical map, lost in thought. Kriz and Wollard both had the good judgment not to interrupt.

  “We could retaliate by reducing one of their bunkers to ashes,” she said, “along with all the soldiers inside. Or we could just vaporize their next raiding party. It’s a hateful thing to even consider, but it would deter them from further attacks.”

  Wollard cleared his throat and said, “It might indeed; however, there would be a price to pay for such a response. The Hahn would undoubtedly claim the reaction was disproportionate to their action, giving them the rights of the aggrieved party. Form would dictate that they respond by destroying one of our installations, and as our position is that we are the wronged party, we would be forced to destroy another of theirs. Of course, one side or the other would be forced to see reason and stop this chain of events before all life on the planet is destroyed. Sadly, if the Hahn were well known for seeing reason, we would likely not be having this discussion. Many of the ruling houses would take our side, but many would not, and in the end House Jakabitus would lose face, if not the entire war.”

  Lady Jakabitus nodded. “You’re right, of course. I had to
consider it, though.”

  Wollard bowed slightly. “Of course, Milady.”

  Lady Jakabitus stared down at the map, and Wollard took the opportunity to check on Phee, who was looking at her papers. She quickly glanced up to show that she was paying attention to the meeting.

  “All right,” Lady Jakabitus said. “Aerial bombardment is out. How do we defend ourselves, General?”

  “That’s where the news gets better. While our soldiers are not currently as well trained in hand-to-hand combat as we would like, it would appear that the Hahn aren’t adept at it either. Their technique is haphazard, and their discipline is lacking.”

  “Are you saying that the Hahn are using a method of attack for which they themselves are not well prepared?”

  “So it would appear. That means that the skirmishes almost always devolve into a combination of grappling and wrestling. When that happens, our soldiers are invariably on their own home turf, which, combined with their experience with sports, gives them an edge. As such, Hahn casualties have been consistently higher than ours.”

  “What are the losses?” Lady Jakabitus asked.

  General Kriz exhaled, paused, and inhaled. “Milady, it has been one day since the Hahn began their irrational offensive. In that time we have lost three hundred and twenty-three soldiers, and the Hahn have sacrificed five hundred and thirty-one.”

  A single tear rolled down Kriz’s cheek as he delivered the figures. Wollard turned to make eye contact with Phee. He didn’t approve of referring to Kriz as The Weeper, but he understood how the name had been earned. To Wollard’s disappointment, he found Phee with her quill out, writing something in her papers.