by Yoon Ha Lee
“What an intriguing proposal from someone who recently agreed to have the man offed,” Psa said.
“I’m adaptable?” Mikodez suggested.
“We could get lucky,” Shandal Yeng said. “Maybe the Hafn will kill him for us.”
Tsoro coughed. When Shandal Yeng raised her eyebrows, Tsoro said, “We’d be left trying to defeat the general who defeated Jedao. This is unlikely to be a strategic improvement.”
“If there’s no way of retrieving the swarm,” Iruja said, “we may be stuck with that.”
“This is the curious part,” Faian said. “If General Khiruev’s stray staff officer is to be believed, the Kel on the command moth authenticated off the wrong thing, to the extent authentication’s even possible with a revenant. All of Jedao’s anchors inherited his movement patterns and, eventually, his accent, thanks to bleed-through. Of course, the Kel are used to reading each other that way.” As part of formation instinct, a certain baseline body language was imprinted on cadets. “Neither of those proves anything, however. A sufficiently good actor or infiltrator could fake them. It’s the apparent inheritance of Jedao’s skills, too, that’s more worrisome.”
“Nobody’s ever scrounged up any evidence that Captain Cheris had the least scrap of acting ability,” Tsoro said. “We made some inquiries with former instructors and classmates. She couldn’t even shed her low language accent until she was a second-year cadet.”
“I wish I knew why anyone would capitulate to Jedao to the point of giving up her own existence,” Faian said.
Tsoro shrugged. “No one else could hear what he said to her, so we’ll never know for sure. The fact that she responded to being nudged toward Jedao in the first place is suggestive, but for all that, she was determined to be a good Kel. She joined up despite family resistance.”
“No ties there, then,” Psa said, thoughtful.
“Not entirely true,” Tsoro said. “She wrote to her parents regularly, and exchanged the occasional letter with some of her old classmates.”
“Well, then,” Psa said. “We could apply pressure from that direction. We already have Cheris’s parents under surveillance, as a precautionary measure. We could detain them and let Jedao know, see if we get a reaction.”
“That isn’t a good idea,” Faian said, her brow creasing. “If any part of Cheris is alive in there, she’s not remotely psychologically stable.”
“Faian,” Iruja said, “that may give us the opening we need.”
“It may drive her even crazier.”
Tsoro was thinking about something else. “If we’re applying pressure anyway,” she said, “we might as well turn it up all the way. Cheris used to write to her parents in Mwen-dal, which is only spoken by her mother’s people, the Mwennin. There are scattered communities of them on the second-largest continent of Bonepyre, and there are so few of them that they’re extinct by any reasonable standard. We could round them up and threaten to wipe them out if the swarm isn’t restored to Kel control. Vidona, you’ll find a use for them sooner or later, won’t you? It’s too bad they’re so obscure that a massacre of them would be no use as a calendrical attack. In any case, if Cheris is indeed alive in there, it might give her the incentive she needs to resist Jedao’s influence.”
“I don’t see that anything’s lost by trying it,” Shandal Yeng said. “I for one would feel better if we didn’t have a rogue swarm rampaging through the hexarchate.” How many times had she said that already? Or, more accurately, had her protocol program said that to cover for the side conversation she was having, and which Mikodez was recording for review after the meeting now that he’d picked it up? “If this works, then fine.”
Iruja turned a hand palm-up. “I have no objections either.”
“I’ll make it a priority,” Psa said.
Nirai Faian looked intensely frustrated, but said nothing. She knew when she’d lost, and she was the least powerful hexarch.
“No,” Mikodez said. “That’s as in absolutely not, we’re not doing this.”
Shandal Yeng pulled off one of her rings and slammed it down out of sight. “I wasn’t expecting you to be the one with the sudden attack of humanitarianism.”
“This is me, remember?” Mikodez said. “I could care less about that. I don’t object to atrocities because of ethics, which we’ve never taught at Shuos Academy anyway.” She rolled her eyes at the old joke. “I object to atrocities because they’re terrible policy. It may be the case that no one cares about the Mwennin or whatever they call themselves, but if we had so tight a hold over the populace as we like to advertise, we wouldn’t perennially be dealing with heretic brushfires. Make threats against Cheris’s own parents, fine. But it’s unwise to be indiscriminate about these things. We’ll just be creating a new group of heretics, however small.”
Iruja steepled her hands and sighed. For a moment Mikodez was reminded of her age: 126 years, old enough to feel every clock’s ticking heart. “Are you going to throw a fit over this, too?”
As if that would work. Iruja had intervened earlier because she wanted to get the meeting moving and the agent had already been exposed. (Mikodez bet that there would be a lot of extra personnel screening in the next months, though.) On this issue, however, only Faian agreed with Mikodez, and she wasn’t a credible ally. “It’s not worth it to me,” he said.
She laughed without humor. “Good to know. Not that I’m interested in putting this to some kind of vote, but this endeavor will go better if we coordinate.”
“I do appreciate that, Iruja.”
“Well.” Iruja exhaled slowly. “We’re going to send Jedao an ultimatum. The important thing is recovering the swarm. The precedent can’t be allowed to stand. What do you suppose the odds are that General Khiruev is still alive?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tsoro said. “Khiruev’s already been compromised even if she survived. We don’t want her in charge of that swarm after Jedao’s had a chance to mess with her mind.”
“I assume you have an alternate.”
“We’ve recalled General Kel Inesser from the High Glass border. If Jedao can be persuaded to turn himself in, she’s more than capable of handling the Hafn.”
Inesser, the Kel’s senior general, and one of their most respected. Mikodez snorted. “Isn’t that the woman you’ve been holding at arm’s length for the last two decades?” He’d met her a few times at official functions: a woman vainglorious about her hair, with a disarming fondness for talking about her cross-stitch projects. It hadn’t escaped him how adroit she was at manipulating conversations while pretending to be a typical blunt Kel. “I peeked at some of the evaluations. I’m surprised you wouldn’t rather assimilate her already.”
Tsoro gave him a look. “Inesser may be one of the best strategists we’ve seen in two hundred years, and she’s an excellent logistician, but we’d prefer that she not end as another Jedao.” She didn’t elaborate on the evaluation, which she’d discussed with Mikodez, reluctantly, in the past. The textbook Kel opinion of Jedao was that Jedao’s battlefield successes added up to him never thinking far into the future, since he always assumed he could fight his way out of whatever fix he landed in, instead of asking whether the battle was worth fighting in the first place. Mikodez had preferred the much more succinct words of a Kel instructor who had spoken off the record: “Brilliant tactician, shit strategist.” Presumably Kel Command was supposed to think about the big picture for him.
“I realize that you’re saddled with almost four centuries of condensed prejudices,” Mikodez said, “but don’t you think it’s time to stop letting Jedao dictate everything you do? You’ll turn Inesser into an entirely different kind of enemy at this rate.”
“Shuos,” Tsoro said, “when you feel the need to pull stunts like assassinating your own cadets, we don’t send you memos telling you how to run your faction.”
Mikodez fiddled with one of the leaves of his green onion. “Fine,” he said, “but never say I didn’t give you good advice.�
�
“If you two are quite finished,” Iruja said without raising her voice. “Mikodez, I’ll need you to monitor the situation. Don’t intervene as long as Jedao makes no play against us, and especially leave him alone if he’s fighting the Hafn.”
“I have a useful number of shadowmoths moving into position,” Mikodez said. “Trust me, their commanders have as little interest in getting into a firefight with Jedao as I do.”
Psa grunted. “I’ve seen you at the firing range, Mikodez. I’d give you even odds.”
“Very flattering,” Mikodez said demurely, “but while Jedao has demonstrated that his solution to a man with a gun is shoot it out of his hand—the kind of idiot stunt I tell my operatives to avoid attempting—my solution is not to be in the same damn room to begin with.”
Andan Shandal Yeng was smiling. “I’m glad we have a course of action, regardless.”
Mikodez kept his expression noncommittal. He’d caught Kel Tsoro’s eyes flickering several times. She and Shandal Yeng had definitely been holding that side conversation. Both used kinesics and protocol programs to smooth things like that, but Mikodez had bypassed them ages ago. Both hexarchs would have been better served lying the old-fashioned way, not that he was about to inform them.
“One last thing,” Iruja said. “Faian, how’s progress on the immortality process?”
“Kujen’s notes are a mess,” Faian said. She meant the ones she had stolen from him, on the grounds that she would rather not accidentally recreate something as unappetizing as the black cradle that had once caged Jedao. It wasn’t so much that Kujen was disorganized—quite the contrary. The man was meticulous about everything. The reports that he sent to the other hexarchs, before he’d vanished, were flawlessly organized and proofread, models of clarity. But his private notes, on projects that he didn’t mean to share with anyone else, took a great deal of decoding because he recorded them in a personal shorthand and his genius made it difficult (so Faian had explained once) to follow the odd jagged leaps of intuition.
Faian went over some of the recent technical difficulties, addressing herself mostly to Iruja, who had the background necessary to follow her. Mikodez simply recorded the details to run by his staff later. Watching everyone else tie themselves up in knots about the prospect of living forever had its entertainment value, not that he meant to let on.
The conference wrapped up after that. Soon Mikodez was left alone with his green onion. It was clear that the other hexarchs were going to make hash of their attempts to control Jedao. Mikodez supposed that no one had been thinking clearly after Hellspin Fortress, but the long-dead Kel and Shuos heptarchs had a lot to answer for. In what universe was keeping an insane undead general as an attack dog a good idea?
On the other hand, wrangling hexarchs had grown tedious. The fact that Jedao had slipped his leash gave Mikodez a new challenge. While he went over the transcript of Tsoro and Shandal Yeng’s conversation, he called up a set of files he had poached from Nirai Kujen, back when. He’d be reviewing those next.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BREZAN CAME AWAKE in snatches, like a puzzle assembling itself out of a junk heap. “What?” he said, then grimaced at the furry, sour, metallic taste of his mouth. Gradually, he took in his surroundings. Walls of warm gray, with a single abstract painting where he could see it without lifting his head. After that, it occurred to him that he was lying on a pallet, hooked up to a standard medical unit. Spider restraints held him fast.
All right, this was an improvement over the fucking sleeper unit that Jedao had had him stuffed in. “Hello?” Brezan called out. It emerged as a croak. He tried again, without much better results.
Around this time he discovered that someone had shut down his augment, which either implied a very good technician or someone with the overrides or both. Bad news, either way. He assumed there was a local grid, but even if it wouldn’t talk to him, it would have been nice to be able to access his internal chronometer and basic diagnostics. How long had he been out of it? And where the hell was he, anyway?
Brezan waited some more. Infuriatingly, despite the lingering pain when he breathed, he developed an itch behind his left knee. Which he couldn’t reach to scratch.
Just when he decided to have a go at the spider restraints anyway, a very pale, smiling woman with an elaborate shimmering tattoo over her right cheek came in. She wore a purple half-jacket over lavender clothes liberally decorated with aquamarine tassels, and silver jewelry chimed from her throat and wrists. The fluttering slits at her neck suggested that she had gills. The only useful hint as to her identity was the clashing gold pin over her left breast: the Shuos eye.
“Hello there,” she said. “Give me a moment and I’ll get you out of those.”
“I need to talk to Kel Command, please,” Brezan said, remembering his mission.
“We need to process you first.”
There it was: the hint of Shuos obdurateness despite the flowery getup. Still, as a staff officer, Brezan had his share of experience bowing to bureaucratic prerequisites. Shuos procedures tended to be well enforced. Best to go along.
After she’d unhooked him from the medical unit, a process that hurt more than he wanted to admit, the woman said, “Glass of water?”
“Water closet is more like it.”
“One moment. I still have to unspider you.” She didn’t do anything visible, but he bet she had a working augment. “You can move now.” She pointed to a door. “Don’t take too long if you can help it?” Her smile again, winsome. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
Both her friendly demeanor and her vagueness about ‘someone’ made Brezan suspicious. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do but comply. He braced himself and sat up. Pain, yes, but not the slicing pain associated with spider restraints, which he’d experienced years ago as a cadet, in a demonstration.
“Thank you,” Brezan said, and managed not to stumble on the way.
After he emerged, appalled anew at the shakiness of his legs, the woman held out a glass of water. Wordlessly, he accepted it and drained it in several desperate gulps. It didn’t taste of anything in particular, but if they’d wanted to drug or poison him, they could have done so at any point before he regained consciousness.
“All right,” the woman said when he had finished. “Just set that down, a servitor will clear it later. Ready?”
Brezan nodded.
“Even if you are a hawk,” she said, so amiably that he couldn’t take offense, “you’re awfully incurious.”
He smiled unconvincingly back at her.
This didn’t seem to bother her. “Oh well,” she said with a cheer that he was certain was unaffected, “none of my business. Shall we?”
If she didn’t mind his reticence, all the better. They took a lift to another level. Brezan still couldn’t tell whether they were on a moth or a moon or a station, or something else entirely. They didn’t pass any obvious viewports, and the doors were singularly inexpressive. Nine levels down, a walk through corridors barren of other human presence, and finally, an office with its door standing open to receive them.
“Brought the hawk,” the woman said loudly. Brezan almost jumped. “You busy in there, Sfenni, or shall I send him up, or what?”
“Please tell me he’s cleaned up,” a man’s rumbling voice said from within.
“Medical took care of that. I don’t think he’ll expire messily during the interview.”
“Excellent,” Sfenni said in a tone implying the opposite.
“In you go,” the woman said, and pivoted on her heel without waiting for Brezan to walk into Sfenni’s office. Granted, there had to be a hidden security team scrutinizing his every move, but Brezan couldn’t help feeling offended at being counted so small a threat, even if the Kel and Shuos were nominally allies.
Brezan squared his shoulders, wondered if he should adjust his uniform, then decided that medium formal was good enough. He stepped in.
The first thing Brezan noticed
about the office was the shelves. It wasn’t so much that they were finely made, although he couldn’t help wondering if that was genuine cloudwood, all shimmering gray with subtle pearly swirls, or one of the better facsimiles. The shelves were crammed with books. Not just books, either. They looked hand-bound, and the smells of aged paper and glue almost overwhelmed him.
Shuos Sfenni sat at a much less expensive-looking desk overshadowed by all those shelves. He had an incongruously round, soft face atop a boxer’s blockish frame. For all Brezan knew, he whiled away his time between alphabetizing tomes and dealing with inconvenient Kel by pummeling unlucky bears. At least, unlike the tasseled woman, Sfenni wore a proper Shuos uniform.
“Have a seat,” Sfenni said, indicating the chair on the other side of the desk. “So. Colonel Brezan, is it?”
“Yes,” Brezan said, and waited.
“I’m substituting for Shuos Oyan, who would ordinarily be processing you,” Sfenni said, “so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little slow. We intercepted your, ah, request to talk to the hexarch’s personal assistant.”
“Yes,” Brezan said, more cautiously this time. Granted, he hadn’t expected it to be easy to get to a secured terminal, but he didn’t like where this was going.
Sfenni not-smiled at him. “Let me summarize what we fished out of that pile of reports.”
The high language didn’t inflect for number, but ‘pile’ was pretty unambiguous. Just how many hand-offs was Brezan dealing with? His stomach clenched.
Sfenni’s summation was, thankfully, accurate as far as it went. After he had finished, he scrutinized Brezan and sighed. “Enough games, Colonel. Tell me why you’re really here.”
What does he mean, ‘really’—”I don’t know how to verify my identity or rank if you haven’t been able to get the necessary information from the Kel,” Brezan said, “but I assure you that my need to contact my superiors is urgent and then I’ll be out of your hair. I apologize for involving the Shuos. Circumstances made that seem like the best way forward.” More like he had been muzzy from sleeper-sickness, but no need to spell that out. He didn’t know how much more was safe to say, no way of telling what Sfenni’s security clearance was. For that matter, even if Sfenni let him access a terminal, there was no guarantee it would be secured. Still, one problem at a time.