Raven Stratagem

by Yoon Ha Lee

  It took her a few seconds to understand what the video was showing her, partly because of the bite of pain, partly because she didn’t want to. A man in dust-colored clothes like the ones they had put her in held still in a chair very like her own. Next to the chair was a table with a bronze tray. The chair explained everything. It was of a dark green material, glossy, with bronze striations.

  Next the video showed a Vidona officer entering. Her uniform was a slightly lighter green, the bronze piping and buttons brighter. In her hand she held an instrument that resembled a spoon, if a spoon had incandescently sharp edges.

  Dzera guessed what was coming, but not in time to look away. The image tracked the movements of her eyes. It was suddenly impossible to squeeze her eyes shut. The spoon flashed. The man screamed. His eye was a lump with red flesh clinging to it. Blood and fluid dripped from it, and tracked viscous lines down the man’s face. The Vidona tossed the eye onto the tray. The tray was much larger than the eye was. Dzera could guess what that meant, too.

  The Vidona were unlikely to go through this with every single Mwennin in custody. Too inefficient. But Dzera couldn’t look forward to an efficient death because she was Cheris’s mother.

  I can’t do this, she thought.

  She looked sideways, seeking to escape the video even though she knew it was hopeless. The next one had already begun playing where her gaze had fallen. This one showed a young woman who might have been Cheris’s age, although Cheris had never worn her hair that long. Dzera liked to think that Cheris would never have cringed like that.

  When the spoon flashed again, Dzera felt a sudden sting in her right ear. She tensed up, breath scraping against her throat.

  “Don’t react,” a tiny crystalline voice said right in her ear at the young woman’s next scream. The voice spoke flawless Mwen-dal. The timing was just as well, because Dzera flinched anyway. “It will be painless. We tried to find a way to free you, but this is all we can do.”

  The stinging sensation intensified, and then there came a subtle flash of heat. A hundred questions crowded in her mind, then ebbed away. The last thought she had before her benefactor’s drugs scoured everything to static was that there would be no one to restore the garden.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BREZAN WISHED HE could claim that he had no idea how he and Tseya had started sleeping together, but he knew very well how it had happened. Nothing in the Kel code of conduct forbade it, and their pursuit of Jedao took enough time that they both welcomed the diversion. He wasn’t under any illusions that either of them saw it as anything more than that.

  Right now Tseya was sitting at the edge of her bed combing out her hair. She had an astonishing variety of outfits. Today’s involved a blue-gray chemise beneath a vest that seemed to be more lace than substance, and darker pants. Her bare feet looked weirdly incongruous. She had a grudge against socks when she wasn’t wearing shoes.

  “I should make you help me with this,” Tseya said, amused, when she caught Brezan admiring her hair. He appreciated the aesthetics when it was someone else’s problem. “There are days the stuff tangles if I so much as breathe.”

  Brezan located a spare comb on her dresser, half-hidden under some pearl necklaces, and weighed it dubiously in his hand. He couldn’t tell what it was made of, possibly wood. Would it snap if he tried to use it? What if it was an heirloom?

  Tseya chuckled. “I bought that cheap in some souvenir shop in a city whose name I can’t remember,” she said. “My mother did always say I had abysmal taste. Anyway, it won’t bite you, and I won’t cry if it breaks.”

  He eased himself down behind her and began combing, careful to work through the tangles without yanking, a skill he’d learned from his sisters as a child. Tseya’s perfume wafted back to him: citrus-sweet, no roses at all. He resisted the urge to inhale more deeply.

  She hummed contentedly. “You must think Andan are terribly indolent.”

  “No, just you,” he said. It had taken him a while to adjust to life on a silkmoth. It felt as though he ought to spend longer shifts in the command center, or else that he should be constantly embroiled in paperwork. But Tseya had pointed out that a moth ordinarily intended for a single pilot couldn’t have that single pilot on duty continually. The Orchid relied on a lot more automation than Brezan was accustomed to.

  Tseya reached over to stroke the inside of his thigh. Brezan made a noncommittal noise, although his hand trembled. He kept combing. “Have you ever considered that wigs would be easier to manage?” he asked. “You could swap them out at whim, or program one to change colors to harmonize with your outfit.”

  She snorted.

  “Just a suggestion.”

  After a little while, she said, “I’m clearly not distracting enough.”

  Brezan paused. “You’re not even facing me. How can you tell?”

  “People talk with their hands as much as they do with their tongues, Brezan.” She never used endearments, even when they fucked, which he liked about her. “Shall I try harder?”

  “I’d have to start over with your hair,” he said in dismay, as much as he liked running his hands through the glossy-dark mass.

  Tseya twisted around and kissed the side of his face, then his chin. “I could let it hang in tangles and go around as a ghost.”

  “Why do ghosts in the stories always have long, tangled hair?”

  She pushed him down with one hand, which he didn’t resist, and regarded him with a slow smile. “Do all Kel get sidetracked that easily, or are crashhawks special?”

  It almost didn’t hurt when she said that, especially considering what she was doing with her other hand. He slitted his eyes at her and said, “Are you ordering me to answer?”

  “What, you won’t volunteer the information?”

  “Kel never volunteer if we can help it. I thought you’d heard.”

  Her hair brushed over his face. It tickled, but if he laughed it’d get in his mouth, which Tseya found hilarious. He craned his head up, and she dipped her head so they could kiss.

  He woke alone some time afterward. Tseya never stuck around, although hot tea always awaited him on a side table. The other thing Tseya liked to do was leave his clothes folded over a chair. Brezan couldn’t help wondering if this was something they taught in Introduction to Seduction at Andan Academy, or if this was some personal quirk. Kel speculation was divided on just what was in that course’s curriculum. He was almost tempted to ask. Brezan got dressed and drank the tea quickly, since Tseya wasn’t there to watch.

  Then he went to the silkmoth’s command center. By now he had almost developed the knack of ignoring the aquarium in the command center, which took the shape of a fluted column. It was filled with seahorses and striped colorful fish with comical eyes and snails and green-dark kelp. Once he would have thought the Andan were frivolous. Now he suspected advanced psychological warfare. Tseya refused to say which.

  Tseya was already there. It had been evident from early on that she had a lot of specialized training, especially with the moth’s scan suite, some of whose functions were more advanced than what they’d had on the Hierarchy of Feasts. Tseya had grimaced when he remarked on it, and confirmed what he’d heard about silkmoths: “There are trade-offs. We can sneak, run, or see things far away, but we’re only good at two of the three at any given time. Right now we’re running and sneaking so we can catch up to Jedao without getting caught, so the scan suffers a lot.”

  “Anything interesting?” Brezan said as he took his seat.

  Tseya nodded at him, all business. “Take a look at the chatter,” she said.

  Brezan picked through the backlog of communications, which the mothgrid had sorted according to their criteria. An alert flashed red just as he got through the second of the digests. He groaned. “Jedao again?”

  “More propaganda, I expect,” Tseya said, leaning forward. “I want to see what he has for us this time.” She played the message.

  The piece opened with the Deuce
of Gears, which Brezan wouldn’t have minded burning up or melting down, then went into a two-dimensional animation, brushstrokes applied to elegant spline curves, unrelieved black and white. Swarms of moths as stylized as paper airplanes flew and wheeled and fought against a backdrop of—

  Those weren’t stars, although it only became evident when the camera zoomed in on one moth colliding with another. Those were lanterns. The battle dissolved into ashes. The ashes became ink; the brushstrokes condensed into a single column of calligraphy: penance. And that was just the introduction, in a few seconds.

  “Fuck you,” Brezan said as the propaganda continued to play, as though Jedao stood in the command center with them smiling his tilted smile.

  “I admit this wasn’t the angle I expected him to take,” Tseya said after the rest of the piece had finished. The earlier propaganda pieces had included maddeningly irrefutable documentation of how the commandant of the Fortress of Spinshot Coins had prevented Jedao from mauling the Hafn. Said commandant had been removed, but no one knew the full story. You would expect the Shuos to have broadcast a rebuttal; no such luck. Jedao had also made straightforward requests for specific systems not to interfere with swarm operations, which they tended to honor, mainly because his requests were sensible.

  “It’s infuriating that people are retransmitting his broadcasts,” Brezan said, “but I suppose people will be people. What I want to know is, why would he want to remind his nervous but gossipy listeners about Hellspin Fortress? How does that help him?”

  Tseya’s smile had a curious sour quality. “Brezan, he’s rewriting the story. It’s one thing to have it out of the archives, or some drama no one expects to be historically accurate, and another to hear it told by someone who was there.”

  Brezan bit off what he’d been about to say and busied himself with a map depicting Jedao’s movements over the last two weeks in red. Hafn movements appeared in a ghost-cloud of gray. The latter had speared past the Fortress of Scattered Needles in the Entangled March and into the adjacent Severed March. Ever since the battle at Spinshot Coins, Jedao and the Hafn had been feinting at each other without engaging. The two swarms were now approaching Minang System, home to a wolf tower. The tower acted as a calendrical beacon, facilitating navigation, and contained one of the great clocks by which the hexarchate reckoned time.

  Tseya was going through more of the chatter. “Here’s another one,” she said. This time it concerned the Vidona extermination of the Mwennin. Very little text on this one, either.

  “Hold on,” Brezan said when the video got to an appalling clip of a screaming boy and an instrument made of hot curved wires. He paused it. “Who the hell is passing Jedao these?” A quick check confirmed that this particular clip hadn’t been released by the official news services, but he wasn’t sure he bought that Jedao had faked it, either. The video displayed the Vidona seal in the corner. The mothgrid believed the seal was authentic.

  Tseya pursed her lips. “An excellent question, although there’s not a lot we can do to find out. All the histories go on and on about Jedao as a tactician, but he did graduate from the Shuos before running off to play soldier. I presume he learned something about setting up intelligence networks while he was there. No, what I want to know is, why has the hexarchs’ response been so tepid?”

  “What response?” Brezan retorted. “Other than the occasional bulletin, they haven’t done anything to counter the damage he’s doing to public morale.” Not that that was ever good to begin with.

  “Yes, exactly,” Tseya said. She had pulled out her hairstick and was fiddling with it, her hair in disarray. “Managing information fallout is what the Shuos are for. Is Mikodez asleep or something?”

  Brezan noted, with sharp alarm, the odd familiarity with which she mentioned Mikodez. She didn’t use an honorific, just the personal name, as though they were equals. Just how high a position had she occupied before her disgrace?

  Tseya tapped the hairstick against the base of her palm, looking for all the world like she wished she could pin Mikodez and make him get to work. “It just figures,” she said. “We finally have a Shuos hexarch capable of hanging on to the seat longer than a hiccup, and the man has the attention span of a ferret. He probably got bored of the invasion in the first week and is off learning to bake custards instead.”

  Ever since Exercise Purple Paranoia, Brezan had belonged to the category of people who thought about Shuos Mikodez as little as possible, in the belief that this would keep him from coming to Mikodez’s attention. But Brezan always remembered what Shuos Zehun had told him about Mikodez. He couldn’t help thinking that Tseya was missing part of the picture. Shuos cadets were not known for being willing to cooperate with each other. The fact that Mikodez had persuaded his classmates to do so for the exercise, put together with his forty-two years in power, suggested that he was dangerously charismatic, ferret or no ferret.

  “Well, we can’t prod Hexarch Mikodez from here, either,” Brezan said, “unless you plan on calling him up.”

  “Absolutely not,” Tseya said.

  “Well, then. Anything else I should pay attention to in current events?”

  He wasn’t sure whether he hoped the answer was a no or a yes. They knew, for instance, that Jedao had resupplied at Tankut Primary thirteen days ago, although Brezan couldn’t hope that the stationers had indulged in some sabotage. The idea was to take out Jedao with minimal damage to the swarm, after all. Elsewhere, several systems in the general vicinity were experiencing civil disruptions. Lensmoths had been dispatched, which meant the Rahal suspected that full-fledged heresy was around the corner.

  Tseya scanned the digests. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  They passed the next two hours and seventy-three minutes with a minimum of conversation. Guiltily, Brezan was starting to wish that something would implode, just for variety, when Tseya swore under her breath. “What is it?” he asked.

  “This isn’t going to end well,” she said, and passed the message over to his terminal.

  “Please let it not be a surprise.”

  “You won’t find it surprising, but it’s regrettable all the same.”

  A moon-city and an orbital station had transmitted the Deuce of Gears when the Hafn veered close to their system. It had to be Brezan’s imagination that the red field was even bloodier than the one Jedao used. He smashed his fist against the terminal, then swore at the pain. Tseya frowned at him.

  “Idiots,” Brezan said bitterly. “They didn’t need to do that. The Immolation Fox would have rescued them for some grandstanding purpose of his own if they’d been in real danger.” Aside from terrorizing the population, Brezan couldn’t see any good reason for the Hafn to bother. Neither city nor station had significant military value. “Now they’re going to be scoured.”

  “Look at it from their point of view,” Tseya said. “The only Kel force in a position to chase off the foreigners is under Jedao’s control. They probably thought it was worth a try.” She put the hairstick down and fixed Brezan with a speculative stare. “Speaking of emblems, did you ever have a chance to register one?”

  “My what?” Brezan said before he worked out what she meant. He blushed and averted his eyes, looking at the aquarium, then at the hairstick, anywhere but at her face. “You can’t be serious.”

  “What, are you going with the temporary emblem?” she said, referring to the sword-and-feather.

  Brezan made himself return her stare. “I don’t see why this is important all of a sudden,” he said. Was this some Andan thing about projecting the right image? “Jedao can’t have killed everyone in the swarm if it’s still functioning. There’ll be someone able to—”

  “—take charge?”

  He disliked the mocking edge to her tone, but maybe he had imagined it. “Look,” he said, “it’s inconsequential.”

  Tseya leaned over and laid her palm on his chest right over the wings-and-flame insignia.

  He froze.

  “Are you
telling me this is an illusion?” she said. “I thought the point of this exercise was for you to pull rank on Jedao the way he pulled rank on General Khiruev.”

  Brezan wished desperately that he could pull away and stalk out of the command center, but Kel Command had assigned him to Tseya. Damned if he was going to slink away because of a few words. “It’s not an illusion,” he said. “It’s just—it’s just temporary.” How had the conversation turned hostile so suddenly?

  “You’re not going to convince your own people if that’s all the conviction you can scare up.”

  He glared at her, not trusting himself to speak.

  “Look, you’re from a Kel family, yes?”

  Brezan didn’t like where this was going.

  Tseya waited. Her hand didn’t move.

  “Yes,” he said stiffly, “although I don’t know why you’re asking me questions you know the answers to.”

  “Two Kel sisters. One of whom is on General Inesser’s staff.”

  “Go on,” Brezan said after counting to six, “tell me about my childhood.”

  Her smile had no teeth in it. The teeth would have been friendlier. “You must be so disappointed that you can’t tell them about your spectacular new promotion.”

  He couldn’t suppress his wince in time.

  “Is there a proper way to tell your family that you’re a crashhawk?”

  Thinking clearly was impossible. He had a flash of memory: the heat of her mouth, the curve of her neck, the delicious creamy skin of her thigh. “You know there isn’t,” he said. It was usually outprocessing or execution.

  “It must be nice to be a special case,” she added before Brezan could devise a suitable retort. “I feel for you. I can’t imagine what they have planned for you once the mission’s over.”

  Brezan clenched his teeth. The Andan were supposed to be the diplomatic ones. “I am Kel,” he said, although it felt as though he had to drag each word through fire and thorns. “I do what my orders tell me to. By choice if I must.”

  Tseya’s eyes were pits of shadow. “You’re young yet,” she said, reminding him that he had only a vague idea of her age. “You’re going to be faced with orders for a long time. It doesn’t matter how perfectly you execute them, however many times. They’ll never accept you as a real Kel.”