Raven Stratagem

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Then I don’t see that I owe you any help.”

  “All right, Kujen,” she said. “I realize you’re beyond the need for petty things like companionship—”

  “I don’t know, it’s always nice to have an audience,” Kujen said to Mahar.

  “Hush,” Mahar said subvocally. “I want to see if she offers us anything good.”

  “—but I meant what I said about payment. Don’t you tire of being dependent on the goodwill of the Kel? It looks like certain of your assets are still tied up with theirs.”

  It looked like Shandal Yeng’s analysts weren’t as good at following money trails as they needed to be. Happy news.

  “If I cared to find out, I’m sure I could look up how much you’re worth,” Mahar said. “Maybe you could offer me some museums full of paintings while you’re at it?” Mahar cared a lot more about fine art than Kujen did, which was why he got to deal with interior decoration.

  “If you’ve developed new tastes in that area,” Shandal Yeng said, “I should only be happy to guide you toward pieces worthy of your interest.”

  “Too bad,” Kujen said, playing toward her misimpression that he was still allied with the Kel, who would have given a lot to know where he was. “I’m more interested in big guns. I don’t know if it’s escaped your attention, but when it comes to putting holes in things, you can’t go wrong with the Kel.”

  “Money is a much better defense than violence.”

  “When money’s gone,” Kujen said softly, “only violence will do.” He had never been good at it himself, which was where people like Jedao came in handy.

  “You don’t want me for an enemy, Kujen,” she said.

  Kujen had known it would come to threats. “If you can take me down without stabbing yourself in the back,” he said, “please, go ahead. Don’t bother Faian again. She’s strong-willed, one of the things I like about her. I’ll send you some textbooks if you want to work out the equations for yourself. And don’t call again. You won’t find me here or anywhere. In the meantime, I have some appallingly unethical pastimes to attend to.”

  Shandal Yeng’s expression went remote. Then she cut the connection.

  “And to think she wanted us to face eternity with her hanging around,” Kujen said.

  Mahar yawned, then took the scarf off and looped it around his wrist. “You should have said yes,” he said. “Bought her off for a few centuries.”

  “She’d work her way around to hating me for saying yes. With some people you can’t win.” Kujen considered the matter. “Do you want immortality? The real thing, not what we have here?” He made the offer from time to time, in case the answer changed.

  Mahar scoffed. “Unlike certain people, I understand the math. Rather not be a test subject for a fucking prototype, no offense. I keep studying your design specifications, Kujen, and they ought to be correct, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re overlooking something. Besides, I know about Esfarel and Jedao, remember? One functional immortal out of three is a dismal success rate.”

  “Esfarel was weak,” Kujen said carelessly, “even though he was spectacular in bed. Jedao was a head case when he arrived. That’s not a fair test. And anyway, that was the black cradle, not the new variant.”

  “If you say so.” Mahar unwound his scarf and put it away, then had a servitor bring him breakfast. The breakfast, when it arrived, was typical Kel fare: rice, pickles, sesame leaves, and marinated roasted meat chopped fine. He ate a few bites, blinked, then eyed the food. “That wasn’t what I meant to order. You’re still thinking about Jedao, aren’t you?”

  Bleed-through. “He was such a good project,” Kujen said. “There was always something to fix. Or break, take your pick.”

  “Oh, for love of stars above. Now that he’s running around loose, send him a courier with a shiny gun prototype or a nice bottle of whiskey and your apologies. It’ll make you both feel better. He might even forgive you for sticking him in the black cradle. The two of you can team up and conquer the galaxy.”

  Mahar might understand the math, but he hadn’t ever looked closely enough at a certain class of weapons. Like the hexarchs, he was deeply confused as to what ‘Jedao’ was up to. “Someday I’ll take you up on that,” Kujen said. “But not just yet.”

  KUJEN REMEMBERED WHEN the Kel had first delivered General Shuos Jedao to the black cradle facility 397 years ago. There had been a lot of grim soldiers in Kel black-and-gold. Jedao himself occupied a plain metal casket with a transparent pane. “Held under sedation lock, Nirai-zho,” the Kel corporal said, as if that wasn’t obvious. “Suicide risk.”

  “I’ll say.” His anchor at the time, Liyeng, strode over to the casket and inspected the status readings. Kujen had already checked them over. Jedao was alive in there, even if he’d picked one hell of a grandstanding maneuver for his bid for immortality.

  “Nirai-zho,” said a different voice. It belonged to High General Kel Anien, a thin, gray-haired woman. She was shuffling a deck of cards over and over, unable to be still. “Command sent me to address any questions you might have.”

  “Good,” Kujen said curtly, since he had a role to play. “I didn’t see anything in that mess of reports about what the Rahal inquisitors got out of General Jedao. Who do I have to vivisect to get the right security clearance?”

  Anien flipped a card over, made a face at it, stuck it back in the deck. At last she looked at Liyeng. “You should have witnessed the interrogation, Nirai-zho,” she said. “If it hadn’t been such a mess, it would have been hilarious. The wolves that Rahal-zho dispatched couldn’t get anything out of him. They started a side-argument with Shuos-zho about the appropriateness of certain Shuos techniques for fooling scrying and why they should be dropped from Shuos Academy’s curriculum. Watching wolves have fits is an excellent pastime when you’re recovering from an incandescent disaster.”

  Kujen had always suspected that Anien got bored too easily for her own good. He could relate. “Nothing?” he said, because he needed to be sure that Jedao hadn’t hinted at their alliance. He’d already watched the excerpts from the regular interrogation that they had deigned to send him. Please shoot me, Jedao had said over and over. “He couldn’t have been completely brain-dead if he could form a sentence in response to stimuli. Even a very dull sentence.”

  “Jedao has a singularity response to scrying,” Anien said, sobering. Same image no matter what the query.

  “Let me guess,” Kujen said. “Immolation Fox.” An obvious choice, given the circumstances, if you had the ability to mask your signifier to block scrying.

  “That’s it exactly.”

  Kujen took pity on the Kel soldiers waiting to be told what to do and prompted Liyeng. “Follow Technician 24,” Liyeng said, and pointed obligingly. “She’ll show you where to stash the general.” Anien confirmed this with a nod. The Kel and their casket moved off.

  “They left something out of the interrogation files Command sent you,” Anien said once they were alone. “We’ve been trying not to let it get out.”

  “Do tell,” Kujen said.

  “I don’t have video to show you,” Anien said, “and if you mention this to anyone, I’ll have to deny that I ever said anything, Nirai-zho. But Jedao didn’t start off begging to be shot. He didn’t seem to understand what had happened. He—he kept asking what had happened to his soldiers. Asking if they were all right. It was only after he understood what he’d done that he started to beg.”

  All this time she hadn’t stopped playing with the cards.

  “You’re worried about him,” Kujen said. Interesting change from the overwhelming contingent of Kel who wanted Jedao’s entrails cut into little writhing pieces and the conspiracy theorists who thought the Lanterners had devised a brainwashing ray. Kujen happened to know that there weren’t useful shortcuts when it came to brainwashing.

  “Ignore the blame-mongers, Nirai-zho,” Anien said. “We promoted Jedao too fast and pushed him too hard, and he cracked.” Her mouth
twitched. “He was a great suicide hawk. Indistinguishable from the real thing.”

  She was getting distracted. He had to convince her to do what he wanted. “About the black cradle,” Kujen said. “Are you certain? I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to repair someone that badly broken.”

  Anien gave Liyeng a considering look. “How good are you at tactics, Nirai-zho?”

  “The real kind, not game theory with perfectly rational actors? Sort of not,” Kujen said. Jedao had always been annoyingly nice about it no matter how much Kujen needled him about his math difficulties. “I solve equations, not guns.”

  “He’s good enough for the experiment to be worth attempting,” she said flatly. “Who knows? He might become a useful weapon again.”

  “I only talked to him in passing before Hellspin Fortress, once or twice,” Kujen lied. “What was he like before he lost his mind?”

  “Other than his inordinate fox-like love for games and his inordinate hawk-like love for guns? Talkative. Brave. Occasionally funny. His soldiers loved him. Or they did, until, well.”

  She cut the deck, then showed him the top card. The Deuce of Gears. “Stupid magic trick,” she said. Kujen refrained from mentioning that he had seen most of Jedao’s repertoire. “He showed me how to do a bunch of them a few years ago. Honestly, Nirai-zho, I don’t know what to tell you to look for. No one saw it coming. I would have suspected myself a traitor before I suspected him.”

  Kujen heard what she wasn’t saying. “I’ll do my best for him, Anien.”

  He could have gotten rid of her if it looked like she was going to be an obstacle, but this way was easier, and he was looking forward to taking Jedao apart.

  KUJEN SHOULD HAVE known that his life would be filled with inconveniences after High General Kel Shiang was appointed his new liaison. High General Anien had died of a rare cancer, leaving him her collection of playing cards. A strange thing to offer someone who technically didn’t have hands.

  Shiang was a tall, tawny woman with a broad frame. The forcefulness of her movements made him wonder if the facility was going to thunder itself into rubble around her. Kujen’s current anchor, a shorter manform named Uwo, found this intimidating. Kujen couldn’t blame them, but it was a bit of a distraction.

  Uwo had brought Shiang to the lab where Jedao was pinned. The room was drab except for a single wall devoted to a one-per-minute cycle of riotously colorful photographs of flowers. Forsythias, cosmos, moss roses, azaleas, everything. Flowers were an innocuous way of giving Jedao access to color when they switched on the portal that could, for short periods, give him a limited window into the world.

  “He’s in here, Nirai-zho?” Shiang asked, looking around at the terminals with their graphs and readouts. One of them was still set to a card game.

  “Not precisely,” Kujen said, “but this is the single point of access we’ve allowed him. I didn’t deem it wise to give him an anchor of his own without Kel Command’s approval.”

  “I’m authorized to make that determination.”

  “Of course,” Kujen murmured. “Do you wish to talk to him?”

  Shiang eyed him. “I did read your reports, but is he stable?”

  What was Jedao going to do without a body, put nails through her eyes? “As stable as anyone is,” Kujen said. “You came all this way, you might as well see for yourself. I should warn you that the time windows are dependent on calendrical mechanics—the equations were in Appendix 5—so you’ll have twenty-three minutes this session if we start now.”

  “Let’s do this, then.”

  Uwo flipped the switch. A chime sounded. A shadow rippled through the room. Nine candle-yellow eyes stared at them through a crack of black-silver. Then the shadow faded, and the eyes with them.

  “Jedao?” Shiang said, unmoved by the phenomenon.

  “I apologize for being unable to salute, sir,” Jedao said, that same easy baritone with its drawl. It sounded as though he stood in the room facing them, except he’d also have to be invisible. “What do you require of me?”

  “I’m here to evaluate your recovery,” she said. “Nirai-zho tells me you’ve given no explanation for your behavior at Hellspin Fortress.”

  “I have none, sir.”

  “Do you remember what happened?” She was frowning at Uwo, as though Kujen’s anchor should have an answer for her.

  Jedao hesitated. “I remember it in pieces, sir. The pieces aren’t in order. They showed me some of the videos, including—” His voice wavered. “Including when I shot Colonel Gized. I don’t—I don’t understand why I would want to do that. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  “Can the Rahal get anything out of him now?” Shiang asked Kujen.

  “Unfortunately, that’s impossible,” Kujen said. It had, in fact, been one of the design parameters for the black cradle. Not that Shiang was ever going to learn that from him. “Neither of us sleeps. A wolf scrying has no access.”

  Shiang swore under her breath, then said, “What do you think I hope to accomplish here, Jedao?”

  “I imagine you’re here to render judgment, sir. I’m not sure why I’m being retained as a revenant, however. There must have been a court-martial, but I can’t remember any of it. I realize I killed a great many, including my own people. I am prepared for your sentence.”

  “We kept you alive”—Shiang’s nostrils flared—“because Kel Command needs tacticians of your caliber, because you may yet ‘serve’ in an experimental capacity, and because the heptarchate continues to face many threats.”

  Uwo coughed. “About that.” This would have gone better if Shiang had read the report as she had claimed.

  Shiang glared at Uwo. “You have something to say, Nirai-zho?”

  Kujen decided that he needed to go back to picking more physically intimidating anchors. This one was excellent in all other regards. They had marvelous conversations about homological conjectures over breakfast, but even bleed-through hadn’t overcome Uwo’s naturally retiring demeanor.

  “Sir,” Jedao said, “I—I would recommend against using me for that purpose. I have difficulty with tactical simulations now. I don’t have any reason to believe that things would be any better in the field.”

  “That must be humbling for you to admit, given your former stature,” Shiang said.

  Jedao sounded puzzled. “I wish to serve, sir, but it’s important that you have an accurate assessment of my capabilities.”

  “And if I decided that the Kel would best be served by your permanent death?”

  “Then I will die, sir.”

  “Do you want to die, Jedao?”

  “I wish to serve, sir,” he said again. “It’s not for me to question your orders.”

  “Are you happy here?”

  “I am waiting to serve, sir. That’s all that matters.”

  Shiang flipped the switch herself, banishing Jedao. Kujen hated it when strangers touched his equipment. Uwo would have said something, but Kujen held them back. He didn’t want to pick a fight over this when there were more important matters at hand.

  Shiang scowled. “He’s respectful, obedient, self-effacing, and sounds nothing like the cocksure bastard who bet a fortune that he could get his army through the Battle of Spiral Deluge with under ten percent casualties, and who came in under seven,” she said. “Congratulations, Nirai-zho, you’ve turned him into a sheep. There’s nothing of the general left.”

  Kujen would have smiled. He had botched the job on purpose. “You wanted a perfect wind-up soldier,” he said. “I gave you one. I can’t make him any better than this. He’s stable and he’ll serve you no matter how poorly you treat him.”

  “And your report admitted that his tactical ability tests under the thirty-seventh percentile on all four of the simulators we provided. A squirrel with a bowl of marbles could do better. When they say he’s never been defeated, do you appreciate what that means? We didn’t send him off to a bunch of easy battles on a lark. Most of his assignments should have kil
led him. A Shuos officer was always going to be more expendable than one of our own. It just so happened that his choice was to be brilliant or not to die. He figured out how not to die. Kel Command expected him to be annihilated at Candle Arc, outnumbered eight to one, and he didn’t just win, he smashed the enemy. This experiment is no good if he isn’t usable.”

  “It was a necessary compromise,” Kujen said. This was the part he had to sell. “People aren’t lumps of clay. You have to work with what’s already there. With Jedao, you can either have perfect obedience or you can have the little box in his head that magically tells him what his opponent is going to do so he can tie them in knots, but you can’t have both at the same time. Please don’t ask me how to put the little box back in while he’s like this. I can’t. You’d need a psych surgeon who was also a tactician.” That part was even true. “If you know where to find someone like that, send them my way. I’d love to talk shop. What exactly is it that you expect of me, High General?”

  Kujen had misgivings about Shiang’s smile. He used to have one like it, back when he was alive.

  “He seemed at peace,” Shiang said. “I had a niece who served under him at Hellspin, did you know that? I’ll make this easy for you. If you can’t make him better, make him worse. Break him. Cripple him. He’s a fucking traitor, Nirai-zho. He doesn’t deserve to have his life handed back to him, even like this. He needs to suffer.”

  Kujen laughed incredulously. “My peach”—the Kel hated condescending endearments as much as anyone else—”you realize your operational parameters contradict themselves? Do you want a torture chew-toy, or a useful commander?”

  “You’re such a genius, Nirai-zho,” Shiang retorted. “All the Nirai tell us so—but I guess you program them that way. Why don’t you prove it to the rest of us? Find a way. Make Jedao a tactician again. Make him suffer as he serves the Kel.”

  “Feel lucky that I despise you, High General,” Kujen said, “and that I can’t wait to get you off my facility. Anything I can do to Jedao, I can do to you. Face it, Jedao’s a lot more complex than you are.”