Raven Stratagem

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Brezan stopped at a terminal in one of the lounges to verify that Cheris was, indeed, still in her quarters. “Not that Jedao couldn’t have done something tricky to the grid,” he said, “but if I really believed that, I wouldn’t have accepted the parole.”

  “Let me enter first anyway,” Khiruev said. “Just in case.”

  Brezan made a pained sound. “You trusted him once.”

  Khiruev couldn’t see the relevance of this. “Your safety, sir.”

  “Look,” Brezan said, “if he wanted to hurt us, we should be more worried that he’d blow the whole place up instead of shooting us up piecemeal.”

  “Did you leave high explosives in there with him?” Khiruev demanded.

  “No, but—”

  “There’s no need to ascribe supernatural powers to him, sir. Or to fail to take sensible precautions.”

  Brezan grimaced. “The way my year’s been going, I’m not ruling anything out.” He strode briskly the rest of the way to Cheris’s door and requested to be let in. His hand wasn’t anywhere near his sidearm. Given how all this had started, fair enough.

  After a few moments, the door slid open. Brezan walked in unhesitatingly. Cheris rose to greet him, although she didn’t salute. She had changed her clothes: an unexpectedly festive lavender dress and a raven pendant, the one Khiruev had seen once before when she played dangerously with her gun. The pendant must have some meaning to her, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Khiruev was so used to seeing her in Kel uniform that she felt the bones of Cheris’s face had changed, or her silhouette; that she was someone Khiruev had never met.

  “Have you decided?” Cheris said to Brezan.

  “There’s one thing more,” Brezan said. He was—not smiling, exactly, but his mouth had an ironic twist.

  “Do tell,” she said.

  Brezan nodded at Khiruev. “General,” he said, “I’m sure you have questions of your own for the interloper. I want you to ask them as though I weren’t here.”

  Khiruev drew a shuddering breath, unable even to acknowledge the order.

  “You’re learning cruelty, I see,” Cheris said to Brezan.

  Khiruev looked at her. “Jedao?” she said.

  Her smile was still Jedao’s smile, but this time sad. “If that’s who I am.”

  “Was any of it real?” Khiruev asked.

  “It was real enough,” Cheris said. “I’m what’s left of Shuos Jedao. Kel Command anchored his ghost to me. You can guess what some of the side-effects were. When he finally died, he passed on his memories to me. The hexarchs aren’t wrong to be concerned.”

  Khiruev had difficulty thinking clearly. Cheris waited calmly while Khiruev formulated her next question. Not long ago Khiruev had answered to Cheris, although the memory of that loyalty was threadbare already, and would soon be gone except as a puzzling shadow. “Was there ever a chance to bring the hexarchs down?” she said. She wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be, given that Brezan himself seemed ambivalent on that count.

  “Brezan,” Cheris said, “why don’t you ask me straight out yourself, instead of doing this to her? I have the same incentive to give you the answers you need, either way.”

  “Because she’s the one you hurt,” Brezan said. “Because she’s the one who’s dying for a cause you never bothered to explain.”

  “Brezan—”

  “You did this to her, don’t you think you owe her something?”

  “I didn’t ask her to—”

  “But she did. Don’t you think you should at least give her a fucking reason before she falls dead?” Brezan was shouting now.

  “Brezan,” Cheris said, all ice, “look at her. You’re a Kel. You should know better than to lose it around one of your subordinates.”

  Khiruev’s breath was coming hard. She couldn’t explain why. She had trouble looking at the high general, as though he was surrounded by fire, by death painted into the crevices between molecules.

  Brezan choked back whatever he had originally meant to say. “Fine. I concede you didn’t turn the swarm into a pyre. That you fought the invaders. But that’s not enough justification for using people as game pieces. Tell me what the hell this plan is, what the hell made this whole crazy outing worth it, or I will feed you to a very pissed-off Andan. She’ll have my head too, but at that point it’ll be worth it to be rid of you. So tell me, and make it good.”

  “Just think,” Cheris said, “all this passion for a system you’re not even committed to. Imagine who you’d become in service of something you truly believed in.”

  Brezan visibly checked himself from hitting her.

  “We need a new calendar,” Cheris said.

  Brezan and Khiruev exchanged glances involuntarily. Then Brezan said, “The hexarchate has spent almost a millennium crushing heresies, some of which drummed up a significant amount of local support. Hell, weren’t the Lanterners heretics?”

  “Technically a client state and not part of the heptarchate proper,” Cheris said. “The histories tend to get that part wrong.”

  “It’s besides the point anyway,” Brezan said. “You can’t possibly enforce a new calendar over enough of the hexarchate to make a difference. Not to mention—” He stopped, paling.

  “Sir?” Khiruev said. Cheris had started to smile, very faintly. That couldn’t bode well.

  “That was the whole fucking point, wasn’t it?” Brezan said to Cheris. And to Khiruev: “It’s in her fucking profile. It was there all along. She’s a mathematician. I mean phenomenally good, as in the Nirai tried to recruit her and it was her specialty in academy.”

  “Yes,” Cheris said. “I won’t deny it was often helpful being Jedao, but I meant it as a distraction. Jedao could do calendrical warfare only so long as he used a computer, or someone else juggled the congruences for him. Anytime he was in play, all people ever thought about was where the next massacre would be, not about mathematical skullduggery. Frankly, Brezan, the calendar reset is going to go off in fifteen days no matter what you do to me.”

  If anything, Brezan looked even less reassured. “Splendid,” he said. “You’ve admitted that you’re running around with pieces of a spectacularly bloodthirsty mass murderer inside your head. Now you’re trying to convince me that this new calendar of yours will be an improvement? Because—because as bad as the hexarchate is, as bad as the remembrances are, and the suicide formations, and Kel Command getting crazier with each successive generation—as bad as this all is, I’m not under any illusion that things can’t get worse. Do you have any idea how much chaos there will be if you destroy our technology base?”

  “I designed the new calendar to be compatible with most existing exotic technologies,” Cheris said. “Especially communications and the mothdrive.”

  Brezan scowled at her. “I’m not a Rahal, and I’m not a Nirai-class mathematician either, but that means the associated social structures have to remain similar. That’s not an improvement.”

  “You haven’t seen the theorem I dragged out of the postulates,” Cheris said wearily. “Yes, you’re right. The calendar won’t make all the Vidona disappear. It won’t make people forget about remembrances, or change the minds of people who think ritual torture is entertaining. It won’t make the hexarchs people that I ever want to meet. What it will do is let people choose which exotic effects apply to them. That’s all.”

  Khiruev worked through the implications. “Sir,” she said to Brezan, “you have to stop her. If she can do this, she’ll destroy the Kel. Without formation instinct—”

  “The Kel existed as an elite before formation instinct was ever conceived,” Cheris said. “I remember it, even. It could be done again, if the Kel decided it was worth doing.”

  To Khiruev’s dismay, Brezan was studying Cheris intently. “If you’re lying to me about this, any of this,” he said, “I will never forgive you.”

  “Sir—” Khiruev protested.

  The muscles along Brezan’s jaw convulsed. “Khiruev,” he said, �
��when she no longer outranked you, when you first had a choice between Kel Command and her, you chose her. You chose Vrae Tala. You saw something in her, in what she was doing. Do you remember what it was?”

  It was like trying to look through a lens made of mist. “I am Kel,” Khiruev said. “You are here now, sir. My service is owed to you. I understand that I was in error. I accept whatever consequence you impose.”

  Brezan jerked his gaze away. “I could order you to do practically anything,” he said savagely, “and you wouldn’t even see anything wrong with the arrangement.”

  “Then I await your orders,” Khiruev said, because it was the most correct response she could think of.

  Brezan scrubbed angrily at his eyes, but didn’t say anything to that. “Cheris,” he said, “just how do you propose setting off a calendrical spike? I assume it’s a calendrical spike you have in mind. It’d have to be something big.”

  “The Rahal, like everyone else, rely on servitors for maintenance tasks,” Cheris said, “including those for the master clocks.” She let the statement hang there.

  “You can’t possibly be talking about having sway over a legion of treacherous disaffected Rahal—” Brezan paled again. His glance swept around the room, at servitor-height. “Servitors? But they’re not—” He swallowed. “Can they be trusted?”

  Cheris crossed her arms. “Brezan,” she said, “has a servitor ever offered you harm? Or anyone you know, for that matter?”

  After a drawn-out pause, he said, “All right. I’ll concede that. But why? What do they want?”

  “They’re individuals,” Cheris said tartly. “I don’t presume to speak for each and every one of them.”

  Khiruev thought back to the servitors who had hung around Cheris’s quarters back when she was being Jedao. Khiruev had never thought twice about their presence. Most people gave servitors less thought than the wallpaper. If they had wanted to slaughter humans in their sleep, they could have managed it forever ago. It spoke better of them than the humans.

  Brezan hadn’t finished questioning Cheris, however. “That takes care of calendar values,” he said, “but you’re going to have to do something pretty fucking dramatic to mark a full-on calendar reset. What are you going to do, aim some torture beams at all the hexarchs?”

  Cheris gave him a look. “No torture,” she said. “But Kel Command has to go.”

  Khiruev drew her gun.

  “Stand down,” Brezan hissed.

  Khiruev holstered her gun, although she didn’t want to. “It’s high treason.”

  “This whole thing is high treason,” Brezan said, which didn’t help. “I’m not done talking to her.”

  “So you want to see if I can pull it off,” Cheris said to Brezan.

  “I am sick of serving something I don’t even believe in,” Brezan said. “What the hell. Fifteen days, you say? I want to know down to the fucking hour, and I want to see the math so someone who is not me can check it over. If nothing happens, if nothing changes, I’ll scorch you dead and drag you back to Kel Command. And then, if they don’t hang up my corpse next to yours, I will spend the rest of this rotted career helping them smash whatever uprising they point me at.”

  “And the Andan agent?” Cheris said. “What’s her place?”

  “I left her in confinement,” Brezan said. His voice had gone distant. “She claimed to be disgraced, but it’s always possible she was lying to get my guard down.” Brezan colored. Khiruev knew then what their relationship had been. “It may not be safe for anyone, er, human to enter the room with her. We’ll have to find somewhere to let her off at some point.”

  “Were you expected to report in?”

  “They’d expect to hear from her, not me,” he said. “I’m positive there’s no way to secure her cooperation. As far as I know, she’s loyal. And I—I don’t have any leverage.” His eyes darkened. “Her silkmoth is mated to the Hierarchy of Feasts. I’d better do something about that before we set off for wherever the hell we’re going.”

  “I’m certain we’ve driven off the Hafn,” Cheris said. “It’s not impossible they have yet another reserve swarm, but I was looking in on the analysis that Doctrine was doing. The Hafn had a staggering number of those caskets, but they run through them fast. I looked at what we could deduce of their calendar and figured it out. Those people sewn up with birds and flowers—they’re a power source. That’s why the Hafn were able to use their native exotics in high calendar terrain. Fortunately for us, they were running low, and they weren’t able to link up with their logistics swarm.” The one with the mysterious auxiliaries.

  “They use people as a power source?” Brezan said in revulsion. He had been shown videos of the caskets during the meeting he had called.

  “So do we,” Cheris said, “only we call them suicide formations.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  Cheris held her silence just long enough for Brezan to get the point.

  “Anyway,” Brezan said, unable to meet her eyes, “since this border is otherwise wide-open, it won’t kill us to be on patrol. At least until non-crashhawk Kel show up spoiling for a fight.”

  Khiruev listened while the two crashhawks discussed logistics, and wondered if it was possible for her world to tumble any more upside-down. In fifteen days she would find out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ONE OF THE important features of the Citadel of Eyes was also one of its great disadvantages: the pervasive attention to security. It was 03.67 and Shuos Mikodez was seriously considering whether he had any chance of sneaking past his own guards and into one of the restricted sections of Archives. There had always been the rumor that one of the old heptarchs had squirreled away a collection of heretical calendrical erotica. Just how you made abstract algebra erotic was going to have to remain a mystery for the next Shuos hexarch to puzzle over, because Mikodez couldn’t figure out a way past that one checkpoint without pissing off an agent whose ability to brew perfect Six Leaves tea was unrivaled. Oh well, the expedition probably only seemed like a good idea because of the hour and, all right, the fact that he’d only had five hours of sleep in the last seventy-five.

  Three red lights came on in a triangle. The grid said, “High priority high priority message.” Stupid phrasing, but no one could seem to fix the alert, and that was on top of the fact that most of the time it was a false alarm. He wished they were doing this on purpose to keep staff on their toes; no such luck.

  Another set of lights came on. “Mikodez, wake up already,” said Shuos Zehun’s aggravated voice. “Someone sent in a code red nine, burst transmission, in response to a bug we planted on the Deuce of Gears swarm. Mikodez—”

  “Open connection,” he said. “I’m awake. In fact, you have no idea how awake I am.”

  “Fuck it, Mikodez, are you up scheming again instead of getting sleep like a sane person? You’re not eighteen anymore.”

  What could be that bad for them to start swearing at him right out of the gate? “Just pipe me the damn message.”

  “Honestly, Mikodez, I’m going to make Istradez slip you sleeping pills.”

  Before Mikodez could say anything snide, the message came through. One of the bugs that they had gotten aboard the Hierarchy of Feasts during its layover at Tankut Primary had finally borne fruit. The report said that one High General Kel Brezan—that crashhawk who had contacted Zehun not long ago, funny how he got around—had taken over the swarm. This news wouldn’t have been worth much in itself. They already knew about the Kel-Andan mission, and it wasn’t surprising that the Andan half was lying low.

  No: the important part was that the high general had given a briefing warning of a planned calendrical spike with an intended effect of making formation instinct voluntary. The report included some of the relevant mathematics. What was more, the spike was going to be activated by a strike at Kel Command. Mikodez reflected that Brezan was ruining things for honest crashhawks everywhere.

  “Zehun, are you still there?” Mik
odez said.

  The link obligingly updated with video. Even at this hour, Zehun looked fresh and alert in full uniform. “You know perfectly well that the only person in the Citadel who keeps worse hours than you do is me,” they said. “And before you ask, so far as I know, that report went directly to me. If someone is capable of intercepting and decrypting it, we’re in so much trouble that we need to have another set of emergency meetings anyway.”

  “We’ve been had,” Mikodez said after he had a chance to scan the report summary. “Ajewen Cheris has the mathematical ability to devise a calendrical spike of that order. Jedao would never have been able to put one together himself, and we’d know if Kujen had been in contact to make him a proposal.”

  Zehun’s expression was pensive. “The hexarchate gave Cheris plenty of opportunities to reconsider her loyalties. We should have ensured that she died with her swarm at the Fortress of Scattered Needles.”

  “Yes,” Mikodez said, “but Kujen insisted on retrieving her, and since he was checking over some critical cryptological results for us at the time, I deemed it unwise to piss him off. There wasn’t any way to guess he’d take a vacation for the first time in centuries. Anyway, might-have-beens don’t concern me. We have to decide what to do about the situation as it exists.”

  “We’ve got the shadowmoths on standby and we’ve been alerted of the situation,” Zehun said. “If we’re willing to lose most of that swarm, we can take out the Hierarchy of Feasts. As for Kel Command, I’ve been running a search on the report summaries and I cannot for the life of me figure out how Cheris, if that’s who she is, is going to break through centuries of Kel paranoia—”

  Shuos calling Kel paranoid. His day was already complete.

  “—but if we inform them, they might be able to see what we’re missing.” Zehun’s tone became deprecating. “The irony is that even if the threat gets through, the Kel hexarch will survive.”

  All the other hexarchs would be journeying to Station Mavi 514-11, where Faian had built her immortality device. Mikodez already planned to send a double. He didn’t have any use for immortality, but it would look too suspicious to decline.