Raven Stratagem Read online

  Given that the Shuos were notorious for backstabbing each other out of sheer reflex, Brezan was impressed in spite of himself.

  “You didn’t have that opportunity, exactly, not just because of Kel prejudices but because my security was going to be better than any hypothetical hacking attempts. But it does raise a question I’ve been asking myself. Why did you decide to become a Kel?”

  “My family, sir,” Brezan said after a damning pause.

  “That’s not an explanation. I have no doubt you’ll do well, but frankly, you’ll do well if you allow yourself not to be a typical Kel. Which is going to be tough in, sorry, a society of rigorous conformists.”

  Brezan fought down the urge to glare at Zehun, which probably wasn’t helping his case.

  “I wouldn’t mind recruiting you for the Shuos,” Zehun said with the air of someone who knew just how terrifying their words were. “We’d be able to use you better, to say nothing of training you to hide your reactions. I hope you stay out of jeng-zai games or you’re going to lose a fortune. But I expect you’re determined to do things your own way.”

  Moves were flashing at Zehun on a subdisplay. Zehun ignored them. Their voice became brisk. “Incidentally, you might be interested to know who that Shuos cadet was. His name was Vauhan Mikodez.”

  Hexarch Shuos fucking Mikodez. Cadet-killer Mikodez, the most brilliant Shuos who wasn’t also a mass murderer. This was the last thing Brezan wanted to hear.

  Zehun turned then to their slate. Brezan stared at those ungloved hands and swore to himself that he was going to be a boring, ordinary, unimaginative Kel like the ones in all the Kel jokes.

  After Jedao’s takeover, then, it was blackly hilarious to regain consciousness to an argument over whether or not he was a Kel.

  “—anyone can put on black gloves and a uniform if they’re willing to get shot over it,” a high-pitched voice was saying. “Look, just wait until we figure out where the hell a working gene scanner is. I don’t know what possessed Hachej to take the good one apart just because it made that weird intermittent gleeping noise.”

  Brezan attempted to blink or open his eyes. His eyelids might as well have been chained down. He had some understanding that he was still in the sleeper unit that they had stuffed him into on Jedao’s orders. The prep had been rushed, not that he remembered much besides fragmentary cold and the sense that someone was playing music out of reach. Experimentally, he tried to move his hands. That didn’t work either.

  The darkness behind his eyelids was suffocating, and he almost missed what the second, much deeper voice was saying. “—rotten luck. A mutiny, really?”

  “Or maybe it was Kel Command with some convoluted new plan. You know how it goes,” said the first voice.

  This reminded Brezan that he had a warning to convey to Kel Command, except his head was swimming and he couldn’t seem to stop hyperventilating.

  “—this one here. Honestly, if they were going to do prep this shoddy, why not just shoot the lot?”

  Brezan wouldn’t have minded the answer to that question himself. He screwed his eyelids open. Light filtered dimly into the sleeper, and he could see one of the medics as a reticulated blur. He attempted to knock, although he wasn’t sure he succeeded in moving his arm.

  After an interminable interval, the medic opened the sleeper. Brezan would have cringed from the sudden brightness if he’d had any coordination. Speaking was equally hopeless.

  “Look at the insignia,” the man said. “That’s some kind of officer, isn’t it?”

  Whoever the medics were, they clearly weren’t Kel.

  “That’s a lieutenant colonel, you dimwit.” The owner of the first voice sounded like they wished their companion were something smarter, like a slime mold. “But any bored kid these days can steal and hack a Kel uniform.”

  Brezan opened his mouth to object to this. Instead, he went into a painful coughing fit. His mouth tasted like copper. After that, he couldn’t tell whether he was breathing, which was so distracting that he didn’t notice the servitors extracting him to a pallet.

  “—clearly what happened,” the first voice said. “I mean, there’s no way they’d simply dump a crashhawk. The Kel shoot crashhawks who get caught at it. He’s got to be some kind of impostor. Although I’m not sure why they wouldn’t shoot an impostor, either. I get why they have to return the Nirai and so on to their own people, but this one’s a mystery. The whole thing is so random. It must have been one hell of a mutiny. I would have bought tickets.”

  “It wasn’t a fucking mutiny,” Brezan said before he realized he had his voice back. It sounded as though someone had taken a rasp to it, but it was better than nothing.

  The two medics peered down at him with great interest. The first speaker was small and pale and had deeply cynical eyes. The second was fidgeting with his stylus. “Yeah?” he said. “What did happen? No one so far has a coherent story.”

  Brezan regrouped enough to register that neither medic was dressed in faction colors of any sort. He couldn’t blurt the truth out to civilians. Another coughing fit prevented him from answering in any case.

  “He’s going to be just as hysterical as the others,” the first medic said. “Sedate him and let the servitors sort it out.”

  Between wheezes, Brezan said, “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan. I need to get to a secured terminal.”

  “He sounds like he means it,” the second medic said as though Brezan weren’t right there.

  “What’s he going to do to us, pull rank? I mean, doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that we’re 73% through decanting these losers and this is the only hawk—I don’t mean officer, I mean any Kel at all—in the whole lot? Damned suspicious if you ask me.”

  Brezan was ready to throttle them both, but in his current condition that was a wretched idea. Fine. If the first medic had some conspiracy theory—not all that unreasonable, given the evidence—he might as well play to it.

  “All right, you have me,” he said, trying not to sound as irritated as he felt. “They booted me because I’m working for the Shuos. I suggest you let me report before I kill you with my belt buckle.” Stupid threat, but he couldn’t think of a better one.

  The medics exchanged glances. “I told you it had to be something like that,” the first medic said to the second, eyes alight. To Brezan: “You’re in bad shape. I’ll have to monitor you while you make the call.”

  They were fishing for gossip. Shit. If he tried to tell the truth to Kel Command, besides the security leak, the medic might jab him full of sedatives for being delusional.

  It was hard to think clearly, and when he tried to examine things too closely, he started seeing double. But he had to convey his warning. “Send a message to Shuos Zehun with as much priority as you can pile on the thing, from Rhezny Brezan of the Swanknot swarm,” he said. Zehun must ignore half the junk addressed to them, but there was a chance they might remember him from that cadet exercise years ago. How much was safe to reveal, though? Over a channel whose security he couldn’t guarantee? “Say I came across someone else who knows how to beat Exercise Purple 53 and that I’d like to discuss it with them.”

  That might be too oblique, but Brezan had a desperate need to sink into sleep so the world would stop looking like someone had drowned it in undulant water.

  Of all things, the first medic looked enthusiastic. The wretched message had to be an exciting change from their daily routine. “You rest, Shuos agent,” the medic said. “I’ll see to it that your message gets out.”

  The conversation continued after that, but Brezan was too busy slamming into unconsciousness to hear it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HEXARCH SHUOS MIKODEZ’S latest hobby was container gardening. At the moment he was admiring the spectacularly ugly flower his green onion, which he had given a prominent place on his desk, had produced. He was also having tea with his younger brother, Vauhan Istradez. Istradez was less than thrilled by this development. It meant one more detail
about Mikodez to memorize, to say nothing about all the notes on potting soils and drainage.

  Mikodez was blessed with the Vauhan line’s good looks, which had hardly required genetic tinkering. He was tall, and a little too thin from the drugs he took, with flawless dark skin, glossy black hair, and smiling eyes. He had once joked that he had joined the Shuos because the faction’s red-and-gold uniform complemented his coloration. At that point his youngest parent threatened to hold Mikodez down and dye his hair turquoise.

  Istradez looked identical to his brother, which was not a coincidence. Today, along with the duplicate of the hexarch’s uniform, he also wore the same topaz earrings. While he’d been born Mikodez’s younger sister, he had undergone modding to serve as Mikodez’s double on the grounds that this was almost as good as Mikodez being able to be in two places at once, and the benefits were almost as good as the downsides.

  “Thank you for picking such an ugly plant, by the way,” Istradez was saying. He spoke effortlessly with his brother’s inflections. “Couldn’t you have chosen something nice to look at, like forsythias? Even Zehun agrees with me that that thing is an eyesore.”

  “Yes,” Mikodez said, knowing that Istradez was carping not because he cared about the scenery but because he’d been cooped up in the Citadel of Eyes—the star fortress that served as Shuos Headquarters—for a month and twelve days. “But it made a nice garnish for the chicken ginseng soup, don’t you agree?”

  Istradez eyed the hapless green onion’s snipped-off leaves. “I don’t see how you can tell, since you hardly touched the soup.” He tapped the cookie tray, which Mikodez had demolished.

  “It’s the price I pay for never sleeping,” Mikodez said blandly. His assistant Zehun regularly tried, and failed, to get him to follow a healthier diet. Mikodez’s usual retort was that the sweets hadn’t killed him yet, so why mess with what was working?

  “At least you’re in a good mood today,” Istradez said, and smiled Mikodez’s own smile at him.

  In his more honest moments, Mikodez admitted that he couldn’t tell the difference, but then, that was the point. You don’t have to do that in here, he sometimes thought of saying, except it wasn’t true. Even in the Citadel of Eyes, even in this fucking room where they sat across each other like twins, he didn’t dare. Sad truth: paranoia was his trade. He wouldn’t have survived forty-two years as hexarch otherwise.

  “I thought the chicken soup would be to your taste,” Mikodez said. Kel fare, which Mikodez found dreadfully plain. But after long assignments eating the things that Mikodez himself was known to fancy, Istradez went through periods bingeing on bland fare. It was hardly something Mikodez would deny his favorite sibling.

  Istradez fluttered his eyelashes at Mikodez. “It was. I’m just being difficult.”

  “Foxes preserve us.”

  “As if foxes have ever been known for their constructiveness.”

  “You wound me,” Mikodez said. “Foxes are capable of being useful if you train them appropriately.”

  “But then they’re not foxes anymore, only hounds.”

  It was a distinction peculiar to the Shuos. Most people outside the faction called all Shuos foxes. The Shuos themselves distinguished between foxes and hounds. The former were the flashy ‘secret’ agents you saw on the dramas; the latter were the bureaucrats, technicians, and analysts who got the real work done. (Mikodez, who had trained as an administrator with a side of analysis, had his own biases.)

  “You say ‘only’ like it’s a bad thing,” Mikodez said. He reached for one of the candies in the bowl on the table between them, and bit through the hard, sugar-dusted shell into the even more sugary plum-flavored center. “One fox is smarter than one hound; a pack of hounds is another beast entirely. And I have always believed that a properly guided bureaucracy is deadlier than any bomb.”

  “I’ll avoid making all the obvious jokes about paperwork.” Istradez was avoiding the more obvious jokes about Shuos Jedao. “I’m so glad I don’t have your job. It’s bad enough being shot at without also being in charge of policy.”

  This wasn’t strictly true. By necessity, Istradez sometimes had to make policy calls while in his role. But Mikodez always made sure that he was fully briefed and that he had a team of advisers to rely on, the way Mikodez himself relied on Zehun and his staff.

  “Speaking of which, do you have another assignment for me yet?”

  “It’s not yet time,” Mikodez said. “Getting bored of your surroundings? I swear, your attention span is almost as bad as mine these days. You should meet with Recreation and give them some suggestions.”

  “Sorry, you’re only paying me to be you, not to also do Medical’s job for them.”

  “Worth a—”

  An alert gleeped at Mikodez. “High priority to the hexarch, Shuos Zehun,” the grid said. “Zehun requests an immediate meeting with you, alone.”

  Istradez smiled ruefully at his brother. “I’ll leave you to the latest national emergency,” he said. “You know where I’ll be if you break your mirror.” He leaned in and embraced Mikodez, kissing him on the mouth. They were lovers on and off, something the rest of the family had regarded with bemusement. At least they keep each other occupied, had been their older mother’s opinion. As the two had been crèche-born exactly a year apart, family superstition considered it inevitable that the two would be particularly close. Mikodez didn’t have any particular interest in bedroom gyrations for their own sake, but he liked keeping Istradez happy.

  Mikodez waved his brother off. “Yes, yes,” he said, “enjoy your date, and feel free to put the gory details in an appendix so I can skip it at my leisure.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it in person,” Istradez said sweetly. “I’ll look in on our nephew for you while we’re at it.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  Istradez sauntered out with a very un-Mikodez-like gait.

  Minutes after Istradez departed, Zehun requested entry into Mikodez’s office. Mikodez let Zehun in. He was always surprised that they were just a bit shorter than he was, as if he was still that cadet who had been called out for a surprise evaluation. (Late growth spurt.) Zehun had wrapped themselves in a shawl of maroon wool. They were getting on in years, and claimed that Mikodez kept his workspaces too cold.

  A cat wriggled in Zehun’s arms: the orange tabby Jienji, who, like all of Zehun’s cats, was named after a notorious Shuos assassin. Even someone who liked cats as much as Zehun did was unlikely to run out of names anytime soon. At the first opportunity, Jienji squirmed free and leapt up onto Mikodez’s desk.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Mikodez said, scooping up the cat and depositing her back on the floor. He wasn’t about to lose his green onion to a feline nuisance. “So, Zehun, what’s so urgent that you had to interrupt my family time?” Ordinarily, after chatting with Istradez, the two of them would have gone to see their nephew afterward.

  Zehun didn’t smile in response to his cajoling tone. He immediately went alert. “You’re going to love this,” they said. “Hexarch Nirai Kujen is confirmed missing.”

  Mikodez didn’t waste time gaping. He turned to his terminal and said, “Details.”

  Zehun gave him a file code. He brought it up. The report’s contents were, if anything, worse than he expected.

  In theory, six factions shared rule of the hexarchate. Three high factions: Rahal, which governed the high calendar and set the law; Andan, with their financiers, diplomats, and artisans; and Shuos, which specialized either in information operations or backstabbing, depending on whom you asked. Three low factions: Kel, known best for their military; Vidona, which handled education and the ceremonial torture that was fundamental to the calendar’s remembrances; and Nirai, which consisted of the technicians and researchers.

  ‘High’ and ‘low’ were old designations, more a matter of tradition than actual power, which fluctuated according to resources, infighting, and the interplay between the current hexarchs. The Nirai were irregular in that t
heir true hexarch, Kujen, was immortal. Or, more accurately, undead, a revenant who anchored himself to a living marionette to wield continued influence.

  The Nirai’s public face was False Hexarch Faian. Kujen had selected her for a combination of administrative ability and a certain narrow genius in calendrical mechanics. Mikodez had always suspected that Kujen had known from the outset that Faian would develop a mind of her own.

  Mikodez had also suspected that Kujen figured it out very quickly when Faian and the Rahal hexarch conspired to develop an alternate immortality device, one less inimical to its users’ sanity. Kujen called his the black cradle, and seemed perfectly happy with it, but Kujen was also psychotic. Most people who knew how the black cradle functioned considered it a glorified torture device.

  Kujen had stood at an impasse with the other hexarchs for centuries. He would have disposed of the rest of them long ago if not for the fact that they did the tedious work of government so that he could focus on the research that was his passion. The hexarchs, especially Kel Tsoro, put up with this arrangement because Kujen offered ever-better mothdrives to convey people between the stars and ever deadlier weapons for Kel warmoths.

  Now Kujen was gone, with no indication of his destination. This from a man who preferred to hole up with his projects for years at a time, allowing the false hexarch to attend official functions in his stead. Faian was apparently driving herself to distraction trying to determine what had become of Kujen and whether she should seize the opportunity to oust the man who had put her in power. Mikodez wished her luck. If he could find out as much, he would be surprised if Kujen didn’t know and have countermeasures in place. It was unlikely that Kujen had survived nine centuries of parasitism without picking up some basic survival skills.

  Jienji had gotten bored of the desk and was busy shedding orange hairs on Mikodez’s carpet. Oh well, the carpet was largely self-cleaning, and the servitors would take care of anything the carpet didn’t eat. In point of fact, one had already swooped in and was methodically following the cat’s trail.