Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

“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.

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.”