Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

Tseya’s mouth pulled into a moue. “I mean, think about it. Jedao no longer has any rank, even if he controls that swarm. He’s running on pure notoriety. Imagine how much trouble it’d be inviting him to dinner. You could give one of my people nightmares by putting them in charge of the seating chart.”

Brezan was unamused. “So you’re here because you’re expendable, too.”

“I’m here because I am particularly motivated to redeem myself in the eyes of my superiors,” she returned. “I’ve had some violent differences of opinion with them on policy matters. They didn’t take them well.”

“I suppose I’m not in a position to judge,” Brezan said. He finished the slice of cake in the silence that followed, and still couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not.

KHIRUEV HAD NEVER expected her intimate, if eccentric, acquaintance with curio stores to come in handy during swarm operations. In particular, she had learned more about the art of dickering than she had realized. She missed high table when Station Tankut Primary responded to her suggestion that they negotiate over repairs and supplies, and she was currently in the command center examining their latest offer.

Colonel Najjad of Logistics was shooting her looks of dismay. Najjad had obviously hoped to get their own raw materials so they could print their own components rather than relying on the station to do it for them at exorbitant rates. Khiruev and the crew’s conventional assets had been frozen by the Andan, but they were still able to sell combat data on the Hafn to the black market and, of all things, independent dramatists and historians. However, there was only so far Khiruev could push the station chief, who was not a Kel. Indeed, the fact that the station chief had no faction affiliation, plus Tankut’s reputation for black market dealings, was what had led Jedao and Khiruev to pick it.

The station chief, a woman with excellent teeth and a smile she used with needle precision, was awaiting Khiruev’s response. Khiruev made a few adjustments to the list and sent it back. “Final offer,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll take our chances selling Hafn trophies to private collectors directly.” That was not entirely an idle threat. She was getting curious as to what some of those odd engine components would bring. Someone had mentioned the caskets, but she had quashed that notion the moment it was brought to her attention.

“Pleasure doing business,” the stationer said, sounding sincere. “I’ve sent over local regulations. Ensure that your people stick to them while we get working on this.”

The grid ran through the document and found only a few sections that deviated from common practice, none of which Khiruev expected to cause trouble. Jedao had agreed with her that contact with the locals be kept to the minimum necessary to ensure resupply. “The pleasure is mine,” Khiruev said dryly. “I’ll keep this place in mind in case I ever decide my real calling is to be a smuggler.”

The station chief grinned before signing off.

“What,” Khiruev said in response to Najjad’s glum expression, “you never used to fantasize about running off and becoming a pirate? This is what it’d be like.”

“In the dramas they’re never short on matter printers as much as we are,” Najjad muttered. “But I guess there’s no help for it.”

Khiruev paused in the middle of composing a report for Jedao. “Look at it from the station’s point of view. They’re risking excommunication by dealing with us.”

“I doubt it’s anything that altruistic. More like they’re being paid by the local Shuos authorities to plant some bugs. Or currying favor with whoever is closest so we’ll be inclined to protect them from the Hafn. Or, possibly, planning to sell us out to the foreigners.”

“Above my pay grade,” Khiruev said deliberately.

Najjad stiffened. It was subtle, but Khiruev had been watching for it. By this point, everyone in the swarm knew that she had invoked Vrae Tala. She wouldn’t be surprised if there were betting pools as to whether she’d make it to the end of her hundred days. Najjad was civil about it, but he clearly didn’t approve.

They exchanged a few more words on the workarounds they’d needed to institute due to the absence of their Nirai and Shuos personnel. Then Jedao interrupted with a summons for Khiruev, atypically laconic: “Come now.”

Khiruev looked at Commander Janaia, who had spent the last hour meeting her eyes only when she had to. “Let me know if the stationers take us up on the offer of tacky souvenirs,” Khiruev said.

“Naturally, sir,” Janaia said, quite formally.

Khiruev sighed to herself. She couldn’t blame Janaia. Khiruev had damned the swarm. Assuming they survived the whole tangled mess, even if Janaia hadn’t had any say in Khiruev’s decision, Kel Command was unlikely to regard her charitably. Khiruev’s threadbare consolation was the knowledge that Janaia would carry out every order faultlessly, even if she found a loophole somewhere. She was that kind of Kel.

When Khiruev reported in, Jedao was playing an unfamiliar board game with three servitors. Khiruev saluted, bemused by how much more lively the receiving room felt with the servitors’ presence, even though it was hardly cramped by any reasonable standard and the rooms had seen their share of past servitor traffic on more usual chores. Besides the servitors—a mothform and two lizardforms—the terminal was surrounded by paperwork pertaining to the swarm’s provisioning, documents neatly arranged in a grid and casting a faint pale light over the walls and floor. Curiously, a mathematical paper was imaged over to the side.

Khiruev waited. Jedao was pondering a game token stamped with a trefoil knot. “At ease,” Jedao said without looking at her. “Damnation,” he said to the mothform, “you weren’t kidding about that gambit. Teach me to run off my mouth about odds around people better at math than I am.”

The servitor responded with an amused flurry of pink-and-yellow lights.

“Anyway,” Jedao said, “you’ll have to pardon me for a—” Jedao’s terminal flashed a code that Khiruev didn’t recognize. “Another one? I’d better see to this.” Khiruev jerked her chin toward the door, wondering whether she should withdraw, but Jedao said, “No, stay.”

The message started with a confusing snowfall of static and gradually coalesced into a woman with long hair and a habit of gnawing on the end of her stylus. Eventually they found out that she was Researcher Nirai Maholarion of Station Anner 56-5. More interestingly, the recording wasn’t an official report, but a compilation of notes she had made while debating whether to recommend to her superiors that her data be forwarded to the Kel, even if the Kel had loftier matters on their mind.

Jedao had her preliminary abstract image itself so Khiruev could get a good look at it. “We’ve had a few of these come in from various stations,” he said. “I can read basic scan, but these don’t look like any formants I’ve seen in 400 years. You got anything?”

The scan data weren’t Khiruev’s immediate concern. She had gotten distracted by the last part of the video, which showed Maholarion absently handing off a stack of data solids to a mothform servitor. She had thought that Mevru solids were obsolete, but maybe the Nirai used them for reasons of backwards compatibility.

“Just how reliable are your sources, sir?” Khiruev said. She was betting that, over in the command center, Communications had no knowledge of these notes, or the other reports Jedao had alluded to. And how had he suborned these people to begin with?