Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

“If it makes you happy, Nirai-zho—”

Jedao used to understand that this was a very risky line of thought. “I’m asking what you would prefer.”

“I want to remember,” Jedao said, his voice suddenly steady.

So Jedao hadn’t entirely lost his understanding of pain or pride or ugly bargains after all. Good to know. “Fine,” Kujen said. “We’ll begin now.”

He flipped the switch, leaving Jedao trapped in the black cradle’s sensory deprivation.

Over the next week, Kujen modified the setup so he could hear Jedao without Jedao hearing him. Jedao turned out to be good about not talking to himself, unlike Esfarel. If it hadn’t been for the readings, Kujen would have wondered if Jedao had died in there.

He started dismantling the work he’d done to stabilize Jedao so he could reinstall the death wish.

After seven months and three days in utter isolation, Jedao broke his silence. “Nirai-zho? Are you there? Please—” His voice was brittle.

Kujen didn’t answer. Instead, he started the finicky work of suppressing more of Jedao’s memories now that Jedao had cracked. If Kujen was going to spend eternity with someone, he might as well guarantee that that someone would be pleasant company. Esfarel had gone mad in the black cradle, but Kujen had figured out better techniques since then. Jedao was more resilient to begin with if he’d lasted this long.

Sixteen days after Jedao spoke, Kujen noticed the thrashing. The instruments didn’t pick up on it, but as a revenant himself he could feel it. Esfarel had done that when he was newly undead and trying to figure out how to kill himself.

Eighty-three days after that, just as Kujen thought he’d be able to move on to the next phase, Jedao spoke again, very quietly. “Kujen, please. I miss you. It’s so dark. Are you—are you there?”

That wasn’t fear.

It was loneliness.

Kujen happened to know that even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway. “Shut up,” he said, suddenly irritated. The only reason they were in this situation to begin with was Jedao’s ridiculous grand strategy. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

Jedao still couldn’t hear him. Hear anything, really.

Kujen returned to work.

KUJEN CONTEMPLATED MAHAR. He’d taken a brilliant young student and ruined him utterly, done him a favor no one else could have done, promised him luxury and power and his brother’s life in exchange for the use of his body. The anchor lived a restrained lifestyle, given that, but that was his affair.

Kujen had laid out the terms clearly. It worked best when he was up-front; he had figured that out early on. In a just universe, he should be a lonely pile of cinders beneath some rock, rather than hanging around to parasitize his own people, but he had never cared for justice anyhow.

A long time ago, one of his mentors had told him of the good he could do with his astonishing versatility in the technical fields. Restorative psych surgery on refugees and veterans. Better mothdrives. The occasional paper on algebraic topology. He could have done any of it, had eventually done all of it, except none of it changed the fact that he would die someday.

As it turned out, you could fix the calendar to cheat death. Even the Rahal couldn’t fix calendars the way Kujen could. Granted, this didn’t come without its cost. The calendar had made remembrances even more pervasive than they had been during Kujen’s childhood.

Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were. He could have warned his fellow hexarchs, but it was going to be more fun to watch them discover it for themselves.

KHIRUEV RESISTED THE urge to stare at the door to the command center. Jedao’s continued absence during an engagement was a problem, but Khiruev freezing up would be a worse one. Besides, Jedao’s instructions to Khiruev, while requiring a great deal of faith, were unambiguous.

Hafn Swarm One (as the tactical display now tagged it) was still headed for them from Cobweb. They would be curving toward Minang Tower on the way. Hafn Swarm Two was still in disarray after the bombs that had taken out part of their lower left flank (relative to the swarm’s orientation and axis of motion), but she couldn’t count on that state of affairs to last.

For its part, Minang had the standard defenses for a wolf tower. The good news was that they were solidly in hexarchate territory, with friendly terrain. The irritating Hafn ability to use their native exotics in the hexarchate did not deny Minang the use of high calendar defenses. The bad news was that those defenses had never been meant for extended activation. No one had expected an invader to penetrate so deeply into hexarchate space, even in a border march.

“Shall we engage, General?” Janaia said.

“All units banner the Deuce of Gears,” Khiruev said, keeping her voice unemotional. “Activate the primary pivot and close, but carefully.” She specified the parameters. Like most shield formations, Knives Are Our Walls offered only short-lived protection, but it beat letting the Hafn pummel them at will. “Scan, what is going on out there?”

“Estimated thirty Hafn moths dead or disabled out of eighty-two,” Scan said. “I’m distinguishing four types of mothdrives, two of them unfamiliar.” The familiar ones belonged to the Lilacs and the Magnolias. “Guessing they’re support vessels of some type, given their placement well back of the combat moths.”

Weapons, usually reticent, spoke up abruptly. “Sir, more are coming. Look at the way they’re regrouping to clear the area.”

Khiruev concurred. Hafn Swarm Two wasn’t gathering into the familiar dish-and-funnel configuration. Rather, its warmoths were forming a half-shell around a cluster of slower-moving moths.

The Hierarchy of Feasts reached the formation’s pivot, and the formation’s shield effect activated. It didn’t show in human-normal visuals, which had made Khiruev anxious when she was younger, but the scan overlay showed that nothing was wrong. The Hafn could apparently detect the shield as well. After an initial barrage of missiles, like a stutter of wayward stars, they held their fire.

“Sir!” Scan cried. “Here they come.”

More Hafn juddered into existence near Hafn Swarm Two. One group had the misfortune to arrive practically on top of a moth that had been damaged earlier. It went out in a horrible sudden sizzle, torching two other moths near it.

There were 105 warmoths in the Kel swarm. Over 150 Hafn had joined the battle, and that wasn’t even counting the 71 from Hafn Swarm One that were dashing back toward them and which would be able to hit them with known exotics in twenty-four minutes at current accelerations.

The command center was everywhere awash with light, red and gold, gold and red. Sometimes Khiruev thought that the Kel had an institutionalized horror of dying in the dark, with not even a candle for your pyre.

Deal with it, Jedao had said. This meant, if you regarded the whole situation as a particularly lethal training exercise, that he believed Khiruev had both the knowledge and resources necessary to prevail. Ordinarily Khiruev didn’t believe in applying this kind of meta-analysis to real life, but Jedao had a known tendency to think of everything in terms of games.

Khiruev had no idea what Jedao was so busy with. However, she did know what to do about the Hafn. Swarm One had done their damnedest to lead the Kel away from Swarm Two’s arrival point, and she didn’t think it was a feint. They had only turned back when it became clear the Kel weren’t falling for it. Swarm Two couldn’t just be reinforcements. It contained something vital to the Hafn. Khiruev had no intention of obliging them.