Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

“You’ve watched videos of Jedao dueling, General?” Brezan asked.

Khiruev was touched at how often Brezan addressed her by her rank, as if that could restore their professional relationship to what it had been. “Once or twice, sir,” Khiruev said. “I remember that he was good, but that’s about it. Why, do you intend to duel Jedao?” She assumed she was to use the cover identity until Brezan indicated otherwise.

“Jedao’s colleague was supposed to be dead mediocre at it,” Brezan said, meaning Cheris, “not that that’s enough reason to keep someone from a hobby. But Jedao’s another story.”

Khiruev sensed that she wasn’t supposed to respond to that, so she didn’t. Whatever Kel Command had done to Cheris, they surely regretted it now.

“I should have killed you already,” Brezan said abruptly.

“After a thorough interrogation, yes,” Khiruev said. “It’s not too late.” It was Brezan’s most persistent fault, his impetuosity. That, and the fact that if you put a goal in front of him, he focused on it to the exclusion of everything else. No strategic vision. Khiruev would have put Brezan in the category of a ‘use with caution’ Kel if he’d been a line officer: great on special missions for his ability to think unconventionally, useful in charge of a tactical group if carefully supervised, and for mercy’s sake don’t promote him any higher than that. Kel Command wasn’t wrong: the promotion, in this case, was key to this particular special mission. As long as Brezan leaned hard on Strategy if the Hafn showed up again, he should be all right.

“I don’t care if they execute me too,” Brezan said after a while, although they both knew that mere execution would be the merciful option. “What I did—I wanted to do what was right. It looked simple. How the fuck do you mess up ‘kill swarm-stealing mass-murderer’?” He was gazing abstractedly at the sizzle-and-flash of the calendrical swords. “I don’t know enough about swarm tactics to read stylistic differences. Does Jedao fight as he always did?”

“That’s complicated,” Khiruev said, “since his black cradle engagements were classified and we’ll never know exactly how they were handled, but I’d point out that everyone seems rattled. Sir, if you want more information, you know who you have to ask. You’re going to have to hope Jedao wants to tell you the truth. It’s clear that he can be a very good liar when he wants to be.”

“Yes,” Brezan said, “you’re right.” Nevertheless, he lingered another nine minutes, until two more of the duelists started a practice round. “Let’s go.”

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.