Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

“So do we,” Cheris said, “only we call them suicide formations.”

“It’s not the same.”

Cheris held her silence just long enough for Brezan to get the point.

“Anyway,” Brezan said, unable to meet her eyes, “since this border is otherwise wide-open, it won’t kill us to be on patrol. At least until non-crashhawk Kel show up spoiling for a fight.”

Khiruev listened while the two crashhawks discussed logistics, and wondered if it was possible for her world to tumble any more upside-down. In fifteen days she would find out.

ONE OF THE important features of the Citadel of Eyes was also one of its great disadvantages: the pervasive attention to security. It was 03.67 and Shuos Mikodez was seriously considering whether he had any chance of sneaking past his own guards and into one of the restricted sections of Archives. There had always been the rumor that one of the old heptarchs had squirreled away a collection of heretical calendrical erotica. Just how you made abstract algebra erotic was going to have to remain a mystery for the next Shuos hexarch to puzzle over, because Mikodez couldn’t figure out a way past that one checkpoint without pissing off an agent whose ability to brew perfect Six Leaves tea was unrivaled. Oh well, the expedition probably only seemed like a good idea because of the hour and, all right, the fact that he’d only had five hours of sleep in the last seventy-five.

Three red lights came on in a triangle. The grid said, “High priority high priority message.” Stupid phrasing, but no one could seem to fix the alert, and that was on top of the fact that most of the time it was a false alarm. He wished they were doing this on purpose to keep staff on their toes; no such luck.

Another set of lights came on. “Mikodez, wake up already,” said Shuos Zehun’s aggravated voice. “Someone sent in a code red nine, burst transmission, in response to a bug we planted on the Deuce of Gears swarm. Mikodez—”

“Open connection,” he said. “I’m awake. In fact, you have no idea how awake I am.”

“Fuck it, Mikodez, are you up scheming again instead of getting sleep like a sane person? You’re not eighteen anymore.”

What could be that bad for them to start swearing at him right out of the gate? “Just pipe me the damn message.”

“Honestly, Mikodez, I’m going to make Istradez slip you sleeping pills.”

Before Mikodez could say anything snide, the message came through. One of the bugs that they had gotten aboard the Hierarchy of Feasts during its layover at Tankut Primary had finally borne fruit. The report said that one High General Kel Brezan—that crashhawk who had contacted Zehun not long ago, funny how he got around—had taken over the swarm. This news wouldn’t have been worth much in itself. They already knew about the Kel-Andan mission, and it wasn’t surprising that the Andan half was lying low.

No: the important part was that the high general had given a briefing warning of a planned calendrical spike with an intended effect of making formation instinct voluntary. The report included some of the relevant mathematics. What was more, the spike was going to be activated by a strike at Kel Command. Mikodez reflected that Brezan was ruining things for honest crashhawks everywhere.

“Zehun, are you still there?” Mikodez said.

The link obligingly updated with video. Even at this hour, Zehun looked fresh and alert in full uniform. “You know perfectly well that the only person in the Citadel who keeps worse hours than you do is me,” they said. “And before you ask, so far as I know, that report went directly to me. If someone is capable of intercepting and decrypting it, we’re in so much trouble that we need to have another set of emergency meetings anyway.”

“We’ve been had,” Mikodez said after he had a chance to scan the report summary. “Ajewen Cheris has the mathematical ability to devise a calendrical spike of that order. Jedao would never have been able to put one together himself, and we’d know if Kujen had been in contact to make him a proposal.”

Zehun’s expression was pensive. “The hexarchate gave Cheris plenty of opportunities to reconsider her loyalties. We should have ensured that she died with her swarm at the Fortress of Scattered Needles.”

“Yes,” Mikodez said, “but Kujen insisted on retrieving her, and since he was checking over some critical cryptological results for us at the time, I deemed it unwise to piss him off. There wasn’t any way to guess he’d take a vacation for the first time in centuries. Anyway, might-have-beens don’t concern me. We have to decide what to do about the situation as it exists.”

“We’ve got the shadowmoths on standby and we’ve been alerted of the situation,” Zehun said. “If we’re willing to lose most of that swarm, we can take out the Hierarchy of Feasts . As for Kel Command, I’ve been running a search on the report summaries and I cannot for the life of me figure out how Cheris, if that’s who she is, is going to break through centuries of Kel paranoia—”

Shuos calling Kel paranoid. His day was already complete.

“—but if we inform them, they might be able to see what we’re missing.” Zehun’s tone became deprecating. “The irony is that even if the threat gets through, the Kel hexarch will survive.”

All the other hexarchs would be journeying to Station Mavi 514-11, where Faian had built her immortality device. Mikodez already planned to send a double. He didn’t have any use for immortality, but it would look too suspicious to decline.

“You know,” Mikodez said, “that’s one option, but it’s not the only option.”

Zehun went dead quiet. “If that’s supposed to be a Shuos joke I haven’t heard before,” Zehun said at last, “fine, I haven’t heard it before. But it’s a terrible idea, and maybe you should get some sleep.”

“I’m not joking,” Mikodez said. “It’s true, however, that our window of opportunity is limited. I realize we only have so much information about the planned spike, but I want all our mathematicians on the problem. What will this spike do if it goes off? Formations can’t be the whole story. Even Jedao with his Kel fixation wouldn’t have made this play based on that alone, and even if Cheris is merely very good at emulating a dead man, we have plenty of evidence that her moves take place on multiple gameboards simultaneously. We need a fuller picture so we can make an informed decision.”

“You frighten me on a regular basis,” Zehun said in a low voice, “but this is something else.”

Mikodez raised an eyebrow. “You could have had me killed when I was eighteen,” he said, “and you didn’t.”

At eighteen, Mikodez had been a second-year Shuos cadet. Ever since Hellspin Fortress, Shuos Academy stopped admitting prospects who shared Jedao’s signifier, Ninefox Crowned with Eyes. Never mind that for generations before that, Shuos Crowned with Eyes had managed to lead lives free of high treason and massacre. As for Shuos who developed that signifier later, they were purged.

Mikodez had entered with a Ninefox Smiling. However, during one of the periodic evaluations, it emerged that he had a variable signifier. Uncommon, but not unheard of either, especially among Shuos and Andan. The ability could even be trained in to a certain extent, which was handy for undercover work. Unfortunately, the evaluation had recorded a brief shift to Crowned with Eyes. Zehun, as a senior instructor, had been dispatched with a team of assassins to assess Mikodez.