Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

He hadn’t personally forged that compilation. One of his teams had done the work, but the packet should stand up to the hivemind’s scrutiny. While Tsoro didn’t like him, she believed in his fundamental competence. “Tell me you have a defense swarm hanging around there,” he added.

“Does it matter if we do?” Tsoro asked darkly. “We can’t afford for the Aerie to fall. Your warning is appreciated.”

“Splendid,” Mikodez said with the particular breeziness that he knew irritated her, because she would expect it. “In that case, I’ll leave you to your tedious logistical calculations.” He signed off.

The problem with Cheris’s plan was that it inconveniently involved blowing up Kel Command before Mikodez could, if everyone stuck to the original schedule, stab the other hexarchs in the back. First item: if marking a calendrical reset by getting rid of Kel Command was good, annihilating the other hexarchs at the same time would be even better. Second item: it would be easiest to assassinate the hexarchs if they gathered at a single location. Happily, Nirai Faian’s facility would do the trick. Third item: convincing four hexarchs to change their schedules to match Cheris’s was going to be a lot harder than persuading Cheris to hold off until the pieces were in place. Fourth item: calling her up and telling her what he intended wouldn’t work, even if the idea had a certain appealing simplicity. He had no evidence that she was gullible around Shuos, even if she’d dated a few, and having Jedao rattling around her skull wouldn’t help. So he needed a way to influence her without her realizing it.

Fifth item: nobody had figured out how the hell Cheris intended to destroy the Aerie. It would have been nice if the bugs on the Hierarchy of Feasts had been able to shed any light on this matter, but no such luck. At this point, Mikodez was gambling that Cheris wasn’t crazy, that this wasn’t a bluff, and that some method existed. The crashhawk high general’s faith in her was only circumstantial evidence, but better than nothing.

Sixth item: to do what she was doing, Cheris had to have some kind of intelligence network. It looked like she’d contacted Colonel Ragath at one point, but they hadn’t been able to piece together specifics. Mikodez’s other gamble was that Cheris’s sources would alert her about Kel swarm movements and cause her to revise her timetable. At least, he trusted she wouldn’t risk her swarm against the Aerie and multiple defense swarms if she could afford to wait things out.

And people think I’m untrustworthy and dangerous on account of two cadets, Mikodez thought cynically. But that was it: he made it a point not to get attached to any specific way of doing things. If he saw a better solution and it made sense to switch over, he was only too happy to do so.

The grid was informing Mikodez that the number of people who urgently wanted to talk to him was piling up. He fished in his second drawer until he retrieved the russet leaf-pattern lace scarf he had left off knitting two months ago. Perfect. The only thing people hated seeing more than a Shuos with a gun was a Shuos with knitting needles. As if any sane assassin would take you out with knitting needles if they could do it instead from a nice sheltered balcony with a high-powered rifle.

“All right,” he said, “let’s hear the first one.”

CHERIS AND BREZAN were in Cheris’s lounge, rotating a map of the hexarchate this way and that. Khiruev tried to concentrate on the glowing notations, the swarms with their generals’ emblems, but she could only manage it in start-stop snatches. Neither Cheris nor Brezan wanted her here because she had anything to contribute to matters of strategy or logistics. Rather, the high general was afraid she would topple over dead if left unattended.

“That’s six full swarms,” Cheris was saying. “They must be dreadfully worried.”

Khiruev marked the swarms’ trajectories converging on a point in a stretch of space she had thought unremarkable, except Cheris insisted it was the Aerie’s location and the high general believed her. Of the six emblems, the one Khiruev kept returning to was General Inesser’s Three Kestrels Three Suns.

Cheris and Brezan weren’t the only ones having a discussion. There were four servitors: three deltaforms and a birdform. The deltaforms kept flashing rapid lights at each other. The fact that the lights were in the human visible spectrum was almost certainly a matter of courtesy. Khiruev had learned that servitors cared a great deal about courtesy, and had endeavored to revise her behavior accordingly, since the high general hadn’t forbidden it. The birdform either approved of this or had decided that dying generals made a good hobby. Whichever was the case, it hovered companionably by Khiruev, periodically refilling her teacup from the kettle that Cheris and Brezan were ignoring.

“If I’m understanding this correctly,” Brezan said, “the servitors prefer not to take action with so many observers around who might figure out they were responsible?”

Khiruev wondered if Brezan had realized that he tended to direct his speech toward empty expanses of wall whenever he mentioned the servitors, or even when he was supposedly addressing them.

Two of the deltaforms, whom Khiruev had tagged Two and Three because she was tired, exchanged a heated flurry of lights and dissonant chords. Then Three said something in very red lights to Cheris.

Cheris frowned, then said, “That’s basically it. They’ve already evacuated as many servitors as they could, but even so—”

Brezan bit his lip. “Cheris,” he said, “if there are servitors on those defense swarms as well—” He stopped.

“You may as well come out and say it,” she said.

“If they can reduce Kel Command to radioactive static, then surely a bunch of moths—”

Cheris’s hands tensed, untensed. “Brezan,” she said, “that’s a lot of moths. Crew on the order of 300,000 altogether. Even if we had definite information that all six generals were irredeemably corrupt, which we don’t, I’d rather kill as few people as we can get away with. Besides which, those aren’t small swarms, and the hexarchate’s enemies haven’t gone away. Do you really want to do away with that chunk of the hexarchate’s forces? Its senior generals?”

“That’s an interesting argument from someone who’s dead-set on tearing the realm apart,” Brezan said.

“I’m not entirely Jedao,” Cheris said, although Khiruev wondered sometimes. “The point of the exercise isn’t to maximize the death toll. It’s to change the system so ordinary people have a chance. People will die, yes. A lot of them. But we don’t have to go out of our way to kill even more.”

“I want to know how you came to this philosophy after having a mass murderer stuffed up your nose,” Brezan said.

“I’m trying to fix the things he broke,” Cheris said, “because I remember breaking them.”

Brezan slumped. “So we wait? You’re not tempted to sweep in and rescue Kel Command from the Hafn?”

Khiruev roused enough to say, “Sir, not only would they not thank us, General Inesser should be more than adequate to the task anyway.”

“By ‘not thank us’ you mean they’d blow themselves up just to get rid of us,” Cheris said wryly. “Don’t they teach us to avoid full frontal assaults anyway?”

Brezan groaned, clearly thinking of any one of four hundred Kel jokes. “Fine,” he said. “We wait for a better opportunity. But what if one doesn’t come?”

“Then we reassess the plan,” Cheris said. “What concerns me is that we haven’t been able to figure out the Hafn vector of approach. The coverage of the detectors and listening posts is hardly universal, so we’re going to have to wait and see.”