Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER EIGHT

BREZAN CAME AWAKE in snatches, like a puzzle assembling itself out of a junk heap. “What?” he said, then grimaced at the furry, sour, metallic taste of his mouth. Gradually, he took in his surroundings. Walls of warm gray, with a single abstract painting where he could see it without lifting his head. After that, it occurred to him that he was lying on a pallet, hooked up to a standard medical unit. Spider restraints held him fast.

All right, this was an improvement over the fucking sleeper unit that Jedao had had him stuffed in. “Hello?” Brezan called out. It emerged as a croak. He tried again, without much better results.

Around this time he discovered that someone had shut down his augment, which either implied a very good technician or someone with the overrides or both. Bad news, either way. He assumed there was a local grid, but even if it wouldn’t talk to him, it would have been nice to be able to access his internal chronometer and basic diagnostics. How long had he been out of it? And where the hell was he, anyway?

Brezan waited some more. Infuriatingly, despite the lingering pain when he breathed, he developed an itch behind his left knee. Which he couldn’t reach to scratch.

Just when he decided to have a go at the spider restraints anyway, a very pale, smiling woman with an elaborate shimmering tattoo over her right cheek came in. She wore a purple half-jacket over lavender clothes liberally decorated with aquamarine tassels, and silver jewelry chimed from her throat and wrists. The fluttering slits at her neck suggested that she had gills. The only useful hint as to her identity was the clashing gold pin over her left breast: the Shuos eye.

“Hello there,” she said. “Give me a moment and I’ll get you out of those.”

“I need to talk to Kel Command, please,” Brezan said, remembering his mission.

“We need to process you first.”

There it was: the hint of Shuos obdurateness despite the flowery getup. Still, as a staff officer, Brezan had his share of experience bowing to bureaucratic prerequisites. Shuos procedures tended to be well enforced. Best to go along.

After she’d unhooked him from the medical unit, a process that hurt more than he wanted to admit, the woman said, “Glass of water?”

“Water closet is more like it.”

“One moment. I still have to unspider you.” She didn’t do anything visible, but he bet she had a working augment. “You can move now.” She pointed to a door. “Don’t take too long if you can help it?” Her smile again, winsome. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

Both her friendly demeanor and her vagueness about ‘someone’ made Brezan suspicious. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do but comply. He braced himself and sat up. Pain, yes, but not the slicing pain associated with spider restraints, which he’d experienced years ago as a cadet, in a demonstration.

“Thank you,” Brezan said, and managed not to stumble on the way.

After he emerged, appalled anew at the shakiness of his legs, the woman held out a glass of water. Wordlessly, he accepted it and drained it in several desperate gulps. It didn’t taste of anything in particular, but if they’d wanted to drug or poison him, they could have done so at any point before he regained consciousness.

“All right,” the woman said when he had finished. “Just set that down, a servitor will clear it later. Ready?”

Brezan nodded.

“Even if you are a hawk,” she said, so amiably that he couldn’t take offense, “you’re awfully incurious.”

He smiled unconvincingly back at her.

This didn’t seem to bother her. “Oh well,” she said with a cheer that he was certain was unaffected, “none of my business. Shall we?”

If she didn’t mind his reticence, all the better. They took a lift to another level. Brezan still couldn’t tell whether they were on a moth or a moon or a station, or something else entirely. They didn’t pass any obvious viewports, and the doors were singularly inexpressive. Nine levels down, a walk through corridors barren of other human presence, and finally, an office with its door standing open to receive them.

“Brought the hawk,” the woman said loudly. Brezan almost jumped. “You busy in there, Sfenni, or shall I send him up, or what?”

“Please tell me he’s cleaned up,” a man’s rumbling voice said from within.

“Medical took care of that. I don’t think he’ll expire messily during the interview.”

“Excellent,” Sfenni said in a tone implying the opposite.

“In you go,” the woman said, and pivoted on her heel without waiting for Brezan to walk into Sfenni’s office. Granted, there had to be a hidden security team scrutinizing his every move, but Brezan couldn’t help feeling offended at being counted so small a threat, even if the Kel and Shuos were nominally allies.

Brezan squared his shoulders, wondered if he should adjust his uniform, then decided that medium formal was good enough. He stepped in.

The first thing Brezan noticed about the office was the shelves. It wasn’t so much that they were finely made, although he couldn’t help wondering if that was genuine cloudwood, all shimmering gray with subtle pearly swirls, or one of the better facsimiles. The shelves were crammed with books. Not just books, either. They looked hand-bound, and the smells of aged paper and glue almost overwhelmed him.

Shuos Sfenni sat at a much less expensive-looking desk overshadowed by all those shelves. He had an incongruously round, soft face atop a boxer’s blockish frame. For all Brezan knew, he whiled away his time between alphabetizing tomes and dealing with inconvenient Kel by pummeling unlucky bears. At least, unlike the tasseled woman, Sfenni wore a proper Shuos uniform.

“Have a seat,” Sfenni said, indicating the chair on the other side of the desk. “So. Colonel Brezan, is it?”

“Yes,” Brezan said, and waited.

“I’m substituting for Shuos Oyan, who would ordinarily be processing you,” Sfenni said, “so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little slow. We intercepted your, ah, request to talk to the hexarch’s personal assistant.”

“Yes,” Brezan said, more cautiously this time. Granted, he hadn’t expected it to be easy to get to a secured terminal, but he didn’t like where this was going.

Sfenni not-smiled at him. “Let me summarize what we fished out of that pile of reports.”

The high language didn’t inflect for number, but ‘pile’ was pretty unambiguous. Just how many hand-offs was Brezan dealing with? His stomach clenched.

Sfenni’s summation was, thankfully, accurate as far as it went. After he had finished, he scrutinized Brezan and sighed. “Enough games, Colonel. Tell me why you’re really here.”

What does he mean, ‘really’—”I don’t know how to verify my identity or rank if you haven’t been able to get the necessary information from the Kel,” Brezan said, “but I assure you that my need to contact my superiors is urgent and then I’ll be out of your hair. I apologize for involving the Shuos. Circumstances made that seem like the best way forward.” More like he had been muzzy from sleeper-sickness, but no need to spell that out. He didn’t know how much more was safe to say, no way of telling what Sfenni’s security clearance was. For that matter, even if Sfenni let him access a terminal, there was no guarantee it would be secured. Still, one problem at a time.

Sfenni reached into a drawer. Brezan tensed, but all Sfenni did was retrieve a pill dispenser and dry-swallow one of the bright green capsules. “All right, look,” Sfenni said after a painful-sounding coughing fit. “Can we level with each other, Colonel? You’re in holding on Minner Station”—Where? Brezan wondered—“and this is the most boring place in the march, for all that it’s become very exciting lately. The thing is, some of us appreciate boredom.”

Brezan knew where this was heading.

“So here’s the thing, Colonel. I understand that you hit the ceiling of your career”—Brezan bristled, but Sfenni didn’t pause—“and you’d like to be seconded to the Shuos or retire to some nice planetary city and dabble in energy market intelligence or whatever the fuck. But Shuos Zehun is known for being unforgiving when people waste their time. Things around here could get very uncomfortable, and some of us like our comforts.”

If Sfenni said ‘some of us’ with that particular greasy inflection again, Brezan was going to throttle him. “I don’t care about your philosophy of life,” he said, and Sfenni’s eyes became moistly reproachful. “Would you get to the fucking point already?”

“Well,” Sfenni said, “inconveniences are inconveniences, you know.”

Then, to Brezan’s massive irritation (that note in his profile about anger management was never going away at this rate, but this one time surely he was justified?), Sfenni got up and trundled over to a decorous cloudwood-or-next-best-thing cabinet. “What’s your poison?” he said.

Oh, for—Brezan bit down on what he’d been about to say. Sure, he shouldn’t be randomly getting drunk, but if it got this loser to get him to that fucking terminal, why not. It couldn’t make the inside of his mouth taste any worse than it did anyway. “Peach brandy,” he said. He despised peach brandy, but it was the most expensive drink he could see from where he was sitting.

Sfenni pulled out a decanter, then two snifters. “Sorry, my collection of brandies is atrocious,” he said, as if Brezan cared, “but my supply has dried up of late.” With fussy courtesy, he poured for them both.

Brezan took the tiniest sip that could still be construed as polite and forced himself to smile. Overpriced brandy or not, he couldn’t tell, and anyway it didn’t matter. He needed this despicable man. Sfenni would come to the point in his own time.

“I’m not an unpatriotic citizen,” Sfenni said. It had been so long since Brezan had heard ‘unpatriotic’ without an expletive attached to it (or ‘patriotic,’ for that matter) that he almost burst into laughter, and he only just caught himself in time. “But the administration of Minner facilities requires more funding than we’re usually able to wheedle out of regional headquarters.” He let the statement hang there.

‘Administration of Minner facilities,’ his ass. More like every ill-gotten mark that Sfenni received in bribes went into cultivating that garden of books. Brezan didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or lunge across the desk. Kel Command wouldn’t care that much about a transgression like bribery, under the circumstances, especially if he reported it before they uncovered it independently. And especially if he had a good excuse, which he did. Brezan cared fuck-all about Shuos opinions on the matter. But Brezan did very much care about having to compromise his principles like this, even when the need was so great.

Get over yourself, Brezan told himself. No one cares about your petty irrelevant scruples.

But sometimes—sometimes he wished someone did.

In the meantime, his higher duty had not changed.

“Since we’re being so delightfully candid,” Brezan said, “I have funds, yes.” Unlike General Khiruev, he didn’t go on leave and shop for staggeringly overpriced antique trinkets. Brezan’s vices were simpler and less expensive: alcohol (just not peach brandy), the obligatory spot of dueling, and the occasional cooking class, because sometimes the best way to understand people was through their food. All this meant that he was reasonably well-off.

“Then an accommodation is possible—?” Sfenni said.

“I know how to make a transfer,” Brezan said. “I don’t know how to keep the transaction from being traced.” Not completely true. He’d learned odd tricks from the people he talked to. He just thought those tricks wouldn’t fool a full-on audit.

“I can instruct you,” Sfenni said. “But an honest man like myself—”

At the end of this whole unreal interlude, Brezan was either going to emerge as the hexarchate’s best actor, or he was going to spontaneously self-combust.

“—needs to take precautions.” Sfenni’s eyes crinkled suddenly. “And in case you’re thinking that an honest Kel would rather take precautions of his own, I assure you that this will go more smoothly if we come to our agreement peaceably.”

“I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise,” Brezan said.

Sfenni passed a tablet to him. He named a sum.

Brezan didn’t bother to hide his contempt. “Fine.”

As promised, Sfenni’s instructions were easy to follow. Brezan made note of the fancy accounting tricks. They weren’t far off what he’d already known.

“Excellent,” Sfenni said. “We’ll get you settled while that goes through. For our mutual protection, you understand. Do you want me to have more brandy sent up to you while you wait?”

Tempting to make Sfenni waste the stuff, but... “That won’t be necessary,” Brezan said as diplomatically as he could manage. His parents would have been proud of him.

Sfenni tapped out a summons on his terminal. After an agonizing wait, the tasseled woman appeared again. “Hi there,” she said with no sign of diminished cheer. “What do you have for me now, Sfenni?”

“Take our guest somewhere comfortable to wait,” Sfenni said. “Make sure he’s fed, hydrated, the usual. I absolutely must deal with that damnable Vidona envoy now.”

“Sure thing,” the woman said, and dimpled at Brezan.

Fuck, he hoped she wasn’t flirting with him. Not because she didn’t attract him, but because she did, and right now he desperately needed fewer distractions in his life. Thankfully, the woman left it at that.

They took the lift again, to an entirely different level. To distract himself from his misgivings, he cataloged the decor. Whoever had decorated this level liked monochromatic paintings of ice planets bordered by dizzying fractal swirls. Nice work: Brezan wasn’t artistic himself, but his youngest father was a children’s illustrator with a chronic inability to look at artwork without vivisecting it.

By the time they arrived at the waiting room, it had already been set up with a tray of little dishes, everything from a bowl of noodles topped with half a boiled egg to platters of sliced fruit. Even a shelf of books that Brezan had no intention of touching. The room was overwhelmingly blue-and-cream, so soothing that Brezan’s shoulder blades itched.

“And that’s that,” the woman said. “Anything I can provide to make this less aggravating?” She dimpled again, hopefully.

Tempting, but—“No, I’m fine,” Brezan said. His dilemma wasn’t her fault.

“All right, then. I’ll fetch you later.”

Brezan had just enough time to sag into a damnably comfortable chair and wonder what it would be like to go through life so blithely. Then, appallingly, he fell asleep. He woke up an indeterminate amount of time later with a horrible crick in his neck. The remnants of the peach brandy tasted foul, although he had scarcely touched it. And the tasseled woman was nowhere in sight.

Deliberately, Brezan hauled himself up, stalked over to the wall, and began writing on it with his finger:

over and over again, like a children’s writing lesson. Could handwriting be sarcastic?

The waiting room opened into a compact but complete bathroom. He knew what this implied about how long they planned to stash him here. He demanded to talk to someone in charge. This didn’t work, but he hadn’t expected it to.

Resigned, he ate the food. Pure military practicality. Besides, that milk-and-carrot pudding was tasty. He’d have to try to duplicate it if he ever got out of here, which was looking increasingly unlikely.

More waiting. More food trays, always deposited through a slit that looked like it would guillotine his hands if he put one in. More sleeping in chairs, in spite of his resolution to do better. His sergeant back in academy would have been ashamed of him. The next time he saw General Khiruev, he swore he would apologize for ever thinking of watch repair as a frivolous hobby and ask for engineering lessons.

Finally, scant moments before he tried ramming the door with his shoulder, the kind of stupid stunt even a Kel would only do in a Kel joke when trapped in a Shuos building, the tasseled woman showed up.

“There you are,” she said, as if she hadn’t been the one to deposit him here. “Let’s go!”

She might have made small talk on the way to Sfenni’s office. Brezan responded with distracted grunts. Still, he envied her the ability to be unoffended by his terrible manners.

“Sfenni,” the woman said once they’d made it to the office with its menagerie of books. “Here he is. Enjoy!”

Her teasing voice would have made Brezan smile grudgingly at her on another day, but not today.

“There’s been a complication,” Sfenni said as soon as the door shut behind Brezan.

Brezan’s heart sank. Sfenni wanted another bribe, the wormfucker. Which could be managed. That wasn’t an issue in itself, since at this rate he was going to die of exasperation before retirement became pressing. But what guarantee did he have that Sfenni wouldn’t string this out until Brezan was broke, and all without ever delivering the promised terminal access?

FOXES ARE COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY, indeed.

“It’s your turn to listen,” Brezan said coldly, without bothering to sit, no matter how much his legs would have appreciated it. Out of habit, he stuck to the polite forms of verbs, and the more-or-less polite pronouns. “I bet you know to the hundredth how much I have left in my primary account, and my obligatory health and retirement accounts, and my independent investments, and everybloodything else. Just clean it all out and buy yourself a few libraries, or hell, hire yourself a planet of bookbinders. I need to get that warning out. Name your price. The real one this time.”

Sfenni didn’t blink at this outburst. But then, who knew how many just like it he had weathered? Instead, matter-of-fact, he slid his tablet across the desk. “I know you hawks are used to the big, wallopingly fancy terminals that look like ancient shrines from back when people sacrificed chickens to fox spirits,” he said, “but this is a Shuos model, and it is secured.”

The hexarchate’s six-spoked wheel with its faction emblems sheened gold-silver-bronze against the black of the tablet’s display. Sfenni said, “I’ll leave the room so you can make your call. You’ll be monitored in the sense that alarms will go off if you try to set anything on fire—which I don’t recommend, by the way, I’m positive some of that paper is made of weird toxic shit—but otherwise you’ll be left alone. Believe me, don’t believe me, it’s all one to me.”

“Then what do you mean, ‘complication’?” Brezan said, because he couldn’t let well enough alone. What he should have done was snatch up the tablet, although admittedly he expected it to be rigged to zap him. Shuos Sfenni, collector of bribes, gardener of books. What had changed? “I don’t understand.”

“We received word that the Swanknot swarm had been subverted about a month ago,” Sfenni said. “You’ve been out of it for a few weeks.”

Brezan hissed in despair.

“We only found out about your outlandish claim to be a personal agent of Shuos Zehun’s because an analyst was double-checking the usual torrent of nonsense messages to find something especially funny to tell their teammates about. Your story was sufficiently odd that we looked into the matter. We figured we’d better evaluate your motives before dumping you back on the Kel, because it was clear that you’d had some kind of breakdown. Let’s not kid ourselves, Kel Medical’s solution to broken birds is usually to throw them in the stewpot.”

“And—?” Brezan said, flabbergasted.

“Let me guess,” Sfenni said. “You couldn’t get anyone to believe a crashhawk”—Brezan didn’t bother correcting him—”so you played up a glancing connection to Shuos Zehun back in academy in the hopes of getting your warning out. It’s the Immolation Fox, isn’t it?”

The world shuddered dark. “General Jedao,” Brezan said. “Jedao’s made his move and I’m too late.”

“Don’t be like that,” Sfenni said kindly. “Any information you have might yet be useful in putting down the hawkfucker for good. Now, go ahead and make that report. And don’t bother looking for the green pills in the desk unless you’re into foul-tasting rubbish. They’re not real anxiety medications, and something tells me that placebos don’t do you a whit of good.”