Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

KHIRUEV HAD NEVER expected her intimate, if eccentric, acquaintance with curio stores to come in handy during swarm operations. In particular, she had learned more about the art of dickering than she had realized. She missed high table when Station Tankut Primary responded to her suggestion that they negotiate over repairs and supplies, and she was currently in the command center examining their latest offer.

Colonel Najjad of Logistics was shooting her looks of dismay. Najjad had obviously hoped to get their own raw materials so they could print their own components rather than relying on the station to do it for them at exorbitant rates. Khiruev and the crew’s conventional assets had been frozen by the Andan, but they were still able to sell combat data on the Hafn to the black market and, of all things, independent dramatists and historians. However, there was only so far Khiruev could push the station chief, who was not a Kel. Indeed, the fact that the station chief had no faction affiliation, plus Tankut’s reputation for black market dealings, was what had led Jedao and Khiruev to pick it.

The station chief, a woman with excellent teeth and a smile she used with needle precision, was awaiting Khiruev’s response. Khiruev made a few adjustments to the list and sent it back. “Final offer,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll take our chances selling Hafn trophies to private collectors directly.” That was not entirely an idle threat. She was getting curious as to what some of those odd engine components would bring. Someone had mentioned the caskets, but she had quashed that notion the moment it was brought to her attention.

“Pleasure doing business,” the stationer said, sounding sincere. “I’ve sent over local regulations. Ensure that your people stick to them while we get working on this.”

The grid ran through the document and found only a few sections that deviated from common practice, none of which Khiruev expected to cause trouble. Jedao had agreed with her that contact with the locals be kept to the minimum necessary to ensure resupply. “The pleasure is mine,” Khiruev said dryly. “I’ll keep this place in mind in case I ever decide my real calling is to be a smuggler.”

The station chief grinned before signing off.

“What,” Khiruev said in response to Najjad’s glum expression, “you never used to fantasize about running off and becoming a pirate? This is what it’d be like.”

“In the dramas they’re never short on matter printers as much as we are,” Najjad muttered. “But I guess there’s no help for it.”

Khiruev paused in the middle of composing a report for Jedao. “Look at it from the station’s point of view. They’re risking excommunication by dealing with us.”

“I doubt it’s anything that altruistic. More like they’re being paid by the local Shuos authorities to plant some bugs. Or currying favor with whoever is closest so we’ll be inclined to protect them from the Hafn. Or, possibly, planning to sell us out to the foreigners.”

“Above my pay grade,” Khiruev said deliberately.

Najjad stiffened. It was subtle, but Khiruev had been watching for it. By this point, everyone in the swarm knew that she had invoked Vrae Tala. She wouldn’t be surprised if there were betting pools as to whether she’d make it to the end of her hundred days. Najjad was civil about it, but he clearly didn’t approve.

They exchanged a few more words on the workarounds they’d needed to institute due to the absence of their Nirai and Shuos personnel. Then Jedao interrupted with a summons for Khiruev, atypically laconic: “Come now.”

Khiruev looked at Commander Janaia, who had spent the last hour meeting her eyes only when she had to. “Let me know if the stationers take us up on the offer of tacky souvenirs,” Khiruev said.

“Naturally, sir,” Janaia said, quite formally.

Khiruev sighed to herself. She couldn’t blame Janaia. Khiruev had damned the swarm. Assuming they survived the whole tangled mess, even if Janaia hadn’t had any say in Khiruev’s decision, Kel Command was unlikely to regard her charitably. Khiruev’s threadbare consolation was the knowledge that Janaia would carry out every order faultlessly, even if she found a loophole somewhere. She was that kind of Kel.

When Khiruev reported in, Jedao was playing an unfamiliar board game with three servitors. Khiruev saluted, bemused by how much more lively the receiving room felt with the servitors’ presence, even though it was hardly cramped by any reasonable standard and the rooms had seen their share of past servitor traffic on more usual chores. Besides the servitors—a mothform and two lizardforms—the terminal was surrounded by paperwork pertaining to the swarm’s provisioning, documents neatly arranged in a grid and casting a faint pale light over the walls and floor. Curiously, a mathematical paper was imaged over to the side.

Khiruev waited. Jedao was pondering a game token stamped with a trefoil knot. “At ease,” Jedao said without looking at her. “Damnation,” he said to the mothform, “you weren’t kidding about that gambit. Teach me to run off my mouth about odds around people better at math than I am.”

The servitor responded with an amused flurry of pink-and-yellow lights.

“Anyway,” Jedao said, “you’ll have to pardon me for a—” Jedao’s terminal flashed a code that Khiruev didn’t recognize. “Another one? I’d better see to this.” Khiruev jerked her chin toward the door, wondering whether she should withdraw, but Jedao said, “No, stay.”

The message started with a confusing snowfall of static and gradually coalesced into a woman with long hair and a habit of gnawing on the end of her stylus. Eventually they found out that she was Researcher Nirai Maholarion of Station Anner 56-5. More interestingly, the recording wasn’t an official report, but a compilation of notes she had made while debating whether to recommend to her superiors that her data be forwarded to the Kel, even if the Kel had loftier matters on their mind.

Jedao had her preliminary abstract image itself so Khiruev could get a good look at it. “We’ve had a few of these come in from various stations,” he said. “I can read basic scan, but these don’t look like any formants I’ve seen in 400 years. You got anything?”

The scan data weren’t Khiruev’s immediate concern. She had gotten distracted by the last part of the video, which showed Maholarion absently handing off a stack of data solids to a mothform servitor. She had thought that Mevru solids were obsolete, but maybe the Nirai used them for reasons of backwards compatibility.

“Just how reliable are your sources, sir?” Khiruev said. She was betting that, over in the command center, Communications had no knowledge of these notes, or the other reports Jedao had alluded to. And how had he suborned these people to begin with?

“They’re reliable enough to satisfy me,” Jedao said.

She could take the hint. Khiruev considered the scan readings, then paged through the accompanying analysis. “I’m impressed they detected this at all, even with state-of-the-art noise cancellation.” She highlighted the relevant portions of the paper.

Jedao looked politely blank. “I can’t read most of that notation.” He jabbed at an example.

Khiruev had been afraid of that. “It shows up in that paper you were looking at,” she said. “See?” She highlighted it in gold. As a point of fact, the treatise looked more difficult by orders of magnitude.

Jedao grimaced. “That wasn’t me. The servitors were having a side-argument about some theorem. I thought it meant they would be too distracted to pay attention to the ambush I was so cleverly setting in the game, so I let them have at it. No such luck, oh well.”

The mothform blinked in blue and purple this time, with a suspiciously smug flash of red.

“It could be some stray new astronomical phenomenon,” Khiruev said, “but the researcher seemed to think it might be a side-effect of the Hafn tearing around our space.”

“I hope it’s a scan glitch,” Jedao said, “but multiple reports from independent observers? We’re not going to get so lucky. Anyway, I’m going to pass that on to Scan and Doctrine and see what they make of it. This wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about, however. Tell me, General, what do you know about Devenay Ragath?”

Devenay—suddenly Khiruev was concerned. “You don’t mean Colonel Kel Ragath?” she said. “I had heard that he was assigned to your campaign at the Fortress of Scattered Needles.”

“That’s correct,” Jedao said, “but I didn’t ask you what I know. I’m hoping you can tell me what’s in your brain.”

“He has training as a historian and he’s very well-regarded,” Khiruev said, “although I have never had the honor of working with him myself.”

“Hmm,” was all Jedao said to that. “Well, listen to this.”

It seemed to be a day for listening to things. In response to Jedao’s gesture, a video blazed up, displacing a summary of casualties in Tactical Group Four. The man in the video was definitely Ragath, with his long jaw, narrow eyes, and cynical slash of a mouth, but he wasn’t in uniform. Instead, he wore a dark brown jacket over a taupe shirt. Khiruev’s disquiet increased.

“This message is addressed to General Cheris,” Ragath said, “by a communications channel I trust she will find satisfactory.”

Khiruev was jolted into studying Jedao anew. That body had never belonged to Jedao to begin with. It had belonged to a Kel woman, who had probably never imagined that she’d end up hosting a traitor’s ghost.

The message was still playing. Jedao had trained his regard on Khiruev’s face, his expression coolly considering. Khiruev made herself go blank and returned her attention to the message.

“If the fox general has taught you anything,” Ragath was saying, “you’re wondering how I survived and where the trap is in this. I regret to say I owe the former to a couple of chance fuck-ups. I was supposed to be on the Badger’s Stripes when the bomb hit the swarm, but thanks to a riot on the Fortress I was delayed getting to my shuttle.”

Khiruev paused the message without Jedao’s permission. Jedao’s eyebrows rose. “Sir,” Khiruev said, “he must be a deserter.” She didn’t say crashhawk. “I don’t understand how—”

“Keep listening,” Jedao said, and unpaused playback.

“I left the Fortress at the earliest opportunity,” Ragath said. “It so happens that Kel Command frequently neglects to issue orders to the dead, something I imagine we both found handy. At this point, you’re wondering what I have to offer you. I wasn’t sure of that myself, once I learned that you’d survived. But if you’re doing what I think you’re doing, some of this information will help you. I will attempt to report in again if I find anything else you should know, but I don’t expect to live long. Devenay Ragath out.”

“He appended an exhaustive strategic overview of the local marches and their surrounds,” Jedao said. Maybe this was the source of Jedao’s mysterious intelligence network. “I have a feeling that’s not what’s on your mind, though.”

Khiruev decided that this was an invitation to broach the subject. “Sir, Ragath appears to be under the impression that you’re Brevet General Cheris.” Was that why Ragath had broken formation? Loyalty to a dead woman?

“His mistake,” Jedao said, “but I plan to use it. If you know anything about Kel Cheris”—the offhanded way he said her name was chilling—“then you know she was an expendable infantry captain. I regretted it when the bomb killed her, but it gave me the opportunity to escape the black cradle. I was in there for a very long time, General. I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

“She can’t have been as expendable as all that if she earned the colonel’s trust,” Khiruev said. “I’ve seen the list of Ragath’s decorations. He wouldn’t have done this lightly.”

“Was it trust, or the presumption of a shared grudge? Don’t answer that.”

“What exactly is it that Ragath thinks you’re up to?”

Jedao eased himself back against one of the pillows on the couch and motioned Khiruev to sit, which she did. It amazed her every time she came in here that these rooms, which she had inhabited so recently, had completely changed character with Jedao in them. The servitors were almost done clearing the game. Jedao grabbed a token stamped with a hexagon and flipped it in the air, catching it neatly.

“I imagine Ragath thinks I’m going to conquer the galaxy and make it into a place where your superiors don’t randomly bomb an entire swarm just to off one person,” Jedao said. He tapped the token against the edge of the table. “I wish I could say this was a low bar for reform. However, our regime’s history argues otherwise. Given his background, Ragath has to be aware of that.”

He flipped the game token a few more times, then set it down with a click. “We’re going to start offering people some choices.” The humor in his smile had an edge. “Our location is no one’s secret, partly because it’s hard to pretend cows are chickens, but partly because I want us to be seen.”

Khiruev didn’t remark on this. It was the kind of thing Shuos liked to do, but no field commander lasted long without doing similar. As much as the Kel hated admitting it.

“We are shortly going to send out a transmission in the clear in all directions,” Jedao went on. “I don’t plan on going on at length. People’s nerves are already shot and I imagine their attention spans aren’t doing much better. Yes, I can see that you doubt that I’m capable of brevity, but I can manage it when I put my mind to it.”

Khiruev didn’t trust herself to respond to that.

Jedao drummed his fingers on the couch’s arm, then examined his glove. “I plan on sending an account of our engagements to date, highlighting in particular what happened at the Fortress of Spinshot Coins. We could have had the Hafn swarm there, General. It’s only thanks to hexarchate interference that we haven’t blasted the Hafn into little glowing pieces. Even now, we’re being treated as though we instigated the fireworks.” His eyes hardened. “I want it to be excruciatingly clear that we could be dealing with the invasion a lot more effectively if not for the hexarchs.”

“Sir,” Khiruev said, “the Hafn aren’t stupid. What you’re proposing—if you send out a message in the clear, you’ll make it obvious that the hexarchate is easy meat. Is this your intent?”

Jedao smiled at her. “You’re reckoning this backwards.”

She’d been afraid of that. Why alienate the populace by opening fire on them when Jedao could get the invaders to do it for him?

“It would be inconvenient for them to go home after getting their noses bloodied,” Jedao said. “They need an incentive to stay in the game. I’m giving them one. Moreover, if the Hafn are still hanging around making a nuisance of themselves, the hexarchate’s citizens will have a bright blazing excuse to think about just what protection the existing regime is offering them, and what the alternatives might be.”

Khiruev wasn’t fooled by Jedao’s casual tone. He was gambling a lot on this. “It’s my turn to be the pragmatic one,” she said. “You have only the one swarm. There are Vidona in every settlement of any size. Unless you can magically disappear all the Vidona?”

“The Vidona aren’t the biggest problem. When you get right down to it, the Vidona have a lot of toys”—Jedao’s voice dipped sardonically—“but they hardly outnumber the mass of citizens. Sufficiently motivated cadres of insurrectionists could maneuver around them, as I’m sure you realize. The biggest problem is that everyone’s too afraid to try.”

Khiruev’s mouth went dry. She had no rejoinder to the charge of cowardice because it was true.

Jedao’s tilted smile flicked at her: he was waiting for the response.

Khiruev said, after a pause of several seconds, “A lot of people will die if it works. But I imagine you have it all calculated out.”

She hadn’t meant it as a dig at Jedao’s math difficulties. But Jedao turned his hand palm-up to acknowledge the hit.

Kel Command had reprimanded Khiruev for organizing guerrilla warfare during the Wicker’s End campaign. They didn’t like the possibility of citizens getting it into their heads that techniques that bought time against entrenched heretics could be turned against their legitimate masters. Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without, but if you had any desire for a quiet life, you kept those thoughts inside your skull where the Vidona couldn’t see them.

“As much as I usually lament people’s obsession with numbers,” Jedao said, “in this instance you’re correct. But is it better to let people die at random because we flinch from anticipating the casualties, or to go into battle knowing exactly how many people we’re putting into harm’s way?”

“I don’t contest this,” Khiruev said. “I can’t figure out your angle, though.”

Jedao laughed suddenly. “The fact that a Kel general is hoping that I have a reasonable plan is cause for optimism, in its way.”

“Am I mistaken, sir?”

“The plan isn’t reasonable,” Jedao said, entirely too cavalierly. “But it has good odds. As Devenay would tell you, history forgives the winner a lot of things.”

Khiruev thought hard before she asked the next question. “Do you expect forgiveness?”

Next to the wall, the mothform and one of the lizardforms, speaking to each other in flashes of light, paused. Khiruev paid them no heed.

A shadow passed through Jedao’s eyes. “No,” he said. “I lie to myself about a lot of things, but that’s not one of them. We’re long past that point.”