Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER FIVE

KHIRUEV COULD THINK of good reasons why General Jedao might not want to corral her after the latest staff meeting, none of which implied any trust on the general’s part. Eleven days had elapsed since Jedao had claimed the swarm. Jedao had divided that time between meetings and drilling the swarm on unusual formations. For the past four days—lucky unlucky four, she couldn’t help thinking, Kel superstition—Jedao had been inviting staff officers singly to his quarters for meetings that averaged an hour and thirty-seven minutes. Khiruev was reminded of the bedtime stories of ravenous fox-spirits that Mother Allu had liked to tell. And it couldn’t be a coincidence that Jedao had ordered composite wiring shut down. Khiruev’s best guess was that he didn’t want to risk the Kel conspiring against him over a channel he couldn’t monitor, since Jedao’s body was not wired for composite work. She couldn’t blame Jedao for not wanting to risk the necessary operation.

But all the staff came out intact. Major Arvikoi, who looked terribly young even in a society where most people chose to look young, emerged with a disconcertingly pleased expression. Lieutenant Colonel Riozu’s smile was downright predatory. And Colonel Stsan, who had been Khiruev’s chief of staff, went around politely blank. She almost certainly knew that Khiruev had authored the assassination attempt.

Khiruev could trust no one, having helped get rid of the lone Kel who had stood up to Jedao. She reflected on this fact daily.

“Here we are,” Jedao said as they approached his quarters, as if nothing was wrong. Two servitors awaited them inside, sleek metal and blinking lights, a birdform and a spiderform. If Khiruev hadn’t known better, she would have said they looked sheepish. “Don’t suppose you mind playing jeng-zai with a couple servitors, General?”

“I don’t see why I should, sir,” Khiruev said. She hadn’t realized servitors had any interest in card games, but who knew what they did in their spare time?

Khiruev’s eyes were caught by a painting imaged over the table. To be fair, it was hard to miss. Jedao took one look at her face and burst out laughing. “All right, General,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

Since she had been asked for candor—“It looks like a rainbow vomited over a fragmentation grenade.”

“I like colors,” Jedao said, and the soft yearning in his voice made Khiruev shudder inside. “There are so many of them. But I won’t torture you with this any longer.” He waved a hand and the visual flicked out. “Anyway, the servitors are very firm that they don’t want me to give them money for proper betting, which is good because I’m flat broke.” He smiled suddenly. “Imagine how Kel Command would react if I asked for my back pay.”

Khiruev took the seat indicated, across from Jedao. The servitors blinked their lights at her, a friendly yellow-orange. She nodded at each in turn, feeling odd—but why not.

The spiderform passed out tokens. “Standard rules, sir?” Khiruev said. She knew better than to ask why they were wasting time on a card game. Jedao was sure to have some twisty Shuos lesson to convey. Khiruev sometimes thought that Kel-Shuos relations would improve if someone sat the Shuos down and taught them to make presentations with easy-to-read captions like normal people.

“Standard suits me fine,” Jedao said. He looked at the servitors. “You two know the rules?”

Both servitors made subdued acquiescent noises.

“If I may ask, sir,” Khiruev said, “why servitors?”

(Much later it occurred to her to wonder what the servitors themselves had made of the entire business.)

Jedao blinked. “Well, why not? We didn’t have machine sentiences when I was alive. I asked them if they had pressing duties elsewhere, and they said no.”

Servitors might not be human, but after centuries among the Kel, they must recognize commanding officer for ‘or else’ as well as anyone else. They turned out to be well-behaved jeng-zai opponents. The spiderform made no attempt to bluff. Khiruev couldn’t tell for certain, but the birdform seemed to be using a pseudorandom generator to guide its raises. Jedao, on the other hand—

Khiruev shook her head as Jedao flipped over the latest card to reveal a Four of Roses. It was just as well that they were playing with tokens. “Sir,” she said, “the odds of you drawing to an inner Splendor of Flowers three times in a row are—”

“—some number so tiny you can’t inscribe it with a needle, yes,” Jedao said, leaning back and smiling crookedly.

The birdform made a small cheeping sound. The spiderform drew its legs in.

“I’m glad somebody finally called me on it,” Jedao said. “I was starting to wonder what the hell I’d have to do to get a Kel to crack. Anyway, bad form to cheat when no real money’s involved. Not that that stopped some of my classmates. You have my apologies.”

“That’s not necessary, sir.”

“Of course it’s necessary.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because,” Jedao said, gathering all the cards up and squaring them in his hands, “we’re not fighting Kel. We’re fighting people whose only interest in Kel rules of engagement is to tie us in knots with them. They’re going to cheat. Which means we have to cheat better.”

Jedao laid the deck down. “I have a certain personal interest that you may not be aware of,” he added. “It was long ago and no one has any reason to remember it, but my world-of-birth was conquered by the Hafn a long time ago, and it passed out of the heptarchate’s control.”

“I don’t think I ever knew that,” Khiruev said.

“As I said, no reason you should.” Jedao’s voice held no sentiment, but Khiruev wondered. “Anyway, if the records aren’t lying about your victory at Wicker’s End, you don’t need me to explain the value of unconventional warfare to you.”

“Surely you didn’t miss the part where they reprimanded me for my actions,” Khiruev said. She had taken a reduction to half-pay for four years, and had barely escaped a demotion.

“You won.”

“My methods didn’t sufficiently conform to Doctrine. Kel Command had every right to—”

Jedao laughed shortly. “Kel Command would rather pin medals on corpses than on people who survived by doing the sensible thing. Still, I’m crazy, so who am I to talk?”

“There’s no point in saving the hexarchate’s citizens if they’re going to fall prey to heresy,” Khiruev said carefully.

“Where in Doctrine does it say that it’s wrong to teach people to organize themselves against an insurrection instead of waiting for the people in pretty uniforms to show up and do the hard work?”

“The isolation of Wicker’s End made it an unusual case, sir. If there had been another way—”

“As they used to say at Shuos Academy, ‘Counterfactuals never feed the children’. Which is hilarious coming from us, but never mind.” Jedao slammed his hand on the table, causing some of the cards to slide down from the pile, and got up. “I’ve poked about the mothgrid and I’ve quizzed your staff heads and I’ve been putting in calls to the moth commanders and driving them to distraction, and now I’m asking you. Where the fuck is our intelligence on the Hafn?”

“Sir,” Khiruev said, bracing herself, “we’re telling you very little because very little is all we know.”

“That’s remarkably unfunny.”

“It’s the truth.” She would have liked to produce a file for Jedao’s delectation, if only to have Jedao’s attention on an actual enemy. “All we have are old scraps of history—” She remembered what Jedao had revealed, but Jedao only shrugged. “—and a few notes that the Andan deigned to share from a cultural exchange several years back. If you read between the lines, the Andan are pretty baffled themselves.”

“I saw those fascinating treatises on the Hafn reverence for the agrarian lifestyle, not to mention all the pastoral poetry. Fucking peculiar for spacefarers, not to mention their descriptions of milking machines are bizarre—who writes poetry about milking machines?—but I agree that the Andan are no help. Which is a shame, because they’re the ones with the contact specialists and if they’re stuck, we’re not likely to do much better.”

Khiruev tried to remember if she’d read anything about milking machines.

Her question must have been evident, because Jedao said deprecatingly, “The descriptions can’t be anything else. My mother made me learn to milk cows the old-fashioned way even though the research facility had perfectly good machines for it. You would be surprised how many ridiculous footnotes there are in my life.”

This is not the strangest thing I have ever heard, Khiruev told herself, not with a whole deal of conviction.

Jedao was grinning at her. “I should tell you more about my mother sometime. She was something of an eccentric. She liked to watch those dramas where giant things with tentacles invade from gate-space and the only survivors are stalwart country people with big guns and loyal, delicious farm animals. I’m hoping the Hafn aren’t like my mother. That would be disturbing.”

Too bad the servitors seemed disinclined to rescue them from this line of thought. “Sir,” Khiruev said, “if you think any of us are withholding vital information from you, then you may as well shoot us all. We’ve told you all we know.”

“You’ve got to get over that Kel thing where you offer to commit suicide just to make a point,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t looking at Khiruev. “The Hafn are technically human, so I wish I could assume some basic motivations, but ‘human’ covers a lot of ground. What I do know is that their attack on the Fortress of Scattered Needles almost succeeded. We want to blow them up before they unleash the next awful thing, but to do that we need more information. Which means getting them to talk to us.”

“Crescendo 2,” Khiruev said flatly. “Crescendo 3. Knifer.”

Khiruev had seen a great deal of war in her career. It wasn’t a secret that the hexarchate was perennially one rebellion away from sputtering into pieces. Even heretics’ weapons, however, tended to fall into well-understood classifications. Between Rahal regulations and the work of the Vidona, heresies rarely had the opportunity to metastasize into truly degenerate forms.

The Hafn had an entire society based on an alien calendar, and their worlds must be likewise alien. The Andan had spoken of delegates who cared a great deal about etiquette, but the delegates had been aristocrats, and who knew what the rest of the culture looked like.

The first time Khiruev had seen the videos of the attack on Crescendo 3, she had thought they must have been concocted by a dramatist. Towers upon towers of crystal, great jagged spires and spiraling steps held up only by glittering webs. Vast singing storms and rains that left charred spatter marks on rocks. Red-blue trees that writhed upright, then collapsed, crawling into frenzies with their fellows. The analysts had concluded that the tree-things with their ugly chambered hearts had once been people. Which begged the question: did non-aristocratic Hafn resemble people as they existed in the hexarchate? While the Shuos and Andan went in for body-modding, even they acknowledged certain boundaries.

“I watched everything I could drag out of the mothgrid, yes,” Jedao said.

“People who launch unprovoked attacks without making any attempt to communicate are unlikely to be interested in negotiation.”

Jedao was pacing. There was an odd hitch in his stride, as though he hadn’t gotten used to the length of his legs. Entirely possible, given the circumstances. “I agree with you there. But guns talk. Moths talk. Everything has something to say if you know how to—”

“Command center to General Jedao,” Communications’ voice said from the terminal. “Hafn contact. Commander Janaia requests your presence.”

“General Khiruev and I are on our way,” Jedao said. “You two,” he said to the servitors, “thanks for humoring me. See you some other time if we all live?”

It must be nice not to have to respond to jokes like that. Khiruev followed Jedao out. The servitors blinked respectfully, then began cleaning up the cards that had been spilled.

The cindermoth had rearranged its corridors so their route to the command center was short and direct. Khiruev disliked the accompanying sense of vertigo. In her dreams she was always convinced that the floors would gnash open to reveal the teeth of eager gears, but Jedao gave no sign of discomfort.

Commander Janaia saluted them on behalf of the command center’s crew. “Hafn outriders of some sort, sir. Scoutmoth 7 is staying at maximum scan. Formants are a mess. Hard to tell whether they’ve spotted us.”

“All moths on combat alert,” Jedao said. Red light washed from all the terminal boundaries. He took the command chair and studied the scan readings while the webbing secured him. Khiruev took her place to the general’s right, feeling redundant.

“Oh, don’t look like that,” Jedao murmured. “I have every intention of making use of you.”

How serious was he? “If you want information from the Hafn,” Khiruev said, “now’s the time. It’s not any secret to them that they have an enemy swarm incoming. Assume they’ve spotted us and probe them for their capabilities.”

“Agreed,” Jedao said, half-smiling. “Communications, get me Commander Kavinte.”

That was the commander of Singe the Hour, lead bannermoth of Tactical Group Five. “I should warn you that she’s argumentative, sir,” Khiruev said.

“Yes, I saw that in her profile.”

“Singe the Hour responding, sir,” Communications said, and forwarded the call to Jedao’s terminal.

Commander Kavinte had an overly pretty face, all symmetry and graceful nuance, until you got to her eyes. The intimation of casual ruthlessness in her eyes reminded Khiruev of Jedao, now that she thought about it. “General,” Kavinte said.

“We have no idea how many Hafn are out there because their mothdrives fuck up our readings,” Jedao said with cheerful bluntness, “and for that matter who knows the range on their scan, either. Want to help me figure it out?”

“Sir,” Kavinte said crushingly, “you’re our general. You don’t have to put it to a vote. Just give the order already before the Hafn notice we’re dithering and call their friends.”

“Oh, I never put anything to votes,” Jedao said, “but your brain is a resource and I intend to use it as one. You want to prove to me how good Tactical Five is at Lexicon Secondary?”

Lexicon Primary referred to the formations that the Kel were benchmarked against in drill, and which they used in battle. Lexicon Secondary mostly contained formations that were of historical interest, or that were trotted out for colorful effects in parades and during celebrations. Kavinte had a standing interest in obscure formations. Khiruev had been guessing that that was why Jedao had singled her out.

“We’re Kel, sir,” Kavinte said. “We’ll execute whatever you have in mind.” There was more than a hint of challenge in her words.

“Good to know.” Jedao adjusted some figures on his tactical subdisplay, considered them, then looked up. “Tactical Five, assume formation Swallow Braves the Thorns. Once you’re in formation, approach the long axis of the outrider spindle exactly head-on until you’re at extreme scan range. Scoutmoth 7 will withdraw to—” He named the coordinates. “All other tactical groups, assume grand formation Harrower Hawk with forward central null and the command moth as primary pivot. Moth commanders acknowledge.”

The terminal lit up with acknowledgments in neat amber columns corresponding to the tactical groups and scoutmoth flights. Commander Janaia’s eyes were alight. She turned to her executive officer and began giving orders.

Khiruev wished she felt as sanguine. She was certain that Swallow Braves the Thorns was a test for the Hafn. It was a flashy parade formation from Lexicon Secondary, but if you didn’t see the disposition of the rear elements, it could be mistaken for Wave-Breaker from Lexicon Primary.

Tactical Five reported that it had reached extreme scan range and that the Hafn moths’ formants didn’t look any clearer, but the Hafn didn’t seem to be reacting, either.

Jedao tapped out a calculation. “General Jedao to Tactical Five. I want you to maintain formation and advance at 19% of your secondary drive. Alert me the moment you get a reaction, and also report your distance from their leading elements at that time.” To Khiruev, he said, “Odd that they’re just maintaining their distance. Can they not see Tactical Five, or is it a trap?”

Khiruev had her mind on something else. She had a clear view of Jedao’s calculation. One of the systems of modulo congruences that Jedao had asked the grid to solve for him was something that any first-year cadet should have been able to do in his head, by inspection. The general couldn’t—but now wasn’t the time to ask. Khiruev looked away and told herself that her unease was baseless, but she was honestly surprised that Jedao was weak in abstract algebra.

“Commander Janaia,” Jedao was saying, “I’ve forwarded you a series of waypoints. Advance, but keep Tactical Five within eighteen minutes of the swarm at current acceleration at all times.”

“Sir,” Janaia said, and gave the necessary orders to Navigation.

“Incoming from Commander Kavinte,” Communications said.

“Put her on,” Jedao said.

“General,” Kavinte said, “we got a reaction when our leading element tripped past forty-nine Hafn ayyan.” She gave the hexarchate distance conversion. A databurst accompanied the transmission with further details. “No attack still, but look at this—”

The close-up scan data showed the Hafn outrider positions relative to each other, stretched into the shape of a curving dish with Tactical Five’s axis of advance pointed straight at its center. Khiruev wasn’t a scan specialist, but she could tell that the formants were better defined than before, giving them a better idea of the individual outriders’ locations. Just as interestingly, Tactical Five had intercepted signals from a number of outriders. It didn’t take much triangulation to deduce the region of space those signals were aimed at.

“Forward transmissions to Intelligence,” Jedao said, “although I don’t expect fast results. Commander Kavinte, I have another formation for you. Try Every Mirror Is a Flatterer and approach the outrider dish’s focal point.”

“Sir,” Khiruev said, “that will allow the Hafn units to focus fire on Tactical Five. If they have real guns”—Hafn units had respectable invariant weaponry, last she’d checked—“it could get ugly.”

“I understand the concern,” Jedao said, “but here’s the thing. You notice how they’ve been moving?” He played back some of the observations. “I don’t think those outriders are human. I think they’re geese.”

Khiruev caught Janaia’s eye when Jedao returned his attention to the scan record. Is he out of his mind? Janaia mouthed. Khiruev could only shrug.

“You have your orders, Commander Kavinte,” Jedao said. “If I’m right, the geese will let down their guard when they see the configuration. You’ll have ample opportunity to blast holes in them. I’m as much for that as the next soldier, but capture a few intact if you can. Give our engineers something to take apart.”

“Acknowledged, sir,” Kavinte said in a tone of dour resignation.

Jedao cocked his head at Khiruev. “You’re convinced I’ve lost it.”

Or getting rid of a commander who annoyed him, but Khiruev couldn’t express that out loud. “If it’s not a trap, then I don’t know what it is,” Khiruev said. “Although it’s possible that their scan has short range because it’s operating in hostile calendrical terrain.” The Hafn weapons were all fired at short range in previous engagements, but they’d discussed this before and she didn’t need to remind Jedao of it now. “Perhaps they’re attempting to deceive us as to their capabilities.” She kept an eye on Tactical Five’s movements in the subdisplay. “No one with two brain cells is going to fall for Every Mirror.”

Every Mirror Was a Flatterer was an illusion generator specifically affecting the swarm’s scan formants rather than direct visuals, which meant it wasn’t even useful for impressing civilians. The Kel never bothered with it in battle because the illusion only was visible from such a short distance that any enemy with halfway decent scan would already have spotted you first. No one would mistake them for Hafn at this point.

“Didn’t say the outriders were stupid,” Jedao said. “I said they were geese. Excellent sentries, geese, for what they are. Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’ve clearly never had to beat off an offended gander with a stick.” He leaned forward. “There we go, that’s the last pivot moving into place.”

The Hafn outriders, faced with what were apparently more Hafn outriders, began adjusting themselves to form a greater—Khiruev couldn’t help thinking of it as a flock.

“It makes no sense, sir,” Janaia said. “Why use rather stupid drones for your advance warning system?”

Tactical Five knew an advantageous situation when it met one. The subdisplays were suddenly crowded with reports of fire. Impossible to tell whether Jedao’s request for captive outriders would be honored amid that mess of hellfire and kinetics.

“The Andan made no mention of Hafn servitors,” Khiruev said, “only pre-sentients. Maybe the Hafn lag in that area of technology.”

“If they could get into the Fortress of Scattered Needles,” Jedao said, “stealing some invariant technology wouldn’t have been difficult.” His mouth curled sardonically. “For all we know, there’s some peculiar cultural prejudice at work.”

Commander Kavinte issued terse periodic reports. Janaia’s eyes had a decidedly longing look at being left out of the shooting. Her executive officer’s expression was unreadable, but that was Muris for you. He could be counted on to be businesslike about everything. The operation had so overwhelmed the outriders that Khiruev expected something with long, serrated teeth to materialize behind her shoulder as a way of ensuring cosmic justice.

Eventually Kavinte said, “Sir, most of the outriders blew themselves up rather than be captured. We’ll send you our reports when we have a better analysis. But the scoutmoths managed to retrieve one of them in the confusion before they figured out what was up.”

“Good work,” Jedao said. “My compliments to your people. Crack the thing open, but use every precaution. For all we know, there are death spores or haunts inside.”

Kavinte laughed at that. “All the more fun for us.”

“Pull back Tactical Five and fill our null for us while you’re at it. Just in case the Hafn main swarm is much faster or nearer than we reckoned on.”

“Of course, sir.”

Three hours and twelve minutes passed before the next call. “General Jedao,” Communications said, “a message from Commander Kavinte. Your eyes only.”

“This can’t be good,” Jedao said, although his tone was more annoyed than worried. “I’ll hear it in my quarters. General Khiruev, let me know if anything exciting happens.”

“Sir,” Khiruev said.

Exactly one hour after that, Jedao called Khiruev in the command center. “Come see me,” Jedao said. That was all.

“I hope it’s not death spores,” Janaia remarked.

“I don’t think anyone could keep death spores secret from the whole swarm,” Khiruev said. “I’d better see what the issue is.”

“Better you than me,” Janaia said. They shared a chuckle. Muris exuded disapproval, ever so faintly.

The door to Jedao’s quarters opened at Khiruev’s approach. Jedao stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring at something angled so Khiruev couldn’t yet see it in any detail. Khiruev saluted and waited.

“At ease,” Jedao said. “You know, I always hated it when my commanding officers told me to be frank. But hell, I’m going to ask you to be frank.

“I have spent most of an unnaturally long life doing horrible things to people. Assassination. Torture. Treason. Mass murder. It doesn’t sound like anything when you pare it down to such a short list, but those were real people. It was—I did real harm. Which is the long way of saying that my personal metric for horrible things is not calibrated right. I need you to tell me how bad this thing is that I’m going to show you.”

Khiruev considered this, then decided that honesty wouldn’t cost her anything. “Sir,” she said, “I’m a high officer. I got to my present rank by doing many of the same things you did.”

“Just humor me, General. I’d like to believe that someone in this damn swarm is a better human being than I am.”

“Then show me whatever it is.”

Jedao gestured for Khiruev to come around and stand next to him. The video had been taken by the engineering team on Singe the Hour. Jedao fast-forwarded past the decontamination precautions to the part where the team breached the casket. There wasn’t a better word for the object. On the lid of the casket shone a golden plaque. It was engraved with an archaic form of the Hafn script, which Khiruev recognized but couldn’t read. The border featured an elaborate design of unfamiliar flowers, fruit, and feathers entwined in knotwork. When she looked more closely, she could see odd cavorting insects worked into the design, and what looked suspiciously like cat’s cradle figures.

The technicians in their suits had worked out how to remove the lid from the casket. It came off with a whisper of blue-violet vapor. Someone had appended a note saying that they were still studying the gas, but preliminary results said it was not toxic. It took Khiruev a long moment to understand what she saw within the casket. Jedao kept silent.

The first thing Khiruev noticed was the care with which the components—she struggled for a better term—had been laid out. Beautiful long-necked birds of a type she had never seen before, their curling crests arranged just so. Flowers whose petals moved as though they were breathing. Filaments of gold and crystal threading in and out of flesh and stem, eventually winding their way to the circuit-inscribed walls of the casket.

In the center of the casket was a boy, or a very young man. At various junctures, his flesh was pale and translucent. A complicated circulatory system grew out of the translucent regions and joined him to the birds, the flowers, the filaments. The veins were also translucent, and an endless procession of small red spiders crawled through them.

In one hand he clutched a faded purple cord tied into a loop. It was exactly the right length for cat’s cradle, and it was the only item in the casket that didn’t look expensively contrived.

Jedao paused playback. “They got medics in there,” he said, almost in a normal voice, “but the boy—the whole whatever-it-is—went into cardiac arrest or the equivalent. They shoved him into a jury-rigged sleeper unit, but I don’t think there’s any hope.”

Khiruev had vaguely assumed that Jedao was one of those people who disliked children since she’d never heard any mention in the histories that Jedao had fathered any. The shadow of anguish in Jedao’s eyes made her reconsider.

Jedao was looking into the distance. “Tell me, General, what the fuck are we fighting? What’s so wrong with the Hafn calendar that this is their best way of making masses of scouts?”

“If they’re like us,” Khiruev said, “they’re locked into their existing calendar for exotic technologies they can’t bear to give up, and that means they’re stuck with some bloody awful options in other areas.”

“Tell me you didn’t know about this,” Jedao said.

“I didn’t know about this,” Khiruev said. “It must be a new development permitting this invasion, or an old one they were hiding from us as a trump card. But it wouldn’t have made a difference. We’re Kel. We fight where we’re told. I understood that you already wanted to fight the Hafn.”

Jedao turned the video off. “Khiruev—”

The sudden use of her name made her wary.

“—if I ever think it’s all right to do that to someone, shoot me. I don’t care how rational I make it sound. I have a history of sounding very rational, and we all know where that ends.”

Astonishing: Jedao sounded sincere. “I hope the boy’s death was quick, sir,” Khiruev said.

“Someday I would like to live in a world where people can aspire to something better than caskets and being sewn up with birds and quick deaths.”

“If you want to fight for that, the swarm is yours.”

“I’d say that I’ll try not to abuse the privilege,” Jedao said, “but we’re past that point.”

Khiruev stood with him after that, wondering when she had started to see Jedao as a human being and not a death sentence.