Raven Stratagem

by Yoon Ha Lee

  She sat.

  Jedao crossed his arms. “I’m not unaware of the effect that formation instinct is having on you right now, General, but I need you to pay attention to what I’m saying with your actual brain and not the part of your brain that’s going to ‘sir’ me to death. If you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Khiruev stared at Jedao’s holstered gun. “I’ve betrayed you, sir,” she rasped. “My death is yours.”

  “That’s not the salient point, General.”

  Khiruev tried to make sense of the statement. For that matter, Jedao was being awfully conscientious about addressing her by her rank. What was going on?

  Jedao’s eyes were very cold. “You fucked up, General. You got two of ours killed. If that’s the standard needler unit, then it holds twelve rounds and we’re lucky it jammed so more people didn’t die.”

  Khiruev shook at the contempt in Jedao’s voice.

  “I’m not unaware of my reputation. I really did slaughter a Kel army. So I’m not unaware that the Kel have a million reasons to want me dead.

  “But I meant it when I said I was going to fight the Hafn.” Jedao’s mouth twisted. “Shooting people is one of the few things I’m good at. It’s the only way I can make amends. And to do that, I need soldiers, not corpses.”

  “Sir,” Khiruev whispered, and couldn’t think of what to say after that.

  “I used to be a Shuos agent,” Jedao said in a more normal tone of voice, which made Khiruev’s heart freeze. “Didn’t stay at it long before transferring to the Kel, but you’d be surprised how many assassinations you can pull off in eight months if your heptarch insists. There were Kel between me and the drone, including yourself. Given formation instinct, you needed to get me alone. You could have sent the drone after me on the way to the conference room, assuming you had it available then. You were half a step behind me, but you might have been able to submerge formation instinct long enough to keep from tackling me or some damn thing while it went to work. I assume you didn’t build in a weapon with better penetration for lack of appropriate parts. Anyway, it would have had a clear shot at my back. If you’d done this in a semi-competent fashion, you’d have your swarm back and those officers would still be alive.”

  Khiruev’s first thought was that of all the things she had expected of this conversation, a critique of her assassination attempt had not been one of them. The second was that she should have known that even a four-hundred-year-old Shuos who had spent his adult life in Kel service would display the Shuos obsession with competence. “That option didn’t occur to me,” Khiruev said simply.

  “Obviously.”

  “My death is yours, sir.”

  Jedao gave her a cockeyed look. “How do you tell the difference between a violin and a Kel?”

  She knew the answer to that one. “The Kel burns longer.”

  “Listen,” Jedao said, “I’m only good at speaking the language of guns, so maybe I haven’t made myself clear yet. I don’t want your fucking death, General. Killing people is so easy, but it’s usually irreversible. Kel Command clearly thinks you’re good. They’ve been mulling over promoting you someday, if I’m understanding the notations in your profile correctly.”

  Khiruev stiffened in spite of herself, but Jedao went on.

  “I want your life, General. I want your help fighting the Hafn. But you need to promise me you’re not going to get more people killed through this kind of carelessness. Because if you pull that again, I’m going to show you a damned nasty way of killing someone with a playing card.” Jedao pulled a card out of his sleeve: the Deuce of Gears. His personal emblem.

  “You have my service, sir,” Khiruev said, “as long as you require it.”

  Jedao smiled brilliantly at her, and Khiruev knew then how completely she’d been defeated.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN RHEZNY BREZAN was a third-year cadet at Kel Academy Secondary, he learned why Exercise Purple 53 was listed as Purple Paranoia. His class had known that the exercise was coming, although not how bad it would be. A few years back, one class had drawn the one that involved lots of orbital bombardment. The consensus was that no one else would get as lucky so soon. Besides, two years ago, a new commandant had been appointed, and she had a reputation for designing no-win scenarios over breakfast.

  The usual instructor was a stocky, graying man who never smiled. Brezan, sitting in the classroom with the other cadets, noticed the gleam in his eyes. Not a good sign. Next to him, Onuen Wei was taking slow, deep breaths, which meant she had noticed, too.

  A slim manform entered the room. Brezan recognized the alt, who had worn any number of faces, all of them cheerfully ugly. The sight of their naked hands made Brezan’s stomach knot with revulsion. None of the cadets wore Kel gloves; they’d only earn that right upon graduation. But the newcomer’s unostentatious bearing gave the impression of great experience. The manform wore no faction or rank insignia. They didn’t have to. No one here dared cross them.

  The room went dead silent.

  “For this exercise,” the instructor said, “I’m handing you over to a guest instructor. Shuos Zehun is on loan to us from the Shuos hexarch.” Zehun was Hexarch Shuos Mikodez’s personal assistant, one of the few Shuos scarier than the hexarch himself. Zehun had switched to this face several months ago; it had been impossible to escape the news. “I expect you to accord Zehun the same respect and obedience you would myself or any Kel superior.” The instructor’s not-smile turned fiendish. “There’s every possibility that they know more ways of dismembering annoying cadets than I do.”

  The threat wasn’t necessary. Everyone had heard about how Mikodez had assassinated two of his own cadets on a lark shortly after he rose to power.

  “Pleased to meet you all,” Shuos Zehun said. Their voice was quiet but not soft.

  The regular instructor nodded to them and walked out, whistling pointedly.

  “All right,” Zehun said. “Come with me.”

  They filed out after Zehun, walking down a long hall and through several passageways until they reached the variable-layout sections of Citadel 9. From that point on, Brezan concentrated on not looking too closely at the walls, whose angles seemed to be on the verge of shattering apart, or the floor, which put him in mind of great and restless snakes. Brezan’s bunkmate, an engineering candidate, liked to read trashy adventures set in the bowels of the campus. They inevitably involved rogue killer robots, the occasional talking ferret, and plucky cadets who never ran out of ammunition. Brezan had tried some and found them unnaturally compulsive reading. Of course, most of the adventures had happy endings. Nothing involving a Shuos could possibly have a happy ending.

  At last they reached a door. Brezan’s eyes refused to focus on it, so instead he looked at the Shuos. The fact that Zehun’s right hand never strayed from their side was unreassuring. Brezan couldn’t spot a weapon, but that didn’t mean anything.

  “You’re wondering why you’re having a fox lobbed at you,” Zehun said. “I’ll be frank. Your commandant lost a bet with my hexarch. For reasons beyond my understanding, my hexarch is letting her off light.”

  This didn’t make Brezan feel better, either.

  “That being said, we might as well make the most of the situation. When I give you leave, you’ll enter the door single-file. Inside, you’ll arrive at a desk with an envelope on it and a pen to write with. I advise opening the envelope straightaway, because while this scenario is turn-based, the turns are timed. Six minutes per tick, to be exact.”

  Brezan thought for a moment. “Sir, a question.”

  “Your name, fledge.”

  Aggravating to be addressed thus by a non-Kel, but as a guest instructor, Zehun was within their rights. Not to mention that it would be suicidal to cry insult against a hexarch’s assistant. “Cadet Rhezny Brezan, sir.”

  “Your question.”

  “Is there a clock in the room?” He’d noticed that his augment was being uncommunicative.

  Zehun s
miled suddenly. “No.”

  Wonderful. Brezan decided that he could wait to find out more rather than sticking his neck out any further. He tried not to think about what his Kel sister Miuzan would have said. Her “I’m going to be more Kel than everyone” taunt had been the bane of his existence when he was little.

  “Most of the instructions will be in the paperwork,” Zehun said, “but the scenario is basically this. You’re part of a Kel task force sent to deal with an insurrection at an isolated city. You’ve been given information that one of you is a crashhawk working with the insurrectionists, but the informant died before being able to finger the traitor. Good luck figuring out the situation.”

  A crashhawk: one of those rare Kel for whom the injection of formation instinct failed. Brezan’s lip curled in distaste. He was looking forward to a chance to smash the traitor.

  Wei wanted to ask a question, and received permission. “Sir, what is the win condition?”

  “Let me put it this way,” Zehun said. “You’ll know immediately if you lose.”

  No one else had a question.

  “All right,” Zehun said, “in you go.”

  The door opened. It was impossible to see what lay beyond it. Brezan saw in the shimmer-haze his signifier, the Ashhawk Sundered, with the headachy sensation that meant that everyone was seeing something different, probably their own signifiers. He was reminded that his older sister Miuzan had fetched up with a much more respectable Ashhawk Vigilant, although the last time they’d both been home, their oldest father had told Miuzan to shut up about a stupid personality test done up in pictures and go clean the family’s staggering collection of antique guns. In retrospect, he should have gone into sound engineering like his oldest sister. Then he wouldn’t be here sweating over a Shuos’s sense of humor, which was bound to have teeth in it.

  The line was moving. Brezan clenched his jaw in spite of himself when his turn came. Astonishingly, it didn’t hurt to cross the threshold, although he had braced for it. For a scrabbling moment he couldn’t tell where his hands and feet were in relation to the rest of his body. He knew better than to freeze, though. Who knew what happened to people who got stuck in the door. Then he rediscovered which way was up and which was down, and he was standing alone in the room.

  The room had walls of glassy black brick, if anyone made bricks that gave the impression of great unfolding wings when you looked at them out of the corners of your eyes. Brezan shook himself out of gaping at the walls—careless, he ought to know better—and approached the desk. The desk and its accompanying chair were, to his relief, ordinary. He took up the envelope, which was of pale, creamy paper. The moment he touched it, he knew something was off. Who the hell wasted mulberry paper of this quality on a training exercise? On the occasions that the academy used actual paper instead of gridpaper, it favored the slightly waxy stuff made to be used with grease pencils.

  The first item in the envelope was a map of the city and its garrison, both undoubtedly fictional. Of course, there were a lot of lonely cities on isolated moons in the hexarchate, so who knew. The map had been copied out by hand by someone with an artist’s sensitivity. The envelope also contained two more maps, thankfully just printouts, giving estimated dispositions and a terse rundown of critical installations. Any moment now he was going to blink and they would turn into treasure maps written in ghost ichor, like in his bunkmate’s adventure stories.

  The next set of papers talked unhelpfully about the insurrectionists—dubbed the Purples, for obscure reasons—and the Purples’ first move. They had assassinated a visiting Andan potentate. He was probably not the only one thinking good riddance, although the Andan in question had to be fictitious, too. Kel-Andan relations had been strained for the past decade.

  After that came the rules, including a reminder that a turn lasted six minutes. He was to keep the maps and other materials. There was a single sheet of blank paper. He could address his move to a single unit or to a fellow cadet, and it all had to fit on the sheet. The rules said nothing about how legible your handwriting had to be. Moves had to be stuffed back into the envelope before turn’s end. The envelope would scan and convey the sheet’s contents to the instructor. A bell would tell him when to open the envelope for the next move.

  Then he reached the final instruction. It was on a smaller sheet, on even nicer paper, and it had been calligraphed beautifully. Brezan had taken the obligatory calligraphy lessons and was only passable with a brush, but he knew beauty when he saw it. For a moment the aesthetics distracted him from what the instruction said.

  You are the crashhawk, the sheet informed him. It gave the rules by which he could give orders to Purple units and what he was allowed to do to the Kel. The rules were succinct, elegant, and brutal. He had no idea what roles had been assigned to the other cadets, but he could already see ways to maneuver to find out.

  “Fuck you,” Brezan said out loud, although it was certain that he was being monitored. He wasn’t going to be a traitor.

  He had gone through First Formation like all the other cadets after the initial injection of formation instinct, but he had barely passed. Not a crashhawk, a formation-breaker, but the next best thing to one. Had Shuos fucking Zehun assigned him the role on purpose, as a test?

  I am going to beat you, Brezan thought. But he had to do it by the rules. He wouldn’t cheat the way a Shuos might. Tempting as it was.

  Six minutes couldn’t have elapsed already, assuming Zehun had told the truth about that. Brezan’s hands were sweating. He knew what he needed to do. No sense in delaying.

  If he was the crashhawk, then technically he was a Purple unit.

  He picked up the pen and wrote, Order for Rhezny Brezan, Purple unit. Assist any Kel unit that contacts you to the best of your ability.

  Brezan stuffed the paper in the envelope. There were ink stains on his thumb and forefinger. He had a fit of anxiety over whether he’d written neatly enough, but he refrained from reopening the envelope.

  There, he thought savagely, and waited to be booted from the exercise.

  It wasn’t long in coming. Five moves in, a slip of paper informed him that he’d died in a Purple bombing of a university while directing a Kel squad working as riot police during a demonstration. Vidona work, except in the exercise there were not enough Vidona to be had.

  There was a knock at the door. “Come out if you’re done reading your fate,” a voice said. It was Zehun. “You can bring the materials or leave them, your choice.”

  Some choice. Brezan gathered up the materials and exited through the door into a conference room. Shuos Zehun sat alone, peering at a terminal showing what looked like a cross between an inkblot and a traffic accident.

  “I suppose I died first, sir?” Brezan said, regarding the room sullenly.

  “No, a few got offed after the second move,” Zehun said. “There’s always somebody. You must be wondering why you’re here.”

  Brezan stiffened, wishing for body armor.

  The corners of Zehun’s mouth lifted. “What, no guesses?”

  “It’s un-Kel to use a loophole the way I did,” Brezan said. He couldn’t wait until this conversation ended. “I expect to be reprimanded.”

  “Oh, we Shuos don’t do anything like that,” Zehun said. “If anyone botches a training scenario, we make them design the next one under supervision. Then we run it, and we make sure every cadet in the exercise knows who the scenario’s author is.”

  Brezan was grateful that Kel Academy was run by Kel, who did things according to rulebooks, and not ferrets, ghosts, or Shuos. He looked at Zehun with their calm, dark face, wondering what response was expected of him.

  “You’re here because your solution caught my attention,” Zehun said. “Kel spirit, un-Kel method. You remained loyal to your people by finessing the rules.”

  “It still got me killed, sir,” Brezan said, although it wasn’t in his best interests to remind Zehun.

  “Because it’s so surprising when a Kel f
etches up dead?”

  “I’m not a Kel yet, sir.”

  “Details, details,” Zehun said. “Anyway, want to see how everyone is doing?” They tapped a command into the terminal.

  The terminal’s display flattened, then reappeared in three dimensions over the conference table. It didn’t take any genius to realize that the Purples were slaughtering the cadets. Granted, the opponent was being run by a senior Shuos who hadn’t played fair since they were six, but Brezan had hoped for a less one-sided showing. A couple of his classmates usually excelled at tactics. What had gone wrong?

  “I have information you don’t,” Zehun said. “These are the roles I assigned.” They tapped again.

  Calligraphy in the same rhythmic hand imaged itself next to the purple-blotched map.

  You are the crashhawk.

  “Everyone got that,” Zehun said.

  Brezan started, then gripped the edge of the table. “I asked about the wrong rule,” he said flatly. “If I’d asked about the right one, would you have answered, sir?”

  “Doubtful,” Zehun said, eyes crinkling. “I’m an excellent liar.”

  “I’m surprised we’re not destroying ourselves faster.” No one had thought to question the orders, typical Kel pathology. Since the cadets were isolated from each other, they had fallen easy prey to the trick.

  Zehun zoomed in on a particularly disastrous part of the map. “Useful lesson, don’t you think? I’ll tell you something, though. Years ago at Shuos Academy Prime, we ran a similar training exercise. Infiltrators instead of Kel units doing counterinsurgency work they weren’t trained for, but same basic idea. The cadets won that round.”

  “I’m sure it was a clever solution, sir,” Brezan said in his most neutral voice. What had it involved? Invisible ink? Trained messenger squirrels? Poisoning the instructor?

  “Don’t look so unhappy,” Zehun said, almost kindly. “They won because one of the cadets came up with the same solution you did. The difference was, he had figured out which scenario was being run ahead of time. We have different rules about cheating, after all. He briefed the other cadets. Everyone used the solution as their first move, and from that point on they worked as a team to defeat the instructor.”