Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

Vidona Psa was smirking at Mikodez, but that was all. The conference ended.

Line 7 was blinking at him, and if he didn’t pick it up, Zehun was going to override. “Put it on,” he said. When Zehun’s face appeared in the subdisplay, he added, “I take it you were listening in on the whole thing.”

“If you didn’t want to be spied on,” Zehun said unsympathetically, “you should have pursued a nice, quiet life as a hopper mechanic or a pastry chef.”

“You only say that because you’ve never seen me try to use a screwdriver,” Mikodez said. “Or a spatula, for that matter. More seriously, what’s on your mind? Please tell me someone has extracted something definite from Cheris’s damn equations.”

Zehun shook their head. “Zhao thinks she’s onto something, but the others are giving her long odds as to whether it’s the right track.” Then they stopped, frowning.

Mikodez’s hand was out of sight of the camera and he had already begun entering certain codes, just in case. “Go ahead and say it.”

“Forget the mathematicians,” Zehun said. Their face was composed. “You keep putting off this discussion, but we have to have it now. Forget sending a double. Don’t pull a Tsoro. You should accept immortality.”

“I don’t understand why you feel so strongly about this,” Mikodez said. He felt calm, made of clear brittle lines inside and out. This was his punishment for taking his assistant for granted for so long. First Cheris and now this. He was getting sloppy.

Zehun smiled like a knife. There were faint lines around their mouth, at the corners of their eyes. Mikodez was abruptly reminded of their age. “Mikodez,” Zehun said, “remember what I told you earlier. Four decades of stability in the Shuos. Few Shuos hexarchs have accomplished as much.”

“I’m not saying that the succession isn’t a very large problem,” Mikodez said, “but this is not the way. Remember, Heptarch Khiaz lasted a good six decades, and she was responsible for her share of ruinous decisions.”

The question was, did Zehun feel strongly enough about this decision that they’d betray him over it? Their support had been critical to his rise to power. Zehun was uniquely positioned to be able to destroy him. After all, they could throw their support to a new candidate; they had to keep a list. It was what he would do.

“If I believe you were a second Khiaz,” Zehun said, “I would never have backed you. Give me a little credit. Please reconsider, Mikodez. Without a strong Shuos voice, who is going to counterbalance Andan and Rahal?”

“Zehun-shei,” Mikodez said. This time he used not the instructor honorific, but an honorific used sometimes by lovers, although that was one thing they had never been to each other. “Listen. We know of three people who ended up in the black cradle. I have never been able to extract details, but Nirai Esfarel found existence as a ghost so unbearable that he convinced his anchor to kill them both.

“Nirai Kujen, on the other hand—” Mikodez weighed his words. “Kujen thinks being a parasite is so entertaining that he’ll hang on until the universe’s last atoms unravel. He gave us remembrances, and with them, the mothdrive. He gave us formation instinct. He will show up with more gifts. I am one of the few people in the hexarchate who genuinely likes him, but we cannot afford to accept any more of his gifts.

“And then there’s Jedao. I don’t know at what point Jedao stopped regarding himself as a person, but once he decided he was a gun, everyone turned into a target.” Mikodez smiled grimly. “That’s three immortals who should never have ended up that way.”

Zehun put their chin in their hands. “The problem with your argument is the black cradle,” they said. “I don’t care what Kujen likes to say about stabilization effects, prolonged isolation would drive anyone crazy. That won’t be a problem with Faian’s method. The math seems to check out. Youth eternal, life unending, who wouldn’t want it?”

“Should I send you in my stead?” Mikodez said. “I’m serious. It’s not a state secret that you’re the glue holding this place together. I just give bored assassins a target.”

“You’re the only one who believes that,” Zehun retorted. “And no thanks, I’d rather leave eternity with people like Vidona Psa to those who are psychologically equipped for the job. I hear he’s always late on his paperwork.”

Mikodez drummed his fingers on his desk, then tapped out a few commands. The commands were simple. The multiple overrides necessary to make them go through, on the other hand, were a pain in the ass. He’d designed them that way.

“Mikodez, what are you—” Zehun’s breath caught. “The fuck, Mikodez, I taught you never to—”

He had given Zehun access to all the emergency protocols that involved assassinating them. “I think that’s all of them,” he said flatly, “but it’s not impossible that I missed something, and it’s guaranteed that some subordinate has something creative in the works just for the hell of it. Please tell me you’d broken into some of them anyway.”

“Some of them,” Zehun said. “Not all of them. What is wrong with you today? You can’t afford to trust anyone completely, least of all me! If you need to order my ‘suicide’—”

“Zehun!” Mikodez didn’t realize he had slammed his hands down on the desk until the pain hit a moment later. Considering what he kept in that desk, it was a great way to flirt with suicide himself. “You want an eternity of this? Being ruled by a man who’s ready to stab anyone who looks at him sideways? Because that’s what it would turn into.”

“Security intercepted an attempt on you just four hours ago,” Zehun said pointedly. “The only reason you didn’t get the alert is that we’re dealing with a bigger emergency. This is the reality we live in.”

“And having you killed because we’re having a policy dispute? Is that the reality we live in, too?”

“You’ve always preferred to turn people into resources and not enemies, but not everyone is going to cooperate with that.”

Mikodez studied Zehun’s face for signs that they were going to give up on him. He was very good at reading people, but Zehun was very good at hiding what they thought—they usually won at jeng-zai—so that was a wash. “Zehun,” he said, “the black cradle’s isolation is sideways to the point anyway. Thanks to Kujen’s narcissistic conviction that the universe can’t get by without him, we have the technology to kick death in the teeth. So sure, the unfortunate tendency of the body to give out over time has been dealt with. What I personally find infuriating is that everyone is obsessed with solving the wrong fucking problem. Granted, Kujen is psychotic so I don’t expect any better from him, but what good is immortality if nothing has been done to repair the fault lines in the human heart?”

“Mikodez—”

“We’re looking at an eternity of Iruja fussing over minutiae while ignoring the substance of the latest crisis,” Mikodez said. “An eternity of Shandal Yeng clutching silks to compensate for the fact that she can’t buy her children’s love. Nirai Faian trying to solve our problems by throwing equations at them. Vidona Psa inventing more excruciating remembrances because the heretics come so close to shutting down the system each time and he thinks brutalizing them will erode their determination. Or me, sticking knives in people because ruling a faction of people almost as paranoid as I am is the only entertainment that keeps my interest. Do you think I don’t know how bad my attention span is, even with the medications I take? At least Kel had the sense to opt out. Perhaps blowing up the system would be worse than having everyone be ruled by psychotic immortals, but I sure as hell refuse to become one of them.”

“I’m not planning to betray you,” Zehun said softly.

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