“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.”
Given that the Shuos were notorious for backstabbing each other out of sheer reflex, Brezan was impressed in spite of himself.
“You didn’t have that opportunity, exactly, not just because of Kel prejudices but because my security was going to be better than any hypothetical hacking attempts. But it does raise a question I’ve been asking myself. Why did you decide to become a Kel?”
“My family, sir,” Brezan said after a damning pause.
“That’s not an explanation. I have no doubt you’ll do well, but frankly, you’ll do well if you allow yourself not to be a typical Kel. Which is going to be tough in, sorry, a society of rigorous conformists.”
Brezan fought down the urge to glare at Zehun, which probably wasn’t helping his case.
“I wouldn’t mind recruiting you for the Shuos,” Zehun said with the air of someone who knew just how terrifying their words were. “We’d be able to use you better, to say nothing of training you to hide your reactions. I hope you stay out of jeng-zai games or you’re going to lose a fortune. But I expect you’re determined to do things your own way.”
Moves were flashing at Zehun on a subdisplay. Zehun ignored them. Their voice became brisk. “Incidentally, you might be interested to know who that Shuos cadet was. His name was Vauhan Mikodez.”
Hexarch Shuos fucking Mikodez. Cadet-killer Mikodez, the most brilliant Shuos who wasn’t also a mass murderer. This was the last thing Brezan wanted to hear.
Zehun turned then to their slate. Brezan stared at those ungloved hands and swore to himself that he was going to be a boring, ordinary, unimaginative Kel like the ones in all the Kel jokes.
After Jedao’s takeover, then, it was blackly hilarious to regain consciousness to an argument over whether or not he was a Kel.
“—anyone can put on black gloves and a uniform if they’re willing to get shot over it,” a high-pitched voice was saying. “Look, just wait until we figure out where the hell a working gene scanner is. I don’t know what possessed Hachej to take the good one apart just because it made that weird intermittent gleeping noise.”
Brezan attempted to blink or open his eyes. His eyelids might as well have been chained down. He had some understanding that he was still in the sleeper unit that they had stuffed him into on Jedao’s orders. The prep had been rushed, not that he remembered much besides fragmentary cold and the sense that someone was playing music out of reach. Experimentally, he tried to move his hands. That didn’t work either.
The darkness behind his eyelids was suffocating, and he almost missed what the second, much deeper voice was saying. “—rotten luck. A mutiny, really?”
“Or maybe it was Kel Command with some convoluted new plan. You know how it goes,” said the first voice.
This reminded Brezan that he had a warning to convey to Kel Command, except his head was swimming and he couldn’t seem to stop hyperventilating.
“—this one here. Honestly, if they were going to do prep this shoddy, why not just shoot the lot?”
Brezan wouldn’t have minded the answer to that question himself. He screwed his eyelids open. Light filtered dimly into the sleeper, and he could see one of the medics as a reticulated blur. He attempted to knock, although he wasn’t sure he succeeded in moving his arm.
After an interminable interval, the medic opened the sleeper. Brezan would have cringed from the sudden brightness if he’d had any coordination. Speaking was equally hopeless.
“Look at the insignia,” the man said. “That’s some kind of officer, isn’t it?”
Whoever the medics were, they clearly weren’t Kel.
“That’s a lieutenant colonel, you dimwit.” The owner of the first voice sounded like they wished their companion were something smarter, like a slime mold. “But any bored kid these days can steal and hack a Kel uniform.”
Brezan opened his mouth to object to this. Instead, he went into a painful coughing fit. His mouth tasted like copper. After that, he couldn’t tell whether he was breathing, which was so distracting that he didn’t notice the servitors extracting him to a pallet.
“—clearly what happened,” the first voice said. “I mean, there’s no way they’d simply dump a crashhawk. The Kel shoot crashhawks who get caught at it. He’s got to be some kind of impostor. Although I’m not sure why they wouldn’t shoot an impostor, either. I get why they have to return the Nirai and so on to their own people, but this one’s a mystery. The whole thing is so random. It must have been one hell of a mutiny. I would have bought tickets.”
“It wasn’t a fucking mutiny,” Brezan said before he realized he had his voice back. It sounded as though someone had taken a rasp to it, but it was better than nothing.
The two medics peered down at him with great interest. The first speaker was small and pale and had deeply cynical eyes. The second was fidgeting with his stylus. “Yeah?” he said. “What did happen? No one so far has a coherent story.”
Brezan regrouped enough to register that neither medic was dressed in faction colors of any sort. He couldn’t blurt the truth out to civilians. Another coughing fit prevented him from answering in any case.
“He’s going to be just as hysterical as the others,” the first medic said. “Sedate him and let the servitors sort it out.”
Between wheezes, Brezan said, “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan. I need to get to a secured terminal.”
“He sounds like he means it,” the second medic said as though Brezan weren’t right there.