Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

And I have always believed that a properly guided bureaucracy is deadlier than any bomb.”

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.

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?—

“You’ve got to get over that Kel thing where you offer to commit suicide just to make a point,”

No: it was that the hexarchate was a terrible place to live, but it would be an even worse one if no one with a conscience consented to serve it. You couldn’t pull the hexarchate apart and exchange it for something better. The fact that the heretics always lost was proof of that. So you had to do the next best thing, the only thing left: serve, and hope that serving honorably made some small difference.

They rounded a bend that featured, among other things, a clear, bright pond with the biggest carp Brezan had ever seen. He hoped like fuck that the carp were an illusion because what did they eat? What if they got hungry? Could they leap out of the pond and attack passers-by?

don’t care if Cheris never had a chance against the hexarchs. I wanted to die having seen that someone believed in a better world enough to fight for it.”

There had always been the rumor that one of the old heptarchs had squirreled away a collection of heretical calendrical erotica. Just how you made abstract algebra erotic was going to have to remain a mystery for the next Shuos hexarch to puzzle over, because Mikodez couldn’t figure out a way past that one checkpoint without pissing off an agent whose ability to brew perfect Six Leaves tea was unrivaled.

He fished in his second drawer until he retrieved the russet leaf-pattern lace scarf he had left off knitting two months ago. Perfect. The only thing people hated seeing more than a Shuos with a gun was a Shuos with knitting needles. As if any sane assassin would take you out with knitting needles if they could do it instead from a nice sheltered balcony with a high-powered rifle.

Shuos Mikodez finished knitting his scarf. The first two people he offered it to were unable to hide their suspicion that it would come alive and strangle them. With modern fibers it was hard to tell.