Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

Of course, this was business as usual. It was no secret that Kel Command, being a hivemind, frequently made questionable decisions.

Mother Ekesra let go. The corpse-paper remnant of her husband drifted to the floor with a horrible crackling noise. But she wasn’t done; she believed in neatness. She knelt to pick up the sheet and began folding it. Paper-folding was an art specific to the Vidona.

“As if foxes have ever been known for their constructiveness.” “You wound me,” Mikodez said. “Foxes are capable of being useful if you train them appropriately.” “But then they’re not foxes anymore, only hounds.”

It was unlikely that Kujen had survived nine centuries of parasitism without picking up some basic survival skills.

“As they used to say at Shuos Academy, ‘Counterfactuals never feed the children’. Which is hilarious coming from us, but never mind.”

“But it does,” Jedao said, hot and cold and sharp at once. “This is exactly what matters. The difference between what should and should not be done. This is what the fight’s about.”

The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.

“Never ascribe to irrational benevolence what selfishness will explain,”

“I 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.”

Khiruev would have put Brezan in the category of a ‘use with caution’ Kel if he’d been a line officer: great on special missions for his ability to think unconventionally, useful in charge of a tactical group if carefully supervised, and for mercy’s sake don’t promote him any higher than that.

“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.”

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?”

Despite a largely successful career as hexarch, he was forever juggling the budget.

“That’s very considerate of you,” the commander said tactfully, “but if those are what I think they are, I’ll never get the pine nuts out of my teeth.” You and me both, Istradez thought sourly. “Your loss,” he said.

But that trick only works once.” “It only needed to work once,” she said.

“Three gameboards all along, isn’t that right? Jedao fighting the Hafn. But that wasn’t the real fight. The hexarchs thought Jedao was using the Hafn to start a revolt against them, a war of public opinion. And that wasn’t the real fight either. The real fight was the calendrical spike that must have been your intention from the beginning. So that’s it. It worked. The hexarchs are dead—well, except Shuos—and you’ve won the war.”