Extended Scenes for the Spoiler Alert Flood

[ninefox]

[Video 3: Private to Iris, Fives, Lark, Mikodez, and Missy. Two soldiers on a battlefield have a terrible conversation, at a terrible price.]

A ground battle churns through the awful slog of an endgame. Two soldiers in red and gold uniforms wait for extraction. One of them is Jedao, who looks painfully young to be so weary. He tries to call for pickup, voice hoarse, but trails off unanswered, the air full of the faraway crash of guns, the hiss-and-sizzle of evaporator fire, the roar of tanks. The other man has lost a leg, the stump crusted with blood and staunched by fast-set foam. He looks like he's dying, although the reason why isn't obvious from the outside. He twitches, periodically, with the kind of agonizing pain that amputation alone couldn't evoke, especially not over and over, not sounding so fresh.

“You should have left hours ago,” says the wounded man, in a dry rasp. Jedao crouches closer, and shivers briefly - his coat is draped over the other soldier. “I’m not leaving you,” he says. “No word yet.”

“I didn’t figure there would be. You know, I always looked at you and thought you planned too hard. You always have the perfect answer prepared.” His words are slow, dragged out one by one, but clearly enunciated: a matter of pride even now.

“Not a very useful character flaw, is it?” Jedao says. “Didn’t do you much good.”

“It’s not your fault the Kel can’t aim.” Jedao looks out over the curve of the hills, the silhouettes of blowing purplish grasses in the sun’s waning light, the rubble of buildings blown apart. You could almost mistake it for peace: the wind, the grass, the hills. The way light snags on the edges of leaves and changed the colors of stone and skin and trickling water.

“How much longer?” he asks after a while. “I don’t know,” Jedao says.

There's a long quiet, and the sun sinks closer to the horizon. Jedao rubs his hands to keep them warm.

“Stupid war, isn’t it?” the wounded man asks.

Jedao startles, then looks annoyed about it. “Don’t say that.”

The man's grin is ghastly. “Don’t be ridiculous. What can they do, kill me?”

“You know just as well as I do what they do to dissidents. The best thing to do is obey.”

“I expected better of you.”

“You should never expect better of anyone.”

After another pause, while strange luminous insects start to dance fluttering dances, Jedao says, gingerly, like he isn't sure the words might not burn his mouth, “It’s a stupid war.”

“Not much to do about it, I suppose.”

“That’s not true,” Jedao says, sudden and vehemently. “If everyone united to defy their tyranny, even the heptarchs would fall back. We say ‘rebels’ as though they all share the same goals and leadership, but they don’t. They don’t coordinate with each other, so the heptarchate will defeat them in detail. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Indeed,” says his companion. Perhaps he is smiling. It's nearly dark now; hard to tell.

“We shouldn’t be fighting this war,” Jedao says, somber now, jaw set. “The only way to get them to stop, though, is if someone takes on the heptarchate entire. I’m not talking about petty assassinations. I’m talking about defeating them on every level of their own game. It wouldn’t be short and it wouldn’t be pretty and you’d end up as much a monster as they are, but maybe it would be worth it to tear the whole fucking structure down.”

The wounded man goes white. Whiter.

“We’re too big, Jedao. You couldn’t do it in one lifetime and guarantee the results.”

“Wouldn’t need to,” Jedao says slowly. “The Kel have the key.”

“If you’re talking about the black cradle, they’re not going to hand that over for your convenience. Assuming you figure out how not to go crazy in there.”

“You’d have to manipulate them into it,” Jedao says. “Another long game, but not outside the realm of possibility. Do something spectacular. Make them want to bring you back, over and over, until you’re done.”

The wounded man laughs painfully.

“Fine, then, you’re already crazy. And you’re going to die in some fistfight over the price of quinces. Or they’ll catch you, and there aren’t words nasty enough for what they’ll do to you.”

“No, I’ll die on this planet,” Jedao says. “But at least we’ll die together.”

The sun sets. Jedao huddles closer to his companion.

They both look shocked when the silence is interrupted by a burst of static in Jedao's ear, and then: “ – tenant Shuos Lharis of Fireflitter 327, shouter team five please respond.” Jedao freezes. His hands flex. He looks at his teammate, then looks away.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the man says. His voice shakes. “Do it.”

“I can’t,” Jedao says, closing his eyes. “You have a chance.”

“I’ll be a cripple even if I make it,” he argues. “And life’s cheap anyway –”

“Don’t say that,” Jedao says violently, “it’s not true. It’s never true.”

“Besides,” he says over Lharis’s repeated message, “you have a plan. Hell of a long shot, but you never know. Go topple the heptarchate for me. Make my death mean something. Hurry, before the lieutenant strands you here.” His voice sounded very weak.

“I won’t forget,” Jedao says. He kisses the other soldier's forehead.

Then, in a single quick, decisive motion, he snatches up the coat and covers his companion's face. After he stops struggling to breathe, Jedao says into the relay, “Shuos Jedao, shouter team five, to Lieutenant Lharis. One for pickup.”

“What happened to the other?” Lharis asks.

“Stray Kel bullet. He didn’t make it.”

“Pity,” Lharis said. “All right. Two hours and forty-six minutes until I can come get you. Stay put.”


[Video 4: Private to Iris and Fives. A conversation at a terrible party. CW for implications of suicide and sexual assault, nothing graphic]

The house is opulent, heavily featuring flowers, and the sounds of a party mingle from the background. Jedao is in an excessively ornate version of his usual black and gold uniform. He walks straight-backed and blank-faced, looking neither left nor right, past a few people pretending not to watch him and titter, and turning into a bathroom. He locks herself in and turns on the water.

Listens to the water running.

He peels back one glove and stares at the veins, and the scar across the base of his palm. For a long moment he hesitates. Then he takes out a beautiful, well-loved handgun - the same one in pride of place in the central case in Mikodez's collection, for anyone who might be able to cross-reference the clips - and lays it next to the sink. He rests his hand on it.

Someone starts knocking loudly. “Open up or I’ll shoot the door off its hinges,” a voice calls over the sound of the water. For a moment, Jedao's expression is savage.

“If you make me shoot, it’ll raise a horrible fuss and it’ll upset the host and you know how the Andan hate it when someone spoils a party. You’ll never hear the end of it for years.”

Jedao hesitates, then unlocks the door and steps back. A burly woman in a similar uniform practically charges in. She takes one long look at Jedao. Her mouth becomes a flat line. Jedao glances involuntarily at the mirror. His expression is tight, eyes abraded of expression. His hair is a mess, too.

The woman closes the door. “It isn’t right, what she did to you,” she says.

“Colonel, I won’t hear you speak against the heptarch,” Jedao says coldly. “I could have said no.”

“Bullshit,” she says. But she doesn’t raise her voice.

“I am a Shuos. She is my heptarch. I belong to her. If that’s how she wants to use me, then that’s how I’ll be used.”

She glances at the gun. “Jedao,” she says, voice careful. “Give me your gun and your knife.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean. Give me your weapons. You’ll get them back tomorrow.” Jedao glares at her.

“You’re out of line, Colonel.”

“You can court-martial me tomorrow. After you give me your weapons.”

He glares back. After a long moment, he breaks eye contact. “I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

The colonel's mouth twists.

“You’re usually a better liar than this, Jedao. Frankly, that worries me more than anything else.”

“I don’t know what you want of me.”

“I’m being remarkably clear, Jedao. The weapons.”

“No.”

“Jedao.”

He hesitates again, then hands them over.

“I’m taking you to barracks, and we’re going to stay up all night playing jeng-zai, which is an incredible concession on my part. You can beat me horribly the way you always do. And when you’re fit to have weapons again, I’ll give them back to you.”

“People will notice us leaving early,” Jedao says.

“I have really obscene things to say about how little I care about people noticing things, including the fact that we’re holed up in the bathroom together. Come on, Jedao. I’ll tell you the worst Kel jokes I know. How many Kel does it take to dig a latrine?”


[Video 6: Private to Iris, Missy, Rosethorn, Shiro, Scott, and Alec. Mindfuckery.]

The room was drab except for a single wall devoted to a one-per-minute cycle of riotously colorful photographs of flowers. Forsythias, cosmos, moss roses, azaleas, everything. A tall, tawny woman with a broad frame strides in with forceful movements, wearing an elaborate black and gold uniform, with a full soaring ashhawk where Jedao's uniform has only wings. A beautiful but short and rather unassuming, slightly annoyed looking man walks with her.

“He’s in here, Nirai-zho?” she asks, looking around at the terminals with their graphs and readouts. One of them is set to a card game.

“Not precisely,” he says, “But this is the single point of access we’ve allowed him. I didn’t deem it wise to give him an anchor of his own without Kel Command’s approval.”

“I’m authorized to make that determination.”

“Of course,” he murmurs.

“Do you wish to talk to him?”

She eyes him. “I did read your reports, but is he stable?”

“As stable as anyone is,” he says. “You came all this way, you might as well see for yourself. I should warn you that the time windows are dependent on calendrical mechanics—the equations were in Appendix 5—so you’ll have twenty-three minutes this session if we start now.”

“Let’s do this, then.” He flips a switch. A chime sounds. A shadow ripples through the room. Nine candle-yellow eyes stare at them through a crack of black-silver. Then the shadow fades, and the eyes with them. “Jedao?” she says, unmoved by the phenomenon.

“I apologize for being unable to salute, sir,” Jedao says, that same easy baritone with its drawl his friends on the barge are familiar with. It sounds as though he's standing in the room facing them, except he’d also have to be invisible. “What do you require of me?”

“I’m here to evaluate your recovery,” she says. “Nirai-zho tells me you’ve given no explanation for your behavior at Hellspin Fortress.”

“I have none, sir.”

“Do you remember what happened?” She frowns at the other man in the room, as though he should have an answer for her. Jedao hesitates.

“I remember it in pieces, sir. The pieces aren’t in order. They showed me some of the videos, including—” His voice wavers. “Including when I shot Colonel Gized. I don’t—I don’t understand understand why I would want to do that. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Can the Rahal get anything out of him now?” she asks the man.

“Unfortunately, that’s impossible,” he says. “Neither of us sleeps. A wolf scrying has no access.”

She swears under her breath, then says, “What do you think I hope to accomplish here, Jedao?”

“I imagine you’re here to render judgment, sir. I’m not sure why I’m being retained as a revenant, however. There must have been a court-martial, but I can’t remember any of it. I realize I killed a great many, including my own people. I am prepared for your sentence.”

“We kept you alive”—her nostrils flared—“because Kel Command needs tacticians of your caliber, because you may yet ‘serve’ in an experimental capacity, and because the heptarchate continues to face many threats.”

The man coughs. “About that.” She glares at him. “You have something to say, Nirai-zho?”

“Sir,” Jedao said, “I—I would recommend against using me for that purpose. I have difficulty with tactical simulations now. I don’t have any reason to believe that things would be any better in the field.”

“That must be humbling for you to admit, given your former stature,” she says.

Jedao sounds puzzled. “I wish to serve, sir, but it’s important that you have an accurate assessment of my capabilities.”

“And if I decided that the Kel would best be served by your permanent death?”

“Then I will die, sir.”

“Do you want to die, Jedao?”

“I wish to serve, sir,” he says again. “It’s not for me to question your orders.”

“Are you happy here?”

“I am waiting to serve, sir. That’s all that matters.” She flips the switch, banishing Jedao. She scowls. “He’s respectful, obedient, self-effacing, and sounds nothing like the cocksure bastard who bet a fortune that he could get his army through the Battle of Spiral Deluge with under ten percent casualties, and who came in under seven,” she says. “Congratulations, Nirai-zho, you’ve turned him into a sheep. There’s nothing of the general left.”

“You wanted a perfect wind-up soldier,” he says. “I gave you one. I can’t make him any better than this. He’s stable and he’ll serve you no matter how poorly you treat him.”

“And your report admitted that his tactical ability tests under the thirty-seventh percentile on all four of the simulators we provided. A squirrel with a bowl of marbles could do better. When they say he’s never been defeated, do you appreciate what that means? We didn’t send him off to a bunch of easy battles on a lark. Most of his assignments should have killed him. A Shuos officer was always going to be more expendable than one of our own. It just so happened that his choice was to be brilliant or not to die. He figured out how not to die. Kel Command expected him to be annihilated at Candle Arc, outnumbered eight to one, and he didn’t just win, he smashed the enemy. This experiment is no good if he isn’t usable.”

“It was a necessary compromise,” he says. “People aren’t lumps of clay. You have to work with what’s already there. With Jedao, you can either have perfect obedience or you can have the little box in his head that magically tells him what his opponent is going to do so he can tie them in knots, but you can’t have both at the same time. Please don’t ask me how to put the little box back in while he’s like this. I can’t. You’d need a psych surgeon who was also a tactician. If you know where to find someone like that, send them my way. I’d love to talk shop. What exactly is it that you expect of me, High General?”

She smiles. It's a terrible sight.

“He seemed at peace,” she says. “I had a niece who served under him at Hellspin, did you know that? I’ll make this easy for you. If you can’t make him better, make him worse. Break him. Cripple him. He’s a fucking traitor, Nirai-zho. He doesn’t deserve to have his life handed back to him, even like this. He needs to suffer.”

The man laughed incredulously. “My peach, you realize your operational parameters contradict themselves? Do you want a torture chew-toy, or a useful commander?”

“You’re such a genius, Nirai-zho,” she retorted. “All the Nirai tell us so—but I guess you program them that way. Why don’t you prove it to the rest of us? Find a way. Make Jedao a tactician again. Make him suffer as he serves the Kel.”

“Feel lucky that I despise you, High General,” he says, “and that I can’t wait to get you off my facility. Anything I can do to Jedao, I can do to you. Face it, Jedao’s a lot more complex than you are.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” she says. “Try anything and some fangmoths will blow your precious equipment into radioactive little pieces. You know us Kel, we’re great at breaking shit. Anyway, I believe I’ve made Kel Command’s requirements clear, Nirai-zho, or do I need to repeat myself?”

“No, you’re perfectly clear,” he says. He looks - very subtly - satisfied.

[Video 8: private to Quentin, Iris and Jean]

A stocky woman, in middle age but excellent shape, in the same black-and-gold Kel uniform, approaches a door much like Jedao's cabin door on the barge, although this one has a few stylistic differences. A different ship; a different era. The door slides open.

Another woman, younger, stands with her hands clasped behind her back, looking at something the communicator's view - and presumably her visitor - cannot yet see. She has Jedao's uniform exactly, down to the shuos eye beneath her rank insignia, down to the revenant's fine silver chain connecting the golden wings, down to the fingerless gloves, where the other soldier has full gloves. She has Jedao's shadow, too, the ninefox's yellow eyes floating around her in a somber amber halo. She holds herself the way Jedao holds himself in public, perfectly balanced, still and ready, sleekly and thoughtlessly precise. When she speaks, she has his faint accent.

The other soldier salutes, and waits.

“At ease,” says the woman who is somehow Jedao. “You know, I always hated it when my commanding officers told me to be frank. But hell, I’m going to ask you to be frank. I have spent most of an unnaturally long life doing horrible things to people. Assassination. Torture. Treason. Mass murder. It doesn’t sound like anything when you pare it down to such a short list, but those were real people. It was—I did real harm. Which is the long way of saying that my personal metric for horrible things is not calibrated right. I need you to tell me how bad this thing is that I’m going to show you.”

“Sir,” the subordinate answers, “I’m a high officer. I got to my present rank by doing many of the same things you did.”

“Just humor me, General. I’d like to believe that someone in this damn swarm is a better human being than I am.”

“Then show me whatever it is.” The woman-who-is-also-Jedao gestures for her officer to come around and stand next to her. There's a screen displaying video; Jedao-the-woman fast-forwards past the decontamination precautions to the part where a team of Kel engineers breach the casket. There isn’t a better word for the object. On the lid of the casket shines a golden plaque, engraved with an archaic alien script. The border features an elaborate design of unfamiliar flowers, fruit, and feathers entwined in knotwork. Careful attention reveals odd cavorting insects worked into the design, and what looks suspiciously like cat’s cradle figures. The technicians in their suits remove the lid from the casket. It comes off with a whisper of blue-violet vapor. A note indicates that they are still studying the gas, but preliminary results say it is not toxic.

Both women stare at the contents of the casket in silence. The components - for lack of a better word - are arranged with obvious care. Beautiful long-necked birds, their curling crests arranged just so. Flowers whose petals move as though they were breathing. Filaments of gold and crystal threading in and out of flesh and stem, eventually winding their way to the circuit-inscribed walls of the casket. In the center of the casket lies a boy, or a very young man. At various junctures, his flesh is pale and translucent. A complicated circulatory system growing out of the translucent regions joins him to the birds, the flowers, the filaments. The veins are also translucent, and an endless procession of small red spiders are crawling through them. In one hand he clutches a faded purple cord tied into a loop, exactly the right length for cat’s cradle, the only item in the casket that doesn’t look expensively contrived.

The woman with Jedao's shadow pauses playback. “They got medics in there,” she says, almost in a normal voice, “but the boy—the whole whatever-it-is—went into cardiac arrest or the equivalent. They shoved him into a jury-rigged sleeper unit, but I don’t think there’s any hope.”

She looks into the distance, the faintest shadow of anguish in her eyes. This expression, too, resembles one of Jedao's.

“Tell me, General, what the fuck are we fighting?" Asks the Ninefox Crowned with Eyes. "What’s so wrong with the Hafn calendar that this is their best way of making masses of scouts?”

“If they’re like us,” answers the other general, “they’re locked into their existing calendar for exotic technologies they can’t bear to give up, and that means they’re stuck with some bloody awful options in other areas.”

“Tell me you didn’t know about this,” Jedao-the-woman says.

“I didn’t know about this. It must be a new development permitting this invasion, or an old one they were hiding from us as a trump card. But it wouldn’t have made a difference. We’re Kel. We fight where we’re told. I understood that you already wanted to fight the Hafn.”

Jedao-the-woman turns the video off. “Khiruev—” The woman who must be General Kel Khiruev stiffens, very slightly. “—if I ever think it’s all right to do that to someone, shoot me. I don’t care how rational I make it sound. I have a history of sounding very rational, and we all know where that ends.”

It's Jedao's tone, too - that particular terrible spare, earnest quality he can sometimes bring to awful or delicate things.

“I hope the boy’s death was quick, sir,” Khiruev says.

“Someday I would like to live in a world where people can aspire to something better than caskets and being sewn up with birds and quick deaths.”

“If you want to fight for that, the swarm is yours.”

“I’d say that I’ll try not to abuse the privilege,” the-woman-who-is-Jedao says, “but we’re past that point.”