Crowned in Black: Chapter 29

Suri found me still at my desk later in the night, mocking up strategic movements on a holomap of north-western Myszno. My head jerked up as the sound of her armor clanking broke through the trance of unit positioning, terrain advantages, and hero deployment options. She was carrying two plates, and looked tired.

“Hey lover. Figured you’d forgotten chow.” She set the plate on my lap without asking. I was leaning back in my chair, waving my hands around in the air like a maestro as I adjusted troop markers, and paused as the hot plate settled on my defenseless lap.

"Uhh... you would be correct." I sighed, and shoved the screens to one side. Reluctantly. "The paradoxical superpower of ADHD is hyperfocus."

"How long've you been at this?" She dragged a rarely used second chair over from the back of the room, then flopped down into it.

"What time is it?"

"Late."

I glanced over at my bio menus: sure enough, my hunger gauge was in the orange zone, and I hadn't even noticed. So was the Pee Meter. "Like… uh… six hours."

Suri rolled her eyes and smiled, then pulled the silver cover off my plate for me before starting on her own meal. The aroma of fresh, perfectly roasted venison hit me like a delicious slap to the face. It was rare, with some kind of dark berry sauce, gravy, vegetables and a spicy buckwheat pilaf. I pulled a sharp knife and a fork from my inventory and began shoving it into my face. The meat was juicy, the potatoes crisp on the outside and soft in the middle. The buckwheat was spicy and chewy, savory with spices and jus from the deer.

"Jesus Christ this is good." I had to remind myself to slow down so I could actually taste it. "Thanks... completely forgot to eat."

"Figured. Also it’d be a nice way to spend some time together." Suri was lingering over her own plate, obviously enjoying every mouthful. "Haven't been able to do it much, you know? Everything's passed in a bloody great blur these last couple of weeks."

"Yeah." I made sure my plate was balanced, then awkwardly scooted my chair over until it was right up against hers. "Fate of the world resting on our shoulders and all. Feels kind of surreal."

"Mmhmm. Prince Hector Dragozin-Corvinus. Rolls right off the tongue." There was a teasing note to her voice.

"You're still the queen, though. The human one, anyway." I speared a potato and held it to her lips. Suri grinned wickedly, and snatched it off the end of the knife.

"Well, that's the plan," she said, once she'd finished chewing. "Yazid Khemmemu’s crazier than a shithouse rat, and the more I've been thinking about it, the more I feel like I NEED to go back. The Khemmemu Dynasty has run my country into the ground. Sachara's Dakhdir was a fuckin' powerhouse: one of the most enlightened cultures in the world. And now look at it. Decadent, bloated, with the upper castes pretty literally shitting on the people under them. That isn't a world I want to live in."

"Yeah. And I haven't forgotten you've got questlines hanging there," I said. "There's more than one reason I'm trying to organize a real functioning army. I've got a feeling that 'uniting the nations of Archemi' is going to involve turfing Khemmemu off the Peacock Throne, then throwing the Peacock Throne out the window and replacing it with the Suri Seat. Have to wonder though... where does that leave us? As in, me and you? If Ignas dies..."

"Then you'll be packing off to Taltos to run this place, yeah." Suri snorted, but her eyes darkened a little. She worried her lip with her teeth a moment, then looked back to her plate. "I guess if I go all Alexander the Great on Dakhdir, and you're here ruling Vlachia, that's gonna put a bit of a crimp on things, isn't it?"

That thought was firmly in the category of ‘shit I didn’t want to think about’. "Yeah, no point marching down that road right now. We've already got a hell of a job ahead of us, with Janos and the drachan and everything. Want to hear the details of my cunning plan?"

"Go for it." Suri relaxed back into her chair, drew a deep breath, and continued eating.

"I already gave the first orders to our men. We're making real and false minefields inside the Pass," I said, glad to change the subject. "The first wave of ground troops will encounter real, small minefields first. Once they're spooked, they'll run into a much larger minefield and other fortifications - except the mines in the second field are random, scattered through all these helmets we buried. You rememeber those dumb-looking round-topped helmets the militia pikemen were given?"

Suri laughed. She knew where this was going. "Yeah?"

"When you only show the tops, they look like anti-calvary mines. I've got a couple hundred recruits out in Vastil burying them halfway into the ground. We're going to psych out Janos' forces. They'll figure out the first couple lines are fakes, and either get bogged down testing every helmet, or get spooked when their commander orders a charge and limbs start flying into the air. I don't think Janos inspires his men enough to force them to play Field of Fortune."

"I'm pretty sure you're right." Suri leaned in, and touched her head to mind. "Gooo on."

"I'll drill everyone in the specifics tomorrow, but there's plenty of places in the canyons to hide camouflaged ships that will protect them from the Dreadnaught's anti-magic field," I continued, leaning back. "I had a chat with Admiral Lostra. Apparently, those fields work like sonar. It doesn't penetrate through objects of a certain density, like mountains. So if you've got physical barriers between you and the field, it can slip right over you. There's a part of Vastil Pass called the Sentinels: the cliffs are really sheer there, but there's some pretty huge creavasses in those canyon walls. I'm thinking we paint our ships and have them park inside some of those big holes so they can come up behind the fleet once it's trapped inside the gauntlet."

"We got time to give the ships a paint job?" Suri asked.

"I've already called up volunteers in Litvy. Sent Elizabet there after her trip to Boros, and she was able to whip them up." I absently called the map back, staring at it as I ate some more. "We're setting up those modified Ix'tamo that were in Solonovka. Remember those? We're calling them shield strippers, or, you know... just strippers."

"Of course you are."

I gasped dramatically, and put a hand to my chest. “Excuse me? You wound me. It was Rin’s name for them.”

“Really?” Suri was actually surprised by that - for a moment. “Must mean we’re rubbing off on her.”

I grinned. "Probably. Anyway, she says each one of those puppies is good to five thousand feet. Rin's decided this project is her baby - they're installing the strippers out on the cliff faces. There's all kinds of murderholes and sniper nests already carved into the walls of the Pass: they're using those to hold the batteries the strippers need. Plan is to keep the devices shielded and inert until the bow of the Sarkany-class is past, then fire them up around the bulk of the fleet. We disable the shields, maybe a few engines... and then the seemingly lightly-manned Temeri Fortress comes to life."

"And boom." Suri set her empty plate on the ground and sat back, thoughtfully sucking on one of her teeth. "I like it. Take it you've got Plan B and C in the works?"

"For sure. No matter what, though, a lot of this fight is going to come down to who can shell the hardest." I frowned, looking over my pins and markers. "If Janos decided to Leeroy Jones it, he could really just fly all his battleships into the pass at once, staggering them in altitude, and bomb the fuck out of us. Without the dragons, there's not much we could do to stop him, either. He'd take Temeri no matter how much we returned fire, and then our only hope would be to stop his fleet at Litvy. Somehow. I'm hoping that taking out his vanguard and sending his capital ship crashing to the ground will scare him and his soldiers enough to force a retreat."

"Asymmetrical warfare at its finest." Suri lay her hand over mine again - gently, this time. "Share the maps?"

Lacing my fingers through Suri's, I queried the KMS, and prompted it to share screens. Suri pursed her lips as she studied it. She was familiar with military jargon and markup. "Yeah, I see it now. Gonna require really good communication with the fleet. That's what me and Gar are for. We'll have to be here and here to give signals so we time the shield breach and artillery, I reckon. You're going to need a Starborn inside of the fort to help signal the artillery, too... and we're one short."

"I was going to do it," I said.

"You can't. You and Karalti need to be leading a charge from the back over the fort once the Dreadnaught's taken down." Suri pointed at the relevant position. "Who else do we know?"

"We don't know that many Starborn." I grimaced, and called up my roster of known player characters in Myszno. There were only three: the Meewfolk bard Kylirra, the barbarian librarian fondly known as 'Kon', and the Meews Brothers - a glitched Ryuko employee split between three bodies. "Kon, Kylirra and the Maxes are all still in the low 20s, too low-level for this shit. We don't know any other Starborn here in Myszno. It's not exactly a popular location, given it's a pimple on the literal ass-end of Artana."

"What about Jacob?" Suri asked.

My eyebrows shot up until they nearly touched my hairline.

"What? Don't look at me like that. He's gotta redeem himself somehow." She flashed me a stern glance.

"If he screws it up or flakes, it could cost lives, and possibly even the Pass itself. Not to mention, if he's killed, he might not wake up in his cell." An uneasy feeling gripped me, and I shook my head. "He's starting to come around to the fact he committed crimes against you and others, but I can't trust him with something as important as signaling our artillery."

"Me and Vash think differently." Suri set her jaw in a way that told me she wasn't going to back down. "As far as I’m concerned, we're either rehabilitating him or we're not. If he's reached a breakthrough point on acting like a human being, then I want to drive that point home. He needs to do something meaningful if he’s got any hope of acting like a human being."

I resisted the urge to groan... but she had a point. "Look... if you can talk to him, and you come away thinking he can do it - and more importantly, thinking that he wants to help instead of being a Trojan Horse in our fortress - we can find a way to set him up securely. He was talking about apologizing to you tonight, explained a bit more of why he didn't believe you or Archemi's people were real and conscious. Maybe if you hear it from him, you'll find some closure."

"He was?" A complex expression passed over Suri's face. She sat back, and looked toward the ceiling. "Think he meant it?"

"He seemed pretty sincere. We also got talking about the fact it seems like OUROS is waking up." The uneasy feeling hadn't left. I set my plate down, a few vegetables unfinished. "I feel like there's some link between OUROS, Ororgael, Squalor, and me. But I don't understand it. The only theories I can think of are fucking whack."

"Yeah, that stuff’s way over my paygrade," Suri replied. "I'll talk to him and see what I think. Even back in Al'Asad, I knew Ratzinger was Nicolai’s bitch. The power imbalance between them was really fucking obvious. I hated his guts, but... now some time's past and Al'Asad’s sunk into the desert where it belongs, I'm starting to think more about the future, you know? Might not ever be able to forgive Jacob, but I can live with him."

"Yeah." I reached out and squeezed her arm. "You know, you're the toughest person I've ever met. It blows my mind how resilient you are."

Suri huffed softly, and flushed with embarrassment. "Just doing my job, lover boy. Tell you what: I'm going to go speak with the Rat and see what he has to say for himself. Give me an hour or so, and meet me in my quarters?"

"Sounds like a date." I leaned in as she did, and kissed her gently. "I'm pretty much done on war plans. Just got one more thing to follow up on."

"Yeah?" Suri bumped her forehead against mine, then rose.

“Yeah. Kind of building a bit of a profile on Lucien.” I frowned. “I feel like I’ve been underestimating him and Violetta and overestimating Ororgael. There’s stuff going on under the surface with that group we can’t see.”

Suri nodded, then grimaced. "Oh… shit, yeah. Speaking of Lucien, and by extension, Princess Sohvi, I got some bad news about her from the Masterhealer that I was supposed to bring to you. She's pregnant."

I made a face. "Fuck. What does she want to do about it?"

"So far? She's still too messed up to make any kind of decision," Suri replied grimly. "The Masterhealer's encouraging her to recover for another couple weeks before they decide what to do. They caught it early, because of what happened while she was captive... another fourteen days won't make much difference if she decides to... you know."

"If I didn't hate Lucien before - and I did - I sure do now." I cracked my knuckles. "Now the plague is under control in Karhad, I’ll see if one of the priestesses of Devana can come and care for her, give her some advice. Anyway... we'll put all this shit aside when I come see you, alright? I'll bring some wine and we'll kick back for a night."

"Sounds good to me." Suri smiled, and gave me a sultry up-and-down look before she turned and strode for the door.

I glanced at the virtual menus and maps still pushed to one side of my HUD, then to the now-empty doorway. After a moment of consideration… I closed the windows, got up, and followed her out. The fight was important, but life was too short to miss out on some things.