The Nest, Rebellion-Held Aviye
Zai
Zai woke up well before dawn, climbing out of her cot and stretching before stepping with practiced silence past the sleeping Doctor and into the common room, before raiding the kitchen for the last of the coffee and starting a pot on the portable etheric stove.
Years in the field had gained her the skill of making coffee in a teapot, and she was perfectly mindful of the improvised filter she made of cloth as she extracted every bit of good flavor from the last of her stash.
Despite the assurances Zai made last night, she doubted they'd see the Nest for a long time once they made it to Major Riel, and so this coffee was as much a farewell drink as a necessary stimulant for when her people awoke.
She took two mugs full and crouched, exiting the bunker to find Sgt. Lorn standing watch. Everything that could be taken inside had been, leaving only Zai's frame and the entrance pallet, which would be buried once they left. Zai could see a couple of etheric batteries and the crank-charger loaded in its basket, her heavy rifle resting sideways inside the bars of the cockpit.
Sergeant K'le Ruu had worked a small miracle getting the arm back on, and Zai could see that she'd also replaced a lot of parts that had been worrisome but functional. Given how treacherous heading north was about to become, Zai appreciated every bolt and plate.
"All quiet, Sergeant?" Zai asked, passing her a mug.
"Had a couple of flybys. No sign of ground troops. Kid came by from the village around midnight, saying the inspectors arrived. Nothing else to report."
"Are you going to be alright for the hike?"
"I'll be fine. Knee might hurt fierce after but I'll make it," she sipped the coffee. "Did you figure out what she's hiding?"
Zai sighed. "A little. She didn't so much hide it as understate it, but I'm pretty sure Ascendants, or even the Hegemony, might be more able to detect her than she indicated."
"I don't like that she didn't say much about how the Hegemony makes theirs. If she was going to share everything..."
"If she shared that, then maybe the Rebellion would try using the same method."
"It would level the playing field, no?"
"It would. But at what cost? We don't know the kinds of people that'll take the first step, much less the kind that should be Ascended. That kind of power... if we do it the wrong way, we might just kill our people only to make something just as sadistic as the First Lightning."
"Don't you think we should have that choice?"
Zai thought about what she asked for a long moment. "No, Fengri. I think we should have the best choice in this case, not the fast one."
The sergeant took a long sip, then changed the subject. "What if we get there and they're gone? We lost General Vaan. If the Major can't keep it together long enough for Command to sort itself out..."
"We have to trust our people. The Sunrise Sword has lasted thirty years, even when they were just a bunch of students. The Iconoclast had the wisdom to preserve the way of revolution, and it'll see the people back to power, one way or another."
"I hope you're right. The reformists were doing more damage to us than the monarchy... if we can't take a victory, I'm afraid some of the other commanders might try to make peace with the Kingdom in exchange for pardons."
"Any names come to mind?"
"Commander Jiang."
The man in charge of the Northern theatre had clearly failed to keep the Ascendant in check. Zai didn't know enough about him to make a judgment, but Sergeant Lorn had been in the Sunrise Sword since the beginning, and Zai trusted her. "Why Jiang?"
"He started slipping after the first Lightning died. Argued we should come to terms with the monarchy and focus on expelling the Hegemons."
"I remember that. He backed down though."
"He's been dragging his feet on major operations since then... and now he happens to let the Second Lightning slip into the Eastern front?"
"We don't even know if he's alive." Zai sipped her coffee. "Sounds like you have a history with him."
Lorn looked out into the gloom for a long moment. "I do. The short version is that right after he defected to our side, he got a lot of people I cared for killed."
"Who were they?"
"The Nightravens. Your predecessors." She sipped. "Only ones left from back then are the Major and me."
Zai sat in silence for a moment. When she'd received this command, she hadn't been given the usual historic report. The only brief she got was that it was an older unit for political education and tactical strikes.
The Major had kept her in it, even when transfers and casualties whittled Zai's command down from a platoon to a single squad. Zai had just assumed it was because she'd defected out of a major college. She'd never given the Major her history, or even her old name.
With the rebellion hurting for officers, she'd quickly proven a capable and dependable Lieutenant in her first squad. Then only a year after achieving that rank, they promoted her and gave her the Nightravens.
She figured it was to give her a command she couldn't cause much harm in, see if she understood the teachings of Mea enough to educate others. Four years of command, three in one place, and her Ravens had done the work of ten times their number educating and coordinating with the local villages, and in all that time the only reinforcements they'd gotten were locals youths and widows like K'le.
Being stationed this far into the southeast of Aviye meant the Nightravens had to operate virtually independently, since the rural mountains and rice fields seemed frozen in time to a more less developed era. The Hegemony had pumped enough cheap food into the major cities to let the Kingdom forget the region, as long as villages paid lip service to the king and allowed inspections.
"Four years, Fengri, and you never thought to tell me about this?"
"It didn't matter, Captain. Thanks to the Major, the big fight inside the rebellion was won. We got equality, a dialectical index that people like us exist and will be respected, and the entire Sunrise Sword was educated out of its old prejudices. Hells, the people in every region under the rebellion are better at accepting us than any city under that fat puppet in the capital. I'm sure you noticed in Zuret."
"I did, Fengri, but that still doesn't excuse you knowing about the squad I'm supposed to be in command of and not telling me. You and I are supposed to be the core of this." The wind picked up.
Fengri sighed. "I... I wanted..."
Suddenly both women stood up straighter. There was a scent on the wind.
"Smoke." Zai acknowledged. "It's coming from the village." She downed the small amount of coffee she had remaining.
"Orders?" Sergeant Lorn asked after finishing her own.
"Get everyone up." Zai sprinted for Rabbit and pulled her rifle to a safer spot before she started mounting up. "I'm the only one that can make it there and back."
"I'm frame certified too, Captain. I can go instead."
"Not for Rabbit you aren't. We don't have time for you to learn on run." She strapped in and activated the etheric switches for each of the limbs, relaxing her legs as the armor took on the load of standing. Sergeant Lorn adjusted Zai's straps. Reaching sideways, she picked up the heavy rifle and gave herself a quick calibration shake. "If I'm not back in an hour, take everyone to the old depot. I'll catch up by noon tomorrow. If not, keep going and don't stop if you can help it." She started walking towards the trail leading out of the camp, stopping right before she stepped out and turning to look back at her friend and comrade. "Don't leave any coffee for the enemy."
Taking off at a jog let Captain Zai arrive at the forest line quickly. She kept to the concrete drainage ditch, overgrown with vines as it was, in order to keep a lower profile as she made as much speed as she could in the rapidly lightening gloom.
On the flatter surface she could tell that Rabbit was in dire need of a calibration after her recent repair, but saving the village took priority in Zai's mind, and so after a brief sprint she paused to extract an arm and twist all the resistance dials on the panel above her head to zero. She'd risk a torsion injury if it meant saving them.
With that done, Rabbit moved even faster, but less smoothly as the loosening of its limbs meant Zai would need a finicky amount of precision to keep from overcompensating on the frame's natural weight. Luckily she'd been Rabbit's pilot for two years. She knew her frame well enough to argue with K'le over maintenance.
Peaking at just over forty miles an hour, she arrived at the village only twenty minutes after she gave Sergeant Lorn her orders, just as the morning fog began to cover everything.
Everything was ablaze. The wooden houses built on raised square foundations lit up the night in an eerie pyre of fog-muffled sound.
A man's voice was shouting, loud enough that Zai risked getting close, ducking against the stone of the village office's burning mass to get closer.
Peeking past it, she saw huddled forms under the bright lights of Kingdom transports, thankfully not aiming in her direction. Everyone from Zuret-ran-Rhosi had been gathered in the square while their homes burned around them.
Looming over them, a Kingdom officer stood, pacing slowly along the crowd... and draped across his elbow was Sh'zi's blood-stained jacket.
"Oh no..." Zai said before ducking back into cover, and cocking her rifle.