Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  She had eaten with him at high table for years, listened to his anecdotes of service in the Drowned March and at the Feathered Bridge between the two great continents of the world Makhtu. She knew that he liked to drink two sips from his own cup after the communal cup went around, and then to arrange his pickles or sesame spinach on top of his rice. She knew that he cared about putting things in their proper place. It was an understandable impulse. It was also going to get him killed.

  Already she was rewriting the equations because she knew what his answer would be.

  The sergeant reiterated his protest, stopping short of accusing her of heresy herself. Formation instinct should have forced him to obey her, but the fact that he considered her actions deeply un-Kel was enabling him to resist.

  Cheris cut contact and sent another override. Lieutenant Verab’s acknowledgment sounded grim. Cheris marked Squadron Four outcasts, Kel no longer. They had failed to obey her, and that was that.

  Disjointedly, the new formation pieced itself together and pressed forward. They were taking heavier fire now. Two trees exploded at the touch of Eelfire as Squadron Five passed them. A corporal was stapled to a hillside by the resultant lash of splinters. A soldier three paces to Cheris’s left fell out of formation and vanished in a vapor of blood and tatters. Kel Nikara, who had sung so well.

  Squadron Four was already dissolving, but she had no attention to spare for it.

  Cheris guided the advance from point to point. She adjusted the formation again by sending orders to individual soldiers, solving for intermediate forms in her head to keep the geometry within the necessary error bounds. The storm was dissipating: they were too close to the Eels. The next question was whether she could devise a formation that would give them better protection against the Eels’ invariant weapons, which would work in any calendar, now that the storm was no longer a factor.

  They were outnumbered five to one, but the Eels didn’t have access to formations, so the Kel had a chance. Cheris was in a hurry, so a straightforward force multiplier was her best bet. More modifications. Her remaining soldiers knew to trust her. The soundstream reflected this. Eels, the stink of corpses, heavy fire from that copse, drumbeats. They were paying attention to the important things again.

  To her relief, the force multiplier, adapted from One Thorn Poisons a Thousand Hands, could be linearized for use with her ad hoc formation. She and her soldiers were equipped with calendrical swords, ordinarily used for duels. Not her weapon of choice, but they were near the storm generator, which they were to take intact, and the general’s orders had been clear. The swords shouldn’t damage unliving objects, which was the primary consideration.

  “Swords, now,” Cheris said.

  The Kel unsheathed their swords, each tinted differently, blank bars of light. Cheris’s ran from blue near the hilt to red at the tip. As they closed with the enemy, numbers blazed to life along the lengths of the blades: the day and the hour of your death, as the Kel liked to say.

  Except the date and time on Cheris’s sword was wrong. She wasn’t the only one who was dismayed. Maintenance, rather use my rifle, the dreaded calendrical rot. Not only were the numbers wrong, they jittered and sparked, snapping in and out of focus. A quick survey of her company indicated that everyone’s swords were having the same problem. That would have been bad enough, but the swords weren’t even synchronized.

  “Sir, maybe another weapon –” Lieutenant Verab said.

  “Continue the advance,” Cheris said. “No guns.” If the swords proved ineffectual, they would have to try something different, but the swords hadn’t sputtered out entirely. That gave her hope, if you could call it that.

  At first it went well. For every sword-stroke, tens of Eels went down as lines of force scythed through their ranks. Cheris’s own swordwork was methodical, businesslike, the same way she dueled. One of her lunges pierced eight soldiers in the Eels’ ranks. She had always been good at angles.

  The Kel formation held as they butchered their way through the Eels. The hills’ residual mist had a ruddy tint. Cheris made a point of noticing the Eels’ faces. They weren’t much different from the faces of her own soldiers: younger and older, dark skin and pale, eyes mostly brown or sometimes gray. One of them might have been Dineng’s brother, if not for the pale eyes. But the calendrical light made them alien, washed in shadows of indefinite color slowly becoming more definite.

  They hit an unexpected snag as the storm generator came into view. It crouched on the rise of a stubby hill, visible through a transparent palisade. The generator resembled nothing so much as a small, deformed tank. Cheris asked for, and got, an assay of its approximate mass from one of the Sparrows. The answer made her bite her lip. Well, that was what the floaters were for.

  More bizarre was the fact that the generator was undefended except by four Eel servitors. They were armed with lasers, but so far their fire hadn’t penetrated Kel defenses.

  Cheris knew the current formation was losing effectiveness when the air went cold and gray. She was having difficulty breathing, and while she had an emergency air supply, they all did, she suspected this was just the beginning. Sure enough, it also became harder and harder to move.

  Her first attempts at repairing the formation only resulted in a colder wind, a grayer world. Gritting her teeth – winter, entropy, it was time to get out but they were so close – she tried another configuration. It was hard to think, hard to make herself breathe. She thought she heard the song of snow.

  “I need your computational allocations,” Cheris told her lieutenants. They were so close to the weather generator, and the Eels were broken and peeling away behind them. They just had to grab the wretched thing and hold on until pickup arrived. But to hold it they had to have a working formation. It was enough to make her long for the days of straightforward bullets and bombs.

  She liked the thought of stripping her soldiers’ computational resources as much as they did, which was to say not at all. But they weren’t in camp, where they could instantiate a more powerful grid. They had no access to the larger, more powerful grid of a friendly voidmoth transport or a military base. She had to use the field grid because it was all they had.

  Cheris gave her company a second to understand what was going to happen, then diverted their allocated resources to herself. She ignored the protests, most reflexive, some less so: can’t see, lost coordinates, it was so cold, a scatter of profanities. Verab was saying something to the other lieutenants, but hadn’t flagged the conversation for her attention, so she assumed he’d take care of it.

  She formulated her question so a computational attack might give her an answer in a reasonable amount of time. The company’s grid was not sentient in the way of military-grade servitors, but if you knew how to talk to the system, it was capable of nuanced responses. As the world faded toward black, the grid informed her that she should proceed by a particular series of approximations. She authorized the computation and added some constraints designed to speed the exploration of likely solutions.

  The problem was easy to see: not only did the storm generator rely on heretical mechanics, which also explained the weather-eaters’ difficulties, it was itself a disruption to the high calendar. Cheris wasn’t looking forward to reporting this to her superiors.

  Green-black fire washed around them, the dregs of Eel resistance. Cheris silently entreated the formation to hold long enough for the field grid to chew through the computations. Faster, she thought, feeling so cold that she was certain that her teeth were icicles and that her fingers had frozen into arthritic twigs.

  “The generator’s ours, sir!” Verab cried as his platoon took out a last sputtering knot of Eels. They were clear for the moment.

  “Well done,” she said, meaning it. “Now we have to hang on.”

  The computations were taking their toll. Through the relay, Cheris discovered that Kel Zro in Squadron Three had offloaded more of her situational awareness functions into the relay than was strictly a
dvisable, and was paying for it now. The soldier to Zro’s right shouted a warning, and she corrected her position barely in time to avoid being splashed by Eelfire. Zro wasn’t the only one having difficulties. Even people who used their relays with the usual precautions were desynchronizing.

  Cheris asked the grid for a summary of preliminary results and skimmed through them. Nothing, nothing, nothing – aha. As the sky waned, she tapped in her suggestions and waited some more.

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Ankat from Platoon Three said, “I have this hunch someone’s rallying the Eels to rush us. You know, the smart thing for them to do.”

  “I can’t make the grid compute faster,” Cheris said. “We’re Kel. They’re not. If we have to bite them off our heels with our teeth, we’ll do it that way.”

  At last the system came up with a working model of the conditions they were suffering. She swallowed an involuntary hiss of relief and rapped out the orders with a tongue that might have been a lump of coal after the last spark’s dying.

  Like a machine dismembered into creaking components, the company moved in response. Cheris adjusted in response to the paths of Platoons One and Two, and had the rear platoons change front to deal with the Eel remnants. Gradually, as they found their proper positions, the last of the entropic cold summered away. Being able to breathe normally again was a relief.

  Cheris allowed herself a second to contemplate the corpses of the Eels nearest them. Some had weathered into statues of murky ice. Others were puddling into mysterious colors, forgetting the proper hues of flesh, eyes, hair. She estimated casualties and recorded it for later comparison with the Sparrows’ observations. It was important to acknowledge numbers, especially when the dead were dead by your doing.

  She and the lieutenants reorganized the company to better defend the storm generator, using a formation that bore a disturbing resemblance to the Pyre Burns Inward, which was on the proscribed list. Then she sent a burst transmission informing orbital command that they had gained a tenuous foothold in Eel territory. With any luck it would go through.

  For a moment she didn’t recognize the command signature on the incoming call because she wasn’t expecting it, not so soon after the transmission.

  The voice was shockingly clear and biting after the buzzing haze of relay chatter. “Captain Kel Cheris, Heron Company, 109-229th Battalion, acknowledge,” it said. She recognized the voice as belonging to Brigadier General Kel Farosh, who was in charge of the expedition.

  Keeping an eye on the situation, Cheris responded on the same channel using the appropriate key. “Captain Cheris, General. We’re securing the objective.”

  “Immaterial,” Farosh said: not the response Cheris had expected. “Prepare for extraction in twenty-six minutes. You’ll be leaving the generator. We’ve knocked out the Eels’ local air defenses for the moment.”

  Cheris glanced over her shoulder at the generator, not sure she had heard correctly. The generator was surrounded by a coruscating knot of blue-violet light. The sight of it made her bones ache with remembered chill. “The generator, sir?”

  “It’s a job well-done,” Farosh said, “but it’s someone else’s problem now. Leave it where you found it.” She clicked out.

  Cheris passed along the notification.

  “You’ve got to be kidding, sir,” was Verab’s response. “We’re here right now, let us finish the job.”

  “We could always volunteer to stay,” Ankat said dryly. “You know how much Kel Command loves volunteers.”

  “It was clear that they want us out of here,” Cheris said. But she shared their frustration. They had expected to drive the Eels out of their hiding places so the hexarchate’s enforcers could reprogram the survivors to rejoin civilization. It was peculiar for the expedition to be cut short like this. Why send them to retrieve the storm generator if they weren’t going to take it with them after all?

  The youngest soldier – Kel Dezken, scarcely out of academy – slipped out of position trying to share a bad joke with a comrade, and died to a last Eel bullet. Cheris noted it in passing. Terrible timing, but Kel luck was frequently bad.

  By the time the hoppers and medic teams came to ferry them into orbit, escorted by Guardhawk servitors and – of dubious utility – weather-eaters, Cheris was disappointed to abandon the battlefield. In a way each battle was home: a wretched home, where small mistakes were punished and great virtues went unnoticed, but a home nonetheless. She didn’t know what it said about her that her duty suited her so well, but so long as it was her duty, it didn’t matter what she thought about it.

  The Guardhawks, angular birdforms, laid down covering fire so the company could board safely. They seemed to take a certain serene joy in their work, weaving up and down, back and forth. No formations; Kel servitors were formation-neutral.

  Dredge’s sun was bright in the sky. Its light caught on weapons fallen from broken hands, ribs cracked and gleaming with blood and yellowy fluid, the needle-remnants of storm crystals. Cheris boarded last. She fixed the battlefield in her memory as though she were scratching it into the sutures of her skull.

  The hopper was crowded and stank of sweat and exhaustion. Cheris sat a little way apart from the other soldiers. She was looking out of the window as they arced into the sky, so she saw the waiting Kel bannermoth drop two bombs, neat and precise, on the site they had just left. A day’s worth of hard battle and the entire objective rendered irrelevant by high explosives. She kept watching until the explosions’ bright flowers dwindled into specks just large enough to trouble the eye.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HEXARCH SHUOS MIKODEZ wasn’t sure which was worse: the flickering readouts that updated him on the crisis at the Fortress of Scattered Needles, or the fact that Hexarch Nirai Kujen’s silver voidmoth call indicator had been blinking at him nonstop for the past four hours and twelve minutes. Kujen was a talkative bastard to begin with – not that Mikodez should be one to criticize – and the worst part was, he had legitimate reason to want to get in touch with Mikodez about the danger the hexarchate was in.

  Shuos headquarters was at the Citadel of Eyes, a star fortress in the Stabglass March. A simple fact of astrography, except it put the Citadel uncomfortably close to the Fortress of Scattered Needles in the adjacent Entangled March, where the recent trouble was going on. Calendrical currents could be surprisingly far-reaching, star-spanning distances or not, and it made him especially appreciative of the trouble they were in. A little heresy went a long way, unfortunately. But he was certain that their best candidate for dealing with the matter was the best candidate for being authorized to use a certain Shuos weapon, the oldest Shuos weapon, especially since said weapon was in the Kel Arsenal. Heptarch Shuos Khiaz, who had signed it (or him, take your pick) over to Kel control 398 years ago, in a fit of towering spite, had a lot to answer for.

  In any case, Mikodez didn’t like stalling, but he needed to buy time while his mathematicians did the final checks on the Kel candidate that he’d been saving up, based on what she had just pulled at Dredge. He had multiple offices at the Citadel of Eyes, and today he had holed himself up in the one he used for getting work done rather than scaring impressionable interlocutors. Nothing he kept in the office would intimidate Kujen, anyway, not the paintings of ninefoxes with their staring tails, not the lack of visible weapons, or the pattern-stones board with its halfway game, or the randomly selected images of still lifes. Mikodez considered it important to look at things that had nothing to do with his job. (Mostly. He was as susceptible as the next Shuos to thinking up ways to assassinate people with unlikely objects.)

  He had selected today’s image specifically to put Kujen on edge: a spectacular piece of architecture, composed of wild curves and tessellated facets, that had existed during Kujen’s distant childhood. Kujen couldn’t be bothered to care about people, unless the people could keep up with him on things like number theory – something that described vanishingly few people in the hexarchate, the current candidate being one of
them – but he liked architecture, and engines, and the machinery of empire.

  Mikodez looked again at the candidate’s portrait and frowned. He knew her psych profile well. One of his agents had flagged her extraordinary math scores back when she was a lieutenant, and they’d kept an eye on her, in the hopes that she wouldn’t get herself shot in some stupid mission guarding a shipment of cabbages. (Cabbages were a Kel idiosyncrasy. They were adamant about their spiced cabbage pickles.) Appearance-wise she was nothing special: black-haired and brown-eyed like almost everyone in the hexarchate, with ivory-tinged skin much lighter than his own. Attractive in a somber way, but not so that she’d turn heads coming into a room, and with a mouth that made him wonder if she smiled much. Probably not, and even then only around her friends, or when she needed to reassure some green soldier. The profile indicated a strong sense of duty, however; that would be useful.

  How long could he keep putting off Kujen? He considered paging the mathematicians, but sticking a blinking amber eye on their communications panels would just make them grouchy, and he needed them in a good mood since he couldn’t do this himself. He’d done well at math as a cadet, but that had been decades ago. It didn’t make him a mathematician, let alone one specializing in calendrical techniques, let alone one trained in this kind of evaluation.

  Technically, as Shuos hexarch, Mikodez outranked Kujen, because he led a high faction and Kujen led a low one. But not only was Kujen the senior hexarch at 864 years old, he was also, in a distressingly real sense, responsible for the hexarchate’s dominance. He’d invented the mothdrive in its first form, enabling the original heptarchate’s rapid expansion, and pioneered a whole field of mathematics that resulted in modern calendrical mechanics. Mikodez was keenly aware that when you got right down to it, he was an expendable bureaucrat in charge of a bunch of cantankerous spies, analysts, and assassins, albeit one who had done rather well over the past four decades considering a Shuos hexarch’s lifespan was usually measured in the single digits. In contrast, Kujen was irreplaceable – at least until Mikodez could figure out a better alternative.