Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Kujen’s immortality was tied to certain protections, which Mikodez hadn’t figured out a way around. It wasn’t just Kujen’s age, although no one else had found a reasonable method of living past 140 or 150. The other four hexarchs had a keen interest in cracking Kujen’s secret. The first person the existing immortality device had been tried on had gone crazy. The third had started that way. Kujen, the second, had emerged perfectly functional. He liked to hint that he knew how not to go crazy, but he refused to share. Typical.

  If anyone ever asked Mikodez, immortality was like sex: it made idiots of otherwise rational people. The other hexarchs never asked, though. Instead, they assumed he wanted it as badly as they did.

  The Fortress readout flickered again. Gray rot, like tendrils, the color of death and dust and cold rain. Mikodez frowned, then typed in a query. He could work that much of the analysis for himself. The numbers came right up. The matrices’ most problematic entries blinked. There were a lot of them.

  The Rahal, who oversaw the normal functioning of the calendar, had put in place their countermeasures; but their countermeasures weren’t adequate to deal with a heresy of this magnitude. It was going to have to be military action, no matter how much everyone (except the Kel) wished otherwise.

  Mikodez looked again at the voidmoth, then queried his assistant. Maybe something had turned up in the last sixteen minutes. If not, he was going to talk to Kujen anyway and see if the usual pretense of high-wire distractibility would buy him the necessary extra minutes. Likely not, given how well Kujen knew him, but worth a try.

  His assistant, Shuos Zehun, responded with an unusually blunt note: You can stop dithering, Mikodez. This one’s sane and suitable. They appended the mathematicians’ assessments. Agreement all down the line that the candidate was as good as everyone thought, at least in this one area.

  All right, then. “Line 1-1,” Mikodez said. “Put Kujen on.”

  The video placed itself to the right of a set of indices that let Mikodez keep an eye on just how bad the calendrical rot had gotten in the Entangled March, as opposed to the numbers for the Fortress’s immediate surrounds. At the moment the aggregate figures were holding steady, but they were unlikely to stay that way.

  The man in the video was slender and dark-haired and very pale, with wickedly gorgeous eyes. For someone who headed the technical faction, not the cultural one, Nirai Kujen would have made a credible Andan: he was never less than beautiful. Right now he was wearing a smoke-colored scarf with iridescent strands in it, and his black-and-gray shirt had buttons of mother-of-pearl carved in the shape of leaves. Kujen could probably fund a whole research department out of his wardrobe. On the other hand, there was no denying he got results. The Kel had him to thank for most of their weapons.

  “How good to see you haven’t been assassinated,” Kujen said drily. Shuos philosophy was that the hexarch’s seat was yours if you could hold onto it. Fighting over the hexarch’s seat was a popular Shuos pastime. “If you were any other Shuos, I would accuse you of avoiding my calls by going out to shoot or seduce or spy on someone, but in your case I honestly think you got behind on paperwork.”

  Mikodez shrugged. Ordinarily they agreed on the importance of a functioning bureaucracy. “I don’t care what candidates you’ve scared up,” Mikodez said, “I have a better one for you.” He sent the file over.

  This time, when Mikodez looked at the photo of the candidate, Captain Kel Cheris, his gaze went to her signifier, which showed beneath the portrait: Ashhawk Sheathed Wings. A good sign for the stability it implied, although the Kel had an unreasonable prejudice against it. Kujen wasn’t going to think highly of it either, but no one expected a sociopath to care about sanity.

  “You know,” Kujen was saying, “I wish the Kel would devise more reliable tactical ability batteries. I’m going to let Jedao figure out the – fuck me sideways with a drill press, is that a Kel with decent math scores?”

  “You always make it sound like Kel-shopping is such a chore,” Mikodez said, “so I thought I’d present you with someone more up your alley.”

  Cheris wasn’t just good at math. She was possibly good enough to compete with Kujen, although the fact that she hadn’t gone into research mathematics made it hard to tell for certain. Just as importantly, she was good enough to make up for Jedao’s – the weapon’s – deficiencies in that area.

  “Where on earth did you find her? No, don’t answer that. It’s charming to think that there’s a Kel who might understand some higher math. Too bad I can’t yell at the Kel recruiters for not sending her my way.”

  “Be fair,” Mikodez said. “They tried to redirect her to the Nirai, but she insisted that she wanted to be a Kel. She was attractive enough as an officer candidate that they relented.”

  Something flickered at the corner of his eye. Kujen frowned and said, “Take a look at the composite indices for the Fortress readings, Mikodez. Whatever they’re doing in there hit all the wards at once. We just had to luck out with intelligent heretics instead of the usual stupid kind, so we need to settle on a candidate to deal with them. That’s hard to do when you’re dicking around avoiding me.”

  “I wanted just the right one,” Mikodez said.

  “She looks pretty good,” Kujen conceded, “but that commander with the beautiful hands also looked pretty good. And don’t roll your eyes at me, I’m talking about his qualifications, not his aesthetics. Honestly, Mikodez, don’t you ever take anything seriously? The commander at least has experience in space warfare, which your infantry captain doesn’t.”

  “I take the situation at the Fortress very seriously,” Mikodez said. “Besides, the fact that Cheris specialized in mathematics might enable her to better deal with calendrical warfare.” Still, he smiled lazily at Kujen because it was best not to be seen to care too much.

  The Fortress of Scattered Needles was located at a nexus point in a stretch of empty space and was nearest the Footbreak system. The Rahal had already stationed a lensmoth there, but all it could do was staunch the bleeding as long as the Fortress itself was afflicted.

  The Fortress was also divided into six wards, one for each faction, although the boundaries weren’t as strictly enforced as they had been in the old days. There had once been a seventh ward for the seventh faction, the Liozh. The Fortress’s interior had been demolished and rebuilt to remove the seventh ward, at staggering expense, after the Liozh heresy was put down.

  Whoever had infected the Fortress with rot had taken down all six wards at the same time. The degree of coordination implied would have been enough of a problem, but Mikodez had reason to believe that the particular form the rot had taken was the result of heretics taking advantage of an experiment being run by Hexarch Rahal Iruja and the false hexarch Nirai Faian. Faian was supposed to run the Nirai in public so Kujen could amuse himself with whatever research caught his fancy, but Iruja had suborned her almost from the beginning. A nexus fortress made an ideal proving ground for their work because it represented the hexarchate in miniature. What Mikodez didn’t understand was why they hadn’t used one of the smaller fortresses instead.

  As to why Iruja and Faian were experimenting with the calendar, that was obvious. All the hexarchs knew, and even Kujen, who hadn’t been told, could guess. They wanted a better form of immortality. There was a comprehensive body of work suggesting that you couldn’t do better than Kujen had under the existing calendar. Mikodez wouldn’t have minded asking Kujen about it outright, but he was supposed to be keeping an eye on Kujen for the other hexarchs. Iruja would have disapproved of him tipping their hand, even about something so easy to figure out.

  Kujen, for his part, tolerated the other hexarchs because his immortality relied on the high calendar in its present form, and the high calendar didn’t just include the numbers and measures of time, but the associated social system. In this case, that meant the six factions. If Kujen came up with a viable alternative that eliminated the competition, he would become a real threat to the sys
tem. The fact that he hadn’t already done away with everyone else strongly suggested that it was unlikely that such an alternative existed.

  At some point, Rahal Iruja was going to ask Mikodez to remove Kujen for real. Mikodez already had files detailing possible ways to do it, which he updated twice a month (more often when he got bored), although he wasn’t going to unless it became necessary. True, Kujen’s taste in hobbies made him an annoying transaction cost, but he was good at his job and he represented a certain amount of stability. Of course, Mikodez had plans for how to deal with the inevitable transition after Kujen’s death, just in case.

  Kujen had sent Mikodez his projections of possible heretical calendars. “I’ve sorted them by likelihood,” Kujen said. “That first one is bad news, especially if they’re fixated on seven as their central integer. And here I thought nobody paid attention to the past anymore.” He was one of two people who still remembered what life had been like under seven factions, not six.

  “You’ve been hanging out with too many Kel,” Mikodez said, although it wasn’t entirely true that the Kel disdained history. Nevertheless, the prospect of a Liozh revival – of a time when the hexarchate was a heptarchate – did concern him. The Liozh had been the philosophers and ethicists of the heptarchate, and some evidence suggested that they had been destroyed when they attempted to do away with the remembrances, which Kujen was fond of. Mikodez didn’t like the thought of Kujen becoming more personally invested in the matter, given his proclivities. Besides, it was hard to tell without more data, but if the Liozh had failed with their heresy the first time around, why would any sane heretic pick them to emulate?

  “You’re stooping to making Kel jokes?” Kujen said. The corner of his mouth lifted.

  “Someone has to,” Mikodez said. The Kel hexarch was known to make them herself.

  Kujen fiddled with something off-screen. “Anyway, all those calendars are compatible with the Fortress’s shields. I have advised Kel Command that they might as well just say how to take the shields out since it’s not like it’ll stay a secret, but they are proving resistant.”

  “Never give information away if you don’t have to,” Mikodez said. If the shields went down, the Fortress was dangerously vulnerable.

  “Yes, but your own side?”

  “Own side” was putting it a bit strongly. “They won’t like it if you say anything about it,” Mikodez said, as if Kujen needed the warning. Kujen shouldn’t have a say in a military decision anyway, except no one else was capable of overseeing the particular weapon Kel Command wanted to deploy.

  “I can keep my mouth shut,” Kujen said irritably. “You’ve made no secret of the fact that you have the usual Shuos prejudices, but I suppose you have your reasons for authorizing the mission.”

  It had been a sore point with Shuos leaders for almost four centuries that the Kel had snatched away their last general, even if the Shuos still had to approve Kel operations involving his use. “Anyway,” Mikodez said after a pause to see if Kujen was going to add anything, “you haven’t told me if you think the candidate’s acceptable.”

  “You really like the Sheathed Wings, don’t you? Aren’t you afraid she’s going to put Jedao to sleep?”

  It was entirely in character for Kujen to think psychological stability was dull. “I’m sure the general will bring some excitement into her life,” Mikodez said.

  “She’s wasted on him,” Kujen said. “I still think that commander would be a better fit. And I could get more use out of the Sheathed Wings if Kel Command doesn’t want her anymore.”

  Sometimes Mikodez thought Kujen would benefit from having his knuckles rapped. “Don’t get greedy,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of time to see if she can tell you anything about the latest cryptology conjectures after the Fortress has been dealt with.” Although whether she would prefer dealing with the Fortress or a sociopathic hexarch was an open question.

  “Killjoy,” Kujen said. “You’re not going to fold on this one, are you?”

  Mikodez smiled at him. “You wanted more funding for research on that latest jamming system, didn’t you?”

  “It’s unlike you to resort to naked bribery,” Kujen said, “not that I’m complaining.”

  “I’m bored,” Mikodez said, “and if I don’t spend this money, one of my subordinates will put it into something wholesome, like algorithmic threat identification.” He cultivated a reputation for being erratic for occasions like this.

  “All right, all right, I’ll put in the authorizations on my end,” Kujen said. “You think you have paperwork, you should see mine.”

  You think I don’t? Mikodez thought, but he kept his expression bland. Kujen’s security wasn’t nearly as up-to-date as he thought it was.

  “At least I’ll get a chance to say hello to her,” Kujen went on, “even though I’m sure she’ll be focused on her duty. Sometimes I think Visyas and I did too good a job designing formation instinct, but the results can be adorable.”

  Mikodez would have felt sorry for Kel Cheris, but at the moment Kujen was unlikely to damage anyone who had a chance of entertaining him in matters related to number theory. Besides, the emergency was real. A shame that she had made herself a candidate for dealing with the calendrical rot, but someone had to do it, and she had a better chance of survival than most.

  “I’ll set it up, then,” Mikodez said. “Depending on how hard I can lean on Kel Command, I can get her to you in eighteen days or so.”

  “Splendid,” Kujen said. “In the future, do try to be less transparent about avoiding me. It’s embarrassing when a grown Shuos is so obvious.” He signed off without waiting for a response.

  Embarrassing, but worth it to ensure that his preferred candidate was sent to deal with the calendrical rot. Mikodez spent several minutes composing his instructions to Kel Command, then sent them off.

  Kel Cheris was sane, although the odds were that she wouldn’t stay that way. Still, Mikodez had to trade her welfare for the hexarchate’s. Someday someone might come up with a better government, one in which brainwashing and the remembrances’ ritual torture weren’t an unremarkable fact of life. Until then, he did what he could.

  CHERIS SPENT THE flight back to the boxmoth infantry transport in silence. The boxmoth was like any other: walls painted solemn black and charcoal gray, with the occasional unsubtle touch of gold. Cheris reported to the commander’s executive officer, an unsmiling man with a scar over his right eye. She saluted him fist to shoulder, and he returned the salute. She passed over her company’s grid key so the data could be examined by her superiors at their leisure.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” the executive officer said, eying her with a faint spark of curiosity.

  This alarmed her – it never paid to stand out too much among the Kel – but no response seemed to be expected.

  The mothgrid informed her of the vessel’s current layout and where she might find the high halls, her quarters, the soldiers’ barracks. In reality, no one was going to their assigned high hall without cleaning up first. Per protocol, she was told the status of those who had been taken to Medical for their injuries. She thought of the recalcitrant squadron that had died on Dredge before the evacuation.

  Her quarters were next to her company’s barracks. She had two small rooms and an adjoining bath. All her muscles ached, but she dug out a small box of personal items and pulled out the raven luckstone her mother had given her on her twenty-third birthday. It was a polished stone, drab gray, and the raven’s silhouette was a welcome reminder of the home she visited so seldom.

  There came a rapid series of taps at her door: three, one, four, one, five –

  “Come in,” Cheris said, amused at the ritual. She put the luckstone away.

  One of the boxmoth’s birdform servitors came in bearing an arrangement of anodized wire flowers. There were twelve flowers, just as twelve servitors had fallen in action. They would never receive official acknowledgment of their service, but that wasn’t any reason
not to remember them.

  “Thank you,” Cheris said to the birdform. “It was bad down there. I wish I could have done more.”

  The birdform flashed a series of ironic golds and reds. Cheris had learned to read Simplified Machine Universal, and nodded her agreement. It added that it had been having trouble with one of its grippers, if she had a moment to adjust it?

  “Of course,” Cheris said. She wasn’t a technician, but some repair jobs were better handled by human hands, and she had learned the basics. As it turned out, all it took was a few moment’s jiggering with some specially shaped pliers. The birdform made a pleased bell tone.

  “I have to see to my duties now,” Cheris said. “I’ll talk to you later?”

  The birdform indicated its acquiescence, and headed out, leaving the flowers.

  Cheris didn’t know its name. The servitors had designations for human convenience, but she was certain that they had names of their own. She made a point of not asking.

  Washing up didn’t take long, and her uniform cleaned itself while she did so. The fabric smoothed itself of a last few creases as she picked it up. “Middle formal,” she told it, which was not too different from battle dress, except for the cuffs and the brightness of the gold trim.

  She had fourteen minutes before she ought to show up at the high hall to share the communal cup with her company, in celebration of their survival. The unscheduled time was a greater treasure than the bath. Alone, she eased herself into the chair and set her hands on the desk, taking comfort from the cool, solid glasswood. If she looked down she might have seen her dark-eyed reflection, crossed over with whorls and eddies like vagrant galaxies.

  Her contemplation was broken by heat-pulses in her arm. They told her to report to a secured terminal for orders. The formal closing sequence told her she was dealing with someone high in the chain of command. When in combat, people only used the abbreviated closings. She couldn’t imagine why dealing with her company was a matter of any urgency now that the Eels had been subdued.