Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Shuos Liis was watching her with knowing eyes. Cheris wasn’t immune to the woman’s striking beauty, but she desperately wanted to know what test it was she was passing, and what Jedao knew about Liis.

  “How long have you been at your position?” Cheris asked Ko, feeling she should at least get to know him.

  “Eight years, General,” he said. “Don’t believe the dramas. We spend most of our time destroying our eyesight reading reports and staring at maps and clocks. I’m surprised we haven’t all turned into mushrooms from the lack of light.”

  Interesting comment. “Planet-born?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve mostly lived on stations since graduating Shuos Academy, but it’s not the same.”

  Cheris could sympathize with that. The City of Ravens Feasting was a port on a small peninsula. During her first year as a cadet, she had sometimes woken listening for the sound of the river, or the birds.

  “General,” Liis said. Her eyes were deferential, but her voice was not. “Why the Immolation Fox and not some other weapon?”

  “I looked at his record,” Cheris said. She turned away, not wanting to invite further questions.

  “Still passing,” Jedao said.

  She was starting to wish they had some kind of ability to talk mind-to-mind for occasions like this.

  A voice said echoingly, “The cindermoth is prepared to receive you. Please exit using the primary door and go down the hall. A hopper will ferry you to the Unspoken Law.”

  “About time,” Mrai Dhun said.

  “After you, General,” Ko said, reminding Cheris she was supposed to go first.

  Her shadow preceded her through the door and down the hall. She didn’t stumble on the way, but it took a lot of concentration. The hopper waited at the end. It had no name, only a number, but then, she had always liked numbers. The hopper would ordinarily have held a platoon at full strength. The Shuos sat some way behind her, to her relief.

  The hopper set off, humming to itself with a voice like barbed wire and bells.

  Time for subvocals. “What’s the matter with Shuos Liis?” Cheris demanded, trusting that Jedao could pick out her voice despite the noise.

  “She’s been surgically altered.”

  “That’s all?” she said. Did Jedao have some hang-up about body modifications? A lot of Kel did, but the Shuos were supposed to be more relaxed about such things.

  “I wasn’t specific enough. She’s been surgically altered to resemble Shuos Khiaz, who was heptarch during most of my lifetime.”

  “And this is a test?”

  “Not for you. For me. If we were more closely linked, you might have shown a particular reaction. She hasn’t gotten the reaction, so that’s a point in your favor.”

  He was being awfully vague about – she figured it out. “You did what with a heptarch?”

  “Subvocals, please.” His voice was as cold as a knife’s edge. “It’s a reminder, that’s all. I’m a Shuos, but I’m currently Kel property because Heptarch Khiaz signed me over to Kel Command after Hellspin Fortress. Tell me, who’s the current Shuos hexarch?”

  “Shuos Mikodez,” Cheris said. Mikodez was notorious for the time he had assassinated two of his own cadets, apparently out of boredom.

  “I’m not surprised he’s still in power. He’s very good at what he does. Most Shuos don’t approve of me, but Mikodez really doesn’t approve of me. If I ever slip up – if he ever convinces Kel Command to hand me back to the Shuos – he’ll have me killed. This is a reminder that I need to behave.” He was silent for the rest of the admittedly short trip.

  Commander Kel Nerevor received them personally as they debarked from the hopper. She was resplendent in full formal, and her smile had a predatory cast. “General,” she said, almost in a purr. “Captain Shuos.” It was slightly insulting to refer to an officer by omitting his personal name, but Ko’s mild expression didn’t change.

  The null banner was prominently in evidence. Cheris felt a spasm of distaste. She reminded herself that she had chosen it, and that disgrace wasn’t far off from her real status, or Jedao’s for that matter.

  “Have someone show the Shuos to their quarters,” Cheris said.

  Servitors were already waiting to escort the Shuos. On the Unspoken Law they seemed to favor deltaforms with multiple gripping beaks. The Shuos saluted and headed off.

  “And yourself?” Commander Nerevor asked.

  “I want to see the moth’s command center,” Cheris said. More accurately, she wanted to see how Nerevor had set it up. “Then I’m going to retire to quarters as well. Lead the way, Commander.”

  “Of course,” Nerevor said.

  The command center was brightly lit and busy with the work of composite marionettes at all stations: Weapons, Communications, Sensors, Engineering, Navigation, and Doctrine. No, she was mistaken. The Doctrine officer was a captain-magistrate seconded from the Rahal, with the wolf’s-head emblem beneath her rank insignia.

  “She must be new,” Jedao said. “I paid special attention to the Doctrine officers for the cindermoths and I don’t recognize her.”

  Bad news, because Cheris didn’t recognize her either, and had hoped her memory had slipped. On the other hand, it wasn’t surprising the Rahal had placed someone to keep an eye on them. Odds were that the Doctrine officer on Commander Paizan’s cindermoth had been replaced, too. “Captain,” Cheris said, “may I ask your name?”

  The Rahal rose and saluted. She was pale and reed-thin, and Cheris wouldn’t have suspected her of being able to break a twig, but her voice was strong. “Captain-magistrate Rahal Gara, sir,” she said.

  Cheris nodded at Nerevor. The commander wasn’t part of a composite, but her profile had indicated that she preferred to work independently. Since they couldn’t rely on composites working in a heretical calendar anyway, this wasn’t necessarily bad.

  Cheris said, “Have Navigation plot the most direct route to the Fortress of Scattered Needles” – she gave parameters that would allow the less powerful moths to keep up. “Stellate formation. That should get us to the afflicted zone in 21.3 days, and then we’ll have to switch to invariant propulsion.”

  “Noted,” Nerevor said crisply. The Navigation marionette, which had long blue hair in tight braids, began its work.

  “That’s all I wanted to see,” Cheris said. “I’ll join you at high table in 3.2 hours.”

  “Of course.”

  Cheris declined Nerevor’s offer to escort her to quarters. Instead, she followed a trio of birdform servitors who took turns leading and whistling cheerful tunes. Cheris missed the servitors she had known on the Burning Leaf, but perhaps the ones here would be amenable to the occasional friendly chat.

  Her quarters were staggering in size and luxurious to boot. She could have held a party if she cared to. But there was no time to gawk at the furnishings. She webbed herself into the couch for mothdrive transition.

  “I’ll be glad to get underway,” Cheris said.

  “Everyone says that,” Jedao said, “but then the killing begins.”

  “Better action than nothing. The siege has to be fought.”

  “That I won’t dispute.”

  In two ten-weeks they would close on the Fortress. Cheris told herself to be calm. A lot could happen in that time, and when the shooting started, she would probably be so busy that boredom would look good. She closed her eyes and thought of yellow eyes, unblinking, and what they might see in the space between stars.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

  Priority: Normal

  From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

  To: Heptarch Liozh Zai

  Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Chicken, Day of the Rooster. Why both chicken and rooster? Who knows. I’ll ask during the next vote.

  In the meantime, Zai, you really must reconsider that ascetic diet of yours. That alarmingly excellent confectionary has come up with a whole new flaky pas
try with alternating layers of jujube filling and lemon custard, and I shudder to think what the fillings are going for these days considering what they’re charging for the pastries. I have been very good about rationing myself to one a day.

  You wanted my take on Scan’s reports, so here goes. Analysis of the long-range readings confirms we’ve got an incoming Kel swarm. There are one or two cindermoths in the lead, impossible to conceal them entirely, and ignore the fact that Scan is equivocating on the formants, I’d bet on two. I would estimate a dozen bannermoths and maybe some miscellaneous transports, but their formation has been chosen to obscure scan readings and it’s going to be impossible to get an exact count until they’re closer.

  What interests me more is their choice of general. Luckily, this is the Kel, so most of the options are in our favor. I could tell you were losing patience during all the old tedious debates, and who could blame you, Stoghan won’t shut up when he has an opinion to drone on about, so I’ll sum up the possibilities as they stand. The most dangerous full general who might be available is Kel Cherkad, who’s served with the Andan. I’ve never liked her emblem – I swear that bizarre spiral pattern gives me migraines – but there’s no denying her effectiveness. The next worst prospect would be Lieutenant General Kel Daristu, who’s still young enough to be open-minded about assessing the political situation. However, based on the last reports before the communications blackout, I judge that Kel Command is unlikely to pull him off the Ivenua border. We’re just lucky the scariest one, Kel Inesser, is on the other side of the hexarchate.

  I’ve attached the file with my detailed breakdowns of the options, but this is just killing time until we see what banner the Kel broadcast so we know who we’re dealing with. There’s an outside chance they’ll composite their general with a Shuos higher-up, but I can’t imagine the Kel would admit to that kind of desperation.

  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to talk to some of the people responsible for maintaining the new exotics. They’ve been delinquent in turning in performance reports and I find that sort of laziness unacceptable. You know how to reach me if there are any new developments.

  Yours in calendrical heresy,

  Vh.

  THE TWO TEN-WEEKS passed more quickly than Cheris had reckoned on. Her first experience at high table was awkward. People tended to talk to her shadow rather than her face. Kel Nerevor didn’t do this, but instead made cheerful remarks that played up her experience and Cheris’s lack thereof.

  Cheris had thought that she had recovered the ability to use chopsticks without fumbling them, but nerves made her drop them on the floor. A deltaform servitor brought her a new pair, and she thanked it, grateful that her voice didn’t shake. The deltaform chirped and bobbed before it returned to its duties.

  “I’ve noticed your affinity for the servitors, General,” Nerevor said toward the end of the meal.

  Cheris considered her response. “I like to think of them as allies,” she said. She hadn’t had much time to talk to the ones on the Unspoken Law, mostly because there was far more paperwork involved in being a general than she had realized.

  “Never too many of those,” Nerevor said, but she clearly thought Cheris was eccentric.

  Afterward, she reviewed available information on the Fortress of Scattered Needles, singling out the six wards and their associated factions for attention. The Andan, Shuos, and Rahal were represented by the Drummers’ Ward, Dragonfly Ward, and Anemone Ward; the Vidona, Kel, and Nirai were represented by the Ribbon Ward, Radiant Ward, and Umbrella Ward. She still didn’t like the fact that all the wards’ communication posts had been taken over simultaneously. Then she tried to make a dent in her paperwork.

  “You should take a break,” Jedao said while she was in the middle of parsing a particularly disorganized report on Medical’s preparedness. “Isn’t there something you do to relax?”

  “I should –”

  “Trust me, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to work yourself to death later. Do something fun while you can.”

  Cheris was dubious, but she invited some servitors to join her for a drama. A deltaform and a mothform came by, and they exchanged friendly greetings while the drama began playing. The mothform lit up in ebullient golds, magentas, and oranges every time the heroine’s sidekick, who was supposedly a Nirai, wrote so-called equations.

  For her part, Cheris quizzed the deltaform about its opinion of the cindermoth’s Kel, especially Commander Nerevor. Maybe it was underhanded to turn to a servitor for intelligence, especially since most people didn’t take notice of them even when they were right under their noses, but she needed all the help she could get. As a captain she’d been able to associate with her lieutenants and the other infantry captains and listen in on a little gossip. Here, the greater difference in rank, to say nothing of Jedao, made it impossible to talk to people in the same way.

  In any case, in between sarcastic comments on the heroine’s taste in power tools (many servitors had definite opinions about power tools), the deltaform told Cheris that Nerevor was popular among the crew for her flamboyant style and the fact that she was unstinting with her appreciation when her subordinates did something well, even when it involved outsmarting her. Competitive but fair. For that matter, the servitors had no quarrel with her, and it said philosophically that the Kel were as well-mannered as Kel ever were. Cheris smiled wryly.

  Jedao didn’t seem to be paying attention to their discussion at all. “I had no idea your taste in entertainment ran to romantic comedy,” he said quizzically during one of the pauses. “Romantic comedy with a rogue engineer, at that.”

  “Oh, they all duel each other, too,” Cheris said. “Every episode the heroine makes a whole new calendrical sword out of paper clips and metaltape.” The dueling was the reason she liked this show. “The dueling is ludicrous, but the special attacks are really funny. Like that one just now with the galloping horses.”

  The deltaform said that if someone summoned horses to attack it, it would just surrender.

  “Given that they outmass you by lots, that would be sensible,” Cheris said. “Jedao, weren’t you a duelist? If you hate this, we can watch something else.”

  Jedao laughed. “And here I was thinking that you have much better taste in dramas than my mother.”

  She was disconcerted by the thought that Jedao had had a mother. She didn’t know anything about his family.

  “I’m told someone murdered her while I was being interrogated,” Jedao said, as though he were reporting the number of cucumbers a battalion ate in a month. “My father was already dead. We were never close to begin with. My brother –” Suddenly the unsentimental voice became raw. “My brother shot his partner and their three daughters in their sleep exactly a year after Hellspin Fortress, then killed himself. And my sister vanished. Probably ran right out of the heptarchate. She was always the practical one.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cheris said, because she couldn’t think of what else to say. The servitors blinked lights at her inquiringly, then subsided. They continued to watch the drama in silence.

  As the episode wound down, Jedao said, “You’re not doing badly with Nerevor. She’s expecting your nerve to crack and it hasn’t yet.”

  “Jedao,” Cheris said, “I’m stapled to a bigger threat. I’m worried about her, but when you get right down to it, my situation is already worse.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Good what?”

  “Be more assertive. You tend to defer to Nerevor. The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you. You have to act like a general or people won’t respect you as one.”

  Cheris frowned, but he was right. Feeling twitchy, she started doing some exercises. She was still dealing with having a stranger’s patterns of motion stamped into her. The more she thought about ways to compensate, the more she fell over her feet.

  On the fourth day at high table, as everyone finished the cinnamon-ginger punch wi
th floating pine nuts that was the day’s indulgence, Kel Nerevor leaned over and said, “I haven’t seen you sparring with anyone since you arrived, General.”

  Nerevor had chosen day four – four for death, the unlucky lucky number that suicide hawks favored – for this conversational gambit. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to indulge me with a duel?” she went on. “Some of my officers have been speculating about your style.”

  It would have been terrible protocol to refuse, although it wasn’t good protocol for Nerevor to ask, either. “I’ll oblige you,” Cheris said, because she liked dueling, “although I’m sure you’ve had more challenging opponents.” This was bound to be true even without Cheris’s current difficulty getting her body to cooperate. The servitors had told her that Nerevor enjoyed a fair deal of success as a duelist, and that her style was flashy and aggressive. She remembered Jedao’s words on authority and added, “In one hour.”

  People were talking and eying her speculatively. Her clumsiness had not gone unremarked. Clumsy Kel were rare.

  “This will be interesting,” Jedao said once she was back in her quarters. She was never going to get used to how big they were. She didn’t have to look at the general’s wings on her uniform most of the time, but there was no escaping the rooms. “I had hoped your coordination would recover faster than this.”

  “Did your other anchors perform better in this regard?”

  “Yes, but please don’t think this reflects badly on you. I have an idea of what’s going on, but it doesn’t help you, and if I’m right you’ll figure it out immediately.”

  “I hate it when you’re cryptic.”

  “Well, you might as well warm up.”

  Cheris did so. Twelve minutes before the appointed time, she took up her calendrical sword.

  When Cheris reached the dueling hall, Nerevor was already there. Nerevor’s calendrical sword had a burnished bronze hilt with scrollwork in green: elaborate, but a cindermoth commander was entitled to it. A fair number of Nerevor’s officers were there, including the Rahal captain-magistrate, Gara. Most of the Kel were intent. Shuos Liis had a seat near the front and was smiling openly. Cheris avoided looking at her.