Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  It only took a moment’s extra ferreting to find the people who had died at the Siege of Hellspin Fortress, heretics and heptarchate soldiers both.

  “All right,” Jedao said quietly. “All of my anchors do this sooner or later.”

  At this remove of time, the statistics weren’t precise, but the Kel historians had done what they could. The swarm that Jedao had led against Hellspin Fortress had not been small even by modern standards. His orders had told him to conquer the fortress so the Lanterners could be converted and the calendar repaired from the damage done to it.

  Cheris read the number of the dead once, twice, thrice. A fourth time; four for death. Even so, she knew that she didn’t understand numbers, that a number over a million was a series of scratched lines and curves. If she heard tomorrow that her parents had choked on their soup and fallen over dead, it would hurt her more than the deaths of people who would have died anyway generations before she was born. Nevertheless, she started reading capsule biographies in reverse alphabetical order.

  She read about two sisters who died trying to veil the dead after the custom of their people. Their reasoning had probably been that it might staunch the threshold winnower’s radiations, which was not illogical, but wrong anyway. She read about a child. A woman. A man trying to carry a crippled child to safety. Both died bleeding from every pore in their skin. A woman. A woman and her two-year-old child. Three soldiers. Three more. Seven. Now four. You could find the dead in any combination of numbers.

  Faces pitted with bullet holes. Stagnant prayers scratched into dust. Eye sockets stopped up with ash. Mouths ringed with dried bile, tongues bitten through and abandoned like shucked oysters. Fingers worn down to nubs of bone by corrosive light. The beaks of scavenger birds trapped in twisted rib cages. Desiccated blood limning interference patterns. Intestines in three separate stages of decay, and even the worms had boiled into pale meat.

  Two women. A man and a woman. A child. Another child. She hadn’t known there were so many children, even if they were heretics, but look, there was another. She had lost count already despite her intent to remember every one.

  I remember every ugly thing I have ever done, Jedao had said. But Cheris wondered. It was impossible that he could remember causing all of this to happen without feeling all those deaths crouching at his side.

  Cheris couldn’t bear the silence any longer. “Say whatever you mean to say,” she said.

  “I know things about the victims that aren’t in the records,” Jedao said. He might have been standing right next to her, as a lover would: too close. “Ask me.”

  She picked a foreign-looking name from the list. She was sure it belonged to a Lanterner. Her hands sweated inside her gloves.

  “You’re thinking I couldn’t possibly say much about a Lanterner,” Jedao said, “but that’s not true. They were people, too, with their own histories. Look at where she died – yes, that’s a reasonable map. The Lanterners were desperate. They had tried using children and invalids as shields before, and they had learned from the second battle that that wouldn’t deter me.” His voice was too steady. “So they sent the dregs of their troops to die first. The report says she was found with a Tchennes 42 in her hand. The Tchennes was an excellent gun. They wouldn’t have handed one out except to an officer, someone they trusted to keep questionable soldiers in line. From her name, you can tell she probably came from Maign City.”

  “All right,” Cheris said, digesting that, “another.” She pointed.

  “He’s from the technician caste from what’s now the Outspecker Colonies, before the heptarchate annexed them. There was a conflict between Doctrine and Gheffeu caste structure – you’d need a Rahal to explain the details – so his people had to be assimilated. We’d tried raids with Shuos shouters for fast compliance, but the calendricals were too unstable. By the time Kel Command finished arguing with the Shuos heptarch about it, the Gheffeu had thrown in with the Lanterners.

  “It was a mess that the Andan should have handled, but we were fighting each other for influence. You’re used to thinking of the hexarchate as a unified entity, but during my lifetime, the factions were still quarreling over Doctrine. The winners would have their specific technologies preserved under the final calendrical order, and the losers – well, we know what happened to the Liozh.

  “Anyway, that man. He died among strangers. If you look at the other names, none of them are Gheffeu. The Lanterners didn’t trust their latest recruits and split up ethnic groups. He died during a Gheffeu holy week, and he would have been wearing a white armband in honor of a particular saint.”

  Cheris wasn’t a historian, but she had the awful feeling that Jedao wasn’t making anything up.

  She didn’t point for the third one. “Colonel Kel Gized.” Jedao’s chief of staff.

  Jedao’s voice was no longer steady. “Do you want it backwards or forwards?”

  Cheris pulled up a picture of Kel Gized because she wanted to know. Gized had a round, bland face and an untidy scar, shockingly pale against her dark brown skin, along the side of her head. The hair above it, cropped short, was gray. Her gloves looked like they were made of heavier material than the Kel favored nowadays. “Chronological,” Cheris said.

  “I met her at one of those damnable flower-viewing parties I had to attend as a high officer. The host was a friend of the Andan heptarch’s sister. They liked to decorate parties with us military types to reassure the populace that the breakaway factions weren’t going to chew the realm to rags.

  “I was looking at the orchids when I overheard Gized critiquing an Andan functionary’s poetry to his face. I decided I had to find out more about her, so I waited until she was done bludgeoning him about the head with his use of synecdoche, and asked her for a duel.”

  It wasn’t much of an anecdote, although Kel who cared about literary techniques were oddities the way her ability at abstract mathematics was an oddity. But there was a brittle quality to his tone.

  “It was over very quickly. I’ve only once lost a duel to a Kel, and it wasn’t Gized. She wasn’t humiliated, she was bored. She’d come to enjoy the party and I was getting in the way. But I looked up her profile. Mediocre duelist, excellent administrator. When Kel Command gave me my pick of staff, I chose her. You would have liked her. She tolerated all the games I challenged her to despite never figuring out how to bluff at jeng-zai, but it was always clear that I was wasting her time.”

  “Then why do it? Why the games?”

  His voice came from a little ways off, as though he had paced to the far end of the room. “You probably have some notion that we wield weapons and formations and plans. But none of that matters if you can’t wield people. You can learn about how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane.” The word choice jarred Cheris. “So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”

  “You haven’t challenged me to anything,” Cheris said, wondering.

  “What, and interrupt your dramas? You’re entitled to leisure time. I have to admit, I don’t even know what to make of the episode with the dolphin chorale.”

  Now he was trying to distract her. “Tell me how you killed her,” she said.

  “There’s not a lot to tell,” Jedao said. Pacing again. “She had an analytical mind and wouldn’t have considered me above suspicion. Another ten minutes and she would have concluded that everything going wrong implied a very highly placed traitor. Lucky for me she was never a fast thinker. I shot her through the side of the head.

  “It was a bad moment because Jiang and Gwe Pia were also in the command center, and Gwe Pia was a spectacularly good shot. She would have gotten me if she’d been willing to shoot through Jiang, but she wouldn’t have thought of that, even if I did straight off.”

  Cheris could think of words for an officer who immediately jumped to shooting through a comrade as a firing solution.

  “Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getti
ng low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.”

  “This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped.

  “I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?”

  “It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation?

  “You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.”

  “Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise?”

  A ragged silence. “Fine. But listen, if your purpose was to kill a large group of people concentrated in one location, what would be the sensible way of doing it?”

  Her shoulders ached. “Orbital bombardment,” she said reluctantly.

  “The way I did it made no sense.”

  He was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t imagine what it was. Her formation instinct was at a low ebb. The Kel relied on hierarchy, and he had comprehensively betrayed his subordinates. “Why does it matter?” she said. “My career isn’t going anywhere.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing. I would have liked to be an instructor, I even put in the request, but they wanted me in the field.”

  Cheris stared at the shadow. A few hundred years of Nirai expertise and they didn’t even know what was wrong with him. What had she been thinking, fetching him out of the Kel Arsenal? And what had Kel Command been thinking for letting her do it?

  She pulled up the figures again, made them march neatly for her inspection. “Do you have anything to say to that?”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know about myself,” Jedao said.

  “Explain it to me,” Cheris said. She wasn’t going to shout. “Make the numbers make sense. It can’t have been a case of breaking under stress; I don’t know what stress you could have been under. Candle Arc, outnumbered eight to one by the Lanterners, sure. Of course, you won that one so handily it’s in all the textbooks. But Hellspin Fortress? Everyone agrees the Lanterners were doomed. So what happened? Why don’t the numbers work?”

  “You’re the one who’s good with figures,” Jedao retorted. “Run the numbers and you tell me.”

  Numbers. Everyone knew Shuos Jedao for the massacre, but she wondered how many people he would have killed if he had continued what had been a brilliant career.

  The people he would have destroyed in that imaginary past would have been the heptarchate’s enemies. Their lives shouldn’t be reckoned as equal to those of the heptarchate’s own citizens. But she wondered.

  “There must have been some reason for all that death,” Cheris said. “If you’d sold out to the Lanterners, that would at least be a motive. But wrecking both sides like that? With no one standing to gain?” She remembered the bleed-through. “Was it because you wanted to die and you were taking it out on everyone else?” But why would he have been suicidal before Hellspin, or the black cradle?

  “I’m not completely stupid,” Jedao snapped. “If I’d meant to kill myself at Hellspin Fortress, I would have put a bullet in my head. My aim isn’t that bad.”

  She had hit a nerve. It must gall him that he could never hold a weapon again.

  “Maybe I’m only what they say I am.” There was still an edge to his voice. “A madman. I had an excellent career. I had comrades. I had power, if you care about power. There’s no sane reason to give any of that up.”

  He was trying to tell her something again and it was right in front of her where she couldn’t see it. But she was exhausted, and it was difficult to think clearly. “Yes, well, you have immortality instead,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying it.”

  Jedao was silent.

  “The people you killed never had a chance,” she said, willing him to answer her. “And none of them are coming back, either.”

  Unexpectedly, he said, “A million people dead four centuries before you were born, and you care about them. It speaks well of you, even if it doesn’t speak well of me.”

  She couldn’t sleep for a long time after that.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “NEW ORDERS FROM Colonel Ragath,” the captain had said once upon a time. At one point, Kel Niaad had been able to recite them word for word. Now he wasn’t sure if there was anything in his head but the staccato of gunfire.

  A scant hour ago they had been advancing through a residential complex in the Anemone Ward. Fighting had been a matter of around-the-corner shots and shatter grenades, the heartstop terror that every moan in the Fortress’s winds was death in red spikes coming straight for their eyes. The captain had ordered the patrol to hold the complex against the heretics, but almost all were dead, one was not just dead but obliterated into a stray loop of intestine on a potted shrub, and one was comatose, a state Niaad would have preferred for himself.

  The other surviving member was Corporal Kel Isaure, whose only reaction to the gore had been to send Niaad to retrieve equipment from the dead. She didn’t shirk danger herself; she’d ventured farther than he had. Niaad wished she wouldn’t risk herself. If she died, his formation instinct would short out and the heretics would find him curled in a ball.

  “Niaad.” It was Isaure, her voice hoarse but clear. “Hey, soldier. You awake?”

  The shouts and thuds and clatter of ricochets seemed farther away than before, but sound traveled strangely in the Fortress.

  “I’m awake, Corporal,” Niaad said. He couldn’t get his eyes to focus on her.

  “I need you, soldier,” Isaure said. “You’re a lousy excuse for a Kel, but you’re all I have left.”

  The insult, basic as it was, kept his attention.

  “Thing is,” Isaure said, drawing lines into the shrapnel and shredded metalweave with her toe, “to cut us off from our company, they should either be coming through this branch or branch 71-13. I have no idea what the fuck our general is up to, but neither side has seen fit to blow up the ward with us still in it. Which is good. But we have to take the Fortress so the Vidona can get to work. Which means getting our asses out of this fucking complex so we can be useful.”

  Niaad stared at her.

  “Only thing is,” Isaure said, “do we go straight toward the corpsefuckers, or cut ourselves a shortcut?”

  Niaad was alarmed. Isaure was only a corporal, and the captain had been quite specific that they had to hold this miserable complex until they received orders otherwise.

  “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” Isaure said as she continued to draw a map with her toe. It was surprisingly good, especially if you ignored the streaky marks left by skull splinters and the accompanying shreds of brain. “Dregs spit up by Personnel because they needed more warm bodies.”

  Niaad wished the corporal would stop philosophizing and give a fucking order already.

  “We have the same problem.” Now Isaure was kneeling and using gristle to diagram a perimeter. Her expression showed nothing but contempt for the situation. “You jump –” She banged the nearest wall. The noise was horrifyingly loud, and it took Niaad a full three seconds to stop scrabbling for cover. “– at the smallest noises and you’re not getting much benefit from formation instinct.”

  There wasn’t much Niaad could say to that. When the head of the man next to him had been vaporized, he had fallen apart.

  Isaure crouched and made a second diagram. Niaad should have been paying attention, but he couldn’t think clearly. Every so often, Isaure lifted her head to listen, but if she had any conclusions about what was going on, she didn’t share them.

  “You should ask,” she said at last.

  “Corporal?”

  “Ask why I’m the same as you. Soldier no one has a use for.”

  Now she was getting personal. “Why, sir?” he said warily.

  “I used to be a tank captain,” Isaure said. “A good one.” She frowned at the gristle,
then wiped it off with her glove and marked out a new perimeter, this time scratching it into the floor with a bit of broken tile that shrieked as it drew the curve. “Miss the beasts. But they found out I was good at saying no to stupid orders.”

  Niaad swore in spite of himself. The corporal was a crashhawk, a formation breaker. His formation instinct might not keep him from blanking in the middle of a firefight, but it did oblige him to follow orders, even a crashhawk’s orders.

  Isaure was snickering. “It’s your lucky day, Niaad. They stripped my commission and broke me all the way down, and reinjected me with formation instinct. They never realized it didn’t take the second time, either.”

  “All respect, sir, why are you still with the Kel?”

  His tone hadn’t been respectful in the slightest, but Isaure didn’t seem to care. “Because the Kel need me,” she said. Niaad’s skin crawled. “Any other corporal would be rooted here. I see a job to be done and we’re going to do it. If I’m not mistaken, the heretics are setting up some weapon to cover the approaches, and they’re worried it’ll hit them too or they’d have moved in. You were paying attention to the reports, right? Anyway, best to hit them from behind.”

  “Sir, there are only two of us!”

  “Look, soldier, if you love life so much, why the fuck did you sign on to be a suicide hawk? Come on, let’s see how many weapons we can carry.”

  Nirai didn’t feel sanguine about the number of grenades he was loaded down with. On the other hand, Isaure was a crack shot, and if anyone was going to be the beast of burden, it was him.

  Isaure knew exactly where they were going, even if she was crazy. They entered residences of necessity. This was the one ward built hive-fashion. In order to get anywhere in the hive segments, you went through people’s homes and offices, rooms nestled up to each other like cells, and only the occasional corridor, more to transport goods than people. Some Rahal must have come up with the layout. He couldn’t see any other faction thinking of it.