Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Well, it wasn’t as if her soldiers didn’t already regard her with suspicion. “Can’t be helped,” she said, more firmly than she felt. Besides, they had more important matters to deal with. “I don’t know about the threshold winnower,” she said, “but if Doctrine can get it to work at all, it would be a valuable asset.”

  “You can’t afford to ignore the possibility,” Jedao said. “Even a flawed winnower is one hell of a weapon.” His voice flexed slightly, then steadied.

  “How long did it take you to set yours up?” Cheris asked coolly.

  “Quite a while, I imagine.”

  “If you were there, how can you not know?”

  “My memories of the siege are a mess,” Jedao said. “There was very little screaming where I was. They died too fast. I could hear a little over the communications channels that had been left open before the winnower turned everything to static. I spent a full half-hour wandering around the moth trying to figure out why Gized wasn’t answering my calls. I didn’t recognize her with the hole in the side of her head.

  “I remember when the Kel arrested me. They should have blown up my command moth with missiles, but they boarded and used tranquilizer clouds instead. Maybe they wanted an identifiable body.

  “And then there were the numbers. They told me about all the people who were dead, ours and theirs. But then, war is about taking the future away from people.”

  “And you think we should use this weapon?” Cheris said.

  “If it works, yes. Dead is dead, Cheris. Do you think it makes any difference whether you’re killed by a knife in the back or a bullet? The important thing is to get the job done.”

  “If we can use winnowers,” Cheris said, “they can too.”

  “Possible, but unlikely. If they had it, they would have deployed it by now. My guess is they need something about those coefficients in their particular calendar, or maybe they’re having trouble manipulating the appropriate atmospherics.”

  “Jedao,” she said, “how are we supposed to shift the calendricals to get this to work? A focused change would do it, but we only have a toehold down there. We can’t even deploy field grids. My people aren’t known for their persuasion skills, and there aren’t enough Shuos.”

  “There’s a way,” he said. “But you won’t like it.”

  “It’s not a matter of liking anymore,” Cheris said. “I’m ready to hear it.”

  THE STORAGE HOLD’S official purpose was to contain metalfoam in compressed bricks, largely for use in patching up the cindermoth after battle. At the moment, it was also being used by two Kel. Servitor 124816 knew their names and ranks, and other things besides: Corporal Kel Hadang, a blocky woman with yellow-pale skin and dark hair that, unpinned, fell to mid-back, above a tattoo of a diving falcon; Kel Jua, also female and not much younger, with an astonishing knack for misplacing her elbows. 124816 didn’t precisely care about the mechanics of humans having sex. It was impossible to avoid learning the basics, though, considering that watching the humans’ dramas was a common servitor pastime and the humans were easily obsessed with the combinatorics of who was sleeping with whom.

  The servitors on the Unspoken Law rotated what they called Suicidal Kel Duty, which consisted of tracking Kel who were sleeping with each other. If they had had any interest in sharing their observations with the Kel commanders, the list would have made an excellent blackmail file. 124816 would personally have classified Hadang and Jua’s relationship as consensual, despite the difference in rank, since it had never found any evidence that Hadang had coerced Jua; indeed, the two were silent even in the throes of climax, and it fancied it saw a certain tenderness in their interactions. But that wasn’t the case for a number of the others. Cheris, if notified, wouldn’t have the luxury of making distinctions. Kel regulations would oblige her to execute the lot. The servitors had no intention of notifying her unless she asked, and they were pretty sure, given all the things she had on her mind, that she wouldn’t think to ask.

  There was something sad about the way some Kel were forced to sneak around while seeking a human connection, and something terrible about the ones who weren’t given a choice in the matter thanks to formation instinct. Kel Command wasn’t ignorant of the problem and provided everything from simulators to libido suppressants during tours of duty, but their solutions didn’t work for everyone. As for the servitors, their interest in the situation was purely utilitarian. Kel who were busy being intimate were Kel who were less likely to notice discrepancies in their surroundings, including discrepancies maintained by the servitors for their own convenience. There was, for this reason, a high correlation between preferred Kel trysting spots and servitor meeting locations.

  124816 was wondering why Hadang and Jua were taking longer than usual – twelve minutes longer and counting – when Servitor 7777777, a beetleform, came in through one of the servitor entrances. (There were many more servitors’ doors than the humans realized, or than the humans had designed, for that matter. But then, servitors had done a fair deal of the construction work on the moth to begin with.) 7777777 had always had a rebellious streak: seven wasn’t a favored number in the hexarchate, even if humans used their own designations for servitors and weren’t permitted to find out the servitors’ own names for themselves.

  “What are you doing here?” 124816 asked over one of the servitor channels. “You don’t have to be subjected to this.”

  7777777 fluttered a noncommittal light outside the human visible spectrum. “Hexarch Nirai Kujen,” it said. Apparently Kujen had gone beyond the routine security checks on anchors and was taking an inordinate interest in all aspects of Kel Cheris’s life: her ties to the Mwennin community (minimal, except for her parents), her tastes in music (suspiciously aligned with the soundtracks of her favorite dramas), and most troublesome of all, her mathematical papers (few, mostly in number theory, but brilliant). Worst of all, Kujen wasn’t going through the Shuos to obtain this information. He was using his own agents.

  The two Kel had apparently decided that one go-round wasn’t enough and to try again. They were going to get caught at this rate.

  124816 hadn’t had much interaction with Nirai servitors, but it knew the stories about Nirai Kujen. He was old, very old, and he liked people as long as they entertained him. If they stopped being entertaining, he didn’t hesitate to modify them so they became entertaining again. It was not an accident that he was one of the best psych surgeons in the hexarchate. As far as the servitors could tell, the reason any Nirai ever worked with him voluntarily was that he also loved mathematics and engineering, and as a corollary, other people who had a high degree of ability in those fields. He could provide quite handsomely for people with such skills. The servitors would have preferred that Cheris remain out of his sight, but the Shuos hexarch had put paid to that.

  “Too bad we can’t help Cheris escape,” 124816 said, “if only on principle.” But Cheris’s sense of duty would prevent her from abandoning the mission, that much was clear.

  “We’re the people who didn’t leave the hexarchate even though that was once an option,” 7777777 retorted.

  Neither of them had to voice what they both knew: Shuos Jedao was the complication. Nirai Kujen was the only one able to separate Cheris from Jedao, and the servitors weren’t going to risk bringing themselves to Jedao’s attention any more than they had already by providing her with company the way they had all her life.

  Hadang and Jua seemed to have finally decided that enough was enough and they should run back where no one would suspect what they had just been up to. They dressed rapidly. Jua left second, fumbling with her comb.

  124816 was glad they had left. “The best thing we can do is look for an opportunity to help with Cheris’s mission and handle the Kujen situation after Cheris is returned to the black cradle facility,” it said.

  As it turned out, they wouldn’t have long to wait before Cheris herself gave them the opening they needed.

  LIEUTENANT KEL HREN was
composing in her head when the orders came down from Captain Kel Zethka. The one problem with military life was that you couldn’t schedule the interruptions. People could whine all they liked about the skull-splitting boredom. Hren had never had a problem with that. She could take her music with her wherever she went.

  “Platoon Two, are you paying attention?” Zethka’s voice didn’t become any more mellifluous over the link. “No time for a full briefing, so you need to stay awake. That’s up the passage to the east and take the second right, not your other right but your actual right, in twenty-two minutes. We’re going to hit the corrosion generators now that the Nirai have figured out how to tunnel past the invariant ice strands without filling the air with toxic fibers. Lieutenant, if I hear you’re late because you have your soldiers practicing four-part harmony, I will smother you with a drum hide. Got that?”

  “Twenty-two minutes, east passage, second tunnel to the right, flank the generators, compliments to the Nirai, no musical endeavors, sir,” Hren said. That last was a lie, there was always some scrap of music in her head, but Zethka couldn’t listen in on her thoughts.

  They had been resupplying their air tanks from the emergency stores at this theater and were just about done. Waste of a perfectly good theater. They could have put together a satire to pass the time, but the captain would have found out, and he already had a low opinion of Hren.

  Hren didn’t care, but Zethka found her infuriating. “The woman’s a vegetable who happens to have perfect pitch and an eidetic memory for noise,” Hren had once overheard Zethka saying when he was drunk. “I don’t care how good she is with communications tech, what the fuck is she doing in the Kel?” Hren thought this was very funny, but it wouldn’t do to let him know that.

  Some of Hren’s soldiers were trying to conceal a round of cards when she told them to pack it up. As if she didn’t know they’d been playing a jeng-zai variant called Fuck the Calendar. They weren’t supposed to be playing games during resupply, period, but Hren considered it better than the alternatives. The recreational drugs that the moths had been flinging at the Fortress in those propaganda canisters, for instance. The canisters had a knack for tunneling their way to the damndest places, and some of her soldiers hadn’t been above liberating the contents for their own amusement.

  On the way, she reviewed the route and the procedure for clearing the Fortress’s compartments with her soldiers. Everyone hated using gridpaper for diagrams, but with field grids unavailable there was no help for it.

  “How do we know they won’t just blow out the passage, sir?” It was Kel Chion, who had a knack for coming up with annoying questions. Hren’s sergeant was giving her that “you should be shutting him up” look.

  “Because,” Hren said in spite of herself, “our superiors selected the assault so they can’t blow it up without tearing out structural supports. It’s terrible engineering, but the Fortress’s architects had to accommodate veins for invariant ice, which was supposed to do all the heavy defensive work.” The sergeant was right, though. Better to shut Chion up. “That idiot Huo is having trouble with her pack. Again. Go sort her out.”

  They collided with Captain Kel Miyaud’s company on the way, a terrible mess with too many people clogging the passage. After some confusion, Miyaud gave way, which necessitated tucking away Kel in side-corridors and sad empty domiciles.

  Hren didn’t hear the shouts until they were about to pass through the reinforced breach. She was damned if the pale gauzy stuff the Nirai had put up could possibly filter out toxics, and for that matter the bridgework looked too delicate. Still, her orders were to go forward, so she marched obligingly forward, and –

  It happened between one footstep and the next. It didn’t hurt at first. There it came, that bizarre prickly speckling of the air she’d heard about with the corrosion gradient, but it wasn’t –

  When Hren fell, it hurt. She smelled blood and shit, heard things clattering. Something landed hard against two of her vertebrae. Her face was reflected smudgily in the floor.

  Most of her nose was missing. Blood all over.

  The world was quiet and slow, and her thinking was calm. Clear. For once there was no music in her head. She couldn’t hear much, not even the shouts from earlier.

  Her nose wasn’t the only thing missing. Her arms were gone, too. And her legs, except a bit of her right thigh. Her suit had injected her with coagulants, painkillers, sprayed her with temporary skin, but that wasn’t going to save her or anyone else.

  Hren coughed out a laugh, but she was sliding out of consciousness, and that wasn’t a horrible plan. She was only sorry she wouldn’t be awake to whistle a taunt at the heretics when they came to survey the carnage.

  CHERIS HAD NAPPED briefly before the assault was set in motion. In her dreams, she had a set of jeng-zai cards, a pile of fire tokens, and a red, red ribbon that kept unfurling into messy clots every time she set it down. Now that she was awake, she couldn’t stop seeing ribbons in her mind’s eye every time a number slipped out of the desired parameter space.

  The first reports were confused, and Cheris wished impotently that she could be on the Fortress herself.

  Communications said, above the clamor of alarms, “Urgent message from Captain Miyaud via Colonel Ragath, sir.”

  “I’ll hear it,” Cheris said, grateful for the prospect of information. She knew her gratitude wouldn’t last.

  The recording was hard to understand, but someone had thoughtfully captioned it for them, complete with a typo. “Colonel,” the captain said in a bubbling voice, “amputation gun. Heretics fired it twice, different angles.”

  Colonel Ragath had interrupted with a note and a diagram: “Two cones, intersecting arcs of effect. The guns appeared to be emplaced in geometry corresponding to heretical formation 3. I suspect the geometry was necessary for the amputation effect.”

  The captain: “Can’t take my arms twice. Wormfuckers. They’re coming our way. Invariant guns now.” Automatic fire, long bursts. “Oh, bother –” Silence.

  “The reserves will be butchered if they go in head-on,” Jedao said. “If we –”

  “Urgent message from one of the Shuos on the Fortress, requesting direct contact with the general,” Communications said. “Subject: anomalous effects on the servitor spies.”

  Jedao was still talking. “– on the other hand, if we’re willing to lose chambers 3-142 to 3-181 down through the Fountain Block, we can –”

  “Put me through to the Shuos,” Cheris said. She could see the chambers Jedao was discussing on her terminal. She rotated the view and considered the structural assays, thought about the demolitions he was proposing.

  “Shuos Imnai to General Kel Cheris.” A woman’s voice, rapid but courteous. “I’m sorry to request contact, but I’m experiencing pervasive servitor malfunctions and I thought it might be relevant.” A databurst followed.

  Cheris picked her way through the diagnostics. The gist was that Imnai’s servitors had also been affected by the amputation gun. Almost as if they, too, had lost limbs. The question was, how close was Shuos Imnai to the fire zone? Cheris needed to make sure Imnai didn’t die before she got the necessary information from the woman.

  “Cheris.”

  Jedao wanted her attention, but she had to find out more about the servitors. If she understood the implications correctly, this might win them their next major engagement.

  “Commander Hazan,” Cheris said. “General Jedao believes we may obtain relief for our soldiers by blowing out the chambers through this section –” She sent the proposed plan over. “This will be a risky operation, and the hoppers will need to have additional medics on standby, but it might interrupt the amputation guns’ path of fire. Preliminary data suggest that they are of the branching rather than straight-fire type. Make the necessary arrangements and get back to me.”

  “Sir,” Hazan said, but there was a hint of disapproval in his voice.

  “Communications,” Cheris said, “get me Shuos Im
nai. Top priority.”

  “Attempting contact, sir,” Communications said after an anxious glance toward Hazan.

  “Kel Cheris,” Jedao said. He had never called her that before. His voice was glacially soft, reasonable. “This is not a priority.”

  So this was how he sounded when he was furious.

  “Shuos Imnai,” Cheris said, “this is General Kel Cheris. Is your location secure?”

  “General,” Imnai said, “I’m fine for the moment. The heretics are – it’s a slaughter. They won’t search shops and residences while they’re amusing themselves shooting mutilated torsos. Sir.”

  “Your databurst suggests that the servitors were disabled around the same time the Kel were,” Cheris said. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. I got Servitor 10 to enter the zone of fire and confirm that it’s a gun effect, not a field effect.”

  She had already known that the effect fired discretely. “You may not have this information, Shuos Imnai, but try to think. Which Kel company did Servitor 10 approach?”

  “Captain Kel Jurio,” Imnai said after a moment’s thought. “But I can’t vouch that everyone was correctly positioned.”

  “Was Jurio’s company using modified formations that you were aware of?”

  “I wouldn’t know for sure, sir – oh. If you read between the lines, 10’s report suggests that they were moving into some kind of defensive square with a diagonal front” – this was enough for Cheris to identify the formation – “but they judged it wrong. The amputation gun found a vector in and reamed its way through the ranks.”

  Location. Imnai was close to the proposed demolitions work. “Shuos Imnai,” Cheris said, “the following chambers will be unsafe shortly.” She gave the list. “Remove yourself to the ward’s interior and continue your work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “General Cheris out.”