Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  During the winnower attack, Shuos infiltrators in other wards had been busy with sabotage. A lot of sabotage, carefully targeted.

  Out loud again: “Get me Captain Damiod and Captain Ko.” The cryptology team and the Shuos. Their faces appeared next to her primary display.

  “Sir,” Ko said, saluting.

  “Sir,” Damiod said. “You wanted to hear about that line.”

  “Yes,” Cheris said. He had brought it to her attention not long ago.

  “With aid from the infiltrators, we’ve confirmed that Line 92832-17 goes directly to the Fortress’s command center. It’s probably Inaiga Zai’s direct line. We haven’t had any luck decrypting the packets. I suspect there’s some cutting-edge theorem being used because the structures smell funny, but never mind that.

  “More to the point, we’ve confirmed that the tap on 17 goes to an individual associated with Zai’s lieutenant Gerenag Abrana. Unless the Shuos have gotten bored, no one’s tampered with the tap. We think Zai doesn’t realize it’s there.”

  “Do you concur?” Cheris asked Ko.

  “I do, sir,” Ko said.

  “I’m sorry not to have better news for you,” Damiod said, although he sounded as though what he was really sorry about was this demand on his time.

  “It’s all right,” Cheris said, and took note of Ko’s eyes, momentarily narrowed. “That’s not what I need. You’ve prepared that dummy cipher for me?”

  “It’s ready,” Ko said. “It looks like a hedgehog, but a good team should be able to crack it in days if they approach it the right way, especially with the Fortress’s computational resources.”

  Cheris was betting that Gerenag Abrana had an excellent team.

  “Then here’s the next thing,” Cheris said. “Can we insert a message into Line 17? And make sure the tap sees it?”

  “It’s an excellent tap,” Damiod said scornfully. “It probably sees more than the main line does. But sir, once you do that, they’ll be able to run a trace. You’ll blow our ability to listen in.”

  “That’s fine,” Cheris said. “After this message we may not need to listen any longer.”

  Ko was thoughtful. “How very Shuos of you, sir.”

  “Do you have an objection?” Cheris said.

  “It was merely an observation, sir.”

  “This is the message I want inserted,” Cheris said to Ko and Damiod, “by whatever means necessary. Full video, show the shadow. Open with the Deuce of Gears.” Jedao had insisted on this. “This is Garach Jedao Shkan, forgive the cosmetic changes; my options were limited.” The name sounded unnaturally natural. “As per your request, I’ve cleared out the pests in your house. If you take care of your end, you should have a free hand to negotiate once the Hafn arrive. Meanwhile, I have some Kel to attend to. I trust we can discuss further arrangements over dinner as previously agreed. Enjoy the peace and quiet.”

  If this worked, if Zai’s lieutenant cracked the dummy cipher and overheard Zai’s “negotiations” with Jedao to get rid of Zai’s subordinates, the heretics would tear each other apart and they could all go home soon.

  Cheris looked down at her half-gloved hands so she wouldn’t have to notice the way people were looking at her.

  “That’s it,” Jedao said. “Now we wait.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SHUOS HAODAN HATED assassination assignments. Years ago, an instructor had explained that this was why he was ideal for them. Certainly he had the requisite skills, some of which had come from growing up in a Kel family, and he had excelled in academy. Originally, however, he had hoped for something quiet in analysis or adminstration.

  On one of his first missions, his supervisor had sent him as a backup field agent anyway. The primary agent was talented but erratic. She got herself tangled up in some side scheme involving art fraud (he would have loved to see the wording of the reprimand), and Haodan had to dispatch the target himself.

  He did too good a job. His supervisor told him it was his duty to take on more assassination assignments. When he protested that he didn’t enjoy taking lives – in some Shuos divisions you could go your entire career without taking a life, not that the general public would ever believe it – the supervisor said, with cruel persuasiveness, that if every Shuos weaseled out of wetwork, that would leave no one but the bullies and sociopaths. Hence it was Shuos policy to retain some assassins who didn’t glory in their work. Not that the general public would believe that, either.

  Haodan knew that the argument was an appeal to his ego. It worked.

  So here he was in the Fortress’s Dragonfly Ward years later, getting in position for his attempt on the head of the heretics’ analysis section, a foreigner named Vahenz afrir dai Noum. Shuos eavesdropping on the heretics’ discussions suggested that she was influential in policy-making as well. As his handler had explained, they hadn’t wanted to make an attempt on Vahenz earlier because it was more useful to monitor her activities without doing anything that would trigger an inconvenient stepping up of security. Now that the Fortress was all but taken, however, they wanted to make sure that Vahenz didn’t escape to cause trouble elsewhere, considering how much damage she had done already. They’d considered trying to capture her alive, but in the end they had decided against it on the grounds that the operation would be too uncertain.

  Haodan had secured a job as a delivery man for a fancy confectioner; the Fortress’s citizens apparently took a certain level of decadence for granted, even while under siege. The previous delivery woman had gotten sick with Haodan’s encouragement, and Haodan had made all the right noises at the interview. Some research had turned up the manager’s worry for relatives trapped on the Drummers’ Ward, which Haodan played on shamelessly. He could have told her that life wasn’t going to be any better in the Dragonfly Ward now that the campaign was drawing to a close, even if the confectionary was in one of the areas least affected. Once the Kel had secured the Fortress, they would send for the Vidona, and the Vidona were bound to be more thorough than usual about reeducation procedures with a nexus fortress in the wake of a rebellion.

  Vahenz ordered confections every other day like clockwork. Haodan despaired of predictable people. They made his job too easy. But then, the easier the job, the likelier it was that he could pull it off without excessive secondary casualties, so he ought to be grateful.

  The parcel he was interested in was pasted over with cunning cutout paper shapes, farm animals in accordance with the heretical calendar. The effect was elegant, espeecially with the tasteful subdued colors of the paper. It would be his third delivery.

  It amused him that the confectionary’s manager insisted on hand delivery during a siege. The human touch or something. She claimed people paid extra for it. Servitor delivery wouldn’t have made his work significantly harder, though. He knew ways of handling civilian servitors.

  The manager was giving him instructions. She liked the fact that he stood practically at attention – something you learned fast with a Kel father, albeit one who was a medical technician – and treated her seriously. “Don’t forget to tell Leng that I’m thinking of their son,” she was saying. “And be certain to tell Ajenio that I’ve got those new sesame cookies in production, if he wants to place an order. I’ve included samples in his parcel so he can try before he decides, but he’ll like them. I’m always right about these things. Oh, and avoid the 17-4 passage. They’ll be marching soldiers through there around the time you go through, and you don’t want to be mixed up in that. Some kind of parade, but you’ve got a job to do.”

  At last she had said everything she was going to say, and Haodan was able to leave. He rode his scooter in the designated lane. The passages on this level were messy, and the lifts were a disaster. Then again, the Fortress had originally been intended as a retreat for the heptarchs, with wards designed by separate teams, and for reasons of Doctrine they had demolished and reconstructed great chunks of the interior to do away with the seventh ward after they destroyed the Liozh
. It was a wonder the thing was habitable.

  The first two deliveries went as expected. Ajenio, a round, florid man, insisted on trying a sesame cookie in front of Haodan, and then offered him one. Haodan declined. He knew the manager would take a dim view of his saying yes. Besides, she already sent him home with a basket of treats every evening and he was convinced he was gaining weight.

  By the time he freed himself from Ajenio, who was capable of waxing poetic about a cookie to a degree even an Andan would find embarrassing, he was twelve minutes behind schedule. Still, not disastrous.

  The office Haodan went to after that was in a building that had its back up against one of the ward’s walls. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that escape passages were involved, although the Shuos attempts at scan had been inconclusive. He had been here before. His face and his uniform with the swan-and-ribbon logo were familiar to security. They waved him through, smiling. He smiled back. It was only polite.

  Seventeen minutes late. He still had some margin.

  Up to the fourth floor. Lucky unlucky four, as the Kel would say. The target worked in this office sometimes, instead of being holed up in the Fortress’s command center all the time. Judging from some of the infiltrators’ gossip, the heretics didn’t all get along. She probably wanted to monitor the ward in person, or hide some of her activities from her putative superior.

  The target’s assistant sat at the front desk. She was stabbing at the terminal. Too bad: if he had a different pretext he could have offered to help her with the problem, but as it stood that would arouse suspicion. Besides, odds were that a Shuos had caused the problem to begin with.

  Haodan bobbed in a calculatedly nervous bow. “Swan and Ribbon. Sorry to interrupt, should I drop this off or take it in?” He always asked.

  The assistant never let him take it in, but he had gotten one of the other infiltrators to run a flickerform servitor into the ceiling above the target’s office. Maddeningly, the target had enough shielding and scan machinery in there to outfit a warmoth. Even the servitor spy was a risk. All it did was listen, and at a random time each day it sent an encrypted databurst to indicate what times it detected human activity in there. No luck getting clean vocals out.

  The office was located far to the back, with additional security in the way. It would have been nice to go in and do the job personally, but Haodan wasn’t suicidal.

  “I’ll make sure it gets to her,” the assistant said with a wan smile.

  “Rough day?” Haodan said, placing the parcel on her desk.

  “You have no idea. And now this terminal.”

  “Sorry, I can’t help you with that,” Haodan lied. His orders had been specific: assassination, not intelligence-fishing. Besides, the target would have seen through the tired “I’m here to fix that hardware glitch” routine. Her weaknesses were gustatory, so Haodan had tailored his approach accordingly.

  “Oh, you’re always a help,” the assistant said, smiling more genuinely. “She loves those sweets. They’ll put her in a good mood, all the better for the rest of us.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Haodan said. This was a weakness in the plan. If the target kept to schedule, she’d be in the office in approximately twenty-seven minutes. He had set the timer accordingly. There was a strong chance the bomb would kill the assistant, too. Haodan was sorry about this, as he had grown to like her, but contriving a way to keep her safe would have elevated the risk to unacceptable levels.

  The assistant went back to wrestling with her terminal. “I’d best be going,” Haodan said. She said something indistinct in response.

  Down to the ground floor, back to the scooter. Haodan had no intention of returning to the confectionary now that the job had served its purpose, but he might as well finish the day’s deliveries. It only seemed fair.

  Seven minutes after Haodan left, a round-faced man in white-and-gold entered the fourth floor office suite and rapped on the wall.

  “Pioro,” the assistant said, “she’s not in yet –”

  “She won’t be for some time,” Pioro said. “Emergency meeting, need-to-know, all of that. I’m on the way myself, but I remembered she’s always bitchy if she misses the sweets, especially since Zai’s taken to serving vegetable rolls with fish sauce lately, so I thought I’d stop by to pick them up. Don’t worry, I’ll save you a couple.”

  “Yes, that would be good,” the assistant said. “I don’t suppose you have time to look at this synchronization error –”

  Pioro’s eyebrows shot up as he leaned over to glance at the display. “Probably some Shuos grid diver. Bad sign if they’re this far in. I ought to run, but you should lock down and restore to clean state. It’s a pain, but we have to take precautions.” He hefted the parcel. “Must be something good in there. Fortunately, she likes to share.”

  “Thanks for your help, Pioro,” the assistant said.

  “Anytime,” Pioro said as he left with the parcel and its tasteful paper decorations.

  THE FIRST THING Vahenz afrir dai Noum did when she cracked General Jedao’s message was start the self-destruct in her remote office. She knew how much that equipment had cost, and how irritated her employers would be, but you could always buy new equipment. She, on the other hand, would be hard to replace. They’d already gotten Pioro with an attack clearly meant for her; she wasn’t about to let them get her too. A pity about the associated casualties, but she didn’t excel at her job by being sentimental.

  (Interesting that Jedao had fetched up in a woman’s body, but then, the Shuos didn’t care about that sort of thing. She would have expected it to give the Kel fits, though. Maybe the mere fact of Jedao’s presence made them twitch so much that the issue of the body didn’t even register.)

  The second thing Vahenz did was head for the command center to meet Liozh Zai. The Liozh name was an affectation, but it defined Zai. One of the things she liked about Zai was her radiant sincerity, even if it seemed to come hooked into lamentably ascetic tastes in food and drink; Vahenz had always made a point of bringing her own snacks to Zai’s meetings rather than being stuck eating things like sour fruits and unsweetened tea. Trivial points of law mattered to Zai, but because she believed in them, other people believed in them, too. If she’d had more time to season Zai to the grubby realities of politics, Vahenz could have done more with that nascent charisma. But then, what could you expect from someone who had grown up in a glorified warriors’ guild? Zai had been deeply wounded when the hexarchs stripped her of her post as a shield operator for protesting the hexarchs’ calendrical experiments, but that had made Zai into a resource.

  Vahenz hoped that Gerenag Abrana’s cryptologists were slower than she was, that her specialized code and superior intelligence gave her the necessary edge. It was her fault for not spotting the tap earlier. She hadn’t realized how good Abrana’s security people were. But once she saw Jedao’s message, she knew the tap had to exist. She had broken the encryption too easily; it was meant to be spied on. And she knew Zai, knew Zai hadn’t been engaged in secret negotiations with the fucking ninefox general. Which meant that the message’s intended recipient was Abrana, or Stoghan, or anyone with a grudge. People who would believe the lie because they half-believed it already.

  The recent spate of sabotage and assassinations hadn’t helped. Most victims had been lower-level followers, but people were rattled, and rattled people didn’t think clearly. Everything had targeted Zai’s lieutenants but not Zai herself. They hadn’t found logic spikes or mazes in Zai’s grid systems not because they had been better hidden, but because there had been nothing to find, a fact that Abrana’s people would have noted.

  The passages to the command center were dimly lit, familiar. The security systems and guards knew her, and made no complaint as she passed through the outer defenses and the empty shield operator stations, and went into the inner sanctum. She ought to write up a critique of security procedures, but it would be wasted on these fools.

  “I want a pr
ivate conversation,” Vahenz said as she entered. “It will only take an hour.”

  Liozh Zai got up to greet her. Even though she had to have gotten as little sleep as Vahenz had, she looked composed, almost regal. “Of course,” she said, formal as always. “Given the situation, we have a lot to discuss.” She turned to set the sanctum’s security mode.

  “There won’t be any discussions,” Vahenz said. Her scorch pistol was already in her hand.

  Zai understood her immediately and spun, reaching for her own sidearm, but Vahenz was faster. The scorch bolt caught Zai in the side of the head.

  Zai fell heavily. Vahenz hated the reek of charred meat and singed hair, but Zai was of no more use, and the less she could tell people about Vahenz, the better.

  Vahenz knelt, then, and rearranged the corpse to a better pretense of dignity. It was the least she could do. Besides, she had to concede that Zai had had excellent taste in tailors, pearl-and-gold buttons and pale silk and perfect curves and all. Shame to let that go to waste even in death.

  She left as she had come, without a fuss. People trusted her and didn’t even think to ask why the meeting had been so short. Terrible to have a mission go this badly, but she’d warned the Hafn it would be a toss of the dice from the get-go. What she regretted most was Pioro’s death. It was so hard to find decent conversationalists. The universe was a big place, though. She was sure to turn up more dinner partners if she kept looking.

  Besides, she was going to have a bothersome report to make to the Hafn once she made it off the Fortress. It appeared Kel Command wasn’t completely misguided in fielding Jedao, or at least, Kel Command and Jedao were using each other in a beautiful dysfunctional ballet. It was irritating that Jedao had fouled her mission, to say the least, but she could appreciate a capable fellow operator when she encountered one.

  COLONEL RAGATH HAD reported that the Radiant Ward was a wasteland no one wanted to enter except some corpse calligraphers bent on memorializing the event. Resistance had collapsed in the Umbrella Ward when Znev Stoghan pulled out his troops to deal with some internal crisis. The Drummers’ Ward was wracked by riots. Cheris had asked what the riots were about. Ragath had given her a jaundiced look, then said, “The generalized unfairness of life.”