Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Someone started knocking loudly. “Open up or I’ll shoot the door off its hinges,” a voice said over the sound of the water. It was Colonel Kel Gized.

  Cheris had a sudden violent desire to take her gloves off and cut them to shreds. People knew now that she wanted to sleep with another soldier, forbidden though it was. The last person she wanted to talk to was a Kel, least of all her chief of staff. Even Khiaz would have been preferable.

  “If you make me shoot, it’ll raise a horrible fuss and it’ll upset the host and you know how the Andan hate it when someone spoils a party. You’ll never hear the end of it for years.”

  Cheris hesitated, then unlocked the door and stepped back.

  Gized practically charged in. She took one long look at Cheris. Her mouth became a flat line.

  Cheris glanced involuntarily at the mirror. Her face looked like a stranger’s, angles ground too sharp, eyes abraded of expression. Her hair was a mess, too; she hadn’t thought to run her fingers through it.

  Gized closed the door. “It isn’t right, what she did to you,” she said.

  “Colonel, I won’t hear you speak against the heptarch,” Cheris said coldly. Technically, Gized could be charged with treason. Most people wouldn’t waste their time with such charges, considering them to be frivolous, but Cheris knew personally that Khiaz was mercurial and might insist. “I could have said no.”

  “Bullshit,” Gized said. But she didn’t raise her voice.

  “I am a Shuos. She is my heptarch. I belong to her. If that’s how she wants to use me, then that’s how I’ll be used.” She was aware of how Kel she sounded. Nevertheless, it was true. Khiaz had just asserted her ownership.

  All those years ago, when she had gotten herself seconded to the Kel, Cheris had thought she had escaped the heptarch’s eye. She should have known that a fellow Shuos would have a long-term plan.

  Gized glanced at the Patterner 52. “Jedao,” Gized said, even though she never addressed Cheris without her rank. “Give me your gun and your knife.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Give me your weapons. You’ll get them back tomorrow.”

  Cheris glared at her. “You’re out of line, Colonel.”

  “You can court-martial me tomorrow. After you give me your weapons.” She glared back.

  Cheris entertained fantasies of court-martialing Gized, but where was she going to find another administrator as good? After a long moment, she broke eye contact. “I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  Gized’s mouth twisted. “You’re usually a better liar than this, Jedao. Frankly, that worries me more than anything else.”

  “I don’t know what you want of me.”

  “I’m being remarkably clear, Jedao. The weapons.”

  “No.”

  “Jedao.”

  She hesitated, then handed them over, hating herself for her weakness.

  “I’m taking you to barracks, and we’re going to stay up all night playing jeng-zai, which is an incredible concession on my part. You can beat me horribly the way you always do. And when you’re fit to have weapons again, I’ll give them back to you.”

  “People will notice us leaving early,” Cheris said.

  “I have really obscene things to say about how little I care about people noticing things, including the fact that we’re holed up in the bathroom together. Come on, Jedao. I’ll tell you the worst Kel jokes I know. How many Kel does it take to dig a latrine?”

  THE SPLINTER FADED. Cheris was shuddering, and she inadvertently swallowed another splinter while she was trying to sit up.

  CHERIS WAS IN the command center of the fangmoth One Card Too Lucky, listening to the latest report on the Lanterners’ position as she kept an eye on her swarm’s formation pivots on the terminal. Gized had said this would be a straightforward engagement. Naturally, this had jinxed the whole operation. At least, Cheris didn’t like what the report implied about her options.

  “All right,” she said to her moth commander, “I’ve got this.” She would have to approach this cautiously, in case Kel Command disappointed her. “Communications, get me Kel Command. If nothing else, High General Kel Anien owes me an embarrassing sum because she keeps trying to draw to an inner Crowned Door in jeng-zai. The least she can do is take my calls.”

  “Do you play games just to blackmail people?” Kel Gized demanded. She was sitting close by, running through logistical tables for the hundredth time.

  “If I wanted to blackmail people, I would actually exert some effort,” Cheris said lightly.

  Gized had that expression that meant she wished she could roll her eyes at a superior officer.

  They didn’t get High General Anien, but High General Garit, who was much better at jeng-zai than Anien but couldn’t win board games, which everyone but Garit thought was very funny. “All right, Jedao,” Garit said in exasperation, “what’s the emergency?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an emergency, sir,” Cheris said, “more like an issue of protocol.” Make the query casual. “No, really. I just got reliable intel that the Lanterners have filled their defensive outposts with children and hospital cases along with skeleton crews to operate the nasty weapons. Honestly, I thought I knew the regs backwards and forwards and something new turns up. They’re broadcasting from their brand-new orphanages in the clear in all directions. Anyway, what do you want me to do about it?”

  She had played fox-and-hunters with Garit, and endless rounds of jeng-zai. They had gone on a hunting trip together back when she was a major general, dismaying because shooting gray tigers was too easy and she had no use for the tigers’ deaths, stupid pointless waste, but it was the sort of thing Garit went in for, and it would have been impolitic to turn him down. Most of all, she knew Garit’s three children, one of whom she had introduced to handguns and who was in Kel Academy right now. There was a right way and a lot of wrong ways to handle the situation. She willed Garit to choose the right way.

  When Garit answered, she knew immediately that he had picked one of the wrong ways. “There’s no tactical difficulty, though?”

  Cheris froze inside. “Not in the slightest,” she said, keeping her tone relaxed. “But everyone will see the slaughter” – unsubtle word choice, that was the point – “and I thought there might be information operations fallout.”

  “Heptarch Khiaz has been working on this propaganda campaign,” Garit said.

  Khiaz. It was impossible to escape the fucking woman.

  “You should see some of her latest pieces, really brilliant. I have no idea how she does it. But then, I daresay that’s why I’m not a Shuos.” He laughed. “Go ahead and shoot your way through, Jedao. There’s no difficulty with Kel protocol or public opinion considerations.”

  She had always wanted children. She had always known it was a terrible idea, given her goal; had only allowed herself the most glancing affairs. But she hadn’t expected the universe to explain to her in such detail why she had been right to avoid forming attachments.

  If she defied Garit’s orders, however casually phrased, he would relieve her of command. And then Garit would tell her moth commander to carry out the order. The commander was a good Kel. He would carry out the order. And Colonel Gized was also a good Kel. She would back the order.

  Afterward, Cheris could never remember what she said to High General Kel Garit, or anything up until the point where they reached the perimeter and she ordered the swarm to open fire on the first outpost: an interval of two days and sixteen hours. A perfect black cutout in her memory.

  She did remember, however, that Gized never even blinked when the shooting began. It was hard not to hate her after that.

  Of course, Cheris didn’t blink either. She was too well-trained for that.

  CHERIS CHOKED AND forced herself to breathe more calmly in spite of the stinging pain. The splinters wouldn’t stop hurting, but she had to know. She looked around the crystallized command center with its profu
sion of bleak glass pillars and broken walls.

  I need information, she reminded herself.

  THE SIEGE OF Hellspin Fortress. The fire-flashes of alerts, blood on the walls and floor and terminals, ricochet marks. A dropped stylus. Cheris could see where it had been chewed on the end. A fallen woman with gray in her hair and a bullet hole in the side of her head, blood puddled on the floor. She tried to think of the woman’s name, she should know this, but it wouldn’t come to her.

  Gwe Pia was sprawled next to Jiang. She heard orders over the communications links, a desperate query from Commander Kel Menowen of Tactical Eight, then static. No one knew what was going on. A few people had tried to reassert order, the ones she had predicted would have the presence of mind to do so. But the bombs and logic grenades had taken care of them. Her habit of thorough inspections had made it easy to plant things. With the addition of the threshold winnowers, the Kel siege force was truly broken.

  She had expected her hands to be sweating inside her gloves, but they were dry. Calm.

  There was a lot of blood. She had not cared for neatness, only efficiency. She had one bullet left over, as she had calculated, and if necessary she could have taken weapons from the dead. They hadn’t so much as clipped her. She had always been fast, and she knew the value of a good ambush.

  It had been the weakest part of the plan. Atrocious setup: from a tactical standpoint, it would have made more sense to frame a subset of her staff as the traitors, and turn her people against each other. Easier to finish them off that way.

  The problem was, she hadn’t wanted to win.

  Cheris turned the gun around in her hand. It was her Patterner 52, a model known for its accuracy. It was engraved on the grip with her personal emblem, the Deuce of Gears. She hadn’t wanted to do it – it felt vainglorious – but it would have raised eyebrows if she hadn’t. The Kel expected their generals to have healthy egos. The metal was still warm, at the exact temperature she expected.

  She eased the muzzle of the gun into her mouth. It tasted the way metal should taste. She felt nothing. Not relief, not guilt, not triumph. Everything had gone more or less as she had planned. No one had risen to stop her, to tell her she was wrong, to say there was a better way of fighting the heptarchs. But then, the only one who had known about her rebellion was a heptarch himself. Years with the Kel, sharing the cup, and they had never figured it out.

  Her finger tightened fractionally on the trigger. Surely the split second of heat and pain would be better than this roaring emptiness.

  I am a coward, she thought, lowering the gun. What she had done was unforgivable. But to do it for no purpose was even worse. She couldn’t quit now.

  THE SPLINTERS WERE starting to hurt worse and worse, but Cheris couldn’t stop. If she stopped she would lose all courage. Jedao had warned her about Kujen. At the very least she had to find out about him.

  She closed her eyes this time, but it didn’t help.

  Only later did she remember that Kujen had taken an interest in her mathematical ability.

  CHERIS HADN’T ORIGINALLY thought anything much of the refit: perfectly routine, and the Nirai station the swarm had put in at had better amenities than most, not that she was taking advantage of them at the moment. She was in barracks procrastinating on her paperwork for the chief engineer by shuffling a deck of cards that was going to be worn transparent if she kept this up any longer. This particular deck, whose artwork featured anthropomorphic farm animals in the borders, had been a gift from her sister. Nidana had said she’d picked it out because of the geese.

  Without any notification, the door whisked open. In a moment Cheris was on her feet, flattened against the wall away from her desk, pistol drawn.

  The man who entered was slightly taller than Cheris was, and he paused in the doorway, making a perfect silhouette of himself, the kind of thing you didn’t want to do in front of a former assassin. He wore Nirai colors, black-and-silver, even if the layered brocades and filigree buttons spoke to expensive tastes, and didn’t look terribly practical, either. There was no indication of rank or position, just the silver voidmoth pin. Cheris didn’t relax. The Nirai frequently had odd senses of humor, but it wasn’t usual for them to play pranks on visiting generals who submitted all the proper forms and didn’t push too hard about speedy repairs.

  “I’m sorry,” Cheris said, “but what is your authorization for being here?”

  “Oh, put that thing down, General Jedao,” the Nirai said, smiling. The man was striking, with a dark, oval face and tousled hair and graceful hands; it was impossible not to appreciate his beauty. Cheris couldn’t help but notice that his tone wasn’t remotely deferential, however. “I’m Nirai Kujen.” He took a step forward.

  In academy, one of Cheris’s instructors had said, rather despairingly, that having ninety-sixth percentile reflexes could be just as much of a liability for an assassin as an asset. Cheris hadn’t served as an assassin for years, but the habits of paranoia would not be denied.

  She had allowed the Nirai to get too close, but there wasn’t much space in here and she didn’t have time to work through the options. She fired twice into his forehead, then cursed herself for losing her head and wasting a bullet. You’d think Kujen would have reacted when she brought up the pistol anyway, but no.

  Kujen fell with an ungraceful thump. Cheris’s pulse was racing. She looked at the fallen body, the lurid splash of blood against the wall, the closing door. She had just committed high treason, even if she could claim that she had reacted to an intruder in barracks.

  The bigger problem was that she couldn’t figure out why Nirai Kujen, who had presumably survived the past 500 years by being paranoid himself, had bothered showing up in person.

  Four seconds later, the door swished open again. No warning this time, either.

  Cheris retreated. Her world narrowed to the doorway.

  A shadow fell across the threshold. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” A different man’s voice, deeper, but with the same accent. “Put that thing down. Suffice it to say that I can restore from backups more times than you have bullets, and someone’s going to notice the fuss. I do realize you can probably kill people with your teeth, but it won’t hurt you to hear me out. Besides, I would really rather not have to hop into your body next. No offense, General, but I have other uses for you.”

  Fuck. Cheris had known Kujen was immortal. What she hadn’t known was how. She laid the gun down on the floor where Kujen could see it, then backed up. Her gloves felt as though they had turned to ice.

  Kujen entered. Cheris saw how carefully he placed his feet, like a dancer, so he wouldn’t get anything on his shoes. This body was also beautiful, but thinner, with a triangular face. Cheris wondered who it had belonged to before Kujen had happened to him.

  The door closed, trapping her with him.

  “If this is because I tore up my moth’s engines doing that maneuver that last battle I was in,” Cheris said, because at this point bravado was all she had left, “this is overkill, don’t you think? The chief engineer could have just called.”

  “Sit down and let’s cut the bullshit.”

  Cheris looked at Kujen, then walked over to the desk and sat.

  Kujen came over to the side of the desk. “It’s odd for a brigadier general to spend as much time as you do hacking into classified files,” he said. “Don’t you have other things to do, like shooting heretics?”

  Cheris picked up her cards and began shuffling them, bringing her half-gloved hands into view. “Funny thing about this uniform,” she said, “but I’m still a Shuos. I like to keep my hand in.”

  “You’re adorable,” Kujen said, “but that’s more bullshit. You can’t deny that you recognized my name. There aren’t many people in the heptarchate who can say that.”

  She had blown the chance to play innocent rather spectacularly, at that. “How do I know this isn’t a joke?” she said.

  When Cheris had first learned that one of the heptarchs
was immortal, she had been skeptical. She could see good reasons for such a man to hide behind a false heptarch. But why weren’t the other heptarchs fighting over the technology, then?

  Kujen reached over and plucked one of the cards out of the deck. Turned it around so they could both see it: Deuce of Gears.

  Cheris was even more worried. Kujen shouldn’t have been able to spot the card.

  “I hear you’re a gambler,” Kujen said. “Are you after immortality, too?”

  “Maybe later,” Cheris said. The idea repelled her, especially now that she had some idea how it worked, but she couldn’t afford to reject it entirely. “I just want my heptarch’s position. I’m sorry to be such a boring ordinary Shuos, but that’s all there is to it.”

  “Lovely story,” Kujen said, “but I’m not buying. I checked your background, General. If you wanted to backstab Khiaz, you should have stayed attached to her office. I mean, from all reports she was very fond of you.” His smile widened when he said that.

  Cheris stiffened in spite of herself, even if her recent encounter with Shuos Khiaz was nobody’s secret. Time to change the topic. “All right, Nirai-zho,” she said without emphasizing the honorific, “since I’m apparently so confused about my own motives, you tell me what the hell it is I’m after.”

  Kujen’s long fingers picked more cards out of the deck, slow and precise. He laid them in a circle, face-up. Ace through seven from the suit of Doors. “You want to bring down the whole damn calendar,” he said. “Took me a little while to see it. You’re very conscientious about researching all the heretics near your assignments. It looks a lot like duty, doesn’t it? But I think you’re fishing for allies, even if you haven’t found any that meet your criteria, whatever they are. You want to bring the whole damn heptarchate down.”