Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Sereset went white. Whiter. “We’re too big, Jedao. You couldn’t do it in one lifetime and guarantee the results.”

  In one lifetime. “Wouldn’t need to,” Cheris said slowly. “The Kel have the key.”

  “If you’re talking about the black cradle, they’re not going to hand that over for your convenience. Assuming you figure out how not to go crazy in there.”

  “You’d have to manipulate them into it,” Cheris said. “Another long game, but not outside the realm of possibility. Do something spectacular. Make them want to bring you back, over and over, until you’re done.”

  There had to be better, less chancy ways, but they were going to die here anyway. Might as well go for broke while they were playing what-if anyway.

  Sereset laughed painfully. “Fine, then, you’re already crazy. And you’re going to die in some fistfight over the price of quinces. Or they’ll catch you, and there aren’t words nasty enough for what they’ll do to you.”

  “No, I’ll die on this planet,” Cheris said. “But at least we’ll die together.”

  Cheris thought she could get to like the glowing insects.

  The sun set. Cheris huddled closer to Sereset, warmth overlapping dwindling warmth.

  It came as a considerable surprise when the silence was interrupted by a burst of static in her ear, and then: “ – tenant Shuos Lharis of Fireflitter 327, shouter team five please respond.”

  Cheris froze. She had broken her own rule, talked to someone, security lapse. Sereset might live with medical attention. But then he might give her away: drunken mutters, drugged mumblings, thoughtless malice. You could never trust anyone.

  Her hands flexed. She looked at him, then looked away.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Sereset said. His voice shook. “Do it.”

  “I can’t,” Cheris said, closing her eyes in shame. “You have a chance.”

  “I’ll be a cripple even if I make it,” Sereset said. “And life’s cheap anyway –”

  “Don’t say that,” Cheris said violently, “it’s not true. It’s never true.”

  “Besides,” Sereset said over Lharis’s repeated message, “you have a plan. Hell of a long shot, but you never know. Go topple the heptarchate for me. Make my death mean something. Hurry, before the lieutenant strands you here.” His voice sounded very weak.

  “I won’t forget,” Cheris said. She kissed his forehead.

  Then, in a single quick, decisive motion, she snatched up the coat and covered Sereset’s face.

  After Sereset stopped struggling to breathe, she said into the relay, “Shuos Jedao, shouter team five, to Lieutenant Lharis. One for pickup.”

  “What happened to the other?” Lharis said.

  “Stray Kel bullet. He didn’t make it.”

  “Pity,” Lharis said. “All right. Two hours and forty-six minutes until I can come get you. Stay put.”

  For the first time since Ruo’s suicide, Cheris had found a moment’s furtive camaraderie, and because of it, she had had to murder. Because she had been weak; because she had wanted to talk. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Never forgive me, Cheris thought to Sereset as she put her coat back on. The two hours and forty-six minutes until the hoverer’s arrival stretched forever.

  Commit to fire, as the Kel would say.

  No looking back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  VAHENZ HAD TO admit that, in her long career as an agent-at-large, she had encountered any number of organizations with the gift of stabbing one hand with the other during important operations. The Taurags had their oversight officers, the Haussen had separate bureaus with overlapping purviews, the Hafn had petty squabbles between aristocrats. Kel Command was pretty good at this trick, too. She hadn’t imagined that they had anything pleasant in mind for the fox general once they were done with him, but it was anyone’s guess as to why they hadn’t just sent someone both competent and trustworthy to do the job in the first place. The combination had to exist even among Kel generals. What she was really looking at was an excellent argument against making your high command a hivemind, especially in the wake of a high-profile massacre.

  Kel Command’s willingness to blow up a swarm just to get rid of Jedao wasn’t precisely surprising, although Vahenz found it interesting that they had put a cindermoth out of action during a major invasion. They wouldn’t have blinked at killing the soldiers, naturally. Vahenz sometimes wondered how the hexarchate’s history would have played out differently if the first Kel formation discovered hadn’t been a suicide formation. Courage and last stands against desperate odds were one thing. Casual suicide, on the other hand, was just wasteful.

  Still, Vahenz found the situation deplorable. It was sheer stupid luck that she’d escaped the bomb’s area of effect, and even then the fringe of the blast had knocked half her systems offline, frying her box of sweet bean pastries in the process. The saving grace was that her needlemoth’s stealth systems had been spared, so the Fortress didn’t shoot her down while she was making emergency repairs.

  Vahenz had an intimate familiarity with the Fortress’s scan suites and their limitations. So when she repaired her own scan and it told her there was a single surviving life form on the Unspoken Law, not only was she sure who the survivor had to be, she was also sure that the Fortress had no idea anyone was wandering around the hulk of what had once been a perfectly functional cindermoth.

  She could have dealt with the situation a few different ways. Not by leaving, although her superiors would probably have preferred that she report to them sooner rather than later. What news of the mess was public was no doubt giving them ulcers. She couldn’t simply shoot up the cindermoth, either. The needlemoth was good at stealth, but not good enough to disguise a serious display of fireworks even if it had had the necessary firepower.

  She had considered tipping off the Kel that their target was still alive and letting them deal with the problem. Of course, she couldn’t be absolutely certain that that hadn’t been the intent. No: she was going to have to take out Jedao herself. More fun this way, anyhow. She always enjoyed the chance to take out an interesting opponent herself, instead of relying on underlings to do it for her.

  The carrion bomb was intended to wipe out people rather than inorganic structures. In particular, it had clearly not been designed to destroy something the size of a cindermoth, not in one hit. Which wasn’t to say that the cindermoth was undamaged, and she knew for a fact that the rest of the swarm wasn’t in great shape either. The cindermoth’s upper surface looked like someone had made a jigsaw of it with the help of a glassblower’s mad fantasias, but life-support still functioned, and artificial gravity looked like it wasn’t trying to do anything innovative. With a sufficiently good team of Nirai, you might even be able to get it to fly in a few days.

  Vahenz slipped the needlemoth next to one of the hopper bays and got to work with its burrowers. This was exactly the kind of dead time that she had brought the pastries for, and instead she was reduced to staring at her scan suites while she waited to penetrate the Unspoken Law. If any of its food stores had survived, it was probably Kel food. The Kel had a displeasing fascination with vegetables. To say nothing of the dreadful pickles.

  Scan gave her a pretty good idea of what the internals looked like, a mess of passages and cracked walls. She loaded the maps into her augment and memorized as much as she could the old-fashioned way, just in case. You never knew when stray exotic effects would interfere with your personal tech. And while she doubted Jedao had emerged from the bombing unscathed, she expected that he would be far from an easy target.

  She suited up no earlier than she had to, and brought along a torchknife and scorch pistol. It was a pity that she had no handheld scanner that could pinpoint a life form’s location. She was going to have to leave the needlemoth’s scanner running and rely on its grid to update her through the link. Setting up an ambush under these conditions was going to be an interesting challenge.


  From the moment Vahenz stepped into the cindermoth, glass fibers drifted in the air, loosened by the intrusion. Her suit’s filters would protect her, but she couldn’t escape the sensation of ashes on the roof of her mouth, as though she were walking through a forest a scant hour after the inferno sputtered out. Her light, ordinarily a clear white, turned the color of broken steel in the dark passages.

  The single life-sign had been moving slowly and erratically in the command center since Vahenz picked it up on scan. Wounded, she imagined, and trying to figure out his situation.

  Vahenz watched it on the overlay map for a few minutes, then headed toward the command center. The acting commander apparently hadn’t been doing anything fancy with variable layout when the bomb hit. Even so, it was hard not to look askance at the skewed angles, the walls bowed outward, the pitted floors. If she had been more imaginative, she would have fancied that she saw crumpled eyes staring up out of the holes.

  Here the game picked up. Jedao’s movements changed, became more purposeful. Hard to tell, though: had he detected her, or was this coincidental? Most of the cindermoth’s systems were blown to hell and gone, but it wasn’t impossible that he had managed to revive enough to figure out that he wasn’t alone anymore. She kept watching without looking for explicit cues: intuition, she judged, would give her the best sense of his awareness of her.

  It was impossible to ignore the gritty texture beneath her boots as she worked her way down the corridors, as though she walked through the wreckage of a sandglass. It felt as though she was making loud crunching sounds, although her sensors assured her she was being reasonably quiet. The ashhawk paintings to either side of her were damaged beyond all hope: gold leaf peeling free in agonizing spirals, bird necks crumpled into uncomfortable knots, brush-strokes transfixed by splinters. Holes stabbed across the Kel watchwords: from every spark a fire.

  Jedao had passed out of the command center. Unfortunately, the fastest way to intercept him was by going through it; she’d have to risk it. You didn’t have to be a fox to think of setting traps. The only thing that would keep him from doing so, she imagined, was lack of opportunity. Given that he’d been bombed, he’d assume that someone would come for him sooner or later.

  As it turned out, he’d had the opportunity, although the first concrete sign she had that her quarry knew that she had boarded wasn’t the trap. The first sign was the emblem that Jedao had scratched into the floor, aligned so that she would see it right-side up as she entered. The doors were warped open. Vahenz fired scorch bursts ahead of her as she sprinted through and to one side – it was a long time since she had made the amateur’s mistake of freezing in the doorway to make a target of herself – but there was no return fire. If Jedao was still in the area, he was well-hidden. Which didn’t mean she was safe. His heat signatures hadn’t faded entirely, and tellingly, she picked up a muffled thump, as though he’d stumbled. He couldn’t be too far.

  She hadn’t paused as she passed the emblem, which looked like it had been carved with a Kel combat knife. However, she triggered several snapshots in passing so that she could review them more closely later, preferably when she wasn’t pinned in a vulnerable location.

  It was an appallingly clumsy trap, and Vahenz didn’t so much as sweat as she flung herself away from the scatter of small explosions and behind a crystal pillar. He’d probably run out of time and decided that a half-assed effort was better than getting nothing for his trouble. Jedao had stripped weapons from the dead to set up that little display of fireworks, but the standard-issue Kel pistols had not reacted well to standard-issue Kel betrayal. After scanning the area again, she ventured out and knelt to inspect a bullet. It didn’t even resemble a bullet anymore, but one of those quasicrystal dodecahedrons that used to be popular as earrings back home.

  Jedao hadn’t been able to hide other traces of his work. There were footprints and long, unsteady furrows where he had tried to lever himself up after taking a spill. Either the gravity had still been sorting itself out while he had been doing his work here, or he’d already been in the command center when the bomb hit.

  That reminded her: the Deuce of Gears swarm had made a botched attempt at evasion when it was far too late. Why hadn’t Jedao seen the knife coming for his back?

  Just how badly injured was the fox, anyway? Assuming he wasn’t feigning, which was a big assumption. Vahenz quickly checked the rest of the command center, but most of the terminals were pretty thoroughly wrecked.

  The needlemoth called in with an update: the life sign had taken a turn and was headed deeper into the moth’s guts. She narrowed her eyes at the pale-dark glass, the gravelly sounds it made underfoot. Charming exhibit, but she did have an opponent to destroy.

  Vahenz wasn’t superstitious about moths the way some of the Nirai got – one of many reasons she avoided getting stuck at bars with amorous technicians – but the unceasing slivered reflections, the eyeless spaces, the syncopated lights made her tense. Well, shooting people could be relaxing, if you shot the right people. She’d settle for that, and promise herself extra luxury when she made it somewhere safe with civilized amenities.

  She brought up the photos of the Deuce of Gears. The image came up in front of her left eye, and she saw what hadn’t been evident at first, the jagged column cutting through the lightning-crack in the larger gear on the left. Jedao had written a number: 1,082,771.

  Vahenz dismissed the image, mouth peeling back in a sneer. What, all those other fools he’d killed weren’t worthy of being added to the tally, just Hellspin Fortress and this latest tragicomedy? Granted, the man wasn’t known for his sanity. Let him savor his kills however he liked.

  Funny but true: at one point she had dreamed about the things she could accomplish if the Kel ever let her walk around a cindermoth unmolested. Now that she was here, the Kel themselves had done most of the work for her, or scotched it in a supreme display of incompetence, take your pick.

  The life sign had paused. It was close by now. She slowed and reflexively dropped behind a terminal’s slanted remnants when a red-and-yellow light came on in the center of the room. It blinked in the rapid one-two-three-four of the Kel drum code for distress. A shape flickered in the shadows. Vahenz fired. The wall sizzled, and sparks flew up, aggressively red-orange. Part of a tapestry disappeared: streaks of soot, ghosts stitched into smoke.

  “Honestly,” a woman’s voice came out of the shadows, crackling with static, “if that was the best Kel Command could do for a kill count, they should have kept me on. Anyway, I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’re formally acquainted?”

  “Shuos Jedao, I presume,” Vahenz said. Same female voice as that last conspiratorial “message” to Liozh Zai, same accent, same fucking cocksure attitude.

  The voice was coming over the broadcast system, as though that was supposed to fool her. Still, she couldn’t discount the possibility of some elaborate trick. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not eager to introduce myself,” Vahenz said. She queried the needlemoth’s systems anyway, but it wasn’t having any better luck without her to hold its hand.

  “And yet here you are, when you could be long gone on your way to wherever secret agents go when they have to compose apologetic reports to their superiors.” Jedao’s voice was annoyingly rueful. “You think I didn’t write my share of same when I was working for the Shuos?”

  Jedao was moving again, very slowly. Vahenz was having none of that. She crouched low and set after him, cat-footed. “Cut to the point,” she said. But she was smiling. She made her way around the remnants of the trap.

  The red-and-yellow lights paced her, sometimes appearing to the left, sometimes to the right. Sometimes they were near the ceiling, and sometimes near the floor. Still blinking in that one-two-three-four pattern, as if she was supposed to be impressed by Kel superstition. At least she could assume that he knew exactly where she was. The fact that he hadn’t shot her yet, plus his talkativeness, suggested desperation for information.

 
“I have to ask,” Jedao said conversationally, “if you’re here to see me dead, aren’t there less risky ways of doing the job? I mean, we don’t have inconvenient bystanders fouling up the arena now. It’s just the two of us. There’s no more need for lies and ploys. If I had some way of blowing you up for real, I’d have hit the button by now. That pathetic light show in the command center would have gotten me flunked out of Shuos Academy.”

  So she was right after all. But she didn’t have any problem letting him continue to talk. Just in case he let something drop. As a bonus, he was moving more and more slowly. Too obvious. She stopped, refusing to be lured in further.

  “You might be a Hafn, or you might be freelancing,” he went on. “I don’t really care at this point. The part that’s relevant to me is that you’re not with the hexarchate. That could be very useful.”

  “Jedao,” Vahenz said, “I don’t have any plans of teaming up with you and conquering the universe. Especially since you have a talent for betrayal with a side of attempted omnicide.”

  He had stopped entirely. She waited; no sense in blowing things by getting impatient. “If you’re anything like me,” he said, “and I have some reason to believe that you are, you find your superiors’ lack of vision deeply regrettable. Anyway, how will it hurt you to hear me out? You should be asking me why, if I am so good at shooting people in the back of the head, the Kel have been making a point of using me as their pet general for the last 400 fucking years.”

  All right, she had to admit he had her attention. Maybe this was the part where he trotted out whatever pretty rationalization he had for his past behavior. “Is this the part where we see who knows more Kel jokes?” Vahenz said sardonically.