Ninefox Gambit

A SCHEMATIC OF the Fortress of Scattered Needles spun slowly in the air. It resembled a swollen moon with six underground chambers, each holding 40,000 to 60,000 people, each differently structured. Defensive ribs held the Fortress together.

“Invariant ice,” Jedao was saying. “I don’t suppose anyone’s figured out where to get more of the stuff.”

Cheris looked at the Nirai, but he was ignoring them. “Not that an infantry captain would have heard,” Cheris said.

Invariant ice had the ability to generate shields in the surrounding space. The shields were impermeable to anything but a narrow band of communications frequencies. In principle, a sufficiently strong attack could overwhelm the shields and drain the ice of virtue. But the last Cheris had heard, even fury bombs would not suffice, and those were exotics anyway.

“I don’t know how you plan on getting past the shields,” Cheris said. The hexarchs had installed them at the central nexus point precisely because of their invulnerability. Calendrical effects were exaggerated at nexus points, and it had been taken for granted that invariant ice provided the Fortress enough protection.

“How many people have tried?” Jedao asked.

“They die before they get close enough,” Cheris said, “but it’s still a bad situation.” She consulted one of the standardized simulators and ran a very simplified scenario. The after-battle statistics glowed at her. “I don’t think the hexarchs are going to be impressed with a twenty-nine-year siege.”

Jedao laughed quietly. “It won’t take that long. We’re not fighting the ice, Cheris, we’re fighting the people using the ice. Let’s see what intelligence we have on the Fortress.”

They divided up the summaries and the most relevant-looking of the individual reports. “I don’t suppose you’re also trained to handle intelligence work,” Jedao said.

The Nirai was now arranging cards face-up. At the center was the Drowned General. Cheris winced at the reference to her situation.

“Sorry,” Cheris said to Jedao. “Why don’t you tell me what to look for?”

“The obvious things. Who set this up, and how? With a locus like the Fortress, it can’t be accidental. Someone targeted the Fortress and succeeded. I’m surprised that the Rahal justiciars in residence didn’t catch it and get rid of the problem in the usual blunt Rahal fashion. Which suggests that a lot of parameters were held at the tipping point and nudged over at the right moment. That would have taken a lot of organization.”

“You’re suggesting a conspiracy,” Cheris said.

“I don’t have any evidence, but intuition’s worth something.”

Most of the reports were weeks old. Whatever had happened had been sudden. Communications had been one of the first things to go. Only when the lensmoth returned out of the twenty-five-strong task force did the hexarchs put the Fortress under interdict.

“That was smart, by the way,” Jedao said sarcastically. “With no outside news coming in, whoever’s in there doesn’t have a choice but to listen to whatever the heretics say.”

The Nirai was smirking again. “Yes, well,” he said, “what can you expect of a bunch of hexarchs?”

“It’s standard procedure,” Cheris said, stiffening.

“Of course it is,” the Nirai said.

She was puzzling over the Fortress’s internal politics – fractious, but the system encouraged faction rivalry – when Jedao spoke again.

“It’s only mentioned in passing,” Jedao said to himself, “but that’s a hell of a lot of ‘preliminary market research’ by the locals. Marketing what? The demographics are right there on file, unless...”

“What is it?” Cheris said.

“I have an overactive imagination,” Jedao said, “that’s all. I recommend that we bring a Shuos intelligence team for analytical support and a full company of Shuos infiltrators. There are going to be Shuos teams in the swarm anyway, but they’ll be watching you for signs that I’ve gotten to you. We need people who are devoted to figuring out the enemy. The more eyes the better.”

The more eyes the better. The Shuos watchwords. She hadn’t heard them in a while, but it was reassuring that even a Shuos as old as Jedao lived by them.

“I would be more comfortable,” Cheris said, “if I knew more about your plans to deal with invariant ice.”

She looked at the Nirai’s game again. He was constructing an elaborate card fortress. This must be what bored Nirai did. She had clearly missed out by becoming a Kel.

“When I was alive,” Jedao said, “an assault on the Fortress was a standard exam question at Kel Academy, and it was common as one of those no-hope wargame exercises in simulation. Is that still the case?”

“I’m not an examiner,” Cheris said, “but we might be able to get that information released to us. Sixth display?”

“Might as well.”

Cheris stared in fascination at the categorization system for responses to that particular exam question. Who knew Kel examiners had a sense of humor? Two categories that caught her eye were “heretical thinking” (expected) and “irredeemably stupid” (expected, but not phrased so bluntly).

“No wonder they didn’t want me as an instructor,” Jedao said in fascination. “I’d never have fit in.”

The Immolation Fox, an instructor? She hoped not. “Which category were you interested in?” she asked.

“Let’s check the distributions in ‘heretical thinking’ and ‘promote tomorrow.’”

A worm curled in her belly.

“Just the distributions, Cheris.”

Two percent of exam responses were classified heretical. Cheris suspected those cadets hadn’t lasted long, or had been shunted into less desirable positions with permanent warnings in their records. She probably had a similar one in her full profile, the one she wasn’t allowed to see, for deciding to wake Jedao up.

“I know better than to suggest you hack this for more details,” Jedao said wistfully. “You Kel are awfully stiff about that sort of thing.”

“I’m glad you think so highly of us,” Cheris said.

“Shuos habit, that’s all. You’ll notice you’re the ones with all the weapons?” He sounded as though he was pacing around the room.

“She’s not stupid enough not to have realized that the Shuos are the ones who decide where to point them,” the Nirai said unkindly. The fortress was bigger than ever. Cheris was impressed that it hadn’t fallen over in a blizzard of cards.

“Why did you apply to the Kel army?” Cheris asked Jedao.

Jedao stopped, or at least his voice wasn’t moving anymore. “It was a better fit,” he said. “I wanted to serve, and picking over intelligence reports made me twitchy.”

“Don’t believe him,” the Nirai said. He started taking apart one of the towers. “He spent more time assassinating people than doing analyst work.”

“Sure didn’t feel like it,” Jedao said.

Cheris changed the subject before it could go anywhere dangerous. “The top scorers have a lot of topologically complicated operations,” she said. “You can theoretically force a puncture by convincing the operator to do something mathematically unwise.” She skimmed a few of the proposals. “It looks like it requires machine speed and precision, though, and I’m guessing composite wiring won’t work near the Fortress.”

“If you see a topological solution,” Jedao said, “tell me. I’d need an augment to carry out something like that, and I’m unable to have one installed.”

“So if not that, then what?”

“I have almost the same information that you do, which should tell you something. Invariant ice was classified to the highest levels even in my day. But see if you can call up the file on the Fortress signifier tests.”

A nexus fortress could have a signifier? Cheris made the query.

The system informed Cheris that the file didn’t exist.

“Oh, for love of fox and hound.” Jedao thought for a moment. “Ask if you can speak to someone.”

Cheris did and was stymied by the form that came up.

“Sign it with my name. That might send up some flags.”

“My career is going to be very short,” she said, but did as he said.

“You’re a suicide hawk,” Jedao said. “It comes with the territory.”

The Nirai had finished disassembling the original tower and was building a new one with the same cards.

Eight minutes later, they were wondering if anything had gone through when a response arrived. It said, simply: FILES NONEXISTENT.

“Is that what Kel Command’s seal looks like now?” Jedao said. “I thought it was the ashhawk-and-sword. Or is that a subdivision?”

“That’s Records,” the Nirai said, “same as always.” He was adjusting a pair of cards from the Gears suit in the tower. One of them was the Deuce of Gears, and Cheris felt a chill: Jedao had taken it as his personal emblem, long ago.

“No matter,” Jedao said. “We do have a problem, though, which is that Kel Command is withholding information from us. That file exists unless they purged it, and they wouldn’t have done that.”

Cheris frowned. “They’re not being subtle.”

“They don’t need to be. We have no leverage. But it does tell us that they’re protecting something so important that its secrecy trumps the necessity of taking the Fortress back.”

This line of thinking made her nervous, but it was consistent with what she knew of Kel Command.

“Anyway, let me tell you what I know. If you look at the surviving recordings, there’s a fair amount of variation in the physical manifestation of the shields, mostly to do with color and pattern. This is due to the influence of the human operator.”

“Are you certain it couldn’t be some property of invariant ice?” Cheris asked.

“No,” the Nirai said. “My faction would know if it were.”

“He’s reliable on technical matters,” Jedao said, correctly interpreting Cheris’s hesitation. “This means we don’t have to break the shields, we have to break the operator. You look skeptical.”

“It would be foolish for me to request your aid if I’m not going to make use of your expertise,” Cheris said. “Can you be more specific as to how you’re going to do this?”

“I would prefer not to until we’re there. We don’t know how the Fortress was taken, even if it looks like it was toppled from within. We can choose our assault force, but we won’t know how much of it we can trust. The rot could be anywhere. Or ordinary spies. People can’t hear the things I tell you, but they’ll be able to read your reactions. To be blunt, Cheris, you’re not a trained liar.”

Cheris bit her lip. While it was true that she was sworn to serve Kel Command, Jedao was her immediate superior. The urge to take everything at his word, thanks to formation instinct, was almost overpowering. She reminded herself that she had to be willing to kill him.

“We’ll do it this way,” Cheris said, “but when I need this to be explained later, I’m going to get an explanation.”

She was making demands of a general. She might have known this whole assignment was going to make her un-Kel.

“More than fair,” Jedao said.

He agreed so readily that she was suspicious, but she was committed now.

“What are your recommendations for the swarm composition?”

“I’d ordinarily look at calendrical considerations,” Cheris said, nonplussed that he was asking her input despite her lack of experience, “but invariant weapons are going to be more useful and you can only adjust existing exotics so far.”

“Generally true. The Fortress isn’t a calendrical null, but we don’t know what the heretical regime will look like once we get there, or what other defenses they’ll have.”

“They already have the best one.”

“It would be convenient if they didn’t have any backup plans,” Jedao said drolly, “but we can’t count on that.”

Cheris stared at the numbers. After consulting the fourth display’s readouts, she put together a swarm. Under ordinary circumstances, the two cindermoths would have been enough to handle any threat by themselves, but she added thirteen bannermoths for fire support and seven boxmoths for infantry transport. “I assume you want to go in with infantry,” she said, “although I don’t see how you can burn out the heresy that way. Are we putting down armed resistance so the Vidona reeducators can come in after?”

“We can do better than that,” Jedao said. “When I said we weren’t going to defeat the defenses, we were going to defeat the defenses’ operators, I was being literal. This predates calendrical war. Breaking the enemy’s will has always been important.”

Yes, Cheris thought, but who is your enemy?

She knew better than to ask him, but her disquiet stayed with her through the rest of the planning session.