Ninefox Gambit

ON THE NINETEENTH day, Cheris was reviewing the New Anchor Orientation Packet, hoping for clues on how to handle Jedao, when the chime came. “Commander Nerevor requests your presence,” Communications’ voice said. “Scan indicates possible guardswarm contact.”

“I’m on my way,” Cheris said.

“We’re going to try to coax some information out of the enemy,” Jedao said. “You’re going to have to talk your swarm commanders through it. Be ready.”

The cindermoth realigned itself briefly so she could reach the command center more quickly, although the savings in time was a matter of seconds. Cheris entered and looked around. Nerevor was pacing.

“General,” Nerevor said with a rapid salute. “I don’t like it. There’s something peculiar going on with the formation effects, probably the jinxed calendricals, but that looks like a full defense swarm and it’s moving to intercept.”

“Let me see the formation data,” Cheris said. Scan routed the information to her terminal. She looked through the decay coefficients, then set up some preliminary computations, frowning to herself. “Doctrine, what do you have on the rot?”

“Summary or equations, sir?” Rahal Gara asked.

“Equations,” Cheris said. Subvocally, she said, “Jedao, you need to tell me what the plan is or we’re going straight to the fight.”

“We can’t surprise them,” Jedao said, “but we can confuse them. Listen, they have to have some plan beyond sitting under siege for, what was it, thirty years? They won’t have supplies for that long. They must expect a relief force to make their heresy viable. It could be a conspiracy, but whatever Captain Ko’s suspicions are, I don’t think the hexarchate is quite that lax. Which leaves foreign intrigue. Pretending to be their allies might do the trick.”

Cheris started to say, But that’s treason, then reconsidered. “We can’t act like a foreign swarm! They know what Kel moths look like. And we don’t even know who they’re expecting.”

“True, but we can be the next best thing: opportunistic domestic allies. Just be prepared to be firm with your officers.”

“There it is,” Scan said. “See that odd formant in the readings, sir? That’s got to be a rot effect, and I’m convinced it’s keeping me from getting a closer look at the lead warmoth.”

Cheris looked up from the fever-tangle of equations and numbers long enough to ask, “They’ve transmitted no banner?”

“We should be so lucky,” Nerevor said. “Should we transmit ours?” She had reason to be enthusiastic even about the null banner: once banners had been exchanged, battle could be properly joined.

“Not yet,” Jedao said. “They know we’re here, but the banner is additional information. We want to give it when we can provoke a response we can read for clues, and they’re too far away. Now would be a good time to explain to Nerevor that we’re going to try a ruse.”

“Commander,” Cheris said, “when they’re close enough for scan to give us better detail, we’re going to try to trick some information out of them. Communications: warn the swarm commanders of the same.”

“How very Shuos,” Nerevor said, “but orders are orders, sir.”

“I heard that,” Jedao said, a little testily.

Scan and Doctrine consulted with each other, and agreed that the guardswarm was 1.7 days out from the effective range of the Fortress’s shields.

“That swarm isn’t out here for defense,” Nerevor said. “It’s here to scout us.”

“Have you hailed it?” Cheris asked sharply.

“We were awaiting your instructions.”

“Good,” Cheris said.

“I hate tripwires,” Nerevor said, “but why so close to the Fortress proper?”

“We need to get closer,” Cheris said. “Look—” She mapped the calendrical gradients. “The fractal boundaries are a mess, but we can’t define them better without active probing and that’ll take too long.” She pointed out the key equations. “There, there, and there. If you solve for the roots and iterate—” She demonstrated. The map updated itself accordingly.

“My guess is they’re hoping to meet us in that yellow zone,” Jedao said. “They’ve got something planned for the phase transition.”

Cheris concurred and relayed the assessment.

“I didn’t know you were Nirai-trained, sir,” Nerevor said, scrutinizing Cheris.

“Mathematics was my specialty in Kel Academy,” Cheris said patiently. She had known this would come up.

“Trip the wire?” Nerevor said. “Or lure them out here?”

“We need information,” Jedao said. “We need to take the hit more than they need to make it.”

Cheris didn’t like the idea, but there was no getting around the fact that they had to crack the Fortress, and that meant getting past the guardswarm.

“I’d ordinarily scout them right back,” Jedao added, “but go in with the whole swarm. I saw the grid data on how fast you tested calendrical effects against the Eels on Dredge. You can take them by surprise.”

“Sir?” Nerevor said at what she perceived to be Cheris’s inattentiveness.

“I was consulting with General Jedao,” Cheris said, since she couldn’t keep a secret of it. “We’re going in with the full swarm to see how they react.”

Nerevor was clearly ill at ease with the decision, but said only, “What formation?”

Cheris plotted it out. “That one.”

Rahal Gara double-checked the formation, as it didn’t belong to Lexicon Primary. “Sir,” she said, “that’s going to have vulnerabilities at three pivot points. I assume you’re doing it for speed of modulation.”

“Yes,” Cheris said, pleased that Gara had figured it out. To Nerevor, she said, “Do it.”

Nerevor confirmed the order. Cheris had expected to feel something when the communications chatter began, but all that came to her was a glassy calm.

“Prepare a message,” Jedao said. “Plain text, no audio, no video, nothing. Don’t pass it over to Communications yet. I find the Kel react better – sorry, Cheris – if you just take things out of their hands. It would be better if I could record it myself, but oh well.”

“I’m listening,” Cheris said.

“This is Garach Jedao Shkan—”

It had never occurred to her to wonder what his name had been before he became a Shuos.

“– and I have a score to settle with the hexarchate. You’ll need allies to hold out until help arrives, because I know how to get past the shields. Call off your guardswarm so we can talk, or I’ll make a point of sharing the trick.”

Cheris entered the message and squinted at it. “They can’t possibly fall for that.”

“The beautiful thing about that message is I’m not bluffing.”

This gave Cheris pause. “You’re serious?”

“Even the Shuos occasionally tell the truth, I hear.”

Nerevor was talking to some of the composites. Cheris watched, then said to Jedao, “What do you think of her command style?” People were largely ignoring her.

“Very hands-on,” Jedao said. “I see why you like her. She’s combative, but she gets involved. I also suspect she’s erratic, so use her accordingly.” Interestingly, he didn’t sound as though he approved of her himself.

“You never stop analyzing people, do you?”

“There are worse habits to have.”

“They’re accelerating toward us, sir,” Scan reported. “Toward the phase transition zone.”

“We’ll meet them there,” Cheris said.

They couldn’t see the Fortress directly on scan due to the shields, although it stamped its calendrical influence throughout space as distinctively as a fingerprint. Cheris imagined it staring at them like a winter eye, cold and cunning and infallibly patient.

The Kel swarm served to meet the guardswarm, each moth oriented in accordance with formation logic. Although Cheris knew better, she kept expecting the world to change around her in response to the calendrical rot: for the walls to run like water, the light to shiver into turbulent colors, the sounds of human voices to shred into the cries of migrating birds. But that was the trouble: you had to use exotic effects to analyze the rot. If quotidian human physiology had much sensitivity to calendrical effects, the hexarchate would have destroyed itself with its own technology base.

The minutes trickled past. Cheris could almost feel them creeping down her spine. Silently, she thanked Jedao for keeping quiet.

“We’re 13.4 minutes out of dire cannon range,” Weapons said. “We’re unlikely to hit with the erasure cannon at these speeds.”

“All right,” Jedao said intently, “maneuver until we’re twenty-five seconds out of dire cannon range at present speed, then transmit the message along with our banner. Such as it is.”

Cheris passed on the instructions.

Communications swiveled to stare at her. “Sir, are you—”

“You have your orders,” Cheris said. “Tell the swarm: hold formation.”

“We’re masquerading as what?” Nerevor said. “Sir—”

Communications indicated queries from other moth commander as well. Cheris’s command panel lit up accordingly.

“I’m not taking questions,” Cheris said. “The order stands. Any response from the guardswarm?”

“Correlating formants with the previous assault swarm’s signatures, sir,” Scan said. “The bannermoth in the lead is Ungentle Paragon. The one at the next pivot point might be Forever Minus a Day, but the formants keep changing around so it’s hard to be sure.”

“I went to academy with the commander of Forever,” Nerevor said in outrage. “I can only hope he gave a good accounting of himself for his moth to be taken from him like this.”

“I wouldn’t make any assumptions about who’s commanding that bannermoth,” Jedao said.

“Enemy swarm has bannered,” Communications said.

“Let’s see it,” Cheris said.

The banner was a white wheel with seven spokes, not the hexarchate’s six, and a golden flame in the center. Cheris remembered what Subcommand Two had said about central integers.

A murmur went around the command center. “Well,” Nerevor said, “they’re not making any attempt to hide their heresy.”

“Liozh,” Jedao said, very quietly. The seventh faction, which had been destroyed for its heresy. Cheris hoped she had misheard him.

“Thirty seconds out of dire cannon range,” Weapons said.

“Message and null banner transmitted per instructions,” Communications said just after that.

“They’re shifting formation in response,” Scan said. “We may be able to catch a glimpse – that’s odd.” The marionette bit off a curse. “There only seem to be five moths in the swarm.”

“Of course,” Cheris said, angry with herself. “Look at those pivots—” Those pivots, those coefficients. “They maximized their scan shadow. Unless they’re feigning low numbers by feigning high numbers” – baroque, but you could never be sure – “that might mean they only captured five moths.” Had the rest been destroyed?

“They’re transmitting a message to the Fortress,” Communications said. “I’m dumping it to the crypto team, but this is military-grade and we don’t have the session keys, so it’ll take time to see if there are vulnerabilities.”

“Let’s see if the Fortress responds,” Jedao said. “Someone over there might have an attack of nerves.”

Were the heretics really going to believe the preposterous claim that they could break the shields?

Jedao said, “Wake up, that’s not a standard—”

Cheris spotted the incoming object in the scan summary.

“That’s a bomb!” Scan said. “Don’t understand the trajectory. It’s going to catch more of them than us in the blast radius.”

Anomalies never worked in your favor. Especially since the five-swarm was moving toward the bomb, not away from it.

The bomb went off. It did not, in fact, catch any of the Kel swarm in its radius. It did, however, encompass the entirety of the five-swarm, in a sphere of rippling light the color of broken glass, and it shifted the moths around in a dizzying swirl.

The Kel swarm was now surrounded by a kaleidoscope of phantom bannermoths, a hundred of them. Only five of them were real, but the phantoms could undoubtedly do some kind of damage. Cheris immediately mapped the symmetries: it was a radial force multiplier, it was probably only going to last as long as the bomb’s radiation lingered, and if they didn’t come up with a counter, they were going to be nailed full of holes by a numerically superior force.