Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“NEW ORDERS FROM Colonel Ragath,” the captain had said once upon a time. At one point, Kel Niaad had been able to recite them word for word. Now he wasn’t sure if there was anything in his head but the staccato of gunfire.

A scant hour ago they had been advancing through a residential complex in the Anemone Ward. Fighting had been a matter of around-the-corner shots and shatter grenades, the heartstop terror that every moan in the Fortress’s winds was death in red spikes coming straight for their eyes. The captain had ordered the patrol to hold the complex against the heretics, but almost all were dead, one was not just dead but obliterated into a stray loop of intestine on a potted shrub, and one was comatose, a state Niaad would have preferred for himself.

The other surviving member was Corporal Kel Isaure, whose only reaction to the gore had been to send Niaad to retrieve equipment from the dead. She didn’t shirk danger herself; she’d ventured farther than he had. Niaad wished she wouldn’t risk herself. If she died, his formation instinct would short out and the heretics would find him curled in a ball.

“Niaad.” It was Isaure, her voice hoarse but clear. “Hey, soldier. You awake?”

The shouts and thuds and clatter of ricochets seemed farther away than before, but sound traveled strangely in the Fortress.

“I’m awake, Corporal,” Niaad said. He couldn’t get his eyes to focus on her.

“I need you, soldier,” Isaure said. “You’re a lousy excuse for a Kel, but you’re all I have left.”

The insult, basic as it was, kept his attention.

“Thing is,” Isaure said, drawing lines into the shrapnel and shredded metalweave with her toe, “to cut us off from our company, they should either be coming through this branch or branch 71-13. I have no idea what the fuck our general is up to, but neither side has seen fit to blow up the ward with us still in it. Which is good. But we have to take the Fortress so the Vidona can get to work. Which means getting our asses out of this fucking complex so we can be useful.”

Niaad stared at her.

“Only thing is,” Isaure said, “do we go straight toward the corpsefuckers, or cut ourselves a shortcut?”

Niaad was alarmed. Isaure was only a corporal, and the captain had been quite specific that they had to hold this miserable complex until they received orders otherwise.

“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” Isaure said as she continued to draw a map with her toe. It was surprisingly good, especially if you ignored the streaky marks left by skull splinters and the accompanying shreds of brain. “Dregs spit up by Personnel because they needed more warm bodies.”

Niaad wished the corporal would stop philosophizing and give a fucking order already.

“We have the same problem.” Now Isaure was kneeling and using gristle to diagram a perimeter. Her expression showed nothing but contempt for the situation. “You jump—” She banged the nearest wall. The noise was horrifyingly loud, and it took Niaad a full three seconds to stop scrabbling for cover. “– at the smallest noises and you’re not getting much benefit from formation instinct.”

There wasn’t much Niaad could say to that. When the head of the man next to him had been vaporized, he had fallen apart.

Isaure crouched and made a second diagram. Niaad should have been paying attention, but he couldn’t think clearly. Every so often, Isaure lifted her head to listen, but if she had any conclusions about what was going on, she didn’t share them.

“You should ask,” she said at last.

“Corporal?”

“Ask why I’m the same as you. Soldier no one has a use for.”

Now she was getting personal. “Why, sir?” he said warily.

“I used to be a tank captain,” Isaure said. “A good one.” She frowned at the gristle, then wiped it off with her glove and marked out a new perimeter, this time scratching it into the floor with a bit of broken tile that shrieked as it drew the curve. “Miss the beasts. But they found out I was good at saying no to stupid orders.”

Niaad swore in spite of himself. The corporal was a crashhawk, a formation breaker. His formation instinct might not keep him from blanking in the middle of a firefight, but it did oblige him to follow orders, even a crashhawk’s orders.

Isaure was snickering. “It’s your lucky day, Niaad. They stripped my commission and broke me all the way down, and reinjected me with formation instinct. They never realized it didn’t take the second time, either.”

“All respect, sir, why are you still with the Kel?”

His tone hadn’t been respectful in the slightest, but Isaure didn’t seem to care. “Because the Kel need me,” she said. Niaad’s skin crawled. “Any other corporal would be rooted here. I see a job to be done and we’re going to do it. If I’m not mistaken, the heretics are setting up some weapon to cover the approaches, and they’re worried it’ll hit them too or they’d have moved in. You were paying attention to the reports, right? Anyway, best to hit them from behind.”

“Sir, there are only two of us!”

“Look, soldier, if you love life so much, why the fuck did you sign on to be a suicide hawk? Come on, let’s see how many weapons we can carry.”

Nirai didn’t feel sanguine about the number of grenades he was loaded down with. On the other hand, Isaure was a crack shot, and if anyone was going to be the beast of burden, it was him.

Isaure knew exactly where they were going, even if she was crazy. They entered residences of necessity. This was the one ward built hive-fashion. In order to get anywhere in the hive segments, you went through people’s homes and offices, rooms nestled up to each other like cells, and only the occasional corridor, more to transport goods than people. Some Rahal must have come up with the layout. He couldn’t see any other faction thinking of it.

The first time they encountered civilians – at least, Niaad assumed from their ornate coats and spangly jewelry that they were civilians – he was astonished by how decisively Isaure killed them, three quick bursts, red holes. He had barely gotten a look at their faces.

“They would have been screamers,” Isaure said, although Niaad hadn’t opened his mouth. “I can’t stand screamers.”

Most of the civilians got no chance to scream.

They went in and out of rooms as though they were burrowing beetles, occasionally cutting passages through walls with equipment that Isaure was not supposed to have. Niaad hadn’t thought it was possible to get any more lost, but he didn’t want to distract Isaure by asking where they were. He became fascinated by the objects people kept in their homes. Musical instruments that could have doubled as Vidona torture implements, especially the ones with the hungry wires. Floating globes that imitated pleasing weather patterns on green or purple planets. A collection of cat toys, but thankfully no trace of the cat itself. Isaure would probably classify a cat as a screamer.

Isaure kept consulting the field scanner, drilling holes, and muttering about angles of fire. Niaad was amazed no one heard the drill. It was quiet, but he could hear the whir as clearly as though it were biting into the lobes of his brain.

“There they are,” Isaure said. “They’ve been taking down walls, you can’t mistake the signs.” Her patient voice suggested that she didn’t care whether Niaad understood the situation. “It’s where I thought it would be.”

She pulled away from the latest hole. “All right. There’s a machine down that passage. We need to light it up so our people know something’s there. If we run like hell we can make it.” She had kept the cracked bit of tile; she drew with it now. At least she was no longer diagramming with dead people’s fluids.

“They’ll see us coming, sir.”

“They’ll see you coming,” Isaure said. “I’ll provide covering fire. I just want you to lob as many of the grenades as you can at that machine, get some explosions going.”

“We could pick off a few of them first, sir—”

“Soldier,” Isaure said crushingly, “did I give you permission to think? Charge straight in, throw grenades, get the hell out. I’ve given you instructions. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged, sir,” Niaad said, despite a sincere desire to tell her to fuck a jackhammer.

“Go,” Isaure said, gesturing with her scorch rifle.

Niaad was already having trouble with his peripheral vision. He kept having to swing his head from side to side to check his surroundings. It wasn’t until Isaure shook his shoulder that he realized his hearing was half-gone, too. The stress effects wouldn’t have set in so early in a properly tuned Kel.

“There’s the gauntlet,” Isaure said. “Sloppy guards, no one’s facing our way. Their misfortune, our gain. Get in, lob the grenades, get out. I’ll cover you. Simple.”

“Yes, sir,” he whispered. Stupid plan, but he had to obey.

“Good man. We’ll make a Kel of you yet. Go!”

Niaad shuffled at first because he couldn’t get his legs to cooperate. The noise alerted them. He primed one grenade and threw poorly, well short of the machine. It was hard not to be hypnotized by its red glow and wires and strange gears.

The heretics’ guards may have been careless, but they weren’t fools. One of them kicked the grenade down the corridor. The others swung up their rifles.

Niaad was too terrified to move.

Which, he realized in a slow crystal moment, was what Corporal Isaure had counted on. She fired four times in rapid succession, cool and precise: once to scorch out his knee, pitching him forward and closer to the machine, and three more to trigger the grenades.

Whether he was close enough for the grenades to do any damage to the mystery machine was a question Kel Niaad never found out the answer to.

Kel Isaure was already sprinting away from the explosion. She had gotten what she wanted. Now it was time to rejoin the Kel and show them what they needed to do.