Ninefox Gambit

CHERIS’S WORLD WAS very large. It contained the full crews of the Kel swarm, the infantry and infiltrators who were facing off against the heretics, the Fortress and its six wards. She thought in the on-off language of guns instead of words. Everything coalesced into numbers and coordinates, angles and intersecting lines.

“Sir, Tactical Three’s firepower is now down to seventy-four percent,” Communications said. “Commander Rai Mogen is asking if they should alter formation.”

Cheris rubbed her temples. She had identified heretical formation keys through rapid modulation at the beginning of the engagement. Fast, but not fast enough; Commander Kel Tavathe’s bannermoth Spiders and Scars had taken serious damage to its life support systems. Still, they now had access to a small repertoire of defensive effects.

“Tactical Three, heretical formation 8,” Cheris said hoarsely. A conservative response, but she couldn’t afford to lose more guns. “Let me know if there are any more breakdowns.”

A certain percentage of the Kel reacted poorly to using heretical formations. None of the commanders had broken down, but Commander Kel Hapo Nar had had to relieve his executive officer during the second hour of the engagement. As time passed, other Kel proved vulnerable as well.

“You should take a break soon,” Jedao said, but she ignored him.

“Commander Rai Mogen acknowledges,” Communications said. “Formation shift underway.”

They had been whittling down the Fortress’s guns for the past 17.3 hours. When the heretics opened fire on the Kel infantry, there was no longer any point to pretense. Cheris had recalled Kel Koroe’s bannermoth Unenclosed by Fear. The two cindermoths had kept up a barrage from a distance – it wasn’t as though the Fortress could evade – and the bannermoths offered supporting fire. Cheris had endeavored not to damage the Fortress’s integral structure, although it was tempting to blast random holes in the thing. Kel Command could always take it out of her pay for the next millennium.

Cheris had sent a report to Kel Command explaining that the Fortress’s shields had been defeated and that additional information on the Fortress’s capabilities and personnel would be appreciated. With any luck, they would respond soon. One of the things she and Jedao agreed on was that Kel Command was shooting itself in the foot by giving them so little information from the outset, although she hoped that Jedao’s theory that they were the victims of some unrelated power play was incorrect.

Cheris’s world was also very small. It had narrowed to her terminal with its glitterspin of displays. Everything announced itself in colors, numbers, diagrams. At some point, she had been aware that certain numbers represented people, and other numbers represented guns, and still others represented Kel moths. Now she was only aware of interlocking hierarchies and the imperative to trade some numbers for others.

Fire became numbers became lines. She tapped out an order, knowing only the necessity of perfection. Another order, then another. Numbers changed, drifted, folded out of sight. Too low. She frowned, trying to concentrate. It was getting harder and harder to think.

“General.” It wasn’t Jedao, but another man, his voice deeper, gruffer. Cheris couldn’t remember his name. She could barely find her own. “Sir, you ought to rest. The combat drugs aren’t meant to handle that kind of mental exertion.”

He wasn’t part of the terminal that was her world. She didn’t have to listen – unless he was a number? How could she have lost track of a number? Her heart raced.

“Cheris.” This time it was Jedao. He spoke very clearly. “That’s Commander Kel Hazan. He can oversee the swarm. He got on shift 1.8 hours ago, and Weapons and Navigation have been feeding your responses into the grid so it can learn from them. They can handle things while you rest.”

She had to find her way out of the numbers. When she did speak to Hazan, she wasn’t sure she was intelligible, but he gave no sign that anything was wrong. Then she headed to her quarters.

Cheris took a shower even though she would rather have collapsed asleep the instant she was through the door. She had hoped the sonics’ cloying hum would wake her up. No such luck.

“Stop trying to stay awake,” Jedao said.

She was so tired, and she had no idea what, if anything, she had done right. In mathematics you had peer review, definite proofs and answers, but war was nothing but uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty.

“Sleep,” Jedao said, exasperated.

Cheris gave up trying to resist and fell asleep as soon as she lay down.

When she woke, there was a tray with scallion pancakes, rice, and cooling tea. “A pair of servitors came in with that twenty-seven minutes ago,” Jedao said, “but I thought you needed the rest more. I would have thanked them if they had been able to hear me.”

He let her eat in peace, then said, “We’re going to prepare propaganda drops.”

“What?” Cheris said. Planning sessions with Jedao were never dull. “Do you think the heretics will fall for something that obvious?”

“You’d be surprised at what people will read out of curiosity,” Jedao said. “Although we won’t ask them to read much. We’re going to modify some game templates and send them down. The thing is, I’ll need your colonel’s help. He’ll know more about the Liozh heresy than I do, and since he’s a Kel, he’ll know the most about the bloodthirsty bits.”

A servitor requested entry, although it could have just come in. “Come in,” Cheris said. It bore more tea. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m in danger of dehydrating here in the command moth, but I appreciate it.”

The servitor made a skeptical sound, but flashed a series of satisfied green-gold lights and left.

“Anyway,” Jedao said, “I know what happened in outline, but not the details. We want the details.”

Cheris thought of the things she did and didn’t remember from her history lessons, and grimaced. “Wouldn’t you be able to find this in the archives?”

“When’s the last time you dug through primary sources? The problem with the Liozh rebellion is that half that stuff’s classified, and the other problem is that you have to know how to sift through it. Which is where Ragath’s background as a historian will come in handy.”

“He’s very busy,” Cheris said. It was bad enough that she had to put up with Jedao. The least she could do for her infantry commander was shield him from the fox’s direct interference.

“All he has to do is give us pointers to the best examples of the Liozh getting shot into sieves,” Jedao said. “Just leave him a message and he’ll respond when he has the time. I doubt it’ll take him that long.”

Cheris thought of her instructors dismissing Kel actions against the Liozh as unworthy of study, victories too easily won. “I’m still not sure—”

“Did you play many games in academy? Sports?”

“Dueling mostly,” Cheris said. Here it came, the ubiquitous Shuos obsession with games.

Jedao snorted. “You’re thinking something uncharitable about foxes. Tell you what, then. We’re going to make a game.”

“I should get back to the command center, is what I should be doing.” She eyed the clock and the shift schedule. Technically she wasn’t due back for another five hours and forty-one minutes, but she didn’t want to admit it.

“If they needed you, they’d have sent for you,” Jedao said. “You could use more sleep, but you’re unlikely to see sense about that.”

Cheris finally realized what he had said. “I have people dying down there and you want me to play another fucking Shuos game?”

“I said invent a game. We won’t have time to play it.”

“Why?” Cheris said.

“We’re going to invent a game about the Fortress.”

He wasn’t going to let it go. “If you want a battle simulation, wouldn’t it be better to use one of the ones already in the grid?”

“But that would only tell me what the simulator thinks of the situation. And the level of abstraction is too low – we’ll get back to that. I want to know how you understand the situation, Cheris.”

“What, you don’t have a plan? I thought you always had a plan.”

“Humor me.”

She had misgivings, but – “Where do we start?”

Maddeningly, he responded as she had thought he would. “Where do you think we should start?”

Cheris thought for a moment. Under other circumstances, and with the help of some beer, it would have been tempting to devise a taxonomy that could handle dueling, jeng-zai, and truth-or-dare. But Jedao would have a specific purpose in mind, and he wouldn’t have given her an impossible task. “If the point is a specific game, I’ll start by modifying an existing game.” A mathematical solution: reduce a problem to a previously solved problem.

Jedao didn’t say anything, so Cheris assumed she was being left to thrash around for his edification. She went to the terminal and pulled up fires-and-towers. Using it as a basis, she set up an asymmetrical two-player board game to be played with grid assistance. There was no point making the bookkeeping more annoying than necessary.

She lost time on legible visual representations. It wouldn’t do for the player to confuse infantry and infiltrators, for instance. Assigning legal moves and point values was worse. How was she supposed to know the heretics’ strength? Was she supposed to ensure that both sides were evenly matched? She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it. And she omitted the shields, since they had been cracked and weren’t relevant anymore.

Cheris was confronted with the difficulty of coding a grid opponent so she could test the values. Normally she would have asked a servitor for help, but she suspected Jedao would intervene. The attack values on some of the guns felt too high to be realistic, but you probably couldn’t tell by eyeballing the numbers. If only she had more time –

She straightened and barked a laugh. If Jedao meant to distract her from her duty, he was succeeding. She longed for a call from the command center, even if it implied a new disaster.

It was peculiar that Jedao seemed determined to teach her. Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to trigger her formation instinct so she could convey his orders without any of this back and forth?

Her mind was wandering again. She had barely addressed combat resolution. It was tempting to squander time on pseudorandom generators and probability distributions because at least she understood those, but it was more important to pick something inoffensive and run with it.

It was impossible not to think of herself as the Kel swarm, even in the context of scratchy, half-formed notations. She put herself in the role of the Fortress’s commandant and saw problems with the game that hadn’t been evident before: ambiguities, ill-defined objectives, a certain lopsidedness of agency. Surely the heretics had motives and the ability to maneuver toward their own goals. The game should reflect that.

She entered more scratchwork, agonizingly aware of the mess of numbers and contradictory rules and shaky assumptions. A senior cadet had once told her that proofs were just like essays, no one expected the rough draft to be a work of art, but it was hard not to feel that she should try for elegance from the outset.

“You can stop there,” Jedao said.

Cheris’s eyes felt sand-dry. “It won’t work,” she said.

“There are issues that would come up in initial playtest,” Jedao said, “but that’s not a bad first outing, especially from a Nirai thinker. You should have seen the first time I went through design critique. Blood everywhere.”

She had a hard time believing that.

“Cheris, I wasn’t born a tactician. I had to learn like everyone else.”

“Tell me,” she said carefully, “why you stopped me there.”

“You must suspect or you wouldn’t be asking.”

“That was when I changed my focus to consider the Fortress’s player.”

But why stop there? If the Fortress expected aid from – “The foreigners,” Cheris said in a rush. “They’re part of the situation. And our objectives aren’t exactly the same as Kel Command’s, or they wouldn’t keep hiding information from us.” And who else? What other players had she missed?

She remembered, with nauseating clarity, the Shuos eye watching her out of her own face. Subcommand Two’s face.

She had gotten the scenario wrong. Her focus had been on the immediate problem of subduing the Fortress, without encoding the context.

“I see,” Cheris said. “I got caught up in the tactical problem, when the issue is strategy. All that time with modifiers and attack values and it wasn’t even relevant.”

“Well, we were sent here as tacticians,” Jedao said, “so you’re not entirely to blame.”

“Still, I appreciate the lesson,” Cheris said, thinking that next time she would try to catch on sooner.

“It’s not over,” Jedao said. “Two things. First: the value of a game is in abstraction. Many Nirai go in for simulationist approaches, a tendency you share, but sometimes you learn more by throwing details out than coding them all in. You want to get rid of everything nonessential, cook it down to its simplest possible form.”

“I see, sir.” The fact that she had been solving the wrong problem with great dedication, if not exactly enthusiasm, was humbling.

“Second: what do you think games do? What are they about?”

The flippant answers weren’t going to be right, but she had no idea what he was after. “Winning and losing?” she said. “Simulations?”

“It hasn’t escaped me that your first answer is a Kel answer and the second is a Nirai answer,” Jedao said. “A Rahal would say that games are about rules, an Andan would say they’re about passing time with people, and who knows what the Vidona are authorized to say.”

“You’re a Shuos,” Cheris said, “so I presume you’re going to tell me what the Shuos answer is.”

“According to the Shuos,” Jedao said, “games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.”

Cheris felt cold all the way down to her marrow. “The siege is a distraction,” she said. “You’re going to game the heretics to death.”

“A war of hearts, Cheris. Not guns. As you observed not so long ago.”

“So this is what the propaganda pieces are about,” she said.

“I want the heretics thinking about what about what happened to the Liozh the first time around,” Jedao said. “There’s a chance this is some completely different heresy, but after the shield operator’s response to the Web of Worlds, I doubt it. I’m guessing that their leaders neglected to remind them of the fate the original Liozh met. It’ll still be on their minds, however. Sometimes even obvious openings are worth taking. If nothing else, we can learn something from their response.”

The Liozh had been a living faction when Jedao was alive. “Did you see any signs of their heresy before you died?” she asked. “An entire faction going wrong – that’s worse than losing a nexus fortress.”

“I didn’t see it coming at all,” Jedao said with an undertone of bitterness. “Didn’t interact with the Liozh much except on social occasions. I was always at war, Cheris. It didn’t leave me a lot of free time to discuss philosophy and ethics.”

Cheris sent the request down to Colonel Ragath. It didn’t take long for him long to respond. “I’ll send over a list as soon as I can, sir,” he said. “Plenty of material to choose from if you want to paint everything in gore. The Liozh military was known more for its revolutionary fervor than its battle prowess. They lost their single best general – who was pretty good – to a Shuos assassin early on. It went to pieces after that. The killing irony is that the Shuos was after another target, a Shuos traitor, and got the wrong woman. Fascinating stuff if you like watching the underdogs getting smeared to paste.”

Cheris looked at Ragath narrowly. It was impossible to tell if he was being sarcastic.

“Tell him I’m grateful for his assistance in this matter,” Jedao said.

She repeated the words, puzzled by Jedao’s unusual deference.

“Happy to oblige, sir,” Ragath said. His gaze flicked sideways. “I have a minor emergency in the Umbrella Ward, is there anything else you need right now?”

“No, that’s everything,” Cheris said as she scanned the status reports on the terminal’s subdisplay, recognizing the understatement for what it was. “Out.”

“Now this,” Jedao said, “is where game presets can be useful. The archives contain the collected efforts of a lot of Shuos trying to impress each other. We don’t have to design propaganda pieces from scratch. All we have to do is feed in some parameters and however many horrifying images we can scare up.”

Jedao’s matter-of-factness about the Liozh defeat stood at odds with the way he had spoken of the Lanterners as fellow human beings. Cheris wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Did you have something against the Liozh?”

“Not in the slightest,” Jedao said, “but they died in dreadful ways and we can leverage that.”

She knew she shouldn’t feel anything for heretics past or present, but Jedao’s sudden callousness made her feel strangely defensive on their behalf.