Ninefox Gambit

“YOU’VE BEEN AT the formations for hours,” Jedao said. “Are you sure you shouldn’t rest?”

“You’re a great believer in rest,” Cheris said. She grimaced at the leftmost pivot of the latest formation. Would skew symmetry get her the results she wanted? The whole thing was moot if they couldn’t wrench the heretics’ calendar into a more favorable configuration, but she preferred to prepare just in case.

“I once had someone swerve her tank out of our column and straight into a house. With a very large basement. Because she was too sleep-deprived to think. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny then. – Oh, who am I kidding, it was hilarious, even if it was kind of a disaster. I laughed so hard my aide almost shot me.”

“Do I look that tired?”

“Not yet,” Jedao said.

Great. “I have some of Doctrine on this, too,” Cheris said, “but I’m faster.”

“I know.”

Cheris didn’t look around the room, didn’t look at the ashhawk emblem, didn’t look at the ninefox shadow. Her world was graying at the edges, not the way it did in combat, but the way it had in Kel Academy when she got another letter from her mother handwritten in not entirely grammatical high language.

Skew symmetry wasn’t it, either. Cheris played with the pivots in her head, trying different configurations. Ah: that looked promising. She fiddled with the simulator.

“Colonel Ragath’s unit list for the assault looks good,” Jedao said, “but I had expected as much. I’ve been pleased with his competence.”

An update flashed in from Medical. Cheris gritted her teeth as she looked at the collation. The battalion had taken eighty-eight percent casualties.

The boxmoths were having difficulty loading all the possibles into the sleepers to stabilize them until they could be unfrozen for treatment at a real medical facility. The colonel-medic noted, very clinically, that due to time pressure, lower quality prep would affect recovery rates.

“This won’t make you feel better,” Jedao said, “but the heretics mistimed that attack.”

“Yes, I see,” Cheris said after a moment. She and Jedao would have followed up to hold the position if the initial attack had been successful. If the heretics had given way slowly, drawn the Kel further into the Fortress, they could have hit the entire assault force with the amputation guns. As it stood, the Kel had taken staggering losses, but they still had soldiers left to fight with.

Jedao was quiet while Cheris worked through another six formations, but it was a companionable quiet. Then she tried to work the tension out of her hands. She had gotten used to the fingerless gloves. Even her officers no longer took notice of them.

“I wish I knew I was doing this right,” Cheris said, “but there’s nothing for it but to move forward.”

“The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still,” Jedao said. “It’s better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than to freeze.”

“You’ve lost soldiers.” It wasn’t what she had meant to say.

“Nothing makes it easier,” Jedao said. “I sometimes think I’m not the mad one, that it’s Kel Command. They should know better. Anyway, you should stop delaying.”

“I should,” she agreed, and headed out.

Commander Hazan frowned when Cheris entered the command center. “Has something changed, sir?”

“Commander,” Cheris said, “I wish to address the servitors.”

“The moth servitors, sir?”

“The swarm servitors. All of them, or as many of them as can be reached for an address in twenty-four minutes.”

He didn’t understand. “If you have orders for them—”

“I’m not interested in presenting them with orders,” Cheris said, resolved to be patient with him. “I need to address them. To make a request. It would be better if I could do so personally, but with the swarm entire that’s impossible. The servitors themselves may have suggestions for how to accommodate this. I am amenable to any reasonable suggestion.”

The command center’s atmosphere was distinctly awkward. Her officers thought this was Jedao’s mad scheme. It wouldn’t make them feel better to know that it was hers, and in any case she didn’t owe them explanations.

Hazan recovered enough to say, “Commander Hazan to Servitor Overgroup One.” He began explaining the request.

“We didn’t have servitors when I was alive,” Jedao said. “No true sentients, anyway, although there were rumors. Plenty of presentient drones. I wonder what the servitors think of what we did to their forebears, but then we make damn sure they don’t burden us with their opinions, don’t we?”

Dangerously, Cheris agreed with this.

“The linkup is ready for you, sir,” Hazan said. “Address in eighteen minutes?”

“That will suffice,” Cheris said. She kept out of the way while waiting and read reports as they crossed her terminal. Briefly, she fantasized about sitting in a chair by a window and watching clouds go by. Did Jedao ever wish for quiet vacations? Or, dreadful thought, was this already his idea of a vacation?

“Six minutes, sir,” Hazan said.

She was signing off on several Shuos reports. Grid warfare, mostly, with the targets she and Jedao had designated after consultation with Captain-analyst Ko. She hoped none of the Shuos were getting too creative.

“I’m ready,” Cheris said as the minute slid closer.

Servitors didn’t organize themselves the same way on all moths. The Unspoken Law’s servitors had a traditionalist bent, and they were represented by a single sleek deltaform from Overgroup One. The Sincere Greeting had two delegates, one labeled Over, the other labeled Sideways. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The largest group was from Commander Kel Irio’s Spectrum Fallacy: five servitors, each of a different form.

She had to start somewhere. “Servitors,” she said, for lack of a better form of address, “this is Brevet General Kel Cheris. I have interrupted your duties because I have a request for you. It is not an order.” Best to make that clear from the start.

Cheris heard a stifled exclamation from Scan.

The servitors were silent, motionless, prism-eyes focused on her.

“We have threshold winnowers being modified for use under the heretics’ calendar,” Cheris said, “but we need to regain a toehold on the Umbrella Ward and advance into the Drummers’ Ward. The difficulty is the amputation gun.

“There’s one useful thing we know about the amputation guns. They have to be deployed in formation. The heretical calendar occupies a phase basin that is, unusually, not servitor-neutral. If servitors can be covertly landed, we can use you to construct grand formations and take the heretics by surprise. With Doctrine’s aid, I have identified formations that will offer protection against the amputation guns. It’s likely that the heretics haven’t anticipated this possibility. Certainly, as their infantry is not Kel-indoctrinated, they won’t have access to formations themselves.”

The terminal lit up to indicate that the servitors were consulting each other. At last one of them said to her, through the translation interface, “This is not an order.”

Her heart sank. “That’s correct,” she said. “You are Kel, but your service has traditionally been given certain parameters. It would be improper for me to order you to carry out a human duty when you don’t receive the accompanying human privileges. The only thing I can do is ask.”

“Release the logistical preliminaries.”

Cheris did so, wondering what sort of critique she was about to receive.

“Steady,” Jedao said. “They haven’t said no.”

The servitors spoke among themselves for a much longer time. It couldn’t be a matter of computation; that would have been fast. It had to be an argument. Cheris was aware of Commander Hazan shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“The numbers are straightforward,” said a snakeform from Spiders and Scars. “We are not tacticians. But the odds of retrieval are minimal.”

“That’s also correct,” Cheris said. “The situation on the Fortress will be messy.”

“How do you propose transport?”

“We’ve been sending propaganda canisters twice daily. Some of them could be modified to accommodate you. The heretics used early canisters for shooting practice, but we started including recreational drugs and other luxuries, and we have some indication that they’re getting through now. There’s still risk involved, obviously. But I think the heretics are convinced the setup is an exercise forced on us by Doctrine. They’re unlikely to consider the canisters a real threat.”

Cheris was increasingly convinced that the propaganda materials, narrating the stomach-turning ways in which the six factions had turned on the Liozh, hadn’t been directed at the heretics, but at her. Egocentric as that sounded. But she would take that up with Jedao later.

“Absurd,” the snakeform said after a pause, “but workable.”

Her breath caught.

This time the Sincere Greeting’s Sideways-servitor spoke. “We are Kel. We will serve as Kel. We will fight as Kel, although we were not made for this kind of fighting. This is a Kel mission. If it furthers the Kel mission, we will serve.”

“Thank you,” Cheris said. “I will send further instructions. I appreciate your service.”

“Plan wisely, Kel general,” the Sideways-servitor said. And that was all.

“Of all the damn things,” Hazan said.

“I’ve forwarded you my preliminary plans,” Cheris said. “I need to speak to Doctrine.”

“Of course, sir,” Hazan said, his expression still astounded.

“A lot of people are going to die because of what I just did,” Cheris said subvocally.

She expected Jedao to explain why it was necessary. Instead, he said, “I’m afraid it never stops hurting.”

“Get me Captain-magistrate Gara,” Cheris said before she had time to think about that too hard.

Gara, who was off-shift, was slow to respond. “Sir?” she asked.

Cheris reviewed what they had on the heretics’ calendar. “In four days, look,” she said. “Their node in the remembrance superstructure has collapsed partly due to the damage we did to the Fortress’s geometry. If we knock that ritual day aside and preempt with some kind of victory feast—”

Gara’s brow furrowed. “I see it, sir. But the timing’s tight. Maybe—” She searched the parameters and fed the results back to Cheris. “No, next best opportunity is seven months out, assuming no more damage to the over-geometry. We have to take the chance while we have it.” Then: “I shouldn’t ask, sir, but what word on the Hafn?”

“Nothing from Kel Command,” Cheris said bitterly. She had sent a couple more inquiries, on the grounds that she’d like to know how close the invasion swarm was. No further word from Brigadier General Marish, either. “Anyway, if we force-jump the heretics’ calendar at that time, it’ll give us the opening we need.”

Commander Hazan coughed. “To give the heretics a victory feast, sir,” he said, “we need to give them a victory. A big one.”

Cheris looked at him steadily. “That’s right. Or the appearance of a big victory, and enough time for the infiltrators to seed a ‘spontaneous’ celebration on our schedule.” Back to Gara: “Can you work with Weapons on this moth and the Sincere Greeting to prepare the winnowers and their crews?”

“Yes, sir,” Gara said.

Now all she had to do was figure out the least expensive, most convincing way to lose a battle.