Ninefox Gambit

IT WAS A very pretty attack if you didn’t care about it succeeding. Captain Kel Mieng, who had recently been deposited in the Drummers’ Ward, wished her mortar contained real rounds instead of harmless fireworks. They had been assigned to take and hold the Hall of Stochastic Longings. Mieng had misgivings about its security features. She had once gotten locked in a bank while she and her comrade Kel Belleren were visiting a mutual friend. Some idiot had adjusted a priceless ink painting personally instead of letting a bank servitor handle it, and had triggered a building-wide alarm.

Come to think of it, Belleren, who had made major, was in charge of a company in the van. It would be nice to catch up with him at some point.

One of the lieutenant colonels had asked Colonel Ragath why they were wasting time in the administrative district. Ragath had gotten that look. “The Drummers value this site,” he said. “Cultural heritage. I realize we’re all Kel, but try to pretend you didn’t have to look that up on the grid. For instance, one of those buildings is a museum. Contains the gun that General Andan Zhe Navo used in her last battle. The Hall of Stochastic Longings has an archive containing Andan and Liozh – yes, Liozh – documents going back 500 years.

“All this to say,” Ragath went on, “we may be able to get concessions out of the civilians by threatening to wreck priceless artifacts.” He had given orders against looting, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, but everyone wanted immediate revenge after the amputation gun. The current mission was some kind of backwards lose-so-we-win-later gambit, which made Mieng’s teeth itch.

It was hard to believe anyone would care about some Andan gun that hadn’t been properly cleaned for centuries, or a bunch of calligraphed books no one read anymore. But then, the colonel clearly cared about dried-up bits of history, so maybe he had some insight into how the Drummers felt about their artifacts.

The Drummers’ Forum was cursed with wide approaches, a boon to the Kel, and had a park that provided some cover. There was a lot of rubble already, from the forward companies that had gone in with real weapons for credibility’s sake. Bullets whined across the garden and kicked up dirt. Most of the corpses were unreal broken things, dressed in hats and jade necklaces and embroidered clothes. A lot of blood and stray body parts, too, like a human jigsaw upended.

They benefited from mostly unnecessary covering fire as they advanced to the Hall of Stochastic Longings. It was an eerie building, full of walls that sang your breath back to you as poetry, and light that coruscated like flowers. Beautiful, if you wanted to feel that beauty hid unhealthy secrets from you.

Guards offered some resistance, but the only one in the company who got seriously injured was Kel Ajerio, and he ought to have known better than to dash up like that.

Mieng had the gunner platoon set up in the atrium. “Where the hell is everyone?” she wondered. Scan told her, but—”We’re going to have to send two platoons to clean out the squirrels.” She hated splitting her company, but they couldn’t leave civilians running around.

It was hard to hear herself think over the sound of the mortars. The decoy guns were even louder than the real thing. In the meantime, Platoons Two and Three went squirrel-hunting. She could occasionally hear short bursts of fire and the more occasional muffled shriek.

It was as well that it took the heretics a full 6.6 hours to respond to the attack as a real threat, by which point more decoy units had been set up.

By the time the heretics arrived in force, Mieng had a hard time convincing herself to give way in measured stages. They had to haul back the damn decoys because it wouldn’t do to leave evidence. Corpses were piling up around the copses of trees and the flowerbeds. Broken stems and chewed-up leaves. Smoke everywhere, nauseating even through the breather. No one had fired an amputation gun yet, but that didn’t mean one wasn’t around the corner.

“Pull out now,” the colonel’s voice crackled over the link. “The Nirai are about to put on some fireworks.” He started listing the units that were to get to the pickup point.

A list. Not all units. Six companies weren’t on the list, if she remembered the roster correctly, so they’d be staying.

Her company was on the list. So that was fine.

Major Kel Belleren’s company was not on the list. That was not fine. They had gone to academy together.

She should have queried her battalion commander, but instead she called the colonel directly. “Sir, Captain Mieng, Battalion Three, Company Two. If you need another unit to hold, we can hold.”

Her battalion commander was going to kill her. If the colonel didn’t do it first.

An infinitely brief pause. “Captain,” Ragath said, “I’m not leaving those companies to cover the retreat. I’m leaving them for the butcher’s block. On direct orders from the general. She has decided that, with the confusion from the Nirai explosives, this is the minimum number that will convince the heretics that their victory was real so the next operation can proceed. I hear she’s good with numbers.”

This was more explaining than Ragath usually troubled with. “Sir, we can—”

“I’m not interested in martyrs.” His voice grew hard. “You have your orders, Captain. Colonel Ragath out.”

She bit her lip, but formation instinct made her give the necessary orders, made her march out of the smoke-haze with its stench of upturned dirt and chemicals and livid blood, made her get into the hopper with her soldiers.

She was Kel. Her life was a coin to be spent, and today her superiors had chosen not to spend it. She should have been grateful, but for the first time in a long time, she resented what formation instinct had made of her.