Ninefox Gambit

SHE WAS HOLDING a gun, the same Patterner 52 with which she had failed to kill Nirai Kujen, and the same one with which she would murder her staff three years later at Hellspin Fortress. Next year she would rise to general from lieutenant general, have to listen yet again to the gossip about the unseemly haste with which Kel Command kept promoting her.

This latest campaign, against a heretic faction that called themselves the Aughens, had gotten ugly very quickly, not least because a good many Kel had developed sympathy for the Aughens’ cause. The Aughens fought honorably, made few demands, and wanted mainly to be left alone; but the heptarchate could not afford to cede that stretch of territory because it made the Blue Heron border vulnerable, and that was that.

Cheris stood at the center of a line of Kel with rifles beneath a green-violet sky, down the field from five Kel soldiers bound and stripped of rank. It was a rainy day, and the air smelled of damp leaves, earthy-pungent; of bitter salts. In the near distance she could hear the trees with their branches rattling in the wind, the roar of the sea. She wiped rain out of her eyes with the back of her glove and raised her gun.

The five Kel had failed their formation, and Cheris couldn’t help but think that formation instinct, however repugnant, would have been a great help in the battle. So much had depended on that last siege, and after every battle she ended up executing cowards and deserters. But then, formation instinct wouldn’t be developed until after she was executed for high treason. Back when she had been alive, it would have been a controversial measure. The Liozh in particular would have studied its implications carefully, and others would have protested it. By the time it was invented, after the fall of the Liozh, Kel Command and the hexarchs installed it into the Kel without any qualms.

The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

Cheris fired five times in rapid succession. Five flawless head shots. Her instructors at Shuos Academy would have approved. She had to remind herself to see the blood. The Kel with rifles would have finished the job for her if she had missed, but it was a point of pride with her not to miss.

The Kel approved of efficient kills, too. They had had their doubts about her at first. Most Shuos were seconded to the Kel military as intelligence officers. She had come in sideways as infantry on the strength of her tactical ability, but no one trusted a fox. She had had an opportunity to prove herself, if you could call it that, as a lieutenant: the Kel officers who outranked her had all been killed, and she’d gotten the company out of a bad situation. After that, the Kel took notice of her competence, mostly by giving her the worst assignments. A Shuos was always going to be more expendable than one of their own. It had only given her more incentive to get good faster.

After the Aughen campaign, Kel Command assigned her to fight the Lanterners. Cheris had considered abandoning her original plan and turning coat, Kujen be damned. The Lanterners worried the heptarchs, which was a good sign. For her part, she had spent a great deal of time getting to know the best Kel generals and how they thought. The card games and hunting trips hadn’t been entirely frivolous. If it had simply been a matter of battle, she could have offered her services to the Lanterners. She was confident of her ability to defeat anyone the Kel could field.

It hadn’t been difficult to win the respect of the Kel. The Kel, being practical, liked people who won battles. If she could have done her work with that alone, she would have tried. But two things forced her hand. The first was technological advances in augments. The Kel were going the route of composites, and there was a good chance that she wouldn’t be able to hide her intentions – two decades plotting high treason – from a hivemind. The second problem was Nirai Kujen, who could turn on her at any time. If she was going to act, she had to act sooner rather than later.

The hard part wasn’t getting rid of the heptarchs. It was creating a functioning, stable, sane society from the heptarchate’s ashes. She still had no idea whether it would have been possible to convince the Lanterners to give up remembrances, assuming some alternative could be found that gave them a viable calendar. When the Lanterners used their children as shields, however, she knew they wouldn’t work out anyway.

She didn’t have a lot of time left, so all she had was Hellspin Fortress. The massacre fixated the Kel on her and made her infamous. The Kel had respected her. Now they feared her.

Respect was a good lever, but fear was better. If she was going to make a bid for immortality, she needed a very good lever.

Terrible irony: if only she’d waited, if she had known what the Liozh were debating in their white-and-gold chambers, she could have offered her services to them instead. She wouldn’t have needed to resort to mass murder. But the Liozh heresy reared up two decades after her death and some time before the Kel first revived her. Worse, there was a good chance that the calendrical disruption caused by Hellspin Fortress was what led them to investigate alternate forms of government, which led to their particular heresy. Democracy.