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.

SERVITOR 244666 HADN’T intended to get caught. Of course, people rarely did. But it would have gotten away with its illicit snooping if it hadn’t been for a flickering glitch in the cindermoth’s variable layout, consequence of a moment’s power fluctuation. It had been coming out of Cheris’s quarters after having planted the bug. As luck would have it, another servitor, 819825, spotted it through the moment’s window between the brevet general’s quarters and the high halls that were, ordinarily, a right turn and a few minutes away.

It wasn’t that servitors were precisely forbidden to enter humans’ quarters. The maintenance work and routine chores that were their responsibility necessitated it, although they made a point of knocking as a matter of courtesy. Some of the humans would shoo them off if it was an inconvenient moment, but in general they didn’t think much of it, an attitude the servitors themselves had encouraged during the scant centuries of their sentience.

The servitors themselves, however, had their own rules to govern how they went about their duties. It was always fair to enter if duty required it, or, in rare cases like Cheris’s, if they were invited to socialize. It was not, according to servitor consensus, fair to drop bugs into the brevet general’s quarters for around-the-clock monitoring even if you were the lead servitor assigned to keep tabs on her whenever she was in the moth’s public areas.

At present, 244666 folded up its limbs, hinges neat and precise, and stared patiently at 819825, who had volunteered to serve as its guard or companion, take your pick. They were both shut up in one of the service corridors, dark except when they flashed prickly comments at each other, for remedial meditation. You could hear a lot here, especially with a servitor’s senses, although they were circumspect in how they used their scan capabilities. At the moment what they got was the occasional exchange between the humans below them, including a Kel joke or two; footsteps, superstitious one-two-three-four knockings on the walls, the whoosh of air circulating, the quiet whisking of other servitors hovering through the passages.

819825 had reported 244666 to the other servitors, and they had summoned it to explain itself. 244666 had shown up; it didn’t have many places to hide, and besides, it might have some philosophical differences with its fellows, but it didn’t want to defy the most important rules of servitor society.

819825, who had always had the most annoying prim streak, had explained to 244666 in exacting detail that the foundation of servitor society was courtesy, and that this differentiated them from the humans who ran their world, and that if they started deviating from it in small matters it would only be a matter of time before they slid into deviating from it in larger ones. Besides, the brevet general had been unfailingly polite to them. She deserved better consideration. It was the kind of lecture you expected to outgrow after your first few neural flowerings.

244666 thought to itself that this was all very well, but they mostly had the word of distant servitors as to Cheris’s character, and besides, no one with half a sentience could think that Shuos Jedao’s involvement boded well. It would have felt much easier knowing what went on in Cheris’s quarters at all times. Still, it hadn’t had a chance to activate the bug, its fellows had removed the thing anyway, and moreover it was impossible to eavesdrop on Jedao’s half of any conversation, something that they had had abundant opportunity to verify. It had to concede defeat. In the meantime, 244666 could have endured its confinement, however temporary, in true solitude, and instead 819825 had chosen to accompany it when it didn’t have to. It resolved to repay the kindness when they were done with this.

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.

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

Priority: High

From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

To: Heptarch Liozh Zai

Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, Day of the Carp, the vote in Doctrine says it’s Hour of the Snail and I for one have better things to argue about.

I heard from Analysis Team Three that they located one of the missing Rahal. Not of terrible use, because they only happened on the corpse after someone called in a strange murder near Stoghan’s troops by Kel Encampment Two. At least the neighborhood watch system is ticking along nicely. We have no idea what was in the damnable woman’s head, but she was clearly trying to contact her people. Stoghan’s troops deny responsibility and for once I believe them. It’s infuriating to think that we lost intelligence to ordinary crime.

I heard of the latest sniper incident. I’m tired of explaining this to Stoghan, but draconian reprisals against the civilians “sheltering” the snipers aren’t the way to go. I would be surprised if the poor stiffs knew they were being used as cover by Shuos operatives. Stoghan’s actions are only hurting our credibility. I imagine that some of the brutalized citizens are going to revert to the loyalists’ side. This is what we call “counterproductive.”

I know that Stoghan’s swaggering and “decisiveness” have his popularity at an all-time high, but please balance this against, I don’t know, every other consideration on the table. Rig some votes if you have to.

All right, I can see you glowering at me, so I will say this. One thing the man is doing right, amazingly, is insisting that his soldiers treat the propaganda canisters as real threats. So far it’s all gridpaper games, and they don’t interface with anything, but still. Solid game design, but I expect that from a Shuos.

No, the issue is that they’re miniature history lessons. I think Jedao has miscalculated, though. Take that one video segment with the Liozh prisoners’ ribs cracked open so their lungs could be extracted while they were still alive. This sort of thing is only stiffening resistance on our end. It’s an amateur’s mistake, and I have to wonder if Jedao is up to something else. Is there some other target for the propaganda?

Well, I see that Pioro has extra-special flagged a few reports with an extra-special case of that brandy he knows I like. I’d better see what the fuss is before the world collapses, eh? Do have a good hard think about what I’ve said.

Yours in calendrical heresy,

Vh.