Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SERVITOR OVERGROUP THREE 13610 had no fear of enclosed spaces. As a snakeform, its duties often took it into the Unspoken Law’s less accessible passages. It sometimes wondered what burrowing felt like, not that it could experience atavistic urges from an evolutionary past it didn’t have, but the cindermoth was low on dirt and high on unyielding metal.

13610 had been loaded into a propaganda canister that it refused to dignify with a number. The interior was cushioned with webbing, into which recreational drugs were tucked. 13610 had assayed a capsule: a euphoric variant of a painkiller the Kel used with some frequency. Uninteresting molecular structure, but that wasn’t the point. It contemplated discussing chemistry with a heretic, but the average heretic was probably as minimally informed on the subject as the average Kel. Most Kel didn’t care about things unless they made other things blow up. Endearing, really.

Someone banged on the canister. “Er, fourteen minutes to launch,” said a high, nervous voice. “Are you, er, comfortable in there?”

13610 failed to see what comfort had to do with anything. Did this Kel child want to hand out soothing logic puzzles and blankets?

One of the other servitors, taking pity on the child, made a chirring sound of reassurance.

“I should thank you for your service, too,” the Kel child said. “Since the general did. I expect formations will come very easily to you all.”

Amazing. The Kel were learning manners. It was a long-going and mostly affectionate debate among Kel servitors as to whether their humans were ever going to figure this out.

Fourteen minutes was a long time. 13610 reviewed its move orders and the formations General Cheris had provided diagrams for, the names of the Kel unit commanders who would be involved.

“Here we go,” the Kel child said. “Fire’s own fortune, and all that. Kill lots of heretics.”

The belt made a clattering sound, and then came the acceleration through the chute. 13610 had no visuals from within the canister, and it had instructions to keep scan to a minimum so as not to alert the heretics. Still, it knew how fast they were moving and their approximate trajectory. When the miniature engine cut in, it knew they had reached some cranny of the Fortress proper.

There was a hiss as the canister exuded a metalfoam blister, and then the burrower set to work puncturing the outer shell. This took some time, so 13610 contemplated some favorite theorems in algebraic topology. Pity for the heretics that the physical armor didn’t represent the latest in materials science advances, but the upgrades would have been exorbitantly expensive and no one would have been in a hurry to pay for them while everyone believed in the supremacy of invariant ice.

The canister finally dropped down with a thunk. 13610 listened hard for an hour, then extended the faintest tendrils of scan one by one in a radial pattern. Nothing.

13610 freed itself from the webbing and pried open the canister from the inside. Aha. The canister had lodged itself behind someone’s bookcase. How the canister had gotten here was a mystery, but no matter. 13610 risked another scan, reaching farther, farther – a signal there along the outer shell. Stop. That was probably a hostile. But 13610 had enough information to orient itself.

Time to slither out of the canister and make its way toward the rendezvous. Since it didn’t know how many interruptions to expect – bored heretical soldiers, feral fungus, odd bursts of radiation – it might as well move while it could.

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.

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 Pig, Day of the whatever the hell the fucking Kel decide it is.

Today started as a good day, my dear Zai. It didn’t stay that way. I can’t blame the Fortress’s people for their festivities, but they’ve given Jedao a disastrous opening. The hell of it is that we can’t disclaim the victory as an enemy ploy; it would hurt morale.

I could have kicked Stoghan for organizing those parades, but the truth is he only capitalized on an existing public trend. People wanted something to celebrate, even if they were hiding under desks during the shooting.

For that matter, not that we have hard evidence, those weren’t spontaneous celebrations. They were too well synchronized. That had to be the work of Shuos instigators. I suppose one of them is responsible for the irrepressibly catchy anthem that’s been making its way around the grid. I caught myself tapping my foot to it.

They’re already calling it the Day of Drummers’ Splendor. It won’t last, but it won’t need to, not for Kel purposes. You might as well make the notation in Doctrine’s calendar.

What I’ve been unable to determine is what the Kel are setting up. The parameter space is too tangled. I’ve got part of my team on it, but if I try to squeeze any more work out of them, they’ll expire. I’d retask Analysis Team Two because Tsegai has some mathematical credentials, but she’s also their best grid diver and you need her doing that work.

I was cheered to hear the good news on the Hafn front: they’ve destroyed the Eyespike swarm. They were concerned as to whether Brigadier General Marish escaped to fight again, but I could have told them not to worry. Kel generals rarely choose to survive the deaths of their swarms.

Gerenag Abrana and some of the people in Finance are spending too much time together. Yes, of course I’m spying on your coalition, Zai. I’m here to do the despicable things so you don’t have to. I realize you have a vision of a more egalitarian heptarchate spontaneously emerging from the cinders of the old regime, but you’re going to find that people are people no matter how you reorganize your social structures. Anyway, you may have to backstab Abrana before she makes an attempt on you. If she were smarter, she’d realize it’s better to let someone else take the heat while she pulled the strings. But we both know the trade-offs of that arrangement, don’t we?

If things had turned out differently, we would be adversaries. By accusing you of treachery for a little earnest criticism, the hexarchate turned you into a traitor. I know you don’t like that word, but we should be honest with ourselves.

At this point of the game, Jedao is one move ahead, so we’ll have to see if we can overcome that disadvantage. I’ll alert you if we have any luck with that brute-force computational search, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. In the meantime, I’m off to find some atrocious beer to drown my misgivings in.

Yours in calendrical heresy,

Vh.

“THAT’S ANOTHER POSITIVE,” Cheris said after reading the latest Shuos report.

She wasn’t standing in the command center. She wasn’t standing in the cindermoth at all. Instead, she was pulled to Drummers’ Forum, what was left of it. The videos had been clear. Blast marks, craters, torn viscera, splintered trees. There was supposed to have been a priceless gun down there, a pearl-handled affair that had belonged to the great general Andan Zhe Navo. She would have liked to hold it up to her head and see if it still worked. The guns at her belt wouldn’t work. They were back with her body on the Unspoken Law where everyone could see them.

“That’s good,” Jedao said in a way that indicated that he didn’t think it was good at all. “Cheris, you’re dissociating or hallucinating, I can’t tell which. Go to Medical.”

She barely remembered to speak subvocally. “No,” she said. “It’s supposed to hurt.”

She had told six Kel companies that the best use she could make of their loyalty was to have them fight the heretics and lose. Meat for a sham victory. All for one day of the calendar.

Formation instinct had made the infantry colonel implement her orders. Formation instinct had made the companies obey. They wouldn’t be the last.

“You used to make people do things like this without the benefit of formation instinct,” Cheris said.

“Yes,” Jedao said. “Remember the numbers, Cheris. Sometimes they’re all you have.”

Thanks to the Shuos, they had a reasonable map of Liozh Zai’s allies and their material holdings in the six wards, even if the individuals’ locations were guesswork. That was the nice thing about factories: hard to move at a moment’s notice. The suspected source of the amputation guns’ components was located deep in the Radiant Ward.

Engineering reported that the threshold winnower refit was only twenty-seven minutes behind schedule, which was a miracle. Engineering added that the work was slowed down because a number of the most technically skilled servitors were having an adventure down on the Fortress, and maybe the next time the general pulled a stunt like that, she could consult Engineering about assignments instead of simply letting the servitors run loose.

Cheris marked that with a simple acknowledgment and didn’t bother with a more elaborate reply. She blinked, and was standing outside herself again. This time she was in the dueling hall, and Kel Nerevor was saluting her with that fierce yellow calendrical sword. There were at least three things wrong with the scenario, but she didn’t want to leave.

“Cheris,” Jedao said again. “General. Either get some fucking drugs or get out of the fucking command center. Right now you’re a menace to the swarm.”

“It’s 2.9 hours until the operation begins,” Cheris said. Nerevor was trying to tell her something, but she spoke in words of fracture, seizure, cooling ash. Cheris couldn’t decipher the words. “I have to –”

“Cheris, most generals have aides for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with me. Drugs, sleep, drugged sleep, I don’t care, pick something or I will figure out how to possess you.”

“Commander, I’ll be in my quarters,” Cheris said to Hazan.

“Sir, I’ll call you when the action starts.”

She wouldn’t trust herself to wake up, either. At least he didn’t realize she was lying.

Jedao figured it out straight off. “Cheris,” he said, “you’re being ridiculous.”

When Cheris entered the dueling hall, several people looked at her with wide eyes. After all, she had only come here the one time.

“I hope it’s redundant for me to say this,” Jedao said, “but you shouldn’t duel. You’re apt to slaughter people by accident.”

Her chest hurt. “I suppose that’s to be preferred to killing them on purpose.”

“When you became a soldier, what did you expect it to be about? Parades? Pretty speeches? Admirers?”

“I know it’s about killing,” she snapped. “I didn’t want it to be about deliberately killing my own soldiers.”

“Sometimes there’s no other way.”

The shadow was behind her, so she couldn’t glare at it. “Yes, well,” Cheris said, “you live your beliefs. How commendable.”

“I wasn’t referring specifically to Hellspin Fortress.”

She snorted.

“I am not good for you,” Jedao said. “I know this. But if I were as good at manipulating people as you think I am, you would be taking a nap instead of making all the duelists nervous.”

“You don’t sleep,” Cheris said, remembering. “You don’t sleep at all. What do you do in all that time? Count ravens?”

Jedao was silent for so long that she thought something had happened to him. Then he said, “It’s dark in the black cradle, and it’s very quiet unless they’re running tests. Out here there are things to look at and I can remember what colors are and what voices sound like. Please, Cheris. Go sleep. You will never realize how valuable it is unless someone takes it away from you forever.”

“You’re only telling me this to get me to do what you want,” Cheris said.

“You’ll have to let me know how that works out,” Jedao said. “Something’s bound to go wrong in the Radiant Ward, and they’ll need you.”

“Need you, you mean.”

“I said what I meant.”

Cheris looked around the dueling hall, then let her feet carry her back to her quarters. Before she lay down, she asked, “Are you lonely when I sleep?” He didn’t answer, but this time she left a small light on.