Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWO

HEXARCH SHUOS MIKODEZ wasn’t sure which was worse: the flickering readouts that updated him on the crisis at the Fortress of Scattered Needles, or the fact that Hexarch Nirai Kujen’s silver voidmoth call indicator had been blinking at him nonstop for the past four hours and twelve minutes. Kujen was a talkative bastard to begin with – not that Mikodez should be one to criticize – and the worst part was, he had legitimate reason to want to get in touch with Mikodez about the danger the hexarchate was in.

Shuos headquarters was at the Citadel of Eyes, a star fortress in the Stabglass March. A simple fact of astrography, except it put the Citadel uncomfortably close to the Fortress of Scattered Needles in the adjacent Entangled March, where the recent trouble was going on. Calendrical currents could be surprisingly far-reaching, star-spanning distances or not, and it made him especially appreciative of the trouble they were in. A little heresy went a long way, unfortunately. But he was certain that their best candidate for dealing with the matter was the best candidate for being authorized to use a certain Shuos weapon, the oldest Shuos weapon, especially since said weapon was in the Kel Arsenal. Heptarch Shuos Khiaz, who had signed it (or him, take your pick) over to Kel control 398 years ago, in a fit of towering spite, had a lot to answer for.

In any case, Mikodez didn’t like stalling, but he needed to buy time while his mathematicians did the final checks on the Kel candidate that he’d been saving up, based on what she had just pulled at Dredge. He had multiple offices at the Citadel of Eyes, and today he had holed himself up in the one he used for getting work done rather than scaring impressionable interlocutors. Nothing he kept in the office would intimidate Kujen, anyway, not the paintings of ninefoxes with their staring tails, not the lack of visible weapons, or the pattern-stones board with its halfway game, or the randomly selected images of still lifes. Mikodez considered it important to look at things that had nothing to do with his job. (Mostly. He was as susceptible as the next Shuos to thinking up ways to assassinate people with unlikely objects.)

He had selected today’s image specifically to put Kujen on edge: a spectacular piece of architecture, composed of wild curves and tessellated facets, that had existed during Kujen’s distant childhood. Kujen couldn’t be bothered to care about people, unless the people could keep up with him on things like number theory – something that described vanishingly few people in the hexarchate, the current candidate being one of them – but he liked architecture, and engines, and the machinery of empire.

Mikodez looked again at the candidate’s portrait and frowned. He knew her psych profile well. One of his agents had flagged her extraordinary math scores back when she was a lieutenant, and they’d kept an eye on her, in the hopes that she wouldn’t get herself shot in some stupid mission guarding a shipment of cabbages. (Cabbages were a Kel idiosyncrasy. They were adamant about their spiced cabbage pickles.) Appearance-wise she was nothing special: black-haired and brown-eyed like almost everyone in the hexarchate, with ivory-tinged skin much lighter than his own. Attractive in a somber way, but not so that she’d turn heads coming into a room, and with a mouth that made him wonder if she smiled much. Probably not, and even then only around her friends, or when she needed to reassure some green soldier. The profile indicated a strong sense of duty, however; that would be useful.

How long could he keep putting off Kujen? He considered paging the mathematicians, but sticking a blinking amber eye on their communications panels would just make them grouchy, and he needed them in a good mood since he couldn’t do this himself. He’d done well at math as a cadet, but that had been decades ago. It didn’t make him a mathematician, let alone one specializing in calendrical techniques, let alone one trained in this kind of evaluation.

Technically, as Shuos hexarch, Mikodez outranked Kujen, because he led a high faction and Kujen led a low one. But not only was Kujen the senior hexarch at 864 years old, he was also, in a distressingly real sense, responsible for the hexarchate’s dominance. He’d invented the mothdrive in its first form, enabling the original heptarchate’s rapid expansion, and pioneered a whole field of mathematics that resulted in modern calendrical mechanics. Mikodez was keenly aware that when you got right down to it, he was an expendable bureaucrat in charge of a bunch of cantankerous spies, analysts, and assassins, albeit one who had done rather well over the past four decades considering a Shuos hexarch’s lifespan was usually measured in the single digits. In contrast, Kujen was irreplaceable – at least until Mikodez could figure out a better alternative.

Kujen’s immortality was tied to certain protections, which Mikodez hadn’t figured out a way around. It wasn’t just Kujen’s age, although no one else had found a reasonable method of living past 140 or 150. The other four hexarchs had a keen interest in cracking Kujen’s secret. The first person the existing immortality device had been tried on had gone crazy. The third had started that way. Kujen, the second, had emerged perfectly functional. He liked to hint that he knew how not to go crazy, but he refused to share. Typical.

If anyone ever asked Mikodez, immortality was like sex: it made idiots of otherwise rational people. The other hexarchs never asked, though. Instead, they assumed he wanted it as badly as they did.

The Fortress readout flickered again. Gray rot, like tendrils, the color of death and dust and cold rain. Mikodez frowned, then typed in a query. He could work that much of the analysis for himself. The numbers came right up. The matrices’ most problematic entries blinked. There were a lot of them.

The Rahal, who oversaw the normal functioning of the calendar, had put in place their countermeasures; but their countermeasures weren’t adequate to deal with a heresy of this magnitude. It was going to have to be military action, no matter how much everyone (except the Kel) wished otherwise.

Mikodez looked again at the voidmoth, then queried his assistant. Maybe something had turned up in the last sixteen minutes. If not, he was going to talk to Kujen anyway and see if the usual pretense of high-wire distractibility would buy him the necessary extra minutes. Likely not, given how well Kujen knew him, but worth a try.

His assistant, Shuos Zehun, responded with an unusually blunt note: You can stop dithering, Mikodez. This one’s sane and suitable. They appended the mathematicians’ assessments. Agreement all down the line that the candidate was as good as everyone thought, at least in this one area.

All right, then. “Line 1-1,” Mikodez said. “Put Kujen on.”

The video placed itself to the right of a set of indices that let Mikodez keep an eye on just how bad the calendrical rot had gotten in the Entangled March, as opposed to the numbers for the Fortress’s immediate surrounds. At the moment the aggregate figures were holding steady, but they were unlikely to stay that way.

The man in the video was slender and dark-haired and very pale, with wickedly gorgeous eyes. For someone who headed the technical faction, not the cultural one, Nirai Kujen would have made a credible Andan: he was never less than beautiful. Right now he was wearing a smoke-colored scarf with iridescent strands in it, and his black-and-gray shirt had buttons of mother-of-pearl carved in the shape of leaves. Kujen could probably fund a whole research department out of his wardrobe. On the other hand, there was no denying he got results. The Kel had him to thank for most of their weapons.

“How good to see you haven’t been assassinated,” Kujen said drily. Shuos philosophy was that the hexarch’s seat was yours if you could hold onto it. Fighting over the hexarch’s seat was a popular Shuos pastime. “If you were any other Shuos, I would accuse you of avoiding my calls by going out to shoot or seduce or spy on someone, but in your case I honestly think you got behind on paperwork.”

Mikodez shrugged. Ordinarily they agreed on the importance of a functioning bureaucracy. “I don’t care what candidates you’ve scared up,” Mikodez said, “I have a better one for you.” He sent the file over.

This time, when Mikodez looked at the photo of the candidate, Captain Kel Cheris, his gaze went to her signifier, which showed beneath the portrait: Ashhawk Sheathed Wings. A good sign for the stability it implied, although the Kel had an unreasonable prejudice against it. Kujen wasn’t going to think highly of it either, but no one expected a sociopath to care about sanity.

“You know,” Kujen was saying, “I wish the Kel would devise more reliable tactical ability batteries. I’m going to let Jedao figure out the – fuck me sideways with a drill press, is that a Kel with decent math scores?”

“You always make it sound like Kel-shopping is such a chore,” Mikodez said, “so I thought I’d present you with someone more up your alley.”

Cheris wasn’t just good at math. She was possibly good enough to compete with Kujen, although the fact that she hadn’t gone into research mathematics made it hard to tell for certain. Just as importantly, she was good enough to make up for Jedao’s – the weapon’s – deficiencies in that area.

“Where on earth did you find her? No, don’t answer that. It’s charming to think that there’s a Kel who might understand some higher math. Too bad I can’t yell at the Kel recruiters for not sending her my way.”

“Be fair,” Mikodez said. “They tried to redirect her to the Nirai, but she insisted that she wanted to be a Kel. She was attractive enough as an officer candidate that they relented.”

Something flickered at the corner of his eye. Kujen frowned and said, “Take a look at the composite indices for the Fortress readings, Mikodez. Whatever they’re doing in there hit all the wards at once. We just had to luck out with intelligent heretics instead of the usual stupid kind, so we need to settle on a candidate to deal with them. That’s hard to do when you’re dicking around avoiding me.”

“I wanted just the right one,” Mikodez said.

“She looks pretty good,” Kujen conceded, “but that commander with the beautiful hands also looked pretty good. And don’t roll your eyes at me, I’m talking about his qualifications, not his aesthetics. Honestly, Mikodez, don’t you ever take anything seriously? The commander at least has experience in space warfare, which your infantry captain doesn’t.”

“I take the situation at the Fortress very seriously,” Mikodez said. “Besides, the fact that Cheris specialized in mathematics might enable her to better deal with calendrical warfare.” Still, he smiled lazily at Kujen because it was best not to be seen to care too much.

The Fortress of Scattered Needles was located at a nexus point in a stretch of empty space and was nearest the Footbreak system. The Rahal had already stationed a lensmoth there, but all it could do was staunch the bleeding as long as the Fortress itself was afflicted.

The Fortress was also divided into six wards, one for each faction, although the boundaries weren’t as strictly enforced as they had been in the old days. There had once been a seventh ward for the seventh faction, the Liozh. The Fortress’s interior had been demolished and rebuilt to remove the seventh ward, at staggering expense, after the Liozh heresy was put down.

Whoever had infected the Fortress with rot had taken down all six wards at the same time. The degree of coordination implied would have been enough of a problem, but Mikodez had reason to believe that the particular form the rot had taken was the result of heretics taking advantage of an experiment being run by Hexarch Rahal Iruja and the false hexarch Nirai Faian. Faian was supposed to run the Nirai in public so Kujen could amuse himself with whatever research caught his fancy, but Iruja had suborned her almost from the beginning. A nexus fortress made an ideal proving ground for their work because it represented the hexarchate in miniature. What Mikodez didn’t understand was why they hadn’t used one of the smaller fortresses instead.

As to why Iruja and Faian were experimenting with the calendar, that was obvious. All the hexarchs knew, and even Kujen, who hadn’t been told, could guess. They wanted a better form of immortality. There was a comprehensive body of work suggesting that you couldn’t do better than Kujen had under the existing calendar. Mikodez wouldn’t have minded asking Kujen about it outright, but he was supposed to be keeping an eye on Kujen for the other hexarchs. Iruja would have disapproved of him tipping their hand, even about something so easy to figure out.

Kujen, for his part, tolerated the other hexarchs because his immortality relied on the high calendar in its present form, and the high calendar didn’t just include the numbers and measures of time, but the associated social system. In this case, that meant the six factions. If Kujen came up with a viable alternative that eliminated the competition, he would become a real threat to the system. The fact that he hadn’t already done away with everyone else strongly suggested that it was unlikely that such an alternative existed.

At some point, Rahal Iruja was going to ask Mikodez to remove Kujen for real. Mikodez already had files detailing possible ways to do it, which he updated twice a month (more often when he got bored), although he wasn’t going to unless it became necessary. True, Kujen’s taste in hobbies made him an annoying transaction cost, but he was good at his job and he represented a certain amount of stability. Of course, Mikodez had plans for how to deal with the inevitable transition after Kujen’s death, just in case.

Kujen had sent Mikodez his projections of possible heretical calendars. “I’ve sorted them by likelihood,” Kujen said. “That first one is bad news, especially if they’re fixated on seven as their central integer. And here I thought nobody paid attention to the past anymore.” He was one of two people who still remembered what life had been like under seven factions, not six.

“You’ve been hanging out with too many Kel,” Mikodez said, although it wasn’t entirely true that the Kel disdained history. Nevertheless, the prospect of a Liozh revival – of a time when the hexarchate was a heptarchate – did concern him. The Liozh had been the philosophers and ethicists of the heptarchate, and some evidence suggested that they had been destroyed when they attempted to do away with the remembrances, which Kujen was fond of. Mikodez didn’t like the thought of Kujen becoming more personally invested in the matter, given his proclivities. Besides, it was hard to tell without more data, but if the Liozh had failed with their heresy the first time around, why would any sane heretic pick them to emulate?

“You’re stooping to making Kel jokes?” Kujen said. The corner of his mouth lifted.

“Someone has to,” Mikodez said. The Kel hexarch was known to make them herself.

Kujen fiddled with something off-screen. “Anyway, all those calendars are compatible with the Fortress’s shields. I have advised Kel Command that they might as well just say how to take the shields out since it’s not like it’ll stay a secret, but they are proving resistant.”

“Never give information away if you don’t have to,” Mikodez said. If the shields went down, the Fortress was dangerously vulnerable.

“Yes, but your own side?”

“Own side” was putting it a bit strongly. “They won’t like it if you say anything about it,” Mikodez said, as if Kujen needed the warning. Kujen shouldn’t have a say in a military decision anyway, except no one else was capable of overseeing the particular weapon Kel Command wanted to deploy.

“I can keep my mouth shut,” Kujen said irritably. “You’ve made no secret of the fact that you have the usual Shuos prejudices, but I suppose you have your reasons for authorizing the mission.”

It had been a sore point with Shuos leaders for almost four centuries that the Kel had snatched away their last general, even if the Shuos still had to approve Kel operations involving his use. “Anyway,” Mikodez said after a pause to see if Kujen was going to add anything, “you haven’t told me if you think the candidate’s acceptable.”

“You really like the Sheathed Wings, don’t you? Aren’t you afraid she’s going to put Jedao to sleep?”

It was entirely in character for Kujen to think psychological stability was dull. “I’m sure the general will bring some excitement into her life,” Mikodez said.

“She’s wasted on him,” Kujen said. “I still think that commander would be a better fit. And I could get more use out of the Sheathed Wings if Kel Command doesn’t want her anymore.”

Sometimes Mikodez thought Kujen would benefit from having his knuckles rapped. “Don’t get greedy,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of time to see if she can tell you anything about the latest cryptology conjectures after the Fortress has been dealt with.” Although whether she would prefer dealing with the Fortress or a sociopathic hexarch was an open question.

“Killjoy,” Kujen said. “You’re not going to fold on this one, are you?”

Mikodez smiled at him. “You wanted more funding for research on that latest jamming system, didn’t you?”

“It’s unlike you to resort to naked bribery,” Kujen said, “not that I’m complaining.”

“I’m bored,” Mikodez said, “and if I don’t spend this money, one of my subordinates will put it into something wholesome, like algorithmic threat identification.” He cultivated a reputation for being erratic for occasions like this.

“All right, all right, I’ll put in the authorizations on my end,” Kujen said. “You think you have paperwork, you should see mine.”

You think I don’t? Mikodez thought, but he kept his expression bland. Kujen’s security wasn’t nearly as up-to-date as he thought it was.

“At least I’ll get a chance to say hello to her,” Kujen went on, “even though I’m sure she’ll be focused on her duty. Sometimes I think Visyas and I did too good a job designing formation instinct, but the results can be adorable.”

Mikodez would have felt sorry for Kel Cheris, but at the moment Kujen was unlikely to damage anyone who had a chance of entertaining him in matters related to number theory. Besides, the emergency was real. A shame that she had made herself a candidate for dealing with the calendrical rot, but someone had to do it, and she had a better chance of survival than most.

“I’ll set it up, then,” Mikodez said. “Depending on how hard I can lean on Kel Command, I can get her to you in eighteen days or so.”

“Splendid,” Kujen said. “In the future, do try to be less transparent about avoiding me. It’s embarrassing when a grown Shuos is so obvious.” He signed off without waiting for a response.

Embarrassing, but worth it to ensure that his preferred candidate was sent to deal with the calendrical rot. Mikodez spent several minutes composing his instructions to Kel Command, then sent them off.

Kel Cheris was sane, although the odds were that she wouldn’t stay that way. Still, Mikodez had to trade her welfare for the hexarchate’s. Someday someone might come up with a better government, one in which brainwashing and the remembrances’ ritual torture weren’t an unremarkable fact of life. Until then, he did what he could.

CHERIS SPENT THE flight back to the boxmoth infantry transport in silence. The boxmoth was like any other: walls painted solemn black and charcoal gray, with the occasional unsubtle touch of gold. Cheris reported to the commander’s executive officer, an unsmiling man with a scar over his right eye. She saluted him fist to shoulder, and he returned the salute. She passed over her company’s grid key so the data could be examined by her superiors at their leisure.

“Welcome back, Captain,” the executive officer said, eying her with a faint spark of curiosity.

This alarmed her – it never paid to stand out too much among the Kel – but no response seemed to be expected.

The mothgrid informed her of the vessel’s current layout and where she might find the high halls, her quarters, the soldiers’ barracks. In reality, no one was going to their assigned high hall without cleaning up first. Per protocol, she was told the status of those who had been taken to Medical for their injuries. She thought of the recalcitrant squadron that had died on Dredge before the evacuation.

Her quarters were next to her company’s barracks. She had two small rooms and an adjoining bath. All her muscles ached, but she dug out a small box of personal items and pulled out the raven luckstone her mother had given her on her twenty-third birthday. It was a polished stone, drab gray, and the raven’s silhouette was a welcome reminder of the home she visited so seldom.

There came a rapid series of taps at her door: three, one, four, one, five –

“Come in,” Cheris said, amused at the ritual. She put the luckstone away.

One of the boxmoth’s birdform servitors came in bearing an arrangement of anodized wire flowers. There were twelve flowers, just as twelve servitors had fallen in action. They would never receive official acknowledgment of their service, but that wasn’t any reason not to remember them.

“Thank you,” Cheris said to the birdform. “It was bad down there. I wish I could have done more.”

The birdform flashed a series of ironic golds and reds. Cheris had learned to read Simplified Machine Universal, and nodded her agreement. It added that it had been having trouble with one of its grippers, if she had a moment to adjust it?

“Of course,” Cheris said. She wasn’t a technician, but some repair jobs were better handled by human hands, and she had learned the basics. As it turned out, all it took was a few moment’s jiggering with some specially shaped pliers. The birdform made a pleased bell tone.

“I have to see to my duties now,” Cheris said. “I’ll talk to you later?”

The birdform indicated its acquiescence, and headed out, leaving the flowers.

Cheris didn’t know its name. The servitors had designations for human convenience, but she was certain that they had names of their own. She made a point of not asking.

Washing up didn’t take long, and her uniform cleaned itself while she did so. The fabric smoothed itself of a last few creases as she picked it up. “Middle formal,” she told it, which was not too different from battle dress, except for the cuffs and the brightness of the gold trim.

She had fourteen minutes before she ought to show up at the high hall to share the communal cup with her company, in celebration of their survival. The unscheduled time was a greater treasure than the bath. Alone, she eased herself into the chair and set her hands on the desk, taking comfort from the cool, solid glasswood. If she looked down she might have seen her dark-eyed reflection, crossed over with whorls and eddies like vagrant galaxies.

Her contemplation was broken by heat-pulses in her arm. They told her to report to a secured terminal for orders. The formal closing sequence told her she was dealing with someone high in the chain of command. When in combat, people only used the abbreviated closings. She couldn’t imagine why dealing with her company was a matter of any urgency now that the Eels had been subdued.

Cheris had the feeling that she wasn’t going to share this meal with her soldiers, but it couldn’t be helped. The orders took precedence.

The terminal occupied the far end of the quarters they had put her in. It was a recessed plate of metal in the wall, matte black. Graven on the floor before it was the hexarchate’s emblem of a wheel with six spokes. Capping each spoke was each faction’s emblem, the high factions opposed by their corresponding low factions: the Shuos ninefox with its waving tails, each with a lidless eye, and the Kel ashhawk in flames; the Andan kniferose and the Vidona stingray; the Rahal scrywolf and the Nirai voidmoth scattered with stars.

She prompted her uniform to modify itself into full formal. The Kel ashhawk brightened and arched its neck, a gesture that the Kel jokingly called preening; subtle shades of turquoise and violet gave the fabric greater depth. The cuffs and collar lengthened and developed a brocade texture. Her gloves remained the same, plain and functional. Only at funerals did the Kel wear more elaborate gloves.

“Captain Kel Cheris reporting as ordered,” she said.

The terminal showed her signifier, which was to say that it drew red-gold flames around an ashhawk’s silhouette. Unlike the emblem on her uniform, the signifier’s ashhawk was in the Sheathed Wings configuration.

Cheris didn’t attach too much importance to the signifier, although hers indicated that she was deliberate by nature. There were, however, historical examples of flagrantly incorrect signifiers. They were estimations, not scryings, in any case. The arch-traitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox. The final Liozh heptarch, who had, to the last, been the Web of Worlds, unity of unities, had died broken before Shuos, Kel, and Rahal troops.

She was beginning to wonder if she should leave her apologies and try again later when the terminal’s signifier shattered and showed her her own face: the same neat dark hair, the same dark eyes. But the smile was not her own, and the stranger wore a high general’s flared wings and flame where Cheris had a captain’s talon with its pricked bead of blood.

“Captain,” the stranger said. It even had her voice. “This is Composite Subcommand Two of Kel Command. Acknowledge.”

Cheris started to sweat. The composites changed from task to task. There was no telling which high general she was dealing with, or how many had wired their minds together into a greater intelligence. But the designation Two indicated that at least one of the highest generals was in the composite. A bad sign. She made the correct salute, not too fast and not too slow.

“Now you understand,” Subcommand Two said, as though dropping back into a conversation they had left off last night over glasses of wine, “that your assignment was a terrible one. Frankly, it’s a waste of good officers.”

“I know my oath, sir,” Cheris said cautiously, but not too cautiously. The Kel didn’t favor caution, something her instructors had reminded her of time and again.

Subcommand Two ignored her, which was the best response she could have hoped for. “This is the context you weren’t given when you were sent down to Dredge. You figured out that the Eels built a weapon that took advantage of calendrical rot in order to function. Don’t deny it. Your actions against the heretics indicate your understanding of the situation.”

Cheris said, as steadily as she could, “I am prepared to be outprocessed.” It was not a fate any Kel wanted. She had not come from a family with a tradition of Kel service – any faction service. Despite her parents’ opposition, she had survived the tests and been admitted to Kel Academy Prime. She had honed her life for service, and it was bitter to have it terminated. Still, it was a fitting fate for a Kel: the bright upward trajectory, the sudden death.

Many people knew the ashhawk by its other name: suicide hawk.

Subcommand Two said, “Most of your soldiers will have to be processed by Doctrine, true. But it would be a waste of your improvisational abilities to send you with them.”

Cheris recognized a euphemism as well as the next Kel. They had something worse in mind for her, and they were going to split up her command. Still, she felt a wary relief. They wouldn’t bother briefing her unless they had some challenge in mind, and there were few wholly impossible challenges.

“The truth of the situation is worse than a handful of Eels in peripheral systems,” Subcommand Two said. “Calendrical rot has taken hold not only in Dredge but in several central marches of the hexarchate. It cannot be allowed to persist.”

“Sir,” Cheris said, “is this a task for a Kel rather than a Shuos?” The Rahal concerned themselves with Doctrine and justice, but they rarely dealt with full-fledged uprisings; the Vidona cleaned up the aftermath, although no one trusted them to put heresies down at the outset. The Shuos and the Kel were collectively regarded as the hexarchate’s sword, but the Kel specialized in kinetic operations and short-term goals while the Shuos pursued information operations and long-term plans. No Kel liked fox games, but there was a place and time for every method.

For a moment the reflection wavered, and she saw amber staring out from the golden wings: a ninefox’s knowing eye. Then Cheris knew that the composite included a Shuos, probably an envoy from the Shuos hexarch himself. Her dismay was immediate. Kel Command wouldn’t consent to intimate Shuos oversight for anything less than a crisis.

“I’m listening, sir,” Cheris said.

“We have six officers competing to deal with the heresy in the Fortress of Scattered Needles and its surrounds,” the composite said. “The Shuos have requested to be represented by a seventh as their web piece.” Cheris’s face smiled at her with a momentary glint of teeth. “You.”

She thought at first she had misheard. The high calendar was projected throughout the hexarchate by a series of nexus fortresses, and Scattered Needles was the most famed of them. How had it –? And why did the Shuos want her, of all people, as a web piece?

In the old days of the heptarchate, the Liozh faction had coordinated the government. In a Shuos training game from the post-Liozh period, the web piece had been named after their emblem, the mirrorweb. Cheris had only played once, but she remembered the basic rules. Players were divided up into several marches, and each march competed separately. Certain actions conferred great advantage, but also incremented a heresy clock. As the clock went up, the game’s rules changed. The web piece interacted with the heresy clock and represented the weapon that saved you even as it poisoned your principles.

“I will serve, sir,” Cheris said. As long as it was possible to be played as a web piece and survive, she meant to try.

Was that another glimpse of the fox’s unwavering eye? “Do you know what your primary examiner said of you before approving you for service?” Subcommand Two said.

“As I recall, sir,” Cheris said mildly, “I graduated in the top six percent that year from Academy Prime.”

“He noted your conservatism and wondered what had driven you toward a faction full of people who take risks on command. Are we to interpret your continued service as evidence that you have a Kel’s heart after all?”

“I will serve, sir,” Cheris said again.

Subcommand Two could have demanded a more substantive response, and didn’t. Her face smiled again, this time with a fox’s patient pleasure, and winked out.

The two ways to win at gambling were to read the situation and know the odds. Cheris had calculated her situation already. She had only a single life to offer, and she was aware of the ugly deaths that awaited her should she fail, but at some point you had to trust yourself.

After Cheris was sure the meeting was over, she stared at her reflection in the terminal. It still displayed the Ashhawk Sheathed Wings. When she had been younger, she had hoped for it to change and show her something new about herself, but today as always, there was nothing new to show.

She would have to go to her soldiers and break the news to them. Aware of her duties, she submitted a very terse report and signed off on the casualty intake form, wincing at the numbers. She hoped she would have an opportunity to pay a call on the injured in Medical, but she doubted it.

“Medium formal,” she told the uniform, and it obliged her. Her hands were sweating inside the gloves.

The hall outside her quarters was quiet and almost chilly, and the slight curve intensified as she walked down its length. The curve was partly illusion, a topological trick to enable the voidmoth to hold more passengers, but her eye was fooled nonetheless.

It was only a single circuit to the high halls where the Kel infantry ate separately from the moth’s regular crew. There was a painting on the wall just before she reached the doors, on textured paper: the queen of birds holding court in a winterdrift forest, and to her side, a fox half-hidden and wholly smiling.

Their assigned high hall, when she entered it, was less full than it should have been. The other halls, for the other companies that had not survived, would stand empty. The servitors had arranged the tables to make the place look less vast. Some of them hovered in the air as they made fussy adjustments to the furnishings: the ashhawk with wings outspread, Brightly Burning, bannered across the wall; the calligraphed motto that was found everywhere the Kel went, from every spark a fire; tapestries woven from the threads of dead soldiers’ uniforms and embroidered with their names and the names and dates of the battlefields that had claimed their lives.

Every soldier rose at her entrance, spoons and chopsticks clinking as they set them down. Cheris paused long enough to return the honor, and smiled with her eyes. Lieutenant Verab was sober-faced as always, but Ankat returned the expression with a sardonic grin. Ready to tell the officers’ table a brand-new Kel joke, no doubt. He had a better repertoire than anyone she’d ever met. Then she headed to her seat at the center of the officers’ table, and indicated that they should sit again.

The communal cup was waiting for her. It was lacquered red and graven with maple leaves, and someone had refilled it nearly to the brim. Verab, who sat at her right, passed her the cup. He looked very tired, and she lifted an eyebrow at him. He shrugged slightly: nothing important. She didn’t challenge the lie. Cheris felt tired herself, knowing the news she was going to have to break to him, and to the rest of her company. Schooling her expression to calm, she took one sip. The water was sweet and cool, yet she felt it ought to be bitter.

She had a bowl of rice, and the communal platters had familiar fare: fish fried in rice flour and egg and leaves of sage, pickled plums, quail eggs with sesame salt. Some fresh fruit had been saved for her. Verab was mindful of her love for tangerines, a sometime luxury; plus he didn’t care for them himself. She looked at the food and thought about all the meals she had shared with these people, the times she had dragged herself out of a battle knowing that soon she would be able to sit down with them and eat the food they ate, and listen to the Kel jokes that she really wasn’t offended by, even though she sometimes pretended to be as a joke in itself, and comfort herself with the voices of those who had made it through. All of that was about to end.

“I have bad news,” Cheris said. “They’re breaking up the company.”

They were staring at her, even Verab, who should have guessed. “Doctrine,” he said. His voice cracked. Verab was fifth-generation Kel. His family would take it hard.

“You may be able to serve again, some of you,” Cheris said, aware of the inadequacy of her words, “but that depends on the magistrates’ assessments. I’m sorry. I don’t have details.”

“Kel luck is always bad,” Lieutenant Ankat said. He was about to make a joke of his own, she could tell, sheer anxiety. She looked at him, hard, and he swallowed whatever it had been.

“It’s duty,” Cheris said. Right now duty seemed arid. “I am not to go with you. They have another use for me.”

A murmur rippled up and down the table, quickly quelled. They knew the euphemisms, too.

They weren’t looking forward to the future. Most of them would lose Kel tradition and formation instinct. They might remember the mottoes and formations, but the mottoes would give them no more comfort, and the formations would no longer have any potency for them.

“Good luck where you’re going then, sir,” Ankat said, and Verab murmured his agreement. He didn’t believe this had just happened. She could tell by the stricken look in his eyes.

“I would hear your names and dates of service,” she said quietly. It would make all of this real, and the ceremony would give them something to hold onto, even if that something wasn’t precisely comfort. “All of you. Acknowledge.”

“Sir,” they said in one voice. Ankat looked down at his hands, then back at her.

It was not the formal roll call. They had no drum, no fire, no flute. She would have included those things if she could. But even the servitors had heard her. They stopped what they were doing and arranged themselves in a listening posture. She nodded at them.

They started with the most junior soldier – Kel Nirrio, now that Dezken was dead – and ascended the ladder of rank. Nobody ate during the recital. Cheris was hungry, but hunger could wait. She didn’t need to commit the names to memory, as she had done that long ago, but she wanted to make sure she remembered what every intent face looked like, what every rough voice sounded like, so she could warm herself by them in the days to come.

She spoke her name last, as was proper. The hall was otherwise silent. And then, breaking the ritual: “Thank you,” she said. “I wish you well.”

For all that she was leaving them, she couldn’t help feeling a guilty twinge of anticipation for the challenge to come; but it would not do to let on.

“Eat, sir,” Ankat said then, and she ate, not too fast and not too slow, making sure to finish with the two tangerines Verab had set aside for her.