Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

VAHENZ HAD TO admit that, in her long career as an agent-at-large, she had encountered any number of organizations with the gift of stabbing one hand with the other during important operations. The Taurags had their oversight officers, the Haussen had separate bureaus with overlapping purviews, the Hafn had petty squabbles between aristocrats. Kel Command was pretty good at this trick, too. She hadn’t imagined that they had anything pleasant in mind for the fox general once they were done with him, but it was anyone’s guess as to why they hadn’t just sent someone both competent and trustworthy to do the job in the first place. The combination had to exist even among Kel generals. What she was really looking at was an excellent argument against making your high command a hivemind, especially in the wake of a high-profile massacre.

Kel Command’s willingness to blow up a swarm just to get rid of Jedao wasn’t precisely surprising, although Vahenz found it interesting that they had put a cindermoth out of action during a major invasion. They wouldn’t have blinked at killing the soldiers, naturally. Vahenz sometimes wondered how the hexarchate’s history would have played out differently if the first Kel formation discovered hadn’t been a suicide formation. Courage and last stands against desperate odds were one thing. Casual suicide, on the other hand, was just wasteful.

Still, Vahenz found the situation deplorable. It was sheer stupid luck that she’d escaped the bomb’s area of effect, and even then the fringe of the blast had knocked half her systems offline, frying her box of sweet bean pastries in the process. The saving grace was that her needlemoth’s stealth systems had been spared, so the Fortress didn’t shoot her down while she was making emergency repairs.

Vahenz had an intimate familiarity with the Fortress’s scan suites and their limitations. So when she repaired her own scan and it told her there was a single surviving life form on the Unspoken Law, not only was she sure who the survivor had to be, she was also sure that the Fortress had no idea anyone was wandering around the hulk of what had once been a perfectly functional cindermoth.

She could have dealt with the situation a few different ways. Not by leaving, although her superiors would probably have preferred that she report to them sooner rather than later. What news of the mess was public was no doubt giving them ulcers. She couldn’t simply shoot up the cindermoth, either. The needlemoth was good at stealth, but not good enough to disguise a serious display of fireworks even if it had had the necessary firepower.

She had considered tipping off the Kel that their target was still alive and letting them deal with the problem. Of course, she couldn’t be absolutely certain that that hadn’t been the intent. No: she was going to have to take out Jedao herself. More fun this way, anyhow. She always enjoyed the chance to take out an interesting opponent herself, instead of relying on underlings to do it for her.

The carrion bomb was intended to wipe out people rather than inorganic structures. In particular, it had clearly not been designed to destroy something the size of a cindermoth, not in one hit. Which wasn’t to say that the cindermoth was undamaged, and she knew for a fact that the rest of the swarm wasn’t in great shape either. The cindermoth’s upper surface looked like someone had made a jigsaw of it with the help of a glassblower’s mad fantasias, but life-support still functioned, and artificial gravity looked like it wasn’t trying to do anything innovative. With a sufficiently good team of Nirai, you might even be able to get it to fly in a few days.

Vahenz slipped the needlemoth next to one of the hopper bays and got to work with its burrowers. This was exactly the kind of dead time that she had brought the pastries for, and instead she was reduced to staring at her scan suites while she waited to penetrate the Unspoken Law. If any of its food stores had survived, it was probably Kel food. The Kel had a displeasing fascination with vegetables. To say nothing of the dreadful pickles.

Scan gave her a pretty good idea of what the internals looked like, a mess of passages and cracked walls. She loaded the maps into her augment and memorized as much as she could the old-fashioned way, just in case. You never knew when stray exotic effects would interfere with your personal tech. And while she doubted Jedao had emerged from the bombing unscathed, she expected that he would be far from an easy target.

She suited up no earlier than she had to, and brought along a torchknife and scorch pistol. It was a pity that she had no handheld scanner that could pinpoint a life form’s location. She was going to have to leave the needlemoth’s scanner running and rely on its grid to update her through the link. Setting up an ambush under these conditions was going to be an interesting challenge.

From the moment Vahenz stepped into the cindermoth, glass fibers drifted in the air, loosened by the intrusion. Her suit’s filters would protect her, but she couldn’t escape the sensation of ashes on the roof of her mouth, as though she were walking through a forest a scant hour after the inferno sputtered out. Her light, ordinarily a clear white, turned the color of broken steel in the dark passages.

The single life-sign had been moving slowly and erratically in the command center since Vahenz picked it up on scan. Wounded, she imagined, and trying to figure out his situation.

Vahenz watched it on the overlay map for a few minutes, then headed toward the command center. The acting commander apparently hadn’t been doing anything fancy with variable layout when the bomb hit. Even so, it was hard not to look askance at the skewed angles, the walls bowed outward, the pitted floors. If she had been more imaginative, she would have fancied that she saw crumpled eyes staring up out of the holes.

Here the game picked up. Jedao’s movements changed, became more purposeful. Hard to tell, though: had he detected her, or was this coincidental? Most of the cindermoth’s systems were blown to hell and gone, but it wasn’t impossible that he had managed to revive enough to figure out that he wasn’t alone anymore. She kept watching without looking for explicit cues: intuition, she judged, would give her the best sense of his awareness of her.

It was impossible to ignore the gritty texture beneath her boots as she worked her way down the corridors, as though she walked through the wreckage of a sandglass. It felt as though she was making loud crunching sounds, although her sensors assured her she was being reasonably quiet. The ashhawk paintings to either side of her were damaged beyond all hope: gold leaf peeling free in agonizing spirals, bird necks crumpled into uncomfortable knots, brush-strokes transfixed by splinters. Holes stabbed across the Kel watchwords: from every spark a fire.

Jedao had passed out of the command center. Unfortunately, the fastest way to intercept him was by going through it; she’d have to risk it. You didn’t have to be a fox to think of setting traps. The only thing that would keep him from doing so, she imagined, was lack of opportunity. Given that he’d been bombed, he’d assume that someone would come for him sooner or later.

As it turned out, he’d had the opportunity, although the first concrete sign she had that her quarry knew that she had boarded wasn’t the trap. The first sign was the emblem that Jedao had scratched into the floor, aligned so that she would see it right-side up as she entered. The doors were warped open. Vahenz fired scorch bursts ahead of her as she sprinted through and to one side – it was a long time since she had made the amateur’s mistake of freezing in the doorway to make a target of herself – but there was no return fire. If Jedao was still in the area, he was well-hidden. Which didn’t mean she was safe. His heat signatures hadn’t faded entirely, and tellingly, she picked up a muffled thump, as though he’d stumbled. He couldn’t be too far.

She hadn’t paused as she passed the emblem, which looked like it had been carved with a Kel combat knife. However, she triggered several snapshots in passing so that she could review them more closely later, preferably when she wasn’t pinned in a vulnerable location.

It was an appallingly clumsy trap, and Vahenz didn’t so much as sweat as she flung herself away from the scatter of small explosions and behind a crystal pillar. He’d probably run out of time and decided that a half-assed effort was better than getting nothing for his trouble. Jedao had stripped weapons from the dead to set up that little display of fireworks, but the standard-issue Kel pistols had not reacted well to standard-issue Kel betrayal. After scanning the area again, she ventured out and knelt to inspect a bullet. It didn’t even resemble a bullet anymore, but one of those quasicrystal dodecahedrons that used to be popular as earrings back home.

Jedao hadn’t been able to hide other traces of his work. There were footprints and long, unsteady furrows where he had tried to lever himself up after taking a spill. Either the gravity had still been sorting itself out while he had been doing his work here, or he’d already been in the command center when the bomb hit.

That reminded her: the Deuce of Gears swarm had made a botched attempt at evasion when it was far too late. Why hadn’t Jedao seen the knife coming for his back?

Just how badly injured was the fox, anyway? Assuming he wasn’t feigning, which was a big assumption. Vahenz quickly checked the rest of the command center, but most of the terminals were pretty thoroughly wrecked.

The needlemoth called in with an update: the life sign had taken a turn and was headed deeper into the moth’s guts. She narrowed her eyes at the pale-dark glass, the gravelly sounds it made underfoot. Charming exhibit, but she did have an opponent to destroy.

Vahenz wasn’t superstitious about moths the way some of the Nirai got – one of many reasons she avoided getting stuck at bars with amorous technicians – but the unceasing slivered reflections, the eyeless spaces, the syncopated lights made her tense. Well, shooting people could be relaxing, if you shot the right people. She’d settle for that, and promise herself extra luxury when she made it somewhere safe with civilized amenities.

She brought up the photos of the Deuce of Gears. The image came up in front of her left eye, and she saw what hadn’t been evident at first, the jagged column cutting through the lightning-crack in the larger gear on the left. Jedao had written a number: 1,082,771.

Vahenz dismissed the image, mouth peeling back in a sneer. What, all those other fools he’d killed weren’t worthy of being added to the tally, just Hellspin Fortress and this latest tragicomedy? Granted, the man wasn’t known for his sanity. Let him savor his kills however he liked.

Funny but true: at one point she had dreamed about the things she could accomplish if the Kel ever let her walk around a cindermoth unmolested. Now that she was here, the Kel themselves had done most of the work for her, or scotched it in a supreme display of incompetence, take your pick.

The life sign had paused. It was close by now. She slowed and reflexively dropped behind a terminal’s slanted remnants when a red-and-yellow light came on in the center of the room. It blinked in the rapid one-two-three-four of the Kel drum code for distress. A shape flickered in the shadows. Vahenz fired. The wall sizzled, and sparks flew up, aggressively red-orange. Part of a tapestry disappeared: streaks of soot, ghosts stitched into smoke.

“Honestly,” a woman’s voice came out of the shadows, crackling with static, “if that was the best Kel Command could do for a kill count, they should have kept me on. Anyway, I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’re formally acquainted?”

“Shuos Jedao, I presume,” Vahenz said. Same female voice as that last conspiratorial “message” to Liozh Zai, same accent, same fucking cocksure attitude.

The voice was coming over the broadcast system, as though that was supposed to fool her. Still, she couldn’t discount the possibility of some elaborate trick. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not eager to introduce myself,” Vahenz said. She queried the needlemoth’s systems anyway, but it wasn’t having any better luck without her to hold its hand.

“And yet here you are, when you could be long gone on your way to wherever secret agents go when they have to compose apologetic reports to their superiors.” Jedao’s voice was annoyingly rueful. “You think I didn’t write my share of same when I was working for the Shuos?”

Jedao was moving again, very slowly. Vahenz was having none of that. She crouched low and set after him, cat-footed. “Cut to the point,” she said. But she was smiling. She made her way around the remnants of the trap.

The red-and-yellow lights paced her, sometimes appearing to the left, sometimes to the right. Sometimes they were near the ceiling, and sometimes near the floor. Still blinking in that one-two-three-four pattern, as if she was supposed to be impressed by Kel superstition. At least she could assume that he knew exactly where she was. The fact that he hadn’t shot her yet, plus his talkativeness, suggested desperation for information.

“I have to ask,” Jedao said conversationally, “if you’re here to see me dead, aren’t there less risky ways of doing the job? I mean, we don’t have inconvenient bystanders fouling up the arena now. It’s just the two of us. There’s no more need for lies and ploys. If I had some way of blowing you up for real, I’d have hit the button by now. That pathetic light show in the command center would have gotten me flunked out of Shuos Academy.”

So she was right after all. But she didn’t have any problem letting him continue to talk. Just in case he let something drop. As a bonus, he was moving more and more slowly. Too obvious. She stopped, refusing to be lured in further.

“You might be a Hafn, or you might be freelancing,” he went on. “I don’t really care at this point. The part that’s relevant to me is that you’re not with the hexarchate. That could be very useful.”

“Jedao,” Vahenz said, “I don’t have any plans of teaming up with you and conquering the universe. Especially since you have a talent for betrayal with a side of attempted omnicide.”

He had stopped entirely. She waited; no sense in blowing things by getting impatient. “If you’re anything like me,” he said, “and I have some reason to believe that you are, you find your superiors’ lack of vision deeply regrettable. Anyway, how will it hurt you to hear me out? You should be asking me why, if I am so good at shooting people in the back of the head, the Kel have been making a point of using me as their pet general for the last 400 fucking years.”

All right, she had to admit he had her attention. Maybe this was the part where he trotted out whatever pretty rationalization he had for his past behavior. “Is this the part where we see who knows more Kel jokes?” Vahenz said sardonically.

“Kel Command keeps a file of them, did you know that? But back to the subject. Let’s think about this. The first time they pulled me out of the black cradle, the senior high generals remembered what I’d done. It was a fresh wound. They remembered having dinner with me. Losing games of jeng-zai to me. Hell, I danced with some of their kids at the damn ceremonies. I wasn’t a historical figure, I was a real person. I was better than their generals – but that made me more of a risk. So why use an undead traitor?”

“Jedao,” Vahenz said, “you clearly have a point to make. You might as well go ahead and make it.” She could feel the pistol’s grip in her fingers, the precise weight of it.

“I want to offer you my service.”

Vahenz couldn’t help it. She laughed so hard it almost became a coughing fit. “Come again?”

“I’m deadly serious.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“I’m not fussy,” Jedao said. “Let me hit this from another angle, then. What do you know about the invention of formation instinct?”

“I confess I’m stumped,” Vahenz said, which was unusual. She had made a point of being well-informed on the hexarchate’s history, especially the parts it didn’t like to remember. “I had some impression that the Nirai developed it for the Kel, but I couldn’t provide citations.”

“The Nirai like doing a lot of things for the Kel,” Jedao said. “Codependent, really.”

Vahenz didn’t trust the direction that this discussion was going in. “If you’re implying what I think you’re implying –”

“I’m not a Kel,” Jedao said, abruptly savage, “but they did their best to make me like one. You ever wonder who the prototype was for formation instinct? I’m saying I have to serve someone. If it’s not you, it’s going to be whoever next shows up on this fucking wreck. Even if it’s the fucking Kel again. Four hundred years and they weren’t going to let me out without some kind of assurance that I was going to do as they told me. I’m just lucky the weapon they used to ‘kill’ me didn’t work the way they were told it would, and that I have a brief window of freedom.”

An interesting story. Almost plausible, even. But Vahenz knew how good he was at being plausible.

The lights flickered left, flickered right. She didn’t even notice them anymore.

“One more angle,” Jedao said, and Vahenz thought he was going to dredge up some bit of history regarding Shuos cadets, or game design, or vengeful commanders, but instead what she got was: “What do you know about geese?”

Vahenz blinked. “Unlike certain undead generals,” she said, “I don’t have a whole lot to do with fowl other than eating them.” She knew he had grown up on a farm of some sort, although what this had to do with –

“Then you don’t know about goslings.”

“They’re tasty?”

“Well, that too. But the thing about goslings is that just after they hatch, they’ll imprint on the first thing they see moving near them as a parent. When I was a boy I thought this was hilarious. It became less hilarious when I had a full-grown goose following me to school and making a nuisance of herself.”

“You’re a resurrecting gosling,” Vahenz said, entertained in spite of herself.

“Something like, yes.”

“All right,” Vahenz said, weighing her options. “I want a token of – good faith, say.” She was remembering how he’d landed his infantry on the Fortress in the first place, the sacrifice of Commander Kel Nerevor. Besides, if she got him where she could see him, she would be in a better position to assess his sincerity. Body language counted for something, even with a Shuos. She backed up to another crystal pillar – the whole moth was riddled with them, might make a great museum concept – and positioned herself behind it, poking out just enough of her head and the muzzle of her pistol that she could get a clear shot. “Come out where I can see you. The same doorway you came through. If I catch a shadow of a weapon, I’ll char you down to particles.”

If Jedao hesitated – but he didn’t. He came around the corner and down the corrugated hall, dragging himself as though he had taken an injury to one of his legs. Vahenz’s suit informed her that it was holding the temperature constant, but she felt as though pinpricks of ice were forming underneath her skin.

Although Jedao’s body belonged to a young woman, his face was drawn and ghastly pale, streaked with sweat and dust, and bruised heavily on one side. There was a cut across his forehead, visible beneath the disheveled hair. Blood had smeared down and sideways from the cut and dried in ugly crusts. With a curiously affecting dignity, although not grace, he lurched down to both knees in the antiquated obeisance to a heptarch. Well, almost the obeisance. He kept both hands where she could see them, instead of folding the left behind his back. How considerate of him.

There was a terrible barbed clarity in Jedao’s eyes, as though the universe had constricted to a circle with her at its center. She had seen its like in Kel who had been fledge-nulled. On the other hand, Vahenz also thought she saw an odd amber spark in them, which she didn’t remember from the earlier communication, but that could have been a trick of the sputtering lights. “If you want me to beg,” Jedao said, looking straight toward her, his voice hungry, “I will beg.”

Too tempting. “How do you know I won’t be worse for you than the Kel were?” Vahenz said in a purr. She was almost starting to think that he wasn’t making up his story. Which was too bad for him: once she found out how much he knew about the carrion bomb, she was going to shoot him anyway.

His laughter was mocking. “Worse, what do I care about worse? You’re more competent. And you’re not the Kel. Everything else, that’s just details. I’m not in a position to care about details anymore. You own me now. I hate you already, but you’ll find a way to deal with that or you’re not worth my time anyway.” His voice grew eerily soft. “Just point me in a direction and tell me who to shoot. I like shooting people so long as I don’t have to stop.”

Well, if Jedao hadn’t been psychotic before, he certainly was now. Why anyone thought a crazy asset was worth cultivating in these circumstances, even a crazy asset with an obnoxious habit of winning battles, was beyond her. As she questioned him about the carrion bomb attack, keeping her voice conversational, she prepared to fire. His eyes didn’t so much as track the pistol’s movements.

Before she had a chance to squeeze the trigger, however, a light came from the center of a servitor clinging to the wall. It had finally had a chance to get into position while she was focused on the interrogation. The laser fried the back of her head and cooked her brain, and she fell without finishing her sentence.