Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER THREE

CHERIS HAD HOPED for more specific orders, but no such luck. She slept uneasily and woke in the middle of the night, four hours and sixty-two minutes before she would ordinarily rise. The room was dark, with only a single candlevine glowing.

The Burning Leaf had shuffled itself into a new configuration. More importantly, a message on the terminal alerted her that they had already separated her from her company. She wished she had been awake for it, but they had undoubtedly done it this way on purpose. If anyone had a sense of mercy, her soldiers would be allowed some rest before they were hauled off for an examination by Doctrine, and those needing further medical care would receive it before they, too, went to their fate.

When she paused by her desk, she noticed a new presence: a servitor in the open doorway. It hadn’t knocked, and she didn’t recognize it. “Hello,” Cheris said, looking at it quizzically.

It was a foxform rather than the moth’s more usual spiderforms and birdforms. It had eyes of faceted glass, and they lit up yellow. A Shuos servitor. Of course.

The servitor didn’t answer. Kel servitors never spoke human languages and Shuos servitors rarely did, although Andan and Vidona servitors usually could if they cared to. The foxform skittered in, moving in furtive zigzags. Then it stepped up into the air until it was level with the surface of Cheris’s desk.

The servitor disgorged a roll of cloth from a side compartment. The cloth was closed with a slender chain that Cheris could have scattered with her hands. Instead, murmuring her thanks, she turned the cloth around until she found the catches.

It wasn’t blank fabric. It was a gamecloth sewn with a square grid in lines of variegated silk. The entire boundary glittered with tiny beads of bronze and rich orange. She ran her thumb over the beads, taking pleasure in their pebbled texture.

The most notable thing about the gamecloth was that it was more of a record than a playing surface. Pieces had been embroidered at the intersections of lines, capturing the positions of an incomplete match. Cheris’s eyes went immediately to the web piece in the corner, and she smiled crookedly.

The one time she had played the game had been against a pretty female communications technician she was dating, Shuos Alaia. Cheris remembered Alaia’s wry laugh and stories about growing up in a dysfunctional mining community. They had even had the same taste in dramas (ridiculous melodrama, the more duels the better). Alaia had had light brown eyes and skin half a shade darker, and hands that never stopped moving. A nervous tic in a Shuos was usually a sign of a training incident, but Cheris had known better than to inquire. She should have expected that some higher-ranking Shuos had logged their interaction, though.

Cheris considered the positions of the game’s towers and the single remaining cannon. She had a good memory, but not an eidetic one, and since she had been on leave, she hadn’t stored the memory in her allotment on the company’s grid. This could have been a recreation of that match – she had been losing at this point, and it was difficult to recover from the loss of a cannon – but if there was some small divergence, some subtle message, she couldn’t unriddle it.

It was a pity the Shuos couldn’t tell her straight out what they wanted of her, but the Shuos were incapable of passing up a chance to use a game as a pedagogical weapon. (Admittedly, this could be fun in bed, as Alaia had been happy to demonstrate.)

She picked up the gamecloth again, inspecting both sides and wondering what she had missed. There it was: worked into the back of an empty square was a flexible filament in the shape of a gear.

The servitor tilted its head at her encouragingly. Cheris hesitated, then pulled the filament out. She felt a painful pulse of heat in her forearm. There had to be a message in the filament. Her gloves felt briefly warm, then cold.

A map distended in her mind. She could feel it as though she could walk her fingers over the tangled strands of voidmoth routes and feel the heat of far-scattered stars. The map identified the Fortress of Scattered Needles for her, unnecessarily. It was the largest nexus fortress in the Entangled March, and formed a microcosm of the hexarchate.

One of the Fortress’s functions was to project calendrical stability throughout the region. If it had fallen to calendrical rot, the hexarchate’s exotic weapons would be of limited use there. The hexarchate lagged in invariant technology, which could be used under any calendrical regime. In particular, too close to the rot the voidmoths’ primary stardrives would fail. Without the voidmoths to connect the hexarchate’s worlds, the realm would unravel.

If the heretics converted the Fortress to their own calendrical system, the problem became critical. The hexarchate would have to contend with a rival power at the heart of its richest systems.

Given the gravity of the situation, Cheris was surprised that Kel Command hadn’t dispatched a general to deal with the matter already. Perhaps they didn’t want to risk a general’s contamination.

Cheris was given threadbare information on the other six who desired the honor of putting down this particular rebellion. Not their names; she suspected she would not be permitted to see their faces, either, nor they hers. She was surprised that there was any question of choice for something this critical. Shouldn’t they have picked someone before setting it to a game? But the decision was not hers, and she reminded herself of the notorious Shuos fondness for games, the Shuos eye staring at her out of the composite.

All the Kel except Cheris were high officers, although there were no generals. Maybe they were disgraced the way she was. Not unsurprisingly, all of them had experience in space warfare, except for Four and Cheris.

One was a lieutenant colonel with what she assumed was a distinguished record. It was hard to tell with all the locations scrubbed out, but there were five medals in there, including the Red Pyre, which was awarded for what the Kel called “suicidal bravery even for us.”

Two, the Rahal, was a Doctrine officer. The idea of giving a Rahal direct control over a mission worried Cheris. The Rahal were the high faction who led the hexarchate: they set Doctrine and maintained the high calendar. They weren’t known for flexibility, although this one’s involvement suggested a certain minimal willingness to deal with Kel foibles.

Three was another lieutenant colonel, but nothing in their record – nothing she could see, anyway – made them stand out one way or the other.

Four was an infantry colonel with a staggering collection of decorations. Cheris bet this one would be hard to beat. It figured: lucky unlucky four, the number of death and the favored number of the Kel.

Five worried her the most: a Shuos agent. The Shuos were typically closemouthed about records. If they already had one of their own involved, what were they trying to do by rescuing a Kel from outprocessing? She owed no loyalty to the Shuos beyond what she owed to the hexarchate entire. Did they know her well enough to expect her to fulfill some role without being prompted? But she knew the answer to that.

Six was the third lieutenant colonel, who looked entirely conventional and who had participated in three sieges. Cheris reminded herself that she might be overmatched, but they were probably in the bidding for the same reason that she was, which meant they weren’t any better at staying out of trouble with Doctrine.

“I don’t suppose,” Cheris said to the servitor, “you know what resources I am allowed to include in my proposal?” It was tempting, but stereotypically Kel, to suggest dropping all available bombs on the Fortress and seeing if they knocked out the shields. Not that Kel stereotypes ever stopped a Kel.

The servitor surprised her by speaking, albeit in flashes of light in the Kel drum code. “Any plan you can induce Kel Command to accept is permitted,” it said: not quite a tautology.

“Is there further intelligence on the Entangled March?”

The servitor was silent. Need-to-know, probably.

It had been worth a try. “Has the meeting been scheduled yet?” Cheris asked.

“Approximately three hours,” the servitor said.

“Approximately?” Cheris said incredulously.

The servitor shrugged.

“All right,” she said. “Is there anything else?”

Another shrug.

Cheris rolled up the gamecloth and chained it shut again, but when she turned to offer it to the servitor, it had gone and the door was closing behind it.

Approximately three hours, which would still be earlier than she would rather have risen. She should have been researching instead of sleeping, but she had been tired and she had needed the rest.

Since there was no point in going back to bed, she put the gamecloth on a corner of the desk and frowned at the wall. Any plan you can induce Kel Command to accept is permitted. She had to assume that the others had been told the same thing. It was one thing to know that the might of the Kel was theoretically available to you. It was another thing to devise a plan that had a chance of being accepted. The Kel had six cindermoths, their most powerful warmoths, which could also project calendrical stability. She might propose that they all be sent to the Fortress, and then they’d have a chance, but that would leave the rest of the hexarchate undefended, and no one would take her seriously. Her future depended on being taken seriously. Even if her future meant nothing to her, which wasn’t the case anyway, she was obliged to offer the best plan she could for the hexarchate’s sake.

Cheris looked down at her hands and forced them to relax. Kel Command would be looking for the fastest, most economical solution. This meant the use of weapons ordinarily forbidden.

And that meant the Kel Arsenal. Catastrophe guns, abrogation sieves, small shining boxes that held the deaths of worlds. During graduation from Kel Academy Prime, she had seen such a box, disarmed, dented, and ordinary in appearance. The speaker said it had annihilated the populations of three planets. Small planets, but still. It was remarkable how much death could be held in a small box.

Cheris didn’t have the Arsenal’s inventory and knew better than to ask for it. How many small shining boxes could she request? But the hexarchs didn’t seek a scouring, or they would have done it already. They meant to preserve the Fortress of Scattered Needles under their rule.

Which details mattered most to Kel Command? If the point was just to bomb the heretics into submission, it became a matter of optimization. Costs, supplies laid in, acceptable deaths.

She looked at the gamecloth again. The web piece. Poisoning your principles. What were the Shuos trying to tell her?

“Of course,” she whispered. They were telling her to choose her battlefield. She could expect conventional proposals from a few of the Kel. There was no telling what the Shuos would come up with, but the Rahal could be relied upon to suggest something elegant and cutting.

If the Fortress of Scattered Needles had fallen, she would need a way to crack its legendary defenses, its shields of invariant ice. The shields functioned under any calendrical regime, which meant the heretics could use them against the hexarchate. Cheris didn’t know how the shields worked – classified information – much less how to overcome them.

She could, however, think of a time a general had overcome another terrible fortress. If “overcome” was the word for it. Three hundred ninety-nine years ago, General Shuos Jedao was in the service of the Kel. Because he had a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, they assigned him to deal with the Lanterner rebellion.

In five battles, Jedao shattered the rebels. In the first battle, at Candle Arc, he was outnumbered eight to one. In the second, that was no longer true. The rebels’ leader escaped to Hellspin Fortress, which was guarded by predatory masses and corrosive dust, but the heptarchs expected that Jedao would capture the fortress without undue difficulty.

Instead, Jedao plunged the entirety of his force into the gyre and activated the first threshold winnowers, known ever since for their deadliness. Lanterners and Kel alike drowned in a surfeit of corpselight.

On the command moth, Jedao pulled out an ordinary pistol, his Patterner 52, and murdered his staff. They were fine soldiers, but he was their better. Or he had been.

The scouring operation that had to be undertaken after Jedao was extracted cost the heptarchate wealth that could have bought entire systems, and many more lives.

Over one million people died at Hellspin Fortress. Survivors were numbered in the hundreds.

Kel Command chose to preserve Jedao for future use. The histories said he didn’t resist arrest, that they found him digging bullets out of the dead and arranging them in patterns. So Kel Command put Jedao into the black cradle, making him their immortal prisoner.

Cheris’s best move, which was also a desperation maneuver, wasn’t to choose a weapon or an army. Everyone would be thinking of weapons and armies. Her best move would be to choose a general.

The problem was that any swarm sent against the Fortress would have to contend with the fact that its exotic weapons wouldn’t function properly. She didn’t need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel Arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.

Cheris was aware that there was a good chance Kel Command would strike her down for the suggestion. It was also possible that Jedao would be no use to her. But Kel Command wouldn’t have preserved him unless they thought he could be deployed to their benefit.

Besides, Kel Command appreciated audacity. Despite the wasted fighting at Dredge, their approval mattered to her. Kel training instilled reflexive loyalty. She knew that as well as anyone else.

She halfway expected to see an ashhawk in her shadow, wings unsheathed at last. But for the moment, her shadow was only a shadow. It was best that way.

Another communication told Cheris when the meeting was to be, and instructed her to report to the strategy hall for it. Cheris tried to extract information on the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the mothgrid, but she only found the usual unclassified data. Nothing on invariant ice. She was probably raising flags by querying it, but given her situation, that wasn’t important. She plotted the path to the strategy hall in advance.

Cheris showed up six minutes early. There were several doors to the hall, all painted with Ashhawks Brightly Burning. She transmitted the code from her augment and one door swished open.

The hall was empty, which she had expected. One through Six wouldn’t be present in person. She wondered if she would see their faces or if they would be represented by signifiers. If she wasn’t to know any of their names, it made no sense to reveal their faces, but perhaps their faces would be blanked from her memory as she left the hall.

Composite Subcommand Two blazed up like a pyre exactly one minute early. It loped down the hall until it faced her. Cheris fought back her revulsion. It was unnerving to see herself wearing a general’s wings so casually, which was possibly why it was doing it.

“I suggest you sit there,” Subcommand Two said, pointing to one end of a long table.

As Cheris did so, the others arrived. They were, in fact, represented by signifiers. Likewise, each of them would see Cheris as a silhouette overshadowed by Sheathed Wings.

One and Four were both represented by Ashhawks Skyward Falling, a well-favored signifier for the bravery it implied. Three, who had been the one with the unremarkable record, made her stare: an Ashhawk Unhatched. Rationally, she knew the signifier didn’t mean anything, but Unhatched was a terrible omen. Six was, unhelpfully, Brightly Burning, the most common Kel signifier. Two, the Rahal, was a Scrywolf Hunting Alone, which explained why they were in Kel service to begin with. Five, the Shuos, was a Ninefox Half-Lidded, suggesting that everyone should watch their backs. Cheris was convinced that each of the fox’s eyes was looking at her.

“The situation is calendrical rot centered at the Fortress of Scattered Needles,” Subcommand Two said abruptly. A map imaged itself above the center of the table. “If this continues, the hexarchate’s control of the Entangled March will be threatened, and due to the march’s central position, the entire hexarchate will be threatened. As of the last report, the invariant ice shields are up at full strength. The initial task force sent to scour the rot was defeated.”

“Defeated or subverted, sir?” the Shuos said. It was a woman’s voice, cool and unintimidated.

“First the one, then the other,” Subcommand Two said. “The task force was a swarm of twenty-five, including a Rahal lensmoth. The lensmoth was the only one that returned, which is how we know what happened.”

Three and Four, Unhatched and the colonel, exchanged glances. So at least two of the Kel knew each other. That must be an uncomfortable position to be in.

Cheris wondered if they had additional information that she didn’t. The fact that a lensmoth had been dispatched was bad. The Rahal guarded their dedicated moths jealously. Just sending one to a system was usually enough to get it to back down from whatever heresy it was nurturing. However, the lensmoths’ reliance on exotic technologies made them useless in sufficiently advanced cases of calendrical heresy. In a way, it gave heretics an incentive to go radical as quickly as possible.

“The Rahal have ceded the matter to Kel Command,” Subcommand Two said, by which everyone understood that the Rahal expected Kel Command to bludgeon the Fortress until it was ready to be judged and punished. “In this instance, each of you is expendable, but success will not be without its rewards. Propose what seems appropriate to you. You will go in numbered order.”

One rose and saluted. It was like watching a living puppet, articulated in the right places yet subtly wrong in its movements. His plan involved a joint Kel-Shuos force and bombardment from outside the afflicted zone. Risky to trust invariant kinetics when the rot might give the rebels access to unknown countermeasures. The other problem was that One wanted the Fortress depopulated, which meant the Kel would have to rely on the Vidona to supply enough loyal citizens afterward to reestablish the appropriate consensus mechanics.

Two was the Rahal, and his proposal was simple: a lensmoth swarm to burn out the areas of heretic belief. The Rahal must be desperate to condone this. Despite their power, the Rahal’s combination of rigid honesty, abstract mindset, and asceticism meant that they were one of the poorer factions. The pragmatic problem was that lensmoths were a slow solution to a fast contagion. Cheris pored over the map and concluded that Two’s plan was workable, but only just, and only if carried out by people with a pathological ability to be precise about the geometries involved. Of course, finding Rahal with that trait wasn’t difficult.

Three and Four presented their plan together, an infantry assault using weapons from the Kel Arsenal. Cheris hadn’t even known about the neglect cannon.

Five made Cheris sit a little straighter. The Shuos wanted to requisition a weapon from the Andan Archives.

“We can’t assume access to Andan resources,” Subcommand Two said, the first time it had interrupted any of the proposals. The Andan were the third high faction, along with the Rahal and the Shuos, and they generally stayed out of military matters. They were known for their love, not to say control, of high culture, and their wealth. Significantly, they didn’t get along with the Shuos or the Kel.

“My pardon, Generals,” Five said, “but that’s not true. The Andan are as amenable to persuasion as anyone else. I wouldn’t have mentioned this if the means of persuasion didn’t exist.”

“Finish speaking,” Subcommand Two said after a pause.

“The Andan have a version of the Shuos shouter that works over a wider range of calendrical values,” Five said. “Evidence suggests that the survivors can be encouraged, with proper Vidona methods, to resume productive lives. In the interests of full disclosure, I note that the survival rate is around forty percent, and the rest are no longer able to function as sentients.”

Cheris was still convinced that all the eyes Half-Lidded were staring at her, and not at the composite that would choose from their proposals. The hell of it was, with a Shuos she wasn’t being paranoid.

“You have been heard,” Subcommand Two said after another long silence. “Next.”

Six started by recapitulating the previous proposals, from infantry assault to lensmoths to the Andan shouter, and then smiled. It was impossible to mistake her smile, for all that her silhouette had no mouth. You could hear it in the curve of her voice.

“Sacrifice some of the Nirai,” Six said. Cheris disliked her immediately. It was one thing to sacrifice Kel soldiers. That was the purpose of the Kel. But the Nirai existed to be researchers and engineers, not to die. “Have the Nirai concoct weapons for the heretics, and the heretics will turn those weapons upon each other before they turn them against us. Only after they’ve annihilated each other should we move in.”

It wasn’t the sort of plan you’d expect a Kel to propose, but all the Kel weren’t as straightforward as they were in the jokes, or they’d never win a battle. The idea was pragmatic, even probable. Cheris could think of historical instances where Shuos trickery had achieved much the same. But it bothered her anyway.

“Seven,” Subcommand Two said. “Do you have anything better to suggest?”

Cheris didn’t look at the ninefox’s eyes. “Five suggested one weapon,” she said. “I can do better. You can win this with one man.”

She had their attention.

“Specify,” Subcommand Two said. It knew. What other gambit could she have brought to the table?

“General Shuos Jedao.” There. She had said it.

“Sir,” Four said immediately, “I withdraw.”

This was both a good sign and a bad sign. It was a good sign because a fellow Kel, and the much-decorated colonel at that, recognized merit in the proposal. It was a bad sign for the same reason.

Four was the only one to withdraw. The Rahal’s posture was thoughtful. Cheris continued avoiding the eyes of the Shuos.

“How intriguing,” Subcommand Two said. This time it smiled directly at Cheris. “I will have to inform Hexarch Shuos Mikodez.” As a courtesy, of course, although General Jedao had been in Kel custody for 397 years. Before it finished speaking, the others’ silhouettes flickered out, leaving only a momentary gust of shadow-wind. The composite’s eyes were fox-yellow, now, and maliciously pleased.

Cheris realized how they had manipulated her with the gamecloth. What she still didn’t understand was why Kel Command hadn’t made the decision straight out.

“Sir,” she said with a questioning lift of her voice.

“General Jedao’s revival has been ordered,” Subcommand Two said. “The Burning Leaf is on its way to a transfer point so you can retrieve your weapon of choice. I recommend that you rest.”

Then Subcommand Two flickered out as well, leaving Cheris alone in a hall full of unanswered questions.