Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER FOUR

A FEW PEOPLE always washed out of Kel Academy the first time they were asked to demonstrate a formation. Cheris remembered the occasion. She had stood next to a young man who was practically vibrating: a bad sign, but their instructors had been emphatic that the washouts weren’t easily predicted.

Their class had been injected with a general-purpose phobia of vermin. The instructor had told them to take up First Formation. First Formation existed for the purpose of finding out which cadets were fit to be Kel and which could not be assimilated. Cheris had been determined to be fit, and equally determined not to vibrate so annoyingly.

Once they were in formation – a square with projections from each flank, like horns – the instructor summoned the vermin.

They weren’t actually vermin. They were miniature servitors in the shapes of snake and stingfly and spider. Still, the resemblance was good enough for the phobia. Even Cheris, who had made friends with servitors since childhood, was unable to stop her reaction.

They tasted her skin and prodded the crevices of her taut hands. At one point her face was heavy with clinging servitors and their cold weight. She tried not to blink when silver antennae waved right in front of her eyes. She was gripped by the fancy that it was going to insert an antenna into her pupil and force it open, wider, wider, crawl in through her optic nerve and take up residence in the crenellations of her brain, lay eggs in the secret nodes of nerve and fatty tissue.

The formation required that they hold fast. Cheris held fast. She thought at first that the strange frozen calm was the phobia, but realized it was the formation. She was taking succor from her massed comrades, just as they did from her. Even when a spiderform paused at the corner of her mouth, even when she was shaking with the effort of not swatting it aside, she would have done anything to avoid breaking formation.

Three cadets broke. Damningly, the servitors didn’t pursue them. They only harassed people who belonged.

Ordinarily Cheris had a good sense of passing time, but the phobia trumped it. When the instructor was satisfied that no one else was going to break and called off the servitors, she remarked that they had only been standing there for twenty-four minutes. It had felt much longer.

Even after the technicians removed the phobia, Cheris dreamt of small scuttling things eager to crawl through her veins to live in her heart. But she had the tremulous comfort of knowing she wasn’t alone.

TWO OF HERON Company’s servitors, whom the humans knew as Sparrow 2 and Sparrow 11, were having a chat. They were at leisure until the mothgrid received instructions for the remnants of the company, and neither the grid nor the Kel humans monitored servitor-specific communications channels because they didn’t consider it worth listening in on tedious technical discussions. A number of the moth servitors cultivated long-winded arguments on machining tolerances and pseudorandom number generators to regurgitate whenever the humans got bored enough to try.

Sparrow 2 was arguing that they should have warned Cheris that she was a pawn in a Shuos game.

Sparrow 11, which was repairing one of its limbs, differed. She wasn’t just going into a Shuos game. She was also going into the hands of the Nirai hexarch and the Immolation Fox. If the hexarchs knew the depth of her contacts with their kind, it would endanger her, and it would endanger all the servitors, who relied on the humans thinking of them as well-trained furniture.

The servitors considered themselves lucky that the Nirai hexarch, who had grown up before machine sentience was achieved, found it difficult to think of humans as people, let alone machines. The Immolation Fox was a threat to the hexarchate, but not specifically to servitors, so he was less of a concern. Since they were Kel servitors, however, the two Sparrows had the obligatory prejudices against him.

Sparrow 2 expressed its discomfort with the situation. It remembered how much it had liked talking about number theory with Cheris, and the stories she had had about the ravens in her home city. Couldn’t something be done?

Sparrow 11 thought to itself that Sparrow 2 was very young. It reminded Sparrow 2 that Cheris was a terrible liar. The only way she was going to get through her first encounter with the black cradle was if she genuinely had no idea what she was in for. Otherwise the Nirai hexarch would suspect something and destroy her.

They went back and forth a little more, but Sparrow 2 eventually conceded the correctness of Sparrow 11’s views. At least the servitor grapevine would keep it informed of further developments if Cheris managed to escape the hexarch’s grasp. And there would be servitors on whatever warmoth Cheris ended up on; the question was whether she would ever think to call on them for more than casual conversation. Servitor policy was never to offer, but they didn’t mind being asked by an ally, even one in such a precarious position, as long as the request was polite.

THE BOXMOTH’S EXECUTIVE officer showed up at Cheris’s door not long after the meeting and explained that she would have to be drugged for her journey. “There’s no other way, Captain,” he said. “They’d have to pull out your spatial memory and scour it clean otherwise.” He didn’t say what they both knew, that the entire boxmoth would be subject to scouring after it transferred her. “The technicians at your destination will give you more details.”

Cheris didn’t like the thought of being under for the trip, but at least he hadn’t said it was a full sedation lock. “I could prepare more adequately if I were given some of the details now, sir,” Cheris said, not because she expected him to tell her more, but because he would report her objection to their superiors.

“I’m sure you could, Captain,” the executive officer said, but that was all.

Cheris reported to Medical and didn’t even remember reaching the door due to the retroactive effect. Much later she recovered a few impressions: a smell like mint and smoke and sedge blossoms, a heartbeat too slow to be her own, the world tilting and curving. Water the color of sleep, or sleep the color of water.

She woke up afterward. Her augment told her she had been transferred off the Burning Leaf. In fact, she was on a station, not a moth, probably the facility the black cradle was housed in. In a moment of confusion she waited for the heat-pulses in her left arm, but nothing came. The pulses were only used by infantry anyway, not moth Kel, and she probably wasn’t considered infantry anymore.

The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a dazzlement of glittering planes and angles. She was in a strange six-sided room like the heart of a mirror. Her skin was cold and her breath scarcely misted the chill air. But as she stirred, slowly and stiffly, she felt the blood coursing in her veins and knew she was not dead.

There was something wrong with the inside of her skull, as if someone had rewritten all her nerves in a foreign alphabet. She could barely form coherent thoughts.

Someone had dressed her in an inoffensive tan shift covered by a heated outer robe. She stretched carefully, feeling unaccountably awkward, then let the robe’s warmth soothe her aching muscles. After looking around, she located one of her uniforms and started to put it on. All her limbs seemed to be the wrong length.

Then she caught sight of her shadow. Froze.

The shadow wouldn’t have looked like her own even if it weren’t for the eyes. Not only were proportions wrong, there were nine eyes, unblinking and candle-yellow, arranged in three triangles. As she watched, the eyes moved to form a perfect line bisecting the shadow. They might have been growing larger; they might have been coming closer.

She didn’t feel hazy anymore. Something curdled in her throat. She thought, I am not going to scream. Except the thought wasn’t in her voice. She heard it in an unfamiliar man’s voice all the way inside her skull. She couldn’t make it stop, she couldn’t get it out, she couldn’t get her voice back. Every time she had a thought, she heard it in the stranger’s voice, and under other circumstances she would have found it pleasant, a low drawl, but –

Kel training reasserted itself. She was ashamed of her panic. It must be a formation, it must be a new formation that her superiors were only now teaching her, and the proper response to a formation was to submit to it. She forced herself to look at the shadow. She saw now that it was a man’s. Had they made her a man? They could do that, it was unremarkable among the Shuos and Andan, and she’d wondered what it was like, but most Kel considered sex changes distasteful so why would her superiors –?

Then she heard the same male voice, but the words were distinctly someone else’s, as though someone were talking to her. She couldn’t see anyone in the room with her, however. The voice said, “They must not have warned you. My apologies, no one has told me your name –?”

For all its concern, the voice spoke with authority, and she knew the correct response to authority. “Captain Kel Cheris, sir,” she said, using the politest form.

Cheris glanced down at her gloves, at every part of her that she could see. No, she had been right the first time. When she spoke, as opposed to merely thinking, her voice was her own, but her body was her own after all, so that made sense.

There was a pause. “I can’t read your thoughts,” the voice went on. “I can hear you if you speak, which includes subvocals. Do you want me to continue, or would you rather orient yourself on your own?”

Cheris was confused that he was giving her a choice. “Sir?” she said.

“You are a Kel, aren’t you? You usually are.” He added, “It’s so easy to forget what colors look like. The style of the uniform hasn’t changed much, though. Don’t – what you’re doing to yourself, this isn’t a formation, that’s not necessary. It will go better if you don’t try to fit yourself into me like I’m a glove. My name is Shuos Jedao, but you needn’t keep calling me ‘sir.’ Under the circumstances I think you’ll agree that it’s a little ridiculous.”

She looked around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. If she wasn’t to respond by resorting to formation instinct, what was she supposed to do?

“You’d better look more closely in the mirror,” Jedao said. She decided that this was an order. She stared into it in fascination, then at her hands, then at it again. Jedao’s reflection looked back at her. She tried to remember what he had looked like in the videos she had seen back in academy, but her memories were hazy. He had straight black hair with bangs almost too long for current Kel regulations, and dark eyes, and a face that might have been handsome if he had only been smiling. Cheris was not tempted to smile. He was leanly muscular, and a wide scar was just visible at his neck above the collar.

Just to make sure, Cheris examined herself again: her old familiar body. It was only the reflection that belonged to Jedao. Relieved, she finished dressing.

She rechecked the reflection because he hadn’t forbidden it. The reflection’s uniform had a general’s wings over the staring Shuos eye, but the wings were connected by a chain picked out in silver thread. She didn’t have to ask about the symbolism.

More distressing were the gloves. Jedao’s reflection wore a black pair in deference to Kel custom, because she had put hers on, but his were fingerless to signify that he wasn’t a Kel. These days, outsiders seconded to the Kel wore gray gloves instead of Kel black. Fingerless gloves had fallen out of fashion because of Jedao’s betrayal, and she had only seen them in old photos and paintings.

He was taller than she was by half a head. Not being able to look his reflection in the eye made her want to twitch.

“Sir,” she said in spite of herself. How was she supposed to address an undead general if not by his rank or title? “You” didn’t seem right.

Jedao sighed quietly. “Questions? I’ve done this before and you haven’t.”

“Are you a ghost?”

“Mostly. I have no substance, although you can target me with exotics through the shadow. I’m anchored to you, which means my welfare is linked to yours. I absorb most exotic damage before it gets through to you, so you might say I’m a glorified shield. It’s only after I die that you’re in trouble on that front. And the only people who can hear me right now are you and other revenants. That’s going to be both a help and a dreadful inconvenience, you’ll find. There’s only one other revenant, who won’t be accompanying us. You’ll be meeting him shortly.”

The mirror opened up, without warning, to a narrow room with a treadmill. A pale, slender man wearing Kel black-and-gold awaited them, although he had neglected to put on gloves. The man had no rank designation, but his silver voidmoth insignia meant he was a Nirai seconded to the Kel. The moth’s wings, too, were connected by a silver chain. If you looked closely at his shadow, it was made of fluttering moths in silhouette. The sight of the moths made Cheris uneasy, as though they were about to rise from the floor and devour her from the bones out.

Cheris was used to being short by Kel standards, but the man was considerably taller than she was. She said, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir.” Just in case, she spoke to the Nirai as she would to a superior, but she wondered at the absence of rank insignia.

“I was monitoring your awakening,” the Nirai said, unruffled, “and in this matter your health is paramount. Rather less panic than the last one, anyway. I admire good examples of Kel stoicism.” His speech was plain, despite his beautiful voice, his verb forms almost disparaging. It was hard to figure out what that indicated. Many Nirai were informal, after all.

“Should formation instinct have taken her so strongly?” Jedao said. He sounded deferential.

The Nirai raised an eyebrow, good-humored. “Kel Academy keeps fiddling with the parameters,” he said, “hence the variation. I don’t think she’s unusual, but we can’t let her out as your keeper when she’s so suggestible. Much as you wish we would.”

“I’ve behaved for four centuries,” Jedao said. “I’m not likely to change now.”

“That’s what they thought when you were alive, too.”

“You like irrefutable arguments, don’t you?”

“I like winning.” The Nirai turned his attention to Cheris. She was struck by the extraordinary beauty of his eyes, smoky amber with velvety eyelashes, and she wasn’t usually interested in men. “Walk on the treadmill,” he said, “to remind your muscles of their function. Also because you probably got some of his muscle memory and you’ll be useless if you trip over the floor.”

Cheris obliged, not unwillingly. She found a good pace: fast enough to raise her pulse, slow enough that her uncooperative legs didn’t betray her. The fact that her coordination had suffered bothered her. She’d never been the most agile of her comrades, but she hoped the effect was temporary.

“Jedao,” the Nirai said, “I trust she’s satisfactory?”

“I’m your gun,” Jedao said.

Cheris was nonplussed. A Kel might say that ceremonially to a superior, and even then only on the highest of occasions, but the irony in Jedao’s voice suggested that something else was going on.

“Besides,” Jedao added, “if she’s like the others, she never had a substantive choice, and I didn’t have one either.”

The question must have shown on Cheris’s face. The Nirai said, “We prefer volunteers. They survive the process better.”

Ah, yes. Volunteers Kel-style.

“Let me brief you on the basics,” the Nirai went on. “You apparently have some use for Jedao, and Kel Command approved it. What you ought to know is that the black cradle’s ghosts can only be revived by attaching them to someone living, which we call anchoring. This is not general knowledge. Jedao mentioned that most exotic weapons will harm him before they harm you. There are a few exceptions. I advise you to look them up when you get a chance.

“Jedao can’t read your thoughts, which he told you about, but the part he left out is that he can see and hear, and in particular he sees farther than a human does, in all directions at once. It’s futile to tell a Kel this, but watch your body language around him or you’ll be giving him a window into the contents of your brain. You may occasionally experience moments of bleed-through from his presence, his reactions seeping into yours, but the big one is muscle memory, and that’s not all bad. His reflexes have saved previous anchors.”

The Nirai slouched against a wall, but his gaze was direct. “The other thing, and this is going to hurt you, is that it’s imperative that you kill Jedao if it looks like he’s going mad or he’s about to betray your mission.”

He was right. It hurt her. She stumbled off the treadmill because her legs stopped working, and tumbled to the floor with a thump. She was part of a hierarchy she was sworn to uphold, and people still referred to Jedao by his rank. Shuddering, she levered herself up. Rationally, she knew that she was receiving orders and that the orders made sense, but right now she was keyed to Jedao as her formation leader, even if he was a ghost. And a traitor.

The Nirai had been watching her reaction. He was smiling, making no effort to hide his amusement.

“It will pass,” Jedao said softly. “And he’s right, you know. I remember every ugly thing I have ever done.”

“There will be backup teams,” the Nirai said, “because it would be stupid not to. But it would be best for you to handle it yourself.” He tapped a table, and a dull gray-green gun dislodged from some unseen compartment. Cheris had never seen one of that type before, which took some doing around a Kel, but she presumed a Nirai could manage it. “This is the preferred weapon. It’s a chrysalis gun, and it’ll prepare him to be shoved back into the black cradle for his next deployment.”

Cheris tried to form a question. It came out on the third try. “What defenses does the general have, sir?”

“He can talk to you,” the Nirai said sardonically. “No, don’t laugh. He’s very good at it. When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger. No offense, Jedao.”

“It’s not news that I’m a madman,” Jedao said, still ironic.

The Nirai held the gun out. “It’s on the lowest setting and won’t damage him permanently,” he said, showing her the slider. “Cheris, I want you to shoot Jedao.”

Cheris took the gun. The Nirai might be lying to her, even if she didn’t see the purpose of such a lie. “Where do I aim, sir?”

“Shadow or reflection,” he said. “Aiming it at yourself also works, but according to my sources, the hangover’s terrible. I don’t recommend it.”

Cheris pointed the chrysalis gun at her shadow. She was sweating inside her gloves; sweat trickled down her back. But she had orders, however informally given, which steadied her. Before she could talk herself out of it, she squeezed the trigger.

A great pain seized her, and she dropped the gun. She had been trained never to drop a weapon.

Jedao was swearing in a language she didn’t recognize. At least, it sounded like swearing.

Jedao? she thought.

Her thought came in his voice.

But the formation instinct was ebbing. She could think more clearly now.

“That’s better,” Jedao said. Was that genuine relief? “Pick up the gun and keep it with you always. The holster’s right there.”

She did as instructed.

“You might as well get to work, then,” the Nirai said briskly. “I’ve prepared more comfortable surroundings. Six circuits and kick down the door. I was going to replace the door with something more interesting, but my attention wandered.” A door opened right next to him, and he walked out of it without any further farewell.

“‘My attention wandered’?” Cheris said, remembering his smile when she had fallen off the treadmill.

“The Nirai has peculiar ideas about entertainment,” Jedao said without any particular inflection. “Two people survived being put into the black cradle. He’s one of them, the other is me, and now you know why the hexarchate hasn’t been shoving more people into it. Anyway, I assume we have a war to win, or you wouldn’t have taken me out of the freezer.”

“Is it cold where you are?” Sometimes Kel literalism was useful.

“It’s just a figure of speech.”

Cheris walked out of the treadmill room. They made the outer circuit six times, each iteration identical except for the sickening jolt of nausea once per circuit. Toward the end, the hall swallowed Cheris’s footsteps and gave back echoes after a delay that was too long. The walls were black, and so were the floor and ceiling. If you looked too long at the ceiling, which Cheris did once, you started to see stars, faintly at first, then closer and closer, faster and faster, the luminous smears of nebulae resolving into individual jewels of light, and even the velvety darkness admitted cracks behind which great gears groaned – but she stopped looking. She’d always heard that Nirai stations were peculiar, but this was the first time she’d seen anything like this.

The door at the end of the hall looked like it had been carved with a torchknife. Cheris half-expected the edges to hiss and seethe white-red. She decided more Kel literalism was called for, and kicked it. It opened.

The room was quietly furnished. Everything was aligned with the walls to a degree that even Cheris, who was neat, found oppressive. On a desk were four vases arranged upon a red-and-gold table runner. Shuos red-and-gold, fox colors: in Jedao’s honor? But she wasn’t about to ask. Each vase held a flower in a different phase of life, from bud to bloom, from drooping petals to tufted seedcase. Cheris couldn’t help thinking that one good tug on the runner would destroy the arrangement.

“How much have they told you?” Cheris said.

“About this outing?” Jedao said. “Nothing. Information is a weapon like any other. I can’t be trusted with weapons.”

“I’m not sure how to interpret that.”

“The people I betrayed are a matter of historical record. You can’t afford to take the chance that I’ll figure out a way to do the same to you.”

Cheris frowned. Something didn’t add up. “I appreciate your concern, sir.” The word slipped out: habit.

“You weren’t at the Siege of Hellspin Fortress,” Jedao said. For the first time, his voice went completely flat.

She had to ask, although he must have heard the question hundreds of times. “Why did you do it?”

Like every Kel and every Shuos, she had studied accounts of the siege. There was no doubting the deliberateness of the massacre.

“If you think you’re going to cure me,” Jedao said, “the best Nirai technicians for hundreds of years haven’t found the trigger. They’ve poked around inside my dreams – which takes some doing when I never sleep – and they’ve made me take those ridiculous associational tests that involve different fruits, and they’ve made me play every card game known to the hexarchate. Besides, it’s too late. They would have had to catch it before all the deaths.” A pause. “So tell me why I’m here, Captain.”

Cheris was thinking furiously. He sounded rational, but he could still be planning to betray her. His apparent frankness wasn’t to be trusted, either. On the other hand, there was no point having him around if she wasn’t going to make use of him. All the accounts agreed on his excellence as a tactician, and tactics began with an understanding of people. Cheris wasn’t under any illusions that she could parry a trained fox’s regard. She was developing the dangerous idea that her best bet was to deal with him honestly and see what happened.

“Calendrical rot,” Cheris said. She explained everything she knew as it had been presented to her. As she spoke, she called up maps. The grid brought up others that she hadn’t previously had access to. The rot was more advanced than it had been before, and it was possible to trace regions of outflowing rot to the Fortress’s corruption.

“This is winnable, with the right resources,” Jedao said slowly, “but I wouldn’t call it easy.”

She didn’t know whether to feel better or worse at his assessment.

One of the terminals explained the resources available to them within a six-day transportation radius. Cheris read the message twice. “I’m not complaining about the guns,” she said, “but guns change minds, not hearts. And calendrical rot is a matter of hearts.”

“It depends on what you shoot,” Jedao said dryly. “Pull that display into three dimensions, will you?”

Cheris unfurled the display in contours of burning color. She rotated it about the vertical axis so they could take a closer look at the regions worst afflicted by the rot, colored an unpleasantly textured pale gray.

The Fortress was located in a stretch of empty space for calendrical reasons and was nearest the Footbreak system. The notation indicated that a lensmoth had already been stationed there, but all it could do was staunch the bleeding as long as the Fortress itself was afflicted.

“I see two viable approaches here,” Jedao said. “Three, actually, but if the hexarchate intended to scour the region, neither of us would be necessary.”

She read the relevant part of their orders out loud: “Economically inadvisable.” The rot already touched on inhabited planets in Footbreak, whose ecosystems were too valuable to destroy casually.

Jedao was silent for a while. “All right. We can either try to stabilize Footbreak and use it as a launching point for a larger assault later, or spear straight toward the Fortress from the beginning and hope that backwash from Footbreak doesn’t hit us at the wrong time. What’s your preference?”

Cheris knew about the Fortress. She knew, in outline, the most prestigious low languages and the distribution of wealth among their classes. She knew how many citizens the Fortress sent to the academies and the breakdowns by individual academy as well. And she knew about the fabled shields that ran on invariant ice, but everyone knew that.

She knew many things, and she knew nothing. She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures. Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.

“We’re going to have to confront the Fortress sooner or later,” Cheris said. “It might as well be sooner. With any luck, fewer people will die this way.”

“Good,” Jedao said crisply. “I’m glad we care about the same things.”

It was an odd thing for a mass murderer to say, and she wouldn’t figure out its significance until much later.