Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ROOM CHERIS was provided with was decorated with vases filled with the bones of small animals wired into the shapes of flowers. Cheris was wondering just what else the Nirai did when he got bored, but she knew more than she cared to already.

“First things first,” Jedao said. “Ask the grid for the New Anchor Orientation Packet.”

With a name like that, it had to have been written by committee. Nevertheless, Cheris queried the grid. First she was pleasantly surprised by how short it was. Then she was worried.

“If you have any questions,” Jedao said, “ask, but I have to warn you that there are whole sections that I can’t tell you anything about.”

Cheris was torn between the urge to read it as quickly as she could so they could go on to planning the siege, and trying to commit everything to memory. She settled for something in between. Most of the instructions were elaborations on what she had already been told, but Cheris frowned when she hit the section on carrion glass.

After retrieval, the general shall be extracted for reuse using a carrion gun, the Orientation Packet said. And a footnote: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.

“‘Volunteer’?” Cheris said. The Nirai definition of “volunteer” was undoubtedly the same as the Kel definition.

“I don’t think they can force-feed someone a ghost corpse,” Jedao said, “but to my knowledge it’s never been tried. I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. The Nirai believes that having pieces of my brain inside you would drive you crazy even if I weren’t crazy myself.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cheris said, trying not to think about the fact that this wasn’t very different from her current situation. She looked up from the Orientation Packet. “I’m ready.”

“All right,” Jedao said. “Setup. First display: the Fortress of Scattered Needles and whatever’s on file about its defenses. Second display: reports on its population and the origin of the heresy. Third: data on this specific regime of rot and how rapidly it’s metastasizing. We’re going to have to ask the Nirai to loan us a mathematical analyst –”

“I can handle that,” Cheris said.

Sharp interest: “You’re Nirai-trained?”

“My specialty was mathematics,” Cheris said. She was used to this. “The recruiters advised me to apply to Nirai Academy, but I declined.”

“And the Kel took you anyway.”

“After advising me to apply to Nirai Academy instead, yes.”

“I want to make sure I understand this,” Jedao said. “You had a choice and a noteworthy aptitude for math, and you decided to become a hawk anyway. Was it family pressure?”

“I can request my profile for your perusal,” she said.

“I’d like that, yes, but I want to hear it from you as well.”

Cheris brought up her profile – the part of it she was allowed to see, anyway – and wondered which sections were inviting particular scrutiny. Should she be embarrassed about her taste in dramas, under “leisure activities”? Or the fact that she was an enthusiastic but mediocre duelist? What did undead generals do in their spare time anyway?

“My family wanted me to stay home,” she said. “They don’t approve of the military.” Or the hexarchate, really. She didn’t say that she had wanted to fit in for once, and that the Kel with their conformism had seemed a good place to do that.

“Fine,” Jedao said after a disquieting silence. “Fourth display: review of available resources. Fifth: I want a look at tech advances over the last four decades. Maybe the state of the art is better than it used to be. Leave the sixth blank for now.”

“You’ve been thinking about this,” Cheris said as she set up the displays.

“I don’t like wasting time,” Jedao said. “This whole regime is about time, isn’t it? Let’s go in reverse order.”

The hexarchate dealt with low-level calendrical degradation on a daily basis. Outbreaks of full-scale rot were comparatively uncommon, but all the same the necessity of invariant weapons that didn’t rely on the high calendar had been realized a long time ago.

Cheris and Jedao went through the fifth display together. “No breakthroughs,” Jedao said after they had perused the summary. “With the exception of the fungal cocoon, most of the military stuff is similar to before. And we don’t want to resort to the cocoon because cleanup would cost a fortune. It’s nice to see that war never changes.”

Cheris glanced sharply at the shadow, but the eyes were unrevealing. “The heretics will know what to expect from us,” she said.

“I wasn’t planning on zapping them with a secret weapon anyway,” Jedao said. “Of course, it’s possible that they have nasty new exotics. The only way to find out is to get close enough to see what they throw at us.”

When they turned to the fourth display, there were two rapid taps at the door. The Nirai technician entered without waiting for any acknowledgment. “I am a mirror in your hands, but I break at your kiss,” the Nirai said with a wicked smile.

“Water,” Jedao said blandly. “That riddle is older than the hexarchate. Cheris, could you reset five to show power allocations? Thank you.”

“A riddle should never admit its own age,” the Nirai said. He found himself a chair, sat down, and started a solitaire game with jeng-zai cards.

“Ignore him,” Jedao said to Cheris. “Tell me about the class 22-5 mothdrives. If the Pale Fracture weren’t a calendrical dead zone, they would almost be good enough to fuel a whole new wave of expansion.”

“Don’t get cocky,” the Nirai said without looking up, “you have enough problems already.”

“One could hope for some variety in opponents,” Jedao said.

Cheris blinked. She didn’t think she had imagined the chill in his voice. But the Nirai’s expression was serene, as if he hadn’t heard it at all.

“About the swarm,” Jedao went on. “I have to admit that the new – sorry, not new to you – cindermoth class is impressive, but I have no intuition for its performance just looking at the numbers, and you’ve never served on one yourself.”

As if. “No,” Cheris said. There were only six cindermoths in the hexarchate, and it astonished her that two of them, the Sincere Greeting and Unspoken Law, were available for their use. Cheris wasn’t sure how their commanders would react to the situation. “I do have a question about protocol.”

“Ask.”

“How is your rank going to be handled? Especially since no one else can hear you?”

“Once we assemble the swarm, they’ll brevet you to general on my behalf.”

Cheris tried not to look appalled.

“If you sneeze wrong, they’ll shoot you first and sort it out later. Kel Command insists I can’t be stripped of rank until they put everyone through the appropriate ceremony, but they never seem to get around to it.”

Because they wanted to retain him for their use, and they could presumably kill him at any time. But she didn’t say that.

After a moment, Jedao added, “There’s a very short list of exotic weapons that will kill both of us. Most exotics will kill me first without damaging you permanently, but once I’m out of the way, you’re just as vulnerable as anyone else. And you’ll still have to be careful around invariants. Let’s have the list of exotics on the sixth display after all. Yes, that search should bring it up.”

When Jedao said the list was very short, he meant it. There were only two weapons on it, the genial gun and the snakescratch dart. “Other than that,” Jedao said, “you don’t have anything to fear from the first shot. If they resort to an exotic, they want to recover you alive, so you’re probably safe. Not that the Nirai would ever want to run tests.”

“I heard that,” the Nirai said. “I’ll think of some especially for you, if you like.”

“Oh, good,” Jedao said, with considerably less deference than earlier, “I was beginning to think your imagination was running out. More seriously, tell me about the cindermoths’ capabilities. Your design, I’m guessing?”

“Mostly,” the Nirai said, “but why don’t you ask your anchor? Find out how good she is at numbers.” He didn’t just mean the dimensions, or how many dire cannons the moth carried, but the importance of those numbers and their interrelations in the context of the high calendar as a system of belief.

Cheris reflexively tried to read the expression Jedao wasn’t capable of having.

Jedao noticed. “I can make some estimates,” he said, “but I used computational tools to check them, or I consulted specialists. I couldn’t build a moth even if you gave me blueprints and a box of nails” – the Nirai was smirking – “but I can make them sing in battle. You’re going to be my specialist, Cheris. Tell me.”

There were certain figures in the cindermoth’s specifications that she would not ordinarily have had access to. She arrayed them in her head and saw the way the numbers aligned. “They’re agile,” she said after a while. “I hadn’t expected that.”

She pointed out the governing equations and the way they were linked to the power curves. Jedao went very quiet, then: “Put that into graphical form for me, if you would.”

Interesting. Math wasn’t his strong suit? But the request was easy enough to accommodate. She also used graphics to display how the cindermoths projected calendrical stability around them, and how their firepower compared to that of the smaller bannermoths. Using a standardized simulator, she showed how a single cindermoth would do against invariant ice, assuming perfect operation on both sides, and then two cindermoths, then six. It was almost a pity they couldn’t have all six; they had a synergistic effect on each other. She noticed that the Nirai was looking thoughtful as he watched her, but if he had anything to say, he kept it to himself.

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

Priority: Personal

From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

To: Heptarch Liozh Zai

Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Chicken, and it’s bizarre that people voted in farm animals for this newfangled calendar, but make it Day of the Silkworm? Send me a memo if Doctrine has come up with something more thrilling.

My dear Zai, you must forgive my jitters. I don’t claim how much they claim the new day cycles in the Fortress should be easy to adapt to. The light has gone pale and cold everywhere, as though it came from some land of snow and stinging wings. I came here to get away from nuisances like planetary-style weather.

I urge you to reconsider tasking Analysis Team Three with that last Rahal justiciar. I’m as much for a delicious lead as the next woman, but this is the Rahal we’re talking about. If you want to know the truth, the Kel aren’t the ones you have to worry about suiciding on you, “suicide hawk” nothing. The Kel will at least look at the numbers and realize that it makes no sense to sacrifice ten of them to get one of you, bless their tiny brains. No: a Rahal will kill herself out of spite if some abstract higher principle tells her to. Still, I take it your mind is set on this matter, and it’s not in dispute that we have to purge the lot, so we’ll do it your way.

I know you skip the preliminary nonsense in favor of the meat of the report, so I should get started, eh? I’ve been monitoring communications from the tripwire guardswarm, you know I wouldn’t slack on that. You should appreciate that I was in the middle of a delightful bath with – never mind that, I don’t imagine you have any interest in such mundane pleasures. Suffice it to say that I’m even starting to see the up-down sweep of the data as I fall asleep.

The Kel have been keeping their distance. Like a dueling match, you know? But you don’t watch those either. Little swarms of paranoid scoutmoths darting in and out, that’s all we’ve been seeing. They’re monitoring the situation. No sign yet of a proper warswarm. As you might imagine, everyone in Analysis is on edge waiting to see what they’re going to throw at us.

And that’s the problem. Kel jokes aside, the hawks are trigger-happy, not slow on the draw. What we’re seeing is the Shuos leaning on them hard because if it were just up to the Kel hexarch, we wouldn’t be able to sleep for the bombs. They’re not just coming in bristling with guns. We could handle guns. They’re coming into this with a plan, which means some kind of twisty knotted-up Shuos plan. No luck cracking their encryption, but the thing is, they have to come to us sooner or later. If they lose the Entangled March completely, the surrounding marches start to go. It’s the beauty of rot-flow, and they’re not going to expect that our Analysis is as well-integrated as it is.

In the meantime, down at the firing range we’ve been using targets in the shapes of nine-tailed foxes. Good way to relieve stress. You should come join me sometime. Or at least come admire what an excellent shot I am. I hit the eyes every time.

Yours in calendrical heresy,

Vh.

A SCHEMATIC OF the Fortress of Scattered Needles spun slowly in the air. It resembled a swollen moon with six underground chambers, each holding 40,000 to 60,000 people, each differently structured. Defensive ribs held the Fortress together.

“Invariant ice,” Jedao was saying. “I don’t suppose anyone’s figured out where to get more of the stuff.”

Cheris looked at the Nirai, but he was ignoring them. “Not that an infantry captain would have heard,” Cheris said.

Invariant ice had the ability to generate shields in the surrounding space. The shields were impermeable to anything but a narrow band of communications frequencies. In principle, a sufficiently strong attack could overwhelm the shields and drain the ice of virtue. But the last Cheris had heard, even fury bombs would not suffice, and those were exotics anyway.

“I don’t know how you plan on getting past the shields,” Cheris said. The hexarchs had installed them at the central nexus point precisely because of their invulnerability. Calendrical effects were exaggerated at nexus points, and it had been taken for granted that invariant ice provided the Fortress enough protection.

“How many people have tried?” Jedao asked.

“They die before they get close enough,” Cheris said, “but it’s still a bad situation.” She consulted one of the standardized simulators and ran a very simplified scenario. The after-battle statistics glowed at her. “I don’t think the hexarchs are going to be impressed with a twenty-nine-year siege.”

Jedao laughed quietly. “It won’t take that long. We’re not fighting the ice, Cheris, we’re fighting the people using the ice. Let’s see what intelligence we have on the Fortress.”

They divided up the summaries and the most relevant-looking of the individual reports. “I don’t suppose you’re also trained to handle intelligence work,” Jedao said.

The Nirai was now arranging cards face-up. At the center was the Drowned General. Cheris winced at the reference to her situation.

“Sorry,” Cheris said to Jedao. “Why don’t you tell me what to look for?”

“The obvious things. Who set this up, and how? With a locus like the Fortress, it can’t be accidental. Someone targeted the Fortress and succeeded. I’m surprised that the Rahal justiciars in residence didn’t catch it and get rid of the problem in the usual blunt Rahal fashion. Which suggests that a lot of parameters were held at the tipping point and nudged over at the right moment. That would have taken a lot of organization.”

“You’re suggesting a conspiracy,” Cheris said.

“I don’t have any evidence, but intuition’s worth something.”

Most of the reports were weeks old. Whatever had happened had been sudden. Communications had been one of the first things to go. Only when the lensmoth returned out of the twenty-five-strong task force did the hexarchs put the Fortress under interdict.

“That was smart, by the way,” Jedao said sarcastically. “With no outside news coming in, whoever’s in there doesn’t have a choice but to listen to whatever the heretics say.”

The Nirai was smirking again. “Yes, well,” he said, “what can you expect of a bunch of hexarchs?”

“It’s standard procedure,” Cheris said, stiffening.

“Of course it is,” the Nirai said.

She was puzzling over the Fortress’s internal politics – fractious, but the system encouraged faction rivalry – when Jedao spoke again.

“It’s only mentioned in passing,” Jedao said to himself, “but that’s a hell of a lot of ‘preliminary market research’ by the locals. Marketing what? The demographics are right there on file, unless…”

“What is it?” Cheris said.

“I have an overactive imagination,” Jedao said, “that’s all. I recommend that we bring a Shuos intelligence team for analytical support and a full company of Shuos infiltrators. There are going to be Shuos teams in the swarm anyway, but they’ll be watching you for signs that I’ve gotten to you. We need people who are devoted to figuring out the enemy. The more eyes the better.”

The more eyes the better. The Shuos watchwords. She hadn’t heard them in a while, but it was reassuring that even a Shuos as old as Jedao lived by them.

“I would be more comfortable,” Cheris said, “if I knew more about your plans to deal with invariant ice.”

She looked at the Nirai’s game again. He was constructing an elaborate card fortress. This must be what bored Nirai did. She had clearly missed out by becoming a Kel.

“When I was alive,” Jedao said, “an assault on the Fortress was a standard exam question at Kel Academy, and it was common as one of those no-hope wargame exercises in simulation. Is that still the case?”

“I’m not an examiner,” Cheris said, “but we might be able to get that information released to us. Sixth display?”

“Might as well.”

Cheris stared in fascination at the categorization system for responses to that particular exam question. Who knew Kel examiners had a sense of humor? Two categories that caught her eye were “heretical thinking” (expected) and “irredeemably stupid” (expected, but not phrased so bluntly).

“No wonder they didn’t want me as an instructor,” Jedao said in fascination. “I’d never have fit in.”

The Immolation Fox, an instructor? She hoped not. “Which category were you interested in?” she asked.

“Let’s check the distributions in ‘heretical thinking’ and ‘promote tomorrow.’”

A worm curled in her belly.

“Just the distributions, Cheris.”

Two percent of exam responses were classified heretical. Cheris suspected those cadets hadn’t lasted long, or had been shunted into less desirable positions with permanent warnings in their records. She probably had a similar one in her full profile, the one she wasn’t allowed to see, for deciding to wake Jedao up.

“I know better than to suggest you hack this for more details,” Jedao said wistfully. “You Kel are awfully stiff about that sort of thing.”

“I’m glad you think so highly of us,” Cheris said.

“Shuos habit, that’s all. You’ll notice you’re the ones with all the weapons?” He sounded as though he was pacing around the room.

“She’s not stupid enough not to have realized that the Shuos are the ones who decide where to point them,” the Nirai said unkindly. The fortress was bigger than ever. Cheris was impressed that it hadn’t fallen over in a blizzard of cards.

“Why did you apply to the Kel army?” Cheris asked Jedao.

Jedao stopped, or at least his voice wasn’t moving anymore. “It was a better fit,” he said. “I wanted to serve, and picking over intelligence reports made me twitchy.”

“Don’t believe him,” the Nirai said. He started taking apart one of the towers. “He spent more time assassinating people than doing analyst work.”

“Sure didn’t feel like it,” Jedao said.

Cheris changed the subject before it could go anywhere dangerous. “The top scorers have a lot of topologically complicated operations,” she said. “You can theoretically force a puncture by convincing the operator to do something mathematically unwise.” She skimmed a few of the proposals. “It looks like it requires machine speed and precision, though, and I’m guessing composite wiring won’t work near the Fortress.”

“If you see a topological solution,” Jedao said, “tell me. I’d need an augment to carry out something like that, and I’m unable to have one installed.”

“So if not that, then what?”

“I have almost the same information that you do, which should tell you something. Invariant ice was classified to the highest levels even in my day. But see if you can call up the file on the Fortress signifier tests.”

A nexus fortress could have a signifier? Cheris made the query.

The system informed Cheris that the file didn’t exist.

“Oh, for love of fox and hound.” Jedao thought for a moment. “Ask if you can speak to someone.”

Cheris did and was stymied by the form that came up.

“Sign it with my name. That might send up some flags.”

“My career is going to be very short,” she said, but did as he said.

“You’re a suicide hawk,” Jedao said. “It comes with the territory.”

The Nirai had finished disassembling the original tower and was building a new one with the same cards.

Eight minutes later, they were wondering if anything had gone through when a response arrived. It said, simply: FILES NONEXISTENT.

“Is that what Kel Command’s seal looks like now?” Jedao said. “I thought it was the ashhawk-and-sword. Or is that a subdivision?”

“That’s Records,” the Nirai said, “same as always.” He was adjusting a pair of cards from the Gears suit in the tower. One of them was the Deuce of Gears, and Cheris felt a chill: Jedao had taken it as his personal emblem, long ago.

“No matter,” Jedao said. “We do have a problem, though, which is that Kel Command is withholding information from us. That file exists unless they purged it, and they wouldn’t have done that.”

Cheris frowned. “They’re not being subtle.”

“They don’t need to be. We have no leverage. But it does tell us that they’re protecting something so important that its secrecy trumps the necessity of taking the Fortress back.”

This line of thinking made her nervous, but it was consistent with what she knew of Kel Command.

“Anyway, let me tell you what I know. If you look at the surviving recordings, there’s a fair amount of variation in the physical manifestation of the shields, mostly to do with color and pattern. This is due to the influence of the human operator.”

“Are you certain it couldn’t be some property of invariant ice?” Cheris asked.

“No,” the Nirai said. “My faction would know if it were.”

“He’s reliable on technical matters,” Jedao said, correctly interpreting Cheris’s hesitation. “This means we don’t have to break the shields, we have to break the operator. You look skeptical.”

“It would be foolish for me to request your aid if I’m not going to make use of your expertise,” Cheris said. “Can you be more specific as to how you’re going to do this?”

“I would prefer not to until we’re there. We don’t know how the Fortress was taken, even if it looks like it was toppled from within. We can choose our assault force, but we won’t know how much of it we can trust. The rot could be anywhere. Or ordinary spies. People can’t hear the things I tell you, but they’ll be able to read your reactions. To be blunt, Cheris, you’re not a trained liar.”

Cheris bit her lip. While it was true that she was sworn to serve Kel Command, Jedao was her immediate superior. The urge to take everything at his word, thanks to formation instinct, was almost overpowering. She reminded herself that she had to be willing to kill him.

“We’ll do it this way,” Cheris said, “but when I need this to be explained later, I’m going to get an explanation.”

She was making demands of a general. She might have known this whole assignment was going to make her un-Kel.

“More than fair,” Jedao said.

He agreed so readily that she was suspicious, but she was committed now.

“What are your recommendations for the swarm composition?”

“I’d ordinarily look at calendrical considerations,” Cheris said, nonplussed that he was asking her input despite her lack of experience, “but invariant weapons are going to be more useful and you can only adjust existing exotics so far.”

“Generally true. The Fortress isn’t a calendrical null, but we don’t know what the heretical regime will look like once we get there, or what other defenses they’ll have.”

“They already have the best one.”

“It would be convenient if they didn’t have any backup plans,” Jedao said drolly, “but we can’t count on that.”

Cheris stared at the numbers. After consulting the fourth display’s readouts, she put together a swarm. Under ordinary circumstances, the two cindermoths would have been enough to handle any threat by themselves, but she added thirteen bannermoths for fire support and seven boxmoths for infantry transport. “I assume you want to go in with infantry,” she said, “although I don’t see how you can burn out the heresy that way. Are we putting down armed resistance so the Vidona reeducators can come in after?”

“We can do better than that,” Jedao said. “When I said we weren’t going to defeat the defenses, we were going to defeat the defenses’ operators, I was being literal. This predates calendrical war. Breaking the enemy’s will has always been important.”

Yes, Cheris thought, but who is your enemy?

She knew better than to ask him, but her disquiet stayed with her through the rest of the planning session.