Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER NINE

“SO THAT’S WHAT they were up to,” Jedao said.

Cheris couldn’t spare the effort to talk to him. Instead, her fingers flew over the terminal. “This formation, now,” she said. It was only going to buy them a little time. Shield effects were usually short-lived, and that didn’t take into account phase transition modifiers.

“They’re testing us,” Jedao said. “Time for a show of force. Destroy them.”

She needed an objective. The enemy swarm would react if she threatened the Fortress, so she needed to get closer. Distance was her lever. Not only could she force them to react in defense of the Fortress, she could nullify further use of the kaleidoscope bomb by getting too close for them to use it without also multiplying the Kel swarm. Twenty Jedaos, what a terrible thought. But the multiplier should only work on straightforward weapon effects, not people.

Cheris sent her intermediate computations to Navigation, with instructions to calculate the final movements.

They started taking hits. The formation shields blossomed like fever-flowers in Kel gold. Cheris instructed Weapons to return fire according to a preset pattern. Weapons looked like it wanted to protest, but Nerevor glared at it, then returned to coordinating the other officers in support of Cheris’s orders.

Cheris wished that she was crowned with eyes so she could take in all the data that were skittering across her display, but she had to make do with the eyes she had. Jedao seemed content to leave matters in her hands.

The kaleidoscope swarm’s movements revealed dependencies: all phantoms of a given moth tended to move in the same way. From the variable strength of the effect, she could figure out which of the moths were the originals; the phantoms looked too similar for scan to distinguish them directly.

“Coordinates for the originals,” Cheris said, passing on the information. “Focus fire on One –”

The Kel swarm moved in, shifting to regenerate the shield effect.

“Cheris!” Jedao said. “Vidona Diaiya’s up to something.”

“Formation break, sir!” Scan said at the same time.

Cheris caught herself before she hissed a profanity. What was it with her and formation breaks? Besides the fact that Kel luck was always bad?

“Message from Commander Diaiya,” Communications said, and played it back at Cheris’s nod.

Diaiya was smiling. “Let me sort that out for you, General,” she said, with too much emphasis on Cheris’s rank.

White-red enemy dire cannon fire pierced the shields at the formation break. Vidona Diaiya’s Starvation Hound had changed facing even though she had no dire cannon on that side to bring to bear. One of the boxmoths, Kel Nhiel’s River Full of Stones, took a crippling hit to its engine.

Commander Nerevor was shouting at Diaiya to resume formation, but the Hound remained obdurately silent.

And this, Cheris thought in a fury, was why the Kel rarely allowed non-Kel to rise to command: no formation instinct meant they couldn’t be relied on to follow orders themselves.

“All units, reconfigure formation to exclude Starvation Hound,” Cheris said coldly. Too late to save Nhiel’s moth, but it had to be done.

The Starvation Hound had launched a large, stubby projectile out of what appeared to be a modified gunport. It exploded into a cobwebby cloud of spores. A good third of the kaleidoscope moths were trapped when the spores billowed into enormous fungal blooms, sickly pink-gray with violet undertones.

Seconds later, the Hound was written over in words of fire, ash, failure.

“That skullfucking idiot killed all her soldiers because she had to show off her special toy,” Jedao said savagely.

Cheris swung around to stare at Jedao, even if she agreed with him, but of course there was no one there but a shadow. People in the command center were giving her strange looks.

“How in the name of ash and talon did that fucking Vidona fit a fucking fungal canister on a fucking bannermoth?” Nerevor was demanding. “That shouldn’t even be possible!”

“It’s a little late to ask her,” Cheris snapped. The fungal cocoon helped, she couldn’t deny that, but they should have been able to win this without it, just with greater casualties. Besides, in the normal course of things, moths only came equipped with cocoons with direct authorization from Kel Command. She didn’t look forward to explaining the incident to them.

“Both of you need to stay focused,” Jedao said sharply.

Cheris glared at Nerevor, and the other woman returned her attention to the crew.

“Cheris,” Jedao said after she had given the next set of orders. “Movement patterns. I can’t prove it mathematically, but targets Three and Four are slaved to One, and Five is slaved to Two.” He was referring to the actual enemy moths, not the phantoms; damage to the actual moths reduced the phantoms’ firepower.

Four was partly blocked by the cocoon. They could deal with it later. Cheris asked Scan for confirmation about the others. Scan chewed over the data and agreed that Jedao was probably correct.

Cheris directed the swarm to focus fire on One. The Kel swarm compacted itself. The guns spoke again.

Two was next. Kel Paizan’s Sincere Greeting took it out, opening a precise, narrow hole through the shield to fire through. The erasure cannon’s kinetic projectile punched horrifyingly through Two’s drive array. One of the bannermoths, Auspicious Glass, took damage from return fire before Sincere Greeting could close the hole, but Glass reported itself functional.

Jedao’s hunch was correct: Three, Four, and Five ceased fire when One and Two went down.

Communications informed Cheris that Two had sent a final transmission toward the Fortress, based on trace emissions. Unfortunately, they hadn’t intercepted the transmission proper.

To Cheris’s dismay, the phantom moths didn’t vanish, but they stopped firing when their sources fell silent.

“I don’t recommend boarding, sir,” Kel Nerevor said, scowling at the scan data. “Rigged to blow, like as not.”

“Cinder them completely, except Four,” Cheris said. “If scan can’t go in or out of the shields, let’s deafen them.”

They carried this out cautiously, just in case, but nothing untoward happened.

“Sir, I have an incoming transmission from the Fortress of Scattered Needles,” Communications said. “It’s text-only.”

“Go ahead and read it,” Cheris said.

“‘Very impressive, General Jedao. If that’s who you are. Prove yourself by penetrating the shield by 25:14 on the first day of the Month of the Moth.’ They gave us the conversion to our calendar.” Communications read that off too. The high calendar day was 1.21 of the heretics’ days. They had set the deadline for four of their days from now.

“Send a bannermoth out of range,” Jedao said. “Do it now. And send this message back to whoever it is: That bannermoth has orders to broadcast the trick of defeating the shields in the clear in all directions if anyone fires on us once we’re in. If you have any more tests, direct them to Shuos Academy. I’m sure they’re bored over there.”

Cheris selected Kel Koroe’s Unenclosed by Fear and gave it the necessary instructions. Koroe was supposed to be unimaginative but reliable.

“Let them think about that,” Cheris said, agonizingly aware of Nerevor’s worried expression. First things first. She sent a commendation to Sincere Greeting for its precise shooting.

Paizan responded almost immediately. “I don’t like being at such close range, General,” he said. “It makes the whole concept of distance weapons ridiculous. But in this situation there was no help for it.”

“You did well,” Cheris said.

Nerevor raised an eyebrow, and Cheris nodded at her. She expected that the cindermoth commanders would consider each other peers. “Next time I hope to take part in some dismemberment too,” Nerevor said to Paizan. “That Vidona ended things too quickly, and against orders.”

“You always were bloodthirsty, Nerevor,” Paizan said, with what might have been affection, and signed off.

“Get me the cryptology team,” Cheris said to Communications.

“General,” Nerevor said, “you should be aware that crypto doesn’t use composite work. They’re more efficient working as individuals.” Since she was discussing Nirai, this meant that the team’s members were too cantankerous to composite effectively. “Do you want to address the whole team, or just Captain-analyst Nirai Damiod?”

“Just Captain Damiod. Are they working with the Shuos team?”

“I had given no such orders, sir.”

“Give them now. If we have Shuos, we might as well get some use out of them.”

“Ha,” Jedao said.

Nirai Damiod’s face appeared to the left of Cheris’s display, with Captain Shuos Ko’s just below it. Damiod was a thin, nervous-looking man with pale brown eyes in a darker face. Ko looked, if anything, more imperturbably bland.

Before Cheris even asked him to explain anything, Damiod said, with the air of a man used to simplifying explanations, “It’s standard military encryption, usually called 67 Snake, based on a certain class of functions –”

“What class?” Cheris wondered just what kind of conversations he was used to having with Nerevor.

He peered at her. “Machiva-Ju quasiknot polynomials, to be precise. Ah – you have background in this field?”

“I have some general familiarity,” Cheris said. Unfortunately, as with all good cryptosystems, knowing the specific system in use didn’t, by itself, help them crack the ciphertexts. “You don’t think there’s hope.”

“There’s always hope, General,” Damiod said, “but even if we hooked together the swarm’s grid resources, we couldn’t crack it by brute force. It’d be a weak system if it yielded that easily. No, our best bet is seeing if whoever encrypted the message made some kind of amateur’s mistake or ran it on the wrong hardware or left some kind of fingerprint. Stupider things have happened.”

“Cooperate with Captain Ko in your work,” Cheris said.

“Easy enough,” Damiod said.

“Sir,” Ko said with a genial nod.

“Good luck,” she said, and ended the conversation.

Cheris called up the gradient map and grimaced at it. “We’re going to have to be more careful once we exit the transition zone,” she said. “We have no idea how well any formations will work under the heretical calendar. Look at that sector. The Fortress’s projections are remarkably stable. I don’t like that.”

“At least I trust there will be no more fungus,” Kel Nerevor said. She was looking at the damage to Four. The fungus in question was lethal to humans if you were lucky, and caused unappetizing mutations otherwise. It would take a full Nirai decontamination team to deal with the afflicted bannermoth. “Waste of a good moth. With that junk all over it, it’d be cheaper to ram it into a star and build a new one from scratch.”

“That’s Kel Command’s decision,” Cheris said. “Doctrine, I want you to look at the data from the engagement and see what you can get me on the heretics’ calendar.”

“Of course, sir,” Rahal Gara said.

Cheris closed her eyes for a moment. “Everyone switch over to invariant propulsion.” Giving up the luxuries that went with the high calendar’s exotics was going to be irritating. “We have to continue toward the Fortress.”

“The shields, General?” Nerevor asked, as Cheris had known she would.

“There will be a briefing,” Cheris said unemotionally. “Alert me if anything happens.”

She left the command center before they could see her hands start to shake.

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

Priority: Normal

From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

To: Heptarch Liozh Zai

Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, make it Day of the Goose. I’ve always loved goose.

My dear Zai, don’t pace holes into the floor with that scowl you always get, you’ll give yourself wrinkles, but we might be in more trouble than I had figured. Not to be an alarmist, mind you! Still, it’s best to be prepared. Sorry I missed you earlier – I thought I’d catch you at the firing range, but it appears I have terrible timing. You might be amused that Pioro still can’t beat my scores, though. A little humility will be good for him.

The speed with which the kaleidoscope swarm was dispatched isn’t the real issue, whatever those incompetents on Team Two claim. All the Kel would have had to do is wire some fancy composite work with Nirai specialists brought along for the purpose. I don’t know about you, but if I were headed into a heretical calendrical regime, the first thing I’d do is round up some nice meek Nirai to crunch numbers for me.

Our dubious consolation is that composite wiring is useless under our regime. That’s usually a disadvantage, but maintaining our hold on the Fortress is more important and you can only juggle day-to-day belief parameters so far. I’ve got people working on that, but it’ll take time to shift the aggregate scores.

The true concern here is General Garach Jedao Shkan, Shuos Jedao, the arch-traitor, whatever he’s calling himself these days. Let’s go through the possibilities systematically, shall we? Either he’s who he says he is, or he isn’t.

If he really is Jedao, he could still be lying about why he’s here. You would think that the escape of the hexarchate’s greatest traitor would occasion some kind of uproar, but the hexarchs wouldn’t want to start a mass panic, and the communications blackout makes it hard to tell. It’s barely conceivable he could have blackmailed his way into a Kel swarm.

On the other hand, if this is Jedao, he could be working for the Kel. It’s said he’s been well-behaved for them on past outings, but who knows how true that is. The Kel habit of wiping the memories of people who work with him doesn’t help us, intelligence-wise. Jedao being a Kel pet would explain his possession of a Kel swarm, however, and be consistent with Kel shortsightedness.

My money is on the third possibility, that someone’s using Jedao’s name to scare us. I bet the Kel in that swarm are thrilled about this tactic. Notice how the Kel transmitted a null banner instead of the famed Deuce of Gears: that might have been a compromise. I doubt you could get any hawk in the hexarchate to serve under the Deuce, no matter the importance of the operation. The general is probably someone in disgrace, which is peculiar. This should be a juicy assignment for an ambitious commander, despite the ruse. People would have been fighting over it if the Kel admitted to anything as pedestrian as personal ambition.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been reviewing the combat data from that engagement. The style is completely wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. Our opponent is very competent, and we should be wary of them. But their approach was calculating, cautious. Team Two will argue based on the fungal cocoon that our opponent likes fancy technology, but you’ll notice they abandoned the moth that released it: typical Kel, they don’t like seeing too much initiative.

Anyway, do recall old lessons. General Jedao’s campaigns are a matter of historical record. What stands out is his combination of aggressiveness and an uncanny ability to anticipate the enemy’s thinking. His first battle against the Lanterners was notable because he was outnumbered eight to one and he still inflicted a decisive defeat on them. Thankfully, our opponent is not of that caliber.

I doubt even Jedao could finesse his way past the shields, whatever our opponent’s recent boast, so it’ll be interesting to see what transpires in the next four days. In the meantime, I had these delightful bonbons delivered from that confectionary the other day. I realize they’re terrible for me, but what is life without a few indulgences? I sent some over even though I know perfectly well you’re not going to try them. But your assistant likes them and it never hurts to have your staff happy with you.

Before I forget, you should get on Stoghan’s case about holding on to the communications post in the Anemone Ward. Delegation to qualified subordinates and all that, but I don’t care how many supporters he has, his military skills are better on paper than in fact. I wonder if the loyalists are trying to warn Jedao off or to warn the hexarchs about Jedao, but best not to give them a chance to say anything if you can help it.

Yours in calendrical heresy,

Vh.

CHERIS WASHED HER hands in hot water, but they wouldn’t stop shaking.

“You’ll be fine,” Jedao said. “Have a drink of water. That always helped me.”

“I hate being so obvious.”

“I almost threw up after my first battle in space. I thought it would be different because the corpses weren’t in front of me. But there’s something terrible about that dry metallic click that indicates a hit. They’ve changed it since then, but for me it’s always that click.”

Jedao added, when Cheris declined to answer, “I’ve seen a lot of young officers through a lot of awful situations. That’s all it is.”

She poured herself a glass of water. It tasted cold and empty. After drinking it, she said, “I had expected you to –” She fumbled for a better way of expressing herself. “Take charge.”

“Why?” Jedao said. “You didn’t fight the way I would have, but that doesn’t matter. You won. I brought relevant items to your attention, but since you were doing your job, it was in everyone’s best interest for me to shut up and stay out of your way. I have watched a lot of junior officers get ruined by their superiors’ refusal to allow them the least bit of autonomy.”

Interesting. Maybe he wouldn’t have been a completely horrible instructor after all. As odd a thought as that was. “You feel strongly about this.”

“There’s no point asking people to risk their lives for you if you aren’t going to trust them in turn. Surely Kel Academy still teaches that.”

Cheris conceded the point. “I have a briefing in two hours,” she said. “You need to tell me about the signifier tests and how we’re getting past the shields. With a time limit, no less.”

“Yes, that’s fair,” Jedao said. “I know one thing about the Fortress that you don’t, and it’s because I once attended a live-fire demonstration of the shields’ effectiveness. They didn’t explain how the shields worked, but the shields produced artifacts in the human visible spectrum, nowhere else. I’m not a technician, far from it, but I found that curious. Too convenient.”

“I’m not sure how that helps us,” Cheris said. Of course, she wasn’t a technician either.

“If I’m right, the visual chaff is the key to understanding the shield operators. Who are human. The system can’t be grid-controlled – although maybe it can be composite-controlled?”

Cheris was sure the answer was no, but queried Doctrine to double-check. The answer came quickly. They must have figured it out beforehand and it had probably been sitting in some report awaiting her perusal. “No composites in the heretical calendar,” she said.

“So we’re dealing with humans. Think of this as an exercise in decryption. Once we crack the language of symbols, we’ll know how to break the operator and force our way in.”

“Jedao,” Cheris said, “do you have any idea how computationally expensive it is to crack any decent cryptosystem? Even one this old, if it hasn’t been done already?”

“You’re thinking like a Nirai, not a Shuos or Andan. I doubt the shields were designed this way on purpose. My guess is that the chaff is an unavoidable side-effect of the technology, which is why they’re so keen to hush it up.”

After an agonized silence, Cheris said, “I need a demonstration. I can’t take this to our officers. Especially after I’ve asked them to masquerade as traitors. But I don’t see how you can possibly make a demonstration before the fact, either.”

“All right,” Jedao said calmly. “Pick something up, something small, and hold it in your hand, Cheris.”

“What?”

“You asked for a demonstration.”

This was the kind of pointless game that the Shuos were notorious for. One of her colonels had once remarked that a Shuos would never tell you something straight out when they could force you to take an agonizing snaky route to the conclusion by manipulating you with word games. “I don’t see –”

“Do you want the demonstration or not?”

Cheris bit back her first response and went to get her luckstone. She slipped it free of its chain. The stone shone in curves of light interrupted by the raven engraving. “All right,” she said. He had better not be wasting her time.

“You’re going to hold on to that stone,” Jedao said. “Consider that an order, if it helps. I’m going to convince you to let it go before the briefing.”

Cheris was already unimpressed. What was he going to do, arm-wrestle her for it with the arm he didn’t have anymore? “That’s all?” she said. Then, grudgingly: “I see. The stone is the Fortress. My hand is the shields. This won’t work, Jedao. Even if you have some way of making me fail a simple task, I can’t persuade our commanders like this.” She was pretty sure the Kel commanders would have much the same reaction she was having. Except they would be less polite about it.

“Oh, we’re not going to bother with rocks –”

“It’s a luckstone,” she said, more sharply than she had meant to, even if she couldn’t imagine that Jedao knew anything about Mwennin custom. It was her birthday-stone, a gift from mother to child, and the raven was the bird of her birthday-saint. Little things that she never discussed with other Kel, because they wouldn’t understand.

“My apologies,” Jedao said promptly enough. “In any case, with the officers we need something bigger. We’ve already made an example of Vidona Diaiya –”

“That was ordinary discipline!”

“Don’t let go.”

Her fingers clenched around the luckstone, then relaxed.

“If it had been to our advantage to save her for future use, I might have advised that instead,” Jedao said. “But that wasn’t the case. No, we need a new target.”

Target? They were out of hostiles for the moment, unless he wanted her to order up more. Where was he going with this?

“We can’t demonstrate on the Fortress because that’s what we’re trying to persuade the commanders we can do in the first place,” Jedao said, “so we’ll have to demonstrate on our swarm. We can afford to lose a moth. Diaiya was going to be my expendable, but as it so happens she torched herself before I could make use of her that way.” His voice was utterly level.

Cheris had a creeping feeling at the back of her neck. How had she forgotten he was a madman? “Diaiya disobeyed orders and broke formation, that’s one thing,” she said, “but the other commanders have done nothing wrong. They don’t deserve to be toyed with.” Assuming he only meant to toy with them, which she had serious doubts about.

She was now remembering, too, his earlier comment about having a use for Diaiya, back when they’d selected her for the swarm. At the time it had slipped her mind as being nothing important. The knot in her gut told her she had been terribly, terribly wrong.

“We can’t afford any weaknesses when we go up against the Fortress,” Jedao said. “The swarm has to be ready to obey, and to believe in our methods, whatever they are, even if I’m involved. Not only did the heretics capture the hexarchate’s most celebrated nexus fortress, they had help. That kaleidoscope bomb wasn’t developed and manufactured overnight. In any case, to unite the swarm, we need them focused on an adversary. Framing one of your own commanders for heresy ought to do the trick.”

Cheris was speechless.

Jedao’s voice cracked without warning. “My gun. Where did I put my gun? It’s so dark.”

Cheris bit back a curse. This had to be a ploy, even though she couldn’t see what an undead general would be getting out of playing a bad joke. “Jedao,” she said, trying to sound composed and failing, “there’s no need –”

Not only was the shadow darker than she remembered it being, Jedao’s eyes had flared hell-bright, and the entire room was heavy with darkness like tongues of night licking inward from some unseen sky. Cheris’s mouth went dry as sand. She’d seen combat before, she’d fought before, and all she could do was freeze and stare like a soldier just out of academy.

Where was her chrysalis gun? There it was at her waist, that unmoving weight. She had to reach for it, had to unfreeze –

“General.” Now Jedao was coolly imperious. “I don’t recognize you, but your uniform is irregular. Fix it.”

She had no idea what had caused him to go mad in the first place, no one did, so she had no idea if he was going mad again. She lost a precious second wondering inanely if snapping a salute would mollify him, then unfroze and fumbled for the chrysalis gun. Just in case.

The nine-eyed shadow whipped around behind her in defiance of all the laws of geometry it had obeyed until now, and then she knew she was really in trouble. All that time she had spent reading up on her swarm’s high officers and what intelligence they had on the enemy – some of it should have been spent researching Jedao.

“You shouldn’t be standing still,” he said. His voice was casual, as though he addressed an old friend. “They’ll get you if you stand still. You should always be moving. And you should also be shooting back.”

“Shooting who?” she said, struck by the awful thought that this was how he had gone crazy at Hellspin Fortress.

The shadow moved slowly, slowly, pacing her. Perhaps if she kept him talking she could buy time, even figure out what was going through his mind.

Jedao didn’t seem to hear her. “If you keep waiting, all the lanterns will go out,” he said, his voice gone eerily soft, “and then they’ll be able to see you but you won’t be able to see them. It’ll be dark for a very long time.”

Lanterns. The Lanterners? Hellspin Fortress? Or some coincidence of imagery?

The gun was in her hand. She aimed at the shadow, but it was too fast. If she fired, would it send up alarms? She didn’t want to start a panic in her command moth for no reason. She nerved herself and did it anyway, but the shadow anticipated her and whipped out of the way. The gray-green bolt sparked and dissipated harmlessly against the floor. Her next attempts fared no better. Cheris wished the Nirai had warned her that shooting Jedao wouldn’t be simple.

Despite the shadow’s movements, he didn’t sound like he noticed that she was trying to shoot him, either. “You brought a whole swarm here,” he said, voice rising. “They have no idea. It’s going to be a million dead all over again.”

If this kept up she was going to have to aim the gun at herself, terrible hangover or not. But then she’d drop the luckstone; there was still some chance this whole thing was an act. Then why wouldn’t her hands cooperate?

This would be much easier if she knew him well enough to tell whether this was an aggressively irresponsible mind game on his part, or a genuine sign of insanity. Stop hesitating, she told herself angrily. She knew better than to dither like this.

Jedao fell silent. In spite of herself, Cheris hoped that Jedao was done testing her, that he would call the game off. She wasn’t cut out for this. She was about to ask him when his voice started up again. This time he sounded unnervingly young, half an octave higher, like a first-year cadet.

“General?” he said.

He wasn’t speaking equal to equal this time. He spoke with deference. Fear, even.

“Sir, the dead. I can’t keep count. I don’t, I don’t – sir, I don’t know what to do next.” The eerie thing was that she couldn’t hear him breathing, despite the raggedness. When he next spoke, his voice wavered in shame, then firmed. “It’s my turn to die, isn’t it? I just have to find my gun in the dark –”

A long silence.

And then, quite softly, “My teeth will have to do.”

Cheris had seized up again, trying to tell herself this was a trick, that it had nothing to do with Hellspin Fortress, or worse, some other incident she couldn’t remember out of the history lessons she had stupidly failed to review. But this time she was sure. She aimed and fired again, fruitlessly.

“Cheris.” His voice no longer sounded young, and Cheris sensed he was finally in earnest. She half-turned toward the source of the sound, which was across the room from the shadow. Everywhere darkness hung like curtains of sleep. There were starting to be amber points of light not just in Jedao’s shadow, but everywhere, in the walls, in the air, everywhere, like stars coming closer to stare. She had no doubt that when they did, they would reveal themselves as foxes’ eyes.

Jedao recognized her again: he spoke to her as a subordinate, and formation instinct began to trigger. “Not that way. Or that way, either, if you’re thinking to escape. You’re about to swing left. No, don’t freeze, that’s even worse.”

In the swarm of lights she couldn’t figure out what to shoot. His speech, rapid but precise, now came from several directions at once, which only confused her further.

He was half-laughing. “You keep reacting, and you’re reacting with my reflexes, don’t you think I know what you’ll do?”

Her hands clenched. Another bolt hissed against the wall, to no effect. It wasn’t just the sudden cool malevolence of his voice, or its authority, it was that his reflexes were a part of her, he was in her, she couldn’t get him out.

On the other hand, if this wasn’t just a game, if this wasn’t pure pretense, then she might be able to trigger his madness and use it against him. Too bad she couldn’t get him to shut up so she could think clearly –

“You’re determined not to drop the gun, but look at your hand shaking – there it goes, and you’re still fixated on that stupid fucking luckstone. Reprioritize. What’s the real threat – where’s the real game? Go ahead, pick up the gun, try again.”

Cheris couldn’t make his voice go away and she couldn’t stop reacting like him. As a Kel, she couldn’t help responding to the orders, either. She was going to go ahead, pick up the gun, try –

Jedao started to laugh in earnest. “I’m going to enjoy watching you die, fledge.”

The Kel called their cadets that, or inferiors who fell out of line. All her muscles locked up in spite of her intentions. The luckstone felt leaden in her hand. She had taken comfort from it since her mother gave it to her. It gave her none now.

“You have no idea whether that gun works as advertised on full strength,” Jedao said contemptuously, “or how it works if it does, and you never asked. The Kel don’t get smarter, do they? Go ahead, pull the trigger.”

The Nirai technician wouldn’t have lied to her –

She knew nothing of the kind.

“Think about the name of the gun, fledge. You know what a chrysalis is. Where do you think they put me when it’s time for retrieval? I have to go into a container, and your carcass is handy. Remember that despite the fact that I’m a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn’t me.”

It was horribly plausible. She fired again, but wildly. Sparks; a dance of staring eyes. Again and again. No better luck.

“Honestly, Captain,” Jedao said, biting down on her usual rank, “if this is a typical example of Kel competence, no wonder Kel Command keeps using a man they despise utterly to win their wars for them.”

Cheris tried to make herself keep firing. Couldn’t. The shadow revealed itself next to the door, the nine eyes arrayed in an inhumanly broad candle smile. She stared at the shadow and felt herself falling into it, toward the pitiless eyes. They were opening wider: she thought she saw an intimation of teeth in them. It was worse that he had called her captain rather than fledge, that naked reminder of Kel hierarchy. Her nerve shattered: too much strangeness all at once. “General,” she croaked. “I didn’t mean to – I don’t know what you want, sir, I don’t understand the order –” She was talking too much, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “I failed you, sir, I’m sorry, I –”

“Cheris.” The eyes dimmed, rearranged themselves into the more familiar line.

“– can’t figure out –”

“Cheris! I’m done. It’s over.”

“Sir,” she whispered like a broken thread, “what are your orders?” Her fingers crept toward the chrysalis gun. She made them stop. What if he wanted something else from her? She couldn’t bear the thought of getting it wrong again.

“Cheris, sit down,” Jedao said gently.

It took her two tries to take a step toward the chair. But the general wanted it, so it was an order, so she would do it. Wasn’t that how life went, in the Kel?

“I’m a hawkfucking prick,” Jedao said. Cheris flinched: hawkfucker, fraternizer. “I didn’t realize how badly formation instinct would affect you. You had conflicting orders. The fault isn’t yours.”

“I am Kel, sir.”

“I know.” His voice dipped tiredly. “I misjudged. No excuse.”

She had no idea how to respond to that, so she kept silent. He was her superior. He demonstrably knew how to break her. And yet she was supposed to be able to judge him and kill him if necessary. How did Kel Command expect a Kel to be able to deal with this? The fact that he was always present, always watching her, only made it worse.

“Cheris. Please say something.”

She would have bet that he was sincere, except she had thought the same when he was pressuring her to shoot herself. “The chrysalis gun, sir.” Some use it had been.

“I wasn’t entirely lying about that. It forces me inside and puts us both in hibernation. I don’t know whether it does permanent damage to you. I’m never around for that part.”

That would have been useful to know much earlier. Naturally, the Orientation Packet hadn’t mentioned any such thing. She didn’t know why she had expected it to be more helpful. But then, she had gotten herself into this situation, hadn’t she?

Cheris focused on the in-out of her breathing until she felt calm enough to think clearly again. She put the luckstone on the corner of the desk. It made a small click. “I’m done with your game, sir,” she said flatly. “You win.”

“Oh, for love of –” Jedao checked himself. “At the risk of alienating you forever, I have to point out that you lost the moment you agreed to play the game on my terms, without negotiating.”

This was typical Shuos thinking, but she couldn’t disregard it. “You weren’t serious about playing games with the swarm, sir?”

“I seem to recall someone arguing that the commanders didn’t deserve to be toyed with. No, I wasn’t serious, but it was plausible that I was, wasn’t it? Think about that.”

She frowned. “Was it worth doing that just to make a point?” She was looking at the luckstone.

“You have the lesson backwards, Cheris. The luckstone is incidental. I don’t have hands and I can’t hold a gun. When you agreed to be my opponent, what weapons did you think I had?”

“Your voice,” she said at once, but she had missed the important one. “Your reputation.”

“Yes. We’ve already told the heretics that I’m facing them.”

“Garach Jedao Shkan,” she said. Her voice was unsteady. Maybe they should have bannered the Deuce of Gears after all, so the enemy would know to dread them.

“Anytime you want me to feel like my mother caught me harassing the geese again, go right ahead,” Jedao said with unexpected humor. “In any case, reputation: it’s an awful tool to have, but you can’t escape it, so you must learn to use it.”

“I understand, sir,” she said. She did. They didn’t call Jedao a weapon for nothing; and fear of weapons was a weapon in itself.

“Do you?” Jedao said. “Then you’re ready for the plan. Here’s how it’ll go.”