Lieutenant Verab alerted her of the enemy sighting via heat pulse. Over the relay, Cheris heard a junior sergeant shouting at someone who had dropped his rifle, a recent recruit who had a talent for botching things.
The Eels’ field fortifications, which commanded one of the larger hills, looked like a rough shore in a sea of dust, and their patrols carried themselves with a certain sloppiness. But the distant figures stirred in agitation: Cheris was betting they had thought themselves safe.
Of momentary interest was the Eels’ banner, which was of green fire and grim shadow with a twisting motif. The Eels called themselves the Society of the Flourish, although the hexarchate didn’t use this name. Taking away people’s names denied their power, a lesson Cheris tried not to think about.
Cheris snapped, “Unfurl Kel banner. Advance and fire. I want anything that twitches to die.”
The banner-bearers ignited the generator, and fire blazed in the sky. At the heart of the golden flames was the Kel ashhawk, the black bird that burned in its own glory, and beneath it their general’s emblem, the Chain of Thorns. Despite Cheris’s amusement at Kel design sensibilities – of course the emblem was the flamboyant ashhawk, of course it involved fire – she felt a stinging in her secret heart at the sight of it.
Several green soldiers in Verab’s platoon were shooting too rapidly at the guards and not very well. A sergeant, distracted by some other matter, was slow to direct their efforts more usefully, but Verab was already dealing with the issue. Still, better to be shooting than not to be shooting.
The storm started up around them, avoiding the Eel fortifications with dismaying precision. The world became a tumult of silhouettes. The smell of the earth was pungent, salt-grit-sweet. In the back of her head she realized that the sweetness came from the succulents flowering awake.
They were going to have to wade through the encampment before they could count on safety from the weather. Cheris wondered if the Eels would sacrifice their own so they could direct the storm’s full fury against the Kel.
“Lieutenant, have you got your platoon in hand?” Cheris asked Verab.
For formation fighting, each soldier’s state of mind mattered, or else the exotic effects would falter. It was a microcosm of the importance of Doctrine in hexarchate society. Formation instinct, which every Kel was programmed with during academy, was supposed to ensure the necessary cohesion. In practice, it worked better with some than others.
“They’ll serve, sir,” Verab said, biting off each word.
“See that they do,” Cheris said.
The display showed that the other platoons were holding steady. Bullets hit the formation’s protection zone and ricocheted at absurd angles. The rain pelted down around them, yet none of it touched Cheris or the soldiers standing near her.
Strangely, however, the rain was scattering into snow, the snow into crystal. She had Sparrow 14 bring her a captured crystal. It was a shining sliver, fracturing the light into rainbows if rainbows only knew the cold, sad hues of blue and violet. She didn’t touch the crystal even though she was wearing Kel gloves. The Sparrow was already starting to corrode, and she expressed her regrets to it. It made a resigned chirping noise.
Pir’s Fan should have shed the storm without additional transformative effects. Cheris frowned. She had spent a good portion of her five-year academy stint examining the mathematics of formation mechanics. When she chose a formation, she did so with a full understanding of its particular weaknesses.
The problem was that her analyses depended on the high calendar’s consensus mechanics. She now had indication that the directional storm generator worked the way it did because it relied on a radically heretical calendar, with the attendant heretical mechanics, which were interfering with the formation’s proper function. She was angry at herself for not anticipating this. Most of the time heretics used technology that was compatible with the high calendar, but the development of purely heretical technology was always possible.
Her superiors had to have known, but she didn’t expect them to tell a low officer about matters that involved heresy. Still, the other Kel companies hadn’t had to die the way they had, smeared into irrelevance. Like Cheris, their captains had relied on the weather-eaters, on their formations, on the exotics that their civilization had become dependent on since their discovery. Cheris didn’t despise many things, but needless waste was one of them.
The deviation from the high calendar could be measured, and her unit gave her an instrument with which to perform the measurement. She sucked in a breath, listening to relay chatter.
Storm
and
death
and
the color of the sky
and
blisters
.
Contacts contacts contacts
and
fucking crystals
.
Just a scratch, no – Chrif is down.
That would be Chriferafa, who always got teased because her name was unpronounceable.
Bullets and Eelfire came at them like part of the storm. Cheris flinched in spite of herself as a tendril of fire hissed past, deflected by the formation.
Her soldiers weren’t going to like her, but that didn’t matter as long as they lived. “Formation override,” Cheris said into the relay. Her breath was silver-white in the air. She barely felt the cold, bad sign. “Squadrons Three through Six, adjust formation.” She wrote the equations on one hand with the other, letting the kinetic sensors pick them up for transmission.
A minor test first. Then, based on the results, additional tests to see what the deviations were and whether they admitted any good options. There was a certain amount of heresy in working with heretical mechanics, but her orders told her to work with the resources she had, so she was going to do exactly that.
The formation staggered. She couldn’t see it clearly from her position, but the formation icon came up bright and prickly, warning her that the formation’s integrity was failing. The grating tone in her head suggested that she order a retreat or have her soldiers modulate into an alternate formation, something, anything to conform with Doctrine. Her vision was reddening at the edges.
“It’s part of the
plan
,” she said in vexation, and overrode the warnings.
That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was her soldiers’ hesitation. Squadrons Three, Five, and Six were following orders, although Six was having difficulty adjusting around the fallen. Cheris relented enough to request a snapshot from the sergeant. The directional storm had cut a gash through the squadron, leaving greasy stains and partial corpses in a growing pinkish puddle. Cheris suggested an alteration, but the sergeant was going to have to deal with the rest herself.
Squadron Four was resisting the order. Pir’s Fan was something they knew and understood. The modifications she had sent them were not. The sergeant protested formulaically, all but quoting the Kel code of conduct. The formation didn’t belong to the Kel lexicons. Unconventional thinking was a danger to a well-tested hierarchical system. Her orders did not advance the best interests of the hexarchate. And so on.
The storm fell in sheets of undulating light, snake-sharp and acrid. Cheris had Dineng send for another Sparrow to verify that the light was fatal. The Sparrow dodged a ribbon of light too late and was transformed into a mass of parallel slices and metal shrieks. It fell unmoving to the ground, where the light rearranged it again and again until it was nothing but an accretion of truncated cubes. Cheris winced, but there was nothing to be done now.
Cheris opened the relay and said to the recalcitrant sergeant, with great leniency, “Reconsider.” It would be preferable to secure his cooperation. She would have to adjust the formation otherwise, with uncertain results.
She had eaten with him at high table for years, listened to his anecdotes of service in the Drowned March and at the Feathered Bridge between the two great continents of the world Makhtu. She knew that he liked to drink two sips from his own cup after the communal cup went around, and then to arrange his pickles or sesame spinach on top of his rice. She knew that he cared about putting things in their proper place. It was an understandable impulse. It was also going to get him killed.
Already she was rewriting the equations because she knew what his answer would be.
The sergeant reiterated his protest, stopping short of accusing her of heresy herself. Formation instinct should have forced him to obey her, but the fact that he considered her actions deeply un-Kel was enabling him to resist.
Cheris cut contact and sent another override. Lieutenant Verab’s acknowledgment sounded grim. Cheris marked Squadron Four outcasts, Kel no longer. They had failed to obey her, and that was that.
Disjointedly, the new formation pieced itself together and pressed forward. They were taking heavier fire now. Two trees exploded at the touch of Eelfire as Squadron Five passed them. A corporal was stapled to a hillside by the resultant lash of splinters. A soldier three paces to Cheris’s left fell out of formation and vanished in a vapor of blood and tatters. Kel Nikara, who had sung so well.
Squadron Four was already dissolving, but she had no attention to spare for it.
Cheris guided the advance from point to point. She adjusted the formation again by sending orders to individual soldiers, solving for intermediate forms in her head to keep the geometry within the necessary error bounds. The storm was dissipating: they were too close to the Eels. The next question was whether she could devise a formation that would give them better protection against the Eels’ invariant weapons, which would work in any calendar, now that the storm was no longer a factor.
They were outnumbered five to one, but the Eels didn’t have access to formations, so the Kel had a chance. Cheris was in a hurry, so a straightforward force multiplier was her best bet. More modifications. Her remaining soldiers knew to trust her. The soundstream reflected this.
Eels
,
the stink of corpses
,
heavy fire from that copse
,
drumbeats
. They were paying attention to the important things again.
To her relief, the force multiplier, adapted from One Thorn Poisons a Thousand Hands, could be linearized for use with her ad hoc formation. She and her soldiers were equipped with calendrical swords, ordinarily used for duels. Not her weapon of choice, but they were near the storm generator, which they were to take intact, and the general’s orders had been clear. The swords shouldn’t damage unliving objects, which was the primary consideration.
“Swords, now,” Cheris said.
The Kel unsheathed their swords, each tinted differently, blank bars of light. Cheris’s ran from blue near the hilt to red at the tip. As they closed with the enemy, numbers blazed to life along the lengths of the blades:
the day and the hour of your death
, as the Kel liked to say.
Except the date and time on Cheris’s sword was wrong. She wasn’t the only one who was dismayed.
Maintenance
,
rather use my rifle
, the dreaded
calendrical rot
. Not only were the numbers wrong, they jittered and sparked, snapping in and out of focus. A quick survey of her company indicated that everyone’s swords were having the same problem. That would have been bad enough, but the swords weren’t even synchronized.
“Sir, maybe another weapon –” Lieutenant Verab said.
“Continue the advance,” Cheris said. “No guns.” If the swords proved ineffectual, they would have to try something different, but the swords hadn’t sputtered out entirely. That gave her hope, if you could call it that.
At first it went well. For every sword-stroke, tens of Eels went down as lines of force scythed through their ranks. Cheris’s own swordwork was methodical, businesslike, the same way she dueled. One of her lunges pierced eight soldiers in the Eels’ ranks. She had always been good at angles.
The Kel formation held as they butchered their way through the Eels. The hills’ residual mist had a ruddy tint. Cheris made a point of noticing the Eels’ faces. They weren’t much different from the faces of her own soldiers: younger and older, dark skin and pale, eyes mostly brown or sometimes gray. One of them might have been Dineng’s brother, if not for the pale eyes. But the calendrical light made them alien, washed in shadows of indefinite color slowly becoming more definite.
They hit an unexpected snag as the storm generator came into view. It crouched on the rise of a stubby hill, visible through a transparent palisade. The generator resembled nothing so much as a small, deformed tank. Cheris asked for, and got, an assay of its approximate mass from one of the Sparrows. The answer made her bite her lip. Well, that was what the floaters were for.
More bizarre was the fact that the generator was undefended except by four Eel servitors. They were armed with lasers, but so far their fire hadn’t penetrated Kel defenses.
Cheris knew the current formation was losing effectiveness when the air went cold and gray. She was having difficulty breathing, and while she had an emergency air supply, they all did, she suspected this was just the beginning. Sure enough, it also became harder and harder to move.
Her first attempts at repairing the formation only resulted in a colder wind, a grayer world. Gritting her teeth –
winter
,
entropy
, it was time to
get out
but they were
so close
– she tried another configuration. It was hard to think, hard to make herself breathe. She thought she heard the song of snow.
“I need your computational allocations,” Cheris told her lieutenants. They were so close to the weather generator, and the Eels were broken and peeling away behind them. They just had to grab the wretched thing and hold on until pickup arrived. But to hold it they had to have a working formation. It was enough to make her long for the days of straightforward bullets and bombs.
She liked the thought of stripping her soldiers’ computational resources as much as they did, which was to say not at all. But they weren’t in camp, where they could instantiate a more powerful grid. They had no access to the larger, more powerful grid of a friendly voidmoth transport or a military base. She had to use the field grid because it was all they had.