Ninefox Gambit (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had their attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.