Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

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.

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.