Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

Sparrow 2 was arguing that they should have warned Cheris that she was a pawn in a Shuos game.

Sparrow 11, which was repairing one of its limbs, differed. She wasn’t just going into a Shuos game. She was also going into the hands of the Nirai hexarch and the Immolation Fox. If the hexarchs knew the depth of her contacts with their kind, it would endanger her, and it would endanger all the servitors, who relied on the humans thinking of them as well-trained furniture.

The servitors considered themselves lucky that the Nirai hexarch, who had grown up before machine sentience was achieved, found it difficult to think of humans as people, let alone machines. The Immolation Fox was a threat to the hexarchate, but not specifically to servitors, so he was less of a concern. Since they were Kel servitors, however, the two Sparrows had the obligatory prejudices against him.

Sparrow 2 expressed its discomfort with the situation. It remembered how much it had liked talking about number theory with Cheris, and the stories she had had about the ravens in her home city. Couldn’t something be done?

Sparrow 11 thought to itself that Sparrow 2 was very young. It reminded Sparrow 2 that Cheris was a terrible liar. The only way she was going to get through her first encounter with the black cradle was if she genuinely had no idea what she was in for. Otherwise the Nirai hexarch would suspect something and destroy her.

They went back and forth a little more, but Sparrow 2 eventually conceded the correctness of Sparrow 11’s views. At least the servitor grapevine would keep it informed of further developments if Cheris managed to escape the hexarch’s grasp. And there would be servitors on whatever warmoth Cheris ended up on; the question was whether she would ever think to call on them for more than casual conversation. Servitor policy was never to offer, but they didn’t mind being asked by an ally, even one in such a precarious position, as long as the request was polite.

THE BOXMOTH’S EXECUTIVE officer showed up at Cheris’s door not long after the meeting and explained that she would have to be drugged for her journey. “There’s no other way, Captain,” he said. “They’d have to pull out your spatial memory and scour it clean otherwise.” He didn’t say what they both knew, that the entire boxmoth would be subject to scouring after it transferred her. “The technicians at your destination will give you more details.”

Cheris didn’t like the thought of being under for the trip, but at least he hadn’t said it was a full sedation lock. “I could prepare more adequately if I were given some of the details now, sir,” Cheris said, not because she expected him to tell her more, but because he would report her objection to their superiors.

“I’m sure you could, Captain,” the executive officer said, but that was all.

Cheris reported to Medical and didn’t even remember reaching the door due to the retroactive effect. Much later she recovered a few impressions: a smell like mint and smoke and sedge blossoms, a heartbeat too slow to be her own, the world tilting and curving. Water the color of sleep, or sleep the color of water.

She woke up afterward. Her augment told her she had been transferred off the Burning Leaf . In fact, she was on a station, not a moth, probably the facility the black cradle was housed in. In a moment of confusion she waited for the heat-pulses in her left arm, but nothing came. The pulses were only used by infantry anyway, not moth Kel, and she probably wasn’t considered infantry anymore.

The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a dazzlement of glittering planes and angles. She was in a strange six-sided room like the heart of a mirror. Her skin was cold and her breath scarcely misted the chill air. But as she stirred, slowly and stiffly, she felt the blood coursing in her veins and knew she was not dead.

There was something wrong with the inside of her skull, as if someone had rewritten all her nerves in a foreign alphabet. She could barely form coherent thoughts.

Someone had dressed her in an inoffensive tan shift covered by a heated outer robe. She stretched carefully, feeling unaccountably awkward, then let the robe’s warmth soothe her aching muscles. After looking around, she located one of her uniforms and started to put it on. All her limbs seemed to be the wrong length.

Then she caught sight of her shadow. Froze.

The shadow wouldn’t have looked like her own even if it weren’t for the eyes. Not only were proportions wrong, there were nine eyes, unblinking and candle-yellow, arranged in three triangles. As she watched, the eyes moved to form a perfect line bisecting the shadow. They might have been growing larger; they might have been coming closer.

She didn’t feel hazy anymore. Something curdled in her throat. She thought, I am not going to scream. Except the thought wasn’t in her voice. She heard it in an unfamiliar man’s voice all the way inside her skull. She couldn’t make it stop, she couldn’t get it out, she couldn’t get her voice back. Every time she had a thought, she heard it in the stranger’s voice, and under other circumstances she would have found it pleasant, a low drawl, but –

Kel training reasserted itself. She was ashamed of her panic. It must be a formation, it must be a new formation that her superiors were only now teaching her, and the proper response to a formation was to submit to it. She forced herself to look at the shadow. She saw now that it was a man’s. Had they made her a man? They could do that, it was unremarkable among the Shuos and Andan, and she’d wondered what it was like, but most Kel considered sex changes distasteful so why would her superiors –?

Then she heard the same male voice, but the words were distinctly someone else’s, as though someone were talking to her. She couldn’t see anyone in the room with her, however. The voice said, “They must not have warned you. My apologies, no one has told me your name –?”

For all its concern, the voice spoke with authority, and she knew the correct response to authority. “Captain Kel Cheris, sir,” she said, using the politest form.

Cheris glanced down at her gloves, at every part of her that she could see. No, she had been right the first time. When she spoke, as opposed to merely thinking, her voice was her own, but her body was her own after all, so that made sense.

There was a pause. “I can’t read your thoughts,” the voice went on. “I can hear you if you speak, which includes subvocals. Do you want me to continue, or would you rather orient yourself on your own?”

Cheris was confused that he was giving her a choice. “Sir?” she said.

“You are a Kel, aren’t you? You usually are.” He added, “It’s so easy to forget what colors look like. The style of the uniform hasn’t changed much, though. Don’t – what you’re doing to yourself, this isn’t a formation, that’s not necessary. It will go better if you don’t try to fit yourself into me like I’m a glove. My name is Shuos Jedao, but you needn’t keep calling me ‘sir.’ Under the circumstances I think you’ll agree that it’s a little ridiculous.”

She looked around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. If she wasn’t to respond by resorting to formation instinct, what was she supposed to do?

“You’d better look more closely in the mirror,” Jedao said. She decided that this was an order. She stared into it in fascination, then at her hands, then at it again. Jedao’s reflection looked back at her. She tried to remember what he had looked like in the videos she had seen back in academy, but her memories were hazy. He had straight black hair with bangs almost too long for current Kel regulations, and dark eyes, and a face that might have been handsome if he had only been smiling. Cheris was not tempted to smile. He was leanly muscular, and a wide scar was just visible at his neck above the collar.