Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“We’re going to have to confront the Fortress sooner or later,” Cheris said. “It might as well be sooner. With any luck, fewer people will die this way.”

“Good,” Jedao said crisply. “I’m glad we care about the same things.”

It was an odd thing for a mass murderer to say, and she wouldn’t figure out its significance until much later.

THE ROOM CHERIS was provided with was decorated with vases filled with the bones of small animals wired into the shapes of flowers. Cheris was wondering just what else the Nirai did when he got bored, but she knew more than she cared to already.

“First things first,” Jedao said. “Ask the grid for the New Anchor Orientation Packet.”

With a name like that, it had to have been written by committee. Nevertheless, Cheris queried the grid. First she was pleasantly surprised by how short it was. Then she was worried.

“If you have any questions,” Jedao said, “ask, but I have to warn you that there are whole sections that I can’t tell you anything about.”

Cheris was torn between the urge to read it as quickly as she could so they could go on to planning the siege, and trying to commit everything to memory. She settled for something in between. Most of the instructions were elaborations on what she had already been told, but Cheris frowned when she hit the section on carrion glass.

After retrieval, the general shall be extracted for reuse using a carrion gun, the Orientation Packet said. And a footnote: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.

“‘Volunteer’?” Cheris said. The Nirai definition of “volunteer” was undoubtedly the same as the Kel definition.

“I don’t think they can force-feed someone a ghost corpse,” Jedao said, “but to my knowledge it’s never been tried. I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. The Nirai believes that having pieces of my brain inside you would drive you crazy even if I weren’t crazy myself.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cheris said, trying not to think about the fact that this wasn’t very different from her current situation. She looked up from the Orientation Packet. “I’m ready.”

“All right,” Jedao said. “Setup. First display: the Fortress of Scattered Needles and whatever’s on file about its defenses. Second display: reports on its population and the origin of the heresy. Third: data on this specific regime of rot and how rapidly it’s metastasizing. We’re going to have to ask the Nirai to loan us a mathematical analyst –”

“I can handle that,” Cheris said.

Sharp interest: “You’re Nirai-trained?”

“My specialty was mathematics,” Cheris said. She was used to this. “The recruiters advised me to apply to Nirai Academy, but I declined.”

“And the Kel took you anyway.”

“After advising me to apply to Nirai Academy instead, yes.”

“I want to make sure I understand this,” Jedao said. “You had a choice and a noteworthy aptitude for math, and you decided to become a hawk anyway. Was it family pressure?”

“I can request my profile for your perusal,” she said.

“I’d like that, yes, but I want to hear it from you as well.”

Cheris brought up her profile – the part of it she was allowed to see, anyway – and wondered which sections were inviting particular scrutiny. Should she be embarrassed about her taste in dramas, under “leisure activities”? Or the fact that she was an enthusiastic but mediocre duelist? What did undead generals do in their spare time anyway?

“My family wanted me to stay home,” she said. “They don’t approve of the military.” Or the hexarchate, really. She didn’t say that she had wanted to fit in for once, and that the Kel with their conformism had seemed a good place to do that.

“Fine,” Jedao said after a disquieting silence. “Fourth display: review of available resources. Fifth: I want a look at tech advances over the last four decades. Maybe the state of the art is better than it used to be. Leave the sixth blank for now.”

“You’ve been thinking about this,” Cheris said as she set up the displays.

“I don’t like wasting time,” Jedao said. “This whole regime is about time, isn’t it? Let’s go in reverse order.”

The hexarchate dealt with low-level calendrical degradation on a daily basis. Outbreaks of full-scale rot were comparatively uncommon, but all the same the necessity of invariant weapons that didn’t rely on the high calendar had been realized a long time ago.

Cheris and Jedao went through the fifth display together. “No breakthroughs,” Jedao said after they had perused the summary. “With the exception of the fungal cocoon, most of the military stuff is similar to before. And we don’t want to resort to the cocoon because cleanup would cost a fortune. It’s nice to see that war never changes.”

Cheris glanced sharply at the shadow, but the eyes were unrevealing. “The heretics will know what to expect from us,” she said.

“I wasn’t planning on zapping them with a secret weapon anyway,” Jedao said. “Of course, it’s possible that they have nasty new exotics. The only way to find out is to get close enough to see what they throw at us.”

When they turned to the fourth display, there were two rapid taps at the door. The Nirai technician entered without waiting for any acknowledgment. “I am a mirror in your hands, but I break at your kiss,” the Nirai said with a wicked smile.

“Water,” Jedao said blandly. “That riddle is older than the hexarchate. Cheris, could you reset five to show power allocations? Thank you.”

“A riddle should never admit its own age,” the Nirai said. He found himself a chair, sat down, and started a solitaire game with jeng-zai cards.

“Ignore him,” Jedao said to Cheris. “Tell me about the class 22-5 mothdrives. If the Pale Fracture weren’t a calendrical dead zone, they would almost be good enough to fuel a whole new wave of expansion.”

“Don’t get cocky,” the Nirai said without looking up, “you have enough problems already.”

“One could hope for some variety in opponents,” Jedao said.

Cheris blinked. She didn’t think she had imagined the chill in his voice. But the Nirai’s expression was serene, as if he hadn’t heard it at all.

“About the swarm,” Jedao went on. “I have to admit that the new – sorry, not new to you – cindermoth class is impressive, but I have no intuition for its performance just looking at the numbers, and you’ve never served on one yourself.”

As if. “No,” Cheris said. There were only six cindermoths in the hexarchate, and it astonished her that two of them, the Sincere Greeting and Unspoken Law , were available for their use. Cheris wasn’t sure how their commanders would react to the situation. “I do have a question about protocol.”

“Ask.”

“How is your rank going to be handled? Especially since no one else can hear you?”

“Once we assemble the swarm, they’ll brevet you to general on my behalf.”

Cheris tried not to look appalled.

“If you sneeze wrong, they’ll shoot you first and sort it out later. Kel Command insists I can’t be stripped of rank until they put everyone through the appropriate ceremony, but they never seem to get around to it.”

Because they wanted to retain him for their use, and they could presumably kill him at any time. But she didn’t say that.