Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“Anyway, let me tell you what I know. If you look at the surviving recordings, there’s a fair amount of variation in the physical manifestation of the shields, mostly to do with color and pattern. This is due to the influence of the human operator.”

“Are you certain it couldn’t be some property of invariant ice?” Cheris asked.

“No,” the Nirai said. “My faction would know if it were.”

“He’s reliable on technical matters,” Jedao said, correctly interpreting Cheris’s hesitation. “This means we don’t have to break the shields, we have to break the operator. You look skeptical.”

“It would be foolish for me to request your aid if I’m not going to make use of your expertise,” Cheris said. “Can you be more specific as to how you’re going to do this?”

“I would prefer not to until we’re there. We don’t know how the Fortress was taken, even if it looks like it was toppled from within. We can choose our assault force, but we won’t know how much of it we can trust. The rot could be anywhere. Or ordinary spies. People can’t hear the things I tell you, but they’ll be able to read your reactions. To be blunt, Cheris, you’re not a trained liar.”

Cheris bit her lip. While it was true that she was sworn to serve Kel Command, Jedao was her immediate superior. The urge to take everything at his word, thanks to formation instinct, was almost overpowering. She reminded herself that she had to be willing to kill him.

“We’ll do it this way,” Cheris said, “but when I need this to be explained later, I’m going to get an explanation.”

She was making demands of a general. She might have known this whole assignment was going to make her un-Kel.

“More than fair,” Jedao said.

He agreed so readily that she was suspicious, but she was committed now.

“What are your recommendations for the swarm composition?”

“I’d ordinarily look at calendrical considerations,” Cheris said, nonplussed that he was asking her input despite her lack of experience, “but invariant weapons are going to be more useful and you can only adjust existing exotics so far.”

“Generally true. The Fortress isn’t a calendrical null, but we don’t know what the heretical regime will look like once we get there, or what other defenses they’ll have.”

“They already have the best one.”

“It would be convenient if they didn’t have any backup plans,” Jedao said drolly, “but we can’t count on that.”

Cheris stared at the numbers. After consulting the fourth display’s readouts, she put together a swarm. Under ordinary circumstances, the two cindermoths would have been enough to handle any threat by themselves, but she added thirteen bannermoths for fire support and seven boxmoths for infantry transport. “I assume you want to go in with infantry,” she said, “although I don’t see how you can burn out the heresy that way. Are we putting down armed resistance so the Vidona reeducators can come in after?”

“We can do better than that,” Jedao said. “When I said we weren’t going to defeat the defenses, we were going to defeat the defenses’ operators, I was being literal. This predates calendrical war. Breaking the enemy’s will has always been important.”

Yes, Cheris thought, but who is your enemy?

She knew better than to ask him, but her disquiet stayed with her through the rest of the planning session.

CHERIS WAS IN for a surprise when it came time to choose an infantry commander. She and Jedao agreed on Colonel Kel Ragath, who had returned to the Kel after a stint as a historian. Ragath’s service record with all its decorations looked exactly like that of Four from the bidding session. Since she couldn’t prove anything, she kept this knowledge to herself.

The order for the Shuos intelligence team and infiltrator company was trickier. Frustratingly, the system allowed her to describe the operation, then request a team and a company, and that was it. She could give no other parameters for personnel selection.

“That’s typical,” Jedao told her. “Our love of petty secrets, to say nothing of paperwork, hasn’t changed over the past few centuries. We’re going to have to trust that the hexarchs want us to win this. That ought to be incentive to assign us competent operatives.”

The next step was putting in the swarm order. Cheris felt ridiculous, since swarms only assembled for a general and she hadn’t been brevetted yet. To be fair, she would have felt ridiculous even with the brevet. The system flashed an acknowledgment of “unusual circumstances” and gave an assembly time of 5.9 days.

Cheris wondered what to do next, then was mortified to find herself yawning.

“You should sleep,” Jedao said. “You won’t be good to either of us without rest.”

“I’m worried news will come in the night,” she said. To say nothing of her reluctance to fall unconscious while he remained awake. “Don’t you usually have staff for things like this?” She would feel better knowing there were other Kel around, even if they were strangers.

“You should,” Jedao agreed, “but they’re trying to minimize the number of officers contaminated by close contact with me, and for a swarm this size you can make do with the moth’s staff.” There went that. “Anyway, I can’t work the monitors, but if you automate some flags, I can wake you if anything exciting happens. I also can’t read more than one thing at a time, but I can keep track of more graphics than a human could. And I don’t mind being an alarm clock.” He laughed at her dismayed expression. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to shock you.”

Cheris didn’t want to sleep under his watch, and yet she couldn’t stay awake indefinitely. If she’d known that this would be the setup, she would have had serious second thoughts about waking Jedao up. “Ah – where am I to sleep?” she asked in a neutral voice.

“Go out the way we came, and it’s probably been set up for you already.”

He was right. The room looked more ordinary now, despite the mirrors. The room was also much larger than anything she’d ever slept in.

Cheris looked at the reflection. Jedao was smiling mockingly at her. She gritted her teeth and glared back at him.

“Good,” Jedao said, unfazed, and she wished immediately that she had been less obvious. “You’ll need that in the days to come.” She decided it was best not to answer.

Her possessions from the Burning Leaf were on a table. She checked: they hadn’t forgotten the raven luckstone. Then she looked through the other things, her uniforms and her civilian clothes, her weapons. She was especially glad to see the calendrical sword, although who knew if she’d have a chance to indulge in any dueling. And it wasn’t – she had looked it up earlier, while Jedao remained disarmingly silent – going to offer her any protection against revenants.

The Orientation Packet had assured her that she had nothing to fear from him while sleeping, but she didn’t believe it. Not to mention that it was awkward to have her commanding officer around continually.

“Sleep,” Jedao said. “We’ll see if there’s additional intelligence in the morning.”

She made herself undress as usual, hesitating only when she reached her gloves. Ordinarily she would have taken them off to sleep, but she didn’t like the thought of Jedao seeing her hands naked. In public, the Kel ungloved only for suicide missions. He had already seen her hands. She did not feel easy about that.