Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“Yes,” Cheris said, mouth dry.

He wasn’t done. “When I was alive, I used to pass around something I’d taken off an enemy soldier, a flimsy affair made of cheap tin.” His voice flexed, resumed its calm. “I thought it was a salutary reminder of our common humanity.”

At one point. “What happened to the cup?” He was waiting for her to ask anyway. Was there a trap in the question?

“I lost it on campaign. Ambush, a nasty one. One of my soldiers went back for the fucking thing against direct orders because she thought a cup mattered more to me than her life. You won’t find this in the records. I didn’t think there was any sense shaming her family with the details since she was already dead.”

Jedao could be lying to her and she would have no way of verifying the story. But no one could have guessed that the small details of his life would matter centuries later. If they mattered. What she didn’t understand was, what was he trying to prove with the anecdote? He sounded like a good commander. Of course, everyone had thought he was a good commander until he stopped being a good human being.

“You cared a lot about your soldiers once,” she said, taking the story at face value. “What changed?”

“If you figure it out,” Jedao said, “let me know.”

Back to games. No use playing anymore, then. Cheris looked at the trays. The smell of rice tantalized her.

“Eat,” Jedao said. “You must be hungry.”

“How can you remember hunger if you had trouble with colors?” Cheris demanded.

“It’s hard to forget starvation,” he said. When she hesitated, he muttered something in a different language. It sounded like a profanity. She bet after a few centuries he knew a lot of those. “Sorry, habit. My birth tongue. Your profile said high language wasn’t your native tongue, either?”

“Yes,” Cheris said. Her parents had ensured that she knew Mwen-dal, her mother’s language, even though it was a low language spoken by a minority even in the City of Ravens Feasting. Cheris only spoke it when she visited them, having learned to restrict herself to the high language in Kel society. The hexarchate regarded all the low languages with suspicion.

“Yes,” Jedao said. “I still swear in Shparoi, too, although it’s a dead language in the hexarchate. My homeworld was lost to the Hafn in a border flare-up about three hundred years ago.”

She hadn’t known that. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she was, even though she knew better. Tried to imagine what it was like for your entire planet to be gone. Couldn’t. It was the first time that she had a sense of the centuries that separated them, the fact that the difference between them wasn’t just a matter of rank.

“Time happens to everyone,” he said, as though it didn’t matter. “Eat. If you fall over from hunger, I can’t revive you, although I imagine someone would figure something out.”

She placed his tray across from hers at the table, then picked up her own cup. One sip, since Jedao couldn’t take the first one, and then the chopsticks. The rice was rice, but the fish was layered with thin slices of pickled radish, and the fiddleheads tasted pleasantly bitter beneath the sauce.

“Did you eat like this when you were alive?” she asked. Three hundred ninety-seven years since his execution. A lot had to have changed.

“We ate whatever the quartermasters could get us,” Jedao said. “I remember one land campaign we came across a cache of jellied frogs’ eggs. Not even a large cache. They were a delicacy in that region. I see from your expression that this isn’t exotic to you, but they were to us. We were hungry, so we ate them anyway. There were a lot of bad jokes about gills afterward.”

Cheris finished her meal in silence after that, thinking about tin cups and disobeying orders and frogs’ eggs. When she had finished, she sipped the last of her tea and eyed Jedao’s cup with its mysterious mist. “Am I supposed to do anything with that?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I doubt it’s nourishing in any sense of the word.”

One last sip. Cheris put the teacup down and stretched. She was twisting to the left when the grid’s impersonal voice said, “Incoming message.” The communications panel turned black, with the ashhawk-and-sword emblem of Kel Command in blazing bright gold.

Cheris put her uniform in full formal. “I can receive the message now,” she said to the grid as she faced the panel.

It was Subcommand Two, wearing her face again. “General Shuos Jedao,” it said, as if it could see him standing there. For all she knew, it could. “Captain Kel Cheris.”

Cheris was already saluting.

“Try not to let on that its face bothers you so much,” Jedao said. “It’s a bad habit to let people read you so easily.”

She didn’t like the fact that he was giving her advice, especially of that nature, during a communication from Kel Command. Even if there would undoubtedly be more of that in the days to come.

“At ease,” Subcommand Two said, and only then Cheris was sure it couldn’t hear Jedao. “I think you know what this is about. Due to the general’s inability to manifest physically, Captain, you are going to have to serve as his hands and his voice. To facilitate this, Kel Command is brevetting you to general for the duration of the campaign.”

Cheris had expected to feel something – discomfort, elation, confusion – but all that came was weariness.

“I also have one other piece of information you might find helpful.”

Cheris tensed.

“Readings suggest the heretics are keying their regime to seven as their central integer. You’ll have better data sooner than we will, but keep that in mind.”

Seven. Were they suggesting a revival of the Liozh heresy? She wished she had paid more attention during the obligatory history survey her first year in academy. As it stood, she had done well in all her courses, but some of them had gone clean out of her head as soon as she got her grades back.

“That’s all. Best wishes.” The panel went blank.

“This is not good news,” Cheris said.

“We already knew that,” Jedao said. “Ah – your uniform, Cheris. Take care of it before you forget.”

Kel Command had ordered it. There was no need to feel like a cadet embarking on a tasteless prank, but she did anyway. “Brevetted rank, general,” she said. The uniform replaced the captain’s talon with a general’s wings.

“I want to take another look at the high officers in the swarm,” Jedao said. “I hope I’m not the only one nervous about the Vidona.”

Starvation Hound was commanded by Vidona Diaiya, who had a reputation for finding loopholes in orders. It was unusual for a Vidona to rise to command in the Kel military. Like most citizens, Cheris had a healthy respect for the Vidona, who were responsible for disseminating Doctrine and reeducating dissidents, but she preferred to respect them from a distance. “Commander Diaiya has a lot of commendations,” she said, determined to avoid unnecessary trouble.

“They were very carefully worded,” Jedao said. “I imagine she has high connections.”

“That can’t be the only explanation,” Cheris said. “Besides, if it’s not her, then we have to go with Simplicity Eye or Six Spires Standing .” The former had a commander with two reprimands for “excessive brutality,” which Cheris hadn’t even known Kel Command cared about. The latter was overdue for repairs.

“Yes, bad options all around,” Jedao said. “Diaiya, then. We’ll have to watch her carefully, but I might have a use for her anyway. And we’ll need Colonel Ragath’s cooperation. I’ve flagged a couple of his Nirai as potential problems, but we’re going to have to rely on him to keep them from getting creative.” He gave her the names.