Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“You did well,” Cheris said.

Nerevor raised an eyebrow, and Cheris nodded at her. She expected that the cindermoth commanders would consider each other peers. “Next time I hope to take part in some dismemberment too,” Nerevor said to Paizan. “That Vidona ended things too quickly, and against orders.”

“You always were bloodthirsty, Nerevor,” Paizan said, with what might have been affection, and signed off.

“Get me the cryptology team,” Cheris said to Communications.

“General,” Nerevor said, “you should be aware that crypto doesn’t use composite work. They’re more efficient working as individuals.” Since she was discussing Nirai, this meant that the team’s members were too cantankerous to composite effectively. “Do you want to address the whole team, or just Captain-analyst Nirai Damiod?”

“Just Captain Damiod. Are they working with the Shuos team?”

“I had given no such orders, sir.”

“Give them now. If we have Shuos, we might as well get some use out of them.”

“Ha,” Jedao said.

Nirai Damiod’s face appeared to the left of Cheris’s display, with Captain Shuos Ko’s just below it. Damiod was a thin, nervous-looking man with pale brown eyes in a darker face. Ko looked, if anything, more imperturbably bland.

Before Cheris even asked him to explain anything, Damiod said, with the air of a man used to simplifying explanations, “It’s standard military encryption, usually called 67 Snake, based on a certain class of functions –”

“What class?” Cheris wondered just what kind of conversations he was used to having with Nerevor.

He peered at her. “Machiva-Ju quasiknot polynomials, to be precise. Ah – you have background in this field?”

“I have some general familiarity,” Cheris said. Unfortunately, as with all good cryptosystems, knowing the specific system in use didn’t, by itself, help them crack the ciphertexts. “You don’t think there’s hope.”

“There’s always hope , General,” Damiod said, “but even if we hooked together the swarm’s grid resources, we couldn’t crack it by brute force. It’d be a weak system if it yielded that easily. No, our best bet is seeing if whoever encrypted the message made some kind of amateur’s mistake or ran it on the wrong hardware or left some kind of fingerprint. Stupider things have happened.”

“Cooperate with Captain Ko in your work,” Cheris said.

“Easy enough,” Damiod said.

“Sir,” Ko said with a genial nod.

“Good luck,” she said, and ended the conversation.

Cheris called up the gradient map and grimaced at it. “We’re going to have to be more careful once we exit the transition zone,” she said. “We have no idea how well any formations will work under the heretical calendar. Look at that sector. The Fortress’s projections are remarkably stable. I don’t like that.”

“At least I trust there will be no more fungus,” Kel Nerevor said. She was looking at the damage to Four. The fungus in question was lethal to humans if you were lucky, and caused unappetizing mutations otherwise. It would take a full Nirai decontamination team to deal with the afflicted bannermoth. “Waste of a good moth. With that junk all over it, it’d be cheaper to ram it into a star and build a new one from scratch.”

“That’s Kel Command’s decision,” Cheris said. “Doctrine, I want you to look at the data from the engagement and see what you can get me on the heretics’ calendar.”

“Of course, sir,” Rahal Gara said.

Cheris closed her eyes for a moment. “Everyone switch over to invariant propulsion.” Giving up the luxuries that went with the high calendar’s exotics was going to be irritating. “We have to continue toward the Fortress.”

“The shields, General?” Nerevor asked, as Cheris had known she would.

“There will be a briefing,” Cheris said unemotionally. “Alert me if anything happens.”

She left the command center before they could see her hands start to shake.

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

Priority:Normal

From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

To:Heptarch Liozh Zai

Calendrical Minutiae:Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, make it Day of the Goose. I’ve always loved goose.

My dear Zai, don’t pace holes into the floor with that scowl you always get, you’ll give yourself wrinkles, but we might be in more trouble than I had figured. Not to be an alarmist, mind you! Still, it’s best to be prepared. Sorry I missed you earlier – I thought I’d catch you at the firing range, but it appears I have terrible timing. You might be amused that Pioro still can’t beat my scores, though. A little humility will be good for him.

The speed with which the kaleidoscope swarm was dispatched isn’t the real issue, whatever those incompetents on Team Two claim. All the Kel would have had to do is wire some fancy composite work with Nirai specialists brought along for the purpose. I don’t know about you, but if I were headed into a heretical calendrical regime, the first thing I’d do is round up some nice meek Nirai to crunch numbers for me.

Our dubious consolation is that composite wiring is useless under our regime. That’s usually a disadvantage, but maintaining our hold on the Fortress is more important and you can only juggle day-to-day belief parameters so far. I’ve got people working on that, but it’ll take time to shift the aggregate scores.

The true concern here is General Garach Jedao Shkan, Shuos Jedao, the arch-traitor, whatever he’s calling himself these days. Let’s go through the possibilities systematically, shall we? Either he’s who he says he is, or he isn’t.

If he really is Jedao, he could still be lying about why he’s here. You would think that the escape of the hexarchate’s greatest traitor would occasion some kind of uproar, but the hexarchs wouldn’t want to start a mass panic, and the communications blackout makes it hard to tell. It’s barely conceivable he could have blackmailed his way into a Kel swarm.

On the other hand, if this is Jedao, he could be working for the Kel. It’s said he’s been well-behaved for them on past outings, but who knows how true that is. The Kel habit of wiping the memories of people who work with him doesn’t help us, intelligence-wise. Jedao being a Kel pet would explain his possession of a Kel swarm, however, and be consistent with Kel shortsightedness.

My money is on the third possibility, that someone’s using Jedao’s name to scare us. I bet the Kel in that swarm are thrilled about this tactic. Notice how the Kel transmitted a null banner instead of the famed Deuce of Gears: that might have been a compromise. I doubt you could get any hawk in the hexarchate to serve under the Deuce, no matter the importance of the operation. The general is probably someone in disgrace, which is peculiar. This should be a juicy assignment for an ambitious commander, despite the ruse. People would have been fighting over it if the Kel admitted to anything as pedestrian as personal ambition.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been reviewing the combat data from that engagement. The style is completely wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. Our opponent is very competent, and we should be wary of them. But their approach was calculating, cautious. Team Two will argue based on the fungal cocoon that our opponent likes fancy technology, but you’ll notice they abandoned the moth that released it: typical Kel, they don’t like seeing too much initiative.

Anyway, do recall old lessons. General Jedao’s campaigns are a matter of historical record. What stands out is his combination of aggressiveness and an uncanny ability to anticipate the enemy’s thinking. His first battle against the Lanterners was notable because he was outnumbered eight to one and he still inflicted a decisive defeat on them. Thankfully, our opponent is not of that caliber.