Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“Run through the following signifiers in this order and tabulate results,” Jedao said. “Kniferose Thorns Wild, Pierced, Burning Sweetly.”

Cheris was increasingly convinced that the Fortress was going to open a hole in its shields to fire at them, even though the heretics had nothing to worry about yet. Still, the chaff shifted with a responsiveness that she could only describe as human.

They set up the pivots for the next ghost formation, which with a grand swarm of ninety-three would have been Carrion Strike. They patterned the Rahal scrywolf to accompany it. Cheris looked over her shoulder at Rahal Gara. The other woman’s mouth was pale, compressed.

The shields didn’t react as strongly this time, although some chaff manifested anyway: a brief glimpse of the high alert triangle, the dendritic shapes of coral, the occasional glassy hexagon. Flickers of numbers. Gara confirmed that they were consistent with what they knew of the heretics’ calendrical keys.

Jedao laughed shortly. “Definitely not a wolf. A wolf’s mind would be better-disciplined. All right. Hunting Alone, Uncircled, Trapped in Glass, Ambushed.”

Cheris wondered what he was looking for. The signifiers changed the chaff, but the shields didn’t show any signs of going down.

Next was the Shuos ninefox. It scarcely produced any result, as if the shield operator had gotten bored. Cheris was expecting Jedao to try the signifier Crowned with Eyes, which he was known for, but he chose four others.

They went through the three low factions according to schedule: Kel, Nirai, and finally Vidona. With each one, the chaff dwindled until it became faint smudges, the shapes hard to guess even with interpolation.

“Now what?” Cheris asked subvocally, watching Nerevor pace.

“I hate my hunches sometimes,” Jedao said. “Marketing and demographics. I might have guessed.”

She hoped he would explain that to her sometime.

“For the next one, we want to use pivots from the grand formation Skyfall. The firing pattern should sketch the Web of Worlds. Not the basic mirrorweb emblem, but specifically the Web of Worlds.”

Cheris plotted it out, but had to refer to the archives to make sure she had it right. Surely the heretics weren’t really thinking of reviving a dead faction?

“One more, General?” Nerevor said. She was still pacing. “If we could just get the shields down –”

Cheris tried to remember what she knew about the Liozh as she relayed the order. It wasn’t much. The details of the heresy had been suppressed. Kel Academy hadn’t had much to say about it, as most military actions against the Liozh insurrectionists had been sufficiently one-sided as to be, as one instructor had put it, “militarily uninteresting.”

The significance of Skyfall was easier. General Jedao had used it to devastating effect against the Lanterners at the Battle of Severed Hands.

Cheris was jolted back into paying attention when Scan called, “Pinpoint breach at –” He gave the coordinates. Seven more appeared in rapid succession.

“Scan,” Cheris said, but Scan was already working. “Focus fire on the pole spine. We want to scare the operator.”

Between the chatter in the command center, Nerevor’s terse orders coordinating the tactical group, occasional status alerts from the moth commanders, and Jedao’s hellishly confident voice, Cheris could hardly hear herself, let alone shape a thought of her own.

An opening formed to permit return fire. The swarm dispersed to avoid available angles of fire. The two cindermoths’ erasure cannon slung their projectiles one after the other.

“Pull up the dictionary of signifier responses we’ve compiled,” Jedao said. “This will hurt. Tactical One and Two, nail the Deuce of Gears onto surface structures.” His personal emblem. “They can do what they have to as long as the pattern is recognizable. Cheris, ask them to sort the dictionary on antonyms. Have Tactical Three fire on the shields, not the breaches. Every time they see chaff, they’re to hit with the antonym. A fast response is more important than a certain one. Make sure Commander Rai Mogen is clear on this.”

Nerevor frowned at the orders when Cheris gave them. “Sir,” she said, “that’s practically bannering the Deuce –”

Cheris flexed her half-gloved hands to draw attention to them. “We’re using the arch-traitor,” she said. “We’ve admitted as much. If his reputation benefits us, we’ll keep using it. The order stands.”

Nerevor’s mouth was tight, but she didn’t protest further.

Tactical Groups One and Two began hammering the Deuce of Gears on the Fortress’s armor with weapons at twenty percent. It was hard to see the gears as anything but a large circle and a smaller one, the teeth obliterated to nubs, but in context Jedao’s emblem was clear.

The red triangles showed up at greater and greater scale, lightning flashes of anxiety bleeding across the shields like a haywire fractal gasket.

“There we go,” Jedao said.

Guns spoke from the Fortress, a beam raking Kel Shan’s Trading in Solstice from a momentary opening, then fell silent.

Tactical Three was still responding to the maelstrom of chaff – fissures, broken teeth, bridges swaying dangerously, red splashes – with the antonym attack. Cheris made herself breathe evenly despite the gasps and stutters in the images. She was finally convinced that, for whatever reason, the shields were tied to the operator’s inner world, the knots in their heart. But why would you design a defensive system that –

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Cheris said. Nerevor stiffened, ready for new orders, but Cheris wasn’t looking at her.

“Figured it out?” Jedao said, pleased. “Let’s hear it. Subvocals. Although Kel Command is going to have to outprocess everyone anyway.”

“How long have you known that invariant ice isn’t an invariant ?”

Before now, it hadn’t occurred to Cheris that the shields were based on an exotic technology and that the heretics had simply designed their calendar to enable them to continue using it. After all, everyone in the hexarchate knew that invariant ice was an invariant.

“Lucky guess,” Jedao said. “Sorry. Shouldn’t be flip. Cheris, those shields aren’t based on standard physical forces, no matter what the hexarchs say about technological breakthroughs. I’m no Nirai, but I know what the universe’s laws look like, and shields like this? Never happen. This means they’re an exotic effect. We also know that the Fortress projects a calendrical regime due to the nexus. It stands to reason that the shields take advantage of the same phenomenon.

“And this suggests that the shields are a projection of the operator’s belief system. Not the beliefs of a group; the symbol system is too consistent and composites don’t work here anymore. I can’t see why else there would be chaff, or why Kel Command wanted to distract people from it. – Nerevor wants your attention.”

“Sir,” Nerevor said, “Scan is starting to get coherent readouts through the punctures.”

Scan followed that up with, “More breaches above the Anemone and Radiant Wards, but – wait a moment.”

The triangle pattern spattered the shields like summer wildfire. Tactical Three responded with the scrywolf Uncircled.

“How does this even –” Cheris started to say.

“Cheris, people are very simple,” Jedao said. “You occupy the conscious mind with one thing, then drive a spike into the subconscious mind with something else while the walls are down. That’s how we used formations just now. The operator was trained to pay attention to Kel formations, so that took care of their conscious focus, and now we’ve pinned them with my emblem, which they know to fear. The emblems on the shields – for us they’re just time-lapse pictures, but for the operator, because the shields are an ego projection, we’re tattooing words directly onto their brain.”