Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“We’re in!” Scan cried over Jedao’s words.

For a merciful second Cheris felt nothing. But everyone else fell over like hingeless puppets.

The world was awash in colors, patterns, floating echoes of shapes she had seen in the shields. Leaf into feather into petal in great blowing drifts that passed through her hands. Fissures and fractures of peeling black. Sandglasses pouring themselves out.

Jedao was silent. Cheris looked at Nerevor, but Nerevor was curled up on the floor, wheezing something in a low language Cheris didn’t recognize.

She couldn’t waste time panicking. She rerouted Communications to her own terminal. “Get me Commander Paizan,” she said.

After a long moment, the grid said in its crisp voice, “Commander Paizan is not responding.”

She sent a general query to the moth commanders. Nothing.

“General Jedao,” she said, remembering that he had called himself a shield, “where are you?”

Still no response.

She forced herself to breathe steadily.

The scan readout indicated that the Fortress’s shields had splayed themselves outward like hands with the skin peeled off and nerves unfurled in all directions. Cheris lost another minute picking through the equations, trying to find out how all her soldiers had been disabled. Two people were screaming. She half-turned, tried to think of what she could do for them, then remembered the whole swarm was in trouble. She tried calling Medical. No luck there.

“General Kel Cheris to swarm grids,” she said. “Override Aerie Primary. Slave all moths to Unspoken Law .”

The responses stuttered back to her as the swarm moths acknowledged. Someone on Kel Liai Meng’s Essential Verses had recovered enough to acknowledge verbally, but when she asked for his status, there was no answer. Fear bit her heart.

Nerevor was now trying to stand up, but her legs kept collapsing under her, and her eyes were unfocused. Cheris went over and settled her against the wall, telling her to stay still, but Nerevor wouldn’t stop trying.

Sudden despair crashed over Cheris. She looked around the command center, and the knowledge of her failure was like a black knife. She was so tired, she had been in the darkness for so long, and she was fighting against long odds. If only she could fold asleep, just for a little space; and if only the universe had any mercy, she would never have to wake.

Cheris reached for her combat knife. She hadn’t thought she’d have further use for it on a moth, but there it was. She weighed it in her hand, then brought it up to her –

“Cheris, stop it.” It was Jedao, whispering as across a hollow distance.

“What happened to you?” she asked without interest.

“It hurts,” he said simply. “Cheris, put the knife away.”

“I failed,” she said, “and all of it was for nothing.”

“Cheris, I mean it.” His voice grew sharper. “You’re experiencing bleed-through. I’m sorry. But you need to put the knife away.”

She didn’t want to obey. It was tempting to close her eyes and use the knife anyway.

“The knife, Cheris.”

Then she understood. “This isn’t me,” she said, jolted out of the despair. “It’s you. How long have you been suicidal?” She sheathed the knife.

He had been a ghost for 397 years. She imagined that if there were a way for him to kill himself, he would have figured it out by now. Something she could use against him if he tried to pull mind games on her again.

“The bleed-through will pass,” Jedao said coolly, “and you’ll be all right. Prepare orders for the infantry and the Shuos infiltrators. The operator can’t sustain the shield inversion – look at the scan. They’re disabling the entire Fortress to get us. We’ll have to endure.”

Assuming the shields went down, they still had the problem of landing troops. She began setting up move orders, checking routes carefully to avoid collisions. It would be stupid to crash her own swarm.

Cheris heard thumping, and glanced back at Rahal Gara, who was going into convulsions. Gara wasn’t the only one. “This had better end soon,” she said.

Seven minutes and nineteen seconds later, the inverted shield dissipated completely.

A message came in from the Fortress. It said: “Very impressive, Garach Jedao. We’ll have a use for you.”

People were starting to recover, and they had a Fortress to conquer, but Cheris was remembering the knife. Jedao had claimed to fear being executed by the Shuos hexarch, but he was also suicidal. Something didn’t add up. She could only hope that she figured it out before it came around to bite her.

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

Priority:High

From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

To:Heptarch Liozh Zai

Calendrical Minutiae:Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, Day of the Goose, and now we’re down to hours or these reports will all look the same. How about Hour of the Locust? It seems appropriate.

All right. You know how much I hate to apologize. Well, I’m apologizing. I shouldn’t have shouted at you. That was the point at which the meeting degenerated past all hope of usefulness. One of my instructors used to say to me that if I was ever about to lose my temper, do something productive instead, like draw hanged stick figures on my tablet where no one can see them, or think up death-traps using office chairs and nail clippers. I used to think she was being facetious but now I see that was good advice. If nothing else, I bet I could get Stoghan with a pathetically simple trap. He’s very careless about personal security and I know you’ve noticed that too. (Don’t worry. You think you need him, so I’ll restrain myself.)

Anyway, I must impress this point upon you. My advice is only as good as the information I have to base it on. I don’t take it personally when the enemy tries to deceive me. They are only behaving rationally. On the other hand, it hurts your cause when you keep vital information from me. I’m not talking about things like that Andan-certified courtesan that Stoghan is seeing on the side, whom he thinks I don’t know about. I’m talking about things like the basic functioning of our famed defense system. If you knew the weakness in advance, why hide it from me?

You know the calculations as well as I do. Inconvenient arch-traitor or no, those shields were supposed to hold out indefinitely. We can’t predict how long it’ll take for the Hafn relief swarm to arrive. Even with considerable resources devoted to deceiving Kel Command, it’s hard for them not to figure out that the Hafn might head here.

So much for external problems. Let’s look at what’s going on in the six wards. Right now the Anemone Ward is a mess. Each report from Stoghan is more incoherent than the last. The loyalists seem to be fighting quite effectively, but we can’t allow them to hold the communications post.

I’m keeping an eye on atmospheric scores in the Drummers’ Ward and the Ribbon Ward, so don’t fret about public opinion fluctuations. We’re still convincing your citizens of the importance of adhering to the new calendars and participating in this newfangled voting thing. No blunt methods. I’ve always despised the Vidona. Which reminds me, we’ve got to be faster at processing the Vidona detainees for release. Word will get out and that can only do us good.

The loyalists aren’t anywhere near the routes to the command center, which is another reason to silence them quickly. I’ve always found it charming how your high language associates “silence” and “community.” Where I come from, it’s “silence” and “death.”