Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

Faces pitted with bullet holes. Stagnant prayers scratched into dust. Eye sockets stopped up with ash. Mouths ringed with dried bile, tongues bitten through and abandoned like shucked oysters. Fingers worn down to nubs of bone by corrosive light. The beaks of scavenger birds trapped in twisted rib cages. Desiccated blood limning interference patterns. Intestines in three separate stages of decay, and even the worms had boiled into pale meat.

Two women. A man and a woman. A child. Another child. She hadn’t known there were so many children, even if they were heretics, but look, there was another. She had lost count already despite her intent to remember every one.

I remember every ugly thing I have ever done, Jedao had said. But Cheris wondered. It was impossible that he could remember causing all of this to happen without feeling all those deaths crouching at his side.

Cheris couldn’t bear the silence any longer. “Say whatever you mean to say,” she said.

“I know things about the victims that aren’t in the records,” Jedao said. He might have been standing right next to her, as a lover would: too close. “Ask me.”

She picked a foreign-looking name from the list. She was sure it belonged to a Lanterner. Her hands sweated inside her gloves.

“You’re thinking I couldn’t possibly say much about a Lanterner,” Jedao said, “but that’s not true. They were people, too, with their own histories. Look at where she died – yes, that’s a reasonable map. The Lanterners were desperate. They had tried using children and invalids as shields before, and they had learned from the second battle that that wouldn’t deter me.” His voice was too steady. “So they sent the dregs of their troops to die first. The report says she was found with a Tchennes 42 in her hand. The Tchennes was an excellent gun. They wouldn’t have handed one out except to an officer, someone they trusted to keep questionable soldiers in line. From her name, you can tell she probably came from Maign City.”

“All right,” Cheris said, digesting that, “another.” She pointed.

“He’s from the technician caste from what’s now the Outspecker Colonies, before the heptarchate annexed them. There was a conflict between Doctrine and Gheffeu caste structure – you’d need a Rahal to explain the details – so his people had to be assimilated. We’d tried raids with Shuos shouters for fast compliance, but the calendricals were too unstable. By the time Kel Command finished arguing with the Shuos heptarch about it, the Gheffeu had thrown in with the Lanterners.

“It was a mess that the Andan should have handled, but we were fighting each other for influence. You’re used to thinking of the hexarchate as a unified entity, but during my lifetime, the factions were still quarreling over Doctrine. The winners would have their specific technologies preserved under the final calendrical order, and the losers – well, we know what happened to the Liozh.

“Anyway, that man. He died among strangers. If you look at the other names, none of them are Gheffeu. The Lanterners didn’t trust their latest recruits and split up ethnic groups. He died during a Gheffeu holy week, and he would have been wearing a white armband in honor of a particular saint.”

Cheris wasn’t a historian, but she had the awful feeling that Jedao wasn’t making anything up.

She didn’t point for the third one. “Colonel Kel Gized.” Jedao’s chief of staff.

Jedao’s voice was no longer steady. “Do you want it backwards or forwards?”

Cheris pulled up a picture of Kel Gized because she wanted to know. Gized had a round, bland face and an untidy scar, shockingly pale against her dark brown skin, along the side of her head. The hair above it, cropped short, was gray. Her gloves looked like they were made of heavier material than the Kel favored nowadays. “Chronological,” Cheris said.

“I met her at one of those damnable flower-viewing parties I had to attend as a high officer. The host was a friend of the Andan heptarch’s sister. They liked to decorate parties with us military types to reassure the populace that the breakaway factions weren’t going to chew the realm to rags.

“I was looking at the orchids when I overheard Gized critiquing an Andan functionary’s poetry to his face. I decided I had to find out more about her, so I waited until she was done bludgeoning him about the head with his use of synecdoche, and asked her for a duel.”

It wasn’t much of an anecdote, although Kel who cared about literary techniques were oddities the way her ability at abstract mathematics was an oddity. But there was a brittle quality to his tone.

“It was over very quickly. I’ve only once lost a duel to a Kel, and it wasn’t Gized. She wasn’t humiliated, she was bored. She’d come to enjoy the party and I was getting in the way. But I looked up her profile. Mediocre duelist, excellent administrator. When Kel Command gave me my pick of staff, I chose her. You would have liked her. She tolerated all the games I challenged her to despite never figuring out how to bluff at jeng-zai, but it was always clear that I was wasting her time.”

“Then why do it? Why the games?”

His voice came from a little ways off, as though he had paced to the far end of the room. “You probably have some notion that we wield weapons and formations and plans. But none of that matters if you can’t wield people. You can learn about how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane.” The word choice jarred Cheris. “So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”

“You haven’t challenged me to anything,” Cheris said, wondering.

“What, and interrupt your dramas? You’re entitled to leisure time. I have to admit, I don’t even know what to make of the episode with the dolphin chorale.”

Now he was trying to distract her. “Tell me how you killed her,” she said.

“There’s not a lot to tell,” Jedao said. Pacing again. “She had an analytical mind and wouldn’t have considered me above suspicion. Another ten minutes and she would have concluded that everything going wrong implied a very highly placed traitor. Lucky for me she was never a fast thinker. I shot her through the side of the head.

“It was a bad moment because Jiang and Gwe Pia were also in the command center, and Gwe Pia was a spectacularly good shot. She would have gotten me if she’d been willing to shoot through Jiang, but she wouldn’t have thought of that, even if I did straight off.”

Cheris could think of words for an officer who immediately jumped to shooting through a comrade as a firing solution.

“Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getting low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.”

“This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped.

“I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?”

“It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation?

“You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.”

“Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise ?”

A ragged silence. “Fine. But listen, if your purpose was to kill a large group of people concentrated in one location, what would be the sensible way of doing it?”

Her shoulders ached. “Orbital bombardment,” she said reluctantly.

“The way I did it made no sense.”

He was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t imagine what it was. Her formation instinct was at a low ebb. The Kel relied on hierarchy, and he had comprehensively betrayed his subordinates. “Why does it matter?” she said. “My career isn’t going anywhere.”