Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“It’s the principle of the thing. I would have liked to be an instructor, I even put in the request, but they wanted me in the field.”

Cheris stared at the shadow. A few hundred years of Nirai expertise and they didn’t even know what was wrong with him. What had she been thinking, fetching him out of the Kel Arsenal? And what had Kel Command been thinking for letting her do it?

She pulled up the figures again, made them march neatly for her inspection. “Do you have anything to say to that?”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know about myself,” Jedao said.

“Explain it to me,” Cheris said. She wasn’t going to shout. “Make the numbers make sense. It can’t have been a case of breaking under stress; I don’t know what stress you could have been under. Candle Arc, outnumbered eight to one by the Lanterners, sure. Of course, you won that one so handily it’s in all the textbooks. But Hellspin Fortress? Everyone agrees the Lanterners were doomed. So what happened? Why don’t the numbers work?”

“You’re the one who’s good with figures,” Jedao retorted. “Run the numbers and you tell me.”

Numbers. Everyone knew Shuos Jedao for the massacre, but she wondered how many people he would have killed if he had continued what had been a brilliant career.

The people he would have destroyed in that imaginary past would have been the heptarchate’s enemies. Their lives shouldn’t be reckoned as equal to those of the heptarchate’s own citizens. But she wondered.

“There must have been some reason for all that death,” Cheris said. “If you’d sold out to the Lanterners, that would at least be a motive. But wrecking both sides like that? With no one standing to gain?” She remembered the bleed-through. “Was it because you wanted to die and you were taking it out on everyone else?” But why would he have been suicidal before Hellspin, or the black cradle?

“I’m not completely stupid,” Jedao snapped. “If I’d meant to kill myself at Hellspin Fortress, I would have put a bullet in my head. My aim isn’t that bad.”

She had hit a nerve. It must gall him that he could never hold a weapon again.

“Maybe I’m only what they say I am.” There was still an edge to his voice. “A madman. I had an excellent career. I had comrades. I had power, if you care about power. There’s no sane reason to give any of that up.”

He was trying to tell her something again and it was right in front of her where she couldn’t see it. But she was exhausted, and it was difficult to think clearly. “Yes, well, you have immortality instead,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying it.”

Jedao was silent.

“The people you killed never had a chance,” she said, willing him to answer her. “And none of them are coming back, either.”

Unexpectedly, he said, “A million people dead four centuries before you were born, and you care about them. It speaks well of you, even if it doesn’t speak well of me.”

She couldn’t sleep for a long time after that.

“NEW ORDERS FROM Colonel Ragath,” the captain had said once upon a time. At one point, Kel Niaad had been able to recite them word for word. Now he wasn’t sure if there was anything in his head but the staccato of gunfire.

A scant hour ago they had been advancing through a residential complex in the Anemone Ward. Fighting had been a matter of around-the-corner shots and shatter grenades, the heartstop terror that every moan in the Fortress’s winds was death in red spikes coming straight for their eyes. The captain had ordered the patrol to hold the complex against the heretics, but almost all were dead, one was not just dead but obliterated into a stray loop of intestine on a potted shrub, and one was comatose, a state Niaad would have preferred for himself.

The other surviving member was Corporal Kel Isaure, whose only reaction to the gore had been to send Niaad to retrieve equipment from the dead. She didn’t shirk danger herself; she’d ventured farther than he had. Niaad wished she wouldn’t risk herself. If she died, his formation instinct would short out and the heretics would find him curled in a ball.

“Niaad.” It was Isaure, her voice hoarse but clear. “Hey, soldier. You awake?”

The shouts and thuds and clatter of ricochets seemed farther away than before, but sound traveled strangely in the Fortress.

“I’m awake, Corporal,” Niaad said. He couldn’t get his eyes to focus on her.

“I need you, soldier,” Isaure said. “You’re a lousy excuse for a Kel, but you’re all I have left.”

The insult, basic as it was, kept his attention.

“Thing is,” Isaure said, drawing lines into the shrapnel and shredded metalweave with her toe, “to cut us off from our company, they should either be coming through this branch or branch 71-13. I have no idea what the fuck our general is up to, but neither side has seen fit to blow up the ward with us still in it. Which is good. But we have to take the Fortress so the Vidona can get to work. Which means getting our asses out of this fucking complex so we can be useful.”

Niaad stared at her.

“Only thing is,” Isaure said, “do we go straight toward the corpsefuckers, or cut ourselves a shortcut?”

Niaad was alarmed. Isaure was only a corporal, and the captain had been quite specific that they had to hold this miserable complex until they received orders otherwise.

“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” Isaure said as she continued to draw a map with her toe. It was surprisingly good, especially if you ignored the streaky marks left by skull splinters and the accompanying shreds of brain. “Dregs spit up by Personnel because they needed more warm bodies.”

Niaad wished the corporal would stop philosophizing and give a fucking order already.

“We have the same problem.” Now Isaure was kneeling and using gristle to diagram a perimeter. Her expression showed nothing but contempt for the situation. “You jump –” She banged the nearest wall. The noise was horrifyingly loud, and it took Niaad a full three seconds to stop scrabbling for cover. “– at the smallest noises and you’re not getting much benefit from formation instinct.”

There wasn’t much Niaad could say to that. When the head of the man next to him had been vaporized, he had fallen apart.

Isaure crouched and made a second diagram. Niaad should have been paying attention, but he couldn’t think clearly. Every so often, Isaure lifted her head to listen, but if she had any conclusions about what was going on, she didn’t share them.

“You should ask,” she said at last.

“Corporal?”

“Ask why I’m the same as you. Soldier no one has a use for.”

Now she was getting personal. “Why, sir?” he said warily.

“I used to be a tank captain,” Isaure said. “A good one.” She frowned at the gristle, then wiped it off with her glove and marked out a new perimeter, this time scratching it into the floor with a bit of broken tile that shrieked as it drew the curve. “Miss the beasts. But they found out I was good at saying no to stupid orders.”

Niaad swore in spite of himself. The corporal was a crashhawk, a formation breaker. His formation instinct might not keep him from blanking in the middle of a firefight, but it did oblige him to follow orders, even a crashhawk’s orders.

Isaure was snickering. “It’s your lucky day, Niaad. They stripped my commission and broke me all the way down, and reinjected me with formation instinct. They never realized it didn’t take the second time, either.”