Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“He’s very busy,” Cheris said. It was bad enough that she had to put up with Jedao. The least she could do for her infantry commander was shield him from the fox’s direct interference.

“All he has to do is give us pointers to the best examples of the Liozh getting shot into sieves,” Jedao said. “Just leave him a message and he’ll respond when he has the time. I doubt it’ll take him that long.”

Cheris thought of her instructors dismissing Kel actions against the Liozh as unworthy of study, victories too easily won. “I’m still not sure –”

“Did you play many games in academy? Sports?”

“Dueling mostly,” Cheris said. Here it came, the ubiquitous Shuos obsession with games.

Jedao snorted. “You’re thinking something uncharitable about foxes. Tell you what, then. We’re going to make a game.”

“I should get back to the command center, is what I should be doing.” She eyed the clock and the shift schedule. Technically she wasn’t due back for another five hours and forty-one minutes, but she didn’t want to admit it.

“If they needed you, they’d have sent for you,” Jedao said. “You could use more sleep, but you’re unlikely to see sense about that.”

Cheris finally realized what he had said. “I have people dying down there and you want me to play another fucking Shuos game?”

“I said invent a game. We won’t have time to play it.”

“Why?” Cheris said.

“We’re going to invent a game about the Fortress.”

He wasn’t going to let it go. “If you want a battle simulation, wouldn’t it be better to use one of the ones already in the grid?”

“But that would only tell me what the simulator thinks of the situation. And the level of abstraction is too low – we’ll get back to that. I want to know how you understand the situation, Cheris.”

“What, you don’t have a plan? I thought you always had a plan.”

“Humor me.”

She had misgivings, but – “Where do we start?”

Maddeningly, he responded as she had thought he would. “Where do you think we should start?”

Cheris thought for a moment. Under other circumstances, and with the help of some beer, it would have been tempting to devise a taxonomy that could handle dueling, jeng-zai, and truth-or-dare. But Jedao would have a specific purpose in mind, and he wouldn’t have given her an impossible task. “If the point is a specific game, I’ll start by modifying an existing game.” A mathematical solution: reduce a problem to a previously solved problem.

Jedao didn’t say anything, so Cheris assumed she was being left to thrash around for his edification. She went to the terminal and pulled up fires-and-towers. Using it as a basis, she set up an asymmetrical two-player board game to be played with grid assistance. There was no point making the bookkeeping more annoying than necessary.

She lost time on legible visual representations. It wouldn’t do for the player to confuse infantry and infiltrators, for instance. Assigning legal moves and point values was worse. How was she supposed to know the heretics’ strength? Was she supposed to ensure that both sides were evenly matched? She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it. And she omitted the shields, since they had been cracked and weren’t relevant anymore.

Cheris was confronted with the difficulty of coding a grid opponent so she could test the values. Normally she would have asked a servitor for help, but she suspected Jedao would intervene. The attack values on some of the guns felt too high to be realistic, but you probably couldn’t tell by eyeballing the numbers. If only she had more time –

She straightened and barked a laugh. If Jedao meant to distract her from her duty, he was succeeding. She longed for a call from the command center, even if it implied a new disaster.

It was peculiar that Jedao seemed determined to teach her. Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to trigger her formation instinct so she could convey his orders without any of this back and forth?

Her mind was wandering again. She had barely addressed combat resolution. It was tempting to squander time on pseudorandom generators and probability distributions because at least she understood those, but it was more important to pick something inoffensive and run with it.

It was impossible not to think of herself as the Kel swarm, even in the context of scratchy, half-formed notations. She put herself in the role of the Fortress’s commandant and saw problems with the game that hadn’t been evident before: ambiguities, ill-defined objectives, a certain lopsidedness of agency. Surely the heretics had motives and the ability to maneuver toward their own goals. The game should reflect that.

She entered more scratchwork, agonizingly aware of the mess of numbers and contradictory rules and shaky assumptions. A senior cadet had once told her that proofs were just like essays, no one expected the rough draft to be a work of art, but it was hard not to feel that she should try for elegance from the outset.

“You can stop there,” Jedao said.

Cheris’s eyes felt sand-dry. “It won’t work,” she said.

“There are issues that would come up in initial playtest,” Jedao said, “but that’s not a bad first outing, especially from a Nirai thinker. You should have seen the first time I went through design critique. Blood everywhere.”

She had a hard time believing that.

“Cheris, I wasn’t born a tactician. I had to learn like everyone else.”

“Tell me,” she said carefully, “why you stopped me there.”

“You must suspect or you wouldn’t be asking.”

“That was when I changed my focus to consider the Fortress’s player.”

But why stop there? If the Fortress expected aid from – “The foreigners,” Cheris said in a rush. “They’re part of the situation. And our objectives aren’t exactly the same as Kel Command’s, or they wouldn’t keep hiding information from us.” And who else? What other players had she missed?

She remembered, with nauseating clarity, the Shuos eye watching her out of her own face. Subcommand Two’s face.

She had gotten the scenario wrong. Her focus had been on the immediate problem of subduing the Fortress, without encoding the context.

“I see,” Cheris said. “I got caught up in the tactical problem, when the issue is strategy. All that time with modifiers and attack values and it wasn’t even relevant.”

“Well, we were sent here as tacticians,” Jedao said, “so you’re not entirely to blame.”

“Still, I appreciate the lesson,” Cheris said, thinking that next time she would try to catch on sooner.

“It’s not over,” Jedao said. “Two things. First: the value of a game is in abstraction. Many Nirai go in for simulationist approaches, a tendency you share, but sometimes you learn more by throwing details out than coding them all in. You want to get rid of everything nonessential, cook it down to its simplest possible form.”

“I see, sir.” The fact that she had been solving the wrong problem with great dedication, if not exactly enthusiasm, was humbling.

“Second: what do you think games do? What are they about?”

The flippant answers weren’t going to be right, but she had no idea what he was after. “Winning and losing?” she said. “Simulations?”

“It hasn’t escaped me that your first answer is a Kel answer and the second is a Nirai answer,” Jedao said. “A Rahal would say that games are about rules, an Andan would say they’re about passing time with people, and who knows what the Vidona are authorized to say.”

“You’re a Shuos,” Cheris said, “so I presume you’re going to tell me what the Shuos answer is.”