Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

I know what those are, Cheris thought blankly. Everyone did, and everyone knew the old chant: From every mouth a maw; from every door a death.

People remembered the winnowers because of the use Jedao had made of them at Hellspin Fortress. Even today, Kel Command used them sparingly.

“What are the guidance parameters?” Cheris said, because she had to say something.

“Well, that’s the interesting part, sir,” Gara said, as though they were discussing a vacation spot and not a weapon. “Most winnower variants are full-spectrum death. We might, however, be able to get this one to target heretics selectively.”

“Weapons that attempt to target loyalty-states are better known for fratricide,” Cheris said. It was the subject of a whole category of Kel jokes.

Gara looked at her again, but was undeterred. “At least give us permission to pursue this. If it does pan out, it won’t be much work to modify the winnowers that Unspoken Law and Sincere Greeting carry.”

“Very well,” Cheris said. “Keep me apprised of your results, but set nothing in motion without my approval.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Cheris shook her head. “Why did Gara keep looking at me strangely?” she asked.

“Cheris,” Jedao said, “can you hear yourself?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,” she said in confusion.

“Not your hearing. Your accent.”

“Everyone has an accent,” Cheris said, even more confused. Her mother had told her that after she came home crying because some children had made fun of the way she talked. Of course, her mother hadn’t been able to hide the fact that some accents were better than others. By her second year as a cadet, Cheris had conformed her speech to Academy Prime standard.

“Yes,” Jedao said, “but yours has been slipping and it’s particularly bad today. Listen to my speech patterns and then listen to yourself.”

“Are we talking about bleed-through?” Cheris said. “Because if you have anything else to share on that front, I think I deserve to know.”

He was right. She was speaking with his drawl.

“Speech is a physical act,” Jedao said. “It’s probably related to the muscle memory issue. And no, I don’t think there are any more surprises in store for you.”

Well, it wasn’t as if her soldiers didn’t already regard her with suspicion. “Can’t be helped,” she said, more firmly than she felt. Besides, they had more important matters to deal with. “I don’t know about the threshold winnower,” she said, “but if Doctrine can get it to work at all, it would be a valuable asset.”

“You can’t afford to ignore the possibility,” Jedao said. “Even a flawed winnower is one hell of a weapon.” His voice flexed slightly, then steadied.

“How long did it take you to set yours up?” Cheris asked coolly.

“Quite a while, I imagine.”

“If you were there, how can you not know?”

“My memories of the siege are a mess,” Jedao said. “There was very little screaming where I was. They died too fast. I could hear a little over the communications channels that had been left open before the winnower turned everything to static. I spent a full half-hour wandering around the moth trying to figure out why Gized wasn’t answering my calls. I didn’t recognize her with the hole in the side of her head.

“I remember when the Kel arrested me. They should have blown up my command moth with missiles, but they boarded and used tranquilizer clouds instead. Maybe they wanted an identifiable body.

“And then there were the numbers. They told me about all the people who were dead, ours and theirs. But then, war is about taking the future away from people.”

“And you think we should use this weapon?” Cheris said.

“If it works, yes. Dead is dead, Cheris. Do you think it makes any difference whether you’re killed by a knife in the back or a bullet? The important thing is to get the job done.”

“If we can use winnowers,” Cheris said, “they can too.”

“Possible, but unlikely. If they had it, they would have deployed it by now. My guess is they need something about those coefficients in their particular calendar, or maybe they’re having trouble manipulating the appropriate atmospherics.”

“Jedao,” she said, “how are we supposed to shift the calendricals to get this to work? A focused change would do it, but we only have a toehold down there. We can’t even deploy field grids. My people aren’t known for their persuasion skills, and there aren’t enough Shuos.”

“There’s a way,” he said. “But you won’t like it.”

“It’s not a matter of liking anymore,” Cheris said. “I’m ready to hear it.”

THE STORAGE HOLD’S official purpose was to contain metalfoam in compressed bricks, largely for use in patching up the cindermoth after battle. At the moment, it was also being used by two Kel. Servitor 124816 knew their names and ranks, and other things besides: Corporal Kel Hadang, a blocky woman with yellow-pale skin and dark hair that, unpinned, fell to mid-back, above a tattoo of a diving falcon; Kel Jua, also female and not much younger, with an astonishing knack for misplacing her elbows. 124816 didn’t precisely care about the mechanics of humans having sex. It was impossible to avoid learning the basics, though, considering that watching the humans’ dramas was a common servitor pastime and the humans were easily obsessed with the combinatorics of who was sleeping with whom.

The servitors on the Unspoken Law rotated what they called Suicidal Kel Duty, which consisted of tracking Kel who were sleeping with each other. If they had had any interest in sharing their observations with the Kel commanders, the list would have made an excellent blackmail file. 124816 would personally have classified Hadang and Jua’s relationship as consensual, despite the difference in rank, since it had never found any evidence that Hadang had coerced Jua; indeed, the two were silent even in the throes of climax, and it fancied it saw a certain tenderness in their interactions. But that wasn’t the case for a number of the others. Cheris, if notified, wouldn’t have the luxury of making distinctions. Kel regulations would oblige her to execute the lot. The servitors had no intention of notifying her unless she asked, and they were pretty sure, given all the things she had on her mind, that she wouldn’t think to ask.

There was something sad about the way some Kel were forced to sneak around while seeking a human connection, and something terrible about the ones who weren’t given a choice in the matter thanks to formation instinct. Kel Command wasn’t ignorant of the problem and provided everything from simulators to libido suppressants during tours of duty, but their solutions didn’t work for everyone. As for the servitors, their interest in the situation was purely utilitarian. Kel who were busy being intimate were Kel who were less likely to notice discrepancies in their surroundings, including discrepancies maintained by the servitors for their own convenience. There was, for this reason, a high correlation between preferred Kel trysting spots and servitor meeting locations.

124816 was wondering why Hadang and Jua were taking longer than usual – twelve minutes longer and counting – when Servitor 7777777, a beetleform, came in through one of the servitor entrances. (There were many more servitors’ doors than the humans realized, or than the humans had designed, for that matter. But then, servitors had done a fair deal of the construction work on the moth to begin with.) 7777777 had always had a rebellious streak: seven wasn’t a favored number in the hexarchate, even if humans used their own designations for servitors and weren’t permitted to find out the servitors’ own names for themselves.