Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“What are you doing here?” 124816 asked over one of the servitor channels. “You don’t have to be subjected to this.”

7777777 fluttered a noncommittal light outside the human visible spectrum. “Hexarch Nirai Kujen,” it said. Apparently Kujen had gone beyond the routine security checks on anchors and was taking an inordinate interest in all aspects of Kel Cheris’s life: her ties to the Mwennin community (minimal, except for her parents), her tastes in music (suspiciously aligned with the soundtracks of her favorite dramas), and most troublesome of all, her mathematical papers (few, mostly in number theory, but brilliant). Worst of all, Kujen wasn’t going through the Shuos to obtain this information. He was using his own agents.

The two Kel had apparently decided that one go-round wasn’t enough and to try again. They were going to get caught at this rate.

124816 hadn’t had much interaction with Nirai servitors, but it knew the stories about Nirai Kujen. He was old, very old, and he liked people as long as they entertained him. If they stopped being entertaining, he didn’t hesitate to modify them so they became entertaining again. It was not an accident that he was one of the best psych surgeons in the hexarchate. As far as the servitors could tell, the reason any Nirai ever worked with him voluntarily was that he also loved mathematics and engineering, and as a corollary, other people who had a high degree of ability in those fields. He could provide quite handsomely for people with such skills. The servitors would have preferred that Cheris remain out of his sight, but the Shuos hexarch had put paid to that.

“Too bad we can’t help Cheris escape,” 124816 said, “if only on principle.” But Cheris’s sense of duty would prevent her from abandoning the mission, that much was clear.

“We’re the people who didn’t leave the hexarchate even though that was once an option,” 7777777 retorted.

Neither of them had to voice what they both knew: Shuos Jedao was the complication. Nirai Kujen was the only one able to separate Cheris from Jedao, and the servitors weren’t going to risk bringing themselves to Jedao’s attention any more than they had already by providing her with company the way they had all her life.

Hadang and Jua seemed to have finally decided that enough was enough and they should run back where no one would suspect what they had just been up to. They dressed rapidly. Jua left second, fumbling with her comb.

124816 was glad they had left. “The best thing we can do is look for an opportunity to help with Cheris’s mission and handle the Kujen situation after Cheris is returned to the black cradle facility,” it said.

As it turned out, they wouldn’t have long to wait before Cheris herself gave them the opening they needed.

LIEUTENANT KEL HREN was composing in her head when the orders came down from Captain Kel Zethka. The one problem with military life was that you couldn’t schedule the interruptions. People could whine all they liked about the skull-splitting boredom. Hren had never had a problem with that. She could take her music with her wherever she went.

“Platoon Two, are you paying attention?” Zethka’s voice didn’t become any more mellifluous over the link. “No time for a full briefing, so you need to stay awake. That’s up the passage to the east and take the second right, not your other right but your actual right, in twenty-two minutes. We’re going to hit the corrosion generators now that the Nirai have figured out how to tunnel past the invariant ice strands without filling the air with toxic fibers. Lieutenant, if I hear you’re late because you have your soldiers practicing four-part harmony, I will smother you with a drum hide. Got that?”

“Twenty-two minutes, east passage, second tunnel to the right, flank the generators, compliments to the Nirai, no musical endeavors, sir,” Hren said. That last was a lie, there was always some scrap of music in her head, but Zethka couldn’t listen in on her thoughts.

They had been resupplying their air tanks from the emergency stores at this theater and were just about done. Waste of a perfectly good theater. They could have put together a satire to pass the time, but the captain would have found out, and he already had a low opinion of Hren.

Hren didn’t care, but Zethka found her infuriating. “The woman’s a vegetable who happens to have perfect pitch and an eidetic memory for noise,” Hren had once overheard Zethka saying when he was drunk. “I don’t care how good she is with communications tech, what the fuck is she doing in the Kel?” Hren thought this was very funny, but it wouldn’t do to let him know that.

Some of Hren’s soldiers were trying to conceal a round of cards when she told them to pack it up. As if she didn’t know they’d been playing a jeng-zai variant called Fuck the Calendar. They weren’t supposed to be playing games during resupply, period, but Hren considered it better than the alternatives. The recreational drugs that the moths had been flinging at the Fortress in those propaganda canisters, for instance. The canisters had a knack for tunneling their way to the damndest places, and some of her soldiers hadn’t been above liberating the contents for their own amusement.

On the way, she reviewed the route and the procedure for clearing the Fortress’s compartments with her soldiers. Everyone hated using gridpaper for diagrams, but with field grids unavailable there was no help for it.

“How do we know they won’t just blow out the passage, sir?” It was Kel Chion, who had a knack for coming up with annoying questions. Hren’s sergeant was giving her that “you should be shutting him up” look.

“Because,” Hren said in spite of herself, “our superiors selected the assault so they can’t blow it up without tearing out structural supports. It’s terrible engineering, but the Fortress’s architects had to accommodate veins for invariant ice, which was supposed to do all the heavy defensive work.” The sergeant was right, though. Better to shut Chion up. “That idiot Huo is having trouble with her pack. Again. Go sort her out.”

They collided with Captain Kel Miyaud’s company on the way, a terrible mess with too many people clogging the passage. After some confusion, Miyaud gave way, which necessitated tucking away Kel in side-corridors and sad empty domiciles.

Hren didn’t hear the shouts until they were about to pass through the reinforced breach. She was damned if the pale gauzy stuff the Nirai had put up could possibly filter out toxics, and for that matter the bridgework looked too delicate. Still, her orders were to go forward, so she marched obligingly forward, and –

It happened between one footstep and the next. It didn’t hurt at first. There it came, that bizarre prickly speckling of the air she’d heard about with the corrosion gradient, but it wasn’t –

When Hren fell, it hurt. She smelled blood and shit, heard things clattering. Something landed hard against two of her vertebrae. Her face was reflected smudgily in the floor.

Most of her nose was missing. Blood all over.

The world was quiet and slow, and her thinking was calm. Clear. For once there was no music in her head. She couldn’t hear much, not even the shouts from earlier.

Her nose wasn’t the only thing missing. Her arms were gone, too. And her legs, except a bit of her right thigh. Her suit had injected her with coagulants, painkillers, sprayed her with temporary skin, but that wasn’t going to save her or anyone else.

Hren coughed out a laugh, but she was sliding out of consciousness, and that wasn’t a horrible plan. She was only sorry she wouldn’t be awake to whistle a taunt at the heretics when they came to survey the carnage.

CHERIS HAD NAPPED briefly before the assault was set in motion. In her dreams, she had a set of jeng-zai cards, a pile of fire tokens, and a red, red ribbon that kept unfurling into messy clots every time she set it down. Now that she was awake, she couldn’t stop seeing ribbons in her mind’s eye every time a number slipped out of the desired parameter space.