Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“Nothing from Kel Command,” Cheris said bitterly. She had sent a couple more inquiries, on the grounds that she’d like to know how close the invasion swarm was. No further word from Brigadier General Marish, either. “Anyway, if we force-jump the heretics’ calendar at that time, it’ll give us the opening we need.”

Commander Hazan coughed. “To give the heretics a victory feast, sir,” he said, “we need to give them a victory. A big one.”

Cheris looked at him steadily. “That’s right. Or the appearance of a big victory, and enough time for the infiltrators to seed a ‘spontaneous’ celebration on our schedule.” Back to Gara: “Can you work with Weapons on this moth and the Sincere Greeting to prepare the winnowers and their crews?”

“Yes, sir,” Gara said.

Now all she had to do was figure out the least expensive, most convincing way to lose a battle.

SERVITOR OVERGROUP THREE 13610 had no fear of enclosed spaces. As a snakeform, its duties often took it into the Unspoken Law ’s less accessible passages. It sometimes wondered what burrowing felt like, not that it could experience atavistic urges from an evolutionary past it didn’t have, but the cindermoth was low on dirt and high on unyielding metal.

13610 had been loaded into a propaganda canister that it refused to dignify with a number. The interior was cushioned with webbing, into which recreational drugs were tucked. 13610 had assayed a capsule: a euphoric variant of a painkiller the Kel used with some frequency. Uninteresting molecular structure, but that wasn’t the point. It contemplated discussing chemistry with a heretic, but the average heretic was probably as minimally informed on the subject as the average Kel. Most Kel didn’t care about things unless they made other things blow up. Endearing, really.

Someone banged on the canister. “Er, fourteen minutes to launch,” said a high, nervous voice. “Are you, er, comfortable in there?”

13610 failed to see what comfort had to do with anything. Did this Kel child want to hand out soothing logic puzzles and blankets?

One of the other servitors, taking pity on the child, made a chirring sound of reassurance.

“I should thank you for your service, too,” the Kel child said. “Since the general did. I expect formations will come very easily to you all.”

Amazing. The Kel were learning manners. It was a long-going and mostly affectionate debate among Kel servitors as to whether their humans were ever going to figure this out.

Fourteen minutes was a long time. 13610 reviewed its move orders and the formations General Cheris had provided diagrams for, the names of the Kel unit commanders who would be involved.

“Here we go,” the Kel child said. “Fire’s own fortune, and all that. Kill lots of heretics.”

The belt made a clattering sound, and then came the acceleration through the chute. 13610 had no visuals from within the canister, and it had instructions to keep scan to a minimum so as not to alert the heretics. Still, it knew how fast they were moving and their approximate trajectory. When the miniature engine cut in, it knew they had reached some cranny of the Fortress proper.

There was a hiss as the canister exuded a metalfoam blister, and then the burrower set to work puncturing the outer shell. This took some time, so 13610 contemplated some favorite theorems in algebraic topology. Pity for the heretics that the physical armor didn’t represent the latest in materials science advances, but the upgrades would have been exorbitantly expensive and no one would have been in a hurry to pay for them while everyone believed in the supremacy of invariant ice.

The canister finally dropped down with a thunk. 13610 listened hard for an hour, then extended the faintest tendrils of scan one by one in a radial pattern. Nothing.

13610 freed itself from the webbing and pried open the canister from the inside. Aha. The canister had lodged itself behind someone’s bookcase. How the canister had gotten here was a mystery, but no matter. 13610 risked another scan, reaching farther, farther – a signal there along the outer shell. Stop. That was probably a hostile. But 13610 had enough information to orient itself.

Time to slither out of the canister and make its way toward the rendezvous. Since it didn’t know how many interruptions to expect – bored heretical soldiers, feral fungus, odd bursts of radiation – it might as well move while it could.

IT WAS A very pretty attack if you didn’t care about it succeeding. Captain Kel Mieng, who had recently been deposited in the Drummers’ Ward, wished her mortar contained real rounds instead of harmless fireworks. They had been assigned to take and hold the Hall of Stochastic Longings. Mieng had misgivings about its security features. She had once gotten locked in a bank while she and her comrade Kel Belleren were visiting a mutual friend. Some idiot had adjusted a priceless ink painting personally instead of letting a bank servitor handle it, and had triggered a building-wide alarm.

Come to think of it, Belleren, who had made major, was in charge of a company in the van. It would be nice to catch up with him at some point.

One of the lieutenant colonels had asked Colonel Ragath why they were wasting time in the administrative district. Ragath had gotten that look. “The Drummers value this site,” he said. “Cultural heritage. I realize we’re all Kel, but try to pretend you didn’t have to look that up on the grid. For instance, one of those buildings is a museum. Contains the gun that General Andan Zhe Navo used in her last battle. The Hall of Stochastic Longings has an archive containing Andan and Liozh – yes, Liozh – documents going back 500 years.

“All this to say,” Ragath went on, “we may be able to get concessions out of the civilians by threatening to wreck priceless artifacts.” He had given orders against looting, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, but everyone wanted immediate revenge after the amputation gun. The current mission was some kind of backwards lose-so-we-win-later gambit, which made Mieng’s teeth itch.

It was hard to believe anyone would care about some Andan gun that hadn’t been properly cleaned for centuries, or a bunch of calligraphed books no one read anymore. But then, the colonel clearly cared about dried-up bits of history, so maybe he had some insight into how the Drummers felt about their artifacts.

The Drummers’ Forum was cursed with wide approaches, a boon to the Kel, and had a park that provided some cover. There was a lot of rubble already, from the forward companies that had gone in with real weapons for credibility’s sake. Bullets whined across the garden and kicked up dirt. Most of the corpses were unreal broken things, dressed in hats and jade necklaces and embroidered clothes. A lot of blood and stray body parts, too, like a human jigsaw upended.

They benefited from mostly unnecessary covering fire as they advanced to the Hall of Stochastic Longings. It was an eerie building, full of walls that sang your breath back to you as poetry, and light that coruscated like flowers. Beautiful, if you wanted to feel that beauty hid unhealthy secrets from you.

Guards offered some resistance, but the only one in the company who got seriously injured was Kel Ajerio, and he ought to have known better than to dash up like that.

Mieng had the gunner platoon set up in the atrium. “Where the hell is everyone?” she wondered. Scan told her, but –”We’re going to have to send two platoons to clean out the squirrels.” She hated splitting her company, but they couldn’t leave civilians running around.