Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

Still, Vahenz found the situation deplorable. It was sheer stupid luck that she’d escaped the bomb’s area of effect, and even then the fringe of the blast had knocked half her systems offline, frying her box of sweet bean pastries in the process. The saving grace was that her needlemoth’s stealth systems had been spared, so the Fortress didn’t shoot her down while she was making emergency repairs.

Vahenz had an intimate familiarity with the Fortress’s scan suites and their limitations. So when she repaired her own scan and it told her there was a single surviving life form on the Unspoken Law , not only was she sure who the survivor had to be, she was also sure that the Fortress had no idea anyone was wandering around the hulk of what had once been a perfectly functional cindermoth.

She could have dealt with the situation a few different ways. Not by leaving, although her superiors would probably have preferred that she report to them sooner rather than later. What news of the mess was public was no doubt giving them ulcers. She couldn’t simply shoot up the cindermoth, either. The needlemoth was good at stealth, but not good enough to disguise a serious display of fireworks even if it had had the necessary firepower.

She had considered tipping off the Kel that their target was still alive and letting them deal with the problem. Of course, she couldn’t be absolutely certain that that hadn’t been the intent. No: she was going to have to take out Jedao herself. More fun this way, anyhow. She always enjoyed the chance to take out an interesting opponent herself, instead of relying on underlings to do it for her.

The carrion bomb was intended to wipe out people rather than inorganic structures. In particular, it had clearly not been designed to destroy something the size of a cindermoth, not in one hit. Which wasn’t to say that the cindermoth was undamaged, and she knew for a fact that the rest of the swarm wasn’t in great shape either. The cindermoth’s upper surface looked like someone had made a jigsaw of it with the help of a glassblower’s mad fantasias, but life-support still functioned, and artificial gravity looked like it wasn’t trying to do anything innovative. With a sufficiently good team of Nirai, you might even be able to get it to fly in a few days.

Vahenz slipped the needlemoth next to one of the hopper bays and got to work with its burrowers. This was exactly the kind of dead time that she had brought the pastries for, and instead she was reduced to staring at her scan suites while she waited to penetrate the Unspoken Law . If any of its food stores had survived, it was probably Kel food. The Kel had a displeasing fascination with vegetables. To say nothing of the dreadful pickles.

Scan gave her a pretty good idea of what the internals looked like, a mess of passages and cracked walls. She loaded the maps into her augment and memorized as much as she could the old-fashioned way, just in case. You never knew when stray exotic effects would interfere with your personal tech. And while she doubted Jedao had emerged from the bombing unscathed, she expected that he would be far from an easy target.

She suited up no earlier than she had to, and brought along a torchknife and scorch pistol. It was a pity that she had no handheld scanner that could pinpoint a life form’s location. She was going to have to leave the needlemoth’s scanner running and rely on its grid to update her through the link. Setting up an ambush under these conditions was going to be an interesting challenge.

From the moment Vahenz stepped into the cindermoth, glass fibers drifted in the air, loosened by the intrusion. Her suit’s filters would protect her, but she couldn’t escape the sensation of ashes on the roof of her mouth, as though she were walking through a forest a scant hour after the inferno sputtered out. Her light, ordinarily a clear white, turned the color of broken steel in the dark passages.

The single life-sign had been moving slowly and erratically in the command center since Vahenz picked it up on scan. Wounded, she imagined, and trying to figure out his situation.

Vahenz watched it on the overlay map for a few minutes, then headed toward the command center. The acting commander apparently hadn’t been doing anything fancy with variable layout when the bomb hit. Even so, it was hard not to look askance at the skewed angles, the walls bowed outward, the pitted floors. If she had been more imaginative, she would have fancied that she saw crumpled eyes staring up out of the holes.

Here the game picked up. Jedao’s movements changed, became more purposeful. Hard to tell, though: had he detected her, or was this coincidental? Most of the cindermoth’s systems were blown to hell and gone, but it wasn’t impossible that he had managed to revive enough to figure out that he wasn’t alone anymore. She kept watching without looking for explicit cues: intuition, she judged, would give her the best sense of his awareness of her.

It was impossible to ignore the gritty texture beneath her boots as she worked her way down the corridors, as though she walked through the wreckage of a sandglass. It felt as though she was making loud crunching sounds, although her sensors assured her she was being reasonably quiet. The ashhawk paintings to either side of her were damaged beyond all hope: gold leaf peeling free in agonizing spirals, bird necks crumpled into uncomfortable knots, brush-strokes transfixed by splinters. Holes stabbed across the Kel watchwords: from every spark a fire .

Jedao had passed out of the command center. Unfortunately, the fastest way to intercept him was by going through it; she’d have to risk it. You didn’t have to be a fox to think of setting traps. The only thing that would keep him from doing so, she imagined, was lack of opportunity. Given that he’d been bombed, he’d assume that someone would come for him sooner or later.

As it turned out, he’d had the opportunity, although the first concrete sign she had that her quarry knew that she had boarded wasn’t the trap. The first sign was the emblem that Jedao had scratched into the floor, aligned so that she would see it right-side up as she entered. The doors were warped open. Vahenz fired scorch bursts ahead of her as she sprinted through and to one side – it was a long time since she had made the amateur’s mistake of freezing in the doorway to make a target of herself – but there was no return fire. If Jedao was still in the area, he was well-hidden. Which didn’t mean she was safe. His heat signatures hadn’t faded entirely, and tellingly, she picked up a muffled thump, as though he’d stumbled. He couldn’t be too far.

She hadn’t paused as she passed the emblem, which looked like it had been carved with a Kel combat knife. However, she triggered several snapshots in passing so that she could review them more closely later, preferably when she wasn’t pinned in a vulnerable location.

It was an appallingly clumsy trap, and Vahenz didn’t so much as sweat as she flung herself away from the scatter of small explosions and behind a crystal pillar. He’d probably run out of time and decided that a half-assed effort was better than getting nothing for his trouble. Jedao had stripped weapons from the dead to set up that little display of fireworks, but the standard-issue Kel pistols had not reacted well to standard-issue Kel betrayal. After scanning the area again, she ventured out and knelt to inspect a bullet. It didn’t even resemble a bullet anymore, but one of those quasicrystal dodecahedrons that used to be popular as earrings back home.

Jedao hadn’t been able to hide other traces of his work. There were footprints and long, unsteady furrows where he had tried to lever himself up after taking a spill. Either the gravity had still been sorting itself out while he had been doing his work here, or he’d already been in the command center when the bomb hit.