Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

That reminded her: the Deuce of Gears swarm had made a botched attempt at evasion when it was far too late. Why hadn’t Jedao seen the knife coming for his back?

Just how badly injured was the fox, anyway? Assuming he wasn’t feigning, which was a big assumption. Vahenz quickly checked the rest of the command center, but most of the terminals were pretty thoroughly wrecked.

The needlemoth called in with an update: the life sign had taken a turn and was headed deeper into the moth’s guts. She narrowed her eyes at the pale-dark glass, the gravelly sounds it made underfoot. Charming exhibit, but she did have an opponent to destroy.

Vahenz wasn’t superstitious about moths the way some of the Nirai got – one of many reasons she avoided getting stuck at bars with amorous technicians – but the unceasing slivered reflections, the eyeless spaces, the syncopated lights made her tense. Well, shooting people could be relaxing, if you shot the right people. She’d settle for that, and promise herself extra luxury when she made it somewhere safe with civilized amenities.

She brought up the photos of the Deuce of Gears. The image came up in front of her left eye, and she saw what hadn’t been evident at first, the jagged column cutting through the lightning-crack in the larger gear on the left. Jedao had written a number: 1,082,771 .

Vahenz dismissed the image, mouth peeling back in a sneer. What, all those other fools he’d killed weren’t worthy of being added to the tally, just Hellspin Fortress and this latest tragicomedy? Granted, the man wasn’t known for his sanity. Let him savor his kills however he liked.

Funny but true: at one point she had dreamed about the things she could accomplish if the Kel ever let her walk around a cindermoth unmolested. Now that she was here, the Kel themselves had done most of the work for her, or scotched it in a supreme display of incompetence, take your pick.

The life sign had paused. It was close by now. She slowed and reflexively dropped behind a terminal’s slanted remnants when a red-and-yellow light came on in the center of the room. It blinked in the rapid one-two-three-four of the Kel drum code for distress. A shape flickered in the shadows. Vahenz fired. The wall sizzled, and sparks flew up, aggressively red-orange. Part of a tapestry disappeared: streaks of soot, ghosts stitched into smoke.

“Honestly,” a woman’s voice came out of the shadows, crackling with static, “if that was the best Kel Command could do for a kill count, they should have kept me on. Anyway, I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’re formally acquainted?”

“Shuos Jedao, I presume,” Vahenz said. Same female voice as that last conspiratorial “message” to Liozh Zai, same accent, same fucking cocksure attitude.

The voice was coming over the broadcast system, as though that was supposed to fool her. Still, she couldn’t discount the possibility of some elaborate trick. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not eager to introduce myself,” Vahenz said. She queried the needlemoth’s systems anyway, but it wasn’t having any better luck without her to hold its hand.

“And yet here you are, when you could be long gone on your way to wherever secret agents go when they have to compose apologetic reports to their superiors.” Jedao’s voice was annoyingly rueful. “You think I didn’t write my share of same when I was working for the Shuos?”

Jedao was moving again, very slowly. Vahenz was having none of that. She crouched low and set after him, cat-footed. “Cut to the point,” she said. But she was smiling. She made her way around the remnants of the trap.

The red-and-yellow lights paced her, sometimes appearing to the left, sometimes to the right. Sometimes they were near the ceiling, and sometimes near the floor. Still blinking in that one-two-three-four pattern, as if she was supposed to be impressed by Kel superstition. At least she could assume that he knew exactly where she was. The fact that he hadn’t shot her yet, plus his talkativeness, suggested desperation for information.

“I have to ask,” Jedao said conversationally, “if you’re here to see me dead, aren’t there less risky ways of doing the job? I mean, we don’t have inconvenient bystanders fouling up the arena now. It’s just the two of us. There’s no more need for lies and ploys. If I had some way of blowing you up for real, I’d have hit the button by now. That pathetic light show in the command center would have gotten me flunked out of Shuos Academy.”

So she was right after all. But she didn’t have any problem letting him continue to talk. Just in case he let something drop. As a bonus, he was moving more and more slowly. Too obvious. She stopped, refusing to be lured in further.

“You might be a Hafn, or you might be freelancing,” he went on. “I don’t really care at this point. The part that’s relevant to me is that you’re not with the hexarchate. That could be very useful.”

“Jedao,” Vahenz said, “I don’t have any plans of teaming up with you and conquering the universe. Especially since you have a talent for betrayal with a side of attempted omnicide.”

He had stopped entirely. She waited; no sense in blowing things by getting impatient. “If you’re anything like me,” he said, “and I have some reason to believe that you are, you find your superiors’ lack of vision deeply regrettable. Anyway, how will it hurt you to hear me out? You should be asking me why, if I am so good at shooting people in the back of the head, the Kel have been making a point of using me as their pet general for the last 400 fucking years.”

All right, she had to admit he had her attention. Maybe this was the part where he trotted out whatever pretty rationalization he had for his past behavior. “Is this the part where we see who knows more Kel jokes?” Vahenz said sardonically.

“Kel Command keeps a file of them, did you know that? But back to the subject. Let’s think about this. The first time they pulled me out of the black cradle, the senior high generals remembered what I’d done. It was a fresh wound. They remembered having dinner with me. Losing games of jeng-zai to me. Hell, I danced with some of their kids at the damn ceremonies. I wasn’t a historical figure, I was a real person. I was better than their generals – but that made me more of a risk. So why use an undead traitor?”

“Jedao,” Vahenz said, “you clearly have a point to make. You might as well go ahead and make it.” She could feel the pistol’s grip in her fingers, the precise weight of it.

“I want to offer you my service.”

Vahenz couldn’t help it. She laughed so hard it almost became a coughing fit. “Come again?”

“I’m deadly serious.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“I’m not fussy,” Jedao said. “Let me hit this from another angle, then. What do you know about the invention of formation instinct?”

“I confess I’m stumped,” Vahenz said, which was unusual. She had made a point of being well-informed on the hexarchate’s history, especially the parts it didn’t like to remember. “I had some impression that the Nirai developed it for the Kel, but I couldn’t provide citations.”

“The Nirai like doing a lot of things for the Kel,” Jedao said. “Codependent, really.”

Vahenz didn’t trust the direction that this discussion was going in. “If you’re implying what I think you’re implying –”

“I’m not a Kel,” Jedao said, abruptly savage, “but they did their best to make me like one. You ever wonder who the prototype was for formation instinct? I’m saying I have to serve someone . If it’s not you, it’s going to be whoever next shows up on this fucking wreck. Even if it’s the fucking Kel again. Four hundred years and they weren’t going to let me out without some kind of assurance that I was going to do as they told me. I’m just lucky the weapon they used to ‘kill’ me didn’t work the way they were told it would, and that I have a brief window of freedom.”