Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

The terminal showed her signifier, which was to say that it drew red-gold flames around an ashhawk’s silhouette. Unlike the emblem on her uniform, the signifier’s ashhawk was in the Sheathed Wings configuration.

Cheris didn’t attach too much importance to the signifier, although hers indicated that she was deliberate by nature. There were, however, historical examples of flagrantly incorrect signifiers. They were estimations, not scryings, in any case. The arch-traitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox. The final Liozh heptarch, who had, to the last, been the Web of Worlds, unity of unities, had died broken before Shuos, Kel, and Rahal troops.

She was beginning to wonder if she should leave her apologies and try again later when the terminal’s signifier shattered and showed her her own face: the same neat dark hair, the same dark eyes. But the smile was not her own, and the stranger wore a high general’s flared wings and flame where Cheris had a captain’s talon with its pricked bead of blood.

“Captain,” the stranger said. It even had her voice. “This is Composite Subcommand Two of Kel Command. Acknowledge.”

Cheris started to sweat. The composites changed from task to task. There was no telling which high general she was dealing with, or how many had wired their minds together into a greater intelligence. But the designation Two indicated that at least one of the highest generals was in the composite. A bad sign. She made the correct salute, not too fast and not too slow.

“Now you understand,” Subcommand Two said, as though dropping back into a conversation they had left off last night over glasses of wine, “that your assignment was a terrible one. Frankly, it’s a waste of good officers.”

“I know my oath, sir,” Cheris said cautiously, but not too cautiously. The Kel didn’t favor caution, something her instructors had reminded her of time and again.

Subcommand Two ignored her, which was the best response she could have hoped for. “This is the context you weren’t given when you were sent down to Dredge. You figured out that the Eels built a weapon that took advantage of calendrical rot in order to function. Don’t deny it. Your actions against the heretics indicate your understanding of the situation.”

Cheris said, as steadily as she could, “I am prepared to be outprocessed.” It was not a fate any Kel wanted. She had not come from a family with a tradition of Kel service – any faction service. Despite her parents’ opposition, she had survived the tests and been admitted to Kel Academy Prime. She had honed her life for service, and it was bitter to have it terminated. Still, it was a fitting fate for a Kel: the bright upward trajectory, the sudden death.

Many people knew the ashhawk by its other name: suicide hawk.

Subcommand Two said, “Most of your soldiers will have to be processed by Doctrine, true. But it would be a waste of your improvisational abilities to send you with them.”

Cheris recognized a euphemism as well as the next Kel. They had something worse in mind for her, and they were going to split up her command. Still, she felt a wary relief. They wouldn’t bother briefing her unless they had some challenge in mind, and there were few wholly impossible challenges.

“The truth of the situation is worse than a handful of Eels in peripheral systems,” Subcommand Two said. “Calendrical rot has taken hold not only in Dredge but in several central marches of the hexarchate. It cannot be allowed to persist.”

“Sir,” Cheris said, “is this a task for a Kel rather than a Shuos?” The Rahal concerned themselves with Doctrine and justice, but they rarely dealt with full-fledged uprisings; the Vidona cleaned up the aftermath, although no one trusted them to put heresies down at the outset. The Shuos and the Kel were collectively regarded as the hexarchate’s sword, but the Kel specialized in kinetic operations and short-term goals while the Shuos pursued information operations and long-term plans. No Kel liked fox games, but there was a place and time for every method.

For a moment the reflection wavered, and she saw amber staring out from the golden wings: a ninefox’s knowing eye. Then Cheris knew that the composite included a Shuos, probably an envoy from the Shuos hexarch himself. Her dismay was immediate. Kel Command wouldn’t consent to intimate Shuos oversight for anything less than a crisis.

“I’m listening, sir,” Cheris said.

“We have six officers competing to deal with the heresy in the Fortress of Scattered Needles and its surrounds,” the composite said. “The Shuos have requested to be represented by a seventh as their web piece.” Cheris’s face smiled at her with a momentary glint of teeth. “You.”

She thought at first she had misheard. The high calendar was projected throughout the hexarchate by a series of nexus fortresses, and Scattered Needles was the most famed of them. How had it –? And why did the Shuos want her, of all people, as a web piece?

In the old days of the heptarchate, the Liozh faction had coordinated the government. In a Shuos training game from the post-Liozh period, the web piece had been named after their emblem, the mirrorweb. Cheris had only played once, but she remembered the basic rules. Players were divided up into several marches, and each march competed separately. Certain actions conferred great advantage, but also incremented a heresy clock. As the clock went up, the game’s rules changed. The web piece interacted with the heresy clock and represented the weapon that saved you even as it poisoned your principles.

“I will serve, sir,” Cheris said. As long as it was possible to be played as a web piece and survive, she meant to try.

Was that another glimpse of the fox’s unwavering eye? “Do you know what your primary examiner said of you before approving you for service?” Subcommand Two said.

“As I recall, sir,” Cheris said mildly, “I graduated in the top six percent that year from Academy Prime.”

“He noted your conservatism and wondered what had driven you toward a faction full of people who take risks on command. Are we to interpret your continued service as evidence that you have a Kel’s heart after all?”

“I will serve, sir,” Cheris said again.

Subcommand Two could have demanded a more substantive response, and didn’t. Her face smiled again, this time with a fox’s patient pleasure, and winked out.

The two ways to win at gambling were to read the situation and know the odds. Cheris had calculated her situation already. She had only a single life to offer, and she was aware of the ugly deaths that awaited her should she fail, but at some point you had to trust yourself.

After Cheris was sure the meeting was over, she stared at her reflection in the terminal. It still displayed the Ashhawk Sheathed Wings. When she had been younger, she had hoped for it to change and show her something new about herself, but today as always, there was nothing new to show.

She would have to go to her soldiers and break the news to them. Aware of her duties, she submitted a very terse report and signed off on the casualty intake form, wincing at the numbers. She hoped she would have an opportunity to pay a call on the injured in Medical, but she doubted it.

“Medium formal,” she told the uniform, and it obliged her. Her hands were sweating inside the gloves.

The hall outside her quarters was quiet and almost chilly, and the slight curve intensified as she walked down its length. The curve was partly illusion, a topological trick to enable the voidmoth to hold more passengers, but her eye was fooled nonetheless.

It was only a single circuit to the high halls where the Kel infantry ate separately from the moth’s regular crew. There was a painting on the wall just before she reached the doors, on textured paper: the queen of birds holding court in a winterdrift forest, and to her side, a fox half-hidden and wholly smiling.