Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER NINE

“SO THAT’S WHAT they were up to,” Jedao said.

Cheris couldn’t spare the effort to talk to him. Instead, her fingers flew over the terminal. “This formation, now,” she said. It was only going to buy them a little time. Shield effects were usually short-lived, and that didn’t take into account phase transition modifiers.

“They’re testing us,” Jedao said. “Time for a show of force. Destroy them.”

She needed an objective. The enemy swarm would react if she threatened the Fortress, so she needed to get closer. Distance was her lever. Not only could she force them to react in defense of the Fortress, she could nullify further use of the kaleidoscope bomb by getting too close for them to use it without also multiplying the Kel swarm. Twenty Jedaos, what a terrible thought. But the multiplier should only work on straightforward weapon effects, not people.

Cheris sent her intermediate computations to Navigation, with instructions to calculate the final movements.

They started taking hits. The formation shields blossomed like fever-flowers in Kel gold. Cheris instructed Weapons to return fire according to a preset pattern. Weapons looked like it wanted to protest, but Nerevor glared at it, then returned to coordinating the other officers in support of Cheris’s orders.

Cheris wished that she was crowned with eyes so she could take in all the data that were skittering across her display, but she had to make do with the eyes she had. Jedao seemed content to leave matters in her hands.

The kaleidoscope swarm’s movements revealed dependencies: all phantoms of a given moth tended to move in the same way. From the variable strength of the effect, she could figure out which of the moths were the originals; the phantoms looked too similar for scan to distinguish them directly.

“Coordinates for the originals,” Cheris said, passing on the information. “Focus fire on One—”

The Kel swarm moved in, shifting to regenerate the shield effect.

“Cheris!” Jedao said. “Vidona Diaiya’s up to something.”

“Formation break, sir!” Scan said at the same time.

Cheris caught herself before she hissed a profanity. What was it with her and formation breaks? Besides the fact that Kel luck was always bad?

“Message from Commander Diaiya,” Communications said, and played it back at Cheris’s nod.

Diaiya was smiling. “Let me sort that out for you, General,” she said, with too much emphasis on Cheris’s rank.

White-red enemy dire cannon fire pierced the shields at the formation break. Vidona Diaiya’s Starvation Hound had changed facing even though she had no dire cannon on that side to bring to bear. One of the boxmoths, Kel Nhiel’s River Full of Stones, took a crippling hit to its engine.

Commander Nerevor was shouting at Diaiya to resume formation, but the Hound remained obdurately silent.

And this, Cheris thought in a fury, was why the Kel rarely allowed non-Kel to rise to command: no formation instinct meant they couldn’t be relied on to follow orders themselves.

“All units, reconfigure formation to exclude Starvation Hound,” Cheris said coldly. Too late to save Nhiel’s moth, but it had to be done.

The Starvation Hound had launched a large, stubby projectile out of what appeared to be a modified gunport. It exploded into a cobwebby cloud of spores. A good third of the kaleidoscope moths were trapped when the spores billowed into enormous fungal blooms, sickly pink-gray with violet undertones.

Seconds later, the Hound was written over in words of fire, ash, failure.

“That skullfucking idiot killed all her soldiers because she had to show off her special toy,” Jedao said savagely.

Cheris swung around to stare at Jedao, even if she agreed with him, but of course there was no one there but a shadow. People in the command center were giving her strange looks.

“How in the name of ash and talon did that fucking Vidona fit a fucking fungal canister on a fucking bannermoth?” Nerevor was demanding. “That shouldn’t even be possible!”

“It’s a little late to ask her,” Cheris snapped. The fungal cocoon helped, she couldn’t deny that, but they should have been able to win this without it, just with greater casualties. Besides, in the normal course of things, moths only came equipped with cocoons with direct authorization from Kel Command. She didn’t look forward to explaining the incident to them.

“Both of you need to stay focused,” Jedao said sharply.

Cheris glared at Nerevor, and the other woman returned her attention to the crew.

“Cheris,” Jedao said after she had given the next set of orders. “Movement patterns. I can’t prove it mathematically, but targets Three and Four are slaved to One, and Five is slaved to Two.” He was referring to the actual enemy moths, not the phantoms; damage to the actual moths reduced the phantoms’ firepower.

Four was partly blocked by the cocoon. They could deal with it later. Cheris asked Scan for confirmation about the others. Scan chewed over the data and agreed that Jedao was probably correct.

Cheris directed the swarm to focus fire on One. The Kel swarm compacted itself. The guns spoke again.

Two was next. Kel Paizan’s Sincere Greeting took it out, opening a precise, narrow hole through the shield to fire through. The erasure cannon’s kinetic projectile punched horrifyingly through Two’s drive array. One of the bannermoths, Auspicious Glass, took damage from return fire before Sincere Greeting could close the hole, but Glass reported itself functional.

Jedao’s hunch was correct: Three, Four, and Five ceased fire when One and Two went down.

Communications informed Cheris that Two had sent a final transmission toward the Fortress, based on trace emissions. Unfortunately, they hadn’t intercepted the transmission proper.

To Cheris’s dismay, the phantom moths didn’t vanish, but they stopped firing when their sources fell silent.

“I don’t recommend boarding, sir,” Kel Nerevor said, scowling at the scan data. “Rigged to blow, like as not.”

“Cinder them completely, except Four,” Cheris said. “If scan can’t go in or out of the shields, let’s deafen them.”

They carried this out cautiously, just in case, but nothing untoward happened.

“Sir, I have an incoming transmission from the Fortress of Scattered Needles,” Communications said. “It’s text-only.”

“Go ahead and read it,” Cheris said.

“‘Very impressive, General Jedao. If that’s who you are. Prove yourself by penetrating the shield by 25:14 on the first day of the Month of the Moth.’ They gave us the conversion to our calendar.” Communications read that off too. The high calendar day was 1.21 of the heretics’ days. They had set the deadline for four of their days from now.

“Send a bannermoth out of range,” Jedao said. “Do it now. And send this message back to whoever it is: That bannermoth has orders to broadcast the trick of defeating the shields in the clear in all directions if anyone fires on us once we’re in. If you have any more tests, direct them to Shuos Academy. I’m sure they’re bored over there.”

Cheris selected Kel Koroe’s Unenclosed by Fear and gave it the necessary instructions. Koroe was supposed to be unimaginative but reliable.

“Let them think about that,” Cheris said, agonizingly aware of Nerevor’s worried expression. First things first. She sent a commendation to Sincere Greeting for its precise shooting.

Paizan responded almost immediately. “I don’t like being at such close range, General,” he said. “It makes the whole concept of distance weapons ridiculous. But in this situation there was no help for it.”

“You did well,” Cheris said.

Nerevor raised an eyebrow, and Cheris nodded at her. She expected that the cindermoth commanders would consider each other peers. “Next time I hope to take part in some dismemberment too,” Nerevor said to Paizan. “That Vidona ended things too quickly, and against orders.”

“You always were bloodthirsty, Nerevor,” Paizan said, with what might have been affection, and signed off.

“Get me the cryptology team,” Cheris said to Communications.

“General,” Nerevor said, “you should be aware that crypto doesn’t use composite work. They’re more efficient working as individuals.” Since she was discussing Nirai, this meant that the team’s members were too cantankerous to composite effectively. “Do you want to address the whole team, or just Captain-analyst Nirai Damiod?”

“Just Captain Damiod. Are they working with the Shuos team?”

“I had given no such orders, sir.”

“Give them now. If we have Shuos, we might as well get some use out of them.”

“Ha,” Jedao said.

Nirai Damiod’s face appeared to the left of Cheris’s display, with Captain Shuos Ko’s just below it. Damiod was a thin, nervous-looking man with pale brown eyes in a darker face. Ko looked, if anything, more imperturbably bland.

Before Cheris even asked him to explain anything, Damiod said, with the air of a man used to simplifying explanations, “It’s standard military encryption, usually called 67 Snake, based on a certain class of functions—”

“What class?” Cheris wondered just what kind of conversations he was used to having with Nerevor.

He peered at her. “Machiva-Ju quasiknot polynomials, to be precise. Ah – you have background in this field?”

“I have some general familiarity,” Cheris said. Unfortunately, as with all good cryptosystems, knowing the specific system in use didn’t, by itself, help them crack the ciphertexts. “You don’t think there’s hope.”

“There’s always hope, General,” Damiod said, “but even if we hooked together the swarm’s grid resources, we couldn’t crack it by brute force. It’d be a weak system if it yielded that easily. No, our best bet is seeing if whoever encrypted the message made some kind of amateur’s mistake or ran it on the wrong hardware or left some kind of fingerprint. Stupider things have happened.”

“Cooperate with Captain Ko in your work,” Cheris said.

“Easy enough,” Damiod said.

“Sir,” Ko said with a genial nod.

“Good luck,” she said, and ended the conversation.

Cheris called up the gradient map and grimaced at it. “We’re going to have to be more careful once we exit the transition zone,” she said. “We have no idea how well any formations will work under the heretical calendar. Look at that sector. The Fortress’s projections are remarkably stable. I don’t like that.”

“At least I trust there will be no more fungus,” Kel Nerevor said. She was looking at the damage to Four. The fungus in question was lethal to humans if you were lucky, and caused unappetizing mutations otherwise. It would take a full Nirai decontamination team to deal with the afflicted bannermoth. “Waste of a good moth. With that junk all over it, it’d be cheaper to ram it into a star and build a new one from scratch.”

“That’s Kel Command’s decision,” Cheris said. “Doctrine, I want you to look at the data from the engagement and see what you can get me on the heretics’ calendar.”

“Of course, sir,” Rahal Gara said.

Cheris closed her eyes for a moment. “Everyone switch over to invariant propulsion.” Giving up the luxuries that went with the high calendar’s exotics was going to be irritating. “We have to continue toward the Fortress.”

“The shields, General?” Nerevor asked, as Cheris had known she would.

“There will be a briefing,” Cheris said unemotionally. “Alert me if anything happens.”

She left the command center before they could see her hands start to shake.