Ninefox Gambit

CHERIS PACED THE perimeter of her quarters, determined not to get used to their size; determined to remember what she really was. Then she asked for a slate because she wanted something solid in her hands. A deltaform servitor brought her one: a black slab just thick enough to feel substantial, gold-rimmed so that it winked as she tilted it. The servitor made a worried noise. “I’ll be all right,” Cheris said, and it left after an unconvinced pause.

“You could have asked me about the hostage idea earlier,” Cheris said, “while there was time to come up with alternatives.”

“You could have anticipated the issue,” Jedao said. “The landing problem shouldn’t have taken you by surprise. You had the same time that I did to come up with a solution. Do you have a better one now?”

Her eyes stung. She had relied on him instead of thinking for herself. “You have the advantage of being an observer,” she said sharply. “But no. I don’t have a better plan now.”

“Cheris.”

She closed her eyes, thinking of Nerevor’s bravery. Jedao had told her that the Kel reacted better when given no time to object to a plan. Fair warning.

“I saw a solution and set it in motion. That’s all.”

There was no way to escape his voice.

“I saw how badly you wanted to go in Nerevor’s stead. She saw it too, you know. That’s why she was willing to sacrifice herself.”

“I didn’t want to manipulate her into it,” Cheris said.

A soft pause. “All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.”

“I am not fit to serve,” she said.

“Cheris,” Jedao said, “you’re Kel. You will serve as long as Kel Command needs you to. That’s all there is to it.”

“You’re so good at making the Kel follow where you lead,” Cheris said. “How can I trust anything you say?” She raised her tablet and entered a query.

It wasn’t difficult to bring up the available transcripts of Shuos Jedao’s service. Even though she knew how well-regarded he had been, even though she had studied some of his campaigns, the number of deaths he had inflicted before Hellspin Fortress took her breath away. The Kel had known many generals, and he had been one of the best.

It only took a moment’s extra ferreting to find the people who had died at the Siege of Hellspin Fortress, heretics and heptarchate soldiers both.

“All right,” Jedao said quietly. “All of my anchors do this sooner or later.”

At this remove of time, the statistics weren’t precise, but the Kel historians had done what they could. The swarm that Jedao had led against Hellspin Fortress had not been small even by modern standards. His orders had told him to conquer the fortress so the Lanterners could be converted and the calendar repaired from the damage done to it.

Cheris read the number of the dead once, twice, thrice. A fourth time; four for death. Even so, she knew that she didn’t understand numbers, that a number over a million was a series of scratched lines and curves. If she heard tomorrow that her parents had choked on their soup and fallen over dead, it would hurt her more than the deaths of people who would have died anyway generations before she was born. Nevertheless, she started reading capsule biographies in reverse alphabetical order.

She read about two sisters who died trying to veil the dead after the custom of their people. Their reasoning had probably been that it might staunch the threshold winnower’s radiations, which was not illogical, but wrong anyway. She read about a child. A woman. A man trying to carry a crippled child to safety. Both died bleeding from every pore in their skin. A woman. A woman and her two-year-old child. Three soldiers. Three more. Seven. Now four. You could find the dead in any combination of numbers.

Faces pitted with bullet holes. Stagnant prayers scratched into dust. Eye sockets stopped up with ash. Mouths ringed with dried bile, tongues bitten through and abandoned like shucked oysters. Fingers worn down to nubs of bone by corrosive light. The beaks of scavenger birds trapped in twisted rib cages. Desiccated blood limning interference patterns. Intestines in three separate stages of decay, and even the worms had boiled into pale meat.

Two women. A man and a woman. A child. Another child. She hadn’t known there were so many children, even if they were heretics, but look, there was another. She had lost count already despite her intent to remember every one.

I remember every ugly thing I have ever done, Jedao had said. But Cheris wondered. It was impossible that he could remember causing all of this to happen without feeling all those deaths crouching at his side.

Cheris couldn’t bear the silence any longer. “Say whatever you mean to say,” she said.

“I know things about the victims that aren’t in the records,” Jedao said. He might have been standing right next to her, as a lover would: too close. “Ask me.”

She picked a foreign-looking name from the list. She was sure it belonged to a Lanterner. Her hands sweated inside her gloves.

“You’re thinking I couldn’t possibly say much about a Lanterner,” Jedao said, “but that’s not true. They were people, too, with their own histories. Look at where she died – yes, that’s a reasonable map. The Lanterners were desperate. They had tried using children and invalids as shields before, and they had learned from the second battle that that wouldn’t deter me.” His voice was too steady. “So they sent the dregs of their troops to die first. The report says she was found with a Tchennes 42 in her hand. The Tchennes was an excellent gun. They wouldn’t have handed one out except to an officer, someone they trusted to keep questionable soldiers in line. From her name, you can tell she probably came from Maign City.”

“All right,” Cheris said, digesting that, “another.” She pointed.

“He’s from the technician caste from what’s now the Outspecker Colonies, before the heptarchate annexed them. There was a conflict between Doctrine and Gheffeu caste structure – you’d need a Rahal to explain the details – so his people had to be assimilated. We’d tried raids with Shuos shouters for fast compliance, but the calendricals were too unstable. By the time Kel Command finished arguing with the Shuos heptarch about it, the Gheffeu had thrown in with the Lanterners.

“It was a mess that the Andan should have handled, but we were fighting each other for influence. You’re used to thinking of the hexarchate as a unified entity, but during my lifetime, the factions were still quarreling over Doctrine. The winners would have their specific technologies preserved under the final calendrical order, and the losers – well, we know what happened to the Liozh.

“Anyway, that man. He died among strangers. If you look at the other names, none of them are Gheffeu. The Lanterners didn’t trust their latest recruits and split up ethnic groups. He died during a Gheffeu holy week, and he would have been wearing a white armband in honor of a particular saint.”

Cheris wasn’t a historian, but she had the awful feeling that Jedao wasn’t making anything up.

She didn’t point for the third one. “Colonel Kel Gized.” Jedao’s chief of staff.

Jedao’s voice was no longer steady. “Do you want it backwards or forwards?”

Cheris pulled up a picture of Kel Gized because she wanted to know. Gized had a round, bland face and an untidy scar, shockingly pale against her dark brown skin, along the side of her head. The hair above it, cropped short, was gray. Her gloves looked like they were made of heavier material than the Kel favored nowadays. “Chronological,” Cheris said.

“I met her at one of those damnable flower-viewing parties I had to attend as a high officer. The host was a friend of the Andan heptarch’s sister. They liked to decorate parties with us military types to reassure the populace that the breakaway factions weren’t going to chew the realm to rags.

“I was looking at the orchids when I overheard Gized critiquing an Andan functionary’s poetry to his face. I decided I had to find out more about her, so I waited until she was done bludgeoning him about the head with his use of synecdoche, and asked her for a duel.”

It wasn’t much of an anecdote, although Kel who cared about literary techniques were oddities the way her ability at abstract mathematics was an oddity. But there was a brittle quality to his tone.

“It was over very quickly. I’ve only once lost a duel to a Kel, and it wasn’t Gized. She wasn’t humiliated, she was bored. She’d come to enjoy the party and I was getting in the way. But I looked up her profile. Mediocre duelist, excellent administrator. When Kel Command gave me my pick of staff, I chose her. You would have liked her. She tolerated all the games I challenged her to despite never figuring out how to bluff at jeng-zai, but it was always clear that I was wasting her time.”

“Then why do it? Why the games?”

His voice came from a little ways off, as though he had paced to the far end of the room. “You probably have some notion that we wield weapons and formations and plans. But none of that matters if you can’t wield people. You can learn about how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane.” The word choice jarred Cheris. “So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”

“You haven’t challenged me to anything,” Cheris said, wondering.

“What, and interrupt your dramas? You’re entitled to leisure time. I have to admit, I don’t even know what to make of the episode with the dolphin chorale.”

Now he was trying to distract her. “Tell me how you killed her,” she said.

“There’s not a lot to tell,” Jedao said. Pacing again. “She had an analytical mind and wouldn’t have considered me above suspicion. Another ten minutes and she would have concluded that everything going wrong implied a very highly placed traitor. Lucky for me she was never a fast thinker. I shot her through the side of the head.

“It was a bad moment because Jiang and Gwe Pia were also in the command center, and Gwe Pia was a spectacularly good shot. She would have gotten me if she’d been willing to shoot through Jiang, but she wouldn’t have thought of that, even if I did straight off.”

Cheris could think of words for an officer who immediately jumped to shooting through a comrade as a firing solution.

“Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getting low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.”

“This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped.

“I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?”

“It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation?

“You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.”

“Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise?”

A ragged silence. “Fine. But listen, if your purpose was to kill a large group of people concentrated in one location, what would be the sensible way of doing it?”

Her shoulders ached. “Orbital bombardment,” she said reluctantly.

“The way I did it made no sense.”

He was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t imagine what it was. Her formation instinct was at a low ebb. The Kel relied on hierarchy, and he had comprehensively betrayed his subordinates. “Why does it matter?” she said. “My career isn’t going anywhere.”

“It’s the principle of the thing. I would have liked to be an instructor, I even put in the request, but they wanted me in the field.”

Cheris stared at the shadow. A few hundred years of Nirai expertise and they didn’t even know what was wrong with him. What had she been thinking, fetching him out of the Kel Arsenal? And what had Kel Command been thinking for letting her do it?

She pulled up the figures again, made them march neatly for her inspection. “Do you have anything to say to that?”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know about myself,” Jedao said.

“Explain it to me,” Cheris said. She wasn’t going to shout. “Make the numbers make sense. It can’t have been a case of breaking under stress; I don’t know what stress you could have been under. Candle Arc, outnumbered eight to one by the Lanterners, sure. Of course, you won that one so handily it’s in all the textbooks. But Hellspin Fortress? Everyone agrees the Lanterners were doomed. So what happened? Why don’t the numbers work?”

“You’re the one who’s good with figures,” Jedao retorted. “Run the numbers and you tell me.”

Numbers. Everyone knew Shuos Jedao for the massacre, but she wondered how many people he would have killed if he had continued what had been a brilliant career.

The people he would have destroyed in that imaginary past would have been the heptarchate’s enemies. Their lives shouldn’t be reckoned as equal to those of the heptarchate’s own citizens. But she wondered.

“There must have been some reason for all that death,” Cheris said. “If you’d sold out to the Lanterners, that would at least be a motive. But wrecking both sides like that? With no one standing to gain?” She remembered the bleed-through. “Was it because you wanted to die and you were taking it out on everyone else?” But why would he have been suicidal before Hellspin, or the black cradle?

“I’m not completely stupid,” Jedao snapped. “If I’d meant to kill myself at Hellspin Fortress, I would have put a bullet in my head. My aim isn’t that bad.”

She had hit a nerve. It must gall him that he could never hold a weapon again.

“Maybe I’m only what they say I am.” There was still an edge to his voice. “A madman. I had an excellent career. I had comrades. I had power, if you care about power. There’s no sane reason to give any of that up.”

He was trying to tell her something again and it was right in front of her where she couldn’t see it. But she was exhausted, and it was difficult to think clearly. “Yes, well, you have immortality instead,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying it.”

Jedao was silent.

“The people you killed never had a chance,” she said, willing him to answer her. “And none of them are coming back, either.”

Unexpectedly, he said, “A million people dead four centuries before you were born, and you care about them. It speaks well of you, even if it doesn’t speak well of me.”

She couldn’t sleep for a long time after that.