Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE LAST TIME Kel Naraucher had experienced a grand formation had been in drill for a parade in the City of Filigree Masks, and they hadn’t even ended up using it. Naraucher liked parades. Everything could go wrong, but when you got down to it, no one was going to die. Except that one time with the combustible pigeon, and that had been a tasteless prank.

The hopper had landed them behind cover of the corrosion gradient, well back, using a captured bay. They assembled the condensed points of a grand formation that had no name. It was heretical, after all. It was hard to concentrate on distances and alignment and where his feet were, even with formation instinct yanking him into position each time the sergeant issued a correction.

Then the servitors arrived.

Naraucher had reservations about putting servitors into Kel formations. He didn’t mind them in the usual course of their duties, but this was different. Maybe he was more of a traditionalist than he had reckoned, even though he was the first Kel in his family. He made himself watch as the servitors hovered into position. They were efficient about it, no wasted motion. If he was honest with himself, the emotion the servitors aroused in him wasn’t contempt. It was inadequacy.

The general had decided they were Kel enough to serve with the Kel. If he was any sort of Kel himself, that had to be good enough for him.

Servitor attrition was higher than planned for. Major Kel Ula called the colonel and received modified orders of battle. This caused delays as formations were switched to accommodate the numbers and a few people were shuffled into other companies. There were a good forty-three people and servitors left to hang around the rear. Naraucher spent this time daydreaming about spending some time with his brother’s dogs. Dogs were much more pleasant to be around than grumpy fellow soldiers, even with all the slobber. It wasn’t as though there weren’t lots of fluids in warfare anyway.

“All right,” Colonel Ragath said over the link, and Naraucher paid attention. “Major Ula from Battalion Seven has the van. She’s to make it across the causeway and tunnel down the Radiant Gate. Don’t activate formation pivots until you’re right there. We don’t know how long it’ll take the corrosion squads to twig to the fact that we’re bypassing them. I wouldn’t allow for more than an hour, so don’t dawdle.

“Once you’re in the Radiant Ward, head straight for that factory. You won’t be able to hold it, but I’m sure creative individuals like yourselves can mess it up bad. Drag things out as long as you can to give the winnower teams a chance to set up. We’ll alert you when it’s time to peel out of there.

“You may have heard that the winnowers read loyalty-states and are theoretically incapable of fratricide. That’s according to numbers in a machine, not field tests. If you’re stupid enough to stick around for the field tests, I’ll personally lay some flowers on your pyre.”

Naraucher was with Captain Zhan Goro, right behind Major Ula’s company. He felt a creeping sense that something was watching him, probably from being among so many servitors. It did occur to him that maybe the servitors felt just as awkward being here as he felt about them. Maybe they could talk over drinks someday, although he wasn’t sure what they’d be interested in in place of alcohol.

The corrosion gradients were supposed to keep the Kel boxed in, and the heretics must have been short of generators or they would already have deployed them. Naraucher had heard Shuos grid sabotage was responsible. He knew the Shuos regarded the Kel as addled younger siblings, but he was glad to have them along.

The Nirai had been busy with heavy-duty burrowers, preparing a passage to the Radiant Gate. The gate was one of the Radiant Ward’s popular attractions and a defense in itself. It was made of material condensed from a certain dying star. If the entire Fortress had been made of the stuff, they would have been in trouble. Backwards to be grateful for a weakness in one of the hexarchate’s defenses, but there it was.

The passage was weirdly dank. Naraucher had the morbid fantasy that someone was gardening Kel in confined spaces with the unhealthy blue-white light, and soon it would be time for the harvest. Were the Kel best pickled? Smoked? He hated smoked food, but it seemed appropriate for ashhawks.

There it was: the Radiant Gate. The entire thing was transparent, although the index of refraction gave Naraucher a headache even from here. Coiled behind the surface were living lines of light, writing and rewriting praises to the hexarchate. The light was alternately gold and bronze and silver, and suffused with a warmth that Naraucher had never ascribed to his government.

Major Ula’s company wavered for a moment. Then they got themselves sorted out and the pivots started moving into place. A great fierce light sprang up around her company. No, it wasn’t light. You couldn’t read by it or warm your hands by it, but whatever it was, it drew the eye and made it flinch at the same time. It intimated banners and swords held high and six-gun salutes.

Ula was bannering: surely that was a good sign, the suicide hawk plain to see, even if all they had to represent their general was the null banner. Someone was hissing at him. He remembered to keep up. If the servitors could do their job when they were so new at it, it behooved him to do his.

Astonishingly, the gate was giving way. The transparent stuff was snaking off in curling vapor. And the light – those radiant words, all the ideals of the hexarchate scribed by poets long dead – the light was funneling free in scrolls and coils, words uncaged, or perhaps words driven off.

“– is the captain.” The voice on the link was savage even through the crackling. “Word from the colonel. The heretics have woken up. They’ve dropped the corrosion gradient and they’re headed for our rear. Rear units are changing front. We’re to follow the major once she’s through and hit that factory, hope the rearguard can keep the heretics occupied.”

Naraucher looked again at Ula’s company. This time he noticed something that hadn’t been apparent before. At the edges of the formation, the non-pivot positions, humans and servitors both, were changing into pillars of candescent numbers. Naraucher shouldn’t have been able to recognize the numbers at this distance, but he could. Most but not all were in the high language’s vertical script. Machine Universal was identifiable as such, although he couldn’t read it.

He couldn’t have justified this conviction, but he would have said that the numbers were numbers that mattered. Birthdays and festival days. A child’s shoe size. The number of times a soldier visited a crippled comrade. The specific gravity of a favorite wine. The number of bullets left in a pistol. The distance from this siege to a childhood home, remembered but never visited.

The number of soldiers a Kel general was willing to sacrifice to achieve her objective.

Naraucher wasn’t crying when his company reached the gate’s shriveled remnants, passing through the smoke-memory of people reduced to phantasms of number. But his eyes hurt. Ula’s company had burned up evaporating the gate. He could only do his part: fight through the breach they had won for those who followed.