Ninefox Gambit

CHERIS SPENT THE flight back to the boxmoth infantry transport in silence. The boxmoth was like any other: walls painted solemn black and charcoal gray, with the occasional unsubtle touch of gold. Cheris reported to the commander’s executive officer, an unsmiling man with a scar over his right eye. She saluted him fist to shoulder, and he returned the salute. She passed over her company’s grid key so the data could be examined by her superiors at their leisure.

“Welcome back, Captain,” the executive officer said, eying her with a faint spark of curiosity.

This alarmed her – it never paid to stand out too much among the Kel – but no response seemed to be expected.

The mothgrid informed her of the vessel’s current layout and where she might find the high halls, her quarters, the soldiers’ barracks. In reality, no one was going to their assigned high hall without cleaning up first. Per protocol, she was told the status of those who had been taken to Medical for their injuries. She thought of the recalcitrant squadron that had died on Dredge before the evacuation.

Her quarters were next to her company’s barracks. She had two small rooms and an adjoining bath. All her muscles ached, but she dug out a small box of personal items and pulled out the raven luckstone her mother had given her on her twenty-third birthday. It was a polished stone, drab gray, and the raven’s silhouette was a welcome reminder of the home she visited so seldom.

There came a rapid series of taps at her door: three, one, four, one, five –

“Come in,” Cheris said, amused at the ritual. She put the luckstone away.

One of the boxmoth’s birdform servitors came in bearing an arrangement of anodized wire flowers. There were twelve flowers, just as twelve servitors had fallen in action. They would never receive official acknowledgment of their service, but that wasn’t any reason not to remember them.

“Thank you,” Cheris said to the birdform. “It was bad down there. I wish I could have done more.”

The birdform flashed a series of ironic golds and reds. Cheris had learned to read Simplified Machine Universal, and nodded her agreement. It added that it had been having trouble with one of its grippers, if she had a moment to adjust it?

“Of course,” Cheris said. She wasn’t a technician, but some repair jobs were better handled by human hands, and she had learned the basics. As it turned out, all it took was a few moment’s jiggering with some specially shaped pliers. The birdform made a pleased bell tone.

“I have to see to my duties now,” Cheris said. “I’ll talk to you later?”

The birdform indicated its acquiescence, and headed out, leaving the flowers.

Cheris didn’t know its name. The servitors had designations for human convenience, but she was certain that they had names of their own. She made a point of not asking.

Washing up didn’t take long, and her uniform cleaned itself while she did so. The fabric smoothed itself of a last few creases as she picked it up. “Middle formal,” she told it, which was not too different from battle dress, except for the cuffs and the brightness of the gold trim.

She had fourteen minutes before she ought to show up at the high hall to share the communal cup with her company, in celebration of their survival. The unscheduled time was a greater treasure than the bath. Alone, she eased herself into the chair and set her hands on the desk, taking comfort from the cool, solid glasswood. If she looked down she might have seen her dark-eyed reflection, crossed over with whorls and eddies like vagrant galaxies.

Her contemplation was broken by heat-pulses in her arm. They told her to report to a secured terminal for orders. The formal closing sequence told her she was dealing with someone high in the chain of command. When in combat, people only used the abbreviated closings. She couldn’t imagine why dealing with her company was a matter of any urgency now that the Eels had been subdued.

Cheris had the feeling that she wasn’t going to share this meal with her soldiers, but it couldn’t be helped. The orders took precedence.

The terminal occupied the far end of the quarters they had put her in. It was a recessed plate of metal in the wall, matte black. Graven on the floor before it was the hexarchate’s emblem of a wheel with six spokes. Capping each spoke was each faction’s emblem, the high factions opposed by their corresponding low factions: the Shuos ninefox with its waving tails, each with a lidless eye, and the Kel ashhawk in flames; the Andan kniferose and the Vidona stingray; the Rahal scrywolf and the Nirai voidmoth scattered with stars.

She prompted her uniform to modify itself into full formal. The Kel ashhawk brightened and arched its neck, a gesture that the Kel jokingly called preening; subtle shades of turquoise and violet gave the fabric greater depth. The cuffs and collar lengthened and developed a brocade texture. Her gloves remained the same, plain and functional. Only at funerals did the Kel wear more elaborate gloves.

“Captain Kel Cheris reporting as ordered,” she said.

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.

Their assigned high hall, when she entered it, was less full than it should have been. The other halls, for the other companies that had not survived, would stand empty. The servitors had arranged the tables to make the place look less vast. Some of them hovered in the air as they made fussy adjustments to the furnishings: the ashhawk with wings outspread, Brightly Burning, bannered across the wall; the calligraphed motto that was found everywhere the Kel went, from every spark a fire; tapestries woven from the threads of dead soldiers’ uniforms and embroidered with their names and the names and dates of the battlefields that had claimed their lives.

Every soldier rose at her entrance, spoons and chopsticks clinking as they set them down. Cheris paused long enough to return the honor, and smiled with her eyes. Lieutenant Verab was sober-faced as always, but Ankat returned the expression with a sardonic grin. Ready to tell the officers’ table a brand-new Kel joke, no doubt. He had a better repertoire than anyone she’d ever met. Then she headed to her seat at the center of the officers’ table, and indicated that they should sit again.

The communal cup was waiting for her. It was lacquered red and graven with maple leaves, and someone had refilled it nearly to the brim. Verab, who sat at her right, passed her the cup. He looked very tired, and she lifted an eyebrow at him. He shrugged slightly: nothing important. She didn’t challenge the lie. Cheris felt tired herself, knowing the news she was going to have to break to him, and to the rest of her company. Schooling her expression to calm, she took one sip. The water was sweet and cool, yet she felt it ought to be bitter.

She had a bowl of rice, and the communal platters had familiar fare: fish fried in rice flour and egg and leaves of sage, pickled plums, quail eggs with sesame salt. Some fresh fruit had been saved for her. Verab was mindful of her love for tangerines, a sometime luxury; plus he didn’t care for them himself. She looked at the food and thought about all the meals she had shared with these people, the times she had dragged herself out of a battle knowing that soon she would be able to sit down with them and eat the food they ate, and listen to the Kel jokes that she really wasn’t offended by, even though she sometimes pretended to be as a joke in itself, and comfort herself with the voices of those who had made it through. All of that was about to end.

“I have bad news,” Cheris said. “They’re breaking up the company.”

They were staring at her, even Verab, who should have guessed. “Doctrine,” he said. His voice cracked. Verab was fifth-generation Kel. His family would take it hard.

“You may be able to serve again, some of you,” Cheris said, aware of the inadequacy of her words, “but that depends on the magistrates’ assessments. I’m sorry. I don’t have details.”

“Kel luck is always bad,” Lieutenant Ankat said. He was about to make a joke of his own, she could tell, sheer anxiety. She looked at him, hard, and he swallowed whatever it had been.

“It’s duty,” Cheris said. Right now duty seemed arid. “I am not to go with you. They have another use for me.”

A murmur rippled up and down the table, quickly quelled. They knew the euphemisms, too.

They weren’t looking forward to the future. Most of them would lose Kel tradition and formation instinct. They might remember the mottoes and formations, but the mottoes would give them no more comfort, and the formations would no longer have any potency for them.

“Good luck where you’re going then, sir,” Ankat said, and Verab murmured his agreement. He didn’t believe this had just happened. She could tell by the stricken look in his eyes.

“I would hear your names and dates of service,” she said quietly. It would make all of this real, and the ceremony would give them something to hold onto, even if that something wasn’t precisely comfort. “All of you. Acknowledge.”

“Sir,” they said in one voice. Ankat looked down at his hands, then back at her.

It was not the formal roll call. They had no drum, no fire, no flute. She would have included those things if she could. But even the servitors had heard her. They stopped what they were doing and arranged themselves in a listening posture. She nodded at them.

They started with the most junior soldier – Kel Nirrio, now that Dezken was dead – and ascended the ladder of rank. Nobody ate during the recital. Cheris was hungry, but hunger could wait. She didn’t need to commit the names to memory, as she had done that long ago, but she wanted to make sure she remembered what every intent face looked like, what every rough voice sounded like, so she could warm herself by them in the days to come.

She spoke her name last, as was proper. The hall was otherwise silent. And then, breaking the ritual: “Thank you,” she said. “I wish you well.”

For all that she was leaving them, she couldn’t help feeling a guilty twinge of anticipation for the challenge to come; but it would not do to let on.

“Eat, sir,” Ankat said then, and she ate, not too fast and not too slow, making sure to finish with the two tangerines Verab had set aside for her.