Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TEN

KEL NEREVOR WAS about to say some banal greeting when Cheris showed up at the command center. Instead, Nerevor stared openly, then drew herself up, her face grim.

Cheris wasn’t wearing her gloves. Both were tucked into her belt. Her hands felt cold and clammy and exposed. The combat knife also at her belt was too heavy, too light, for all that she was used to it. She reminded herself that this part was her idea, even if Jedao had agreed it would work.

“General,” Nerevor said.

“The briefing,” Cheris said. She didn’t want to have to repeat herself.

The ranks of moth commanders blazed into life. Cheris scanned them, trying to get an overall impression of their reactions. After her last time doing this, she knew that attempting to track every individual would just fluster her. Better to set herself a smaller goal and hope that Jedao picked up on whatever she missed.

Cheris inhaled, then began. “We’re going to force a breach in the shields.” Mouths opened. “No, I’m not taking questions. You’re here to listen.”

Jedao didn’t bother telling her most of them were skeptical. She could figure that out herself. “Shuos Ko is taking you seriously,” Jedao said, “but then he would. Kel Paizan and some of the bannermoth commanders are worried we’re going to pull a second Hellspin.”

Cheris went on. She couldn’t pause every time Jedao said something. “The shields have a weakness. They rely on a human operator who can be made to falter. You will receive further instructions when we begin the siege. I have knowledge you don’t, and we still don’t know how or why the Fortress fell. I won’t risk that information falling into enemy hands.”

On the word “hands,” she unsheathed the combat knife, then retrieved her left glove. The knife was sharp in the way of bitter nights. Cheris made a show of sawing off each of the glove’s fingers in turn. They fluttered to the floor, looking like hollowed-out leeches. When she was done, it looked like a ragged imitation of Jedao’s fingerless gloves, the kind no one had worn since his execution.

The silence could have swallowed a star.

She put on the amputated glove, then cut all the fingers off its mate. She put that one on, too.

“I give the orders here,” Cheris said. “We have already seen what happens when a moth commander falls out of line. I will not tolerate any further lapses in discipline. I trust I have made myself understood.”

Cheris didn’t dare glance back at Kel Nerevor, but a muscle was working in Kel Paizan’s jaw. Colonel Kel Ragath looked amused, of all things.

“Say something,” Jedao said. “Don’t let up.”

“You are thinking,” Cheris said, “that this can’t possibly work. But the fact is that out of all the great and terrible weapons in the Kel Arsenal, Kel Command saw fit to send us a single man. If you cannot trust in Kel Command, you are not fit to be Kel.”

It was a gamble saying this to officers who had, in some cases, served longer than she had been alive, but the argument felt right. It was a Kel argument, an appeal to authority.

They looked at her in silence.

“Acknowledge,” Cheris said.

“Sir,” they said in one voice.

She wondered what Shuos Jedao could have achieved in life with the Kel united behind him. His soldiers had loved him; the histories were mercilessly clear on this point.

“We will continue our approach to the Fortress of Scattered Needles along a favorable gradient,” Cheris went on. “Because of the changing calendrical terrain, we will be forced to use nonstandard formations. I have transmitted the orders giving the coordinates and the preliminary formation keys. In the meantime, I expect everyone’s reports on the recent engagement in two hours. That’s all.”

It was a relief when the salutes were replaced by the colorful chatter of status graphs.

Commander Nerevor’s eyes were deeply troubled. “The – fingers, General,” she said. “What are your orders?”

“Just dispose of them,” Cheris said. She felt ill about the gloves herself, but she had needed the symbol. Besides, if she ever recovered from her present disgrace, she could always acquire a new pair of gloves.

The hush around her spoke something of fear. If that had been her intent, why was her stomach knotted up?

CHERIS WAS IN the command center when Commander Nerevor alerted her that they were an hour out from the shields. “Look, sir,” she said, gesturing at her scan readouts.

The scan didn’t show them the Fortress proper, as it couldn’t penetrate the shields. The grid showed a simulation of the Fortress’s position, a whorled mass of curves and lines like ink spun solid. The adjacent display showed the facing hemisphere, with subdisplays to pick out key features in the hexagon-pentagon facets.

As Cheris watched, flickers of pallid glowing shapes lit the shields: feathers, leaves, the fractured hearts of river rocks, bullets, stormclouds. She might have stood there forever, entranced by the unexpected beauty of the patterndrift.

“The unvanquishable Fortress,” Nerevor said in a colorless voice. “Your orders, sir.”

“Deployments as follows,” Cheris said. She checked each one, not for the first time, before sending it to Communications. This would be one hell of a time to discover that she’d transposed two digits. Jedao had looked over them as well, but she was determined to make sure.

They had put together the tactical groups based on their best estimates of who would work well together. Already the losses hurt, small though they were. Starvation Hound was gone, and the damaged Auspicious Glass had to be used carefully. There was no help for it. The numbers wouldn’t repair themselves.

Tactical One was led by Unspoken Law. Tactical Two was led by Sincere Greeting under Kel Paizan, and Tactical Three was led by the senior bannermoth commander, Kel Rai Mogen with Red Stitch. The six remaining boxmoths were distributed two to a group. Since they couldn’t predict the breach’s location, they had to be prepared to secure a landing point with infantry. Just as importantly, the Shuos infiltrators were on standby; once they were injected, they could begin gathering local intelligence.

The moths repositioned themselves as indicated. Fire coverage wasn’t going to be an issue until – if – the breach was made. There was no particular reaction from the shields.

Cheris said, “In 8.26 minutes” – ten of the heretics’ minutes, at the start of their hour –”switch formations: Six Towers Six Banners, and open fire according to the given firing pattern.” She sent it to Communications. “I don’t care what you see out there, adhere to this exactly. Scan, copy Captain Ko on everything. I want the Shuos team’s analysis.”

There was the slightest flicker of leafwrack and searush foam in the shields when the Kel moths eased into position. Six Towers Six Banners was nominally a defensive formation, although it was relegated to Lexicon Secondary because of its weakness. The Kel occasionally trotted it out when they wanted something visually impressive for parade flybys.

“Open fire,” Cheris said, since the commanders would want confirmation. The acknowledgment indicators lit up bright gold on her terminal.

The targets had been randomized. The shields flared up in hot-cold colors, bright but fading quickly.

“I didn’t expect that one to draw a response,” Jedao said. “Just let the Shuos map the chaff for a baseline. Switch in 8.26 minutes, as we discussed.”

Cheris gave the next set of orders. This one wasn’t technically a formation. Her palms felt damp. How long would the Kel stand for this? Be steadfast, she reminded herself, and heard Jedao’s voice in her head. She was almost used to it already. How could her officers be strong if she faltered?

“Sir,” Nerevor said, “this would be the pivot framework of a grand formation if we had exactly seventy-nine more moths to fill the rest up –”

The grand formation Nerevor was referring to was Glory of Roses. “New firing pattern,” Cheris said. “On my mark.” She consulted the terminal’s clock. The moths took up their positions, absurd long triangles on the display. “Mark.” Gold lights again.

This time fire blazed up in a definite pattern, lines and swirls of light outlining the familiar shape of the Andan kniferose. The colors were wrong, no help for that, and this wasn’t going to work either, the shields were – wait.

“Replay first six seconds of shield response,” Cheris said. “One-tenth speed.”

There it was. A fractional delay, as the operator pieced together the pattern. Then the shields glimmered with a tempest of roses falling, petals pierced by curving thorns. Interspersed with the roses was a curious figure, three dots arranged in a triangle, each oriented so the apex pointed toward the Fortress’s primary pole, and each lit up balefire-red. No holes in the shield, however.

“The pictures mean something?” Nerevor said.

“Not an Andan,” Jedao said, “but a definite reaction. The operator identified the grand formation and reacted to it, so they have some background in space tactics. Of course, that could be anyone who watches the right dramas –”

“Sir,” the Communications officer said, “it’s Captain Shuos Ko. Says he has something for you.”

“I’ll hear him,” Cheris said.

It was too much to hope that Ko ever looked less than imperturbable. “General,” he said. “How familiar are you with Shuos security suites?”

“I’m not,” Cheris said.

“Oh, this will be interesting,” Jedao said. “I bet they look completely different now.”

“Five years ago, the standard interface was overhauled in accordance with new Rahal guidelines, something to do with calendrical adjustments,” Ko said. “The old symbol for high alert was a red chevron. It’s now the triangle of dots with all three lit up. Whoever is working the shields has recent security experience.”

“Good man,” Jedao said. “I wouldn’t have known that.”

“Thank you,” Cheris said to Ko. “Anything else?”

“That’s all, sir.” His face winked out.

“Run through the following signifiers in this order and tabulate results,” Jedao said. “Kniferose Thorns Wild, Pierced, Burning Sweetly.”

Cheris was increasingly convinced that the Fortress was going to open a hole in its shields to fire at them, even though the heretics had nothing to worry about yet. Still, the chaff shifted with a responsiveness that she could only describe as human.

They set up the pivots for the next ghost formation, which with a grand swarm of ninety-three would have been Carrion Strike. They patterned the Rahal scrywolf to accompany it. Cheris looked over her shoulder at Rahal Gara. The other woman’s mouth was pale, compressed.

The shields didn’t react as strongly this time, although some chaff manifested anyway: a brief glimpse of the high alert triangle, the dendritic shapes of coral, the occasional glassy hexagon. Flickers of numbers. Gara confirmed that they were consistent with what they knew of the heretics’ calendrical keys.

Jedao laughed shortly. “Definitely not a wolf. A wolf’s mind would be better-disciplined. All right. Hunting Alone, Uncircled, Trapped in Glass, Ambushed.”

Cheris wondered what he was looking for. The signifiers changed the chaff, but the shields didn’t show any signs of going down.

Next was the Shuos ninefox. It scarcely produced any result, as if the shield operator had gotten bored. Cheris was expecting Jedao to try the signifier Crowned with Eyes, which he was known for, but he chose four others.

They went through the three low factions according to schedule: Kel, Nirai, and finally Vidona. With each one, the chaff dwindled until it became faint smudges, the shapes hard to guess even with interpolation.

“Now what?” Cheris asked subvocally, watching Nerevor pace.

“I hate my hunches sometimes,” Jedao said. “Marketing and demographics. I might have guessed.”

She hoped he would explain that to her sometime.

“For the next one, we want to use pivots from the grand formation Skyfall. The firing pattern should sketch the Web of Worlds. Not the basic mirrorweb emblem, but specifically the Web of Worlds.”

Cheris plotted it out, but had to refer to the archives to make sure she had it right. Surely the heretics weren’t really thinking of reviving a dead faction?

“One more, General?” Nerevor said. She was still pacing. “If we could just get the shields down –”

Cheris tried to remember what she knew about the Liozh as she relayed the order. It wasn’t much. The details of the heresy had been suppressed. Kel Academy hadn’t had much to say about it, as most military actions against the Liozh insurrectionists had been sufficiently one-sided as to be, as one instructor had put it, “militarily uninteresting.”

The significance of Skyfall was easier. General Jedao had used it to devastating effect against the Lanterners at the Battle of Severed Hands.

Cheris was jolted back into paying attention when Scan called, “Pinpoint breach at –” He gave the coordinates. Seven more appeared in rapid succession.

“Scan,” Cheris said, but Scan was already working. “Focus fire on the pole spine. We want to scare the operator.”

Between the chatter in the command center, Nerevor’s terse orders coordinating the tactical group, occasional status alerts from the moth commanders, and Jedao’s hellishly confident voice, Cheris could hardly hear herself, let alone shape a thought of her own.

An opening formed to permit return fire. The swarm dispersed to avoid available angles of fire. The two cindermoths’ erasure cannon slung their projectiles one after the other.

“Pull up the dictionary of signifier responses we’ve compiled,” Jedao said. “This will hurt. Tactical One and Two, nail the Deuce of Gears onto surface structures.” His personal emblem. “They can do what they have to as long as the pattern is recognizable. Cheris, ask them to sort the dictionary on antonyms. Have Tactical Three fire on the shields, not the breaches. Every time they see chaff, they’re to hit with the antonym. A fast response is more important than a certain one. Make sure Commander Rai Mogen is clear on this.”

Nerevor frowned at the orders when Cheris gave them. “Sir,” she said, “that’s practically bannering the Deuce –”

Cheris flexed her half-gloved hands to draw attention to them. “We’re using the arch-traitor,” she said. “We’ve admitted as much. If his reputation benefits us, we’ll keep using it. The order stands.”

Nerevor’s mouth was tight, but she didn’t protest further.

Tactical Groups One and Two began hammering the Deuce of Gears on the Fortress’s armor with weapons at twenty percent. It was hard to see the gears as anything but a large circle and a smaller one, the teeth obliterated to nubs, but in context Jedao’s emblem was clear.

The red triangles showed up at greater and greater scale, lightning flashes of anxiety bleeding across the shields like a haywire fractal gasket.

“There we go,” Jedao said.

Guns spoke from the Fortress, a beam raking Kel Shan’s Trading in Solstice from a momentary opening, then fell silent.

Tactical Three was still responding to the maelstrom of chaff – fissures, broken teeth, bridges swaying dangerously, red splashes – with the antonym attack. Cheris made herself breathe evenly despite the gasps and stutters in the images. She was finally convinced that, for whatever reason, the shields were tied to the operator’s inner world, the knots in their heart. But why would you design a defensive system that –

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Cheris said. Nerevor stiffened, ready for new orders, but Cheris wasn’t looking at her.

“Figured it out?” Jedao said, pleased. “Let’s hear it. Subvocals. Although Kel Command is going to have to outprocess everyone anyway.”

“How long have you known that invariant ice isn’t an invariant?”

Before now, it hadn’t occurred to Cheris that the shields were based on an exotic technology and that the heretics had simply designed their calendar to enable them to continue using it. After all, everyone in the hexarchate knew that invariant ice was an invariant.

“Lucky guess,” Jedao said. “Sorry. Shouldn’t be flip. Cheris, those shields aren’t based on standard physical forces, no matter what the hexarchs say about technological breakthroughs. I’m no Nirai, but I know what the universe’s laws look like, and shields like this? Never happen. This means they’re an exotic effect. We also know that the Fortress projects a calendrical regime due to the nexus. It stands to reason that the shields take advantage of the same phenomenon.

“And this suggests that the shields are a projection of the operator’s belief system. Not the beliefs of a group; the symbol system is too consistent and composites don’t work here anymore. I can’t see why else there would be chaff, or why Kel Command wanted to distract people from it. – Nerevor wants your attention.”

“Sir,” Nerevor said, “Scan is starting to get coherent readouts through the punctures.”

Scan followed that up with, “More breaches above the Anemone and Radiant Wards, but – wait a moment.”

The triangle pattern spattered the shields like summer wildfire. Tactical Three responded with the scrywolf Uncircled.

“How does this even –” Cheris started to say.

“Cheris, people are very simple,” Jedao said. “You occupy the conscious mind with one thing, then drive a spike into the subconscious mind with something else while the walls are down. That’s how we used formations just now. The operator was trained to pay attention to Kel formations, so that took care of their conscious focus, and now we’ve pinned them with my emblem, which they know to fear. The emblems on the shields – for us they’re just time-lapse pictures, but for the operator, because the shields are an ego projection, we’re tattooing words directly onto their brain.”

“We’re in!” Scan cried over Jedao’s words.

For a merciful second Cheris felt nothing. But everyone else fell over like hingeless puppets.

The world was awash in colors, patterns, floating echoes of shapes she had seen in the shields. Leaf into feather into petal in great blowing drifts that passed through her hands. Fissures and fractures of peeling black. Sandglasses pouring themselves out.

Jedao was silent. Cheris looked at Nerevor, but Nerevor was curled up on the floor, wheezing something in a low language Cheris didn’t recognize.

She couldn’t waste time panicking. She rerouted Communications to her own terminal. “Get me Commander Paizan,” she said.

After a long moment, the grid said in its crisp voice, “Commander Paizan is not responding.”

She sent a general query to the moth commanders. Nothing.

“General Jedao,” she said, remembering that he had called himself a shield, “where are you?”

Still no response.

She forced herself to breathe steadily.

The scan readout indicated that the Fortress’s shields had splayed themselves outward like hands with the skin peeled off and nerves unfurled in all directions. Cheris lost another minute picking through the equations, trying to find out how all her soldiers had been disabled. Two people were screaming. She half-turned, tried to think of what she could do for them, then remembered the whole swarm was in trouble. She tried calling Medical. No luck there.

“General Kel Cheris to swarm grids,” she said. “Override Aerie Primary. Slave all moths to Unspoken Law.”

The responses stuttered back to her as the swarm moths acknowledged. Someone on Kel Liai Meng’s Essential Verses had recovered enough to acknowledge verbally, but when she asked for his status, there was no answer. Fear bit her heart.

Nerevor was now trying to stand up, but her legs kept collapsing under her, and her eyes were unfocused. Cheris went over and settled her against the wall, telling her to stay still, but Nerevor wouldn’t stop trying.

Sudden despair crashed over Cheris. She looked around the command center, and the knowledge of her failure was like a black knife. She was so tired, she had been in the darkness for so long, and she was fighting against long odds. If only she could fold asleep, just for a little space; and if only the universe had any mercy, she would never have to wake.

Cheris reached for her combat knife. She hadn’t thought she’d have further use for it on a moth, but there it was. She weighed it in her hand, then brought it up to her –

“Cheris, stop it.” It was Jedao, whispering as across a hollow distance.

“What happened to you?” she asked without interest.

“It hurts,” he said simply. “Cheris, put the knife away.”

“I failed,” she said, “and all of it was for nothing.”

“Cheris, I mean it.” His voice grew sharper. “You’re experiencing bleed-through. I’m sorry. But you need to put the knife away.”

She didn’t want to obey. It was tempting to close her eyes and use the knife anyway.

“The knife, Cheris.”

Then she understood. “This isn’t me,” she said, jolted out of the despair. “It’s you. How long have you been suicidal?” She sheathed the knife.

He had been a ghost for 397 years. She imagined that if there were a way for him to kill himself, he would have figured it out by now. Something she could use against him if he tried to pull mind games on her again.

“The bleed-through will pass,” Jedao said coolly, “and you’ll be all right. Prepare orders for the infantry and the Shuos infiltrators. The operator can’t sustain the shield inversion – look at the scan. They’re disabling the entire Fortress to get us. We’ll have to endure.”

Assuming the shields went down, they still had the problem of landing troops. She began setting up move orders, checking routes carefully to avoid collisions. It would be stupid to crash her own swarm.

Cheris heard thumping, and glanced back at Rahal Gara, who was going into convulsions. Gara wasn’t the only one. “This had better end soon,” she said.

Seven minutes and nineteen seconds later, the inverted shield dissipated completely.

A message came in from the Fortress. It said: “Very impressive, Garach Jedao. We’ll have a use for you.”

People were starting to recover, and they had a Fortress to conquer, but Cheris was remembering the knife. Jedao had claimed to fear being executed by the Shuos hexarch, but he was also suicidal. Something didn’t add up. She could only hope that she figured it out before it came around to bite her.