Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWENTY

SHUOS HAODAN HATED assassination assignments. Years ago, an instructor had explained that this was why he was ideal for them. Certainly he had the requisite skills, some of which had come from growing up in a Kel family, and he had excelled in academy. Originally, however, he had hoped for something quiet in analysis or adminstration.

On one of his first missions, his supervisor had sent him as a backup field agent anyway. The primary agent was talented but erratic. She got herself tangled up in some side scheme involving art fraud (he would have loved to see the wording of the reprimand), and Haodan had to dispatch the target himself.

He did too good a job. His supervisor told him it was his duty to take on more assassination assignments. When he protested that he didn’t enjoy taking lives – in some Shuos divisions you could go your entire career without taking a life, not that the general public would ever believe it – the supervisor said, with cruel persuasiveness, that if every Shuos weaseled out of wetwork, that would leave no one but the bullies and sociopaths. Hence it was Shuos policy to retain some assassins who didn’t glory in their work. Not that the general public would believe that, either.

Haodan knew that the argument was an appeal to his ego. It worked.

So here he was in the Fortress’s Dragonfly Ward years later, getting in position for his attempt on the head of the heretics’ analysis section, a foreigner named Vahenz afrir dai Noum. Shuos eavesdropping on the heretics’ discussions suggested that she was influential in policy-making as well. As his handler had explained, they hadn’t wanted to make an attempt on Vahenz earlier because it was more useful to monitor her activities without doing anything that would trigger an inconvenient stepping up of security. Now that the Fortress was all but taken, however, they wanted to make sure that Vahenz didn’t escape to cause trouble elsewhere, considering how much damage she had done already. They’d considered trying to capture her alive, but in the end they had decided against it on the grounds that the operation would be too uncertain.

Haodan had secured a job as a delivery man for a fancy confectioner; the Fortress’s citizens apparently took a certain level of decadence for granted, even while under siege. The previous delivery woman had gotten sick with Haodan’s encouragement, and Haodan had made all the right noises at the interview. Some research had turned up the manager’s worry for relatives trapped on the Drummers’ Ward, which Haodan played on shamelessly. He could have told her that life wasn’t going to be any better in the Dragonfly Ward now that the campaign was drawing to a close, even if the confectionary was in one of the areas least affected. Once the Kel had secured the Fortress, they would send for the Vidona, and the Vidona were bound to be more thorough than usual about reeducation procedures with a nexus fortress in the wake of a rebellion.

Vahenz ordered confections every other day like clockwork. Haodan despaired of predictable people. They made his job too easy. But then, the easier the job, the likelier it was that he could pull it off without excessive secondary casualties, so he ought to be grateful.

The parcel he was interested in was pasted over with cunning cutout paper shapes, farm animals in accordance with the heretical calendar. The effect was elegant, espeecially with the tasteful subdued colors of the paper. It would be his third delivery.

It amused him that the confectionary’s manager insisted on hand delivery during a siege. The human touch or something. She claimed people paid extra for it. Servitor delivery wouldn’t have made his work significantly harder, though. He knew ways of handling civilian servitors.

The manager was giving him instructions. She liked the fact that he stood practically at attention – something you learned fast with a Kel father, albeit one who was a medical technician – and treated her seriously. “Don’t forget to tell Leng that I’m thinking of their son,” she was saying. “And be certain to tell Ajenio that I’ve got those new sesame cookies in production, if he wants to place an order. I’ve included samples in his parcel so he can try before he decides, but he’ll like them. I’m always right about these things. Oh, and avoid the 17-4 passage. They’ll be marching soldiers through there around the time you go through, and you don’t want to be mixed up in that. Some kind of parade, but you’ve got a job to do.”

At last she had said everything she was going to say, and Haodan was able to leave. He rode his scooter in the designated lane. The passages on this level were messy, and the lifts were a disaster. Then again, the Fortress had originally been intended as a retreat for the heptarchs, with wards designed by separate teams, and for reasons of Doctrine they had demolished and reconstructed great chunks of the interior to do away with the seventh ward after they destroyed the Liozh. It was a wonder the thing was habitable.

The first two deliveries went as expected. Ajenio, a round, florid man, insisted on trying a sesame cookie in front of Haodan, and then offered him one. Haodan declined. He knew the manager would take a dim view of his saying yes. Besides, she already sent him home with a basket of treats every evening and he was convinced he was gaining weight.

By the time he freed himself from Ajenio, who was capable of waxing poetic about a cookie to a degree even an Andan would find embarrassing, he was twelve minutes behind schedule. Still, not disastrous.

The office Haodan went to after that was in a building that had its back up against one of the ward’s walls. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that escape passages were involved, although the Shuos attempts at scan had been inconclusive. He had been here before. His face and his uniform with the swan-and-ribbon logo were familiar to security. They waved him through, smiling. He smiled back. It was only polite.

Seventeen minutes late. He still had some margin.

Up to the fourth floor. Lucky unlucky four, as the Kel would say. The target worked in this office sometimes, instead of being holed up in the Fortress’s command center all the time. Judging from some of the infiltrators’ gossip, the heretics didn’t all get along. She probably wanted to monitor the ward in person, or hide some of her activities from her putative superior.

The target’s assistant sat at the front desk. She was stabbing at the terminal. Too bad: if he had a different pretext he could have offered to help her with the problem, but as it stood that would arouse suspicion. Besides, odds were that a Shuos had caused the problem to begin with.

Haodan bobbed in a calculatedly nervous bow. “Swan and Ribbon. Sorry to interrupt, should I drop this off or take it in?” He always asked.

The assistant never let him take it in, but he had gotten one of the other infiltrators to run a flickerform servitor into the ceiling above the target’s office. Maddeningly, the target had enough shielding and scan machinery in there to outfit a warmoth. Even the servitor spy was a risk. All it did was listen, and at a random time each day it sent an encrypted databurst to indicate what times it detected human activity in there. No luck getting clean vocals out.

The office was located far to the back, with additional security in the way. It would have been nice to go in and do the job personally, but Haodan wasn’t suicidal.

“I’ll make sure it gets to her,” the assistant said with a wan smile.

“Rough day?” Haodan said, placing the parcel on her desk.

“You have no idea. And now this terminal.”

“Sorry, I can’t help you with that,” Haodan lied. His orders had been specific: assassination, not intelligence-fishing. Besides, the target would have seen through the tired “I’m here to fix that hardware glitch” routine. Her weaknesses were gustatory, so Haodan had tailored his approach accordingly.

“Oh, you’re always a help,” the assistant said, smiling more genuinely. “She loves those sweets. They’ll put her in a good mood, all the better for the rest of us.”

“That’s good to hear,” Haodan said. This was a weakness in the plan. If the target kept to schedule, she’d be in the office in approximately twenty-seven minutes. He had set the timer accordingly. There was a strong chance the bomb would kill the assistant, too. Haodan was sorry about this, as he had grown to like her, but contriving a way to keep her safe would have elevated the risk to unacceptable levels.

The assistant went back to wrestling with her terminal. “I’d best be going,” Haodan said. She said something indistinct in response.

Down to the ground floor, back to the scooter. Haodan had no intention of returning to the confectionary now that the job had served its purpose, but he might as well finish the day’s deliveries. It only seemed fair.

Seven minutes after Haodan left, a round-faced man in white-and-gold entered the fourth floor office suite and rapped on the wall.

“Pioro,” the assistant said, “she’s not in yet –”

“She won’t be for some time,” Pioro said. “Emergency meeting, need-to-know, all of that. I’m on the way myself, but I remembered she’s always bitchy if she misses the sweets, especially since Zai’s taken to serving vegetable rolls with fish sauce lately, so I thought I’d stop by to pick them up. Don’t worry, I’ll save you a couple.”

“Yes, that would be good,” the assistant said. “I don’t suppose you have time to look at this synchronization error –”

Pioro’s eyebrows shot up as he leaned over to glance at the display. “Probably some Shuos grid diver. Bad sign if they’re this far in. I ought to run, but you should lock down and restore to clean state. It’s a pain, but we have to take precautions.” He hefted the parcel. “Must be something good in there. Fortunately, she likes to share.”

“Thanks for your help, Pioro,” the assistant said.

“Anytime,” Pioro said as he left with the parcel and its tasteful paper decorations.

THE FIRST THING Vahenz afrir dai Noum did when she cracked General Jedao’s message was start the self-destruct in her remote office. She knew how much that equipment had cost, and how irritated her employers would be, but you could always buy new equipment. She, on the other hand, would be hard to replace. They’d already gotten Pioro with an attack clearly meant for her; she wasn’t about to let them get her too. A pity about the associated casualties, but she didn’t excel at her job by being sentimental.

(Interesting that Jedao had fetched up in a woman’s body, but then, the Shuos didn’t care about that sort of thing. She would have expected it to give the Kel fits, though. Maybe the mere fact of Jedao’s presence made them twitch so much that the issue of the body didn’t even register.)

The second thing Vahenz did was head for the command center to meet Liozh Zai. The Liozh name was an affectation, but it defined Zai. One of the things she liked about Zai was her radiant sincerity, even if it seemed to come hooked into lamentably ascetic tastes in food and drink; Vahenz had always made a point of bringing her own snacks to Zai’s meetings rather than being stuck eating things like sour fruits and unsweetened tea. Trivial points of law mattered to Zai, but because she believed in them, other people believed in them, too. If she’d had more time to season Zai to the grubby realities of politics, Vahenz could have done more with that nascent charisma. But then, what could you expect from someone who had grown up in a glorified warriors’ guild? Zai had been deeply wounded when the hexarchs stripped her of her post as a shield operator for protesting the hexarchs’ calendrical experiments, but that had made Zai into a resource.

Vahenz hoped that Gerenag Abrana’s cryptologists were slower than she was, that her specialized code and superior intelligence gave her the necessary edge. It was her fault for not spotting the tap earlier. She hadn’t realized how good Abrana’s security people were. But once she saw Jedao’s message, she knew the tap had to exist. She had broken the encryption too easily; it was meant to be spied on. And she knew Zai, knew Zai hadn’t been engaged in secret negotiations with the fucking ninefox general. Which meant that the message’s intended recipient was Abrana, or Stoghan, or anyone with a grudge. People who would believe the lie because they half-believed it already.

The recent spate of sabotage and assassinations hadn’t helped. Most victims had been lower-level followers, but people were rattled, and rattled people didn’t think clearly. Everything had targeted Zai’s lieutenants but not Zai herself. They hadn’t found logic spikes or mazes in Zai’s grid systems not because they had been better hidden, but because there had been nothing to find, a fact that Abrana’s people would have noted.

The passages to the command center were dimly lit, familiar. The security systems and guards knew her, and made no complaint as she passed through the outer defenses and the empty shield operator stations, and went into the inner sanctum. She ought to write up a critique of security procedures, but it would be wasted on these fools.

“I want a private conversation,” Vahenz said as she entered. “It will only take an hour.”

Liozh Zai got up to greet her. Even though she had to have gotten as little sleep as Vahenz had, she looked composed, almost regal. “Of course,” she said, formal as always. “Given the situation, we have a lot to discuss.” She turned to set the sanctum’s security mode.

“There won’t be any discussions,” Vahenz said. Her scorch pistol was already in her hand.

Zai understood her immediately and spun, reaching for her own sidearm, but Vahenz was faster. The scorch bolt caught Zai in the side of the head.

Zai fell heavily. Vahenz hated the reek of charred meat and singed hair, but Zai was of no more use, and the less she could tell people about Vahenz, the better.

Vahenz knelt, then, and rearranged the corpse to a better pretense of dignity. It was the least she could do. Besides, she had to concede that Zai had had excellent taste in tailors, pearl-and-gold buttons and pale silk and perfect curves and all. Shame to let that go to waste even in death.

She left as she had come, without a fuss. People trusted her and didn’t even think to ask why the meeting had been so short. Terrible to have a mission go this badly, but she’d warned the Hafn it would be a toss of the dice from the get-go. What she regretted most was Pioro’s death. It was so hard to find decent conversationalists. The universe was a big place, though. She was sure to turn up more dinner partners if she kept looking.

Besides, she was going to have a bothersome report to make to the Hafn once she made it off the Fortress. It appeared Kel Command wasn’t completely misguided in fielding Jedao, or at least, Kel Command and Jedao were using each other in a beautiful dysfunctional ballet. It was irritating that Jedao had fouled her mission, to say the least, but she could appreciate a capable fellow operator when she encountered one.

COLONEL RAGATH HAD reported that the Radiant Ward was a wasteland no one wanted to enter except some corpse calligraphers bent on memorializing the event. Resistance had collapsed in the Umbrella Ward when Znev Stoghan pulled out his troops to deal with some internal crisis. The Drummers’ Ward was wracked by riots. Cheris had asked what the riots were about. Ragath had given her a jaundiced look, then said, “The generalized unfairness of life.”

Disposal of bodies was going to be a problem. Cheris had authorized Ragath to conscript civilians in the secured wards. This caused chaos, recriminations, and more riots, but she had to try something.

A Shuos reported in: fighting among the heretics in the Dragonfly Ward. Cheris felt as though she were watching the gears in a machine settle into place, or dissolve. She couldn’t tell which.

10.6 hours later, Doctrine reported that calendrical values were shifting toward approved norms.

Cheris slept long and deeply after that. When she woke, she dressed and paused while pulling her gloves back on. “The propaganda drops,” she said. “They weren’t for the heretics, were they.”

“I wanted you to know what we were annihilating,” Jedao said.

“Why is it important?”

“Are you saying it’s not?”

“No,” Cheris said. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. But we have our orders.”

“I never forgot that,” Jedao said.

When the time came, Cheris went to high table. She paused for a moment at the threshold, looking not at the people but at the banners with their ashhawks Brightly Burning, the calligraphy scrolls, the tapestries. For a dizzying second she thought she was back in the boxmoth Burning Leaf, with her old unit, with Verab and Ankat and soldiers younger than she was by a count of battles that, however small, felt like forever drum-tides. Then she blinked and she was back on the cindermoth again, immeasurably older.

Commander Hazan was overseeing the command center, but Cheris saw Rahal Gara and Shuos Ko and other familiar faces. Shuos Liis smiled at her, a slow, sweet curve. Cheris caught herself admiring Liis’s velvet-dark eyes and lush mouth, then flinched, suddenly worried.

Cheris took her sip from the communal cup, barely tasting the wine, and passed it down. The ritual brought her comfort. She would have given much to have Kel Nerevor by her side, bright as fire, but no one had any word of her.

She left high table as early as she could get away with, returning to her quarters so she could sit on the bed. There were no servitors: the last two she had talked to had suggested that she should sleep instead of staying up with her paperwork. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected them of conspiring with Jedao.

“Tell me something about yourself,” Jedao said out of nowhere. “What it was like in the City of Ravens Feasting. That luckstone means something to you, but you haven’t looked at it since I – since I ruined it for you.” He didn’t say what they both knew: she would be free of him soon.

“I was determined to leave,” Cheris said, wishing he had picked another topic. But she was starting to question her motivations for fleeing toward the Kel. “My mother’s people are old-fashioned, barely within approved norms. I was natural-born, not crèche-born –”

“That’s something we have in common,” Jedao said wryly. “Crèches were still coming into use when my mother had me. I really can say I was born on a farm. I remember the day I first woke up and realized that I was bigger than the geese.”

Cheris tried to picture this. How big were geese anyway? “If my instructors had ever mentioned things like this, I would have paid more attention to history.”

Jedao laughed. “But you were saying about your people –?”

“Most of them are concentrated in a ghetto in the city, although we lived by a park. I didn’t speak the high language until I entered school, and then I couldn’t get rid of the accent until Kel Academy.”

“I’ve never heard you speak your native language.”

She felt a rush of embarrassment. “I don’t speak it well anymore.” Was she embarrassed because of her ineptitude, or because she spoke it at all?

“I barely speak Shparoi anymore myself,” Jedao said, “although I have a Shparoi name.”

“Does it mean something?”

“Does yours?”

An exchange. Fair enough. “In the traditions of my mother’s people,” Cheris said, “I would have been named after – after a saint’s day in the old calendar. A heretical calendar. So instead my parents named me after the high calendar day I was born on. ‘Cheris’ is the word for ‘twenty-three.’ It’s a vigesimal system. That’s all it is.”

“My mother, who was eccentric by our culture’s standards, had three children by three different fathers,” Jedao said. “You’re not supposed to name children after living relatives, it’s disrespectful, but Koiresh Shkan was my father’s name. He was a musician, and I only met him a few times. My other name is derived from a root that means something like ‘honesty.’ You can bet that made my life hell when it got out at Shuos Academy.”

“So your mother was really a farmer?”

“Agricultural researcher. I have no complaints about my childhood, and anyway the Nirai scraped it over for clues already.”

She had forgotten that he was a madman. It was going to be a relief when Kel Command unstapled her from Jedao so she knew what things to believe again. At this rate he was going to ruin her for the Kel.

It occurred to her that Kel Command had done that already.

CHERIS COMPOSED A report to Kel Command. Just the notes made her wince. Vidona Diaiya’s fungal canister. The pervasive use of heretical formations. The threshold winnowers. She made Jedao look over it four times before she sent it along with her request for Andan or Vidona backup, both for preference. The Kel weren’t suited to conversions, and there weren’t enough Shuos to go around.

“Oh, that reminds me – you should go into detail on all the computations you did for the heretical formations and the calendrical spike,” Jedao said just as she was about to send it. “Kel Command might not care about the derivations, but the Rahal like that sort of thing. Put them in a good mood for whatever renormalization they need to do on the Fortress. Plus, you can impress them with your mathematical skills.”

“Is this some new trick?” Cheris said. All she wanted was for the mission to be over.

“What, by throwing math I don’t understand at people I’ve never met?”

It was true that the Rahal might find some of that information helpful, at that. Besides, she didn’t want to get into an argument about something so trivial.

The day after that conversation, Znev Stoghan’s body turned up in neat pieces in the middle of the amputation guns’ original kill zone. A gene scanner confirmed his identity. No one claimed responsibility. Cheris declined to inquire into the matter.

No one ever found Commander Kel Nerevor. But Cheris kept hoping.

Over the next several days, while Cheris struggled to keep up with the administration of the Fortress, calendrical values continued to normalize at a maddeningly slow rate. Rahal Gara and the other Doctrine officers spent a lot of time muttering to each other.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Cheris said to Jedao.

“I don’t get tired, so there’s no need to relax,” he said. “But I wonder what it is they’re so worried about.”

She didn’t think anything of it until two days later, when Communications and Scan spoke at once.

“Relief swarm, four bannermoths escorting twelve boxmoths –”

“We’re being hailed –”

Cheris’s heart leapt. Kel Command hadn’t forgotten them after all. She was going to be done with the whole wretched situation. “Accept communications,” she said.

“Cheris.” Jedao was trying to get her attention. “Rahal Gara sent a signal you didn’t authorize. I don’t know what she said, and I’ve never seen that override before.”

But she was too giddy with relief to hear him. She didn’t recognize the man whose face appeared on her display, with his dark, steady eyes, but given the number of bannermoth commanders in the hexarchate, there was no reason she should. “This is Commander Kel Huan of the Coiled Stone,” the man said. “I assume I’m addressing Brevet General Kel Cheris and General Shuos Jedao.”

“Fuck,” Jedao said, which wasn’t the response Cheris had expected from him. “Look at the pulse in his neck, Cheris. Something’s wrong.”

“This is Brevet General Kel Cheris,” Cheris said over Jedao’s voice. But she was starting to worry. “I assume you’re here to assist with the conversion of the Fortress.”

“We’ll take care of you, sir,” Huan said. “Just hang tight. – One moment, I’ve got a ridiculous emergency in Engineering to attend to. I need to yell at my Nirai again. My apologies.” He signed off.

“He’s lying,” Jedao said. “Short-term you’ll save more people firing on Huan –”

Cheris remembered what she had learned from Jedao’s sacrifice of Nerevor. No shouting. “I’m not firing on other Kel,” she said coldly. Let alone the relief swarm, of all people. “How are four bannermoths going to take down two cindermoths, to say nothing of the rest of our swarm?”

Scan again. “Formation break! Sincere Greeting has left the secondary pivot.”

Her heart froze. “Get me Commander Paizan. I need an explanation.”

“Waste of time,” Jedao said. Now he sounded calm. “He’ll have been warned. You’re fucked. If you want to preserve your swarm, you have to open fire. But then you’ll be outcast forever, to say nothing of the odds. If you let them bomb you, your swarm will die, but you might live.”

Cheris glanced at the display: the relief swarm was closing rapidly, and was well within erasure cannon range. Her hand had reached the chrysalis gun at her hip when Jedao spoke again. “I don’t advise that,” he said. “I’m your only hope of survival if they hit you with exotics. One survivor is better than none.” His voice cracked suddenly. “I fucked up. Four hundred years trying to put it right and it all goes up in smoke because they decide massive overkill is the best way to execute me. Six to one it’s not Mikodez after all, it’s Kujen. He miscalculated anchoring me to you.”

Mikodez was the Shuos hexarch, but who on earth was Kujen? And why was she a mistake?

Slight pause. “I wasn’t crazy when I killed everyone at Hellspin Fortress,” Jedao said rapidly. “Nirai-zho has the answers, Nirai Kujen, the black cradle’s master, but don’t ever, ever trust him.”

Panic frothed up in her. How was a random faraway Nirai technician germane to the situation? Jedao had picked one hell of a time to make himself a distraction. This was it, he had gone mad, he was going to betray her –

“Sir!” Scan sounded frantic. “Something’s wrong with the Coiled Stone’s engine harmonics. That’s – I think that’s a bomb.”

The only thing worse than Jedao being crazy was Jedao not being crazy. “All units into formation Rising Tiger,” Cheris said, but she knew it was too late. “Open fire on Coiled Stone.”

“One last throw of the dice,” Jedao was saying. “I taught you what I could. Don’t make my mistakes. Goodbye, General. And – and thank you for the light.”

Moments later, the world came apart in a roar of needles and bright, hard angles, and there was no more room in her head for questions, or words, or any scrap of feeling.