by Yoon Ha Lee
Praise for Ninefox Gambit
‘The story is dense, the pace intense, and the delicate East Asian flavoring of the math-rich setting might make it seem utterly alien to many readers—yet metaphors for our own world abound. Readers willing to invest in a steep learning curve will be rewarded with a tight-woven, complicated but not convoluted, breathtakingly original space opera. And since this is only the first book of the Machineries of Empire trilogy, it’s the start of what looks to be a wild ride.’
N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times
‘I love Yoon’s work! Ninefox Gambit is solidly and satisfyingly full of battles and political intrigue, in a beautifully built far-future that manages to be human and alien at the same time. It should be a treat for readers already familiar with Yoon’s excellent short fiction, and an extra treat for readers finding Yoon’s work for the first time.’
Ann Leckie
‘Cheris and Jedao are fascinating, multi-faceted entities, filled with contradictions and idiosyncrasies; Lee’s prose is clever and opulently detailed; the worldbuilding is jaw-droppingly good. Like the many-eyed Shuos, the book appears to delight in its own game, a tangle of plots and subplots. It almost seems content to never be deciphered, but if you persist, you’re in for a fantastic story. Lee’s novel is a brilliant way to begin a trilogy.’
Ars Technica
‘Yoon Ha Lee recasts Korean legend in a densely rendered, high-tech future universe, with intricate worldbuilding.’
The Guardian
‘Rather than aping the generic clipped-and-grim style so often employed by other, less talented writers, Lee leans in the other direction, finding a sumptuous beauty in physical moments and complexity in thought and motivation. Ninefox is a book with math in its heart, but also one which understands that even numbers can lie. That it’s what you see in the numbers that matters most. And that something — maybe all things — begun with the best, truest of intentions can go terribly wrong once the gears of reality begin to churn.’
NPR
‘Beautiful, brutal and full of the kind of off-hand inventiveness that the best SF trades in, Ninefox Gambit is an effortlessly accomplished SF novel. Yoon Ha Lee has arrived in spectacular fashion.’
Alastair Reynolds
‘Starship Troopers meets Apocalypse Now—and they’ve put Kurtz in charge... Mind-blistering military space opera, but with a density of ideas and strangeness that recalls the works of Hannu Rajaniemi, even Cordwainer Smith. An unmissable debut.’
Stephen Baxter
‘For those itching for dense worldbuilding, a riproaring plot, complex relationships, and military SF with a deep imagination, it’ll do just the trick. Lee’s already shown he has the chops for short fiction, and now Ninefox Gambit proves that he’s a novelist to watch out for. This is military SF with blood, guts, math, and heart.’
Tor.com
‘“You know what’s going on, right?” Ninefox Gambit asks. Often, you have to say, “Uh, yeah, of course,” when the real answer is “I have no idea, but I really, really care.” And then you keep reading.’
Strange Horizons
‘For sixteen years Yoon Ha Lee has been the shadow general of science fiction, the calculating tactician behind victory after victory. Now he launches his great manoeuvre. Origami elegant, fox-sly, defiantly and ferociously new, this book will burn your brain. Axiomatically brilliant. Heretically good.’
Seth Dickinson
‘A high-octane ride through an endlessly inventive world, where calendars are weapons of war and dead soldiers can assist the living. Bold, fearlessly innovative and just a bit brutal, this is a book that deserves to be on every awards list.’
Aliette de Bodard
‘Ambitious. Confusing. Enthralling. Brilliant. These are the words I will use to describe Yoon Ha Lee’s utterly immersive, utterly memorable novel. I had heard very high praise for Lee’s short fiction—still, even with those moderate expectations I had no idea what I was in for. I haven’t felt this blown away by a novel’s originality since Ancillary Justice. And, since I’m being completely honest, Ninefox Gambit is actually more inventive, boundary-breaking, and ambitious than that.’
The Book Smugglers
‘Cheris’ world feels genuinely alien, with thrillingly unfamiliar social structures and technologies, and the attention to detail is simply stunning. Just don’t ever let your concentration slip, or there’s a good chance that you will miss something wonderful.’
SciFi Now
‘A dizzying composite of military space opera and sheer poetry. Every word, name and concept in Lee’s unique world is imbued with a sense of wonder.’
Hannu Rajaniemi
‘There’s a good chance that this series will be seen as an important addition to the space opera resurgence of recent years. While Lee has developed a singular combination of military SF, mathematical elegance, and futuristic strangeness, readers may note echoes of or similarities to Iain M. Banks, Hannu Rajaniemi, C. J. Cherryh, Ann Leckie and Cordwainer Smith. Admirers of these authors, or anyone interested in state-of-the-art space opera, ought to give Ninefox Gambit a try.’
Worlds Without End
‘Daring, original and compulsive. As if Cordwainer Smith had written a Warhammer novel.’
Gareth L. Powell
‘That was a great read; very intriguing world building in particular. I now want to sign all my emails with “Yours in calendrical heresy.”’
Tobias Buckell
‘A striking space opera by a bright new talent.’
Elizabeth Bear
‘Suitably, given the rigid Doctrine of the hexarchate and the irresistible formation instinct of the warrior Kel faction, Ninefox Gambit is a book of precise rigor. It gives a wonderful amount of worldbuilding without any clunky exposition dumps, is ruthlessly clear-eyed about the costs and concerns of war (especially at this technological level) and gives us an instantly ingratiating heroine who spends most of the book doing her best to outmaneuver the forces that have set her up to fail, waste the lives of her troops or just die. This is a future to get excited about.’
RT Book Reviews
‘Space-based nail-biter Ninefox Gambit is a smart space opera that pushes the frontier of science fiction. A must-read.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Confused yet? The learning curve on Ninefox Gambit shouldn’t be underestimated, although readers with a solid foundation in hard science fiction will have an easier time parsing the narrative. It’s a challenging story, tackling science fiction concepts we’re familiar with (spaceships and intergalactic war) while layering on purposefully obfuscated but compelling twists.’
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog
‘If you’re looking for another great sci-fi read, you should consider Ninefox Gambit.’
Sci-Fi Addicts
First published 2017 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-046-9
Copyright © 2017 Yoon Ha Lee
Cover art by Chris Moore
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
CHAPTER ONE
LIEUTENANT COLONEL KEL Brezan’s general had just been tapped to deal with the Hafn invasion. Brezan had expected chaos, just not this much of it. General Kel Khiruev had had to scramble he
r swarm after the Hafn assassinated General Kel Chrenka eighteen days ago. In Brezan’s experience, assassinations never made the situation less chaotic.
Brezan was one of Khiruev’s personnel officers. It was a better position than Brezan had ever hoped for, given the equivocal notes in his profile. As it stood, Khiruev’s swarm was immense, in keeping with the threat that Kel Command anticipated. Brezan was impressed they’d scared up so many people on short notice. They’d given Khiruev one of the hexarchate’s six cindermoths, its largest and most powerful vessels of war, as her command moth: the Hierarchy of Feasts. The swarm contained an additional 119 bannermoths and 48 scoutmoths. Kel Command had informed them that the Hafn had advanced to the Severed March, a region of space that had been quiet for as long as Brezan remembered, and which was therefore less well-prepared for the event than anyone would like. Yet here they were, cooling their heels at a transfer point because Kel Command, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that it was so important to add a single captain with secret orders that it was worth holding up Khiruev’s swarm.
Brezan had spent the last seventy-three minutes reviewing the damnable woman’s profile and refraining from kicking the terminal. He didn’t care how good she was at calendrical warfare. If he didn’t hear from her transport in the next twelve minutes, he was going to recommend that they head out anyway, with a side of telling Kel Command to go hang. The Hafn had already left population centers on eight planets in crystallized ruins. The priority was fighting them sooner rather than later.
Captain Kel Cheris. Her early record showed that she was competent, as infantry officers went, with one oddity, her mathematical aptitude. The Nirai, the faction that contained most of the hexarchate’s scientists and engineers, had tried to recruit her on the strength of it. Her heart had been set on joining the Kel, however—something that Brezan knew a little about—and, as the joke went, the Kel never said no to volunteers.
More interestingly, Cheris was a Mwennin, a member of a minority that no one had heard of. Granted, in an interstellar polity containing uncounted systems, this wasn’t difficult, but the Mwennin additionally kept their heads down and avoided faction service. Brezan had no doubt that their existence was tolerated only because their numbers were minuscule even in the one system where they had settled, and because, between the heretics and the foreigners that might as well be heretics, the hexarchate had enough trouble to deal with. Still, Cheris had acquitted herself well enough, given her origins.
Brezan couldn’t help a twinge of bitterness when he thought about it. He came from an honorable Kel family, an older sister on General Inesser’s staff for fuck’s sake, but he would never go far and he knew it. Some of the soldiers made disparaging comments about the fact that he was a womanform when they thought he couldn’t hear them. But his fellow officers were civil about it, which was all he cared about. Rather, the notes in his profile about impulsiveness and unconventional thinking had impeded his advancement.
Cheris had not been able to stay out of trouble either, for all that her record had previously been good. She had recently been involved with the Siege of the Fortress of Scattered Needles, which had been taken over by heretics colluding with the Hafn. Brezan suspected that the record was leaving out something important, but most of the relevant segments were classified. Even General Khiruev’s direct inquiries had been stonewalled.
Even better, Kel Command had fielded the undead general Shuos Jedao at Scattered Needles. No one denied Jedao’s brilliance at tactics, but he was also mad, and he had once massacred two armies at Hellspin Fortress, one of them his own. The Kel swarm sent to deal with the Fortress’s heretics had been wiped out, probably by Jedao himself. He was supposedly dead for good now, but who knew how true that was. Kel Command had been reviving him through mysterious means to throw at emergencies for the last few centuries, after all.
Cheris had tangled herself in that disaster, and something in that accomplishment had convinced Kel Command that General Khiruev would find her vitally useful. They just wouldn’t say how. Brezan would rather they had sent a shipment of extra boots. Because, with all the marching they did in space, the boots would be more useful.
Brezan looked around the cindermoth’s command center with its faintly glowing terminals, the impatient officers, beetleform and deltaform servitors performing maintenance. General Khiruev was a dark-skinned woman with an untidy streak of white in her hair and disfiguring scars showing pale along the side of her face where she’d never bothered getting them fixed. Unlike the others, she looked unruffled. On the other hand, the moth commander, Kel Janaia, kept checking her terminal for the time even though her augment’s internal clock should have been synchronized with the mothgrid.
Seven more minutes. Shouldn’t they have heard from the transport by now? Brezan resisted sending a note to Communications, who wouldn’t thank him.
Of course, this was business as usual. It was no secret that Kel Command, being a hivemind, frequently made questionable decisions. A few centuries abusing composite technology would do that to you. Brezan functioned indifferently as part of a composite, one of the reasons he had expected to land at a boring desk dirtside instead of here, but he conceded that that sense of utter humming conviction, of belonging, was addictive. At least things weren’t likely to get worse.
As it turned out, things were about to get worse.
“Sir, a needlemoth is requesting permission to land,” Communications said to the general. “The transport bears one Captain Kel Cheris for transfer.”
Who the hell was the captain that she rated a needlemoth, anyway? Brezan had never seen one in person, although they turned up all the time in spy dramas. Scan had put it on the central display. It looked like it’d hold a person and a half, if the scale was to be believed.
“Not late yet,” Khiruev said with an equanimity Brezan wished he shared. “Colonel Brezan, make the arrangements.”
“Sir,” Brezan said. He dispatched instructions to the mothgrid to be passed on to the captain. She’d be staying in one of the nicer guest rooms rather than with the command moth’s infantry complement, as befitted her courier status.
Just then they received a report that a Hafn swarm had been spotted on the way to the Fortress of Spinshot Coins. Like Scattered Needles, Spinshot Coins was one of the hexarchate’s nexus fortresses, which maintained calendrical stability throughout the realm. Unless everyone adhered to the high calendar and its associated systems of behavior, the hexarchate’s exotic technologies—most notably the mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems—would cease to function. The nexus fortresses had been designed to magnify the effect of calendrical observances.
The Hafn, not being stupid, were focusing their efforts on the fortresses. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the Hafn had demonstrated that their exotic technology functioned in hexarchate space, where the high calendar was dominant. It shouldn’t have been possible, yet here they were. Still, the general had orders to protect the nexus fortresses at all costs. Who knew what the Hafn would be able to pull if they got calendrical terrain lined up on their side?
“Scoutmoth 19 says there are possible scan ghosts,” Communications was saying when someone entered the command center.
Brezan started, mainly because he had studied Cheris’s profile extensively. While he expected her to report to the command center, the newcomer didn’t move like her. The medical records and kinesthetic data had showed that Cheris had the standard body language that Kel infantry were imprinted with in Academy. This woman moved with the deceptive efficiency of an assassin. Brezan began to snap a reprimand. Instead, the words stuck to his teeth.
Captain Kel Cheris was short, with yellow-pale skin, an oval face, and black hair worn in a regulation bob. Those weren’t what surprised him. At least they matched the profile.
Besides the jarring body language, he noticed her uniform. Kel black-and-gold, like that of almost everyone in the command center, except her insignia should h
ave been a captain’s talon. Instead, she sported a general’s wings. Beneath the wings was a Shuos eye. To say nothing of her gloves, Kel-black, but with no fingers.
Brezan froze up. He knew what the insignia meant, what the fingerless gloves meant. Occasionally the Shuos, who specialized in information operations, were seconded to Kel service. They wore the ninefox eye to indicate their faction of origin. But no Shuos general had served among the Kel for four centuries.
No living Shuos general, anyway.
General Khiruev had risen from her seat. “That joke’s in terrible taste, fledge,” she said in her mild voice. Nevertheless, people flinched from ‘fledge’: the Kel only said that to cadets, in public anyway. “Fix the insignia and take off the gloves. Now.”
During his lifetime, General Shuos Jedao had been one of the Kel’s best officers. Then Hellspin Fortress had happened. Brezan considered it proof of Kel Command’s psychosis that their response to Jedao going comprehensively insane was to stick him in an immortality device to repair his mind, then add him to the Kel Arsenal on the grounds that Jedao was scarier than they were, so why not weaponize him?
The half-gloves that Jedao had worn in life had been out of fashion in the hexarchate for a good four centuries, and with excellent cause.