Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  It was impossible not to think of herself as the Kel swarm, even in the context of scratchy, half-formed notations. She put herself in the role of the Fortress’s commandant and saw problems with the game that hadn’t been evident before: ambiguities, ill-defined objectives, a certain lopsidedness of agency. Surely the heretics had motives and the ability to maneuver toward their own goals. The game should reflect that.

  She entered more scratchwork, agonizingly aware of the mess of numbers and contradictory rules and shaky assumptions. A senior cadet had once told her that proofs were just like essays, no one expected the rough draft to be a work of art, but it was hard not to feel that she should try for elegance from the outset.

  “You can stop there,” Jedao said.

  Cheris’s eyes felt sand-dry. “It won’t work,” she said.

  “There are issues that would come up in initial playtest,” Jedao said, “but that’s not a bad first outing, especially from a Nirai thinker. You should have seen the first time I went through design critique. Blood everywhere.”

  She had a hard time believing that.

  “Cheris, I wasn’t born a tactician. I had to learn like everyone else.”

  “Tell me,” she said carefully, “why you stopped me there.”

  “You must suspect or you wouldn’t be asking.”

  “That was when I changed my focus to consider the Fortress’s player.”

  But why stop there? If the Fortress expected aid from – “The foreigners,” Cheris said in a rush. “They’re part of the situation. And our objectives aren’t exactly the same as Kel Command’s, or they wouldn’t keep hiding information from us.” And who else? What other players had she missed?

  She remembered, with nauseating clarity, the Shuos eye watching her out of her own face. Subcommand Two’s face.

  She had gotten the scenario wrong. Her focus had been on the immediate problem of subduing the Fortress, without encoding the context.

  “I see,” Cheris said. “I got caught up in the tactical problem, when the issue is strategy. All that time with modifiers and attack values and it wasn’t even relevant.”

  “Well, we were sent here as tacticians,” Jedao said, “so you’re not entirely to blame.”

  “Still, I appreciate the lesson,” Cheris said, thinking that next time she would try to catch on sooner.

  “It’s not over,” Jedao said. “Two things. First: the value of a game is in abstraction. Many Nirai go in for simulationist approaches, a tendency you share, but sometimes you learn more by throwing details out than coding them all in. You want to get rid of everything nonessential, cook it down to its simplest possible form.”

  “I see, sir.” The fact that she had been solving the wrong problem with great dedication, if not exactly enthusiasm, was humbling.

  “Second: what do you think games do? What are they about?”

  The flippant answers weren’t going to be right, but she had no idea what he was after. “Winning and losing?” she said. “Simulations?”

  “It hasn’t escaped me that your first answer is a Kel answer and the second is a Nirai answer,” Jedao said. “A Rahal would say that games are about rules, an Andan would say they’re about passing time with people, and who knows what the Vidona are authorized to say.”

  “You’re a Shuos,” Cheris said, “so I presume you’re going to tell me what the Shuos answer is.”

  “According to the Shuos,” Jedao said, “games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.”

  Cheris felt cold all the way down to her marrow. “The siege is a distraction,” she said. “You’re going to game the heretics to death.”

  “A war of hearts, Cheris. Not guns. As you observed not so long ago.”

  “So this is what the propaganda pieces are about,” she said.

  “I want the heretics thinking about what about what happened to the Liozh the first time around,” Jedao said. “There’s a chance this is some completely different heresy, but after the shield operator’s response to the Web of Worlds, I doubt it. I’m guessing that their leaders neglected to remind them of the fate the original Liozh met. It’ll still be on their minds, however. Sometimes even obvious openings are worth taking. If nothing else, we can learn something from their response.”

  The Liozh had been a living faction when Jedao was alive. “Did you see any signs of their heresy before you died?” she asked. “An entire faction going wrong – that’s worse than losing a nexus fortress.”

  “I didn’t see it coming at all,” Jedao said with an undertone of bitterness. “Didn’t interact with the Liozh much except on social occasions. I was always at war, Cheris. It didn’t leave me a lot of free time to discuss philosophy and ethics.”

  Cheris sent the request down to Colonel Ragath. It didn’t take long for him long to respond. “I’ll send over a list as soon as I can, sir,” he said. “Plenty of material to choose from if you want to paint everything in gore. The Liozh military was known more for its revolutionary fervor than its battle prowess. They lost their single best general – who was pretty good – to a Shuos assassin early on. It went to pieces after that. The killing irony is that the Shuos was after another target, a Shuos traitor, and got the wrong woman. Fascinating stuff if you like watching the underdogs getting smeared to paste.”

  Cheris looked at Ragath narrowly. It was impossible to tell if he was being sarcastic.

  “Tell him I’m grateful for his assistance in this matter,” Jedao said.

  She repeated the words, puzzled by Jedao’s unusual deference.

  “Happy to oblige, sir,” Ragath said. His gaze flicked sideways. “I have a minor emergency in the Umbrella Ward, is there anything else you need right now?”

  “No, that’s everything,” Cheris said as she scanned the status reports on the terminal’s subdisplay, recognizing the understatement for what it was. “Out.”

  “Now this,” Jedao said, “is where game presets can be useful. The archives contain the collected efforts of a lot of Shuos trying to impress each other. We don’t have to design propaganda pieces from scratch. All we have to do is feed in some parameters and however many horrifying images we can scare up.”

  Jedao’s matter-of-factness about the Liozh defeat stood at odds with the way he had spoken of the Lanterners as fellow human beings. Cheris wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Did you have something against the Liozh?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Jedao said, “but they died in dreadful ways and we can leverage that.”

  She knew she shouldn’t feel anything for heretics past or present, but Jedao’s sudden callousness made her feel strangely defensive on their behalf.

  Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

  Priority: High

  From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

  To: Heptarch Liozh Zai

  Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, Day of the Carp, the vote in Doctrine says it’s Hour of the Snail and I for one have better things to argue about.

  I heard from Analysis Team Three that they located one of the missing Rahal. Not of terrible use, because they only happened on the corpse after someone called in a strange murder near Stoghan’s troops by Kel Encampment Two. At least the neighborhood watch system is ticking along nicely. We have no idea what was in the damnable woman’s head, but she was clearly trying to contact her people. Stoghan’s troops deny responsibility and for once I believe them. It’s infuriating to think that we lost intelligence to ordinary crime.

  I heard of the latest sniper incident. I’m tired of explaining thi
s to Stoghan, but draconian reprisals against the civilians “sheltering” the snipers aren’t the way to go. I would be surprised if the poor stiffs knew they were being used as cover by Shuos operatives. Stoghan’s actions are only hurting our credibility. I imagine that some of the brutalized citizens are going to revert to the loyalists’ side. This is what we call “counterproductive.”

  I know that Stoghan’s swaggering and “decisiveness” have his popularity at an all-time high, but please balance this against, I don’t know, every other consideration on the table. Rig some votes if you have to.

  All right, I can see you glowering at me, so I will say this. One thing the man is doing right, amazingly, is insisting that his soldiers treat the propaganda canisters as real threats. So far it’s all gridpaper games, and they don’t interface with anything, but still. Solid game design, but I expect that from a Shuos.

  No, the issue is that they’re miniature history lessons. I think Jedao has miscalculated, though. Take that one video segment with the Liozh prisoners’ ribs cracked open so their lungs could be extracted while they were still alive. This sort of thing is only stiffening resistance on our end. It’s an amateur’s mistake, and I have to wonder if Jedao is up to something else. Is there some other target for the propaganda?

  Well, I see that Pioro has extra-special flagged a few reports with an extra-special case of that brandy he knows I like. I’d better see what the fuss is before the world collapses, eh? Do have a good hard think about what I’ve said.

  Yours in calendrical heresy,

  Vh.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LIEUTENANT KEL MIKEV hated his assignment, but it could have been worse. Sure, his eyes hurt, and even through the suits’ filters some of his soldiers had fetched up with nasty nosebleeds and soft tissue damage, but he preferred a little honest smoke in a contained environment to planetside missions where you had to watch every fucking square centimeter for things that bit or oozed or crooned at you in your childhood sweetheart’s voice.

  Mikev’s platoon was responsible for the forward section near Gate 3-12, where the Kel had established a toehold in the Umbrella Ward. The heretics had sucked out the atmosphere while the Kel spent a hair-raising several hours blowing down walls in some places and blocking off passages in others, building a fortress in the Fortress. One of the company’s other platoons had had to herd the unhappy civilians to a holding area. Not all the civilians had gotten suited in time.

  Mikev was glad he hadn’t been assigned that duty. He felt terrible when the fragile ones blubbered. But he reminded himself not to get distracted by irrelevancies.

  Eggshell was whining about grit in his eyes that he couldn’t unsuit to get at. Trigger was obsessively checking her weapons. One of these days Trigger was going to be so caught up making sure every component fit just right that she’d stand there as the heretics punched her full of holes. Mikev had a lot of theories about how his soldiers would die. It was one of the ways, like giving them nicknames, that he kept from getting too attached to them.

  The attack came as the warning did, sudden pulse of heat in his forearm to indicate incoming. Incoming from where? And what? Poison gas? Surely they would have done it earlier, and it’d be easy enough to pump it out after all the Kel were dead. He didn’t hear guns, didn’t see wildfire flashes or smoke –

  “Everyone stay under cover,” Mikev said, which he wished was an unnecessary order.

  Trigger, who had been half out of position, was slow to respond. Mikev groaned. She was a great shot, but not very bright. He couldn’t tell what she thought she saw, but she brought her scattergun up and fired through the loophole.

  Or would have fired, if the gun were working.

  Mikev thought at first that the crawling sensation was horror. It couldn’t be some local parasite, not here, they’d never allow such a thing through the Fortress’s ecoscrubbers. Then he realized that the sensation came from his belt, his pack, the pistol in his hand, a disgusting itch that started to hurt in earnest.

  Trigger had cast down her scattergun. There was a bizarre streaky speckiness in the air, suggesting a field effect just outside human visual range, which in turn suggested a heretical exotic.

  “Everyone get rid of your weapons. Get away from them,” Mikev snapped. This was sufficiently novel that he added, “That’s a direct order.”

  The crawling sensation weakened away from the guns, although Mikev wasn’t sure they wouldn’t explode messily. No, that didn’t seem to be the case. The fuck? The gun was fossilizing as he watched, making tiny shrieking sounds. It made him want to put the thing out of its misery and it wasn’t even alive.

  More interesting was the fact that the grenades and power tools were unaffected. So this corrosion field was keyed to specific weapon archetypes.

  Mikev had just opened the link to inform the captain when she said, before he could get anything out, “I know, Lieutenant, I’m not stupid. Keep your eyes peeled in case the heretics get it into their heads that they can beat Kel knives. We have orders from the colonel to hold. Out.”

  Trigger looked distressed. Mikev yelled at her to get away from the corroding guns. She looked for all the world like she wanted to hug them better. Honestly, she was a full-grown Kel.

  In the back of his head, he was convinced that the field was rotting his cells from the inside. Sometimes the universe was determined to send creeping things after you no matter how far away you stayed from planets.

  “THEY NEED BETTER mathematicians over there,” Cheris was saying to Commander Hazan. “Although it’s just as well.”

  Hazan had some mathematical ability himself. He was poring over the formulas she had sent him.

  The corrosion gradient was a nuisance, but as exotic effects went, it could have been worse. Presumably suitable modulation would let you key it to other weapon archetypes. All you needed was generators set up in the right places.

  Cheris and Hazan had been studying the problem. The heretics had used the gradient to corral the Kel. While the Kel were capable of going in with their fists, Cheris preferred to use that as a last resort. She had hoped for useful reports from the Shuos infiltrators, but nothing decisive had come in yet.

  Jedao had been unusually quiet when the infiltrators’ reports started coming in, except when one described some of the heretics’ calendar values.

  “Any way to find out if they’re doing anything new and exciting with their remembrances?” Jedao had asked ironically. “One does wish sometimes for some creativity.”

  Obligingly, Cheris had dug around until she found the answer. “No, they’re doing the same basic thing we do, just with different numbers and different tortures,” she said, and he had lost interest.

  Cheris had taken a painkiller for the headache she was developing when Communications sat up straighter and said, “Message from the Fortress, sir.”

  “Pass it over,” Cheris said.

  “It’s a full recording.”

  “High time we see a face,” Jedao said. “Not that I’m one to speak.”

  “Play it,” Cheris said. Her pulse sped up. She reminded herself to take deep breaths.

  The image showed a woman. Her hair was an unusual light brown, her skin pale. She had done up her hair in complicated braids that wound around the sides of her head and were fastened by gold pins. Her clothes were white with buttons of gold filigree.

  “A Liozh, all right.” Jedao sounded torn between bitterness and exasperation. The same ancient grievance he wouldn’t talk about earlier? But the recording was already talking.

  “I am Liozh Zai, representing the people of the Fortress,” the woman said. Her voice was strong and precise. “We are no longer content to endure the hexarchs’ tyranny, to believe only the things they say we should believe, to reckon time only in the ways they say we should reckon time. We are no longer reconciled to the destruction of heresies or the removal of our right to self-determination. We are expecting reinforcements shortly. You have 75 of our hours
– 108.9 of your own – to withdraw your troops and leave. Otherwise our allies will show you no mercy.”

  That was all. Cheris had expected more bluster and said as much.

  “You’re not paying attention to the right words,” Jedao said. “She said ‘representing.’ That wasn’t marketing research they were doing, that was polling. She claims to be sitting on a nascent democracy.”

  “A what?”

  Jedao sighed. “An obscure experimental form of government where citizens choose their own leaders or policies by voting on them.”

  Cheris tried to imagine this and failed. How could you form a stable regime this way? Wouldn’t it destroy the reliability of the calendar and all its associated technology?

  “That was the rest of the heptarchate’s reaction to the Liozh heresy, I’m told. Except they used a lot of guns to express their opinion.”

  A message from Shuos Ko. “I’ll hear it,” Cheris said.

  “Three things, sir,” Ko said. “First, one of the infiltrators got a partial personnel dump out of a terminal before she had to scoot. The dump is weeks out of date and we’re still sifting through it, but we’re in luck. I’ve got positive identification on the speaker. She’s Inaiga Zai, a clerk who works for a Doctrine subsidiary in the Anemone Ward.”

  “A clerk?” Cheris said incredulously. And one with no faction affiliation, judging by the name.

  “I don’t believe it for a second either, sir. Her profile is designed to bore us to sleep, with a dash of petty embezzlement so she doesn’t look too clean.”

  “I imagine all the shield operators have such cover identities,” Jedao said.

  Cheris repeated this to Ko.

  “No proof,” Ko said, “but I agree. Unfortunately, no lasting success putting logic worms in the Fortress’s grid, so that’s all we have on Zai.

  “Second, which General Jedao may have told you already, Zai is using the Liozh ceremonial outfit as a calendrical focus. It’s odd, because only one person in six is going to be the kind of antiquarian enthusiast who’d even care –”