Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Kel Command keeps a file of them, did you know that? But back to the subject. Let’s think about this. The first time they pulled me out of the black cradle, the senior high generals remembered what I’d done. It was a fresh wound. They remembered having dinner with me. Losing games of jeng-zai to me. Hell, I danced with some of their kids at the damn ceremonies. I wasn’t a historical figure, I was a real person. I was better than their generals – but that made me more of a risk. So why use an undead traitor?”

  “Jedao,” Vahenz said, “you clearly have a point to make. You might as well go ahead and make it.” She could feel the pistol’s grip in her fingers, the precise weight of it.

  “I want to offer you my service.”

  Vahenz couldn’t help it. She laughed so hard it almost became a coughing fit. “Come again?”

  “I’m deadly serious.”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “I’m not fussy,” Jedao said. “Let me hit this from another angle, then. What do you know about the invention of formation instinct?”

  “I confess I’m stumped,” Vahenz said, which was unusual. She had made a point of being well-informed on the hexarchate’s history, especially the parts it didn’t like to remember. “I had some impression that the Nirai developed it for the Kel, but I couldn’t provide citations.”

  “The Nirai like doing a lot of things for the Kel,” Jedao said. “Codependent, really.”

  Vahenz didn’t trust the direction that this discussion was going in. “If you’re implying what I think you’re implying –”

  “I’m not a Kel,” Jedao said, abruptly savage, “but they did their best to make me like one. You ever wonder who the prototype was for formation instinct? I’m saying I have to serve someone. If it’s not you, it’s going to be whoever next shows up on this fucking wreck. Even if it’s the fucking Kel again. Four hundred years and they weren’t going to let me out without some kind of assurance that I was going to do as they told me. I’m just lucky the weapon they used to ‘kill’ me didn’t work the way they were told it would, and that I have a brief window of freedom.”

  An interesting story. Almost plausible, even. But Vahenz knew how good he was at being plausible.

  The lights flickered left, flickered right. She didn’t even notice them anymore.

  “One more angle,” Jedao said, and Vahenz thought he was going to dredge up some bit of history regarding Shuos cadets, or game design, or vengeful commanders, but instead what she got was: “What do you know about geese?”

  Vahenz blinked. “Unlike certain undead generals,” she said, “I don’t have a whole lot to do with fowl other than eating them.” She knew he had grown up on a farm of some sort, although what this had to do with –

  “Then you don’t know about goslings.”

  “They’re tasty?”

  “Well, that too. But the thing about goslings is that just after they hatch, they’ll imprint on the first thing they see moving near them as a parent. When I was a boy I thought this was hilarious. It became less hilarious when I had a full-grown goose following me to school and making a nuisance of herself.”

  “You’re a resurrecting gosling,” Vahenz said, entertained in spite of herself.

  “Something like, yes.”

  “All right,” Vahenz said, weighing her options. “I want a token of – good faith, say.” She was remembering how he’d landed his infantry on the Fortress in the first place, the sacrifice of Commander Kel Nerevor. Besides, if she got him where she could see him, she would be in a better position to assess his sincerity. Body language counted for something, even with a Shuos. She backed up to another crystal pillar – the whole moth was riddled with them, might make a great museum concept – and positioned herself behind it, poking out just enough of her head and the muzzle of her pistol that she could get a clear shot. “Come out where I can see you. The same doorway you came through. If I catch a shadow of a weapon, I’ll char you down to particles.”

  If Jedao hesitated – but he didn’t. He came around the corner and down the corrugated hall, dragging himself as though he had taken an injury to one of his legs. Vahenz’s suit informed her that it was holding the temperature constant, but she felt as though pinpricks of ice were forming underneath her skin.

  Although Jedao’s body belonged to a young woman, his face was drawn and ghastly pale, streaked with sweat and dust, and bruised heavily on one side. There was a cut across his forehead, visible beneath the disheveled hair. Blood had smeared down and sideways from the cut and dried in ugly crusts. With a curiously affecting dignity, although not grace, he lurched down to both knees in the antiquated obeisance to a heptarch. Well, almost the obeisance. He kept both hands where she could see them, instead of folding the left behind his back. How considerate of him.

  There was a terrible barbed clarity in Jedao’s eyes, as though the universe had constricted to a circle with her at its center. She had seen its like in Kel who had been fledge-nulled. On the other hand, Vahenz also thought she saw an odd amber spark in them, which she didn’t remember from the earlier communication, but that could have been a trick of the sputtering lights. “If you want me to beg,” Jedao said, looking straight toward her, his voice hungry, “I will beg.”

  Too tempting. “How do you know I won’t be worse for you than the Kel were?” Vahenz said in a purr. She was almost starting to think that he wasn’t making up his story. Which was too bad for him: once she found out how much he knew about the carrion bomb, she was going to shoot him anyway.

  His laughter was mocking. “Worse, what do I care about worse? You’re more competent. And you’re not the Kel. Everything else, that’s just details. I’m not in a position to care about details anymore. You own me now. I hate you already, but you’ll find a way to deal with that or you’re not worth my time anyway.” His voice grew eerily soft. “Just point me in a direction and tell me who to shoot. I like shooting people so long as I don’t have to stop.”

  Well, if Jedao hadn’t been psychotic before, he certainly was now. Why anyone thought a crazy asset was worth cultivating in these circumstances, even a crazy asset with an obnoxious habit of winning battles, was beyond her. As she questioned him about the carrion bomb attack, keeping her voice conversational, she prepared to fire. His eyes didn’t so much as track the pistol’s movements.

  Before she had a chance to squeeze the trigger, however, a light came from the center of a servitor clinging to the wall. It had finally had a chance to get into position while she was focused on the interrogation. The laser fried the back of her head and cooked her brain, and she fell without finishing her sentence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE NEEDLEMOTH DIDN’T look like anything Cheris had ever stepped in before, small surprise. It wasn’t much larger than a hopper, but it didn’t take any genius to realize that it was a hell of a lot more valuable. It had been intended to be operated by one person, with perhaps a single human-sized guest. As it was, she and the two servitors fit snugly.

  Cheris was still certain that none of the humans had survived the carrion bomb. There was carrion glass everywhere. Shuos Ko spindled into dark, imperturbable strands. Shuos Liis, except Cheris hadn’t been able to make herself go near the rippling glass once she knew who it had been, as though Khiaz waited just around the corner, smiling her inescapable smile.

  The servitors had appeared dead, but Cheris had been willing to bet that the bomb’s designers hadn’t given a moment’s thought as to how it would affect them. Although she wasn’t a technician, it was impossible to spend as much time with servitors as she had without picking up a few tricks. With some improvised tools and a lot of swearing, she had managed to revive a deltaform. The deltaform had then helped her revive a birdform.

  There hadn’t been time for more, because the birdform, whose scanners were in better shape than the deltaform’s, had informed them of the intruder.

  They had agreed that the intruder was either after Cheris or Jedao, de
pending on how much they knew about anchoring, that they were relying on the needlemoth’s systems to track Cheris, and that they probably weren’t a Kel. Not that non-Kel were good news at this point, either. Cheris still regretted that they hadn’t been able to take the woman prisoner, or find out so much as her name. But at least their ploy had worked. Cheris had first kept the intruder distracted while the deltaform paced them and the birdform raced to the needlemoth and hacked its systems. Cheris had considered using traps to delay the intruder and sprinting to join the servitors at the needlemoth so they could hightail it off the cindermoth, but they couldn’t risk leaving the intruder alive so she could leak Cheris’s survival to the Kel. So instead, Cheris made a distraction of herself so the deltaform could make certain of the intruder’s death.

  “We had better get out of here before anyone else shows up,” Cheris said to the two servitors. “I hope you know how to drive a moth, because one of me doesn’t and the other of me is hopelessly out of date.”

  The deltaform was already making irritated cheeps as it wrangled the needlemoth’s grid. The mothdrive hummed lowly and sweetly.

  The birdform tilted its head, lights whirring from green to yellow to orange. It asked her who she really was.

  “I’m Ajewen Cheris,” she said. She would call herself Kel no longer. “But I’m also Shuos Jedao. And apparently it’s not time for me to stop fighting.”

  She had eaten the fox’s eyes. She had seen what he had seen.

  At the center of the blast, there was a mass of fossilized pasts and devalued futures. The better part of a Kel swarm reduced to carrion glass. Over 8,000 Kel and those in service to the Kel, all to guarantee the death of one man.

  The deltaform wanted to know where they were going.

  Cheris smiled crookedly at it. She yanked off her gloves and set them neatly to the side. There was a cold, pale fire in her heart. The hexarchs had no idea how badly they had fucked up.

  She had gone to a lot of trouble to put herself into the black cradle, one bad option among many worse, so she would have time to run her campaign against the heptarchate. But she couldn’t win her own war. The key to calendrical warfare was mathematics, and the only mathematician she had access to, Nirai Kujen, was more monstrous than she was.

  Now she had an alternate mathematician, so to speak.

  I’m dead, she thought, very clearly, as I wanted to be, but I’m alive enough to carry on the war.

  All her life, she had lived to the hexarchate’s high calendar. Now she lived to another calendar. She would measure her years by the death-day of her swarm, and not by the cold, prim feasts of the Rahal, the Kel’s parades, the Vidona’s cutting remembrances. Her every maneuver would be to the sandglass necessity of rebellion. The tide in her heart turned to the memory of amputations and evaporated soldiers, to deaths spent like counterfeit coins.

  Cheris finally knew the meaning of Hellspin Fortress. She had killed a terrifying number of people for the heptarchate. When it came to the Lanterners, she decided she was done. A Lanterner’s life had worth the way a heptarchate soldier’s life had worth. A life was a life. It was a simple equation, but she hadn’t been a mathematician then, and Kel Command had failed to understand the notation.

  That hadn’t been the only reason – she couldn’t help being a Shuos – but it was the one that mattered.

  Calendrical warfare was a matter of hearts.

  But numbers could move hearts, with the right numbers, and with the right hearts.

  She had learned that not all masters were worth serving. It was time to carry the fight to the hexarchs.

  I’m your gun.

  Calendrical rot had set in again.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to the following people: my editor, Jonathan Oliver, and the wonderful folks at Solaris Books; my agent, Jennifer Jackson; and my agent’s assistant, Michael Curry.

  I am grateful to my beta readers: Sam Kabo Ashwell, Peter Berman, Joseph Betzwieser, Daedala, Helen Keeble, Yune Kyung Lee, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Nancy Sauer, and Sonya Taaffe.

  This one is for Yune Kyung Lee, best sister ever, who was there when everything began.

  FOR FANS OF THE MARTIAN AND THE MARS TRILOGY

  In the near future Dr. Holland, a scientist running from a painful past, joins the Mars colonisation effort, cataloguing the remnants of Mars’ biosphere before it is swept away by the terraforming programme.

  When an artefact is discovered deep in the caverns of the red planet, Holland’s employers interfere, leading to tragedy. The consequences ripple throughout time, affecting Holland’s present, and the destiny of the red planet.

  For in the far future, Mars is dying a second time. The Final War of men and spirits is beginning. In a last bid for peace, the disgraced Champion Val Mora and his ‘spirit’ lover are set free from the Arena to find the long-missing Librarian of Mars, the only hope to save mankind.

  Holland’s and the Champion’s lives intertwine, across the millennia, in a breathtaking story of vast ambition.

  “Champion of Mars celebrates all that is best in SF. Simply put, Guy Haley is a very good writer, with an infectious love for sci-fi that shines off every page.”

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  “Haley weaves two tales into a tight, compelling narrative. Champion of Mars is a thriller, an unnatural mystery and a strange sort of love story. Highly entertaining and original, and well worth a look.”

  Starburst Magazine

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  THE FUTURE IS OURSELVES

  The world is rapidly changing. We surf future-shock every day, as the progress of technology races ever on. Increasingly we are asking: how do we change to live in the world to come?

  Whether it’s climate change, inundated coastlines and drowned cities; the cramped confines of a tin can hurtling through space to the outer reaches of our Solar System; or the rush of being uploaded into cyberspace, our minds and bodies are going to have to drastically alter.

  Multi-award winning editor Jonathan Strahan brings us another incredible volume in his much praised science-fiction anthology series, featuring stories by Madeline Ashby, John Barnes, James S.A. Corey, Gregory Benford, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Simon Ings, Kameron Hurley, Nancy Kress, Gwyneth Jones, Yoon Ha Lee, Bruce Sterling, Sean Williams, Aliette de Bodard, Ramez Naam, An Owomoyela and Ian McDonald.

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