Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

AT KEL ACADEMY, an instructor had explained to Cheris’s class that the threshold winnower was a weapon of last resort, and not just for its notorious connotations. Said instructor had once witnessed a winnower in use. The detail that stuck in Cheris’s head wasn’t the part where every door in the besieged city exhaled radiation that baked the inhabitants dead. It wasn’t the weapon’s governing equations or even the instructor’s left eye, damaged during the attack, from which ghostlight glimmered. What Cheris remembered most was the instructor’s aside: that returning to corpses that were only corpses, rather than radiation gates contorted against black-blasted walls and glassy rubble, eyes ruptured open, was one of the best moments of her life. Five years, five months, and sixteen days later, surrounded by smashed tanks and smoking pits on the heretic Eels’ outpost world of Dredge, Captain Kel Cheris of Heron Company, 109-229th Battalion, had come to the conclusion that her instructor was full of shit. There was no comfort to be extracted from the dead, from flesh evaporated from bones. Nothing but numbers snipped short.

“Formation,” she said, “Pir’s Fan.” It had a longer name, but nobody had time for the full names on the battlefield. Pir’s Fan was one of the simpler formations. As its name suggested, it resembled a wedge. It was easiest for Cheris: she held the primary pivot at the van, and everyone adjusted their position relative to hers. The Kel specialty was formation fighting. The combination of formation geometry and Kel discipline allowed them to channel exotic effects, from heat lances to force shields. Unfortunately, like all exotics, this ability depended on the local society’s adherence to the hexarchate’s high calendar. And the high calendar wasn’t just a system of timekeeping. It encompassed the feasts, the remembrances with their ritual torture of heretics, the entire precarious social order. Cheris knew the formation’s effect had begun to propagate when the world shifted blue and the blacks bent gray. Pir’s Fan offered protection against the weather. It was usually better to rely on the weather-eaters, but Cheris had lost any faith that they would be effective on this mission. Unfortunately, the formation wouldn’t shield the unit from a direct hit. She hoped to close with the generator before that became an issue.

“Unfurl Kel banner. Advance and fire. I want anything that twitches to die.” The banner-bearers ignited the generator, and fire blazed in the sky. At the heart of the golden flames was the Kel ashhawk, the black bird that burned in its own glory, and beneath it their general’s emblem, the Chain of Thorns. Despite Cheris’s amusement at Kel design sensibilities – of course the emblem was the flamboyant ashhawk, of course it involved fire – she felt a stinging in her secret heart at the sight of it.

The display showed that the other platoons were holding steady. Bullets hit the formation’s protection zone and ricocheted at absurd angles. The rain pelted down around them, yet none of it touched Cheris or the soldiers standing near her. Strangely, however, the rain was scattering into snow, the snow into crystal. She had Sparrow 14 bring her a captured crystal. It was a shining sliver, fracturing the light into rainbows if rainbows only knew the cold, sad hues of blue and violet. She didn’t touch the crystal even though she was wearing Kel gloves. The Sparrow was already starting to corrode, and she expressed her regrets to it. It made a resigned chirping noise. Pir’s Fan should have shed the storm without additional transformative effects. Cheris frowned. She had spent a good portion of her five-year academy stint examining the mathematics of formation mechanics. When she chose a formation, she did so with a full understanding of its particular weaknesses. The problem was that her analyses depended on the high calendar’s consensus mechanics. She now had indication that the directional storm generator worked the way it did because it relied on a radically heretical calendar, with the attendant heretical mechanics, which were interfering with the formation’s proper function. She was angry at herself for not anticipating this. Most of the time heretics used technology that was compatible with the high calendar, but the development of purely heretical technology was always...

The storm fell in sheets of undulating light, snake-sharp and acrid. Cheris had Dineng send for another Sparrow to verify that the light was fatal. The Sparrow dodged a ribbon of light too late and was transformed into a mass of parallel slices and metal shrieks. It fell unmoving to the ground, where the light rearranged it again and again until it was nothing but an accretion of truncated cubes. Cheris winced, but there was nothing to be done now.

Already she was rewriting the equations because she knew what his answer would be. The sergeant reiterated his protest, stopping short of accusing her of heresy herself. Formation instinct should have forced him to obey her, but the fact that he considered her actions deeply un-Kel was enabling him to resist. Cheris cut contact and sent another override. Lieutenant Verab’s acknowledgment sounded grim. Cheris marked Squadron Four outcasts, Kel no longer. They had failed to obey her, and that was that. Disjointedly, the new formation pieced itself together and pressed forward. They were taking heavier fire now. Two trees exploded at the touch of Eelfire as Squadron Five passed them. A corporal was stapled to a hillside by the resultant lash of splinters. A soldier three paces to Cheris’s left fell out of formation and vanished in a vapor of blood and tatters. Kel Nikara, who had sung so well. Squadron Four was already dissolving, but she had no attention to spare for it. Cheris guided the advance from point to point. She adjusted the formation again by sending orders to individual soldiers, solving for intermediate forms in her head to keep the geometry within the necessary error bounds. The storm was dissipating: they were too close to the Eels. The next question was whether she could devise a formation that would give them better protection against the Eels’ invariant weapons, which would work in any calendar, now that the storm was no longer a factor.

To her relief, the force multiplier, adapted from One Thorn Poisons a Thousand Hands, could be linearized for use with her ad hoc formation. She and her soldiers were equipped with calendrical swords, ordinarily used for duels. Not her weapon of choice, but they were near the storm generator, which they were to take intact, and the general’s orders had been clear. The swords shouldn’t damage unliving objects, which was the primary consideration. “Swords, now,” Cheris said. The Kel unsheathed their swords, each tinted differently, blank bars of light. Cheris’s ran from blue near the hilt to red at the tip. As they closed with the enemy, numbers blazed to life along the lengths of the blades: the day and the hour of your death, as the Kel liked to say. Except the date and time on Cheris’s sword was wrong. She wasn’t the only one who was dismayed. Maintenance, rather use my rifle, the dreaded calendrical rot. Not only were the numbers wrong, they jittered and sparked, snapping in and out of focus. A quick survey of her company indicated that everyone’s swords were having the same problem. That would have been bad enough, but the swords weren’t even synchronized. “Sir, maybe another weapon –” Lieutenant Verab said. “Continue the advance,” Cheris said. “No guns.” If the swords proved ineffectual, they would have to try something different, but the swords hadn’t sputtered out entirely. That gave her hope, if you could call it that. At first it went well. For every sword-stroke, ...

Cheris knew the current formation was losing effectiveness when the air went cold and gray. She was having difficulty breathing, and while she had an emergency air supply, they all did, she suspected this was just the beginning. Sure enough, it also became harder and harder to move. Her first attempts at repairing the formation only resulted in a colder wind, a grayer world. Gritting her teeth – winter, entropy, it was time to get out but they were so close – she tried another configuration. It was hard to think, hard to make herself breathe. She thought she heard the song of snow. “I need your computational allocations,” Cheris told her lieutenants. They were so close to the weather generator, and the Eels were broken and peeling away behind them. They just had to grab the wretched thing and hold on until pickup arrived. But to hold it they had to have a working formation. It was enough to make her long for the days of straightforward bullets and bombs. She liked the thought of stripping her soldiers’ computational resources as much as they did, which was to say not at all. But they weren’t in camp, where they could instantiate a more powerful grid. They had no access to the larger, more powerful grid of a friendly voidmoth transport or a military base. She had to use the field grid because it was all they had. Cheris gave her company a second to understand what was going to happen, then diverted their allocated resources to herself. She ignored the protests, most reflexi...

At last the system came up with a working model of the conditions they were suffering. She swallowed an involuntary hiss of relief and rapped out the orders with a tongue that might have been a lump of coal after the last spark’s dying. Like a machine dismembered into creaking components, the company moved in response. Cheris adjusted in response to the paths of Platoons One and Two, and had the rear platoons change front to deal with the Eel remnants. Gradually, as they found their proper positions, the last of the entropic cold summered away. Being able to breathe normally again was a relief. Cheris allowed herself a second to contemplate the corpses of the Eels nearest them. Some had weathered into statues of murky ice. Others were puddling into mysterious colors, forgetting the proper hues of flesh, eyes, hair. She estimated casualties and recorded it for later comparison with the Sparrows’ observations. It was important to acknowledge numbers, especially when the dead were dead by your doing.

Dredge’s sun was bright in the sky. Its light caught on weapons fallen from broken hands, ribs cracked and gleaming with blood and yellowy fluid, the needle-remnants of storm crystals. Cheris boarded last. She fixed the battlefield in her memory as though she were scratching it into the sutures of her skull. The hopper was crowded and stank of sweat and exhaustion. Cheris sat a little way apart from the other soldiers. She was looking out of the window as they arced into the sky, so she saw the waiting Kel bannermoth drop two bombs, neat and precise, on the site they had just left. A day’s worth of hard battle and the entire objective rendered irrelevant by high explosives. She kept watching until the explosions’ bright flowers dwindled into specks just large enough to trouble the eye.

HEXARCH SHUOS MIKODEZ wasn’t sure which was worse: the flickering readouts that updated him on the crisis at the Fortress of Scattered Needles, or the fact that Hexarch Nirai Kujen’s silver voidmoth call indicator had been blinking at him nonstop for the past four hours and twelve minutes. Kujen was a talkative bastard to begin with – not that Mikodez should be one to criticize – and the worst part was, he had legitimate reason to want to get in touch with Mikodez about the danger the hexarchate was in. Shuos headquarters was at the Citadel of Eyes, a star fortress in the Stabglass March. A simple fact of astrography, except it put the Citadel uncomfortably close to the Fortress of Scattered Needles in the adjacent Entangled March, where the recent trouble was going on. Calendrical currents could be surprisingly far-reaching, star-spanning distances or not, and it made him especially appreciative of the trouble they were in. A little heresy went a long way, unfortunately. But he was certain that their best candidate for dealing with the matter was the best candidate for being authorized to use a certain Shuos weapon, the oldest Shuos weapon, especially since said weapon was in the Kel Arsenal. Heptarch Shuos Khiaz, who had signed it (or him, take your pick) over to Kel control 398 years ago, in a fit of towering spite, had a lot to answer for.

How long could he keep putting off Kujen? He considered paging the mathematicians, but sticking a blinking amber eye on their communications panels would just make them grouchy, and he needed them in a good mood since he couldn’t do this himself. He’d done well at math as a cadet, but that had been decades ago. It didn’t make him a mathematician, let alone one specializing in calendrical techniques, let alone one trained in this kind of evaluation. Technically, as Shuos hexarch, Mikodez outranked Kujen, because he led a high faction and Kujen led a low one. But not only was Kujen the senior hexarch at 864 years old, he was also, in a distressingly real sense, responsible for the hexarchate’s dominance. He’d invented the mothdrive in its first form, enabling the original heptarchate’s rapid expansion, and pioneered a whole field of mathematics that resulted in modern calendrical mechanics. Mikodez was keenly aware that when you got right down to it, he was an expendable bureaucrat in charge of a bunch of cantankerous spies, analysts, and assassins, albeit one who had done rather well over the past four decades considering a Shuos hexarch’s lifespan was usually measured in the single digits. In contrast, Kujen was irreplaceable – at least until Mikodez could figure out a better alternative. Kujen’s immortality was tied to certain protections, which Mikodez hadn’t figured out a way around. It wasn’t just Kujen’s age, although no one else had found a reasonable method of livin...

The Fortress readout flickered again. Gray rot, like tendrils, the color of death and dust and cold rain. Mikodez frowned, then typed in a query. He could work that much of the analysis for himself. The numbers came right up. The matrices’ most problematic entries blinked. There were a lot of them. The Rahal, who oversaw the normal functioning of the calendar, had put in place their countermeasures; but their countermeasures weren’t adequate to deal with a heresy of this magnitude. It was going to have to be military action, no matter how much everyone (except the Kel) wished otherwise.

The Fortress of Scattered Needles was located at a nexus point in a stretch of empty space and was nearest the Footbreak system. The Rahal had already stationed a lensmoth there, but all it could do was staunch the bleeding as long as the Fortress itself was afflicted. The Fortress was also divided into six wards, one for each faction, although the boundaries weren’t as strictly enforced as they had been in the old days. There had once been a seventh ward for the seventh faction, the Liozh. The Fortress’s interior had been demolished and rebuilt to remove the seventh ward, at staggering expense, after the Liozh heresy was put down. Whoever had infected the Fortress with rot had taken down all six wards at the same time. The degree of coordination implied would have been enough of a problem, but Mikodez had reason to believe that the particular form the rot had taken was the result of heretics taking advantage of an experiment being run by Hexarch Rahal Iruja and the false hexarch Nirai Faian. Faian was supposed to run the Nirai in public so Kujen could amuse himself with whatever research caught his fancy, but Iruja had suborned her almost from the beginning. A nexus fortress made an ideal proving ground for their work because it represented the hexarchate in miniature. What Mikodez didn’t understand was why they hadn’t used one of the smaller fortresses instead. As to why Iruja and Faian were experimenting with the calendar, that was obvious. All the hexarchs knew, and ev...

Kujen had sent Mikodez his projections of possible heretical calendars. “I’ve sorted them by likelihood,” Kujen said. “That first one is bad news, especially if they’re fixated on seven as their central integer. And here I thought nobody paid attention to the past anymore.” He was one of two people who still remembered what life had been like under seven factions, not six. “You’ve been hanging out with too many Kel,” Mikodez said, although it wasn’t entirely true that the Kel disdained history. Nevertheless, the prospect of a Liozh revival – of a time when the hexarchate was a heptarchate – did concern him. The Liozh had been the philosophers and ethicists of the heptarchate, and some evidence suggested that they had been destroyed when they attempted to do away with the remembrances, which Kujen was fond of. Mikodez didn’t like the thought of Kujen becoming more personally invested in the matter, given his proclivities. Besides, it was hard to tell without more data, but if the Liozh had failed with their heresy the first time around, why would any sane heretic pick them to emulate?

Kel Cheris was sane, although the odds were that she wouldn’t stay that way. Still, Mikodez had to trade her welfare for the hexarchate’s. Someday someone might come up with a better government, one in which brainwashing and the remembrances’ ritual torture weren’t an unremarkable fact of life. Until then, he did what he could.

She was beginning to wonder if she should leave her apologies and try again later when the terminal’s signifier shattered and showed her her own face: the same neat dark hair, the same dark eyes. But the smile was not her own, and the stranger wore a high general’s flared wings and flame where Cheris had a captain’s talon with its pricked bead of blood. “Captain,” the stranger said. It even had her voice. “This is Composite Subcommand Two of Kel Command. Acknowledge.” Cheris started to sweat. The composites changed from task to task. There was no telling which high general she was dealing with, or how many had wired their minds together into a greater intelligence. But the designation Two indicated that at least one of the highest generals was in the composite. A bad sign. She made the correct salute, not too fast and not too slow.

If the Fortress of Scattered Needles had fallen, she would need a way to crack its legendary defenses, its shields of invariant ice. The shields functioned under any calendrical regime, which meant the heretics could use them against the hexarchate. Cheris didn’t know how the shields worked – classified information – much less how to overcome them. She could, however, think of a time a general had overcome another terrible fortress. If “overcome” was the word for it. Three hundred ninety-nine years ago, General Shuos Jedao was in the service of the Kel. Because he had a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, they assigned him to deal with the Lanterner rebellion. In five battles, Jedao shattered the rebels. In the first battle, at Candle Arc, he was outnumbered eight to one. In the second, that was no longer true. The rebels’ leader escaped to Hellspin Fortress, which was guarded by predatory masses and corrosive dust, but the heptarchs expected that Jedao would capture the fortress without undue difficulty. Instead, Jedao plunged the entirety of his force into the gyre and activated the first threshold winnowers, known ever since for their deadliness. Lanterners and Kel alike drowned in a surfeit of corpselight. On the command moth, Jedao pulled out an ordinary pistol, his Patterner 52, and murdered his staff. They were fine soldiers, but he was their better. Or he had been. The scouring operation that had to be undertaken after Jedao was extracted cost the heptarchate...

A FEW PEOPLE always washed out of Kel Academy the first time they were asked to demonstrate a formation. Cheris remembered the occasion. She had stood next to a young man who was practically vibrating: a bad sign, but their instructors had been emphatic that the washouts weren’t easily predicted. Their class had been injected with a general-purpose phobia of vermin. The instructor had told them to take up First Formation. First Formation existed for the purpose of finding out which cadets were fit to be Kel and which could not be assimilated. Cheris had been determined to be fit, and equally determined not to vibrate so annoyingly. Once they were in formation – a square with projections from each flank, like horns – the instructor summoned the vermin. They weren’t actually vermin. They were miniature servitors in the shapes of snake and stingfly and spider. Still, the resemblance was good enough for the phobia. Even Cheris, who had made friends with servitors since childhood, was unable to stop her reaction. They tasted her skin and prodded the crevices of her taut hands. At one point her face was heavy with clinging servitors and their cold weight. She tried not to blink when silver antennae waved right in front of her eyes. She was gripped by the fancy that it was going to insert an antenna into her pupil and force it open, wider, wider, crawl in through her optic nerve and take up residence in the crenellations of her brain, lay eggs in the secret nodes of nerve and fat...

THE BOXMOTH’S EXECUTIVE officer showed up at Cheris’s door not long after the meeting and explained that she would have to be drugged for her journey. “There’s no other way, Captain,” he said. “They’d have to pull out your spatial memory and scour it clean otherwise.” He didn’t say what they both knew, that the entire boxmoth would be subject to scouring after it transferred her. “The technicians at your destination will give you more details.” Cheris didn’t like the thought of being under for the trip, but at least he hadn’t said it was a full sedation lock. “I could prepare more adequately if I were given some of the details now, sir,” Cheris said, not because she expected him to tell her more, but because he would report her objection to their superiors. “I’m sure you could, Captain,” the executive officer said, but that was all. Cheris reported to Medical and didn’t even remember reaching the door due to the retroactive effect. Much later she recovered a few impressions: a smell like mint and smoke and sedge blossoms, a heartbeat too slow to be her own, the world tilting and curving. Water the color of sleep, or sleep the color of water. She woke up afterward. Her augment told her she had been transferred off the Burning Leaf. In fact, she was on a station, not a moth, probably the facility the black cradle was housed in. In a moment of confusion she waited for the heat-pulses in her left arm, but nothing came. The pulses were only used by infantry anyway, not moth Kel...

“You are a Kel, aren’t you? You usually are.” He added, “It’s so easy to forget what colors look like. The style of the uniform hasn’t changed much, though. Don’t – what you’re doing to yourself, this isn’t a formation, that’s not necessary. It will go better if you don’t try to fit yourself into me like I’m a glove. My name is Shuos Jedao, but you needn’t keep calling me ‘sir.’ Under the circumstances I think you’ll agree that it’s a little ridiculous.” She looked around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. If she wasn’t to respond by resorting to formation instinct, what was she supposed to do? “You’d better look more closely in the mirror,” Jedao said. She decided that this was an order. She stared into it in fascination, then at her hands, then at it again. Jedao’s reflection looked back at her. She tried to remember what he had looked like in the videos she had seen back in academy, but her memories were hazy. He had straight black hair with bangs almost too long for current Kel regulations, and dark eyes, and a face that might have been handsome if he had only been smiling. Cheris was not tempted to smile. He was leanly muscular, and a wide scar was just visible at his neck above the collar. Just to make sure, Cheris examined herself again: her old familiar body. It was only the reflection that belonged to Jedao. Relieved, she finished dressing. She rechecked the reflection because he hadn’t forbidden it. The reflection’s uniform had a general’s win...

Jedao sighed quietly. “Questions? I’ve done this before and you haven’t.” “Are you a ghost?” “Mostly. I have no substance, although you can target me with exotics through the shadow. I’m anchored to you, which means my welfare is linked to yours. I absorb most exotic damage before it gets through to you, so you might say I’m a glorified shield. It’s only after I die that you’re in trouble on that front. And the only people who can hear me right now are you and other revenants. That’s going to be both a help and a dreadful inconvenience, you’ll find. There’s only one other revenant, who won’t be accompanying us. You’ll be meeting him shortly.” The mirror opened up, without warning, to a narrow room with a treadmill. A pale, slender man wearing Kel black-and-gold awaited them, although he had neglected to put on gloves. The man had no rank designation, but his silver voidmoth insignia meant he was a Nirai seconded to the Kel. The moth’s wings, too, were connected by a silver chain. If you looked closely at his shadow, it was made of fluttering moths in silhouette. The sight of the moths made Cheris uneasy, as though they were about to rise from the floor and devour her from the bones out.

“Walk on the treadmill,” he said, “to remind your muscles of their function. Also because you probably got some of his muscle memory and you’ll be useless if you trip over the floor.” Cheris obliged, not unwillingly. She found a good pace: fast enough to raise her pulse, slow enough that her uncooperative legs didn’t betray her. The fact that her coordination had suffered bothered her. She’d never been the most agile of her comrades, but she hoped the effect was temporary. “Jedao,” the Nirai said, “I trust she’s satisfactory?” “I’m your gun,” Jedao said. Cheris was nonplussed. A Kel might say that ceremonially to a superior, and even then only on the highest of occasions, but the irony in Jedao’s voice suggested that something else was going on. “Besides,” Jedao added, “if she’s like the others, she never had a substantive choice, and I didn’t have one either.” The question must have shown on Cheris’s face. The Nirai said, “We prefer volunteers. They survive the process better.” Ah, yes. Volunteers Kel-style. “Let me brief you on the basics,” the Nirai went on. “You apparently have some use for Jedao, and Kel Command approved it. What you ought to know is that the black cradle’s ghosts can only be revived by attaching them to someone living, which we call anchoring. This is not general knowledge. Jedao mentioned that most exotic weapons will harm him before they harm you. There are a few exceptions. I advise you to look them up when you get a chance. “Jedao can’t read your...

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis Priority: Personal From:: Vahenz afrir dai Noum To: Heptarch Liozh Zai Calendrical Minutiae: Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Chicken, and it’s bizarre that people voted in farm animals for this newfangled calendar, but make it Day of the Silkworm? Send me a memo if Doctrine has come up with something more thrilling. My dear Zai, you must forgive my jitters. I don’t claim how much they claim the new day cycles in the Fortress should be easy to adapt to. The light has gone pale and cold everywhere, as though it came from some land of snow and stinging wings. I came here to get away from nuisances like planetary-style weather. I urge you to reconsider tasking Analysis Team Three with that last Rahal justiciar. I’m as much for a delicious lead as the next woman, but this is the Rahal we’re talking about. If you want to know the truth, the Kel aren’t the ones you have to worry about suiciding on you, “suicide hawk” nothing. The Kel will at least look at the numbers and realize that it makes no sense to sacrifice ten of them to get one of you, bless their tiny brains. No: a Rahal will kill herself out of spite if some abstract higher principle tells her to. Still, I take it your mind is set on this matter, and it’s not in dispute that we have to purge the lot, so we’ll do it your way. I know you skip the preliminary nonsense in favor of the meat of the report, so I should get started, eh? I’ve been monitoring communications from the...

“Invariant ice,” Jedao was saying. “I don’t suppose anyone’s figured out where to get more of the stuff.” Cheris looked at the Nirai, but he was ignoring them. “Not that an infantry captain would have heard,” Cheris said. Invariant ice had the ability to generate shields in the surrounding space. The shields were impermeable to anything but a narrow band of communications frequencies. In principle, a sufficiently strong attack could overwhelm the shields and drain the ice of virtue. But the last Cheris had heard, even fury bombs would not suffice, and those were exotics anyway. “I don’t know how you plan on getting past the shields,” Cheris said. The hexarchs had installed them at the central nexus point precisely because of their invulnerability. Calendrical effects were exaggerated at nexus points, and it had been taken for granted that invariant ice provided the Fortress enough protection. “How many people have tried?” Jedao asked. “They die before they get close enough,” Cheris said, “but it’s still a bad situation.” She consulted one of the standardized simulators and ran a very simplified scenario. The after-battle statistics glowed at her. “I don’t think the hexarchs are going to be impressed with a twenty-nine-year siege.”

As the episode wound down, Jedao said, “You’re not doing badly with Nerevor. She’s expecting your nerve to crack and it hasn’t yet.” “Jedao,” Cheris said, “I’m stapled to a bigger threat. I’m worried about her, but when you get right down to it, my situation is already worse.” “Good,” he said. “Good what?” “Be more assertive. You tend to defer to Nerevor. The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you. You have to act like a general or people won’t respect you as one.”

“Seriously, what’s bothering you?” “It wasn’t a fair fight.” Jedao’s brief silence spoke volumes. “The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don’t fold,” he said. “Besides, you didn’t use any resources Nerevor didn’t know of in advance. She knew I was anchored to you. If she couldn’t compensate for it, that’s not your fault.” “That’s a good way to save lives,” she said, a chill in her voice. They weren’t discussing the duel anymore. “The faster it’s over with, the fewer people die,” Jedao said. “I realize you have delicate Kel sensibilities, but please accept my advice. You can’t leave advantages lying around, either, or people will use them against you.”

Were the heretics really going to believe the preposterous claim that they could break the shields? Jedao said, “Wake up, that’s not a standard –” Cheris spotted the incoming object in the scan summary. “That’s a bomb!” Scan said. “Don’t understand the trajectory. It’s going to catch more of them than us in the blast radius.” Anomalies never worked in your favor. Especially since the five-swarm was moving toward the bomb, not away from it. The bomb went off. It did not, in fact, catch any of the Kel swarm in its radius. It did, however, encompass the entirety of the five-swarm, in a sphere of rippling light the color of broken glass, and it shifted the moths around in a dizzying swirl. The Kel swarm was now surrounded by a kaleidoscope of phantom bannermoths, a hundred of them. Only five of them were real, but the phantoms could undoubtedly do some kind of damage. Cheris immediately mapped the symmetries: it was a radial force multiplier, it was probably only going to last as long as the bomb’s radiation lingered, and if they didn’t come up with a counter, they were going to be nailed full of holes by a numerically superior force.

The Starvation Hound had launched a large, stubby projectile out of what appeared to be a modified gunport. It exploded into a cobwebby cloud of spores. A good third of the kaleidoscope moths were trapped when the spores billowed into enormous fungal blooms, sickly pink-gray with violet undertones. Seconds later, the Hound was written over in words of fire, ash, failure. “That skullfucking idiot killed all her soldiers because she had to show off her special toy,” Jedao said savagely. Cheris swung around to stare at Jedao, even if she agreed with him, but of course there was no one there but a shadow. People in the command center were giving her strange looks. “How in the name of ash and talon did that fucking Vidona fit a fucking fungal canister on a fucking bannermoth?” Nerevor was demanding. “That shouldn’t even be possible!”

Jedao’s voice cracked without warning. “My gun. Where did I put my gun? It’s so dark.” Cheris bit back a curse. This had to be a ploy, even though she couldn’t see what an undead general would be getting out of playing a bad joke. “Jedao,” she said, trying to sound composed and failing, “there’s no need –” Not only was the shadow darker than she remembered it being, Jedao’s eyes had flared hell-bright, and the entire room was heavy with darkness like tongues of night licking inward from some unseen sky. Cheris’s mouth went dry as sand. She’d seen combat before, she’d fought before, and all she could do was freeze and stare like a soldier just out of academy. Where was her chrysalis gun? There it was at her waist, that unmoving weight. She had to reach for it, had to unfreeze – “General.” Now Jedao was coolly imperious. “I don’t recognize you, but your uniform is irregular. Fix it.” She had no idea what had caused him to go mad in the first place, no one did, so she had no idea if he was going mad again. She lost a precious second wondering inanely if snapping a salute would mollify him, then unfroze and fumbled for the chrysalis gun. Just in case. The nine-eyed shadow whipped around behind her in defiance of all the laws of geometry it had obeyed until now, and then she knew she was really in trouble. All that time she had spent reading up on her swarm’s high officers and what intelligence they had on the enemy – some of it should have been spent researching Jedao. “You sh...

Cheris couldn’t make his voice go away and she couldn’t stop reacting like him. As a Kel, she couldn’t help responding to the orders, either. She was going to go ahead, pick up the gun, try – Jedao started to laugh in earnest. “I’m going to enjoy watching you die, fledge.” The Kel called their cadets that, or inferiors who fell out of line. All her muscles locked up in spite of her intentions. The luckstone felt leaden in her hand. She had taken comfort from it since her mother gave it to her. It gave her none now. “You have no idea whether that gun works as advertised on full strength,” Jedao said contemptuously, “or how it works if it does, and you never asked. The Kel don’t get smarter, do they? Go ahead, pull the trigger.” The Nirai technician wouldn’t have lied to her – She knew nothing of the kind. “Think about the name of the gun, fledge. You know what a chrysalis is. Where do you think they put me when it’s time for retrieval? I have to go into a container, and your carcass is handy. Remember that despite the fact that I’m a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn’t me.” It was horribly plausible. She fired again, but wildly. Sparks; a dance of staring eyes. Again and again. No better luck. “Honestly, Captain,” Jedao said, biting down on her usual rank, “if this is a typical example of Kel competence, no wonder Kel Command keeps using a man they despise utterly to win their wars for them.” Cheris tried to make herself keep firing. Couldn’t. T...

“I’m done with your game, sir,” she said flatly. “You win.” “Oh, for love of –” Jedao checked himself. “At the risk of alienating you forever, I have to point out that you lost the moment you agreed to play the game on my terms, without negotiating.” This was typical Shuos thinking, but she couldn’t disregard it. “You weren’t serious about playing games with the swarm, sir?” “I seem to recall someone arguing that the commanders didn’t deserve to be toyed with. No, I wasn’t serious, but it was plausible that I was, wasn’t it? Think about that.” She frowned. “Was it worth doing that just to make a point?” She was looking at the luckstone. “You have the lesson backwards, Cheris. The luckstone is incidental. I don’t have hands and I can’t hold a gun. When you agreed to be my opponent, what weapons did you think I had?” “Your voice,” she said at once, but she had missed the important one. “Your reputation.” “Yes. We’ve already told the heretics that I’m facing them.” “Garach Jedao Shkan,” she said. Her voice was unsteady. Maybe they should have bannered the Deuce of Gears after all, so the enemy would know to dread them. “Anytime you want me to feel like my mother caught me harassing the geese again, go right ahead,” Jedao said with unexpected humor. “In any case, reputation: it’s an awful tool to have, but you can’t escape it, so you must learn to use it.” “I understand, sir,” she said. She did. They didn’t call Jedao a weapon for nothing; and fear of weapons was a weapon in i...

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 ...

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 sug...

“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 calle...

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. ...

IT’S NO USE,” a man was saying. “Look.” Nerevor was staring straight ahead at a gray wall, in a room of gray sodden shadows. Restraints of cold metal held her fast, and the shift they had given her was too thin. Her shoulder hurt, and something about her jaw felt wrong, but it was only pain. She was Kel. She would survive as long as it was given her to survive. “Your name.” It was the man again, impersonal. He was not Kel. She did not have to answer. This time a woman spoke. “We already know who she is.” “That’s not the point. The point is getting her to respond.” “In that case, scare up a uniform and try again.” “She’d know the difference,” the man said. “There’s a baseline body language that’s imprinted on cadets along with formation instinct, subtle stuff. A good Shuos infiltrator could fake it. An Andan could enthrall their way around it. We’re just stuck. She’d break all the bones in her body to please a Kel officer, but we’re short of those. Jedao was making sure we were getting nothing but a warm body with the commander’s face attached, and he can undoubtedly restore her, but we can’t. At least the DNA matches records. Cold bastard.” Nerevor wasn’t sure what Shuos Jedao had to do with the situation, but she made a note of the mention in case it became useful later.

The woman had been thinking about something else. “Doesn’t a high officer have to authorize fledge-null in the first place? Who the hell did the Immolation Fox subvert up there?” “Subvert or bribe or coerce,” the man said. “We don’t know which.” “I’m surprised you wanted to talk in front of her. You’re normally obsessed with discretion.” “I wanted to see if there’d be a reaction. Depending on where in the calendrical zones he wiped her, the fledge-state might have chinks. A problem for the technicians, as I said.” The man tapped on the door. “Anything you want to say, fledge?” Nerevor didn’t like being called “fledge” by this stranger, but it didn’t matter. He was not Kel. She did not have to answer. After they were gone, she listened for gunfire, footsteps. If the Kel meant for her to die here, then she would die here. But she could not help but comfort herself with the idea that her people would come for her if she was brave enough, if she endured enough, if she proved herself worthy of the Kel name.

The communications post in the Anemone Ward is back in our hands and Jedao’s troops even handed over the loyalists, but I’m bothered by Jedao’s resources. I threatened some videos out of Stoghan’s lackeys, and those aren’t just infantry he landed, those are Kel. I don’t care if they were wearing brown instead of black-and-gold, those are Kel. You know the joke, right? If you have a choice between sending a three-year-old to do covert ops and a Kel, you pick the three-year-old because the Kel is too stupid to lie? Anyway, where did Jedao get these Kel? If we’re dealing with a legitimate Kel swarm, if Kel Command gave Jedao command – but how did he convince the Kel to surrender one of their high officers? Any other general would be able to rely on formation instinct to shove the order through, but I’m not sure Jedao would inspire that kind of obedience unless he explicitly got Kel Command’s blessing. Yet this seems more likely than the other possibility, which is that the least trustworthy general in Kel history convinced at least one Kel high officer to join him. That’s the problem with formation instinct: if he turned the right individual, he could have taken down the rest. The thing is, Jedao isn’t just a traitor, even if people’s brains short out around that fact. He’s also a Shuos. The two aren’t equivalent, despite the Shuos jokes. He was a Shuos assassin before he switched tracks, and there’s circumstantial evidence he did some analyst work as well. Anyway, his career...

“I saw how badly you wanted to go in Nerevor’s stead. She saw it too, you know. That’s why she was willing to sacrifice herself.” “I didn’t want to manipulate her into it,” Cheris said. A soft pause. “All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.”

It only took a moment’s extra ferreting to find the people who had died at the Siege of Hellspin Fortress, heretics and heptarchate soldiers both. “All right,” Jedao said quietly. “All of my anchors do this sooner or later.” At this remove of time, the statistics weren’t precise, but the Kel historians had done what they could. The swarm that Jedao had led against Hellspin Fortress had not been small even by modern standards. His orders had told him to conquer the fortress so the Lanterners could be converted and the calendar repaired from the damage done to it. Cheris read the number of the dead once, twice, thrice. A fourth time; four for death. Even so, she knew that she didn’t understand numbers, that a number over a million was a series of scratched lines and curves. If she heard tomorrow that her parents had choked on their soup and fallen over dead, it would hurt her more than the deaths of people who would have died anyway generations before she was born. Nevertheless, she started reading capsule biographies in reverse alphabetical order. She read about two sisters who died trying to veil the dead after the custom of their people. Their reasoning had probably been that it might staunch the threshold winnower’s radiations, which was not illogical, but wrong anyway. She read about a child. A woman. A man trying to carry a crippled child to safety. Both died bleeding from every pore in their skin. A woman. A woman and her two-year-old child. Three soldiers. Three more...

Cheris wasn’t a historian, but she had the awful feeling that Jedao wasn’t making anything up. She didn’t point for the third one. “Colonel Kel Gized.” Jedao’s chief of staff. Jedao’s voice was no longer steady. “Do you want it backwards or forwards?” Cheris pulled up a picture of Kel Gized because she wanted to know. Gized had a round, bland face and an untidy scar, shockingly pale against her dark brown skin, along the side of her head. The hair above it, cropped short, was gray. Her gloves looked like they were made of heavier material than the Kel favored nowadays. “Chronological,” Cheris said. “I met her at one of those damnable flower-viewing parties I had to attend as a high officer. The host was a friend of the Andan heptarch’s sister. They liked to decorate parties with us military types to reassure the populace that the breakaway factions weren’t going to chew the realm to rags. “I was looking at the orchids when I overheard Gized critiquing an Andan functionary’s poetry to his face. I decided I had to find out more about her, so I waited until she was done bludgeoning him about the head with his use of synecdoche, and asked her for a duel.” It wasn’t much of an anecdote, although Kel who cared about literary techniques were oddities the way her ability at abstract mathematics was an oddity. But there was a brittle quality to his tone. “It was over very quickly. I’ve only once lost a duel to a Kel, and it wasn’t Gized. She wasn’t humiliated, she was bored. She’d ...

Now he was trying to distract her. “Tell me how you killed her,” she said. “There’s not a lot to tell,” Jedao said. Pacing again. “She had an analytical mind and wouldn’t have considered me above suspicion. Another ten minutes and she would have concluded that everything going wrong implied a very highly placed traitor. Lucky for me she was never a fast thinker. I shot her through the side of the head. “It was a bad moment because Jiang and Gwe Pia were also in the command center, and Gwe Pia was a spectacularly good shot. She would have gotten me if she’d been willing to shoot through Jiang, but she wouldn’t have thought of that, even if I did straight off.” Cheris could think of words for an officer who immediately jumped to shooting through a comrade as a firing solution. “Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getting low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.” “This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped. “I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?” “It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation? “You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.” “Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise?” A ragged silence. “Fine. But listen...

Niaad was alarmed. Isaure was only a corporal, and the captain had been quite specific that they had to hold this miserable complex until they received orders otherwise. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” Isaure said as she continued to draw a map with her toe. It was surprisingly good, especially if you ignored the streaky marks left by skull splinters and the accompanying shreds of brain. “Dregs spit up by Personnel because they needed more warm bodies.” Niaad wished the corporal would stop philosophizing and give a fucking order already. “We have the same problem.” Now Isaure was kneeling and using gristle to diagram a perimeter. Her expression showed nothing but contempt for the situation. “You jump –” She banged the nearest wall. The noise was horrifyingly loud, and it took Niaad a full three seconds to stop scrabbling for cover. “– at the smallest noises and you’re not getting much benefit from formation instinct.” There wasn’t much Niaad could say to that. When the head of the man next to him had been vaporized, he had fallen apart. Isaure crouched and made a second diagram. Niaad should have been paying attention, but he couldn’t think clearly. Every so often, Isaure lifted her head to listen, but if she had any conclusions about what was going on, she didn’t share them. “You should ask,” she said at last. “Corporal?” “Ask why I’m the same as you. Soldier no one has a use for.” Now she was getting personal. “Why, sir?” he said warily. “I used to be a tank captain,” I...

“They’ll see us coming, sir.” “They’ll see you coming,” Isaure said. “I’ll provide covering fire. I just want you to lob as many of the grenades as you can at that machine, get some explosions going.” “We could pick off a few of them first, sir –” “Soldier,” Isaure said crushingly, “did I give you permission to think? Charge straight in, throw grenades, get the hell out. I’ve given you instructions. Acknowledge.” “Acknowledged, sir,” Niaad said, despite a sincere desire to tell her to fuck a jackhammer. “Go,” Isaure said, gesturing with her scorch rifle. Niaad was already having trouble with his peripheral vision. He kept having to swing his head from side to side to check his surroundings. It wasn’t until Isaure shook his shoulder that he realized his hearing was half-gone, too. The stress effects wouldn’t have set in so early in a properly tuned Kel. “There’s the gauntlet,” Isaure said. “Sloppy guards, no one’s facing our way. Their misfortune, our gain. Get in, lob the grenades, get out. I’ll cover you. Simple.” “Yes, sir,” he whispered. Stupid plan, but he had to obey. “Good man. We’ll make a Kel of you yet. Go!” Niaad shuffled at first because he couldn’t get his legs to cooperate. The noise alerted them. He primed one grenade and threw poorly, well short of the machine. It was hard not to be hypnotized by its red glow and wires and strange gears. The heretics’ guards may have been careless, but they weren’t fools. One of them kicked the grenade down the corridor. The...

“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...

“Communications, sir,” the lieutenant’s voice said from the terminal. “It’s not Kel Command –” So much for that. “– but there’s a signature match for Brigadier General Kel Marish, bannering the Higher Higher Highest. The transmission request has urgent priority, for your eyes only.” The servitors were already clearing out. Kel Marish of the Eyespike emblem. She had once shouted down a court-martial charging her with overly creative interpretation of orders against the Haussen heretics, and won. Cheris was remembering that her luck this entire campaign was bad. “Send it through,” Cheris said. Of all the generals to reach. Kel Marish wore her uniform with a casual air, even though no single crease was out of place. She had the kind of face you’d expect a card shark to develop among challenging opponents, all ascetic angles and unreadable eyes in a blunt dark face. “Brevet General Kel Cheris,” she said, not insultingly but formally. “If Kel Command hasn’t seen fit to share this information with you, I oughtn’t either, but I feel you can’t adequately discharge your duty otherwise.” “General Marish,” Cheris said, “I’m listening. Is it true that we have an enemy swarm incoming?” “Oh, it’s not just incoming,” Marish said. Her sneer wasn’t directed at Cheris. “We have a full-scale Hafn invasion with messy calendrical business headed toward the Fortress of Spinshot Coins. General Cherkad has been given charge of the campaign, and I’ve been pulled off sentry to assist near the Jewel...

From every mouth a maw; from every door a death.

They collided with Captain Kel Miyaud’s company on the way, a terrible mess with too many people clogging the passage. After some confusion, Miyaud gave way, which necessitated tucking away Kel in side-corridors and sad empty domiciles. Hren didn’t hear the shouts until they were about to pass through the reinforced breach. She was damned if the pale gauzy stuff the Nirai had put up could possibly filter out toxics, and for that matter the bridgework looked too delicate. Still, her orders were to go forward, so she marched obligingly forward, and – It happened between one footstep and the next. It didn’t hurt at first. There it came, that bizarre prickly speckling of the air she’d heard about with the corrosion gradient, but it wasn’t – When Hren fell, it hurt. She smelled blood and shit, heard things clattering. Something landed hard against two of her vertebrae. Her face was reflected smudgily in the floor. Most of her nose was missing. Blood all over. The world was quiet and slow, and her thinking was calm. Clear. For once there was no music in her head. She couldn’t hear much, not even the shouts from earlier. Her nose wasn’t the only thing missing. Her arms were gone, too. And her legs, except a bit of her right thigh. Her suit had injected her with coagulants, painkillers, sprayed her with temporary skin, but that wasn’t going to save her or anyone else. Hren coughed out a laugh, but she was sliding out of consciousness, and that wasn’t a horrible plan. She was only ...

“I wish I knew I was doing this right,” Cheris said, “but there’s nothing for it but to move forward.” “The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still,” Jedao said. “It’s better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than to freeze.” “You’ve lost soldiers.” It wasn’t what she had meant to say. “Nothing makes it easier,” Jedao said. “I sometimes think I’m not the mad one, that it’s Kel Command. They should know better. Anyway, you should stop delaying.”