Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

“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...