Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

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...