Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

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.