Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

“Pull out now,” the colonel’s voice crackled over the link. “The Nirai are about to put on some fireworks.” He started listing the units that were to get to the pickup point. A list. Not all units. Six companies weren’t on the list, if she remembered the roster correctly, so they’d be staying. Her company was on the list. So that was fine. Major Kel Belleren’s company was not on the list. That was not fine. They had gone to academy together. She should have queried her battalion commander, but instead she called the colonel directly. “Sir, Captain Mieng, Battalion Three, Company Two. If you need another unit to hold, we can hold.” Her battalion commander was going to kill her. If the colonel didn’t do it first. An infinitely brief pause. “Captain,” Ragath said, “I’m not leaving those companies to cover the retreat. I’m leaving them for the butcher’s block. On direct orders from the general. She has decided that, with the confusion from the Nirai explosives, this is the minimum number that will convince the heretics that their victory was real so the next operation can proceed. I hear she’s good with numbers.” This was more explaining than Ragath usually troubled with. “Sir, we can –” “I’m not interested in martyrs.” His voice grew hard. “You have your orders, Captain. Colonel Ragath out.” She bit her lip, but formation instinct made her give the necessary orders, made her march out of the smoke-haze with its stench of upturned dirt and chemicals and livid blood, made her g...

Naraucher had reservations about putting servitors into Kel formations. He didn’t mind them in the usual course of their duties, but this was different. Maybe he was more of a traditionalist than he had reckoned, even though he was the first Kel in his family. He made himself watch as the servitors hovered into position. They were efficient about it, no wasted motion. If he was honest with himself, the emotion the servitors aroused in him wasn’t contempt. It was inadequacy. The general had decided they were Kel enough to serve with the Kel. If he was any sort of Kel himself, that had to be good enough for him. Servitor attrition was higher than planned for. Major Kel Ula called the colonel and received modified orders of battle. This caused delays as formations were switched to accommodate the numbers and a few people were shuffled into other companies. There were a good forty-three people and servitors left to hang around the rear. Naraucher spent this time daydreaming about spending some time with his brother’s dogs. Dogs were much more pleasant to be around than grumpy fellow soldiers, even with all the slobber. It wasn’t as though there weren’t lots of fluids in warfare anyway. “All right,” Colonel Ragath said over the link, and Naraucher paid attention. “Major Ula from Battalion Seven has the van. She’s to make it across the causeway and tunnel down the Radiant Gate. Don’t activate formation pivots until you’re right there. We don’t know how long it’ll take the corros...

The Nirai had been busy with heavy-duty burrowers, preparing a passage to the Radiant Gate. The gate was one of the Radiant Ward’s popular attractions and a defense in itself. It was made of material condensed from a certain dying star. If the entire Fortress had been made of the stuff, they would have been in trouble. Backwards to be grateful for a weakness in one of the hexarchate’s defenses, but there it was. The passage was weirdly dank. Naraucher had the morbid fantasy that someone was gardening Kel in confined spaces with the unhealthy blue-white light, and soon it would be time for the harvest. Were the Kel best pickled? Smoked? He hated smoked food, but it seemed appropriate for ashhawks.

Major Ula’s company wavered for a moment. Then they got themselves sorted out and the pivots started moving into place. A great fierce light sprang up around her company. No, it wasn’t light. You couldn’t read by it or warm your hands by it, but whatever it was, it drew the eye and made it flinch at the same time. It intimated banners and swords held high and six-gun salutes. Ula was bannering: surely that was a good sign, the suicide hawk plain to see, even if all they had to represent their general was the null banner. Someone was hissing at him. He remembered to keep up. If the servitors could do their job when they were so new at it, it behooved him to do his. Astonishingly, the gate was giving way. The transparent stuff was snaking off in curling vapor. And the light – those radiant words, all the ideals of the hexarchate scribed by poets long dead – the light was funneling free in scrolls and coils, words uncaged, or perhaps words driven off. “– is the captain.” The voice on the link was savage even through the crackling. “Word from the colonel. The heretics have woken up. They’ve dropped the corrosion gradient and they’re headed for our rear. Rear units are changing front. We’re to follow the major once she’s through and hit that factory, hope the rearguard can keep the heretics occupied.” Naraucher looked again at Ula’s company. This time he noticed something that hadn’t been apparent before. At the edges of the formation, the non-pivot positions, humans and servit...

IN THE COMMAND center of the Unspoken Law, Cheris listened to the reports. She didn’t mourn. She had lost the right to mourn. Jedao would have disagreed, which was why she wasn’t talking to him. The first recorded Kel formation was a suicide formation. She had learned that at academy sometime and forgotten it. Now she would never forget.

CAPTAIN-ENGINEER NIRAI WENIAT might have been the only person in the swarm who liked threshold winnowers. It wasn’t that he thought their destructiveness was funny, although people had accused him of thinking destruction in general was funny. It was the purity of the winnowers’ function: death that caused death that caused death. The universe ran on death. All the clockwork wonders in the world couldn’t halt entropy. You could work with death or you could let it happen; that was all.

Weniat and his team were standing in the winnower’s shelter zone. All modern winnowers provided a shelter zone for their teams. It was anyone’s guess as to whether this model’s would work as specified. The first winnowers hadn’t had shelter zones at all. The winnower made sounds like a furnace exploding, like wineglasses singing shattered, like bells slamming from side to side. It didn’t give off light, but spewed the kind of wind you would get if you twisted a world’s worth of clouds into a spindle and let go after a hundred years. The shelter zone was working, indicated by a faint lambent glow. The question was whether the winnower itself was having any effect. Here in the park, amid the trees’ long shadows, it was hard to tell. Wait. There was a whisper. A knot in a tree was opening into a cracked eye. A strange blemished radiation glared from it. The deer had wandered back toward the noise. The winnower clattered, and it reared up. Light bled from the deer’s eyes, the color of scars and unwhole moons. It staggered a few steps before falling. Curved gashes opened in its throat and flanks, from which tiny teeth gleamed, and there were snapping noises. There was something comical about the angles the deer’s legs made. Round shapes boiled out of the gashes. Eyes. All of the eyes were looking at the winnower. They were in the shelter zone. They were safe.

Over the next several days, while Cheris struggled to keep up with the administration of the Fortress, calendrical values continued to normalize at a maddeningly slow rate. Rahal Gara and the other Doctrine officers spent a lot of time muttering to each other. “You’re awfully quiet,” Cheris said to Jedao. “I don’t get tired, so there’s no need to relax,” he said. “But I wonder what it is they’re so worried about.” She didn’t think anything of it until two days later, when Communications and Scan spoke at once. “Relief swarm, four bannermoths escorting twelve boxmoths –” “We’re being hailed –” Cheris’s heart leapt. Kel Command hadn’t forgotten them after all. She was going to be done with the whole wretched situation. “Accept communications,” she said. “Cheris.” Jedao was trying to get her attention. “Rahal Gara sent a signal you didn’t authorize. I don’t know what she said, and I’ve never seen that override before.” But she was too giddy with relief to hear him. She didn’t recognize the man whose face appeared on her display, with his dark, steady eyes, but given the number of bannermoth commanders in the hexarchate, there was no reason she should. “This is Commander Kel Huan of the Coiled Stone,” the man said. “I assume I’m addressing Brevet General Kel Cheris and General Shuos Jedao.” “Fuck,” Jedao said, which wasn’t the response Cheris had expected from him. “Look at the pulse in his neck, Cheris. Something’s wrong.” “This is Brevet General Kel Cheris,” Cheris said over...

CHERIS WOKE TRANSFIXED by splinters of a ghost’s carrion glass: invisible and insubstantial, but they hurt as though they pierced each nerve. Carrion bomb, she thought, dredging the memory out of the long-ago briefing. As an exotic weapon, it would have killed Jedao, leaving her free of him. She remembered the protocol she had read so long ago through a haze of pain: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured. The cindermoth was a chrysalis of hard light and heavy fractures and empty spaces where people had been. Every time she moved – to breathe, to blink, to scrabble for purchase on the bruising floor – she felt splinters go into her brain and pin her to Jedao’s memories. She had a choice. She could take the splinters out and leave them behind. Refuse to look at them. Or she could scavenge what she could from them. Try to understand Jedao. The New Anchor Orientation Packet seemed to be from a time long ago and far away, but she remembered Jedao’s warning, when she had first read it, that eating the splinters would drive her mad. Having him around to talk to her all the time had been bad enough. Having him inside her head would undoubtedly be worse. On the other hand, her world had already gone mad. Kel Command had just turned on her. Her situation was dire. Jedao had clearly known more about what...

“I wouldn’t call it an emergency, sir,” Cheris said, “more like an issue of protocol.” Make the query casual. “No, really. I just got reliable intel that the Lanterners have filled their defensive outposts with children and hospital cases along with skeleton crews to operate the nasty weapons. Honestly, I thought I knew the regs backwards and forwards and something new turns up. They’re broadcasting from their brand-new orphanages in the clear in all directions. Anyway, what do you want me to do about it?” She had played fox-and-hunters with Garit, and endless rounds of jeng-zai. They had gone on a hunting trip together back when she was a major general, dismaying because shooting gray tigers was too easy and she had no use for the tigers’ deaths, stupid pointless waste, but it was the sort of thing Garit went in for, and it would have been impolitic to turn him down. Most of all, she knew Garit’s three children, one of whom she had introduced to handguns and who was in Kel Academy right now. There was a right way and a lot of wrong ways to handle the situation. She willed Garit to choose the right way. When Garit answered, she knew immediately that he had picked one of the wrong ways. “There’s no tactical difficulty, though?” Cheris froze inside. “Not in the slightest,” she said, keeping her tone relaxed. “But everyone will see the slaughter” – unsubtle word choice, that was the point – “and I thought there might be information operations fallout.” “Heptarch Khiaz has bee...

CHERIS CHOKED AND forced herself to breathe more calmly in spite of the stinging pain. The splinters wouldn’t stop hurting, but she had to know. She looked around the crystallized command center with its profusion of bleak glass pillars and broken walls. I need information, she reminded herself.

THE SIEGE OF Hellspin Fortress. The fire-flashes of alerts, blood on the walls and floor and terminals, ricochet marks. A dropped stylus. Cheris could see where it had been chewed on the end. A fallen woman with gray in her hair and a bullet hole in the side of her head, blood puddled on the floor. She tried to think of the woman’s name, she should know this, but it wouldn’t come to her. Gwe Pia was sprawled next to Jiang. She heard orders over the communications links, a desperate query from Commander Kel Menowen of Tactical Eight, then static. No one knew what was going on. A few people had tried to reassert order, the ones she had predicted would have the presence of mind to do so. But the bombs and logic grenades had taken care of them. Her habit of thorough inspections had made it easy to plant things. With the addition of the threshold winnowers, the Kel siege force was truly broken. She had expected her hands to be sweating inside her gloves, but they were dry. Calm. There was a lot of blood. She had not cared for neatness, only efficiency. She had one bullet left over, as she had calculated, and if necessary she could have taken weapons from the dead. They hadn’t so much as clipped her. She had always been fast, and she knew the value of a good ambush. It had been the weakest part of the plan. Atrocious setup: from a tactical standpoint, it would have made more sense to frame a subset of her staff as the traitors, and turn her people against each other. Easier to f...

THE SPLINTERS WERE starting to hurt worse and worse, but Cheris couldn’t stop. If she stopped she would lose all courage. Jedao had warned her about Kujen. At the very least she had to find out about him. She closed her eyes this time, but it didn’t help. Only later did she remember that Kujen had taken an interest in her mathematical ability.

Without any notification, the door whisked open. In a moment Cheris was on her feet, flattened against the wall away from her desk, pistol drawn. The man who entered was slightly taller than Cheris was, and he paused in the doorway, making a perfect silhouette of himself, the kind of thing you didn’t want to do in front of a former assassin. He wore Nirai colors, black-and-silver, even if the layered brocades and filigree buttons spoke to expensive tastes, and didn’t look terribly practical, either. There was no indication of rank or position, just the silver voidmoth pin. Cheris didn’t relax. The Nirai frequently had odd senses of humor, but it wasn’t usual for them to play pranks on visiting generals who submitted all the proper forms and didn’t push too hard about speedy repairs. “I’m sorry,” Cheris said, “but what is your authorization for being here?” “Oh, put that thing down, General Jedao,” the Nirai said, smiling. The man was striking, with a dark, oval face and tousled hair and graceful hands; it was impossible not to appreciate his beauty. Cheris couldn’t help but notice that his tone wasn’t remotely deferential, however. “I’m Nirai Kujen.” He took a step forward. In academy, one of Cheris’s instructors had said, rather despairingly, that having ninety-sixth percentile reflexes could be just as much of a liability for an assassin as an asset. Cheris hadn’t served as an assassin for years, but the habits of paranoia would not be denied. She had allowed the Nirai t...

Kujen’s long fingers picked more cards out of the deck, slow and precise. He laid them in a circle, face-up. Ace through seven from the suit of Doors. “You want to bring down the whole damn calendar,” he said. “Took me a little while to see it. You’re very conscientious about researching all the heretics near your assignments. It looks a lot like duty, doesn’t it? But I think you’re fishing for allies, even if you haven’t found any that meet your criteria, whatever they are. You want to bring the whole damn heptarchate down.” Cheris was starting to wish she had appreciated her paperwork more. At this rate, she was never going to get a chance to finish it. “Yes, and I’d better hope for a few million soldiers to show up and join me,” she said sarcastically. “Really, a one-man crusade against the heptarchate entire? That’s not cocky, that’s psychotic.” “Funny you should say that,” Kujen said, “considering you’ve never lost a battle.” She hated it when people bludgeoned her over the head with that, but she held her peace.

THE COMMAND CENTER was full of diffuse reflections, making it difficult to see anything clearly. Cheris spotted her own face in the mirror-maze, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to her. Was there a tipping point past which Jedao’s memories would drive her mad? What if she had passed it already? There was carrion glass everywhere, memories spun out in great gleaming crystal spindles. Tangible and visible, unlike Jedao’s. She assumed Jedao’s glass was different because he had been a ghost. People sharded across the walls and burnished into the floor. Had the bomb only hit the command moth? Or had any of the swarm survived? It looked like the grid had been mostly knocked offline, but life-support was still functioning or she would be in real trouble. Either the gravity was settling or she was regaining her coordination. Her breath hitched as she examined a twisted arch of carrion glass. It had once been Commander Hazan. There were faint threaded traces of a tree he had loved as a child, a sister who had died in an accident, things she had never known about him. She backed away, wondering if he would ever have chosen to share these things with her, and choked down another of Jedao’s splinters.

The five Kel had failed their formation, and Cheris couldn’t help but think that formation instinct, however repugnant, would have been a great help in the battle. So much had depended on that last siege, and after every battle she ended up executing cowards and deserters. But then, formation instinct wouldn’t be developed until after she was executed for high treason. Back when she had been alive, it would have been a controversial measure. The Liozh in particular would have studied its implications carefully, and others would have protested it. By the time it was invented, after the fall of the Liozh, Kel Command and the hexarchs installed it into the Kel without any qualms. The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

It hadn’t been difficult to win the respect of the Kel. The Kel, being practical, liked people who won battles. If she could have done her work with that alone, she would have tried. But two things forced her hand. The first was technological advances in augments. The Kel were going the route of composites, and there was a good chance that she wouldn’t be able to hide her intentions – two decades plotting high treason – from a hivemind. The second problem was Nirai Kujen, who could turn on her at any time. If she was going to act, she had to act sooner rather than later. The hard part wasn’t getting rid of the heptarchs. It was creating a functioning, stable, sane society from the heptarchate’s ashes. She still had no idea whether it would have been possible to convince the Lanterners to give up remembrances, assuming some alternative could be found that gave them a viable calendar. When the Lanterners used their children as shields, however, she knew they wouldn’t work out anyway. She didn’t have a lot of time left, so all she had was Hellspin Fortress. The massacre fixated the Kel on her and made her infamous. The Kel had respected her. Now they feared her. Respect was a good lever, but fear was better. If she was going to make a bid for immortality, she needed a very good lever. Terrible irony: if only she’d waited, if she had known what the Liozh were debating in their white-and-gold chambers, she could have offered her services to them instead. She wouldn’t have neede...

CHERIS STRAIGHTENED. IT no longer surprised her that their overseers had decided to kill Jedao. But they could have used a simple carrion gun to do so. They could even have handed her the gun and ordered her to do it herself, as a loyalty test. She took a ragged breath, then another. Candied corpses in every direction. The command center’s walls were warped, and the cracks in the floor were webbed together by fused strands of glass. Maybe she was wrong about the extent of the damage. Maybe there were other survivors. She’d have to check manually. A cindermoth was a large place, but she had nothing better to do. “Jedao?” she asked, because she couldn’t help hoping. No answer came. Jedao had provoked the attack by convincing her to reveal the extent of her mathematical abilities, which alerted Kel Command that they had given him access to someone who could handle a high-level calendrical rebellion for him. But he hadn’t expected Kel Command to risk two cindermoths plus a swarm to execute him. And now the heptarchs – hexarchs, she corrected herself – had finally caught on, and Kujen had abandoned her. Cheris smiled grimly. She was already starting to think of herself as Jedao. Jedao had tried to give her what he could. Don’t make my mistakes, he had said. A few words and a lifetime of memories. He had wanted her to continue the game for him. Or perhaps she was supposed to decide whether the game was worth playing at all. If only he had been able to trust her with more. Cheris...

As a point of fact, Cheris had entered anonymously. A small percentage of competition entries were anonymous each year (although Yeren was correct that most didn’t remain that way for long), but Cheris had an unusually good reason. You scored points in her game by manipulating other people, from cadets to dignitaries, into heresies. Celebrating the wrong feast-days. Giving heterodox answers on Doctrine exams. Inverted flower arrangements. Small heresies, for the most part. Cheris hadn’t intended for many people to fall for it, even if the Shuos had a known love of dares. It had been more in the nature of a thought experiment. The heptarchate’s laws were becoming more rigid as the regime became ever more dependent on the high calendar’s exotic technologies. She had wanted to show how easy it was to inspire people to a little heresy, to demonstrate how fragile the system was. Shuos Academy encouraged games, so a game – especially during the yearly competition – was the perfect vector. She hadn’t checked up on her entry since releasing it, or any of them, for that matter; that was the kind of mistake that got you caught. In fact, she was asleep in Yeren’s bed when she found out. “– Jedao,” Yeren was saying urgently. “Bad news.” Her voice shook. “Hmm?” Cheris said. But she came fully awake. Yeren was sitting at her terminal, wrapped in a robe of violet silk. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, and blue light sheened in the dark curls. “A cadet committed suicide over one o...

RUO,” CHERIS SAID hoarsely into the silence. She had not spoken his name in over four centuries. It was hard to believe that he had been dead that long, that she was the only person who remembered the brightness of his eyes, his laugh, his unexpected fondness for fruit candies. The shape of his hands, with their blunt, steady fingers. For a moment she wondered why her voice sounded too high, strangely alien. And then she remembered that, too. Her face was wet, but she tried not to think about that. Cheris bent herself to finishing the task she had set herself. She already knew how much the splinters hurt. A little more wouldn’t matter.

The wind grew colder, the sun dimmer. “Stupid war, isn’t it?” Sereset said. Cheris startled. Careless of her. She should have better control. “Don’t say that.” Sereset’s grin was ghastly. “Don’t be ridiculous. What can they do, kill me?” “You know just as well as I do what they do to dissidents. The best thing to do is obey.” “I expected better of you.” “You should never expect better of anyone.” Cheris remembered long hours in Shuos Khiaz’s office hunched over lists of numbers. Her imagination wasn’t large enough to encompass the deaths, the cities unmade and the books smothered into platitudes, but that wasn’t any reason not to try. After another pause, while strange luminous insects started to dance their fluttering dances, Cheris said, “It’s a stupid war.” The words tasted strange. She was unused to taking such risks. She wasn’t sure that Sereset had heard her, but then he said, “Not much to do about it, I suppose.” “That’s not true,” Cheris said, more vehemently than she had meant to. “If everyone united to defy their tyranny, even the heptarchs would fall back. We say ‘rebels’ as though they all share the same goals and leadership, but they don’t. They don’t coordinate with each other, so the heptarchate will defeat them in detail. It’s just a matter of time.” “Indeed,” Sereset said. Perhaps he was smiling. At this point it was hard to tell. “We shouldn’t be fighting this war,” Cheris said. She had been silent for so long. “The only way to get them to stop, though, i...

Cheris froze. She had broken her own rule, talked to someone, security lapse. Sereset might live with medical attention. But then he might give her away: drunken mutters, drugged mumblings, thoughtless malice. You could never trust anyone. Her hands flexed. She looked at him, then looked away. “I know what you’re thinking,” Sereset said. His voice shook. “Do it.” “I can’t,” Cheris said, closing her eyes in shame. “You have a chance.” “I’ll be a cripple even if I make it,” Sereset said. “And life’s cheap anyway –” “Don’t say that,” Cheris said violently, “it’s not true. It’s never true.” “Besides,” Sereset said over Lharis’s repeated message, “you have a plan. Hell of a long shot, but you never know. Go topple the heptarchate for me. Make my death mean something. Hurry, before the lieutenant strands you here.” His voice sounded very weak. “I won’t forget,” Cheris said. She kissed his forehead. Then, in a single quick, decisive motion, she snatched up the coat and covered Sereset’s face. After Sereset stopped struggling to breathe, she said into the relay, “Shuos Jedao, shouter team five, to Lieutenant Lharis. One for pickup.” “What happened to the other?” Lharis said. “Stray Kel bullet. He didn’t make it.” “Pity,” Lharis said. “All right. Two hours and forty-six minutes until I can come get you. Stay put.” For the first time since Ruo’s suicide, Cheris had found a moment’s furtive camaraderie, and because of it, she had had to murder. Because she had been weak; because she ...

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...