Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

A book of profanities written in every futile shade of red the human body had ever devised, its pages upended over the battlefield from horizon to horizon.

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.

Cheris was disappointed to abandon the battlefield. In a way each battle was home: a wretched home, where small mistakes were punished and great virtues went unnoticed, but a home nonetheless.

If anyone ever asked Mikodez, immortality was like sex: it made idiots of otherwise rational people. The other hexarchs never asked, though. Instead, they assumed he wanted it as badly as they did.

“If you were any other Shuos, I would accuse you of avoiding my calls by going out to shoot or seduce or spy on someone, but in your case I honestly think you got behind on paperwork.”

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.

Some of them hovered in the air as they made fussy adjustments to the furnishings: the ashhawk with wings outspread, Brightly Burning, bannered across the wall; the calligraphed motto that was found everywhere the Kel went, from every spark a fire;

She slept uneasily and woke in the middle of the night, four hours and sixty-two minutes before she would ordinarily rise.

It was a pity the Shuos couldn’t tell her straight out what they wanted of her, but the Shuos were incapable of passing up a chance to use a game as a pedagogical weapon.

Kel Command would be looking for the fastest, most economical solution. This meant the use of weapons ordinarily forbidden. And that meant the Kel Arsenal. Catastrophe guns, abrogation sieves, small shining boxes that held the deaths of worlds.

It was impossible to mistake her smile, for all that her silhouette had no mouth. You could hear it in the curve of her voice.

The servitors considered themselves lucky that the Nirai hexarch, who had grown up before machine sentience was achieved, found it difficult to think of humans as people, let alone machines.

“I’m not complaining about the guns,” she said, “but guns change minds, not hearts. And calendrical rot is a matter of hearts.” “It depends on what you shoot,” Jedao said dryly.

She knew many things, and she knew nothing. She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures.

Cheris’s favorite, if you could call it that, was: Internal Rahal matter. Further questions will be subject to counter-investigation.

“I’ll be glad to get underway,” Cheris said. “Everyone says that,” Jedao said, “but then the killing begins.”

She closed her eyes and thought of yellow eyes, unblinking, and what they might see in the space between stars.

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.”

“You probably have some notion that we wield weapons and formations and plans. But none of that matters if you can’t wield people. You can learn about how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane.” The word choice jarred Cheris. “So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”

he preferred a little honest smoke in a contained environment to planetside missions where you had to watch every fucking square centimeter for things that bit or oozed or crooned at you in your childhood sweetheart’s voice.

It was an eerie building, full of walls that sang your breath back to you as poetry, and light that coruscated like flowers. Beautiful, if you wanted to feel that beauty hid unhealthy secrets from you.