Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

There was no comfort to be extracted from the dead, from flesh evaporated from bones. Nothing but numbers snipped short.

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.

Unconventional thinking was a danger to a well-tested hierarchical system. Her orders did not advance the best interests of the hexarchate. And so on.

It was important to acknowledge numbers, especially when the dead were dead by your doing.

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.

It was remarkable how much death could be held in a small box.

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.

It was one thing to sacrifice Kel soldiers. That was the purpose of the Kel. But the Nirai existed to be researchers and engineers, not to die.

Water the color of sleep, or sleep the color of water.

She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures.

He sounded like a good commander. Of course, everyone had thought he was a good commander until he stopped being a good human being.

“Time happens to everyone,”

The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.

Everywhere darkness hung like curtains of sleep.

They didn’t call Jedao a weapon for nothing; and fear of weapons was a weapon in itself.

The knife was sharp in the way of bitter nights.

The silence could have swallowed a star.

In a just world she would feel sick, but instead it was as though she stood outside herself, in a world turned to iron and crystal and cryptic facets.

A soft pause. “All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.”

“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.”

Unexpectedly, he said, “A million people dead four centuries before you were born, and you care about them. It speaks well of you, even if it doesn’t speak well of me.”

Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.”

Mikev had a lot of theories about how his soldiers would die. It was one of the ways, like giving them nicknames, that he kept from getting too attached to them.

“People have trouble thinking of the Liozh as anything but failures. But there was a time when they brought something valuable to the heptarchate. They were the idealists and philosophers. They were our leaders and our conscience. No wonder they developed a taste for heresy.”

“And then there were the numbers. They told me about all the people who were dead, ours and theirs. But then, war is about taking the future away from people.”

“The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still,” Jedao said. “It’s better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than to freeze.”

She was Kel. Her life was a coin to be spent, and today her superiors had chosen not to spend it. She should have been grateful, but for the first time in a long time, she resented what formation instinct had made of her.

“I know it’s about killing,” she snapped. “I didn’t want it to be about deliberately killing my own soldiers.” “Sometimes there’s no other way.”

Please, Cheris. Go sleep. You will never realize how valuable it is unless someone takes it away from you forever.”

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.

Kel Command and Jedao were using each other in a beautiful dysfunctional ballet.

The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

Cheris drew three cards in rapid succession: Ace of Roses, Ace of Doors, Ace of Gears.

on a world whose name had atrophied to a murmur,

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.

At the center of the blast, there was a mass of fossilized pasts and devalued futures.

Calendrical warfare was a matter of hearts.