Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

“You think you have paperwork, you should see mine.” You think I don’t?

When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger.

guns change minds, not hearts.

Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.

“All right,” Jedao said calmly. “Pick something up, something small, and hold it in your hand, Cheris.” “What?” “You asked for a demonstration.” This was the kind of pointless game that the Shuos were notorious for. One of her colonels had once remarked that a Shuos would never tell you something straight out when they could force you to take an agonizing snaky route to the conclusion by manipulating you with word games.

The thing is, Jedao isn’t just a traitor, even if people’s brains short out around that fact. He’s also a Shuos. The two aren’t equivalent, despite the Shuos jokes. He was a Shuos assassin before he switched tracks, and there’s circumstantial evidence he did some analyst work as well. Anyway, his career with the Kel was unobjectionable. He kept that up for almost twenty years. As if he were under deep cover. All the way up to Hellspin Fortress. Hellspin Fortress wasn’t a Kel assault. The Kel wave banners at you before they join battle. You can always see them coming. Setting up a deathtrap for not one but two armies – that’s not a psychotic break. That’s a plan with a twenty-year setup. A Shuos plan, to be precise. Ambushes, computer systems going haywire, contradictory orders, weapons failing. To say nothing of the infamous threshold winnowers. Too much fancy shooting with his staff, but it worked. No wonder the Nirai have made no progress. They’ve been trying to cure Jedao, but he was never mad to begin with. I’ll go you one better. He’s exactly where he wants to be. He’s immortal and he has all the time in the world to carry out his plot, whatever it is. I don’t know why he slaughtered his way into the black cradle. But I will bet you my last sweet bean pastry that even the incomprehensible slaughter served some purpose. And we’re the next step in his plan. Zai, we’ve got to stop him. We’ve got to destroy him because I don’t care how many Kel swarms we have incoming, he...

“Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getting low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.” “This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped. “I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?” “It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation? “You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.” “Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise?”

At the edges of the formation, the non-pivot positions, humans and servitors both, were changing into pillars of candescent numbers. Naraucher shouldn’t have been able to recognize the numbers at this distance, but he could. Most but not all were in the high language’s vertical script. Machine Universal was identifiable as such, although he couldn’t read it. He couldn’t have justified this conviction, but he would have said that the numbers were numbers that mattered. Birthdays and festival days. A child’s shoe size. The number of times a soldier visited a crippled comrade. The specific gravity of a favorite wine. The number of bullets left in a pistol. The distance from this siege to a childhood home, remembered but never visited. The number of soldiers a Kel general was willing to sacrifice to achieve her objective.

The ward’s population had been estimated at 43,000 people. It wasn’t that the number was high. It wasn’t. Weniat knew what large numbers looked like. It was the ratio. Everyone dead.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid.” Gized’s mouth twisted. “You’re usually a better liar than this, Jedao. Frankly, that worries me more than anything else.”

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