Ninefox Gambit (31 page)

The command center’s atmosphere was distinctly awkward. Her officers thought this was Jedao’s mad scheme. It wouldn’t make them feel better to know that it was hers, and in any case she didn’t owe them explanations.

Hazan recovered enough to say, “Commander Hazan to Servitor Overgroup One.” He began explaining the request.

“We didn’t have servitors when I was alive,” Jedao said. “No true sentients, anyway, although there were rumors. Plenty of presentient drones. I wonder what the servitors think of what we did to their forebears, but then we make damn sure they don’t burden us with their opinions, don’t we?”

Dangerously, Cheris agreed with this.

“The linkup is ready for you, sir,” Hazan said. “Address in eighteen minutes?”

“That will suffice,” Cheris said. She kept out of the way while waiting and read reports as they crossed her terminal. Briefly, she fantasized about sitting in a chair by a window and watching clouds go by. Did Jedao ever wish for quiet vacations? Or, dreadful thought, was this already his idea of a vacation?

“Six minutes, sir,” Hazan said.

She was signing off on several Shuos reports. Grid warfare, mostly, with the targets she and Jedao had designated after consultation with Captain-analyst Ko. She hoped none of the Shuos were getting too creative.

“I’m ready,” Cheris said as the minute slid closer.

Servitors didn’t organize themselves the same way on all moths. The
Unspoken Law
’s servitors had a traditionalist bent, and they were represented by a single sleek deltaform from Overgroup One. The
Sincere Greeting
had two delegates, one labeled Over, the other labeled Sideways. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The largest group was from Commander Kel Irio’s
Spectrum Fallacy
: five servitors, each of a different form.

She had to start somewhere. “Servitors,” she said, for lack of a better form of address, “this is Brevet General Kel Cheris. I have interrupted your duties because I have a request for you. It is not an order.” Best to make that clear from the start.

Cheris heard a stifled exclamation from Scan.

The servitors were silent, motionless, prism-eyes focused on her.

“We have threshold winnowers being modified for use under the heretics’ calendar,” Cheris said, “but we need to regain a toehold on the Umbrella Ward and advance into the Drummers’ Ward. The difficulty is the amputation gun.

“There’s one useful thing we know about the amputation guns. They have to be deployed in formation. The heretical calendar occupies a phase basin that is, unusually, not servitor-neutral. If servitors can be covertly landed, we can use you to construct grand formations and take the heretics by surprise. With Doctrine’s aid, I have identified formations that will offer protection against the amputation guns. It’s likely that the heretics haven’t anticipated this possibility. Certainly, as their infantry is not Kel-indoctrinated, they won’t have access to formations themselves.”

The terminal lit up to indicate that the servitors were consulting each other. At last one of them said to her, through the translation interface, “This is not an order.”

Her heart sank. “That’s correct,” she said. “You are Kel, but your service has traditionally been given certain parameters. It would be improper for me to order you to carry out a human duty when you don’t receive the accompanying human privileges. The only thing I can do is ask.”

“Release the logistical preliminaries.”

Cheris did so, wondering what sort of critique she was about to receive.

“Steady,” Jedao said. “They haven’t said no.”

The servitors spoke among themselves for a much longer time. It couldn’t be a matter of computation; that would have been fast. It had to be an argument. Cheris was aware of Commander Hazan shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“The numbers are straightforward,” said a snakeform from
Spiders and Scars
. “We are not tacticians. But the odds of retrieval are minimal.”

“That’s also correct,” Cheris said. “The situation on the Fortress will be messy.”

“How do you propose transport?”

“We’ve been sending propaganda canisters twice daily. Some of them could be modified to accommodate you. The heretics used early canisters for shooting practice, but we started including recreational drugs and other luxuries, and we have some indication that they’re getting through now. There’s still risk involved, obviously. But I think the heretics are convinced the setup is an exercise forced on us by Doctrine. They’re unlikely to consider the canisters a real threat.”

Cheris was increasingly convinced that the propaganda materials, narrating the stomach-turning ways in which the six factions had turned on the Liozh, hadn’t been directed at the heretics, but at her. Egocentric as that sounded. But she would take that up with Jedao later.

“Absurd,” the snakeform said after a pause, “but workable.”

Her breath caught.

This time the
Sincere Greeting
’s Sideways-servitor spoke. “We are Kel. We will serve as Kel. We will fight as Kel, although we were not made for this kind of fighting. This is a Kel mission. If it furthers the Kel mission, we will serve.”

“Thank you,” Cheris said. “I will send further instructions. I appreciate your service.”

“Plan wisely, Kel general,” the Sideways-servitor said. And that was all.

“Of all the damn things,” Hazan said.

“I’ve forwarded you my preliminary plans,” Cheris said. “I need to speak to Doctrine.”

“Of course, sir,” Hazan said, his expression still astounded.

“A lot of people are going to die because of what I just did,” Cheris said subvocally.

She expected Jedao to explain why it was necessary. Instead, he said, “I’m afraid it never stops hurting.”

“Get me Captain-magistrate Gara,” Cheris said before she had time to think about that too hard.

Gara, who was off-shift, was slow to respond. “Sir?” she asked.

Cheris reviewed what they had on the heretics’ calendar. “In four days, look,” she said. “Their node in the remembrance superstructure has collapsed partly due to the damage we did to the Fortress’s geometry. If we knock that ritual day aside and preempt with some kind of victory feast –”

Gara’s brow furrowed. “I see it, sir. But the timing’s tight. Maybe –” She searched the parameters and fed the results back to Cheris. “No, next best opportunity is seven months out, assuming no more damage to the over-geometry. We have to take the chance while we have it.” Then: “I shouldn’t ask, sir, but what word on the Hafn?”

“Nothing from Kel Command,” Cheris said bitterly. She had sent a couple more inquiries, on the grounds that she’d like to know how close the invasion swarm was. No further word from Brigadier General Marish, either. “Anyway, if we force-jump the heretics’ calendar at that time, it’ll give us the opening we need.”

Commander Hazan coughed. “To give the heretics a victory feast, sir,” he said, “we need to give them a victory. A big one.”

Cheris looked at him steadily. “That’s right. Or the appearance of a big victory, and enough time for the infiltrators to seed a ‘spontaneous’ celebration on our schedule.” Back to Gara: “Can you work with Weapons on this moth and the
Sincere Greeting
to prepare the winnowers and their crews?”

“Yes, sir,” Gara said.

Now all she had to do was figure out the least expensive, most convincing way to lose a battle.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

S
ERVITOR
O
VERGROUP
T
HREE
13610 had no fear of enclosed spaces. As a snakeform, its duties often took it into the
Unspoken Law
’s less accessible passages. It sometimes wondered what burrowing felt like, not that it could experience atavistic urges from an evolutionary past it didn’t have, but the cindermoth was low on dirt and high on unyielding metal.

13610 had been loaded into a propaganda canister that it refused to dignify with a number. The interior was cushioned with webbing, into which recreational drugs were tucked. 13610 had assayed a capsule: a euphoric variant of a painkiller the Kel used with some frequency. Uninteresting molecular structure, but that wasn’t the point. It contemplated discussing chemistry with a heretic, but the average heretic was probably as minimally informed on the subject as the average Kel. Most Kel didn’t care about things unless they made other things blow up. Endearing, really.

Someone banged on the canister. “Er, fourteen minutes to launch,” said a high, nervous voice. “Are you, er, comfortable in there?”

13610 failed to see what comfort had to do with anything. Did this Kel child want to hand out soothing logic puzzles and blankets?

One of the other servitors, taking pity on the child, made a chirring sound of reassurance.

“I should thank you for your service, too,” the Kel child said. “Since the general did. I expect formations will come very easily to you all.”

Amazing. The Kel were learning manners. It was a long-going and mostly affectionate debate among Kel servitors as to whether their humans were ever going to figure this out.

Fourteen minutes was a long time. 13610 reviewed its move orders and the formations General Cheris had provided diagrams for, the names of the Kel unit commanders who would be involved.

“Here we go,” the Kel child said. “Fire’s own fortune, and all that. Kill lots of heretics.”

The belt made a clattering sound, and then came the acceleration through the chute. 13610 had no visuals from within the canister, and it had instructions to keep scan to a minimum so as not to alert the heretics. Still, it knew how fast they were moving and their approximate trajectory. When the miniature engine cut in, it knew they had reached some cranny of the Fortress proper.

There was a hiss as the canister exuded a metalfoam blister, and then the burrower set to work puncturing the outer shell. This took some time, so 13610 contemplated some favorite theorems in algebraic topology. Pity for the heretics that the physical armor didn’t represent the latest in materials science advances, but the upgrades would have been exorbitantly expensive and no one would have been in a hurry to pay for them while everyone believed in the supremacy of invariant ice.

The canister finally dropped down with a thunk. 13610 listened hard for an hour, then extended the faintest tendrils of scan one by one in a radial pattern. Nothing.

13610 freed itself from the webbing and pried open the canister from the inside. Aha. The canister had lodged itself behind someone’s bookcase. How the canister had gotten here was a mystery, but no matter. 13610 risked another scan, reaching farther, farther – a signal there along the outer shell. Stop. That was probably a hostile. But 13610 had enough information to orient itself.

Time to slither out of the canister and make its way toward the rendezvous. Since it didn’t know how many interruptions to expect – bored heretical soldiers, feral fungus, odd bursts of radiation – it might as well move while it could.

I
T WAS A
very pretty attack if you didn’t care about it succeeding. Captain Kel Mieng, who had recently been deposited in the Drummers’ Ward, wished her mortar contained real rounds instead of harmless fireworks. They had been assigned to take and hold the Hall of Stochastic Longings. Mieng had misgivings about its security features. She had once gotten locked in a bank while she and her comrade Kel Belleren were visiting a mutual friend. Some idiot had adjusted a priceless ink painting personally instead of letting a bank servitor handle it, and had triggered a building-wide alarm.

Come to think of it, Belleren, who had made major, was in charge of a company in the van. It would be nice to catch up with him at some point.

One of the lieutenant colonels had asked Colonel Ragath why they were wasting time in the administrative district. Ragath had gotten that look. “The Drummers value this site,” he said. “Cultural heritage. I realize we’re all Kel, but try to pretend you didn’t have to look that up on the grid. For instance, one of those buildings is a museum. Contains the gun that General Andan Zhe Navo used in her last battle. The Hall of Stochastic Longings has an archive containing Andan and Liozh – yes, Liozh – documents going back 500 years.

“All this to say,” Ragath went on, “we may be able to get concessions out of the civilians by threatening to wreck priceless artifacts.” He had given orders against looting, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, but everyone wanted immediate revenge after the amputation gun. The current mission was some kind of backwards lose-so-we-win-later gambit, which made Mieng’s teeth itch.

It was hard to believe anyone would care about some Andan gun that hadn’t been properly cleaned for centuries, or a bunch of calligraphed books no one read anymore. But then, the colonel clearly cared about dried-up bits of history, so maybe he had some insight into how the Drummers felt about their artifacts.

The Drummers’ Forum was cursed with wide approaches, a boon to the Kel, and had a park that provided some cover. There was a lot of rubble already, from the forward companies that had gone in with real weapons for credibility’s sake. Bullets whined across the garden and kicked up dirt. Most of the corpses were unreal broken things, dressed in hats and jade necklaces and embroidered clothes. A lot of blood and stray body parts, too, like a human jigsaw upended.