Ninefox Gambit Read Free

his own cup after the communal cup went around, and then to arrange his pickles or sesame spinach on top of his rice. She knew that he cared about putting things in their proper place. It was an understandable impulse. It was also going to get him killed.
    Already she was rewriting the equations because she knew what his answer would be.
    The sergeant reiterated his protest, stopping short of accusing her of heresy herself. Formation instinct should have forced him to obey her, but the fact that he considered her actions deeply un-Kel was enabling him to resist.
    Cheris cut contact and sent another override. Lieutenant Verab’s acknowledgment sounded grim. Cheris marked Squadron Four outcasts, Kel no longer. They had failed to obey her, and that was that.
    Disjointedly, the new formation pieced itself together and pressed forward. They were taking heavier fire now. Two trees exploded at the touch of Eelfire as Squadron Five passed them. A corporal was stapled to a hillside by the resultant lash of splinters. A soldier three paces to Cheris’s left fell out of formation and vanished in a vapor of blood and tatters. Kel Nikara, who had sung so well.
    Squadron Four was already dissolving, but she had no attention to spare for it.
    Cheris guided the advance from point to point. She adjusted the formation again by sending orders to individual soldiers, solving for intermediate forms in her head to keep the geometry within the necessary error bounds. The storm was dissipating: they were too close to the Eels. The next question was whether she could devise a formation that would give them better protection against the Eels’ invariant weapons, which would work in any calendar, now that the storm was no longer a factor.
    They were outnumbered five to one, but the Eels didn’t have access to formations, so the Kel had a chance. Cheris was in a hurry, so a straightforward force multiplier was her best bet. More modifications. Her remaining soldiers knew to trust her. The soundstream reflected this. Eels , the stink of corpses , heavy fire from that copse , drumbeats . They were paying attention to the important things again.
    To her relief, the force multiplier, adapted from One Thorn Poisons a Thousand Hands, could be linearized for use with her ad hoc formation. She and her soldiers were equipped with calendrical swords, ordinarily used for duels. Not her weapon of choice, but they were near the storm generator, which they were to take intact, and the general’s orders had been clear. The swords shouldn’t damage unliving objects, which was the primary consideration.
    “Swords, now,” Cheris said.
    The Kel unsheathed their swords, each tinted differently, blank bars of light. Cheris’s ran from blue near the hilt to red at the tip. As they closed with the enemy, numbers blazed to life along the lengths of the blades: the day and the hour of your death , as the Kel liked to say.
    Except the date and time on Cheris’s sword was wrong. She wasn’t the only one who was dismayed. Maintenance , rather use my rifle , the dreaded calendrical rot . Not only were the numbers wrong, they jittered and sparked, snapping in and out of focus. A quick survey of her company indicated that everyone’s swords were having the same problem. That would have been bad enough, but the swords weren’t even synchronized.
    “Sir, maybe another weapon –” Lieutenant Verab said.
    “Continue the advance,” Cheris said. “No guns.” If the swords proved ineffectual, they would have to try something different, but the swords hadn’t sputtered out entirely. That gave her hope, if you could call it that.
    At first it went well. For every sword-stroke, tens of Eels went down as lines of force scythed through their ranks. Cheris’s own swordwork was methodical, businesslike, the same way she dueled. One of her lunges pierced eight soldiers in the Eels’ ranks. She had always been good at angles.
    The Kel formation held as they butchered their way