Ninefox Gambit Read Free Page A

through the Eels. The hills’ residual mist had a ruddy tint. Cheris made a point of noticing the Eels’ faces. They weren’t much different from the faces of her own soldiers: younger and older, dark skin and pale, eyes mostly brown or sometimes gray. One of them might have been Dineng’s brother, if not for the pale eyes. But the calendrical light made them alien, washed in shadows of indefinite color slowly becoming more definite.
    They hit an unexpected snag as the storm generator came into view. It crouched on the rise of a stubby hill, visible through a transparent palisade. The generator resembled nothing so much as a small, deformed tank. Cheris asked for, and got, an assay of its approximate mass from one of the Sparrows. The answer made her bite her lip. Well, that was what the floaters were for.
    More bizarre was the fact that the generator was undefended except by four Eel servitors. They were armed with lasers, but so far their fire hadn’t penetrated Kel defenses.
    Cheris knew the current formation was losing effectiveness when the air went cold and gray. She was having difficulty breathing, and while she had an emergency air supply, they all did, she suspected this was just the beginning. Sure enough, it also became harder and harder to move.
    Her first attempts at repairing the formation only resulted in a colder wind, a grayer world. Gritting her teeth – winter , entropy , it was time to get out but they were so close – she tried another configuration. It was hard to think, hard to make herself breathe. She thought she heard the song of snow.
    “I need your computational allocations,” Cheris told her lieutenants. They were so close to the weather generator, and the Eels were broken and peeling away behind them. They just had to grab the wretched thing and hold on until pickup arrived. But to hold it they had to have a working formation. It was enough to make her long for the days of straightforward bullets and bombs.
    She liked the thought of stripping her soldiers’ computational resources as much as they did, which was to say not at all. But they weren’t in camp, where they could instantiate a more powerful grid. They had no access to the larger, more powerful grid of a friendly voidmoth transport or a military base. She had to use the field grid because it was all they had.
    Cheris gave her company a second to understand what was going to happen, then diverted their allocated resources to herself. She ignored the protests, most reflexive, some less so: can’t see , lost coordinates , it was so cold , a scatter of profanities. Verab was saying something to the other lieutenants, but hadn’t flagged the conversation for her attention, so she assumed he’d take care of it.
    She formulated her question so a computational attack might give her an answer in a reasonable amount of time. The company’s grid was not sentient in the way of military-grade servitors, but if you knew how to talk to the system, it was capable of nuanced responses. As the world faded toward black, the grid informed her that she should proceed by a particular series of approximations. She authorized the computation and added some constraints designed to speed the exploration of likely solutions.
    The problem was easy to see: not only did the storm generator rely on heretical mechanics, which also explained the weather-eaters’ difficulties, it was itself a disruption to the high calendar. Cheris wasn’t looking forward to reporting this to her superiors.
    Green-black fire washed around them, the dregs of Eel resistance. Cheris silently entreated the formation to hold long enough for the field grid to chew through the computations. Faster, she thought, feeling so cold that she was certain that her teeth were icicles and that her fingers had frozen into arthritic twigs.
    “The generator’s ours, sir!” Verab cried as his platoon took out a last sputtering knot of Eels. They were clear for the moment.
    “Well done,”