Ninefox Gambit (26 page)

Cheris finally realized what he had said. “I have people dying down there and you want me to play another fucking Shuos game?”

“I said invent a game. We won’t have time to play it.”

“Why?” Cheris said.

“We’re going to invent a game about the Fortress.”

He wasn’t going to let it go. “If you want a battle simulation, wouldn’t it be better to use one of the ones already in the grid?”

“But that would only tell me what the simulator thinks of the situation. And the level of abstraction is too low – we’ll get back to that. I want to know how you understand the situation, Cheris.”

“What, you don’t have a plan? I thought you always had a plan.”

“Humor me.”

She had misgivings, but – “Where do we start?”

Maddeningly, he responded as she had thought he would. “Where do you think we should start?”

Cheris thought for a moment. Under other circumstances, and with the help of some beer, it would have been tempting to devise a taxonomy that could handle dueling, jeng-zai, and truth-or-dare. But Jedao would have a specific purpose in mind, and he wouldn’t have given her an impossible task. “If the point is a specific game, I’ll start by modifying an existing game.” A mathematical solution: reduce a problem to a previously solved problem.

Jedao didn’t say anything, so Cheris assumed she was being left to thrash around for his edification. She went to the terminal and pulled up fires-and-towers. Using it as a basis, she set up an asymmetrical two-player board game to be played with grid assistance. There was no point making the bookkeeping more annoying than necessary.

She lost time on legible visual representations. It wouldn’t do for the player to confuse infantry and infiltrators, for instance. Assigning legal moves and point values was worse. How was she supposed to know the heretics’ strength? Was she supposed to ensure that both sides were evenly matched? She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it. And she omitted the shields, since they had been cracked and weren’t relevant anymore.

Cheris was confronted with the difficulty of coding a grid opponent so she could test the values. Normally she would have asked a servitor for help, but she suspected Jedao would intervene. The attack values on some of the guns felt too high to be realistic, but you probably couldn’t tell by eyeballing the numbers. If only she had more time –

She straightened and barked a laugh. If Jedao meant to distract her from her duty, he was succeeding. She longed for a call from the command center, even if it implied a new disaster.

It was peculiar that Jedao seemed determined to
teach
her. Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to trigger her formation instinct so she could convey his orders without any of this back and forth?

Her mind was wandering again. She had barely addressed combat resolution. It was tempting to squander time on pseudorandom generators and probability distributions because at least she understood those, but it was more important to pick something inoffensive and run with it.

It was impossible not to think of herself as the Kel swarm, even in the context of scratchy, half-formed notations. She put herself in the role of the Fortress’s commandant and saw problems with the game that hadn’t been evident before: ambiguities, ill-defined objectives, a certain lopsidedness of agency. Surely the heretics had motives and the ability to maneuver toward their own goals. The game should reflect that.

She entered more scratchwork, agonizingly aware of the mess of numbers and contradictory rules and shaky assumptions. A senior cadet had once told her that proofs were just like essays, no one expected the rough draft to be a work of art, but it was hard not to feel that she should try for elegance from the outset.

“You can stop there,” Jedao said.

Cheris’s eyes felt sand-dry. “It won’t work,” she said.

“There are issues that would come up in initial playtest,” Jedao said, “but that’s not a bad first outing, especially from a Nirai thinker. You should have seen the first time I went through design critique. Blood everywhere.”

She had a hard time believing that.

“Cheris, I wasn’t born a tactician. I had to learn like everyone else.”

“Tell me,” she said carefully, “why you stopped me there.”

“You must suspect or you wouldn’t be asking.”

“That was when I changed my focus to consider the Fortress’s player.”

But why stop there? If the Fortress expected aid from – “The foreigners,” Cheris said in a rush. “They’re part of the situation. And our objectives aren’t exactly the same as Kel Command’s, or they wouldn’t keep hiding information from us.” And who else? What other players had she missed?

She remembered, with nauseating clarity, the Shuos eye watching her out of her own face. Subcommand Two’s face.

She had gotten the scenario wrong. Her focus had been on the immediate problem of subduing the Fortress, without encoding the context.

“I see,” Cheris said. “I got caught up in the tactical problem, when the issue is strategy. All that time with modifiers and attack values and it wasn’t even relevant.”

“Well, we were sent here as tacticians,” Jedao said, “so you’re not entirely to blame.”

“Still, I appreciate the lesson,” Cheris said, thinking that next time she would try to catch on sooner.

“It’s not over,” Jedao said. “Two things. First: the value of a game is in abstraction. Many Nirai go in for simulationist approaches, a tendency you share, but sometimes you learn more by throwing details out than coding them all in. You want to get rid of everything nonessential, cook it down to its simplest possible form.”

“I see, sir.” The fact that she had been solving the wrong problem with great dedication, if not exactly enthusiasm, was humbling.

“Second: what do you think games do? What are they about?”

The flippant answers weren’t going to be right, but she had no idea what he was after. “Winning and losing?” she said. “Simulations?”

“It hasn’t escaped me that your first answer is a Kel answer and the second is a Nirai answer,” Jedao said. “A Rahal would say that games are about rules, an Andan would say they’re about passing time with people, and who knows what the Vidona are authorized to say.”

“You’re a Shuos,” Cheris said, “so I presume you’re going to tell me what the Shuos answer is.”

“According to the Shuos,” Jedao said, “games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. 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.”

Cheris felt cold all the way down to her marrow. “The siege is a distraction,” she said. “You’re going to game the heretics to death.”

“A war of hearts, Cheris. Not guns. As you observed not so long ago.”

“So this is what the propaganda pieces are about,” she said.

“I want the heretics thinking about what about what happened to the Liozh the first time around,” Jedao said. “There’s a chance this is some completely different heresy, but after the shield operator’s response to the Web of Worlds, I doubt it. I’m guessing that their leaders neglected to remind them of the fate the original Liozh met. It’ll still be on their minds, however. Sometimes even obvious openings are worth taking. If nothing else, we can learn something from their response.”

The Liozh had been a living faction when Jedao was alive. “Did you see any signs of their heresy before you died?” she asked. “An entire faction going wrong – that’s worse than losing a nexus fortress.”

“I didn’t see it coming at all,” Jedao said with an undertone of bitterness. “Didn’t interact with the Liozh much except on social occasions. I was always at war, Cheris. It didn’t leave me a lot of free time to discuss philosophy and ethics.”

Cheris sent the request down to Colonel Ragath. It didn’t take long for him long to respond. “I’ll send over a list as soon as I can, sir,” he said. “Plenty of material to choose from if you want to paint everything in gore. The Liozh military was known more for its revolutionary fervor than its battle prowess. They lost their single best general – who was pretty good – to a Shuos assassin early on. It went to pieces after that. The killing irony is that the Shuos was after another target, a Shuos traitor, and got the wrong woman. Fascinating stuff if you like watching the underdogs getting smeared to paste.”

Cheris looked at Ragath narrowly. It was impossible to tell if he was being sarcastic.

“Tell him I’m grateful for his assistance in this matter,” Jedao said.

She repeated the words, puzzled by Jedao’s unusual deference.

“Happy to oblige, sir,” Ragath said. His gaze flicked sideways. “I have a minor emergency in the Umbrella Ward, is there anything else you need right now?”

“No, that’s everything,” Cheris said as she scanned the status reports on the terminal’s subdisplay, recognizing the understatement for what it was. “Out.”

“Now this,” Jedao said, “is where game presets can be useful. The archives contain the collected efforts of a lot of Shuos trying to impress each other. We don’t have to design propaganda pieces from scratch. All we have to do is feed in some parameters and however many horrifying images we can scare up.”

Jedao’s matter-of-factness about the Liozh defeat stood at odds with the way he had spoken of the Lanterners as fellow human beings. Cheris wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Did you have something against the Liozh?”

“Not in the slightest,” Jedao said, “but they died in dreadful ways and we can leverage that.”

She knew she shouldn’t feel anything for heretics past or present, but Jedao’s sudden callousness made her feel strangely defensive on their behalf.

Fortress of Scattered Needles, Analysis

Priority:
High

From:
: Vahenz afrir dai Noum

To:
Heptarch Liozh Zai

Calendrical Minutiae:
Year of the Fatted Cow, Month of the Partridge, Day of the Carp, the vote in Doctrine says it’s Hour of the Snail and I for one have better things to argue about.

I heard from Analysis Team Three that they located one of the missing Rahal. Not of terrible use, because they only happened on the corpse after someone called in a strange murder near Stoghan’s troops by Kel Encampment Two. At least the neighborhood watch system is ticking along nicely. We have no idea what was in the damnable woman’s head, but she was clearly trying to contact her people. Stoghan’s troops deny responsibility and for once I believe them. It’s infuriating to think that we lost intelligence to ordinary crime.

I heard of the latest sniper incident. I’m tired of explaining this to Stoghan, but draconian reprisals against the civilians “sheltering” the snipers aren’t the way to go. I would be surprised if the poor stiffs knew they were being used as cover by Shuos operatives. Stoghan’s actions are only hurting our credibility. I imagine that some of the brutalized citizens are going to revert to the loyalists’ side. This is what we call “counterproductive.”

I know that Stoghan’s swaggering and “decisiveness” have his popularity at an all-time high, but please balance this against, I don’t know, every other consideration on the table. Rig some votes if you have to.

All right, I can see you glowering at me, so I will say this. One thing the man is doing right, amazingly, is insisting that his soldiers treat the propaganda canisters as real threats. So far it’s all gridpaper games, and they don’t interface with anything, but still. Solid game design, but I expect that from a Shuos.

No, the issue is that they’re miniature history lessons. I think Jedao has miscalculated, though. Take that one video segment with the Liozh prisoners’ ribs cracked open so their lungs could be extracted while they were still alive. This sort of thing is only stiffening resistance on our end. It’s an amateur’s mistake, and I have to wonder if Jedao is up to something else. Is there some other target for the propaganda?

Well, I see that Pioro has extra-special flagged a few reports with an extra-special case of that brandy he knows I like. I’d better see what the fuss is before the world collapses, eh? Do have a good hard think about what I’ve said.

Yours in calendrical heresy,

Vh.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

L
IEUTENANT
K
EL
M
IKEV
hated his assignment, but it could have been worse. Sure, his eyes hurt, and even through the suits’ filters some of his soldiers had fetched up with nasty nosebleeds and soft tissue damage, but he preferred a little honest smoke in a contained environment to planetside missions where you had to watch every fucking square centimeter for things that bit or oozed or crooned at you in your childhood sweetheart’s voice.

Mikev’s platoon was responsible for the forward section near Gate 3-12, where the Kel had established a toehold in the Umbrella Ward. The heretics had sucked out the atmosphere while the Kel spent a hair-raising several hours blowing down walls in some places and blocking off passages in others, building a fortress in the Fortress. One of the company’s other platoons had had to herd the unhappy civilians to a holding area. Not all the civilians had gotten suited in time.