Ninefox Gambit (40 page)

It was exactly the kind of thing that Ruo would have thought hilarious. Except for the part about getting caught. Shuos Academy might have protected one of its cadets if the matter had been a minor infraction; each faction tended not to surrender its own to outsiders as a matter of jurisdictional principle. But the Rahal were also a high faction, and a
magistrate
– that wasn’t just an infraction, that was an offense for which the guilty party could be tortured to death in a remembrance.

Cheris had opened her mouth to admit that the game had been hers, that she was the one who had killed Ruo, when Yeren went on, “The game’s not anonymous anymore, at any rate. It looks like Chenoi Tiana has confessed that it’s hers. She’s under investigation right now.”

Both of them knew that “under investigation” was unlikely to result in any serious reprimand. Cheris’s heartbeat had slowed. “Who’s Tiana?” she asked.

She had a way out. And she was taking it. She hadn’t realized she had already made the decision.

“She’s a third-year, no reason you should know her,” Yeren said. “I’m so sorry, Jedao. It – I might be wrong. The suicide could be someone else.”

Cheris doubted it. Yeren was very good at hacking. One of the benefits of dating her was learning from her. And the dead cadet being someone else wouldn’t make the situation much better.

She couldn’t put off the hard part. “Ruo was an idiot if he let himself get caught,” she said with deliberate carelessness. “Suicide’s better than hanging around to have your fingers pulled off, so I can’t say that I blame him.”

Yeren made a pained sound. “He was our friend, Jedao.”

Cheris dressed quickly. “Friendship doesn’t mean anything to the dead, and I don’t think either of us wants to be associated with him anyhow.”

“If that’s your take on it,” she said, her voice shaking again, “get out. Maybe I’ll see you later and maybe I won’t.”

Yeren might have some intention of salvaging the relationship after calming down, but Cheris didn’t. She left without argument.

Cheris headed out to a café. She had arranged for a small null in camera coverage – as the joke went, if you didn’t hack the commandant’s surveillance system at least once as a first-year, you were fit only for the Andan – and she wanted to listen in on the news. People were already gossiping about the suicide.

While Cheris listened to the gossip with half an ear, she started hacking the academy’s grid. The tablet she was using looked like a model that had been popular four years ago, but what wasn’t obvious was that she had wired together the innards from a decrepit laboratory machine she had begged off her mother. Her mother had been amenable so long as she didn’t cause anything to blow up. (She was never going to live down that experiment with the food processor when she was twelve.) She didn’t have any illusions that the tablet’s secret obsolescence would hinder a real Shuos grid diver, but if she worked quickly, she had a chance of getting away with her query.

It didn’t take long for Cheris to find pictures of Ruo’s corpse. Even with the bullet hole in the side of his head, the red-gray mess on the other side, the blood matted in his hair, she recognized him. She would have known him in the dark by his footsteps, or by the taste of his mouth, or the way he always broke left when he was startled. She had assumed that he would always greet her with that kiss on the top of her head, and that they would graduate together, perhaps even apply to the same assignments. All of that was gone now.

Cheris had difficulty concentrating. Up until this point, she had convinced herself that all the game maneuvers existed solely in some abstract space. There was nothing abstract about the fact that she’d killed her best friend.

Still, she wasn’t done yet. As luck would have it, she made it into Tiana’s profile because someone had forgotten to lock it down after making their edits, or someone else had been hacking it before she had and left the doors open.

Two instructors had made private notes in Tiana’s profile. They praised her ruthlessness and her boldness in claiming credit in the wake of a suicide. They praised her mastery of Shuos ideals. And, almost as an afterthought, they recommended that she be placed in two advanced seminars next term.

Cheris closed the connection and stayed in the café until it got dark. During that time, she played seven games of jeng-zai and lost them all.

No one ever figured out that Cheris was the author of Tiana’s game.

“R
UO,
” C
HERIS SAID
hoarsely into the silence. She had not spoken his name in over four centuries. It was hard to believe that he had been dead that long, that she was the only person who remembered the brightness of his eyes, his laugh, his unexpected fondness for fruit candies. The shape of his hands, with their blunt, steady fingers.

For a moment she wondered why her voice sounded too high, strangely alien. And then she remembered that, too. Her face was wet, but she tried not to think about that.

Cheris bent herself to finishing the task she had set herself. She already knew how much the splinters hurt. A little more wouldn’t matter.

F
OUR HUNDRED AND
nineteen years before the Siege of the Fortress of Scattered Needles, on a world whose name had atrophied to a murmur, the heptarchate warred against rebels. The rebels flew many banners: the Thorn-and-Circle, the Winged Flower, the Red Fist. The Inverted Chalice and the Snake Defiant. The Stone Axe. In those days, it seemed that every hilltop, every city in the shadow of a forever cloud, every glimmering moon had its own device.

The battle had passed Cheris and Shuos Sereset by like a red tide. They had been assigned to assassinate the Axers’ general, then position shouters by hand. As it turned out, the assassination had been the easy part. Now Cheris listened to the faraway crash of guns, the hiss-and-sizzle of evaporator fire, the roar of tanks. For hours she had been trying to call the Shuos for pickup; for hours she had sought any indication that heptarchate forces were still in the area, or that the heretics were coming back.

The shouters had proved more troublesome. Their handler had explained, in a cold dead voice, that Shuos drones could have accomplished the task, but their leadership was unwilling to reveal the full extent of the drones’ capabilities to the Kel. The Kel, their allies.

Now Sereset was dying of a stray Kel bullet, pure stupid luck. The bullet was a tunneler, and Sereset’s amputation failsafe had reacted too slowly. All Cheris could think of, looking at the crusts of drying blood, at the messy hardened foam that partly staunched the leg’s stump and the perforations, was how little she knew the other man. At Shuos Academy Sereset had had a habit of keeping his head down and smiling a lot, but he had reasonably good marks and liked working with finicky equipment. None of this told Cheris what Sereset thought about the Liozh heptarch’s rhetoric, or what music he hummed when no one else was listening, or whether he thought the bitter wine served at the Shuos table was better than Andan rose liqueur.

“You should have left hours ago,” Sereset said in a dry rasp.

Cheris crouched closer. It was cold – she’d pulled off her coat and draped it over the other man – but this much cold wouldn’t kill her. “I’m not leaving you,” she said. “No word yet.”

“I didn’t figure there would be. You know, I always looked at you and thought you planned too hard. You always have the perfect answer prepared.” Sereset’s words were slow, dragged out one by one, but clearly enunciated: a matter of pride even now.

“Not a very useful character flaw, is it?” Cheris said. “Didn’t do you much good.”

“It’s not your fault the Kel can’t aim.”

Cheris looked out over the curve of the hills, the silhouettes of blowing purplish grasses in the sun’s waning light, the rubble of buildings blown apart. You could almost mistake this for peace: the wind, the grass, the hills. The way light snagged on the edges of leaves and changed the colors of stone and skin and trickling water.

You could almost forget the trajectories of bullets. You could almost forget that, less than a day ago, the Kel had fought the rebels over control of the nearby city. You could almost forget that the shouters had shouted enemy and ally alike into submission, driving out all thought but the imperative to kneel before the heptarchs’ sign. The shouters were a Shuos weapon, and the Kel were not immune to them. Their weapons had fallen slack from their hands; the engines of war had chewed through the battlefield unguided. The casualties must have been appalling. For that matter, Cheris had to wonder how many of the other shouter teams had made it through.

Cheris had originally intended to pick a track that would make use of her gift for languages. She had been good at a lot of things, and having options worked in her favor. But after Ruo’s suicide, she switched to the assassin track with a side of analysis. It would take more than assassinations to bring down the heptarchate, but it gave her a starting place.

And now, it turned out, she was going to die forgotten on a battlefield before she could set anything in motion.

“How much longer?” Sereset asked after a while.

“I don’t know,” Cheris said. A Shuos hoverer was supposed to have retrieved them over ten hours ago. They had no way of returning to the transport in orbit, and they couldn’t leave the shouters: too dangerous to abandon into enemy hands, too valuable to destroy. In theory, the Kel had been mopping up the battlefield and its shambles of prisoners. Cheris had risked burst transmissions asking the Kel for pickup, but she had her suspicions about what the Kel thought about the Shuos just now.

The wind grew colder, the sun dimmer.

“Stupid war, isn’t it?” Sereset said.

Cheris startled. Careless of her. She should have better control. “Don’t say that.”

Sereset’s grin was ghastly. “Don’t be ridiculous. What can they do, kill me?”

“You know just as well as I do what they do to dissidents. The best thing to do is obey.”

“I expected better of you.”

“You should never expect better of anyone.” Cheris remembered long hours in Shuos Khiaz’s office hunched over lists of numbers. Her imagination wasn’t large enough to encompass the deaths, the cities unmade and the books smothered into platitudes, but that wasn’t any reason not to try.

After another pause, while strange luminous insects started to dance their fluttering dances, Cheris said, “It’s a stupid war.” The words tasted strange. She was unused to taking such risks.

She wasn’t sure that Sereset had heard her, but then he said, “Not much to do about it, I suppose.”

“That’s not true,” Cheris said, more vehemently than she had meant to. “If everyone united to defy their tyranny, even the heptarchs would fall back. We say ‘rebels’ as though they all share the same goals and leadership, but they don’t. They don’t coordinate with each other, so the heptarchate will defeat them in detail. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Indeed,” Sereset said. Perhaps he was smiling. At this point it was hard to tell.

“We shouldn’t be fighting this war,” Cheris said. She had been silent for so long. “The only way to get them to stop, though, is if someone takes on the heptarchate entire. I’m not talking about petty assassinations. I’m talking about defeating them on every level of their own game. It wouldn’t be short and it wouldn’t be pretty and you’d end up as much a monster as they are, but maybe it would be worth it to tear the whole fucking structure down.”

Sereset went white. Whiter. “We’re too big, Jedao. You couldn’t do it in one lifetime and guarantee the results.”

In one lifetime.
“Wouldn’t need to,” Cheris said slowly. “The Kel have the key.”

“If you’re talking about the black cradle, they’re not going to hand that over for your convenience. Assuming you figure out how not to go crazy in there.”

“You’d have to manipulate them into it,” Cheris said. “Another long game, but not outside the realm of possibility. Do something spectacular. Make them
want
to bring you back, over and over, until you’re done.”

There had to be better, less chancy ways, but they were going to die here anyway. Might as well go for broke while they were playing what-if anyway.

Sereset laughed painfully. “Fine, then, you’re already crazy. And you’re going to die in some fistfight over the price of quinces. Or they’ll catch you, and there aren’t words nasty enough for what they’ll do to you.”

“No, I’ll die on this planet,” Cheris said. “But at least we’ll die together.”

Cheris thought she could get to like the glowing insects.

The sun set. Cheris huddled closer to Sereset, warmth overlapping dwindling warmth.

It came as a considerable surprise when the silence was interrupted by a burst of static in her ear, and then: “ – tenant Shuos Lharis of
Fireflitter 327
, shouter team five please respond.”

Cheris froze. She had broken her own rule, talked to someone, security lapse. Sereset might live with medical attention. But then he might give her away: drunken mutters, drugged mumblings, thoughtless malice. You could never trust anyone.

Her hands flexed. She looked at him, then looked away.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sereset said. His voice shook. “Do it.”

“I can’t,” Cheris said, closing her eyes in shame. “You have a chance.”

“I’ll be a cripple even if I make it,” Sereset said. “And life’s cheap anyway –”

“Don’t say that,” Cheris said violently, “it’s not true. It’s never true.”

“Besides,” Sereset said over Lharis’s repeated message, “you have a plan. Hell of a long shot, but you never know. Go topple the heptarchate for me. Make my death mean something. Hurry, before the lieutenant strands you here.” His voice sounded very weak.

“I won’t forget,” Cheris said. She kissed his forehead.

Then, in a single quick, decisive motion, she snatched up the coat and covered Sereset’s face.

After Sereset stopped struggling to breathe, she said into the relay, “Shuos Jedao, shouter team five, to Lieutenant Lharis. One for pickup.”

“What happened to the other?” Lharis said.