Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee Page A

Needles had fallen, she would need a way to crack its legendary defenses, its shields of invariant ice. The shields functioned under any calendrical regime, which meant the heretics could use them against the hexarchate. Cheris didn’t know how the shields worked – classified information – much less how to overcome them.
    She could, however, think of a time a general had overcome another terrible fortress. If “overcome” was the word for it. Three hundred ninety-nine years ago, General Shuos Jedao was in the service of the Kel. Because he had a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, they assigned him to deal with the Lanterner rebellion.
    In five battles, Jedao shattered the rebels. In the first battle, at Candle Arc, he was outnumbered eight to one. In the second, that was no longer true. The rebels’ leader escaped to Hellspin Fortress, which was guarded by predatory masses and corrosive dust, but the heptarchs expected that Jedao would capture the fortress without undue difficulty.
    Instead, Jedao plunged the entirety of his force into the gyre and activated the first threshold winnowers, known ever since for their deadliness. Lanterners and Kel alike drowned in a surfeit of corpselight.
    On the command moth, Jedao pulled out an ordinary pistol, his Patterner 52, and murdered his staff. They were fine soldiers, but he was their better. Or he had been.
    The scouring operation that had to be undertaken after Jedao was extracted cost the heptarchate wealth that could have bought entire systems, and many more lives.
    Over one million people died at Hellspin Fortress. Survivors were numbered in the hundreds.
    Kel Command chose to preserve Jedao for future use. The histories said he didn’t resist arrest, that they found him digging bullets out of the dead and arranging them in patterns. So Kel Command put Jedao into the black cradle, making him their immortal prisoner.
    Cheris’s best move, which was also a desperation maneuver, wasn’t to choose a weapon or an army. Everyone would be thinking of weapons and armies. Her best move would be to choose a general .
    The problem was that any swarm sent against the Fortress would have to contend with the fact that its exotic weapons wouldn’t function properly. She didn’t need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel Arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.
    Cheris was aware that there was a good chance Kel Command would strike her down for the suggestion. It was also possible that Jedao would be no use to her. But Kel Command wouldn’t have preserved him unless they thought he could be deployed to their benefit.
    Besides, Kel Command appreciated audacity. Despite the wasted fighting at Dredge, their approval mattered to her. Kel training instilled reflexive loyalty. She knew that as well as anyone else.
    She halfway expected to see an ashhawk in her shadow, wings unsheathed at last. But for the moment, her shadow was only a shadow. It was best that way.
    Another communication told Cheris when the meeting was to be, and instructed her to report to the strategy hall for it. Cheris tried to extract information on the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the mothgrid, but she only found the usual unclassified data. Nothing on invariant ice. She was probably raising flags by querying it, but given her situation, that wasn’t important. She plotted the path to the strategy hall in advance.
    Cheris showed up six minutes early. There were several doors to the hall, all painted with Ashhawks Brightly Burning. She transmitted the code from her augment and one door swished open.
    The hall was empty, which she had expected. One through Six wouldn’t be present in person. She wondered if she would see their faces or if they