Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee Page B

would be represented by signifiers. If she wasn’t to know any of their names, it made no sense to reveal their faces, but perhaps their faces would be blanked from her memory as she left the hall.
    Composite Subcommand Two blazed up like a pyre exactly one minute early. It loped down the hall until it faced her. Cheris fought back her revulsion. It was unnerving to see herself wearing a general’s wings so casually, which was possibly why it was doing it.
    “I suggest you sit there,” Subcommand Two said, pointing to one end of a long table.
    As Cheris did so, the others arrived. They were, in fact, represented by signifiers. Likewise, each of them would see Cheris as a silhouette overshadowed by Sheathed Wings.
    One and Four were both represented by Ashhawks Skyward Falling, a well-favored signifier for the bravery it implied. Three, who had been the one with the unremarkable record, made her stare: an Ashhawk Unhatched. Rationally, she knew the signifier didn’t mean anything, but Unhatched was a terrible omen. Six was, unhelpfully, Brightly Burning, the most common Kel signifier. Two, the Rahal, was a Scrywolf Hunting Alone, which explained why they were in Kel service to begin with. Five, the Shuos, was a Ninefox Half-Lidded, suggesting that everyone should watch their backs. Cheris was convinced that each of the fox’s eyes was looking at her.
    “The situation is calendrical rot centered at the Fortress of Scattered Needles,” Subcommand Two said abruptly. A map imaged itself above the center of the table. “If this continues, the hexarchate’s control of the Entangled March will be threatened, and due to the march’s central position, the entire hexarchate will be threatened. As of the last report, the invariant ice shields are up at full strength. The initial task force sent to scour the rot was defeated.”
    “Defeated or subverted, sir?” the Shuos said. It was a woman’s voice, cool and unintimidated.
    “First the one, then the other,” Subcommand Two said. “The task force was a swarm of twenty-five, including a Rahal lensmoth. The lensmoth was the only one that returned, which is how we know what happened.”
    Three and Four, Unhatched and the colonel, exchanged glances. So at least two of the Kel knew each other. That must be an uncomfortable position to be in.
    Cheris wondered if they had additional information that she didn’t. The fact that a lensmoth had been dispatched was bad. The Rahal guarded their dedicated moths jealously. Just sending one to a system was usually enough to get it to back down from whatever heresy it was nurturing. However, the lensmoths’ reliance on exotic technologies made them useless in sufficiently advanced cases of calendrical heresy. In a way, it gave heretics an incentive to go radical as quickly as possible.
    “The Rahal have ceded the matter to Kel Command,” Subcommand Two said, by which everyone understood that the Rahal expected Kel Command to bludgeon the Fortress until it was ready to be judged and punished. “In this instance, each of you is expendable, but success will not be without its rewards. Propose what seems appropriate to you. You will go in numbered order.”
    One rose and saluted. It was like watching a living puppet, articulated in the right places yet subtly wrong in its movements. His plan involved a joint Kel-Shuos force and bombardment from outside the afflicted zone. Risky to trust invariant kinetics when the rot might give the rebels access to unknown countermeasures. The other problem was that One wanted the Fortress depopulated, which meant the Kel would have to rely on the Vidona to supply enough loyal citizens afterward to reestablish the appropriate consensus mechanics.
    Two was the Rahal, and his proposal was simple: a lensmoth swarm to burn out the areas of heretic belief. The Rahal must be desperate to condone this. Despite their power, the Rahal’s combination of rigid honesty, abstract mindset, and asceticism meant that