Bullets and Eelfire came at them like part of the storm. Cheris flinched in spite of herself as a tendril of fire hissed past, deflected by the formation.
Her soldiers weren’t going to like her, but that didn’t matter as long as they lived. “Formation override,” Cheris said into the relay. Her breath was silver-white in the air. She barely felt the cold, bad sign. “Squadrons Three through Six, adjust formation.” She wrote the equations on one hand with the other, letting the kinetic sensors pick them up for transmission.
A minor test first. Then, based on the results, additional tests to see what the deviations were and whether they admitted any good options. There was a certain amount of heresy in working with heretical mechanics, but her orders told her to work with the resources she had, so she was going to do exactly that.
The formation staggered. She couldn’t see it clearly from her position, but the formation icon came up bright and prickly, warning her that the formation’s integrity was failing. The grating tone in her head suggested that she order a retreat or have her soldiers modulate into an alternate formation, something, anything to conform with Doctrine. Her vision was reddening at the edges.
“It’s part of the plan,” she said in vexation, and overrode the warnings.
That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was her soldiers’ hesitation. Squadrons Three, Five, and Six were following orders, although Six was having difficulty adjusting around the fallen. Cheris relented enough to request a snapshot from the sergeant. The directional storm had cut a gash through the squadron, leaving greasy stains and partial corpses in a growing pinkish puddle. Cheris suggested an alteration, but the sergeant was going to have to deal with the rest herself.
Squadron Four was resisting the order. Pir’s Fan was something they knew and understood. The modifications she had sent them were not. The sergeant protested formulaically, all but quoting the Kel code of conduct. The formation didn’t belong to the Kel lexicons. Unconventional thinking was a danger to a well-tested hierarchical system. Her orders did not advance the best interests of the hexarchate. And so on.
The storm fell in sheets of undulating light, snake-sharp and acrid. Cheris had Dineng send for another Sparrow to verify that the light was fatal. The Sparrow dodged a ribbon of light too late and was transformed into a mass of parallel slices and metal shrieks. It fell unmoving to the ground, where the light rearranged it again and again until it was nothing but an accretion of truncated cubes. Cheris winced, but there was nothing to be done now.
Cheris opened the relay and said to the recalcitrant sergeant, with great leniency, “Reconsider.” It would be preferable to secure his cooperation. She would have to adjust the formation otherwise, with uncertain results.
She had eaten with him at high table for years, listened to his anecdotes of service in the Drowned March and at the Feathered Bridge between the two great continents of the world Makhtu. She knew that he liked to drink two sips from his own cup after the communal cup went around, and then to arrange his pickles or sesame spinach on top of his rice. She knew that he cared about putting things in their proper place. It was an understandable impulse. It was also going to get him killed.
Already she was rewriting the equations because she knew what his answer would be.
The sergeant reiterated his protest, stopping short of accusing her of heresy herself. Formation instinct should have forced him to obey her, but the fact that he considered her actions deeply un-Kel was enabling him to resist.
Cheris cut contact and sent another override. Lieutenant Verab’s acknowledgment sounded grim. Cheris marked Squadron Four outcasts, Kel no longer. They had failed to obey her, and that was that.
Disjointedly, the new formation pieced itself together and pressed forward. They were taking heavier fire now. Two trees exploded at the touch of Eelfire as Squadron Five passed them. A corporal was stapled to a hillside by the resultant lash of splinters. A soldier three paces to Cheris’s left fell out of formation and vanished in a vapor of blood and tatters. Kel Nikara, who had sung so well.
Squadron Four was already dissolving, but she had no attention to spare for it.
Cheris guided the advance from point to point. She adjusted the formation again by sending orders to individual soldiers, solving for intermediate forms in her head to keep the geometry within the necessary error bounds. The storm was dissipating: they were too close to the Eels. The next question was whether she could devise a formation that would give them better protection against the Eels’ invariant weapons, which would work in any calendar, now that the storm was no longer a factor.
They were outnumbered five to one, but the Eels didn’t have access to formations, so the Kel had a chance. Cheris was in a hurry, so a straightforward force multiplier was her best bet. More modifications. Her remaining soldiers knew to trust her. The soundstream reflected this. Eels, the stink of corpses, heavy fire from that copse, drumbeats. They were paying attention to the important things again.
To her relief, the force multiplier, adapted from One Thorn Poisons a Thousand Hands, could be linearized for use with her ad hoc formation. She and her soldiers were equipped with calendrical swords, ordinarily used for duels. Not her weapon of choice, but they were near the storm generator, which they were to take intact, and the general’s orders had been clear. The swords shouldn’t damage unliving objects, which was the primary consideration.
“Swords, now,” Cheris said.
The Kel unsheathed their swords, each tinted differently, blank bars of light. Cheris’s ran from blue near the hilt to red at the tip. As they closed with the enemy, numbers blazed to life along the lengths of the blades: the day and the hour of your death, as the Kel liked to say.
Except the date and time on Cheris’s sword was wrong. She wasn’t the only one who was dismayed. Maintenance, rather use my rifle, the dreaded calendrical rot. Not only were the numbers wrong, they jittered and sparked, snapping in and out of focus. A quick survey of her company indicated that everyone’s swords were having the same problem. That would have been bad enough, but the swords weren’t even synchronized.
“Sir, maybe another weapon—” Lieutenant Verab said.
“Continue the advance,” Cheris said. “No guns.” If the swords proved ineffectual, they would have to try something different, but the swords hadn’t sputtered out entirely. That gave her hope, if you could call it that.
At first it went well. For every sword-stroke, tens of Eels went down as lines of force scythed through their ranks. Cheris’s own swordwork was methodical, businesslike, the same way she dueled. One of her lunges pierced eight soldiers in the Eels’ ranks. She had always been good at angles.
The Kel formation held as they butchered their way 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.