“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Cheris said. Nerevor stiffened, ready for new orders, but Cheris wasn’t looking at her.
“Figured it out?” Jedao said, pleased. “Let’s hear it. Subvocals. Although Kel Command is going to have to outprocess everyone anyway.”
“How long have you known that invariant ice isn’t an invariant?”
Before now, it hadn’t occurred to Cheris that the shields were based on an exotic technology and that the heretics had simply designed their calendar to enable them to continue using it. After all, everyone in the hexarchate knew that invariant ice was an invariant.
“Lucky guess,” Jedao said. “Sorry. Shouldn’t be flip. Cheris, those shields aren’t based on standard physical forces, no matter what the hexarchs say about technological breakthroughs. I’m no Nirai, but I know what the universe’s laws look like, and shields like this? Never happen. This means they’re an exotic effect. We also know that the Fortress projects a calendrical regime due to the nexus. It stands to reason that the shields take advantage of the same phenomenon.
“And this suggests that the shields are a projection of the operator’s belief system. Not the beliefs of a group; the symbol system is too consistent and composites don’t work here anymore. I can’t see why else there would be chaff, or why Kel Command wanted to distract people from it. – Nerevor wants your attention.”
“Sir,” Nerevor said, “Scan is starting to get coherent readouts through the punctures.”
Scan followed that up with, “More breaches above the Anemone and Radiant Wards, but – wait a moment.”
The triangle pattern spattered the shields like summer wildfire. Tactical Three responded with the scrywolf Uncircled.
“How does this even—” Cheris started to say.
“Cheris, people are very simple,” Jedao said. “You occupy the conscious mind with one thing, then drive a spike into the subconscious mind with something else while the walls are down. That’s how we used formations just now. The operator was trained to pay attention to Kel formations, so that took care of their conscious focus, and now we’ve pinned them with my emblem, which they know to fear. The emblems on the shields – for us they’re just time-lapse pictures, but for the operator, because the shields are an ego projection, we’re tattooing words directly onto their brain.”
“We’re in!” Scan cried over Jedao’s words.
For a merciful second Cheris felt nothing. But everyone else fell over like hingeless puppets.
The world was awash in colors, patterns, floating echoes of shapes she had seen in the shields. Leaf into feather into petal in great blowing drifts that passed through her hands. Fissures and fractures of peeling black. Sandglasses pouring themselves out.
Jedao was silent. Cheris looked at Nerevor, but Nerevor was curled up on the floor, wheezing something in a low language Cheris didn’t recognize.
She couldn’t waste time panicking. She rerouted Communications to her own terminal. “Get me Commander Paizan,” she said.
After a long moment, the grid said in its crisp voice, “Commander Paizan is not responding.”
She sent a general query to the moth commanders. Nothing.
“General Jedao,” she said, remembering that he had called himself a shield, “where are you?”
Still no response.
She forced herself to breathe steadily.
The scan readout indicated that the Fortress’s shields had splayed themselves outward like hands with the skin peeled off and nerves unfurled in all directions. Cheris lost another minute picking through the equations, trying to find out how all her soldiers had been disabled. Two people were screaming. She half-turned, tried to think of what she could do for them, then remembered the whole swarm was in trouble. She tried calling Medical. No luck there.
“General Kel Cheris to swarm grids,” she said. “Override Aerie Primary. Slave all moths to Unspoken Law.”
The responses stuttered back to her as the swarm moths acknowledged. Someone on Kel Liai Meng’s Essential Verses had recovered enough to acknowledge verbally, but when she asked for his status, there was no answer. Fear bit her heart.
Nerevor was now trying to stand up, but her legs kept collapsing under her, and her eyes were unfocused. Cheris went over and settled her against the wall, telling her to stay still, but Nerevor wouldn’t stop trying.
Sudden despair crashed over Cheris. She looked around the command center, and the knowledge of her failure was like a black knife. She was so tired, she had been in the darkness for so long, and she was fighting against long odds. If only she could fold asleep, just for a little space; and if only the universe had any mercy, she would never have to wake.
Cheris reached for her combat knife. She hadn’t thought she’d have further use for it on a moth, but there it was. She weighed it in her hand, then brought it up to her –
“Cheris, stop it.” It was Jedao, whispering as across a hollow distance.
“What happened to you?” she asked without interest.
“It hurts,” he said simply. “Cheris, put the knife away.”
“I failed,” she said, “and all of it was for nothing.”
“Cheris, I mean it.” His voice grew sharper. “You’re experiencing bleed-through. I’m sorry. But you need to put the knife away.”
She didn’t want to obey. It was tempting to close her eyes and use the knife anyway.
“The knife, Cheris.”
Then she understood. “This isn’t me,” she said, jolted out of the despair. “It’s you. How long have you been suicidal?” She sheathed the knife.
He had been a ghost for 397 years. She imagined that if there were a way for him to kill himself, he would have figured it out by now. Something she could use against him if he tried to pull mind games on her again.
“The bleed-through will pass,” Jedao said coolly, “and you’ll be all right. Prepare orders for the infantry and the Shuos infiltrators. The operator can’t sustain the shield inversion – look at the scan. They’re disabling the entire Fortress to get us. We’ll have to endure.”
Assuming the shields went down, they still had the problem of landing troops. She began setting up move orders, checking routes carefully to avoid collisions. It would be stupid to crash her own swarm.
Cheris heard thumping, and glanced back at Rahal Gara, who was going into convulsions. Gara wasn’t the only one. “This had better end soon,” she said.
Seven minutes and nineteen seconds later, the inverted shield dissipated completely.
A message came in from the Fortress. It said: “Very impressive, Garach Jedao. We’ll have a use for you.”
People were starting to recover, and they had a Fortress to conquer, but Cheris was remembering the knife. Jedao had claimed to fear being executed by the Shuos hexarch, but he was also suicidal. Something didn’t add up. She could only hope that she figured it out before it came around to bite her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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 Goose, and now we’re down to hours or these reports will all look the same. How about Hour of the Locust? It seems appropriate.