Hmm, the last of these was back at the end of January, and was supposed to be part one of two. Whoops!
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
The Hexarchate is an interstellar empire, in a universe where physics bends to the will of the state’s calendar. Celebrate a historic massacre on the right day and you reinforce the physical rules that let your weapons and spaceships work. Don’t celebrate it, or let some heretic celebrate a different feast, and the physical rules may shift to allow your enemy’s calendrical technologies to work instead.
Kel Cheris is a lowly infantry captain in the forces of the Kel, the Hexarchate’s military faction, but Cheris is also a mathematician, and talented enough no one quite understands why she turned down suggestions she join the Nirai, the science faction, instead. Caught in an impossible fight against heretics, she uses her mathematical insight to organise her troops into formations that verge on heretical, and emerges triumphant. But in a brutal example of the reward for competence being a greater challenge, she immediately finds herself drafted to deal with a threat that could destroy the Hexarchate.
The Fortress of Scattered Needles, the Hexarchate’s greatest stellar fortress, has risen in revolt and raised the standard of heresy. The Hexarchate needs it taken down, fast, before its enemies can take advantage, but the fortresses’ shields may be unbreachable. With precisely zero experience of space combat Cheris is handed the job and breveted all the way up to general. For reasons she doesn’t understand she has become the chosen pawn of the Shuos faction, the hexarchate’s spymasters, assassins and gameplayers, but she is certain that to win the siege she needs the Hexarchate’s greatest general, the unbeaten Shuos Jedao. Just one problem, Jedao has been dead for several hundred years, since winning his last battle by destroying, to the last man, both the enemy’s army and his own, including personally hunting down and executing his own command staff with his pistol. Nowadays Jedao is kept on cybernetic ice, the ultimate weapon, to be wheeled out in time of need.
Allowed to requisition Jedao, Cheris finds out rather too late that the gothic technology that sustains him can only manifest him as her shadow, with a voice only she can hear. Which leaves her unproven and jumped far beyond her rank and competencies, on the command deck of one of the Hexarchate’s greatest battleships, a fleet clustered around it, and having conversations with a voice that no one else can hear. And Shuos Jedao is not a voice she can ignore. The Kel are nicknamed the Suicide Hawks, because their loyalty can extend to tactical formations that manifest calendrical weapons, while simultaneously wiping out the entire formation, but the Shuos are the Ninefoxes, gameplayers and tricksters, and Jedao was the Immolation Fox, the perfect Shuos, bringer of the ultimate in Pyrrhic victories, playing a game no one has yet understood.
Cheris finds herself fighting on two fronts: on the outer, to take the fortress, a war that requires both her mathematics and Jedao’s wiles; but on the inside she is alone in her mind with Jedao, the arch-manipulator, the gameplayer, the Immolation Fox. And as they progress on the outer front, so Cheris progresses on the inner, gaining a fraction of insight into Jedao’s game, and into why the Hexarchate considers him both their most dangerous weapon, and their most terrifying potential foe.
What a review like this can’t show is how gorgeous Yoon’s prose is:
It was not the formal roll call. They had no drum, no fire, no flute. She would have included those things if she could. But even the servitors had heard her. They stopped what they were doing and arranged themselves in a listening posture. She nodded at them.
They started with the most junior soldier – Kel Nirio, now that Derken was dead – and ascended the ladder of rank. Nobody ate during the recital. Cheris was hungry, but hunger could wait. She didn’t need to commit the names to memory, as she had done that long ago, but she wanted to remember what every intent face looked like, what every rough voice sounded like, so she could warm herself by them in the days to come.
(Full disclosure, Yoon’s in my DW circle)
An Ancient Peace, Tanya Huff
This is the latest in Huff’s Valor series, which has apparently switched the series title to Peacekeepers given series protagonist Torin Kerr is now out of the Marines and running a contracted special operations team for the Wardens, the Confederation’s interstellar police force. Of course a minor thing like being out of the Marines doesn’t stop Torin’s people from calling her Gunny, or acting like they’re all still marines, which Is somewhat irritating for Craig, Torin’s very unmilitary lover, and confusing for Alamber, the semi-abused and criminally inclined di’Taykan they picked up in the previous story.
But it isn’t the Wardens who turn up with a mission, it’s Military Intelligence. Artefacts, grave goods, are turning up from the H’san, the Confederation’s founders, and though the Elder races are all now avowedly pacifistic (but not so pacifistic as to not bring in the Younger Races, the Humans, Krai and di’Taykan, to fight for them during the War with the Others, before Torin stopped it), the H’san have a brutal past that involved wiping their own colony world clear of life, a colony world they eventually used to bury both the victims of their war, and their weapons, before erasing it from the star charts. If someone is circulating grave goods from that world, then someone else is there and digging, and the consequences of someone actually getting hold of H’san weapons and using them could be the Elder Races deciding the Younger Races aren’t safe to let out on their own. So MI’s instructions are find the world, find the diggers, no survivors.
Of course if you’re going to seal up a planet’s worth of weapons of mass destruction as grave goods, then you probably aren’t going to leave them unguarded, so the story plays out as Torin does Tomb Raider, and those no survivors orders inevitably become a problem for Torin’s no man left behind ethos.
I find the series a little formulaic, but it’s a very competent formulaic that makes for an enjoyable, if unchallenging, read.
Digital Divide, Maker Space, State Machine, The Russians Came Knocking, KB Spangler
Re-reads of Spangler’s Rachel Peng technothrillers, and the one Josh Glassman novella, which is technically a technothriller, but played for laughs, with added squirrels.
Bone and Jewel Creatures, Elizabeth Bear
In Messaline, the city of Jackals, Brazen the Enchanter brings Bijou the Wizard an injured feral child, and as Bijou and the constructs she builds of bone and jewel examine the child, she realises it is the first move in a war against her and Brazen by Kaulas the Necromancer, the three of them bound by old ties of family.
As Kaulas’ plan plays out and death walks Messaline, Bijou fights corruption with artifice, replacing diseased flesh with bone and jewel, and Brazen joins her, adding his skill with pistons and levers. And all the while the child, the Cub as it thinks of itself, watches and tries to understand.
I love Bear’s writing, and this is a novella to read for the prose as much as the plot. Point of view wanders between the aging Bijou – how many stories feature a 96yo heroine? – and the Cub, showing us two sides of the story, one full of wisdom, the other struggling to understand the war into which it has been drafted, but able to see opportunity and hope for the pack it left behind.
It’s a very unusual story, a very unusual setting, but a marvellous one.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
