Cheris took a shower even though she would rather have collapsed asleep the instant she was through the door. She had hoped the sonics’ cloying hum would wake her up. No such luck.
“Stop trying to stay awake,” Jedao said.
She was so tired, and she had no idea what, if anything, she had done right. In mathematics you had peer review, definite proofs and answers, but war was nothing but uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty.
“Sleep,” Jedao said, exasperated.
Cheris gave up trying to resist and fell asleep as soon as she lay down.
When she woke, there was a tray with scallion pancakes, rice, and cooling tea. “A pair of servitors came in with that twenty-seven minutes ago,” Jedao said, “but I thought you needed the rest more. I would have thanked them if they had been able to hear me.”
He let her eat in peace, then said, “We’re going to prepare propaganda drops.”
“What?” Cheris said. Planning sessions with Jedao were never dull. “Do you think the heretics will fall for something that obvious?”
“You’d be surprised at what people will read out of curiosity,” Jedao said. “Although we won’t ask them to read much. We’re going to modify some game templates and send them down. The thing is, I’ll need your colonel’s help. He’ll know more about the Liozh heresy than I do, and since he’s a Kel, he’ll know the most about the bloodthirsty bits.”
A servitor requested entry, although it could have just come in. “Come in,” Cheris said. It bore more tea. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m in danger of dehydrating here in the command moth, but I appreciate it.”
The servitor made a skeptical sound, but flashed a series of satisfied green-gold lights and left.
“Anyway,” Jedao said, “I know what happened in outline, but not the details. We want the details.”
Cheris thought of the things she did and didn’t remember from her history lessons, and grimaced. “Wouldn’t you be able to find this in the archives?”
“When’s the last time you dug through primary sources? The problem with the Liozh rebellion is that half that stuff’s classified, and the other problem is that you have to know how to sift through it. Which is where Ragath’s background as a historian will come in handy.”
“He’s very busy,” Cheris said. It was bad enough that she had to put up with Jedao. The least she could do for her infantry commander was shield him from the fox’s direct interference.
“All he has to do is give us pointers to the best examples of the Liozh getting shot into sieves,” Jedao said. “Just leave him a message and he’ll respond when he has the time. I doubt it’ll take him that long.”
Cheris thought of her instructors dismissing Kel actions against the Liozh as unworthy of study, victories too easily won. “I’m still not sure—”
“Did you play many games in academy? Sports?”
“Dueling mostly,” Cheris said. Here it came, the ubiquitous Shuos obsession with games.
Jedao snorted. “You’re thinking something uncharitable about foxes. Tell you what, then. We’re going to make a game.”
“I should get back to the command center, is what I should be doing.” She eyed the clock and the shift schedule. Technically she wasn’t due back for another five hours and forty-one minutes, but she didn’t want to admit it.
“If they needed you, they’d have sent for you,” Jedao said. “You could use more sleep, but you’re unlikely to see sense about that.”
Cheris finally realized what he had said. “I have people dying down there and you want me to play another fucking Shuos game?”
“I said invent a game. We won’t have time to play it.”
“Why?” Cheris said.
“We’re going to invent a game about the Fortress.”
He wasn’t going to let it go. “If you want a battle simulation, wouldn’t it be better to use one of the ones already in the grid?”
“But that would only tell me what the simulator thinks of the situation. And the level of abstraction is too low – we’ll get back to that. I want to know how you understand the situation, Cheris.”
“What, you don’t have a plan? I thought you always had a plan.”
“Humor me.”
She had misgivings, but – “Where do we start?”
Maddeningly, he responded as she had thought he would. “Where do you think we should start?”
Cheris thought for a moment. Under other circumstances, and with the help of some beer, it would have been tempting to devise a taxonomy that could handle dueling, jeng-zai, and truth-or-dare. But Jedao would have a specific purpose in mind, and he wouldn’t have given her an impossible task. “If the point is a specific game, I’ll start by modifying an existing game.” A mathematical solution: reduce a problem to a previously solved problem.
Jedao didn’t say anything, so Cheris assumed she was being left to thrash around for his edification. She went to the terminal and pulled up fires-and-towers. Using it as a basis, she set up an asymmetrical two-player board game to be played with grid assistance. There was no point making the bookkeeping more annoying than necessary.
She lost time on legible visual representations. It wouldn’t do for the player to confuse infantry and infiltrators, for instance. Assigning legal moves and point values was worse. How was she supposed to know the heretics’ strength? Was she supposed to ensure that both sides were evenly matched? She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it. And she omitted the shields, since they had been cracked and weren’t relevant anymore.
Cheris was confronted with the difficulty of coding a grid opponent so she could test the values. Normally she would have asked a servitor for help, but she suspected Jedao would intervene. The attack values on some of the guns felt too high to be realistic, but you probably couldn’t tell by eyeballing the numbers. If only she had more time –
She straightened and barked a laugh. If Jedao meant to distract her from her duty, he was succeeding. She longed for a call from the command center, even if it implied a new disaster.
It was peculiar that Jedao seemed determined to teach her. Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to trigger her formation instinct so she could convey his orders without any of this back and forth?
Her mind was wandering again. She had barely addressed combat resolution. It was tempting to squander time on pseudorandom generators and probability distributions because at least she understood those, but it was more important to pick something inoffensive and run with it.
It was impossible not to think of herself as the Kel swarm, even in the context of scratchy, half-formed notations. She put herself in the role of the Fortress’s commandant and saw problems with the game that hadn’t been evident before: ambiguities, ill-defined objectives, a certain lopsidedness of agency. Surely the heretics had motives and the ability to maneuver toward their own goals. The game should reflect that.
She entered more scratchwork, agonizingly aware of the mess of numbers and contradictory rules and shaky assumptions. A senior cadet had once told her that proofs were just like essays, no one expected the rough draft to be a work of art, but it was hard not to feel that she should try for elegance from the outset.
“You can stop there,” Jedao said.
Cheris’s eyes felt sand-dry. “It won’t work,” she said.
“There are issues that would come up in initial playtest,” Jedao said, “but that’s not a bad first outing, especially from a Nirai thinker. You should have seen the first time I went through design critique. Blood everywhere.”
She had a hard time believing that.