Ninefox Gambit

The first installment in The Machineries of Empire trilogy, Ninefox Gambit is a curious sci-fi novel: despite its complex and almost inscrutable lore, which revolves around calendars affecting technology, and the scope of its plot, which revolves around a siege of a space fortress, Ninefox Gambit offers a tightly focused narrative about just two characters. Its main mistake, therefore, is its reluctance to evolve their relationship beyond its initial stages, content in just laying the groundwork for the books to come.

The protagonist is Kel Cheris, a disgraced captain of the Kel army, who is called upon to lead a siege at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. She must fight alongside Shuos Jedao, an undead general who is rumored to be a brilliant man but a mad psychopath.

At the beginning of the book, we are immediately thrown in the midst of a chaotic battle, being bombarded by terms, names, and places we don’t recognize. There are weather-eaters, exotic effects, and battle formations that depend on a calendar to work. There’s a moment when the protagonist’s battalion enters Pir’s Fan formation and we only know it resembles a wedge. We are thrown in the deep end, lost and confused.

Trying to visualize what is happening in this first battle – or in any other battle in the book, for that matter – is a pretty difficult task, but the point of the narrative is not Cheris’ war tactics but what they say about her character. In the first chapter, against all odds, she manages to keep her battalion alive and complete her mission, but to accomplish this extraordinary feat she bends the rules, breaking norms and acting just like the heretics she’s fighting against – and Cheris is aware that she’s going to be severely punished for that.

Her unorthodoxy is a major offense in her world, since their military, technology, and social systems all depend on belief. Her society is called Hexarchate because it’s divided into six factions – the Kel and the Shuos are two of them – and they must all adhere to the same High Calendar, a system that not only counts days and weeks in a specific way, but affects how everything in their society functions. Their weapons only do damage and their formations only shield them in battle if the soldiers are all adhering to this calendar: their belief in it allows it the power to reshape reality itself – or something along these lines, it’s hard to tell.

The heresy Cheris is fighting against is of calendrical nature, since the Hexarchate’s enemies want to implement another calendar altogether, changing the system at its core. The characters make a point of saying it’s all based on mathematics, but to us anything related to this High Calendar reads like magic: we either accept these things function the way they are described – mirroring the way the characters must act – or we convalesce trying to understand their inner workings. The novel is narrated in the third person and the narrator rarely offers exposition regarding worldbuilding, as the characters are already familiar with the concepts that form their society: we are supposed to get what we can along the way and that’s it.

This means that Cheris and Jedao’s tactics to win the siege usually go over our heads and we are left to focus on what matters, which is the characters themselves. Cheris is a soldier through and through, loyal and obedient, who feels right at home on the battlefield, trying her best to survive while fulfilling her mission: “In a way each battle was home: a wretched home, where small mistakes were punished and great virtues went unnoticed, but a home nonetheless. She didn’t know what it said about her that her duty suited her so well, but so long as it was her duty, it didn’t matter what she thought about it.”

Cheris is also a Kel, the military faction famous for being blunt instruments, always loyal and ready to use the biggest gun in their arsenal to blow everything up. Their loyalty – or submissive nature – is imprinted on them as “formation instinct”: the thought of disobeying their superiors now makes them physically sick, going against everything they believe. The Kel are molded into perfect soldiers – no questions, all loyalty – being effective weapons to be used and discarded in suicide missions.

Due to her alarming tendency to employ unusual tactics, Kel Cheris is asked for advice regarding the siege of the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Her superiors needed someone to suggest the unthinkable and they knew the biggest gun Cheris could find was Shuos Jedao, a general who has never lost a battle, but went mad one day and murdered everyone in his fleet. Due to his military prowess, instead of being executed, Jedao was preserved in spirit form, to be called upon when the need arises. Cheris makes the suggestion to use Jedao, is then possessed by him, and they both depart to the fortress to take it back from the heretics.

Their relationship takes center stage in Ninefox Gambit. Jedao is always at her side, a shadow looming over her, whispering in her ear. To Cheris, he’s as untrustworthy and dangerous as one can get, someone who could stab her in the back at any moment. His tactics usually give her pause, as he often gambles with the lives of her soldiers to achieve victory. Jedao’s methods can seem cold and cruel – there’s a constant metaphor about war being a game to him – but he always achieves results. Cheris’ more humane strategies, on the other hand, not so much. When the moment comes to make the hard choice, she often hesitates and, in the midst of battle, this can lead to a crushing defeat: “The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don’t fold,” Jedao explains to the protagonist.

Whenever he’s addressing her, Jedao acts in a paternalistic, empathetic, almost kind way. He spends the lives of Cheris’ soldiers in the siege without a second thought, but wants her to know that he mourns and remembers each and every one of them. He could just order Cheris around – because of formation instinct, she would obey – and yet he tries to make her understand where he’s coming from and the thought process behind each of his decisions. In other words, he’s teaching her to be like him, taking the role of a mentor figure.

Their relationship, which fortunately never evolves into a love story (Cheris’ interests lie elsewhere), is formed by constant clashes, but also attempts of mutual understanding. Cheris wants to believe Jedao even though she knows it’s not prudent to do so – his kind demeanor may be only a ruse, a way of manipulating her to be more amenable to him. The vulnerable side he exposes to her may be a trap, carefully molded to invite empathy. He’s built as that type of character who is always two steps ahead of everyone, being able to correctly predict each reaction to his words. This makes Cheris distrust his actions, despite Jedao’s best efforts to befriend her – and they stay in this conflicted relationship for the most part of the novel.

The question of whether Jedao truly went mad when he killed his crew or faked it as part of an overelaborate plan is the core mystery in the novel – and its Achilles’ heel. The main issue here is that the narrative delays the answer for so long – almost every option of resolution is discussed beforehand, robbing any chance of a surprise – that it leaves no room for the answer to really impact the story. The consequences of the revelation are left for the sequels to deal with, leaving this one with an anticlimactic ending: there’s the reveal, but no real payoff to it.

Answering this question at the middle of the novel, instead of going on about the seemingly nonsensical calendrical warfare, could have allowed Cheris and Jedao’s relationship to grow and evolve beyond their initial and obvious distrust – and make the narrative less repetitive in the process.

The antagonists, meanwhile, have little room to shine. Their development mainly comes in the form of e-mails that they send each other, which are spirited and playful. These heretics constantly joke about the new days of their calendar and sign each email with “Yours in calendrical heresy,” while discussing their strategies to implement a new world order. We are pushed to root for them, as Cheris’ world seems a horrible place to live in, being a tyranny of belief that thrives on unwavering submission. The novel could have benefited from exploring more of their point of view, since the problem of Cheris’ society is a major driving point for the main characters – and this could have offered the opportunity to explain this world a bit better as well.

Finally, we have the servitors, who – much like the antagonists – form a delightful, but underused element. They are robots that serve the Hexarchate and act in the background, without anyone paying too much attention to them. However, we are sometimes privy to their point of view, witnessing how they are sentient and organized, displaying individuality. We see them judging their masters (“Amazing. The Kel were learning manners. It was a long-going and mostly affectionate debate among Kel servitors as to whether their humans were ever going to figure this out.”) and making plans of their own… but this never amounts to much in the end.

Ninefox Gambit is a fascinating if problematic novel that presents an utterly bizarre world and a couple of potentially interesting characters. It’s a pity, then, that the desire to stretch its plot and central dynamic for too long leads to a lot of unexplored elements and unresolved conflicts. The first book of a series always has the difficult task of working on its own while also laying the groundwork for the sequels, but Ninefox Gambit does just the latter.

June 21, 2022.