Captain Kel Cheris is having a very bad day. A loyal soldier of the Hexarchate, she's been paired with the undead, insane, and genocidal General Jedao, imprisoned for 400 years after betraying his own command and killing one million people. Evil though Jedao may be, he's never lost a battle, and Kel Command keeps him on ice to take down major threats, like the heretical corruption of a key border fortress protected by impenetrable shields. If Cheris can keep her sanity and accomplish her mission, power and promotion await.

Lee's first novel (he has an accomplished body of shorter fiction) is a dark byzantine military adventure. The Hexarchate runs on a combination of math and belief called the high calendar, which allows its military to access exotic quantum effects through the right formation. Life is an endless bulwark of rituals against the madness of the Hexarchate leaders, and a multisided history of atrocity and torture. Their military makes a fetish out of loyalty and suicide, while the intelligence services see everything as a game, and lives as nothing more than tokens to be spent in pursuit of victory. The people in charge of doctrine actively demand torture to keep the whole thing working. Super bleak, super stylish, and a strong debut in the weird tradition of The Quantum Thief.

***

On a reread of all three books, Ninefox Gambit is still damn near perfect, chilling in the implications of the setting and characters, the interplay between Cheris and Jedao, and occasional interjection of other viewpoints, most of whom serve to die horribly to illustrate some point.