A Game of Three Generals

Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James R. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

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For July’s First, free to read and share, story, a Xuya story from Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya makes its online debut. ~ Julian and Fran, July 5, 2026

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A Game of Three Generals

by Aliette de Bodard

Every day is the same: Song Ha gets down to the refectory and spoons rice porridge into her mouth, feeling the salty taste of fish sauce against her palate—there used to be something subtly wrong with it, wasn’t there? But now it’s a familiar beat like a syllable in a poem—a daily counting out—she’s not sure exactly what, but it’s important that she doesn’t lose count.

There are no windows in the refectory, but the facility’s Mind does her best, showing holographic displays of outside, a deserted land of lava and molten metal, with brightly colored threads showing the atmosphere leaking away bit by bit, the heavier atoms of carbon and oxygen carried away by the hydrogen flow, a continuous rush that is reassuring, almost hypnotic in its constancy. Not that any of it matters. Song Ha will be long gone by the time Nen Lo Suoi Gia becomes a scoured, compact dead rock.

After breakfast, Song Ha plays chess: a single game against the Mind—Song Ha always struggles to remember the Mind’s name, but it always comes back to her, an instant before the Mind’s chariot takes her general after blocking her in a pincer move between a horse and a cannon. Triple check, and why does she never see it coming?

Instead, Song Ha remembers—for a brief, elating moment—that the Mind is called The Color of Water and Smoke, that it’s a reference to one of Uc Trai’s poems from Old Earth, except that the verses themselves always seem to hover just outside her reach.

When the chess game is done, Song Ha moves, to sit in the refectory again, staring at the displays—landscapes the color of fire dancing in front of her eyes, and in the distance, the mining encampment where the scientists and the engineers work to mine ore from the surface of Nen Lo Suoi Gia, sending it back to the numbered planets of the Empire. She knows something is wrong with the encampment, too. When her thoughts linger on it for too long, there’s a feeling, as though someone were clenching a fist of ice around her innards—fear and grief and anger, but it never remains for long.

She’s never too sure where the rest of the day goes.

#

Song Ha only ever plays chess with The Color of Water and Smoke—she’s sure she used to talk with the Mind, in the past, but her meager store of words seems to have been exhausted a long time ago.

Once, there was another Mind, one she gave birth to. Once . . . if Song Ha closes her eyes, she can still feel the prickle of the anesthetic needle going into her spine, the pain that seemed to wring her dry with every beat, the breath she was trying to draw that never came. She can look down at her hands and see them red with blood, holding something that bristles with flesh protuberances and optics and cables—and then the scene shifts: nothing moves, but she knows the thing she’s holding is her newborn daughter. She cradles her in her arms, singing a lullaby as she carries her to the cradle of the mindship: she lays her down among the sockets and wires, watching the ship slowly come to life, the featureless walls replaced by blurred starscapes, and the voice of the newly born ship echoing in the vast room, haltingly babbling the words of Song Ha’s lullaby back at her.

The mindship’s name won’t come. Song Ha stares at herself in the mirror, dark-skinned, dark-haired, impossibly young—and, as the image shifts and becomes older, weariness etched on every line of a stranger’s face, she knows.

The Three-Drop Piety—not the name she wanted to call her, but the birth-master was adamant, and it was the name that was recorded on the imperial rolls.

Mother, the ship whispers, in her memory. Come with me.

They wouldn’t let her, of course. Still seventeen years left on her sentence, after the ship was grown and ready to travel through space, linking the numbered planets together—not the years of Nen Lo Suoi Gia, the quick rotations that don’t take much of a handful of days, not even the few short months that make up the years on the orbitals around the hot, inhabitable solidity of the Fifty-Seventh Planet—but the years of the First Planet where the Keeper of the Peace Empress sits on the Dragon Throne; of Old Earth, endless and always renewed.

They . . . they barely let the ship go, as it was—arguments, endless, about whether her three-generation crime of rebellion against the state should apply to a child still in the mother’s womb at the time of sentencing. Papers and memorials she saw pass as though in a daze, the beats of a world that had ceased to mean much of anything to her.

Mother.

Song Ha sits up from a daze. The room is silent, the ambient light tuned to evening. She stares at her hands—the hands of an old woman, wrinkled and spotted—bots crawling at her wrists, their touch the prickle of needles and chemicals, the hazy euphoria of sedatives dissolving her thoughts. And, before everything withers and fades away, she listens, straining to hear a voice that isn’t here anymore.

#

Something is wrong with the chessboard.

The same configuration—the pieces scattered on either side, the chariot and the cannon moving into place; the horse moving, zigzagging, leaping over pieces—for a moment, it seems to writhe and become alive.

Nothing is wrong.

Mother.

Things keep shifting, changing; moving just at the corner of her eyes. The board reconfigures itself. The game flows past her, toward that checkmate she can never see, never anticipate.

And then she sees: there are three generals on the board.

No.

Song Ha looks up from the board, startled, not caring about the move she’s going to make, the same move she always makes. The holographic screens show the same entrancing flow of atoms in the dwindling atmosphere, the mining camp crushed beneath the gigantic orb of the too-close sun, the molten lava with only a few glistening islands of solid metal—and then, for a bare moment, everything flickers out of sight, and she sees beneath them; not the illusion the facility’s Mind maintains for her, but the unadorned walls of the facility: the rusted metal, the paint running down like old, tired blood from a diseased organ.

How long has she been here?

“They left,” she says aloud. “They all left.”

“Ssh. You worry too much. You’re safe here,” the facility’s Mind says. She hears the clink of pieces moving, locking themselves into place; feels the touch of needles, the pleasant, numbing cold at her wrists. “Checkmate.”

And Song Ha looks down at the board again, and remembers Uc Trai; remembers that the Mind’s name is The Color of Water and Smoke; even has an inkling of the verses that led to this, the elusive literary reference she can never catch.

And the day goes on, as it always does.

#

Song Ha dreams, that night.

She’s walking in the facility, wearing the gray, drab robes of prisoners—the same ones she wears now—toward the refectory, except that it’s not empty anymore. All the tables are full. Here is Linh, nervously playing with the strands of her long hair; Khanh Giao, lost in silent contemplation of her bowl, as if she could dredge up enlightenment from the depths of boiled rice; Duc Duy, writing something on a piece of paper, his young face alight with an enthusiasm they lost a long time ago. And the same anger and grief rises up within her, as their outlines waver and shift—nothing to stop it now, it’s so strong it feels like it’s compressing her, as if it could make her into emotionless, hard stone.

They . . . they used to be here. Where have they gone?

Mother.

It’s just a voice. It’s just an illusion. The dream will go away, come morning. She will get up and eat her breakfast, the taste of the sauce sharp against her palate—but she remembers, when she first came to Nen Lo Suoi Gia, how odd it tasted, because it’s not fish sauce, not made from anchovies fermented under starlight, but a processed, cheaper ersatz; what they give to political prisoners, because why waste money on the condemned?

She will get up, and play chess.

But, in the dream, when Song Ha sits at her table, the bowl of rice is gone. Instead is a math problem, the kind she used to solve all the time, when she was still practicing for the engineering exams that saw her promoted to Grand Master of Weapons—before her disgrace, before she refused to build warships to devastate the rebel habitats; before they arrested her and sent her there.

The problem doesn’t even bother to state the goal: there is only one variable worth solving for, though perhaps the solution might not be unique. It doesn’t look as though there are nearly enough equations to define uniqueness; but when she tries to substitute in the first of them, she finds that she has not one, but two equalities—and that they keep on getting longer and longer, with more complex symbols the further she goes.

No, they’re not equations. They’re characters. They’re a story—facts laid out drily for her to dissect, things she’s kept at bay for—for how long?

Nguyen Thi Boi Linh. Vo Thi Khanh Giao. Pham Van Duc Duy.

The Sixteenth Day of the Second Month, in the Fifty-Third Minute of the Bi-Hour of the Snake, in the Seventy-Third Year of the rule of the Keeper of the Peace Empress (by Compensated Imperial Reckoning).

Vehicle failure.

Extensive burns, going deep under the skin into the muscles and tendons, and charring the bones from the outside in. Air turning to fire in their lungs—the bodies went up in flames when the temperature rose . . .

Song Ha wakes up, gasping. The characters are still in her thoughts—filling gaps, pushing away the fog of sedatives—things twisting and turning until she’s on her knees on the floor, hardly daring to breathe. Bots crawl out of the ceiling and bedstead, cover her arms like black tar; but she bats them away, waving her arms and screaming until they lie in broken heaps of electronics on the floor.

They didn’t leave, the others. They died.

#

In the refectory, the same bowl of porridge is laid out, and the chessboard is on the same table, laid out at the beginning of a game—The Color of Water and Smoke always lays it out the same way, with the same opening, the right flank chariot moving forward, toward the distant palace where the general and his advisors sit.

There is something else, too; something hovering beneath the layers of holographic deception: the blurred but distinctive shape of a mindship, trying to connect in whichever way she can. How long has she been in orbit, desperately sending message after message?

Mother.

Song Ha moves, not toward the bowl, but toward the board. “Tell me,” she says, aloud.

This high into living quarters, The Color of Water and Smoke is not corporeal. Her body lies deep within the facility, keeping up the thermal shields and the other protections that make the station viable. All Song Ha can see is another hologram: the facility in miniature, its wings flaring like those on the cap of a magistrate, the doors tightly shut, the outside walls gray and featureless.

“I’ve kept you safe,” The Color of Water and Smoke says.

Twenty years. Her sentence was twenty-four years, and she’s an old woman now. That time has elapsed twice over, if not more—who knows if there are rejuv treatments? She can’t tell, not anymore.

But she can tell one thing. She can stand by the holograms and look at the mining camp, and know that it is deserted. She can remember—the other prisoners piling up in a vehicle, going to work in the mines to earn money and favors for after their release. Song Ha remained behind, of course: her sentence was so long she didn’t believe she would ever need either of these. She . . . she read a book on chess, one that The Color of Water and Smoke had obtained for her from the meager library in the facility.

She can remember that slow, agonizing moment when the thermal shields failed: not in a single go, but slowly, slowly enough that she heard them scream when the heat of Nen Lo Suoi Gia baked them alive inside their suits.

Even months afterward, she’d wake up and hear the screams, tearing at her from the inside; would sit in her bed, choking, trying to forget that it had ever happened, that she’d ever witnessed it.

“They’re dead.” She can’t keep her voice steady. Linh and Khanh Giao and Duc Duy, and the facility, she now knows, is completely deserted. No, not the facility, the planet. They evacuated the mining encampment after the . . . accident, but the Mind wouldn’t let her leave.

The Color of Water and Smoke says nothing for a while. At last she says, and her voice is a thin thread of sound, “I couldn’t keep them safe.”

They were out of the Mind’s zone of influence when this happened, and the vehicle they were driven in belonged to the mining encampment. Song Ha wants to say it’s not the Mind’s fault; but it’s the Mind who kept her here, long past when she should have left. It’s the Mind that prevented the engineers from entering; who told them she didn’t trust them, that Song Ha was still alive and would remain that way.

“How—” The words taste like ashes on her tongue. “How many years?”

#

Sixty-one years.

Like a familiar beat in a poem, repeated over and over; not the mayfly years of Nen Lo Suoi Gia, the False Hearth that eventually killed all her friends; not the years of the Fifty-Seventh Planet’s orbitals; but the years of the First Planet where the Keeper of the Peace Empress sits on the Dragon Throne. The years of Old Earth.

Sixty-one years.

“You’re safe,” The Color of Smoke and Water says, and Song Ha knows it is the truth. Rice for dozens of people, stretched to feed only one; fish sauce, recycled again and again; sedatives, endlessly given when she woke up screaming—it started before the accident, of course, the Empire was always tinkering with their minds, trying to make the sentence more bearable, the flow of days and nights feel like an eye-blink—a small kindness, after exiling them all to this island in the midst of a planet so nightmarish it wasn’t even numbered. “You’re alive.”

“Did I—tell me I asked for it.”

The Color of Water and Smoke doesn’t say anything. And what answer would she make? Would it make Song Ha feel better, to know she brought this on herself? That, after the miners left, after the planet fell silent on coms—when it was just her and The Color of Smoke and Water, and the nightmares that kept waking her up—she stared at what was left to her, and found it impossible to bear unaided?

“I did what was necessary,” The Color of Water and Smoke says, again.

Safe.

Song Ha would die, if she went outside. Burnt alive like the others; crushed to death by the gravity; suffocated by the thinning atmosphere—so many ways to die, on Nen Lo Suoi Gia. She stands on an island, on the last possible place where she can draw breath.

Song Ha stares at the board. All the pieces: two chariots, two elephants, two advisors—two generals.

No. Three generals, and the symbols from her dreams, welling up like blood from a wound—and a feeling of hanging, weightless, in space—of her hull, relentlessly bombarded by a stream of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in the exosphere, her thermal shields struggling to cope with the heat of the escaping atoms.

She reaches out, for the third piece; holds it in the palm of her hand, feeling the roughness of the character carved atop it.

There is a ship, in the midst of the room: not the sleek metal and impossible grace she remembers from stories, but a pitted and distorted thing, its hull blackened by solar winds—the sun of the Fifty-Seventh Planet and Nen Lo Suoi Gia, hugging its planets too close, too heavily, filling the sky to bursting with fire and blinding light. The ship’s outline shimmers and bends like smoke—nothing more than a projection, of course, its real body is in orbit, waiting for her to board.

“Child,” Song Ha whispers, and her voice feels raw and exposed.

“Hello, Mother.”

The holograms waver and shift; and the surface of the planet shows the outside of the facility—the shuttle, as pitted and blackened as the ship that sent it, slowly descending, its shields shimmering in and out of focus, battered by the gravity and the temperature of the exosphere—the supply dome, slowly opening, and then stopping, halfway through.

Song Ha turns, then, to face The Color of Water and Smoke. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“You can’t leave.”

Because she wouldn’t be safe. Because the Mind would be alone in the growing darkness of the facility, the artificial days and nights that don’t reflect anything of outside, anything real—because it’s not only her that the game of chess, the daily routine, kept going.

“Sixty-one years,” The Color of Water and Smoke whispers. “The numbered planets have moved on, child. The empire has moved on.”

She—everyone she knows will be old, or dead, or both, and even her daughter the mindship will have changed from the enthusiastic and awkward newborn she remembers. Her memories are mist, elusive and intangible, scattering under the slightest pressure, streaming away like the atoms of Nen Lo Suoi Gia’s atmosphere: she might as well be a child, reborn into a universe that has since long forgotten all about her.

“I know,” Song Ha says. She lays the piece again on the board, halfway between the two generals whose positions she knows by heart—always fighting one another, always defining one another.

“Checkmate,” she whispers, and keeps her eyes on the supply dome, willing it with all her heart to open.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction. She has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award, and six British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of Navigational Entanglements, a xianxia-inspired romantic space opera, and A Fire Born of Exile, a sapphic Count of Monte Cristo in space (Gollancz/JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.). She lives in Paris. Visit www.aliettedebodard.com for free stories, recipes, and more.

“A Game of Three Generals,” © Aliette de Bodard, 2017.