A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER FIVE

THE last time Nine Hibiscus had flown a Shard was several model generations back. Her cloudhook spent a truly absurd amount of time updating its programming before it would even let her hook in to the collective vision that the Shard pilots shared, and she was completely innocent of the new biofeedback system that let them react like one large organism. That technology had come over from the imperial police into the Fleet, Science Ministry to Ministry of War, around ten years ago. Minister Nine Propulsion—former Minister Nine Propulsion, Nine Hibiscus reminded herself—had been a great proponent of it. She’d seen what it did for the Sunlit down in the Jewel of the World—an instant reactivity, hypercommunication, she’d said once to Nine Hibiscus and some other officers over a long night of drinks—and had it reworked for the Shards. Gotten the Science Ministry to do it—Minister Ten Pearl, of the epithet “he who writes patterns into the world,” the algorithm master himself, had adjusted the code on Nine Propulsion’s behalf. Now the new system was hardwired into how the Shard interfaces interacted with the pilots’ cloudhooks, and into a set of external electrodes and magnetic sensors that were woven into their vacuum suits, providing an artificial sense of collective proprioception as well as vision. Proprioception, vision, and (the rumors went) shared pain and shared instinctive reflexes about danger. Casualty rates had dropped nine percent since the new system came online, and that made the Fifth Palm—armaments and research—very happy. But even if Nine Hibiscus had been inside a Shard and wearing a Shard vacuum suit, she wouldn’t have known what to do with the new proprioception aside from inconveniently vomit, which was apparently the most common training side effect—so it was likely for the best that she’d stick to Shard-sight, which her cloudhook could provide for her by itself, no Shard required. She sat in her captain’s chair on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, tipped 90 percent horizontal, cloudhook arrayed over both eyes. There was no way she was going to let Sixteen Moonrise attack Peloa-2 without keeping her under extremely direct observation.

Her people could call her out of Shard-sight with a touch, and she’d be back in command. But for now, since her flagship was doing nothing but sitting here receiving recognizance, she’d left Twenty Cicada in official control while her perceptions were elsewhere.

She rode along, an invisible presence, down with the Shard pilots seconded to the small-fighter support craft Dreaming Citadel, following Sixteen Moonrise’s Porcelain Fragment Scorched into the silence that had eaten up Peloa-2. Absently, she wondered if the comms breakdown would affect Shard-sight, and figured with some anticipation that it would be a useful thing to find out.

Porcelain Fragment Scorched was a beautiful ship. Through the ever-shifting viewpoints of Shard-eyes, it cut through space like an obsidian blade, darkly reflective: a stealth cruiser, Pyroclast-class. If it wasn’t the pride of Sixteen Moonrise’s Twenty-Fourth Legion, it ought to be. As it came around the far side of the Peloa System’s dwarf sun—where Knifepoint had been when they’d been intercepted by the three-ringed alien ship—it looked like a slightly darker piece of starfield. Almost invisible. Dreaming Citadel floated in its wake, letting Sixteen Moonrise (of course she’d taken the command herself; Nine Hibiscus would have done exactly the same) lead. No one had seen Peloa-2 since the communication blackout. Nine Hibiscus wasn’t sure what she expected. Anything from a blackened, burnt-out shell to a bright-lit, healthy colony with some kind of blockade up around it—

It was neither. Peloa-2 looked like Peloa-2 was supposed to, from holoimages: a small planet, three continents, large silicate desert in the middle of the biggest one. The Teixcalaanli colony at the southern edge of that desert, the shape of refineries and cloudhook-glass production facilities just visible, like a glyph etched into the landscape. All that pure silica sand, white-glitter surrounding the colony, a setting for a rough industrial jewel. Day, down on the part of the planet where there was settlement, so it was impossible to tell if the colony had power or not. The usual collection of satellites was still in orbit—but half of those satellites were dark, and the planet itself was—there was no movement, no rise and descent of small craft. And no visible aliens.

Over the Shard-chatter feed she heard Sixteen Moonrise, smooth and unfazed, say, “Come in slow to orbit. It’s a graveyard.”

Nine Hibiscus had no biofeedback to shiver with, but she shivered anyway, imagined it collective—all the Shards feeling that crawling, silent peculiarity. It’s a graveyard. Sixteen Moonrise wasn’t wrong. As they slipped in close, Dreaming Citadel passed the darkened satellites. They were debris and nothing more, ragged, chewed open; parts of them torn away. Nine Hibiscus tried to see a pattern in the devouring—the aliens could want metal, could want reactor cores, oxygen, any manner of thing—and couldn’t. The satellites merely looked ripped. Eviscerated. Whatever is useful in them is what they wanted to take, she found herself thinking. The animating force. Whatever made them objects with a purpose and not discarded trash. That’s what they took.

She was aware that she was anthropomorphizing the threat, giving meaning and reason to what might very well be reasonless destruction. These aliens weren’t people. They weren’t even barbarians.

Sixteen Moonrise again, on comms, steady command: “Maintain orbit and stay in touch. I’m sending down a ground party—six Shards from Dreaming Citadel, ten from Porcelain. Peel off.”

A risk. One that Nine Hibiscus might not have taken—if the satellites were a graveyard (and no wonder all of Peloa-2 had gone dark to communication, they had nothing left to communicate with), what sort of mass destruction would exist on the planet below? But she had told Sixteen Moonrise to retake this colony. Had challenged her to do it. And merely surrounding it with Teixcalaanli ships was insufficient. If there were Teixcalaanli citizens down there, they deserved to be reclaimed. They deserved defending. To be brought back into the world. Nine Hibiscus shifted her focus to ride with the Shard pilots headed down through the burn of atmosphere, letting the remainder fade to background, peripheral vision on her cloudhook, flickers in the dark.

They hailed the colony’s spaceport on the way in—the usual way, asking for a landing vector and an appropriate berth between the skynets. Shards came down on their own power—not like seed-skiffs or cargo, which had to be caught. It should have been routine. (Nothing about this planet was routine.)

Peloa-2 didn’t answer the hail. They didn’t answer the second hail, either, or the broadcast on all channels which instructed the port to be cleared, War Ministry override—Nine Hibiscus would have skipped that one, wide broadcast felt too risky. Even graveyards could be haunted by the things that made graves. The Shards landed where they could, made their descent through the orange-purple glow of plasma and the pressure and shaking of deceleration g-forces, and came to rest neatly enough. All these pilots had made far more complex landings, in far worse conditions than radio silence and no vector bearings, only visual confirmation on a safe spot to sink down.

The spaceport was dark, too. Silent. No Teixcalaanlitzlim and no aliens came to meet the sixteen ships. Full daylight—the readout on one of the Shards’ instrumentation panels told its pilot that it was nearly fifty degrees outside, summer on Peloa-2, right on the upper edge of human tolerances—and Nine Hibiscus on her bridge so very far away still felt chilled, looking at all that silence and stillness. The plumes of silicate dust, rising when the wind did, ripples of white in the air like storm-whipped snow.

Sixteen Moonrise’s voice in her ears: “Find out how bad it is. Locate survivors if you can.”

That was an order Nine Hibiscus might have given. No matter what else they disagreed on, it was good to know that she and Sixteen Moonrise were both concerned with the Empire’s people and what had become of them. That was somewhere to start, in finding commonalities that might let them work together during this war.

Shard-sight carried her out of the ships—she was glad for the pilots that they had their vacuum suits and the temperature control they maintained, and also for the updated interfaces that rode in them, keeping the collective vision active even on the ground, without the benefit of a ship’s AI to route the connections through. Glad all the way until they reached the insides of the port’s buildings and found the first bodies.

Nine Hibiscus was a soldier. She’d killed more people than she strictly could count—there was no way to know, for real, in space combat situations—and some of those people had been face-to-face, blood and the stink of shit and organ meat spilled and wasted, sacrifices to no one and to everyone at once. She’d worn the blood of her first groundside kill across her forehead until it flaked off, that old ritual, and had felt more Teixcalaanli at that moment than at any other time in her life. Twenty years old and crowned red, up to her knees in the mud of some half-rebelled planetoid—

—and still, seeing these bodies, she wished she could unsee them. So many people. Cut open, mostly: not the clean death of energy weapons, though there were some of those scars too, Teixcalaanlitzlim turned to partially blackened, partially melted corpse-friezes. But mostly, cut open. Eviscerated like the satellites. She thought, Maybe they eat large mammals, and almost found that idea comforting—a species that thought humans were prey was a problem, but the Ebrekti ate large mammals too, and they’d managed with the Ebrekti. But none of the spilled viscera had been chewed on. It had all just been—pulled out. Discards, then, not food.

How easy it was to begin to think like these enemies. And in thinking like them, to begin to hate them quite personally.

The group leader from Dreaming Citadel’s complement of Shards gestured to her companions, and to the Shard group from Porcelain: We go this way, you go that way. Her opposite number nodded. They were running silent, for safety’s sake—if the aliens were still here, letting them know they had company would be a good way to get rapidly killed—relying only on their shared sight to communicate by. Nine Hibiscus was drawn along with the group comprising her people. They knew she was with them, watching. She hoped they found it a comfort, as they waded through the destruction of Peloa-2. Their Fleet Captain, witnessing as they did.

It took several hours before she began to understand what the aliens had wanted here, aside from destruction for destruction’s sake. Several hours of finding another and another group of dead Teixcalaanli, days dead, building after building full of corpses. The invading force had been quite efficient in the slaughter. She’d have to check the manifests—she’d ask Twenty Cicada, he would know—but she thought there had been around fifteen hundred colonists on Peloa-2, maybe as many as two thousand. It was a tiny colony. It was a glorified factory floor, a place for turning fine sand full of rare crystalline additives into the kind of glass that made cloudhooks, flexible and near-unbreakable. Peloa-2 was out on the very edge of Teixcalaanli territory, too hot for most people to do more than a short engineering stint on, earn hazard pay on top of their usual contracts with the War Ministry. The only reason all these people were dead, Nine Hibiscus realized, was that these aliens understood supply lines, and what to do with a single-resource colony.

Cut it off. And take whatever it had already produced.

The central factory floor, where the tall stacks of cloudhook-ready glass had waited for their journey back through the jumpgate toward more thickly civilized parts of the universe, was pristine—and empty. Nothing was broken here except the machinery to produce more sheets of glass. All the glass itself was gone, as if it had turned back into silica dust and blown away.

They were hungry, then, these enemies of Teixcalaan: they wanted at least one thing. They wanted to take away a resource the Empire needed, and prevent them from ever being able to make more. They couldn’t know that there were other planets that made cloudhook-glass, other deserts that had the right mineral mix. They were right enough: Peloa-2 had been worth colonizing when the Empire had found it because of those resources, those particular mineral additives. And in a war with the Empire, if your enemy was Teixcalaan, that resource—any resource that was controllable—needed to be denied. Taken away. The people here—the people hadn’t mattered, in that calculation.

How the hell am I going to talk to these things, even with an Information Ministry spook? Nine Hibiscus thought, and blinked herself out of Shard-sight, back into the comforting normalcy of Weight for the Wheel, where no one was currently a half-empty corpse.

“Call it off,” she said on tight-band comm to Sixteen Moonrise. “Pull our people back, set up an orbital perimeter around Peloa, and tell your legion to prepare for a funerary rite for a whole fucking planet.”

Lsel Station was little. Little and very pretty, a turning diamond-shaped jewel set against a rich starfield, two spokes and a thick torus of decks at their middle. Three Seagrass couldn’t quite imagine living on it—it’d be like living on a warship full-time, the biggest warship anyone had ever built—but she liked it immediately.

Liked it, at least, until the cargo barge she’d paid an extortionate price to ride on for eleven uncomfortable, chilly hours docked at the bottom point of one of those spokes and began to unload its crates of—well, whatever was in them was labeled in Verashk-Talay, and thus Three Seagrass wasn’t sure if she was remembering the script for “fish” correctly or not. Freeze-dried fish? Fish powder? Who could need this many crates of fish powder, even out here on a planetless planet made of metal? She’d unloaded herself along with the crates, still in her Esker-1 jumpsuit, and a tall barbarian with an enormous forehead had immediately grabbed her, shoved her up against a wall, and demanded some information in Mahit’s very syllabic and unpronounceable language. Three Seagrass didn’t know what information, and also the wall was metal and hurt to be shoved into, and the cargo-barge engineer took it upon herself to stand around unhelpfully, emitting I told you so in every gesture.

Maybe she should have worn the special-envoy outfit.

“I’m Envoy Three Seagrass of the Teixcalaanli Information Ministry,” she said, in her own language, loudly, “and you’re committing a diplomatic offense. Unhand me.”

The barbarian apparently knew Teixcalaanli. He unhanded her. And then he pressed some button on a flat screen he carried instead of a cloudhook, and a rather loud alarm began to go off: a bright noise, three tones repeated, like the start of a song, if the song was being played in a noisecore club in Belltown Six.

“You’re who?” asked the cargo-barge engineer.

Three Seagrass waved a hand at her ears. Can’t hear you, someone’s decided to set off an alarm, also that is a terrible question all considered.

“I brought what here?” asked the cargo-barge captain, which was insulting. Three Seagrass was a person, not a what. She shrugged. Smiled, Teixcalaanli wide-eyed. Made sure she had control of her luggage, while the barbarian who had grabbed her said, “Don’t move,” in quite passable Teixcalaanli. She didn’t move.

(Her heart was in her throat. If the alarm went off for much longer, she might actually get scared. Being thrown in jail on Lsel Station would be an abrogation of her duties as an envoy, not to mention that she’d never been in jail unless that terrible few hours trapped in the Ministry during the insurrection counted—she wasn’t supposed to have come here at all—)

There was a commotion at the other end of the hangar. The barbarian who’d set up the alarm had summoned some more barbarians with it, it seemed like—important ones, for how the attention of all the other Stationers working to unload this barge and the other newly arrived ships had rotated their attention toward them. Three Seagrass could read the feel of the room, even when she was scared, even when it was so loud—that bit of her training hadn’t deserted her, even outside the Empire amongst strangers. One of the newcomers waved an arm, and the alarm silenced itself.

Three Seagrass exhaled hard into the quiet. Shut her eyes for a quarter second, squeezed the lids together until she saw phosphenes, rolled her shoulders back. Thought, Here we go, then, time to talk my way to Mahit Dzmare, even if I have to tie my tongue in spirals to get through to these Stationers. Opened her eyes again.

And found Mahit herself standing in front of her, flanked by an old man and a middle-aged woman who looked like a hawk.

Mahit looked awful, and also rested. Still tall as ever, spare-boned and olive-pale, with the same curly hair—longer now, tendrils down the back of her neck and framing her face, brushing her cheekbones and making them even sharper, as sharp as her nose was. She no longer seemed like a strong shove would knock her sideways, sleepless and shaken; instead she looked surprised, and angry, and faintly sick to her stomach. My barbarian, Three Seagrass thought, which was—oh, inopportune in its fondness, entirely.

“Hello,” she said to Mahit, and tried smiling like a Stationer again.

“What are you doing here?” Mahit asked her, and it was very nice to have someone speak her own language so gracefully. “Three Seagrass, I was under the impression you were an Undersecretary now, not in the habit of being smuggled cargo—”

“You know her,” said the hawk-faced woman. It seemed very like an accusation. Of course Mahit would be in some kind of political mess; she attracted them. Three Seagrass was well aware of that, from direct experience.

“This is the asekreta Three Seagrass,” Mahit began, and Three Seagrass found herself utterly, peculiarly delighted to be introduced. It was like they’d reversed roles, liaison and barbarian inverted, and hadn’t they just, she was on Mahit’s planet—station—now, wasn’t she? “Patrician first-class, Third Undersecretary to the Teixcalaanli Minister for Information. My former cultural liaison.”

“Most interesting job I’ll ever have, being your cultural liaison,” Three Seagrass added, thinking, Except perhaps this one I’m doing now. She bowed over her fingertips at the strange barbarians. “You have my advantage; Mahit, if you would be so kind as to introduce your—companions?”

Diplomacy was a lovely refuge. There were rituals for it, and none of them involved being arrested. Usually.

Mahit’s expression had gone from faintly ill to a mix of chagrin and pleasure. She was so expressive. All Stationers seemed to be: the other two that Mahit had come in with looked positively scheming, observant and attentive and not displeased so much as—anticipatory.

Mahit said, “You are quite honored, Three Seagrass; these are two members of our governing Council. Darj Tarats, the Councilor for the Miners”—she gestured to the old thin man to her right—“and Dekakel Onchu, the Councilor for the Pilots. I believe you are Councilor Onchu’s problem, as you’re in her hangar. Illegally.”

Three Seagrass asked, with as much apology as she could muster, “Councilors. Do you understand Teixcalaanli?” (Really, she needed to learn Stationer properly, more than the amateur level of vocabulary she currently had, even if Mahit’s language had noises in it that a civilized tongue disliked.)

The hawk-faced woman, Onchu, nodded. Just once. She hadn’t said a word yet. She didn’t need to; everything about her demanded Three Seagrass justify herself posthaste or be ejected out the nearest airlock, of which there were two in direct line of sight.

“My deepest apologies for the unorthodox method of my arrival,” Three Seagrass went on, “but I needed to come to Lsel Station with absolute speed, and there was no way to circumvent the sublight travel time aside from traveling through the Anhamemat Gate instead of the usual one. I do understand that I may have inadvertently violated the treaties between our two peoples by not announcing my intentions, but trust me, I am not here in secret or for purposes that would damage our relations further.”

Councilor Onchu’s eyebrows were as expressive as the rest of her. They’d climbed nearly to where her hairline would have been if she hadn’t shaved her head bald. “What are you here for, then?” she asked. Her Teixcalaanli was more than passable. “What requires absolute speed? And why were we not informed of a situation that would cause you to choose this method of coming into our territory, Undersecretary?”

Some things had been easier when she was simply an asekreta. People seemed to expect Undersecretaries of any variety to have staff, and press releases over the newsfeeds, and probably to file their intersystem travel plans ahead of time.

“I need,” said Three Seagrass, figuring that clarity was the simpler part of valor, “to borrow the Ambassador.” She gestured at Mahit, who had gone Teixcalaanli-still around the eyes. “She is still the Ambassador, is she not?”

Once he’d sealed the door to his bedroom shut behind him, Eight Antidote could pretend that he had some privacy. He knew better: there were two camera-eyes in here that he was aware of, and another one in the bathroom, discreetly pointed at the window rather than either the shower or the toilet. (That one was to look for intruders and people who might want to kidnap an imperial heir, not for watching the imperial heir wash himself. He hoped. Even so, he’d always showered with his back to the window and his genitals facing the corner of the shower stall.) But shutting the door made him feel alone.

Eight Antidote told his holoprojector to cue up an episode of Dawn with Encroaching Clouds. It was a serial drama with an absolutely enormous costume budget and a set that was partially built out of a real historical warship, a museum piece from four hundred years ago, the same time as when the story took place. There’d been special permission from the War Ministry for using it, during the filming. The current episode he was watching was from the fifth season of six. The fifth season was called Sunlight Dissolves Tendrils of Haze, and it was the part of the story where the Emperor Two Sunspot—having faced down the first-contact negotiation with the Ebrekti and returned through the jumpgate she’d fled through, only to reencounter on the other side her former ezuazuacat, the attempted usurper Eleven Cloud—began a yearlong campaign of attrition against the usurper’s legionary ships. It was Eight Antidote’s favorite part, or at least it had been before the whole insurrection and usurpation last year. Now it was harder to watch, but it made him—feel nervous, and excited, and interested, and a little awful.

Which was how he felt anyway, after talking to the Emperor herself about Nine Hibiscus on Kauraan and the new war, so it worked out.

Eleven Cloud, or the actress playing her, was in the middle of having her Fleet Captains reaffirm their vows of loyalty to her and their acclamation of her as Emperor. Which of course meant she couldn’t just surrender to Two Sunspot, even though they’d grown up together and loved each other. It was a very dramatic episode, with flashback sections where Eleven Cloud and Two Sunspot were in bed together in Palace-Earth, before everything went wrong between them. The sex was pretty graphic. Eight Antidote knew that kids his age probably weren’t supposed to watch Dawn with Encroaching Clouds, there was a no-sex-and-less-blood version of the story of Two Sunspot and Eleven Cloud called Glass Key, which was labeled as appropriate for crèche-school use, but the writing in it was awful.

Also Eight Antidote had never had any restrictions on his media accesses. He’d watched a lot of people have sex on holoproj. It seemed messy and also made people do stupid things afterward.

Probably the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus hadn’t gotten stuck with leading an unwinnable war because of sex, though. It looked more like politics to Eight Antidote, and everyone had politics, even if only some people had sex. He kept thinking about what the Emperor had said: that Nine Hibiscus might be good enough to stay alive. Which was so different from what Eleven Laurel seemed to want him to think—that there was something so dangerous about her, and her people’s loyalty to her, that it was better if she died nobly.

Well, if she died nobly, nothing like what happened to Eleven Cloud could happen to her, and to Teixcalaan through her. Her loyal legions couldn’t convince her to become Emperor if she wasn’t there to convince.

It seemed like such a waste to him, though. To let someone who could come up with how to find a victory on Kauraan just—die, because of what might happen. Not everything was like it had been four hundred years ago. Nineteen Adze didn’t even know Nine Hibiscus, not really, Eight Antidote didn’t think they’d met more than one time in person.

Not everything was like a holodrama, though, either. Even if the holodrama was a visual version of a novel that was a version of an epic poem that still got sung at concerts in the palace. Some things were new, and also recent. Like the former yaotlek One Lightning, and his loyalist legions, and how Eight Antidote’s ancestor-the-Emperor had died. Maybe that was part of the answer. Not letting anyone who had a chance of being like One Lightning close enough to know, or like, or even stick around long enough to think maybe they should be Emperor instead of Nineteen Adze.

Instead of him, too. He didn’t want to think about that.

(Sometimes, when he felt really awful and interested at the same time, when he was already nauseous and unhappy, he would pull up the newsfeeds from the day of the riots and look at pictures of Six Direction dying. He always wondered if he’d look like that, when he was old, when he was dying. That same expression. Probably. It was like seeing the future.)

Next time he went to see Eleven Laurel, he decided, he was going to find out how the war was going, for real.

It wasn’t, Three Seagrass thought, the worst place she and Mahit had sat down together. That was probably the bunker underneath the palace, where they’d watched Six Direction die on live newsfeed. (Or maybe not: that had also been when they’d ended up kissing. Even if Three Seagrass had been about to cry the whole time that had been happening, and had almost certainly ruined the whole experience because of it. It had only been that one time. If Mahit wasn’t going to mention that kissing had happened, she certainly wasn’t either.)

Mahit hadn’t mentioned much, yet. Just extracted her from both the utter disaster of Lsel Station customs and the clutches of not one, but two high government officials, after she’d gone and demanded Mahit come with her. So far, she’d come with Mahit instead. They’d walked through the hangar and out into the deck—so many Stationers, it was fascinating, and most of them ignoring her very pointedly—and Mahit had unerringly steered her through a maze of corridors until they’d arrived at a tiny room. A pod, really, hanging in a rack like a two-person-sized seed, the only thing that could grow from a metal world like this Station—with curved walls and curved couches inside to match. Mahit had keyed it open with her infopad, and it had descended from its row of other, identical pods and opened up for them. Three Seagrass had looked over Mahit’s shoulder while she was calling it (they kept standing close to each other, Three Seagrass was just used to it from back in the City, or at least she had been, and it was simple to pick up the habit again, stand at Mahit’s left shoulder like she belonged there), and thought that the transaction was a financial one.

“You have rent-an-offices on the Station?” she asked, brightly, when they were inside. The couches were a pale grey-blue, one on each wall. There was a table between them. Three Seagrass rested her elbows on it—cold metal—and wished for her Information Ministry jackets, still safely folded inside her luggage.

“They’re efficient,” Mahit told her, “and use-fungible. Also I can’t take you off this deck. You’re not really here.”

“I really did come to get you, though. I’m here enough for that.”

Mahit looked at her for a moment, sufficiently long to make Three Seagrass want to turn away. Instead she widened her eyes and propped her chin in her hands and made herself wait.

Finally, Mahit said, “Did you come? Or did Nineteen Adze send you?”

Her barbarian always did ask the clever questions.

“I came,” Three Seagrass said. “I’m really not meant to be here at all. But it’s on the way to where I’m going, and I did come here for you. Her Brilliance—well, I imagine she knows exactly where I ended up, but it was my idea.”

“She knows where most people end up,” Mahit said.

“She’s the Emperor,” Three Seagrass agreed. “And also she’s herself, so, yes. I should tell you, she sent Five Agate to bother me in a spaceport bar before I left, and I hadn’t filed a single travel plan with the City. She found me anyhow.”

“Five Agate, really. I’m trying to imagine her in a spaceport bar.”

“She wanted me to swear a blood oath that I wasn’t suborned by one of the Undersecretaries of the War Ministry, it wasn’t incongruous at all, she sort of—slots into whatever setting—”

Mahit had reached across the table, and now her fingertips were touching the skin just above Three Seagrass’s right elbow. Warm fingertips. “Reed,” she said—and Three Seagrass felt like a spike had gone right through her throat, no one called her that anymore, Mahit never had before now, but oh, oh—“Reed, are you in the sort of trouble you had to run away from?”

She wished she was. If she was, the next part of this story would be where the imperial agent and the barbarian stole a small fighter-ship and went off through the nearest jumpgate into the black, together. She’d always liked those sorts of poems, even if they invariably ended in tragedy.

She covered Mahit’s hand with her own. “No. I’m fine. I don’t even know Undersecretary Eleven Laurel. I’m supposed to go to war, that’s all. And talk to aliens. Come with me. You’re the best at talking to aliens of anyone I know.”

“That’s because you Teixcalaanlitzlim insist on thinking that I’m the alien,” Mahit said, but so very gently. Three Seagrass didn’t think she was behaving in a way that would need gentleness, not from Mahit Dzmare, but quite honestly she couldn’t be sure; Mahit surprised her all the time, which was also why she wanted to take her to the front.

“You’re only almost an alien,” she told her, firmly. “Wouldn’t you like to meet some real ones? And try to understand them faster than the Ministry of War can shoot them down?”

Mahit didn’t answer her questions, or say yes—or even say no. She said, “First explain why it’s you going to war. And wearing that.”

At least she hadn’t moved her hand from under Three Seagrass’s. “… It’s a very expensive jumpsuit,” she said.

“Are you in disguise?”

“Not currently!”

Mahit actually laughed, and Three Seagrass found herself smirking at her. This, this was what she had missed. The dizzying speed of events, the hilarious and absurd questions that nevertheless needed to be asked. She would never have had this in her office in the Ministry.

“I needed to get here fast, that’s all,” she explained. “That’s why I came through the wrong gate. And several of the stops along the way were—easier if I wasn’t me. Briefly. But you should see my special envoy uniforms. I could have one made up for you, if you weren’t so tall.” She paused. Squeezed Mahit’s hand, knowing very well that she was structuring this conversation, offering and enticing, the sort of manipulation she really oughtn’t be doing to someone she wanted to trust and be trusted by in turn. But she also wanted her to say yes. Needed her to, now that she’d come all this way. “I mean. If you’re willing to serve as Ambassador again. Ambassador, and special political agent seconded to the Tenth Legion, via the Information Ministry.”

Mahit said, “You are in trouble, aren’t you. Or the Empire is. It’s a bad war.”

“How wide,” said Three Seagrass, “is Lsel’s definition of ‘you’?” Unspoken, but entirely acknowledged: Yes, it’s a bad war. We don’t know the nature of the enemy, we’ve lost multiple resource-extraction colonies, you yourself told us how bad it will be if we let these all-devouring aliens move farther into our territory. Why would the Fleet want a diplomat, when they already have warships, if this wasn’t a bad war?

Half of Mahit’s mouth had twisted up, a grimace, close to laughter but suppressed. “Not wide enough,” she said, and for a moment she sounded like—someone else. The way her face moved, too—not quite right. Not what Three Seagrass remembered. Three Seagrass needed to ask her about why she’d been surrounded by her own government’s highest officials. It was Mahit. She was probably up to her hairline in unpleasant and threatening politics all on her own time, if Three Seagrass knew her at all.

(They’d really only been together a little over a week, in the City. A week wasn’t enough to know someone. But that week seemed longer. Fulcrum points usually did. There was before that week, when Three Seagrass had been an ambitious young Information agent with a habit of spending her evenings at court poetry salons, and a best friend out in the City who she’d known since they’d been cadets together; and then there was after, when she was Three Seagrass, Third Undersecretary to the Minister for Information, and her friend was dead, and she hadn’t written a poem, much less read one at court, in more than two months.)

“Are you in trouble?” she asked Mahit.

“When haven’t I been?” Mahit said, and sighed, and sank back into her couch, letting go of Three Seagrass’s wrist. The loss felt like a spark-gap, widened just too far for current to pass through.

“Presumably you were an exemplary student,” Three Seagrass said.

“All right,” Mahit agreed, “I was briefly not in trouble, while safely locked in an examination hall.”

“And now?”

“I would have come back to the City eventually,” Mahit said, after an excruciating pause. “I think I would have. When I thought it was the right time.”

Three Seagrass waited for her. She thought Mahit had already arrived at her decision, but it was better if Three Seagrass didn’t push her while she made it a decision that could be spoken out loud. She’d pushed fairly hard already. Mahit might not forgive her for that, later on. If this went badly for them. Or even—especially—if it went well. Hadn’t she run off just when it seemed like the City and all of Teixcalaan had finally stopped trying to kill her and acknowledged how much it could make use of her, barbarian or not, instead? She might do it again: succeed, and then write herself out of Teixcalaan’s memory and history, make herself a ghost, exiled to her own home.

Mahit shut her eyes, squeezed their lids shut. She pressed her fingertips to the wrinkles that drew themselves up her forehead, twin worry lines. “You’re going to have to make this very official,” she said, muffled by her own palm. “‘The Ministry of Information commands, at the order of Her Brilliance the Emperor’ sort of official. The Edgeshine of a Knife, through her envoy Three Seagrass, demands the immediate presence of the Ambassador Mahit Dzmare on the Whatever That Legion’s Flagship Is Called.”

She had an annoyingly good grasp on exactly how Teixcalaanli communiqués were structured grammatically. It wasn’t fair that she was a barbarian. She’d have made a brilliant Information agent.

“And while you’re at it,” Mahit went on, “please don’t break our import-export laws again? Find a way to have been here officially all along. I would like Councilor Onchu not to find reasons beyond the usual ones to hate me.”

Three Seagrass was going to have to find out what the usual reasons were. But she’d have a while, she thought. She’d have the three-month length of her assignment, and a battlefront. That was long enough to get to know anyone, and all their secrets. Even if they were Mahit Dzmare.

“The Empire is going to remember the colonist-workers of Peloa-2 as Teixcalaanlitzlim who died in combat,” Twenty Cicada was saying to the assembled soldiers, standing rank on rank in the widest hangar bay of Weight for the Wheel—the only space on the ship large enough to assemble all nonemergency, nondeployed personnel. “Your participation in these mourning rites will make sure of it. You will carry the dead of Peloa-2 in your memory; you will inscribe their names on the weapons with which you will avenge them. The blood they spilled will not be drunk by the ground of their planet, but by the Empire that fed them, and feeds you too.”

It wasn’t the usual funeral oration. It couldn’t be, for many reasons: a funeral for so many dead at once could only be done via the modes Teixcalaan had developed either for commemorating space-dead, or the ones for plague victims. Nine Hibiscus was glad Twenty Cicada had gone for a variant on these citizens died in the black between the stars and we reclaim their blood sacrifice from the void, rather than the world is out of balance and illness obliterates our grief and their lives mercifully. They’d had a disagreement about which one to choose. He’d made a disturbingly convincing argument that the eviscerated bodies were plague-dead and the plague was the aliens, a plague that destroyed without meaning, like a virus that killed its hosts so fast that it killed itself, too.

Nine Hibiscus didn’t want that sort of idea spread to the rest of her soldiers, even if Twenty Cicada was usually right about how systems worked, even—especially—biological ones. Having an entire legion of frightened germophobes would cripple any direct engagement with the enemy that happened face-to-face, or face-to-mandible, or face to whatever horror they actually turned out to be. Neither did she want a bunch of overeager captains breaking out the flamethrowers and biochemical sanitizing blanket bombs. The next planet they recaptured might have survivors. She wasn’t willing to give up on that possibility. Not yet.

The Information Ministry spook couldn’t get here soon enough, for her tastes. If she was going to be able to talk to these things at all, it needed to be soon. While she still had even the slightest shred of desire to. A war of extermination, against these aliens, would have a great many Teixcalaanli casualties, more than she was willing to risk, even if the first group of them happened to be someone else’s legion and not her own people. But they would be her people. Her people, who had followed her out to this bleak edge. They deserved better than being bodies thrown into the machinery of a war in order to begin the breaking of its gears. So she had to figure out if there was anything there to talk to, anything worth what had happened to Peloa-2, what had probably happened to the other darkened systems in this sector.

“From this barren soil will grow new flowers,” Twenty Cicada said, intent and dreamy-soft, an enticement made audible throughout the entire hangar, reverberating in everyone’s cloudhook, on the overhead speakers, on the other speakers embedded in the floor, bone-conduction transmission so that a captain’s voice—or an adjutant’s voice, if one’s adjutant could have been a great orator if he hadn’t wanted to be a soldier instead, and had unorthodox religious beliefs besides—could sound inside the skull of every soldier gathered. Be felt, collectively. “They will be hard-won flowers—fragile petals well defended by your hands, with parasites beaten away, warmed by the sunlight of energy weapons.”

The parasites line was definitely Twenty Cicada having feelings about plague. About homeostasis, and balance. Even if the rest of this speech was the usual rousing entry to a collective mourning rite—all of those soldiers would be pricking their fingers for a blood-bowl by the end of the hour, the sort of bowl she could pour out on Peloa-2’s empty factory floor like a promise (and she would do it herself, better her than Sixteen Moonrise, it had to be the yaotlek who led the Fleet)—talking about parasites was entirely from Twenty Cicada’s own philosophy and religious convictions.

Nine Hibiscus trusted him more than anyone else in the entire galaxy, and she still didn’t understand why he didn’t follow the usual Teixcalaanli religion. Spend time in a sun temple and bleed for luck like anyone else. He’d always kept to the religion of his home planet instead—the homeostat-cult, in crude parlance, even though his home planet had been inside the Empire for generations. Her ikantlos-prime fasted and shaved his head and filled his personal chamber with a thousand growing-green plants, and kept the logistical flow of her ship (and her legion, and her Fleet) running in perfect systematic balance. A person’s religion was their own business, Nine Hibiscus had always thought, but—

Parasites.

It probably wouldn’t matter. Most of these soldiers wouldn’t even register the valences. They hadn’t seen Peloa-2. They hadn’t seen the alien ship-spit eat up one of their own Shard pilots—except for the other Shard pilots who had shared her death. Felt her death, all the way down to the last merciful conflagration. They would know. She wondered how this oration was landing with them. The new technology made Shard pilots even closer to one another than they’d been when she was one of them, and they’d been close then—the closeness of people who were willing to die in starfire brilliance, as easy as breathing.

It was almost over. Twenty Cicada had reached the part of the rite which everyone knew: the call and response eulogy-poem that had closed almost all funerals since the time of the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, when it had been written for her dead ezuazuacat Two Amaranth.

“Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” Twenty Cicada began, and by the time he’d finished the syllables of the line, half the soldiers were saying it along with him, a massed voice that made Nine Hibiscus ache with how much she loved them, loved all of them, loved the hungry and clever beast they made together, they her claws and her lungs and her eyes, and she their guiding mind.

“All of Peloa-2, committed to the earth,” Twenty Cicada said, slurring the scansion to make it fit, “shall burst into a thousand flowers—”

“As many as their breaths in life,” Nine Hibiscus said, joining in. Her mouth knew the shapes of these words. How many times had she said them? How many lives had she commemorated in this way?

Enough. Enough to feel ancient, standing here with all of her soldiers looking up at her on the bridge, to feel heavy in the weight of all their regard.

“And we shall recall their names!”

All the soldiers together: “Their names and the names of their ancestors!”

“And in those names, the people gathered here let blood bloom also from their palms,” called Twenty Cicada, and the soldiers with the copper bowls and carbon-steel sacrifice knives began to move up and down their assigned rows. “And shall cast this chemical fire as well into the earth, to join them—”

The bowl and knife came to Nine Hibiscus’s left. She sliced the pad of her left thumb open, right through the scar from the last time she’d given funereal blood, after Kauraan. She healed fast. It was a good quality in a Fleet Captain.

It was probably an even better one in a yaotlek.