A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER SIX

THE Jasmine Throat, a Succor-class Teixcalaanli supply ship, had begun its journey out of Teixcalaanli space a good three weeks before Three Seagrass had, headed for the war with a bellyful of flash-dried cured meats, energy-pulse chargers sized variously for hand weapons all the way up to Shard cannons, apricots and squash blossoms to rehydrate or chew dried on long deployments, and gallons and gallons of medical-grade plasma suspension fluid. Your standard complement of we don’t know what this war is going to be like, but you’ll probably need to eat, and shoot people, and patch up your wounded. The Jasmine Throat had filed a travel plan, and obtained a transit visa for the sector of space that Lsel Station was in, and was, right on schedule, passing by the Station on its way to the Anhamemat Gate and nastier regions beyond.

Three Seagrass, who had put back on her special-envoy uniform with considerable relief the moment she was alone enough to dig it out of her luggage and strip off the jumpsuit, hailed it as it came into hailing range.

The captain of the Jasmine Throat was ixplanatl Six Capsaicin, who did not sound nearly as surprised as Three Seagrass had expected him to be when hailed by an Information Ministry special envoy and asked for a pickup shuttle off of the local not-quite-imperial, definitely-an-independent-republic-we-swear mining station. Probably he had stranger things happen to him all the time—he was a captain and had managed to earn ixplanatl rank, which meant he’d written some kind of scientific thesis in addition to qualifying himself to fly a military supply ship. A person like that surely had had more inconvenient adventures than this one. He had simply checked Three Seagrass’s identity glyph against his cloudhook, determined she was in fact herself and was supposed to be headed to Weight for the Wheel on assignment. Then she’d sent him Mahit’s assignment: the Lsel Ambassador to Teixcalaan, who had graciously volunteered to contribute her skills to the war effort, considering the proximity of her home culture to the front, also needed to be transported there posthaste. Three Seagrass had made the language very official. She hadn’t needed to; Six Capsaicin shrugged, said, “What’s one more warm body for twenty hours, we’ve got the oxygen and she can’t eat that much, Stationers have standard bodily chemistries,” and informed Three Seagrass that a transport shuttle would be arriving for her and her companion in three and three-quarters hours.

It would be very useful if Mahit would come back by then.

They’d arrived at their—agreement, or decision, inside the fungible rent-an-office, and then Mahit had said that she had some loose ends to tie up, which was entirely transparent: she had to go use Three Seagrass’s offer to get herself out of whatever political tangle she’d been in the middle of. Two Councilors out of—Three Seagrass consulted her cloudhook’s onboard storage memory, pulling up the dossier on Lsel Station’s government—only six. A full one-third of the government right there in the hangar, chummily having some sort of problem on either side of Mahit Dzmare.

So it made sense that she’d need the time. Even if waiting for her was nerve-racking.

Waiting also left Three Seagrass at loose ends, in a place she’d never been, and what she wanted more than just about anything else, right now, was to go wandering and get to know it. She’d promised not to leave the deck with the hangar bay, and she planned to keep that promise, but—oh, it was likely a good two miles of a loop around, and full of all sorts of sights. And when would she have the opportunity to see Mahit’s home again? Probably never. It’d be a waste not to go sightseeing. It wasn’t even sightseeing! It was reconnaissance. She was designed for reconnaissance; she was Information Ministry.

She climbed out of the office-pod and arbitrarily decided to turn left down the corridor. Her cloudhook was next to useless here, aside from communicating with Teixcalaanli vessels that might be inside this sector of space. Once she’d gone through a jumpgate into a sector without a Teixcalaanli repeater station network, it couldn’t talk to the City or to much else; cloudhook technology didn’t cross jumpgates. Nothing crossed a jumpgate unless it went through a jumpgate, physically. All she had was onboard storage, her own documents, and a scaled-down, nonupdating version of the Information Ministry intranet, which entirely lacked a map of the inside of Lsel Station. (If she was really doing reconnaissance, she should turn on her cloudhook’s geomapping function while she walked around, but she hadn’t come here to be a spy. It seemed vastly impolite.)

The corridors on Lsel were wide enough to walk four abreast, and floored in metal polished by many feet to a comfortable matte sheen. The first strange thing about walking inside them was that there was sunlight. Sunlight everywhere. She’d always imagined that a station would be a closed metal box, all artificial lighting and no plants to speak of, nothing that grew. But Lsel’s corridors—or at least this outer loop—had well-designed plastisteel window ports, and outside was the lovely spangled starfield, and a genuine small and cheerful sun with a pleasant white-gold light. It was moving quite quickly, that light—the station’s rotational period certainly wasn’t going to be anything like a day, more like four sunrises and sunsets in a usual human-length cycle. Three Seagrass could imagine enjoying that. All those sunrises.

The second strange thing was the people. Stationers were tall, and Stationers were very, very good at ignoring one another, and even at ignoring small Teixcalaanlitzlim in bright coral-orange uniforms. They didn’t make much eye contact, and they slipped out of each other’s way even in the more-crowded parts of the corridors with practiced ease. Three Seagrass imagined that it was a side effect of living in such a small space; they acted like they were Inmost Province City-dwellers, happy and comfortable with being crowded, and yet she knew very well that there were only thirty thousand of them on the whole Station.

It must be very strange to be one of only thirty thousand of a people. Three Seagrass thought it would feel fragile. Just these thin metal walls between all of you and the void.

Actually it was better if she didn’t think about the thinness of Station walls; she’d make herself claustrophobic. Instead she took another turn—she was in a more inward corridor now, and instead of real windows there were flat infoscreens displaying the outside, which was a fascinating choice—maybe Stationers liked feeling close to the stars all the time—and found herself in a shopping district. Kiosks, mostly. She really needed to learn some more of Mahit’s language; it took her far too long to piece out the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics into phonemes, and even then she wasn’t always sure on vocabulary. Let alone pronunciation.

But half the kiosks had glyphs in understandable language right alongside the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics. Very artistic glyphs, more decoration than communication, and she was pretty sure the kiosk selling bottled beverages didn’t mean to have their Teixcalaanli sign read HERE IS PORKS! unless she had severely misunderstood both the nature of bottled beverages and Station animal husbandry capabilities. Also the plural was terribly formed. It was probably meant to say HERE ARE RICH-UMAMI-FLAVORS. The glyphs were close enough that someone could confuse them, she guessed. Unsweet bottled beverages, then.

She approached that kiosk and smiled like a Stationer, remembering to bare her teeth. The kiosk operator didn’t smile back. Maybe she was doing it wrong—she stretched her cheeks until they hurt—

“I didn’t know there were guests from Teixcalaan,” said the Stationer, in entirely decent Teixcalaanli. “Would you like a sample of our drinks?”

Three Seagrass blinked at him, and stopped smiling with relief. “Yes,” she said. “I would enjoy that. You speak so well!”

“I took courses.” He poured a small amount of his beverage into a plastic cup that looked extremely biodegradable—probably a four-hour cup, organic plastic, with a hydro-triggered decay cycle. The beverage foamed. Interesting.

“What is it made of?” Three Seagrass asked, and then drank it before he could answer her.

It tasted like salt. Like—alcoholic salt, and oceans. There weren’t any oceans here. It was fascinating, and also awful, and she was never, ever drinking it again.

The Stationer said a word in his own language. And then screwed up his face like he was racking his brain for vocabulary, and came up with “Underwater wavy plants?”

“Kelp,” Three Seagrass said. “You made beer out of kelp.”

“Do you think it would be popular in the Empire?” asked the Stationer. “I’ve been thinking about an export contract…”

No, Three Seagrass thought. It tastes like kelp. Blood and starlight, no one would drink that—“Perhaps on some planets,” she told him, brightly. “Teixcalaan is very large.”

“Are you with a trade delegation, miss—?”

The kiosk operator had attracted several other kiosk operators during the conversation. They had samples of their own. How hungry was Lsel for trade with the Empire? Mahit had always been so adamant about preserving their independence …

“I am Three Seagrass,” said Three Seagrass, “and I am afraid I have absolutely nothing to do with trade in an official capacity.”

“A private investor, then,” said one of the other Stationers, also in Teixcalaanli. Three Seagrass hoped her … cake? It seemed like cake—wasn’t also made out of kelp.

“Not quite,” she said, and was about to go on when there was another voice, behind her and to the right.

“What is all this, then?” that voice asked, and Three Seagrass watched all the Stationers draw themselves up to their full ridiculous heights. An authority. A … trade authority. She tried to remember which of the six Lsel Councilors controlled trade. It was Miners, wasn’t it? But she’d met the Councilor for the Miners, the cadaverous man in the hangar. She turned around.

This was not Darj Tarats at all. This was a small, spare woman with grey bubbles of curls and high, windburned cheekbones. Three Seagrass bowed to her and waited for her to introduce herself. Safest—simplest. Let the other person lead, until you can take control of the conversation. That was one of the earliest lessons she’d learned as an asekreta cadet. She used to practice on Twelve Azalea. (She didn’t want to think about Twelve Azalea.)

“I was not aware that a Teixcalaanli delegation had been approved to land, let alone wander around a public market,” said the authority. “And yet here you are. I would have you understand, whoever you are, that Heritage does not allow individual trade agreements between Lsel merchants and Teixcalaanli ones.”

“To be sure,” said Three Seagrass. “I have no interest in violating your local laws. I assume you are from Heritage, then?”

“That’s Councilor Amnardbat,” said the kelp beer merchant, behind her. He sounded like he was worried he was about to be given a truly massive fine, and possibly have his kelp confiscated.

What had Mahit told her about the Councilor for Heritage, back in the City? Three Seagrass couldn’t remember anything specific. Certainly she hadn’t mentioned Heritage being a trade-protectionist faction of the Lsel government. “Councilor,” she said. “I merely was interested in sampling local products. I am not a member of a trade concern.”

“What are you a member of?” asked the Councilor.

It sounded rather like saying I’m from the Ministry of Information would be as poor a choice of stated allegiance as I’m a traveling merchant looking for something peculiar enough to surprise even the Teixcalaanli markets. Someone who disliked trade-that-wasn’t-under-her-control this much was also going to dislike what she would doubtlessly interpret as a spy.

“I am on my way to the war,” Three Seagrass said instead, somewhat grandly. “I am a translator and a diplomat. I will shortly be leaving on the Jasmine Throat.”

All true.

Councilor Amnardbat was unimpressed. “Ah,” she said. “I must have missed an arrival manifest.” Her smile was extremely unpleasant, and Three Seagrass sincerely hoped she’d be off this Station and safely on a Teixcalaanli warship being attacked by mysterious aliens before the Councilor finished looking for that manifest which would explain how Three Seagrass had arrived.

“Have you paid for your drink?” asked the Councilor.

“Not yet,” Three Seagrass said, as breezily as she could manage, which was getting less breezy all the time.

“It was a free small drink,” said the kiosk operator, which was rather brave of him, especially since he clearly didn’t know the Teixcalaanli word for sample. “If the—visitor?—wants a big bottle, I will charge her.”

Amnardbat said, “I’ll cover it. I doubt the Teixcalaanlitzlim has anything by the way of local currency.”

Three Seagrass had plenty of local currency—well, not plenty, not after Esker-1 and the cargo barge bribe, but she had some, and this was quite insulting, but also—useful. Interestingly useful. Perhaps she could make the Heritage Councilor believe she owed her. “I’d appreciate that, Councilor,” she said. “As I mentioned, I am only here briefly, and I had no intention of making purchases outside of our already-extant trading contracts…”

The kiosk operator held out a hand-sized scanner, and Amnardbat waved a credit chit at it until it made a pleasant chime. “That’s done, then,” she said. “Now, Three Seagrass—diplomat and translator or whatever you are—might I walk you back to the main transport hangar? I wouldn’t want you to get lost and miss your shuttle.”

You wouldn’t want me to see more of your Station. Or talk to any more unsuspecting citizens. You’re very angry with Teixcalaan, aren’t you, Councilor. And here we didn’t even annex you—“Of course,” Three Seagrass said, and bowed again. “I am honored that you’d spend your time on such a simple errand.”

“It’s so rare that I see a Teixcalaanlitzlim on this deck,” said Amnardbat, still with that very unpleasant smile. “I wouldn’t miss the chance for the world. Come on, then.”

When Eight Antidote climbed out of the tunnels and into the basement of the Ministry of War this time, Eleven Laurel wasn’t waiting for him; it wasn’t time for their weekly meeting. Eight Antidote hadn’t finished the strategy exercise he’d been given after they’d talked about Kauraan, either—he’d looked at it, seen the complex shape of it, and left its cartographs mostly unopened on his cloudhook and kept thinking about Kauraan instead. But even so, being here without having solved his puzzle first made Eight Antidote feel guilty and worried. He always did his assignments. Even the unofficial ones.

But Eleven Laurel wasn’t expecting him, and he was here to—maybe talk to Eleven Laurel, if he saw him, but more to watch the war with the aliens. He’d started thinking of it as Nine Hibiscus’s war, which he definitely wasn’t going to say out loud in the Ministry of War. He wasn’t dumb.

He just wanted to see a real strategy room, with real communication with a real battlefront, and try understanding that the way he understood the puzzles and exercises. See whether the war was going badly, or well, or unexpectedly. Maybe—if he was lucky—he’d talk to someone here in the Six Outreaching Palms who would like having a maybe-someday-Emperor to show off to. That kind of thing worked on adults all the time, even if he was still eleven. It was only going to work better as he got older. He should get in some practice now.

When he passed the first set of camera-eyes that he knew about, the ones that he thought Nineteen Adze watched for him through, he waved at them and smiled, eyes wide, and went on as cheerfully as he could imagine. Walking cheerfully was kind of complicated—what he wanted to do was break into a run. Not to escape—there wasn’t any escape, some official had probably already sent Her Brilliance a note about where Eight Antidote had gone this time—but to get to more populated places of the Ministry faster. To get away from his usual paths, and see something new.

The Ministry of War was laid out in a six-pointed star (how could it be anything else?), and a long time ago each Palm had probably lived in its corresponding sector. Now, because bureaucracy was more efficient if teams were near each other no matter who they ultimately reported up to (this was something his tutors liked to repeat a great deal, which just told Eight Antidote that they were bureaucrats and didn’t like the thought of moving offices), the six spokes of the star were much harder to find one’s way around in. If a person was looking for a specific individual, that was. Eight Antidote wanted to find the central command room. He wanted to look at a real strategy table for a real war. And all that would be in the middle of the star.

Security increased considerably as he turned toward the center of the building, which meant he was headed the right way. There were all sorts of soldiers in a variety of uniforms: the Ministry uniform, like Eleven Laurel wore, was on most of them, but Eight Antidote saw members of at least seven different legions as well; he recognized the diving-hawk patch of the Eighth on one woman’s shoulder, and the star-shower of the First on another’s, plus emblems he couldn’t place immediately. The first person to stop him—four corridors and one security check that he got waved right through later—was carrying a shockstick half as long as Eight Antidote was tall, grey to match his grey War Ministry jacket. The point of the shockstick rested just above Eight Antidote’s breastbone.

He probably should have been scared.

Not being scared was fun.

He bowed, fingertips pressed together, pushing the shockstick into his chest. Then he said, “I am the imperial-associate Eight Antidote, sir, and I would like to see the progress of our war.”

The shockstick went away so fast it might as well have never been there. “Please forgive my impertinence,” said the soldier, and Eight Antidote waved one hand, dismissive. Magnanimous, he thought. Be magnanimous.

“It’s nothing. I appreciate your efforts to keep the Ministry secure.” And then he smiled, wide-eyed, and remembered how he had made himself look like Six Direction when he’d been talking to Nineteen Adze. Tried it again. Remember me? I’m the Emperor, just in kid shape. Just wait, and I might be the Emperor again.

It worked. “This way, Your Excellency,” the soldier said, having received some sort of confirmation on his cloudhook—Eight Antidote had seen the rapid flicker of messages behind the glass. “You are in luck—the Minister Three Azimuth, she who kindles enmity in the most oath-sworn heart—she herself is at the strategy table right now.”

Which was a little more significant of a success than he’d particularly planned. He’d thought he’d just—see the strategy room, hang around, maybe meet some generals, another Undersecretary—if Eleven Laurel was there, that wouldn’t be bad, he’d be showing initiative and creativity—but the Minister of War herself? That was—a lot. He’d met her, but only once, right when she’d arrived two months ago. She hadn’t paid him any attention then, not after the obligatory good-morning-your-Excellencies, just gone in to speak with Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze. She had a poetic epithet that made her sound dangerous and frightening, but that was what poetic epithets were supposed to do.

The soldier took him into the center point of the Ministry’s star. He knew that the strategy rooms were there—Eleven Laurel had explained that a long time back—all of them except for the one for the Emperor, which was in Palace-Earth instead. Everyone stared at him as he passed, trying to look confident in the soldier’s wake, and wishing so much that he was taller already. He wasn’t going to be taller until he was thirteen at least. Holographs of Six Direction only started looking like a man in his midteens. Sometimes Eight Antidote wished his genetics came from someone who was more physically impressive. At least he was going to be able to put on muscle easily and stay as agile as he was now—

The door to Central Strategy Two irised open for him at his escort’s gesture, and beyond was twilight laced so thickly with stars that for a moment he thought the air had turned into a net. Then he blinked and saw the cartograph table—huge, wider than he imagined they could be, set into the floor instead of raised above it—was projecting four entire sectors of space at once, and that the Ministry analysts and generals had dimmed the lights to see the vector trajectories better. Minister of War Three Azimuth was at the far side of it, her hands moving in sweeping gestures, lightening some stars and darkening others. She made a fist, twisted her hand, and shook out a tiny fleet of gunnery ships from her fingertips, holoimages that she flicked out into the starscape and adjusted with minute nudges. It looked like dancing, like she was dancing the battlefield into existence.

I want to do that, Eight Antidote thought. I want to do that more than almost anything I can think of.

Three Azimuth was small and paler than most Teixcalaanlitzlim, with short sleek hair as dark and thick and straight as Eight Antidote’s own, and narrow almond-shaped eyes. She’d taken off her jacket and was arranging the battlefield bare-armed. She had the kind of muscles that came from lifting herself and heavier things, and putting them down again: ropy and defined. Somehow Eight Antidote always thought of her as being taller. Before Nineteen Adze had become Emperor, Three Azimuth had been the military governor of Nakhar System, and Nakhar hadn’t rebelled while she was in control of it, and Nakhar rebelled every indiction or so usually, according to his political history lessons. He still didn’t know why she’d been the one to become Minister of War, or why Nine Propulsion had retired early, but he was pretty sure that Nineteen Adze had made a really good choice.

It took her a while to notice him. She had more ships to place first, and a whole set of supply-line vectors to adjust, her fingers plucking at the lines of light like they were the strings of some instrument. When she was satisfied, she said, “Barring our scouts locating their supply-line bases, this is where we are,” and brought her hands together in a clap. The whole enormous projection began slowly to move, running its simulation.

“His Excellency the imperial heir Eight Antidote is here, Minister,” said Eight Antidote’s soldier. “He would like to see the war, he says.”

“Well, bring the kid over, then,” said Three Azimuth. “He can’t see a bloody thing from that side of the room.”

Eight Antidote went. He tried to skirt around the edges of the projection, but he still walked through star systems, blanking them out for brief moments in his wake, as if he was the aliens who were destroying Teixcalaanli communications. They were in the simulation too—a spreading blackness, like ink. There were a lot of eyes on him: all the advisors and commanders and analysts here to see Three Azimuth simulate the war were watching him traverse a starscape instead. He tried to walk as cheerfully as he had when he’d waved to the camera-eye. The camera-eyes were so much easier than so many pairs of real ones attached to people. (At least none of them were Eleven Laurel. He didn’t know where Eleven Laurel was. Shouldn’t the Third Undersecretary be here too?)

When he got to Three Azimuth’s side—she was only a few inches taller than him, which made him feel very strange, he was a kid and she was the Minister of War—he said, “Thank you for allowing me to see the strategy simulation, Minister,” in the second-highest form of politeness he knew. (Highest was for talking to the Emperor Herself, formally and in public, and he only knew that one because he’d grown up hearing it. It didn’t get used much.)

“I expected you’d find your way in here eventually,” said the Minister. “You’ve been in the Palms enough, and kids your age get curious. I know I was. Watch.”

Eight Antidote nodded, quickly, and turned to look at the simulation. Three Azimuth made a tiny gesture with one finger, and everything which had been paused began to move again, the alien darkness encroaching, the pinpoint-holograms of Teixcalaanli ships arcing through the air. Three Azimuth knew about his visits—of course she did. Did she know what Eleven Laurel had been teaching him? Did she think he was doing a good job?

Abruptly the scope of the strategy projection felt like a test, the biggest one Eight Antidote had ever taken. He watched closely. He hadn’t seen the positioning of their fleet before, not in this detail—a single six of legions, with Nine Hibiscus’s Tenth Legion in the lead, arrayed like a wave about to crest over the blank-dark systems the aliens had touched already. They held position for a long time—shifted, some ships from the Twenty-Fourth Legion coming forward, sending tendrils of light into one of those darkened spaces until it relit in dull grey, Peloa System back inside the world but—damaged? He checked the datestamp on the projection where it floated at the corner of his vision. This was all what had already happened. There was a brief stutter-pause—Three Azimuth opened one of her hands like a flower blooming—and suddenly all that black nothing was replaced by a force of spinning three-wheeled ships that Eight Antidote had never seen before.

They moved like they were carrying jumpgates with them, flickering in and out. While he watched, the entirety of the Twenty-Fourth Legion and half of the Tenth—including Nine Hibiscus’s flagship, Weight for the Wheel—exploded into energy-cannon fire and then into scorched nothingness; or else were struck by some kind of strange liquid weapon and went blank and still. The simulation wound down. The remaining legions in the Six limped back into Teixcalaanli space through the jumpgate.

All of those soldiers would be dead. Dead fast. A legion was ten thousand people, maybe more—a legion and a half dead in a few days would be at least fifteen thousand and—

What if the aliens follow them home? Eight Antidote thought, with a spike of horror. Follow them all the way back to us, sector after sector, and come here to the City and eat us—

“That’s enough,” said Three Azimuth, and the simulation stopped. “Revert to the baseline.” All the ships blinked back into existence, as if the horrible slaughter had never happened.

“Do they move like that?” Eight Antidote asked. He tried to sound calm, even though he wasn’t calm at all. “Our enemy.”

“I hope not,” said Three Azimuth. “Otherwise we’re fucked. Pardon my language, kid.”

Eight Antidote decided not to respond to that. He’d heard a lot worse. “But they might move like that. Like they’re … jumpgates.”

“What we know is that they come in and out of visibility like they’re coming out of a jumpgate,” Three Azimuth went on. “Run it again—the second option, with cloaking but not asynchronous movement.”

The simulation started over. It went better—sort of. If the aliens were just invisible, the Fleet ships could triangulate, pin them down eventually—but it was slow, and a lot of the Fleet died first in the process of finding the enemy. Eight Antidote watched as the Minister directed her analysts to push reinforcements through the jumpgates into the battlefront sector—watched the supply lines get skinnier and longer. And the constraint of the simulation was that Teixcalaan didn’t know where the enemy supply lines came from, didn’t know where their home planet was, or a nearby central base, or if they had a home at all or just lived in the void of space all the time. It was a hard constraint. It meant the Fleet had to go slow, piecemeal, and get ambushed while they found where the enemy was lurking.

“Doesn’t look very good, does it,” she said, after a good ten minutes. Waved her hand. The simulation reset again.

“Not really,” Eight Antidote said, warily. “… There should be a better way to find them than letting them ambush us.”

“So there should,” the Minister said. “Got any ideas, or has my spymaster just been letting you solve old problems?”

It was a test. And now all of the advisors and generals and analysts and the soldier who had brought him to this room at the point of a shockstick, however deferred, and probably Eleven Laurel too (my spymaster, the Minister said, and Eight Antidote felt a little sick to his stomach) were watching to see what he’d do.

It turned out that there was a place you went after you were scared. A big, cold, bright place inside your head. Eight Antidote thought this was a good thing to have discovered.

“May I?” he said, gesturing at the simulation. “It would be easier to show you, Minister.”

Three Azimuth had the kind of expression Eight Antidote couldn’t figure out; one of those adult faces that wasn’t surprise or admiration or displeasure exactly, but something else, something combined. She blinked behind her cloudhook, adjusting the simulation’s control settings. It was one of the enormous ones, a pane of glass that extended from mid-forehead to cheekbone and curved around her skull to cover the ear on that side—or where the ear would be, Eight Antidote noticed, a sudden realization that seemed as much part of his new cold bright place as anything else. She didn’t have an ear on that side. She had a burnt and twisted place where an energy weapon had gotten her ear and melted it.

Real combat was different than the strategy table simulations. He needed to remember that, for when he was Emperor.

He stepped to the front of the room. Took control of the simulation—it had so many more variables than the problems Eleven Laurel had been setting for him, but the program was the same. He knew how to make the Fleet ships move, and the simulation’s AI would move the aliens for him, in the dark where he couldn’t see.

The ships he placed flew from his fingertips like they’d flown from the Minister’s, though he knew he didn’t look half as elegant as she did when she’d danced them into being. He arrayed them in a net, carved the blank sector into cubes like he was using a legion to lay out a garden for planting. Then he gathered a smaller force, all Eternal-class flagships and fast scout-gunners, who would be mobile: if the sweeps found the enemy, the strike force would move in to support them, fast and with firepower. It took longer than he wanted to set up—some ships had to stay by the jumpgate, and the supply lines were so long, sectors long, with jumpgate delays built in. The weight of all those eyes on him felt very heavy by the time he was ready to say, “All right. Run it,” like he was a grown yaotlek, a man who made decisions.

“It’s not bad,” said Three Azimuth, but she didn’t run his simulation. “It’s not bad at all. The net pattern is smart, in fact. But the Eternal-class ships don’t move that fast. They won’t be able to get to where you need them with a net that big. We tried it—oh, before you were born, I think. A sector-wide net pulls the supply lines to nothing. And you’ve used all the legions like one enormous legion—which has its merits, mind you, but a yaotlek’s six is six minds together, and they don’t always move as one…”

“You’re saying,” Eight Antidote said, “that I forgot about politics?”

Three Azimuth laughed. “I’m saying you did very well for someone who’s never been off-planet, let alone been a soldier.”

“I wish I could see it,” Eight Antidote told her, knowing he sounded like a kid, asking for things he couldn’t have, and not being able to help himself from doing it.

“The war?” asked the Minister.

Eight Antidote had meant the simulation he’d just designed. But—“Yes,” he said.

“Can’t let you go out there; there’s only the one of you, and Her Brilliance would be pissed at me.”

“How about here?” he asked. “I can see a lot from right here next to you.”

“You are a nasty little viper,” said Three Azimuth, and actually ruffled his hair. Her hand was warm and calloused and entirely surprising. “How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Blood and starlight. I was painting my toenails at eleven. All right, kid. Show up here in the morning, and we might make an Emperor of you someday.”

Against the rush of satisfaction and excitement, Eight Antidote thought, What will Eleven Laurel say to me? I should have asked him first—and tried to hold on to that worry so he wouldn’t jump up and down and look like someone who was young enough to be painting their toenails instead of learning how to run a war.

Mahit left Three Seagrass in the rent-an-office to arrange for their passage off-Station and into the war. Left her there because she needed to think, needed to breathe for a moment without looking at her, without looking at the impossibility of her presence on Lsel. She leaned her back against the metal corridor a few turns of the deck away, eyes shut, trying not to shake.

Yskandr whispered to her.

I don’t know if we’re friends. She—needs me, or thinks she does.

Briefly. And if I go, we are never going to be able to come home—no one here will protect us, you heard Tarats’s offer—

She was walking, without meaning to be walking. Following Yskandr’s memory like a thread, a path he used to take: up four decks and into the vast and bustling offices of the Miners’ Coalition, the engine of economic policy for Lsel. Slipping past desks and busy Stationers working at them, all the way to the Councilor’s office door. Yskandr leading her. She was letting him. They were doing this, and if how it was happening was the integration she had been waiting to experience, it was both wrong (she was never supposed to give up this much control to her imago, to ride inside his judgment and his momentum, to let go of her own volition so easily) and a profound relief.

Tarats’s secretary, a tall woman whose name Yskandr couldn’t remember and Mahit had never known, took her name and disappeared into his office. She was only gone for a few minutes.

“The Councilor will see you,” she said. “He said to tell you he was expecting you.”

Mahit nodded, thanked her, and strode through the door when the secretary held it open. She wasn’t even moving like herself; Yskandr’s center of gravity was higher. He led with the chest, like a male-bodied person would. She should stop, right now. She should pull back, right now.

Yskandr said to her. us.>

Out loud, she—they—said, “Councilor Tarats,” and even shook his cadaverous, arthritis-twisted hand when he came around his desk to offer it. No bowing over fingertips here on Lsel. The old-fashioned way of greeting, instead. Hand to hand. The continuity of the flesh.

“What have you done with our Teixcalaanli visitor?” Tarats asked her. “Did you stash her somewhere, or did you space her?”

“Stashed,” said Mahit, and then—oh, because she did, horribly, trust Yskandr to get her through this after all—grinned, his grin, too wide for her face, and knew her eyes were bright and gleaming-conspiratorial. “Why would I space an asset, Tarats?”

Unspoken: I wouldn’t. Are you going to? Even if that asset is me?

And, an echo:

“Sit down, Dzmare,” said Darj Tarats. “Let’s have ourselves a discussion about what you plan to do with the envoy if it isn’t consignment to the void.”

“Go with her, of course,” Mahit said. Yskandr had a blitheness to him, an inexorability, which she thought he’d learned from Nineteen Adze: not her own headlong momentum but a calculating belief in his inevitable success. She borrowed it now. “You engineered a war to entrap Teixcalaan, Councilor Tarats. You and my predecessor, though he didn’t want it. And the war is happening, right over our Station’s head, right through our sector. And you have no eyes, Councilor, on that war.”

“You mean to say, I have no eyes yet.”

said Yskandr in her mind.

“I mean precisely that,” Mahit told Tarats, firm, serene. Relying on Yskandr to be serene for her, to keep her heart from racing, her throat from locking up. “I’ll go with this envoy to her war, and I will be your eyes. I’ll be Lsel’s eyes, as I couldn’t be in the City.”

A long time ago Tarats’s voice might have been silky, but all the weft had worn away, and the warp of the sound was harsh. “If you mean to do this for me, Dzmare, I will not have you hide from me like Yskandr did.”

“My predecessor and I are in agreement on this course of action,” said Mahit, which was true enough for the moment. She grinned another Yskandr-grin. The stretch was getting more comfortable. “A full and accurate account of Teixcalaan’s military activities, Councilor, to the best of my knowledge and analysis. Everything.”

Let me be useful again, so that I’m worth protecting.

“That’s the beginning of a promise.” His hands were mobile, punctuation for the shape of his words: inelegant with arthritis and elegant regardless as they gestured. “All your eyes can see and your analytic mind can interpret: good. But why would I want to watch a war, as you say, of entrapment? I’m not a sadist, Dzmare. I don’t have any interest in the detail of Teixcalaanli failure.”

She tried to not to feel Yskandr’s spike of anger. Tried not to think of the scent of juniper gin, of draw a monstrous thing to its death. “And yet you took this meeting with me,” she said. It was a gambit: if Tarats didn’t want her eyes, what did he want?

“I did,” said the Councilor for the Miners. “What else would you do for me, Mahit Dzmare, out amongst the Teixcalaanli warships? I wonder. You were very good at arraying all of the politics on the Jewel of the World to our advantage, when you had to.”

Wary, Mahit asked, “What is more to our advantage than what is happening now, Councilor?”

Tarats smiled, a brief unpleasant flash. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Go to war, Dzmare. Go to war and—if there is an appropriate opportunity, of course—array the politics of the Fleet to ensure that Teixcalaan remains at war. Unable to win. Unable to retreat.”

“How,” Mahit began, because it was easier to ask how than why, than to acknowledge out loud that if she wanted to escape Heritage’s surgeons, she would have to render herself into that hook that was meant to draw Teixcalaan to attrition and death—

Yskandr told her, vicious. Her hands spiked to invisible neuropathic fire.