A Desolation Called Peace

INTERLUDE

THIS is not the first time this has happened. The place: the depth of Bardzravand Sector, close enough to the Anhamemat Gate that the discontinuity of jumpgate space begins to distort vision. Human eyes—and other eyes, any eyes that function on the old clever model of refraction and reflection, that assembly of light on a retina into image flaring between one neuron and the next—they cannot see what a jumpgate does to space-time. There is an inability to assemble the light into any coherent image. A collapse of meaning.

That discontinuity shivers, shudders, spreads. A portion of it sections off, and moves. A ripple thrown into the black, the afterimage of a stone landing in water. The half-caught reflection of a school of fish, glinting once as light glances off their scales, and then—moving together, angling—gone, unseeable.

This is not at all the first time this has happened, and the last time it did—the last time it did, in the aftermath Dekakel Onchu held the hand of her terrified and half-dead pilot and imagined how the shimmering black between stars could resolve into hungry, lamprey-mouth rings. Could devour the entirety of an imago-line before there was any chance of preservation of memory.

The last time, there had been no steady flow of Teixcalaanli military vessels through the Far Gate. Onchu had hoped that, if Darj Tarats was using all of Lsel Station as bait for Teixcalaan, drawing the Empire through and past them into the maws of those ring-ships—she’d hoped at least she wouldn’t have to deal with any more ring-ships eating her pilots.

Hoped, and is now denied even that.

The message comes in bright and hot, a desperate, breathless cry over long-range broadcast: They hide in the jumpgate, they LOOK like the jumpgate, they’re after me, I’m not fast enough—

And Onchu, sitting in the nexus of Pilot’s Command, for her the true heart of Lsel, no matter what Heritage believed about their room-repository of imago-machines—Onchu, sitting there, has to ask her pilot to not come home. To not lead that hungry thing that Tarats thinks could devour an empire back to the fragile shell of Lsel Station. It is the worst thing she’s ever done. When she dies, she will die thinking of it, like a splinter finally reaching her heart after years of worming its way through flesh. Over that long-range broadcast, she says: Go through the jumpgate. If they’re chasing you make them chase you. Dzoh Anjat—her pilot’s name, or that pilot’s imago’s name, in these moments she slips, she has known so many of her people, in all their iterations—I am with you. Lsel is with you. Take them through the jumpgate and hope the Empire is on the other side to catch you. I’ll be listening—

She does not receive an answer aside from a positional ping. A small shift in that discontinuity around the Far Gate. Dzoh Anjat and her pursuer, gone over. Gone entire.

Dekakel Onchu is very good at listening, and she stays by her instruments for hours and hours. She never hears from Dzoh Anjat again.

(Dzoh Anjat, obedient and patriotic, going to her death, but not the death she expected: Teixcalaan is on the other side of the Anhamemat Gate, yes, but Teixcalaan sees the three-ringed maw of one of their enemy’s ships and cares not at all for one small patrol-craft smashed in the conflagration of their energy-cannon fire—cares not at all, and may not have even seen, or noticed, or thought to look. Only to keep themselves safe from what appears, to the member of the Seventeenth Legion who sees that rippling discontinuity materialize, to be a flanking ambush.)

And Dekakel Onchu cannot hear the singing of the we, not at all. Not how the extinguishing of the voices on that ring-ship does not alter the volume of the song, but only its shape. She thinks language, after all.

She thinks language, and finds herself ragged with tears, waiting for voices that will never come to her, not once while she is alive.