A Desolation Called Peace

INTERLUDE

DEKAKEL Onchu is not the sort of person who stands on ceremony, or bothers with channels of communication when she could achieve the same results by simply taking advantage of her own authority. She is the Councilor for the Pilots; her imago-line is the oldest imago-line on Lsel Station. Sometimes, if she is tired enough, she dreams fourteen generations back: the great calculations for maneuvering what had been a ship-world to a point where it could forever be still, a home for all its travelers at last. She never remembers the numbers when she wakes, but she remembers being someone who knew how to find them.

That is all the authority she will ever need to walk directly into Aknel Amnardbat’s office without appointment or announcement. She has questions she wants answered, and she will have her answers now. There will be no further slippery avoidance regarding sabotage. There will be no further waiting for semidisgraced ambassadors to decide to finally admit what Dekakel had suspected to be true all along. And there will be no chance for Councilor Amnardbat to neatly slip away and refuse to talk to her fellow Councilor, like she had in the cargo bay when Mahit Dzmare had so unceremoniously been allowed to be nigh-on kidnapped by a Teixcalaanli envoy.

Amnardbat is behind her desk. She has the grace to not look surprised when Dekakel walks through her door; perhaps her secretary managed to send her a warning message. Dekakel does not sit down, even when Amnardbat gestures at the chair opposite her own. Sitting down would imply a certain equality between the two of them that Dekakel no longer feels.

“Councilor,” says Amnardbat. “How can I help you?”

“You can tell me why you let Dzmare get onto that shuttle when you’d convinced her you wanted her here badly enough that she came to me for rescue. Let’s start there. Councilor.”

Aknel Amnardbat has a face that settles easily into serene and confident distaste; the bubbles of her curls and the pleasant high arches of her cheekbones are accustomed to the look she gives Dekakel now. “I don’t care what happens to Dzmare,” she said, “as long as she isn’t on this Station. I don’t care one bit, as long as that imago-line isn’t here, twisting whatever it touches. If that Teixcalaanlitzlim wants her, she can have her.”

Dekakel doesn’t let herself be shocked. That imago-line. Aghavn and Dzmare. Twisting whatever it touches. No wonder Amnardbat had sabotaged Mahit Dzmare: she’d wanted to kill the whole line, and that line was only one imago-machine strong, if you didn’t count Tsagkel Ambak, and Dekakel doesn’t—she wasn’t an ambassador, she was a negotiator, and a long-gone one. Aghavn’s reticence in returning to Lsel had made sure of that. Sabotage, and let the Empire deal with the wrecked remains of an ambassador; it’d probably kill her its own self.

“And if she’d stayed on-Station? What would you have done with her then?”

“Why does Pilots care what Heritage does with an imago-line? You are out of your jurisdiction, Councilor Onchu.”

“Pilots always cares what Heritage does,” Dekakel snaps, “since Heritage holds our imago-lines as well as everyone else’s—tell me, Aknel, that you aren’t making unilateral decisions about line corruption and suitability, tell me that true, and I will walk out of here and leave you be.”

“I’m the Councilor for Heritage,” says Aknel Amnardbat. “My mandate is to preserve Lsel Station. Are you questioning that mandate, or my adherence to it?”

“That wasn’t no.”

Amnardbat looks at her, and deliberately, slowly, and with intent—shrugs. “Someone, Councilor, needs to make decisions that preserve not only our lives, and our sovereignty, but our sense of ourselves as ourselves. That’s what Heritage is for. That’s what I’m doing.”

“And if Dzmare were to come back?” Dekakel isn’t sure why she asked that; she’s fairly certain that Mahit Dzmare is going to die at war, along with a great many Teixcalaanlitzlim.

“Then I’d want to carve that machine out of her skull, Dekakel, and space it, and see if there was anything left of her worth keeping on-Station if she woke up. Poor woman. I do take a little of the blame—had I given her another imago rather than Aghavn’s, perhaps her xenophilic obsession could have been ameliorated.”

“Why didn’t you, then?”

Amnardbat sighs, put-upon. “Someone needed to be a sacrifice to the Empire, and her aptitudes really were outrageously green for Aghavn’s imago. Might as well be her. And it gets them both off our decks, Councilor.”

Chilled, Dekakel asks one last question: “Is there any other line you’ve done this to?”

“Is there a line you’d recommend?”

Dekakel will remember the easiness with which Aknel Amnardbat answered her for a very long time; the easiness, and the way she abruptly knew she couldn’t trust any imago-line that this woman had touched to be unaltered. How clearly she saw what Amnardbat was, in that moment: a person who so loved Lsel Station that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve it.