A Desolation Called Peace

INTERLUDE

IN all the vast reach of Teixcalaan, it is an honor for a young person sworn to the Six Outreaching Palms to be selected as a medical cadet for the Fleet: the Fifth Palm, medicine coupled close with research and development, is the second-most difficult placement to achieve within the Ministry of War. And thus it is a greater honor still to serve on an active battlefront before the completion of one’s mandatory years of training, and perhaps a further honor yet to be allowed, under no supervision but the watching eyes of Weight for the Wheel’s security cameras and biohazard containment detection algorithm, to clean up the remains of an alien autopsy.

Six Rainfall, two and a half indictions old, young enough to still have acne at his temples that he judiciously scrubs at with astringents each morning before putting on his uniform, is—by his own intimation but also by the evaluations submitted quarterly by his superior officers—quite good at his assigned tasks. He is the sort of soldier-to-be that might be headed for command of a medical bay of his own, in sufficient time. A person who takes both scientific and health-conscious initiative, his last supervisor had written—and that, amongst other factors, had put him here, transferred from one of the Tenth Legion’s smaller ships to the flagship itself.

Currently, he has set his cloudhook to talk to his audiophonic augments and is playing his favorite new album quite loudly into the bone-conduction points in his skull while he cleans the lab and carefully packs away various alien parts in cryostorage. He’s three months out of date on the shatterharmonic music scene, which is what he gets for signing up for a two-year stint with the Fleet without any ground postings, but he’d snagged this album off of an entertainment vendor at the last big jumpgate station they’d stopped at between Kauraan and this back-of-beyond killing field. It’s the latest release from All Points Collapse, who are, in Six Rainfall’s opinion, the shattermost of shatterharmonicists, and next time he takes leave, he’s going to make sure it’s on a planet where they’re touring live. The harmonies sing in triplicate in his skull, and he hums along with them as he packs alien bits into appropriately labeled containers and carries them into the cryostorage unit. He’s wearing latex gloves, of course. And a breathing-mask filter. That’s standard for disposing of any autopsy remnants, and alien autopsy remnants obviously require strict protocol adherence.

Six Rainfall is good at protocol adherence, except for his tendency to play music when he’s working.

The alien is disturbing. It has had its rib cage opened up like deeply unpleasant bloody wings, and its head nearly disarticulated from its overlong neck, all the vocal folds exposed and dissected. Six Rainfall has never seen a dead alien before. Or a live alien before. He peers at it, half to feel the squirming atavistic fascination of being disturbed, and half because he’s quite genuinely interested in it. He tilts its heavy skull back to get a good view of the dentition; the lolling blue-black tongue splotched with pink; the sporelike structures in the oral cavity, white fungal tendrils extending down from the soft palate—

The sporelike structures in the oral cavity which definitely were not described in the autopsy report that Six Rainfall read with great and extremely specific attention before he came in here.

In his ears, the shatterharmonics are a glittering fall, and they do what they have always done for him: make him feel brilliant and fearless and serene in his curiosity.

It’s not exactly a bad idea, what he does next. It’s only a bad idea because he is so sure it was a good one, and because he moves so quickly. Of course he needs to take a sample of those spores—of course he needs to confirm that they are in fact fungal infiltrates, and if they are, immediately report them to his superior officer and from there on up to command, who need to know if the aliens-who-are-their-enemies are not mammals at all, but instead—and here Six Rainfall engages in a surprisingly accurate fantasy, though he will never know it—vessels of some sort of fungal intelligence.

His hand, appropriately gloved, in the maw of the enemy. His fingers encounter the spore-tendrils, and break them off. They’re friable. Easy to aerosolize. Fungal infiltrates are. Always have been. These especially, though Six Rainfall doesn’t know it. These hardly ever need to be as solid as they are now—to grow outward, questing unhappily for somewhere new to dwell within, for an end to silence and rot, for escape from the ruin of a home. Six Rainfall pulls his prize out of the alien’s mouth, thinking with a sick and excited worry that he is so very glad of his breathing mask, so very glad indeed, because these things are probably emitting spores all over the place now that he’s broken them off. He’s going to have to put the whole medbay under contaminant/containment protocol. Right after he gets this stuff under a microscope—

He doesn’t notice, pulling the spores out of the alien’s mouth, that the sharp cutting edge of its teeth—carnivore’s teeth, scavenger’s teeth—slices right through his glove, and right through the pad of flesh at the base of his thumb. It doesn’t hurt. It is too sharp to hurt—a tiny, perfect incision that Six Rainfall ignores entirely. He has a microscopic analysis to perform.

It is fungal, under microscopic analysis. Not a fungus Six Rainfall knows, but he’s hardly a mycologist. Mycologists are usually ixplanatlim, and what Fleet soldier has time for that kind of training? You have to write a thesis, and Six Rainfall would rather be patching up soldiers any day. But he thinks this is a fungus. It’s not anything else, at least, which means it is utterly worth transmitting up the command chain. He takes quick holoimages with his cloudhook connected to the microscopy scan, and composes a brief and breathless missive, the sort of thing that doesn’t even need an infofiche stick. It just says PRIORITY MEDICAL: ALIEN CORPSE IS GROWING ALIEN FUNGAL INFILTRATES, SEE ATTACHED and goes straight to the cloudhooks of everyone associated with medical on Weight for the Wheel, plus Twenty Cicada, who Six Rainfall thinks of only as the adjutant. Twenty Cicada has put himself on all of the ship’s priority message lists, which Six Rainfall does not know about but would find supremely annoying to imagine if he did: stars, so many interrupting messages all the time, it’d be distracting as anything.

Because Twenty Cicada is on all those message lists, he almost arrives to the medbay in time to change what happens next. Almost. But not quite.

Six Rainfall leans in to get a better look at the microscopy, spin the holo around, and see if he can get a more complex and clear idea of how the fungal spores grow; it looks like a fractal, like a neural net, and he’s really very curious. He lifts a hand to spin the holoimage in the air, and feels something hot and liquid drip down his wrist.

Red. Blood. His blood.

He stares at it. He thinks, I don’t remember being hurt.

It hurts now. His thumb. His wrist and fingers. A kind of burning. Like noticing the blood has made it hurt.

He pulls the glove off. It is full of blood. His hand is thickly coated with red. It looks wrong. The blood looks wrong. Blood shouldn’t be as—thick as it is, like all of his clotting factors have gone wild. He’s horrified. He is pretty sure he’s in shock. His breath comes in tight wheezing gasps.

He turns his hand around. The cut is below his thumb, and it gapes wide open, the lips of it spread with white fungal structures. Just like those that he has put under the microscope. They’re growing out of him.

They’re growing. More of them bloom from the wound, fast enough that he can watch. His skin splits at the edges of the cut to make room. That hurts, too, inside the larger hurt. The low strange burning. How he can’t get a breath. There’s a nest of infiltrates, inside his thumb—he lifts his other hand to try to tear it out, try to get it out of him—

They break easily. But they keep blooming. There’s more. They go deeper. They’re in his veins, his arteries—choking them with white along with the red. That’d explain the clotting factor problem, he thinks. He gasps. He wonders if they’re in his lungs or if he’s just having an anaphylactic exposure reaction, and then he is on the floor, and then there is—

(a chorus, like distant screaming, like the music still playing on his audioplants is echoed and made strange, full of voices that no shatterharmonicist had ever sung, some reaching noise, singing we—)

—absolutely nothing.