A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE first thing that Councilor Darj Tarats of Lsel Station said on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, his hands cuffed behind him in the sort of restraints Three Seagrass assumed were usually used for court-martials or other Fleet unpleasantnesses, was “This is not what I sent you here to do, Dzmare.” He said it in Teixcalaanli, which meant that he wanted everyone else to know that Mahit was his creature and no one else’s. Three Seagrass thought that was, if nothing else—and there was so much else—rude.

His face was cadaverously thin and highly mobile, and he looked like he thought being restrained by Teixcalaanli soldiers was a minor inconvenience of dignity, nothing more. He didn’t engage in the protocol of politesse: bowed to no one, acknowledged no one but Mahit. Mahit, who was standing next to her, color draining from her cheeks like water disappearing into desert sand. She didn’t reply. It didn’t help. Tarats kept talking, and Three Seagrass could feel the attention of all of Weight for the Wheel’s bridge officers settle on Mahit, the stranger in their midst—and on Three Seagrass herself, by proximity and association, if nothing else—like a pack of diving birds, waiting for the silver belly-shine of vulnerable fish.

Behind them, Two Foam’s strategy holomap of the Fleet’s position showed Sixteen Moonrise’s flagship creeping closer and closer to the marked-out location of the aliens’ planet. Not stopping. Accelerating on a vector of her own choosing, and this whole bridge was looking at Mahit Dzmare instead.

You terrify me, Mahit, Three Seagrass thought, and found that the thought was galvanizing—terror and desire were wound so close inside her chest. Maybe she’d always been that way. Maybe it was Mahit’s fault. Oh, but she wanted time to find out. How absolutely starfucked inconvenient, to discover that she wanted anything but to live through this, and live through it a credit to her Ministry and her empire—

When Mahit didn’t respond to Tarats’s first insinuatingly nasty comment, he went right on. “I sent you here to keep this war safely over our heads, Dzmare,” he said, “and what have you managed? Nothing. Not a single communication. The first I hear from this front is the horror that you were supposed to keep entwined with Teixcalaan boiling through our Far Gate and toward the Station—even now Onchu is killing our pilots to keep them away from Lsel. And what are you doing?”

“Negotiating,” said Mahit, thinly, right before the weapons officer, Five Thistle, put a pulse pistol under her chin.

Three Seagrass remembered what Mahit had told her, curled together in the dark: that she was meant to be a spy. Worse than a spy: a saboteur, intended to make this war go on forever, destroy Teixcalaan by attrition and waste. Meant to be a saboteur for this man, who repaid the kindness of sparing his life by putting hers in danger.

Three Seagrass always made decisions wholly and entire. All at once. Choosing Information at her aptitudes. Choosing the position of cultural liaison to the Lsel Ambassador. Choosing to trust her. Choosing to come here, to take this assignment—entirely, completely, and without pausing to look to see how deep the water was that she was leaping into.

“Oh, bloody fucking starlight,” she said, stepping between Mahit and Tarats—between Mahit and Tarats and Nine Hibiscus, too, making herself the center point of a triangle. “If you all would stand down for a brief moment so we can sort out the actionable intelligence this Stationer has brought us from his other inopportune exclamations? There’s quite enough shooting going on outside this ship, we don’t need to start doing it in here.”

Tarats said something in Stationer, which to Three Seagrass was still mostly a sequence of impossible-to-pronounce consonants, and Mahit—didn’t answer him, which was very, very smart. It would be smarter still if Mahit didn’t say a thing in any language but Teixcalaanli until Three Seagrass got that pulse pistol away from her throat. It was pressed so close. Like a mouth would be. Cool and patient, tucked up under her jawline.

No time to think about it. No time for anything! Anything save talking. And talking was what Three Seagrass was for.

“Precisely why, Envoy, shouldn’t I have my officer shoot Ambassador Dzmare, as she is clearly, by her own superior’s admission, a spy here?” Nine Hibiscus asked, soft and even. It was a bad tone. There was no hesitance in it. Three Seagrass needed to destabilize the situation further, before she could have any hope of putting it back together properly.

“Because that would be trusting the word of this man”—she made a little falling gesture with one hand, dismissive encapsulation of all of Darj Tarats—“without spending the time to investigate his agenda. Or Ambassador Dzmare’s. Or mine. It shuts off options, yaotlek, and I believe we were just discussing how useful it would be to keep options open, given the current state of conflict with our enemy and the continued negotiations down on Peloa-2. Unless you’ve changed your mind because of one Stationer in a little flit-ship?”

Occasionally Three Seagrass wondered if she was going to die very young. Now might have been one of those moments. That pulse pistol under Mahit’s throat could be pointed at her own back by now, and she wasn’t about to turn around and check. She was going to be fearless and assured, and it was going to work, it was, it was, it was.

“Your agenda,” Nine Hibiscus said, still viciously calm. “Do you have one, Envoy? One of your own? Separate from that of the Fleet?”

Better. Not good—she probably was going to get shot! Just like Petal had, and wouldn’t he laugh, if dead people could laugh—but better. Having the yaotlek focused on her was far more usable—safer—than having her play Mahit and Tarats off of one another. Three Seagrass shrugged, and said, “I’m a Teixcalaanlitzlim, yaotlek, and an asekreta, of course I have an agenda. But it is a simple one: the Fleet asked for a negotiator and I’m that negotiator. My agenda is to keep talking, and to be sure of any more final or drastic steps than that.” She assembled a self-deprecating smile, wide eyes and a blink.

Nine Hibiscus stared her down. The yaotlek was like a pillar, a statue, a solid point with her own gravity. It was very impressive. She said, “Our enemy is not talking, Envoy. Our enemy is acting. In ways none of us predicted, if the Stationer is correct about their increased presence in Parzrawantlak Sector, as well as what they’re doing to the Seventeenth Legion.”

The scatterpoint lights of the Seventeenth Legion’s Shards on Two Foam’s holomap swarmed and fell to nothing, went up in fire, gathered themselves again, dove forward despite how many deaths they were doubtless experiencing. The whole sector-wide battlefield was evidence enough of our enemy is acting—and even if Three Seagrass thought it was mostly due to Sixteen Moonrise’s forward momentum, it was still true. But it wasn’t all that was true.

“Our enemy might be talking,” she said. “Why don’t you call your adjutant and find out, instead of waiting for him to report back? He was very much alive when we left him. And I doubt a person like Twenty Cicada dies easy.”

The flicker of emotion, concern and upset and anger, that passed through Nine Hibiscus’s face was gratifying. Three Seagrass had her now. She had the lever to move her, to destabilize and reform this negotiation, and—bleeding starshine, if she pulled this off she was going to write her very own epic poem about herself, no matter how gauche. Eleven Lathe had never done a negotiation like this.

“Keep that pistol where it is,” Nine Hibiscus said, “and don’t let the other Stationer out of his restraints.” And then she walked over to Two Foam’s comms console. Two Foam got out of her way. She didn’t bother to sit down—this clearly wasn’t going to be that kind of message—she just leaned in, reached through the holodisplay of death and valor to send a tight narrowcast beam down to Peloa-2, and said, “Swarm, if you can, report your status.”

Three Seagrass kept being surprised by that use-name, even knowing that Twenty Cicada had the absurdity of an insect as his noun-sign. It had to be something related to his religion. She wished, absently, that she’d had enough time with him to really wrap her head around him. How he identified waste with immorality. Really, aside from how he was clever and surprising and confusing, he was the worst possible negotiator to have left on Peloa-2 with the aliens, who killed without understanding individual life and individual contribution—

A crackling, staticky noise. And then words.

Eight Antidote was not his ancestor-the-Emperor, and he was not Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, and for a long moment, standing just inside the door of his own suite like a kid who’d been sent to his room to be punished, he was entirely sure that everything was over. He had tried, and he had failed. No one listened to him; he could be a little spy, and Eleven Laurel’s student Cure, and even Minister Three Azimuth’s favorite new political contact, and none of that mattered, because he was eleven and he’d tried and it hadn’t worked. The war was already happening; by now the message ordering planet-killing destruction was in some jumpgate-flitter’s hands, probably a Shard since they were the fastest and Fleet ships always had priority through the jumpgates, more than any other kind of mail—

Fleet ships had priority.

Shards had priority.

Shards could—if Three Azimuth and Eleven Laurel had meant what he was sure they’d meant—talk faster, one to another, than a message could pass through jumpgates.

And Her Brilliance the Emperor didn’t know about that, at all. The only person—well, the only person who wasn’t a Shard pilot and wasn’t in the Ministry of War—who knew about that, was him. Eight Antidote, imperial heir.

He wasn’t Emperor of all Teixcalaan. Not yet. Not for a long time, probably. But he was the closest thing. His word—his orders—they’d open doors all through Palace-Earth. They’d open doors all through the City.

They would, if there wasn’t another order that superseded them, one from the actual Emperor, be as powerful as any order in all of the Empire.

He needed a sealed imperial infofiche stick. And he needed—he needed a Shard. Or a Shard pilot, but just the Shard would do.

He was still standing just inside the doorway of his room. There was a City-eye camera pointed right at him, he knew that. One on the door, one on the window, one on the window in the bathroom. The City always there, the algorithm watching him, keeping him safe. He tried not to let his expression change. Not show that he was shivering, exhausted-sick, and so full up with the possibility of doing something that he thought he might burst. He needed to be entirely—him. Normal. Disappointed and angry and definitely, definitely not picking up the open, empty infofiche stick made of animal bone that Nineteen Adze had sent him when she’d summoned him to talk to her, nights ago. The infofiche stick carved with the imprint of the sun-spear throne. Definitely not picking that up off his desk, along with one of the automatic wax-seals that didn’t need to be heated up, and going into the bathroom, and taking off all his clothes to stand in the shower—without turning on the shower, he wasn’t stupid, getting an infofiche stick wet while it was open would fry it—facing the tiled corner, away from the camera he knew about and any other cameras he didn’t.

He didn’t need to not be seen forever. He just needed to not be seen for long enough.

It took longer than he wanted, though, to compose the order. He’d never written one before, and his first try sounded like he was pretending to be a character in Dawn with Encroaching Clouds, all ancient verb forms that no one used anymore, even in imperial proclamations. His second try was simpler, and it sounded more like him—which meant it sounded like a kid, probably, but he’d rather sound like a kid than like a fake holodrama emperor.

His Excellency Eight Antidote, Imperial Associate, Heir to the Sun-Spear Throne, he composed, drawing the glyphs in light, on behalf of the government of the star-encompassing Teixcalaanli Empire, to the yaotlek Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth Legion: Teixcalaan is civilization, and it is our job to safeguard it. This order forbids the use of civilization-destroying weapons or tactics on the alien threat beyond Parzrawantlak Sector, including nuclear strikes on civilian-occupied planetary systems, except in cases where such weapons or tactics are the only thing standing between us and certain civilization-wide death.

That was probably strong enough. He wondered if he was in the process of setting policy for Emperors to come, and decided that he could do that, if he wanted. He was himself, and Nineteen Adze had let him be, and this was what he knew was true and right and Teixcalaanli.

He sealed the stick. His autoseals all had his name-glyph on them, but that was fine. He was enough. He had to keep believing that.

Now he just had to get the stick in the interstellar mail—and find a Shard pilot or a Shard itself to try to talk to—

Which meant he was going to have to go back to Inmost Province Spaceport. Immediately the hollowness of his stomach turned into a horrible churning. He didn’t want to. Inmost Province Spaceport was where he’d been when the subway derailment happened. The alarms and the panicking people and everyone knowing what to do except him and no way to get home and incendiary devices, and he still hadn’t heard anything from Five Agate about whether it had been an incendiary, like the one that had killed that woman out in Belltown—or anything about whether it had been his own fault it had happened, someone trying to kill him.

Even before the derailment he’d been terrified.

Terrified and stupid and alone with too many people, and he was so embarrassed about that he thought he might die. Even if no one was trying to kill him, he might die all on his own if he kept feeling this squirmingly pathetic.

But he had to go back. There wasn’t anybody else to do it for him. And he didn’t know where else but the Inmost Province Spaceport he’d find either a Shard pilot or an Information Ministry kiosk for sending imperial messages through the inter-jumpgate mail. His stomach felt like it was crawling up his throat.

Right out loud, he said, “Oh fuck,” for the first time in his life, like a grown person would. And then he threw up, turning his head away from the infofiche stick, keeping it clean.

“Oh, I’m alive, Mallow,” said Twenty Cicada, hardly audible through the hiss and pop of static. Three Seagrass leaned closer to the comms console, as if that would help her hear, even though she knew it wouldn’t do anything at all. “For the moment. I’m trying to figure out if the heat or these claws will get me first—don’t worry, I’m not being chased, I’m a—well, a hostage that talks, or draws at least. I can’t talk long. They aren’t very interested in our unmusical mouth noises, and you summoned all the singers back up to the ship.”

“Don’t talk,” said Nine Hibiscus. “Don’t talk to me. Talk to them. And don’t die. This line is open, and I will send Shards for you—”

“If I needed Shards, I’d already be dead by the time they arrived. Hush. I think they’re drawing fractals. Or—mycelium—”

More static. And silence.

Into that silence, Three Seagrass said, with all the vicious brightness she could summon, “See? Still talking. So I think we should wait for official word from the Emperor before you send in that strike force—because you know that the instant you attack that planetary system, he’ll die down there on Peloa. And for what, yaotlek? What sacrifice are you making?”

Nine Hibiscus turned to her slowly—it was more threatening than a fast wheel would be. Ah, Three Seagrass thought, weight, weight for the wheel, I see, and tried not to let anyone know she wanted to have hysterics. Hysterics were for after the negotiation!

“I’ve already sent to the Emperor for confirmation, Envoy. No need to reiterate that argument.”

“Of course,” Three Seagrass told her, light, light, easy—and then whirled, within her triangle, to face Darj Tarats. “Tell us, Councilor,” she said, dropping a level of formality and making herself sound vicious and bored, a poet having to speak to an illiterate at court (and wasn’t this whole negotiation a sort of version of that hoary old trope? With Nine Hibiscus standing in for the Emperor and the bridge for the glittering fan-vaults of Palace-Earth—ah, but she missed the City, for the first time in a while, and intensely), “just how do you suppose that Ambassador Dzmare is responsible for your purported sudden invasion? As far as I am aware—and I have been with the Ambassador since you so kindly allowed me to borrow her from her deserved vacation at home—she has done nothing but contribute to the universal effort to minimize casualties and elucidate meaning out of meaningless conflict. What is it you said she’d failed to do? Communicate with you? Councilor, when would she have had time?”

It was a masterful little performance, if Three Seagrass was any judge of her own rhetorical abilities. She liked elucidate meaning out of meaningless conflict—it was a good paraphrase of Eleven Lathe, and someone (perhaps only her, but someone) would appreciate the allusion.

But Darj Tarats was depressingly unimpressed. He didn’t respond to Three Seagrass at all—he looked at her, all disdain, and turned to say another brisk phrase in Stationer to Mahit, a blur of consonants. Three Seagrass caught the few words she was sure of: “Yskandr,” and the Stationer word for “empire,” which wasn’t at all the same as the word for Teixcalaan. Mahit, the pistol still under her throat, shut her eyes—the lashes fluttered. When she opened them again, she looked different. Not quite herself. The curve of her mouth was wide. The gesture of her hand broad and lazy. Like she was possessed. Like she was—Yskandr Aghavn, probably.

(And which one of them had had her beautiful hands all over Three Seagrass? What a completely inopportune question for her to fixate on right now! Even if the answer was likely a horrifying both. She was never going to like the idea of imago-machines, was she. Not that it’d matter, if Mahit got herself killed now—)

Even her tone was different when she spoke. First in Stationer—there was that word for “empire” again, and another one Three Seagrass knew, “associate,” because that verb was all over import/export documents. And then in Teixcalaanli, thank every single divinity anyone had ever sacrificed blood to: Mahit saying, “I have been tasked with making aliens understandable, Councilor, and with influencing their behavior toward our Station. As you have always tasked me, haven’t you?”

Oh, but there was a history there. Three Seagrass wanted to know it. Wanted to get her mouth around it, and her mind, and chew it up and spit it out again. If Darj Tarats had demanded that Mahit be a saboteur, what had he asked of Yskandr Aghavn, who had been the Emperor Six Direction’s favorite barbarian? How much of what he had asked had Aghavn refused? How much had Aghavn done?

Five Thistle shoved the pistol up tighter against Mahit’s throat, and she went still again. Silent. The movement of her jaw when she swallowed was a stifled gulp. He said, “Is that not a confession of spying, yaotlek? Stealing our secrets and trying to influence our behavior.” Which was tantamount to should I shoot her now? so Three Seagrass really needed to say exactly the right thing—

But Nine Hibiscus got there first. “One does not, Five Thistle, expect a barbarian to do anything but put her fellow barbarians first in her mind.”

How correct! (Mahit was going to hate that it was correct! Three Seagrass could cope with that later.)

“And yet,” Three Seagrass said, quick interruption, “Ambassador Dzmare was willing to come when I asked her to, to lend her skills to our first-contact effort. To serve not only her Station but all of Teixcalaan. Nothing is ever simple, yaotlek, not with barbarians. Not with Mahit Dzmare, who brought our Emperor to her throne, and warned us of our enemy, and knows us very well—and came with me anyway.”

As she said it, she realized she was apologizing. For the stupid thing with Mahit’s jacket. For not talking to her. For assuming she would come with her, of course she would—and not thinking that when the Empire asked, even in the person of a friend, a maybe-lover, there really was no way for a barbarian to say no and keep being the kind of barbarian the Empire thought of as a person.

That was a nasty realization that she was going to have to think a lot more about when people stopped pointing energy weapons at each other on the bridge. Later. (She wanted there to be a later. Rather badly, at this point.)

“And you, Councilor Tarats!” she went on, trying to talk her way toward that later. “Whatever it is that you wish Ambassador Dzmare had done already—if you continue to push us into believing that she is some sort of agent of yours, the officer will dispose of her, and what a waste that would be. Silencing a voice that speaks in your language, which we nevertheless understand.” She forced herself to laugh, light, self-deprecating. “Well. Understand a little. You have ever so many consonants, Councilor.”

There was a little, breathless, terrifying silence. And then Nine Hibiscus said, “Let the Ambassador go, Five Thistle. For the moment. And shall we have our visitor tell us properly what it is that is happening in Parzrawantlak Sector? In detail, Councilor Tarats. And in a civilized language, if you can manage it.”

The pistol came away. Three Seagrass could hear Mahit’s rapid, indrawn breath. She wanted to hug her. Hold her, maybe. Kiss her, definitely. But that would ruin all of the careful balance she’d just managed to spin, so all she did was look her in the eyes, directly, and smile with her teeth showing. It was possible she was getting better at it.

He was glad he’d thrown up in the shower, because that meant he didn’t have anything else to throw up on the subway, or on the groundcar shuttle from the last working subway station to the spaceport. The City’s investigation into the derailment wasn’t over—or there had been a bomb and the repairs weren’t done. Either way, there wasn’t a subway to Inmost Province Spaceport proper: there was the biggest groundcar Eight Antidote had ever been in, with no seats, just poles to hang on to, stuffed with grown-ups and other children and luggage. He fit right in: probably everyone thought he was someone else’s kid. A whole lot of people looked like they either had or wanted to vomit in the shuttle: it jerked when it started and stopped, and hanging on to the poles was hard, and the luggage kept rolling into the backs of everyone’s legs and knocking them off balance.

The worst part was that he was doing this without a cloudhook. Last time he’d left Palace-Central he’d had a guide, and he’d had the City watching over him—but he needed to move fast and quiet now. He wasn’t sure whether Her Brilliance would let him keep being a spy, keep having the freedom to get in trouble and learn information he shouldn’t know. Or that someone didn’t want him to know. He’d disagreed with her to her face. And now he was in the process of countermanding her orders. If he let the City and all its camera-eyes cross-reference the location of his cloudhook with what images they could capture of him—well. If the Emperor wanted to stop him, he’d be making it easy.

So he left his cloudhook in the subway, right before he switched lines and got onto the horrible shuttle. Took it off to rub his eye—pretending he was a littler kid, an eight-year-old with their very first cloudhook, not used to wearing it—and set it on the seat next to him. When he got up and exited at the Plaza Central One stop (huge, and he was so glad he’d done this once with a cloudhook, because he’d never find his way through its seven levels of interlocking tracks alone) he left it there. Presumably it was still there, going around and around the subway, stop to stop, back and forth. And he was exposed, and free, and inside a crowd tall enough to maybe hide him from some of the City’s eyes, and he hated it. He hated it a lot.

The infofiche stick with his replacement order was tucked inside his shirt, where he couldn’t lose it or drop it or have it fall out. It was a sharp rectangular pressure, pushing into his belly every time some adult jostled him in the groundcar shuttle. When the shuttle’s doors finally opened and everyone inside flowed out into Inmost Province Spaceport, Eight Antidote tried not to stay still, not to stop walking. If he stopped, he’d probably turn around. He didn’t want to be here. The spaceport was so loud, and the subway entrances were still roped off, and he had to walk by a whole squadron of Sunlit and not look to see if their featureless gold helmet-faces had all turned to look at him, recognize him, tell the whole City and the Emperor what he was about to do.

(Maybe tell whoever it was who had derailed the subway to try again. That was a horrible idea, and he wanted to never have thought of it.)

Tulip Terminal to Nasturtium Terminal. At least he remembered the way. He felt like he was a tiny starship projected over a strategy cartograph table, moving on a designed trajectory set by someone else, someone who might have been him back in the palace but was a wholly different person than the scared kid he was right now.

The Information Ministry kiosk in Nasturtium Terminal was exactly where it had been, and there were still two Information Ministry officials inside it, looking bored. Eight Antidote fished his infofiche out of his shirt, rubbed it to polished gleaming on his trouser leg, and then—trying to look like an Imperial errand runner, out of breath because he’d come here as fast as he could, not because he was scared to pieces—came up to them.

“Excuse me, asekretim,” he said. “I have an Imperial order that needs to go into the jumpgate mail on fastest-courier override.”

One of the two raised her eyebrows. “You do?” she asked.

Eight Antidote summoned all the righteous rage of a kid with a job who didn’t get believed because he was a kid, and squared his shoulders. He put the stick on the kiosk with a click. “Yes, I do,” he said. “From Palace-Earth. That’s the Emperor’s own infofiche stick, and it’s sealed with an imperial seal. You can look it up. Don’t you have a reference library of seals?”

“… We do,” said the asekreta, but she was still saying it like she didn’t believe him. “And I’m happy to look up this one—but you do know that fraudulent use of an Imperial seal is a very big crime, right? I don’t have to look this up, if you don’t want me to.”

Abruptly Eight Antidote wanted to laugh. She thought he was doing this for a prank! It was amazing. She clearly had no idea who he was. Maybe she had never seen a close-up picture of him. Maybe he looked older now than the last pictures. Maybe kiosk workers were just really stupid. It was incredibly frustrating—but amazing. He repeated himself: “You can look it up, asekreta. This needs to be on the next courier, all overrides, as fast as possible.”

“Scan this, would you, Thirty-One Twilight?” said the asekreta he’d been talking to, and handed his infofiche stick to her coworker. “Let’s find out about it. Make sure it goes to the right place.”

Watching the stick disappear into the kiosk made another wave of nausea creep up through Eight Antidote’s chest. He really hoped he didn’t throw up again. It would ruin everything right now—

“The kid’s right,” said Thirty-One Twilight. “This is Her Brilliance’s own private-use infofiche stick, and it’s sealed correctly. Hey, kid—why did they send you with this?”

Eight Antidote had already come up with an answer to that. He’d figured he’d need it. “Because I run the fastest,” he said, and smiled, wide-eyed and smug. “And I was on duty this morning, and everyone is really busy in Palace-Earth, what with the war. I said I could come deliver this, and no one with a grown-up job would have to waste half a day on the shuttle since the subway’s still down and it takes forever to get here.”

It was a good answer. The asekretim seemed to like it, at least—or Thirty-One Twilight did. The other one still seemed dubious. “Who’s the addressee?” she asked.

But Eight Antidote knew this part, too. The addressee was encoded in the message, inside the infofiche stick itself. And he—if he was an errand runner, someone not important—wouldn’t know what was under that seal. “I’m not sure, asekreta,” he said. “It’s above what I’m supposed to know about, I think. The imperial staff just said fastest courier, and it is going to the Fleet out on the front lines of the war. The rest is supposed to be inside.”

That seemed to be enough. Maybe. The asekreta didn’t give him back the stick, at least. Instead she said, “It’s five and a half hours from point of origin to destination. You go tell that to your supervisor, all right? That’s the absolute fastest we can go.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Eight Antidote, and tried not to giggle hysterically: his supervisor already knew, because he was his own supervisor. “Thank you! The Empire thanks you, also!”

He thought he’d managed it—he’d done it, his order would be on its way out to the Fleet—but he knew he couldn’t stay to watch the Information Ministry workers send it. That’d be suspicious. Fraudulent, even. He wondered if he was committing mail fraud. He didn’t think so. He had every right to give this order.

It was only what he was going to do next that was almost certainly illegal. No one was supposed to be inside a Shard except a Shard pilot, after all.

The Councilor from Lsel Station did not fit neatly into Nine Hibiscus’s more-private just-off-the-bridge conference room: he sat at the table there like a twisted metal stake driven hard into rich ground. Tall and thin, with a high forehead marked with an old man’s thinning curls. His hands were gnarled, arthritis-bulging where he rested them on the table, and still in restraints. His cheekbones looked as if they might be gnarled as well, with how the skin hung from them, dripping off their sharp and narrow points. He was the Lsel Station Councilor for the Miners, so presumably once he’d been hale enough to work ore out of an asteroid. Or perhaps he’d always been a shift boss. A man born to give orders to lesser men. Here on Weight for the Wheel, Nine Hibiscus found him to be an aberration and a discontinuity: but human. And thus something she could talk to, especially since he spoke language, as well as Stationer.

She sat down across from him, which was the sort of respect he deserved. He was a member of a foreign government. She could do him some courtesy while she interrogated him. And interrogating him would distract her from how strange Twenty Cicada’s voice had sounded—from the hot-spark afterimages of Shard deaths, which seemed to live right behind her eyes now, even though she hadn’t dipped into Shard-sight for more than a day—from the accelerating curve of Sixteen Moonrise’s slow, barely plausibly deniable attack vector.

From how she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop Sixteen Moonrise at all, whatever Emperor Nineteen Adze’s opinion of the matter turned out to be.

“Councilor Tarats,” she said. “The Fleet extends its apologies for briefly identifying your vessel as an enemy ship, and is pleased that no harm came to you in the resolution of that misapprehension. Welcome to the Weight for the Wheel.”

“How very like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, to say I am welcome and have me chained,” said the Councilor.

“How very like a barbarian,” Nine Hibiscus said, before she could think better of it—she missed Twenty Cicada, she missed him terribly, it was much harder to be both the voice of reason and the instrument of threat, with only one person talking—“to take a welcome as a chance to demonstrate ingratitude. I am the yaotlek of this Fleet, Councilor. I rule here as the outreached hand of our Illuminate Emperor, with all Her power deferred to me within my sphere. And I, who could be waiting for actionable communication from my soldiers on the bridge of this ship, am taking the time to ask you to tell me what you know of the advances of our enemy toward your Station. For your sake and that of your people, as well as for us here on this ship, I suggest you begin to give me what we both need to know.”

“What should a yaotlek of the Fleet want with knowing that all her ships and weapons have done nothing but allow her enemy to slip behind her and pour through the jumpgate she guards?” asked the Councilor. His Teixcalaanli was stilted, assembled from parts, full of older forms of verbs—and quite correct, even so. Nine Hibiscus wondered how often this Councilor had talked to his Ambassadors, and how deeply. And in which language.

“To know how many and how fast, Councilor,” she said, “and whether it is worth our effort to send a legion or two to defend your Station, or simply brace behind the next jumpgate and wait to see if your thirty thousand lives are enough to sate the enemy on. For that, a yaotlek of the Fleet would want with knowing.” It pleased her to use his own strange constructions; she could see on his mobile, expressive, confusing barbarian face that he didn’t like it when she did. Perhaps he thought she considered him a fool.

That she did not. She considered him a snake, and she was debating whether Mahit Dzmare was another of the same sort, or merely a person who had been bitten by a snake. Tarats looked at her unblinking, and then began with, “How many? Enough that we have scrambled all our pilots, which we have not done in seven generations; how fast? Perhaps you would like to tell us poor barbarian Stationers how to see the invisible, and then I could tell you.”

She could imagine it: a black-void tide that swallowed ships and people faster than a person could count the losses. She could imagine it, because she had seen it. With her own eyes and with the eyes of her Shard pilots.

Why had she let the envoy convince her not to destroy these—things, these things that had eaten worlds and would eat more, these ship-destroying spitting things that had stolen her adjutant and killed her pilots and might kill her career, or just her body—why would she do anything but try to smash the source of that tide, if she could do it?

“I appreciate your candor, Councilor,” she said, smooth, ice to hide the rage in her throat and chest, the burning engine of it. “In a moment I will send in my chief navigation officer, who will help you pinpoint on our maps the known incursion points. I have one more question for you: does your Station have fast ships? We may need all the help we can get.”

“You would need to speak to Councilor Onchu of the Pilots to coordinate such a use of our resources, and she has reason to wish to keep them for herself,” said the Councilor, beginning to lean forward, showing interest for the first time. “Councilor Onchu disapproves of even my small effort here with you, when you—in all your great power, O Teixcalaan—should have been enough to keep these monsters from our home. She is a little busy, at this moment.”

Nine Hibiscus was about to snap at him, tell him that insulting all of Teixcalaan was not about to save his Station—but before she could, her cloudhook covered one of her eyes with green, green and white, Two Foam calling to her from the bridge: Swarm was talking to them again. Talking to them, and asking for her.

Over the static of narrowcast communication from Peloa-2, Twenty Cicada’s voice had the particular edge that Nine Hibiscus remembered from some of their very first deployments together—a rapid, vivid, sudden prolixity that she’d most often heard when he was sleep-deprived, overworked, and absolutely sure of the shape of the universe because he’d seen the pattern of it. At least he wasn’t calling her Mallow. Or my dear—if he ever did that again, she was going to kill him first before anything else had the privilege of breaking her heart.

He was talking, of course, with Dzmare and Three Seagrass, who had managed to take over the comms console in her absence. Two Foam stood next to them, sharply observant, as if she was waiting for the envoy or the Stationer to commit sufficient treason that she could cut the comm line entirely. Nine Hibiscus had come in on the tail end of a sentence: “—have a fair certainty that I understand not only how they communicate without speaking, Envoy, but also how they communicate faster than we can track—it’s not speech at all, it’s a networked collectivity.”

“They share minds?” asked Dzmare, right as Three Seagrass said, “They share memory?” at the same moment. She and Dzmare abruptly stared at each other, like they had some deep secret between them.

Dzmare said, “Minds or memory. If you can tell—”

“I can’t,” Twenty Cicada said. “Certainly not yet, at least—at the moment we’re still drawing at each other, and they find me and my lack of networked connectivity profoundly disturbing, by the way—and what would memory even be like in a collective network of minds?”

“Mahit?” asked Three Seagrass, as if she expected Dzmare to know the answer to that entirely philosophical question.

Nine Hibiscus had more important questions to ask. “Swarm,” she said, as warm as she could make it over the tinny-sounding void of space between them. “I’m sorry I wasn’t available immediately—how did you figure this out?”

“Yaotlek,” Twenty Cicada said, and he managed to make her title sound like a name, sound like her name, he was that satisfied with himself and that glad to hear from her. “It’s the fungus. That’s how. They give it to their babies, and it—wakes them up, that’s as close as I can tell. They drew me a picture—a small one of them being fed it, and then being connected to all the other ones with these fractal networks. It’s some sort of telepathy drug—or a parasite that’s gone symbiotic—what I wouldn’t give for a team of ixplanatlim and a research institute, do we know anyone on Weight for the Wheel who has a hobby studying parasitic fungi—”

“… I’ve never asked that question,” Nine Hibiscus found herself saying, wondering if anyone would have a hobby like that deliberately, especially on a Fleet ship, which was determinedly free of fungi whenever possible. “I have no idea. The same fungus that killed that medical cadet, you think it makes them a—hive mind?”

“The very same. It wasn’t Six Rainfall’s fault that he died—I still think he had a massive anaphylactic reaction—and besides, our enemies don’t inject the stuff, they eat it.”

“An entirely organic way of preserving memory,” said Dzmare, interrupting them in a low, fascinated tone. Nine Hibiscus ignored her. Hadn’t Twenty Cicada just said that it wasn’t memory the aliens shared, but minds?

“Not sabotage, then, to have that fungus ride along into our ship,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“Not on purpose, no,” said Twenty Cicada. “But nuance entirely escapes me, Mallow, I’m working in rebuses, and they’re talking—or singing—to one another all inside their enormous fungal hive mind—I have an idea. You won’t like it.”

Nine Hibiscus wanted to laugh, to hug him, to have him back on their ship. “What is this idea that I won’t like?”

“I think I am going to eat this fungus,” said her adjutant, her dearest friend, her second-in-command for more than twenty years. “And then I’ll be able to talk to them directly.”

It was the worst idea Nine Hibiscus had ever heard.