A Memory Called Empire

INTERLUDE

AGAIN, the vast reach of space: the void and the pinpoint brilliantine stars. Ignore the map; leave it behind. No maps are adequate for what has happened here, at the Anhamemat Gate in Lsel Station’s sector of space. Surrounding the discontinuity which marks the existence of the jumpgate—that small stretch of unseeable space, the place the eye and the instrumentation glance off of—there is wreckage. Some ships have died here, along with their pilots. Some ships have been killed here.

The thing which has killed them is vast, and shaped like a wheel within a wheel within a wheel; it has tripartite spin and a sleek dark grey metallic sheen, and a sort of intelligence. Enough for hunger, at least. That the dead ships attest to: hunger and violence. What they do not attest to is an intelligence that can be spoken to or negotiated with. Not yet. As of yet, what Lsel Station has learned from the predator beyond the Anhamemat Gate is how to run. The last ship to see it has made it all the way back to the Station, and not led it after them, either: if it hunts, it does not chase prey back to the den. It has some other purpose for the ships it kills with such impunity.

Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, sits in the medical facility across from the pilot who has seen that hunting thing: he is being very thoroughly examined by a doctor, but he has the wherewithal to tell Onchu exactly what he saw, three times. She makes him repeat it three times. She will need to remember every word. She will remember also the drawn horror in her man’s face, how the shadows under his eyes have spread in deep pools. She knew this man—Pilot Jirpardz—before he was himself; she knew also the imago he carried, a brave woman named Vardza Ndun. Vardza Ndun, who had trained Onchu herself, before she died and gave her memories to the imago-line that Jirpardz inherited. Onchu is having trouble imagining anyone even partially made up of Vardza Ndun being this frightened, and that frightens her. (It frightens as well Onchu’s own imago, long-absorbed into an echo-flicker of warmth and a voice she thinks of as her better self, her better reflexes—the man who taught her not to fly but to soar through space, who knew his ship like he knew his own body, and who gave to her that skill. Now she feels him like a spasm, an ache of upset in her gut: gravity’s wrong, something is out of phase.)

What frightens her more: just this morning she had news come to her desk from a freighter captain who had docked briefly at Lsel to refuel and take on a cargo of molybdenum, and had just enough time to discreetly inquire if there had been any reports of large, three-ringed ships moving through this sector, like they were moving—like they were massing—in the sector he had come from, three jumpgates away.

It isn’t just Lsel Station’s problem, Onchu thinks, her hand wrapped around Jirpardz’s hand, pressing it in thanks. The freighter captain hadn’t figured out how to talk to the three-ringed devouring ships either. But he was adamant that they weren’t human enough to talk to, and Onchu isn’t entirely sure anything’s not human enough to talk to.

There’s only one other Councilor she can bring this information to and have hope of keeping it secret while they decide what to do with it, and she wishes it was anyone but the one she’s got. She is going to have to speak to Darj Tarats. She needs what allies she can get, even suspicious ones.

Dekakel Onchu is not a conspiracy theorist: she is a practical, experienced woman in her sixth decade, infused with the memory of ten pilots before her, and she thinks she can manage Darj Tarats, even if he is playing games with Teixcalaan, and has been for decades. He sent the Empire an ambassador, and Aghavn had sent back—oh, an open line of trade, which had enriched Lsel—and an open line of imperial culture, flooding back through the jumpgate, which had aligned Lsel more closely with Teixcalaan than ever before. And yet, Tarats—if she gets the man alone, or tipsy and alone—has a vicious, philosophically grounded hatred of Teixcalaan. He is playing some kind of very long game, and Onchu wishes she could have nothing to do with it. But she needs an ally: the Pilots and the Miners have traditionally been allies, from the inception of the Lsel Council. Pilots, Miners, and Heritage. The representatives of the oldest imago-lines, spaceflight and resource extraction, and the representative whose purpose was to guard imago-lines and Lsel culture in general.

Lately, Heritage under Aknel Amnardbat has realigned itself. Not philosophically, Onchu thinks, walking grimly away from the medical facilities and toward her offices, taking the longest loop around the outer edge of the station, just to feel the faint play of gravitational forces against her body. Not philosophically realigned: Amnardbat is as pro-Lsel as anyone Onchu has ever met, and fierce in her defense of it; nor has she made choices of imago-assignment which are disturbing or even unusual. What Onchu has discovered about her is worse than ideological or philosophical differences.

Heritage should never attempt to damage what it is meant to preserve. Onchu believes this, and thus she has sent a warning to Yskandr Aghavn, if he is still capable of receiving warnings: What we have sent to you may be a weapon pointed at you.

But right now, while Aghavn takes his own sweet time in replying, Onchu needs someone to help her deal with what is coming through the Anhamemat Gate, and if Heritage is not to be trusted, Tarats will have to do, games with empire or not.