A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER SEVEN

MAHIT had let herself think she was going to get off-Station entirely clear if not entirely clean (never clean, getting away clean was an impossibility—Teixcalaan had taught her that, Teixcalaan and Yskandr, and now Darj Tarats was proving it to her again). She might manage to get on that shuttle Three Seagrass had called, and leap from an immediate danger into a merely probable one. She might not die under alien gunfire. Sometimes people didn’t.

And yet, here she was, inches from the just-landed Teixcalaanli shuttle, and staring down Aknel Amnardbat herself. Who had somehow, through ill luck or profound cleverness or both, captured Three Seagrass.

Mahit could hear her heartbeat in her ears like rushing water, too fast and too loud. She was going to faint, or she was going to break and run for the shuttle, one or the other, and Three Seagrass and Amnardbat were coming toward her like a slow and terrible wave, too large a problem to outpace. Even having Dekakel Onchu standing right next to her wouldn’t do her a bit of good—Onchu had made it perfectly clear that Mahit’s usefulness to her was over. It had ended the moment she’d decided to not immediately mention that she’d received Onchu’s secret notes to Yskandr when she’d returned to Lsel a month ago. Onchu would hand her over to Amnardbat if Amnardbat asked nicely—Pilots needed Heritage to keep approving new pilot imago-lines, since so many were being lost to the aliens out by the Anhamemat Gate. Onchu was here because she was supervising the exit of a Teixcalaanli ship from Lsel Station, and making sure it stayed gone. Not for Mahit. This little scene was all politics, and Mahit wasn’t a player here; she was a spent and useless resource to everyone but Darj Tarats, who only cared enough to let her go, not keep her safe, and to Three Seagrass—

—who was looking at her with clear and determined and furious eyes as Amnardbat steered her across the hangar bay. With icy clarity, Mahit thought, If I run, I think they may try to kill her for a spy. And icier still: She might be a spy, and I need to get her off my Station, and me with her.

Yskandr murmured, and she ignored him. She couldn’t think about what she’d promised Darj Tarats. Not now. Not until after this, if there was an after this which contained sufficient time to contemplate what a person promised in extremity. What a person promised when they were half letting their imago lead them into choices they would never have made before they were part of a chain of living memory.

“Councilor,” she found herself saying, surprised by the ease of her own voice, the smooth unshaking confidence she felt none of. Her own tonality, this time, not Yskandr. All her, and yet that perfect serenity. “What an unexpected surprise; it will save me leaving a message with your secretary. I’ve been unavoidably called away and will have to postpone my uploading appointment.”

Any minute now, Amnardbat was going to say, No, Mahit, come with me at once, and there would be Heritage security personnel emerging from the shadows like the Teixcalaanli Judiciary’s Mist agents, melting into visibility and taking her away. Any minute now, Amnardbat was going to say, See? Dzmare is compromised, she has allowed this Teixcalaanli agent into our Station, and possibly she wouldn’t even be wrong. Any minute now.

“Where is it that you have been called away to so urgently?” asked Aknel Amnardbat, mild and colorless as distilled water.

“I am afraid, Councilor Amnardbat,” said Three Seagrass in Teixcalaanli, “that it is my duty to reclaim the services of the Ambassador from Lsel Station to Teixcalaan.” The language felt wrong to Mahit for the first time in a long time. Out of context. Three Seagrass, in bright flame-orange, Teixcalaanlitzlim-perfect, was like a cut poisonous flower in the center of the hangar. Something beautiful and dangerous that shouldn’t be where it was, that would die and in its dying take what was nearby with it.

Amnardbat glanced from Three Seagrass to Mahit to the waiting shuttle, its doors open, her eyebrows raised and her mouth pursed like she’d tasted citrus-flavoring powder straight from the packet. And then she let go of Three Seagrass’s arm.

I wonder if there’ll be bruises, Mahit thought.

Yskandr whispered, and there was something utterly filthy in how he said it that made Mahit want to hide from the inside of her own mind. Had that inflection been hers or his? Both? How hard was it going to be to tell, going forward?

Amnardbat did not speak in Teixcalaanli, even though Mahit knew she could use the language perfectly well. But she must also have known that Three Seagrass couldn’t understand much Stationer at all. “Is that so, Dzmare? Are you headed back to the Empire, despite owing your home the repository of your memory?”

Mahit winced. “I’m—we’re—going to the war, not the City. Councilor.” That plural. She should watch her plurals. She’d meant her and Three Seagrass, surely.

Yskandr, a flicker of the younger, damaged version, less prurient, more vicious: <We is an appropriate singular for us.>

Mahit wished both of them would let her think, and also wished she hadn’t wished it. She’d wanted him back so badly, when he’d been gone.

Amnardbat looked her over, and looked Onchu next to her over, too. There was a vast judgment in that gaze, and a sense of utter disregard: Well, if you want. What use are you, anyway. Mahit was projecting. Almost certainly. Assigning narrative where there wasn’t any. She didn’t seem to be able to stop. She hadn’t been able to stop since the City. But then Amnardbat said, still in Stationer, “There are so many easier ways to commit suicide, Dzmare, than going to someone else’s war.”

Mahit didn’t think that barb was pointed at her at all. It was for Onchu, and maybe for Darj Tarats through Onchu: someone else’s war. A waste of Lsel’s resources, again, at the mercy of Teixcalaanli whims.

If you hadn’t threatened me, I wouldn’t be going. I didn’t mean to leave Lsel. I just came home. I came home, Councilor.

Thought was cheap. “I expect to be back, alive,” Mahit said. “Anything else, Councilor?”

Now, surely, would come the security personnel, or Onchu would step in, or Three Seagrass would stop looking like she could suddenly develop telepathy and tell Mahit what to do if she glared with sufficient expression.

“Oh, go on, then,” said Aknel Amnardbat, easy as anything, and waved a hand at the shuttle. “Enjoy yourself, while you’ve got breath for it.” She gave Three Seagrass a pat on the shoulder—Three Seagrass visibly flinched. “Onchu? A word, while the Teixcalaanlitzlim and her … charge … get out of our controlled space?”

“Of course, Councilor,” said Onchu smoothly. “Good luck, Mahit. And good luck to you as well, Envoy.”

Onchu, at least, had bothered to revert to Teixcalaanli when directly addressing Three Seagrass. She also had the wherewithal to immediately walk away from where she and Mahit had been standing, drawing Amnardbat along with her in her wake: these little things—a Teixcalaanlitzlim, a broken Ambassador—all of that was not important when one Councilor of Lsel was having a conversation with another. It was blunt. Blunt and skillful. Mahit could imagine growing into a woman like that, if she lived so long—

The open door of the shuttle looked like a dark mouth. Mahit picked up her luggage—less than she’d taken to the City, by far—and walked into it, Three Seagrass just behind her to the left, snapping back into place like a detached limb suddenly remade. As if they had never stopped being Ambassador and liaison, barbarian and opener-of-doors. As if everything hadn’t changed.

Eight Antidote woke up with the Emperor standing in the frame of his bedroom window, moonlight thick behind her. She glowed like a dream-apparition, a ghost, dressed in the white she’d worn before she’d been made Emperor. Eight Antidote wondered if he’d awoken a year ago, if the entire world he’d fallen into after his ancestor-the-Emperor killed himself would dissolve into dreamsmoke, fade to nothing. Maybe he was ten years old. Maybe all that would happen today was that he’d go see the palace-hummers in their garden, and recite poetry for his tutor, and avoid whoever the other child who had been provided for him to socialize with was. And forget—

Nineteen Adze was watching him. The world as it was refused to slip away into half-recalled snatches. He was eleven, and sole imperial heir, and yesterday he’d convinced the Minister of War to show him how to be a commander.

“I have something I want to show you,” said Nineteen Adze. The weight of her eyes was very heavy. She was paying all of her attention to him right now, and he was in bed without a shirt on. Abruptly he was embarrassed, and pulled the sheet up to his chest as he sat up.

“… Your Brilliance?” he said, trying not to sound like he’d been asleep just a minute ago. Or too much like a kid.

She came away from the window, a shadow separating. She had something in one hand. A sharp something, metal. Eight Antidote couldn’t understand the shape of it. Maybe it was a knife. Maybe she was going to stab him and keep the sun-spear throne for herself and her heirs, whoever they would be, forever. Could he stop her? Eleven Laurel had taught him basic grappling, and he knew how to use an energy pistol, but he didn’t have an energy pistol, and Nineteen Adze outweighed him twice over and also he was lying down and she was standing up, so she had all the advantages she’d need—

It wasn’t a knife. Not exactly.

It was shaped like an arrowhead, like something Eight Antidote had seen in historical holos about pre-spaceflight humans and how they killed each other. But it was big. Big as a palm, and made of a dark brassy metal. The moonlight caught the edge of it. It looked rusted. It wasn’t rusted. It was stained. Blood, old enough it should have flaked off. Nineteen Adze held it out to him. “Go on,” she said. “Take it.”

He did. It was heavy. It had been coated with some kind of thin clear lacquer, which kept the blood on. A memory, then. The tip of a spear, like the points of the sun-spear throne. Down the center of it was a raised part, like a spine, and when he ran his thumb over that ridge, he could feel indentations. He pressed down on the deepest one. A thin panel of the metal spine slid soundlessly back, and inside was—a hologram. Like the entire object was a giant infofiche stick, and he’d just broken it open.

It was an image. Very small, without any glyph annotations. But Eight Antidote could recognize it clearly. There was his ancestor-the-Emperor, middle-aged, strong, with his hair unbound and reaching almost to his hips, sitting on a four-legged animal (a horse, he remembered, that’s a horse, or else a camel, but I think it’s a horse). And next to him, on another horse, was Nineteen Adze in the uniform of a soldier in the Third Legion, no rank marks at all. Eight Antidote wasn’t that good at judging ages, but he thought she might have been twenty. At most.

They were both laughing, in the holo. Like they shared a secret. Nineteen Adze had a long stick with a metal point on the end in her hand, and there was blood dripping down it, and blood on her forehead in the shape of the Emperor’s fingers, like he’d dipped them in an enemy and pressed them there. It was the same spearpoint on that stick that Eight Antidote was holding now. He was absolutely sure.

“Why are you showing me this?” he asked.

The Emperor didn’t smile. She came to the edge of the bed and sat down on it instead. Her weight hardly disturbed it. For the first time, Eight Antidote thought of her as narrow. Unfashionably tall, but in the full imperial regalia, she always seemed broad-shouldered, strong—but here she was, featherlight, like a ghost in the moonshine from the window. “Because I loved your ancestor, Eight Antidote. I would have died for him, in his service. See us there? I don’t know anything of the next thirty years there. Not what I would do, or what he would do, or what he’d ask of me. But I already knew that I believed in his Teixcalaan. In an empire strong enough to be at peace, if only we could build that strength high enough. And we did. We did, for decades. Built it and held it.”

“It didn’t last,” Eight Antidote said. He couldn’t look at her while he said that, only at the tiny hologram-Emperor, unstained with sheets of his own sacrificed blood. Thirty years away from that blood, and still Eight Antidote could almost see it, how it would look. It would get all over the horse.

“Nothing does,” Nineteen Adze told him, which was awful: especially because she said it with such flat, resigned finality. A true thing, from the land of being a grown-up. From the land of being Emperor. “But I still believe in that Teixcalaan. When Six Direction made me Emperor in the sun temple, he entrusted that Teixcalaan to me. And to you, after me.”

“I’m eleven,” said Eight Antidote, as if he could make her go away by saying it. He held on to the metal memory-spear so hard his knuckles were white. The tiny hologram wavered. Stabilized.

“You’re eleven, little spy,” Nineteen Adze agreed, and sighed. “You’re eleven, and you’re not Six Direction, no matter what your face looks like. I made sure you didn’t have to be.” Her mouth twisted. “Sometimes I’m amazed that Six Direction handed me Teixcalaan after I made sure of that. After what I did to make sure of it. But I know you’re not him, Eight Antidote. I know that quite definitively.”

He wanted to ask her, What did you do? What did you do to make you look like that, when you say so? What might have happened to me if you hadn’t? He couldn’t find his voice.

“Which is why we won’t be friends the way your ancestor and I were friends,” she went on. “And you are eleven. But you’re involved already. A kid who finds his way into the Ministry of War and extracts a promise from Three Azimuth is a politician even if he’s a kid. You know that.”

“I know,” Eight Antidote said, very quietly. “I’m sorry I went.”

“Oh, blood and stars, don’t be,” said Nineteen Adze, brisk. “I’d rather have a clever, annoying, interesting successor than a dullard or a bore. How else are we going to build your ancestor’s Teixcalaan?”

She was using the collective plural. Like they were equals. Like they were grown adults and she trusted him. It probably wasn’t true, but he didn’t know why she’d say it if she was lying to him or keeping him from knowing something he was too young to know.

He asked, “Aren’t we at war, Your Brilliance? How can we have Six Direction’s empire of peace if we’re fighting these aliens?”

“We can’t,” Nineteen Adze agreed. “So we’re going to have to win, or we’re going to have to change the parameters of the conflict.”

“Three Azimuth’s projections make winning look—”

“Unlikely, yes. I’ve heard. In detail. Here’s what I want you to do for me, little spy. Little successor. You hold on to this spearhead, and you look at it when you aren’t sure what your Emperor wants for you. You remember what I’ve said tonight. And you go into the Ministry of War, and find out for me what is happening there. Find out why Eleven Laurel is so interested in you. Find out if Three Azimuth means to win this war or if she wants to maintain a permanent state of conflict. Be you, exactly as you have been—but pay attention.”

Eight Antidote felt like his tongue had gone numb, and his fingers. His heart was thrumming. He didn’t know why Three Azimuth wouldn’t want to win a war. Wasn’t that what Ministers of War were for, winning Teixcalaan’s battles? But he managed to nod—how could he not nod?—and clutched the spearhead to his chest.

“Good,” said the Emperor. “Now go back to sleep. You are only eleven. You get to sleep for a while yet.” She reached out, touched his cheek with cool fingertips. A kind, small touch. And then she got up and left. The door to his rooms irised shut behind her with the faintest of clicks.

Eight Antidote didn’t sleep at all. He watched the dawn come up instead, glittering through the hologram, making his dead ancestor look transfigured, sunlit, like a god.

After Peloa-2, there were funeral orations every few hours. Nine Hibiscus kept the old tradition of a Fleetwide broadcast on a seldom-used frequency, a recitation of the names of the dead. When the Tenth Legion wasn’t in active combat, it sang its way through a thousand years of previous casualties, cycling every week and a half from the most recent fallen soldier in the Legion to the very first Teixcalaanlitzlim who had died wearing this uniform. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t forget his name, or the low tone it was sung on during the litany—Two Cholla. A spear-name, all cactus needles, a name that would have sounded very fine with captain or ikantlos in front of it. Two Cholla had died a thousand years ago, at seventeen, before any titles or ranks could accrue around his name. There were a lot of names that came after his.

During active combat, the funeral frequency stopped playing its endless loop of memory and broadcast actual funeral orations, however small and paltry they ended up being. A snatch of song, the sound of blood falling into a bowl, and on to the next.

They were happening so fast because something about what Sixteen Moonrise had done on Peloa-2 had woken up the aliens and set them to full alert. They hadn’t entirely engaged the Fleet yet. They were still testing the edges. The edges were mostly Sixteen Moonrise’s people, the Twenty-Fourth, and a few of Forty Oxide’s Seventeenth Legion who had been positioned on the far left of the Fleet’s current arrangement. The enemy liked the left flank. Nine Hibiscus was beginning to think that somewhere beyond the blackout communication silence, in the dark places between this sector’s thin stars, there was a base, or at least a large collection of ships, that she couldn’t see. Somewhere to the left of Weight for the Wheel.

She’d expected consequences for retaking Peloa-2. It had been a statement: We are here, this planet and these people were ours and are ours again; Peloa is inside the world. Peloa is Teixcalaan. Fuck off. Of course there would be consequences. But somehow she hadn’t been mentally prepared for the enemy—bloody stars, but she needed a better name for them than “the enemy” or “the aliens,” the Information Ministry diplomat couldn’t get here fast enough to tell her what they called themselves—deciding that attrition was the better part of valor.

After the scorched, eviscerated planetary corpse of Peloa-2, she’d been convinced that these aliens were nihilistic, resource-destroying, and covetous of territory more than power or colonization. But attrition—picking at the edges of the Fleet, at the few ships which Sixteen Moonrise had sent out to do reconnoitering—that was something else. That was something smart. Letting the vast tide of Teixcalaan find no purchase, no solid targets.

Only funerals; six so far today, two Shard pilots and the four-person crew of one of Forty Oxide’s scout-gunners. She watched the replay of the death of that ship on holo. The aliens hadn’t bothered with their ship-dissolving spit. They’d simply appeared, with the peculiar vision distortion that accompanied the end of their cloaking system, and tore the ship to pieces with energy weapon fire. The pilot and his crew hadn’t even had time to react before they were burnt and shattered. Which, of course, meant that those three-ringed prowling alien ships could be anywhere.

There were too many deaths. Every time she dipped into Shard-sight she saw another one, another Teixcalaanlitzlim gone dark, felt an echo of the collective flinch, the sharpness of grief, the deeper burn of fury—that we could so easily be lost, how dare these enemies act with such impunity—

All that, and a scrim-afterimage of each death. She wondered how much worse it would be for the Shard pilots who had proprioception as well as visual linkage. Much worse. Almost certainly.

She was going to have to move with overwhelming force, and soon, and still blind—overwhelm them—wherever they were—

Twenty Cicada tapped her on the shoulder, and she startled. Spun on him, had her hand up to shove him in the throat and away, as if they were in a sparring ring. She hadn’t reacted like that in years. He backed off, his hands up.

“Mallow,” he said, so soft—her cadet nickname, when she’d been softer. No one else would remember it now, let alone use it to such effect. Shame was a slow surge; so was the distant fear that she was not in control of herself, or of this Fleet.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

He shook himself, an infinitesimal shuddering resettlement of shoulders. Straightened the collar of his uniform back to regulation-perfect. Smiled at her, a flicker of widened eyes, curving mouth. “You were listening to the funerals,” he said, which was a way of forgiving her. “I would have been startled too.”

“They do keep going,” said Nine Hibiscus. “I should turn it off, or at least down, and actually get some work done.”

“Our casualty rates are too high,” Twenty Cicada agreed. “We can’t wait much longer; losing our most adventurous and fastest ships is rotting morale, yaotlek. We need to—do something.”

“You sound like Sixteen Moonrise.”

Twenty Cicada winced. “I wish I didn’t. But what we are up against is an obscenity, and our people know it. They need to stop having to see it, be hurt by it, and not strike back.”

“We still don’t know what’s out there,” Nine Hibiscus said, hating the bitterness in her own voice. “I can commit the Fleet to all-out attack, but if we go into a slaughtering field, without supplies and reinforcements—”

“They’d go for you. Everyone on this ship.”

“I know,” Nine Hibiscus said. That was the problem.

Twenty Cicada nodded, a short acknowledgment, but didn’t stop talking. “Trust is not an endlessly renewable resource. Loyalty might be. For longer. Especially when we are up against something that doesn’t even bother to use what it takes—”

“I think they do. I think we just don’t understand how yet.”

“I don’t want to understand how what they did to Peloa-2 is useful,” said Twenty Cicada, as softly as when he’d said her old nickname. “I think understanding would stain me indelibly.”

How could she even answer that? She shrugged, her hands open. “I won’t wait much longer. I promise.”

Just until the envoy came. She was supposed to be arriving on the Jasmine Throat, scheduled for two shifts from now. That was only, oh, four more funerals away.

The inside of the Jasmine Throat was shocking, like being thrown into thick humidity after a long time in clear processed air. Not that there was any discernible difference to Mahit in the actual atmosphere: the Jasmine Throat was a spacecraft, and it was precisely climate-controlled and oxygen-regulated like every other spacecraft, including Lsel Station itself. The difference was that it was Teixcalaanli.

The walls were metal and plastisteel, yes—but covered in inlays of gold and green and rich pinks, all the formality and structure of a military supply ship layered over with Teixcalaanli symbolism. Green things, growing things, bright stars. Flowers. Fuck, how could she have forgotten flowers everywhere, white jasmine patterns painted on the ceiling of the hangar bay, the Teixcalaanlitzlim dressed in grey and gold Fleet uniforms, cloudhooks over every eye. No wonder she felt like she was breathing heavy air.

“Welcome back,” Three Seagrass said, still a step behind her and to the left as they exited the shuttle and made their way through the hangar toward the passenger deck, that achingly familiar positioning. “Or—welcome to the war?”

She hadn’t said much to Mahit the entire time they’d been in transit to the Jasmine Throat. Just looked at her, and murmured, “That was interesting,” and shut up, a silent flame-orange presence, Teixcalaanli blank. They’d both thought the encounter with Amnardbat was going to have ended differently, Mahit suspected. And neither of them was sure why it hadn’t. It made for uncomfortable company. Neither of them knew how to talk about a disaster that hadn’t been a disaster, not without explaining to each other why it might have been disastrous. And explaining felt too dangerous to Mahit. Probably to Three Seagrass, as well.

Now, having arrived on the Jasmine Throat proper, with two-jumpgates-and-the-sublight-crawl-between-them’s worth of travel time before they came to the Fleet—call it seven hours subjective time—Mahit realized that she and Three Seagrass were going to have to start all over again. Back to the beginning. Back to let’s assume that I’m not going to try to sabotage you and let’s assume I’m not an idiot.

It seemed a long distance to fall back. Especially since she was (possibly—nothing, nothing was decided, she kept telling herself that, or telling Yskandr that, to stave off the stabs of neuropathic pain radiating through her palms) the saboteur this time. And Three Seagrass had never been an idiot.

When they weren’t thinking about Darj Tarats, Yskandr was a quiet, humming, pleased presence in the back of her mind: he’d never been on a Teixcalaanli military ship, neither supply-line reinforcement nor attack vessel, and Mahit leaned into his intent and curious observation with some relief. She needed that. She needed anything that would remind her that this experience was new, and not quite a return. Not in any sense a coming-home.

“We’re not at the war yet,” she told Three Seagrass. “We have half a day before the war happens to us. We should get ready for it.”

“Fuck, but I missed you,” said Three Seagrass, with a sort of regret that Mahit couldn’t place. “Someone else who throws themselves at problems—”

Mahit could feel the ghost with them then, as abrupt and clear as any other realization of political loyalties, secret alliances: the missing third person. Twelve Azalea was three months dead and interred with the rest of the Information Ministry’s fallen officers behind a plaque down on the City, an unfathomable distance away from the two of them. The one of us who was practical at all, she thought—and then revised. No. The one Three Seagrass needed to keep her steady. I’ve never had a friend like that. Or lost one, either.

“Tell me the problem, then,” Mahit said, “aside from ‘we have to talk to aliens’ and ‘you missed me.’” They were walking past a multitude of Teixcalaanli soldiers, all of whom seemed unabashed in their willingness to stare at an Information envoy and a barbarian.

“That’s really the sum of the problem,” Three Seagrass said. “Those two. The aliens are a bit more pressing. Also I could add that you seem to have made many enemies while you were visiting your Station—”

“That’s not a current problem,” Mahit said, as serene as she could manage.

are going be Tarats’s agent? I was beginning to wonder if you’d simply confess to her.>

Like I said before, Yskandr, if I was going to give us up to Teixcalaan, it would take a lot more than some political pressure.

She didn’t feel as brave as she sounded. She knew he knew that; he was inside her endocrine system, party to the thousand messages of her neurotransmitters and her glands. He knew precisely how neatly Darj Tarats had trapped her: make sure Teixcalaan remains endlessly at war, or be subject to Heritage’s plans. One or the other. So far, all she’d done was fail to mention Tarats’s orders. That wasn’t very much of being his agent. But it left all the doors of future action open. Keeping secrets always did.

“If you say it’s not a current problem, fine,” Three Seagrass said, dryly, and opened a door to the tiny transit chamber—hardly larger than the rent-an-office they’d been in on Lsel—which they had been assigned for the duration of the trip. It had no windows. Mahit wasn’t terribly interested in seeing the distortion of space around a jumpgate, but she still felt obscurely disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to. With the door shut behind them, there was nothing between her and Three Seagrass but three months of time, an envoy’s uniform, and deep suspicion.

Three Seagrass set her luggage down beside the door and knelt to rummage in it. She came up again with her hands full of infofiche sticks, the simple industrial-grey plastic kind, stamped with the Information Ministry seal in cheery and threatening coral-orange.

“Surely,” Mahit found herself saying, “you can’t have brought along the unanswered mail. I swear I had it forwarded when I left, I’ve been working on it—”

She was rewarded by Three Seagrass laughing, and a brief, utterly pleasant relaxation of all the tension months apart had somehow engendered. “No,” said Three Seagrass. “I don’t have a scrap of mail for you. What I have is all the records the yaotlek in charge of the Fleet has of our mysterious and very dangerous aliens. I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet. Want to see?”

murmured Yskandr, covetous, excited—exactly the same as Mahit was. Acquisitiveness, a certain degree of xenophilia—that showed up in both of their aptitudes. It was a central part of their compatibility. Show me something new.

“Let’s figure out what we’re learning to talk to,” she said to Three Seagrass, and took the first of the infofiche sticks from her hand, snapping it open easily between her fingers.

It was audio only. It was—fuck, it was like Mahit had carved a hole in the world between the space of one side of the infofiche stick and the other, and on the inside was static and screaming, or static that was screaming, or—

She felt ill. There didn’t seem to be a way to turn it off. Three Seagrass had gone grey-green under the warm brown of her skin. It made her look dead, or dying. Or like she wanted to be dead, or dying.

And yet there were different terrible sounds in the audio recording, a stuttering shriek that was repeated three times, a lower buzz that roiled Mahit’s stomach and occurred after every pause longer than ten seconds. She couldn’t understand it, and it was hideous, but it wasn’t noise.

When the recording was finally over, both she and Three Seagrass were breathing in hyperventilating gasps, huge snatches of air to shove back the nausea. They stared at each other. “… I don’t know if it’s language,” Mahit managed, finally, “but it’s definitely communication. Phonemes, or—I don’t think words, it’s not enough differentiation, but—maybe tone markers?”

Three Seagrass nodded. Swallowed like she was forcing back bile, and nodded again, more firmly. “Horrible sick-making tone markers. Got it. I want to cross-reference it to the readout from the ship that recorded the transmission, they were interacting with it somehow—maybe we can map which noise goes with what—”

“If either of us vomits, we should vomit in a bin,” Mahit said. “Do we have a bin—are any more of these audio only?” She gestured at Three Seagrass’s fistful of infofiche sticks.

“Only one was marked for audio. The rest should be visual and text,” said Three Seagrass. “Open them up, and I’ll go find two bins. This is a resupply vessel, I’m sure they’ve got bins.”

“Possibly also bin liners. We’re going to have to listen to that—a lot.”

“Bleeding sunlight,” Three Seagrass cursed, but she was smiling, Stationer-style: the edges of her teeth showing. Mahit felt charmed, and worried at being charmed, and utterly relieved that, given work to do, the two of them were apparently fine with one another. “Bin liners, excellent. Seven hours is plenty of time to categorize our tone markers by how many bin liners listening to them requires—”

“Wouldn’t want you to look bad in front of the yaotlek,” Mahit said. “She’ll want the bin liner report straightaway. And presumably the rest of the report also.”

“See?” said Three Seagrass, still smiling that almost-Stationer smile. “I knew fetching a barbarian diplomat who could learn our language would save me time in learning someone else’s—”

She slipped out the door before Mahit could ask her the questions on the tip of her tongue: Would you be as fascinated with these aliens as you have been with me? Considering we are all barbarians, even if I am as human as you are?

Yskandr told her.

In poetry and epics, and even in statecraft manuals of the driest and most clinical kind, emperors were exempt from sleep, or ought to be, and therefore so were starship captains. Nine Hibiscus had always thought that a yaotlek, who was somewhere in-between captain and emperor, really ought to develop the ability to stay awake indefinitely upon receiving her spear-arc collar tabs. Practicality, however, had a notorious way of ignoring poetry, epics, and statecraft manuals. Like everyone else on Weight for the Wheel, Nine Hibiscus had a designated eight-hour shift for sleeping.

Lately, she wasn’t very good at it. Which said something about Emperors, and yaotlekim, and the difference between being in charge of one small but powerful thing, like a starship, and a whole lot of disparate things, like a fleet full of Teixcalaanlitzlim all ready to die for the sake of the Empire, and at her command.

Nine Hibiscus had been trying to sleep. She had removed her uniform, and laid herself down on her bed in an undershirt and sleeping shorts, and cued her cloudhook to dim the roomlights to almost blackout. She’d even set her messages to silent save for absolute priority; if the aliens attacked Weight for the Wheel, she’d wake up, but probably not for anything else.

If she ever went to sleep at all, anyway. She’d been trying for a full third of her eight hours, and had gotten nowhere. All she could think about was the flashfire deaths of the Shards—about whether the new biofeedback technology was worth giving half the Fleet post-traumatic flashbacks when someone half a sector away died badly. Cost-benefit analysis was antithetical to sleeping.

It was a relief when someone physically knocked on her door. Most likely they’d been trying to send a nonpriority message and hadn’t heard from her, and now something was happening and she didn’t have to pretend she was sleeping any longer. She raised the lights and wriggled into her trousers for a modicum of authority, and waved the door open. On the other side, looking apologetic, was her chief communications officer, Two Foam. This wasn’t one of Two Foam’s off-shifts—the bridge took careful and staggered turns, and when Nine Hibiscus was sleeping, Two Foam was usually awake—but she looked exhausted anyhow, even if she hadn’t been woken up.

“Yaotlek,” she said, “there’s been a major development.”

The crew of Weight for the Wheel called Two Foam Bubbles, because she wasn’t bubbly at all. The nickname was ubiquitous; even Nine Hibiscus had to remember not to use it. Instead she waved her inside her quarters without using any name in particular, and let the door shut behind her. Her own heart rate had kicked up; this was better than sleep, this was the shimmer-focus of being responsible in a crisis. “Yes? What sort of development that is significant enough for you to come fetch me?”

Two Foam didn’t seem particularly comfortable standing in her superior officer’s quarters while said superior officer found the other pieces of her uniform and put them back on. Nevertheless, she gamely directed her eyes toward the ceiling and explained. “Sir. We have one of the aliens.”

“What? Alive? Did we capture a ship?”

Two Foam shook her head. “Dead. A Shard from the Seventeenth found it floating in vacuum after one of the … engagements we’ve been having. He lassoed it and brought it back.”

Nine Hibiscus felt shaky with exhilaration; she had to exert effort to keep a visible tremor out of her hands. “Get that soldier a commendation. From Forty Oxide, if you can manage it; it should come from his own Fleet Captain. And—where is it? The alien?”

“In the medical bay,” said Two Foam. “The medtechs are going to autopsy it. But I thought you might want to see it first.”

“Fuck yes I do,” said Nine Hibiscus, and slammed her feet into her boots. “Let’s go.”

Medical was two decks up and in the rear of the ship. They made the fifteen-minute walk in ten, and Nine Hibiscus took a deep, brief pleasure in how Bubbles kept pace with her, a half step behind to her left. It made her feel like something was right in the universe, and she was going to need that to deal with whatever she was about to see. She was trying not to imagine it. Imagination created biases. And besides, all she could think of was a smaller, human-scale version of their three-ringed ships, and that was absurd; they clearly weren’t some kind of hungry ship-species that budded off smaller ships. The Shard pilot wouldn’t have been able to bring one in if they had been.

This was what imagining got her. Absurdities. Comforting absurdities. She suspected what she was going to be looking at would be much worse than anything she could come up with—

But it wasn’t.

Which was awful.

Laid out on the table the medtechs usually used for surgery, which had been stripped of its standard padding and cushions designed to hold a human body in place, pared down to flat metal, was something that looked like an animal. Not even a horrible animal. Just a new one.

They’d stripped it of its clothes, which were a deep red tactical-weight cloth and looked well made—someone would analyze them later, though the fact that it wore clothes at all was significant. But now, now was for the creature itself. Nine Hibiscus stepped close, close enough to see that it would have towered over her by a foot and a half at least when it had been alive and standing. The naked alien had four limbs, like most bipeds. The rear two were thick and short, powerful in the thighs below a long torso; the front two were overlong by human standards, with four-fingered hands that ended in blunt claws. The claws were capped, decoratively, in some kind of bright plastic shot through with silvery wires. Those might be a piloting interface, Nine Hibiscus thought, fascinated, and then kept looking, scanning up the body. The skin was mottled—it could have been trauma, or vacuum-chill, but she thought it was coloration, spots and blotches—and the neck. The neck was wrong.

Too long. Half as long as the torso, a neck for bending and tearing, flexible, muscle-ridged, leading to a head that was all jaw, mouth open in death, a dark tongue hanging over carnivore teeth, jagged and massive. The eyes faced forward, like a human’s eyes, and were sightless, clouded, the left one burst open during whatever dying had happened to it. Predator’s eyes, like a human’s.

The ears were cups set far back on the skull, and faintly furred. Somehow that was the worst thing about it. Those ears were like the ears of the soft almost-cat pets from Kauraan, that purred and bred in the air ducts and annoyed Twenty Cicada. And they were on this thing, this otherwise hairless scavenger thing that was killing her Fleet.

“Is it a mammal?” Nine Hibiscus asked. She knew how to kill mammals. They had fairly standard physiologies. The heart, for example, was in the chest.

“It’s not an insect or a reptile,” said the medtech. “Probably a mammal. A male-sexed one.” He gestured; Nine Hibiscus noted the penile sheath and nodded. “I’ll know more when we open it up.”

“Well, then, open it up,” she said. “Figure out how it works, so we can know how best to stop it from working.”