A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE war dissolved around Nine Hibiscus like spun sugar in water, too fast for her to grieve. She was yaotlek of this six of legions, and she was on the bridge of her flagship, and every report of the sudden hesitance of the enemy, the vanishing of attack forces, the hovering pause of three-ringed death-spitting ships, orbiting Teixcalaanli vessels now, observing and slow, instead of smashing them to pieces—every report came to her. She held them all. She spun up the cartograph strategy table and marked the position of her Fleet, the position of her Fleet’s enemies, kept it updated in as close to real time as possible, while all of the crisis-flashpoint of conflict seemed to simply—stop. Hold itself in patient abeyance. The only moving piece was the Twenty-Fourth, Sixteen Moonrise’s Parabolic Compression, and even she seemed to have slowed, surprised by the sudden lack of forceful opposition. Still moving, but—that was all right. She’d rather have the Twenty-Fourth in position if this strange détente ended, if what Swarm had done wasn’t sufficient.

Whatever Swarm had done, he’d at least bought them time. She’d shouted—no, she’d screamed down the narrowcast band, even after he’d cut it off—screamed nonsense negation she was ashamed of, but it hurt, it hurt like a hole in the center of her, as if the alien acid spit was wearing her away like she was the metal of a ship. That he was either dead, or gone, or—not himself. Her friend. Her dearest friend. What was she going to do about all of his plants? About keeping the hydroponics deck in order? About that fucking Kauraanian kitten he’d been feeding? What was she supposed to do, other than watch the thing that she was for—prosecuting a war, in any way necessary, in all ways possible—become unnecessary, marked out in points of light?

She wanted to ask him: Swarm. Swarm, what are you doing? But he wouldn’t respond to any message she sent. It was possible that he had simply eaten the fungus and died and the enemy had understood this as some sort of sufficient sacrifice.

No one heard him or cared to listen; all Shard-sight was grief or was single-minded determination that shut out grief and dying in a scintillation of light. Eight Antidote lost the shape of the Shards guarding the Parabolic Compression; died again, a simple ugly death, someone thinking so clearly aw, fuck, as a fast-moving piece of debris struck the side of their Shard, deformed it, cracked its bubble of shipglass from its seals—cold, shock-cold, and anger, and then quiet.

He wanted to stop. He wanted to get out. There was no out. There was no stop.

Except that:

—the eyes of Shard after Shard saw a sudden hesitance in the barrage of ship-dissolving acids and energy-cannon fire, a pause as if the enemy was thinking, all together, as a whole—a three-ringed ship, hardly larger than a Shard itself, hung motionless and then made a slow and lazy circle around two Shards without attacking them at all, as if trying to map their edges—alien targets vanished, leaving squirming visual discontinuity in their wakes, and Teixcalaanli hands trembled on Shard controls, hands that had been clenched so tightly they hurt as they were released—there was a stretched-out held breath, a thousand Shards and two thousand eyes trying to feel, to understand, to realize they were not dying any longer.

All except the Shards surrounding the Parabolic Compression, who did not hear, or listen, or care. Who had a purpose and a design. For whom discontinuity—even favorable discontinuity—was something to be undone, as if it had never been. Who had paused, for a moment of disbelief, the dissolve of opposition shocking to stillness—and then had heard some voice, some order, or just some heart-vicious want of their own, and accelerated again. Faster. Faster.

There was a convulsion. A shaking. Eight Antidote wondered if he was dying again, or if the Twenty-Fourth Legion had started the deathrain bombing and this was what it would be like—sudden light—hands—

And he looked up, dazzled, shocked back to his small singular body, as the golden featureless faceplate of a Sunlit removed Four Crocus’s cloudhook from his face and scooped him out of her Shard like the stone from a peach.

When the order on the Imperial fast-courier ship arrived, sealed in one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s own white-on-white seals (or a facsimile thereof, Nine Hibiscus had always heard that Nineteen Adze used animal bone for hers, but that wouldn’t have gone through the transmission stations between jumpgates—this was a plastic copy), the order inside was almost unnecessary.

His Excellency Eight Antidote, Imperial Associate, Heir to the Sun-Spear Throne, it read, 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.

Interesting that it came in the voice of the imperial heir, not the Emperor Herself. A complex political maneuver—the Emperor commands war, her successor practices mercy. It was very designed, in Nine Hibiscus’s opinion. Or maybe she was simply exhausted, and everything seemed to be a little beyond what mattered here on her ship, right now.

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.

There was no certain civilization-wide death. Not now. Not anymore. Not since Swarm had done what he’d done.

She looked up from the strategy table and said, “Two Foam. Send Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise an order to stand down—for the moment.”

The Sunlit—there were more than one of them, of course, there were always more than one Sunlit—caught Eight Antidote by the upper arms when his legs wouldn’t hold him up. The world kept spinning. Nasturtium Terminal seemed claustrophobic—but not because of how many people were in it, this time. Now it felt tiny compared to being stretched over sectors and sectors of space, so spread-thin that being all in himself again was a rush of hideously intense sensation. Eight Antidote squeezed his eyes shut. It didn’t help. Even the reddish dark behind his eyelids was so present.

One of the Sunlit said, “Your Excellency. We have orders to form an escort for you back to the palace.”

Of course they did. The Emperor was going to kill him. Or maybe she’d let Three Azimuth do it. He was probably—definitely—a disruptive person now. “… You have my permission,” he managed to say. His voice sounded like a drunk person’s voice, not steady, sounds blurring into each other. Besides, they didn’t need permission. They were going to take him anyway.

Distantly, he heard Four Crocus ask, “Did you get what you needed, Your Excellency?”

He didn’t know what to tell her. Maybe wasn’t good enough. Yes, he’d achieved what he’d set out to do, and no one would ever get that order from Three Azimuth to kill a planet. And no, he didn’t think he’d made any difference at all.

“I hope so,” he managed instead, and let the cool gold-gloved hands of the Sunlit lead him away.

None of them expected to hear from Twenty Cicada again, Three Seagrass especially. That goodbye had been so final. So absolutely exquisite. She wished she had recorded it—she could have written him such a poem. She might. She might write for him, since it looked like they all might live, at least for long enough to compose a single set of verses.

(Maybe not long enough for an epic, or anything with a complex caesura-dependent rhyme scheme—there was still the problem of Darj Tarats, and who knew how long the détente Twenty Cicada had bought them would last?)

So when that channel stuttered back into static, open, two-way communication instead of just the one-way frequency Nine Hibiscus had shouted down, Three Seagrass was not only surprised but shocked: she’d been almost sure Twenty Cicada was dead. Or so far transformed that it was a functional equivalency.

But there was his voice. It was static-distorted, still, but also—off. The rhythms of his phrasing were gone to syncopation, like he was trying to remember speech and assembling it from first principles. His voice flooding the bridge, because Nine Hibiscus hadn’t adjusted the volume on that comms feed at all.

“Singing,” he said, and then there was a pause. And again, “Singing, oh—we—”

Nine Hibiscus said, “Swarm?” with a kind of broken hope that made Three Seagrass cringe.

“Yes,” he said. “Mostly yes—we are, it’s appropriate, that name. Hello. Mallow. Hello, we. Our—Weight for the Wheel, Mallow, love her for us. For—me. And. We—us and the others, we—want to establish. Is there the envoy?”

“Yes,” said Three Seagrass. “I’m here.”

“And is there the other one? The—memory-person. The. The spook and her pet.” He sounded like he’d found the phrase somewhere in memory, a single phrase recalled all together. “The Stationer.”

“I’m here too,” Mahit said. Nine Hibiscus was staring at them, her eyes glitter-wet with tears she was clearly refusing to shed.

“We—we want to establish. Diplomatic protocol. For a period of cease-fire.”

Three Seagrass looked to Nine Hibiscus, wordless, asking for permission. Nine Hibiscus nodded, a bare fraction of a movement.

“We accept a cease-fire,” she said. “What sort of diplomatic protocol did you have in mind, Twenty Cicada?” Using his name, in case there was enough of him left that his name meant something.

“Send—send us people. People to prove we are people. The memory-sharers. To talk with.”

Mahit said, “Stationers, you mean.”

A long pause.

“Yes?” said Twenty Cicada. Or what had been Twenty Cicada. “Stationers. Pilots. Sunlit. All. All. And we are people. If. We are singing, if.”

All. Everyone. Everyone, Teixcalaanli or not, who had ever been part of some kind of shared mind. Three Seagrass looked at Mahit, helpless with how little she understood of what this meant. What kind of person could be useful here.

“Yes,” said Mahit, and nodded to Three Seagrass. “The diplomats will be humans who understand—collectivity.”

If it was even possible for anyone to understand the kind of collectivity Twenty Cicada had rendered himself up to. Three Seagrass wasn’t so sure.

And then Two Foam said, “Yaotlek—Sixteen Moonrise won’t answer our comms. She’s still on approach target to the alien system. Approach and moving fast.”

Watching Nine Hibiscus try to reorient herself from talking to what was left of her adjutant to deal with whatever Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was doing was like watching a warship attempt to reverse thrust; a wrench, a straining, not entirely effective. It made Three Seagrass wince.

“She’s what?” asked the yaotlek.

“Still on attack vector,” Two Foam repeated. “With shatterbombs primed. She hasn’t acknowledged any of the stand-down orders you sent—”

Nine Hibiscus’s face was a mask. “They’re not my orders. They’re the Emperor’s. Send it again. Tell her if she continues on this course, she is in direct insubordination to the Emperor of all Teixcalaan.”

Two Foam turned back to the console. Her eyes flickered behind her cloudhook; her hands flew through the projected communication-space of the Fleet. There was a strangled, hideous silence; even the creature on the other end of the line, Swarm, it was easier for Three Seagrass to think of him as Swarm and not Twenty Cicada now, draw some separation—even he was quiet.

“No acknowledgment,” said Two Foam, at last. “The Twenty-Fourth is speeding up. She doesn’t—want to hear us, yaotlek.”

Three Seagrass thought, She doesn’t want to hear us, or the aliens, or anything but her own course of action. And then, bright and vivid and nauseating: This is going to be the shortest cease-fire in the history of the Empire.

She watched the mask of Nine Hibiscus’s face crack, an internal decision made, one that flayed her as raw as a barbarian, all of her features twisted in certainty and grief at once, and couldn’t figure out anything at all she could say—and she’d thought herself a negotiator!—that would change anyone’s course now.

It was easier if Nine Hibiscus thought of the static-scattered voice on the other side of the commlink down to Peloa-2 as someone already a ghost. Or—equally heart-flaying, equally absurd—some other person she had never known, who happened to share a name with her dearest friend, the adjutant who had served with her for more than two indictions. A coincidence. No more, no less.

It was easier, and it made it possible for her to ask him—ask it, ask them, ask the thing down on Peloa, whatever it was—to ask without her voice catching, without weeping: “Swarm, I need you to do me a favor. You, and the rest of whatever you are now. It’s a favor, and it’s a sign of our good faith in whatever cease-fire you’ve brokered. Do you hear me?”

She shouldn’t have called him Swarm. It was both too intimate and too appropriate now.

“We hear you,” he said, and aside from the static and the use of a plural pronoun, he sounded exactly the same as he always had. Casual ease. A soldier in perfect command of all of his resources, and willing to bend them to her command.

Nine Hibiscus rolled her shoulders back. Braced herself, her hands flat on the cartograph table, grounded in her ship. “I am going to give you the coordinates and approach vector of Sixteen Moonrise and the Parabolic Compression to the inhabited planet she is targeting,” she said. “The exact coordinates.”

“We will see her coming, then,” said whatever was left of Twenty Cicada. “We will be ready for her, when she comes. Reach for her. Stretch out ourselves. Net her and crack her open, give her to the void-home—” The sound that filled the bridge was a sigh, almost a melody—a falling tone.

The sound that filled the bridge was the grim silence of her own horrified officers. Nine Hibiscus had done this once before, not so long ago. But that soldier—she had begged to die under her Fleet Captain’s hands, rather than dissolve in alien spit-acid. And this command was something altogether different. She had to be unwavering. Unwavering, and sure, and she was still going to lose these people—lose, at least, the effortless trust they’d had in her. She was going to let her adjutant and the aliens that had devoured him and killed a planet and destroyed so many of her ships already kill another one. Kill a Fleet Captain, and her flagship. All those lives on the Parabolic Compression—were they worth the lives on that alien planet? Were they worth the preservation of this uncertain cease-fire?

Could she dishonor Twenty Cicada’s sacrifice by pretending one flagship was more important than ending a war?

No. She couldn’t.

Somehow she had to stop those bombs from being dropped. And if the Emperor’s command wasn’t enough for Sixteen Moonrise—she’d have to let the aliens do her work for her—unless—

“Adjutant,” she snapped, crisp command. Calling whatever was left of Twenty Cicada back to himself. To how they had always been together: logistics and command. “I will give you these coordinates and allow the aliens to strike the Parabolic Compression if and only if you believe that it is possible to take out the bridge and the bridge alone. There are three thousand Teixcalaanlitzlim on that ship. They are our people. Don’t let them go to waste for Sixteen Moonrise.”

A hissing sort of silence: the open channel. And then, soft as a haunting, Twenty Cicada saying to her, “I would never, Mallow. You know that. And so we know that.”

She gave him the coordinates.

“Do you really think the Empire and what they’ve just yoked themselves to is going to want a barbarian Stationer as one of their negotiators, Dzmare?” asked Darj Tarats. He’d come to stand next to Mahit, too close for her liking—come to stand next to her and murmur to her in Stationer as they watched a yaotlek of the Teixcalaanli Fleet call down a precision strike on her own forces. Mahit hadn’t ever imagined such a thing to be possible. The Teixcalaan she knew—the Teixcalaan Yskandr knew, that Tarats believed in, the ever-devouring elegant maw of an empire, teeth light across the throat of every non-Teixcalaanli system, light until they bit down and broke the spine, shook a culture to nothing—that Teixcalaan would never have cut away a part of itself to preserve a barely cohered peace.

She thought, too, of the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, an electrum-shaded flash in the dark of her assigned quarters, come to negotiate or warn. Mahit hadn’t quite put her finger on which, and now she never would, and it didn’t matter—the three-ringed ships would excise all negotiation and all warning that Sixteen Moonrise might have possessed, eliminate them as an option. Preserve themselves and their planet.

Parabolic Compression,> Yskandr murmured. can understand now that humans die and are not replaced.>

Not very easily replaced, Mahit thought, and felt her imago laugh, electric shivering all through her. Replaced with extreme difficulty and complexity.

Darj Tarats clicked his tongue behind his teeth. “I see,” he said, as if Mahit had said anything at all. “You either believe it or you don’t care whether or not it is true.”

She turned to him. She wanted—she and Yskandr wanted, a savage little flare—to talk to him only in the language that he hated and that she loved, speak the language of his enemy, drip poetry from her mouth—but it wasn’t her language. It would never be. She knew that as clearly as she knew anything. In Stationer, she said, “They let me negotiate a first contact, Tarats. Right along with them. Why not have a Stationer as part of the diplomatic protocol, especially as they know quite well that we are far better at collective memory than they are?”

“They should never have known about imago-technology,” Tarats said.

Mahit took a breath. Another. Slow. “No,” she said. “Quite probably not.” The bright stab of pain down her ulnar nerves, again, Yskandr’s vicious displeasure at her disagreement with him. “But it’s done now, Councilor. Done a long time ago. The Empire knows. And we might—if Lsel led this diplomatic delegation, we might have more bargaining power than we’ve had in generations—”

“And the price, Dzmare? The price of putting one of our imago-lines into that—conglomeration—that calls itself we? The price of Teixcalaan wanting even more of us than our self-possession and our language and our economic independence?”

Mahit said, louder, “The price was higher when it was the whole Station smashed under those three-ringed ships, and you know it.” She hadn’t meant to shout. Hadn’t meant to attract the attention of half the faces on the bridge, the ones who weren’t watching the convergence of the Parabolic Compression and a hundred spinning ring-ships on the cartograph table.

“I have,” said Darj Tarats, “spent my entire life on a ruin,” and gestured with his hand, as if to encompass not only the bridge and Peloa-2 beyond it, but all Teixcalaan and all Teixcalaan’s enemies. All his long project of drawing Teixcalaan past its borders into an unwinnable war, undone. Teixcalaan would not beat itself to pieces against an unassailable shore. Not here. Not this way.

It was Yskandr who said, with Mahit’s tongue, “Ruins can be rebuilt in peacetime.”

And it was Yskandr who helped Mahit stay on her feet and keep her face still when Tarats said, “You were a mistake, and so was your entire imago-line, and I will make sure Councilor Amnardbat knows I agree with her. There is no place for you on Lsel. Don’t ever come home, Dzmare.”