A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WHEN Eight Antidote had been small, he’d had minders, like any child: people to keep him from falling into a water garden or eating an infofiche stick or something else very stupid that really little kids did all the time. But he hadn’t had minders for a while now. He had tutors, of course—though since his ancestor-the-Emperor had died, the tutors were more of something he went to when he wanted, rather than something that happened to him every day—and he had all of the camera-eyes of the City.

Camera-eyes couldn’t stop him from deciding to get on the subway and go to the spaceport. They’d keep track of him—and now that he was on his way, he found that kind of reassuring, because there were a lot of people in the Jewel of the World once you got on the subway, and they all seemed to know where they were going and weren’t distracted or overwhelmed by anything they saw, which felt absurd. He was distracted and overwhelmed. There was just so much. He knew the palace complex as well as he knew the shape of his own knees, and he’d mapped out warship trajectories for sectors six jumpgates away, and still the City felt very loud and very—well. Very much.

But he was going to the spaceport. And the City’s eyes would track him. That was, for the first time in a long time, nice.

The subway had signs, and Eight Antidote knew the map—who didn’t know the map?—and even if he didn’t, his cloudhook would. The subway, he decided, made sense. Loud, fast-moving, uncomfortable sense, but sense. If he waited on this platform or that one, the timetables would show when the next train would arrive, and where it was going, and it did arrive then, and went where it was supposed to. That was the subway algorithm doing its work. He switched lines twice—terrified the first time, gleeful the second. He could do this. He absolutely could. It was so much easier than being in Three Azimuth’s office that he didn’t even mind when people walked in front of him and almost tripped him because he was too short for them to have noticed.

And then he was in Inmost Province Spaceport, and he wasn’t sure he could do it after all. The subway was one thing. The spaceport was another thing altogether. There were even more people, and they were milling around looking at arrival and departure holos, clutching suitcases or pushing baggage carts taller than he was. The vaulted ceilings of the spaceport took all their conversations and made them into a wave of noise, a clattering that got itself mixed in with the cheerful holo jingles of food kiosks, all trying to get him to buy SNACK CAKES: LYCHEE FLAVOR! as well as SQUID STICKS: JUST IMPORTED! He felt sick to his stomach. He usually loved squid sticks, and right now he thought he was going to scream, or maybe cry, because everything was so loud, and he never really wanted to eat anything ever again, squid sticks included. How was he going to find the Flower Weave in all of this?

He ducked into a quieter side corridor, where people were moving in one direction or another instead of wandering around without any patterns at all, and sat down on a bench. He wanted to pull his knees up to his chest and hide behind them. But that was what a really little kid would do. He tried to think. He was the ninety-percent clone of the Emperor Six Direction, who was supposed to have been one of the most intelligent Emperors who ever started out as a soldier, so he should be able to think of something.

When he did think of it, it was so obvious he felt even stupider and more like a dumb kid than ever. He turned on his cloudhook’s navigation function, and cross-referenced the berth number the Flower Weave’s absurdly bureaucracy-happy captain had filed when he arrived. His cloudhook chimed, soft enough that only he could hear, and lit up a navigational path from his position (which was apparently in Auxiliary Spaceport Corridor B, Tulip Terminal) to the Flower Weave’s berth, all the way over in what his cloudhook was calling Nasturtium Terminal. The path in front of him glowed a comforting white, everything limned in the color right before dawn on a cloudy day. Eight Antidote struck out across the spaceport floor, trying to look confident and comforted and like a man on a mission.

Nasturtium Terminal was clearly for ships that were headed out-system, through jumpgates. The entire feeling of it was very different than Tulip Terminal: Tulip Terminal had been full of Teixcalaanlitzlim, going everywhere, short hops and long ones, on-planet or up to a satellite or on a cruise around the Jewel of the World’s local planetary systems. Nasturtium Terminal had tourists, sure, but it also had a lot of grown-ups looking very seriously at their travel manifests and visas for out-Teixcalaan trips, and businesspeople with crates of wares, and a few columns of Fleet soldiers in their perfect uniforms, new cadets heading out to their first postings. Looking at them made Eight Antidote straighten his spine and square his shoulders as he walked. His illuminated cloudhook path took him right by an Information Ministry mail kiosk, staffed by two asekretim who looked hardly older than the Fleet cadets. Operating interstellar jumpgate mail must be the sort of thing people got assigned to when they weren’t trained enough to be useful anywhere else.

Eight Antidote stopped and watched them work. It didn’t seem difficult, what they were doing. They took the infofiche sticks that were brought to them—they came in bins about the size of the wastebasket in his bathroom—sorted them (probably by destination, or at least by jumpgate they were supposed to go through first on the way to their destination) into different bins, and then handed off the bins to other Information Ministry workers who had pilots’ uniforms on, except in Information cream-and-orange. Boring. Eight Antidote would hate to have this job. It only got interesting when a non-Information person, someone in perfectly normal clothes except for the Judiciary-grey armband she wore, came and stood at the little window on the side of the kiosk and handed over what looked like a very official infofiche stick. That one didn’t go into a bin. That one made one of the asekretim leave the kiosk, special infofiche in hand, and vanish off to hand-deliver it to what Eight Antidote guessed was a very fast courier indeed. The other asekreta wrote out a receipt.

He was trying to decide if he was going to let the Flower Weave be for a minute and go ask the receipt-writing asekreta about who was authorized to request fast messages from this side of the jumpgates leading away from the Jewel of the World, when the entire spaceport seemed to explode with noise: not chattering, shouting Teixcalaanlitzlim, but the shrill, incessant scream of an evacuation alarm.

In some of the older ethics manuals that Three Seagrass had once spent an excruciating semester of her time as an asekreta cadet reading, there was a persistent fear that extensive emotional—or, stars forbid, physical—contact with non-Teixcalaanlitzlim would produce a state of irredeemable contamination in the Teixcalaanlitzlim who had experienced the contact. Taking an elective course called Philosophical Shifts in Teixcalaanli Xenocontact had seemed like a good idea during the registration period, but also that had been the semester she’d registered drunk, at four in the morning, from an Information kiosk on the Jewel of the World’s southern continent, where she had been practicing cultural immersion, if cultural immersion could be measured by her success at infiltrating music scenes she didn’t even like. Mostly she remembered being bemused at those old manual writers, some of whom recommended prophylactic doses of both antibiotics, sun temple services, and social isolation if close contact had accidentally occurred. Three Seagrass had thought, as a very frustrated and no longer even slightly drunk cadet, that those writers were absurdly old-fashioned. What citizen of the Empire couldn’t hold their own against the paltry cultural contamination of a nonimperial civilization? And anyone who fucked someone with a social disease had bigger problems than irreversible contamination. Problems like fucking someone who came from a planet without adequate public health.

Currently, standing unpleasantly nude next to Mahit Dzmare in a decontamination shower in Weight for the Wheel’s medical facilities, she was beginning to wonder if the Fleet had taken those old manuals to heart. Maybe they hadn’t read anything written on the subject in the past five hundred years. She was also wondering if there were pruriently placed camera-eyes in their quarters.

Shivering in the chlorine-laced water, she said, “This was not what I had in mind for the morning, Mahit,” and was very profoundly gratified when Mahit laughed, even if the laughter was forced and angry.

“On the Station,” she said, “we don’t require new lovers to get quite this clean.”

“On your Station you don’t spend hours talking to apparently infectious aliens before taking new lovers, unless I am entirely wrong about your native culture.”

Mahit shook her head. Her curls, dripping wet, reached almost to the top of her shoulders and she kept shoving them back out of her eyes. “You’re not wrong—about that. And if we’re full of alien fungus, I don’t know how a decon shower is supposed to help.”

Three Seagrass didn’t know either. It certainly hadn’t been what she expected, walking out of the room they’d shared once she’d finished reading The Perilous Frontier! and discovered there were nine more volumes and made Mahit promise to get her them if she had any possible method of doing so. They’d dressed, and headed out with the intention of immediately keeping their scheduled second rendezvous with the aliens, back in the terrible heat of Peloa-2.

So Three Seagrass had in no way anticipated being grabbed by Fleet soldiers in full isolation gear and spirited away into the medbay, where she and Mahit were unceremoniously stripped and decontaminated while hearing only the edges of why this was necessary. The dead alien in the autopsy room had bloomed with fungal infiltrates, apparently. At any moment, perhaps she and Mahit would do the same.

Three Seagrass had her doubts. She felt exactly as uninfiltrated as before. At least by fungi. (When she wasn’t being thoroughly distracted by having chemical disinfectants sluiced over her in chilly waves, she was quite aware of how she had been thoroughly infiltrated by Mahit’s clever fingers, and by the strangeness of the narrative pattern of her graphic story. But there was absolutely nothing sexy about a decontamination shower. This moment was, in fact, the least attractive Three Seagrass had ever felt while being naked and near someone she’d had sex with.)

Besides, she was far more concerned that at any moment she and Mahit would miss their prearranged appointment on Peloa-2, and what would be worse than fungal parasitism running rampant through the Fleet was insulting your enemy by being late to a negotiation so that there wasn’t time for fungal parasitism to run rampant through the Fleet, due to most of the Fleet being dissolved by ship-eating alien weaponry.

The shower finally turned off, and its sealed door unsealed. Three Seagrass exhaled, hard. She was very wet and very cold and very clean, and she needed to be on a shuttle right now. But on the other side of the shower door was the ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, not wearing any isolation gear at all. He was, however, wearing clothes, which gave him a substantial advantage over the two of them.

“Adjutant,” Mahit said, mildly. She was not trying to cover herself with anything, even her hands or the angle of her hips. Three Seagrass wondered about nudity taboo on Lsel Station, and then decided there was very little point in wondering about that right this moment. Mahit had gestured to Twenty Cicada’s lack of filter-mask or plastic plague gear, and was asking, “Are you no longer concerned that we might be emitting—what was it—spores, then?”

“I find it extremely unlikely that you are emitting anything, Ambassador, Envoy,” said Twenty Cicada, “but if you are, it’s no more than I’ve already been exposed to. I was the one who found the body of the medtech, after all. Damage, if there is any, has been done.”

Mahit said, “Why are we suddenly concerned about fungal contamination? The aliens we were speaking with—or trying to speak with—were perfectly healthy. No visible fungi.”

“Not visible,” Twenty Cicada began. “Internal. If they had any. And I am beginning to think they might have—but it was dormant, in the skull cavity, the neural structures.” He looked like he was willing to go on for a long while on the subject. He looked like a man who had been quietly frightened and quite alone for some time, and who would talk about anything if allowed to. Three Seagrass remembered how deeply at home he had been in the garden of hydroponics at the heart of his ship, and thought, Isolation protocols must be terrifying to him. To think that he might lose access to all of that—be an infective agent—it would ache like the oozing sap of a cut flower-stem.

And then: Maybe I’m still a poet after all.

She interrupted him before he could give Mahit much more of his stored-up lecture on the fungi which apparently lay secret and safe inside the bodies of their enemies until those enemies died. She said, “Ikantlos-prime—we have to go down to Peloa-2. We promised we would be there. And I quite genuinely do not know what the aliens will think—or do—if we promise one thing and give another.”

“I know,” said Twenty Cicada. “I’m going with you. I’m flying the shuttle.”

“Your yaotlek doesn’t want to expose anyone who hasn’t been exposed yet,” said Mahit, cool and calm, like an offered hand: I’m sorry for what your people are doing to you.

“Quite,” said Twenty Cicada. “But also, I insisted. I want to ask them questions, Ambassador. I want to show them this and ask them what it’s for.”

He held up a sealed clear plastic cube in one hand. Inside it was a branching fractal structure of white. The shape of it was, Three Seagrass thought, quite similar to the pale green patterns of the just-visible homeostat-cultist tattoos on his wrists. It rattled when he shook the cube.

The alarm went on forever. It was loud and high and unignorable, and it didn’t stop, and everyone but Eight Antidote apparently knew what to do about it. All of Nasturtium Terminal had transformed into a river of people, hurrying out the exits, while the entire spaceport seemed to scream, endlessly. Something is wrong. Something is wrong and you’re in danger. They were probably evacuating. Eight Antidote should evacuate too. But his feet felt rooted to the floor. He was a tiny rock the river of Teixcalaanlitzlim flowed around. What if the alarms were going off because he’d run away into the City and everyone was going to miss their flights and trains and everything because the City was looking for him? What if it was all his fault?

What if it wasn’t, and it was a real alarm, for a real problem, and no one knew where he was and whether he was safe? That was worse. That was—he’d been so selfish—and everyone was moving so fast—he wasn’t a rock anymore, he was a pebble, tumbling in the flow of people, being pushed and shoved as they tried to get to the exits of the terminal and away from the noise. Someone hit him with their backpack, and he fell down. Someone stepped on his belly, and it hurt, and he curled up into a ball like Eleven Laurel had taught him. Covered the back of his neck with his hands, protected his face and middle. He didn’t have enough air to cry; it had all been squished out of him by the person who’d run across him like he was part of the floor—and another person tripped over him and fell and scrambled back up again—

If he stayed here, he was going to get trampled.

He tried to remember that cold, clear place he’d gone to, back in the Ministry of War’s strategy room. The place that happened after you were afraid. He didn’t know where that was. He was so scared. That place wasn’t real right now.

A hand grabbed his arm. Yanked him up to his feet. A voice said, “Fucking kids—gonna get yourself killed like that—”

And he was stumbling forward, inside the river of people now, not an obstacle but one of a thousand parts of the water that flowed, and he had no idea who had grabbed him and helped him up. They were as lost as he was.

They spilled out of Nasturtium Terminal back into Tulip Terminal like a flood. Eight Antidote saw that all the exits to the subway were blocked by spaceport security—flanked by a rising number of Sunlit in their blank gold faceplates, threatening and reassuring at once. Out here in Tulip Terminal, the shrieking alarm had words in it: had please proceed to an outdoor location and there is no immediate risk to life or property and please do not attempt to access the subway at this time mixed in with the high wailing noise.

One of those subway entrances had curling tendrils of white smoke coming out of it. Eight Antidote, bruised and terrified and carried away out the doors of the terminal and into the bright, easy sunlight of a City afternoon, thought, Was there a bomb in the tunnels? and didn’t know at all how to deal with that possibility. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The subway was a perfect algorithm. The algorithm would notice a bomb if there was a bomb, wouldn’t it?

The flow of evacuating people took him beyond the perimeter that the Sunlit were beginning to set up around the spaceport, and then stopped being a river and started being a confusion again: some Teixcalaanlitzlim standing around, some wandering off, hailing groundcars-for-hire or walking briskly away. Eight Antidote sat down on a low curb that bordered a garden plot full of tulips. Tulip Terminal, he thought. Of course tulips. His stomach hurt, and his shoulder, and the side of his face. He touched his cheek and winced at the sting, and wasn’t surprised when his fingers came away bloody.

He wanted to go home.

He didn’t know how to get home if he didn’t have the subway. He was miles from Palace-Central, and he didn’t know what kind of neighborhoods were between here and there anyway, if he decided to walk. His cloudhook would show him a path, but it was such a very long way, and he really never should have tried to be a grown person out in the City. And if he couldn’t do this, how could he ever think he could be Emperor? Or even be a soldier in the Fleet? He was sure Fleet soldiers didn’t panic when they couldn’t use the subway. Or want to go home to someplace that they understood the rules of.

He promised himself he wasn’t going to cry right before he started crying. Which meant he was crying and embarrassed about crying at the same time.

When he managed to unscrew his eyes and wipe his nose with the back of his sleeve (he was being such a baby), and look up at all, there was a person in white crouched in front of him.

“Hi, Your Excellency,” said Five Agate, the Emperor’s ezuazuacat. “How are you doing?”

If he’d been two years younger—if he’d been two weeks younger, maybe—Eight Antidote would have dived into her arms and hung on tight. But he was too embarrassed. Too ashamed.

“Fine,” he said, snot-choked.

“Okay,” said Five Agate, and sat down on the garden curb next to him. “How about we rest here for a minute so that the Sunlit can finish securing the area, and then I take you back to Palace-East?”

That sounded incredibly nice. That sounded easy. Eight Antidote didn’t trust it. Right now he suspected he didn’t trust anything. That was awful. He wanted to trust the Emperor’s sworn right hand. He always had before.

“What happened?” he asked.

“A lot of things,” said Five Agate. “Which do you want to hear about?”

He swallowed. Found himself asking, pathetically, “… Is it my fault?”

Five Agate patted his back, just once. “No,” she said. “Well. Nothing’s your fault aside from how Nineteen Adze asked me to go fetch you myself, and I was fairly busy at the time. But you did a fine job being findable—stayed on camera, stayed still. I only lost you for a few minutes.”

He’d never really been alone at all, had he. Later, he might mind that. Not right now. The City had seen him and sent him Five Agate. Or Nineteen Adze had. Same thing, maybe. It was hard to tell, sometimes, where the City started and the Emperor stopped. “Sorry,” Eight Antidote said. “For making you come out here.”

“I accept your apology.”

“Um. What—else happened? I saw smoke in the subway. Was there—” He didn’t want to ask, Was there a bomb? Asking felt like it would make it real.

“A train derailed,” Five Agate said. “Which is—a very complicated problem. A surprising problem. We haven’t had a train derailment since before you were born.”

“Not since the new algorithms, right?”

“Right.” She didn’t seem surprised that he knew about those. That he’d draw those conclusions. Eight Antidote remembered she had a kid, too. A little kid, but maybe he was a smart little kid and Five Agate was good at trusting kids when they were right. That would make sense. (He really wanted things to make sense right now.)

“Did people die?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Five Agate said, after blinking through some data on her cloudhook. “Some people are being taken to the hospital, but no one has died.”

“Good.” He took a deep breath. “Did I— Did the train I was supposed to be on derail?”

Five Agate made a considering noise. “Maybe,” she said. “It’d help if we knew exactly how the derailment happened. And also—what were you planning on doing, coming out here?”

Being a spy, Eight Antidote thought. Finding things out on my own. But that maybe was rattling around in his throat, awful enough to choke on. So he told the truth. Maybe if he told the truth he’d get to go home and stop being a spy for a little while. He said, “I wanted to ask someone who didn’t work for Information or War about Envoy Three Seagrass.”

“… And you thought you’d find someone like that at the spaceport?”

“Um. She left on the Flower Weave, and—”

“Oh, clever,” said Five Agate. Eight Antidote expected the praise to make him feel good, feel proud, like when Eleven Laurel or Three Azimuth had told him he’d done something right. Instead he just felt tired. There was a long pause, a quiet contemplative space. He sniffled. He had a headache from crying, which was also embarrassing.

Finally, Five Agate stood up. Her white trousers had planter-dirt on them, and she didn’t seem to care. “Let’s go home, Your Excellency,” she said. “The Judiciary and the Sunlit have the scene locked down. There’s no point in hanging around waiting to see if it was a signal problem or an incendiary device.”

An incendiary device. Like the one the ixplanatlim had been talking about in the throne room, days and days ago. A bomb. In the subway. That would be awful. That would be worse than a derailment. Especially if it was Eight Antidote’s fault.

“Do you think,” he tried, willing his voice to be even, “it was an incendiary device?”

“I think,” said Five Agate, “that you and I both will be better off waiting for the Judiciary report on the incident before we start worrying about that. Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.” She paused, and smiled, a quick there-and-gone expression. “Besides, I think I can do better than bringing you the captain of the Flower Weave. How would you like to talk to the envoy herself?”

The shuttle went down to the Peloa System with Swarm on it. Nine Hibiscus watched that shuttle’s engines burn bright fuel and vanish into the atmosphere of Peloa-2 from the bridge, with Sixteen Moonrise right beside her where her adjutant should have been—the worst possible replacement for Swarm that she could imagine. There went Swarm, the envoy, the Ambassador, and her same four escort soldiers as the last time—all of them smelling harshly of chlorine and disinfectants even through fresh uniforms. Down to meet the enemy face-to-face, and the medical deck was still sealed off to all but emergency personnel. Sixteen Moonrise claimed that she’d been appeased sufficiently: there wasn’t going to be an immediate outbreak of fungal-driven anaphylaxis, not just yet, but naturally a Fleet Captain (let alone a yaotlek) shouldn’t take any chances. And of course, of course Sixteen Moonrise refused to return to the Parabolic Compression while there was any chance that she herself could be a vector. How noble. How convenient for her. How easy it was going to be for her to find out about the enemy planetary system before Nine Hibiscus was ready for her to know.

Nine Hibiscus wanted to hurt something. To shoot something. To have a target to unleash all of Weight for the Wheel’s energy cannons on, a conflagration to create. Nothing was making sense any longer. She’d understood Kauraan. She’d understood how to make her enemies trust her, how to give her soldiers strength in their loyalty—she’d always understood that—and here she was, paralyzed, waiting, with a dead cadet next to a dead alien in the autopsy cold-room. All of the power of the Fleet, all of the power of Teixcalaan behind it, all of her own skill and hard-won patience—and yet Swarm had gone down on that star-cursed shuttle to drown in desert heat and ask aliens questions. This had all been her idea, originally, and she wished she could take it back—if taking it back meant she’d have something to do. Something to give her people to do, aside from wait, and die in flashfire bursts when they were caught unawares by the sudden appearing of the enemy ships, peeling out of the void-dark of space.

(She could give them the planetary system. She could give that order at any time, and waste half of every legion on getting there, and then—destroy a whole live planet full of sentients, and have the war continue forever. But it would be a war with targets. It would be a war to break herself open on, and be a song and a story before she was done.)

She wondered if she could get away with shooting Sixteen Moonrise, just by accident. Probably not. Not until she had an excuse.

“How long are you going to give them?” asked Sixteen Moonrise, and Nine Hibiscus regretfully concluded that question wasn’t a sufficient excuse for court-martial and execution. It was the same question everyone else on the bridge wanted to ask—Bubbles, wrapped in her cloudhook’s holoprojections of the Fleet’s comm network; and Eighteen Chisel with his hands fluttering, ghosting over the propulsion and navigation interface, face hungry for anything she could provide.

“… Two hours,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Longer if Swarm sends back an all-clear signal. Which he will.”

“You are very devoted to him,” said Sixteen Moonrise. Nine Hibiscus found herself not even caring that the other woman was still trying to find an angle, information, ways to destroy and undermine her authority. It really didn’t matter now.

“We’ve served together for our entire careers,” she said. “Of course I am. Wouldn’t you be?”

The distortion of his voice through the medbay intercom would stay with her forever, she was entirely sure. The careful choice of words. How he’d called her Mallow and my dear because he was nearly sure he was going to die and some sorts of protocol didn’t matter then, even if you had made your whole life about being a perfect Teixcalaanlitzlim, a perfect Fleet soldier, except in all the ways you weren’t.

“… I would be,” said Sixteen Moonrise, surprisingly, and sighed. A ghost sound, a breath, like ice on the inside of a broken Shard canopy, where vacuum had gotten in. “He is exceptionally brave. His veins would drip starlight—and glow like fireflies in the sacrifice bowl.”

That was “Reclamation Song #1.” The oldest one, the one that had come out of the dirt with Teixcalaan, or almost. The first generation in space, under the First Emperor. The Reclamation Song no one ever assigned an author to, because why would you? It was the song about being Teixcalaanli. Nine Hibiscus was being manipulated, utterly, and that was—all right. “He is,” she said. “And that’s why I let him go down there with the envoy. He deserves a chance to ask these things why they almost killed him, and what for. And if they meant it.”

The sound Sixteen Moonrise made wasn’t a word. “Him, and not the rest of our dead? The rest of my dead? All of our people on Peloa-2?”

“He’s the one who gets the chance.” Whether that was bad luck or good she really wasn’t sure.

“I,” said Sixteen Moonrise, “want to believe in you, my yaotlek. Truly, I do. But there are powers at work here beyond you and me.”

“What powers would those be, Fleet Captain?” Nine Hibiscus asked. Paranoia she’d expected. That was what Third Palmers were like, even retired ones who had ended up in command. Paranoia, but not coupled with this sort of honesty. This sort of—asking, to be allowed to be helped—

This time the noise that came from Sixteen Moonrise’s mouth was a sigh. A grudging noise, the sound of a person getting ready to tell the truth. Fuck, but she was Third Palm, wasn’t she. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t trust her. Even if she turned out to be right—even if she couched her analysis in the language Nine Hibiscus understood as the one that ought to exist between commander and soldier, the mutual protection of I would die for you and I will never ask you to, unless it is a last resort.

Sixteen Moonrise said, “The ones who convinced Information to take along a representative of a foreign government to negotiate a first-contact cease-fire. The ones who pushed Her Brilliance the Emperor to encourage Minister Nine Propulsion to retire early. Any power that wants us entrapped in this war, instead of winning it.”

Nine Hibiscus turned to her. She’d made some kind of decision; she didn’t know what it was yet, only that she’d made it. “Do you want to have this conversation privately, Fleet Captain?” She tried to keep her voice gentle, as she’d ask one of her own soldiers (like she’d asked Eighteen Chisel, when he’d brought her the news that they knew the location of the enemy planetary system). It was an offer: Do you want me to trust you? To protect you?

And Sixteen Moonrise refused it. “No, yaotlek,” she said, all resigned politesse. “I can say all this right here on your bridge. There are factions in the Ministry—as I know you are aware—who would rather see you exhaust yourself on a war of attrition rather than begin a war we could win. And those factions are joined by those who would like power to accrete to the Ministry, the sort of prestige we enjoyed before the unfortunate incident with One Lightning. You do know where Minister Three Azimuth was stationed, before she received her posting?”

“Nakhar,” Nine Hibiscus said, and nothing more. Of course she knew Nakhar. Of course she knew how Three Azimuth had subdued it, the careful and destructive violence she had done to all of its insurgent factions, how she had installed her own people inside those factions and let them betray themselves down to uselessness. She herself had done something similar in the Kauraan engagement—

Abruptly, it occurred to her that the new Minister of War might dislike Sixteen Moonrise and the Third Palm as much as Nine Hibiscus herself did. And at the same time, might dislike Nine Hibiscus equally much, for who her patron had been. For using the same set of ideas, but not needing to have an epithet like she who kindles enmity in the most oath-sworn heart accrete around her like a chain.

“Nakhar,” Sixteen Moonrise agreed. “Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, may she reign a thousand thousand years—she made the butcher of the Nakharese mind Minister of War. And sent your patron Minister Nine Propulsion home to Zorai, and you—and I—out here. With this.” She gestured at the distant, still-spinning three-ringed ship. At Peloa-2, a glitter of reflected light.

Nine Hibiscus had only heard Three Azimuth called the butcher of the Nakharese mind in the nastier parts of Fleet bars, where poetry tended toward doggerel and the epigram so quick-spoken it eviscerated before you’d notice it had been said.

“I appreciate your candor, Fleet Captain,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you? That I suspect we are all going to die slowly out here, the first wave of this war? That I believe that our illuminate star-blessed Emperor would start a war she had no intention of winning, just to root out the last of the elements in the Fleet that might have supported One Lightning? Would you like me to say that, whether or not it is true, so that you can carry it home to your Undersecretary?”

It was gratifying to see Sixteen Moonrise flinch. She hadn’t known that Nine Hibiscus had figured out she was still Third Palm, had she. That was something. Some small thing.

“No,” Sixteen Moonrise said. “That’s not what I want at all. I want—I want this war engaged. I want us to win it.”

Perhaps she wasn’t even lying. Nine Hibiscus didn’t have time to find out: Two Foam had stood up from her console and was saying, “Yaotlek—I’m sorry to interrupt, but we have a priority message from the Emperor Herself. She wants to speak with the envoy. The envoy and Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. As quickly as we can send the message back—the courier is waiting now.”

The envoy and Mahit Dzmare. Who were down on Peloa-2, arguing with the enemy, or possibly dying of fungal infiltration. Or heatstroke.

“… Well, get them back up here, then, will you?” Nine Hibiscus said. The Emperor—her Emperor, no matter what Sixteen Moonrise was trying to make her think, make her doubt—wanted the envoy, and so that was what she was going to get.