A Desolation Called Peace

INTERLUDE

THESE bodies: dry-weather bodies, endurance-gened bodies; one a body which had displayed stubborn determination as a kit, even before it was brought in to personhood; one a body which had displayed a cunning intelligence, a sneaky body, the sort of kit the we near it laughed at, finding it underfoot, babbling in kit-language, yowling its demands at all hours. These bodies, singing in the we: singing heat and sand and confusion-interest in the closed-off but persistent minds of the enemy, just as their precedents had. Singing also now in surprise, stutter-burst fascination/horror, disjointed chords. One of the bodies of their silent enemy had brought strands of person-maker. Had not consumed the person-maker, but locked it in a plastic box, like it was poison.

Like the we were poison.

The bodies in the sand and the heat tried to make sense of this. To not think language, or equivalence of narrative (why would we?), but to attempt to link concepts that had never been possible previously: to think, not a person and also knows how to be a person and also does not want personhood; does not want to sing, fractal, reflected, iterating across the void-home. To cross-reference: those bodies that only sang an iteration of piloting, and were silent otherwise. To echo fear across the we, fear in the shape of the silent enemy: to imagine only wanting a partial singing.

The silent enemy body speaks in the language of mouths, senselessly. When the cunning/sneaksome body plucks the person-maker from its clawless hands, it yowls briefly and then silences itself. It is very still, and very watchful, and the stubborn/determined body sings person and the cunning/sneaksome body sings not a person, not singing, and these threads of melody reverberate endlessly through the we—

And at the same time, aflame with icy determination, the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, sometimes called Ascent by the man who was her most-beloved teacher, whom she wishes she could trust entire (but why then did he send her out this far, to this war, where she is like to die?), sends out orders to her legion. The Twenty-Fourth responds to her as if they were extensions of her hands, of her breath: they gather themselves, they assume strike formation, they begin, cautiously still, to advance.

And Sixteen Moonrise keeps a steady hand on their leash. She will wait a little longer yet. A little longer yet, for wondering why Eleven Laurel sent her here, and for the yaotlek to come to the inevitable conclusion that to avoid an endless war they must begin with an unanswerable atrocity: Peloa-2 a thousand times over.

The we slip in and out of black void-home the way the we slip in and out of jumpgate space: all places are in some sense the same, where there is the iterative song resounding, dirt-home or blood-home or starflyer-home in the dark between the stars. To think: There is a change. To think, knowing the confusion of the bodies in the sand and the heat, The silent ones have turned away from the person-maker and move together now toward the nearest blood-home of ours. To think to sing to shriek, ah, ah, ah, there are a million bodies there, a thousand million, too many to lose at once: so much silence to rebuild—

And, as all things do on the original dirt-home of the we, when they decide to move, their three-ringed ships a glimmer of distortion against the stars, they move all together, one murmuration in many directions. And this time, they move to flank their enemy and drive them away before they can even think to arrive at their ultimate precious destination: one swarm of diving, singing ships suddenly alive in the heart of the Seventeenth Legion, who scrambles, too late, all of their Shards to push the we away—

—and another murmuration heads for the jumpgate from where the silent enemy came, in all their vast spearpoint ships, came through this one point only into the parts of the void-home that belong to the we, came some time ago with their little resource-extraction colonies, and came much more recently with firepower and threat and the eternal inquisitive reach that should belong only to sentient persons. That murmuration comes hidden and flowing to the jumpgate, and begins to pass through, one and the other and the other and the other …

Dekakel Onchu wakes to alarms, to a nightmare she’s dreamed often enough that she has to convince herself that it is real: the aliens are coming through the Anhamemat Gate. She moves on instinct and training, on the voice of her imago-line giving her enough space to breathe, to not hyperventilate or panic. She is the Councilor for the Pilots. Her ancestors brought Lsel Station safely to rest. If she has to, she will bring every last one of the Station’s citizens to a new home, even Aknel fucking Amnardbat, who she has still not decided what to do about, except figure out how to make a Councilor not a Councilor anymore, and how to get Darj Tarats to help her do it—

But she doesn’t want to have to find a new Station, dream up all those fragile numbers like the first pilot in her imago-line did, start the world over again. So she scrambles all of the military craft Lsel Station and every other sub-Station in Bardzravand Sector have, and prepares to meet the threat face-to-face.

She is in the hangar bay, watching her pilots climb into their ships, when she spots a tall, cadaverous shape who can only be Darj Tarats. Him, she stops. Him, she asks to justify himself: now, after all this, after what he has done and condemned the Station to suffer—now he is taking a flitter-ship and running away? Alone? How many Councilors are going to betray their duty to Lsel Station today? First Amnardbat—and how she is going to deal with Amnardbat is clearly something that will have to be considered after this conflagration, if there is an after to consider problems in—and now Tarats, abandoning the Station?

And Darj Tarats says to her, “No. I’m not running away. I’m going to get Mahit Dzmare, and we are going to redirect this war.”

Onchu doesn’t know—will never quite know—why she lets him leave. Perhaps she thinks he’ll die trying to get through the Far Gate and none of it will matter. Perhaps she thinks he might manage what he says he’s trying to do—and if he can, she will have less blood to mop up.

The cartograph table in Eleven Laurel’s office is small; it fits on a side table half as long as his desk. He runs it all the time; a sort of background music, a thousand solved military puzzles replaying beside him as he does the work he is required to do. He likes to think it lets him remember his history. His history, his Ministry’s history, his Empire’s history. He’s an old soldier, Eleven Laurel is, and decades gone from a battlefront he personally had to solve. Old soldiers need to keep their teeth, and Eleven Laurel sharpens his on the knotty flesh of centuries’ worth of Teixcalaanli campaigns, played out again in pinpoints of light.

He has it on now; it is playing some battle in a double-star system from two centuries ago, and he isn’t watching it at all except for how the lights shift across his hands.

His Ministry’s history, his Ministry’s successes. How fragile they can turn out to be, in the hands of a yaotlek who would rather be an Emperor, and the reactions of an Emperor who came to her throne in the aftermath of that yaotlek. Eleven Laurel is an old soldier. He thinks of the Shards, tied together with new technology from the Science Ministry, shifted and strange, not quite trustable—more like the Sunlit than his fellow soldiers now, in their worst moments, which are also their undeniable tactical best ones. He thinks of slow poison, and of trust.

Of what he has asked his favorite student to die for, all unknowing, in hopes of preserving his Ministry’s history, his Ministry’s successes. Cutting away what might be susceptible to rot—or the suspicion of rot. Sixteen Moonrise is an acceptable sacrifice if she takes Nine Hibiscus with her and wins a victory for War that will keep War relevant in the new Emperor’s estimation for as long as the conflict continues.

In the Seventeenth Legion: all the Shards together, linked by Shard-sight and biofeedback and the other thing—the Shard trick, they call it, when they’re alone amongst themselves, no superior officers, no nonpilots. The Shard trick, where sometimes it isn’t just proprioception and pain that are shared between each Shard, but instinct—reaction time—and in moments of extremity or beauty, thought.

Not words, exactly. But communication. The ones who like it—and only a small percentage of Shard pilots like the Shard trick—have pushed its limits: recited poetry to one another without ever opening their mouths.

Recited poetry to one another from either side of a jumpgate, and heard. A distorted echo, a vibration in the bones. Something from a sector of space utterly disconnected from this one save for the stitch of the jumpgate, and the vast breathing Shard-sense.

All the Shards together, in the Seventeenth Legion, whether they like the Shard trick or not: dying under the slick dissolving ship-spit of the three-ringed alien enemy, under the flashes of energy-cannon fire. Dying, and it hurts, and there are a very great many of them dying.

A long way away, in the sector of Teixcalaanli space which holds the Jewel of the World, and also the Third Legion cruiser Verdigris Mesa, four Shard pilots on a training exercise return to the hangar bay screaming, weeping; they help each other from their ships, stand braced and linked as if they cannot bear to be alone, and one of them says, thread of sense within their sobbing—truly, it does not matter which one—“We need to speak with the Minister of War. Code Hyacinth. Now.”