A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  This book is for all the exiles:

  the displaced, the refugee, the stateless;

  the abandoned and the abandoner;

  those made desolate and those cast free.

  (And for Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to question orders.)

  First, reality was suspended. All breaches to Inca protocol occurred at once: the rules governing personal contact (visual, oral, and corporal), drinking, and eating were broken. When Ciquinchara first met the conquerors he was allowed to do what no Indian could, and now the tables were turned. Since there was no signifying context to frame their interactions, the actors exposed themselves to limitless risk. Atahualpa could have been slaughtered, or Soto and Hernando poisoned.…

  —Gonzolo Lamana, in “Beyond Exoticization and Likeness: Alterity and the Production of Sense in a Colonial Encounter,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 1 (2005): 4–39

  To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles—this they name empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

  —Tacitus (quoting Calgacus), Agricola 30

  PRELUDE

  TO think—not language. To not think language. To think, we, and not have a tongue-sound or cry for its crystalline depths. To have discarded tongue-sounds where they are unsuitable. To think as a person and not as a wantful voice, not as a blank-eyed hungering beast, not as a child thinks, with only its own self and the cries of its mouth for company. To look outward from the two-ring or three-ring of one of our starflyers, and see every pinpoint light, every fusion-heart star. To see the pattern these stars make in our eyes reflecting the pattern of our eyes in the dark on the old planet. How our eyeshine glowed in the dirt-home, the blood-home! How we closed them and were invisible, dark-scavengers, secret-hunters! How our starflyers glow in the void-home, the light-home of us! How we slip sideways, like a closing eye, and are invisible! To think as a person, with the singing fractal swarm of we, and see these places that we have not yet scavenged, not yet torn open, claws as delicate as surgeon-scalpels, for their secrets!

  Oh, the other hunger, the hunger of we that is nothing to do with the body. The hunger of we to reach out.

  This body or that body: flesh full of the genes for strength and savagery, flesh full of the genes for patience and pattern-spotting. This body a curious body, an observer body, trained well for celestial navigation and surveying, its claws laced through with the filaments of metal that allow it to sing not only to we but to any starflyer it touches. This body a body that almost did not become we, almost became meat instead, but is we, and sings we, and is a body for making other bodies meat, for making also other bodies with itself: this body full of kits and clever with its hands on the triggers of a starflyer’s energy cannons.

  These bodies, singing in the we, singing together of the flesh of bodies who are not we but have built starflyers and energy cannon. Bodies who are meat and cannot sing! Bodies who think language, who cry with their mouths and leak water from their eyes, who are clawless but vicious in their own hunger to reach out. Who have touched so much of the void-home already, and dwell in it, and have come so very close to the jumpgates behind which are all of our blood-homes, new and old.

  These bodies sing: the clever meat dies like every other meat, like we do, but it does not remember what its dead meat knew. So we have brought down our sibling-bodies onto one of their planets, not a blood-home but a dirt-home, full of resources to scavenge, and we have rendered them up for usage, the meat and the resources both.

  To sing—hunger satisfied. To sing—understanding. Except:

  Another body provides counterpoint, a dissonant chord. This body a curious body, an observer body, a stubborn and patrolling body who has slipped sideways in and out of vision in the same sector of void for lo these many cycles and remains a curious body even so. This body sings in the we, sings of a few clever meat bodies that do remember what their dead meat knew. But not all of them. Not all the same knowing. Not like the singing of the we.

  To think of a we that fragments! That does not flock, that remembers but could not hold the shape of a murmuration. We sing disturbance and we sing the hunger of reaching-out, to think of fragmentation! We sing, too: What does this clever meat have that we do not? What singing is their singing, that we cannot hear?

  And we send our starflyers whirling, whirling close. Close enough to taste.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  … INTERDICT SUSPENDED—for a duration of four months, extensible by Council order, the interdict regarding Teixcalaanli military transport through Stationer space is suspended; all ships bearing Teixcalaanli military callsign are permitted to pass through the Anhamemat Gate—this suspension does not authorize Teixcalaanli ships, military or otherwise, to dock at Lsel Station without prior visas, approvals, and customs clearances—SUSPENSION AUTHORIZED BY THE COUNCILOR FOR THE MINERS (DARJ TARATS)—message repeats …

  —priority message deployed on diplomatic, commercial, and universal frequencies in the Bardzravand Sector, 52nd day, 1st year, in the 1st indiction of the Emperor of All Teixcalaan Nineteen Adze

  * * *

  Your Brilliance, you have left me with all the world, and yet I am bereft; I’d take your star-cursed possessing ghost, Six Direction, if only he would teach me how not to sleep.

  —the private notes of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, undated, locked, and encrypted

  NINE Hibiscus watched the cartograph cycle through its last week of recorded developments for a third time, and then switched it off. Without its pinpoint stargleams and Fleet-movement arcs inscribed in light, the strategy table on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel was a flat black expanse, dull-matte, as impatient as its captain for new information.

  There was none forthcoming. Nine Hibiscus didn’t need to watch the cartograph again to remember how the displayed planet-points had winked first distress-red and then out-of-communication black, vanishing like they were being swallowed by a tide. No matter how thickly laid the lines of incoming Teixcalaanli ships were shown on that cartograph, none of them had advanced into the flood of blank silence. Beyond this point, Nine Hibiscus thought, not without a shimmering anticipation, we are quite afraid to see.

  Her own Weight for the Wheel was the second-closest vessel to the communicationless swath. She’d sent only one ship farther out than she’d take her own people. That was the hybrid scout-gunner called Knifepoint’s Ninth Blooming, a near-invisible sliver of a ship that slipped free of her flagship’s open-mawed hangar and into the silent black. Sending it might have been Nine Hibiscus’s first mistake as Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze
’s newest yaotlek—commander of Fleet commanders, with multiple Teixcalaanli legions under her control. An Emperor made new yaotlekim when that Emperor wanted to make a war: the one begot the other. Nine Hibiscus had heard that old saying the first time when she’d been a cadet, and thought it herself approximately once a week, absent confirmation of absolute observed truth.

  Nineteen Adze, new-crowned, had very badly wanted to make a war.

  Now, at the very forefront of that war, Nine Hibiscus hoped sending Knifepoint hadn’t been a mistake after all. It’d be useful to avoid unforced errors, considering how new a yaotlek she was. (It’d be useful to avoid errors at all, but Nine Hibiscus had been an officer of the Six Outreaching Palms—the Teixcalaanli imperial military, hands outstretched in every direction—long enough to know that errors, in war, were inevitable.) So far Knifepoint was running as quiet as the dead planets up ahead, and the cartograph hadn’t updated in four hours.

  So that gambit could be going any way at all.

  She leaned her elbows on the strategy table. There’d be elbowprints later: the soft pillowing flesh of her arms leaving its oils on the matte surface, and she’d have to get out a screen-cleaner cloth to wipe them away. But Nine Hibiscus liked to touch her ship, know it even when it was just waiting for orders. Feel, even this far from its engine core, the humming of the great machine for which she served as a brain. Or at least a ganglion cluster, a central point. A Fleet captain was a filter for all the information that came to the bridge, after all—and a yaotlek was more so, a yaotlek had farther reach, more hands to stretch out in every possible direction. More ships.

  Nine Hibiscus was going to need every one of them she had got. The Emperor Herself might have wanted a war to cut the teeth of her rulership on, but the war that she’d sent Nine Hibiscus out to win was already ugly: ugly and mysterious. A poison tide lapping at the edges of Teixcalaan. It had begun with rumors, stories of aliens that struck, destroyed, vanished without warning or demands, leaving shattered ship pieces in the void if they left anything at all. But there were always horror stories of spooks in the black. Every Fleet soldier grew up on them, passed them down to new cadets. And these particular rumors had all crept inward from the Empire’s neighbors, from Verashk-Talay and Lsel Station, nowhere central, nowhere important—not until the old Emperor, eternally-sun-caught Six Direction, died … and in his dying declared that all the rumors were true.

  After that the war was inevitable. It would have happened anyway, even before five Teixcalaanli colony outposts on the other side of the jumpgate in Parzrawantlak Sector went as silent and dull as stones, just where those horror-stories would have crawled out from, if they were going to crawl out of the black spaces between the stars at all. It merely might have happened slower.

  Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze had been Emperor for two months, and Nine Hibiscus had been yaotlek for this war for almost half that time.

  Around her the bridge was both too busy and too quiet. Every station was occupied by its appropriate officer. Navigation, propulsion, weaponry, comms: all arrayed around her and her strategy table like a solid, scaled-up version of the holographic workspace she could call into being with her cloudhook, the glass-and-metal overlay on her right eye that linked her—even here on the edge of the Teixcalaanli imperium—to the great data-and-story networks that held the Empire together. Every one of the bridge’s stations was occupied, and every occupant was trying to look as if they had something to do besides wait and wonder if the force they had been sent to defeat would catch them unawares and do—whatever it was that these aliens were doing that snuffed out planetary communication systems like flames in vacuum. All of her bridge officers were nervous, and all of them were tired of being patient. They were the Fleet, the Six Outreaching Palms of Teixcalaan: conquest was their style, not massed waiting on the edge of the inevitable, paused in worrisome silence at the very forefront of six legions’ worth of ships. Nearest to the danger, and yet still unmoving.

  At least when Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze had made her yaotlek to prosecute this war, Nine Hibiscus thought, she’d let her keep her own ship as flagship. Each of these officers was a Teixcalaanlitzlim she’d worked with, served with, commanded—each of them she’d led to victory at the uprising at Kauraan System less than three months ago. They were hers. They’d trust her a little longer. Just a little longer, until Knifepoint came back with some actionable information and she could let them loose a bit. Taste a little blood, a little dust and fire blooming from the death of an alien ship. A fleet could last a long time, fed on those sips of sugar-water violence, as long as they believed their yaotlek knew what she was doing.

  Or that’d always been how Nine Hibiscus had felt, when she used to serve under Fleet Captain Nine Propulsion before Nine Propulsion had gone off to pilot a desk planetside in the City. She’d risen all the way to Minister of War under the last, dead, lamented Emperor, and Nine Hibiscus—who spelled her name with the same number glyph Nine Propulsion used, and hadn’t yet regretted that late-teenage star-eyed choice of how to style herself in written form—had thought she’d probably be Minister under the new one. Had expected that.

  But instead, Nine Propulsion had taken retirement almost immediately upon Nineteen Adze’s ascension. She’d left the City entirely, gone home to her birth system—no chance yet for one of her old subordinates to drop by and ask her what for, and why now, and all the usual gossip. Instead, Nine Hibiscus, bereft of the comfort of mentorship (she’d been lucky to have had it so long, if she was being honest with herself) had woken up one shift with an urgent infofiche stick message from the Emperor Herself—a commission.

  If this war is winnable, I want you to win it. The Emperor’s dark cheekbones like knives, like the edges of the flares of the sun-spear throne she sat on.

  And now, calling her back to herself in this present moment, a low voice to Nine Hibiscus’s direct left: one that wouldn’t startle her at that distance. (The only one who could sneak up that close, regardless.) “Nothing yet, then, sir?”

  Twenty Cicada, her ikantlos-prime, highest-ranking of all the officers who served directly under the Fleet Captain and not in another administrative division. He was her adjutant and second-in-command, which was one of the ways that rank could be used—she couldn’t imagine having anyone else in the position save for him. He had his arms folded neatly across the cadaverous thinness of his chest, one eyebrow an expressive arch. As always, his uniform was impeccable, perfect-Teixcalaanli, the very image of a soldier in a propaganda holofilm: if you ignored the shaved head and how he looked like he hadn’t eaten in a month. The curling edges of green-and-white-inked tattoos just visible at his wrists and throat, when the uniform shifted as he moved or breathed.

  “Nothing,” said Nine Hibiscus, loud enough for the rest of the bridge to hear. “Absolute quiet. Knifepoint’s running silenced, and at their usual speed they’re not going to be back for another shift and a half, unless they’re running from something nasty. And there isn’t much Knifepoint would run from.”

  Twenty Cicada knew all that. It wasn’t for him. It was for how Eighteen Chisel in Navigation’s shoulders dropped an inch; how Two Foam, on comm, actually sent the message she’d been hesitating on for the past five minutes, reporting continued clear skies to the rest of their multilegion Fleet.

  “Excellent,” said Twenty Cicada. “Then you won’t mind if I borrow you for a moment, yaotlek?”

  “Tell me that we are not still having problems with the escaped pets in the air ducts on Deck Five, and I will not mind being borrowed,” Nine Hibiscus said, widening her eyes in fond near-mockery. The pets—small furred things that vibrated pleasantly and ate vermin, a peculiar variant on cat that was endemic to Kauraan—had come aboard during their last planetfall there, when she’d still been Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth Legion, not yaotlek yet. The pets had not been a problem—or something Nine Hibiscus had even known about—until they had decided to reproduce themselves, and moved into a
Deck Five air duct to do it. Twenty Cicada had complained vociferously about how they were disturbing the homeostasis of Weight for the Wheel’s environment.

  “It is not the pets,” Twenty Cicada said. “That I promise. Conference room?”

  If he wanted privacy to discuss whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. “Perfect,” Nine Hibiscus said, pushing herself upright. She was twice as wide as Twenty Cicada, but he moved around her as if he had solidity enough to match. “Two Foam, your bridge.”

  “My bridge, Yaotlek,” Two Foam called, and that was as it should be, so Nine Hibiscus went to see what was wrong with her ship—her Fleet—now.

  Weight for the Wheel had two conference rooms right off the bridge—a large one, for strategy meetings, and a small one, for fixing problems. Nine Hibiscus had repurposed the latter from an auxiliary weapon-control station when she’d first been made captain. A ship needed a space to have private official conversations, she’d thought then, and she’d been largely right; the small conference room was the best place to solve personnel issues, recorded on the ship’s cameras, visible and invisible all at once. She took Twenty Cicada inside, cuing the door to open with a micromovement of one eye that directed her cloudhook to talk to the ship’s algorithmic AI.

  Twenty Cicada wasn’t given to preambles; Nine Hibiscus had always known him to be efficient, brisk and clean and mercilessly direct. He preceded her through the door—and to her surprise, did not turn to give his report. Instead he headed directly for the room’s narrow viewport and put a hand up against the plastisteel separating his body and the vacuum. Nine Hibiscus felt a flicker of warmth at the familiarity of the gesture, warmth mixed with uncomfortable dread: like her, Twenty Cicada touched the ship, but he touched it like he was longing for space to come in and take his hand. He’d done that for as long as Nine Hibiscus had known him, and the two of them had met on their very first deployment.