A Desolation Called Peace
Page 3
“I’m glad to be here,” said Mahit. “What can I do for you, Councilor?”
“I did promise to have a meal with you,” Amnardbat said, still smiling, and Mahit felt an echo of Yskandr’s flinch, his remembered fear: the Minister of Science in Teixcalaan, offering him food as a pretext to poison. She shoved it back. Not her endocrine trauma response. (She wished that she trusted Lsel’s integration therapists with the secret of what she’d done when she’d overlaid two imago-Yskandrs. Mahit didn’t have memory-linked trauma responses—probably—but Mahit and Yskandr were blurred, blurring more all the time, and she didn’t know what to do with his.)
“It isn’t that I don’t appreciate that,” Mahit said, “but I am sure you’re busy enough to not just want to share some food with a returned Ambassador.”
Councilor Amnardbat’s expression didn’t change. She radiated pleasant, brusque good cheer, laced with an almost-parental concern. “Come sit down, Ambassador Dzmare. We’ll talk. I have spiced fish cakes and flatbread—I figured you’d missed Lsel food.”
Mahit had, but she’d fixed that the first week back, gone to one of her old haunts and eaten hydroponic-raised flaky white fish stew until she’d ached from it and, feeling entirely ill, fled the place before any of her friends could show up accidentally and welcome her back with their questions. Something about Councilor Amnardbat’s emotional timeline was skewed. Perhaps skewed on purpose. (And what purpose would it serve? Checking for some Teixcalaanli-derived corruption of taste? And what if Mahit had been one of those Stationers who hated fish cakes, it was a preference—)
“It’s very kind of you to have it brought,” she said, sitting down at the conference table across from the Councilor’s desk and tamping back (again) on her imago’s frisson of adrenaline signaling. The danger here wasn’t going to come from the food. In fact, it smelled good enough to make Mahit’s mouth water: the flaky fish spiced with red peppers, the carbon-scent of slightly charred flatbread, made from real wheat and precious thereby. Amnardbat sat across from her, and for a good two minutes they were just Stationers together: rolling flatbread around fish, devouring the first one and making another to be eaten more slowly.
The Councilor swallowed the last bite of the first flatbread she’d rolled. “Let’s get the awkward question out of the way, Mahit,” she said. Mahit attempted to not let her eyebrows climb up to her hairline and mostly succeeded. “Why did you return so soon? I’m asking this in my capacity as the Councilor for Heritage—I want to know if we didn’t give you something you needed, out in the Empire. I know the process of integration was foreshortened…”
Possibly she sabotaged us, she reminded him. If we believe Onchu. Who we also haven’t spoken with—
She’d been too afraid to. Too afraid of Onchu being right, or Onchu being wrong, and too exhausted by the sudden and irrevocable strangeness of what had been home to get around that being-afraid.
“No,” she said, out loud. “There wasn’t anything I needed that Lsel didn’t try to give me. Of course I’d have liked more time with Yskandr before we went out, but what happened to me wasn’t the shortest integration period in our history, I’m sure.”
“Then why?” asked Amnardbat, and took another bite of fish. Question over, time to eat, time to listen.
Mahit sighed. Shrugged, rueful and aiming for self-deprecation, some echo of how uncomfortable she imagined Heritage would like a Stationer to be with things Teixcalaanli. “I was involved in a riot and a succession crisis, Councilor. It was violent and difficult—personally, professionally—and after I secured promises from the new Emperor as to our continued independence, I wanted to rest. Just for a while.”
“So you came home.”
“So I came home.” While I still wanted to.
“You’ve been here for a month. And yet you haven’t had yourself uploaded into a new imago-machine for your successor, Ambassador. Even though you know quite well that our last recording is extremely out of date, and we don’t have one of you at all.”
Fuck. So that’s what she wants. To know if the sabotage worked—
… At the moment I do.
“It didn’t occur to me,” said Mahit. “It hasn’t even been a year—forgive me, this is my first year having an imago at all. I thought there was a schedule? With appointment reminders?”
Refuge in bureaucratic ignorance. Which would also act as a shield—however temporary, however flimsy—against Amnardbat finding out that she had two imagos. Uploading would make short shrift of that little deception. And Mahit had no idea what policy there was on Lsel about doing something like what she’d done. Or if there even was any policy. She expected there wasn’t. It was so clearly a bad idea. It had certainly given her enough squirming, revulsive qualms, before she’d done it.
No. I needed you. I still need—us.
“Oh, of course there’s a schedule,” Amnardbat said. “But we in Heritage—well, I specifically, but I do speak for everyone here—have a policy of encouraging people who experience significant events or accomplishments to update their imago records more often than the automated calendar suggests.”
Politely, Mahit took another bite of her flatbread wrap. Chewed and swallowed past the psychosomatic tightening of her throat. “Councilor,” she said, “of course I can make an appointment with the machinists, now that I know about your policies. Is that really all? It’s a kindness, to have this much fish cooked for us, and real flatbread, just to ask for an administrative favor that you could have written to me about.”
Let her deal with the suggestion that she was being profligate with food resources. Heritage Councilors had been removed for lesser corruptions, generations ago. That imago-line wasn’t given to new Heritage Councilors any longer. Mothballed, preserved somewhere in the banks of recorded memories, deemed unsuitable: anyone who would serve their own needs before the long-remembered needs of the Station shouldn’t be influencing the one Councilor devoted to preserving the continuity of that Station.
Some very nice Teixcalaanlitzlim and my imago have conspired to teach me to weaponize references.
But Amnardbat was saying, “It’s not a favor,” and as she said it, Mahit realized that she’d underestimated the Councilor, was underestimating the reasons for her behavior, expecting that she could be manipulated like a Teixcalaanlitzlim could be, with allusion and narrative. “It’s an order, Ambassador. We need a copy of your memory. To make sure that whatever it was that made Yskandr Aghavn stay away so long from the uploading process hasn’t spread to you, too.”
Fascinating, really, how she felt so cold. So cold, her fingers gone to ice-electric prickling, no sensation around how she held the remains of her flatbread. So cold, and yet: hummingly focused. Afraid. Alive. “Spread?” she asked.
“It is a terrible thing, to lose a citizen to Teixcalaan,” Amnardbat said. “To worry that there is something in the Empire that steals our best. The machinists and I will be expecting you this week, Mahit.”
When she smiled again, Mahit thought she understood what made the Teixcalaanlitzlim so nervous about bared teeth.
* * *
Knifepoint was in visual range when Nine Hibiscus made it back to the bridge, briefly out of breath from the speed of that short transit. She took deep inhalations like she was an orator, settled her lungs, tried to keep any adrenaline response limited. It was her bridge now, her bridge and her command. All her officers rotated toward her as if they were flowers and she was a welcome sunrise. For a moment everything felt correct. And then she noticed how quickly Knifepoint was approaching the rest of the Fleet, growing in size even as she watched through the viewports. They had to be
burning the engines at absolute maximum to be coming in this hot. Knifepoint was a scout—it could hit that speed, but not maintain it for very long; it was too small and would run out of fuel—and if its pilot had decided to run as fast as possible, then they were absolutely being chased.
“Do we know what’s following them?” she asked, and Two Foam shook her head in swift negation from the comms chair.
“Everything’s blank,” she said. “Just Knifepoint and dead void behind them—but they’ll be in hailing range in two minutes—”
“Get them on the holograph as soon as you can. And scramble the Shards. If there’s something after them, we’re not going to let it get far.”
“Scrambling, yaotlek,” said Two Foam, her eyes flickering in rapid motion behind her cloudhook. All around them the high clear whine of the alarm rose through Weight for the Wheel. A Fleet’s first line of defense, and most mobile: a swarm of single-pilot small craft, all weaponry and navigation, short-range and absolutely deadly. Nine Hibiscus had been a Shard pilot herself, on that long-ago first deployment, and she still felt the scramble alarm like a delicious vibration in the marrow of her bones: go, go, go. Go now, and if you die, you die star-brilliant.
With the alarm singing through her, Nine Hibiscus said, “And let’s charge up the top two energy-cannon banks, shall we?” She settled again into her captain’s chair. Five Thistle, the duty weapons officer, gave her a bright, wide-eyed grin.
“Sir,” he said.
They all wanted this so much. Her, too. The fire and the blood of it, something to do. A proper battle, blue and white energy weapons arcing through the black, shattering and scorching.
Just as the first Shards spilled, sparkling, into the viewport’s visual range, the thing that Knifepoint was running away from appeared.
It didn’t come into view. It appeared, as if it had been there all along, hidden in some kind of visual cloak. The black nothingness of space—this sector had so few stars—rippled, squirmed like a nudibranch touched by a finger, an enormous and organic recoiling, and there it was, the first ship-of-their-enemy any Teixcalaanli eyes had seen. (Any Teixcalaanli eyes which had lived to describe it, at least.) Three grey hoops, rotating at speed around a central ball. It was hard to look at, and Nine Hibiscus didn’t know why—some of that recoiling, squirming visual distortion clung to it, made the grey metal of its hull seem oil-slick and unfocused.
It had been not-there, and now it was there. Right up on Knifepoint’s tail, just as fast, and closing—
“This is the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus,” she said, wide-broadcast. “Cut that thing out of its vector and surround it. Hold fire unless you are fired upon.”
Like they were extensions of her will, of her exhaled breath, the Shards flew outward on a fast approach toward the foreign object that had dared come so very near. It took them a moment to orient themselves around the alien ship; it wasn’t a shape they knew, and it moved in unexpected ways, a slippery roll like a greased ball bearing. But the Shards were smart, and they were interlinked—each ship providing positional and visual biofeedback not only to its own pilot through their cloudhook, but to all of the pilots in the swarm—and they learned quickly. Knifepoint shot out between the glittering sparkle of them like a shuttle breaking atmosphere and was caught safely by the outreaching net of Weight for the Wheel’s hangar bay.
Two Foam had gotten Knifepoint’s captain on holo: he looked harried, wild-eyed and breathing rapidly, his hands visibly white at the knuckles as he gripped the controls of his ship.
“Well done,” Nine Hibiscus said to him, “not a scratch on you—give us a minute to deal with this thing you brought us, and I’ll bring you right up to debrief—”
“Yaotlek,” he interrupted, “they’re invisible until they want to be, that might not be the only one, and they have firepower—”
“Stand down, Knifepoint,” Nine Hibiscus said. “It’s our problem now, and we have firepower too.” They did. The energy cannons, and the smaller, more vicious, more ugly power of nuclear core-bombs. If necessary.
“I intercepted a communication,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her at all.
“Excellent. Put it in your report.”
“It’s not language, yaotlek—”
“Two Foam, deal with this? We are a little busy just now.” The alien ship did have firepower—what looked like a fairly standard but very precise suite of energy cannons, arrayed on the outmost of those three spinning loops. Soundless bursts of light blinded her through the viewport, and when she blinked the afterimages away, there were three fewer Shards. She winced.
“All right, containment is no longer the protocol—Five Thistle, tell the Shards to clear a path for cannonry.”
At their best, Nine Hibiscus’s officers didn’t need to confirm they’d heard her—they acted. Five Thistle’s hands gestured inside the holographic workspace of the weapons station, moving ships and vector lines in the embedded starfield, a miniature version of her own cartograph table—and the Shards moved in response, forming a new pattern, clearing a space for Weight for the Wheel’s main cannon banks to aim and to fire.
Electric blue. The light that Nine Hibiscus had always imagined a person saw if they accidentally stepped inside an industrial irradiator, in the brief moment they’d have to see anything at all. Deathlight, with its hum like a scramble-alarm, as familiar as breathing or ceasing to breathe.
(For a fraction of a second, she wondered if she oughtn’t try to capture the thing first—shut it down with targeted electromagnetic pulses while it was still far away enough that EMP wouldn’t fry her own ships, pull it on board—but Knifepoint had said they had an intercepted communication, and this thing had killed three of her own soldiers already. Four—another Shard winked out in a silent shatter of flame, a candle going up and going out in rapid succession.)
Full cannon power lit the alien ship like a beacon, shook it, peeled some of that slick and squirming visuality away from it—the parts of the outer ring which had been blown off looked like metal, like space debris, entirely standard. But full cannon power didn’t destroy it. It spun faster—it whirred—Nine Hibiscus imagined she could hear it spinning, though she knew that was impossible—and just before the second cannon barrage struck its inner ball, smashing it open into nothingness and destruction entire, it emitted from the second of its damaged rings some dark viscous substance that fell through null-grav in strange ropes.
Spit, Nine Hibiscus thought, repulsed.
Five Thistle was already calling get away from it on all channels, and the great reactor-fueled engines of Weight for the Wheel flared into life, pulled them backward, away from how the ropes tangled like a liquid net where the alien ship had been. What fluid moved like that? As if it was—seeking, mobile, far too cohesive. The surface tension on it—not so much that it clung together in a ball, but enough that it spun itself out in thinning, reaching strings—
One of the Shards, a glittering wedge tumbling easily onto a new vector, vernier thrusters firing, intersected with one of those spit-strings. Nine Hibiscus watched it happen. Watched all the gleam of the little fighter vanish, slicked over with alien ship-saliva, a fractal net of it that stuck and clung even when the Shard pulled free of the string. Saw, disbelieving while seeing, that net begin to bubble its way through the Shard’s hull, corrosive, eating its metal and plastisteel like some kind of hyperoxidizing fungus.
The Shard’s pilot screamed.
Screamed on the open channel Five Thistle had used, screamed and then shouted, “Kill me, kill me now, it’s going to eat the ship, it’s in here with me, don’t let it touch anyone else,” a controlled and desperate spasm of bravery.
Nine Hibiscus hesitated. She had done many things she’d regretted, as a pilot and a captain and as Fleet Captain of the Tenth Teixcalaanli Legion—uncountable things, she was a soldier, it was the nature of being what she was to commit small atrocities, like it was the nature of stars to emit radiation that burned and poisoned as mu
ch as it gave warmth and life. But she’d never ordered her ship to fire on her own people. Never once yet.
On that same channel, a chorus of anguish: all the Shard pilots, linked together by biofeedback, all of them feeling the death of their sibling ship, devoured alive. Sobbing. The sound of snatched breath, hyperventilation. A low moaning scream, that echoed, was picked up by other voices—
“Do it,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Shoot her. As she asked.”
Deathlight-fire, precise and merciful. A burst of blue, and one Teixcalaanlitzlim rendered to ashes.
Silence on all the comms. Nine Hibiscus heard nothing but the hideous pounding of her own heartbeat.
“Well,” said Twenty Cicada, finally—sounding as shaken as anyone, but briskly shaken—“that’s approximately eight new things about these people we didn’t know ten minutes ago.”
CHAPTER
TWO
[…] and of course your reputation precedes you, like an earthquake precedes a city-drowning wave; the tremors of your arrival are already setting the Ministry to vibration as if we were all made of tlini-strings and you were the bow. Of course we regret the absence of former Minister Nine Propulsion—her guidance was a warm silk glove that has been taken off the Palms now that she has retired (and so abruptly!)—but I, for one, look forward to having meetings with a person who was the first successful Governor of Nakhar System. We have work to do. I remain, in anticipation […]
—letter from Third Undersecretary Eleven Laurel of the Ministry of War to the incoming Minister of War, Three Azimuth, dated to the 21st day, 1st year, in the 1st indiction of the Emperor of All Teixcalaan Nineteen Adze
* * *
Letters to the dead are poor practice; I’d do myself a service if I merely kept a journal like half the Emperors who have slept in this bed before me. But since when have you known me to do service to myself? And at least you are dead—or it is simplest to think of you so now—I have all the stars in my hands, Yskandr, and it is terribly easy to let them slip through a finger-width gap. Especially when some of them are going dark, eaten up by your successor’s so-convenient alien threat. You slept here more often than I did—more often than I do, if we count sleeping and not nights. How often did you wish for the convenience of narrative to bow to your whims? More or less often than our Emperor, awake beside you?