A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  It doesn’t matter. She’s Heritage, and she isn’t alone—she has all of Lsel Station with her, all its history and its people to watch over. She comes to the station’s secret heart, the imago-machine repository, whenever she feels too much like her office has built a glass cage between her and her home. All the memories of the Station’s imago-lines, in her safekeeping here, where she stands now.

  An echo, imago-memory flare, emotion quickly repressed: Except those you mar.

  Aknel Amnardbat doesn’t make mistakes often. When she does, she admits them to herself and holds herself accountable.

  What she’d done to Mahit Dzmare hadn’t been a mistake. Cutting the imago-line of Empire-besotted ambassadors out of the heart of Lsel was right; no one should have been heir to Yskandr Aghavn’s memories at all. Dzmare was acceptable collateral. She was a perfect match on aptitudes for him—she would have been another one just like him, even without his live memory to infect her. Getting them both off-Station had been the best possible idea.

  Adjusting—weakening—the imago-machine Dzmare carried in her brainstem was almost as good. Either have the new Ambassador short out somewhere no one could help her—or free her of Yskandr Aghavn entirely, and see what she’d make of herself out there.

  (Sabotage, one of the voices of her imago-line murmured, and she ignored it.)

  Except Dzmare came back, imago apparently intact, and now Teixcalaan was closer than it had ever been, sucking up Lsel resources into the bellies of its warships as they passed through Bardzravand Sector on the way to their war.

  Aknel Amnardbat doesn’t make mistakes that she refuses to acknowledge. She acknowledges this one: her mistake here was imagining that Aghavn and Dzmare were already so different from their fellow Stationers that Lsel would never be a place they’d want to come home to. She’d been wrong: the two of them weren’t so far gone as to want to get away and stay away.

  It makes Dzmare more dangerous than she could ever have been off playing Ambassador. Returned, her whole imago-line is capable of spreading its empire-infected, already-colonized ideas to other imago-lines, and live Stationers carrying them. It makes them a vector, a more subtle one than an approaching warship, but just as true and just as poisonous to Lsel. It is the minds of a people that have to stay free. Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts. And what would Lsel Station be, with its memory suborned to the seduction of Teixcalaanli culture? They’re losing enough lines already—mostly pilots, recently, vanished out by the Far Gate, to whatever enemy Teixcalaan is fighting (or, Amnardbat thinks, viciously and sharp, to Teixcalaan itself, under pretense). They can’t afford to lose more to corruption.

  If Dzmare misses her appointment with the imago-machine technicians, Amnardbat thinks, she will have her arrested. Even Darj Tarats can’t argue with the legality of arresting someone for disobedience to a direct order from a Councilor. The law is embedded in all of Lsel’s codes, woven into the meat of what Stationer culture is. The Council can give emergency commands, which must be obeyed.

  And once Dzmare is arrested, Amnardbat will have her imago-machine under her hands one more time. Once the Lsel Council were captains and commanders, and their words meant death, or life amongst the black between the stars.

  Perhaps they should be again.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  The set of practices derogatorily referred to as the “homeostat-cult” originate in a single planetary system, comprising two inhabited planets (Neltoc and Pozon) and one inhabited satellite (Sepryi), collectively referred to as the Neltoc System. Neltoctlim refer to their heritage religious practice as “homeostatic meditation” or, colloquially, “balancing,” and consider it a cultural artifact (with attendant registration and protections—see entry 32915-A in the Information Ministry’s Approved Cultural Artifacts Registry). However, Neltoc System has been within Teixcalaan for eight generations, and Teixcalaanlitzlim whose planetary origins are located there are certainly not all adherents of the homeostatic meditation practice. An active practitioner can be identified by their green-ink tattoos, which take the form of fractals, mold-growth patterns, and lightning-strike figures, amongst other forms inspired by natural patternings …

  —excerpt, Intertwined with Our Starlight: A Handbook of Syncretic Religious Forms within Teixcalaan, by the historian Eighteen Smoke

  * * *

  PRIORITY MESSAGE—ALL PILOTS—Travel in the direction of the Far Gate is highly discouraged during the period of Teixcalaanli military activity and while the usual interdict on military transport is suspended. Avoid contact with Teixcalaanli vessels. Avoid allowing visual confirmation of numbers, size, and armaments of Lsel ships. This order stands unless specifically rescinded by the Councilor for the Pilots regarding a particular vessel, journey, or communication—assume caution is the better part of valor—authorized by the COUNCILOR FOR THE PILOTS (DEKAKEL ONCHU) … message repeats …

  —priority message deployed on pilot-only frequencies in the vicinity of Lsel Station, and on the Pilots’ Intranet, 54.1.1–19A (Teixcalaanli reckoning)

  THE last time Nine Hibiscus had flown a Shard was several model generations back. Her cloudhook spent a truly absurd amount of time updating its programming before it would even let her hook in to the collective vision that the Shard pilots shared, and she was completely innocent of the new biofeedback system that let them react like one large organism. That technology had come over from the imperial police into the Fleet, Science Ministry to Ministry of War, around ten years ago. Minister Nine Propulsion—former Minister Nine Propulsion, Nine Hibiscus reminded herself—had been a great proponent of it. She’d seen what it did for the Sunlit down in the Jewel of the World—an instant reactivity, hypercommunication, she’d said once to Nine Hibiscus and some other officers over a long night of drinks—and had it reworked for the Shards. Gotten the Science Ministry to do it—Minister Ten Pearl, of the epithet “he who writes patterns into the world,” the algorithm master himself, had adjusted the code on Nine Propulsion’s behalf. Now the new system was hardwired into how the Shard interfaces interacted with the pilots’ cloudhooks, and into a set of external electrodes and magnetic sensors that were woven into their vacuum suits, providing an artificial sense of collective proprioception as well as vision. Proprioception, vision, and (the rumors went) shared pain and shared instinctive reflexes about danger. Casualty rates had dropped nine percent since the new system came online, and that made the Fifth Palm—armaments and research—very happy. But even if Nine Hibiscus had been inside a Shard and wearing a Shard vacuum suit, she wouldn’t have known what to do with the new proprioception aside from inconveniently vomit, which was apparently the most common training side effect—so it was likely for the best that she’d stick to Shard-sight, which her cloudhook could provide for her by itself, no Shard required. She sat in her captain’s chair on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, tipped 90 percent horizontal, cloudhook arrayed over both eyes. There was no way she was going to let Sixteen Moonrise attack Peloa-2 without keeping her under extremely direct observation.

  Her people could call her out of Shard-sight with a touch, and she’d be back in command. But for now, since her flagship was doing nothing but sitting here receiving recognizance, she’d left Twenty Cicada in official control while her perceptions were elsewhere.

  She rode along, an invisible presence, down with the Shard pilots seconded to the small-fighter support craft Dreaming Citadel, following Sixteen Moonrise’s Porcelain Fragment Scorched into the silence that had eaten up Peloa-2. Absently, she wondered if the comms breakdown would affect Shard-sight, and figured with some anticipation that it would be a useful thing to find out.

  Porcelain Fragment Scorched was a beautiful ship. Through the ever-shifting viewpoints of Shard-eyes, it cut through space like an obsidian blade, darkly reflective: a stealth cruiser, Pyroclast-class. If it wasn’t the pride of Sixteen Moonrise’s Twenty-Fourth Legion, it ought to be. As it came around the far side of the Peloa
System’s dwarf sun—where Knifepoint had been when they’d been intercepted by the three-ringed alien ship—it looked like a slightly darker piece of starfield. Almost invisible. Dreaming Citadel floated in its wake, letting Sixteen Moonrise (of course she’d taken the command herself; Nine Hibiscus would have done exactly the same) lead. No one had seen Peloa-2 since the communication blackout. Nine Hibiscus wasn’t sure what she expected. Anything from a blackened, burnt-out shell to a bright-lit, healthy colony with some kind of blockade up around it—

  It was neither. Peloa-2 looked like Peloa-2 was supposed to, from holoimages: a small planet, three continents, large silicate desert in the middle of the biggest one. The Teixcalaanli colony at the southern edge of that desert, the shape of refineries and cloudhook-glass production facilities just visible, like a glyph etched into the landscape. All that pure silica sand, white-glitter surrounding the colony, a setting for a rough industrial jewel. Day, down on the part of the planet where there was settlement, so it was impossible to tell if the colony had power or not. The usual collection of satellites was still in orbit—but half of those satellites were dark, and the planet itself was—there was no movement, no rise and descent of small craft. And no visible aliens.

  Over the Shard-chatter feed she heard Sixteen Moonrise, smooth and unfazed, say, “Come in slow to orbit. It’s a graveyard.”

  Nine Hibiscus had no biofeedback to shiver with, but she shivered anyway, imagined it collective—all the Shards feeling that crawling, silent peculiarity. It’s a graveyard. Sixteen Moonrise wasn’t wrong. As they slipped in close, Dreaming Citadel passed the darkened satellites. They were debris and nothing more, ragged, chewed open; parts of them torn away. Nine Hibiscus tried to see a pattern in the devouring—the aliens could want metal, could want reactor cores, oxygen, any manner of thing—and couldn’t. The satellites merely looked ripped. Eviscerated. Whatever is useful in them is what they wanted to take, she found herself thinking. The animating force. Whatever made them objects with a purpose and not discarded trash. That’s what they took.

  She was aware that she was anthropomorphizing the threat, giving meaning and reason to what might very well be reasonless destruction. These aliens weren’t people. They weren’t even barbarians.

  Sixteen Moonrise again, on comms, steady command: “Maintain orbit and stay in touch. I’m sending down a ground party—six Shards from Dreaming Citadel, ten from Porcelain. Peel off.”

  A risk. One that Nine Hibiscus might not have taken—if the satellites were a graveyard (and no wonder all of Peloa-2 had gone dark to communication, they had nothing left to communicate with), what sort of mass destruction would exist on the planet below? But she had told Sixteen Moonrise to retake this colony. Had challenged her to do it. And merely surrounding it with Teixcalaanli ships was insufficient. If there were Teixcalaanli citizens down there, they deserved to be reclaimed. They deserved defending. To be brought back into the world. Nine Hibiscus shifted her focus to ride with the Shard pilots headed down through the burn of atmosphere, letting the remainder fade to background, peripheral vision on her cloudhook, flickers in the dark.

  They hailed the colony’s spaceport on the way in—the usual way, asking for a landing vector and an appropriate berth between the skynets. Shards came down on their own power—not like seed-skiffs or cargo, which had to be caught. It should have been routine. (Nothing about this planet was routine.)

  Peloa-2 didn’t answer the hail. They didn’t answer the second hail, either, or the broadcast on all channels which instructed the port to be cleared, War Ministry override—Nine Hibiscus would have skipped that one, wide broadcast felt too risky. Even graveyards could be haunted by the things that made graves. The Shards landed where they could, made their descent through the orange-purple glow of plasma and the pressure and shaking of deceleration g-forces, and came to rest neatly enough. All these pilots had made far more complex landings, in far worse conditions than radio silence and no vector bearings, only visual confirmation on a safe spot to sink down.

  The spaceport was dark, too. Silent. No Teixcalaanlitzlim and no aliens came to meet the sixteen ships. Full daylight—the readout on one of the Shards’ instrumentation panels told its pilot that it was nearly fifty degrees outside, summer on Peloa-2, right on the upper edge of human tolerances—and Nine Hibiscus on her bridge so very far away still felt chilled, looking at all that silence and stillness. The plumes of silicate dust, rising when the wind did, ripples of white in the air like storm-whipped snow.

  Sixteen Moonrise’s voice in her ears: “Find out how bad it is. Locate survivors if you can.”

  That was an order Nine Hibiscus might have given. No matter what else they disagreed on, it was good to know that she and Sixteen Moonrise were both concerned with the Empire’s people and what had become of them. That was somewhere to start, in finding commonalities that might let them work together during this war.

  Shard-sight carried her out of the ships—she was glad for the pilots that they had their vacuum suits and the temperature control they maintained, and also for the updated interfaces that rode in them, keeping the collective vision active even on the ground, without the benefit of a ship’s AI to route the connections through. Glad all the way until they reached the insides of the port’s buildings and found the first bodies.

  Nine Hibiscus was a soldier. She’d killed more people than she strictly could count—there was no way to know, for real, in space combat situations—and some of those people had been face-to-face, blood and the stink of shit and organ meat spilled and wasted, sacrifices to no one and to everyone at once. She’d worn the blood of her first groundside kill across her forehead until it flaked off, that old ritual, and had felt more Teixcalaanli at that moment than at any other time in her life. Twenty years old and crowned red, up to her knees in the mud of some half-rebelled planetoid—

  —and still, seeing these bodies, she wished she could unsee them. So many people. Cut open, mostly: not the clean death of energy weapons, though there were some of those scars too, Teixcalaanlitzlim turned to partially blackened, partially melted corpse-friezes. But mostly, cut open. Eviscerated like the satellites. She thought, Maybe they eat large mammals, and almost found that idea comforting—a species that thought humans were prey was a problem, but the Ebrekti ate large mammals too, and they’d managed with the Ebrekti. But none of the spilled viscera had been chewed on. It had all just been—pulled out. Discards, then, not food.

  How easy it was to begin to think like these enemies. And in thinking like them, to begin to hate them quite personally.

  The group leader from Dreaming Citadel’s complement of Shards gestured to her companions, and to the Shard group from Porcelain: We go this way, you go that way. Her opposite number nodded. They were running silent, for safety’s sake—if the aliens were still here, letting them know they had company would be a good way to get rapidly killed—relying only on their shared sight to communicate by. Nine Hibiscus was drawn along with the group comprising her people. They knew she was with them, watching. She hoped they found it a comfort, as they waded through the destruction of Peloa-2. Their Fleet Captain, witnessing as they did.

  It took several hours before she began to understand what the aliens had wanted here, aside from destruction for destruction’s sake. Several hours of finding another and another group of dead Teixcalaanli, days dead, building after building full of corpses. The invading force had been quite efficient in the slaughter. She’d have to check the manifests—she’d ask Twenty Cicada, he would know—but she thought there had been around fifteen hundred colonists on Peloa-2, maybe as many as two thousand. It was a tiny colony. It was a glorified factory floor, a place for turning fine sand full of rare crystalline additives into the kind of glass that made cloudhooks, flexible and near-unbreakable. Peloa-2 was out on the very edge of Teixcalaanli territory, too hot for most people to do more than a short engineering stint on, earn hazard pay on top of their usual contracts with the War Ministry. The on
ly reason all these people were dead, Nine Hibiscus realized, was that these aliens understood supply lines, and what to do with a single-resource colony.

  Cut it off. And take whatever it had already produced.

  The central factory floor, where the tall stacks of cloudhook-ready glass had waited for their journey back through the jumpgate toward more thickly civilized parts of the universe, was pristine—and empty. Nothing was broken here except the machinery to produce more sheets of glass. All the glass itself was gone, as if it had turned back into silica dust and blown away.

  They were hungry, then, these enemies of Teixcalaan: they wanted at least one thing. They wanted to take away a resource the Empire needed, and prevent them from ever being able to make more. They couldn’t know that there were other planets that made cloudhook-glass, other deserts that had the right mineral mix. They were right enough: Peloa-2 had been worth colonizing when the Empire had found it because of those resources, those particular mineral additives. And in a war with the Empire, if your enemy was Teixcalaan, that resource—any resource that was controllable—needed to be denied. Taken away. The people here—the people hadn’t mattered, in that calculation.

  How the hell am I going to talk to these things, even with an Information Ministry spook? Nine Hibiscus thought, and blinked herself out of Shard-sight, back into the comforting normalcy of Weight for the Wheel, where no one was currently a half-empty corpse.

  “Call it off,” she said on tight-band comm to Sixteen Moonrise. “Pull our people back, set up an orbital perimeter around Peloa, and tell your legion to prepare for a funerary rite for a whole fucking planet.”

  * * *

  Lsel Station was little. Little and very pretty, a turning diamond-shaped jewel set against a rich starfield, two spokes and a thick torus of decks at their middle. Three Seagrass couldn’t quite imagine living on it—it’d be like living on a warship full-time, the biggest warship anyone had ever built—but she liked it immediately.