The hangar was busy—this shuttle wasn’t the only one being unloaded—and there were so very many soldiers. The Fleet was enormous. Mahit thought of the thirty thousand Stationers on Lsel and how that had once, when she was a small child, seemed like a very large number of people. There were probably three thousand Teixcalaanlitzlim on this flagship. Maybe more. And at least ten ships this size only on this battlefront—there was Lsel entire, rendered in Teixcalaanli battle flags. And so many other ships besides, all over the galaxy, on the other side of nearly every jumpgate. Some of the soldiers were obviously injured—one ship in this hangar was scorched almost black, partially absent, and the people climbing out of it were bleeding, or burnt, or being carried on stretchers by efficient medical personnel.
All ships burn the same, Mahit thought, echo, stutter-thought—and then Three Seagrass tapped her lightly on the shoulder, gesturing across the crowds with her chin, pointing out that they had clearly, clearly been expected.
She and Three Seagrass had been sent an escort, and that escort was waiting for them. A man and a woman, each in full Fleet uniform instead of the hangar-worker coveralls. The man was tall, terrifyingly thin, and had shaved his head absolutely bald; the first bald Teixcalaanlitzlim that Mahit had ever seen who wasn’t also old. The woman was all the same color all over, an electrum shade, hair and skin only fractionally different. She wore a Fleet Captain’s sunburst on her shoulder, and Mahit wondered for a moment if this was the yaotlek herself—but no, it couldn’t be Nine Hibiscus, this woman’s legion insignia was different, the glyph for Twenty-Four turned into a stylized parabola. Not this legion’s Fleet Captain, but on this legion’s flagship nevertheless—and coming to greet the Information agent, too—
Mahit didn’t have much time to wonder about internecine competition between the legions making up the attack force; she was a fractional step behind Three Seagrass, feeling utterly drab and barbaric in her jacket and trousers next to that spot of flame-coral and everyone else’s perfect Fleet uniforms, and the two-person high-powered welcoming committee wasn’t waiting for them to get close. They were coming to meet them in the middle of the hangar. It looked like it was the woman’s idea—she strode forward, long ship-circumnavigating strides that ate up the space—and the man shot her a look of absolute unbridled displeasure, so quickly blooming and gone again from his face that Mahit wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t imagined it. He followed after, catching up in the space of four steps.
They coincided beneath the glittering curve of a bank of those triangular fighter ships. Three Seagrass bowed to the two Fleet representatives over her fingertips, a deep but not servile greeting, and Mahit imitated it, right down to the angle. She was a barbarian, but she was also supposed to be here, wasn’t she? She was. Supposed to be surrounded by all the swarming might of the Teixcalaanli military, too huge and too complex to be seen all at once.
“The envoy, and the linguist-diplomat,” said the man, that same arch tenor voice that had emerged from the comm—this must be the adjutant, the ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, and wasn’t that interesting, that a man who looked so very un-Teixcalaanli aside from the perfection of his uniform—unfashionably, worryingly thin, bald—this close Mahit could tell that he didn’t even have eyebrows, he’d shaved them off, and Teixcalaanlitzlim were usually so proud of their hair, wore it long and braided or long and loose—and yet, here he was, second in command of the lead flagship of a Teixcalaanli imperial war.
What sort of yaotlek has this man as her second?
There were tattoos, just barely visible under the sleeves of his uniform. Green branching things, fractals. A what cultist?
The woman had not bowed. “I see that the Information Ministry has sent Nine Hibiscus one very young woman and one barbarian,” she said, ice-clear. “A fantastic showing. I’m sure the two of you will be of profound help to her.”
Twenty Cicada said, in murmured perfect formality, “The Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth Legion,” and gestured, as if he was displaying her as a curiosity. “Our honored guest today.”
Sixteen Moonrise failed, with deliberation and malice aforethought, to match Twenty Cicada’s utterly polite tense usage. “Let’s get on with it, shall we, adjutant? Now you’ve got the spook and her pet all picked up, show me to what we all came here to see. The body.”
“The body?” asked Three Seagrass, as if none of this byplay mattered at all.
“The body,” Sixteen Moonrise said, “of the things you’re here to talk to. How good is Information at raising the dead?”
“It isn’t my specialty,” Three Seagrass said.
“The yaotlek is expecting all of us in the medical bay morgue,” Twenty Cicada confirmed, ignoring all insinuations of necromantic powers. “We do have a body to show you, Envoy; it doesn’t talk, but it ought to show you something. Shall we?”
Ring composition, Mahit thought, around we go. I’ve only just arrived, and it is time to see a corpse—at least it won’t be your corpse, Yskandr.
said Yskandr, which was hideously funny. Mahit had to work to keep her face still. It wouldn’t be useful, just now, to make the Teixcalaanlitzlim think that the barbarian talked to invisible ghosts inside her head. Invisible, blackly hilarious ghosts. That wouldn’t be useful at all.
This time there was no elevator down into the basement of the Judiciary, no knot of ixplanatlim in red huddled around a body, and no modest sheet covering the corpse. Mahit arrived in this morgue just as a medtech lifted two enormous lungs out of the splayed-open barrel of an alien rib cage and bore them off to be weighed and measured, tested for oxygenation, for cause of death, for whatever else Teixcalaanlitzlim tested alien body parts for. The rib cage, eviscerated of lungs, gaped like naked wings on either side of the alien’s long neck. Behind it, looking down at it like she could read fortunes in its hollowness, was the yaotlek. Mahit knew her by her sun-spear epaulets, but she was also quite precisely what Mahit had imagined a yaotlek to look like, if that yaotlek wasn’t the unlamented One Lightning, he of the near-usurpation three months back.
Nine Hibiscus was large and sleek, solid muscle under a generous curve of fat: all hips and smooth outcurve of belly, broad shoulders and broad chest, thighs like the steady steel T-bars that constructed station decks. She looked like someone who could never be moved. She looked like it would take months of searching for an actress who perfectly suited when some Teixcalaanli holoproduction did an epic about this war; Teixcalaanli central casting couldn’t have done better.
The first thing that came out of Mahit’s mouth, seeing her, was “That alien did not make those sounds from that throat, yaotlek,” as if she thought direct clarity would prove her usefulness beyond reproach of barbarism.
“Five points for drawing the obvious conclusion,” said Nine Hibiscus, in a smooth, attentive low alto that reminded Mahit of nothing so much as Nineteen Adze’s calm and terrifying precision. “Are you a xenobiologist, then?”
“The spook brought a pet,” said the other Fleet Captain. Sixteen Moonrise. Nine Hibiscus looked at her with what Mahit suspected was deep dislike under multiple layers of propriety and projected authority.
“I am not a xenobiologist,” Mahit said, deciding that Sixteen Moonrise’s opinions of her were unlikely to become less hostile if she answered the yaotlek’s question. “I am Mahit Dzmare, the Ambassador to Teixcalaan from Lsel Station, and Lsel Station’s d
iplomatic authority in this sector.”
“The Ambassador is a linguist and translator,” said Three Seagrass. “I’m the spook.” She paused, entirely for effect. “We’re here to help.”
The adjutant, Twenty Cicada, made an entirely remarkable noise, like he’d drowned a laugh and swallowed its corpse. Three Seagrass either neglected to notice or neglected to care. She went on, saying, “It is exquisite to make your acquaintance, yaotlek. I, and the Information Ministry, are grateful for the opportunity to be of service in this first-contact scenario. What a fascinating throat this alien has.”
“And yet,” said the yaotlek, “your linguist-translator-ambassador is entirely sure that it cannot have made the sounds on our transmission. However fascinating it may be. Care to explain? For my edification, and for the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, of course.” When she looked at Sixteen Moonrise, she smiled enough to show a tiny flash of teeth, and Mahit’s mouth went metallic and dry at the sense of threat. A Teixcalaanli general who would bare her teeth while smiling. All energy, all danger.
—who was in the middle of saying, serene and direct, “After extensive audio analysis of the samples you sent to the Ministry of Information, we believe that the sounds on the transmission are tonal markers, not specific speech—and unless this alien has got vocal cords made of synthesizers and a theremin, it can’t have made them by itself.”
“You could dissect it and find out, though,” Mahit added. “To be certain that it isn’t capable of producing sound via oscillating magnetic fields.”
“You’ve dissected the rest,” added Sixteen Moonrise. “You might as well look at its neck. Since I’m here, I’ll stay and watch. It’s my soldiers who are being killed by these things most imminently, after all.”
“If I’d known you were on board the Weight for the Wheel, Fleet Captain,” said Twenty Cicada silkily, “more than two minutes before you met me in the hangar bay, I would have made sure you also were invited to the autopsy.”
Mahit couldn’t turn around to see Sixteen Moonrise’s reaction, and having it occur behind her made her feel peculiarly exposed, her skin prickling with the crawling sensation of being watched, even if she wasn’t at all the focus of the watcher. She wanted to see. This tangle of Fleet Captains was—significant, important; if she and Three Seagrass were going to be useful enough to survive this war, she had to understand it.
Yet, Mahit thought. But it’s politics, and I need to understand—
Sixteen Moonrise, whatever her expression, was saying, “Swarm, I had always believed better of you—Porcelain Fragment Scorched docked four hours back, and I have been cooling my heels all unknown to the adjutant of our yaotlek?”
Twenty Cicada—Swarm. Mahit remembered what Yskandr had said to her, when she’d caught sight of his tattoos. Homeostat-cultist. With the name of an insect. A pervasive insect. Teixcalaanlitzlim weren’t supposed to have names which were animals, at all. Did insects not qualify as animals? She’d always assumed they did.
Nine Hibiscus watched the squabble with that same threatening impassiveness that seemed to be endemic to her, and then set her hands down on the metal autopsy table heavily enough to quell any further sniping. One on either side of the alien’s head, as if she could crush it between her palms. “Stay, Sixteen Moonrise. See the inside of our enemy. The medtech will fill you in on what you’ve missed. Now. You—” She pointed at Three Seagrass with her chin. “I want to know if either you or your barbarian linguist can talk back with these tonal markers you say you’ve identified. That’s the whole point of you. Figure out how to talk to these things before I decide they’re not worth the trouble of talking to.”
“What’s your broadcast system like?” Three Seagrass asked, bright and effervescent, as if this would be no trouble at all. Mahit knew better. They’d barely started interpreting the sounds on the transmission, spent half of their interpretation time too nauseated to think, breathing in gasps against the wrongness of those sounds. They might be able to say something to the aliens, but it was almost certainly going to be a wrong thing, a half-formed and misshapen utterance, distorted by human tongues and human minds.
Just like Darj Tarats had used Lsel as bait for Teixcalaan.
Just as she herself was bait now—for Three Seagrass, for this Fleet. If she acted as Tarats’s saboteur. She didn’t know how she could. She didn’t—
I don’t want to be bad at my job on purpose, Mahit thought, a vicious little stab of a phrase, and felt Yskandr’s answering query of Oh? And your job is first-contact protocols now? as a stabbing pain from elbows to fourth fingers and her own voice in her own head. They were so very close now. And still the places they were misaligned bloomed into pain.
“We can prepare a transmission to be intercepted on the frequency they used,” said Nine Hibiscus to Three Seagrass. “Once you have a transmission to send. Bring it to me first. Twenty Cicada will show you to your quarters and to the communications workroom.”
That was some sort of a dismissal. The next gesture the yaotlek made, calling the medtech in his red scrubs over and Sixteen Moonrise to stand by her side and watch, was another. Mahit bowed deep over her fingertips, and found herself distressed all over again by the comfort of knowing that gesture was appropriate again, here. At how easily she’d been scooped up out of the Station, slipped easily into the politics and pleasures and poisons of Teixcalaan. At how much she wanted to be useful, and how much she hated that wanting.
* * *
The throat of the alien peeled open under her medtech’s scalpel like a perfectly ripe fruit. Inside Nine Hibiscus could see the usual sort of muscles, still sluggishly oozing red. Oxygenated blood. It hadn’t been dead very long, this alien, and wasn’t that disturbing, if she thought about it too deeply—this thing had been alive, and hungry, and acting with its own inexplicable intelligence, less than half a day ago, and if it wasn’t cut open like this, it could have been hiding, pretending, lying in wait to spring—
Sixteen Moonrise, persistent at her left elbow, leaned in and peered at the flash of the scalpel blade as it sliced the muscle free and revealed something that looked like a trachea, ribbed and rubbery. “It looks like a normal throat,” she said, and Nine Hibiscus wondered how many throats her fellow Fleet Captain had dissected personally.
“Open it. At the top, where the larynx should be,” Nine Hibiscus said, and her medtech did.
There were laryngic membranes, all right. A large but—from what she could remember from basic anatomy, aeons ago at the Fleet academy in her first year—standard sort of arrangement. Folds of alien flesh at the top of the alien trachea, all very regular and mammalian-standard: closeable to keep food out of the airway, capable of vibrating to produce sound when air was forced through them. Nothing that looked like it could produce those machine-screaming resonant noises from the intercepted recording.
Sixteen Moonrise said, “Go lower. Where the trachea branches into the lungs. It has lungs, right?”
The lungs were resting in metal basins across the surgery-cum-autopsy room, on a shelf. Nine Hibiscus pointed at them. “It had lungs. Two of them.”
Whatever political game Sixteen
Moonrise was playing, coming onto her flagship and invading her medical labs, it seemed to have paled before the possibility of having come up with a good idea. Nine Hibiscus wondered if she’d aimed for a medical career before she’d joined the Fleet, or was just the sort of ghoul who watched autopsies and studied the inner workings of bodies for her own amusement. “Go lower,” she repeated, and her eyes were wide in a satisfied grin.
Nine Hibiscus nodded to her medtech, and he did as Sixteen Moonrise was suggesting, splitting the tube of the trachea open so it lay nearly flat, a ridged strip of stiff flesh. Where it began to divide, there was something—a bony structure like another voice box, surrounded by what looked like a deflated balloon connected to a whole series of muscles Nine Hibiscus definitely did not remember from basic anatomy.
“A syrinx,” said Sixteen Moonrise, with profound satisfaction. “Birds have them. Your spook and her pet are wrong, yaotlek—this alien can make all sorts of horrible noises with that thing.”
The balloon around it must be the part that vibrated, Nine Hibiscus thought, and the muscles were what held it at appropriate levels of tension. With a certain delicious squeamishness, she reached into the alien’s throat and stretched the membrane between her fingertips. It was strong and thick. Her fingertips were red.
If this had been her kill, she’d have smeared the blood on her forehead in victory. But she didn’t deserve that yet.
“Cut it out,” she directed the medtech. “With as many of the muscles as you can keep. And preserve it. I suspect my spook and her pet”—that, for Sixteen Moonrise’s benefit, an acknowledgment, a sidewise appreciation of the other Fleet Captain’s skill at predicting autopsy results—“might want to use it to make some of those noises themselves.”
“So you are trusting the Information agent,” said Sixteen Moonrise. They’d come away from the table to let the medtech do his work. Nine Hibiscus hadn’t washed her hands yet. There was something satisfying about having touched the alien and not being dead, or dissolving. Some small part of the mystery of them undone. They died. They died and bled and cooled and were peculiar but entirely understandable as collections of organs. Just meat, like any other dead thing.
A Desolation Called Peace Page 19
