A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  Listened, while Three Azimuth and Eleven Laurel calmly discussed historical precedent for massive planetary strikes. He knew of some. They were from eight hundred years ago, or more, when Teixcalaan had been—vicious. Uncompromising in stamping out rebellions.

  Eleven Laurel had said lightly, “There are very good reasons the Fleet has shifted to a negotiation-and-subordination modality, Minister, which I know you’re well aware of, considering Nakhar…”

  And Three Azimuth had answered, “Massive planetary strikes on people waste resources and goodwill, and create eternal enmity between new-integrated systems and Teixcalaan. As you said, Undersecretary: Nakhar is an excellent example of the success of negotiation and subordination. Do you have some reason to believe I’d revise my methodology so drastically now that I’ve become Minister? Her Illuminate Majesty appointed me to this position for good reasons.” It sounded like a warning.

  “So she did!” Eleven Laurel agreed. “And for very good reasons—I am ever so well acquainted with your work on Nakhar. What was it they called you? The butcher of the Nakharese mind? So interesting to find out that there is something even a person with such an elegant epithet finds morally objectionable.”

  Eight Antidote was sure he was not supposed to be hearing this. He was equally sure that Eleven Laurel meant him to hear it, meant him to think that only he, Third Undersecretary Eleven Laurel, was trustable in the Ministry of War. That Three Azimuth had done something as governor of Nakhar that was so very wrong that she could be—pressured (blackmailed?) with only the casual mention of it. That Eight Antidote should return to being only Eleven Laurel’s student. (Like Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had been Eleven Laurel’s student?)

  Disruptive persons, he thought again. And then, What happens to them afterward, once Three Azimuth knows who they are? Nothing good. Nothing he wanted to examine too closely.

  And at the same time, he wanted with a stupid heartfelt instant want to defend her. Hadn’t her methods—however butcherlike—worked?

  Did he want them to have worked, if it meant she’d do the same sort of thing again, to a whole planet?

  Three Azimuth sighed, a delicate and annoyed sound. “The question is, Undersecretary, whether these enemies are people for whom morally objectionable applies.”

  “We have only Information finding out,” Eleven Laurel said, with elegant distaste.

  “Information and a barbarian diplomat. I’m not pleased about it either, trust me.”

  Eight Antidote had had to say something then. He couldn’t stay quiet, not when they were considering a first-strike planetary destruction. He didn’t know what he wanted to say, only that he wanted them both to know he was there and listening.

  “Why aren’t we—I mean, why isn’t the Fleet doing the negotiation?” he said. He knew he’d slipped when he’d said we. Knew he’d been in this office too long. It was awful, to know all that and to still realize it was a useful slip to have made, aligning himself with the two of them. He was going to learn something now. He missed thinking that mistakes were just mistakes. Since he’d become a spy, he felt bad about good things as much as he did about errors.

  “The kid has a point,” said Three Azimuth. “We could—if we used the Shard trick, get one of your own people down in that negotiation, Undersecretary—”

  Eight Antidote, confused, thought, the Shard trick? Just as Eleven Laurel shook his head, harsh negation, all of the lines on his face that Eight Antidote used to think were friendly going savage and frowning. “I don’t think that discussion is happening in front of an appropriate audience,” he said.

  Which meant—which meant that Eight Antidote had just heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear at all, even more than he hadn’t been meant to hear about the butcher of the Nakharese mind. Something worse. Something stranger. The Shard trick. Something that was faster than fast couriers? He was waiting for Three Azimuth to shut Eleven Laurel down; she was his superior, after all, blackmail or no blackmail, and she’d seemed like she was really interested in the idea—

  But all she did was shrug one shoulder a little, and nod, and no one talked about Shards or joining the negotiations again. It was back to endless meetings with Logistics, and Armaments. Supply lines. How to move weapons through jumpgates without breaking too many treaties at once.

  Like the Minister of War wouldn’t cross Eleven Laurel at all. Which was backward. Like Eleven Laurel was the one who could identify disruptive persons, and had decided that the Minister herself, and maybe Eight Antidote too, were some of them.

  That night Eight Antidote had crept back into his room in Palace-Earth and gone to bed straightaway, even though it was still hours before midnight. He wished he hadn’t. Less sleep would have meant less time to dream.

  * * *

  As she approached the medbay, every protocol subroutine in Weight for the Wheel’s ship AI shouted alerts into Nine Hibiscus’s cloudhook: STOP—DO NOT ENTER—DANGER—BIOLOGICAL HAZARD on endless and unrhyming repeat. It was far more jarring than a normal safety message. Those had prosody. This was … this was for being shocked and disturbed and terrified, and for being warned away, shaken out of normalcy by monosyllables. Nevertheless she approached the vacuum-sealed medbay doors. Sixteen Moonrise was following her, as avid as a vulture, and she felt full up with the weight of knowing that the alien enemy did have a home she could reach and attack, if she was willing to risk the ships and the loss of life.

  Afterimage, too fast to do more than kick her heart rate up another few notches: that Shard-death by fire, the hideous relief she had thought she’d felt from the pilot—but that had to have been her own projection—emotion didn’t travel through Shard-sight. Or at least it never had before.

  She peered through the heavy glass window set in the center of the medbay doors. It was her only view into whatever the fuck was happening to Swarm.

  He’d shut himself off, closed down everything like the medbay was experiencing an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. She assumed an alien fungal bloom that had killed at least one of her soldiers was an approximate equivalent to a hemorrhagic fever. If it spread like one, Twenty Cicada was already dead, even if he hadn’t finished dying yet.

  Aloud, not caring if Sixteen Moonrise heard her, she called up her messaging system again and sent him a quick inquiry: “We’re here. What’s going on inside?”

  “Well,” said Twenty Cicada, using the medbay’s intercom service—he must not be dying very hard yet, if he’d turned on the two-way communication inside that was meant for just this sort of emergency, infectious disease on the inside of those doors and a healthy ship on the outside—“currently I feel fine, and there is no one in here but one dead alien and one dead medical cadet—Six Rainfall, I think. He’s got fungi growing out of a wound on his hand.”

  “You’ve turned on the purifiers, and none of the air in there is getting recycled back into the ship, right?”

  “Yaotlek. Mallow, my dear, you know me. Of course the purifiers are on outgas cycle. We’ll make up the oxygen in about three days from the hydroponics decks.”

  My dear was worse than Mallow, as a sign of how concerned Twenty Cicada was about his own life expectancy. Fuck, but she didn’t want to lose him. And she really didn’t want to lose him where Sixteen Moonrise could see her grieve. “I never doubted,” she told him, wishing she could see him. “Tell me about the cadet.”

  “… Well, he found the fungus before it killed him, and he had time to send all of medical a message about it with microscopic analysis holos. That’s how I knew to come—I’m on that message list. So it’s slow, whatever it is that killed him. From what I can tell—and trust me, I am not doing what this poor child did and sticking my hand in the alien’s mouth—the original locus of fungus is growing out of its brain. The alien, I mean. Not Six Rainfall.”

  Sixteen Moonrise said, “… Like a fungal herniation through the ethmoid bone? Into the oral cavity?”

  “Quite exactly, Fleet Captain,” said Tw
enty Cicada, faintly sepulchral through the intercom. “Are you, perhaps, a biologist by training?”

  “I never have had the pleasure of serving in medical,” said Sixteen Moonrise, which was not no, and also Nine Hibiscus despised her entirely for being useful as well as herself. “But if the fungus was living in its brain, that is how it might emerge to spore. A pressure downward, first through the ethmoid bone and then through the soft palate. The alien did have a soft palate, I recall.”

  Nine Hibiscus interrupted her. “How did the cadet die?”

  “He cut himself,” Twenty Cicada said. “And got the fungus in the wound. But I think it was anaphylaxis that killed him. Not the fungus itself. It’s—not very widespread. And he is cyanotic.”

  One more question. The one she really didn’t want to ask. “And you?”

  “No cuts, no anaphylaxis,” said Twenty Cicada, brisk and brief. “In a moment or two I’ll have a better readout on whether these things are aerosolizing or not—the ship is running me a particle diagnostic, it’s crude but it’ll tell me something—and the fungus isn’t very happy.”

  “Happy,” Sixteen Moonrise said, flat.

  “It’s been robbed of its host,” Twenty Cicada told her, “and it doesn’t much like living in Six Rainfall. Or at least in Six Rainfall’s bloodstream. It is wilting as I watch.”

  “Perhaps it’d like his brain better.”

  Nine Hibiscus turned on Sixteen Moonrise and took a step into her personal space. Used all of her weight and size to loom, to make a point of her authority. “We are not cutting open the skull of one of our dead,” she said, “to do experiments. Alien fungi or not.”

  “I was hardly suggesting such a thing, yaotlek,” Sixteen Moonrise said, and managed to sound affronted.

  “What were you suggesting, then?”

  “That this fungus likes neural tissue, and is stable there. That our enemies might have sent this one as a trap. A bomb. A sacrifice. That you should check your spook and your spook’s pet for anaphylaxis—or fungal infiltrates in the brain. And your adjutant, as well. Yaotlek, I am not attempting to challenge you on your ship—I am frightened of what this might mean. Take it seriously, for the Empire’s sake if not your own.”

  She could sound so very sincere. Cold, and sincere, and far too likely to be right to be dismissed—either from Weight for the Wheel or from this conversation.

  “My own adjutant, as you’ve noticed, is inside the contaminant field,” Nine Hibiscus said. “I cannot take it more seriously than I am doing right now.”

  Sixteen Moonrise nodded—and pushed onward. “And the Information officer? And the escort team you sent down with her? They could already have died. And already be spreading the fungus outside the contaminant field.” Nine Hibiscus thought she must be the sort of Fleet Captain whose command was always laced through with the intimation of threat. The Parabolic Compression would be an exquisitely tuned ship—tightened to snapping.

  Through the intercom, Twenty Cicada said, “I doubt it, Fleet Captain. I have the results of the particle assay, and it isn’t aerosolizing at detectable levels. Whatever it does, that’s not how it spreads best. Be reassured.”

  Nine Hibiscus couldn’t have sounded that calm or that comforting. Not from the other side of the medbay door. “Swarm,” she said. “Confirm that you mean you are unlikely to die of fungal infection?”

  His laughter was sudden, strange. “Unlikely to, yes. But I’m not coming out of here until six hours have passed and I am sure. Besides, the Fleet Captain’s right, my dear—the asekreta should know about this development.”

  “If she doesn’t already,” Sixteen Moonrise said, darkly, and Nine Hibiscus could imagine, quite clearly: the bodies of asekreta Three Seagrass and her barbarian xenolinguist ambassador, filmed over with mold, hours dead in the quarters she had assigned them—and worse, the bodies of her soldiers, haphazardly placed throughout Weight for the Wheel, each a locus of infection. If it did spread. But it hadn’t spread to Twenty Cicada—yet—

  “Time to find out,” she said. “I’ll have them brought to the medical deck, and we’ll see.”

  Everything else would have to wait until afterward.

  * * *

  Mahit woke warm—blood-heat warm, sharing-space warm, the deep primal comfort of being wrapped around another living person in a small space. There was no moment of confusion, no sensation of let me feel this a little longer before I think about how I got here: she knew at the first flicker of consciousness exactly where she was. She was curled around Three Seagrass in the lower bunk of their quarters on the Teixcalaanli flagship Weight for the Wheel: her knees behind Three Seagrass’s knees, her face pressed into the loose dark tangle of Three Seagrass’s hair, her naked hips a cup for Three Seagrass’s naked hips. Her hand curled over Three Seagrass’s rib cage, pulling her close. The sweet used ache between her thighs.

  Oh, Mahit knew exactly where she was, and exactly what they had done, and how much she had enjoyed it, and how at the moment of orgasm, with half of Three Seagrass’s hand inside her, almost to the knuckle, she had seen in an explosion of gold the blurred faces of Nineteen Adze and the Emperor Six Direction and remembered an entirely different physical experience of climax. And how she—hadn’t minded that, either, just found her way back to herself enough to press Three Seagrass into the mattress and see if Yskandr had known any tricks for oral sex that she hadn’t figured out herself.

  he murmured to her now.

  It was amazing how prurient he could sound in the privacy of their own mind. She was blushing, hot-faced, glad that Three Seagrass was either really asleep or pretending to be asleep the same as she was, so that she didn’t have to explain.

  It would have been nice if they could stay right here. And not have to explain anything. Or figure out just how bad of an idea this had been.

  Reed, she thought, as deliberately as she would direct a thought to Yskandr, if you weren’t compromised before in the eyes of all these soldiers, you will be now.

  And Yskandr murmured back to her,

  Just like that, all vestiges of desire vanished: she felt cold and clear and faintly nauseated, like she had been plunged into icy water and released again. She had managed to not think about what she had promised Darj Tarats for almost a whole twenty-four hours, lost in culture shock, disappointed fury, first-contact protocols, heat exhaustion, and really good sex—in that order. It had been very nice, not thinking about Darj Tarats, and how her eyes were his eyes now. How she was a spy here, embedded in this ship like a shrapnel shard, working her way slowly through to its heart. How she was a spy, and had been commanded to be a saboteur as well, even if she hadn’t figured out what to sabotage exactly—

  Yskandr murmured.

  He’ll like this, then, Mahit thought, deliberate and bitter. Look how much Teixcalaan trusts me. Admittedly, she’s not an Emperor, so you’re still a little ways ahead.

  She could feel how she’d hurt him, feel it in the hollowness of her own chest, the ache of grief as vivid as tears. She tried not to be sorry, and was sorry, and didn’t know if she was sorry because she’d hurt him or because she was hurt, too. One more thing that integration therapists never warned you about: having two people’s heartsickness to evoke with a misplaced slice of self-recrimination.

  Yskandr said, finally.

  She’d never heard him so clearly describe the shape of his own despair, his own sense of self-hatred. It was like looking into a mirror that went on forever
, a hole in the world abruptly made real. She was afraid when she asked him, quiet in the vault of their mind, hesitant: Darj Tarats would like Teixcalaan to smash itself against these aliens until they are both dead. I could tell him about Sixteen Moonrise—and then sabotage our negotiations on Peloa-2—I could get us all killed. Should I?

  Yskandr said.

  And because he had said that, her eyes were leaking tears when Three Seagrass turned over in her arms and pressed cool fingers to her cheek, tracing the wet.

  “Surely,” she said, “you don’t regret me this much?”

  She sounded devastated, which was not at all what Mahit wanted. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, but it wasn’t this: Three Seagrass looking like Mahit had hit her, just by weeping.

  “No,” she said, and hated how her voice sounded thick and choked. “No, it’s not you, Reed, it’s not you at all, I—”

  Words took too long, and were all in Teixcalaanli anyway. She kissed her instead.

  It was still a good kiss, and Three Seagrass continued to be very good at kissing (when she wasn’t having an existential crisis over watching her Emperor commit ritual suicide on empire-wide holocast, at least). When they broke apart, Three Seagrass was tucked easily against Mahit’s shoulder, like they were designed to fit together.

  “So,” she said, brisk and bright and with a gentleness that reminded Mahit terribly of Nineteen Adze (or reminded Yskandr of Nineteen Adze, which was probably closer to the truth), “if it’s not me you regret, Mahit, what is it? We did so well yesterday.”

  “We did,” Mahit agreed. “We did, and we have such a long way to go, and—”

  “Don’t tell me you’re doubting your own capabilities. You figured out how to sing to them. We really need a name for them besides the enemy, don’t you think?”