That depends, Mahit thought at him. Did she sabotage us the first time, and if so, why did she? You knew her, Yskandr, you have more—time, more years than I do.
In her office I was scared. There was a waiting sort of silence, an abeyance that wasn’t acknowledgment as much as it was frustration, and Mahit was so tired of not thinking half of her own thoughts. Are you happy now, Yskandr? I was frightened, and you were spilling trauma reaction all over my endocrine system, of course I was sure Amnardbat had sabotaged us right then. And now I’m alone and I can think, and I can’t just work with I was scared, I have to—
She took a breath; it came short, and she realized she’d been breathing in little fast useless inhalations for at least a minute and hadn’t really noticed when she’d started. She took another, and it was still so hard, to breathe like her lungs weren’t going to seize up, like she wasn’t trapped—she was trapped, even in the safety of her private pod, she was absolutely trapped, the Councilor for Heritage wanted to carve her open and she still—months later, and she still didn’t understand why Amnardbat would have tried to sabotage her, or how, or anything, and—
She breathed, deep, a circular breath through the nostrils and the mouth; it wasn’t her choice, but she knew (or Yskandr knew) the pattern of it, the calming way of breathing. He took over their body entirely so rarely. Only when he needed to. The last time—the last real time—he’d run them through a riot unscathed, with all of the City in conflagration around them.
Thank you.
Warmth—all the little hairs on her arms and legs standing up and lying down again in a shivery wave, like her own neurology was touching her gently. This, too, was in none of the imago-training, none of the expectations for what would happen after a person received a live memory and a line of experience to be part of. Nothing in Mahit’s education had told her about the strange kindnesses of living in a body with a—friend.
An intensely annoying friend.
Electric laughter, and that vicious spike of ulnar-nerve pain; it wasn’t always a shimmer now. Sometimes it just hurt.
She sat up. Pressed her spine against the comforting inward curve of her pod. What we should have done when we first got back, Yskandr. I think we should tell Dekakel Onchu that her messages for you didn’t go unread entirely.
Again she felt alive—awake in a way she hadn’t seemed to be ever since she’d come back to Lsel. Awake was close to frightened, and exhilarating. There were remarkable similarities between how her aptitudes and Yskandr’s had spelled for risk-seeking; she’d always assumed that had been a necessary precondition for the sort of xenophilia that made a person fall in love with a culture that was slowly eating her own, but perhaps it was something simpler, something gut-deep: I can’t leave anything well enough alone.
Petal, she thought, with fond grief—not what she’d called him, that had been Three Seagrass’s pet name for a man named for a pink extravagance of a flower. Yes, I guess I have.
* * *
It wasn’t language. Knifepoint’s captain had been right about that much. The recording they’d made from the intercepted enemy-ship transmissions could have just been bad static feedback, cosmic radiation interference jacked up into a sharp crackle, at least to Nine Hibiscus’s inexperienced ears. A sharp, ugly noise with the intimation of a headache inside it, that ended in a scream that had taste—a foul, oilslick, tongue-coating taste that made her nauseated. Synesthesia wasn’t in Nine Hibiscus’s usual suite of neurological oddities, and sound that made humans crosswire to taste was at best unpleasant and at worst actively harmful.
Nevertheless she listened to it twice, confirming for herself that Knifepoint had been right about the pauses in the crackling: even if this wasn’t language, it was responsive to what Knifepoint had done. So it was communication. Of one sort or another. She made Twenty Cicada join her for the third time through. When the noise skittered higher and louder, he winced and put his hand over his mouth, swallowing a gag. He’d always been more sensitive than Nine Hibiscus was to local environments. She wished, abrupt and useless, that she hadn’t made him hear this.
“—I can’t,” he said, once he’d gotten control of himself again, “imagine that their mouths are very pleasantly shaped, if they talk like that.”
Nine Hibiscus shrugged, one shoulder up and down again. “They could be using a distorter. Or this is machine communication, one ship to another—”
“Or they could be machines communicating.”
She wondered if Twenty Cicada would find that comforting: machines that accidentally talked in a way that disturbed human homeostasis, rather than something organic that could hurt other organic things by speaking. If she wasn’t so short on time—shorter now, with Sixteen Moonrise due in an hour for a strategic defusing of politics over dinner—she’d ask him about it. “I doubt it,” she said instead. “The spit that ate the Shard—See? I’m already calling it spit. Too organic. They’re not machines.”
Twenty Cicada said, “You don’t know that,” and she nodded.
“I don’t know anything. We need a linguist. Who have we got on board for translation?”
Twenty Cicada leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind the smooth dome of his head, and dipped his eyelids shut, consulting with the internal lexicon of personnel he seemed to always have easy memory of. “Cuecuelihui Fourteen Spike—that’s who was on Knifepoint—but she is a translator, not a linguist. Outer Rim languages. One of your spy-types, she was on the ground team at Kauraan. Clever but better with humans than whatever this is, I think.”
“Not her,” Nine Hibiscus said. “I need someone without any preconceptions, who hasn’t heard the transmission before.” Fourteen Spike was one of her “spy-types”—not spies, she didn’t have spies unless Swarm himself counted. Third Palmers—political officers, in common parlance, the Ministry of War’s intelligence branch—weren’t the sort of people that a Fleet Captain kept around on purpose. Fourteen Spike was just one of her soldiers who she’d picked out for quiet charisma, language skills, the ability to become indispensable to anyone they were near. Usually someone of cuecuelihui rank, not command-track but the highest level of nonofficer specialist soldier. Someone flexible enough for independent work, strong enough to keep their loyalties regardless, like a metal that didn’t go brittle when bent. Sometimes people like that could talk to barbarians so well that the barbarians forgot they were Teixcalaanlitzlim until it was too late for the barbarians. Fourteen Spike was for barbarians. Not aliens. Not something that not only wasn’t civilized but wasn’t even human. “Who else?”
“I could pull up the rest of the Kauraan team—”
“I don’t want someone wh
o can make people trust them, Swarm, I want someone who can talk to aliens without mouths.”
Twenty Cicada covered his mouth again, but this time it was to hide a snicker. “Not you then either, my yaotlek. Only people trust you.”
Her people trusted her, yes—the Tenth Legion trusted her, would die for her like she’d die for them: that was a captain’s bargain. The rest of this Fleet? Not yet. Not with Sixteen Moonrise and her letter of political discontent already working its way through the other legions. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t pull translators from some other legion’s contingent, she was almost sure. Not without knowing Sixteen Moonrise’s business, and how far it might have spread. She hated working on fractured ground, without the comfort of the Minister of War to contact as a last resort—but perhaps she’d grown too used to having that comfort.
Perhaps it was time to learn what sort of yaotlek she’d like to be remembered as, in her own right.
“This,” she said at last, sitting down next to Twenty Cicada like they were both still palest-leaf-green cadets, shoulder to shoulder, “is a job for the Information Ministry.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Top panel, two-thirds of the page: Captain Cameron and the rescued Heritage archivist Esharakir Lrut huddle in the shadow of the ruined caravanserai. It is snowing hard. Esharakir is feeding the papers and codex-books she has been guarding for twenty years into the fire, one by one. The flames look like words, curling up the panel: Teixcalaanli poetry, Heritage documents, maybe even a passage from the Lsel Record of Origin, a super-recognizable one—but altered slightly. A secret version that Heritage has kept from the rest of us, being destroyed so they can live through the storm.
Lower panel, one-third of the page: Captain Cameron’s hand, snatching at the burning Record of Origin words, and Esharakir’s face. She’s serene.
CAMERON: You don’t have to—Esharakir, what’s the point if we can’t keep what you’ve found—stop—
ESHARAKIR LRUT: This is dross, Captain. It’s precious, but it’s not a memory. Did you think you were coming here for documents? What sort of Stationer guards documents when she could preserve an imago-line that would be lost without her? I’m everything you need.
—graphic-story script for THE PERILOUS FRONTIER! vol. 1, distributed from local small printer ADVENTURE/BLEAK on Tier Nine, Lsel Station
* * *
[…] meals, supplement to hydroponics (meat substitute, taurine substitute)—twelve shipping containers; meals, supplement to hydroponics (preserved fruit)—one shipping container; missiles (projectile, hand weapon)—three shipping containers; missiles (projectile, ground cannon)—four cannons […]
—appropriations for Fleet supply, Western Arc sector (page nine of twenty-two)
THE request came in during the early hours of the morning, and so it was the Third Undersecretary to the Minister of Information, who had slept, or not slept (not slept, yet again) in her office, who got to it first. Three Seagrass saw it flash through on the internal Information Ministry network, a bright grey-gold-red cycling pulse in the upper-left quadrant of her cloudhook display: a priority nineteen message in War Ministry colors, the sort of thing that wouldn’t even show up on a regular asekreta’s feed. Three months ago Three Seagrass never would have seen it.
(Three months ago, even if she’d somehow reached this exalted position in the Ministry, complete with her own tiny office with a tiny window only one floor down from the Minister herself, Three Seagrass would have been asleep in her house, and missed the message entirely. There: she’d justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)
The request cycled again, blinking. No one was picking it up. Priority nineteen messages cycled four times and then dumped themselves into the First Undersecretary’s private cloudhook, on the basis that an emergency message from someone command-level in another Ministry would at least get answered fast if otherwise it was clogging up Information’s second-in-command’s workflow. If it cycled one more time, Three Seagrass could safely forget about it until whatever it was settled on the Ministry like a fog of pollen, irritating everyone’s mucous membranes—
Even your allusions are becoming terrible. Fog of pollen? Like that is going to be the base of a decent poem—
Two and a half months ago, Three Seagrass had written a decent poem, a lament for her dearest friend, stupidly and uselessly dead, and after that, well. Fog of fucking pollen, and this exquisite prison of an office.
She flicked her eyes up, micromovement to the left, and claimed that request message for her own.
Twenty minutes later, just as the dawn began to flood through her window to pool in extravagant, vision-obscuring beams across her cloudhook display, Three Seagrass put the finishing touches on the second-stupidest idea of her career in the Information Ministry. She did it accompanied by the determined cheerful voice of Fourth Undersecretary Seven Monograph humming the newest top-ten hit arrangement of “Reclamation Song #5” (the same song for three fucking weeks now and at least Seven Monograph had an exquisite command of prosody and imitation, even if he also had a tendency to get songs stuck in his head and share them with the office … but no one could sing two harmony lines at once without artificial help, and some people shouldn’t try), wafting its way down the hall, as it did every morning. The Third Undersecretary—well, any Undersecretary of the six of them, really—had discretionary authority over assigning Ministry personnel on priority nineteen requests, and oh, had this ever been a request and a half. The yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, out on the edges of Teixcalaanli space, wanted a first-contact specialist with diplomatic chops, and wanted one yesterday. To talk to those same incomprehensible aliens that Mahit Dzmare had used to defuse a civil war while Three Seagrass watched, caught up in the strange gravity of her very own barbarian ambassador.
Her cloudhook pulsed pale gold: message incoming.
Patrician First-Class Three Seagrass, asekreta, Third Undersecretary to Information Minister Four Aloe, you have been reassigned. Your new temporary designation is Envoy-at-Large, seconded to the Tenth Legion on the Eternal-class ship Weight for the Wheel, commanding officer yaotlek Nine Hibiscus. Please report to the central spaceport for expedited travel by sunset on 187.1.1–19A (TODAY). Your pay grade: remains the same; your clearances: remain the same; span of assignment: three months, with unlimited extensions. Assigning officer: Three Seagrass, Third Undersecretary to Information Minister Four Aloe. For questions regarding this assignment, please contact your assigning officer. To accept this assignment, reply to this message—
Last chance, Three Seagrass thought to herself, last chance to have second thoughts. Last chance to not set yourself up for an intensely boring disciplinary meeting when you get back.
And blinked a reply affirmative before she could stop herself, feeling shimmering, feeling like she was already weightless and off-planet and terrified, feeling real. She thought of Eleven Lathe, her poetic model, her hero, writing Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier out alone amongst his aliens, the Ebrekti. Could she do worse? Certainly, but perhaps not much worse—and then, gleeful and bitter, she thought, Fuck you, watch me try, in Twelve Azalea’s eternally silenced voice. That had been the first-stupidest idea of Three Seagrass’s career: believing, wholeheartedly and entire, that the Ministry she and Twelve Azalea had served would protect them both from senselessness, even in the face of imminent civil war. Oh, how very stupid a decision that belief had engendered. And she hadn’t been the one to die for it.
Not her, and not Mahit Dzmare. Mahit, who had kissed Three Seagrass once, in the middle of going more native than Three Seagrass had ever seen a barbarian go, and before she’d run away from the whole concept of Teixcalaan. She missed her, Three Seagrass decided. Maybe she should fix that, while she was exploding her nascent political career for the sake of the Empire.
* * *
The last ti
me Mahit had gotten herself involved with court politics—and wouldn’t the Lsel Council absolutely hate being compared to the Teixcalaanli imperial court, that pit of internecine intrigue and backstabbing, villain of every faintly anti-imperial holoproj drama—she hadn’t been consciously aware of the clock. This time—walking soundless on soft-soled shoes through the decks of the Station, wending a deliberately random path toward the central ship-hangar—she could almost hear the seconds counting down. She had at absolute most six days before Councilor Amnardbat wanted her in the neurological suite, six days before (in the best case) everyone on Lsel knew that she had not one, but two imago-versions of Yskandr Aghavn in her mind.
We die on the table. Carved open, a Heritage neurosurgeon’s scalpel slipping just enough to accidentally (surely accidentally) sever her spinal cord. The surgical scar from where Five Portico had inserted the dead-Yskandr’s imago-machine into Mahit’s skull ached. She’d grown her hair out to cover it; the tight curls were longer than they’d been in years.
Yskandr said, with too much brittle cheer.
Don’t.
The clock had existed in the City too. She’d started it running the instant she’d begun to investigate her predecessor’s death—or Yskandr had started it a long time previously, when he’d promised a dying, brilliant Emperor an imago-machine and eternal life. Like priming the detonator on an explosive. But Mahit hadn’t noticed the acceleration of time, the reduction of options, until she’d been on Teixcalaan for days. At least this time she could see the flat blank wall of the deadline coming for her. She wouldn’t be surprised.
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