A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  “No,” Sixteen Moonrise answered, cutting off her subordinate with a sharp gesture of one hand. “You haven’t half enough legions to waste one on a stunt strategy dinner, yaotlek. Nor are you stupid—”

  That was rich, coming from a woman who was legally her subordinate.

  “Stupid is not the invective usually shouted at me, no,” she said, and tore off another mouthful of bread. It was sour, and delicious, and the crust was sharp enough to cut her soft palate. Eating it showed her teeth, and she caught Twenty Cicada’s faintly reproachful expression. But propriety wasn’t at all what she wanted to convey just now. No, she wanted a sense of rapid motion, of hunger. “A holo of the combat is already on your shuttle for you to peruse on your way back, Fleet Captain,” she continued. “And the Twenty-Fourth will come and join us at the point position in case more of these spitting, ship-dissolving things attack us. We’ll be ready, with your able assistance. Twenty Cicada, play the audio.”

  She had warned him she was going to do this. She wasn’t cruel. (And she’d noticed he hadn’t eaten a single thing save for his obligatory sip of starshine, and hoped she’d keep her own bread down in her belly where it belonged.)

  “You picked up a transmission?” Sixteen Moonrise began, and then the air was made of the hideous noise of the aliens again, and Nine Hibiscus at least had the pleasure of seeing the other woman go even paler than her standard color, and snap her jaw shut against an upsurge of bile.

  After it was over, Nine Hibiscus said, “I’ve sent for a translator from the Information Ministry.”

  “You don’t need a translator, you need a winnowing barrage,” Twelve Fusion said. “Whatever made that shouldn’t exist.”

  “Ah, I expect they think the same of you and me,” Twenty Cicada said, as viciously dry as evaporating starshine liquor. “Perhaps we should try to talk to them and find out if there’s anything else they’d like from us instead. Unless you enjoy watching Shard pilots dissolve from the ship inward. Ikantlos-prime.”

  Nine Hibiscus could not ask for a better second than the one she had. She knew he knew she knew it, too, even if he wasn’t looking at her.

  Sixteen Moonrise placed her hands flat on the table. Nine Hibiscus wondered if they were shaking, or if she was trying to claim space—touching Nine Hibiscus’s ship, getting her palms on it. “Yaotlek,” she said, with the highest level of formality. “Leaving aside the opinion of the entirety of the Twenty-Fourth, which I represent here, that talking to something that talks like that is a waste of all of our time, why the fucking Information Ministry?”

  “What, do you want to talk to it instead?”

  “I’d like to shoot at it. Without the interference of a bunch of manipulative spooks.”

  Nothing in Sixteen Moonrise’s records as Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth had suggested to Nine Hibiscus that she was more bloodthirsty than a standard Teixcalaanli soldier; Nine Hibiscus could imagine saying something similar. I’d like to shoot at it. She would, in fact, like to shoot at anything that came near her right now, including Sixteen Moonrise her own self. And no one in the Six Outreaching Palms was terribly fond of Information; Information were civilians. The eyes of the bureaucracy, of the City, out beyond the jumpgates where the actual City couldn’t see. Eyes, quite often, on Fleet ships, reporting in secret to whoever their master was—either the Minister of Information, spidered away safe planetside (if you believed Fleet rumor), or all Teixcalaan expressed through the person of the Emperor (if you believed the propaganda Information put out). Nine Hibiscus usually neglected to believe the propaganda. Information were—oh, it would work to use Sixteen Moonrise’s term, in her own mind, just for the moment—manipulative spooks.

  But she had no one in her legion who could handle learning to talk to aliens that made human planets vanish into silence. And Sixteen Moonrise wasn’t a trustable ally, not with her transparent power play of a challenge via concerned letter. Not with her immediate distrust of Information—that sounded like Third Palmer talk, Fleet intelligence, with their habitual distrust of anyone else’s spywork. The Third Palm had never been one of Nine Hibiscus’s favorite divisions to deal with. They were obstructionist, insistent on using only their own methods, their own people, anytime a Fleet engagement drifted out of strict combat and logistics and into overt psychological manipulation. Usually, Nine Hibiscus gave the orders she would have given anyway, and neglected to ask permission of the nearest political officer.

  Sixteen Moonrise was a Fleet Captain, of course, not a political officer, but—she’d have to check the woman’s early service record. Perhaps she had been, once. Either way, Nine Hibiscus didn’t have the luxury of agreeing with her. Not now. Perhaps not at all.

  “Information,” said Nine Hibiscus, “talks to aliens as a habit. All of that bullshit with Dispatches From the Numinous Frontier, xenophile poetry and philosophy? These things can’t fuck with Information’s head, Information comes prefucked. It’ll save us time, having them do the diplomacy and extract as much intelligence as possible, while we do the maneuvering. I want you to bring the Parabolic Compression up to meet Weight for the Wheel, with your full complement of Shards, and your stealth cruiser—what’s it called, Twenty Cicada? The fast one.”

  “Porcelain Fragment Scorched,” Twenty Cicada said, as smooth as an AI on cloudhook. “It’s a very nice ship, Fleet Captain, you should be proud of the acquisition—where did you get it? From the Sixth Legion in trade…?”

  Sixteen Moonrise said, “You’d know, Swarm, wouldn’t you,” and fuck but she was going to push every inch of the way. Nine Hibiscus knocked back her glass of starshine, leaving only the Emperor’s share, the last sip.

  “He would,” she said. “We’re going to take back Peloa-2, even if there are more spitting ships waiting out there in the dark. You’re going to, with Porcelain Fragment Scorched. Ask for whatever expertise you need from the Tenth, though I’m sure you’re well staffed. This sector is Teixcalaanli. Let’s remind ourselves of that while we wait for Information’s input.”

  “This is a sop,” Sixteen Moonrise said, her voice flat. “I am not a fool, yaotlek.”

  “On the contrary, Fleet Captain. You’re just smart enough to know what I’m doing and that it will make you look like you’ve won when you come back to your co-conspirators in the Seventeenth and the Sixth Legions. Here’s the action you requested. And here’s my plan for a larger-scale engagement. You get both. Shall we go to work?”

  Sixteen Moonrise made her wait, drawing out the tension between them for a long and ugly moment, and then she flipped over her starshine glass. The last mouthful spilled onto the table and glistened like the spit of their enemy.

  “The Twenty-Fourth will execute this mission as you command, yaotlek,” she said. “It is our honor to serve the Empire. Your hospitality has been impeccable—you remind me ever so much of Minister Nine Propulsion.”

  Ex-Minister Nine Propulsion, her former patron. That was the core of this, somehow. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t quite see what Sixteen Moonrise wanted. Not yet, not with how she was still half-hearing the alien noise and watching the best alcohol in the Empire evaporate, formal gesture of détente-ended. Not yet, but it was surely Ministry politics, out here at the edge of the world; the long reach of the Palms mattered for politics as much as for firepower. Which was a sort of pity. She smiled instead of saying anything, her eyes wide, and tipped out her own glass. Thought, rote pattern, May His Brilliance see a thousand stars, and then corrected, internally. Her Brilliance.

  “Fourth shift,” she said to Twenty Cicada and the retreating backs of her guests. Eighteen hours away. “Recrew Knifepoint and ready Dreaming Citadel as support for the Fleet Captain’s advance into the Peloa System.”

  * * *

  It was kind of brilliant, really, how fast the people in Inmost Province Spaceport got out of Three Seagrass’s way now that she was dressed as a special envoy. Teixcalaanlitzlim loved a uniform, a well-turned suit in shining colors—and Information c
ream and flame had never spun her wrong before when she’d needed to make an impression—but an envoy’s suit, with its faint echo of a Fleet uniform done all up in that same flame-colored fabric? People deferred. She was tiny, and her rib cage was never going to be broad enough to write home about—no wide orator’s lungs for her, no substance to her, at least physically—no matter how many poems she declaimed at court. And yet absolutely no one had gotten in her way, even though Inmost Province was as swarmingly crowded as ever. Merchants and freight pallets and soldiers and a thousand thousand Teixcalaanli citizens scattering like seeds to the stars. It was heady. She felt just exactly like she had when she’d been a trainee and skived off from class: a gorgeous and unfolding sense that she was getting away with something.

  And it was all entirely, completely, and thoroughly legal. She’d signed off on it herself.

  Admittedly, having done so, she’d left an out of office message on repeat outside her office door in cheerful doggerel glyphs, gone home to her flat to pack underwear and hair products and receive delivery of five identical envoy-at-large uniforms, and pointedly ignored any communiqués by cloudhook or infofiche stick that might have arrived with contradictory orders. Also she’d not done the dishes before she left for the spaceport and points unknown, but that wasn’t unusual. She hadn’t done the dishes all week.

  A disturbing flicker of thought: neglecting the dishes all week was standard-overworked-Information-agent, neglecting the dishes before a three-month trip to a war zone was the sort of tell that a good interrogator would notice. Three Seagrass could imagine the conversation perfectly: You weren’t really planning on coming back, asekreta, were you? asked the imaginary interrogator, and imaginary future-Three-Seagrass would have to shrug and say, I wasn’t thinking about that, I was preparing to serve Teixcalaan, and then it’d be up to the two of them to figure out if she was lying.

  None of this was her current problem, and all of it was unpleasant to consider. Three Seagrass strode through a group of off-planet tourists disembarking from a passenger cruiser and scattered them like leaves; wove her way past an enormous crate of brightly scented, spiky-skinned fruit being offloaded onto pallets; and walked straight up to the ship she knew would get her to the first stop on her route fastest of any ship currently at port in Inmost Province. It wasn’t a military vessel. The Flower Weave was a medical resupply skiff, made for darting out-City loaded with equipment that had an extremely limited shelf life. Potent botanicals straight out of the Science Ministry’s laboratory, offgassing to uselessness if they sat around too long, for example. Or—like this particular ship on this particular run—organs for transplant. Hearts. Nice fresh ones on ice, loaded up with antigens that were apparently—according to her quick and dirty research—quite common in the City but in very rare supply on a small planet right next to the first jumpgate that Three Seagrass wanted to move through.

  She blinked directions to her cloudhook, microshifts of her eye, and cued a government official is here to annoy you message to the Flower Weave’s captain. It didn’t take him long to show up, the doors of his hangar bay folding back like a membranous fan. He looked harried. Excellent.

  “Captain Eighteen Gravity,” Three Seagrass said, “My name is Special Envoy Three Seagrass, and I need you to take me along with your cargo when you break orbit.”

  He blinked. “Envoy,” he said, and bowed over his fingertips, which gave him enough time to collect himself; she could watch him do it. “I’m a medical supply ship,” he went on, as he straightened up. “I can’t detour. My cargo is time-sensitive. I know the regulations say I’m supposed to take envoys anywhere they want to go, but—”

  “You’re headed to Calatl System. I am also headed to Calatl System, Captain. And you’re leaving fastest of any ship in this whole spaceport.” Sometimes it was very difficult for Three Seagrass not to smile like a barbarian: bared teeth and gleeful. She’d probably learned that from Mahit. The impulse remained repressible, however, so she repressed it.

  “Oh,” said Captain Eighteen Gravity. “If you don’t mind the cramped quarters in the hold, that’s fine, then. We don’t really have a passenger cabin, it’s just me and my first officer and the ixplanatl tech.”

  “I am very small,” Three Seagrass said, delightedly. “I squish. Put me in between the boxes of hearts, I’ll do just fine.”

  There was a moment where the captain seemed to be attempting to marshal an appropriate response, and then he visibly gave up. “We break orbit in an hour and forty-seven—forty-six, sorry—minutes,” he said. “If you’re squished in with the hearts in an hour and thirty, you can go wherever we go. Envoy.”

  “Excellent,” Three Seagrass told him. “Your service to Teixcalaan and Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze does you credit! See you soon.”

  An hour and thirty was enough time to grab dinner from one of the multitude of spaceport bars, and Three Seagrass figured she’d need it, if she didn’t want to contemplate carpaccio of medically significant human heart at an inopportune moment. Teixcalaan devours, she thought, and then—no, that wasn’t how Mahit said it at all. She could ask her, maybe, when she got to Lsel Station.

  It was on the way to the war. It was in fact right next to the war, in a way that her barbarian must have known would happen when she gave the coordinates of their enemy as sinecure for her Station’s freedom and thought the danger worthwhile. So Lsel was, in fact, a reasonable stop to make—especially if Three Seagrass was meant to learn to talk to aliens, which she was. She could use an alien who was good at talking to humans. Barbarians were the next best thing to aliens. Mahit was the best of the barbarians Three Seagrass had ever met, and also she missed her.

  In the bar she ordered thick noodles in soup with chili oil and shreds of smoked beef, on the basis that it would be a long time before she could have proper in-City food again. She amused herself by drawing her route on one of her cloudhook’s graphics vector programs: to that nearby jumpgate on the Flower Weave, and then to three more jumpgates by whoever was fastest at each stop, doing a complex end run around the two months of sublight travel that getting to Lsel usually took. She would come out the wrong gate, when she got there, and have to convince whoever was piloting her ride to take her to the Station. The wrong gate—which Mahit had called the far gate—would be much closer to Lsel than the usual gated approach to Stationer space, from territories properly controlled by Teixcalaan. The far gate was outside the Empire, and she’d have to switch to non-Teixcalaanli vessels to access it at all, especially from the non-Teixcalaanli side. That side of the Amhamemat Gate was in territory nominally controlled by the Verashk-Talay Confederation, who had an absurd habit of electing their leaders by popular vote. Or at least Three Seagrass thought it was. Verashk-Talay space wasn’t mapped very well, and the Anhamemat Gate also led to places where incomprehensible aliens were making trouble for the Fleet’s newest yaotlek, trouble bad enough to call Information for help rather than stick with the Third Palm’s military-intelligence services …

  “Good evening, Three Seagrass,” said someone behind her, and she dropped her fork with a clatter and turned around.

  “You might consider reducing the intensity of your startle reflexes, with where you’re going,” said Five Agate, once Nineteen Adze’s prize student and chief aide, and now one of her ezuazuacatlim, the Emperor’s sworn band of loyal servants. She hadn’t changed her style of dressing with her elevation in status. She was still in white, like all of Nineteen Adze’s people had been, in imitation of their mistress’s former signature style.

  “Your Excellency,” Three Seagrass said, in the highest level of formality she could muster with noodles in her mouth.

  “Chew your food,” Five Agate told her, and Three Seagrass suspected that she used exactly the same tone when addressing her small son, Two Cartograph; absently parental. Three Seagrass had met the kid once, during the insurrection three months ago. He was very healthy and clever for someone who had been born from a uterus, on purpose.
She chewed her food. Swallowed.

  “What can I do for you, Your Excellency?”

  “Her Brilliance has a question for you.”

  Her first reaction was an entirely terrifying spike of But if I go to Palace-Earth, I’ll miss my ride, an absurd thought: her Emperor wanted to talk to her and she was concerned with her own somewhat-unauthorized exit from all the responsibilities that same Emperor had been gracious enough to grant her? There was something wrong with her for even experiencing the emotion. Best to pretend she hadn’t.

  “Of course,” she said, and waved for the nearest waiter. “Let me settle the bill and then—”

  “No need,” Five Agate said. “I can ask it, and you can finish your meal.”

  “Please.”

  “The Emperor would like to know your opinion of Eleven Laurel.”

  Three Seagrass blinked, and tried to summon up her mental inventory of people named Eleven Laurel who the Emperor would want to know her opinion of—rejected out of hand the asekreta trainee serving as an office assistant on the eighth floor of the Ministry, and also the poet-orator who had died when Three Seagrass was thirteen and convulsed the capital in an ecstasy of internal rhyme for months—and was left with the Third Undersecretary to the Minister of War. Who she technically shared rank with, though that also seemed hilarious; Eleven Laurel was a war hero, and she was … herself. So far.