A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  Eight Antidote nodded, quickly, and turned to look at the simulation. Three Azimuth made a tiny gesture with one finger, and everything which had been paused began to move again, the alien darkness encroaching, the pinpoint-holograms of Teixcalaanli ships arcing through the air. Three Azimuth knew about his visits—of course she did. Did she know what Eleven Laurel had been teaching him? Did she think he was doing a good job?

  Abruptly the scope of the strategy projection felt like a test, the biggest one Eight Antidote had ever taken. He watched closely. He hadn’t seen the positioning of their fleet before, not in this detail—a single six of legions, with Nine Hibiscus’s Tenth Legion in the lead, arrayed like a wave about to crest over the blank-dark systems the aliens had touched already. They held position for a long time—shifted, some ships from the Twenty-Fourth Legion coming forward, sending tendrils of light into one of those darkened spaces until it relit in dull grey, Peloa System back inside the world but—damaged? He checked the datestamp on the projection where it floated at the corner of his vision. This was all what had already happened. There was a brief stutter-pause—Three Azimuth opened one of her hands like a flower blooming—and suddenly all that black nothing was replaced by a force of spinning three-wheeled ships that Eight Antidote had never seen before.

  They moved like they were carrying jumpgates with them, flickering in and out. While he watched, the entirety of the Twenty-Fourth Legion and half of the Tenth—including Nine Hibiscus’s flagship, Weight for the Wheel—exploded into energy-cannon fire and then into scorched nothingness; or else were struck by some kind of strange liquid weapon and went blank and still. The simulation wound down. The remaining legions in the Six limped back into Teixcalaanli space through the jumpgate.

  All of those soldiers would be dead. Dead fast. A legion was ten thousand people, maybe more—a legion and a half dead in a few days would be at least fifteen thousand and—

  What if the aliens follow them home? Eight Antidote thought, with a spike of horror. Follow them all the way back to us, sector after sector, and come here to the City and eat us—

  “That’s enough,” said Three Azimuth, and the simulation stopped. “Revert to the baseline.” All the ships blinked back into existence, as if the horrible slaughter had never happened.

  “Do they move like that?” Eight Antidote asked. He tried to sound calm, even though he wasn’t calm at all. “Our enemy.”

  “I hope not,” said Three Azimuth. “Otherwise we’re fucked. Pardon my language, kid.”

  Eight Antidote decided not to respond to that. He’d heard a lot worse. “But they might move like that. Like they’re … jumpgates.”

  “What we know is that they come in and out of visibility like they’re coming out of a jumpgate,” Three Azimuth went on. “Run it again—the second option, with cloaking but not asynchronous movement.”

  The simulation started over. It went better—sort of. If the aliens were just invisible, the Fleet ships could triangulate, pin them down eventually—but it was slow, and a lot of the Fleet died first in the process of finding the enemy. Eight Antidote watched as the Minister directed her analysts to push reinforcements through the jumpgates into the battlefront sector—watched the supply lines get skinnier and longer. And the constraint of the simulation was that Teixcalaan didn’t know where the enemy supply lines came from, didn’t know where their home planet was, or a nearby central base, or if they had a home at all or just lived in the void of space all the time. It was a hard constraint. It meant the Fleet had to go slow, piecemeal, and get ambushed while they found where the enemy was lurking.

  “Doesn’t look very good, does it,” she said, after a good ten minutes. Waved her hand. The simulation reset again.

  “Not really,” Eight Antidote said, warily. “… There should be a better way to find them than letting them ambush us.”

  “So there should,” the Minister said. “Got any ideas, or has my spymaster just been letting you solve old problems?”

  It was a test. And now all of the advisors and generals and analysts and the soldier who had brought him to this room at the point of a shockstick, however deferred, and probably Eleven Laurel too (my spymaster, the Minister said, and Eight Antidote felt a little sick to his stomach) were watching to see what he’d do.

  It turned out that there was a place you went after you were scared. A big, cold, bright place inside your head. Eight Antidote thought this was a good thing to have discovered.

  “May I?” he said, gesturing at the simulation. “It would be easier to show you, Minister.”

  Three Azimuth had the kind of expression Eight Antidote couldn’t figure out; one of those adult faces that wasn’t surprise or admiration or displeasure exactly, but something else, something combined. She blinked behind her cloudhook, adjusting the simulation’s control settings. It was one of the enormous ones, a pane of glass that extended from mid-forehead to cheekbone and curved around her skull to cover the ear on that side—or where the ear would be, Eight Antidote noticed, a sudden realization that seemed as much part of his new cold bright place as anything else. She didn’t have an ear on that side. She had a burnt and twisted place where an energy weapon had gotten her ear and melted it.

  Real combat was different than the strategy table simulations. He needed to remember that, for when he was Emperor.

  He stepped to the front of the room. Took control of the simulation—it had so many more variables than the problems Eleven Laurel had been setting for him, but the program was the same. He knew how to make the Fleet ships move, and the simulation’s AI would move the aliens for him, in the dark where he couldn’t see.

  The ships he placed flew from his fingertips like they’d flown from the Minister’s, though he knew he didn’t look half as elegant as she did when she’d danced them into being. He arrayed them in a net, carved the blank sector into cubes like he was using a legion to lay out a garden for planting. Then he gathered a smaller force, all Eternal-class flagships and fast scout-gunners, who would be mobile: if the sweeps found the enemy, the strike force would move in to support them, fast and with firepower. It took longer than he wanted to set up—some ships had to stay by the jumpgate, and the supply lines were so long, sectors long, with jumpgate delays built in. The weight of all those eyes on him felt very heavy by the time he was ready to say, “All right. Run it,” like he was a grown yaotlek, a man who made decisions.

  “It’s not bad,” said Three Azimuth, but she didn’t run his simulation. “It’s not bad at all. The net pattern is smart, in fact. But the Eternal-class ships don’t move that fast. They won’t be able to get to where you need them with a net that big. We tried it—oh, before you were born, I think. A sector-wide net pulls the supply lines to nothing. And you’ve used all the legions like one enormous legion—which has its merits, mind you, but a yaotlek’s six is six minds together, and they don’t always move as one…”

  “You’re saying,” Eight Antidote said, “that I forgot about politics?”

  Three Azimuth laughed. “I’m saying you did very well for someone who’s never been off-planet, let alone been a soldier.”

  “I wish I could see it,” Eight Antidote told her, knowing he sounded like a kid, asking for things he couldn’t have, and not being able to help himself from doing it.

  “The war?” asked the Minister.

  Eight Antidote had meant the simulation he’d just designed. But—“Yes,” he said.

  “Can’t let you go out there; there’s only the one of you, and Her Brilliance would be pissed at me.”

  “How about here?” he asked. “I can see a lot from right here next to you.”

  “You are a nasty little viper,” said Three Azimuth, and actually ruffled his hair. Her hand was warm and calloused and entirely surprising. “How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Blood and starlight. I was painting my toenails at eleven. All right, kid. Show up here in the morning, and we might make an Emperor of you so
meday.”

  Against the rush of satisfaction and excitement, Eight Antidote thought, What will Eleven Laurel say to me? I should have asked him first—and tried to hold on to that worry so he wouldn’t jump up and down and look like someone who was young enough to be painting their toenails instead of learning how to run a war.

  * * *

  Mahit left Three Seagrass in the rent-an-office to arrange for their passage off-Station and into the war. Left her there because she needed to think, needed to breathe for a moment without looking at her, without looking at the impossibility of her presence on Lsel. She leaned her back against the metal corridor a few turns of the deck away, eyes shut, trying not to shake.

  Yskandr whispered to her.

  I don’t know if we’re friends. She—needs me, or thinks she does.

 

  Briefly. And if I go, we are never going to be able to come home—no one here will protect us, you heard Tarats’s offer—

  She was walking, without meaning to be walking. Following Yskandr’s memory like a thread, a path he used to take: up four decks and into the vast and bustling offices of the Miners’ Coalition, the engine of economic policy for Lsel. Slipping past desks and busy Stationers working at them, all the way to the Councilor’s office door. Yskandr leading her. She was letting him. They were doing this, and if how it was happening was the integration she had been waiting to experience, it was both wrong (she was never supposed to give up this much control to her imago, to ride inside his judgment and his momentum, to let go of her own volition so easily) and a profound relief.

  Tarats’s secretary, a tall woman whose name Yskandr couldn’t remember and Mahit had never known, took her name and disappeared into his office. She was only gone for a few minutes.

  “The Councilor will see you,” she said. “He said to tell you he was expecting you.”

  Mahit nodded, thanked her, and strode through the door when the secretary held it open. She wasn’t even moving like herself; Yskandr’s center of gravity was higher. He led with the chest, like a male-bodied person would. She should stop, right now. She should pull back, right now.

  Yskandr said to her.

  Out loud, she—they—said, “Councilor Tarats,” and even shook his cadaverous, arthritis-twisted hand when he came around his desk to offer it. No bowing over fingertips here on Lsel. The old-fashioned way of greeting, instead. Hand to hand. The continuity of the flesh.

  “What have you done with our Teixcalaanli visitor?” Tarats asked her. “Did you stash her somewhere, or did you space her?”

  “Stashed,” said Mahit, and then—oh, because she did, horribly, trust Yskandr to get her through this after all—grinned, his grin, too wide for her face, and knew her eyes were bright and gleaming-conspiratorial. “Why would I space an asset, Tarats?”

  Unspoken: I wouldn’t. Are you going to? Even if that asset is me?

  And, an echo:

  “Sit down, Dzmare,” said Darj Tarats. “Let’s have ourselves a discussion about what you plan to do with the envoy if it isn’t consignment to the void.”

  “Go with her, of course,” Mahit said. Yskandr had a blitheness to him, an inexorability, which she thought he’d learned from Nineteen Adze: not her own headlong momentum but a calculating belief in his inevitable success. She borrowed it now. “You engineered a war to entrap Teixcalaan, Councilor Tarats. You and my predecessor, though he didn’t want it. And the war is happening, right over our Station’s head, right through our sector. And you have no eyes, Councilor, on that war.”

  “You mean to say, I have no eyes yet.”

  said Yskandr in her mind.

  “I mean precisely that,” Mahit told Tarats, firm, serene. Relying on Yskandr to be serene for her, to keep her heart from racing, her throat from locking up. “I’ll go with this envoy to her war, and I will be your eyes. I’ll be Lsel’s eyes, as I couldn’t be in the City.”

  A long time ago Tarats’s voice might have been silky, but all the weft had worn away, and the warp of the sound was harsh. “If you mean to do this for me, Dzmare, I will not have you hide from me like Yskandr did.”

  “My predecessor and I are in agreement on this course of action,” said Mahit, which was true enough for the moment. She grinned another Yskandr-grin. The stretch was getting more comfortable. “A full and accurate account of Teixcalaan’s military activities, Councilor, to the best of my knowledge and analysis. Everything.”

  Let me be useful again, so that I’m worth protecting.

  “That’s the beginning of a promise.” His hands were mobile, punctuation for the shape of his words: inelegant with arthritis and elegant regardless as they gestured. “All your eyes can see and your analytic mind can interpret: good. But why would I want to watch a war, as you say, of entrapment? I’m not a sadist, Dzmare. I don’t have any interest in the detail of Teixcalaanli failure.”

  She tried to not to feel Yskandr’s spike of anger. Tried not to think of the scent of juniper gin, of draw a monstrous thing to its death. “And yet you took this meeting with me,” she said. It was a gambit: if Tarats didn’t want her eyes, what did he want?

  “I did,” said the Councilor for the Miners. “What else would you do for me, Mahit Dzmare, out amongst the Teixcalaanli warships? I wonder. You were very good at arraying all of the politics on the Jewel of the World to our advantage, when you had to.”

  Wary, Mahit asked, “What is more to our advantage than what is happening now, Councilor?”

  Tarats smiled, a brief unpleasant flash. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Go to war, Dzmare. Go to war and—if there is an appropriate opportunity, of course—array the politics of the Fleet to ensure that Teixcalaan remains at war. Unable to win. Unable to retreat.”

  “How,” Mahit began, because it was easier to ask how than why, than to acknowledge out loud that if she wanted to escape Heritage’s surgeons, she would have to render herself into that hook that was meant to draw Teixcalaan to attrition and death—

  Yskandr told her, vicious. Her hands spiked to invisible neuropathic fire.

  Tarats was saying, “You have a little experience of sabotage yourself, do you not? I think you’ll find a way.” Mahit wondered what he’d do if she vomited on his desk. She felt as if she might.

  “When have the Ambassadors to Teixcalaan not looked out for Lsel Station’s best interests?” she managed, and thought she sounded like she was agreeing.

  “Mmm.” Tarats paused, like he was weighing her against Yskandr, measuring the depth of their integration, the degree to which he could trust her, given those twenty years of correspondence with her imago. She stayed still. Met his eyes and didn’t drop hers.

  Finally, he said, “Keep it that way. Don’t you have a shuttle to catch, Ambassador?” he added, and Mahit felt the peculiar, disorienting surge of someone else’s triumph running through her sympathetic nervous system while she herself was horrified; Yskandr, satisfied that they’d gotten away, willing to make this promise and break it.

  She wasn’t so sure she’d be able to. Not very sure at all.

  * * *

  Aknel Amnardbat walked Three Seagrass all the way back to the hangar she’d arrived in. It was still full of crates being unloaded, though the crates were mostly coming off different cargo barges than the one she rode in with. She’d only been on Lsel Station for five hours. Flying visit. (She could imagine herself saying that to Mahit: Last time was only a flying visit, won’t you show me around properly? Wouldn’t Councilor Amnardbat be scandalized. A Teixcalaanlitzlim, bein
g shown around all of Lsel’s secrets.) Said Councilor had kept up a perfect, even, impenetrable tour-guide’s patter about the Station as she’d firmly and thoroughly guided Three Seagrass away from anything a tour guide would actually point out. It was masterful. Three Seagrass took internal notes, for the next time she needed to bore someone to death who was genuinely interested in the subject being used as the murder weapon.

  You hate us quite profoundly, she thought, addressing the Councilor in her mind with the sort of formality used for precocious crèche-students or new cadets, a calculated and enjoyable and invisible insult. Someday I will find out why.

  (Mahit, saying Teixcalaan devours us. But Lsel seemed quite entirely itself and undevoured, even if everyone seemed to understand a bit of Teixcalaanli. And her escort spoke it viciously well, like the language was a knife she’d learned to handle carefully.)

  Their arrival in the hangar to meet the Jasmine Throat’s transport shuttle was more abrupt than Three Seagrass expected, and thus she didn’t have the slightest bit of time to prepare: the giant hangar door clanked open, she spotted her baggage (just the one suitcase, she was traveling so light on this entire adventure!) waiting next to Mahit, flanked by her single bag on the left and Dekakel Onchu on the right—and Mahit went white, grey-white like she’d been bleached, as soon as she spotted Three Seagrass.

  No. As soon as she spotted Aknel Amnardbat.

  Whose hand was on Three Seagrass’s elbow, where it hadn’t been before. Who—was surprisingly strong, and clearly wasn’t expecting to see Mahit, either, and—

  Blood and fucking starlight, Three Seagrass hated working without an adequate dossier on current local conditions. Mahit could have told her. Mahit had intimated that she was in political hot water, but she hadn’t bothered to explain what kind, and weren’t they supposed to be partners?

  That was an interestingly wrong thought she’d just had, wasn’t it. An interestingly wrong belief, and she’d have to think about it, really she would; she and Mahit weren’t on the same side anymore, hadn’t been since Mahit had left the City. But now Three Seagrass was walking right up to her, with Amnardbat’s fingers pressing indentations into her upper arm, and all she could think was Don’t run, Mahit Dzmare. Stick with me and we’ll get on that shuttle and away. If you run I am comprehensively fucked.