During active combat, the funeral frequency stopped playing its endless loop of memory and broadcast actual funeral orations, however small and paltry they ended up being. A snatch of song, the sound of blood falling into a bowl, and on to the next.
They were happening so fast because something about what Sixteen Moonrise had done on Peloa-2 had woken up the aliens and set them to full alert. They hadn’t entirely engaged the Fleet yet. They were still testing the edges. The edges were mostly Sixteen Moonrise’s people, the Twenty-Fourth, and a few of Forty Oxide’s Seventeenth Legion who had been positioned on the far left of the Fleet’s current arrangement. The enemy liked the left flank. Nine Hibiscus was beginning to think that somewhere beyond the blackout communication silence, in the dark places between this sector’s thin stars, there was a base, or at least a large collection of ships, that she couldn’t see. Somewhere to the left of Weight for the Wheel.
She’d expected consequences for retaking Peloa-2. It had been a statement: We are here, this planet and these people were ours and are ours again; Peloa is inside the world. Peloa is Teixcalaan. Fuck off. Of course there would be consequences. But somehow she hadn’t been mentally prepared for the enemy—bloody stars, but she needed a better name for them than “the enemy” or “the aliens,” the Information Ministry diplomat couldn’t get here fast enough to tell her what they called themselves—deciding that attrition was the better part of valor.
After the scorched, eviscerated planetary corpse of Peloa-2, she’d been convinced that these aliens were nihilistic, resource-destroying, and covetous of territory more than power or colonization. But attrition—picking at the edges of the Fleet, at the few ships which Sixteen Moonrise had sent out to do reconnoitering—that was something else. That was something smart. Letting the vast tide of Teixcalaan find no purchase, no solid targets.
Only funerals; six so far today, two Shard pilots and the four-person crew of one of Forty Oxide’s scout-gunners. She watched the replay of the death of that ship on holo. The aliens hadn’t bothered with their ship-dissolving spit. They’d simply appeared, with the peculiar vision distortion that accompanied the end of their cloaking system, and tore the ship to pieces with energy weapon fire. The pilot and his crew hadn’t even had time to react before they were burnt and shattered. Which, of course, meant that those three-ringed prowling alien ships could be anywhere.
There were too many deaths. Every time she dipped into Shard-sight she saw another one, another Teixcalaanlitzlim gone dark, felt an echo of the collective flinch, the sharpness of grief, the deeper burn of fury—that we could so easily be lost, how dare these enemies act with such impunity—
All that, and a scrim-afterimage of each death. She wondered how much worse it would be for the Shard pilots who had proprioception as well as visual linkage. Much worse. Almost certainly.
She was going to have to move with overwhelming force, and soon, and still blind—overwhelm them—wherever they were—
Twenty Cicada tapped her on the shoulder, and she startled. Spun on him, had her hand up to shove him in the throat and away, as if they were in a sparring ring. She hadn’t reacted like that in years. He backed off, his hands up.
“Mallow,” he said, so soft—her cadet nickname, when she’d been softer. No one else would remember it now, let alone use it to such effect. Shame was a slow surge; so was the distant fear that she was not in control of herself, or of this Fleet.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
He shook himself, an infinitesimal shuddering resettlement of shoulders. Straightened the collar of his uniform back to regulation-perfect. Smiled at her, a flicker of widened eyes, curving mouth. “You were listening to the funerals,” he said, which was a way of forgiving her. “I would have been startled too.”
“They do keep going,” said Nine Hibiscus. “I should turn it off, or at least down, and actually get some work done.”
“Our casualty rates are too high,” Twenty Cicada agreed. “We can’t wait much longer; losing our most adventurous and fastest ships is rotting morale, yaotlek. We need to—do something.”
“You sound like Sixteen Moonrise.”
Twenty Cicada winced. “I wish I didn’t. But what we are up against is an obscenity, and our people know it. They need to stop having to see it, be hurt by it, and not strike back.”
“We still don’t know what’s out there,” Nine Hibiscus said, hating the bitterness in her own voice. “I can commit the Fleet to all-out attack, but if we go into a slaughtering field, without supplies and reinforcements—”
“They’d go for you. Everyone on this ship.”
“I know,” Nine Hibiscus said. That was the problem.
Twenty Cicada nodded, a short acknowledgment, but didn’t stop talking. “Trust is not an endlessly renewable resource. Loyalty might be. For longer. Especially when we are up against something that doesn’t even bother to use what it takes—”
“I think they do. I think we just don’t understand how yet.”
“I don’t want to understand how what they did to Peloa-2 is useful,” said Twenty Cicada, as softly as when he’d said her old nickname. “I think understanding would stain me indelibly.”
How could she even answer that? She shrugged, her hands open. “I won’t wait much longer. I promise.”
Just until the envoy came. She was supposed to be arriving on the Jasmine Throat, scheduled for two shifts from now. That was only, oh, four more funerals away.
* * *
The inside of the Jasmine Throat was shocking, like being thrown into thick humidity after a long time in clear processed air. Not that there was any discernible difference to Mahit in the actual atmosphere: the Jasmine Throat was a spacecraft, and it was precisely climate-controlled and oxygen-regulated like every other spacecraft, including Lsel Station itself. The difference was that it was Teixcalaanli.
The walls were metal and plastisteel, yes—but covered in inlays of gold and green and rich pinks, all the formality and structure of a military supply ship layered over with Teixcalaanli symbolism. Green things, growing things, bright stars. Flowers. Fuck, how could she have forgotten flowers everywhere, white jasmine patterns painted on the ceiling of the hangar bay, the Teixcalaanlitzlim dressed in grey and gold Fleet uniforms, cloudhooks over every eye. No wonder she felt like she was breathing heavy air.
“Welcome back,” Three Seagrass said, still a step behind her and to the left as they exited the shuttle and made their way through the hangar toward the passenger deck, that achingly familiar positioning. “Or—welcome to the war?”
She hadn’t said much to Mahit the entire time they’d been in transit to the Jasmine Throat. Just looked at her, and murmured, “That was interesting,” and shut up, a silent flame-orange presence, Teixcalaanli blank. They’d both thought the encounter with Amnardbat was going to have ended differently, Mahit suspected. And neither of them was sure why it hadn’t. It made for uncomfortable company. Neither of them knew how to talk about a disaster that hadn’t been a disaster, not without explaining to each other why it might have been disastrous. And explaining felt too dangerous to Mahit. Probably to Three Seagrass, as well.
Now, having arrived on the Jasmine Throat proper, with two-jumpgates-and-the-sublight-crawl-between-them’s worth of travel time before they came to the Fleet—call it seven hours subjective time—Mahit realized that she and Three Seagrass were going to have to start all over again. Back to the beginning. Back to let’s assume that I’m not going to try to sabotage you and let’s assume I’m not an idiot.
It seemed a long distance to fall back. Especially since she was (possibly—nothing, nothing was decided, she kept telling herself that, or telling Yskandr that, to stave off the stabs of neuropathic pain radiating through her palms) the saboteur this time. And Three Seagrass had never been an idiot.
When they weren’t thinking about Darj Tarats, Yskandr was a quiet, humming, pleased presence in the back of her mind: he’d n
ever been on a Teixcalaanli military ship, neither supply-line reinforcement nor attack vessel, and Mahit leaned into his intent and curious observation with some relief. She needed that. She needed anything that would remind her that this experience was new, and not quite a return. Not in any sense a coming-home.
“We’re not at the war yet,” she told Three Seagrass. “We have half a day before the war happens to us. We should get ready for it.”
“Fuck, but I missed you,” said Three Seagrass, with a sort of regret that Mahit couldn’t place. “Someone else who throws themselves at problems—”
Mahit could feel the ghost with them then, as abrupt and clear as any other realization of political loyalties, secret alliances: the missing third person. Twelve Azalea was three months dead and interred with the rest of the Information Ministry’s fallen officers behind a plaque down on the City, an unfathomable distance away from the two of them. The one of us who was practical at all, she thought—and then revised. No. The one Three Seagrass needed to keep her steady. I’ve never had a friend like that. Or lost one, either.
“Tell me the problem, then,” Mahit said, “aside from ‘we have to talk to aliens’ and ‘you missed me.’” They were walking past a multitude of Teixcalaanli soldiers, all of whom seemed unabashed in their willingness to stare at an Information envoy and a barbarian.
“That’s really the sum of the problem,” Three Seagrass said. “Those two. The aliens are a bit more pressing. Also I could add that you seem to have made many enemies while you were visiting your Station—”
“That’s not a current problem,” Mahit said, as serene as she could manage.
Like I said before, Yskandr, if I was going to give us up to Teixcalaan, it would take a lot more than some political pressure.
She didn’t feel as brave as she sounded. She knew he knew that; he was inside her endocrine system, party to the thousand messages of her neurotransmitters and her glands. He knew precisely how neatly Darj Tarats had trapped her: make sure Teixcalaan remains endlessly at war, or be subject to Heritage’s plans. One or the other. So far, all she’d done was fail to mention Tarats’s orders. That wasn’t very much of being his agent. But it left all the doors of future action open. Keeping secrets always did.
“If you say it’s not a current problem, fine,” Three Seagrass said, dryly, and opened a door to the tiny transit chamber—hardly larger than the rent-an-office they’d been in on Lsel—which they had been assigned for the duration of the trip. It had no windows. Mahit wasn’t terribly interested in seeing the distortion of space around a jumpgate, but she still felt obscurely disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to. With the door shut behind them, there was nothing between her and Three Seagrass but three months of time, an envoy’s uniform, and deep suspicion.
Three Seagrass set her luggage down beside the door and knelt to rummage in it. She came up again with her hands full of infofiche sticks, the simple industrial-grey plastic kind, stamped with the Information Ministry seal in cheery and threatening coral-orange.
“Surely,” Mahit found herself saying, “you can’t have brought along the unanswered mail. I swear I had it forwarded when I left, I’ve been working on it—”
She was rewarded by Three Seagrass laughing, and a brief, utterly pleasant relaxation of all the tension months apart had somehow engendered. “No,” said Three Seagrass. “I don’t have a scrap of mail for you. What I have is all the records the yaotlek in charge of the Fleet has of our mysterious and very dangerous aliens. I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet. Want to see?”
“Let’s figure out what we’re learning to talk to,” she said to Three Seagrass, and took the first of the infofiche sticks from her hand, snapping it open easily between her fingers.
It was audio only. It was—fuck, it was like Mahit had carved a hole in the world between the space of one side of the infofiche stick and the other, and on the inside was static and screaming, or static that was screaming, or—
She felt ill. There didn’t seem to be a way to turn it off. Three Seagrass had gone grey-green under the warm brown of her skin. It made her look dead, or dying. Or like she wanted to be dead, or dying.
And yet there were different terrible sounds in the audio recording, a stuttering shriek that was repeated three times, a lower buzz that roiled Mahit’s stomach and occurred after every pause longer than ten seconds. She couldn’t understand it, and it was hideous, but it wasn’t noise.
When the recording was finally over, both she and Three Seagrass were breathing in hyperventilating gasps, huge snatches of air to shove back the nausea. They stared at each other. “… I don’t know if it’s language,” Mahit managed, finally, “but it’s definitely communication. Phonemes, or—I don’t think words, it’s not enough differentiation, but—maybe tone markers?”
Three Seagrass nodded. Swallowed like she was forcing back bile, and nodded again, more firmly. “Horrible sick-making tone markers. Got it. I want to cross-reference it to the readout from the ship that recorded the transmission, they were interacting with it somehow—maybe we can map which noise goes with what—”
“If either of us vomits, we should vomit in a bin,” Mahit said. “Do we have a bin—are any more of these audio only?” She gestured at Three Seagrass’s fistful of infofiche sticks.
“Only one was marked for audio. The rest should be visual and text,” said Three Seagrass. “Open them up, and I’ll go find two bins. This is a resupply vessel, I’m sure they’ve got bins.”
“Possibly also bin liners. We’re going to have to listen to that—a lot.”
“Bleeding sunlight,” Three Seagrass cursed, but she was smiling, Stationer-style: the edges of her teeth showing. Mahit felt charmed, and worried at being charmed, and utterly relieved that, given work to do, the two of them were apparently fine with one another. “Bin liners, excellent. Seven hours is plenty of time to categorize our tone markers by how many bin liners listening to them requires—”
“Wouldn’t want you to look bad in front of the yaotlek,” Mahit said. “She’ll want the bin liner report straightaway. And presumably the rest of the report also.”
“See?” said Three Seagrass, still smiling that almost-Stationer smile. “I knew fetching a barbarian diplomat who could learn our language would save me time in learning someone else’s—”
She slipped out the door before Mahit could ask her the questions on the tip of her tongue: Would you be as fascinated with these aliens as you have been with me? Considering we are all barbarians, even if I am as human as you are?
* * *
In poetry and epics, and even in statecraft manuals of the driest and most clinical kind, emperors were exempt from sleep, or ought to be, and therefore so were starship captains. Nine Hibiscus had always thought that a yaotlek, who was somewhere in-between captain and emperor, really ought to develop the ability to stay awake indefinitely upon receiving her spear-arc collar tabs. Practicality, however, had a notorious way of ignoring poetry, epics, and statecraft manuals. Like everyone else on Weight for the Wheel, Nine Hibiscus had a designated eight-hour shift for sleeping.
Lately, she wasn’t very good at it. Which said something about Emperors, and yaotlekim, and the difference between being in charge of one small but powerful thing, like a starship, and a whole lot of disparate things, like a fleet full of Teixcalaanlitzlim all ready to die for the sake of the Empire, and at her command.
Nine Hibiscus had been trying to sleep. She had removed her uniform, and laid herself down on her bed in an undershirt and sleeping shorts,
and cued her cloudhook to dim the roomlights to almost blackout. She’d even set her messages to silent save for absolute priority; if the aliens attacked Weight for the Wheel, she’d wake up, but probably not for anything else.
If she ever went to sleep at all, anyway. She’d been trying for a full third of her eight hours, and had gotten nowhere. All she could think about was the flashfire deaths of the Shards—about whether the new biofeedback technology was worth giving half the Fleet post-traumatic flashbacks when someone half a sector away died badly. Cost-benefit analysis was antithetical to sleeping.
It was a relief when someone physically knocked on her door. Most likely they’d been trying to send a nonpriority message and hadn’t heard from her, and now something was happening and she didn’t have to pretend she was sleeping any longer. She raised the lights and wriggled into her trousers for a modicum of authority, and waved the door open. On the other side, looking apologetic, was her chief communications officer, Two Foam. This wasn’t one of Two Foam’s off-shifts—the bridge took careful and staggered turns, and when Nine Hibiscus was sleeping, Two Foam was usually awake—but she looked exhausted anyhow, even if she hadn’t been woken up.
“Yaotlek,” she said, “there’s been a major development.”
The crew of Weight for the Wheel called Two Foam Bubbles, because she wasn’t bubbly at all. The nickname was ubiquitous; even Nine Hibiscus had to remember not to use it. Instead she waved her inside her quarters without using any name in particular, and let the door shut behind her. Her own heart rate had kicked up; this was better than sleep, this was the shimmer-focus of being responsible in a crisis. “Yes? What sort of development that is significant enough for you to come fetch me?”
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