A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she asked Sixteen Moonrise. “And if you tell me because she’s a spook, I will have to revise your intelligence downward, and that would be a shame. Specifics, Fleet Captain.”

  Sixteen Moonrise refused to bristle, which Nine Hibiscus gave her some credit for. She said, “You have no idea who she is or where her loyalties lie, except perhaps to Teixcalaan. She’s not Fleet. This,”—she gestured at the alien, the medical bay, the whole situation—“is Fleet work. I never imagined the hero of Kauraan would want to bring in outsiders to prosecute a war. With all due respect, yaotlek.”

  “I’m not a hero,” Nine Hibiscus found herself saying. “I’m a soldier. And Kauraan was won by soldiers, using the best possible intelligence I could procure. I don’t deny my people resources, Fleet Captain. I provide them. The Information agent will get us what we lack, without exposing my people—or yours, or Forty Oxide’s, or anyone’s—to these aliens any more than is strictly necessary.”

  “The Fleet has an intelligence service,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and left it there, hanging between them like a challenge. Why haven’t you gone to the Third Palm, O yaotlek, if you are so concerned with providing adequate resources? She didn’t need to say it. Nine Hibiscus could hear it very well in the silence of the room, interrupted only by the occasional squelch of alien fluids coming from the medtech at work behind them.

  “We don’t do first contact,” she said, as if that was an adequate answer. “Information does. And there’s only one spook, Sixteen Moonrise. Far more controllable than a squadron of Third Palmers.”

  A flicker of some emotion behind those pale eyes. Nine Hibiscus wondered if she’d given Sixteen Moonrise too much information about her own distaste for the Fleet’s intelligencers. That would only be a true problem if the Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth was herself a Third Palmer, or had been, before she became an officer—she had to check her public records. Or have Swarm do it. But they’d been so busy.

  “One spook and one barbarian,” said Sixteen Moonrise, eventually. “A spook I could understand. One with an agenda that includes foreigners who were involved with starting this war? That, yaotlek, disturbs me. She’s from Lsel Station. Lsel Station is the little independent entity that told us about these aliens in the first place—”

  “And brought down One Lightning, yes,” Nine Hibiscus said.

  “One Lightning, and Minister Nine Propulsion along with him.”

  Minister Nine Propulsion, Nine Hibiscus’s patron and mentor, her political protection. Sixteen Moonrise was implying that Nine Propulsion hadn’t retired—but that she’d been implicated in the coup, been pushed out and replaced. “I’m sure the former Minister is enjoying her retirement,” Nine Hibiscus said. It was so difficult to imagine Nine Propulsion doing something like getting involved in an attempted usurpation. She’d always been so careful, a watchful eye in the City, steady enough that Nine Hibiscus had felt she could always take appropriate risks and be backed up.

  “Retirement is an interesting way to put it,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “Half the Ministry turned over, yaotlek, that’s not retirements.” That was a goad. She was trying to get Nine Hibiscus to complain about the new Emperor, about the new Minister of War, Three Azimuth, the very people who had given her this command—

  (Who had sent her out here to defeat an impossible force with only one six of legions, half of which had signed on to Sixteen Moonrise’s little letter of insubordination. Which suggested—unpleasantly—that Sixteen Moonrise was right, and she was being punished for being Nine Propulsion’s protégé, and Nine Propulsion had been in on the attempted usurpation, after all—)

  And if she said any of that, she’d be playing into whatever political game Sixteen Moonrise had brought with her from the Ministry to the front lines. She’d be admitting that her own loyalties might not be to the Empire, or even the Ministry of War. She refused to be entrapped like this. “A new Emperor has new military priorities. And Three Azimuth deserved the promotion. To tell you the truth, Fleet Captain, I hope I do as well as Nine Propulsion has, when my time in the front lines is done.”

  Let Sixteen Moonrise think she hadn’t picked up the insinuation of Nine Propulsion’s disloyalty. Let her think she was simpler than she was.

  “With your record, I can’t imagine otherwise,” Sixteen Moonrise said, which was vicious. Nine Hibiscus could hate her. If she didn’t need her and her Twenty-Fourth Legion to win this war, she could hate her quite a lot.

  “That’s a lovely thing to say,” she told her, and smiled with the edges of her teeth showing.

  Sixteen Moonrise matched her: that sliver of tooth-bone like a threat. “What I’m trying to convey, yaotlek, Ministers all aside, is that I don’t trust anything that came from Lsel Station. And attached to a spook just makes it worse.”

  There was some agenda here, a deeper and more unpleasant one than a rivalry between Fleet Captains. Sixteen Moonrise wanted the Third Palm involved with this war. She wanted it very, very much. And that meant someone in the Ministry or the rest of the palace wanted political-officer attention on what Nine Hibiscus was doing.

  “I do appreciate your candid opinion, Fleet Captain,” she said. “And be assured, I will keep as many eyes on the spook as are necessary. Let’s see what sort of work she does for us. I’ll reserve my judgment.”

  “As you like,” Sixteen Moonrise said. “I believe your tech has extracted the syrinx, yaotlek. Fill it full of air and see if it screams for you before you let the spook have it.”

  And with that, she saluted, spun on her heel, and left Nine Hibiscus alone with the dismembered corpse of their enemy, which had begun to stink of decomposition.

  * * *

  The adjutant Twenty Cicada did not escort Three Seagrass and Mahit to whatever quarters were prepared for them. Instead he mentioned, in an offhand fashion Three Seagrass recognized intimately—the precise air of a person who had to deal with vastly more complex logistics-management problems than this present one at least four times a day—that while their quarters were reconfigured for two beds instead of one, the pair of them could get straight to work.

  “Envoy,” he said, as they followed him through the busy, fine-kept corridors of the Weight for the Wheel, being watched with unabashed curiosity by all sorts of Fleet personnel, “your cloudhook should have a map of the ship now that you’re aboard. You and Ambassador Dzmare have the communications workroom until twenty-two hundred hours—and the yaotlek will want some sort of result at that point.” He glanced back over his shoulder with a sharp smile, a narrow movement of the eyes and the corners of the mouth. Smiling looked odd on a person who lacked eyebrows and hair. Three Seagrass had never interacted with a person who took homeostasis-practice so seriously; most people with an unusual religion were less pointed about reminding you of it. She was … interested, she decided. Interested in how this man had come to his high place of power, while looking ever so not-quite-civilized. But eyebrows or none, Three Seagrass suspected Twenty Cicada knew his master Nine Hibiscus well enough to have meant what he said: the yaotlek would want a report at the end of the evening shift, no matter how late that shift ended or how well matched it was with the yaotlek’s own sleeping schedule.

  “She’ll have it,” Three Seagrass said, and bowed very deeply when Twenty Cicada took this promise as sufficient collateral to nod to the both of them and disappear off at an angle on some business of his own—not an errand boy, that one. Not someone who usually escorted stray Information agents around the ship. Not that an adjutant would be—

  And oh, there was the map, gleaming in tracery over her cloudhook. Four decks up, toward the bow. Easy enough.

  “Follow me,” she said to Mahit, who was being very quiet. Unusually so, especially after she’d been all flashfire forwardness in the medbay. Had Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise spooked her? Three Seagrass didn’t remember Mahit spooking easily. But spooked or not, she followed, close at Three Seagrass’s left shoulder, their habitual p
ositions all reversed. The ship map overlaid on the right side of her vision was easy to follow—someone, probably Twenty Cicada, had highlighted their destination with a small glowing star—and they moved up three levels of the enormous flagship without incident. On the fourth, though—oh, there was the security-conscious Fleet that Three Seagrass had always been taught about in Information briefings.

  It came in the person of a serenely massive Fleet soldier, his hair in a neat queue, his energy pistol—all right, energy pistols, plural—holstered with elegant threat at each hip, who barred the door that Three Seagrass’s map required them to pass through on their way to the communications workroom. This soldier held out a hand, palm flat and authoritative, and Three Seagrass lurched to a stop, with Mahit just behind her.

  “You are both out of uniform,” said the soldier. “Her especially.” He indicated Mahit with his chin. “What is your business on this deck?”

  “I am the envoy Three Seagrass, seconded here by the Information Ministry,” said Three Seagrass, with some annoyance—wasn’t her envoy’s suit uniform uniform enough? But perhaps this soldier had never seen one. “And this is Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. Do check your manifests, sir, we’re on our way to the communications workroom on the yaotlek’s orders.”

  The soldier blinked through some search function on his cloudhook, found whatever he was looking for, and then made her and Mahit wait. She could feel Mahit’s nervous energy like a thrumming power generator at her side, and yet her barbarian continued not saying anything. After an interminable fifteen seconds, the soldier pressed his fingertips together in the most cursory of acknowledgments, and waved them through. “To the left, Envoy. Ambassador,” he said, as if there had been absolutely no reason to stop them.

  It happened again approximately two hundred feet down the corridor, the instant they’d passed out of visual view of one soldier and into the purview of the next. Three Seagrass was unpleasantly reminded of the Sunlit of her childhood, before the algorithmic reform, back when they would ask you the same questions if you’d switched jurisdictions, no matter how many jurisdictions you passed through. This soldier was shorter, brisker, and visibly horrified at Mahit’s lack of propriety: her complaint about you are both out of uniform was accompanied by an encompassing hand gesture, shoulder to foot, as if to suggest, What is a nice envoy like you doing with a jacket-and-trouser set like that?

  Three Seagrass expected Mahit to take point on this one, to give the explanation of who they were as confidently as she’d introduced herself to the yaotlek in the medical bay. But she didn’t. She raised her eyebrows at Three Seagrass until Three Seagrass repeated what she’d told the last soldier, suffered through the waiting as the soldier consulted her cloudhook, and then breezily waved them onward.

  The third time, at the door of the communications workroom itself, was just insulting. The previous impediment was still in view, and doing absolutely nothing about informing her compatriot that the two people standing in front of her had reasonable and assigned business behind the door she was guarding so assiduously.

  “You’re—” the soldier began.

  “Out of uniform, yes,” Mahit snapped, at last—snapped with a fluid and vicious intonation Three Seagrass didn’t remember her using back in the palace. Something in the tone, the deep and bored dismissal of the problem at hand.

  I wonder what Yskandr Aghavn sounded like when he was pissed off, she thought, and didn’t like thinking it.

  “If you would check your records,” she added, before Mahit could say anything else.

  “There’s no need to be so abrupt, Envoy,” said the soldier, which didn’t help: if this one knew who she and Mahit were, why under every single bleeding star wasn’t she letting them into the workroom?

  “We have orders to be inside that workroom,” Mahit said, with that same silky viciousness, her Teixcalaanli note-perfect. “Orders from your yaotlek. For the safety of the Fleet and the apt and skillful prosecution of this war.”

  She was, Three Seagrass realized, quoting one of the Reclamation Songs—“Song #16,” one of the more obscure ones because it was so long and thus difficult to memorize. The apt and skillful prosecution of this war. Fifteen perfect Teixcalaanli syllables, with a caesura in the center. Fuck but it was a continuous heartbreak that Mahit Dzmare had been born a barbarian—

  But would she have liked her as well, if she hadn’t been?

  The soldier acting as doorkeep took her sweet time checking her records, though Three Seagrass thought she saw a flush on her dark cheeks—embarrassment, or even shame, to be so effortlessly put in her place by a barbarian. Mahit should be proud of herself.

  She was about to say so, even—they were finally inside, with a delicious profusion of audiovisual and holorecording equipment arrayed like a bouquet of flowers for their use, and the door shut quite firmly against the doorkeepers outside—but Mahit went straight for the audioplay controls. She had the infofiche stick with the intercepted alien noises on it in her hands, and Three Seagrass absolutely didn’t have time to tell her that this particular audioplay looked like it was preset to full volume repeater before she broke it open and the familiar, completely hideous noises flooded the room—from every direction. The repeater was surround-sound, there were speakers in every wall, the horrible static-singing sounds were hitting her from every angle instead of just one—

  They were getting into her bones, Three Seagrass thought, right before she threw up. The noises were getting into her bones and would sing in there forever, and she was going to die of nausea—

  It stopped. Three Seagrass retched again, helplessly (how brilliant; the first thing the envoy does is vomit on the floor of the flagship, fantastic work on her part), and waited for the waves of queasiness to ease back.

  “—sorry,” Mahit said, thinly. Three Seagrass looked up. Ah. At least she wasn’t the only one to have vomited on the floor. But Mahit had found the off switch for the audioplay. Two and a half minutes of that—the length of the recording—would have left the both of them incapacitated, not just embarrassed.

  “… We forgot the bin liners,” she managed, and Mahit looked as if she would laugh if it was something her innards found advisable.

  Instead, she swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, grimaced, and said, “That was worse than when we listened to it on the shuttle. Much worse.”

  “That audioplay is set to repeater. All input is retransmitted through every speaker in every wall in here.”

  Mahit considered this information, coiled and still, evaluating it—like she was tasting it, or maybe she was only tasting the sourness of her own mouth, like Three Seagrass was. Then she said, “We need a live alien. Not a corpse.”

  “I don’t disagree, but—what makes you bring that up just now?”

  “I think,” Mahit said, “that if a whole lot of them make those noises in a circle—like the speakers did—it amplifies. A reinforcing sound wave. Infrasound, not just what we can hear. I wonder if they know it makes us ill.”

  “I suspect they do,” Three Seagrass said, as dryly as she could manage while looking around for some sort of cloth to wipe up or at least cover two persons’ worth of sick. “They’ve met a lot more live us than we have live them. Everybody on Peloa-2, for example.”

  “All the more reason we need a live one,” said Mahit. “The one in the medbay was a mammal. Even if they’re scavenger mammals, weren’t we the same, a long time ago? And they have to be talking in more ways than just this, this noise—”

  “Some way we can’t hear. A sign language, or—pheromones, or—” There were a lot of cabinets in this room, and none of them had anything absorbent in them—just banks of electronics.

  “Or structural skin coloration that shifts in patterns, I don’t know. Anything, really. Probably not pheromones, pheromones would be more tonal markers, for mammals. I think. Comparative zoology is not my specialty.”

  “All right. A live one. Maybe we can make this message good enough,
even if it’s just tone-shrieking into the void, that they’ll send over someone we can see.” Three Seagrass opened another cabinet, and shut it again in frustration. “Give me your jacket,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Three Seagrass sighed. Mahit was brilliant, and was solving this entire puzzle just like she’d hoped she would, and yet she couldn’t recognize why Three Seagrass needed something made out of cloth. “To clean up with, unless you feel like working surrounded by un-bin-linered stomach contents?”

  “Why my jacket?” Mahit said.

  “Because mine is a uniform, which at least some of the Fleet on this enormous ship recognize as a uniform, and yours is a very nice and very absorbent piece of cloth. We should get you a uniform yourself, really. I’m sure they have some without rank signs, or I can try to adjust one of mine to fit you if you’d rather look like Information. It’ll save us time later, in the hallways…”

  She trailed off at Mahit’s expression, which was as complicatedly hurt as it might have been if Three Seagrass had hit her across the face.

  “I’m not a Fleet member,” said Mahit, too evenly, too sharply. “Nor am I a special envoy of the Information Ministry.”

  “If you’re worried about insubordination for wearing a Teixcalaanli uniform, I’ll take responsibility?” Three Seagrass tried, puzzled as to the severity of Mahit’s reaction. All right, she was being slightly awful about the jacket, she wouldn’t have wanted someone to suggest her jacket be used as a rag—

  “Of course you’d take responsibility,” said Mahit. “That’s always been your job with me, hasn’t it? Opening doors and taking responsibility and being an exact legal equivalent for your barbarian. Since the very beginning.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Three Seagrass said, shocked. She hadn’t. It was a stupid, flippant suggestion, that was all, not some kind of—assumption that Mahit couldn’t decide for herself what she should do. “Stars, Mahit, we’ll use my jacket instead, forget it.”