A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  —from Gustatory Delights of the Outer Systems of Launai Sector: Another Guide for the Tourist in Search of Exquisite Experiences by Twenty-Four Rose, distributed mostly throughout the Western Arc systems

  * * *

  Please confirm that the shipment of fish cakes was in fact a shipment of fish cakes, and did not contain any other unauthorized imports besides one Teixcalaanlitzlim. And revoke that captain’s trade permit on the grounds of possibly bringing in contaminated items; it suits the situation.

  —note from the Councilor for Heritage, Aknel Amnardbat, left on her secretary’s desk with the rest of the incoming mail

  IT was possible—just barely, for a woman of Nine Hibiscus’s size and easily recognizable distinction of rank, but possible—to surprise someone on Weight for the Wheel with the sudden presence of their commanding officer, in a place they had never intended to encounter her. The trick to it, really, was in the Shard programming she had long ago refused to have stripped out of her cloudhook: she could, if she was careful, slip into the collective vision of every Shard pilot on the flagship, and triangulate the location of the person she very much wanted to find through three hundred pairs of eyes. (If that many Shard pilots had their cloudhook programming operational at one time, and if she could handle the multiplicity of vision for long enough to make it useful.) It was like standing on the bridge and cycling through all of the camera-eyes, but—faster. More mobile.

  Her Shard pilots knew about it, of course. She would never have been willing to borrow their eyes if they hadn’t been asked, and signed on, and knew to turn their Shard programming off if they didn’t want her to accidentally see some private or personal moment. It helped that she had no access to their shared proprioception—her cloudhook couldn’t handle the new technology without being upgraded, and besides she’d probably have to plug herself into a Shard to get even close to the necessary processing power. But that lack of bodily access—she suspected that helped, when she asked if she could see through their eyes. Most of her pilots let her watch the ship through them when she needed to. It was one of the ways that they trusted her; one of the ways that their trust felt like a bright and blooming explosion of shrapnel in her chest, whenever she considered it too closely.

  Now she used them—dipping in and out of Shard-sight at the intersections of corridors, trying not to get dizzy or run into anyone while her visual perception was elsewhere—to be where Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was intending to go, before she got there.

  Nine Hibiscus wanted to make her flinch. And then she wanted to very gently kick her off her flagship and back onto the Parabolic Compression where she belonged, and where her Third Palmer spywork habits would be somewhat confined. Keep her far away from Nine Hibiscus’s plans—whatever they ended up being—to deal with the alien homeworld the Gravity Rose had found. But even more than wanting to be able to keep secrets when she chose to, Nine Hibiscus was anticipating Sixteen Moonrise’s expression of strangled distress when she would be surprised. Anticipating it sharply enough that she knew she was letting her teeth show in her smile as she hurried down her ship’s corridors and elevator shafts, command deck to hydroponics to crew mess to—

  —a tumbling vector of stars, the taste of panic-bile and metallic adrenaline in the back of her throat, her vision consumed by the vast arch of an alien ring-ship, slick metal and rippling distortion, too close too close too close and then the stars again, that Shard—wherever they were, and she hadn’t meant to slip out of the set of pilots who were safely on the Weight for the Wheel, off-shift—managing to pull back hard enough that they skirted asymptotically up from the ring, up, away—

  Nine Hibiscus could feel her heartbeat in her wrists, her throat, the membrane of her diaphragm. Her heartbeat, or that Shard pilot’s, and this was without having a Shard and the updated proprioception programming. Just from visuals. No wonder some of the Shard pilots were calling this new programming the Shard trick.

  Flicker-vision: Shard pilots on her ship, in the mess, in the hydroponics deck, in the fitness facility, an echoed sense of strain—psychosomatic, surely—as that pilot bench-pressed heavy plates away from his chest. Her heart still racing.

  The wheel of stars, too fast.

  Did they all feel this? All the time?

  The wheel of stars—and fire, a flash of heat, of sick-sweet panic (there goes the engine, oh—), vision clouded entirely with red, red-to-white, and—

  Gone. Blackness. Nine Hibiscus swallowed. She was hanging on to a wall, somewhere in a passage between Deck Six and Deck Five. She was entirely herself. That pilot had—had swept up away from the enemy ship, avoided a crash, and been shot from behind while in the process of moving through that escape arc. A little flash of fire, and nothing ever again.

  Did every Shard pilot feel every death, if they were paying attention?

  Gingerly, she reached through the programming one more time. Returned to the strain of the weight lifter. If he’d seen that death, he wasn’t reacting in any way visible in his field of vision. She swapped again. There was a Shard pilot with his programming on in the Deck Five mess, and he was sitting at one end of a long communal table, and at the other end, casual in shirtsleeves, her uniform jacket slung over the back of her chair, was the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, engaged in cheerful conversation with Nine Hibiscus’s own soldiers.

  The spike of fury Nine Hibiscus felt was blinding-intense, like a shockstick blow to the solar plexus. Worse than watching that death—more disorienting for having just seen it. She didn’t even know which Shard had just died. Or how many more just like it would die today. And here was this—intruder, this underminer, this woman who was not with her own legion, her own people, but too concerned with infiltrating Nine Hibiscus’s people, her Fleet, her place, to be tending to the soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth that were hers by right—that this person would be eating with the Tenth Legion instead—it was the sort of rage that would make Nine Hibiscus stupid and careless. She let it happen to her. Let it wash through her, and then imagined it like the core of a ship engine, lodged in her chest, an animating force, secret and dangerous and shielded, under control.

  She still wanted to get Sixteen Moonrise off her fucking flagship. That, at least, she could have some influence over.

  When she walked into the Deck Five mess, it was nevertheless savagely gratifying that her people stood up to greet her when they noticed she’d come in. She grinned at them, wide-eyed and performatively incredulous—All this for me? Come on, go eat—and waved them back to sitting. They went. The conversation stayed at the same comfortable volume. Her soldiers were still hers. For now.

  Sixteen Moonrise had been clever with her choice of seats: there were no open ones next to her. Nine Hibiscus took one in the center of the long table instead, and met the eyes of her Shard pilot for a long, shared-and-doubled moment of vision. She felt him turn his Shard programming off, for both their sakes now that they were in the same space. That doubled vision snapped away, and there was an echo, a feeling like she’d almost been breathing in time with him and now she wasn’t. A mild version of feeling his sibling-pilot extinguished in fire. She inclined her head to him, fractionally. Wished she could ask him about the programming, about—side effects.

  And then she didn’t say a starfucked thing. She let Sixteen Moonrise keep talking, as if there was nothing wrong with what she was doing at all, and served herself a helping of rice noodle laden with soybeans and chili oil from the communal bowl in the center of the table. Soldier food. Warm enough to keep the vacuum out of your bones, or make you feel like it might.

  She chewed and swallowed a few bites, feeling the energy of the table shift around her, reorient toward her presence. She licked her lips, chasing the last of the oil’s numbing heat. “Fleet Captain,” she said, convivial, “your crew must be very appreciative that you eat with them down in the mess. You do do this on the Parabolic Compression, don’t you? Or is this only because you’re our guest?”

 
Sixteen Moonrise’s electrum-shaded eyes blinked behind her cloudhook, a slow and faintly reptilian opening and shutting. “When my crew invites me,” she said. A nasty, insinuating answer: she was invited, both here and on her own ships, and Nine Hibiscus merely waltzed in and took a chair, disturbing her people’s privacy away from the eyes of their superior officer.

  “A treat for you, then,” Nine Hibiscus told her. How rarely you must get invitations, to need to be specifically invited.

  “I’m honored by the Tenth’s hospitality, yaotlek.”

  “We are by all measures hospitable,” said Nine Hibiscus, and the soldier on her left laughed—good—and then cut herself off from laughing—less good. Nine Hibiscus wanted so very much to know what sort of conversation Sixteen Moonrise had been having here, to make her people so wary of free expression.

  “I’ve found you so. Though it’s hardly your reputation.”

  Nine Hibiscus raised one eyebrow. Blood-soaked starlight, she wanted this woman off her ship. “What is the reputation of the Tenth amongst your Twenty-Fourth, then?” she asked, melted-glass calm, harnessed-reactor-core calm.

  Sixteen Moonrise shrugged one shoulder. The curve of her mouth was vicious and irreproachable in pretended innocence. “Insular,” she said. “Devoted.”

  If Nine Hibiscus asked to whom, she knew what the answer would be: to you, yaotlek. And now she knew the shape of Sixteen Moonrise’s distaste for her—or at least her masters’ distaste, the Third Palm’s distaste—knew it without bothering to ask. It wasn’t that she was hesitating on the edge of a full, apocalyptic commitment to battle with the aliens. That had been a sop for the ambitions of the Fleet Captains of the Sixth and the Fourteenth, to get them to sign on to Sixteen Moonrise’s letter of proto-insurrection and concern. It wasn’t even that Nine Hibiscus had brought in Information to do the work that the Fleet shouldn’t have to do—though she suspected that decision hadn’t helped. It was that Sixteen Moonrise—or the Third Palm—or the Ministry of War in its entirety, a truly disturbing idea she could not entertain without feeling suddenly ill—thought that she was a risk to the Empire. That her people—their trust, their confidence, their willingness to die for her—would die for her, and not for Teixcalaan.

  (Or would come to think of her as Teixcalaan. Something like that might have happened to One Lightning. And what had he made of it? A botched usurpation, a chaotic transition—she would never have—but if Minister Nine Propulsion had been in on the usurpation, there might be reasons the Third Palm thought Nine Hibiscus, her protégé, might try something similar.)

  She said, “Hardly insular, Fleet Captain. We’re eating with you, aren’t we? And have been for … mm. How long has it been now, since you arrived? Days?”

  “My adjutant, Twelve Fusion, is a commander I would trust with the Parabolic Compression for as long as is necessary for me to be elsewhere,” Sixteen Moonrise said. She sounded a little edgy, a little nervous. Good.

  “Naturally,” Nine Hibiscus said, and took another bite of noodles. Her tongue was numb, a fire-lash. “What, if I might presume to ask”—the highest of polite forms, so polite as to be insulting—“is necessary for you on the Deck Five mess? I’m fascinated. Does the Parabolic Compression lack rice noodles?”

  Now her soldiers did laugh, and more freely. She felt savagely possessive of them. So what if we are ourselves. We’re the weight that turns the wheel.

  “I like your spice mix in the oil,” Sixteen Moonrise said, utterly bland. “I might ask you to lend me this deck’s chief cook, for a day or so.”

  She was lodged in them like a burr. She didn’t want to leave, and she was willing to let Nine Hibiscus know what she was thinking, which meant—fucking Third Palmers—that she was confident in her belief that Nine Hibiscus knowing wouldn’t matter—

  I wonder if I am supposed to die out here, she thought. I wonder if Sixteen Moonrise is supposed to die too, in the mouths of our enemy. Collateral damage her masters are willing to countenance—if it means destroying me as well—

  (And who is going to win the war then, with all the Fleet Captains dead like my Shards are dying?)

  “When we can spare such a necessary person as Deck Five’s cook,” she began—and then her entire cloudhook lit up with the red and white flare of an emergency message.

  There was only one person on Weight for the Wheel who had accesses high enough to override her settings, spill a communiqué across her eyes without her granting permission first.

  Mallow, Twenty Cicada’s message read. Medbay is under contamination protocols. I am inside. There is a fungal bloom from the corpse of our enemy. A medical tech is dead. It ate him. Acknowledge.

  She was on her feet, one hand held up to stop any questions from the table. Her eyes flickered as fast as she could, calling up her messaging system, subvocalizing into it. Swarm, why are you inside?

  A long ten seconds. I didn’t know better. Come see. I don’t seem to be dying yet.

  I have Sixteen Moonrise, she wrote. Waited. Waited. Waited. She existed in a blank abeyance of panic, fear shoved so deep into her chest she felt perfused with it, existing alongside it.

  And then: Starlight, Mallow, bring her along. Might as well.

  * * *

  Eight Antidote dreamed of disruptive persons and woke up with the images of the dream still hanging around him like a sticky miasma, a fog-wrapped morning that no amount of sunlight could entirely get rid of. He was formlessly upset, entirely sure he’d done something very wrong and equally certain that he hadn’t, not in the waking world: he’d only dreamed it, and the dream was fading. Fading, but not gone. Only gone to scraps.

  He’d spent two whole days in the Ministry of War, coming back to Palace-Earth only to sleep, shadowing Minister Three Azimuth. Maybe that was enough to give anyone nightmares.

  He’d followed her out of the gymnasium to the shooting range, and let her correct his aim like she’d corrected the position of his hands on the padded gym mats—and followed her back to her office, and simply, easily, magically—had not left. He would have left if she’d told him to. She just kept not telling him to.

  She let him watch her discussion with the other Palms—Six, engineering and shipbuilding; Two, logistics—even her discussions with Eleven Laurel, who looked at Eight Antidote, curled on the Minister’s window seat, chin on his laced fingers on his knees and watching everything he could watch—with a complex expression, neither pleasure or displeasure. He had fixed the same expression on Minister Three Azimuth, with a leading pause she didn’t fill—and after that had ignored Eight Antidote like he was a throw pillow placed on the window seat for improving the décor. He tried not to feel hurt.

  Late on the first day, closer to the end of the afternoon, Eight Antidote had brought the Minister a coffee. She’d laughed at him, and ruffled his hair, and told him that she didn’t drink coffee and that he was not an office aide.

  He drank the coffee himself, and spent the rest of the evening wired and jittery and hugely terrified, hugely excited, when Three Azimuth began receiving reports that the Information agent and Mahit Dzmare—Mahit Dzmare, creature of disruption—had gone down to the dead planet of Peloa-2 and established first contact with the alien enemy. None of the reports were code Hyacinth. So all of them had to be aboveboard, simple chain-of-command reporting. Coming in on Fleet ships through the jumpgate postal system, standard courier, six hours of delay between message and receipt. Nothing like what the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had done, when she warned the Minister about the Information agent’s existence in the first place. Nothing secret.

  It got—stranger, after that. Stranger being there, stranger listening. Suddenly all of Three Azimuth’s meetings were with members of the Science Ministry who studied xenobiology or the sort of Fleet soldiers who very calmly discussed acceptable casualty rates in an emergency situation. They stretched on into the night, not stopping to eat or drink or rest—and why hadn’t she sent him away, what did she want him to see, why
was he staying, anyway?

  An Ebrekti expert came in, close to midnight, and had a polite shouting match with the acceptable-casualty-rates woman about how long a first-contact experience could be allowed to go on before someone needed to do something to make sure nobody was dead, and Three Azimuth sat there, watching, making notes. Eight Antidote kept staring at the burnt hole where her ear had been and wondering how she’d been injured so badly. Thinking of which of these people were disruptive and how he’d know if they were.

  It had been the darkest, coldest part of the night when he’d gone home, walked across the gardens and into Palace-Earth, shivering in his thin jacket. Gone home, fallen into bed, slept. He didn’t remember those dreams, but he knew he’d had them. And even so, he found himself walking through the dew-glittering grass back into the Ministry of War the next morning just after sunrise. Back into Three Azimuth’s office. He folded up small on the windowsill again, and some Fleet cadet brought him grapefruit and lychee juice for breakfast, and he listened. Listened, while Minister Three Azimuth received a message on fast courier from the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus herself, and watched it with only him, Eleven Laurel, and two of her own close staff in the room. (He shouldn’t have been there. He didn’t leave.) He’d never heard Nine Hibiscus’s voice before, only seen her image on holo, and it was strange to know she sounded like a person, not a threat or a puzzle to solve, just a woman with an easy, confident cadence to her speech and an urgency right behind the reserve with which she reported that her scouts had found an alien planet, a home—one of probably many, but a home—of the enemy that was eating her legions.