A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  Nine Hibiscus wanted to hurt something. To shoot something. To have a target to unleash all of Weight for the Wheel’s energy cannons on, a conflagration to create. Nothing was making sense any longer. She’d understood Kauraan. She’d understood how to make her enemies trust her, how to give her soldiers strength in their loyalty—she’d always understood that—and here she was, paralyzed, waiting, with a dead cadet next to a dead alien in the autopsy cold-room. All of the power of the Fleet, all of the power of Teixcalaan behind it, all of her own skill and hard-won patience—and yet Swarm had gone down on that star-cursed shuttle to drown in desert heat and ask aliens questions. This had all been her idea, originally, and she wished she could take it back—if taking it back meant she’d have something to do. Something to give her people to do, aside from wait, and die in flashfire bursts when they were caught unawares by the sudden appearing of the enemy ships, peeling out of the void-dark of space.

  (She could give them the planetary system. She could give that order at any time, and waste half of every legion on getting there, and then—destroy a whole live planet full of sentients, and have the war continue forever. But it would be a war with targets. It would be a war to break herself open on, and be a song and a story before she was done.)

  She wondered if she could get away with shooting Sixteen Moonrise, just by accident. Probably not. Not until she had an excuse.

  “How long are you going to give them?” asked Sixteen Moonrise, and Nine Hibiscus regretfully concluded that question wasn’t a sufficient excuse for court-martial and execution. It was the same question everyone else on the bridge wanted to ask—Bubbles, wrapped in her cloudhook’s holoprojections of the Fleet’s comm network; and Eighteen Chisel with his hands fluttering, ghosting over the propulsion and navigation interface, face hungry for anything she could provide.

  “… Two hours,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Longer if Swarm sends back an all-clear signal. Which he will.”

  “You are very devoted to him,” said Sixteen Moonrise. Nine Hibiscus found herself not even caring that the other woman was still trying to find an angle, information, ways to destroy and undermine her authority. It really didn’t matter now.

  “We’ve served together for our entire careers,” she said. “Of course I am. Wouldn’t you be?”

  The distortion of his voice through the medbay intercom would stay with her forever, she was entirely sure. The careful choice of words. How he’d called her Mallow and my dear because he was nearly sure he was going to die and some sorts of protocol didn’t matter then, even if you had made your whole life about being a perfect Teixcalaanlitzlim, a perfect Fleet soldier, except in all the ways you weren’t.

  “… I would be,” said Sixteen Moonrise, surprisingly, and sighed. A ghost sound, a breath, like ice on the inside of a broken Shard canopy, where vacuum had gotten in. “He is exceptionally brave. His veins would drip starlight—and glow like fireflies in the sacrifice bowl.”

  That was “Reclamation Song #1.” The oldest one, the one that had come out of the dirt with Teixcalaan, or almost. The first generation in space, under the First Emperor. The Reclamation Song no one ever assigned an author to, because why would you? It was the song about being Teixcalaanli. Nine Hibiscus was being manipulated, utterly, and that was—all right. “He is,” she said. “And that’s why I let him go down there with the envoy. He deserves a chance to ask these things why they almost killed him, and what for. And if they meant it.”

  The sound Sixteen Moonrise made wasn’t a word. “Him, and not the rest of our dead? The rest of my dead? All of our people on Peloa-2?”

  “He’s the one who gets the chance.” Whether that was bad luck or good she really wasn’t sure.

  “I,” said Sixteen Moonrise, “want to believe in you, my yaotlek. Truly, I do. But there are powers at work here beyond you and me.”

  “What powers would those be, Fleet Captain?” Nine Hibiscus asked. Paranoia she’d expected. That was what Third Palmers were like, even retired ones who had ended up in command. Paranoia, but not coupled with this sort of honesty. This sort of—asking, to be allowed to be helped—

  This time the noise that came from Sixteen Moonrise’s mouth was a sigh. A grudging noise, the sound of a person getting ready to tell the truth. Fuck, but she was Third Palm, wasn’t she. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t trust her. Even if she turned out to be right—even if she couched her analysis in the language Nine Hibiscus understood as the one that ought to exist between commander and soldier, the mutual protection of I would die for you and I will never ask you to, unless it is a last resort.

  Sixteen Moonrise said, “The ones who convinced Information to take along a representative of a foreign government to negotiate a first-contact cease-fire. The ones who pushed Her Brilliance the Emperor to encourage Minister Nine Propulsion to retire early. Any power that wants us entrapped in this war, instead of winning it.”

  Nine Hibiscus turned to her. She’d made some kind of decision; she didn’t know what it was yet, only that she’d made it. “Do you want to have this conversation privately, Fleet Captain?” She tried to keep her voice gentle, as she’d ask one of her own soldiers (like she’d asked Eighteen Chisel, when he’d brought her the news that they knew the location of the enemy planetary system). It was an offer: Do you want me to trust you? To protect you?

  And Sixteen Moonrise refused it. “No, yaotlek,” she said, all resigned politesse. “I can say all this right here on your bridge. There are factions in the Ministry—as I know you are aware—who would rather see you exhaust yourself on a war of attrition rather than begin a war we could win. And those factions are joined by those who would like power to accrete to the Ministry, the sort of prestige we enjoyed before the unfortunate incident with One Lightning. You do know where Minister Three Azimuth was stationed, before she received her posting?”

  “Nakhar,” Nine Hibiscus said, and nothing more. Of course she knew Nakhar. Of course she knew how Three Azimuth had subdued it, the careful and destructive violence she had done to all of its insurgent factions, how she had installed her own people inside those factions and let them betray themselves down to uselessness. She herself had done something similar in the Kauraan engagement—

  Abruptly, it occurred to her that the new Minister of War might dislike Sixteen Moonrise and the Third Palm as much as Nine Hibiscus herself did. And at the same time, might dislike Nine Hibiscus equally much, for who her patron had been. For using the same set of ideas, but not needing to have an epithet like she who kindles enmity in the most oath-sworn heart accrete around her like a chain.

  “Nakhar,” Sixteen Moonrise agreed. “Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, may she reign a thousand thousand years—she made the butcher of the Nakharese mind Minister of War. And sent your patron Minister Nine Propulsion home to Zorai, and you—and I—out here. With this.” She gestured at the distant, still-spinning three-ringed ship. At Peloa-2, a glitter of reflected light.

  Nine Hibiscus had only heard Three Azimuth called the butcher of the Nakharese mind in the nastier parts of Fleet bars, where poetry tended toward doggerel and the epigram so quick-spoken it eviscerated before you’d notice it had been said.

  “I appreciate your candor, Fleet Captain,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you? That I suspect we are all going to die slowly out here, the first wave of this war? That I believe that our illuminate star-blessed Emperor would start a war she had no intention of winning, just to root out the last of the elements in the Fleet that might have supported One Lightning? Would you like me to say that, whether or not it is true, so that you can carry it home to your Undersecretary?”

  It was gratifying to see Sixteen Moonrise flinch. She hadn’t known that Nine Hibiscus had figured out she was still Third Palm, had she. That was something. Some small thing.

  “No,” Sixteen Moonrise said. “That’s not what I want at all. I want—I want this war engaged. I want us to win it.”

  Perhaps she wasn’t even lying.
Nine Hibiscus didn’t have time to find out: Two Foam had stood up from her console and was saying, “Yaotlek—I’m sorry to interrupt, but we have a priority message from the Emperor Herself. She wants to speak with the envoy. The envoy and Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. As quickly as we can send the message back—the courier is waiting now.”

  The envoy and Mahit Dzmare. Who were down on Peloa-2, arguing with the enemy, or possibly dying of fungal infiltration. Or heatstroke.

  “… Well, get them back up here, then, will you?” Nine Hibiscus said. The Emperor—her Emperor, no matter what Sixteen Moonrise was trying to make her think, make her doubt—wanted the envoy, and so that was what she was going to get.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  INCIDENT RECORD LOOKUP—NUCLEAR SHATTERBOMB STRIKES (TERRESTRIAL) (?NUMBER) (must-include FLEET)

  There are three recorded instances of a Fleet vessel engaging in a shatterbomb strike on a planetary system since the invention of the technology. None of these instances has occurred in the past four hundred years, though there was a public debate about the usefulness of a threatened deployment in Nakhar System two indictions ago; that public debate resulted in a general social distaste for the idea …

  —//access//INFORMATION, access-limited database query performed 96.1.1-19A by Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, personal cloudhook from secured connection on the Parabolic Compression

  * * *

  … ALL SUBWAY SERVICE IN INMOST PROVINCE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE PENDING INVESTIGATION BY THE MINISTRY OF SCIENCE. MESSAGE REPEATS. EXPECT DELAYS. CHOOSE ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF TRANSIT. ALL SUBWAY SERVICE IN INMOST PROVINCE SUSPENDED …

  —public service announcement, wide broadcast on the Jewel of the World, 96.1.1–19A

  DOWN in the sand and the heat again, Peloa-2 closed around her like a strangling cloak. Eighteen hours hadn’t dimmed the sun. This planet rotated slow. Eighteen hours had thickened the smell of charnel rot. Mahit had expected it, and choked on it anyway. The body forgot pain. That was one of the first things Lsel Station’s imago-integration therapists had taught her when she was small enough to just begin to think about how it would feel to be part of a long chain of imago-memory. The body forgets pain, but it also writes patterns into itself: endocrine response and chemical triggers. Biofeedback that sets patterns. That’s memory: continuity plus endocrine response.

  The charnel smell again, and the sick heat: repeated experience. Mahit wanted to gag. She thought, Yskandr, were you ever on a killing field?

  And got back,

  So this was something new she was adding to their imago-line. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

  Walking back to their plateau-platform was different than it had been the first time. She was still frightened—still terrified, to be perfectly clear about it in her own mind if nowhere else—of the aliens they were talking to. But she had sung to them once, and she could do it again. And the composition of their little expedition was different: the same four escorts with their shocksticks, the same canopy made from the most Teixcalaanli piece of silk Mahit could imagine bringing—but with the addition of Twenty Cicada, vicious with his tiny box of deadly fungus and his questions to ask. It was going to be Mahit’s job, somehow, to find a way to ask those questions. In a language that wasn’t language, on a planet so hot she thought she would faint.

  Three Seagrass kept brushing against her as they walked. At first Mahit had thought she was staking some sort of claim—I’ve had my hands inside you and now you’re mine, and she’d recoiled from the idea with a violence that evoked a wincing sympathy from the echo of Yskandr’s memories of Six Direction and his bed—but then she realized that it was almost certainly unconscious. She was just standing closer. Some wall, dissolved. An easy intimacy. Like any other lover Mahit had ever had. Not different at all. And the continuity of endocrine response worked for everyone, Stationer or Teixcalaanlitzlim or something else: endocrine response said, in that brutal language of the flesh, This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.

  On the crest of the plateau, the aliens were waiting for them. They weren’t the same aliens.

  First and Second were replaced by what Mahit immediately called Third and Fourth: two more of the same species, but obviously two different individuals. Both of these were of a height—a good foot and a half above Mahit’s own, not counting their ears—and one was heavily mottled, dark and light in a roan pattern, while the other was a nearly unmarked grey, with one large black pigmentation mark that spread over half of its face. They had clearly been waiting some time. Mahit wondered if the whole lot of their negotiation team was going to be eaten for rudeness before they even got around to saying hello.

  She decided to head that off at the pass. Either they’d be eaten or they wouldn’t be. (And was that easy fatalism the chemical cocktail of endorphins and oxytocin in her blood, or just her being more Yskandr than they’d been before? That bravado. The simplicity of decisions—) She walked up to Third and Fourth. Came just to the edge of the reach of their claws. The sun raked her, felt like a weight on her skull. And she opened her mouth, took a lungful of desert air, and sang hello as loud and well as she could.

  She was still hoarse from the last time she’d done this. It would be harder, this time. But—but Three Seagrass came up to her side and sang with her, and even Twenty Cicada attempted to join them. A light tenor. Not very resonant. But singing. And Third and Fourth, after an agonizing pause, sang back. Hello.

  They were in business.

  The escort team set up the canopy and the audioproj—and their new toy, a cloudhook rigged for office work, the kind that spread a corona of files and feeds around its wearer—but this one manipulable by any hands that came near it. Three Seagrass had called it a strategic planning modality. Twenty Cicada had just said that it was a strategy table. The kind the Fleet planned wars on.

  No time for language learning, now. No time, even, to decide if what they were learning was a language.

  Given: these aliens communicated and understood communication.

  Given: they communicated in a way that was not visible to Mahit, nor any other human being, as well as by sounds.

  Given: they seemed entirely willing to eat entire planets alive, for scraps, and leave the waste to rot in the sun. All of those bodies, dead. All of those people, dead—

  Given all of that, it was time for crude rebus drawings in holo.

  The most disturbing part wasn’t that Third and Fourth picked up what she and Three Seagrass were doing very quickly, drawing lines of light in the shimmering desert air with their claws. The most disturbing part was that they both simultaneously seemed to know everything First and Second had done the day before—and that they moved in that awful, unsettling-uncanny joint motion that First and Second had also displayed. Third would finish a gesture that Fourth had started. Draw the other half of a figure that Fourth had begun. And they had precisely the same skill in drawing. The same skill, and the same style.

  It was like they were two links in an imago-chain—but both embodied at once. The idea made Mahit squirm. (But wasn’t she herself a thing that was wrong, by all the standards she had learned on Lsel Station about what was the right and the wrong way to be a link in a long line of live memory?)

  Communicating by rebus and song-snatch was slow and agonizing in the heat. They were circling around the idea of—it wasn’t anything so concrete as cease-fire. Maybe something more like managed retreat. If Mahit could only figure out why these creatures did what they did, she could get closer to asking them to do it somewhere else. Somewhere far away from Lsel Station (… and Teixcalaan, and oh, Darj Tarats was probably going to give her to Aknel Amnardbat on a platter). But she couldn’t get to why. She didn’t have any abstract concepts to work with, at all, except—

  Carefully, when it was her turn to begin the next—sentence, phrase, communication unit—Mahit drew the outli
ne of a human being. The outline of a human being, with its guts spilled out in spirals of light. And above it, the outline of an alien, the long neck, the carnivore’s claws.

  Three Seagrass said, hurriedly, “I don’t think this is a good idea, Mahit!” but Mahit had her mouth open already, and the shape of the sung-spat noise on her tongue was the pidgin word for stop. For no, or cease, or stay away.

  Don’t kill us.

  There was a heatstruck silence.

  Third lifted a claw—its hands were so delicate under those claws, and Mahit thought they were retractable, that they’d fold back for precision work—and did not rip Mahit open. Nor did it sing anything back to her. Instead it drew another human outline next to the eviscerated one. And another. And another. And another. As if to say, But you can make more of you.

  How wide, after all, could the concept of “you” stretch?

  Could it be as wide as a species?

  On her other side, Twenty Cicada—his bald head gold-gone-angry-pink in the sun, his cheeks a sallow grey, heat-drained—sighed softly. “All right,” he said. “Enough of this.”

  “What?” Mahit began, confused. But he had already produced his box of fungi, his box of maybe-poison, and held it out for both Third and Fourth to see. Held it like a prize, or like a challenge.

  He pointed to the box. The alien eyes fixed on it like it had the gravitational pull of a black hole. And then he pointed to what Mahit had drawn. The dead human, torn up, wrecked. He shook the cube. The whitish fungus inside, dried to nothing now, rattled. The sound was too loud. (Were there no insects on Peloa-2? Was there really nothing here but silica sand and sunlight?)