A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  * * *

  They came out of the recording room with the evaluating, watching eyes of Two Foam, Weight for the Wheel’s comms officer, still fixed on them. Three Seagrass had ignored her very determinedly the entire time they’d been on holo. It was easier to ignore her than to deal with simultaneously being observed by suspicious Fleet personnel—at least they weren’t wearing isolation gear any longer—and being called back to the flagship to answer, not a summons from the Emperor Herself, but some sort of evaluatory question sequence from the imperial heir. It was like getting an are-you-a-good-cultural-fit-for-my-team job placement interview, from an eleven-year-old. An eleven-year-old who looked exactly like every picture of His Brilliance Six Direction from when Six Direction was a child.

  Three Seagrass had been just about willing to turn around and get back on the shuttle to Peloa-2 and let the kid deal with wanting to know for a few hours—her answers would have been more complete anyway if she could have kept working on the negotiation, kept trying to make the enemy understand that really, they didn’t like casualties very much at all, not even slightly. But Mahit had shaken her head. Had said, If anyone deserves answers about why Teixcalaan does what it does, it’s that child.

  And then Three Seagrass had remembered, quite vividly and with some embarrassment, that Eight Antidote had been born to be Six Direction. To have one of Lsel Station’s imago-machines in his head, so Six Direction could have been Emperor forever. She guessed that Mahit felt complicatedly guilty about that. (And if Mahit was really more Yskandr Aghavn than she’d been six months ago, she probably also felt—thwarted. Frustrated. And guilty.)

  (Which one of them had she fucked, last night? Which one of them had brought along that strange, lovely graphic story, with lines like it’s precious but it’s not a memory and I’m everything you need?)

  (Did she really want to know? Probably not.)

  When it came right down to it—when she was in front of the holorecorder, with Mahit to her right where she belonged, and a disapproving Fleet officer tucked in the corner, Three Seagrass decided to tell the kid as much of the truth as there was and see what happened. It was worth—well. It was that if she was going to do anything she was going to do it right. She’d been like that her whole life. The thing, entire, or not at all.

  Nine Hibiscus was waiting for them on the bridge.

  Three Seagrass bowed to her over her fingers, deeply, and Mahit did the same. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the imperial fast-courier shuttle glitter on its way to the jumpgate, their message inside it, passing across the windows of the bridge. There, gone. And here they were again, alone with the war.

  “Have you heard anything from ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada?” Three Seagrass asked. She kept thinking of him, alone with Third and Fourth and his box of fungi. Alone in the heat, like she and Mahit were alone with the war.

  “Not yet,” said the yaotlek. “Nothing since you arrived. He has—oh, another half hour, before I send you both back down to get him. If he can be gotten.”

  Three Seagrass suspected that if he didn’t radio in, there wouldn’t be much left to get. She’d—be sorry about that. Very sorry. It would be a waste. A waste in the way Twenty Cicada had explained it to her on the hydroponics deck. A flaw in the way the universe should function. A perversity. A use of resources that wasn’t the best use, or even a good use.

  Maybe she’d become a homeostat-cultist, if she ever got home from the war. Or at least read some texts about it.

  “We should go back anyhow,” said Mahit. “We weren’t finished.”

  “The situation has shifted,” said the yaotlek. Three Seagrass winced, internally. That was never a good line for a negotiating partner to deliver. Not in any poem or handbook or case study she knew.

  “How so?” she asked.

  Nine Hibiscus’s face was unreadable. Everything about her looked closed off, protective, angry. She didn’t want to tell Three Seagrass what she was about to tell her, but she was going to do it anyway, probably because she didn’t want the Information Ministry—or Lsel Station—to screw up whatever it was she had decided to do. This was going to be extremely unpleasant. Three Seagrass attempted to brace herself. Mostly, she felt exhausted.

  “The scout-ship Gravity Rose has found one of the inhabited systems of the enemy,” said Nine Hibiscus. “A planet and its satellite.”

  “And?” asked Mahit.

  “And I’m waiting for Swarm to come back with something more actionable than they want to keep talking or they’re full of fungal infiltrates and we cannot trust their dead. And if he doesn’t—well.” For a moment Nine Hibiscus looked like she had the first time Three Seagrass had seen her: the absolute perfect image of a yaotlek. Star-bestriding and unmovable. “Well, then the Fleet knows where their heart is. And I am prepared to sink my hands into it and tear it out. If I have to.”

  INTERLUDE

  THESE bodies: dry-weather bodies, endurance-gened bodies; one a body which had displayed stubborn determination as a kit, even before it was brought in to personhood; one a body which had displayed a cunning intelligence, a sneaky body, the sort of kit the we near it laughed at, finding it underfoot, babbling in kit-language, yowling its demands at all hours. These bodies, singing in the we: singing heat and sand and confusion-interest in the closed-off but persistent minds of the enemy, just as their precedents had. Singing also now in surprise, stutter-burst fascination/horror, disjointed chords. One of the bodies of their silent enemy had brought strands of person-maker. Had not consumed the person-maker, but locked it in a plastic box, like it was poison.

  Like the we were poison.

  The bodies in the sand and the heat tried to make sense of this. To not think language, or equivalence of narrative (why would we?), but to attempt to link concepts that had never been possible previously: to think, not a person and also knows how to be a person and also does not want personhood; does not want to sing, fractal, reflected, iterating across the void-home. To cross-reference: those bodies that only sang an iteration of piloting, and were silent otherwise. To echo fear across the we, fear in the shape of the silent enemy: to imagine only wanting a partial singing.

  The silent enemy body speaks in the language of mouths, senselessly. When the cunning/sneaksome body plucks the person-maker from its clawless hands, it yowls briefly and then silences itself. It is very still, and very watchful, and the stubborn/determined body sings person and the cunning/sneaksome body sings not a person, not singing, and these threads of melody reverberate endlessly through the we—

  * * *

  And at the same time, aflame with icy determination, the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, sometimes called Ascent by the man who was her most-beloved teacher, whom she wishes she could trust entire (but why then did he send her out this far, to this war, where she is like to die?), sends out orders to her legion. The Twenty-Fourth responds to her as if they were extensions of her hands, of her breath: they gather themselves, they assume strike formation, they begin, cautiously still, to advance.

  And Sixteen Moonrise keeps a steady hand on their leash. She will wait a little longer yet. A little longer yet, for wondering why Eleven Laurel sent her here, and for the yaotlek to come to the inevitable conclusion that to avoid an endless war they must begin with an unanswerable atrocity: Peloa-2 a thousand times over.

  * * *

  The we slip in and out of black void-home the way the we slip in and out of jumpgate space: all places are in some sense the same, where there is the iterative song resounding, dirt-home or blood-home or starflyer-home in the dark between the stars. To think: There is a change. To think, knowing the confusion of the bodies in the sand and the heat, The silent ones have turned away from the person-maker and move together now toward the nearest blood-home of ours. To think to sing to shriek, ah, ah, ah, there are a million bodies there, a thousand million, too many to lose at once: so much silence to rebuild—

  And, as all things do on the original dirt-home of the we, w
hen they decide to move, their three-ringed ships a glimmer of distortion against the stars, they move all together, one murmuration in many directions. And this time, they move to flank their enemy and drive them away before they can even think to arrive at their ultimate precious destination: one swarm of diving, singing ships suddenly alive in the heart of the Seventeenth Legion, who scrambles, too late, all of their Shards to push the we away—

  —and another murmuration heads for the jumpgate from where the silent enemy came, in all their vast spearpoint ships, came through this one point only into the parts of the void-home that belong to the we, came some time ago with their little resource-extraction colonies, and came much more recently with firepower and threat and the eternal inquisitive reach that should belong only to sentient persons. That murmuration comes hidden and flowing to the jumpgate, and begins to pass through, one and the other and the other and the other …

  * * *

  Dekakel Onchu wakes to alarms, to a nightmare she’s dreamed often enough that she has to convince herself that it is real: the aliens are coming through the Anhamemat Gate. She moves on instinct and training, on the voice of her imago-line giving her enough space to breathe, to not hyperventilate or panic. She is the Councilor for the Pilots. Her ancestors brought Lsel Station safely to rest. If she has to, she will bring every last one of the Station’s citizens to a new home, even Aknel fucking Amnardbat, who she has still not decided what to do about, except figure out how to make a Councilor not a Councilor anymore, and how to get Darj Tarats to help her do it—

  But she doesn’t want to have to find a new Station, dream up all those fragile numbers like the first pilot in her imago-line did, start the world over again. So she scrambles all of the military craft Lsel Station and every other sub-Station in Bardzravand Sector have, and prepares to meet the threat face-to-face.

  She is in the hangar bay, watching her pilots climb into their ships, when she spots a tall, cadaverous shape who can only be Darj Tarats. Him, she stops. Him, she asks to justify himself: now, after all this, after what he has done and condemned the Station to suffer—now he is taking a flitter-ship and running away? Alone? How many Councilors are going to betray their duty to Lsel Station today? First Amnardbat—and how she is going to deal with Amnardbat is clearly something that will have to be considered after this conflagration, if there is an after to consider problems in—and now Tarats, abandoning the Station?

  And Darj Tarats says to her, “No. I’m not running away. I’m going to get Mahit Dzmare, and we are going to redirect this war.”

  Onchu doesn’t know—will never quite know—why she lets him leave. Perhaps she thinks he’ll die trying to get through the Far Gate and none of it will matter. Perhaps she thinks he might manage what he says he’s trying to do—and if he can, she will have less blood to mop up.

  * * *

  The cartograph table in Eleven Laurel’s office is small; it fits on a side table half as long as his desk. He runs it all the time; a sort of background music, a thousand solved military puzzles replaying beside him as he does the work he is required to do. He likes to think it lets him remember his history. His history, his Ministry’s history, his Empire’s history. He’s an old soldier, Eleven Laurel is, and decades gone from a battlefront he personally had to solve. Old soldiers need to keep their teeth, and Eleven Laurel sharpens his on the knotty flesh of centuries’ worth of Teixcalaanli campaigns, played out again in pinpoints of light.

  He has it on now; it is playing some battle in a double-star system from two centuries ago, and he isn’t watching it at all except for how the lights shift across his hands.

  His Ministry’s history, his Ministry’s successes. How fragile they can turn out to be, in the hands of a yaotlek who would rather be an Emperor, and the reactions of an Emperor who came to her throne in the aftermath of that yaotlek. Eleven Laurel is an old soldier. He thinks of the Shards, tied together with new technology from the Science Ministry, shifted and strange, not quite trustable—more like the Sunlit than his fellow soldiers now, in their worst moments, which are also their undeniable tactical best ones. He thinks of slow poison, and of trust.

  Of what he has asked his favorite student to die for, all unknowing, in hopes of preserving his Ministry’s history, his Ministry’s successes. Cutting away what might be susceptible to rot—or the suspicion of rot. Sixteen Moonrise is an acceptable sacrifice if she takes Nine Hibiscus with her and wins a victory for War that will keep War relevant in the new Emperor’s estimation for as long as the conflict continues.

  * * *

  In the Seventeenth Legion: all the Shards together, linked by Shard-sight and biofeedback and the other thing—the Shard trick, they call it, when they’re alone amongst themselves, no superior officers, no nonpilots. The Shard trick, where sometimes it isn’t just proprioception and pain that are shared between each Shard, but instinct—reaction time—and in moments of extremity or beauty, thought.

  Not words, exactly. But communication. The ones who like it—and only a small percentage of Shard pilots like the Shard trick—have pushed its limits: recited poetry to one another without ever opening their mouths.

  Recited poetry to one another from either side of a jumpgate, and heard. A distorted echo, a vibration in the bones. Something from a sector of space utterly disconnected from this one save for the stitch of the jumpgate, and the vast breathing Shard-sense.

  All the Shards together, in the Seventeenth Legion, whether they like the Shard trick or not: dying under the slick dissolving ship-spit of the three-ringed alien enemy, under the flashes of energy-cannon fire. Dying, and it hurts, and there are a very great many of them dying.

  A long way away, in the sector of Teixcalaanli space which holds the Jewel of the World, and also the Third Legion cruiser Verdigris Mesa, four Shard pilots on a training exercise return to the hangar bay screaming, weeping; they help each other from their ships, stand braced and linked as if they cannot bear to be alone, and one of them says, thread of sense within their sobbing—truly, it does not matter which one—“We need to speak with the Minister of War. Code Hyacinth. Now.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Two Alternator slipped a thumb-sized shockstick up her left sleeve and a garrote wire up her right, and grinned like a barbarian: all her square white teeth displayed. “How do I look?” she asked. “Think I can pass for a Lsel native?”

  “For approximately twenty seconds,” said Nine Foxglove, zipping up her tactical catsuit, “which is all you need, thank starlight. You look absurd. But absurd will work for twenty seconds of fooling that Station’s customs officers while Five Filament and I get into their ductwork.”

  Two Alternator wrinkled her nose. “You’re the ex-Information officer, you should be doing the persuasion,” she said. “Especially if you’re going to tell me I’m doing it wrong!”

  “I would,” Nine Foxglove said, “but they know my face just a bit too well.”

  “You didn’t mention you’d been burned here when I signed on to this job,” said Two Alternator, suspiciously.

  “She has a very distinctive face,” said Five Filament. He shoved a knife into his boot. “I’ve never stolen anything from a space station before. This is going to be fun.”

  —excerpt from Fulcrum, first in the series of Teixcalaanli popular novels by the Western Arc–born writer Five Spear

  * * *

  Top panels, three across page. First panel: Captain Cameron’s ship approaches the underside of the Teixcalaanli warship we saw on the previous splashpage; it is so big it doesn’t look real. Second panel: close-up of Cameron’s hands on the navigation controls, with the glowing echo of Chadra Mav helping him steer; through the cockpit window the warship has turned into a metal backdrop, super decorative with way too many flourishes, and also energy cannons like black eyes. Third panel: Cameron and Chadra Mav have slipped past the ship and into the black. It recedes into the distance. They are unnoticed.

  CAMERON (thought
bubble on third panel): There’s better stars out here than the ones the Empire sees or the Station’s ever thought to look for.

  —graphic-story script for THE PERILOUS FRONTIER! vol. 10, distributed from local small printer ADVENTURE/BLEAK on Tier Nine, Lsel Station

  EIGHT Antidote didn’t dream, and was glad of it. He didn’t remember falling asleep; only remembered waking. It wasn’t dawn yet. He’d slept in his clothes, at his desk, his face pillowed on his hands, and woken himself up an hour or so later. He’d been thinking, when he fell asleep, having said good night to Five Agate and the Emperor Herself and gone back to his rooms. He’d tried watching holoproj shows, but he couldn’t concentrate on any of them. He felt full up with ideas, with concepts, with horror; like he was a supersaturated solution and at any moment he’d crystallize and suddenly understand. He almost did. He kept coming back to I think they might be a kind of person, in Mahit Dzmare’s voice. To they don’t care about death the way we do, but they do understand death.

  To what Three Seagrass had said. They talk.

  And that had been obvious. Of course they’d talk, they had spaceships and weapons and a society—of course they talked. Maybe the important part wasn’t that they talked, but that they talked back.

  Maybe they thought humans might be a kind of person, too.

  He’d been thinking that when he fell asleep, probably. And now it was still full dark and he was wide awake and the only things that were illuminated in his room were the camera-eyes, how they glinted in moonlight. The City, watching him. Keeping track. Like the Sunlit kept track. How the whole of the City knew where he was, even if where he was was (in a horrible subway derailment that wasn’t supposed to be able to happen) (that might have been his own fault, meant for him, meant to—hurt—him) in his own room in Palace-Earth.