A Desolation Called Peace
Page 40
The idea was already all through him, like he’d dreamed himself full of it, without knowing or remembering the dream. It was exactly how he’d woken up understanding how the Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus had won the battle at Kauraan.
The idea was: they might be a kind of person. The idea was, Eight Antidote thought he might know what kind of person.
Start with the Sunlit and the way they could see through all the camera-eyes of the City. The Sunlit were a complicated kind of person, all together. They were Teixcalaanlitzlim, of course they were, as human as Eight Antidote, but they moved together, they reacted together, they all saw through the same eyes that weren’t human eyes but machine eyes, and that was why they moved and reacted together. They used the same algorithm process as the subway did, except they were people instead of a scheduling AI. They had become as good at it as they were when the new algorithmic principles were rolled out across Teixcalaan under Science Minister Ten Pearl. Everyone knew that: that now the Sunlit could see through the camera eyes, all together, like one mind made of a thousand observing pieces.
And if there was a human kind of person who could do that, could have many eyes and move all together easily and simply, it was easy to imagine other kinds of persons, who’d be better at it than the Sunlit ever had been. (Almost, Eight Antidote lost the shape of the idea, distracted by the vivid and surprising realization that he didn’t know how a person became one of the Sunlit, not at all—but he made himself not think about it. Not right now.) If there was a human kind of person who could share vision and intention, and there could be other kinds of persons who would be better at it, who weren’t human at all, then … then, they could be so much better at it that they wouldn’t care about just one of them dying. Like Envoy Three Seagrass had said: they’d know about dying, but not care the same way.
If he was right—if he was right even as much as he’d been right about Kauraan, almost right with one piece missing—if he was right, he had to tell someone. The enemy moved the way they did, destroyed supply lines the way they did, showed up in unexpected locations too fast the way they did in all of those strategy-room simulations because they had only one mind. If he was right. And he thought he was.
The person he had to tell was the Minister of War. Because if the enemy thought all together, like one giant extra-powerful group of Sunlit, then that was why Three Azimuth and all the generals of the Fleet couldn’t figure out how to go around them. He had to tell her right now.
So what if it was hours before dawn? He knew what the Ministry of War was like at the moment. He’d shadowed Three Azimuth for two whole days. If she was asleep, he’d eat a whole reflecting-pool’s worth of lotuses.
* * *
Mahit and Three Seagrass stood on the bridge in front of Nine Hibiscus, still trying—or at least Mahit was trying, who knew what Three Seagrass was thinking, hearing a yaotlek of the Teixcalaanli Fleet say such poetic words as I am prepared to sink my hands into their heart and rip it out, a statement out of an epic conquest poem, said so casually and easily, the absolute weight of Teixcalaan’s narratives settling over Mahit like a shroud she’d never really taken off—to figure out what to say. There was no immediate word from Twenty Cicada, down on Peloa-2 with his precious, absurd box of fungus, trying to take what she and Three Seagrass had established with the aliens about maybe killing us isn’t all right, at least not indiscriminately, and link it up to whatever he wanted to explain about the fungal infiltrate. There was no message at all, and Mahit could see how the lack of one made Nine Hibiscus brittle and sharp, willing to contemplate the total destruction of a planetary system.
Have we ever loved someone like that, she thought. Not quite a question. Enough to want to kill a planet in revenge for them.
She said, “Yaotlek, I do think we were making some kind of progress. Another few hours, or days, and—maybe.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt you, Ambassador,” Nine Hibiscus told her. “But you’re not one of my soldiers, are you? I don’t expect you to understand. Eventually there are points where we in command ask our soldiers to trust us, not only with their lives but with their decisions. The Tenth has been waiting a long time.”
Mahit wanted to tell her, You’re the one who dragged us up here to talk to a kid over infofiche message, we were working—was about to, even with Yskandr on the back of her tongue slowing her, warning her, when the comms officer Two Foam interrupted them both to say, “Yaotlek. Message.”
“Twenty Cicada?” Nine Hibiscus asked. Mahit winced at the naked hope in her voice, saw Three Seagrass wince, too.
“No,” Two Foam said. “It’s Forty Oxide’s flagship, the Chatoyant Sirocco—the Seventeenth Legion is under direct attack. I think the enemy knows we know where they are—the Seventeenth is losing Shards. Fast.”
* * *
Eight Antidote didn’t bother changing clothes. Or telling anyone where he was going. He just put on his shoes—grey spy-shoes to go with spy-trousers and tunic—brushed his hair and rebraided it into a long queue, and took the tunnels. Like he was going to visit Eleven Laurel, before any of this had really gotten started. The tunnels between Palace-Earth and the Ministry felt soothing and familiar, except for how every small noise, every shift of dust, made him shiver and walk a little faster. He’d never been here at this hour. Even trying to sing the walking-marching song of palace architecture to himself—as many roots in the ground as blooms into the sky—felt like a kid’s defense against monsters that might be under his bed. Or in his secret underground tunnels. (That was funny. Except in all the ways it wasn’t. What would happen if an incendiary device went off down here? He didn’t want to think of it.)
He climbed the ladder and came up through the trapdoor in the basement. There was no one there to meet him, and he was suddenly glad. He didn’t want anyone to know he was here except maybe Three Azimuth. He wanted to hand her this idea—her, and Eleven Laurel if he was with her, that would show how good a student Eight Antidote was—and no one else. Not let it escape, until the Six Outreaching Palms had decided what to do about it. But if he was going to get all the way into her office without having to explain himself—even at this hour, when there’d be fewer guards, but more suspicious ones—he needed to be a spy for real. The kind of spy who could sneak, as well as talk and remember and keep his own secrets.
The camera-eyes would see him. That was just how the City was. But people—except for Sunlit—weren’t camera-eyes. And he was small. He could hide in corners. He could be a piece of dust, a snatch of light reflected on a floor. He could be nothing at all. Someone who was supposed to be here, supposed to be where he was. Someone unimportant. A hallway cleaner, or a late-shift cadet doing inspections. He was too young to be either of those, but if he thought of himself as one of them—the hallway cleaner was easier. A person who was meant to be in the Ministry of War, making it look sparkling and new for the morning sunrise to glance off of.
He headed toward Three Azimuth’s office directly. The camera-eyes and the Ministry’s building-security AI would have seen him take this trip multiple times, and not suspect anything unusual. He was following a pattern the algorithm would expect from him. And if he saw a person—a person who wasn’t a Sunlit—who didn’t think he should be here, he’d either explain or he’d slip by them, pretending very hard to be a hallway cleaner. Thinking he was a hallway cleaner. Believing it. That was what spies in stories did.
He practiced believing he was a hallway cleaner until he reached the outside of Three Azimuth’s office. He hadn’t needed to talk to anyone. The only times he’d seen Ministry employees, he’d waited in a shadow and let them go past him. But now, right outside her office, in the center of the Six Outreaching Palms—right down the
hall from it, enough to see the light from under its door and know he’d been right about the Minister for War not sleeping tonight—he heard voices. Raised, strained voices, drifting into the hall from that sliver of light.
He could interrupt them. He needed to tell Three Azimuth what he expected. He really, really did.
But instead he held himself very still, and made his breathing almost not breathing at all, no interruptions of sound or betrayal that he was there—and he listened. It was very hard, it turned out, to stop being a spy once you’d gotten used to being one. And Eight Antidote had gotten very used to being one.
(He wasn’t sure whose fault that was. His, or his ancestor-the-Emperor’s, either genetically or how he’d been raised, or the Emperor Herself’s when she’d given him that spearpoint.)
“—time to wait. I’m not going to stand idly by while Shard pilots come to me hardly able to stop screaming long enough to make their warning coherent. Whatever else is going on out there, they are killing the Fleet’s soldiers, and unless we unhook the Shards from their proprioception link, the whole universe is going to be exquisitely aware of it.”
That was Three Azimuth. That was Three Azimuth sounding more viciously animated than Eight Antidote had ever heard her. Three Azimuth, Minister of War, explaining what he could only think must be the Shard trick, and if the Shard pilots were somehow all linked together so that they heard each other die—as if they were Sunlit, except broken, Sunlit didn’t hear each other die, at least as far as Eight Antidote knew—how hadn’t the Minister of War come to the same conclusions Eight Antidote had? That the aliens they were fighting were also linked together? He took a step forward, toward the door, ready to interrupt and explain his idea.
And heard Eleven Laurel say, “Sending our ships down to that planet will surely expose our people to whatever fungal disease it is teeming with. Really, Minister?”
He didn’t move. Didn’t open the door. (Wasn’t sure about fungal disease, the envoy and Dzmare hadn’t mentioned anything like that.)
“A sufficient number of nuclear shatterbombs will wipe out even very determined fungi,” said Three Azimuth. “I’m not ordering an attack, Undersecretary. I’m ordering a heart-strike. Wipe that one colony off the skin of the universe and see what sort of negotiations we get to have after they know what we can do.”
A quiet, awful pause. Eight Antidote thought about what happened to a planet when its atmosphere was full of radioisotopes. He had to think back a long way. Teixcalaan didn’t do that kind of thing, anymore. It was too … A planet didn’t come back from that. He’d read a whole codex-book about it, two years ago, when one of his tutors had decided he was old enough to learn about the atrocities Teixcalaan had smartly given up committing.
Into that silence, Eleven Laurel said, “Minister, speaking as the Undersecretary of the Third Palm, and nominally your expert on military intelligence praxis … negotiation is not going to be what you’ll get after you order the Fleet to bomb a populated planetary settlement into radioactive winter. You’ll get—oh, surrender, perhaps, or retreat. Or retrenchment, a war that goes on for decades out there in that little, ugly spot of black.”
“Are you telling me it is a terrible idea, Undersecretary?”
“… No,” Eleven Laurel said, and Eight Antidote could imagine his smile. It would be the same one he used when Eight Antidote had gotten most of a strategy puzzle right. Pleased, but smug, too. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible idea at all. Merely that you’re unlikely to have negotiation be one of your outcomes—but then, negotiation’s never been what you’ve liked, has it? Not on Nakhar. You prefer efficacy, Minister.”
“And if I do?”
“Then you do.”
Eight Antidote felt like he should be sick to his stomach, and wasn’t. He wasn’t sure if his stomach was near enough to him to be sick with. Everything was very distant and very frightening. The Minister of War was talking about killing a whole planetary system, and Eleven Laurel was agreeing. And if this was what being in the Fleet was really like, he was sorry for wanting it. Sorry for wanting to dance ships into being in a simulation room. Sorry for wanting to solve all the puzzles of command. Sorry for not thinking about how Shard pilots might scream when their fellow pilots died.
If he cried, he’d be overheard.
So he didn’t.
“… it has to be aboveboard,” Eleven Laurel was saying. “From the Emperor Herself, no Shard trick to get ahead of the process.”
“The Emperor still doesn’t know about the side effects of the proprioception link, then. That’s what you mean, Undersecretary.”
A dry snatch of laughter. “Yes. I assume that is what I mean. I’d prefer to keep as much proprietary knowledge inside War as possible, Minister. In our current diminished state—after what One Lightning attempted—let us not give Her Illuminate Majesty any reasons to send Information or Science in here to take over our decision-making.”
“Sometimes,” said Three Azimuth, with a tiny sigh that made all the hairs on Eight Antidote’s arms stand up, “I understand why Nine Hibiscus prefers Information to you Third Palmers. Even so. Aboveboard, as you recommend. It won’t be a problem; the message is already prepared.”
“I do admire you, Minister. Enormously. My best student is willing to die in executing this plan, if it means we get what we need—”
“Sixteen Moonrise?”
“Yes. Right alongside the yaotlek. Two flagships ought to be sufficient to carve open a space in the enemy lines for the requisite number of shatterbombers to get through, don’t you think?”
Eight Antidote had heard enough. He imagined how many bombs it would take to kill a planetary system, and how many bodies would be on that planet, even if they were all one mind like he thought they were, and he didn’t want it to happen. It wasn’t—just losing some Shard pilots made other Shard pilots cry. What would it be like to lose a whole planet if you felt all the deaths?
They understand death, they just don’t care about it the same way, Dzmare had said.
But that didn’t mean they didn’t care about it at all.
Eight Antidote turned away, back down the hall, and headed into the tunnels. He was going to tell someone his idea. He was. But he was going to tell the Emperor Nineteen Adze, so that she didn’t send that order that Three Azimuth wanted her to send.
* * *
“What does Fleet Captain Forty Oxide want?” Nine Hibiscus said, her voice gone very even, very serene. The voice of a person calculating lines of attack. Mahit wasn’t sure she understood the question (what could a Fleet Captain under attack possibly want but for the attack to end with him victorious?), but Two Foam seemed to.
“It’s not an all-ships distress call, yaotlek. It’s a request for information. Have we done anything that would provoke an intensification of the guerilla strikes to direct engagement, do you have more specific instructions—their comms officer Nine Sea-Ice is waiting for our reply on open channel.”
Before Nine Hibiscus could answer, Three Seagrass, her voice low and urgent and just as calm as the yaotlek’s, said, “Before you answer, yaotlek, find out if any of the other legions in your six are under similar attack or have changed position. I suspect this is not an isolated incident.”
Nine Hibiscus looked at her with a weight of evaluation that made Mahit want to sink down under it, crushed by heavy scrutiny, heavier evaluation.
But Three Seagrass didn’t flinch, and Nine Hibiscus, as if satisfied by that lack, said, “Two Foam. Do so. Status, from all captains.”
It didn’t take long. The order must have been a commonplace one—Two Foam reached above her head, her hands dancing in the holograph display of the Fleet, and transmuted incoming messages into a pattern of light, a stylized representation of what each legion in this sector was doing, how they moved, how many of their ships were under attack.
Even Mahit could see that the Twenty-Fourth Legion—Sixteen Moonrise’s legion—had begun a slow, inexorab
le approach toward the aliens’ planetary system. And that at the same time, or shortly after, the aliens had redoubled their attack on the nearest legion to that system—the Seventeenth. Cause and effect, as plain as sunlight.
“They understand retaliation just fine,” she found herself saying. “Yaotlek. With the greatest of respect. I know I’m not Teixcalaanli, or one of your soldiers, and I know your people are dying, but if this is how the aliens react to the suggestion of approach—think of what they will do if you actually signal an attack.”
“Also,” Three Seagrass added, viciously dry, “I doubt that you ordered Sixteen Moonrise to take her ship in that close. Did you?”
Mahit had never seen any Teixcalaanlitzlim smile like a Stationer who hadn’t lived near or known Stationers, but Nine Hibiscus did it now: bared her teeth, her lips curling back.
Close enough, Mahit told him.
“How right you are, Envoy,” Nine Hibiscus said, still showing her teeth. “But you have reason to make me mistrust my Fleet Captain, do you not? You two—the spook and her pet?”
“You’re the one who asked for Information’s services,” Three Seagrass said. “Yaotlek. It’s you who commands me, just as you command the Fleet Captain.”
“And how do I know, Envoy, if the attack on the Seventeenth is due to Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise’s maneuvers—or something you and Ambassador Dzmare said, down on Peloa-2?”
“You don’t,” said Mahit. “And neither do we.”
Three Seagrass looked at her, flashfire-quick, her mouth twisted into the same amazed-wry expression she’d worn when Mahit had curled her fingers up inside her just so. Which was also the same expression she’d worn when she had watched Mahit turn the performance of barbarism directly against the Minister of Science Ten Pearl, at the very first event they’d ever been to together. That same pleasure, a twisted amazement and joy, a kind of possessive wanting. Mahit couldn’t think about how it made her feel. She didn’t have time to feel anything that strong. That—disarraying of the pattern of the world.