A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  “Hold,” Nine Hibiscus said to Five Thistle, whose hands were already finished targeting the small skiff containing this Darj Tarats. “Why shouldn’t I fire, Ambassador? That ship wouldn’t be the first Stationer vessel caught in the crossfire of this war.”

  The Ambassador probably hadn’t known that. She flinched. Everything was so visible on her face, so clear. And yet her expression wasn’t anything that Nine Hibiscus was sure she recognized.

  “He asked to speak to me,” said Dzmare. “I am—duty-bound to defend him, to preserve the life of my fellow citizen—”

  “Also it’s rude,” said the envoy Three Seagrass, perfectly bland. “To fire on someone who announced himself as friendly.”

  Nine Hibiscus wanted so badly for her to be wrong. For the both of them to be wrong. To be the sort of Fleet Captain who wouldn’t care if they were wrong.

  But she wasn’t.

  “Bring him on board,” she said to Five Thistle, instead. “On board and to me. In restraints. I don’t trust this timing, Envoy. Ambassador. I don’t trust it at all.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  It has always been Teixcalaanli policy to take in and provide for refugee populations fleeing natural disaster on their home systems, whether those systems are hostile or friendly toward the Empire. Those who flee disasters of their people’s own making—war or persecutions—are naturally subject to more stringent integration requirements and evaluation (refer to Judiciary Code 1842.A.9 for procedural details). Given these policies, describe an appropriate course of action for a Teixcalaanli governor of a Western Arc planet confronted with a “worldship” claiming refugee status: 20,000 persons in a self-contained mobile space station, with unknown military capabilities and sanitation practices, parked in orbit around the largest planet in the governed system. Provide citations to defend your course of action.

  —set examination paper for selection into the political track of the Judiciary Ministry post-aptitudes training program, administered once yearly

  * * *

  For all the work that imago-memory does for us—the preservation of skill, the continuity of institutional knowledge that is so necessary to keep a closed and carefully balanced society-system like Lsel Station and its surrounding subsidiary Stations functional through the inevitably high loss-rate of individuals subject to cosmic radiation and the standard accidents of living in vacuum both—imago-memory has not managed to preserve for us the reasons that we Stationers came to Bardzravand Sector and stayed. Nor do we remember where we were coming from, or where we were going. Fourteen generations down the chain of live memory, and all our oldest lines have are dreams of numbers and a certainty that if we did this once, we could do it again. Live memory does not retain the reasons for decisions; only the ability to make them. And yet: we did this once. Could we do it again, in reverse? Unpin Lsel from our gravitational wellpoint and go traveling?

  —excerpt from the introduction to A Pilot’s History of the Future: Worldships and Lsel Station, by the retired pilot Takan Mnal and published 291.3.11–6D (Teixcalaanli reckoning)

  THE first thing that Councilor Darj Tarats of Lsel Station said on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, his hands cuffed behind him in the sort of restraints Three Seagrass assumed were usually used for court-martials or other Fleet unpleasantnesses, was “This is not what I sent you here to do, Dzmare.” He said it in Teixcalaanli, which meant that he wanted everyone else to know that Mahit was his creature and no one else’s. Three Seagrass thought that was, if nothing else—and there was so much else—rude.

  His face was cadaverously thin and highly mobile, and he looked like he thought being restrained by Teixcalaanli soldiers was a minor inconvenience of dignity, nothing more. He didn’t engage in the protocol of politesse: bowed to no one, acknowledged no one but Mahit. Mahit, who was standing next to her, color draining from her cheeks like water disappearing into desert sand. She didn’t reply. It didn’t help. Tarats kept talking, and Three Seagrass could feel the attention of all of Weight for the Wheel’s bridge officers settle on Mahit, the stranger in their midst—and on Three Seagrass herself, by proximity and association, if nothing else—like a pack of diving birds, waiting for the silver belly-shine of vulnerable fish.

  Behind them, Two Foam’s strategy holomap of the Fleet’s position showed Sixteen Moonrise’s flagship creeping closer and closer to the marked-out location of the aliens’ planet. Not stopping. Accelerating on a vector of her own choosing, and this whole bridge was looking at Mahit Dzmare instead.

  You terrify me, Mahit, Three Seagrass thought, and found that the thought was galvanizing—terror and desire were wound so close inside her chest. Maybe she’d always been that way. Maybe it was Mahit’s fault. Oh, but she wanted time to find out. How absolutely starfucked inconvenient, to discover that she wanted anything but to live through this, and live through it a credit to her Ministry and her empire—

  When Mahit didn’t respond to Tarats’s first insinuatingly nasty comment, he went right on. “I sent you here to keep this war safely over our heads, Dzmare,” he said, “and what have you managed? Nothing. Not a single communication. The first I hear from this front is the horror that you were supposed to keep entwined with Teixcalaan boiling through our Far Gate and toward the Station—even now Onchu is killing our pilots to keep them away from Lsel. And what are you doing?”

  “Negotiating,” said Mahit, thinly, right before the weapons officer, Five Thistle, put a pulse pistol under her chin.

  Three Seagrass remembered what Mahit had told her, curled together in the dark: that she was meant to be a spy. Worse than a spy: a saboteur, intended to make this war go on forever, destroy Teixcalaan by attrition and waste. Meant to be a saboteur for this man, who repaid the kindness of sparing his life by putting hers in danger.

  Three Seagrass always made decisions wholly and entire. All at once. Choosing Information at her aptitudes. Choosing the position of cultural liaison to the Lsel Ambassador. Choosing to trust her. Choosing to come here, to take this assignment—entirely, completely, and without pausing to look to see how deep the water was that she was leaping into.

  “Oh, bloody fucking starlight,” she said, stepping between Mahit and Tarats—between Mahit and Tarats and Nine Hibiscus, too, making herself the center point of a triangle. “If you all would stand down for a brief moment so we can sort out the actionable intelligence this Stationer has brought us from his other inopportune exclamations? There’s quite enough shooting going on outside this ship, we don’t need to start doing it in here.”

  Tarats said something in Stationer, which to Three Seagrass was still mostly a sequence of impossible-to-pronounce consonants, and Mahit—didn’t answer him, which was very, very smart. It would be smarter still if Mahit didn’t say a thing in any language but Teixcalaanli until Three Seagrass got that pulse pistol away from her throat. It was pressed so close. Like a mouth would be. Cool and patient, tucked up under her jawline.

  No time to think about it. No time for anything! Anything save talking. And talking was what Three Seagrass was for.

  “Precisely why, Envoy, shouldn’t I have my officer shoot Ambassador Dzmare, as she is clearly, by her own superior’s admission, a spy here?” Nine Hibiscus asked, soft and even. It was a bad tone. There was no hesitance in it. Three Seagrass needed to destabilize the situation further, before she could have any hope of putting it back together properly.

  “Because that would be trusting the word of this man”—she made a little falling gesture with one hand, dismissive encapsulation of all of Darj Tarats—“without spending the time to investigate his agenda. Or Ambassador Dzmare’s. Or mine. It shuts off options, yaotlek, and I believe we were just discussing how useful it would be to keep options open, given the current state of conflict with our enemy and the continued negotiations down on Peloa-2. Unless you’ve changed your mind because of one Stationer in a little flit-ship?”

  Occasionally Three Seagrass wondered if she wa
s going to die very young. Now might have been one of those moments. That pulse pistol under Mahit’s throat could be pointed at her own back by now, and she wasn’t about to turn around and check. She was going to be fearless and assured, and it was going to work, it was, it was, it was.

  “Your agenda,” Nine Hibiscus said, still viciously calm. “Do you have one, Envoy? One of your own? Separate from that of the Fleet?”

  Better. Not good—she probably was going to get shot! Just like Petal had, and wouldn’t he laugh, if dead people could laugh—but better. Having the yaotlek focused on her was far more usable—safer—than having her play Mahit and Tarats off of one another. Three Seagrass shrugged, and said, “I’m a Teixcalaanlitzlim, yaotlek, and an asekreta, of course I have an agenda. But it is a simple one: the Fleet asked for a negotiator and I’m that negotiator. My agenda is to keep talking, and to be sure of any more final or drastic steps than that.” She assembled a self-deprecating smile, wide eyes and a blink.

  Nine Hibiscus stared her down. The yaotlek was like a pillar, a statue, a solid point with her own gravity. It was very impressive. She said, “Our enemy is not talking, Envoy. Our enemy is acting. In ways none of us predicted, if the Stationer is correct about their increased presence in Parzrawantlak Sector, as well as what they’re doing to the Seventeenth Legion.”

  The scatterpoint lights of the Seventeenth Legion’s Shards on Two Foam’s holomap swarmed and fell to nothing, went up in fire, gathered themselves again, dove forward despite how many deaths they were doubtless experiencing. The whole sector-wide battlefield was evidence enough of our enemy is acting—and even if Three Seagrass thought it was mostly due to Sixteen Moonrise’s forward momentum, it was still true. But it wasn’t all that was true.

  “Our enemy might be talking,” she said. “Why don’t you call your adjutant and find out, instead of waiting for him to report back? He was very much alive when we left him. And I doubt a person like Twenty Cicada dies easy.”

  The flicker of emotion, concern and upset and anger, that passed through Nine Hibiscus’s face was gratifying. Three Seagrass had her now. She had the lever to move her, to destabilize and reform this negotiation, and—bleeding starshine, if she pulled this off she was going to write her very own epic poem about herself, no matter how gauche. Eleven Lathe had never done a negotiation like this.

  “Keep that pistol where it is,” Nine Hibiscus said, “and don’t let the other Stationer out of his restraints.” And then she walked over to Two Foam’s comms console. Two Foam got out of her way. She didn’t bother to sit down—this clearly wasn’t going to be that kind of message—she just leaned in, reached through the holodisplay of death and valor to send a tight narrowcast beam down to Peloa-2, and said, “Swarm, if you can, report your status.”

  Three Seagrass kept being surprised by that use-name, even knowing that Twenty Cicada had the absurdity of an insect as his noun-sign. It had to be something related to his religion. She wished, absently, that she’d had enough time with him to really wrap her head around him. How he identified waste with immorality. Really, aside from how he was clever and surprising and confusing, he was the worst possible negotiator to have left on Peloa-2 with the aliens, who killed without understanding individual life and individual contribution—

  A crackling, staticky noise. And then words.

  * * *

  Eight Antidote was not his ancestor-the-Emperor, and he was not Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, and for a long moment, standing just inside the door of his own suite like a kid who’d been sent to his room to be punished, he was entirely sure that everything was over. He had tried, and he had failed. No one listened to him; he could be a little spy, and Eleven Laurel’s student Cure, and even Minister Three Azimuth’s favorite new political contact, and none of that mattered, because he was eleven and he’d tried and it hadn’t worked. The war was already happening; by now the message ordering planet-killing destruction was in some jumpgate-flitter’s hands, probably a Shard since they were the fastest and Fleet ships always had priority through the jumpgates, more than any other kind of mail—

  Fleet ships had priority.

  Shards had priority.

  Shards could—if Three Azimuth and Eleven Laurel had meant what he was sure they’d meant—talk faster, one to another, than a message could pass through jumpgates.

  And Her Brilliance the Emperor didn’t know about that, at all. The only person—well, the only person who wasn’t a Shard pilot and wasn’t in the Ministry of War—who knew about that, was him. Eight Antidote, imperial heir.

  He wasn’t Emperor of all Teixcalaan. Not yet. Not for a long time, probably. But he was the closest thing. His word—his orders—they’d open doors all through Palace-Earth. They’d open doors all through the City.

  They would, if there wasn’t another order that superseded them, one from the actual Emperor, be as powerful as any order in all of the Empire.

  He needed a sealed imperial infofiche stick. And he needed—he needed a Shard. Or a Shard pilot, but just the Shard would do.

  He was still standing just inside the doorway of his room. There was a City-eye camera pointed right at him, he knew that. One on the door, one on the window, one on the window in the bathroom. The City always there, the algorithm watching him, keeping him safe. He tried not to let his expression change. Not show that he was shivering, exhausted-sick, and so full up with the possibility of doing something that he thought he might burst. He needed to be entirely—him. Normal. Disappointed and angry and definitely, definitely not picking up the open, empty infofiche stick made of animal bone that Nineteen Adze had sent him when she’d summoned him to talk to her, nights ago. The infofiche stick carved with the imprint of the sun-spear throne. Definitely not picking that up off his desk, along with one of the automatic wax-seals that didn’t need to be heated up, and going into the bathroom, and taking off all his clothes to stand in the shower—without turning on the shower, he wasn’t stupid, getting an infofiche stick wet while it was open would fry it—facing the tiled corner, away from the camera he knew about and any other cameras he didn’t.

  He didn’t need to not be seen forever. He just needed to not be seen for long enough.

  It took longer than he wanted, though, to compose the order. He’d never written one before, and his first try sounded like he was pretending to be a character in Dawn with Encroaching Clouds, all ancient verb forms that no one used anymore, even in imperial proclamations. His second try was simpler, and it sounded more like him—which meant it sounded like a kid, probably, but he’d rather sound like a kid than like a fake holodrama emperor.

  His Excellency Eight Antidote, Imperial Associate, Heir to the Sun-Spear Throne, he composed, drawing the glyphs in light, on behalf of the government of the star-encompassing Teixcalaanli Empire, to the yaotlek Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth Legion: Teixcalaan is civilization, and it is our job to safeguard it. This order forbids the use of civilization-destroying weapons or tactics on the alien threat beyond Parzrawantlak Sector, including nuclear strikes on civilian-occupied planetary systems, except in cases where such weapons or tactics are the only thing standing between us and certain civilization-wide death.

  That was probably strong enough. He wondered if he was in the process of setting policy for Emperors to come, and decided that he could do that, if he wanted. He was himself, and Nineteen Adze had let him be, and this was what he knew was true and right and Teixcalaanli.

  He sealed the stick. His autoseals all had his name-glyph on them, but that was fine. He was enough. He had to keep believing that.

  Now he just had to get the stick in the interstellar mail—and find a Shard pilot or a Shard itself to try to talk to—

  Which meant he was going to have to go back to Inmost Province Spaceport. Immediately the hollowness of his stomach turned into a horrible churning. He didn’t want to. Inmost Province Spaceport was where he’d been when the subway derailment happened. The alarms and the panicking people and e
veryone knowing what to do except him and no way to get home and incendiary devices, and he still hadn’t heard anything from Five Agate about whether it had been an incendiary, like the one that had killed that woman out in Belltown—or anything about whether it had been his own fault it had happened, someone trying to kill him.

  Even before the derailment he’d been terrified.

  Terrified and stupid and alone with too many people, and he was so embarrassed about that he thought he might die. Even if no one was trying to kill him, he might die all on his own if he kept feeling this squirmingly pathetic.

  But he had to go back. There wasn’t anybody else to do it for him. And he didn’t know where else but the Inmost Province Spaceport he’d find either a Shard pilot or an Information Ministry kiosk for sending imperial messages through the inter-jumpgate mail. His stomach felt like it was crawling up his throat.

  Right out loud, he said, “Oh fuck,” for the first time in his life, like a grown person would. And then he threw up, turning his head away from the infofiche stick, keeping it clean.

  * * *

  “Oh, I’m alive, Mallow,” said Twenty Cicada, hardly audible through the hiss and pop of static. Three Seagrass leaned closer to the comms console, as if that would help her hear, even though she knew it wouldn’t do anything at all. “For the moment. I’m trying to figure out if the heat or these claws will get me first—don’t worry, I’m not being chased, I’m a—well, a hostage that talks, or draws at least. I can’t talk long. They aren’t very interested in our unmusical mouth noises, and you summoned all the singers back up to the ship.”