A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  Nine Hibiscus’s face was a mask. “They’re not my orders. They’re the Emperor’s. Send it again. Tell her if she continues on this course, she is in direct insubordination to the Emperor of all Teixcalaan.”

  Two Foam turned back to the console. Her eyes flickered behind her cloudhook; her hands flew through the projected communication-space of the Fleet. There was a strangled, hideous silence; even the creature on the other end of the line, Swarm, it was easier for Three Seagrass to think of him as Swarm and not Twenty Cicada now, draw some separation—even he was quiet.

  “No acknowledgment,” said Two Foam, at last. “The Twenty-Fourth is speeding up. She doesn’t—want to hear us, yaotlek.”

  Three Seagrass thought, She doesn’t want to hear us, or the aliens, or anything but her own course of action. And then, bright and vivid and nauseating: This is going to be the shortest cease-fire in the history of the Empire.

  She watched the mask of Nine Hibiscus’s face crack, an internal decision made, one that flayed her as raw as a barbarian, all of her features twisted in certainty and grief at once, and couldn’t figure out anything at all she could say—and she’d thought herself a negotiator!—that would change anyone’s course now.

  * * *

  It was easier if Nine Hibiscus thought of the static-scattered voice on the other side of the commlink down to Peloa-2 as someone already a ghost. Or—equally heart-flaying, equally absurd—some other person she had never known, who happened to share a name with her dearest friend, the adjutant who had served with her for more than two indictions. A coincidence. No more, no less.

  It was easier, and it made it possible for her to ask him—ask it, ask them, ask the thing down on Peloa, whatever it was—to ask without her voice catching, without weeping: “Swarm, I need you to do me a favor. You, and the rest of whatever you are now. It’s a favor, and it’s a sign of our good faith in whatever cease-fire you’ve brokered. Do you hear me?”

  She shouldn’t have called him Swarm. It was both too intimate and too appropriate now.

  “We hear you,” he said, and aside from the static and the use of a plural pronoun, he sounded exactly the same as he always had. Casual ease. A soldier in perfect command of all of his resources, and willing to bend them to her command.

  Nine Hibiscus rolled her shoulders back. Braced herself, her hands flat on the cartograph table, grounded in her ship. “I am going to give you the coordinates and approach vector of Sixteen Moonrise and the Parabolic Compression to the inhabited planet she is targeting,” she said. “The exact coordinates.”

  “We will see her coming, then,” said whatever was left of Twenty Cicada. “We will be ready for her, when she comes. Reach for her. Stretch out ourselves. Net her and crack her open, give her to the void-home—” The sound that filled the bridge was a sigh, almost a melody—a falling tone.

  The sound that filled the bridge was the grim silence of her own horrified officers. Nine Hibiscus had done this once before, not so long ago. But that soldier—she had begged to die under her Fleet Captain’s hands, rather than dissolve in alien spit-acid. And this command was something altogether different. She had to be unwavering. Unwavering, and sure, and she was still going to lose these people—lose, at least, the effortless trust they’d had in her. She was going to let her adjutant and the aliens that had devoured him and killed a planet and destroyed so many of her ships already kill another one. Kill a Fleet Captain, and her flagship. All those lives on the Parabolic Compression—were they worth the lives on that alien planet? Were they worth the preservation of this uncertain cease-fire?

  Could she dishonor Twenty Cicada’s sacrifice by pretending one flagship was more important than ending a war?

  No. She couldn’t.

  Somehow she had to stop those bombs from being dropped. And if the Emperor’s command wasn’t enough for Sixteen Moonrise—she’d have to let the aliens do her work for her—unless—

  “Adjutant,” she snapped, crisp command. Calling whatever was left of Twenty Cicada back to himself. To how they had always been together: logistics and command. “I will give you these coordinates and allow the aliens to strike the Parabolic Compression if and only if you believe that it is possible to take out the bridge and the bridge alone. There are three thousand Teixcalaanlitzlim on that ship. They are our people. Don’t let them go to waste for Sixteen Moonrise.”

  A hissing sort of silence: the open channel. And then, soft as a haunting, Twenty Cicada saying to her, “I would never, Mallow. You know that. And so we know that.”

  She gave him the coordinates.

  * * *

  “Do you really think the Empire and what they’ve just yoked themselves to is going to want a barbarian Stationer as one of their negotiators, Dzmare?” asked Darj Tarats. He’d come to stand next to Mahit, too close for her liking—come to stand next to her and murmur to her in Stationer as they watched a yaotlek of the Teixcalaanli Fleet call down a precision strike on her own forces. Mahit hadn’t ever imagined such a thing to be possible. The Teixcalaan she knew—the Teixcalaan Yskandr knew, that Tarats believed in, the ever-devouring elegant maw of an empire, teeth light across the throat of every non-Teixcalaanli system, light until they bit down and broke the spine, shook a culture to nothing—that Teixcalaan would never have cut away a part of itself to preserve a barely cohered peace.

  She thought, too, of the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, an electrum-shaded flash in the dark of her assigned quarters, come to negotiate or warn. Mahit hadn’t quite put her finger on which, and now she never would, and it didn’t matter—the three-ringed ships would excise all negotiation and all warning that Sixteen Moonrise might have possessed, eliminate them as an option. Preserve themselves and their planet.

  Yskandr murmured.

  Not very easily replaced, Mahit thought, and felt her imago laugh, electric shivering all through her. Replaced with extreme difficulty and complexity.

  Darj Tarats clicked his tongue behind his teeth. “I see,” he said, as if Mahit had said anything at all. “You either believe it or you don’t care whether or not it is true.”

  She turned to him. She wanted—she and Yskandr wanted, a savage little flare—to talk to him only in the language that he hated and that she loved, speak the language of his enemy, drip poetry from her mouth—but it wasn’t her language. It would never be. She knew that as clearly as she knew anything. In Stationer, she said, “They let me negotiate a first contact, Tarats. Right along with them. Why not have a Stationer as part of the diplomatic protocol, especially as they know quite well that we are far better at collective memory than they are?”

  “They should never have known about imago-technology,” Tarats said.

  Mahit took a breath. Another. Slow. “No,” she said. “Quite probably not.” The bright stab of pain down her ulnar nerves, again, Yskandr’s vicious displeasure at her disagreement with him. “But it’s done now, Councilor. Done a long time ago. The Empire knows. And we might—if Lsel led this diplomatic delegation, we might have more bargaining power than we’ve had in generations—”

  “And the price, Dzmare? The price of putting one of our imago-lines into that—conglomeration—that calls itself we? The price of Teixcalaan wanting even more of us than our self-possession and our language and our economic independence?”

  Mahit said, louder, “The price was higher when it was the whole Station smashed under those three-ringed ships, and you know it.” She hadn’t meant to shout. Hadn’t meant to attract the attention of half the faces on the bridge, the ones who weren’t watching the convergence of the Parabolic Compression and a hundred spinning ring-ships on the cartograph table.

  “I have,” said Darj Tarats, “spent my entire life on a ruin,” and gestured with his hand, as if to encompass not only the bridg
e and Peloa-2 beyond it, but all Teixcalaan and all Teixcalaan’s enemies. All his long project of drawing Teixcalaan past its borders into an unwinnable war, undone. Teixcalaan would not beat itself to pieces against an unassailable shore. Not here. Not this way.

  It was Yskandr who said, with Mahit’s tongue, “Ruins can be rebuilt in peacetime.”

  And it was Yskandr who helped Mahit stay on her feet and keep her face still when Tarats said, “You were a mistake, and so was your entire imago-line, and I will make sure Councilor Amnardbat knows I agree with her. There is no place for you on Lsel. Don’t ever come home, Dzmare.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  The motion of a swift is an impenetrable language; as incomprehensible to me as the thoughts of a flower when it opens its petals at dawn, without memory or mind. A coherent logic and a dance, but not one I can shape within myself. All my attempts are approximation. One cannot render meaning in a language one finds meaningless; nevertheless I know there is a design, a speaking, a world just on the other side of shadow, untouchable but nonetheless real. Three years since I came home from Ebrekt, and I still dream of the swifts, running: in dreams, sometimes I understand them.

  —from Asymptote/Fragmentation, essay cycle by Eleven Lathe

  NINE Hibiscus knew the shape of the Parabolic Compression without ever having set foot on its decks: knew it as she knew her own ship. Eternal-class flagships were all built on the same bones, the same enormous and delicately balanced armatures of steel and shipglass. The same design. She could be standing on the Parabolic Compression’s bridge and have the arc of vision she had now, the consoles in the same places, only the uniforms changed, exchange the Tenth for the Twenty-Fourth, one Fleet Captain for another—

  Almost, almost she wished that she could make that switch. Take Sixteen Moonrise’s place, her hands on the navigational controls, flying her ship on a brutal-fast trajectory through alien space, her mouth shaped around the insubordinate words—Don’t listen. Even Emperors can be mistaken. There’s nothing about these enemies worth talking to—all they do is poison us, and they will poison us forever if we don’t burn them out.

  Nine Hibiscus could imagine it all too easily, and not only because she had cored out her own belly with guilt when she gave Swarm the order—the permission—to destroy Sixteen Moonrise if he—if they—could. Guilt wasn’t a sufficient impetus to want to die in place of one of your soldiers.

  Wondering if that soldier was right, after all—now, that was enough to wish yourself on the bridge of a distant flagship, even as it shattered under alien energy-cannon fire: a blaze of killing-blue, pinpoint-precise (Swarm was always precise—bloody fucking stars, this was never going to stop hurting, was it), and then a sparkling cloud, glitter of glass and metal, spreading slowly in the void.

  What was left of the Parabolic Compression slowed its arc forward. Somewhere in that glitter was all that remained of Sixteen Moonrise.

  The alien ships withdrew, as quickly as they’d appeared; whatever cease-fire they had brokered was holding. For now.

  Nine Hibiscus let herself wish it hadn’t, wish it as savagely and miserably as she liked—she was a soldier, a leader of soldiers, she was not meant to have ended a war like this—and then locked her wishing away, as if she’d swallowed slow poison her own self.

  * * *

  Nineteen Adze brought him a bowl of tea. It was the second-most surprising thing Eight Antidote had ever seen her do. The first had been when she hugged him, without preamble, taking him from the guiding hands of the Sunlit in public, in the gardens right in front of Palace-Earth, and wrapping him in her arms. She was very thin, and taller than him, and her arms were ropes of muscle. He had thought she’d throw him in prison, or just lock him in his rooms forever, which would be the political version of the same thing, but—this. A fast, savage hug. He couldn’t remember when someone had hugged him last. Hugs were for little kids. He’d hugged Two Cartograph, Five Agate’s son, when they’d stopped playing, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.

  The Emperor hadn’t locked him up, or locked him away. She took him to her suite. Kept a hand on his shoulder, firm and guiding, even when the world slipped sideways, a shadow in a corridor resolving into the shadow of some Shard’s vision of three-ringed death—a memory, he told himself, not real, not anymore. Took him to her suite, and told him that she’d be back in a little while, when she had finished wrapping up the day. And left him there. Unguarded. Cloudhookless. (Probably his cloudhook was going around and around on the subway still.) He could have left, or gone out the window, or—anything—

  Instead he sat on a window seat behind the long white tufted couch, and stared into the early-afternoon sun on the water gardens below, and tried to remember where he was. Where the edges of him were. He didn’t know if he’d ever go all the way back to just being in one place, being absolutely sure of who and where and what he was. It was dizzying and awful, and he guessed he deserved it. The afternoon stretched into evening. He slept a little. Maybe. He might have dreamed he slept, or imagined it, or remembered someone else’s sleeping. But when he was all the way awake again, the world outside the window was flooded blue and fuchsia with the end of sunset.

  And then the Emperor Herself came back, and sat on the windowsill with him, and handed him a bowl of tea, clear green and sweetly astringent. He wondered if she’d made it. It seemed like the perfectly absurd sort of thing she’d do. He drank some. His hands still worked, and so did his throat, and he tasted the tea with only the tastebuds that were absolutely and definitely his, so that—helped. It did.

  He said, “I’m not sorry,” because he wasn’t, and because if the Emperor was going to punish him, he wanted to deserve it.

  Nineteen Adze looked at him for a very long time, long enough that he wanted to blush, and cringe, and get away, even though he did none of those things. Then she nodded, as if she’d come to some satisfying conclusion, and said, “Good.”

  Eight Antidote blinked in surprise. “Good?”

  “Good. You’re sure what you did was right. You had your reasons to do it, you made a plan, you executed that plan. You didn’t harm anyone else in the process, aside from scaring that Shard pilot half to death, thinking she’d gotten the imperial heir killed or brain-damaged, and she’ll be all right. So: good. What did I tell you about successors?”

  “That you would rather an—um. An annoying one, than a dull one.”

  Nineteen Adze, when she smiled, looked more dangerous than when she didn’t. “You are absolutely an annoying successor, little spy. And not dull at all.”

  “Did it—did what I did work?” he asked, suddenly helpless not to.

  The Emperor held out her hand, tilted it one way and then the other. Maybe so, maybe no. “What did you want to have happen?” she asked.

  Eight Antidote thought about being a spy: about keeping all his own desires as close as possible, unrevealed, even when asked directly. About choosing, always, if he was going to tell. He could keep doing that. He probably should. He’d be an Emperor, if there was an Empire left, and he couldn’t just tell people what he wanted to have happened, they’d use it against him—

  But Nineteen Adze had told him about his ancestor-the-Emperor, and the machines from Lsel Station. About what he might have been. She’d told him that, and he’d used it against her, and yet they were both still right here.

  “I wanted the Teixcalaan you told me about,” he said. “Eighty times eighty years of peace, and no one deciding a whole planet is worth killing just to prove a point. I wanted—I wanted to stop Three Azimuth’s order, and I wanted to send mine instead, and I want us to win the war anyway.”

  “The war is ending right now, and that planetary system remains intact,” said Nineteen Adze. “I expect you were part of that. What you did inside that Shard…”

  The war is ending, she’d said, but not how, or why, and Eight Antidote realized he was shaking hard enough that tea spilled over his knuckles. The Emperor t
ook the bowl away from him. Held it for him. “It’s called the Shard trick,” he started. “They can all do it. Not just me.”

  “Pilot Four Crocus explained in detail,” said Nineteen Adze. She didn’t sound pleased. It wasn’t really the sort of thing a person was pleased about, Eight Antidote guessed. Technology like that. Like the Sunlit, but more. (He wasn’t going to tell her that it was still going on inside his mind. He wasn’t. He didn’t know what she’d do. To him or in general.)

  “Eleven Laurel didn’t want you to know,” he said instead.

  “—Ah,” Nineteen Adze said, like he’d given her something she needed. A last part of a pattern, slotting into place. “That’s useful, Eight Antidote. Thank you for that. I wasn’t sure which one of them—the Minister or the Undersecretary—was responsible.”

  “Are you going to…” He didn’t even know how to ask the question.

  The Emperor shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can watch him much more closely inside the Ministry of War than I’d ever be able to if I let him out unsupervised into the Fleet.”

  “And me?”

  “Am I going to do something to you?”

  He nodded.

  She sighed. “I wish, you know, that you could trust me. But you wouldn’t be you, if you did. No, Eight Antidote. No, I’m not going to do anything to you, except wait for you to grow up and take this job out of my hands.”

  It was only in the quiet afterward, when he’d gone back to his own room, and crawled into his bed, that he remembered what Nineteen Adze had said about Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus and why she’d made her yaotlek after what she’d done on Kauraan: not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.