Eight Antidote loved the constraints best of all. Delimiters. This happened, so it must be possible. Solve it.
“Go on,” said Eleven Laurel. “Show me what Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth did here.”
Eight Antidote came up to the table. He called it to his attention with small movements of his eye behind his cloudhook, and carefully allowed the simulation to run forward without making any changes to what was, now, functionally his Fleet: he stood in for Nine Hibiscus. And like he was almost, almost sure she had done, he didn’t send any of her Shards down toward Kauraan, not even when the Kauraani rebels came floating up off the planet in their stolen Teixcalaanli ships. He paused it right as the stolen fleet entered firing range—between all of them, they could have destroyed Nine Hibiscus’s Weight for the Wheel, even though it was an Eternal-class flagship.
“There’s only one solution I can find,” he said, not looking at Eleven Laurel—imagining, instead, that he was a War Minister or a Fleet Captain himself, talking to his people, his troops. “Nobody fired at all.”
“How would that have happened?” asked Eleven Laurel, which wasn’t no, you’re wrong. Eight Antidote didn’t smile, but he felt very bright, very focused—like flying would feel, like being a Shard pilot, tumbling on a vector of his own choosing.
“On Kauraan,” he went on, “the rebellion was small. Just one faction of one ethnic group. But they were smart enough to know that we keep a garrison on that southern continent. A lot of ships. Enough to kill an Eternal if they had to. The rebels were very smart when they captured the port first instead of going after the provincial governor’s offices. But there really weren’t a whole lot of them, I think. Not enough to not—take allies where they could get them.”
“Not implausible thinking.” Eleven Laurel was paying out the rope, Eight Antidote thought, giving him just enough space to get in trouble, but he wasn’t going to get in trouble, because he was right.
“So the Fleet Captain, Nine Hibiscus. She’s got this reputation—her soldiers would do anything for her. And it’s not just the every-captain’s-soldiers-love-them thing, it’s not just poetry. I looked up her prior campaigns, and her people will do a lot of, um. Dumb shit, in my opinion, Undersecretary. If she asked them to.”
Eleven Laurel made a noise that might have been laughter a few decades back. “You did look her up. I’d say dumb shit is a fair description, yes. Go on. What sort of dumb shit did she get her soldiers to do at Kauraan?”
“If she’d sent some of them down to infiltrate the rebels,” said Eight Antidote, “and she trusted that they’d succeeded—then I think she let the rebels take the stolen ships up into space, this close to her ship, and asked her own people to trust that they wouldn’t fire while the coup went down and the rebels got killed on the same ships they’d stolen. Nobody fired at all. They didn’t need to. She’d already won.”
The cartograph went blank. Eight Antidote blinked, afterimages of Weight for the Wheel and Kauraan’s sun bright across the inside of his eyelids.
“That’s very close to right,” said Eleven Laurel. “Well done.”
“What did I miss?” Eight Antidote asked, because he couldn’t help it. Very close wasn’t good enough. Not when he’d come up with they never fired in the middle of the night like a sunburst explosion of I know it, I see it. Woken up with it on his tongue like a bursting fruit.
“Infiltration is part of Fleet counterinsurgency protocols, yes,” Eleven Laurel said. “But who should be in charge of it? Who makes that call, Cure, to send our people to lie for us?”
“Not a Fleet Captain?”
“The Minister of War, or the Undersecretary of the Third Palm.”
“You?” The Third Palm—for the East direction, for—he struggled, reached for it. Palace-East was where Nineteen Adze had lived before she was Emperor, where ambassadors stayed, where the Information Ministry was. But the Information Ministry was civilians.
Eleven Laurel was waiting for him.
Eight Antidote hated that; it made him feel like he was being indulged. He said, “You. Third Palm, because the Third Palm is what’s left of the military part of Information.”
“Quite. Me, and the rump end of the separation of our spies from our soldiers. The Third of Six Outreaching Palms: intelligence, counterintelligence, and Fleet internal affairs. Now, Cure—did our Nine Hibiscus receive this authorization from me, or from Minister Three Azimuth—ah, no, it was still Minister Nine Propulsion then, but even so?”
“… No,” Eight Antidote said. “She didn’t have authorization to give that order. And her people did it anyway.”
“You’re going to make a hell of a tactician when you’re the rest of the way grown,” Eleven Laurel said, and Eight Antidote felt warm all through. He ducked his head, not wanting to blush. “That’s right. She didn’t get permission, she just decided, and none of her people asked a single question about it.”
The blankness of the cartograph table felt abruptly heavy, threatening. “Where is she now?” Eight Antidote asked. “What happened to her after Kauraan?”
“Oh, we made her yaotlek,” Eleven Laurel said, as if this was something that happened every day, “and sent her out to die bravely for Teixcalaan and Her Brilliance the Emperor as quickly as possible.”
It took a particularly vicious sort of self-recrimination for Mahit to wish herself alone inside her own mind: alone like she’d been as a child, imagoless and longing, instead of replete with memories that were only beginning to belong to her, and were doubled and distorted and full of Teixcalaan anyhow. A particularly vicious sort of self-recrimination that also involved lying on the bed in her egg-shaped residence pod and staring at the comforting off-white curve of the ceiling as blankly as possible while not thinking about how completely fucked she was. Having whole hours to contemplate her degree of fuckedness was a luxury. Back in the City she’d never had time to sit with the dawning horror of revelation: she’d kept moving. She’d had to. The ceiling was very nice and very Lsel, and no one could look at her in here; she’d set all her tell-lights on the outside of the pod to privacy, emergency only.
<You’re going to have to come out of the pod eventually,> said Yskandr, and Mahit felt nothing so much as that she was being reprimanded by a parent or a crèche-carer: You’ll have to go to bed eventually, Mahit.
“I could wait a week,” she said, quite out loud. No one could hear her in here; no one could notice how she wasn’t one integrated person but a suspect, secret, virulent merge of three. “And then steal a shuttle and try to make the Anhamemat Gate before the Councilor noticed I missed my appointment and yes this is a stupid idea and no I won’t do it and if I was going to betray Lsel’s interests for your sake, Yskandr, I would have done it back in the Empire.”
<How about for yours? What do you think Amnardbat is going to do to us when she finds out what we are?>