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 was 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—