The infofiche stick with his replacement order was tucked inside his shirt, where he couldn’t lose it or drop it or have it fall out. It was a sharp rectangular pressure, pushing into his belly every time some adult jostled him in the groundcar shuttle. When the shuttle’s doors finally opened and everyone inside flowed out into Inmost Province Spaceport, Eight Antidote tried not to stay still, not to stop walking. If he stopped, he’d probably turn around. He didn’t want to be here. The spaceport was so loud, and the subway entrances were still roped off, and he had to walk by a whole squadron of Sunlit and not look to see if their featureless gold helmet-faces had all turned to look at him, recognize him, tell the whole City and the Emperor what he was about to do.
(Maybe tell whoever it was who had derailed the subway to try again. That was a horrible idea, and he wanted to never have thought of it.)
Tulip Terminal to Nasturtium Terminal. At least he remembered the way. He felt like he was a tiny starship projected over a strategy cartograph table, moving on a designed trajectory set by someone else, someone who might have been him back in the palace but was a wholly different person than the scared kid he was right now.
The Information Ministry kiosk in Nasturtium Terminal was exactly where it had been, and there were still two Information Ministry officials inside it, looking bored. Eight Antidote fished his infofiche out of his shirt, rubbed it to polished gleaming on his trouser leg, and then—trying to look like an Imperial errand runner, out of breath because he’d come here as fast as he could, not because he was scared to pieces—came up to them.
“Excuse me, asekretim,” he said. “I have an Imperial order that needs to go into the jumpgate mail on fastest-courier override.”
One of the two raised her eyebrows. “You do?” she asked.
Eight Antidote summoned all the righteous rage of a kid with a job who didn’t get believed because he was a kid, and squared his shoulders. He put the stick on the kiosk with a click. “Yes, I do,” he said. “From Palace-Earth. That’s the Emperor’s own infofiche stick, and it’s sealed with an imperial seal. You can look it up. Don’t you have a reference library of seals?”
“… We do,” said the asekreta, but she was still saying it like she didn’t believe him. “And I’m happy to look up this one—but you do know that fraudulent use of an Imperial seal is a very big crime, right? I don’t have to look this up, if you don’t want me to.”
Abruptly Eight Antidote wanted to laugh. She thought he was doing this for a prank! It was amazing. She clearly had no idea who he was. Maybe she had never seen a close-up picture of him. Maybe he looked older now than the last pictures. Maybe kiosk workers were just really stupid. It was incredibly frustrating—but amazing. He repeated himself: “You can look it up, asekreta. This needs to be on the next courier, all overrides, as fast as possible.”
“Scan this, would you, Thirty-One Twilight?” said the asekreta he’d been talking to, and handed his infofiche stick to her coworker. “Let’s find out about it. Make sure it goes to the right place.”
Watching the stick disappear into the kiosk made another wave of nausea creep up through Eight Antidote’s chest. He really hoped he didn’t throw up again. It would ruin everything right now—
“The kid’s right,” said Thirty-One Twilight. “This is Her Brilliance’s own private-use infofiche stick, and it’s sealed correctly. Hey, kid—why did they send you with this?”
Eight Antidote had already come up with an answer to that. He’d figured he’d need it. “Because I run the fastest,” he said, and smiled, wide-eyed and smug. “And I was on duty this morning, and everyone is really busy in Palace-Earth, what with the war. I said I could come deliver this, and no one with a grown-up job would have to waste half a day on the shuttle since the subway’s still down and it takes forever to get here.”
It was a good answer. The asekretim seemed to like it, at least—or Thirty-One Twilight did. The other one still seemed dubious. “Who’s the addressee?” she asked.
But Eight Antidote knew this part, too. The addressee was encoded in the message, inside the infofiche stick itself. And he—if he was an errand runner, someone not important—wouldn’t know what was under that seal. “I’m not sure, asekreta,” he said. “It’s above what I’m supposed to know about, I think. The imperial staff just said fastest courier, and it is going to the Fleet out on the front lines of the war. The rest is supposed to be inside.”
That seemed to be enough. Maybe. The asekreta didn’t give him back the stick, at least. Instead she said, “It’s five and a half hours from point of origin to destination. You go tell that to your supervisor, all right? That’s the absolute fastest we can go.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Eight Antidote, and tried not to giggle hysterically: his supervisor already knew, because he was his own supervisor. “Thank you! The Empire thanks you, also!”
He thought he’d managed it—he’d done it, his order would be on its way out to the Fleet—but he knew he couldn’t stay to watch the Information Ministry workers send it. That’d be suspicious. Fraudulent, even. He wondered if he was committing mail fraud. He didn’t think so. He had every right to give this order.
It was only what he was going to do next that was almost certainly illegal. No one was supposed to be inside a Shard except a Shard pilot, after all.
The Councilor from Lsel Station did not fit neatly into Nine Hibiscus’s more-private just-off-the-bridge conference room: he sat at the table there like a twisted metal stake driven hard into rich ground. Tall and thin, with a high forehead marked with an old man’s thinning curls. His hands were gnarled, arthritis-bulging where he rested them on the table, and still in restraints. His cheekbones looked as if they might be gnarled as well, with how the skin hung from them, dripping off their sharp and narrow points. He was the Lsel Station Councilor for the Miners, so presumably once he’d been hale enough to work ore out of an asteroid. Or perhaps he’d always been a shift boss. A man born to give orders to lesser men. Here on Weight for the Wheel, Nine Hibiscus found him to be an aberration and a discontinuity: but human. And thus something she could talk to, especially since he spoke language, as well as Stationer.
She sat down across from him, which was the sort of respect he deserved. He was a member of a foreign government. She could do him some courtesy while she interrogated him. And interrogating him would distract her from how strange Twenty Cicada’s voice had sounded—from the hot-spark afterimages of Shard deaths, which seemed to live right behind her eyes now, even though she hadn’t dipped into Shard-sight for more than a day—from the accelerating curve of Sixteen Moonrise’s slow, barely plausibly deniable attack vector.