From how she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop Sixteen Moonrise at all, whatever Emperor Nineteen Adze’s opinion of the matter turned out to be.
“Councilor Tarats,” she said. “The Fleet extends its apologies for briefly identifying your vessel as an enemy ship, and is pleased that no harm came to you in the resolution of that misapprehension. Welcome to the Weight for the Wheel.”
“How very like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, to say I am welcome and have me chained,” said the Councilor.
“How very like a barbarian,” Nine Hibiscus said, before she could think better of it—she missed Twenty Cicada, she missed him terribly, it was much harder to be both the voice of reason and the instrument of threat, with only one person talking—“to take a welcome as a chance to demonstrate ingratitude. I am the yaotlek of this Fleet, Councilor. I rule here as the outreached hand of our Illuminate Emperor, with all Her power deferred to me within my sphere. And I, who could be waiting for actionable communication from my soldiers on the bridge of this ship, am taking the time to ask you to tell me what you know of the advances of our enemy toward your Station. For your sake and that of your people, as well as for us here on this ship, I suggest you begin to give me what we both need to know.”
“What should a yaotlek of the Fleet want with knowing that all her ships and weapons have done nothing but allow her enemy to slip behind her and pour through the jumpgate she guards?” asked the Councilor. His Teixcalaanli was stilted, assembled from parts, full of older forms of verbs—and quite correct, even so. Nine Hibiscus wondered how often this Councilor had talked to his Ambassadors, and how deeply. And in which language.
“To know how many and how fast, Councilor,” she said, “and whether it is worth our effort to send a legion or two to defend your Station, or simply brace behind the next jumpgate and wait to see if your thirty thousand lives are enough to sate the enemy on. For that, a yaotlek of the Fleet would want with knowing.” It pleased her to use his own strange constructions; she could see on his mobile, expressive, confusing barbarian face that he didn’t like it when she did. Perhaps he thought she considered him a fool.
That she did not. She considered him a snake, and she was debating whether Mahit Dzmare was another of the same sort, or merely a person who had been bitten by a snake. Tarats looked at her unblinking, and then began with, “How many? Enough that we have scrambled all our pilots, which we have not done in seven generations; how fast? Perhaps you would like to tell us poor barbarian Stationers how to see the invisible, and then I could tell you.”
She could imagine it: a black-void tide that swallowed ships and people faster than a person could count the losses. She could imagine it, because she had seen it. With her own eyes and with the eyes of her Shard pilots.
Why had she let the envoy convince her not to destroy these—things, these things that had eaten worlds and would eat more, these ship-destroying spitting things that had stolen her adjutant and killed her pilots and might kill her career, or just her body—why would she do anything but try to smash the source of that tide, if she could do it?
“I appreciate your candor, Councilor,” she said, smooth, ice to hide the rage in her throat and chest, the burning engine of it. “In a moment I will send in my chief navigation officer, who will help you pinpoint on our maps the known incursion points. I have one more question for you: does your Station have fast ships? We may need all the help we can get.”
“You would need to speak to Councilor Onchu of the Pilots to coordinate such a use of our resources, and she has reason to wish to keep them for herself,” said the Councilor, beginning to lean forward, showing interest for the first time. “Councilor Onchu disapproves of even my small effort here with you, when you—in all your great power, O Teixcalaan—should have been enough to keep these monsters from our home. She is a little busy, at this moment.”
Nine Hibiscus was about to snap at him, tell him that insulting all of Teixcalaan was not about to save his Station—but before she could, her cloudhook covered one of her eyes with green, green and white, Two Foam calling to her from the bridge: Swarm was talking to them again. Talking to them, and asking for her.
Over the static of narrowcast communication from Peloa-2, Twenty Cicada’s voice had the particular edge that Nine Hibiscus remembered from some of their very first deployments together—a rapid, vivid, sudden prolixity that she’d most often heard when he was sleep-deprived, overworked, and absolutely sure of the shape of the universe because he’d seen the pattern of it. At least he wasn’t calling her Mallow. Or my dear—if he ever did that again, she was going to kill him first before anything else had the privilege of breaking her heart.
He was talking, of course, with Dzmare and Three Seagrass, who had managed to take over the comms console in her absence. Two Foam stood next to them, sharply observant, as if she was waiting for the envoy or the Stationer to commit sufficient treason that she could cut the comm line entirely. Nine Hibiscus had come in on the tail end of a sentence: “—have a fair certainty that I understand not only how they communicate without speaking, Envoy, but also how they communicate faster than we can track—it’s not speech at all, it’s a networked collectivity.”
“They share minds?” asked Dzmare, right as Three Seagrass said, “They share memory?” at the same moment. She and Dzmare abruptly stared at each other, like they had some deep secret between them.
Dzmare said, “Minds or memory. If you can tell—”
“I can’t,” Twenty Cicada said. “Certainly not yet, at least—at the moment we’re still drawing at each other, and they find me and my lack of networked connectivity profoundly disturbing, by the way—and what would memory even be like in a collective network of minds?”
“Mahit?” asked Three Seagrass, as if she expected Dzmare to know the answer to that entirely philosophical question.
Nine Hibiscus had more important questions to ask. “Swarm,” she said, as warm as she could make it over the tinny-sounding void of space between them. “I’m sorry I wasn’t available immediately—how did you figure this out?”
“Yaotlek,” Twenty Cicada said, and he managed to make her title sound like a name, sound like her name, he was that satisfied with himself and that glad to hear from her. “It’s the fungus. That’s how. They give it to their babies, and it—wakes them up, that’s as close as I can tell. They drew me a picture—a small one of them being fed it, and then being connected to all the other ones with these fractal networks. It’s some sort of telepathy drug—or a parasite that’s gone symbiotic—what I wouldn’t give for a team of ixplanatlim and a research institute, do we know anyone on Weight for the Wheel who has a hobby studying parasitic fungi—”
“… I’ve never asked that question,” Nine Hibiscus found herself saying, wondering if anyone would have a hobby like that deliberately, especially on a Fleet ship, which was determinedly free of fungi whenever possible. “I have no idea. The same fungus that killed that medical cadet, you think it makes them a—hive mind?”