“The very same. It wasn’t Six Rainfall’s fault that he died—I still think he had a massive anaphylactic reaction—and besides, our enemies don’t inject the stuff, they eat it.”
“An entirely organic way of preserving memory,” said Dzmare, interrupting them in a low, fascinated tone. Nine Hibiscus ignored her. Hadn’t Twenty Cicada just said that it wasn’t memory the aliens shared, but minds?
“Not sabotage, then, to have that fungus ride along into our ship,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“Not on purpose, no,” said Twenty Cicada. “But nuance entirely escapes me, Mallow, I’m working in rebuses, and they’re talking—or singing—to one another all inside their enormous fungal hive mind—I have an idea. You won’t like it.”
Nine Hibiscus wanted to laugh, to hug him, to have him back on their ship. “What is this idea that I won’t like?”
“I think I am going to eat this fungus,” said her adjutant, her dearest friend, her second-in-command for more than twenty years. “And then I’ll be able to talk to them directly.”
It was the worst idea Nine Hibiscus had ever heard.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
[…] military applications seem a logical extension of algorithmic information-sharing processes already in use in law enforcement. While the interface for a pilot is necessarily more limited than what is available to one of the Sunlit (allowing for flexibility in time-of-use instead of relying on always-on algorithms), initial tests of shared proprioception are promising. Given the processing capabilities of Shard interface, Science strongly believes that Shards would be a first wide-deployment location for this new technology […]
The statistical chance of imago-integration failure leading to irreversible psychological and/or neurological damage is 0.03%, or three instances in every ten thousand. Heritage and Life Support both consider this level of risk acceptable.
EIGHT Antidote lost twenty minutes trying to find a Shard berthed somewhere in Nasturtium Terminal. There was nothing that looked like the sliver of tumbling sharp-edged glass that he thought a Shard should be, based on all of the specs he’d seen in the Ministry of War, the shape of glitter-point single-pilot fighters scattered over the black of a cartograph table. Twenty minutes before he remembered that almost all Shards would be inside a larger Fleet ship, hanging in berths.
He didn’t need a Shard, exactly. He needed a Shard pilot, who would let him into a Shard.
That was worse, because how was he going to find a pilot—he couldn’t go into a bar, he couldn’t call up the Ministry and ask—and he was losing time every moment. Every minute he stood lost in the chaos of Nasturtium Terminal, Nineteen Adze’s order to commit the Fleet to the total destruction of a whole planet got closer and closer to reaching the yaotlek. His own order was so far behind.
Eventually he found himself lurking behind the Information mail kiosk again, out of eyeshot of the asekretim, trying to imagine how he could get onto a Fleet ship. Maybe he could enlist? He wasn’t old enough, but he could pretend to be … until someone looked up his genetic print and found out that he was the imperial heir and returned him to Palace-Earth like a lost kitten. That wouldn’t work. He could maybe—climb into a crate being loaded onto a Fleet ship? Stow away?
All of his ideas were out of the stupidest episodes of holodramas, the ones he always turned off.
And then, as if he’d made them up, two Fleet soldiers walked right around the Information kiosk and straight toward him. They were both tall and had long dark hair in military-style tight queues, and the one on the left had, right below the patch on her sleeve with the emblem of the Second Legion—that binary star-system in mutual orbit was one of the easiest to recognize—a metallic triangle, all of its lines curved as if it was in motion. She was a Shard pilot. Right here. It seemed impossible. He needed one, and one appeared—except. Except it was the Shards which took the mail on fastest-courier override through the jumpgate mail-system, when the destination was the Fleet.
He had made this soldier up, in a way.
He’d made her come to the kiosk to take his message to the Fleet, and she’d just picked it up.
Eight Antidote swallowed. Straightened up to his full height, and wished he could be dressed like the imperial heir Eight Antidote, and not the errand runner Eight Antidote. But he didn’t have anything but himself. He intercepted the soldiers on an angle, and stopped directly in front of them, making himself a nuisance that would either be tripped over or paused for.
“Honorable pilots,” he said, not quite knowing whether honorable was the right respectful honorific, but he was about to demand a favor from them so he figured it would do. “I am the imperial associate His Excellency Eight Antidote, and I would be very grateful if you would allow me access to your ship for a short moment.”
The two soldiers glanced at each other, and back at him. One of them—not the pilot, her friend—said, “You’re who, kid?”
Eight Antidote gritted his teeth. “I am Eight Antidote. Heir to the sun-spear throne and the rule of all Teixcalaan. If you’d like, I’m sure your cloudhook will show you holos of me, for a visual comparison. I need access to your ship … Well. Her ship.” He pointed with his chin at the Shard pilot. “I need a Shard.”
“This is definitely the weirdest thing that’s happened to me since we got drunk on Kumquat at that really horrible bar on Xelka Station,” said the soldier. Eight Antidote really didn’t want to know what Kumquat was, aside from a fruit. Or whether it could be an alcoholic fruit.
“What do you need a Shard for?” asked the Shard pilot, which was a lot better than anecdotes about getting drunk. Eight Antidote hoped that she’d told her friend about the Shard trick, because otherwise her friend was going to find out right now, in the middle of Inmost Province Spaceport.
“I know,” he said, “that Shard pilots can feel each other when you’re inside your ships. Feel, and talk maybe. Over impossible distances. Over jumpgates.”
The pilot’s face had gone statue-still, like a mask. “How did you come by this information?” she said.
Eight Antidote told the truth. It seemed the most effective method. “From the Minister of War Three Azimuth, in private conference.” Not in private conference with him, but it was close enough.
“… If you are really that Eight Antidote,” the Shard pilot said, slowly, consideringly—and her friend interrupted her.
“Four Crocus, I am sure the kid who’s the imperial heir is, like, one indiction old. If that. This guy’s too old.”
“Look it up,” Eight Antidote said, pleading. If they wouldn’t believe him—if he was stopped now, he was never going to get a chance like this again, and half-done interstellar mail fraud was far worse than successful interstellar mail fraud. “Please. I need this. I’ll order you as the heir to the Teixcalaanli Empire if I have to, honorable pilots, but I don’t want to have to. Please.”