He went on: “Shard-sight is—corrupted, or too intense, or—we don’t know what’s happening to us exactly, yaotlek, but it’s not like Shard-sight was when you were a Shard pilot, it’s the new programming, the collective proprioception—we keep feeling each other die, and there are so many, and I’ve turned off all my programming but I can’t stop thinking about it. You need to know that there’s a threshold—a threshold for trauma experience, I think—where the proprioception starts a feedback loop. I’m not the only one who can’t stop crying, yaotlek. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to insult you like this.”
Nine Hibiscus shook her head. “I am the farthest thing from insulted, Pilot Fifteen Calcite. Tell me a little more, if you can. I know about the—afterimages, in Shard-sight. I was one of you, not so long ago. But this—when did this start? Are the Shards still operational?”
“—When more than three or four of us died near each other, and all of the casualties were running the Shard trick—I mean, the proprioception upgrade.”
Three Seagrass knew she shouldn’t interrupt this—but she wasn’t Fleet, bound by protocol, and she had never heard about this technology. “The Shard trick?” she asked, loud enough to cut through the heavy silence surrounding Nine Hibiscus and her soldier, the rest of the bridge quiet save for the static of the open channel down to Peloa-2, and Twenty Cicada listening.
Every head turned to look at her. She repeated herself. “The Shard trick?”
Two Foam, behind and to her left, murmuring in what Three Seagrass suspected was the hope of getting her to shut up, “New technology from the Ministry of Science—it lets Shard pilots feel where each of the others are in space, and eliminates a lot of navigational lag—it’s based off the algorithm for the Sunlit—”
Three Seagrass was absolutely sure she—and all of the Information Ministry—were not supposed to know about this particular technology. War and Science again, working together and not letting Information in on the game—let alone the Emperor and her staff—just like it had been during the near-insurrection two months ago. The same pattern of influence. She said, much louder than Two Foam had, “The Fleet is using a mind-sharing technology for navigational purposes?”
And heard Mahit laugh, a brittle fast noise. “… See, Three Seagrass?” she said, “it’s not so far a step from what Teixcalaan does already to what we Stationers have done with imago-lines for generations. Except we don’t let anyone go in unprepared, like this pilot has—”
And cut herself off, realizing what she’d said.
Realizing, almost certainly, that she’d admitted the existence of imago-machines without any of Yskandr Aghavn’s careful dance of secrecy.
But it was too late. Councilor Tarats, all his teeth bared—she was never going to understand how Stationers smiled, and what the expression beyond smiling was, and where the edges could be—leaned right over Three Seagrass to snap something nasty and fast in Stationer. Three Seagrass caught imago-machine and could guess the rest: traitor, betrayer, exposer of our proprietary secret incredibly immoral technology, fuck you and everything you stand for. Obvious, really. Obvious, from how Mahit reacted, too—how she blanched and then shoved Three Seagrass gently out of the way to meet Tarats head-on. (Everyone on the bridge was looking at them now. Even the weeping Shard pilot, who had mostly devolved to sniffling.)
Mahit started whatever she was saying in Stationer—one long sentence, a snarl of consonants—and then switched, fluid and easy, to Teixcalaanli. “And, Councilor—do you really think I am the first to trade our technology for our continued existence? Twenty years you wrote to Yskandr, and he fooled you the entire time.” Her voice was silk, slick, sliding in and out of the tonality Three Seagrass was familiar with, and she knew that she was listening in part to Yskandr Aghavn (who was—so very like Mahit, but not at all her, and—oh, there’d either be time for Three Seagrass to panic about which one of them she’d slept with and trusted or there wouldn’t be time for anything, so that didn’t matter now).
Tarats said—in perfectly understandable language, he was capable, obviously—“If you are saying that Aghavn created some kind of—collective mind, that’s not imago-technology, Dzmare. That’s an aberration. A Teixcalaanli corruption, if it exists at all.”
Mahit threw her head back and laughed. “Tarats. Oh, my friend, my predecessor’s friend, my patron and foil—no, why would we do that? When all we had to do was what you asked, and let Teixcalaan fall in love with us, and promise the Empire memory eternal in exchange for our freedom?”
“What you’re doing is sick,” Darj Tarats said, “a perversion of imago-integration—you’re not Yskandr. The pretense is vulgar.”
“No,” Mahit said. “I’m not Yskandr. I would never have offered the Emperor Six Direction an imago-machine, and I would never have died for it. I would have done something else you’d despise. Teixcalaan doesn’t let us stay clean. Not you, not me, not Yskandr. I’m him enough to be sure of that. I remember what I am. What you helped make him, and what he has made me.”
The low static of the open channel that Twenty Cicada was listening through crackled. Hissed. Resolved into his voice, serene and strange. “Ah, Mallow,” he said, and Nine Hibiscus spun like she’d been stung, stared at the starfields outside the bridge like they would resolve into her adjutant’s face. “I won’t even be the first, it seems. Lsel is far ahead of us, aren’t they? But we’re catching up.”
“Don’t,” said Nine Hibiscus. But she didn’t say I order you not to. Nor did she say please. Three Seagrass thought the two might have been equivalent.
“It has been the deepest honor of my life to serve with you, my dear,” said Twenty Cicada. “Wish me luck.”
And then that open-channel static cut off to silence. Circuit closed.
Somewhere down on Peloa-2 a man who believed that waste was the worst thing that could happen to a society was letting himself be devoured.
Even after he’d promised, even after he knew he’d—succeeded, if success meant feeling some Shard pilot far distant from anywhere he’d ever been take a War Ministry–sealed infofiche stick and crush it, stamp it under his heel against the side of his cockpit—smash the battle-flag sigil, the sun all gone to spears, nothing left of illumination except the gold sealing wax—the splintered pieces floating up from around his boot, gravityless, sparkling—even after all of that, Eight Antidote couldn’t quite stop being in Shard-sight. He was spread out so far. There were so many Shards, and he didn’t know which way was up, or if up had meaning, or if he had meaning, really: he was only himself, and there wasn’t a lot of himself compared to dying and desperation and the endless shifting overwhelming beauty of stars and void and moving all together, like a murmuration of birds.
He was scared, and proud. Those things were his, he was sure. But they were the Shard pilots’, too, and it wasn’t enough to be scared and proud. He felt like he was dissolving. Salt dropped in water.
Death and pain drew Shard-sight, but so did a sufficient number of Shards together: and there was one of those now, a center-point of a swarm, a group that knew one another even without the collective feeling that made the Shard trick work over impossible boundaries, impossible distances. That group hung suspended like a scatter of stars themselves, all around a flagship, all moving together, a shifting shield that kept the behemoth of their flagship-home hidden from easy view, easy comprehension. He caught the very edge of a name: that ship was the Parabolic Compression. That ship was the pride of the Twenty-Fourth Legion.