And it, and its Shards, were already—already, without ever being ordered, heedless of anything Eight Antidote had done or learned or promised—approaching the inhabited planetary system of the alien enemy, and they were aflame with triumph and vicious anticipation: they were going to end this all, now, together, at last—
No, Eight Antidote thought, but the word was gone, gone inside the wide stretch of linked-up minds. Too soft to hear. He wasn’t enough of anything, anymore, to reach so far.
Please, no! One voice in a cacophony, in a choir of other negations, worse ones: no, don’t let me die—no, I can’t do this, I am afraid—no, no, no, this cannot be happening—
And the Shards of the Twenty-Fourth pressed forward, unafraid; unconvinced, if they’d even heard him at all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There is no instruction in the practice of balance that firmly forbids or firmly commands an observance: if a person chooses to bleed for the sun and stars of Teixcalaan, there is no harm in it, as long as they are willing to bleed also for the earth and water of each planet, or for the tears and saliva of a stranger, or for something so small and unimportant as a barren patch of garden.
THE war dissolved around Nine Hibiscus like spun sugar in water, too fast for her to grieve. She was yaotlek of this six of legions, and she was on the bridge of her flagship, and every report of the sudden hesitance of the enemy, the vanishing of attack forces, the hovering pause of three-ringed death-spitting ships, orbiting Teixcalaanli vessels now, observing and slow, instead of smashing them to pieces—every report came to her. She held them all. She spun up the cartograph strategy table and marked the position of her Fleet, the position of her Fleet’s enemies, kept it updated in as close to real time as possible, while all of the crisis-flashpoint of conflict seemed to simply—stop. Hold itself in patient abeyance. The only moving piece was the Twenty-Fourth, Sixteen Moonrise’s Parabolic Compression, and even she seemed to have slowed, surprised by the sudden lack of forceful opposition. Still moving, but—that was all right. She’d rather have the Twenty-Fourth in position if this strange détente ended, if what Swarm had done wasn’t sufficient.
Whatever Swarm had done, he’d at least bought them time. She’d shouted—no, she’d screamed down the narrowcast band, even after he’d cut it off—screamed nonsense negation she was ashamed of, but it hurt, it hurt like a hole in the center of her, as if the alien acid spit was wearing her away like she was the metal of a ship. That he was either dead, or gone, or—not himself. Her friend. Her dearest friend. What was she going to do about all of his plants? About keeping the hydroponics deck in order? About that fucking Kauraanian kitten he’d been feeding? What was she supposed to do, other than watch the thing that she was for—prosecuting a war, in any way necessary, in all ways possible—become unnecessary, marked out in points of light?
She wanted to ask him: Swarm. Swarm, what are you doing? But he wouldn’t respond to any message she sent. It was possible that he had simply eaten the fungus and died and the enemy had understood this as some sort of sufficient sacrifice.
No one heard him or cared to listen; all Shard-sight was grief or was single-minded determination that shut out grief and dying in a scintillation of light. Eight Antidote lost the shape of the Shards guarding the Parabolic Compression; died again, a simple ugly death, someone thinking so clearly aw, fuck, as a fast-moving piece of debris struck the side of their Shard, deformed it, cracked its bubble of shipglass from its seals—cold, shock-cold, and anger, and then quiet.
He wanted to stop. He wanted to get out. There was no out. There was no stop.
Except that:
—the eyes of Shard after Shard saw a sudden hesitance in the barrage of ship-dissolving acids and energy-cannon fire, a pause as if the enemy was thinking, all together, as a whole—a three-ringed ship, hardly larger than a Shard itself, hung motionless and then made a slow and lazy circle around two Shards without attacking them at all, as if trying to map their edges—alien targets vanished, leaving squirming visual discontinuity in their wakes, and Teixcalaanli hands trembled on Shard controls, hands that had been clenched so tightly they hurt as they were released—there was a stretched-out held breath, a thousand Shards and two thousand eyes trying to feel, to understand, to realize they were not dying any longer.
All except the Shards surrounding the Parabolic Compression, who did not hear, or listen, or care. Who had a purpose and a design. For whom discontinuity—even favorable discontinuity—was something to be undone, as if it had never been. Who had paused, for a moment of disbelief, the dissolve of opposition shocking to stillness—and then had heard some voice, some order, or just some heart-vicious want of their own, and accelerated again. Faster. Faster.
There was a convulsion. A shaking. Eight Antidote wondered if he was dying again, or if the Twenty-Fourth Legion had started the deathrain bombing and this was what it would be like—sudden light—hands—
And he looked up, dazzled, shocked back to his small singular body, as the golden featureless faceplate of a Sunlit removed Four Crocus’s cloudhook from his face and scooped him out of her Shard like the stone from a peach.
When the order on the Imperial fast-courier ship arrived, sealed in one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s own white-on-white seals (or a facsimile thereof, Nine Hibiscus had always heard that Nineteen Adze used animal bone for hers, but that wouldn’t have gone through the transmission stations between jumpgates—this was a plastic copy), the order inside was almost unnecessary.
His Excellency Eight Antidote, Imperial Associate, Heir to the Sun-Spear Throne, it read, on behalf of the government of the star-encompassing Teixcalaanli Empire, to the Yaotlek Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth Legion: Teixcalaan is civilization, and it is our job to safeguard it.
Interesting that it came in the voice of the imperial heir, not the Emperor Herself. A complex political maneuver—the Emperor commands war, her successor practices mercy. It was very designed, in Nine Hibiscus’s opinion. Or maybe she was simply exhausted, and everything seemed to be a little beyond what mattered here on her ship, right now.