It was easier, and it made it possible for her to ask him—ask it, ask them, ask the thing down on Peloa, whatever it was—to ask without her voice catching, without weeping: “Swarm, I need you to do me a favor. You, and the rest of whatever you are now. It’s a favor, and it’s a sign of our good faith in whatever cease-fire you’ve brokered. Do you hear me?”
She shouldn’t have called him Swarm. It was both too intimate and too appropriate now.
“We hear you,” he said, and aside from the static and the use of a plural pronoun, he sounded exactly the same as he always had. Casual ease. A soldier in perfect command of all of his resources, and willing to bend them to her command.
Nine Hibiscus rolled her shoulders back. Braced herself, her hands flat on the cartograph table, grounded in her ship. “I am going to give you the coordinates and approach vector of Sixteen Moonrise and the Parabolic Compression to the inhabited planet she is targeting,” she said. “The exact coordinates.”
“We will see her coming, then,” said whatever was left of Twenty Cicada. “We will be ready for her, when she comes. Reach for her. Stretch out ourselves. Net her and crack her open, give her to the void-home—” The sound that filled the bridge was a sigh, almost a melody—a falling tone.
The sound that filled the bridge was the grim silence of her own horrified officers. Nine Hibiscus had done this once before, not so long ago. But that soldier—she had begged to die under her Fleet Captain’s hands, rather than dissolve in alien spit-acid. And this command was something altogether different. She had to be unwavering. Unwavering, and sure, and she was still going to lose these people—lose, at least, the effortless trust they’d had in her. She was going to let her adjutant and the aliens that had devoured him and killed a planet and destroyed so many of her ships already kill another one. Kill a Fleet Captain, and her flagship. All those lives on the Parabolic Compression—were they worth the lives on that alien planet? Were they worth the preservation of this uncertain cease-fire?
Could she dishonor Twenty Cicada’s sacrifice by pretending one flagship was more important than ending a war?
No. She couldn’t.
Somehow she had to stop those bombs from being dropped. And if the Emperor’s command wasn’t enough for Sixteen Moonrise—she’d have to let the aliens do her work for her—unless—
“Adjutant,” she snapped, crisp command. Calling whatever was left of Twenty Cicada back to himself. To how they had always been together: logistics and command. “I will give you these coordinates and allow the aliens to strike the Parabolic Compression if and only if you believe that it is possible to take out the bridge and the bridge alone. There are three thousand Teixcalaanlitzlim on that ship. They are our people. Don’t let them go to waste for Sixteen Moonrise.”
A hissing sort of silence: the open channel. And then, soft as a haunting, Twenty Cicada saying to her, “I would never, Mallow. You know that. And so we know that.”
She gave him the coordinates.
“Do you really think the Empire and what they’ve just yoked themselves to is going to want a barbarian Stationer as one of their negotiators, Dzmare?” asked Darj Tarats. He’d come to stand next to Mahit, too close for her liking—come to stand next to her and murmur to her in Stationer as they watched a yaotlek of the Teixcalaanli Fleet call down a precision strike on her own forces. Mahit hadn’t ever imagined such a thing to be possible. The Teixcalaan she knew—the Teixcalaan Yskandr knew, that Tarats believed in, the ever-devouring elegant maw of an empire, teeth light across the throat of every non-Teixcalaanli system, light until they bit down and broke the spine, shook a culture to nothing—that Teixcalaan would never have cut away a part of itself to preserve a barely cohered peace.
She thought, too, of the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, an electrum-shaded flash in the dark of her assigned quarters, come to negotiate or warn. Mahit hadn’t quite put her finger on which, and now she never would, and it didn’t matter—the three-ringed ships would excise all negotiation and all warning that Sixteen Moonrise might have possessed, eliminate them as an option. Preserve themselves and their planet.
<Themselves, their planet, and the rest of the Parabolic Compression,> Yskandr murmured. <That’s some little weight on the side of this alliance being a good idea at all—that they can understand now that humans die and are not replaced.>
Not very easily replaced, Mahit thought, and felt her imago laugh, electric shivering all through her. Replaced with extreme difficulty and complexity.
Darj Tarats clicked his tongue behind his teeth. “I see,” he said, as if Mahit had said anything at all. “You either believe it or you don’t care whether or not it is true.”
She turned to him. She wanted—she and Yskandr wanted, a savage little flare—to talk to him only in the language that he hated and that she loved, speak the language of his enemy, drip poetry from her mouth—but it wasn’t her language. It would never be. She knew that as clearly as she knew anything. In Stationer, she said, “They let me negotiate a first contact, Tarats. Right along with them. Why not have a Stationer as part of the diplomatic protocol, especially as they know quite well that we are far better at collective memory than they are?”
“They should never have known about imago-technology,” Tarats said.
Mahit took a breath. Another. Slow. “No,” she said. “Quite probably not.” The bright stab of pain down her ulnar nerves, again, Yskandr’s vicious displeasure at her disagreement with him. “But it’s done now, Councilor. Done a long time ago. The Empire knows. And we might—if Lsel led this diplomatic delegation, we might have more bargaining power than we’ve had in generations—”
“And the price, Dzmare? The price of putting one of our imago-lines into that—conglomeration—that calls itself we? The price of Teixcalaan wanting even more of us than our self-possession and our language and our economic independence?”
Mahit said, louder, “The price was higher when it was the whole Station smashed under those three-ringed ships, and you know it.” She hadn’t meant to shout. Hadn’t meant to attract the attention of half the faces on the bridge, the ones who weren’t watching the convergence of the Parabolic Compression and a hundred spinning ring-ships on the cartograph table.
“I have,” said Darj Tarats, “spent my entire life on a ruin,” and gestured with his hand, as if to encompass not only the bridge and Peloa-2 beyond it, but all Teixcalaan and all Teixcalaan’s enemies. All his long project of drawing Teixcalaan past its borders into an unwinnable war, undone. Teixcalaan would not beat itself to pieces against an unassailable shore. Not here. Not this way.
It was Yskandr who said, with Mahit’s tongue, “Ruins can be rebuilt in peacetime.”
And it was Yskandr who helped Mahit stay on her feet and keep her face still when Tarats said, “You were a mistake, and so was your entire imago-line, and I will make sure Councilor Amnardbat knows I agree with her. There is no place for you on Lsel. Don’t ever come home, Dzmare.”