“I could pull up the rest of the Kauraan team—”
“I don’t want someone who can make people trust them, Swarm, I want someone who can talk to aliens without mouths.”
Twenty Cicada covered his mouth again, but this time it was to hide a snicker. “Not you then either, my yaotlek. Only people trust you.”
Her people trusted her, yes—the Tenth Legion trusted her, would die for her like she’d die for them: that was a captain’s bargain. The rest of this Fleet? Not yet. Not with Sixteen Moonrise and her letter of political discontent already working its way through the other legions. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t pull translators from some other legion’s contingent, she was almost sure. Not without knowing Sixteen Moonrise’s business, and how far it might have spread. She hated working on fractured ground, without the comfort of the Minister of War to contact as a last resort—but perhaps she’d grown too used to having that comfort.
Perhaps it was time to learn what sort of yaotlek she’d like to be remembered as, in her own right.
“This,” she said at last, sitting down next to Twenty Cicada like they were both still palest-leaf-green cadets, shoulder to shoulder, “is a job for the Information Ministry.”
CHAPTER THREE
Top panel, two-thirds of the page: Captain Cameron and the rescued Heritage archivist Esharakir Lrut huddle in the shadow of the ruined caravanserai. It is snowing hard. Esharakir is feeding the papers and codex-books she has been guarding for twenty years into the fire, one by one. The flames look like words, curling up the paneclass="underline" Teixcalaanli poetry, Heritage documents, maybe even a passage from the Lsel Record of Origin, a super-recognizable one—but altered slightly. A secret version that Heritage has kept from the rest of us, being destroyed so they can live through the storm.
Lower panel, one-third of the page: Captain Cameron’s hand, snatching at the burning Record of Origin words, and Esharakir’s face. She’s serene.
CAMERON: You don’t have to—Esharakir, what’s the point if we can’t keep what you’ve found—stop—
ESHARAKIR LRUT: This is dross, Captain. It’s precious, but it’s not a memory. Did you think you were coming here for documents? What sort of Stationer guards documents when she could preserve an imago-line that would be lost without her? I’m everything you need.
[…] meals, supplement to hydroponics (meat substitute, taurine substitute)—twelve shipping containers; meals, supplement to hydroponics (preserved fruit)—one shipping container; missiles (projectile, hand weapon)—three shipping containers; missiles (projectile, ground cannon)—four cannons […]
THE request came in during the early hours of the morning, and so it was the Third Undersecretary to the Minister of Information, who had slept, or not slept (not slept, yet again) in her office, who got to it first. Three Seagrass saw it flash through on the internal Information Ministry network, a bright grey-gold-red cycling pulse in the upper-left quadrant of her cloudhook display: a priority nineteen message in War Ministry colors, the sort of thing that wouldn’t even show up on a regular asekreta’s feed. Three months ago Three Seagrass never would have seen it.
(Three months ago, even if she’d somehow reached this exalted position in the Ministry, complete with her own tiny office with a tiny window only one floor down from the Minister herself, Three Seagrass would have been asleep in her house, and missed the message entirely. There: she’d justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)
The request cycled again, blinking. No one was picking it up. Priority nineteen messages cycled four times and then dumped themselves into the First Undersecretary’s private cloudhook, on the basis that an emergency message from someone command-level in another Ministry would at least get answered fast if otherwise it was clogging up Information’s second-in-command’s workflow. If it cycled one more time, Three Seagrass could safely forget about it until whatever it was settled on the Ministry like a fog of pollen, irritating everyone’s mucous membranes—
Even your allusions are becoming terrible. Fog of pollen? Like that is going to be the base of a decent poem—
Two and a half months ago, Three Seagrass had written a decent poem, a lament for her dearest friend, stupidly and uselessly dead, and after that, well. Fog of fucking pollen, and this exquisite prison of an office.
She flicked her eyes up, micromovement to the left, and claimed that request message for her own.
Twenty minutes later, just as the dawn began to flood through her window to pool in extravagant, vision-obscuring beams across her cloudhook display, Three Seagrass put the finishing touches on the second-stupidest idea of her career in the Information Ministry. She did it accompanied by the determined cheerful voice of Fourth Undersecretary Seven Monograph humming the newest top-ten hit arrangement of “Reclamation Song #5” (the same song for three fucking weeks now and at least Seven Monograph had an exquisite command of prosody and imitation, even if he also had a tendency to get songs stuck in his head and share them with the office … but no one could sing two harmony lines at once without artificial help, and some people shouldn’t try), wafting its way down the hall, as it did every morning. The Third Undersecretary—well, any Undersecretary of the six of them, really—had discretionary authority over assigning Ministry personnel on priority nineteen requests, and oh, had this ever been a request and a half. The yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, out on the edges of Teixcalaanli space, wanted a first-contact specialist with diplomatic chops, and wanted one yesterday. To talk to those same incomprehensible aliens that Mahit Dzmare had used to defuse a civil war while Three Seagrass watched, caught up in the strange gravity of her very own barbarian ambassador.
Her cloudhook pulsed pale gold: message incoming.
Patrician First-Class Three Seagrass, asekreta, Third Undersecretary to Information Minister Four Aloe, you have been reassigned. Your new temporary designation is Envoy-at-Large, seconded to the Tenth Legion on the Eternal-class ship Weight for the Wheel, commanding officer yaotlek Nine Hibiscus. Please report to the central spaceport for expedited travel by sunset on 187.1.1–19A (TODAY). Your pay grade: remains the same; your clearances: remain the same; span of assignment: three months, with unlimited extensions. Assigning officer: Three Seagrass, Third Undersecretary to Information Minister Four Aloe. For questions regarding this assignment, please contact your assigning officer. To accept this assignment, reply to this message—