“You’re not alone,” Onchu said. “You don’t move like Mahit Dzmare when I first met her.”
No. No, she didn’t. She’d shown that off very pointedly in the bar, and was probably showing it still—she herself didn’t exactly know how she moved. If she ever moved like the person she’d been when she had been alone. “Some of the damage turned out to be reversible,” she said, which wasn’t not true. It just wasn’t very much of what was true.
“In less complex circumstances, I’d be sending you over to medical to have that very thoroughly investigated, for the purposes of possibly reproducing the reclamation of function,” Onchu said. “I hate losing imago-lines to neuro damage, and pilots—well. Lots of ways to get hit on the head. It’d be good to have a way of reestablishing a line that did manage to come back from an incident—I lose enough people as it is, lately.”
“In less complex circumstances,” Mahit replied, so dry that her tongue felt withered in her mouth, “there wouldn’t be anything to investigate, would there.”
Onchu laughed, soundless under the whine of a metal-cutter saw; laughed, and waved a half salute to the man operating it, who grinned back at her, signed all good, and went back to his work. “We suffer under complexity, Dzmare. So tell me. What made you finally decide to get off your ass and come down to the hangar?”
In six days I’m fucked sideways seemed too much like a confession. Like an appeal for sanctuary. She’d tried that on Teixcalaan, and look where it had gotten her: home, except never home again.
<Look where it got Nineteen Adze. Her Brilliance.>
Mahit ignored him. Yskandr—she, too, but mostly Yskandr—had a history of sleeping with emperors. Sleeping next to emperors, or proto-emperors, anyway, while they went their sleepless rounds of work. A thoroughly distracting history. And even if Onchu was worried about losing too many pilot-lines, too many deaths out in the black where Tarats’s alien threat hunkered; Mahit couldn’t trust Pilots to keep her safe through the revelation of her doubled imago any more than she could trust Heritage.
No one can know.
<You begin to see why I never came back.>
Not now, Yskandr.
“Heritage got off its ass,” she said to Onchu. “Thought I should do the same. Now, how about you tell me what you thought you were trying to accomplish by warning Aghavn about me?”
Onchu pressed her lips together, dark red line like a cut beading blood. “Patriotism,” she said, again. “Ask your imago—if that’s still something you can do, if you’ve got more than muscle memory—about Darj Tarats and his philosophy of empire, and then, if you have more questions … I drink in that bar every seventh shift. Come on by.”
Darj Tarats? Mahit asked, internal query …
… and what she got back was <Shit.>
A formal meal on Weight for the Wheel was a precise affair, a protocol dance, a prescribed sequence of events from the entrance of the commanding officer to the final libation poured out for the Emperor, a few drops of alcohol substituting for blood in this latter fallen age—not that Nine Hibiscus was the sort of Fleet Captain who would rather bleed into a bowl for propriety rather than give up her last swallow of peat liquor. This was a very small formal meaclass="underline" four settings around a table in a conference room hastily made grand with Tenth Legion banners and the black-and-gold starburst-cloisonné plates that matched their banner colors. Nine Hibiscus herself wore exactly what she’d been wearing while listening to the hideous alien noises, which was her regular uniform with its new rank stars at the collar: not just her Fleet Captain’s four, but the spear-arc collar tabs of a yaotlek, like the top of the imperial throne cut off and turned sideways.
Guests were seated first, and thus Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada came into the room to find Sixteen Moonrise and her adjutant, the ikantlos-prime Twelve Fusion, already seated poised over their empty plates, waiting like scavenger birds. She’d never met Sixteen Moonrise in person before, only over holo—the Twenty-Fourth Legion and her own Tenth had never been posted in the same sector of space before this particular campaign. Sixteen Moonrise was tall, and her skin and hair were the same suite of colors, like she’d been stamped from a die: the color of the moon if the moon was a coin. Pale face, long and straight pale hair, electrum-sheeny, left—for this official, ceremonious meeting—loose of the queue she usually kept it in. She was younger than Nine Hibiscus by a half indiction, according to her official record. Those three and a half years meant they’d never known each other as cadets. She looked serene and hungry at once.
“The yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, Fleet Captain of the Tenth Teixcalaanli Legion,” murmured the soldier acting as steward, and both Sixteen Moonrise and her second bowed over their fingertips, deep inclinations.
“Welcome aboard the Weight for the Wheel,” Nine Hibiscus said.
“We are welcome indeed,” Sixteen Moonrise replied, the rote and required response, “your hospitality is as boundless as the stars, yaotlek, and as light-giving.”
Nine Hibiscus sat. The table was small enough that all four of them were practically brushing elbows, save for Twenty Cicada, who was too skinny to brush elbows with anyone. The soldier at the door gestured fractionally, and another one of her people came in with real bread—every ship had some flour and yeast, for the particular rituals of hospitality that required their products—and the palest distilled wheat spirit, so alcoholic just inhaling it felt like being drunk: starshine, the Emperor’s drink. Every ship had that, too. (Some more than others. Nine Hibiscus kept Weight for the Wheel well stocked.)
When she’d planned this meal—a strategy dinner, a transparent I-know-you-know-I-know ruse for Sixteen Moonrise to chew on along with her bread—Nine Hibiscus had meant to start with that letter demanding an explanation for the long delay in engagement with the enemy. Start with that, with her knowing about it before it had even officially arrived; cut Sixteen Moonrise’s little political maneuver down at the knees and leave it to bleed out. But since then she’d been listening to aliens. Since then she’d seen their spit eat up one of her own.
“Fleet Captain,” she began. Sixteen Moonrise inclined her head a fraction. “About an hour ago, while you were in transit, we engaged the enemy forces for the first time.”
There was an expression there, but not much of an interpretable one. Twelve Fusion was more obvious: he put his glass of starshine down on the table with a sharp click. “And you’re having us for dinner?” he asked. “Why aren’t you on the bridge?”
“Because you’re my guests, and my Fleet Captains—particularly the eager ones—are my best tools in the campaign that is about to begin in earnest,” Nine Hibiscus snapped. There, that was the I-know-what-you-did portion of the meeting gestured at. If she moved fast enough, she wouldn’t need to expand into a full dressing-down. Sixteen Moonrise was a Fleet Captain, and Nine Hibiscus was going to need the full complement of the Twenty-Fourth Legion—she could have used a triple six of legions, not just a yaotlek’s standard complement of one six, if she was being brutally honest with herself about the situation at hand. Unknown numbers of aliens, a force strong enough to silence whole planets, and here she was with only one six of legions—but she’d been outnumbered before. She’d been outnumbered on Kauraan, and Kauraan had won her this posting, for whatever good it would do her. “And besides,” she finished, ripping a chunk of bread off her roll with her teeth, “the enemy that dared engage us has been neutralized entirely. We aren’t in an active combat situation, Twelve Fusion. Do you think I’d have let you risk yourself and your Fleet Captain coming aboard during one?”