“No,” Sixteen Moonrise answered, cutting off her subordinate with a sharp gesture of one hand. “You haven’t half enough legions to waste one on a stunt strategy dinner, yaotlek. Nor are you stupid—”
That was rich, coming from a woman who was legally her subordinate.
“Stupid is not the invective usually shouted at me, no,” she said, and tore off another mouthful of bread. It was sour, and delicious, and the crust was sharp enough to cut her soft palate. Eating it showed her teeth, and she caught Twenty Cicada’s faintly reproachful expression. But propriety wasn’t at all what she wanted to convey just now. No, she wanted a sense of rapid motion, of hunger. “A holo of the combat is already on your shuttle for you to peruse on your way back, Fleet Captain,” she continued. “And the Twenty-Fourth will come and join us at the point position in case more of these spitting, ship-dissolving things attack us. We’ll be ready, with your able assistance. Twenty Cicada, play the audio.”
She had warned him she was going to do this. She wasn’t cruel. (And she’d noticed he hadn’t eaten a single thing save for his obligatory sip of starshine, and hoped she’d keep her own bread down in her belly where it belonged.)
“You picked up a transmission?” Sixteen Moonrise began, and then the air was made of the hideous noise of the aliens again, and Nine Hibiscus at least had the pleasure of seeing the other woman go even paler than her standard color, and snap her jaw shut against an upsurge of bile.
After it was over, Nine Hibiscus said, “I’ve sent for a translator from the Information Ministry.”
“You don’t need a translator, you need a winnowing barrage,” Twelve Fusion said. “Whatever made that shouldn’t exist.”
“Ah, I expect they think the same of you and me,” Twenty Cicada said, as viciously dry as evaporating starshine liquor. “Perhaps we should try to talk to them and find out if there’s anything else they’d like from us instead. Unless you enjoy watching Shard pilots dissolve from the ship inward. Ikantlos-prime.”
Nine Hibiscus could not ask for a better second than the one she had. She knew he knew she knew it, too, even if he wasn’t looking at her.
Sixteen Moonrise placed her hands flat on the table. Nine Hibiscus wondered if they were shaking, or if she was trying to claim space—touching Nine Hibiscus’s ship, getting her palms on it. “Yaotlek,” she said, with the highest level of formality. “Leaving aside the opinion of the entirety of the Twenty-Fourth, which I represent here, that talking to something that talks like that is a waste of all of our time, why the fucking Information Ministry?”
“What, do you want to talk to it instead?”
“I’d like to shoot at it. Without the interference of a bunch of manipulative spooks.”
Nothing in Sixteen Moonrise’s records as Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth had suggested to Nine Hibiscus that she was more bloodthirsty than a standard Teixcalaanli soldier; Nine Hibiscus could imagine saying something similar. I’d like to shoot at it. She would, in fact, like to shoot at anything that came near her right now, including Sixteen Moonrise her own self. And no one in the Six Outreaching Palms was terribly fond of Information; Information were civilians. The eyes of the bureaucracy, of the City, out beyond the jumpgates where the actual City couldn’t see. Eyes, quite often, on Fleet ships, reporting in secret to whoever their master was—either the Minister of Information, spidered away safe planetside (if you believed Fleet rumor), or all Teixcalaan expressed through the person of the Emperor (if you believed the propaganda Information put out). Nine Hibiscus usually neglected to believe the propaganda. Information were—oh, it would work to use Sixteen Moonrise’s term, in her own mind, just for the moment—manipulative spooks.
But she had no one in her legion who could handle learning to talk to aliens that made human planets vanish into silence. And Sixteen Moonrise wasn’t a trustable ally, not with her transparent power play of a challenge via concerned letter. Not with her immediate distrust of Information—that sounded like Third Palmer talk, Fleet intelligence, with their habitual distrust of anyone else’s spywork. The Third Palm had never been one of Nine Hibiscus’s favorite divisions to deal with. They were obstructionist, insistent on using only their own methods, their own people, anytime a Fleet engagement drifted out of strict combat and logistics and into overt psychological manipulation. Usually, Nine Hibiscus gave the orders she would have given anyway, and neglected to ask permission of the nearest political officer.
Sixteen Moonrise was a Fleet Captain, of course, not a political officer, but—she’d have to check the woman’s early service record. Perhaps she had been, once. Either way, Nine Hibiscus didn’t have the luxury of agreeing with her. Not now. Perhaps not at all.
“Information,” said Nine Hibiscus, “talks to aliens as a habit. All of that bullshit with Dispatches From the Numinous Frontier, xenophile poetry and philosophy? These things can’t fuck with Information’s head, Information comes prefucked. It’ll save us time, having them do the diplomacy and extract as much intelligence as possible, while we do the maneuvering. I want you to bring the Parabolic Compression up to meet Weight for the Wheel, with your full complement of Shards, and your stealth cruiser—what’s it called, Twenty Cicada? The fast one.”
“Porcelain Fragment Scorched,” Twenty Cicada said, as smooth as an AI on cloudhook. “It’s a very nice ship, Fleet Captain, you should be proud of the acquisition—where did you get it? From the Sixth Legion in trade…?”
Sixteen Moonrise said, “You’d know, Swarm, wouldn’t you,” and fuck but she was going to push every inch of the way. Nine Hibiscus knocked back her glass of starshine, leaving only the Emperor’s share, the last sip.
“He would,” she said. “We’re going to take back Peloa-2, even if there are more spitting ships waiting out there in the dark. You’re going to, with Porcelain Fragment Scorched. Ask for whatever expertise you need from the Tenth, though I’m sure you’re well staffed. This sector is Teixcalaanli. Let’s remind ourselves of that while we wait for Information’s input.”
“This is a sop,” Sixteen Moonrise said, her voice flat. “I am not a fool, yaotlek.”
“On the contrary, Fleet Captain. You’re just smart enough to know what I’m doing and that it will make you look like you’ve won when you come back to your co-conspirators in the Seventeenth and the Sixth Legions. Here’s the action you requested. And here’s my plan for a larger-scale engagement. You get both. Shall we go to work?”
Sixteen Moonrise made her wait, drawing out the tension between them for a long and ugly moment, and then she flipped over her starshine glass. The last mouthful spilled onto the table and glistened like the spit of their enemy.