“The Twenty-Fourth will execute this mission as you command, yaotlek,” she said. “It is our honor to serve the Empire. Your hospitality has been impeccable—you remind me ever so much of Minister Nine Propulsion.”
Ex-Minister Nine Propulsion, her former patron. That was the core of this, somehow. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t quite see what Sixteen Moonrise wanted. Not yet, not with how she was still half-hearing the alien noise and watching the best alcohol in the Empire evaporate, formal gesture of détente-ended. Not yet, but it was surely Ministry politics, out here at the edge of the world; the long reach of the Palms mattered for politics as much as for firepower. Which was a sort of pity. She smiled instead of saying anything, her eyes wide, and tipped out her own glass. Thought, rote pattern, May His Brilliance see a thousand stars, and then corrected, internally. Her Brilliance.
“Fourth shift,” she said to Twenty Cicada and the retreating backs of her guests. Eighteen hours away. “Recrew Knifepoint and ready Dreaming Citadel as support for the Fleet Captain’s advance into the Peloa System.”
It was kind of brilliant, really, how fast the people in Inmost Province Spaceport got out of Three Seagrass’s way now that she was dressed as a special envoy. Teixcalaanlitzlim loved a uniform, a well-turned suit in shining colors—and Information cream and flame had never spun her wrong before when she’d needed to make an impression—but an envoy’s suit, with its faint echo of a Fleet uniform done all up in that same flame-colored fabric? People deferred. She was tiny, and her rib cage was never going to be broad enough to write home about—no wide orator’s lungs for her, no substance to her, at least physically—no matter how many poems she declaimed at court. And yet absolutely no one had gotten in her way, even though Inmost Province was as swarmingly crowded as ever. Merchants and freight pallets and soldiers and a thousand thousand Teixcalaanli citizens scattering like seeds to the stars. It was heady. She felt just exactly like she had when she’d been a trainee and skived off from class: a gorgeous and unfolding sense that she was getting away with something.
And it was all entirely, completely, and thoroughly legal. She’d signed off on it herself.
Admittedly, having done so, she’d left an out of office message on repeat outside her office door in cheerful doggerel glyphs, gone home to her flat to pack underwear and hair products and receive delivery of five identical envoy-at-large uniforms, and pointedly ignored any communiqués by cloudhook or infofiche stick that might have arrived with contradictory orders. Also she’d not done the dishes before she left for the spaceport and points unknown, but that wasn’t unusual. She hadn’t done the dishes all week.
A disturbing flicker of thought: neglecting the dishes all week was standard-overworked-Information-agent, neglecting the dishes before a three-month trip to a war zone was the sort of tell that a good interrogator would notice. Three Seagrass could imagine the conversation perfectly: You weren’t really planning on coming back, asekreta, were you? asked the imaginary interrogator, and imaginary future-Three-Seagrass would have to shrug and say, I wasn’t thinking about that, I was preparing to serve Teixcalaan, and then it’d be up to the two of them to figure out if she was lying.
None of this was her current problem, and all of it was unpleasant to consider. Three Seagrass strode through a group of off-planet tourists disembarking from a passenger cruiser and scattered them like leaves; wove her way past an enormous crate of brightly scented, spiky-skinned fruit being offloaded onto pallets; and walked straight up to the ship she knew would get her to the first stop on her route fastest of any ship currently at port in Inmost Province. It wasn’t a military vessel. The Flower Weave was a medical resupply skiff, made for darting out-City loaded with equipment that had an extremely limited shelf life. Potent botanicals straight out of the Science Ministry’s laboratory, offgassing to uselessness if they sat around too long, for example. Or—like this particular ship on this particular run—organs for transplant. Hearts. Nice fresh ones on ice, loaded up with antigens that were apparently—according to her quick and dirty research—quite common in the City but in very rare supply on a small planet right next to the first jumpgate that Three Seagrass wanted to move through.
She blinked directions to her cloudhook, microshifts of her eye, and cued a government official is here to annoy you message to the Flower Weave’s captain. It didn’t take him long to show up, the doors of his hangar bay folding back like a membranous fan. He looked harried. Excellent.
“Captain Eighteen Gravity,” Three Seagrass said, “My name is Special Envoy Three Seagrass, and I need you to take me along with your cargo when you break orbit.”
He blinked. “Envoy,” he said, and bowed over his fingertips, which gave him enough time to collect himself; she could watch him do it. “I’m a medical supply ship,” he went on, as he straightened up. “I can’t detour. My cargo is time-sensitive. I know the regulations say I’m supposed to take envoys anywhere they want to go, but—”
“You’re headed to Calatl System. I am also headed to Calatl System, Captain. And you’re leaving fastest of any ship in this whole spaceport.” Sometimes it was very difficult for Three Seagrass not to smile like a barbarian: bared teeth and gleeful. She’d probably learned that from Mahit. The impulse remained repressible, however, so she repressed it.
“Oh,” said Captain Eighteen Gravity. “If you don’t mind the cramped quarters in the hold, that’s fine, then. We don’t really have a passenger cabin, it’s just me and my first officer and the ixplanatl tech.”
“I am very small,” Three Seagrass said, delightedly. “I squish. Put me in between the boxes of hearts, I’ll do just fine.”
There was a moment where the captain seemed to be attempting to marshal an appropriate response, and then he visibly gave up. “We break orbit in an hour and forty-seven—forty-six, sorry—minutes,” he said. “If you’re squished in with the hearts in an hour and thirty, you can go wherever we go. Envoy.”
“Excellent,” Three Seagrass told him. “Your service to Teixcalaan and Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze does you credit! See you soon.”
An hour and thirty was enough time to grab dinner from one of the multitude of spaceport bars, and Three Seagrass figured she’d need it, if she didn’t want to contemplate carpaccio of medically significant human heart at an inopportune moment. Teixcalaan devours, she thought, and then—no, that wasn’t how Mahit said it at all. She could ask her, maybe, when she got to Lsel Station.
It was on the way to the war. It was in fact right next to the war, in a way that her barbarian must have known would happen when she gave the coordinates of their enemy as sinecure for her Station’s freedom and thought the danger worthwhile. So Lsel was, in fact, a reasonable stop to make—especially if Three Seagrass was meant to learn to talk to aliens, which she was. She could use an alien who was good at talking to humans. Barbarians were the next best thing to aliens. Mahit was the best of the barbarians Three Seagrass had ever met, and also she missed her.