Porcelain Fragment Scorched was a beautiful ship. Through the ever-shifting viewpoints of Shard-eyes, it cut through space like an obsidian blade, darkly reflective: a stealth cruiser, Pyroclast-class. If it wasn’t the pride of Sixteen Moonrise’s Twenty-Fourth Legion, it ought to be. As it came around the far side of the Peloa System’s dwarf sun—where Knifepoint had been when they’d been intercepted by the three-ringed alien ship—it looked like a slightly darker piece of starfield. Almost invisible. Dreaming Citadel floated in its wake, letting Sixteen Moonrise (of course she’d taken the command herself; Nine Hibiscus would have done exactly the same) lead. No one had seen Peloa-2 since the communication blackout. Nine Hibiscus wasn’t sure what she expected. Anything from a blackened, burnt-out shell to a bright-lit, healthy colony with some kind of blockade up around it—
It was neither. Peloa-2 looked like Peloa-2 was supposed to, from holoimages: a small planet, three continents, large silicate desert in the middle of the biggest one. The Teixcalaanli colony at the southern edge of that desert, the shape of refineries and cloudhook-glass production facilities just visible, like a glyph etched into the landscape. All that pure silica sand, white-glitter surrounding the colony, a setting for a rough industrial jewel. Day, down on the part of the planet where there was settlement, so it was impossible to tell if the colony had power or not. The usual collection of satellites was still in orbit—but half of those satellites were dark, and the planet itself was—there was no movement, no rise and descent of small craft. And no visible aliens.
Over the Shard-chatter feed she heard Sixteen Moonrise, smooth and unfazed, say, “Come in slow to orbit. It’s a graveyard.”
Nine Hibiscus had no biofeedback to shiver with, but she shivered anyway, imagined it collective—all the Shards feeling that crawling, silent peculiarity. It’s a graveyard. Sixteen Moonrise wasn’t wrong. As they slipped in close, Dreaming Citadel passed the darkened satellites. They were debris and nothing more, ragged, chewed open; parts of them torn away. Nine Hibiscus tried to see a pattern in the devouring—the aliens could want metal, could want reactor cores, oxygen, any manner of thing—and couldn’t. The satellites merely looked ripped. Eviscerated. Whatever is useful in them is what they wanted to take, she found herself thinking. The animating force. Whatever made them objects with a purpose and not discarded trash. That’s what they took.
She was aware that she was anthropomorphizing the threat, giving meaning and reason to what might very well be reasonless destruction. These aliens weren’t people. They weren’t even barbarians.
Sixteen Moonrise again, on comms, steady command: “Maintain orbit and stay in touch. I’m sending down a ground party—six Shards from Dreaming Citadel, ten from Porcelain. Peel off.”
A risk. One that Nine Hibiscus might not have taken—if the satellites were a graveyard (and no wonder all of Peloa-2 had gone dark to communication, they had nothing left to communicate with), what sort of mass destruction would exist on the planet below? But she had told Sixteen Moonrise to retake this colony. Had challenged her to do it. And merely surrounding it with Teixcalaanli ships was insufficient. If there were Teixcalaanli citizens down there, they deserved to be reclaimed. They deserved defending. To be brought back into the world. Nine Hibiscus shifted her focus to ride with the Shard pilots headed down through the burn of atmosphere, letting the remainder fade to background, peripheral vision on her cloudhook, flickers in the dark.
They hailed the colony’s spaceport on the way in—the usual way, asking for a landing vector and an appropriate berth between the skynets. Shards came down on their own power—not like seed-skiffs or cargo, which had to be caught. It should have been routine. (Nothing about this planet was routine.)
Peloa-2 didn’t answer the hail. They didn’t answer the second hail, either, or the broadcast on all channels which instructed the port to be cleared, War Ministry override—Nine Hibiscus would have skipped that one, wide broadcast felt too risky. Even graveyards could be haunted by the things that made graves. The Shards landed where they could, made their descent through the orange-purple glow of plasma and the pressure and shaking of deceleration g-forces, and came to rest neatly enough. All these pilots had made far more complex landings, in far worse conditions than radio silence and no vector bearings, only visual confirmation on a safe spot to sink down.
The spaceport was dark, too. Silent. No Teixcalaanlitzlim and no aliens came to meet the sixteen ships. Full daylight—the readout on one of the Shards’ instrumentation panels told its pilot that it was nearly fifty degrees outside, summer on Peloa-2, right on the upper edge of human tolerances—and Nine Hibiscus on her bridge so very far away still felt chilled, looking at all that silence and stillness. The plumes of silicate dust, rising when the wind did, ripples of white in the air like storm-whipped snow.
Sixteen Moonrise’s voice in her ears: “Find out how bad it is. Locate survivors if you can.”
That was an order Nine Hibiscus might have given. No matter what else they disagreed on, it was good to know that she and Sixteen Moonrise were both concerned with the Empire’s people and what had become of them. That was somewhere to start, in finding commonalities that might let them work together during this war.
Shard-sight carried her out of the ships—she was glad for the pilots that they had their vacuum suits and the temperature control they maintained, and also for the updated interfaces that rode in them, keeping the collective vision active even on the ground, without the benefit of a ship’s AI to route the connections through. Glad all the way until they reached the insides of the port’s buildings and found the first bodies.
Nine Hibiscus was a soldier. She’d killed more people than she strictly could count—there was no way to know, for real, in space combat situations—and some of those people had been face-to-face, blood and the stink of shit and organ meat spilled and wasted, sacrifices to no one and to everyone at once. She’d worn the blood of her first groundside kill across her forehead until it flaked off, that old ritual, and had felt more Teixcalaanli at that moment than at any other time in her life. Twenty years old and crowned red, up to her knees in the mud of some half-rebelled planetoid—
—and still, seeing these bodies, she wished she could unsee them. So many people. Cut open, mostly: not the clean death of energy weapons, though there were some of those scars too, Teixcalaanlitzlim turned to partially blackened, partially melted corpse-friezes. But mostly, cut open. Eviscerated like the satellites. She thought, Maybe they eat large mammals, and almost found that idea comforting—a species that thought humans were prey was a problem, but the Ebrekti ate large mammals too, and they’d managed with the Ebrekti. But none of the spilled viscera had been chewed on. It had all just been—pulled out. Discards, then, not food.
How easy it was to begin to think like these enemies. And in thinking like them, to begin to hate them quite personally.
The group leader from Dreaming Citadel’s complement of Shards gestured to her companions, and to the Shard group from Porcelain: We go this way, you go that way. Her opposite number nodded. They were running silent, for safety’s sake—if the aliens were still here, letting them know they had company would be a good way to get rapidly killed—relying only on their shared sight to communicate by. Nine Hibiscus was drawn along with the group comprising her people. They knew she was with them, watching. She hoped they found it a comfort, as they waded through the destruction of Peloa-2. Their Fleet Captain, witnessing as they did.