It took several hours before she began to understand what the aliens had wanted here, aside from destruction for destruction’s sake. Several hours of finding another and another group of dead Teixcalaanli, days dead, building after building full of corpses. The invading force had been quite efficient in the slaughter. She’d have to check the manifests—she’d ask Twenty Cicada, he would know—but she thought there had been around fifteen hundred colonists on Peloa-2, maybe as many as two thousand. It was a tiny colony. It was a glorified factory floor, a place for turning fine sand full of rare crystalline additives into the kind of glass that made cloudhooks, flexible and near-unbreakable. Peloa-2 was out on the very edge of Teixcalaanli territory, too hot for most people to do more than a short engineering stint on, earn hazard pay on top of their usual contracts with the War Ministry. The only reason all these people were dead, Nine Hibiscus realized, was that these aliens understood supply lines, and what to do with a single-resource colony.
Cut it off. And take whatever it had already produced.
The central factory floor, where the tall stacks of cloudhook-ready glass had waited for their journey back through the jumpgate toward more thickly civilized parts of the universe, was pristine—and empty. Nothing was broken here except the machinery to produce more sheets of glass. All the glass itself was gone, as if it had turned back into silica dust and blown away.
They were hungry, then, these enemies of Teixcalaan: they wanted at least one thing. They wanted to take away a resource the Empire needed, and prevent them from ever being able to make more. They couldn’t know that there were other planets that made cloudhook-glass, other deserts that had the right mineral mix. They were right enough: Peloa-2 had been worth colonizing when the Empire had found it because of those resources, those particular mineral additives. And in a war with the Empire, if your enemy was Teixcalaan, that resource—any resource that was controllable—needed to be denied. Taken away. The people here—the people hadn’t mattered, in that calculation.
How the hell am I going to talk to these things, even with an Information Ministry spook? Nine Hibiscus thought, and blinked herself out of Shard-sight, back into the comforting normalcy of Weight for the Wheel, where no one was currently a half-empty corpse.
“Call it off,” she said on tight-band comm to Sixteen Moonrise. “Pull our people back, set up an orbital perimeter around Peloa, and tell your legion to prepare for a funerary rite for a whole fucking planet.”
Lsel Station was little. Little and very pretty, a turning diamond-shaped jewel set against a rich starfield, two spokes and a thick torus of decks at their middle. Three Seagrass couldn’t quite imagine living on it—it’d be like living on a warship full-time, the biggest warship anyone had ever built—but she liked it immediately.
Liked it, at least, until the cargo barge she’d paid an extortionate price to ride on for eleven uncomfortable, chilly hours docked at the bottom point of one of those spokes and began to unload its crates of—well, whatever was in them was labeled in Verashk-Talay, and thus Three Seagrass wasn’t sure if she was remembering the script for “fish” correctly or not. Freeze-dried fish? Fish powder? Who could need this many crates of fish powder, even out here on a planetless planet made of metal? She’d unloaded herself along with the crates, still in her Esker-1 jumpsuit, and a tall barbarian with an enormous forehead had immediately grabbed her, shoved her up against a wall, and demanded some information in Mahit’s very syllabic and unpronounceable language. Three Seagrass didn’t know what information, and also the wall was metal and hurt to be shoved into, and the cargo-barge engineer took it upon herself to stand around unhelpfully, emitting I told you so in every gesture.
Maybe she should have worn the special-envoy outfit.
“I’m Envoy Three Seagrass of the Teixcalaanli Information Ministry,” she said, in her own language, loudly, “and you’re committing a diplomatic offense. Unhand me.”
The barbarian apparently knew Teixcalaanli. He unhanded her. And then he pressed some button on a flat screen he carried instead of a cloudhook, and a rather loud alarm began to go off: a bright noise, three tones repeated, like the start of a song, if the song was being played in a noisecore club in Belltown Six.
“You’re who?” asked the cargo-barge engineer.
Three Seagrass waved a hand at her ears. Can’t hear you, someone’s decided to set off an alarm, also that is a terrible question all considered.
“I brought what here?” asked the cargo-barge captain, which was insulting. Three Seagrass was a person, not a what. She shrugged. Smiled, Teixcalaanli wide-eyed. Made sure she had control of her luggage, while the barbarian who had grabbed her said, “Don’t move,” in quite passable Teixcalaanli. She didn’t move.
(Her heart was in her throat. If the alarm went off for much longer, she might actually get scared. Being thrown in jail on Lsel Station would be an abrogation of her duties as an envoy, not to mention that she’d never been in jail unless that terrible few hours trapped in the Ministry during the insurrection counted—she wasn’t supposed to have come here at all—)
There was a commotion at the other end of the hangar. The barbarian who’d set up the alarm had summoned some more barbarians with it, it seemed like—important ones, for how the attention of all the other Stationers working to unload this barge and the other newly arrived ships had rotated their attention toward them. Three Seagrass could read the feel of the room, even when she was scared, even when it was so loud—that bit of her training hadn’t deserted her, even outside the Empire amongst strangers. One of the newcomers waved an arm, and the alarm silenced itself.
Three Seagrass exhaled hard into the quiet. Shut her eyes for a quarter second, squeezed the lids together until she saw phosphenes, rolled her shoulders back. Thought, Here we go, then, time to talk my way to Mahit Dzmare, even if I have to tie my tongue in spirals to get through to these Stationers. Opened her eyes again.
And found Mahit herself standing in front of her, flanked by an old man and a middle-aged woman who looked like a hawk.
Mahit looked awful, and also rested. Still tall as ever, spare-boned and olive-pale, with the same curly hair—longer now, tendrils down the back of her neck and framing her face, brushing her cheekbones and making them even sharper, as sharp as her nose was. She no longer seemed like a strong shove would knock her sideways, sleepless and shaken; instead she looked surprised, and angry, and faintly sick to her stomach. My barbarian, Three Seagrass thought, which was—oh, inopportune in its fondness, entirely.
“Hello,” she said to Mahit, and tried smiling like a Stationer again.
“What are you doing here?” Mahit asked her, and it was very nice to have someone speak her own language so gracefully. “Three Seagrass, I was under the impression you were an Undersecretary now, not in the habit of being smuggled cargo—”
“You know her,” said the hawk-faced woman. It seemed very like an accusation. Of course Mahit would be in some kind of political mess; she attracted them. Three Seagrass was well aware of that, from direct experience.