Twenty Cicada knew all that. It wasn’t for him. It was for how Eighteen Chisel in Navigation’s shoulders dropped an inch; how Two Foam, on comm, actually sent the message she’d been hesitating on for the past five minutes, reporting continued clear skies to the rest of their multilegion Fleet.
“Excellent,” said Twenty Cicada. “Then you won’t mind if I borrow you for a moment, yaotlek?”
“Tell me that we are not still having problems with the escaped pets in the air ducts on Deck Five, and I will not mind being borrowed,” Nine Hibiscus said, widening her eyes in fond near-mockery. The pets—small furred things that vibrated pleasantly and ate vermin, a peculiar variant on cat that was endemic to Kauraan—had come aboard during their last planetfall there, when she’d still been Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth Legion, not yaotlek yet. The pets had not been a problem—or something Nine Hibiscus had even known about—until they had decided to reproduce themselves, and moved into a Deck Five air duct to do it. Twenty Cicada had complained vociferously about how they were disturbing the homeostasis of Weight for the Wheel’s environment.
“It is not the pets,” Twenty Cicada said. “That I promise. Conference room?”
If he wanted privacy to discuss whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. “Perfect,” Nine Hibiscus said, pushing herself upright. She was twice as wide as Twenty Cicada, but he moved around her as if he had solidity enough to match. “Two Foam, your bridge.”
“My bridge, Yaotlek,” Two Foam called, and that was as it should be, so Nine Hibiscus went to see what was wrong with her ship—her Fleet—now.
Weight for the Wheel had two conference rooms right off the bridge—a large one, for strategy meetings, and a small one, for fixing problems. Nine Hibiscus had repurposed the latter from an auxiliary weapon-control station when she’d first been made captain. A ship needed a space to have private official conversations, she’d thought then, and she’d been largely right; the small conference room was the best place to solve personnel issues, recorded on the ship’s cameras, visible and invisible all at once. She took Twenty Cicada inside, cuing the door to open with a micromovement of one eye that directed her cloudhook to talk to the ship’s algorithmic AI.
Twenty Cicada wasn’t given to preambles; Nine Hibiscus had always known him to be efficient, brisk and clean and mercilessly direct. He preceded her through the door—and to her surprise, did not turn to give his report. Instead he headed directly for the room’s narrow viewport and put a hand up against the plastisteel separating his body and the vacuum. Nine Hibiscus felt a flicker of warmth at the familiarity of the gesture, warmth mixed with uncomfortable dread: like her, Twenty Cicada touched the ship, but he touched it like he was longing for space to come in and take his hand. He’d done that for as long as Nine Hibiscus had known him, and the two of them had met on their very first deployment.
Which was long enough ago by now that Nine Hibiscus didn’t particularly feel like counting the years.
“Swarm,” she said—the nickname he’d gotten back on that deployment, the one she had mostly given up calling him for the sake of officer hierarchy—“spit it out. What’s going on?”
“Sir,” he said, still staring out at the black, gentle corrective for the cameras, even if the recordings of this room would never be seen by anyone but her: who outranked a yaotlek? But he was so correctly a Fleet officer, a Teixcalaanlitzlim’s Teixcalaanlitzlim, seamless in the role of ikantlos-prime and adjutant, a man who could have walked out of The Expansion History or Opening Frontier Poems, except that the system his people had come from hadn’t even been absorbed into Teixcalaan when either of those works had been written. (Except that he still kept up some of that system’s peculiar cultural-religious practices—but hesitance wasn’t one of those, either. At least not one she knew about.)
“Yes, ikantlos? Report.”
Finally he turned, widened his eyes in wry and resigned amusement, and said, “In about two hours, sir, you’re going to get an official communiqué, addressed to you specifically as yaotlek in charge of this combined Fleet, from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise on the Parabolic Compression of the Twenty-Fourth Legion, demanding to know what the delay in action is. It will be countersigned by Fleet Captain Forty Oxide of the Seventeenth and Fleet Captain Two Canal of the Sixth. We have a problem.”
“The Seventeenth and the Sixth?” Nine Hibiscus asked. “They hate each other. That rivalry is two hundred years old. How did Sixteen Moonrise get them both to sign?”
They absolutely had a problem. Her combined Fleet was six legions strong: her own Tenth and five more, each with its own Fleet Captain newly subordinate to her authority. The traditional yaotlek’s six, both tactically effective and symbolically sound—if a somewhat limited amount of manpower to win a war with. Enough, though, to start a war, which Nine Hibiscus understood her purpose here to be. To start, and then to win with whatever resources she would need to call up from the core of Teixcalaan, if such resources were necessary.
But if three of her initial yaotlek’s six were already willing to sign an opening salvo against her authority as yaotlek … She didn’t need to say it; both she and Twenty Cicada knew what a letter like this one meant. It was a test, a press to check for weak spots: a light barrage to find the best point to concentrate a wedge attack. It was bad enough that she’d been given both the Sixth and the Seventeenth Legions as part of her Fleet, but she’d expected any ensuing conflict to be between them, something to carefully manage by doling out the best assignments equally. Not this surprising show of political unity through displeasure.
“From what information I’ve received from my associates on their ships,” said Twenty Cicada, “Sixteen Moonrise appealed on the one side to Forty Oxide’s long experience compared to yours, and on the other to Two Canal’s vehement wish that she had been made yaotlek instead of you, and neither of them knew the other one had agreed until right before they agreed to send the message.”
There were reasons that Twenty Cicada was nicknamed Swarm, and it wasn’t just his peculiar name: a name with a living creature in it instead of a proper object or color or plant. Swarm was Swarm because he was everywhere at once: he knew someone on every ship in the Fleet, and those someones tended to keep him well-informed. Nine Hibiscus clicked her teeth together, considering. “Politics,” she said. “All right. We’ve had politics before.”
Nine Hibiscus had had politics come after her more than once. Anyone who made Fleet Captain did. Anyone who made Fleet Captain and meant to keep the position and win victories for her legion—well, that sort of Teixcalaanlitzlim made enemies. Jealous ones.
(Every time there’d been politics before, though, Nine Hibiscus had also had Nine Propulsion in the Ministry as a threat of last resort. The new Minister of War, Three Azimuth, was no one’s friend in particular—or at least she wasn’t Nine Hibiscus’s friend.)
“Two Canal and Forty Oxide aren’t the point anyhow,” said Twenty Cicada. “Sixteen Moonrise is. She’s the instigator—she’s the one you’re going to have to defuse.”