Nine Hibiscus trusted him more than anyone else in the entire galaxy, and she still didn’t understand why he didn’t follow the usual Teixcalaanli religion. Spend time in a sun temple and bleed for luck like anyone else. He’d always kept to the religion of his home planet instead—the homeostat-cult, in crude parlance, even though his home planet had been inside the Empire for generations. Her ikantlos-prime fasted and shaved his head and filled his personal chamber with a thousand growing-green plants, and kept the logistical flow of her ship (and her legion, and her Fleet) running in perfect systematic balance. A person’s religion was their own business, Nine Hibiscus had always thought, but—
Parasites.
It probably wouldn’t matter. Most of these soldiers wouldn’t even register the valences. They hadn’t seen Peloa-2. They hadn’t seen the alien ship-spit eat up one of their own Shard pilots—except for the other Shard pilots who had shared her death. Felt her death, all the way down to the last merciful conflagration. They would know. She wondered how this oration was landing with them. The new technology made Shard pilots even closer to one another than they’d been when she was one of them, and they’d been close then—the closeness of people who were willing to die in starfire brilliance, as easy as breathing.
It was almost over. Twenty Cicada had reached the part of the rite which everyone knew: the call and response eulogy-poem that had closed almost all funerals since the time of the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, when it had been written for her dead ezuazuacat Two Amaranth.
“Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” Twenty Cicada began, and by the time he’d finished the syllables of the line, half the soldiers were saying it along with him, a massed voice that made Nine Hibiscus ache with how much she loved them, loved all of them, loved the hungry and clever beast they made together, they her claws and her lungs and her eyes, and she their guiding mind.
“All of Peloa-2, committed to the earth,” Twenty Cicada said, slurring the scansion to make it fit, “shall burst into a thousand flowers—”
“As many as their breaths in life,” Nine Hibiscus said, joining in. Her mouth knew the shapes of these words. How many times had she said them? How many lives had she commemorated in this way?
Enough. Enough to feel ancient, standing here with all of her soldiers looking up at her on the bridge, to feel heavy in the weight of all their regard.
“And we shall recall their names!”
All the soldiers together: “Their names and the names of their ancestors!”
“And in those names, the people gathered here let blood bloom also from their palms,” called Twenty Cicada, and the soldiers with the copper bowls and carbon-steel sacrifice knives began to move up and down their assigned rows. “And shall cast this chemical fire as well into the earth, to join them—”
The bowl and knife came to Nine Hibiscus’s left. She sliced the pad of her left thumb open, right through the scar from the last time she’d given funereal blood, after Kauraan. She healed fast. It was a good quality in a Fleet Captain.
It was probably an even better one in a yaotlek.
CHAPTER SIX
… the problem (one of the problems) with Third Palmers is that they hate Information enough to cover their tracks on public networks. The Undersecretary Eleven Laurel was a good soldier, but the last time I fought with him we were both twenty years younger, and he’s immured himself in the Ministry of War for longer than I’ve even been on-City. Which makes him institutional memory, especially now that I’ve relocated Nine Propulsion. You know the parameters, Five Agate—get me a dossier before he finishes educating Six Direction’s heir and decides he’d like to be Minister of War, would you?
HOLOPROJ SHOW! THIRD SHIFT THROUGH FIFTH SHIFT ON THE PARABOLIC COMPRESSION DECK TWO TONIGHT, AND SIMULCAST TO ANYONE CLOSE ENOUGH TO TUNE IN! SHOWING THE LATEST EPISODES OF ASPHODEL DROWNING (YES THE NEW ONES! SEASON FIVE! WE MEAN IT! DON’T ASK WHERE WE GOT THEM!)
THANK THE GLORIOUS TWENTY-FOURTH LEGION FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT WHILE WE ALL WAIT AROUND WITH OUR THUMBS UP OUR ASSES
THE Jasmine Throat, a Succor-class Teixcalaanli supply ship, had begun its journey out of Teixcalaanli space a good three weeks before Three Seagrass had, headed for the war with a bellyful of flash-dried cured meats, energy-pulse chargers sized variously for hand weapons all the way up to Shard cannons, apricots and squash blossoms to rehydrate or chew dried on long deployments, and gallons and gallons of medical-grade plasma suspension fluid. Your standard complement of we don’t know what this war is going to be like, but you’ll probably need to eat, and shoot people, and patch up your wounded. The Jasmine Throat had filed a travel plan, and obtained a transit visa for the sector of space that Lsel Station was in, and was, right on schedule, passing by the Station on its way to the Anhamemat Gate and nastier regions beyond.
Three Seagrass, who had put back on her special-envoy uniform with considerable relief the moment she was alone enough to dig it out of her luggage and strip off the jumpsuit, hailed it as it came into hailing range.
The captain of the Jasmine Throat was ixplanatl Six Capsaicin, who did not sound nearly as surprised as Three Seagrass had expected him to be when hailed by an Information Ministry special envoy and asked for a pickup shuttle off of the local not-quite-imperial, definitely-an-independent-republic-we-swear mining station. Probably he had stranger things happen to him all the time—he was a captain and had managed to earn ixplanatl rank, which meant he’d written some kind of scientific thesis in addition to qualifying himself to fly a military supply ship. A person like that surely had had more inconvenient adventures than this one. He had simply checked Three Seagrass’s identity glyph against his cloudhook, determined she was in fact herself and was supposed to be headed to Weight for the Wheel on assignment. Then she’d sent him Mahit’s assignment: the Lsel Ambassador to Teixcalaan, who had graciously volunteered to contribute her skills to the war effort, considering the proximity of her home culture to the front, also needed to be transported there posthaste. Three Seagrass had made the language very official. She hadn’t needed to; Six Capsaicin shrugged, said, “What’s one more warm body for twenty hours, we’ve got the oxygen and she can’t eat that much, Stationers have standard bodily chemistries,” and informed Three Seagrass that a transport shuttle would be arriving for her and her companion in three and three-quarters hours.
It would be very useful if Mahit would come back by then.