<She’s very good,> Yskandr murmured, and Mahit agreed with him. Nine Hibiscus was exquisitely in command, even when surprised, as she had clearly been surprised by Sixteen Moonrise. Mahit suspected she hadn’t even known the Fleet Captain was on board her flagship until she’d walked into this makeshift morgue with Mahit and Three Seagrass.
—who was in the middle of saying, serene and direct, “After extensive audio analysis of the samples you sent to the Ministry of Information, we believe that the sounds on the transmission are tonal markers, not specific speech—and unless this alien has got vocal cords made of synthesizers and a theremin, it can’t have made them by itself.”
“You could dissect it and find out, though,” Mahit added. “To be certain that it isn’t capable of producing sound via oscillating magnetic fields.”
“You’ve dissected the rest,” added Sixteen Moonrise. “You might as well look at its neck. Since I’m here, I’ll stay and watch. It’s my soldiers who are being killed by these things most imminently, after all.”
“If I’d known you were on board the Weight for the Wheel, Fleet Captain,” said Twenty Cicada silkily, “more than two minutes before you met me in the hangar bay, I would have made sure you also were invited to the autopsy.”
Mahit couldn’t turn around to see Sixteen Moonrise’s reaction, and having it occur behind her made her feel peculiarly exposed, her skin prickling with the crawling sensation of being watched, even if she wasn’t at all the focus of the watcher. She wanted to see. This tangle of Fleet Captains was—significant, important; if she and Three Seagrass were going to be useful enough to survive this war, she had to understand it.
<You’re still thinking like we’re trying to get away from Councilor Amnardbat,> Yskandr whispered to her. <Useful enough to survive this war? It’s not that bad. Yet.>
Yet, Mahit thought. But it’s politics, and I need to understand—
<The shape of it. Who wants Information here, and who doesn’t.> And then Yskandr slipped away from her, a banked fire just out of reach, like some fish streaking silver-sided into the shadows of the hydroponic tanks.
Sixteen Moonrise, whatever her expression, was saying, “Swarm, I had always believed better of you—Porcelain Fragment Scorched docked four hours back, and I have been cooling my heels all unknown to the adjutant of our yaotlek?”
Twenty Cicada—Swarm. Mahit remembered what Yskandr had said to her, when she’d caught sight of his tattoos. Homeostat-cultist. With the name of an insect. A pervasive insect. Teixcalaanlitzlim weren’t supposed to have names which were animals, at all. Did insects not qualify as animals? She’d always assumed they did.
Nine Hibiscus watched the squabble with that same threatening impassiveness that seemed to be endemic to her, and then set her hands down on the metal autopsy table heavily enough to quell any further sniping. One on either side of the alien’s head, as if she could crush it between her palms. “Stay, Sixteen Moonrise. See the inside of our enemy. The medtech will fill you in on what you’ve missed. Now. You—” She pointed at Three Seagrass with her chin. “I want to know if either you or your barbarian linguist can talk back with these tonal markers you say you’ve identified. That’s the whole point of you. Figure out how to talk to these things before I decide they’re not worth the trouble of talking to.”
“What’s your broadcast system like?” Three Seagrass asked, bright and effervescent, as if this would be no trouble at all. Mahit knew better. They’d barely started interpreting the sounds on the transmission, spent half of their interpretation time too nauseated to think, breathing in gasps against the wrongness of those sounds. They might be able to say something to the aliens, but it was almost certainly going to be a wrong thing, a half-formed and misshapen utterance, distorted by human tongues and human minds.
<But it might draw them in close,> Yskandr murmured, and she thought, Bait.
Just like Darj Tarats had used Lsel as bait for Teixcalaan.
Just as she herself was bait now—for Three Seagrass, for this Fleet. If she acted as Tarats’s saboteur. She didn’t know how she could. She didn’t—
<You don’t want to.>
I don’t want to be bad at my job on purpose, Mahit thought, a vicious little stab of a phrase, and felt Yskandr’s answering query of Oh? And your job is first-contact protocols now? as a stabbing pain from elbows to fourth fingers and her own voice in her own head. They were so very close now. And still the places they were misaligned bloomed into pain.
“We can prepare a transmission to be intercepted on the frequency they used,” said Nine Hibiscus to Three Seagrass. “Once you have a transmission to send. Bring it to me first. Twenty Cicada will show you to your quarters and to the communications workroom.”
That was some sort of a dismissal. The next gesture the yaotlek made, calling the medtech in his red scrubs over and Sixteen Moonrise to stand by her side and watch, was another. Mahit bowed deep over her fingertips, and found herself distressed all over again by the comfort of knowing that gesture was appropriate again, here. At how easily she’d been scooped up out of the Station, slipped easily into the politics and pleasures and poisons of Teixcalaan. At how much she wanted to be useful, and how much she hated that wanting.
The throat of the alien peeled open under her medtech’s scalpel like a perfectly ripe fruit. Inside Nine Hibiscus could see the usual sort of muscles, still sluggishly oozing red. Oxygenated blood. It hadn’t been dead very long, this alien, and wasn’t that disturbing, if she thought about it too deeply—this thing had been alive, and hungry, and acting with its own inexplicable intelligence, less than half a day ago, and if it wasn’t cut open like this, it could have been hiding, pretending, lying in wait to spring—
Sixteen Moonrise, persistent at her left elbow, leaned in and peered at the flash of the scalpel blade as it sliced the muscle free and revealed something that looked like a trachea, ribbed and rubbery. “It looks like a normal throat,” she said, and Nine Hibiscus wondered how many throats her fellow Fleet Captain had dissected personally.
“Open it. At the top, where the larynx should be,” Nine Hibiscus said, and her medtech did.
There were laryngic membranes, all right. A large but—from what she could remember from basic anatomy, aeons ago at the Fleet academy in her first year—standard sort of arrangement. Folds of alien flesh at the top of the alien trachea, all very regular and mammalian-standard: closeable to keep food out of the airway, capable of vibrating to produce sound when air was forced through them. Nothing that looked like it could produce those machine-screaming resonant noises from the intercepted recording.
Sixteen Moonrise said, “Go lower. Where the trachea branches into the lungs. It has lungs, right?”
The lungs were resting in metal basins across the surgery-cum-autopsy room, on a shelf. Nine Hibiscus pointed at them. “It had lungs. Two of them.”