Whatever political game Sixteen Moonrise was playing, coming onto her flagship and invading her medical labs, it seemed to have paled before the possibility of having come up with a good idea. Nine Hibiscus wondered if she’d aimed for a medical career before she’d joined the Fleet, or was just the sort of ghoul who watched autopsies and studied the inner workings of bodies for her own amusement. “Go lower,” she repeated, and her eyes were wide in a satisfied grin.
Nine Hibiscus nodded to her medtech, and he did as Sixteen Moonrise was suggesting, splitting the tube of the trachea open so it lay nearly flat, a ridged strip of stiff flesh. Where it began to divide, there was something—a bony structure like another voice box, surrounded by what looked like a deflated balloon connected to a whole series of muscles Nine Hibiscus definitely did not remember from basic anatomy.
“A syrinx,” said Sixteen Moonrise, with profound satisfaction. “Birds have them. Your spook and her pet are wrong, yaotlek—this alien can make all sorts of horrible noises with that thing.”
The balloon around it must be the part that vibrated, Nine Hibiscus thought, and the muscles were what held it at appropriate levels of tension. With a certain delicious squeamishness, she reached into the alien’s throat and stretched the membrane between her fingertips. It was strong and thick. Her fingertips were red.
If this had been her kill, she’d have smeared the blood on her forehead in victory. But she didn’t deserve that yet.
“Cut it out,” she directed the medtech. “With as many of the muscles as you can keep. And preserve it. I suspect my spook and her pet”—that, for Sixteen Moonrise’s benefit, an acknowledgment, a sidewise appreciation of the other Fleet Captain’s skill at predicting autopsy results—“might want to use it to make some of those noises themselves.”
“So you are trusting the Information agent,” said Sixteen Moonrise. They’d come away from the table to let the medtech do his work. Nine Hibiscus hadn’t washed her hands yet. There was something satisfying about having touched the alien and not being dead, or dissolving. Some small part of the mystery of them undone. They died. They died and bled and cooled and were peculiar but entirely understandable as collections of organs. Just meat, like any other dead thing.
“Why shouldn’t I?” she asked Sixteen Moonrise. “And if you tell me because she’s a spook, I will have to revise your intelligence downward, and that would be a shame. Specifics, Fleet Captain.”
Sixteen Moonrise refused to bristle, which Nine Hibiscus gave her some credit for. She said, “You have no idea who she is or where her loyalties lie, except perhaps to Teixcalaan. She’s not Fleet. This,”—she gestured at the alien, the medical bay, the whole situation—“is Fleet work. I never imagined the hero of Kauraan would want to bring in outsiders to prosecute a war. With all due respect, yaotlek.”
“I’m not a hero,” Nine Hibiscus found herself saying. “I’m a soldier. And Kauraan was won by soldiers, using the best possible intelligence I could procure. I don’t deny my people resources, Fleet Captain. I provide them. The Information agent will get us what we lack, without exposing my people—or yours, or Forty Oxide’s, or anyone’s—to these aliens any more than is strictly necessary.”
“The Fleet has an intelligence service,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and left it there, hanging between them like a challenge. Why haven’t you gone to the Third Palm, O yaotlek, if you are so concerned with providing adequate resources? She didn’t need to say it. Nine Hibiscus could hear it very well in the silence of the room, interrupted only by the occasional squelch of alien fluids coming from the medtech at work behind them.
“We don’t do first contact,” she said, as if that was an adequate answer. “Information does. And there’s only one spook, Sixteen Moonrise. Far more controllable than a squadron of Third Palmers.”
A flicker of some emotion behind those pale eyes. Nine Hibiscus wondered if she’d given Sixteen Moonrise too much information about her own distaste for the Fleet’s intelligencers. That would only be a true problem if the Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth was herself a Third Palmer, or had been, before she became an officer—she had to check her public records. Or have Swarm do it. But they’d been so busy.
“One spook and one barbarian,” said Sixteen Moonrise, eventually. “A spook I could understand. One with an agenda that includes foreigners who were involved with starting this war? That, yaotlek, disturbs me. She’s from Lsel Station. Lsel Station is the little independent entity that told us about these aliens in the first place—”
“And brought down One Lightning, yes,” Nine Hibiscus said.
“One Lightning, and Minister Nine Propulsion along with him.”
Minister Nine Propulsion, Nine Hibiscus’s patron and mentor, her political protection. Sixteen Moonrise was implying that Nine Propulsion hadn’t retired—but that she’d been implicated in the coup, been pushed out and replaced. “I’m sure the former Minister is enjoying her retirement,” Nine Hibiscus said. It was so difficult to imagine Nine Propulsion doing something like getting involved in an attempted usurpation. She’d always been so careful, a watchful eye in the City, steady enough that Nine Hibiscus had felt she could always take appropriate risks and be backed up.
“Retirement is an interesting way to put it,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “Half the Ministry turned over, yaotlek, that’s not retirements.” That was a goad. She was trying to get Nine Hibiscus to complain about the new Emperor, about the new Minister of War, Three Azimuth, the very people who had given her this command—
(Who had sent her out here to defeat an impossible force with only one six of legions, half of which had signed on to Sixteen Moonrise’s little letter of insubordination. Which suggested—unpleasantly—that Sixteen Moonrise was right, and she was being punished for being Nine Propulsion’s protégé, and Nine Propulsion had been in on the attempted usurpation, after all—)
And if she said any of that, she’d be playing into whatever political game Sixteen Moonrise had brought with her from the Ministry to the front lines. She’d be admitting that her own loyalties might not be to the Empire, or even the Ministry of War. She refused to be entrapped like this. “A new Emperor has new military priorities. And Three Azimuth deserved the promotion. To tell you the truth, Fleet Captain, I hope I do as well as Nine Propulsion has, when my time in the front lines is done.”
Let Sixteen Moonrise think she hadn’t picked up the insinuation of Nine Propulsion’s disloyalty. Let her think she was simpler than she was.
“With your record, I can’t imagine otherwise,” Sixteen Moonrise said, which was vicious. Nine Hibiscus could hate her. If she didn’t need her and her Twenty-Fourth Legion to win this war, she could hate her quite a lot.
“That’s a lovely thing to say,” she told her, and smiled with the edges of her teeth showing.
Sixteen Moonrise matched her: that sliver of tooth-bone like a threat. “What I’m trying to convey, yaotlek, Ministers all aside, is that I don’t trust anything that came from Lsel Station. And attached to a spook just makes it worse.”
There was some agenda here, a deeper and more unpleasant one than a rivalry between Fleet Captains. Sixteen Moonrise wanted the Third Palm involved with this war. She wanted it very, very much. And that meant someone in the Ministry or the rest of the palace wanted political-officer attention on what Nine Hibiscus was doing.