“I do appreciate your candid opinion, Fleet Captain,” she said. “And be assured, I will keep as many eyes on the spook as are necessary. Let’s see what sort of work she does for us. I’ll reserve my judgment.”
“As you like,” Sixteen Moonrise said. “I believe your tech has extracted the syrinx, yaotlek. Fill it full of air and see if it screams for you before you let the spook have it.”
And with that, she saluted, spun on her heel, and left Nine Hibiscus alone with the dismembered corpse of their enemy, which had begun to stink of decomposition.
The adjutant Twenty Cicada did not escort Three Seagrass and Mahit to whatever quarters were prepared for them. Instead he mentioned, in an offhand fashion Three Seagrass recognized intimately—the precise air of a person who had to deal with vastly more complex logistics-management problems than this present one at least four times a day—that while their quarters were reconfigured for two beds instead of one, the pair of them could get straight to work.
“Envoy,” he said, as they followed him through the busy, fine-kept corridors of the Weight for the Wheel, being watched with unabashed curiosity by all sorts of Fleet personnel, “your cloudhook should have a map of the ship now that you’re aboard. You and Ambassador Dzmare have the communications workroom until twenty-two hundred hours—and the yaotlek will want some sort of result at that point.” He glanced back over his shoulder with a sharp smile, a narrow movement of the eyes and the corners of the mouth. Smiling looked odd on a person who lacked eyebrows and hair. Three Seagrass had never interacted with a person who took homeostasis-practice so seriously; most people with an unusual religion were less pointed about reminding you of it. She was … interested, she decided. Interested in how this man had come to his high place of power, while looking ever so not-quite-civilized. But eyebrows or none, Three Seagrass suspected Twenty Cicada knew his master Nine Hibiscus well enough to have meant what he said: the yaotlek would want a report at the end of the evening shift, no matter how late that shift ended or how well matched it was with the yaotlek’s own sleeping schedule.
“She’ll have it,” Three Seagrass said, and bowed very deeply when Twenty Cicada took this promise as sufficient collateral to nod to the both of them and disappear off at an angle on some business of his own—not an errand boy, that one. Not someone who usually escorted stray Information agents around the ship. Not that an adjutant would be—
And oh, there was the map, gleaming in tracery over her cloudhook. Four decks up, toward the bow. Easy enough.
“Follow me,” she said to Mahit, who was being very quiet. Unusually so, especially after she’d been all flashfire forwardness in the medbay. Had Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise spooked her? Three Seagrass didn’t remember Mahit spooking easily. But spooked or not, she followed, close at Three Seagrass’s left shoulder, their habitual positions all reversed. The ship map overlaid on the right side of her vision was easy to follow—someone, probably Twenty Cicada, had highlighted their destination with a small glowing star—and they moved up three levels of the enormous flagship without incident. On the fourth, though—oh, there was the security-conscious Fleet that Three Seagrass had always been taught about in Information briefings.
It came in the person of a serenely massive Fleet soldier, his hair in a neat queue, his energy pistol—all right, energy pistols, plural—holstered with elegant threat at each hip, who barred the door that Three Seagrass’s map required them to pass through on their way to the communications workroom. This soldier held out a hand, palm flat and authoritative, and Three Seagrass lurched to a stop, with Mahit just behind her.
“You are both out of uniform,” said the soldier. “Her especially.” He indicated Mahit with his chin. “What is your business on this deck?”
“I am the envoy Three Seagrass, seconded here by the Information Ministry,” said Three Seagrass, with some annoyance—wasn’t her envoy’s suit uniform uniform enough? But perhaps this soldier had never seen one. “And this is Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. Do check your manifests, sir, we’re on our way to the communications workroom on the yaotlek’s orders.”
The soldier blinked through some search function on his cloudhook, found whatever he was looking for, and then made her and Mahit wait. She could feel Mahit’s nervous energy like a thrumming power generator at her side, and yet her barbarian continued not saying anything. After an interminable fifteen seconds, the soldier pressed his fingertips together in the most cursory of acknowledgments, and waved them through. “To the left, Envoy. Ambassador,” he said, as if there had been absolutely no reason to stop them.
It happened again approximately two hundred feet down the corridor, the instant they’d passed out of visual view of one soldier and into the purview of the next. Three Seagrass was unpleasantly reminded of the Sunlit of her childhood, before the algorithmic reform, back when they would ask you the same questions if you’d switched jurisdictions, no matter how many jurisdictions you passed through. This soldier was shorter, brisker, and visibly horrified at Mahit’s lack of propriety: her complaint about you are both out of uniform was accompanied by an encompassing hand gesture, shoulder to foot, as if to suggest, What is a nice envoy like you doing with a jacket-and-trouser set like that?
Three Seagrass expected Mahit to take point on this one, to give the explanation of who they were as confidently as she’d introduced herself to the yaotlek in the medical bay. But she didn’t. She raised her eyebrows at Three Seagrass until Three Seagrass repeated what she’d told the last soldier, suffered through the waiting as the soldier consulted her cloudhook, and then breezily waved them onward.
The third time, at the door of the communications workroom itself, was just insulting. The previous impediment was still in view, and doing absolutely nothing about informing her compatriot that the two people standing in front of her had reasonable and assigned business behind the door she was guarding so assiduously.
“You’re—” the soldier began.
“Out of uniform, yes,” Mahit snapped, at last—snapped with a fluid and vicious intonation Three Seagrass didn’t remember her using back in the palace. Something in the tone, the deep and bored dismissal of the problem at hand.
I wonder what Yskandr Aghavn sounded like when he was pissed off, she thought, and didn’t like thinking it.
“If you would check your records,” she added, before Mahit could say anything else.
“There’s no need to be so abrupt, Envoy,” said the soldier, which didn’t help: if this one knew who she and Mahit were, why under every single bleeding star wasn’t she letting them into the workroom?
“We have orders to be inside that workroom,” Mahit said, with that same silky viciousness, her Teixcalaanli note-perfect. “Orders from your yaotlek. For the safety of the Fleet and the apt and skillful prosecution of this war.”
She was, Three Seagrass realized, quoting one of the Reclamation Songs—“Song #16,” one of the more obscure ones because it was so long and thus difficult to memorize. The apt and skillful prosecution of this war. Fifteen perfect Teixcalaanli syllables, with a caesura in the center. Fuck but it was a continuous heartbreak that Mahit Dzmare had been born a barbarian—