This is a terrible idea. What animal doesn’t come back from a long hunt hungry for scraps? But you don’t want to hear pretty Teixcalaanli rhetoric, do you. You want something direct? How about this: every Fleet officer I’ve ever met would get greedy enough to take a little detour into Station-conquering if they were bored enough and had the opportunity of legal proximity. Fuck off about this and give me another year to work. You’ll get your precious isolation.
EIGHT Antidote came into the Ministry of War through the front door, like he was supposed to be there. Like he’d won the right to be there, which he guessed he had. Three Azimuth had told him to come, and Her Brilliance had—well, she’d given him the strange charge of the spearpoint in the middle of the night. The spearpoint and the command: Find out if Three Azimuth means to win this war. He was still chewing that over, the idea of it like a raw place in his mouth where a baby tooth had fallen out and a new one hadn’t come in yet. Whatever it meant, though, he had double permission to come in the front way instead of from the tunnels. (He’d hidden the spearpoint in the drawer where he kept his shirts, a bright heavy secret, nestled amongst the greys and the golds and the reds.)
Eleven Laurel was waiting for him just inside. Eight Antidote abruptly remembered that he hadn’t even touched his problem set puzzle, and wondered if there was time to turn around and pretend he had ended up here by accident. There wasn’t, and anyway, running off was what a kid would do, so he wouldn’t.
“Hello, Undersecretary,” he said, and bowed over his fingertips, inclined just so far, like he was greeting an equal. It felt squirmy and wrong and great, to presuppose that he and the Third Undersecretary of the Ministry of War, his teacher and his elder by fifty years at least, was someone he didn’t have to bow very far to.
“Cure,” said Eleven Laurel, warm and pleased with him. Eight Antidote was blushing by the time he stood up. He hated being so obvious. He shouldn’t be this obvious. “I think you will enjoy today,” the Undersecretary went on. “We have just received some intelligence from the Twenty-Fourth Legion, and the Minister of War thinks you, my young friend, ought to get to see it analyzed.”
“I’d like that a very great deal,” Eight Antidote said, trying to remember who was in charge of the Twenty-Fourth Legion. Not yaotlek Nine Hibiscus—it had been the Tenth at Kauraan, the Tenth was the dangerously loyal one—but another woman, with an astronomical aspect to the noun half of her name. He’d done just one exercise with the Twenty-Fourth as part of a puzzle, a long time ago, back at the very beginning of when Eleven Laurel was teaching him. But he knew the Twenty-Fourth was one of Nine Hibiscus’s yaotlek’s six, her complement of legions to work with on the edge of the battlefront.
“Not from the Tenth?” he asked, following Eleven Laurel through the warren of the Ministry of War. “That’s interesting.”
“A good observation, Cure,” said Eleven Laurel. “No, our intelligence is straight from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, on fast-courier relay through the jumpgates. She very much wanted the Ministry to have this information right away. I’m extremely curious myself as to what it is she wants to show us.”
Sixteen Moonrise. Eight Antidote had to remember the name this time; at least he’d gotten the astronomical part right. But it’d be much easier to remember her name now that she wasn’t a collection of holographs on a strategy table and instead a Fleet Captain who went above, or around, her yaotlek’s command in order to send intelligence to War back in the City.
For the first time, Eight Antidote wondered if Nine Hibiscus knew that there were elements in the Ministry that had sent her to war hoping she was going to die in it. He figured she must. She wasn’t stupid. No one who could command loyalty like that was stupid. They couldn’t be. He was pretty sure. But maybe she was the kind of person who thought that loyalty protected her, that since all her soldiers loved her so very well, and she loved the Empire (she must, if Nineteen Adze had made her yaotlek), then the Ministry of War would love her and protect her as well.
That seemed like the kind of mistake a person who relied on loyalty would make. He’d have to remember not to make it, when he was Emperor. Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted. Especially if someone else powerful was intervening in the movement of information, like Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was right now.
Eleven Laurel didn’t take him to one of the strategy rooms this time. They went up an elevator in the center of the Palms instead, and through a series of very secure checkpoints staffed with Fleet soldiers, into what must have been Minister Three Azimuth’s very own office. It was covered in star-charts: beautiful ones on the walls, artist’s renderings of Teixcalaanli space, with pride of place behind the Minister’s desk taken by a vast and glimmering mosaic in a frame, dark crystal slices and golden pinpoint stars made out of glass pieces smaller than Eight Antidote’s littlest fingernail. It was a famous piece: The World, it was called, or sometimes just Teixcalaan, a map of everywhere the Empire had touched as of two hundred years ago when it was made by the artisan Eighteen Coral. Eight Antidote had seen it in holo, and on infofiche, but never before in person.
It lived behind the desk of the Minister of War. Of course he’d never seen it in person.
There were maps everywhere, though. On the large table in front of that desk, some holographic and some paper ones too—on the desk itself, in piles—pinned to the walls next to and overlapping the famous and artistic renderings.
Minister Three Azimuth sat amongst her cartography like a bird in a well-lined nest, her cloudhook glowing silver-white and translucent over the wreckage of her melted ear, her hair a smooth dark cap. Eight Antidote swallowed, his throat feeling suddenly thick, and quickly looked away from her to the other Ministry officials seated around the table to her right and left. There was Undersecretary Seven Aster of the Second Palm, the master of supply chains, and his staff, immediately recognizable by how the hands in their shoulder patches had their fingers pointing to the left; next to him was Twenty-Two Thread, the Fifth Palm, the armaments chief, who had come to give a presentation on new sorts of spaceship engines to Eight Antidote’s ancestor-the-Emperor two years ago. Eight Antidote had fallen asleep while she was talking. But he’d been a little kid then. He wouldn’t do that kind of thing now.
Eleven Laurel’s own staff were waiting for him on the other side of the table; two women Eight Antidote didn’t know, both wearing patches figured with downward-pointing hands for the Third Palm, on their shoulders next to their rank sigils. And two empty chairs. One for Eleven Laurel—and one for him. He sat down. Like he belonged. Like he wasn’t eleven years old.
At the end of the table, opposite the Minister, was an empty space where the Emperor would have gone, if she’d been invited. Presumably, if whatever was about to be discussed was important enough, she would be. (Probably. Unless the Ministry of War was hiding something from Nineteen Adze—but that was what he would have to watch for, wasn’t it? Being careful, paying attention. That’s what he’d been asked to do, in the middle of the night.)