One of the Shards, a glittering wedge tumbling easily onto a new vector, vernier thrusters firing, intersected with one of those spit-strings. Nine Hibiscus watched it happen. Watched all the gleam of the little fighter vanish, slicked over with alien ship-saliva, a fractal net of it that stuck and clung even when the Shard pulled free of the string. Saw, disbelieving while seeing, that net begin to bubble its way through the Shard’s hull, corrosive, eating its metal and plastisteel like some kind of hyperoxidizing fungus.
The Shard’s pilot screamed.
Screamed on the open channel Five Thistle had used, screamed and then shouted, “Kill me, kill me now, it’s going to eat the ship, it’s in here with me, don’t let it touch anyone else,” a controlled and desperate spasm of bravery.
Nine Hibiscus hesitated. She had done many things she’d regretted, as a pilot and a captain and as Fleet Captain of the Tenth Teixcalaanli Legion—uncountable things, she was a soldier, it was the nature of being what she was to commit small atrocities, like it was the nature of stars to emit radiation that burned and poisoned as much as it gave warmth and life. But she’d never ordered her ship to fire on her own people. Never once yet.
On that same channel, a chorus of anguish: all the Shard pilots, linked together by biofeedback, all of them feeling the death of their sibling ship, devoured alive. Sobbing. The sound of snatched breath, hyperventilation. A low moaning scream, that echoed, was picked up by other voices—
“Do it,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Shoot her. As she asked.”
Deathlight-fire, precise and merciful. A burst of blue, and one Teixcalaanlitzlim rendered to ashes.
Silence on all the comms. Nine Hibiscus heard nothing but the hideous pounding of her own heartbeat.
“Well,” said Twenty Cicada, finally—sounding as shaken as anyone, but briskly shaken—“that’s approximately eight new things about these people we didn’t know ten minutes ago.”
CHAPTER TWO
[…] and of course your reputation precedes you, like an earthquake precedes a city-drowning wave; the tremors of your arrival are already setting the Ministry to vibration as if we were all made of tlini-strings and you were the bow. Of course we regret the absence of former Minister Nine Propulsion—her guidance was a warm silk glove that has been taken off the Palms now that she has retired (and so abruptly!)—but I, for one, look forward to having meetings with a person who was the first successful Governor of Nakhar System. We have work to do. I remain, in anticipation […]
Letters to the dead are poor practice; I’d do myself a service if I merely kept a journal like half the Emperors who have slept in this bed before me. But since when have you known me to do service to myself? And at least you are dead—or it is simplest to think of you so now—I have all the stars in my hands, Yskandr, and it is terribly easy to let them slip through a finger-width gap. Especially when some of them are going dark, eaten up by your successor’s so-convenient alien threat. You slept here more often than I did—more often than I do, if we count sleeping and not nights. How often did you wish for the convenience of narrative to bow to your whims? More or less often than our Emperor, awake beside you?
KNIFEPOINT’S captain, Thirty Wax-Seal, clutched his cup of coffee like it was the only thing keeping his hands from shaking. He was a nasty shade of grey all through: Nine Hibiscus thought of oatmeal congealed in the bottom of a pan, that leftover scrim of mealy grey-white that needed to be scraped off.
“It’s not language,” he said, for the second time; that had been his opening statement to her, when she’d gotten him retrieved safely from his ship and had him brought to her smaller conference room to be debriefed. “I had Fourteen Spike with me, she speaks five languages—that’s why I took her, in case we got to overhear something—and it was nothing like a language to her. It’s not got—parsable phonemes, she said. That was before the enemy ship came out of nowhere and started chasing us. She didn’t get much farther than we can’t make noises like that.”
I am not equipped to run a first-contact scenario, Nine Hibiscus thought, especially when the things being contacted spit ship-dissolving fluids at my people and don’t make understandable noises. She was a soldier. A strategically minded one, with the vast punch of Teixcalaanli power behind her, but a soldier nonetheless. First contact was for diplomats and people who got into epic poems.
“If it’s not language,” she said, sipping at her coffee—Thirty Wax-Seal drank a bit of his, mirroring, and she was glad of it—“how did you know it was communication at all?”
“Because it didn’t start until we showed up. And it was responsive, yaotlek—I mean, when I took Knifepoint in closer, the transmission shifted, it sounded different, and when I backed us away, it changed again, and when I tried to slide around the far side of that dwarf sun and get eyes on what happened to our colony on Peloa-2, it shrieked at us and then that ring-ship was right there—”
The edge of hysteria in Thirty Wax-Seal’s voice was unsettling. It wasn’t like him; he wouldn’t be a scout-gunner captain if he was prone to the horrors. The ring-ship had been awful, and its spit had been worse, but still. It wouldn’t do.
“You got back, Captain,” Nine Hibiscus said, even, reassuring. “You came home to us and you brought us an intercepted communiqué and we know approximately eight new things about these people than we did before today.” She was using Twenty Cicada’s language, but this captain didn’t know that. Didn’t know how rattled she was, and never would, if she was careful. “You did very well. You can stand down awaiting further orders, unless there’s anything else I should know.”
“No, sir. The recording is with Chief Communications Officer Two Foam, if you want to listen to it. But there’s nothing else specific. We didn’t get close enough to Peloa-2 for actionable intelligence.”
Nine Hibiscus wanted to listen to the recording very badly, and the idea made her skin crawl at the same time. But she had another hour and three-quarters before Sixteen Moonrise was scheduled to come aboard and discuss strategy—discuss strategy, such thin cover for a meeting meant to provide Nine Hibiscus with some leverage against Sixteen Moonrise’s extremely untimely episode of Fleet intrigue—and she would like all the information she could get. Whether it was language or not.
Beneath the imperial palace there was a network of passages, secret and small. There was a poem for them, a good one with a walking rhythm to it. It went, as many roots in the ground as blooms into the sky / daylight servants of the empire gather palace flowers / justice, science, information, war / but the roots that feed us are invisible and strong. Eight Antidote liked two parts of that poem best: how his feet hit the tunnel tilework floor right along with the pulse of roots in the ground and blooms in the sky—and also how he wasn’t a daylight servant at all. Daylight servants got palace flowers. Alone in the tunnels, Eight Antidote, sole heir to Teixcalaan entire (just recently sole heir, which meant something, probably, something about how he needed to think about himself), didn’t need flowers. He was down in the dirt, where silent things grew strong.