They moved like they were carrying jumpgates with them, flickering in and out. While he watched, the entirety of the Twenty-Fourth Legion and half of the Tenth—including Nine Hibiscus’s flagship, Weight for the Wheel—exploded into energy-cannon fire and then into scorched nothingness; or else were struck by some kind of strange liquid weapon and went blank and still. The simulation wound down. The remaining legions in the Six limped back into Teixcalaanli space through the jumpgate.
All of those soldiers would be dead. Dead fast. A legion was ten thousand people, maybe more—a legion and a half dead in a few days would be at least fifteen thousand and—
What if the aliens follow them home? Eight Antidote thought, with a spike of horror. Follow them all the way back to us, sector after sector, and come here to the City and eat us—
“That’s enough,” said Three Azimuth, and the simulation stopped. “Revert to the baseline.” All the ships blinked back into existence, as if the horrible slaughter had never happened.
“Do they move like that?” Eight Antidote asked. He tried to sound calm, even though he wasn’t calm at all. “Our enemy.”
“I hope not,” said Three Azimuth. “Otherwise we’re fucked. Pardon my language, kid.”
Eight Antidote decided not to respond to that. He’d heard a lot worse. “But they might move like that. Like they’re … jumpgates.”
“What we know is that they come in and out of visibility like they’re coming out of a jumpgate,” Three Azimuth went on. “Run it again—the second option, with cloaking but not asynchronous movement.”
The simulation started over. It went better—sort of. If the aliens were just invisible, the Fleet ships could triangulate, pin them down eventually—but it was slow, and a lot of the Fleet died first in the process of finding the enemy. Eight Antidote watched as the Minister directed her analysts to push reinforcements through the jumpgates into the battlefront sector—watched the supply lines get skinnier and longer. And the constraint of the simulation was that Teixcalaan didn’t know where the enemy supply lines came from, didn’t know where their home planet was, or a nearby central base, or if they had a home at all or just lived in the void of space all the time. It was a hard constraint. It meant the Fleet had to go slow, piecemeal, and get ambushed while they found where the enemy was lurking.
“Doesn’t look very good, does it,” she said, after a good ten minutes. Waved her hand. The simulation reset again.
“Not really,” Eight Antidote said, warily. “… There should be a better way to find them than letting them ambush us.”
“So there should,” the Minister said. “Got any ideas, or has my spymaster just been letting you solve old problems?”
It was a test. And now all of the advisors and generals and analysts and the soldier who had brought him to this room at the point of a shockstick, however deferred, and probably Eleven Laurel too (my spymaster, the Minister said, and Eight Antidote felt a little sick to his stomach) were watching to see what he’d do.
It turned out that there was a place you went after you were scared. A big, cold, bright place inside your head. Eight Antidote thought this was a good thing to have discovered.
“May I?” he said, gesturing at the simulation. “It would be easier to show you, Minister.”
Three Azimuth had the kind of expression Eight Antidote couldn’t figure out; one of those adult faces that wasn’t surprise or admiration or displeasure exactly, but something else, something combined. She blinked behind her cloudhook, adjusting the simulation’s control settings. It was one of the enormous ones, a pane of glass that extended from mid-forehead to cheekbone and curved around her skull to cover the ear on that side—or where the ear would be, Eight Antidote noticed, a sudden realization that seemed as much part of his new cold bright place as anything else. She didn’t have an ear on that side. She had a burnt and twisted place where an energy weapon had gotten her ear and melted it.
Real combat was different than the strategy table simulations. He needed to remember that, for when he was Emperor.
He stepped to the front of the room. Took control of the simulation—it had so many more variables than the problems Eleven Laurel had been setting for him, but the program was the same. He knew how to make the Fleet ships move, and the simulation’s AI would move the aliens for him, in the dark where he couldn’t see.
The ships he placed flew from his fingertips like they’d flown from the Minister’s, though he knew he didn’t look half as elegant as she did when she’d danced them into being. He arrayed them in a net, carved the blank sector into cubes like he was using a legion to lay out a garden for planting. Then he gathered a smaller force, all Eternal-class flagships and fast scout-gunners, who would be mobile: if the sweeps found the enemy, the strike force would move in to support them, fast and with firepower. It took longer than he wanted to set up—some ships had to stay by the jumpgate, and the supply lines were so long, sectors long, with jumpgate delays built in. The weight of all those eyes on him felt very heavy by the time he was ready to say, “All right. Run it,” like he was a grown yaotlek, a man who made decisions.
“It’s not bad,” said Three Azimuth, but she didn’t run his simulation. “It’s not bad at all. The net pattern is smart, in fact. But the Eternal-class ships don’t move that fast. They won’t be able to get to where you need them with a net that big. We tried it—oh, before you were born, I think. A sector-wide net pulls the supply lines to nothing. And you’ve used all the legions like one enormous legion—which has its merits, mind you, but a yaotlek’s six is six minds together, and they don’t always move as one…”
“You’re saying,” Eight Antidote said, “that I forgot about politics?”
Three Azimuth laughed. “I’m saying you did very well for someone who’s never been off-planet, let alone been a soldier.”
“I wish I could see it,” Eight Antidote told her, knowing he sounded like a kid, asking for things he couldn’t have, and not being able to help himself from doing it.
“The war?” asked the Minister.
Eight Antidote had meant the simulation he’d just designed. But—“Yes,” he said.
“Can’t let you go out there; there’s only the one of you, and Her Brilliance would be pissed at me.”
“How about here?” he asked. “I can see a lot from right here next to you.”
“You are a nasty little viper,” said Three Azimuth, and actually ruffled his hair. Her hand was warm and calloused and entirely surprising. “How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Blood and starlight. I was painting my toenails at eleven. All right, kid. Show up here in the morning, and we might make an Emperor of you someday.”
Against the rush of satisfaction and excitement, Eight Antidote thought, What will Eleven Laurel say to me? I should have asked him first—and tried to hold on to that worry so he wouldn’t jump up and down and look like someone who was young enough to be painting their toenails instead of learning how to run a war.