The last time, there had been no steady flow of Teixcalaanli military vessels through the Far Gate. Onchu had hoped that, if Darj Tarats was using all of Lsel Station as bait for Teixcalaan, drawing the Empire through and past them into the maws of those ring-ships—she’d hoped at least she wouldn’t have to deal with any more ring-ships eating her pilots.
Hoped, and is now denied even that.
The message comes in bright and hot, a desperate, breathless cry over long-range broadcast: They hide in the jumpgate, they LOOK like the jumpgate, they’re after me, I’m not fast enough—
And Onchu, sitting in the nexus of Pilot’s Command, for her the true heart of Lsel, no matter what Heritage believed about their room-repository of imago-machines—Onchu, sitting there, has to ask her pilot to not come home. To not lead that hungry thing that Tarats thinks could devour an empire back to the fragile shell of Lsel Station. It is the worst thing she’s ever done. When she dies, she will die thinking of it, like a splinter finally reaching her heart after years of worming its way through flesh. Over that long-range broadcast, she says: Go through the jumpgate. If they’re chasing you make them chase you. Dzoh Anjat—her pilot’s name, or that pilot’s imago’s name, in these moments she slips, she has known so many of her people, in all their iterations—I am with you. Lsel is with you. Take them through the jumpgate and hope the Empire is on the other side to catch you. I’ll be listening—
She does not receive an answer aside from a positional ping. A small shift in that discontinuity around the Far Gate. Dzoh Anjat and her pursuer, gone over. Gone entire.
Dekakel Onchu is very good at listening, and she stays by her instruments for hours and hours. She never hears from Dzoh Anjat again.
(Dzoh Anjat, obedient and patriotic, going to her death, but not the death she expected: Teixcalaan is on the other side of the Anhamemat Gate, yes, but Teixcalaan sees the three-ringed maw of one of their enemy’s ships and cares not at all for one small patrol-craft smashed in the conflagration of their energy-cannon fire—cares not at all, and may not have even seen, or noticed, or thought to look. Only to keep themselves safe from what appears, to the member of the Seventeenth Legion who sees that rippling discontinuity materialize, to be a flanking ambush.)
And Dekakel Onchu cannot hear the singing of the we, not at all. Not how the extinguishing of the voices on that ring-ship does not alter the volume of the song, but only its shape. She thinks language, after all.
She thinks language, and finds herself ragged with tears, waiting for voices that will never come to her, not once while she is alive.
CHAPTER EIGHT
… despite his three-indiction stay amongst the Ebrekti, Eleven Lathe neglected to provide the Empire’s scientists with much in the way of physiological information. His Dispatches is a work of philosophical and moral exploration, and perhaps a person cannot be expected to provide both a spiritual exegesis of living amongst aliens and an accurate description of their physical habits, development, diet, and morbidities—but the sheer weight of absence in the text of much practical information means that readers of the Dispatches are far more acquainted with Eleven Lathe’s mind than they are with an Ebrekti body—or an Ebrekti anything-at-all. We sent a poet where we ought to have sent a team of ixplanatl researchers.
>>QUERY/auth:ONCHU(PILOTS)/“re-implantation”
>>There are no records including “re-implantation” in the database. Please refine your search and try again.
>>QUERY/auth:ONCHU(PILOTS)/“imago repair”
>>237 results found. Display? Refine search?
>>REFINE/auth:ONCHU(PILOTS)/“surgical” OR “post- traumatic”
>> 19 results found. Displaying in alpha order …
ON the other side of the last jumpgate between them and the war was the Fleet. Or at least six legions’ worth of the Fleet, and a swath of support ships, darting between the hulking elegance of the larger destroyers and flagships and gunners. The array of them all ate up the visible stars. There weren’t many stars to start with. Mahit knew this sector of space, though she’d never been to it before; it was resource-poor, Teixcalaanli-controlled, and Lsel Station kept a watch on it and did little else.
It was also where Darj Tarats had first noticed the aliens she’d just spent a nauseating six hours listening to, over and over until she was sure she’d dream that sequence of static and metallic squalling in auditory afterimage. This was the sector that had disappeared sufficient numbers of Lsel pilots to make a pattern that first Tarats and then, later, Dekakel Onchu could notice. Notice, take note of, and use. And nevertheless there weren’t enough stars here. No stars, no sky like on the City or any other planet, and only an enormous amount of Teixcalaanli firepower to steer by.
They were very beautiful, all those ships. Mahit’s childhood had been full of breathless horror biopics about what the Fleet could do to a planet (not a Station, never a Station, always a planet, always far away, but it was easy to extrapolate), and equally breathless serial dramas about life on a Teixcalaanli legionary ship, all uniforms and poetry contests off-shift. Fuck, but she’d devoured those like sugar pastilles. She could probably still explain the plots, the convoluted love stories and the politics and multiseason faction-swapping and here she was, and even after all that had happened in the City three months ago, she still felt doubled. Vertiginous and falling. The self that experienced and the self that evaluated, wondered, Is this when I feel real? Is this when I feel like a civilized person?
And the self that sounded like Yskandr, dark and amused: Is this when I forget what being a Stationer feels like? How about now? Now? Are we still Mahit Dzmare?
She had imagined the Fleet, and feared it, and admired it, and seeing it was still a profound discontinuity.
Three Seagrass had no such problems. She had effortlessly infiltrated the affections—or at least the interest—of the Jasmine Throat’s comms officer, and now that they were in hailing range of the Fleet’s flagship-of-flagships, the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s very own Weight for the Wheel, she leaned over his shoulder and took control of the transmission.
“This is Special Envoy Three Seagrass aboard the supply ship Jasmine Throat,” she said. “Hailing the flagship Weight for the Wheel—you called for the Information Ministry, I believe?”
There was a long pause, longer than the time it would take for the transmission to cross the sublight distance between the two ships. Mahit imagined that other bridge: Were they surprised? Annoyed? Had they even been warned about the advent of Three Seagrass?
At last, a transmission came back: an arch tenor voice, smooth and completely unaccented, as if whoever was speaking had learned Teixcalaanli from newsfeeds, or was a newsfeed anchor himself. “Welcome to the Tenth Legion, Envoy. This is the ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, acting as adjutant for the yaotlek herself—she regrets being occupied at the moment and unable to greet you properly.”