And I don’t usually owe people drinks.
NINE Hibiscus was on the bridge when the enemy sent their ships close enough to see. There was that, at least. She hadn’t needed to be fetched. When the slick grey three-wheeled rings—two of them, a large ship and a small one—appeared out of the black in a shimmer of discontinuity, just at the farthest edge of Weight for the Wheel’s visual range, she was right there, as shocked as anyone else. They hadn’t come so close before. Which meant they could have come this close all along, and hadn’t—an idea that made her skin crawl even as she held up a hand, arresting, and said, “Hold.”
They’d been playing the envoy’s message on open channels for seven hours, bouncing it off the back side of Peloa-2 and deeper into the alien-controlled area of the sector. Even so, Nine Hibiscus was surprised by having someone answer. If this was an answer, and not an attack force, right here at the heart of her Fleet, as sudden as a shockstick pressed abruptly behind the ear in the dark.
Two ships could mean anything: an advance scout, here to prove that they could in fact materialize right beside a Teixcalaanli Eternal-class warship like Weight for the Wheel without anyone noticing their approach; or a diplomat and an escort, one big and one small; or even an attack strike, if they had some weapon even more destructive than the corrosive semiliquid net that had eaten her Shard pilot. Two ships was not enough information.
“Captain,” said Five Thistle, and then corrected himself hastily. “Yaotlek, they are still coming closer, I have our energy cannons locked on their vector of approach.”
They were all staring at the ring-ships, all her soldiers, all her officers, as if their own eyes could make the ships legible just by seeing. The weight of human attention on an inhuman problem. Nine Hibiscus’s heart thrummed, adrenaline-shimmer. Her chief weapons officer had just slipped and forgotten her rank, called her by the name he’d always known her by, when their enemies had been understandable, manipulable, predictable.
Every last person on this bridge was waiting for her to make a decision. Attack, or hold. Hope that the Information Ministry’s agents were as clever as they seemed, and that no matter how alien and vicious, these aliens were people that could be spoken with—or obliterate them before they could get any closer. She couldn’t stop thinking about the Shard that she’d had shot down. How that pilot had begged to die before she was eaten. How every other Shard pilot she could hear had begged with her, their biofeedback full of terror and blanked-out shock. The echoes of that shock, still rebounding.
And yet. And yet, she’d called for a special envoy. She’d gone to Information, rather than to the Third Palm, who had never liked her methodology with humans, let alone what she might want to do with aliens. Information had prepared a message. And after that message was sent, something had changed.
“Hold,” she repeated. “Wait for my signal. Two Foam, are you recording on all open channels?”
“Yes,” Two Foam said. “Nothing yet but Fleet unencrypted chatter and our outgoing alien message—I’ve got it muted on pickup in here to preserve our ears, but it’s loud as you want outside.”
“Tell me if it changes,” Nine Hibiscus said. “The instant, if it changes. Five Thistle, stay on that vector and wait for me.”
The ring-ships spun. They were closer. Nine Hibiscus noticed how tight and shallow her breathing had become, and inhaled through her nose, out her mouth, old calming exercises from her first year as a Fleet cadet. They hadn’t worked very well for her then and didn’t work very well now. The smaller ring-ship had shifted in front of the larger one. They spun in different directions, like the shells of electrons around an atomic core, a probabilistic cloud, difficult to see. The smaller one was darker. There was a red tinge to its grey-slick metal. Blood on a deck floor that hadn’t been cleaned properly. A stain.
Almost, she dropped her hand and told Five Thistle to fire. Almost.
“I have something,” said Two Foam. “They’re playing our message back at us, yaotlek. It took me a minute to understand—it’s the same message as we sent, so I didn’t realize—but it’s amplified, like a sine wave reinforcing. Louder.”
Bleeding stars, but I hope the envoy knew what she was saying when she sent that, Nine Hibiscus thought, because they’re saying it too. Only one way to find out, though.
“Get the Reflective Prism on the comm,” she said, and was reassured at the serene command in her own voice. Reflective Prism was the nearest of the Tenth Legion warships to her own position, and she needed someone within the arc of audio interference of the ring-ships. “Tell Captain Twelve Caesura or his comms officer to play the envoy’s message too. Aim at the enemy. Let’s let them know we hear them. And for fuck’s sake, if anyone fires a weapon, I will space them.”
“Understood, yaotlek,” Two Foam said, her hands busy in the air, her eyes already tracking back and forth in micromovements, fast enough that she looked as if she was having a seizure instead of manipulating the communications universe of the Fleet that her cloudhook was projecting for her. The entire bridge felt like an extension of Nine Hibiscus’s own skin, that shimmering intensity which was her people paying attention to her, hanging on every word, waiting for her to show them the way out of this impossible situation just like she’d done in so many impossible situations before.
Right now she thought she might manage it. Might. Sunfire and space willing, she might just manage it. If she kept moving. Which meant she needed to keep the aliens talking.
“—Someone get the Information people up here, now,” she added, feeling her mouth stretch into a barbarian parody of a smile. “Go. Go. Eventually we’re going to need to say something else than what we’ve got, and I can’t make those noises, people. Move.”
The Kauraanian kitten didn’t like being carried in any way Three Seagrass could come up with carrying a kitten. Holding it by the scruff of its neck seemed rude, especially since she didn’t exactly know when she was going to get to put it down, and cradling it like it was a human infant made it puncture her with all of its many, many claws.
Eventually, she stopped carrying it and let it sit on her shoulder instead, which it seemed to enjoy. There was still some puncturing involved, but it was less malicious and more stability-oriented. She still had no idea what to do with it. There was absolutely no way she could bring it to the room she was supposed to share with Mahit, and she didn’t want to go there anyway. Not yet. Maybe not at all.
In the City, this would be when she’d find herself a decent bar and an interesting stranger to amuse herself with for a while. Maybe there were bars and strangers on Fleet ships. (There would absolutely be strangers. Possibly a stranger would like a Kauraanian kitten. Three Seagrass could hold out hope!) She asked her cloudhook to direct her to the nearest location that was both recreational and not a fitness and training facility (she could think of nothing she wanted to do less than exercise, stars), and followed where it led her.
Which … wasn’t a bar. Exactly.