Nine Hibiscus hummed through her teeth. “You think Sixteen Moonrise is that aggressively opposed to my leadership?”
Twenty Cicada shook his head, blinked to have his cloudhook call up a holoimage of Weight for the Wheel as a flattened schematic map. There was a tracery in electrum-silver threaded through a very large number of the decks. “She’s been haunting us,” he said. “I’ve tracked her. I don’t think it’s exactly that the Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth is opposed to you, Nine Hibiscus. I think someone in the Ministry is. And she’s a very effective agent for their purposes. She knows as much about the aliens as we do, for example. As much as anyone save the envoy and Dzmare. And if she wasn’t trying to find out more, she would have gone back to the Parabolic Compression half a day ago.”
“So she’s a spy?”
“So she’s a spy whose eyes should be trained outward and which have been turned inward by someone else’s hand,” Twenty Cicada said. Which was gnomic, even for him. But Nine Hibiscus thought she got what he was gesturing at. Sixteen Moonrise had, after all, spent the first five years of her recorded Fleet career as a political officer on the same Parabolic Compression she captained now. And political officers were placed on the orders of the Undersecretary for the Third Palm—the Ministry of War’s internal intelligence service.
“You think she’s still Third Palm. Not just served there as a cadet.”
Twenty Cicada smiled, one corner of his mouth twisting. “I think that the Third of the Six Outreaching Palms would like to snatch you back into a more controllable orbit than the one you’re on, and that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise is as good a pulling-hook as any.”
“Swarm, she isn’t my type.”
He snorted. “No, you like them with more flesh and more masculinity, I’m well aware. Not that kind of hook. The kind that keeps you distracted enough from our real enemy out there that you make mistakes. And we can’t afford mistakes. Not in this war. Not if we don’t want to learn how to sing funerals for a great many more planets than Peloa-2.”
“Consider me warned,” Nine Hibiscus said. “And get her off my ship, would you?”
“I can try—” Twenty Cicada began, and then both his cloudhook and Nine Hibiscus’s went off with a sharp chime: priority message. Something had come back from Peloa-2 after all.
Of course, he had to wait. Emperors were busy all the time; this was the nature of Emperors, his ancestor had been exactly the same. Eight Antidote only ever had seen him at events or late in the evenings or once, memorably, at dawn, when he showed up to Eight Antidote’s bedroom and took his hand and they went walking in the gardens, like they were parent and child instead of ancestor and ninety-percent clone. He’d been very small then. His ancestor-the-Emperor had plucked a nasturtium and woven it into Eight Antidote’s hair, a red one, and then when he’d said he liked it, a yellow one and an orange one, and he’d worn them until they rotted and he had to be washed.
That was a long time ago, even for someone who was only eleven.
It was almost midnight by the time Nineteen Adze was available to see him, and at that hour, she wanted to see him in her own suite. She’d sent an infofiche-stick message to say so, one of the clean white ones that no one else used but her, waiting in the mail slot outside Eight Antidote’s room like he was a grown person who got mail. He broke the seal open, and the holo glyphs that spilled out were simple and inviting: Come by, if you’re still awake. And then her signature glyph, the same one which was on the infofiche seal. No titles.
Well, they were sort of family. And also she’d shown up inside his bedroom without even asking, so just signing a message Nineteen Adze wasn’t that weird. (It was weird. It was one of those small things that made Eight Antidote wonder when a person stopped being a child entirely, and started being something else.) He put the opened infofiche stick into the drawer of his desk, so he could look at it again later, if he wanted to. If he wanted to think about how simple and clear and friendly that message had been, later.
The Emperor’s suite was where his ancestor had lived, and the Emperor before him, and a whole lot of other Emperors also, but that didn’t mean it looked the same as it had six months ago. His ancestor-the-Emperor had liked lots of small, beautiful objects, and bright colors, blue and teal and red, and there had been a plush woven rug on the floor of the front sitting room, with lotus-flower patterns woven in by hand, a gift from the Western Arc families. Nineteen Adze was different. Nineteen Adze liked books. Codex-books, not just infofiche; books and also stones, slices of rock that you could see the light through. She’d lined the walls with cases for them. That lotus-woven rug was hanging on one of the walls instead of being on the floor, so you just saw the bare tiled flagstones, the marble and its patterns that looked like imaginary cities. The floor had been here as long as Palace-Earth had.
The Emperor Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, She Whose Gracious Presence Illuminates the Room Like the Edgeshine of a Knife, was sitting on a couch, reading one of her books. She looked up when Eight Antidote came in, and patted the arm of the identical couch catty-corner to hers. “Come sit,” she said. “I’m sorry to keep you up this late, but it was the only time we could talk with relatively low chances of emergency interruption.”
Eight Antidote sat. The couches were upholstered in bone-white velvet, with tufted backs, the indentations set with grey-and-gold disks. He always worried he’d spill something on one of them. “It’s all right, Your Brilliance,” he said. “I know emperors don’t sleep. I should get some practice while I can.”
She didn’t smile. He wished she had. Instead she put her book down on the glass end table between the two couches—it was something Eight Antidote had never read, by someone named Eleven Lathe—and looked him over, eyes still narrow and neutral. There was a tiny line between her eyebrows which wasn’t always there.
“What would you like to tell me?” she asked, which wasn’t at all the question he’d expected. It meant he had to choose.
He could start with Eleven Laurel in the garden. That would be telling the Emperor that War and Information—or at least parts of War and Information—really didn’t like each other. But she probably knew that already, and also it would mean revealing how he felt about Eleven Laurel threatening him—and he didn’t want to start with that. Not with the Emperor. It would sound like he was complaining, and asking her to fix it, and he didn’t want Nineteen Adze fixing his problems.
He opened his mouth, and what came out was, “The Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is on yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s flagship.”
Nineteen Adze clicked her tongue against her teeth. “… How did you learn that?” she asked.
“The special envoy from the Information Ministry brought her there,” he said. That wasn’t exactly an answer. It turned out it was very hard to be a spy, when it came time to tell the secrets you’d learned. It turned out you really, really wanted to keep them for yourself. But at least the fact that Dzmare had been brought along by an Information agent seemed like the sort of additional information he really ought to share.
“Of course she did,” said Nineteen Adze, and Eight Antidote couldn’t decipher her expression at all. Whatever it was, it wasn’t surprise. “What else do you know about the envoy?”