“If their language is impenetrable,” said Nine Hibiscus, serene in command, serene in instruction, “then go around it.”
Mahit opened her mouth, probably to explain all of the ways that that command would be next to impossible to achieve—and she wouldn’t be wrong—but it was the wrong thing to say, and Three Seagrass knew that order was as good as permission to keep trying to talk with the aliens—so she opened her mouth, too, and said, “Of course, yaotlek. We’ll be back on Peloa-2 in nine hours for the next rendezvous,” and bowed so deeply over her fingertips that her queue of braided hair brushed the floor.
“See to it that you are,” the yaotlek said—and then, softer, went on. “Sleep first, if you can. If you both keel over of heatstroke or exhaustion, Twenty Cicada will write up the most irate report he is capable of, and I will be honor-bound to read all of it.”
She waved one of her wide-palmed, well-fleshed hands in dismissal. Three Seagrass had to stop herself from grinning, all Stationer-like, and scaring the comms officer. They’d get their next diplomatic meeting. And they’d get some time now, before it. Time where—if she and Mahit didn’t have another stupid, horrible, miserable fight—the two of them could think through the politics of what they were trying to do.
And whether or not it matched the politics of what Mahit’s Station wanted her to do—
But if Three Seagrass brought that up, they would absolutely have another fight. Or—have another iteration of the same fight. No. Better to think of Mahit Dzmare quoting Eleven Lathe as if his words belonged in her clever mouth.
It wasn’t that Three Seagrass was unaware that she was allowing herself to not acquire information about her associate’s loyalties and plans, information that might be vital, all for the sake of her own emotional peace. Really. She was extremely aware. But possibly being aware would be enough in and of itself: if she knew she was missing information, her analysis of the situation could account for its lack. She’d always managed that before. She just had to imagine Lsel Station’s influence on Mahit as a kind of negative space that still had gravity. Diplomatic dark matter.
Her metaphors were getting more extraplanetary every hour she spent on a Fleet ship. That might be a good sign for her poetry, or just exactly the opposite. Cliché wouldn’t help her, even if it was scenically appropriate cliché.
After she’d sent the envoy and her politically complicated companion away—after that, and before she had a real chance to think about what they had brought her (half a negotiation and a lot of unanswered questions, not anything solid enough to put weight on), Nine Hibiscus took stock of the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, and the Fleet beyond it. She was not in a position she liked.
Six legions. A single yaotlek’s six, far too few to fight a war with no current goals but attrition and jumpgate defense, no enemy strongholds to overwhelm. Two of those legions—the Seventeenth under Forty Oxide and the Twenty-Fourth under Sixteen Moonrise—already weakened with guerrilla-warfare casualties, ships lost at their edges to the marauding three-ringed enemy vessels. Three of those legions (the aforementioned two and the Sixth under Two Canal) chafing at her authority, being driven by politics originating somewhere in the Ministry of War, politics Nine Hibiscus couldn’t see clearly from where she was. One Information agent, who was effective but possibly compromised, and one linguist-ambassador, who was certainly a barbarian with barbarian desires, even if they coincided with the Fleet’s at this particular moment.
Supply lines stretched over too many jumpgates.
A funeral for an entire planet.
An enemy that might, or might not, be open to negotiation. That might, or might not, understand the concept of negotiation.
And a visiting Fleet Captain, that selfsame Sixteen Moonrise of too-many-recently-killed-in-action-soldiers and undermining-Nine-Hibiscus’s-authority as well as the Twenty-Fourth Legion, who was haunting her flagship like a rogue AI haunts a comms system.
Not in a position she liked at all. At least her people here on the bridge were still hers, and doing their jobs exactly as they were supposed to.
Eighteen Chisel, the navigation officer, had come up to stand next to her. He was almost as broad as she was: a barrel of a man, with a gut that looked soft and was nothing of the kind. The sort of soldier who was built for endurance, and who had somehow ended up being the most competent celestial mechanic she had ever encountered even after he’d spent the first fifteen years of his service as ground operations infantry. (He’d had the navigation aptitudes down pat, he’d told her once, over drinks in the officer’s mess. He’d just wanted to feel the weight of soldiering first, before he spent all his time staring into the stars.) She turned to him, a fractional motion, a gesture—go on, report.
“Yaotlek,” he murmured. Low. This wasn’t for everyone, then. This was something he wanted to tell her quietly, so she’d have a chance to react. To decide how to react. She nodded to him to go on.
“One of the scout-ships—the Gravity Rose, with Captain Eighty-Four Twilight in command—is reporting on narrowcast that they’ve found something. Something that looks like a home base for these things we’re fighting.”
Nine Hibiscus’s heart thudded against her chest wall like she was being rocked by cannon fire. “Planet, station, or just a really big ship?” she asked, equally soft. “And where?”
“Planet,” said Eighteen Chisel. “Planet and one satellite, both inhabited. Lots of civilian traffic, like a proper system would have. Eighty-Four Twilight didn’t give me much detail, just that the ships are definitely in the same style, but not military. Or don’t look it. The place is—out, far out. Past where Fleet Captain Forty Oxide’s stationed the Seventeenth. But that’s why the angle of attack they’re using is coming from that direction.” His smile was tight, wired, glittering-sharp. “I think we have them, yaotlek. I think if we could get Five Thistle over there with the number of nuclear scatterbombs in our hangar bay … well, we could blow them out of their sky, at least in that system. Send a message.”
“If we can get there without them seeing us,” Nine Hibiscus said. The scatterbombs would do exactly what Eighteen Chisel was imagining. They would, yes, blow anyone out of their sky. And then they’d poison that sky, and the planets below it. The scatterbombs were deathrain. A last resort. Almost never used where people lived—because after them, people didn’t live there anymore. She’d only used a scatterbomb barrage once, and that had been against another ship, safe in the blackness of space. The idea of using them on the aliens was—