Her Shard pilots knew about it, of course. She would never have been willing to borrow their eyes if they hadn’t been asked, and signed on, and knew to turn their Shard programming off if they didn’t want her to accidentally see some private or personal moment. It helped that she had no access to their shared proprioception—her cloudhook couldn’t handle the new technology without being upgraded, and besides she’d probably have to plug herself into a Shard to get even close to the necessary processing power. But that lack of bodily access—she suspected that helped, when she asked if she could see through their eyes. Most of her pilots let her watch the ship through them when she needed to. It was one of the ways that they trusted her; one of the ways that their trust felt like a bright and blooming explosion of shrapnel in her chest, whenever she considered it too closely.
Now she used them—dipping in and out of Shard-sight at the intersections of corridors, trying not to get dizzy or run into anyone while her visual perception was elsewhere—to be where Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was intending to go, before she got there.
Nine Hibiscus wanted to make her flinch. And then she wanted to very gently kick her off her flagship and back onto the Parabolic Compression where she belonged, and where her Third Palmer spywork habits would be somewhat confined. Keep her far away from Nine Hibiscus’s plans—whatever they ended up being—to deal with the alien homeworld the Gravity Rose had found. But even more than wanting to be able to keep secrets when she chose to, Nine Hibiscus was anticipating Sixteen Moonrise’s expression of strangled distress when she would be surprised. Anticipating it sharply enough that she knew she was letting her teeth show in her smile as she hurried down her ship’s corridors and elevator shafts, command deck to hydroponics to crew mess to—
—a tumbling vector of stars, the taste of panic-bile and metallic adrenaline in the back of her throat, her vision consumed by the vast arch of an alien ring-ship, slick metal and rippling distortion, too close too close too close and then the stars again, that Shard—wherever they were, and she hadn’t meant to slip out of the set of pilots who were safely on the Weight for the Wheel, off-shift—managing to pull back hard enough that they skirted asymptotically up from the ring, up, away—
Nine Hibiscus could feel her heartbeat in her wrists, her throat, the membrane of her diaphragm. Her heartbeat, or that Shard pilot’s, and this was without having a Shard and the updated proprioception programming. Just from visuals. No wonder some of the Shard pilots were calling this new programming the Shard trick.
Flicker-vision: Shard pilots on her ship, in the mess, in the hydroponics deck, in the fitness facility, an echoed sense of strain—psychosomatic, surely—as that pilot bench-pressed heavy plates away from his chest. Her heart still racing.
The wheel of stars, too fast.
Did they all feel this? All the time?
The wheel of stars—and fire, a flash of heat, of sick-sweet panic (there goes the engine, oh—), vision clouded entirely with red, red-to-white, and—
Gone. Blackness. Nine Hibiscus swallowed. She was hanging on to a wall, somewhere in a passage between Deck Six and Deck Five. She was entirely herself. That pilot had—had swept up away from the enemy ship, avoided a crash, and been shot from behind while in the process of moving through that escape arc. A little flash of fire, and nothing ever again.
Did every Shard pilot feel every death, if they were paying attention?
Gingerly, she reached through the programming one more time. Returned to the strain of the weight lifter. If he’d seen that death, he wasn’t reacting in any way visible in his field of vision. She swapped again. There was a Shard pilot with his programming on in the Deck Five mess, and he was sitting at one end of a long communal table, and at the other end, casual in shirtsleeves, her uniform jacket slung over the back of her chair, was the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, engaged in cheerful conversation with Nine Hibiscus’s own soldiers.
The spike of fury Nine Hibiscus felt was blinding-intense, like a shockstick blow to the solar plexus. Worse than watching that death—more disorienting for having just seen it. She didn’t even know which Shard had just died. Or how many more just like it would die today. And here was this—intruder, this underminer, this woman who was not with her own legion, her own people, but too concerned with infiltrating Nine Hibiscus’s people, her Fleet, her place, to be tending to the soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth that were hers by right—that this person would be eating with the Tenth Legion instead—it was the sort of rage that would make Nine Hibiscus stupid and careless. She let it happen to her. Let it wash through her, and then imagined it like the core of a ship engine, lodged in her chest, an animating force, secret and dangerous and shielded, under control.
She still wanted to get Sixteen Moonrise off her fucking flagship. That, at least, she could have some influence over.
When she walked into the Deck Five mess, it was nevertheless savagely gratifying that her people stood up to greet her when they noticed she’d come in. She grinned at them, wide-eyed and performatively incredulous—All this for me? Come on, go eat—and waved them back to sitting. They went. The conversation stayed at the same comfortable volume. Her soldiers were still hers. For now.
Sixteen Moonrise had been clever with her choice of seats: there were no open ones next to her. Nine Hibiscus took one in the center of the long table instead, and met the eyes of her Shard pilot for a long, shared-and-doubled moment of vision. She felt him turn his Shard programming off, for both their sakes now that they were in the same space. That doubled vision snapped away, and there was an echo, a feeling like she’d almost been breathing in time with him and now she wasn’t. A mild version of feeling his sibling-pilot extinguished in fire. She inclined her head to him, fractionally. Wished she could ask him about the programming, about—side effects.
And then she didn’t say a starfucked thing. She let Sixteen Moonrise keep talking, as if there was nothing wrong with what she was doing at all, and served herself a helping of rice noodle laden with soybeans and chili oil from the communal bowl in the center of the table. Soldier food. Warm enough to keep the vacuum out of your bones, or make you feel like it might.
She chewed and swallowed a few bites, feeling the energy of the table shift around her, reorient toward her presence. She licked her lips, chasing the last of the oil’s numbing heat. “Fleet Captain,” she said, convivial, “your crew must be very appreciative that you eat with them down in the mess. You do do this on the Parabolic Compression, don’t you? Or is this only because you’re our guest?”