Sixteen Moonrise’s electrum-shaded eyes blinked behind her cloudhook, a slow and faintly reptilian opening and shutting. “When my crew invites me,” she said. A nasty, insinuating answer: she was invited, both here and on her own ships, and Nine Hibiscus merely waltzed in and took a chair, disturbing her people’s privacy away from the eyes of their superior officer.
“A treat for you, then,” Nine Hibiscus told her. How rarely you must get invitations, to need to be specifically invited.
“I’m honored by the Tenth’s hospitality, yaotlek.”
“We are by all measures hospitable,” said Nine Hibiscus, and the soldier on her left laughed—good—and then cut herself off from laughing—less good. Nine Hibiscus wanted so very much to know what sort of conversation Sixteen Moonrise had been having here, to make her people so wary of free expression.
“I’ve found you so. Though it’s hardly your reputation.”
Nine Hibiscus raised one eyebrow. Blood-soaked starlight, she wanted this woman off her ship. “What is the reputation of the Tenth amongst your Twenty-Fourth, then?” she asked, melted-glass calm, harnessed-reactor-core calm.
Sixteen Moonrise shrugged one shoulder. The curve of her mouth was vicious and irreproachable in pretended innocence. “Insular,” she said. “Devoted.”
If Nine Hibiscus asked to whom, she knew what the answer would be: to you, yaotlek. And now she knew the shape of Sixteen Moonrise’s distaste for her—or at least her masters’ distaste, the Third Palm’s distaste—knew it without bothering to ask. It wasn’t that she was hesitating on the edge of a full, apocalyptic commitment to battle with the aliens. That had been a sop for the ambitions of the Fleet Captains of the Sixth and the Fourteenth, to get them to sign on to Sixteen Moonrise’s letter of proto-insurrection and concern. It wasn’t even that Nine Hibiscus had brought in Information to do the work that the Fleet shouldn’t have to do—though she suspected that decision hadn’t helped. It was that Sixteen Moonrise—or the Third Palm—or the Ministry of War in its entirety, a truly disturbing idea she could not entertain without feeling suddenly ill—thought that she was a risk to the Empire. That her people—their trust, their confidence, their willingness to die for her—would die for her, and not for Teixcalaan.
(Or would come to think of her as Teixcalaan. Something like that might have happened to One Lightning. And what had he made of it? A botched usurpation, a chaotic transition—she would never have—but if Minister Nine Propulsion had been in on the usurpation, there might be reasons the Third Palm thought Nine Hibiscus, her protégé, might try something similar.)
She said, “Hardly insular, Fleet Captain. We’re eating with you, aren’t we? And have been for … mm. How long has it been now, since you arrived? Days?”
“My adjutant, Twelve Fusion, is a commander I would trust with the Parabolic Compression for as long as is necessary for me to be elsewhere,” Sixteen Moonrise said. She sounded a little edgy, a little nervous. Good.
“Naturally,” Nine Hibiscus said, and took another bite of noodles. Her tongue was numb, a fire-lash. “What, if I might presume to ask”—the highest of polite forms, so polite as to be insulting—“is necessary for you on the Deck Five mess? I’m fascinated. Does the Parabolic Compression lack rice noodles?”
Now her soldiers did laugh, and more freely. She felt savagely possessive of them. So what if we are ourselves. We’re the weight that turns the wheel.
“I like your spice mix in the oil,” Sixteen Moonrise said, utterly bland. “I might ask you to lend me this deck’s chief cook, for a day or so.”
She was lodged in them like a burr. She didn’t want to leave, and she was willing to let Nine Hibiscus know what she was thinking, which meant—fucking Third Palmers—that she was confident in her belief that Nine Hibiscus knowing wouldn’t matter—
I wonder if I am supposed to die out here, she thought. I wonder if Sixteen Moonrise is supposed to die too, in the mouths of our enemy. Collateral damage her masters are willing to countenance—if it means destroying me as well—
(And who is going to win the war then, with all the Fleet Captains dead like my Shards are dying?)
“When we can spare such a necessary person as Deck Five’s cook,” she began—and then her entire cloudhook lit up with the red and white flare of an emergency message.
There was only one person on Weight for the Wheel who had accesses high enough to override her settings, spill a communiqué across her eyes without her granting permission first.
Mallow, Twenty Cicada’s message read. Medbay is under contamination protocols. I am inside. There is a fungal bloom from the corpse of our enemy. A medical tech is dead. It ate him. Acknowledge.
She was on her feet, one hand held up to stop any questions from the table. Her eyes flickered as fast as she could, calling up her messaging system, subvocalizing into it. Swarm, why are you inside?
A long ten seconds. I didn’t know better. Come see. I don’t seem to be dying yet.
I have Sixteen Moonrise, she wrote. Waited. Waited. Waited. She existed in a blank abeyance of panic, fear shoved so deep into her chest she felt perfused with it, existing alongside it.
And then: Starlight, Mallow, bring her along. Might as well.
Eight Antidote dreamed of disruptive persons and woke up with the images of the dream still hanging around him like a sticky miasma, a fog-wrapped morning that no amount of sunlight could entirely get rid of. He was formlessly upset, entirely sure he’d done something very wrong and equally certain that he hadn’t, not in the waking world: he’d only dreamed it, and the dream was fading. Fading, but not gone. Only gone to scraps.
He’d spent two whole days in the Ministry of War, coming back to Palace-Earth only to sleep, shadowing Minister Three Azimuth. Maybe that was enough to give anyone nightmares.
He’d followed her out of the gymnasium to the shooting range, and let her correct his aim like she’d corrected the position of his hands on the padded gym mats—and followed her back to her office, and simply, easily, magically—had not left. He would have left if she’d told him to. She just kept not telling him to.
She let him watch her discussion with the other Palms—Six, engineering and shipbuilding; Two, logistics—even her discussions with Eleven Laurel, who looked at Eight Antidote, curled on the Minister’s window seat, chin on his laced fingers on his knees and watching everything he could watch—with a complex expression, neither pleasure or displeasure. He had fixed the same expression on Minister Three Azimuth, with a leading pause she didn’t fill—and after that had ignored Eight Antidote like he was a throw pillow placed on the window seat for improving the décor. He tried not to feel hurt.
Late on the first day, closer to the end of the afternoon, Eight Antidote had brought the Minister a coffee. She’d laughed at him, and ruffled his hair, and told him that she didn’t drink coffee and that he was not an office aide.
He drank the coffee himself, and spent the rest of the evening wired and jittery and hugely terrified, hugely excited, when Three Azimuth began receiving reports that the Information agent and Mahit Dzmare—Mahit Dzmare, creature of disruption—had gone down to the dead planet of Peloa-2 and established first contact with the alien enemy. None of the reports were code Hyacinth. So all of them had to be aboveboard, simple chain-of-command reporting. Coming in on Fleet ships through the jumpgate postal system, standard courier, six hours of delay between message and receipt. Nothing like what the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had done, when she warned the Minister about the Information agent’s existence in the first place. Nothing secret.