(She could give them the planetary system. She could give that order at any time, and waste half of every legion on getting there, and then—destroy a whole live planet full of sentients, and have the war continue forever. But it would be a war with targets. It would be a war to break herself open on, and be a song and a story before she was done.)
She wondered if she could get away with shooting Sixteen Moonrise, just by accident. Probably not. Not until she had an excuse.
“How long are you going to give them?” asked Sixteen Moonrise, and Nine Hibiscus regretfully concluded that question wasn’t a sufficient excuse for court-martial and execution. It was the same question everyone else on the bridge wanted to ask—Bubbles, wrapped in her cloudhook’s holoprojections of the Fleet’s comm network; and Eighteen Chisel with his hands fluttering, ghosting over the propulsion and navigation interface, face hungry for anything she could provide.
“… Two hours,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Longer if Swarm sends back an all-clear signal. Which he will.”
“You are very devoted to him,” said Sixteen Moonrise. Nine Hibiscus found herself not even caring that the other woman was still trying to find an angle, information, ways to destroy and undermine her authority. It really didn’t matter now.
“We’ve served together for our entire careers,” she said. “Of course I am. Wouldn’t you be?”
The distortion of his voice through the medbay intercom would stay with her forever, she was entirely sure. The careful choice of words. How he’d called her Mallow and my dear because he was nearly sure he was going to die and some sorts of protocol didn’t matter then, even if you had made your whole life about being a perfect Teixcalaanlitzlim, a perfect Fleet soldier, except in all the ways you weren’t.
“… I would be,” said Sixteen Moonrise, surprisingly, and sighed. A ghost sound, a breath, like ice on the inside of a broken Shard canopy, where vacuum had gotten in. “He is exceptionally brave. His veins would drip starlight—and glow like fireflies in the sacrifice bowl.”
That was “Reclamation Song #1.” The oldest one, the one that had come out of the dirt with Teixcalaan, or almost. The first generation in space, under the First Emperor. The Reclamation Song no one ever assigned an author to, because why would you? It was the song about being Teixcalaanli. Nine Hibiscus was being manipulated, utterly, and that was—all right. “He is,” she said. “And that’s why I let him go down there with the envoy. He deserves a chance to ask these things why they almost killed him, and what for. And if they meant it.”
The sound Sixteen Moonrise made wasn’t a word. “Him, and not the rest of our dead? The rest of my dead? All of our people on Peloa-2?”
“He’s the one who gets the chance.” Whether that was bad luck or good she really wasn’t sure.
“I,” said Sixteen Moonrise, “want to believe in you, my yaotlek. Truly, I do. But there are powers at work here beyond you and me.”
“What powers would those be, Fleet Captain?” Nine Hibiscus asked. Paranoia she’d expected. That was what Third Palmers were like, even retired ones who had ended up in command. Paranoia, but not coupled with this sort of honesty. This sort of—asking, to be allowed to be helped—
This time the noise that came from Sixteen Moonrise’s mouth was a sigh. A grudging noise, the sound of a person getting ready to tell the truth. Fuck, but she was Third Palm, wasn’t she. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t trust her. Even if she turned out to be right—even if she couched her analysis in the language Nine Hibiscus understood as the one that ought to exist between commander and soldier, the mutual protection of I would die for you and I will never ask you to, unless it is a last resort.
Sixteen Moonrise said, “The ones who convinced Information to take along a representative of a foreign government to negotiate a first-contact cease-fire. The ones who pushed Her Brilliance the Emperor to encourage Minister Nine Propulsion to retire early. Any power that wants us entrapped in this war, instead of winning it.”
Nine Hibiscus turned to her. She’d made some kind of decision; she didn’t know what it was yet, only that she’d made it. “Do you want to have this conversation privately, Fleet Captain?” She tried to keep her voice gentle, as she’d ask one of her own soldiers (like she’d asked Eighteen Chisel, when he’d brought her the news that they knew the location of the enemy planetary system). It was an offer: Do you want me to trust you? To protect you?
And Sixteen Moonrise refused it. “No, yaotlek,” she said, all resigned politesse. “I can say all this right here on your bridge. There are factions in the Ministry—as I know you are aware—who would rather see you exhaust yourself on a war of attrition rather than begin a war we could win. And those factions are joined by those who would like power to accrete to the Ministry, the sort of prestige we enjoyed before the unfortunate incident with One Lightning. You do know where Minister Three Azimuth was stationed, before she received her posting?”
“Nakhar,” Nine Hibiscus said, and nothing more. Of course she knew Nakhar. Of course she knew how Three Azimuth had subdued it, the careful and destructive violence she had done to all of its insurgent factions, how she had installed her own people inside those factions and let them betray themselves down to uselessness. She herself had done something similar in the Kauraan engagement—
Abruptly, it occurred to her that the new Minister of War might dislike Sixteen Moonrise and the Third Palm as much as Nine Hibiscus herself did. And at the same time, might dislike Nine Hibiscus equally much, for who her patron had been. For using the same set of ideas, but not needing to have an epithet like she who kindles enmity in the most oath-sworn heart accrete around her like a chain.
“Nakhar,” Sixteen Moonrise agreed. “Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, may she reign a thousand thousand years—she made the butcher of the Nakharese mind Minister of War. And sent your patron Minister Nine Propulsion home to Zorai, and you—and I—out here. With this.” She gestured at the distant, still-spinning three-ringed ship. At Peloa-2, a glitter of reflected light.
Nine Hibiscus had only heard Three Azimuth called the butcher of the Nakharese mind in the nastier parts of Fleet bars, where poetry tended toward doggerel and the epigram so quick-spoken it eviscerated before you’d notice it had been said.
“I appreciate your candor, Fleet Captain,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you? That I suspect we are all going to die slowly out here, the first wave of this war? That I believe that our illuminate star-blessed Emperor would start a war she had no intention of winning, just to root out the last of the elements in the Fleet that might have supported One Lightning? Would you like me to say that, whether or not it is true, so that you can carry it home to your Undersecretary?”
It was gratifying to see Sixteen Moonrise flinch. She hadn’t known that Nine Hibiscus had figured out she was still Third Palm, had she. That was something. Some small thing.