“No,” Sixteen Moonrise said. “That’s not what I want at all. I want—I want this war engaged. I want us to win it.”
Perhaps she wasn’t even lying. Nine Hibiscus didn’t have time to find out: Two Foam had stood up from her console and was saying, “Yaotlek—I’m sorry to interrupt, but we have a priority message from the Emperor Herself. She wants to speak with the envoy. The envoy and Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. As quickly as we can send the message back—the courier is waiting now.”
The envoy and Mahit Dzmare. Who were down on Peloa-2, arguing with the enemy, or possibly dying of fungal infiltration. Or heatstroke.
“… Well, get them back up here, then, will you?” Nine Hibiscus said. The Emperor—her Emperor, no matter what Sixteen Moonrise was trying to make her think, make her doubt—wanted the envoy, and so that was what she was going to get.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INCIDENT RECORD LOOKUP—NUCLEAR SHATTERBOMB STRIKES (TERRESTRIAL) (?NUMBER) (must-include FLEET)
There are three recorded instances of a Fleet vessel engaging in a shatterbomb strike on a planetary system since the invention of the technology. None of these instances has occurred in the past four hundred years, though there was a public debate about the usefulness of a threatened deployment in Nakhar System two indictions ago; that public debate resulted in a general social distaste for the idea …
… ALL SUBWAY SERVICE IN INMOST PROVINCE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE PENDING INVESTIGATION BY THE MINISTRY OF SCIENCE. MESSAGE REPEATS. EXPECT DELAYS. CHOOSE ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF TRANSIT. ALL SUBWAY SERVICE IN INMOST PROVINCE SUSPENDED …
DOWN in the sand and the heat again, Peloa-2 closed around her like a strangling cloak. Eighteen hours hadn’t dimmed the sun. This planet rotated slow. Eighteen hours had thickened the smell of charnel rot. Mahit had expected it, and choked on it anyway. The body forgot pain. That was one of the first things Lsel Station’s imago-integration therapists had taught her when she was small enough to just begin to think about how it would feel to be part of a long chain of imago-memory. The body forgets pain, but it also writes patterns into itself: endocrine response and chemical triggers. Biofeedback that sets patterns. That’s memory: continuity plus endocrine response.
The charnel smell again, and the sick heat: repeated experience. Mahit wanted to gag. She thought, Yskandr, were you ever on a killing field?
And got back, <No. Not until you.>
So this was something new she was adding to their imago-line. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Walking back to their plateau-platform was different than it had been the first time. She was still frightened—still terrified, to be perfectly clear about it in her own mind if nowhere else—of the aliens they were talking to. But she had sung to them once, and she could do it again. And the composition of their little expedition was different: the same four escorts with their shocksticks, the same canopy made from the most Teixcalaanli piece of silk Mahit could imagine bringing—but with the addition of Twenty Cicada, vicious with his tiny box of deadly fungus and his questions to ask. It was going to be Mahit’s job, somehow, to find a way to ask those questions. In a language that wasn’t language, on a planet so hot she thought she would faint.
Three Seagrass kept brushing against her as they walked. At first Mahit had thought she was staking some sort of claim—I’ve had my hands inside you and now you’re mine, and she’d recoiled from the idea with a violence that evoked a wincing sympathy from the echo of Yskandr’s memories of Six Direction and his bed—but then she realized that it was almost certainly unconscious. She was just standing closer. Some wall, dissolved. An easy intimacy. Like any other lover Mahit had ever had. Not different at all. And the continuity of endocrine response worked for everyone, Stationer or Teixcalaanlitzlim or something else: endocrine response said, in that brutal language of the flesh, This person has had their hands inside you, and you welcomed them in. Let’s do it again. Here are nice chemicals to help.
On the crest of the plateau, the aliens were waiting for them. They weren’t the same aliens.
First and Second were replaced by what Mahit immediately called Third and Fourth: two more of the same species, but obviously two different individuals. Both of these were of a height—a good foot and a half above Mahit’s own, not counting their ears—and one was heavily mottled, dark and light in a roan pattern, while the other was a nearly unmarked grey, with one large black pigmentation mark that spread over half of its face. They had clearly been waiting some time. Mahit wondered if the whole lot of their negotiation team was going to be eaten for rudeness before they even got around to saying hello.
She decided to head that off at the pass. Either they’d be eaten or they wouldn’t be. (And was that easy fatalism the chemical cocktail of endorphins and oxytocin in her blood, or just her being more Yskandr than they’d been before? That bravado. The simplicity of decisions—) She walked up to Third and Fourth. Came just to the edge of the reach of their claws. The sun raked her, felt like a weight on her skull. And she opened her mouth, took a lungful of desert air, and sang hello as loud and well as she could.
She was still hoarse from the last time she’d done this. It would be harder, this time. But—but Three Seagrass came up to her side and sang with her, and even Twenty Cicada attempted to join them. A light tenor. Not very resonant. But singing. And Third and Fourth, after an agonizing pause, sang back. Hello.
They were in business.
The escort team set up the canopy and the audioproj—and their new toy, a cloudhook rigged for office work, the kind that spread a corona of files and feeds around its wearer—but this one manipulable by any hands that came near it. Three Seagrass had called it a strategic planning modality. Twenty Cicada had just said that it was a strategy table. The kind the Fleet planned wars on.
No time for language learning, now. No time, even, to decide if what they were learning was a language.
Given: these aliens communicated and understood communication.
Given: they communicated in a way that was not visible to Mahit, nor any other human being, as well as by sounds.
Given: they seemed entirely willing to eat entire planets alive, for scraps, and leave the waste to rot in the sun. All of those bodies, dead. All of those people, dead—
Given all of that, it was time for crude rebus drawings in holo.
The most disturbing part wasn’t that Third and Fourth picked up what she and Three Seagrass were doing very quickly, drawing lines of light in the shimmering desert air with their claws. The most disturbing part was that they both simultaneously seemed to know everything First and Second had done the day before—and that they moved in that awful, unsettling-uncanny joint motion that First and Second had also displayed. Third would finish a gesture that Fourth had started. Draw the other half of a figure that Fourth had begun. And they had precisely the same skill in drawing. The same skill, and the same style.