And then Three Seagrass had remembered, quite vividly and with some embarrassment, that Eight Antidote had been born to be Six Direction. To have one of Lsel Station’s imago-machines in his head, so Six Direction could have been Emperor forever. She guessed that Mahit felt complicatedly guilty about that. (And if Mahit was really more Yskandr Aghavn than she’d been six months ago, she probably also felt—thwarted. Frustrated. And guilty.)
(Which one of them had she fucked, last night? Which one of them had brought along that strange, lovely graphic story, with lines like it’s precious but it’s not a memory and I’m everything you need?)
(Did she really want to know? Probably not.)
When it came right down to it—when she was in front of the holorecorder, with Mahit to her right where she belonged, and a disapproving Fleet officer tucked in the corner, Three Seagrass decided to tell the kid as much of the truth as there was and see what happened. It was worth—well. It was that if she was going to do anything she was going to do it right. She’d been like that her whole life. The thing, entire, or not at all.
Nine Hibiscus was waiting for them on the bridge.
Three Seagrass bowed to her over her fingers, deeply, and Mahit did the same. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the imperial fast-courier shuttle glitter on its way to the jumpgate, their message inside it, passing across the windows of the bridge. There, gone. And here they were again, alone with the war.
“Have you heard anything from ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada?” Three Seagrass asked. She kept thinking of him, alone with Third and Fourth and his box of fungi. Alone in the heat, like she and Mahit were alone with the war.
“Not yet,” said the yaotlek. “Nothing since you arrived. He has—oh, another half hour, before I send you both back down to get him. If he can be gotten.”
Three Seagrass suspected that if he didn’t radio in, there wouldn’t be much left to get. She’d—be sorry about that. Very sorry. It would be a waste. A waste in the way Twenty Cicada had explained it to her on the hydroponics deck. A flaw in the way the universe should function. A perversity. A use of resources that wasn’t the best use, or even a good use.
Maybe she’d become a homeostat-cultist, if she ever got home from the war. Or at least read some texts about it.
“We should go back anyhow,” said Mahit. “We weren’t finished.”
“The situation has shifted,” said the yaotlek. Three Seagrass winced, internally. That was never a good line for a negotiating partner to deliver. Not in any poem or handbook or case study she knew.
“How so?” she asked.
Nine Hibiscus’s face was unreadable. Everything about her looked closed off, protective, angry. She didn’t want to tell Three Seagrass what she was about to tell her, but she was going to do it anyway, probably because she didn’t want the Information Ministry—or Lsel Station—to screw up whatever it was she had decided to do. This was going to be extremely unpleasant. Three Seagrass attempted to brace herself. Mostly, she felt exhausted.
“The scout-ship Gravity Rose has found one of the inhabited systems of the enemy,” said Nine Hibiscus. “A planet and its satellite.”
“And?” asked Mahit.
“And I’m waiting for Swarm to come back with something more actionable than they want to keep talking or they’re full of fungal infiltrates and we cannot trust their dead. And if he doesn’t—well.” For a moment Nine Hibiscus looked like she had the first time Three Seagrass had seen her: the absolute perfect image of a yaotlek. Star-bestriding and unmovable. “Well, then the Fleet knows where their heart is. And I am prepared to sink my hands into it and tear it out. If I have to.”
INTERLUDE
THESE bodies: dry-weather bodies, endurance-gened bodies; one a body which had displayed stubborn determination as a kit, even before it was brought in to personhood; one a body which had displayed a cunning intelligence, a sneaky body, the sort of kit the we near it laughed at, finding it underfoot, babbling in kit-language, yowling its demands at all hours. These bodies, singing in the we: singing heat and sand and confusion-interest in the closed-off but persistent minds of the enemy, just as their precedents had. Singing also now in surprise, stutter-burst fascination/horror, disjointed chords. One of the bodies of their silent enemy had brought strands of person-maker. Had not consumed the person-maker, but locked it in a plastic box, like it was poison.
Like the we were poison.
The bodies in the sand and the heat tried to make sense of this. To not think language, or equivalence of narrative (why would we?), but to attempt to link concepts that had never been possible previously: to think, not a person and also knows how to be a person and also does not want personhood; does not want to sing, fractal, reflected, iterating across the void-home. To cross-reference: those bodies that only sang an iteration of piloting, and were silent otherwise. To echo fear across the we, fear in the shape of the silent enemy: to imagine only wanting a partial singing.
The silent enemy body speaks in the language of mouths, senselessly. When the cunning/sneaksome body plucks the person-maker from its clawless hands, it yowls briefly and then silences itself. It is very still, and very watchful, and the stubborn/determined body sings person and the cunning/sneaksome body sings not a person, not singing, and these threads of melody reverberate endlessly through the we—
And at the same time, aflame with icy determination, the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, sometimes called Ascent by the man who was her most-beloved teacher, whom she wishes she could trust entire (but why then did he send her out this far, to this war, where she is like to die?), sends out orders to her legion. The Twenty-Fourth responds to her as if they were extensions of her hands, of her breath: they gather themselves, they assume strike formation, they begin, cautiously still, to advance.
And Sixteen Moonrise keeps a steady hand on their leash. She will wait a little longer yet. A little longer yet, for wondering why Eleven Laurel sent her here, and for the yaotlek to come to the inevitable conclusion that to avoid an endless war they must begin with an unanswerable atrocity: Peloa-2 a thousand times over.
The we slip in and out of black void-home the way the we slip in and out of jumpgate space: all places are in some sense the same, where there is the iterative song resounding, dirt-home or blood-home or starflyer-home in the dark between the stars. To think: There is a change. To think, knowing the confusion of the bodies in the sand and the heat, The silent ones have turned away from the person-maker and move together now toward the nearest blood-home of ours. To think to sing to shriek, ah, ah, ah, there are a million bodies there, a thousand million, too many to lose at once: so much silence to rebuild—