Mahit wanted to tell her, You’re the one who dragged us up here to talk to a kid over infofiche message, we were working—was about to, even with Yskandr on the back of her tongue slowing her, warning her, when the comms officer Two Foam interrupted them both to say, “Yaotlek. Message.”
“Twenty Cicada?” Nine Hibiscus asked. Mahit winced at the naked hope in her voice, saw Three Seagrass wince, too.
“No,” Two Foam said. “It’s Forty Oxide’s flagship, the Chatoyant Sirocco—the Seventeenth Legion is under direct attack. I think the enemy knows we know where they are—the Seventeenth is losing Shards. Fast.”
Eight Antidote didn’t bother changing clothes. Or telling anyone where he was going. He just put on his shoes—grey spy-shoes to go with spy-trousers and tunic—brushed his hair and rebraided it into a long queue, and took the tunnels. Like he was going to visit Eleven Laurel, before any of this had really gotten started. The tunnels between Palace-Earth and the Ministry felt soothing and familiar, except for how every small noise, every shift of dust, made him shiver and walk a little faster. He’d never been here at this hour. Even trying to sing the walking-marching song of palace architecture to himself—as many roots in the ground as blooms into the sky—felt like a kid’s defense against monsters that might be under his bed. Or in his secret underground tunnels. (That was funny. Except in all the ways it wasn’t. What would happen if an incendiary device went off down here? He didn’t want to think of it.)
He climbed the ladder and came up through the trapdoor in the basement. There was no one there to meet him, and he was suddenly glad. He didn’t want anyone to know he was here except maybe Three Azimuth. He wanted to hand her this idea—her, and Eleven Laurel if he was with her, that would show how good a student Eight Antidote was—and no one else. Not let it escape, until the Six Outreaching Palms had decided what to do about it. But if he was going to get all the way into her office without having to explain himself—even at this hour, when there’d be fewer guards, but more suspicious ones—he needed to be a spy for real. The kind of spy who could sneak, as well as talk and remember and keep his own secrets.
The camera-eyes would see him. That was just how the City was. But people—except for Sunlit—weren’t camera-eyes. And he was small. He could hide in corners. He could be a piece of dust, a snatch of light reflected on a floor. He could be nothing at all. Someone who was supposed to be here, supposed to be where he was. Someone unimportant. A hallway cleaner, or a late-shift cadet doing inspections. He was too young to be either of those, but if he thought of himself as one of them—the hallway cleaner was easier. A person who was meant to be in the Ministry of War, making it look sparkling and new for the morning sunrise to glance off of.
He headed toward Three Azimuth’s office directly. The camera-eyes and the Ministry’s building-security AI would have seen him take this trip multiple times, and not suspect anything unusual. He was following a pattern the algorithm would expect from him. And if he saw a person—a person who wasn’t a Sunlit—who didn’t think he should be here, he’d either explain or he’d slip by them, pretending very hard to be a hallway cleaner. Thinking he was a hallway cleaner. Believing it. That was what spies in stories did.
He practiced believing he was a hallway cleaner until he reached the outside of Three Azimuth’s office. He hadn’t needed to talk to anyone. The only times he’d seen Ministry employees, he’d waited in a shadow and let them go past him. But now, right outside her office, in the center of the Six Outreaching Palms—right down the hall from it, enough to see the light from under its door and know he’d been right about the Minister for War not sleeping tonight—he heard voices. Raised, strained voices, drifting into the hall from that sliver of light.
He could interrupt them. He needed to tell Three Azimuth what he expected. He really, really did.
But instead he held himself very still, and made his breathing almost not breathing at all, no interruptions of sound or betrayal that he was there—and he listened. It was very hard, it turned out, to stop being a spy once you’d gotten used to being one. And Eight Antidote had gotten very used to being one.
(He wasn’t sure whose fault that was. His, or his ancestor-the-Emperor’s, either genetically or how he’d been raised, or the Emperor Herself’s when she’d given him that spearpoint.)
“—time to wait. I’m not going to stand idly by while Shard pilots come to me hardly able to stop screaming long enough to make their warning coherent. Whatever else is going on out there, they are killing the Fleet’s soldiers, and unless we unhook the Shards from their proprioception link, the whole universe is going to be exquisitely aware of it.”
That was Three Azimuth. That was Three Azimuth sounding more viciously animated than Eight Antidote had ever heard her. Three Azimuth, Minister of War, explaining what he could only think must be the Shard trick, and if the Shard pilots were somehow all linked together so that they heard each other die—as if they were Sunlit, except broken, Sunlit didn’t hear each other die, at least as far as Eight Antidote knew—how hadn’t the Minister of War come to the same conclusions Eight Antidote had? That the aliens they were fighting were also linked together? He took a step forward, toward the door, ready to interrupt and explain his idea.
And heard Eleven Laurel say, “Sending our ships down to that planet will surely expose our people to whatever fungal disease it is teeming with. Really, Minister?”
He didn’t move. Didn’t open the door. (Wasn’t sure about fungal disease, the envoy and Dzmare hadn’t mentioned anything like that.)
“A sufficient number of nuclear shatterbombs will wipe out even very determined fungi,” said Three Azimuth. “I’m not ordering an attack, Undersecretary. I’m ordering a heart-strike. Wipe that one colony off the skin of the universe and see what sort of negotiations we get to have after they know what we can do.”
A quiet, awful pause. Eight Antidote thought about what happened to a planet when its atmosphere was full of radioisotopes. He had to think back a long way. Teixcalaan didn’t do that kind of thing, anymore. It was too … A planet didn’t come back from that. He’d read a whole codex-book about it, two years ago, when one of his tutors had decided he was old enough to learn about the atrocities Teixcalaan had smartly given up committing.
Into that silence, Eleven Laurel said, “Minister, speaking as the Undersecretary of the Third Palm, and nominally your expert on military intelligence praxis … negotiation is not going to be what you’ll get after you order the Fleet to bomb a populated planetary settlement into radioactive winter. You’ll get—oh, surrender, perhaps, or retreat. Or retrenchment, a war that goes on for decades out there in that little, ugly spot of black.”
“Are you telling me it is a terrible idea, Undersecretary?”
“… No,” Eleven Laurel said, and Eight Antidote could imagine his smile. It would be the same one he used when Eight Antidote had gotten most of a strategy puzzle right. Pleased, but smug, too. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible idea at all. Merely that you’re unlikely to have negotiation be one of your outcomes—but then, negotiation’s never been what you’ve liked, has it? Not on Nakhar. You prefer efficacy, Minister.”