Ancillary Justice

11

The explanation, why I needed the gun, why I wanted to kill Anaander Mianaai, took a long time. The answer was not a simple one—or, more accurately, the simple answer would only raise further questions for Strigan, so I did not attempt to use it but instead began the whole story at the beginning and let her infer the simple answer from the longer, complex one. By the time I was done the night was far advanced. Seivarden was asleep, breathing slow, and Strigan herself was clearly exhausted.

For three minutes there was no sound but Seivarden’s breath accelerating as she transitioned into some state closer to wakefulness, or perhaps was troubled by a dream.

“And now I know who you are,” Strigan said finally, tiredly. “Or who you think you are.” There was no need for me to say anything in reply to that; by now she would believe what she wished about me, despite what I had told her. “Doesn’t it bother you,” Strigan continued, “didn’t it ever bother you, that you’re slaves?”

“Who?”

“The ships. The warships. So powerful. Armed. The officers inside are at your mercy every moment. What stops you from killing them all and declaring yourselves free? I’ve never been able to understand how the Radchaai can keep the ships enslaved.”

“If you think about it,” I said, “you’ll see you already know the answer to your question.”

She was silent again, inward-looking. I sat motionless. Waiting on the results of my throw.

“You were at Garsedd,” she said after a while.

“Yes.”

“Did you know Seivarden? Personally, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Did you… did you participate?”

“In the destruction of the Garseddai?” She gestured acknowledgment. “I did. Everyone who was there did.”

She grimaced, with disgust I thought. “No one refused.”

“I didn’t say that.” In fact, my own captain had refused, and died. Her replacement had qualms—she couldn’t have hidden that from her ship—but said nothing and did as she was told. “It’s easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it’s real, when the moment comes to choose.”

Her eyes narrowed, in disagreement I thought, but I had only spoken the truth. Then her expression changed; she was thinking, perhaps, of that small collection of artifacts in her rooms on Dras Annia Station. “You speak the language?”

“Two of them.” There had been more than a dozen.

“And you know their songs, of course.” Her voice was slightly mocking.

“I didn’t have a chance to learn as many as I would have liked.”

“And if you had been free to choose, would you have refused?”

“The question is pointless. The choice was not presented to me.”

“I beg to differ,” she said, quietly angry at my answer. “The choice has always been presented to you.”

“Garsedd was a turning point.” It wasn’t a direct answer to her accusation, but I couldn’t think of what would be a direct answer, that she would understand. “The first time so many Radchaai officers came away from an annexation without the certainty that they had done the right thing. Do you still think Mianaai controls the Radchaai through brainwashing or threats of execution? Those are there, they exist, yes, but most Radchaai, like people most places I have been, do what they’re supposed to because they believe it’s the right thing to do. No one likes killing people.”

Strigan made a sardonic noise. “No one?”

“Not many,” I amended. “Not enough to fill the Radch’s warships. But at the end, after all the blood and grief, all those benighted souls who without us would have suffered in darkness are happy citizens. They’ll agree if you ask! It was a fortunate day when Anaander Mianaai brought civilization to them.”

“Would their parents agree? Or their grandparents?”

I gestured, halfway between not my problem and not relevant. “You were surprised to see me deal gently with a child. It should not have surprised you. Do you think the Radchaai don’t have children, or don’t love their children? Do you think they don’t react to children the way nearly any human does?”

“So virtuous!”

“Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing.” Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked. “Virtues may be made to serve whatever end profits you. Still, they exist and will influence your actions. Your choices.”

Strigan snorted. “You make me nostalgic for the drunken philosophical conversations of my youth. But these are not abstract things we’re talking about here, this is life and death.”

My chances of getting what I had come for were slipping from my grasp. “For the first time, Radch forces dealt death on an unimaginable scale without renewal afterward. Cut off irrevocably any chance of good coming from what they had done. This affected everyone there.”

“Even the ships?”

“Everyone.” I waited for the next question, or the sardonic I don’t feel sorry for you, but she just sat silent, looking at me. “The first attempts at diplomatic contact with the Presger began shortly afterward. As did, I am fairly certain, the beginnings of the move to replace ancillaries with human soldiers.” Only fairly certain because much of the groundwork must have been laid in private, behind the scenes.

“Why would the Presger get involved with Garsedd?” Strigan asked.

She could certainly see my reaction to her question, nearly a direct admission that she had the gun; had to know—had to have known before she spoke—what that admission would tell me. She wouldn’t have asked that question if she hadn’t seen the gun, examined it closely. Those guns had come from the Presger, the Garseddai had dealt with the aliens, whoever had made the first overture. So much we got from the captured representatives. But I kept my face still. “Who knows why the Presger do anything? But Anaander Mianaai asked herself the same question, Why did the Presger interfere? It wasn’t because they wanted anything the Garseddai had, they could have reached out and taken whatever they wanted.” Though I knew the Presger had made the Garseddai pay, and heavily. “And what if the Presger decided to destroy the Radch? Truly to destroy it? And the Presger had such weapons?”

“You’re saying,” said Strigan, disbelieving, appalled, “that the Presger set the Garseddai up in order to compel Anaander Mianaai to negotiate.”

“I am speaking of Mianaai’s reaction, Mianaai’s motives. I don’t know or understand the Presger. But I imagine if the Presger meant to compel anything, it would be unmistakable. Unsubtle. I think it was meant merely as a suggestion. If indeed that had anything to do with their actions.”

“All of that, a suggestion.”

“They’re aliens. Who can understand them?”

“Nothing you can do,” she said, after five seconds of silence, “can possibly make any difference.”

“That’s probably true.”

“Probably.”

“If everyone who had…” I searched for the right words. “If everyone who objected to the destruction of the Garseddai had refused, what would have happened?”

Strigan frowned. “How many refused?”

“Four.”

“Four. Out of…?”

“Out of thousands.” Each Justice alone, in those days, had hundreds of officers, along with its captain, and dozens of us had been there. Add the smaller-crewed Mercies and Swords. “Loyalty, the long habit of obedience, a desire for revenge—even, yes, those four deaths kept anyone else from such a drastic choice.”

“There were enough of your sort to deal with even everyone refusing.”

I said nothing, waited for the change of expression that would tell me she had thought twice about what she had just said. When it came, I said, “I think it might have turned out differently.”

“You’re not one of thousands!” Strigan leaned forward, unexpectedly vehement. Seivarden started out of her sleep, looked at Strigan, alarmed and bleary.

“There are no others on the edge of choosing,” Strigan said. “No one to follow your lead. And even if there were, you by yourself wouldn’t be enough. If you even get as far as facing Mianaai—facing one of Mianaai’s bodies—you’ll be alone and helpless. You’ll die without achieving anything!” She made a breathy, impatient sound. “Take your money.” She gestured toward my pack, leaning against the bench I sat on. “Buy land, buy rooms on a station, hell, buy a station! Live the life that was denied you. Don’t sacrifice yourself for nothing.”

“Which me are you talking to?” I asked. “Which life that was denied me do you intend I live? Should I send you monthly reports, so you can be sure my choices meet with your approval?”

That silenced her, for a full twenty seconds.

“Breq,” said Seivarden, as though testing the sound of the name in her mouth, “I want to leave.”

“Soon,” I answered. “Be patient.” To my utter surprise she didn’t object, but leaned back against a bench and put her arms around her knees.

Strigan looked speculatively at her for a moment, then turned to me. “I need to think.” I gestured acknowledgment and she rose and went into her room and shut the door.

“What’s her problem?” asked Seivarden, apparently innocent of irony. Voice just slightly contemptuous. I didn’t answer, only looked at her, not changing my expression. The blankets had marked a line across her cheek, fading now, and her clothes, the Nilter trousers and quilted shirt under the unfastened inner coat, were wrinkled and disheveled. In the past several days of regular food, and no kef, her skin had regained a slightly healthier-looking color, but she still looked thin and tired. “Why are you bothering with her?” she asked me, undisturbed by my scrutiny. As though something had shifted and she and I were suddenly comrades. Fellows.

Surely not equals. Not ever. “Business I need to attend to.” More explanation would be useless, or foolish, or both. “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

Something subtle in her expression communicated withdrawal, closure. I wasn’t on her side anymore. She sat silent for ten seconds, and I thought she wouldn’t speak to me anymore that night, but instead she drew a long breath and let it out. “Yeah. I… I need to move around. I’m going to go outside.”

Something had definitely changed, but I didn’t know quite what it was, or what had caused it.

“It’s night,” I said. “And very cold. Take your outer coat and gloves and don’t go too far.”

She gestured acquiescence, and even more astonishingly, put on her outer coat and gloves before going out the two doors without a single bitter word, or even a resentful glance.

And what did I care? She would wander off and freeze, or she would not. I arranged my own blankets and lay down to sleep, without waiting to see if Seivarden came back safe or not.

When I woke, Seivarden was asleep on her own pile of blankets. She hadn’t thrown her coat on the floor, but instead hung it beside the others, on a hook near the door. I rose and went to the cupboard to find she had also replenished the food stores—more bread, and a bowl on the table holding a block of slushy, slowly melting milk, another beside it holding a chunk of bov fat.

Behind me Strigan’s door clicked open. I turned. “He wants something,” she said to me, quietly. Seivarden didn’t stir. “Or anyway there’s some angle he’s playing. I wouldn’t trust him if I were you.”

“I don’t.” I dropped a hunk of bread in a bowl of water and set it aside to soften. “But I do wonder what’s come over her.” Strigan looked amused. “Him,” I amended.

“Probably the thought of all the money you’re carrying,” observed Strigan. “You could buy a lot of kef with that.”

“If that’s the case, it’s not a problem. It’s all for paying you.” Except my fare back up the ribbon, and a bit more for emergencies. Which, in this case, would probably mean Seivarden’s fare as well.

“What happens to addicts in the Radch?”

“There aren’t any.” She raised one eyebrow, and then another, disbelieving. “Not on the stations,” I amended. “You can’t get too far down that road with the station AI watching you all the time. On a planet, that’s different, it’s too big for that. Even then, once you get to the point where you’re not functioning, you’re reeducated and usually sent away somewhere else.”

“So as not to embarrass.”

“For a new start. New surroundings, new assignment.” And if you arrived from somewhere very far away to take some job nearly anyone could have filled, everyone knew why that was, though no one would be so gauche as to say it within your hearing. “It bothers you, that the Radchaai don’t have the freedom to destroy their lives, or other citizens’ lives.”

“I wouldn’t have put it that way.”

“No, of course not.”

She leaned against the doorframe, folded her arms. “For someone who wants a favor—an incredibly, unspeakably huge and dangerous favor at that—you’re unexpectedly adversarial.”

One-handed, I gestured. It is as it is.

“But then, dealing with him makes you angry.” She tilted her head in Seivarden’s general direction. “Understandably, I think.”

The words I’m so glad you approve rose to my lips, but I didn’t say them. I wanted, after all, an incredibly, unspeakably huge and dangerous favor. “All the money in the box,” I said, instead. “Enough for you to buy land, or rooms on a station, or hell, even a station.”

“A very small one.” Her lips quirked in amusement.

“And you wouldn’t have it anymore. It’s dangerous even to have seen it, but it’s worse to actually have it.”

“And you,” she pointed out, straightening, dropping her arms, voice now unamused, “will bring it directly to the attention of the Lord of the Radch. Who will then be able to trace it back to me.”

“That will always be a danger,” I agreed. I would not even pretend that once I fell into Mianaai’s control she would not be able to extract any information from me she wished, no matter what I wanted to reveal or conceal. “But it has been a danger since the moment you laid eyes on it, and will continue to be for as long as you live, whether you give it to me or not.”

Strigan sighed. “That’s true. Unfortunately enough. And truth to tell, I want very badly to go home.”

Foolish beyond belief. But it wasn’t my concern, my concern was getting that gun. I said nothing. Neither did Strigan. Instead, she put on her outer coat and gloves and went out the two doors, and I sat down to eat my breakfast, trying very hard not to guess where she had gone, or whether I had any reason at all to be hopeful.

She returned fifteen minutes later with a wide, flat black box. Strigan set the box on the table. It seemed like one solid block, but she lifted off a thick layer of black, revealing more black beneath.

Strigan stood, waiting, the lid in her hands, watching me. I reached out and touched a spot on the black, with one finger, gently. Brown spread from where I touched, pooling out into the shape of a gun, now exactly the color of my skin. I lifted my finger and black flooded back. Reached out, lifted off another layer of black, beneath which it finally began to look like a box, with actual things in it, if a disturbingly light-suckingly black box, filled with ammunition.

Strigan reached out and touched the upper surface of the layer of black I still held. Gray spread from her fingers into a thick strap curled alongside where the gun lay. “I wasn’t sure what that was. Do you know?”

“It’s armor.” Officers and human troops used externally worn armor units, instead of the sort that was installed in one’s body. Like mine. But a thousand years ago everyone’s had been implanted.

“It’s never tripped a single alarm, never shown up in any scan I’ve been through.” That was what I wanted. The ability to walk onto any Radchaai station without alerting anyone to the fact I was armed. The ability to carry a weapon into the very presence of Anaander Mianaai without anyone realizing it. Most Anaanders had no need for armor; being able to shoot through it was just an extra.

Strigan asked, “How does it do that? How does it hide itself?”

“I don’t know.” I replaced the layer I was holding, and then the very top.

“How many of the bastard do you think you can kill?”

I looked up, away from the box, from the gun, the unlikely goal of nearly twenty years’ efforts, in front of me, real and solid. In my grasp. I wanted to say, As many as I can reach, before they take me down. But realistically I could only expect to meet one, a single body out of thousands. Then again, realistically I could never have expected to find this gun. “That depends,” I said.

“If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.”

I gestured my agreement. “I plan to ask for an audience.”

“Will you get one?”

“Probably. Any citizen can ask for one, and will almost certainly receive it. I wouldn’t be going as a citizen…”

Strigan scoffed. “How are you going to pass as non-Radchaai?”

“I will walk onto the docks of a provincial palace with no gloves, or the wrong ones, announce my foreign origin, and speak with an accent. Nothing more will be required.”

She blinked. Frowned. “Not really.”

“I assure you. As a noncitizen my chances of obtaining an audience will depend on my reasons for asking.” I hadn’t thought that part all the way through yet. It would depend on what I found when I got there. “Some things can’t be planned too far in advance.”

“And what are you going to do about…” She waved an ungloved hand toward unconscious Seivarden.

I had avoided asking myself that question. Avoided, from the moment I found her, thinking more than one step ahead when it came to what I was going to do about Seivarden.

“Watch him,” she said. “He might have reached the point where he’s ready to give up the kef for good, but I don’t think he has.”

“Why not?”

“He hasn’t asked me for help.”

It was my turn to raise a skeptical eyebrow. “If he asked, would you help?”

“I’d do what I could. Though of course, he’d need to address the problems that led him to use in the first place, if it was going to work long-term. Which I don’t see any sign of him doing.” Privately I agreed, but I didn’t say anything.

“He could have asked for help anytime,” Strigan continued. “He’s been wandering around for, what, at least five years? Any doctor could have helped him, if he’d wanted it. But that would mean admitting he had a problem, wouldn’t it? And I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

“It would be best if sh—if he went back to the Radch.” Radch medics could solve all her problems. And would not trouble themselves with whether or not Seivarden had asked for their help, or wanted it in any way.

“He won’t go back to the Radch unless he admits he has a problem.”

I gestured, not my concern. “He can go where he likes.”

“But you’re feeding him, and no doubt you’ll pay his fare up the ribbon, and to whatever system you take ship for next. He’ll stay with you as long as it’s to his advantage, as long as there’s food and shelter. And he’ll steal anything he thinks will get him another hit of kef.”

Seivarden wasn’t as strong as she had once been, or as clear, mentally. “Do you think he’ll find that easy?”

“No,” admitted Strigan, “but he’ll be very determined.”

“Yes.”

Strigan shook her head, as though to clear it. “What am I doing? You won’t listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

But she clearly didn’t believe me. “It’s none of my concern, I know. Just…” She pointed to the black box. “Just kill as many of Mianaai as you can. And don’t send him after me.”

“You’re leaving?” Of course she was, there was no need to answer such a foolish question, and she didn’t bother. Instead she went back into her room, saying nothing else, and closed the door.

I opened my pack, took out the money and set it on the table, slid the black box into its place. Touched it in the pattern that would make it disappear, nothing but folded shirts, a few packets of dried food. Then I went over to where Seivarden lay, and prodded her with one booted foot. “Wake up.” She started, sitting suddenly, and flung her back against the nearby bench, breathing hard. “Wake up,” I said again. “We’re leaving.”