Ancillary Justice

2

Nineteen years, three months, and one week before I found Seivarden in the snow, I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis’urna. Troop carriers are the most massive of Radchaai ships, sixteen decks stacked one on top of the other. Command, Administrative, Medical, Hydroponics, Engineering, Central Access, and a deck for each decade, living and working space for my officers, whose every breath, every twitch of every muscle, was known to me.

Troop carriers rarely move. I sat, as I had sat for most of my two-thousand-year existence in one system or another, feeling the bitter chill of vacuum outside my hull, the planet Shis’urna like a blue-and-white glass counter, its orbiting station coming and going around, a steady stream of ships arriving, docking, undocking, departing toward one or the other of the buoy-and beacon-surrounded gates. From my vantage the boundaries of Shis’urna’s various nations and territories weren’t visible, though on its night side the planet’s cities glowed bright here and there, and webs of roads between them, where they’d been restored since the annexation.

I felt and heard—though didn’t always see—the presence of my companion ships—the smaller, faster Swords and Mercies, and most numerous at that time, the Justices, troop carriers like me. The oldest of us was nearly three thousand years old. We had known each other for a long time, and by now we had little to say to each other that had not already been said many times. We were, by and large, companionably silent, not counting routine communications.

As I still had ancillaries, I could be in more than one place at a time. I was also on detached duty in the city of Ors, on the planet Shis’urna, under the command of Esk Decade Lieutenant Awn.

Ors sat half on waterlogged land, half in marshy lake, the lakeward side built on slabs atop foundations sunk deep in the marsh mud. Green slime grew in the canals and joints between slabs, along the lower edges of building columns, on anything stationary the water reached, which varied with the season. The constant stink of hydrogen sulfide only cleared occasionally, when summer storms made the lakeward half of the city tremble and shudder and walkways were knee-deep in water blown in from beyond the barrier islands. Occasionally. Usually the storms made the smell worse. They turned the air temporarily cooler, but the relief generally lasted no more than a few days. Otherwise, it was always humid and hot.

I couldn’t see Ors from orbit. It was more village than city, though it had once sat at the mouth of a river, and been the capital of a country that stretched along the coastline. Trade had come up and down the river, and flat-bottomed boats had plied the coastal marsh, bringing people from one town to the next. The river had shifted away over the centuries, and now Ors was half ruins. What had once been miles of rectangular islands within a grid of channels was now a much smaller place, surrounded by and interspersed with broken, half-sunken slabs, sometimes with roofs and pillars, that emerged from the muddy green water in the dry season. It had once been home to millions. Only 6,318 people had lived here when Radchaai forces annexed Shis’urna five years earlier, and of course the annexation had reduced that number. In Ors less than in some other places: as soon as we had appeared—myself in the form of my Esk cohorts along with their decade lieutenants lined up in the streets of the town, armed and armored—the head priest of Ikkt had approached the most senior officer present—Lieutenant Awn, as I said—and offered immediate surrender. The head priest had told her followers what they needed to do to survive the annexation, and for the most part those followers did indeed survive. This wasn’t as common as one might think—we always made it clear from the beginning that even breathing trouble during an annexation could mean death, and from the instant an annexation began we made demonstrations of just what that meant widely available, but there was always someone who couldn’t resist trying us.

Still, the head priest’s influence was impressive. The city’s small size was to some degree deceptive—during pilgrimage season hundreds of thousands of visitors streamed through the plaza in front of the temple, camped on the slabs of abandoned streets. For worshippers of Ikkt this was the second holiest place on the planet, and the head priest a divine presence.

Usually a civilian police force was in place by the time an annexation was officially complete, something that often took fifty years or more. This annexation was different—citizenship had been granted to the surviving Shis’urnans much earlier than normal. No one in system administration quite trusted the idea of local civilians working security just yet, and military presence was still quite heavy. So when the annexation of Shis’urna was officially complete, most of Justice of Toren Esk went back to the ship, but Lieutenant Awn stayed, and I stayed with her as the twenty-ancillary unit Justice of Toren One Esk.

The head priest lived in a house near the temple, one of the few intact buildings from the days when Ors had been a city—four-storied, with a single-sloped roof and open on all sides, though dividers could be raised whenever an occupant wished privacy, and shutters could be rolled down on the outsides during storms. The head priest received Lieutenant Awn in a partition some five meters square, light peering in over the tops of the dark walls.

“You don’t,” said the priest, an old person with gray hair and a close-cut gray beard, “find serving in Ors a hardship?” Both she and Lieutenant Awn had settled onto cushions—damp, like everything in Ors, and fungal-smelling. The priest wore a length of yellow cloth twisted around her waist, her shoulders inked with shapes, some curling, some angular, that changed depending on the liturgical significance of the day. In deference to Radchaai propriety, she wore gloves.

“Of course not,” said Lieutenant Awn, pleasantly—though, I thought, not entirely truthfully. She had dark brown eyes and close-clipped dark hair. Her skin was dark enough that she wouldn’t be considered pale, but not so dark as to be fashionable—she could have changed it, hair and eyes as well, but she never had. Instead of her uniform—long brown coat with its scattering of jeweled pins, shirt and trousers, boots and gloves—she wore the same sort of skirt the head priest did, and a thin shirt and the lightest of gloves. Still, she was sweating. I stood at the entrance, silent and straight, as a junior priest laid cups and bowls in between Lieutenant Awn and the Divine.

I also stood some forty meters away, in the temple itself—an atypically enclosed space 43.5 meters high, 65.7 meters long, and 29.9 meters wide. At one end were doors nearly as tall as the roof was high, and at the other, towering over the people on the floor below, a representation of a mountainside cliff somewhere else on Shis’urna, worked in painstaking detail. At the foot of this sat a dais, wide steps leading down to a floor of gray-and-green stone. Light streamed in through dozens of green skylights, onto walls painted with scenes from the lives of the saints of the cult of Ikkt. It was unlike any other building in Ors. The architecture, like the cult of Ikkt itself, had been imported from elsewhere on Shis’urna. During pilgrimage season this space would be jammed tight with worshippers. There were other holy sites, but if an Orsian said “pilgrimage” she meant the annual pilgrimage to this place. But that was some weeks away. For now the air of the temple susurrated faintly in one corner with the whispered prayers of a dozen devotees.

The head priest laughed. “You are a diplomat, Lieutenant Awn.”

“I am a soldier, Divine,” answered Lieutenant Awn. They were speaking Radchaai, and she spoke slowly and precisely, careful of her accent. “I don’t find my duty a hardship.”

The head priest did not smile in response. In the brief silence that followed, the junior priest set down a lipped bowl of what Shis’urnans call tea, a thick liquid, lukewarm and sweet, that bears almost no relationship to the actual thing.

Outside the doors of the temple I also stood in the cyanophyte-stained plaza, watching people as they passed. Most wore the same simple, bright-colored skirting the head priest did, though only very small children and the very devout had much in the way of markings, and only a few wore gloves. Some of those passing were transplants, Radchaai assigned to jobs or given property here in Ors after the annexation. Most of them had adopted the simple skirt and added a light, loose shirt, as Lieutenant Awn had. Some stuck stubbornly to trousers and jacket, and sweated their way across the plaza. All wore the jewelry that few Radchaai would ever give up—gifts from friends or lovers, memorials to the dead, marks of family or clientage associations.

To the north, past a rectangular stretch of water called the Fore-Temple after the neighborhood it had once been, Ors rose slightly where the city sat on actual ground during the dry season, an area still called, politely, the upper city. I patrolled there as well. When I walked the edge of the water I could see myself standing in the plaza.

Boats poled slowly across the marshy lake, and up and down channels between groupings of slabs. The water was scummy with swaths of algae, here and there bristling with the tips of water-grasses. Away from the town, east and west, buoys marked prohibited stretches of water, and within their confines the iridescent wings of marshflies shimmered over the water weeds floating thick and tangled there. Around them larger boats floated, and the big dredgers, now silent and still, that before the annexation had hauled up the stinking mud that lay beneath the water.

The view to the south was similar, except for the barest hint on the horizon of the actual sea, past the soggy spit that bounded the swamp. I saw all of this, standing as I did at various points surrounding the temple, and walking the streets of the town itself. It was twenty-seven degrees C, and humid as always.

That accounted for almost half of my twenty bodies. The remainder slept or worked in the house Lieutenant Awn occupied—three-storied and spacious, it had once housed a large extended family and a boat rental. One side opened on a broad, muddy green canal, and the opposite onto the largest of local streets.

Three of the segments in the house were awake, performing administrative duties (I sat on a mat on a low platform in the center of the first floor of the house and listened to an Orsian complain to me about the allocation of fishing rights) and keeping watch. “You should bring this to the district magistrate, citizen,” I told the Orsian, in the local dialect. Because I knew everyone here, I knew she was female, and a grandparent, both of which had to be acknowledged if I were to speak to her not only grammatically but also courteously.

“I don’t know the district magistrate!” she protested, indignant. The magistrate was in a large, populous city well upriver from Ors and nearby Kould Ves. Far enough upriver that the air was often cool and dry, and things didn’t smell of mildew all the time. “What does the district magistrate know about Ors? For all I know the district magistrate doesn’t exist!” She continued, explaining to me the long history of her house’s association with the buoy-enclosed area, which was off-limits and certainly closed to fishing for the next three years.

And as always, in the back of my mind, a constant awareness of being in orbit overhead.

“Come now, Lieutenant,” said the head priest. “No one likes Ors except those of us unfortunate enough to be born here. Most Shis’urnans I know, let alone Radchaai, would rather be in a city, with dry land and actual seasons besides rainy and not rainy.”

Lieutenant Awn, still sweating, accepted a cup of so-called tea, and drank without grimacing—a matter of practice and determination. “My superiors are asking for my return.”

On the relatively dry northern edge of the town, two brown-uniformed soldiers passing in an open runabout saw me, raised hands in greeting. I raised my own, briefly. “One Esk!” one of them called. They were common soldiers, from Justice of Ente’s Seven Issa unit, under Lieutenant Skaaiat. They patrolled the stretch of land between Ors and the far southwestern edge of Kould Ves, the city that had grown up around the river’s newer mouth. The Justice of Ente Seven Issas were human, and knew I was not. They always treated me with slightly guarded friendliness.

“I would prefer you stay,” said the head priest, to Lieutenant Awn. Though Lieutenant Awn had already known that. We’d have been back on Justice of Toren two years before, but for the Divine’s continued request that we stay.

“You understand,” said Lieutenant Awn, “they would much prefer to replace One Esk with a human unit. Ancillaries can stay in suspension indefinitely. Humans…” She set down her tea, took a flat, yellow-brown cake. “Humans have families they want to see again, they have lives. They can’t stay frozen for centuries, the way ancillaries sometimes do. It doesn’t make sense to have ancillaries out of the holds doing work when there are human soldiers who could do it.” Though Lieutenant Awn had been here five years, and routinely met with the head priest, it was the first time the topic had been broached so plainly. She frowned, and changes in her respiration and hormone levels told me she’d thought of something dismaying. “You haven’t had problems with Justice of Ente Seven Issa, have you?”

“No,” said the head priest. She looked at Lieutenant Awn with a wry twist to her mouth. “I know you. I know One Esk. Whoever they’ll send me—I won’t know. Neither will my parishioners.”

“Annexations are messy,” said Lieutenant Awn. The head priest winced slightly at the word annexation and I thought I saw Lieutenant Awn notice, but she continued. “Seven Issa wasn’t here for that. The Justice of Ente Issa battalions didn’t do anything during that time that One Esk didn’t also do.”

“No, Lieutenant.” The priest put down her own cup, seeming disturbed, but I didn’t have access to any of her internal data and so could not be certain. “Justice of Ente Issa did many things One Esk did not. It’s true, One Esk killed as many people as the soldiers of Justice of Ente’s Issa. Likely more.” She looked at me, still standing silent by the enclosure’s entrance. “No offense, but I think it was more.”

“I take no offense, Divine,” I replied. The head priest frequently spoke to me as though I were a person. “And you are correct.”

“Divine,” said Lieutenant Awn, worry clear in her voice. “If the soldiers of Justice of Ente Seven Issa—or anyone else—have been abusing citizens…”

“No, no!” protested the head priest, her voice bitter. “Radchaai are so very careful about how citizens are treated!”

Lieutenant Awn’s face heated, her distress and anger plain to me. I couldn’t read her mind, but I could read every twitch of her every muscle, so her emotions were as transparent to me as glass.

“Forgive me,” said the head priest, though Lieutenant Awn’s expression had not changed, and her skin was too dark to show the flush of her anger. “Since the Radchaai have bestowed citizenship on us…” She stopped, seemed to reconsider her words. “Since their arrival, Seven Issa has given me nothing to complain of. But I’ve seen what your human troops did during what you call the annexation. The citizenship you granted may be as easily taken back, and…”

“We wouldn’t…” protested Lieutenant Awn.

The head priest stopped her with a raised hand. “I know what Seven Issa, or at least those like them, do to people they find on the wrong side of a dividing line. Five years ago it was noncitizen. In the future, who knows? Perhaps not-citizen-enough?” She waved a hand, a gesture of surrender. “It won’t matter. Such boundaries are too easy to create.”

“I can’t blame you for thinking in such terms,” said Lieutenant Awn. “It was a difficult time.”

“And I can’t help but think you inexplicably, unexpectedly naive,” said the head priest. “One Esk will shoot me if you order it. Without hesitation. But One Esk would never beat me or humiliate me, or rape me, for no purpose but to show its power over me, or to satisfy some sick amusement.” She looked at me. “Would you?”

“No, Divine,” I said.

“The soldiers of Justice of Ente Issa did all of those things. Not to me, it’s true, and not to many in Ors itself. But they did them nonetheless. Would Seven Issa have been any different, if it had been them here instead?”

Lieutenant Awn sat, distressed, looking down at her unappetizing tea, unable to answer.

“It’s strange. You hear stories about ancillaries, and it seems like the most awful thing, the most viscerally appalling thing the Radchaai have done. Garsedd—well, yes, Garsedd, but that was a thousand years ago. This—to invade and take, what, half the adult population? And turn them into walking corpses, slaved to your ships’ AIs. Turned against their own people. If you’d asked me before you… annexed us, I’d have said it was a fate worse than death.” She turned to me. “Is it?”

“None of my bodies is dead, Divine,” I said. “And your estimate of the typical percentage of annexed populations who were made into ancillaries is excessive.”

“You used to horrify me,” said the head priest to me. “The very thought of you near was terrifying, your dead faces, those expressionless voices. But today I am more horrified at the thought of a unit of living human beings who serve voluntarily. Because I don’t think I could trust them.”

“Divine,” said Lieutenant Awn, mouth tight. “I serve voluntarily. I make no excuses for it.”

“I believe you are a good person, Lieutenant Awn, despite that.” She picked up her cup of tea and sipped it, as though she had not just said what she had said.

Lieutenant Awn’s throat tightened, and her lips. She had thought of something she wanted to say, but was unsure if she should. “You’ve heard about Ime,” she said, deciding. Still tense and wary despite having chosen to speak.

The head priest seemed bleakly, bitterly amused. “News from Ime is meant to inspire confidence in Radch administration?”

This is what had happened: Ime Station, and the smaller stations and moons in the system, were the farthest one could be from a provincial palace and still be in Radch space. For years the governor of Ime used this distance to her own advantage—embezzling, collecting bribes and protection fees, selling assignments. Thousands of citizens had been unjustly executed or (what was essentially the same thing) forced into service as ancillary bodies, even though the manufacture of ancillaries was no longer legal. The governor controlled all communications and travel permits, and normally a station AI would report such activity to the authorities, but Ime Station had been somehow prevented from doing so, and the corruption grew, and spread unchecked.

Until a ship entered the system, came out of gate space only a few hundred kilometers from the patrol ship Mercy of Sarrse. The strange ship didn’t answer demands that it identify itself. When Mercy of Sarrse’s crew attacked and boarded it, they found dozens of humans, as well as the alien Rrrrrr. The captain of Mercy of Sarrse ordered her soldiers to take captive any humans that seemed suitable for use as ancillaries, and kill the rest, along with all the aliens. The ship would be turned over to the system governor.

Mercy of Sarrse was not the only human-crewed warship in that system. Until that moment human soldiers stationed there had been kept in line by a program of bribes, flattery, and, when those failed, threats and even executions. All very effective, until the moment the soldier Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One decided she wasn’t willing to kill those people, or the Rrrrrr. And convinced the rest of her unit to follow her.

That had all happened five years before. The results of it were still playing themselves out.

Lieutenant Awn shifted on her cushion. “That business was all uncovered because a single human soldier refused an order. And led a mutiny. If it hadn’t been for her… well. Ancillaries won’t do that. They can’t.”

“That business was all uncovered,” replied the head priest, “because the ship that human soldier boarded, she and the rest of her unit, had aliens on it. Radchaai have few qualms about killing humans, especially noncitizen humans, but you’re very cautious about starting wars with aliens.”

Only because wars with aliens might run up against the terms of the treaty with the alien Presger. Violating that agreement would have extremely serious consequences. And even so, plenty of high-ranking Radchaai disagreed on that topic. I saw Lieutenant Awn’s desire to argue the point. Instead she said, “The governor of Ime was not cautious about it. And would have started that war, if not for this one person.”

“Have they executed that person yet?” the head priest asked, pointedly. It was the summary fate of any soldier who refused an order, let alone mutinied.

“Last I heard,” said Lieutenant Awn, breath tight and turning shallow, “the Rrrrrr had agreed to turn her over to Radch authorities.” She swallowed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Of course, it had probably already happened, whatever it was. News could take a year or more to reach Shis’urna from as far away as Ime.

The head priest didn’t answer for a moment. She poured more tea, and spooned fish paste into a small bowl. “Does my continued request for your presence present any sort of disadvantage for you?”

“No,” said Lieutenant Awn. “Actually, the other Esk lieutenants are a bit envious. There’s no chance for action on Justice of Toren.” She picked up her own cup, outwardly calm, inwardly angry. Disturbed. Talking about the news from Ime had increased her unease. “Action means commendations, and possibly promotions.” And this was the last annexation. The last chance for an officer to enrich her house through connections to new citizens, or even through outright appropriation.

“Yet another reason I would prefer you,” said the head priest.

I followed Lieutenant Awn home. And watched inside the temple, and overlooked the people crisscrossing the plaza as they always did, avoiding the children playing kau in the center of the plaza, kicking the ball back and forth, shouting and laughing. On the edge of the Fore-Temple water, a teenager from the upper city sat sullen and listless watching half a dozen little children hopping from stone to stone, singing:

One, two, my aunt told me

Three, four, the corpse soldier

Five, six, it’ll shoot you in the eye

Seven, eight, kill you dead

Nine, ten, break it apart and put it back together.

As I walked the streets people greeted me, and I greeted them in return. Lieutenant Awn was tense and angry, and only nodded absently at the people in the street, who greeted her as she passed.

The person with the fishing-rights complaint left, unsatisfied. Two children rounded the divider after she had gone, and sat cross-legged on the cushion she had vacated. They both wore lengths of fabric wrapped around their waists, clean but faded, though no gloves. The elder was about nine, and the symbols inked on the younger one’s chest and shoulders—slightly smudged—indicated she was no more than six. She looked at me, frowning.

In Orsian addressing children properly was easier than addressing adults. One used a simple, ungendered form. “Hello, citizens,” I said, in the local dialect. I recognized them both—they lived on the south edge of Ors and I had spoken to them quite frequently, but they had never visited the house before. “How can I help you?”

“You aren’t One Esk,” said the smaller child, and the older made an abortive motion as if to hush her.

“I am,” I said, and pointed to the insignia on my uniform jacket. “See? Only this is my number Fourteen segment.”

“I told you,” said the older child.

The younger considered this for a moment, and then said, “I have a song.” I waited in silence, and she took a deep breath, as though about to begin, and then halted, perplexed-seeming. “Do you want to hear it?” she asked, still doubtful of my identity, likely.

“Yes, citizen,” I said. I—that is, I–One Esk—first sang to amuse one of my lieutenants, when Justice of Toren had hardly been commissioned a hundred years. She enjoyed music, and had brought an instrument with her as part of her luggage allowance. She could never interest the other officers in her hobby and so she taught me the parts to the songs she played. I filed those away and went looking for more, to please her. By the time she was captain of her own ship I had collected a large library of vocal music—no one was going to give me an instrument, but I could sing anytime—and it was a matter of rumor and some indulgent smiles that Justice of Toren had an interest in singing. Which it didn’t—I—I–Justice of Toren—tolerated the habit because it was harmless, and because it was quite possible that one of my captains would appreciate it. Otherwise it would have been prevented.

If these children had stopped me on the street, they would have had no hesitation, but here in the house, seated as though for a formal conference, things were different. And I suspected this was an exploratory visit, that the youngest child meant to eventually ask for a chance to serve in the house’s makeshift temple—the prestige of being appointed flower-bearer to Amaat wasn’t a question here, in the stronghold of Ikkt, but the customary term-end gift of fruit and clothing was. And this child’s best friend was currently a flower-bearer, doubtless making the prospect more interesting.

No Orsian would make such a request immediately or directly, so likely the child had chosen this oblique approach, turning a casual encounter into something formal and intimidating. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of sweets and laid them on the floor between us.

The littler girl made an affirmative gesture, as though I had resolved all her doubts, and then took a breath and began.

My heart is a fish

Hiding in the water-grass

In the green, in the green.

The tune was an odd amalgam of a Radchaai song that played occasionally on broadcast and an Orsian one I already knew. The words were unfamiliar to me. She sang four verses in a clear, slightly wavering voice, and seemed ready to launch into a fifth, but stopped abruptly when Lieutenant Awn’s steps sounded outside the divider.

The smaller girl leaned forward and scooped up her payment. Both children bowed, still half-seated, and then rose and ran out the entranceway into the wider house, past Lieutenant Awn, past me following Lieutenant Awn.

“Thank you, citizens,” Lieutenant Awn said to their retreating backs, and they started, and then managed with a single movement to both bow slightly in her direction and continue running, out into the street.

“Anything new?” asked Lieutenant Awn, though she didn’t pay much attention to music, herself, not beyond what most people do.

“Sort of,” I said. Farther down the street I saw the two children, still running as they turned a corner around another house. They slowed to a halt, breathing hard. The littler girl opened her hand to show the older one her fistful of sweets. Surprisingly, she seemed not to have dropped any, small as her hand was, as quick as their flight had been. The older child took a sweet and put it in her mouth.

Five years ago I would have offered something more nutritious, before repairs had begun to the planet’s infrastructure, when supplies were chancy. Now every citizen was guaranteed enough to eat, but the rations were not luxurious, and often as not were unappealing.

Inside the temple all was green-lit silence. The head priest did not emerge from behind the screens in the temple residence, though junior priests came and went. Lieutenant Awn went to the second floor of her house and sat brooding on an Ors-style cushion, screened from the street, shirt thrown off. She refused the (genuine) tea I brought her. I transmitted a steady stream of information to her—everything normal, everything routine—and to Justice of Toren. “She should take that to the district magistrate,” Lieutenant Awn said of the citizen with the fishing dispute, slightly annoyed, eyes closed, the afternoon’s reports in her vision. “We don’t have jurisdiction over that.” I didn’t answer. No answer was required, or expected. She approved, with a quick twitch of her fingers, the message I had composed for the district magistrate, and then opened the most recent message from her young sister. Lieutenant Awn sent a percentage of her earnings home to her parents, who used it to buy their younger child poetry lessons. Poetry was a valuable, civilized accomplishment. I couldn’t judge if Lieutenant Awn’s sister had any particular talent, but then not many did, even among more elevated families. But her work and her letters pleased Lieutenant Awn, and took the edge off her present distress.

The children on the plaza ran away home, laughing. The adolescent sighed, heavily, the way adolescents do, and dropped a pebble in the water and stared at the ripples.

Ancillary units that only ever woke for annexations often wore nothing but a force shield generated by an implant in each body, rank on rank of featureless soldiers that might have been poured from mercury. But I was always out of the holds, and I wore the same uniform human soldiers did, now the fighting was done. My bodies sweated under my uniform jackets, and, bored, I opened three of my mouths, all in close proximity to each other on the temple plaza, and sang with those three voices, “My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass…” One person walking by looked at me, startled, but everyone else ignored me—they were used to me by now.