Ancillary Sword

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A Preview of LEVIATHAN WAKES

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1

“Considering the circumstances, you could use another lieutenant.” Anaander Mianaai, ruler (for the moment) of all the vast reaches of Radchaai space, sat in a wide chair cushioned with embroidered silk. This body that spoke to me—one of thousands—looked to be about thirteen years old. Black-clad, dark-skinned. Her face was already stamped with the aristocratic features that were, in Radchaai space, a marker of the highest rank and fashion. Under normal circumstances no one ever saw such young versions of the Lord of the Radch, but these were not normal circumstances.

The room was small, three and a half meters square, paneled with a lattice of dark wood. In one corner the wood was missing—probably damaged in last week’s violent dispute between rival parts of Anaander Mianaai herself. Where the wood remained, tendrils of some wispy plant trailed, thin silver-green leaves and here and there tiny white flowers. This was not a public area of the palace, not an audience chamber. An empty chair sat beside the Lord of the Radch’s, a table between those chairs held a tea set, flask, and bowls of unadorned white porcelain, gracefully lined, the sort of thing that, at first glance, you might take as unremarkable, but on second would realize was a work of art worth more than some planets.

I had been offered tea, been invited to sit. I had elected to remain standing. “You said I could choose my own officers.” I ought to have added a respectful my lord but did not. I also ought to have knelt and put my forehead to the floor, when I’d entered and found the Lord of the Radch. I hadn’t done that, either.

“You’ve chosen two. Seivarden, of course, and Lieutenant Ekalu was an obvious choice.” The names brought both people reflexively to mind. In approximately a tenth of a second Mercy of Kalr, parked some thirty-five thousand kilometers away from this station, would receive that near-instinctive check for data, and a tenth of a second after that its response would reach me. I’d spent the last several days learning to control that old, old habit. I hadn’t completely succeeded. “A fleet captain is entitled to a third,” Anaander Mianaai continued. Beautiful porcelain bowl in one black-gloved hand, she gestured toward me, meaning, I thought, to indicate my uniform. Radchaai military wore dark-brown jackets and trousers, boots and gloves. Mine was different. The left-hand side was brown, but the right side was black, and my captain’s insignia bore the marks that showed I commanded not only my own ship but other ships’ captains. Of course, I had no ships in my fleet besides my own, Mercy of Kalr, but there were no other fleet captains stationed near Athoek, where I was bound, and the rank would give me an advantage over other captains I might meet. Assuming, of course, those other captains were at all inclined to accept my authority.

Just days ago a long-simmering dispute had broken out and one faction had destroyed two of the intersystem gates. Now preventing more gates from going down—and preventing that faction from seizing gates and stations in other systems—was an urgent priority. I understood Anaander’s reasons for giving me the rank, but still I didn’t like it. “Don’t make the mistake,” I said, “of thinking I’m working for you.”

She smiled. “Oh, I don’t. Your only other choices are officers currently in the system, and near this station. Lieutenant Tisarwat is just out of training. She was on her way to take her first assignment, and now of course that’s out of the question. And I thought you’d appreciate having someone you could train up the way you want.” She seemed amused at that last.

As she spoke I knew Seivarden was in stage two of NREM sleep. I saw pulse, temperature, respiration, blood oxygen, hormone levels. Then that data was gone, replaced by Lieutenant Ekalu, standing watch. Stressed—jaw slightly clenched, elevated cortisol. She’d been a common soldier until one week ago, when Mercy of Kalr’s captain had been arrested for treason. She had never expected to be made an officer. Wasn’t, I thought, entirely sure she was capable of it.

“You can’t possibly think,” I said to the Lord of the Radch, blinking away that vision, “that it’s a good idea to send me into a newly broken-out civil war with only one experienced officer.”

“It can’t be worse than going understaffed,” Anaander Mianaai said, maybe aware of my momentary distraction, maybe not. “And the child is beside herself at the thought of serving under a fleet captain. She’s waiting for you at the docks.” She set down her tea, straightened in her chair. “Since the gate leading to Athoek is down and I have no idea what the situation there might be, I can’t give you specific orders. Besides”—she raised her now-empty hand as though forestalling some speech of mine—“I’d be wasting my time attempting to direct you too closely. You’ll do as you like no matter what I say. You’re loaded up? Have all the supplies you need?”

The question was perfunctory—she surely knew the status of my ship’s stores as well as I did. I made an indefinite gesture, deliberately insolent.

“You might as well take Captain Vel’s things,” she said, as though I’d answered reasonably. “She won’t need them.”

Vel Osck had been captain of Mercy of Kalr until a week ago. There were any number of reasons she might not need her possessions, the most likely, of course, being that she was dead. Anaander Mianaai didn’t do anything halfway, particularly when it came to dealing with her enemies. Of course, in this case, the enemy Vel Osck had supported was Anaander Mianaai herself. “I don’t want them,” I said. “Send them to her family.”

“If I can.” She might well not be able to do that. “Is there anything you need before you go? Anything at all?”

Various answers occurred to me. None seemed useful. “No.”

“I’ll miss you, you know,” she said. “No one else will speak to me quite the way you do. You’re one of the very few people I’ve ever met who really, truly didn’t fear the consequences of offending me. And none of those very few have the… similarity of background you and I have.”

Because I had once been a ship. An AI controlling an enormous troop carrier and thousands of ancillaries, human bodies, part of myself. At the time I had not thought of myself as a slave, but I had been a weapon of conquest, the possession of Anaander Mianaai, herself occupying thousands of bodies spread throughout Radch space.

Now I was only this single human body. “Nothing you can do to me could possibly be worse than what you’ve already done.”

“I am aware of that,” she said, “and aware of just how dangerous that makes you. I may well be extremely foolish just letting you live, let alone giving you official authority and a ship. But the games I play aren’t for the timid.”

“For most of us,” I said, openly angry now, knowing she could see the physical signs of it no matter how impassive my expression, “they aren’t games.”

“I am also aware of that,” said the Lord of the Radch. “Truly I am. It’s just that some losses are unavoidable.”

I could have chosen any of a half dozen responses to that. Instead I turned and walked out of the room without answering. As I stepped through the door, the soldier Mercy of Kalr One Kalr Five, who had been standing at stiff attention just outside, fell in behind me, silent and efficient. Kalr Five was human, like all Mercy of Kalr’s soldiers, not an ancillary. She had a name, beyond her ship, decade, and number. I had addressed her by that name once. She’d responded with outward impassivity, but with an inner wave of alarm and unease. I hadn’t tried it again.

When I had been a ship—when I had been just one component of the troop carrier Justice of Toren—I had been always aware of the state of my officers. What they heard and what they saw. Every breath, every twitch of every muscle. Hormone levels, oxygen levels. Everything, nearly, except the specific contents of their thoughts, though even that I could often guess, from experience, from intimate acquaintance. Not something I had ever shown any of my captains—it would have meant little to them, a stream of meaningless data. But for me, at that time, it had been just part of my awareness.

I no longer was my ship. But I was still an ancillary, could still read that data as no human captain could have. But I only had a single human brain, now, could only handle the smallest fragment of the information I’d once been constantly, unthinkingly aware of. And even that small amount required some care—I’d run straight into a bulkhead trying to walk and receive data at the same time, when I’d first tried it. I queried Mercy of Kalr, deliberately this time. I was fairly sure I could walk through this corridor and monitor Five at the same time without stopping or stumbling.

I made it all the way to the palace’s reception area without incident. Five was tired, and slightly hungover. Bored, I was sure, from standing staring at the wall during my conference with the Lord of the Radch. I saw a strange mix of anticipation and dread, which troubled me a bit, because I couldn’t guess what that conflict was about.

Out on the main concourse, high, broad, and echoing, stone paved, I turned toward the lifts that would take me to the docks, to the shuttle that waited to take me back to Mercy of Kalr. Most shops and offices along the concourse, including the wide, brightly painted gods crowding the temple façade, orange and blue and red and green, seemed surprisingly undamaged after last week’s violence, when the Lord of the Radch’s struggle against herself had broken into the open. Now citizens in colorful coats, trousers, and gloves, glittering with jewelry, walked by, seemingly unconcerned. Last week might never have happened. Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, might still be herself, many-bodied but one single, undivided person. But last week had happened, and Anaander Mianaai was not, in fact, one person. Had not been for quite some time.

As I approached the lifts a sudden surge of resentment and dismay overtook me. I stopped, turned. Kalr Five had stopped when I stopped, and now stared impassively ahead. As though that wave of resentment Ship had shown me hadn’t come from her. I hadn’t thought most humans could mask such strong emotions so effectively—her face was absolutely expressionless. But all the Mercy of Kalrs, it had turned out, could do it. Captain Vel had been an old-fashioned sort—or at the very least she’d had idealized notions of what “old-fashioned” meant—and had demanded that her human soldiers conduct themselves as much like ancillaries as possible.

Five didn’t know I’d been an ancillary. As far as she knew I was Fleet Captain Breq Mianaai, promoted because of Captain Vel’s arrest and what most imagined were my powerful family connections. She couldn’t know how much of her I saw. “What is it?” I asked, brusque. Taken aback.

“Sir?” Flat. Expressionless. Wanting, I saw after the tiny signal delay, for me to turn my attention away from her, to leave her safely ignored. Wanting also to speak.

I was right, that resentment, that dismay had been on my account. “You have something to say. Let’s hear it.”

Surprise. Sheer terror. And not the least twitch of a muscle. “Sir,” she said again, and there was, finally, a faint, fleeting expression of some sort, quickly gone. She swallowed. “It’s the dishes.”

My turn to be surprised. “The dishes?”

“Sir, you sent Captain Vel’s things into storage here on the station.”

And lovely things they had been. The dishes (and utensils, and tea things) Kalr Five was, presumably, preoccupied with had been porcelain, glass, jeweled and enameled metal. But they hadn’t been mine. And I didn’t want anything of Captain Vel’s. Five expected me to understand her. Wanted so much for me to understand. But I didn’t. “Yes?”

Frustration. Anger, even. Clearly, from Five’s perspective what she wanted was obvious. But the only part of it that was obvious to me was the fact she couldn’t just come out and say it, even when I’d asked her to. “Sir,” she said finally, citizens walking around us, some with curious glances, some pretending not to notice us. “I understand we’re leaving the system soon.”

“Soldier,” I said, beginning to be frustrated and angry myself, in no good mood from my talk with the Lord of the Radch. “Are you capable of speaking directly?”

“We can’t leave the system with no good dishes!” she blurted finally, face still impressively impassive. “Sir.” When I didn’t answer, she continued, through another surge of fear at speaking so plainly, “Of course it doesn’t matter to you. You’re a fleet captain, your rank is enough to impress anyone.” And my house name—I was now Breq Mianaai. I wasn’t too pleased at having been given that particular name, which marked me as a cousin of the Lord of the Radch herself. None of my crew but Seivarden and the ship’s medic knew I hadn’t been born with it. “You could invite a captain to supper and serve her soldier’s mess and she wouldn’t say a word, sir.” Couldn’t, unless she outranked me.

“We’re not going where we’re going so we can hold dinner parties,” I said. That apparently confounded her, brief confusion showing for a moment on her face.

“Sir!” she said, voice pleading, in some distress. “You don’t need to worry what other people think of you. I’m only saying, because you ordered me to.”

Of course. I should have seen. Should have realized days ago. She was worried that she would look bad if I didn’t have dinnerware to match my rank. That it would reflect badly on the ship itself. “You’re worried about the reputation of the ship.”

Chagrin, but also relief. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m not Captain Vel.” Captain Vel had cared a great deal about such things.

“No, sir.” I wasn’t sure if the emphasis—and the relief I read in Five—was because my not being Captain Vel was a good thing, or because I had finally understood what she had been trying to tell me. Or both.

I had already cleared my account here, all my money in chits locked in my quarters on board Mercy of Kalr. What little I carried on my person wouldn’t be sufficient to ease Kalr Five’s anxieties. Station—the AI that ran this place, was this place—could probably smooth the financial details over for me. But Station resented me as the cause of last week’s violence and would not be disposed to assist me.

“Go back to the palace,” I said. “Tell the Lord of the Radch what you require.” Her eyes widened just slightly, and two tenths of a second later I read disbelief and then frank terror in Kalr Five. “When everything is arranged to your satisfaction, come to the shuttle.”

Three citizens passed, bags in gloved hands, the fragment of conversation I heard telling me they were on their way to the docks, to catch a ship to one of the outer stations. A lift door slid open, obligingly. Of course. Station knew where they were going, they didn’t have to ask.

Station knew where I was going, but it wouldn’t open any doors for me without my giving the most explicit of requests. I turned, stepped quickly into the dockbound lift after them, saw the lift door close on Five standing, horrified, on the black stone pavement of the concourse. The lift moved, the three citizens chattered. I closed my eyes and saw Kalr Five staring at the lift, hyperventilating slightly. She frowned just the smallest amount—possibly no one passing her would notice. Her fingers twitched, summoning Mercy of Kalr’s attention, though with some trepidation, as though maybe she feared it wouldn’t answer.

But of course Mercy of Kalr was already paying attention. “Don’t worry,” said Mercy of Kalr, voice serene and neutral in Five’s ear and mine. “It’s not you Fleet Captain’s angry with. Go ahead. It’ll be all right.”

True enough. It wasn’t Kalr Five I was angry with. I pushed away the data coming from her, received a disorienting flash of Seivarden, asleep, dreaming, and Lieutenant Ekalu, still tense, in the middle of asking one of her Etrepas for tea. Opened my eyes. The citizens in the lift with me laughed at something, I didn’t know or care what, and as the lift door slid open we walked out into the broad lobby of the docks, lined all around with icons of gods that travelers might find useful or comforting. It was sparsely populated for this time of day, except by the entrance to the dock authority office, where a line of ill-tempered ship captains and pilots waited for their turn to complain to the overburdened inspector adjuncts. Two intersystem gates had been disabled in last week’s upheaval, more were likely to be in the near future, and the Lord of the Radch had forbidden any travel in the remaining ones, trapping dozens of ships in the system, with all their cargo and passengers.

They moved aside for me, bowing slightly as though a wind had blown through them. It was the uniform that had done it—I heard one captain whisper to another one, “Who is that?” and the responding murmur as her neighbor replied and others commented on her ignorance or added what they knew. I heard Mianaai and Special Missions. The sense they’d managed to make out of last week’s events. The official version was that I had come to Omaugh Palace undercover, to root out a seditious conspiracy. That I had been working for Anaander Mianaai all along. Anyone who’d ever been part of events that later received an official version would know or suspect that wasn’t true. But most Radchaai lived unremarkable lives and would have no reason to doubt it.

No one questioned my walking past the adjuncts, into the outer office of the Inspector Supervisor. Daos Ceit, who was her assistant, was still recovering from injuries. An adjunct I didn’t know sat in her place but rose swiftly and bowed as I entered. So did a very, very young lieutenant, more gracefully and collectedly than I expected in a seventeen-year-old, the sort who was still all lanky arms and legs and frivolous enough to spend her first pay on lilac-colored eyes—surely she hadn’t been born with eyes that color. Her dark-brown jacket, trousers, gloves, and boots were crisp and spotless, her straight, dark hair cut close. “Fleet Captain. Sir,” she said. “Lieutenant Tisarwat, sir.” She bowed again.

I didn’t answer, only looked at her. If my scrutiny disturbed her, I couldn’t see it. She wasn’t yet sending data to Mercy of Kalr, and her brown skin hadn’t darkened in any sort of flush. The small, discreet scatter of pins near one shoulder suggested a family of some substance but not the most elevated in the Radch. She was, I thought, either preternaturally self-possessed or a fool. Neither option pleased me.

“Go on in, sir,” said the unfamiliar adjunct, gesturing me toward the inner office. I did, without a word to Lieutenant Tisarwat.

Dark-skinned, amber-eyed, elegant and aristocratic even in the dark-blue uniform of dock authority, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat Awer rose and bowed as the door shut behind me. “Breq. Are you going, then?”

I opened my mouth to say, Whenever you authorize our departure, but remembered Five and the errand I’d sent her on. “I’m only waiting for Kalr Five. Apparently I can’t ship out without an acceptable set of dishes.”

Surprise crossed her face, gone in an instant. She had known, of course, that I had sent Captain Vel’s things here, and that I didn’t own anything to replace them. Once the surprise had gone I saw amusement. “Well,” she said. “Wouldn’t you have felt the same?” When I had been in Five’s place, she meant. When I had been a ship.

“No, I wouldn’t have. I didn’t. Some other ships did. Do.” Mostly Swords, who by and large already thought they were above the smaller, less prestigious Mercies, or the troop carrier Justices.

“My Seven Issas cared about that sort of thing.” Skaaiat Awer had served as a lieutenant on a ship with human troops, before she’d become Inspector Supervisor here at Omaugh Palace. Her eyes went to my single piece of jewelry, a small gold tag pinned near my left shoulder. She gestured, a change of topic that wasn’t really a change of topic. “Athoek, is it?” My destination hadn’t been publicly announced, might, in fact, be considered sensitive information. But Awer was one of the most ancient and wealthy of houses. Skaaiat had cousins who knew people who knew things. “I’m not sure that’s where I’d have sent you.”

“It’s where I’m going.”

She accepted that answer, no surprise or offense visible in her expression. “Have a seat. Tea?”

“Thank you, no.” Actually I could have used some tea, might under other circumstances have been glad of a relaxed chat with Skaaiat Awer, but I was anxious to be off.

This, too, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat took with equanimity. She did not sit, herself. “You’ll be calling on Basnaaid Elming when you get to Athoek Station.” Not a question. She knew I would be. Basnaaid was the younger sister of someone both Skaaiat and I had once loved. Someone I had, under orders from Anaander Mianaai, killed. “She’s like Awn, in some ways, but not in others.”

“Stubborn, you said.”

“Very proud. And fully as stubborn as her sister. Possibly more so. She was very offended when I offered her clientage for her sister’s sake. I mention it because I suspect you’re planning to do something similar. And you might be the only person alive even more stubborn than she is.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not even the tyrant?” The word wasn’t Radchaai, was from one of the worlds annexed and absorbed by the Radch. By Anaander Mianaai. The tyrant herself, almost the only person on Omaugh Palace who would have recognized or understood the word, besides Skaaiat and myself.

Skaaiat Awer’s mouth quirked, sardonic humor. “Possibly. Possibly not. In any event, be very careful about offering Basnaaid money or favors. She won’t take it kindly.” She gestured, good-natured but resigned, as if to say, but of course you’ll do as you like. “You’ll have met your new baby lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Tisarwat, she meant. “Why did she come here and not go directly to the shuttle?”

“She came to apologize to my adjunct.” Daos Ceit’s replacement, there in the outer office. “Their mothers are cousins.” Formally, the word Skaaiat used referred to a relation between two people of different houses who shared a parent or a grandparent, but in casual use meant someone more distantly related who was a friend, or someone you’d grown up with. “They were supposed to meet for tea yesterday, and Tisarwat never showed or answered any messages. And you know how military gets along with dock authorities.” Which was to say, overtly politely and privately contemptuously. “My adjunct took offense.”

“Why should Lieutenant Tisarwat care?”

“You never had a mother to be angry you offended her cousin,” Skaaiat said, half laughing, “or you wouldn’t ask.”

True enough. “What do you make of her?”

“Flighty, I would have said a day or two ago. But today she’s very subdued.” Flighty didn’t match the collected young person I’d seen in that outer office. Except, perhaps, those impossible eyes. “Until today she was on her way to a desk job in a border system.”

“The tyrant sent me a baby administrator?”

“I wouldn’t have thought she’d send you a baby anything,” Skaaiat said. “I’d have thought she’d have wanted to come with you herself. Maybe there’s not enough of her left here.” She drew breath as though to say more but then frowned, head cocked. “I’m sorry, there’s something I have to take care of.”

The docks were crowded with ships in need of supplies or repairs or emergency medical assistance, ships that were trapped here in the system, with crews and passengers who were extremely unhappy about the fact. Skaaiat’s staff had been working hard for days, with very few breaks. “Of course.” I bowed. “I’ll get out of your way.” She was still listening to whoever had messaged her. I turned to go.

“Breq.” I looked back. Skaaiat’s head was still cocked slightly, she was still hearing whoever else spoke. “Take care.”

“You, too.” I walked through the door, to the outer office. Lieutenant Tisarwat stood, still and silent. The adjunct stared ahead, fingers moving, attending to urgent dock business no doubt. “Lieutenant,” I said sharply, and didn’t wait for a reply but walked out of the office, through the crowd of disgruntled ships’ captains, onto the docks where I would find the shuttle that would take me to Mercy of Kalr.

The shuttle was too small to generate its own gravity. I was perfectly comfortable in such circumstances, but very young officers often were not. I stationed Lieutenant Tisarwat at the dock, to wait for Kalr Five, and then pushed myself over the awkward, chancy boundary between the gravity of the palace and the weightlessness of the shuttle, kicked myself over to a seat, and strapped myself in. The pilot gave a respectful nod, bowing being difficult in these circumstances. I closed my eyes, saw that Five stood in a large storage room inside the palace proper, plain, utilitarian, gray-walled. Filled with chests and boxes. In one brown-gloved hand she held a teabowl of delicate, deep rose glass. An open box in front of her showed more—a flask, seven more bowls, other dishes. Her pleasure in the beautiful things, her desire, was undercut by doubt. I couldn’t read her mind, but I guessed that she had been told to choose from this storeroom, had found these and wanted them very much, but didn’t quite believe she would be allowed to take them away. I was fairly sure this set was hand-blown, and some seven hundred years old. I hadn’t realized she had a connoisseur’s eye for such things.

I pushed the vision away. She would be some time, I thought, and I might as well get some sleep.

I woke three hours later, to lilac-eyed Lieutenant Tisarwat strapping herself deftly into a seat across from me. Kalr Five—now radiating contentment, presumably from the results of her stint in the palace storeroom—pushed herself over to Lieutenant Tisarwat, and with a nod and a quiet Just in case, sir proffered a bag for the nearly inevitable moment when the new officer’s stomach reacted to microgravity.

I’d known young lieutenants who took such an offer as an insult. Lieutenant Tisarwat accepted it, with a small, vague smile that didn’t quite reach the rest of her face. Still seeming entirely calm and collected.

“Lieutenant,” I said, as Kalr Five kicked herself forward to strap herself in beside the pilot, another Kalr. “Have you taken any meds?” Another potential insult. Antinausea meds were available, and I’d known excellent, long-serving officers who for the whole length of their careers took them every time they got on a shuttle. None of them ever admitted to it.

The last traces of Lieutenant Tisarwat’s smile vanished. “No, sir.” Even. Calm.

“Pilot has some, if you need them.” That ought to have gotten some kind of reaction.

And it did, though just the barest fraction of a second later than I’d expected. The hint of a frown, an indignant straightening of her shoulders, hampered by her seat restraints. “No, thank you, sir.”

Flighty, Skaaiat Awer had said. She didn’t usually misread people so badly. “I didn’t request your presence, Lieutenant.” I kept my voice calm, but with an edge of anger. Easy enough to do under the circumstances. “You’re here only because Anaander Mianaai ordered it. I don’t have the time or the resources to hand-raise a brand-new baby. You’d better get up to speed fast. I need officers who know what they’re doing. I need a whole crew I can depend on.”

“Sir,” replied Lieutenant Tisarwat. Still calm, but now some earnestness in her voice, that tiny trace of frown deepening, just a bit. “Yes, sir.”

Dosed with something. Possibly antinausea, and if I’d been given to gambling I’d have bet my considerable fortune that she was filled to the ears with at least one sedative. I wanted to pull up her personal record—Mercy of Kalr would have it by now. But the tyrant would see that I had pulled that record up. Mercy of Kalr belonged, ultimately, to Anaander Mianaai, and she had accesses that allowed her to control it. Mercy of Kalr saw and heard everything I did, and if the tyrant wanted that information she had only to demand it. And I didn’t want her to know what it was I suspected. Wanted, truth be told, for my suspicions to be proven false. Unreasonable.

For now, if the tyrant was watching—and she was surely watching, through Mercy of Kalr, would be so long as we were in the system—let her think I resented having a baby foisted on me when I’d rather have someone who knew what they were doing.

I turned my attention away from Lieutenant Tisarwat. Forward, the pilot leaned closer to Five and said, quiet and oblique, “Everything all right?” And then to Five’s responding, puzzled frown, “Too quiet.”

“All this time?” asked Five. Still oblique. Because they were talking about me and didn’t want to trigger any requests I might have made to Ship, to tell me when the crew was talking about me. I had an old habit—some two thousand years old—of singing whatever song ran through my head. Or humming. It had caused the crew some puzzlement and distress at first—this body, the only one left to me, didn’t have a particularly good voice. They were getting used to it, though, and now I was dryly amused to see crew members disturbed by my silence.

“Not a peep,” said the pilot to Kalr Five. With a brief sideways glance and a tiny twitch of neck and shoulder muscles that told me she’d thought of looking back, toward Lieutenant Tisarwat.

“Yeah,” said Five, agreeing, I thought, with the pilot’s unstated assessment of what might be troubling me.

Good. Let Anaander Mianaai be watching that, too.

It was a long ride back to Mercy of Kalr, but Lieutenant Tisarwat never did use the bag or evince any discomfort. I spent the time sleeping, and thinking.

Ships, communications, data traveled between stars using gates, beacon-marked, held constantly open. The calculations had already been made, the routes marked out through the strangeness of gate space, where distances and proximity didn’t match normal space. But military ships—like Mercy of Kalr—could generate their own gates. It was a good deal more risky—choose the wrong route, the wrong exit or entrance, and a ship could end up anywhere, or nowhere. That didn’t trouble me. Mercy of Kalr knew what it was doing, and we would arrive safely at Athoek Station.

And while we moved through gate space in our own, contained bubble of normal space, we would be completely isolated. I wanted that. Wanted to be gone from Omaugh Palace, away from Anaander Mianaai’s sight and any orders or interference she might decide to send.

When we were nearly there, minutes away from docking, Ship spoke directly into my ear. “Fleet Captain.” It didn’t need to speak to me that way, could merely desire me to know it wanted my attention. And it nearly always knew what I wanted without my saying it. I could connect to Mercy of Kalr in a way no one else aboard could. I could not, however, be Mercy of Kalr, as I had been Justice of Toren. Not without losing myself entirely. Permanently.

“Ship,” I replied quietly. And without my saying anything else, Mercy of Kalr gave me the results of its calculations, made unasked, a whole range of possible routes and departure times flaring into my vision. I chose the soonest, gave orders, and a little more than six hours later we were gone.

2

The tyrant had said our backgrounds were similar, and in some ways they were. She was—and I had been—composed of hundreds of bodies all sharing the same identity. From that angle, we were very much the same. Which some citizens had noted (though only relatively recently, within the last hundred or so years) during arguments about the military’s use of ancillaries.

It seemed horrible when one thought of it happening to oneself, or a friend or relative. But the Lord of the Radch herself underwent the same, was arguably in some ways the same sort of being as the ships that served her, so how could it possibly be as bad as detractors claimed? Ridiculous to say that all this time the Radch had been anything less than entirely just.

One of a triad, that word. Justice, propriety, and benefit. No just act could be improper, no proper act unjust. Justice and propriety, so intertwined, themselves led to benefit. The question of just who or what benefited was a topic for late-night discussions over half-empty bottles of arrack, but ordinarily no Radchaai questioned that justice and propriety would ultimately be beneficial in some gods-approved way. Ever, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, questioned that the Radch was anything but just, proper, and beneficial.

Of course, unlike her ships, the Lord of the Radch was a citizen—and not only a citizen but ruler of all the Radch, absolute. I was a weapon she had used to expand that rule. Her servant. In many ways her slave. And the difference went further. Every one of Anaander Mianaai’s bodies was identical to all the others, clones, conceived and grown for the express purpose of being parts of her. Each of her thousands of brains had grown and developed around the implants that joined her to herself. For three thousand years she had never at any time experienced being anyone but Anaander Mianaai. Never been a single-bodied person—preferably in late adolescence or early adulthood, but older would do—taken captive, stored in a suspension pod for decades, maybe even centuries, until she was needed. Unceremoniously thawed out, implant shoved into her brain, severing connections, making new ones, destroying the identity she’d had all her life so far and replacing it with a ship’s AI.

If you haven’t been through it, I don’t think you can really imagine it. The terror and nausea, the horror, even after it’s done and the body knows it’s the ship, that the person it was before doesn’t exist anymore to care that she’s died. It could last a week, sometimes longer, while the body and its brain adjusted to the new state of affairs. A side effect of the process, one that could possibly have been eliminated, presumably it could have been made a good deal less horrific than it was. But what was one body’s temporary discomfort? One body out of dozens, or even hundreds, was nothing, its distress merely a passing inconvenience. If it was too intense or didn’t abate in a reasonable amount of time, that body would be removed and destroyed, replaced with a new one. There were plenty in storage.

But now that Anaander Mianaai had declared that no new ancillaries would be made—not counting the prisoners still suspended in the holds of the huge troop carriers, thousands of bodies frozen, waiting—no one need concern themselves with the question at all.

As captain of Mercy of Kalr, I had quarters all to myself, three meters by four, lined all around with benches that doubled as storage. One of those benches was also my bed, and inside it, under the boxes and cases that held my possessions, was a box that Ship couldn’t see or sense. Human eyes could see it, even when those eyes were part of an ancillary body. But no scanner, no mechanical sensor could see that box, or the gun inside, or its ammunition—bullets that would burn through anything in the universe. How this had been managed was mysterious—not only the inexplicable bullets, but how light coming from the box or the gun might be visible to human eyes but not, say, to cameras, which in the end worked on the same principles. And Ship, for instance, didn’t see an empty space where the box was, where something ought to have been, but instead it saw whatever it might have expected would occupy that space. None of it made any sense. Still, it was the case. Box, weapon, and its ammunition had been manufactured by the alien Presger, whose aims were obscure. Whom even Anaander Mianaai feared, lord as she was of the vast reaches of Radch space, commander of its seemingly endless armies.

Mercy of Kalr knew about the box, about the gun, because I had told it. To the Kalrs who served me, it was just one box among several, none of which they’d opened. Had they really been the ancillaries they sometimes pretended to be, that would have been the end of it. But they were not ancillaries. They were human, and consumingly curious. They still speculated, looked lingeringly, when they stowed the linens and pallet I slept on. If I hadn’t been captain—even weightier, fleet captain—they’d have been through every millimeter of my luggage by now, twice and three times, and discussed it all thoroughly among themselves. But I was captain, with the power of life and death over my entire crew, and so I was granted this small privacy.

This room had been Captain Vel’s, before she’d chosen the wrong side in the Lord of the Radch’s battle with herself. The floor covering and the cloths and cushions that had covered the benches were gone, left behind us at Omaugh Palace. She’d had the walls painted with elaborate scrollwork in purples and greens, a style and a palette that she’d taken from a past era, one presumably nobler and more civilized than this one. Unlike Captain Vel, I had lived through it and didn’t much regret its loss. I’d have had it removed, but there were other, more urgent concerns, and at least the paint didn’t extend any farther than the captain’s quarters.

Her gods, which had sat in a niche under the ship’s gods—Amaat, of course, chief of Radchaai gods, and Kalr, part of this ship’s name—I had replaced with She Who Sprang from the Lily, an EskVar (the Emanation of beginning and ending), and a small, cheap icon of Toren. I had been fortunate to find that. Toren was an old god, not popular, nearly forgotten except by the crews of the ships that bore the name, none of them stationed near here, and one of them—myself—destroyed.

There was room for more gods, there always was. But I didn’t believe in any of them. It would have looked odd to the crew if I’d had none besides the ship’s, and these would do. They were not gods to me, but reminders of something else. The crew wouldn’t know or understand that, and so I burned incense to them daily, along with Amaat and Kalr, and just like those gods they received offerings of food and enameled brass flowers that had made Five frown when she’d first seen them, because they were cheap and common and not, she thought, what a Mianaai and a fleet captain ought to offer to her gods. She’d said so to Kalr Seventeen, obliquely, not mentioning my name or title. She didn’t know I was an ancillary, didn’t know how easy it was, because of that, for Ship to show me what she felt, what she said, wherever she said it, whenever I wished. She was confident Ship would keep her gossip secret.

Two days after we gated, on our way to Athoek in our own tiny, isolated fragment of universe, I sat on the edge of my bed drinking tea from a delicate, deep rose glass bowl while Kalr Five cleared away the omens and the cloth from the morning’s cast. The omens had indicated continuing good fortune, of course, only the most foolish of captains would find any other sort of pattern in the fall of those metal discs on the cloth.

I closed my eyes. Felt the corridors and rooms of Mercy of Kalr, spotless white. The whole ship smelled comfortingly and familiarly of recycled air and cleaning solvent. Amaat decade had scrubbed their portion of those corridors, and the rooms they were responsible for. Their lieutenant, Seivarden, senior of Mercy of Kalr’s lieutenants, was just now finishing her inspection of that work, giving out praise and remonstrance, assignments for tomorrow, in her antiquely elegant accent. Seivarden had been born for this work, had been born with a face that marked her as a member of one of the highest houses in the Radch, distant cousins to Anaander Mianaai herself, wealthy and well-bred. She had been raised with the expectation that she would command. She was in many respects the very image of a Radchaai military officer. Speaking with her Amaats, relaxed and assured, she was nearly the Seivarden I’d known a thousand years ago, before she’d lost her ship, been shoved into an escape pod by one of its ancillaries. The tracker on the pod had been damaged, and she had drifted for centuries. After she’d been found, and thawed, and discovered that everyone she’d ever known was dead, even her house no longer existent and the Radch changed from what she’d known, she’d fled Radchaai space and spent several years wandering, dissipated, aimless. Not quite willing to die, I suspected, but hoping in the back of her mind to meet with some fatal accident. She’d gained weight, since I’d found her, built back some of her lost muscle, looked considerably healthier now, but still somewhat the worse for wear. She’d been forty-eight when her ship’s ancillaries had pushed her into that escape pod. Count that thousand frozen years and she was the second oldest person aboard Mercy of Kalr.

Next in seniority, Lieutenant Ekalu stood watch in Command with two of her Etrepas. It wasn’t theoretically necessary for anyone to stand any sort of watch, not with Mercy of Kalr always awake, always watching, constantly aware of the ship that was its own body and of the space around it. Especially in gate space, where nothing untoward—or, honestly, even interesting—was likely to happen. But ship systems did sometimes malfunction, and it was a good deal quicker and easier to respond to a crisis if the crew was already alert. And of course dozens of people packed into a small ship required work to keep them disciplined and busy. Ship threw up numbers, maps, graphs in Lieutenant Ekalu’s vision, murmured into her ear, information mixed now and then with friendly encouragement. Mercy of Kalr liked Lieutenant Ekalu, had confidence in her intelligence and ability.

Kalr was captain’s decade, my own. There were ten soldiers in all the other decades on Mercy of Kalr, but there were twenty in Kalr. They slept on a staggered schedule, because also unlike the other decades, Kalr was always on duty, a last remnant of the days when Ship had been crewed by ancillary bodies, when its soldiers had been fragments of itself and not dozens of individual human beings. The Kalrs who had awakened just now, as I had, were assembled in the soldiers’ mess, white-walled, plain, just big enough for ten to eat and space to stack the dishes. They stood, each by their dish of skel, a fast-growing, slimy, dark-green plant that contained any nutrients a human body needed. The taste took some getting used to if you hadn’t grown up on it. A lot of Radchaai had in fact grown up on it.

The Kalrs in the soldiers’ mess began the morning prayer in ragged unison. The flower of justice is peace. Within a word or two they settled into step, the words falling into familiar rhythm. The flower of propriety is beauty in thought and action.

Medic—she had a name, and a nominal rank of lieutenant, but was never addressed by either—was attached to Kalr, but was not Kalr Lieutenant. She was, simply, Medic. She could be—had been, would be in another hour—ordered to stand a watch, and two Kalrs would stand that watch with her. She was the only one of Captain Vel’s officers remaining. She would have been difficult to replace, of course, but also her involvement in the previous week’s events had been minimal.

She was tall and spare, light-skinned by Radchaai standards, hair enough lighter than brown to be slightly odd, but not the sort of striking shade that might have been artificial. She frowned habitually, though she wasn’t ill-tempered. She was seventy-six years old and looked much the same as she had in her thirties, and would until she was past a hundred and fifty. Her mother had been a doctor, and her mother before that, and her mother before that. She was, just now, extremely angry with me.

She’d woken determined to confront me in the short time before she went on watch, had said the morning prayer in a rushed mutter as soon as she’d rolled out of bed. The flower of benefit is Amaat whole and entire. I had turned my attention away from Kalr in the soldiers’ mess, but I couldn’t hear the first lines without hearing the rest. I am the sword of justice… Now Medic stood silent and tense by her own seat in the decade room, where the officers ate.

Seivarden came into the decade room for what would be her supper, smiling, relaxed, saw Medic waiting, stiff and impatient, frowning more intensely than usual. For an instant I saw irritation in Seivarden, and then she dismissed it, apologized for her tardiness, got a mumbled, perfunctory it’s nothing in return.

In the soldiers’ mess Kalr finished the morning prayer, mouthed the extra lines I’d ordered, a brief prayer for the dead, and their names. Awn Elming. Nyseme Ptem, the soldier who had mutinied at Ime, preventing a war with the alien Rrrrrr, at the cost of her own life.

Bo decade slept in what was more an alcove than a room, barely large enough for their ten close sleeping bodies, no privacy, no individual space, even in their beds. They twitched, sighed, dreamed, more restless than the ancillaries that had once slept there.

In her own tiny quarters, their lieutenant, the very young, impossibly lilac-eyed Lieutenant Tisarwat, slept as well, still and dreamless, but with an underlying current of unease, adrenaline just a touch higher than it ought to be. That should have awakened her, as it had the night before, but Medic had given her something to help her sleep.

Medic bolted her breakfast, muttered excuses, and all but stormed out of the decade room. “Ship,” she messaged, fingers twitching emphatically, gesturing the words. “I want to speak to the fleet captain.”

“Medic’s coming,” I said to Kalr Five. “We’ll offer her tea. But she probably won’t take it.” Five checked the level of tea in the flask and pulled out another of the rose glass bowls. I suspected I wouldn’t see my old enameled set again unless I specifically ordered it.

“Fleet Captain,” said Mercy of Kalr directly into my ear, and then showed me an Amaat on her way to the soldiers’ mess, singing softly to herself, one of those collections of inconsequential nonsense children from nearly anywhere sing. “It all goes around, it all goes around, the planet goes around the sun, it all goes around. It all goes around, the moon goes around the planet…” Thoughtless and off-key.

In my quarters Kalr Five stood stiffly at attention, said in an expressionless voice, “Medic requests permission to speak with you, Fleet Captain.”

In the corridor, the Amaat, hearing the step of another Amaat behind her, fell silent, suddenly self-conscious. “Granted,” I said to Five, needlessly of course, she already knew I planned to speak with Medic.

The door opened and Medic entered, a bit more abruptly than was strictly proper. “Fleet Captain,” she began, tight and furious.

I raised a forestalling hand. “Medic. Sit. Will you have tea?”

She sat. Refused tea. Kalr Five left the room at my order, just the tiniest bit resentful at missing whatever Medic had to say, which showed every sign of being something interesting. When she was gone, I gestured to Medic, sitting tense across the table from me. Go ahead.

“Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence.” She didn’t sound at all as though she cared whether I’d give it or not. Under the table, she clenched her gloved hands into fists. “Fleet Captain. Sir. You’ve removed some medications from Medical.”

“I have.”

That stopped her momentum, briefly. She had, it seemed, expected a denial. “No one else could have done it. Ship insisted they’d never left inventory, and I’ve looked at the logs, at the recordings themselves, I’ve been all through them, and there’s no record of anyone taking them. There’s nobody else on board who could hide that from me.”

I feared that was no longer true. But I didn’t say that. “Lieutenant Tisarwat came to you yesterday at the end of her shift and asked you for help with some minor nausea and anxiety.” Two days ago, some hours after we’d gated, Lieutenant Tisarwat had begun to feel stressed. Slightly sick. Had found herself unable to eat much of her supper that evening. Her Bos had noticed, of course with concern—the problem with most seventeen-year-olds was feeding them enough, not tempting them to eat. They had decided, among themselves, that she was homesick. And distressed by my obvious anger at her presence. “Are you worried for her health?”

Medic nearly started up out of her seat in indignation. “That’s not the point!” Recollected whom she was speaking to. “Sir.” Swallowed, waited, but I said nothing. “She’s nervous. She reads as under some emotional stress. Perfectly understandable. Perfectly normal for a baby lieutenant on her first assignment.” Realized, as she was speaking, that I probably had extensive experience of what was normal for very young lieutenants on their first assignments. Regretted speaking, regretted, momentarily, coming here to confront, to accuse me. Just for an instant.

“Perfectly normal under the circumstances,” I agreed, but I meant something different.

“And I couldn’t help her because you’d taken every single med I might have given her.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged. “I had. Was there anything in her system when she arrived?” I already knew what the answer would be, but I asked anyway.

Medic blinked, surprised by my question, but only for an instant. “She did look as though maybe she’d taken something, when she came to Medical from the shuttle. But there was nothing when I scanned her. I think she was just tired.” A tiny shift in her posture, a change in the emotions I read coming from her, suggested she was considering, now, the significance of my question, the odd, small mismatch of how Lieutenant Tisarwat had looked, to her professional eye, and what the readings had said.

“Any recommendations or orders to dispense medication, in her file?”

“No, nothing.” Medic didn’t seem to have come to any conclusion. Much less the one I’d come to. But she was curious now, if still angry along with it. “Recent events have been stressful for all of us. And she’s very young. And…” She hesitated. Had, perhaps, been about to say that by now everyone on board knew I’d been very angry when Lieutenant Tisarwat had been assigned to Mercy of Kalr. Angry enough to stop singing for several hours.

By now the whole crew knew what that meant. Had begun, even, to find it comforting to have such an obvious way to know if everything was as it should be. “You were going to say?” I asked, my expression and voice as noncommittal as I could make them.

“I think she feels like you don’t want her here, sir.”

“I don’t,” I said. “As it happens.”

Medic shook her head, not understanding. “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence. You might have refused to take her.”

I might have refused to take her. Might have left her on the palace docks, when Mercy of Kalr’s shuttle left, and never come back for her. I had seriously considered doing that. Skaaiat would have understood, I was sure, would have contrived to discover that not a single docked ship could fetch the young lieutenant out to Mercy of Kalr until it was too late. “You gave her something?”

“Something to help her sleep. It was the end of the day for her. It was all I could do.” That galled Medic, not only that I had interfered in her domain, but that she had been unable to help.

I couldn’t help a quick, momentary look. Lieutenant Tisarwat, asleep but not deeply. Not restfully. Still tense, still that quiet background of unease. “Medic,” I said, returning my attention to where I was, “you have every right to be angry with me. I expected you to be angry, and expected you to protest. I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t.” She blinked, puzzled, hands still clenched in her lap. “Trust me.” There wasn’t much more I could say, just yet. “I am an unknown quantity, I am… not the sort of person who’s generally given command.” A flicker of recognition on Medic’s face, slight revulsion and then embarrassment at having felt that, where she knew I could see it, knew I was almost certainly watching her response. Medic had repaired my implants, which I had deactivated and damaged, to hide them. Medic knew what I was, as no one else aboard but Seivarden knew. “But trust me.”

“I don’t have a choice, do I, sir? We’re cut off until we reach Athoek, there’s no one I can complain to.” Frustrated.

“Complain at Athoek when we get there. If you still want to.” If there was anyone there to complain to, that would do any good.

“Sir.” She rose, bit back whatever else she’d wanted to say. Bowed stiffly. “May I go?”

“Yes, of course, Medic.”

Lieutenant Tisarwat was a problem. Her official personal history, a dry recitation of facts, said she’d been born and raised on a planet, the third child of one parent and the second of another. She’d had the sort of education any well-off, moderately well-born Radchaai had. Done well at math, had an enthusiasm but no gift for poetry, lacked both for history. She had an allowance from her parents but no expectations to speak of. She’d gone into space for the first time when she’d left for training.

Reading between the lines, she had been born not to take some particular place in her house, or inherit anyone’s wealth and position, or fulfill any particular expectations, but for her own sake, and no doubt her parents had loved her and cosseted her right up to the day she’d left for the military. Her correspondence with her parents confirmed this. Her siblings, all older, seemed not to resent her position as favorite, but took it in stride and petted her nearly as much as their parents did.

Flighty, Skaaiat Awer had said of her. Frivolous I had thought on seeing the certainly purchased color of her eyes, and the aptitudes data in her file suggested the same. That data did not suggest self-possessed. Nor did it suggest the nervous gloom she’d displayed since shortly after boarding Mercy of Kalr.

Her trainers had met her sort before, been hard on her on account of that, but not cruelly so. Some of them no doubt had baby sisters of their own, and after all she was destined for an administrative post. It hardly mattered if in microgravity she could never keep her supper down—plenty of other new lieutenants had the same problem, particularly if they had little experience in space.

Two days before, while Tisarwat had sat being examined in Medical, while Ship made the connections that would let it—and me—read her like it could every other member of the crew, her Bos had gone over every millimeter of her luggage and come to fairly accurate conclusions about her history. They were prepared to be disgusted with her ignorance, a baby fresh from training, a matter for mocking and exasperation, yes. But also for sympathy, and some anticipatory pride. Her Bos would be able to claim credit for any of Tisarwat’s future accomplishments, because after all they would have raised her. Taught her anything she knew that was really important. They were prepared to be hers. Wanted very much for her to turn out to be the sort of lieutenant they would be proud to serve under.

I so very much wanted my suspicions not to be true.

Watch was, of course, uneventful. Medic went from our conference to Command, still angry. Seivarden’s Amaats were exercising, bathing, would soon be climbing into their own beds, settling into their accustomed places with shoves and the occasional indignant whisper—there wasn’t much room to stretch out. Ekalu’s Etrepas scrubbed the already near-spotless rooms and corridors they were responsible for. Lieutenant Tisarwat wouldn’t wake for nearly four hours.

I went to the ship’s small gym, a few last Amaats scurrying out of my way. Worked out, hard, for an hour. Went, still angry, still sweaty from exercise, to the firing range.

It was all simulation. No one wanted bullets flying on a small ship, not with hard vacuum outside the hull. The targets were images Ship cast on the far wall. The weapon would bang and recoil as though it had fired real bullets, but it shot only light. Not as destructive as I wanted to be, that very moment, but it would have to do.

Ship knew my mood. It threw up a quick succession of targets, all of which I hit, nearly unthinking. Reloaded—no need to reload, really, but there would be if this had been a real weapon, and so the training routines demanded it. Fired again and again, reloaded again, fired. It wasn’t enough. Seeing that, Ship set the targets moving, a dozen of them at a time. I settled into a familiar rhythm, fire, reload, fire, reload. A song came into my mind—there was always a song, with me. This one was a long narrative, an account of the final dispute between Anaander Mianaai and her erstwhile friend, Naskaaia Eskur. The poet had been executed fifteen hundred years ago—her version of the event had cast Anaander as the villain and ended with the promise that the dead Naskaaia would return to revenge herself. It had been almost utterly forgotten inside Radch space, because singing it, possibly even knowing it existed, could easily cost a citizen a thorough reeducation. It still circulated some places outside Radch influence.

Betrayer! Long ago we promised

To exchange equally, gift for gift.

Take this curse: What you destroy will destroy you.

Fire, reload. Fire, reload. Doubtless little of the song—or any other on the same subject—had any basis in fact. Doubtless the event itself had been quite mundane, not so poetically dramatic, ringing with mythic and prophetic overtones. It was still satisfying to sing it.

I came to the end, lowered my weapon. Unbidden, Ship showed me what was behind my back—three Etrepas crowding the entrance to the firing range, watching, astonished. Seivarden, on her way to her own quarters and bed, standing behind them. She could not read my mood as closely as Ship could, but she knew me well enough to be worried.

“Ninety-seven percent,” said Ship, in my ear. Needlessly.

I took a breath. Stowed the weapon in its niche. Turned. The expressions of the three Etrepas turned instantly from astonishment to blank, ancillary-like expressionlessness, and they stepped back into the corridor. I brushed past them, out into the corridor and away, toward the bath. Heard one Etrepa say, “Fuck! Is that what Special Missions is like?” Saw the panic of the others—their last captain had been very strict about swearing. Heard Seivarden, outwardly jovial, say, “Fleet Captain is pretty fucking badass.” The vulgarity, combined with Seivarden’s archaic, elegant accent, set them laughing, relieved but still unsettled.

Mercy of Kalr didn’t ask me why I was angry. Didn’t ask me what was wrong. That in and of itself suggested my suspicions were correct. I wished, for the first time in my two-thousand-year life, that I was given to swearing.

3

I had Lieutenant Tisarwat awakened three hours before her usual time and ordered her to report immediately to me. She startled awake, heart racing even through the last remnants of the drug Medic had given her. It took her a few seconds to comprehend Ship’s words, spoken directly into her ear. She spent twenty more seconds just breathing, slowly, deliberately. Feeling vaguely sick.

She arrived at my quarters still unsettled. The collar of her jacket was slightly askew—none of her Bos were awake to see to her, and she had dressed in nervous haste, dropping things, fumbling at fastenings that should have been simple. I met her standing, and I didn’t dismiss Kalr Five, who lingered, ostensibly busy but hoping to see or hear something interesting.

“Lieutenant Tisarwat,” I said, stern and angry. “Your decade’s work these past two days has been inadequate.”

Resentment, anger, chagrin. She had already presented herself at creditable attention, considering, but I could see her back, her shoulders stiffen further, see her head come up a couple of millimeters. But she was wise enough not to answer.

I continued. “You may be aware that there are parts of itself Ship can’t see. It used to rely on ancillaries for that. Ship doesn’t have ancillaries anymore. The cleaning and maintenance of those parts of itself are your responsibility. And Bo decade has been skipping them. For instance, the hinge pins on the shuttles’ air locks haven’t been cleaned in quite some time.” That I knew from very personal experience, just last week, when my life, and the lives of everyone on Omaugh Palace, had hung on, among other things, how quickly I could unfasten part of a Mercy of Kalr shuttle’s air lock. “There’s also a place under the grate in the bath that you can’t see unless you put your head down in there.” That was a disgusting proposition at the best of times. Worse when it hadn’t been routinely, thoroughly cleaned. “Mercy of Kalr will give you the list. I expect everything to be taken care of when I inspect this time tomorrow.”

“T-tomorrow, sir?” Lieutenant Tisarwat sounded just the slightest bit strangled.

“This time tomorrow, Lieutenant. And neither you nor your decade is to neglect assigned time in the gym or the firing range. Dismissed.” She bowed, left, angry and unhappy. As her Bos would be, when they discovered how much work I’d just loaded on them.

It was true that I had near-absolute power over everyone on the ship, especially given our isolation in gate space. But it was also true that I would be extremely foolish to alienate my officers. Foolish, also, to so completely court the displeasure of the soldiers without a good reason. Bo would resent my mistreatment of Lieutenant Tisarwat, certainly to the extent that it meant inconvenience to themselves. But also because Lieutenant Tisarwat was their lieutenant.

I wanted that. Was pushing hard on that, deliberately. But timing was everything. Push too hard, too fast, and the results would not be what I wanted, possibly disastrously so. Push too gently, take too long, and I would run out of time, and again results would not be what I wanted. And I needed those specific results. Amaat, Etrepa, my own Kalrs, they understood Bo’s position. And if I was going to be hard on Bo—because being hard on Bo’s lieutenant was the same thing—it would have to be for a reason the other decades could understand. I didn’t want anyone on Mercy of Kalr to think that I was dispensing harsh treatment inexplicably, capriciously, that no matter how good you were the captain might decide to make your life hell. I’d seen captains who ran things that way. It never made for a particularly good crew.

But I couldn’t possibly explain my reasons to anyone, not now, and I hoped I would never be able to. Never have to. But I had hoped, from the beginning, that this situation would not arise at all.

Next morning I invited Seivarden to breakfast. My breakfast, her supper. I ought also to have invited Medic, who ate at the same time, but I thought she would be happier eating alone than with me, just now.

Seivarden was wary. Wanting, I saw, to say something to me but not sure of the wisdom of saying it. Or perhaps not sure of how to say it wisely. She ate three bites of fish, and then said, jokingly, “I didn’t think I rated the best dishes.” She meant the plates, delicate, violet and aqua painted porcelain. And the rose glass teabowls—Five knew my eating with Seivarden didn’t call for any sort of formality, and still she hadn’t been able to bring herself to stow them away and use the enamel.

“Second best,” I said. “Sorry. I haven’t seen the best, yet.” A happy little spike of pride, from Five, standing in the corner pretending to wipe a spotless utensil, just at the thought of the best dishes. “I was told I needed nice dishes so I had the Lord of the Radch send me something suitable.”

She raised an eyebrow, knowing Anaander Mianaai was not a neutral topic for me. “I’m surprised the Lord of the Radch didn’t come along with us. Though…” She glanced, for just an instant, at Five.

Without my saying anything, merely from seeing my desire, Ship suggested to Kalr Five that she leave the room. When we were alone, Seivarden continued. “She has accesses. She can make Ship do anything she wants. She can make you do anything she wants. Can’t she?”

Dangerous territory. But Seivarden had no way of knowing that. For a moment I saw Lieutenant Tisarwat, still stressed and sick, and exhausted besides—she hadn’t slept since I’d wakened her some twenty hours before—lying on the bath floor, grate pulled aside, her head ducked down to examine that spot Ship couldn’t see. An anxious and equally tired Bo behind her, waiting for her verdict.

“It’s not quite that simple,” I said, returning my attention to Seivarden. I made myself take a bite of fish, a drink of tea. “There’s certainly one remaining access, from before.” From when I’d been a ship. Been part of Justice of Toren’s Esk decade. “Only the tyrant’s voice will work that one, though. And yes, she could have used it before I left the palace. She said as much to me, you may recall, and said she didn’t want to.”

“Maybe she used it and told you not to remember she used it.”

I had already considered that possibility, and dismissed it. I gestured, no. “There’s a point where accesses break.” Seivarden gestured acknowledgment. When I had first met her, a baby lieutenant of seventeen, she hadn’t thought ships’ AIs had any feelings in particular—not any that mattered. And like many Radchaai she assumed that thought and emotion were two easily separable things. That the artificial intelligences that ran large stations, and military ships, were supremely dispassionate. Mechanical. Old stories, historical dramas about events before Anaander Mianaai set about building her empire, about ships overwhelmed by grief and despair at the deaths of their captains—that was the past. The Lord of the Radch had improved AI design, removed that flaw.

She had learned otherwise, recently. “At Athoek,” she guessed, “with Lieutenant Awn’s sister there, you’d be too near that breaking point.”

It was more complicated than that. But. “Basically.”

“Breq,” she said. Signaling, maybe, that she wanted to be sure she was speaking to me-as-Breq and not me-as-Fleet-Captain. “There’s something I don’t understand. The Lord of the Radch said, that day, that she couldn’t just make AIs so they always obeyed her no matter what because their minds were complicated.”

“Yes.” She had said that. At a time when other, more urgent matters pressed, so there could be no real discussion of it.

“But Ships do love people. I mean, particular people.” For some reason saying that made her nervous, triggered a tiny spike of apprehension in her. To cover it, she picked up her tea, drank. Set down the lovely deep rose bowl, carefully. “And that’s a breaking point, isn’t it? I mean, it can be. Why not just make all the ships love her?”

“Because that’s potentially a breaking point.” She looked at me, frowning, not understanding. “Do you love randomly?”

She blinked in bewilderment. “What?”

“Do you love at random? Like pulling counters out of a box? You love whichever one came to hand? Or is there something about certain people that makes them likely to be loved by you?”

“I… think I see.” She set down her utensil, the untasted bit of fish it held. “I guess I see what you mean. But I’m not sure what that has to do with…”

“If there’s something about a certain person that makes it likely you’d love them, what happens if that changes? And they’re not really that person anymore?”

“I guess,” she said, slowly, thoughtfully, “I assume that real love doesn’t break for anything.” Real love, to a Radchaai, wasn’t only romantic, between lovers. Wasn’t only between parent and child. Real love could also exist between patron and client. Was supposed to, ideally. “I mean,” Seivarden continued, inexplicably embarrassed, “imagine your parents not loving you anymore.” Another frown. Another surge of apprehension. “Would you ever have stopped loving Lieutenant Awn?”

“If,” I replied, after a deliberate bite and swallow of breakfast, “she had ever become someone other than who she was.” Still incomprehension from Seivarden. “Who is Anaander Mianaai?”

She understood, then, I could tell by the feeling of unease I read in her. “Even she’s not sure, is she. She might be two people. Or more.”

“And over three thousand years she’ll have changed. Everyone does, who isn’t dead. How much can a person change and still be the same? And how could she predict how much she might change over thousands of years, and what might break as a result? It’s much easier to use something else. Duty, say. Loyalty to an idea.”

“Justice,” said Seivarden, aware of the irony, of what used to be my own name. “Propriety. Benefit.”

That last, benefit, was the slippery one. “Any or all of them will do,” I agreed. “And then you keep track of ships’ favorites so you don’t provoke any sort of conflict. Or so you can use those attachments to your advantage.”

“I see,” she said. And applied herself silently to the rest of her supper.

When the food was eaten, and Kalr Five had returned and cleared the dishes and poured us more tea, and left again, Seivarden spoke again. “Sir,” she said. Ship’s business, then. I knew what it would be. The soldiers of Amaat and Etrepa had already seen Bo, up well past their sleep time, all ten of them scrubbing desperately, taking fittings apart, lifting grates, poring over every millimeter, every crack and crevice, of their part of Ship’s maintenance. When Lieutenant Ekalu had relieved Seivarden on watch she’d stopped, dared a few words. Don’t mean to offend… Thought you might mention to Sir… Seivarden had been confused, partly by Lieutenant Ekalu’s accent, partly by the use of Sir instead of the fleet captain, the remnant of Ekalu’s days as Amaat One, the habit this crew had of speaking so as not to attract the captain’s notice. But mostly, it turned out, confused by the suggestion she might be offended. Ekalu was too embarrassed to explain herself. “Do you think, maybe,” Seivarden said to me, doubtless knowing I might well have overheard that exchange, in Command, “you’re being a little hard on Tisarwat?” I said nothing, and she saw, clearly, that I was in a dangerous mood, that this topic was for some reason not an entirely safe one. She took a breath, and forged on ahead. “You’re angry lately.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Lately?” My own bowl of tea sat untouched in front of me.

She lifted her tea a centimeter, acknowledging. “You were less angry for a few days. I don’t know, maybe because you were injured. Because now you’re angry again. And I suppose I know why, and I suppose I can’t really blame you, but…”

“You think I’m taking it out on Lieutenant Tisarwat.” Who I did not want to see just now. I would not look. Two of her Bos were going meticulously over the interior of the shuttle they were responsible for—one of only two, I’d destroyed the third last week. They commented now and then, obliquely and tersely, on the unfairness of my treatment of them, and how hard I was being on their lieutenant.

“You know all the places a soldier can slack off, but how could Tisarwat?”

“She is, nonetheless, responsible for her decade.”

“You could have reprimanded me as well,” Seivarden pointed out, and took another drink of her tea. “I ought to have known, myself, and didn’t. My ancillaries always took care of those things without my asking. Because they knew they ought to. Aatr’s tits, Ekalu should know better than any of us where the crew is skipping over things. Not meaning to criticize her, understand. But either one of us would have deserved a dressing-down over that. Why give it to Tisarwat and not either of us?” I didn’t want to explain that and so didn’t say anything, only picked up my own tea and took a drink. “I’ll admit,” Seivarden continued, “that she’s turning out to be a miserable specimen. All awkward not knowing what to do with her hands and feet, picking at her food. And clumsy. She’s dropped three of the decade room teabowls, broken two of them. And she’s so… so moody. I’m waiting for her to announce that none of us understands her. What was my lord thinking?” She meant Anaander Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch. “Was Tisarwat just all that was available?”

“Probably.” Thinking that only made me angrier than I already was. “Do you remember when you were a baby lieutenant?”

She set her tea on the table, appalled. “Please tell me I wasn’t like that.”

“No. Not like that. You were awkward and annoying in a different way.”

She snorted, amused and chagrined at the same time. “Still.” Turning serious. Nervous, suddenly, having come to something, I saw, that she’d wanted to say all through the meal, but the thought of saying it intimidated her more even than the thought of accusing me of treating Lieutenant Tisarwat unjustly. “Breq, the whole crew thinks I’m kneeling to you.”

“Yes.” I had already known that, of course. “Though I’m not sure why. Five knows well enough you’ve never been in my bed.”

“Well. The general feeling is that I’ve been remiss in my… my duties. It was all very well to give you time to recover from your injuries, but it’s past time for me to… try to relieve whatever is troubling you. And maybe they’re right.” She took another mouthful of tea. Swallowed. “You’re looking at me. That’s never good.”

“I’m sorry to have embarrassed you.”

“Oh, I’m not embarrassed,” she lied. And then added, more truthfully, “Well, not embarrassed that anyone thinks it. But bringing it up like this. Breq, you found me, what, a year ago? And in all that time I’ve never known you to… and, I mean, when you were…” She stopped. Afraid of saying the wrong thing, I thought. Her skin was too dark to really show a flush, but I could see the temperature change. “I mean, I know you were an ancillary. Are an ancillary. And ships don’t… I mean, I know ancillaries can…”

“Ancillaries can,” I agreed. “As you know from personal experience.”

“Yes,” she said. Truly abashed now. “But I guess I never thought that an ancillary might actually want it.”

I let that hang for a moment, for her to think about. Then, “Ancillaries are human bodies, but they’re also part of the ship. What the ancillaries feel, the ship feels. Because they’re the same. Well, different bodies are different. Things taste different or feel different, they don’t always want the same things, but all together, on the average, yes, it’s a thing I attended to, for the bodies that needed it. I don’t like being uncomfortable, no one does. I did what I could to make my ancillaries comfortable.”

“I guess I never noticed.”

“You weren’t really supposed to.” Best to get this over with. “In any event, ships don’t generally want partners. They do that sort of thing for themselves. Ships with ancillaries, anyway. So.” I gestured the obviousness of my conclusion, beyond any need to say it explicitly. Didn’t add that ships didn’t yearn for romantic partners, either. For captains, yes. For lieutenants. But not for lovers.

“Well,” Seivarden said after a moment, “but you don’t have other bodies to do that with, not anymore.” She stopped, struck by a thought. “What must that have been like? With more than one body?”

I wasn’t going to answer that. “I’m a little surprised you haven’t thought of that before.” But only a little. I knew Seivarden too well to think she’d ever dwelt long on what her ship might think or feel. And she’d never been one of those officers who’d been inconveniently fixated on the idea of ancillaries and sex.

“So when they take the ancillaries away,” Seivarden said after a few appalled moments, “it must be like having parts of your body cut off. And never replaced.”

I could have said, Ask Ship. But Ship probably wouldn’t have wanted to answer. “I’m told it’s something like that,” I said. Voice bland.

“Breq,” Seivarden said, “when I was a lieutenant, before.” A thousand years ago, she meant, when she’d been a lieutenant on Justice of Toren, in my care. “Did I ever pay any attention to anyone but myself?”

I considered, a moment, the range of truthful answers I could make, some less diplomatic than others, and said, finally, “Occasionally.”

Unbidden, Mercy of Kalr showed me the soldiers’ mess, where Seivarden’s Amaats were clearing away their own supper. Amaat One said, “It’s orders, citizens. Lieutenant says.”

A few Amaats groaned. “I’ll have it in my head all night,” one complained to her neighbor.

In my own quarters, Seivarden said, penitent, “I hope I’m doing better these days.”

In the mess, Amaat One opened her mouth and sang, tentative, slightly flat, “It all goes around…” The others joined her, unwilling, unenthusiastic. Embarrassed. “… it all goes around. The planet goes around the sun, it all goes around.”

“Yes,” I said to Seivarden. “A little better.”

Bo had done a creditable job finishing all their tasks. The entire decade stood lined up in the mess, not a muscle twitching, every collar and cuff ruler-straight, even Lieutenant Tisarwat managing an outward severe impassivity. Inward was another matter—still that buzz of tension, that slightly sick feeling, steady since the morning before, and she hadn’t slept since I’d awakened her yesterday. Her Bos gave off a wave of collective resentment coupled with defiant pride—they had, after all, managed quite a lot in the last day, managed it fairly well, considering. By rights I ought to indicate my satisfaction, they were waiting for me to do that, all of them certain of it, and prepared to feel ill-used if I didn’t.

They deserved to be proud of themselves. Lieutenant Tisarwat, as things stood now, didn’t deserve them. “Well done, Bo,” I said, and was rewarded with a surge of exhausted pride and relief from every soldier in front of me. “See it stays this way.” Then, sharply, “Lieutenant, with me.” And turned and walked out of the mess to my quarters. Said, silently, to Ship, “Tell Kalr I want privacy.” Not thinking too directly why that was, or I would be angry again. Or angrier. Even the desire to move sent impulses to muscles, tiny movements that Ship could read. That I could read, when Ship showed them to me. In theory no one else on Mercy of Kalr could receive that data the way I could. In theory. But I wouldn’t think about that. I walked into my quarters, door opening without my asking. The Kalr on duty there bowed, left, ducking around Lieutenant Tisarwat where she had stopped just inside the entrance.

“Come in, Lieutenant,” I said, voice calm. No edge to it. I was angry, yes, but I was always angry, that was normal. Nothing to give anyone any alarm, who could see it. Lieutenant Tisarwat came farther into the room. “Did you get any sleep at all?” I asked her.

“Some, sir.” Surprised. She was too tired to think entirely clearly. And still feeling sick and unhappy. Adrenaline levels still higher than normal. Good.

And not good. Not good at all. Terrible. “Eat much?”

“I h…” She blinked. Had to think about my question. “I haven’t had much time, sir.” She breathed, a trifle more easily than the moment before. Muscles in her shoulders relaxed, just the tiniest bit.

Without thinking of what I was doing, I moved as quickly as I possibly could—which was extremely quickly. Grabbed her by the collars of her jacket, shoved her backward, hard, slammed her into the green and purple wall a meter behind her. Pinned her there, bent awkwardly backward over the bench.

Saw what I had been looking for. Just for an instant. For the smallest moment Lieutenant Tisarwat’s general unhappiness became utter, horrified terror. Adrenaline and cortisol spiked unbelievably. And there, in her head, a brief flash, nearly a ghost, of implants that shouldn’t be there, weren’t there an instant later.

Ancillary implants.

Again I slammed her head against the wall. She gave a small cry, and I saw it again, her sickening horror, those implants that no human ought to have threading through her brain, and then gone again. “Let go of Mercy of Kalr or I’ll strangle you right here with my own hands.”

“You wouldn’t,” she gasped.

That told me she wasn’t thinking straight. In her right mind, Anaander Mianaai would never have doubted, not for an instant, what I might do. I shifted my grip. She started to slide down the wall, toward the bench, but I grabbed her around the throat and put pressure on her trachea. She caught hold of my wrists, desperate. Unable to breathe. Ten seconds, more or less, to do what I told her to do, or die. “Let go of my ship.” My voice calm. Even.

The data coming from her flared again, ancillary implants sharp and clear, her own excruciating nausea and terror strong enough almost to make me double over in sympathetic horror. I let go of her, stood straight, and watched her collapse, coughing, gasping, onto the hard, uncushioned bench and then choking, heaving, try to throw up the nothing that was in her stomach.

“Ship,” I said.

“She’s canceled all orders,” said Mercy of Kalr, directly into my ear. “I’m sorry, Captain.”

“You couldn’t help it.” All Radchaai military ships were built with accesses that let Anaander Mianaai control them. Mercy of Kalr was no exception. I was fortunate the ship didn’t have any enthusiasm for following the orders the Lord of the Radch had been giving it, hadn’t made any effort to correct any lapses or small errors. If Ship had truly wanted to help Anaander Mianaai deceive me, it would certainly have succeeded. “Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch,” I said, to the baby lieutenant trembling, heaving, on the bench in front of me. “Did you think that I wouldn’t know?”

“Always a risk,” she whispered, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

“You’re not used to taking risks you don’t have decades—centuries—to prepare for,” I said. I had dropped all pretense of human expression, spoke in my flat ancillary’s voice. “All the parts of you have been part of you since birth. Probably before. You’ve never been one person and then suddenly had ancillary tech shoved into your brain. It isn’t pleasant, is it?”

“I knew it wasn’t.” She had, now, better control of her breathing, had stopped throwing up. But she spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“You knew it wasn’t. And you thought you’d have access to meds to keep you going until you got used to it. You could take them right out of Medical yourself and use your accesses to make Mercy of Kalr cover your tracks.”

“You outmaneuvered me,” she said, still miserable, still looking down at the now-fouled bench. “I admit it.”

“You outmaneuvered yourself. You didn’t have a standard set of ancillary implants.” It hadn’t been legal to make ancillaries for nearly a hundred years. Not counting bodies already stocked and waiting in suspension, and those were nearly all on troop carriers. None of which had been anywhere near Omaugh Palace. “You had to alter the equipment you used for yourself. And meddling with a human brain, it’s a delicate thing. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been your own, you know that brain front to back, if it was one of your own bodies you’d have had no problems. But it couldn’t be one of your own bodies, that was the whole point, you don’t have any to spare these days, and besides I’d have shoved you out the air lock as soon as we gated if you’d tried it. So it had to be somebody else’s body. But your tech, it’s custom-made for your brain. And you didn’t have time to test anything. You had a week. If that. What, did you grab the child, shove the hardware in her, and throw her onto the docks?” Tisarwat had missed tea with her mother’s cousin, that day, not answered messages. “Even with the right hardware, and a medic who knows what she’s doing, it doesn’t always work. Surely you know that.”

She knew that. “What are you going to do now?”

I ignored the question. “You thought you could just order Mercy of Kalr to give me false readings, and Medic as well, to cover up anything that needed covering. You’d still need meds, that was obvious the moment the hardware went in, but you couldn’t pack them because Bo would have found them immediately and I’d have wondered why you needed those particular drugs.” And then, when she couldn’t get them, her misery was so intense that she couldn’t completely hide it—she could only order Ship to make it appear to be much less than it actually was. “But I already knew what lengths you were willing to go to, to achieve your ends, and I had days just lying here in my quarters, recovering from my injuries and imagining what you might try.” And what I might be able to do to circumvent it, undetected. “I never believed you’d give me a ship and let me fly off unsupervised.”

“You did it without meds. You never used them.”

I went to the bench that served as my bed, pulled aside the linens, opened the compartment underneath. Inside was that box that human eyes could see but no ship or station could, not unless it had ancillary eyes to look with. I opened the box, pulled out the packet of meds I’d taken from Medical, days before that last conference with Anaander Mianaai on Omaugh Palace. Before I’d met Lieutenant Tisarwat in Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat’s office, or even known she’d existed. “We’re going to Medical.” And silently, to Mercy of Kalr, “Send two Kalrs.”

Hope flared in Anaander Mianaai, once Lieutenant Tisarwat, triggered by my words, and by the sight of that packet of medicine in my gloved hand, along with an overwhelming wish to be free of her misery. Tears ran from her ridiculously lilac eyes, and she gave a very tiny whimper, quickly suppressed. “How did you stand this?” she asked. “How did you survive it?”

There was no point in answering. It was an exclamation more than a real question, she didn’t really care about the answer. “Stand up.” The door opened, and two of my Kalrs came in, astonished and dismayed to see Lieutenant Tisarwat battered, collapsed on the bench, bile all down the sleeve of her uniform jacket.

We walked to Medical, a sad little procession, Tisarwat (not Tisarwat) leaning on one Kalr, followed by the other. Medic stood frozen, watching us enter. Appalled, having seen what was in the lieutenant’s head the moment Ship had stopped interfering with her data, with Medic’s specialized implants. She turned to me to speak. “Wait,” I said to her curtly, and then, once the Kalrs had helped Tisarwat (not Tisarwat) onto a table, sent them away.

Before Medic could say anything, before Anaander could realize and protest, I triggered the table’s restraints. She was startled but too miserable to realize right away what that meant. “Medic,” I said. “You see that Lieutenant Tisarwat has some unauthorized implants.” Medic was too horrified to speak. “Remove them.”

“No, don’t!” Anaander Mianaai tried to shout but couldn’t quite, and so it came out sounding half-strangled.

“Who did this?” asked Medic. I could see she was still trying to make sense out of it.

“Is that relevant just now?” She knew the answer, if she thought about it. Only one person could have done this. Only one person would have.

“Medic,” said Tisarwat, who had been trying the restraints but found she couldn’t free herself. Her voice still came out a strangled croak. “I am Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch. Arrest the fleet captain, release me, and give me the medicine I need.”

“You’re getting above yourself, Lieutenant,” I said, and turned again to Medic. “I gave an order, Medic.” Isolated as we were in gate space, my word was law. It didn’t matter what my orders were, no matter how illegal or unjust. A captain might face prosecution for giving some orders—her crew would without fail be executed for disobeying those same commands. It was a central fact of any Radchaai soldier’s life, though it rarely came to an actual demonstration. No one on Mercy of Kalr would have forgotten it. Nyseme Ptem, whose name was mentioned every day on this ship, at my particular instructions, had been a soldier like these, had died because she had refused orders to kill innocent people. No one on board Mercy of Kalr could forget her, or forget why she died. Or that I chose to have her name spoken daily, as though she were one of the dead of my own family, or this ship. That couldn’t possibly be lost on Medic, just now.

I could see her distress and indecision. Tisarwat was suffering, clearly, and if anything could make Medic truly angry it was suffering she couldn’t help. My order might be interpreted as backing her into a corner with the threat of execution, but it also gave her cover to do what needed doing, and she would see that soon enough.

“Medic,” croaked Tisarwat, still struggling against the restraints.

I laid one black-gloved hand across her throat. No pressure, just a reminder. “Medic,” I said. Calmly. “No matter who this is, no matter who she claims to be, this installation was illegal—and thoroughly unjust—from the start. And it’s failed. I’ve seen this before, I’ve been through it myself. It won’t get any better, and she’ll be extremely lucky if it doesn’t get worse. Meds might keep her going for a while, but they won’t fix the problem. There’s only one thing that will fix the problem.” Two things. But in some respects the two were the same, at least as far as this fragment of Anaander Mianaai was concerned.

Medic balanced on the knife-edge of two equally bad choices, only the smallest chance of helping her patient making a barely perceptible difference between one course and the other. I saw her tip. “I’ve never… Fleet Captain, I don’t have any experience with this.” Trying very hard not to let her voice shake. She’d never dealt with ancillaries before, I was the first she’d ever had in her medical section. Ship had told her what to do, with me.

And I was hardly typical. “Not many do. Putting them in is routine, but I can’t think of anyone who’s had to take any out. Not anyone who cared about the condition of the body once they were done. But I’m sure you’ll manage. Ship knows what to do.” Ship was saying as much to Medic, at that moment. “And I’ll help.”

Medic looked at Tisarwat—no, Anaander Mianaai—tied down to the table, no longer struggling with the restraints, eyes closed. Looked, then, at me. “Sedation,” she began.

“Oh, no. She has to be awake for this. But don’t worry, I choked her pretty badly, a few minutes ago. She won’t be able to scream very much.”

By the time we finished and Tisarwat was unconscious, dosed as heavily as was safe with sedatives, Medic was shaking, not entirely from exhaustion. We’d both missed lunch and supper, and tired and increasingly anxious Bos were passing the entrance to Medical in ones and twos on increasingly flimsy pretexts. Ship refused to tell anyone what was happening.

“Will she come back?” asked Medic, standing, trembling, as I cleaned instruments and put them away. “Tisarwat, I mean, will she be Tisarwat again?”

“No.” I closed a box, put it in its drawer. “Tisarwat was dead from the moment they put those implants in.” They. Anaander Mianaai would have done that herself.

“She’s a child. Seventeen years old! How could anyone…” She trailed off. Shook her head once, still not quite believing even after hours of surgery, of seeing it with her own eyes.

“I was the same age when it happened to me,” I pointed out. Not I really, but this body, this last one left to me. “A little younger.” I didn’t point out that Medic hadn’t reacted this way to seeing me. That it made a difference when it was a citizen, instead of some uncivilized, conquered enemy.

She didn’t notice it herself, or else was too overwhelmed just now to react. “Who is she now, then?”

“Good question.” I put away the last of the instruments. “She’ll have to decide that.”

“What if you don’t like her decision?” Shrewd, Medic was. I’d rather have her on my side than otherwise.

“That,” I answered, making a small tossing gesture, as though casting the day’s omens, “will be as Amaat wills. Get some rest. Kalr will bring supper to your quarters. Things will seem better after you’ve eaten and slept.”

“Really?” she asked. Bitter and challenging.

“Well, not necessarily,” I admitted. “But it’s easier to deal with things when you’ve had some rest and some breakfast.”

4

In my quarters, Kalr Five, disquieted by the day’s events but of course expressionless, had my supper waiting for me—a bowl of skel and a flask of water, common soldier’s mess. I suspected Ship had suggested it to her but didn’t query to confirm that suspicion. I’d have been content eating skel all the time, but it would have distressed Five, and not only because it would have deprived her of the opportunity to filch tastes of non-skel delicacies, a cherished perquisite of serving the captain or the officers in the decade room.

While I ate, officerless Bo halfheartedly, nearly silently, scrubbed their allotment of corridors, still spotless as it had been this morning, but part of the day’s routine and not to be neglected. They were tired and worried. Judging from their sparse chatter, the consensus was that I’d abused Lieutenant Tisarwat so harshly she’d become sick. There were some grumbles of no different from the last one. Very carefully referentless.

Bo One, decade senior, checked their work, reported to Ship that it was complete. And then said, silently, fingers moving, “Ship.”

“Bo One,” said Mercy of Kalr. Who knew Bo One quite well, had heard all the grumbles. “You should take your questions to the fleet captain.”

When Bo One had gone to see Medic, less than five minutes after I’d left for my own quarters, Medic had told her the same thing. And this was the third time Ship had suggested it. Still, Bo One had hesitated. Even though by rights she was in command of Bo, with Lieutenant Tisarwat unconscious and my not having assigned anyone to replace her. Had therefore the right, the responsibility even, to approach me for information and instructions.

Ancillaries were part of their ship. There was, often, a vague, paradoxical sense that each decade had its own almost-identity, but that existed alongside the knowledge that every ancillary was just one part of the larger thing, just hands and feet—and a voice—for Ship. No ancillary ever had questions for the captain, or anything personal that needed discussion with an officer.

Mercy of Kalr was crewed by humans. But its last captain had demanded that those humans behave as much like ancillaries as possible. Even when her own Kalrs had addressed her, they had done so in the way Ship might have. As though they had no personal concerns or desires. Long habit, I thought, made Bo One hesitate. She might have asked another lieutenant to speak to me for her, but Seivarden was on watch and Lieutenant Ekalu was asleep.

In my purple and green quarters, I ate the last leaf of skel. Said to Five, “Kalr, I’ll have tea. And I want the paint off these walls as soon as you can manage it. I want monitors.” The walls could be altered, made to display whatever one wished, including visuals of the space outside the ship. The materials to do it were on board. For whatever reason, Captain Vel hadn’t wanted that. I didn’t actually need it, but I wanted the previous captain’s arrangements gone as completely as I could manage.

Expressionless, flat-voiced, Five said, “There may be some inconvenience to you, Fleet Captain.” And then a flare of apprehension as Ship spoke to her. Hesitation. Go ahead in her ear, from Ship. “Sir, Bo One wishes to speak to you.”

Good. Four more seconds and I’d have ordered her to report to me. I’d only been waiting to finish my supper. “I don’t care about the inconvenience. And I’ll see Bo One.”

Bo One entered outwardly confident, inwardly frightened. Bowed, stiffly, feeling awkward—ancillaries didn’t bow. “Bo,” I said, acknowledging her. Over in a corner, Kalr Five busied herself pointlessly with the tea flask, pretending there was anything at all to do before she could serve me the tea I’d asked for. Listening. Worried.

Bo One swallowed. Took a breath. “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence,” she began, clearly a rehearsed speech. Slowly, carefully, broadening her vowels, incapable of entirely losing her own accent but trying hard. “There are concerns about the situation of Bo decade’s officer.” A moment of extra doubt there, I saw, knowing I’d been angry at Lieutenant Tisarwat’s even being aboard, Bo One feeling that she was in a precarious place just speaking to me this way, let alone bringing up the young lieutenant. That sentence had been very carefully composed, I thought, both to sound very formal and to avoid Lieutenant Tisarwat’s name. “Medic was consulted, and it was recommended the fleet captain be approached.”

“Bo,” I said. My voice calm, yes, my mood never reached my voice unless I intended it. But I was out of patience for this sort of thing. “Speak directly, when you speak to me.” Kalr Five still puttered with the tea things.

“Yes, sir,” said Bo One, still stiff. Mortified.

“I’m glad you came. I was on the point of calling for you. Lieutenant Tisarwat is ill. She was ill when she came aboard. Military Administration wanted an officer here and didn’t care that she wasn’t fit to ship out. They even tried to hide it from me.” A lie that wasn’t, entirely, a lie. And every soldier and officer on every ship complained about the unthinking, ignorant decisions of Administration, none of whom knew what it was like aboard ships. “I’ll have some things to say about that, when next I have the chance.” I could almost see it clicking together in Bo One’s mind. Fleet captain’s angry at Administration, not our lieutenant. “She’ll be returning to her quarters tomorrow, and she’ll need a day or two of rest, and light duty after that until Medic says otherwise. You’re decade senior, of course, so you’ll be responsible for your soldiers and hold her watches while she’s out, and make your reports to me. I need Bo decade to take very good care of Lieutenant Tisarwat. I already know you will, but now you have my explicit order. If you have any concerns at all about her health, or if her behavior is odd—if she seems confused about something she shouldn’t be, or just doesn’t seem right in any way at all—you’re to report it to Medic. Even if Lieutenant Tisarwat orders you not to. Am I understood?”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Already feeling she was on firmer ground.

“Good. Dismissed.” Kalr Five picked up the flask to finally pour my tea, no doubt composing the narrative she’d give the other Kalrs.

Bo One bowed. And then, with some trepidation, said, “Beg the fleet captain’s indulgence, sir…” Stopped and swallowed, surprised at her own daring. At my expectant gesture. “We all of us, sir, Bo decade, we want to say, thank you for the tea, sir.”

I’d allotted five grams per person aboard, per week (soldiers—even officers—wrung as much tea as possible out of very small rations of leaves) so long as my supply lasted. It had been greeted with suspicion at first. Captain Vel had insisted they only drink water. Like ancillaries. Was I trying to soften them up for something? To show off how wealthy I was? Granting a privilege that I could then deny for some satisfaction of my own?

But if there was one thing any Radchaai considered essential for civilized life, it was tea. And I knew what it was like, to be on a ship full of ancillaries. I had no need to play at it. “You’re very welcome, Bo. Dismissed.”

She bowed again, and left. As the door closed behind her, Ship said, in her ear, “That went well.”

For the next two days, Lieutenant Tisarwat lay on her bed, in her tiny quarters. Ship showed her entertainments from its library, all lighthearted things with songs that were bright or sweet by turns, and happy endings. Tisarwat watched them, placid and noncommittal, would have watched tragedy after tragedy with the same evenness, dosed as she was to keep her mood stable and comfortable. Bo fussed over her, tucking blankets, bringing tea, Bo Nine even contriving some kind of sweet pastry for her, in the decade room’s tiny galley. Speculation about the nature of her illness—no longer blamed on me—was rife. In the end, they decided that Tisarwat had been badly interrogated before being assigned to Mercy of Kalr. Or less likely, but still possible, she’d been the victim of inept education—sometimes, when a citizen needed to learn a great deal of information, she could get that by going to Medical and learning under drugs. The same drugs that were used for interrogation, and aptitudes testing. Or reeducation, a topic most polite Radchaai had difficulty mentioning at all. All four—interrogation, learning, aptitudes, or reeducation—had to be done by a specialist medic, someone who knew what she was doing. Though no one on Mercy of Kalr would ever say it aloud, hovering just under the surface of any conversation about her was the fact that at the moment Tisarwat looked very much like someone who had recently come out of reeducation. The fact that Medic and I had done whatever we had done without the assistance even of any Kalrs, and wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened, this also tended to reinforce the idea that reeducation was involved. But no one who had been reeducated would have ever been allowed to serve in the military, so that was impossible.

Whatever it was, it hadn’t been Tisarwat’s fault. Or mine. Everyone was relieved at that. Sitting in my quarters the next day, drinking tea—still from the rose glass, even I myself hadn’t yet rated the best dishes—Seivarden’s desire to ask me what had happened was palpable, but instead she said, “I was thinking about what you said the other day. About how I never saw you… I mean…” She trailed off, realizing, probably, that the sentence wasn’t going anywhere good. “Officers have their own quarters, so that’s easy, but I hadn’t even thought about if my Amaats… I mean, there’s nowhere private, is there, nowhere they could go if they wanted… I mean…”

Actually, there were quite a number of places, including several storage compartments, all of the shuttles (though lack of gravity did make some things awkward), and even, with enough desperation, under the table in the soldiers’ mess. But Seivarden had always had her own quarters and never had to avail herself of any of them. “I suppose it’s good you’re thinking about these things,” I said. “But leave your Amaats what dignity they can afford.” I took another swallow of tea and added, “You seem to be thinking about sex a lot lately. I’m glad you haven’t just ordered one of your Amaats.” She wouldn’t have been the first officer on this ship to do that.

“The thought crossed my mind,” she said, face heating even further than it already had. “And then I thought about what you would probably say.”

“I don’t think Medic is your type.” Actually, I suspected Medic had no interest in sex to begin with. “Lieutenant Tisarwat is a bit young, and she’s not up for it right now. Have you considered approaching Ekalu?” Ekalu had thought of it, I was sure. But Seivarden’s aristocratic looks and antique accent intimidated her as much as they attracted her.

“I haven’t wanted to insult her.”

“Too much like a superior approaching an inferior?” Seivarden gestured assent. “Kind of insulting in and of itself, thinking of it like that, wouldn’t you say?”

She groaned, set her tea on the table. “I lose either way.”

I gestured uncertainty. “Or you win either way.”

She gave a small laugh. “I’m really glad Medic was able to help Tisarwat.”

In Lieutenant Tisarwat’s quarters, Bo Nine tucked in the blanket for the third time in the last hour. Adjusted pillows, checked the temperature of Lieutenant Tisarwat’s tea. Tisarwat submitted with drugged, dispassionate calm. “So am I,” I said.

Two days later—something less than a third of the way to Athoek—I invited Lieutenant Ekalu and Lieutenant Tisarwat to dine with me. Because of the way schedules worked on Mercy of Kalr, it was my own lunch, Ekalu’s supper, Tisarwat’s breakfast. And because my Kalrs were scraping paint off the walls in my quarters, it was in the decade room. Almost like being with myself again, though Mercy of Kalr’s decade room was a good deal smaller than my own Esk decade room, when I had been Justice of Toren and had twenty lieutenants for each of my ten decades.

My eating in the decade room produced a sort of confusion of jurisdiction, with Kalr Five wanting very much to establish her own authority in what was normally the territory of the officers’ staffs. She’d agonized over whether to insist on using her second-best porcelain, which would show incontrovertibly that it was her meal and also show off the dishes she loved, or whether she should let Etrepa Eight and Bo Nine use the decade room’s own set, which would protect the precious porcelain from accidents but imply the meal was under Etrepa and Bo’s authority. Her pride won in the end, and we ate eggs and vegetables off the hand-painted dishes.

Ekalu, who had served nearly her whole career as a common soldier on this ship and likely knew Kalr Five’s peculiarities, said, “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence, these plates are lovely.” Five didn’t smile, she rarely did in front of me, but I could see Ekalu had hit her target dead on.

“Five chose them,” I said. Approving of Ekalu’s gambit. “They’re Bractware. About twelve hundred years old.” For an instant Ekalu froze, utensil just above the plate, terrified of striking it too hard. “They’re not actually terribly valuable. There are places where nearly everyone has part of a set wrapped up in a box somewhere that they never take out. But they’re lovely, aren’t they, you can see why they were so popular.” If I hadn’t favorably impressed Kalr Five yet, I did so now. “And Lieutenant, if you start every single sentence with begging the fleet captain’s indulgence this is going to be a dreary meal. Just assume I’ve given my indulgence for polite conversation.”

“Sir,” acknowledged Ekalu, embarrassed. She applied herself to her eggs. Carefully, trying not to touch the plate with her utensil.

Tisarwat had said nothing yet beyond the occasionally required yes, sir and no, sir and thank you, sir. All the time those lilac eyes downcast, not looking at me, or Ekalu. Medic had tapered down her sedatives, but Tisarwat was still under their influence. Behind them, crowded back by the drugs, was anger and despair. Just noise, right now, but not what I wanted to predominate when she wasn’t taking medication anymore.

Time to do something about that. “Yesterday,” I said, after I’d swallowed a mouthful of eggs, “Lieutenant Seivarden was telling me that Amaat decade was obviously the best on the ship.” Seivarden had said no such thing, in fact. But the surge of offended pride from Etrepa Eight and Bo Nine, standing in a corner of the room waiting to be useful, was so distinct that for an instant I had trouble believing Ekalu and Tisarwat couldn’t also see it. Kalr Five’s reaction wasn’t nearly as strong—we’d just complimented her porcelain and besides, captain’s decade was in some ways above that sort of thing.

Ekalu’s conflict was immediate, and plainly visible to me. She’d been an Amaat until very recently, had, now, the natural response of an Amaat on hearing someone claim her decade’s superiority. But of course, now she was Etrepa lieutenant. She paused, working that out, working out, I thought, a response. Tisarwat looked down at her plate, probably seeing what I was up to, and not caring.

“Sir,” said Ekalu, finally. Obviously having to force herself to leave off that begging the fleet captain’s indulgence. Carefully navigating her accent. “All Mercy of Kalr’s decades are excellent. But if I were to be called upon to narrow it down…” She paused. Perhaps realizing she’d gone a bit too awkwardly formal with her diction. “If one were forced to choose, I’d have to say Etrepa is best. No offense to Lieutenant Seivarden or her Amaats, all due respect, it’s just a fact.” Slipping back closer to her own accent, at that last.

Silence from Tisarwat. Betrayed alarm from Bo Nine, at silent attention in the corner of the decade room. “Lieutenant,” said Mercy of Kalr into Tisarwat’s ear. “Your decade is waiting for you to speak up for them.”

Tisarwat looked up, looked at me, for just a moment, with serious lilac eyes. She knew what I was doing, knew there was only one move she could make. Resented it, resented me. Her muted anger swelled by just the smallest amount but couldn’t sustain itself, died back to its previous level almost instantly. And not just anger—for a moment I’d seen yearning, a momentary hopeless wishing. She looked away, at Ekalu. “Begging your pardon, lieutenant, with all due respect, I’m afraid you’re mistaken.” Remembering, halfway through the sentence, that she shouldn’t be speaking like Seivarden. Like Anaander Mianaai. Blurring that accent just a bit. “Bo may be junior, but my Bos are clearly better than any other decade on this ship.”

Ekalu blinked. For an instant her face went ancillary-blank with surprise at Tisarwat’s accent, her diction, her obvious self-possession, not much like a seventeen-year-old at all, and then she remembered herself. Searched for a response. She couldn’t point out that nonetheless Bo was junior—that would leave her vulnerable to Seivarden’s claim for Amaat. She looked at me.

I had put a neutral, interested expression on my face and kept it there. “Well,” I said, pleasantly, “we should settle this. Objectively. Firearms and armor proficiency, perhaps.” Ekalu finally realized I’d planned the whole thing. But was still puzzled, specifics not quite making sense to her. I made a show of moving my gloved fingers, sending a request to Kalr Five. Said aloud to the two lieutenants, “What are your numbers?”

They blinked as Ship placed the information in their visions. “All up to standard, sir,” said Ekalu.

“Standard?” I asked, voice incredulous. “Surely this crew is better than standard.” Lieutenant Tisarwat looked down at her plate again, behind the drugs resentment, approval, anger, that yearning I’d seen before. All muted. “I’ll give you a week. At the end of it, let’s see which decade has the highest scores, Etrepa or Bo. Including your own, Lieutenants. Issue armor. You have my permission to wear it for practice, whenever you think best.” My own armor was implanted, a personal force shield I could raise in a very small fraction of a second. These lieutenants, their decades, wore their units strapped around their chests, when issued. Had never, any of them, seen combat, could raise theirs within the required one second, but I wanted better, especially knowing what might be coming, that from now on nothing would be the way it had been.

Kalr Five entered the decade room, a dark-blue bottle in each hand, and one tucked into her elbow. Face impassive, but inwardly disapproving, as she set them on the table. “Arrack,” I said. “The good stuff. For whoever wins.”

“The whole decade, sir?” asked Lieutenant Ekalu, slightly hesitant. Astonished.

“However you’d like to divide it up,” I said, knowing that of course Etrepa Eight and Bo Nine had messaged their decade-mates by now, and the soldiers of both Etrepa and Bo had already calculated their equal share of the prize. Possibly allowing a slightly larger one for their officers.

Later, in Seivarden’s quarters, Ekalu turned over, said to a sleepy Seivarden, “All respect, S… no offense. I don’t mean to offend. But I’ve… everyone’s been wondering if you’re kneeling to Sir.”

“Why do you do that?” Seivarden asked, blurrily, and then as she pulled back from the edge of sleep, “Say Sir like that, instead of Fleet Captain.” Came a bit more awake. “No, I know why, now I think about it. Sorry. Why am I offended?” Ekalu, at an astonished, embarrassed loss, didn’t answer. “I would if she wanted me to. She doesn’t want me to.”

“Is Sir… is the fleet captain an ascetic?”

Seivarden gave a small, ironic laugh. “I don’t think so. She’s not very forthcoming, our fleet captain. Never has been. But I’ll tell you.” She took a breath, let it out. Took another while Ekalu waited for her to speak. “You can trust her to the end of the universe. She’ll never let you down.”

“That would be impressive.” Ekalu, clearly skeptical. Disbelieving. Then, reconsidering something. “She was Special Missions, before?”

“I can’t say.” Seivarden put her bare hand on Ekalu’s stomach. “When do you have to be back working?”

Ekalu suppressed a tiny shiver, born of a complicated tangle of emotions, mostly pleasant. Most non-Radchaai didn’t quite understand the emotional charge bare hands carried, for a Radchaai. “About twenty minutes.”

“Mmmm,” said Seivarden, considering that. “That’s plenty of time.”

I left them to themselves. Bo and their lieutenant slept. In the corridors, Etrepas mopped and scrubbed, intermittently flashing silver as their armor flowed around them and back down again.

Even later, Tisarwat and I had tea in the decade room. Sedatives lessened further still, emotions rawer, closer to the surface, she said, when we were alone for a moment, “I know what you’re doing.” With a strange little skip of anger and wanting. “What you’re trying to do.” That was the want, I thought. To really be part of the crew, to secure Bo’s admiration and loyalty. Possibly even mine. Things the hapless former Tisarwat would have wanted. That I was offering her now.

But offering on my terms, not hers. “Lieutenant Tisarwat,” I said, after a calm drink of my tea, “is that an appropriate way to address me?”

“No, sir,” Tisarwat said. Defeated. And not. Even medicated she was a mass of contradictions, every emotion accompanied by something paradoxical. Tisarwat had never wanted to be Anaander Mianaai. Hadn’t been for very long, just a few days. And whoever she was now, however disastrous it was to Anaander Mianaai’s plans, she felt so much better.

I’d done that. She hated me for it. And didn’t. “Have supper with me, Lieutenant,” I said, as though the previous exchange hadn’t happened. As though I couldn’t see what she was feeling. “You and Ekalu both. You can boast about the progress your decades are making, and Kalr will make that pastry you like so much, with the sugar icing.” In my quarters, Ship spoke the request into Kalr Five’s ear as she looked over the walls, to be sure everything had been properly installed. Five rolled her eyes and sighed as though she was exasperated, muttered something about adolescent appetites, but secretly, where she thought only Ship could see, she was pleased.

The competition was tight. Both Etrepa and Bo had spent all their free time in the firing range, and their duty time raising and lowering their armor while they worked. Their numbers had improved markedly all around, nearly everyone had gone up a difficulty level in the firearms training routines and those who hadn’t soon would. And every Etrepa and every Bo could deploy their armor in less than half a second. Nowhere near what ancillaries could do, or what I wanted, but still a distinct improvement.

All of Bo had understood more or less immediately what the actual purpose of the contest was, and undertaken their practice with serious-minded determination. Etrepa as well—Etrepa, who approved my goal (as they understood it) but had not on that account held back their effort. But the prize went to Bo. I handed the three bottles of (very fine, and very strong) arrack to a virtually sedative-free Lieutenant Tisarwat, in the soldiers’ mess, with all of Bo standing straight and ancillary-expressionless behind her. I congratulated them on their victory and left them to the serious drinking that I knew would begin the instant I was in the corridor.

Less than an hour later, Seivarden came to me, on behalf of her Amaats. Who had mostly tried to be understanding about the whole thing but now couldn’t walk past the soldiers’ mess without being reminded that they’d never even had an opportunity to try for that arrack. And I’d ordered fruit to be served to all the Etrepas and Bos with their supper that day—I had a store of oranges, rambutans, and dredgefruit, all purchased by Kalr Five and carefully stored in suspension. Even after supper was cleared away the sweet smell of the dredgefruit lingered in the corridor and left Seivarden’s Amaats hungry and resentful.

“Tell them,” I said to Seivarden, “that I wanted to give Lieutenant Tisarwat some encouragement, and if they’d been part of the contest she’d never have had a chance.” Seivarden gave a short laugh, partly recognizing a lie when she heard it, partly, I thought, believing that maybe it wasn’t a lie. Her Amaats would probably have a similar reaction. “Have them pull their own numbers up in the next week, and they’ll have dredgefruit with supper, too. And Kalr as well.” That last for always-listening Five.

“And the arrack?” asked Seivarden, hopefully.

In the soldiers’ mess, the drinking, which had begun in a very focused, disciplined manner, each communal swallow accompanied by an invocation of one of the ship’s gods, the sting of the arrack carefully savored on the way down, had begun to degenerate. Bo Ten rose, and just slightly slurrily begged the lieutenant’s indulgence, and, receiving it, declared her intention to recite her own poetry.

“I have more arrack,” I told Seivarden, in my quarters. “And I intend to give some of it out. But I’d rather not give it out wholesale.”

In the soldiers’ mess, Bo Ten’s declaration met with cheers of approval, even from Lieutenant Tisarwat, and so Ten launched into what turned out to be an epic, largely improvised narrative of the deeds of the god Kalr. Who, according to Bo Ten’s account, was drunk a lot of the time and rhymed very badly.

“Limiting the arrack is probably a good idea,” said Seivarden, in my quarters. A shade wistfully. “And I wouldn’t have had any anyway.” When I’d found her, naked and unconscious in an icy street a year before, she’d been taking far too much kef far too often. She’d mostly abstained since then.

As Bo Ten’s poem rambled on, it turned into a paean to Bo decade’s superiority to any other on the ship, including Amaat decade. No, especially Amaat decade, who sang foolish children’s songs, and not very well at that.

“Our song is better!” declared one intoxicated Bo, halting the flow of Bo Ten’s poetry, and another, equally intoxicated but perhaps slightly clearer-thinking soldier, asked, “What is our song?”

Bo Ten, not particular about her subject and not at all ready to yield the center of attention, took a deep breath and began to sing, in a surprisingly pleasant, if wobbly, contralto. “Oh, tree! Eat the fish!” It was a song I had sung to myself fairly frequently. It wasn’t in Radchaai, and Bo Ten was only approximating the sound of the actual words, using more familiar ones she recognized. “This granite folds a peach!” At the head of the table, Tisarwat actually giggled. “Oh, tree! Oh, tree! Where’s my ass?”

The last word rendered Tisarwat and all her Bos utterly helpless with laughter. Four of them slid off their seats and collapsed onto the floor. It took them a good five minutes to recover.

“Wait!” exclaimed Tisarwat. Considered rising, and then abandoned the idea as requiring too much effort. “Wait! Wait!” And when she had their attention, “Wait! That”—she waved one gloved hand—“is our song.” Or she tried to say it—the last word was lost in more laughter. She raised her glass, nearly sloshing the arrack out onto the table. “To Bo!”

“To Bo!” they echoed, and then a soldier added, “To Fleet Captain Breq!”

And Tisarwat was drunk enough to agree, without hesitation, “To Fleet Captain Breq! Who doesn’t know where her ass is!” And after that there was nothing but laughter and top-of-the-lungs choruses of Oh, tree! Where’s my ass?

“That, sir,” said Medic an hour later, in the bath, attended, as I was, by a Kalr with a cloth and a basin, “is why Captain Vel didn’t allow the decades to drink.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said, equably. Medic, still frowning as always, raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue. “I don’t think it would be a good idea on a regular basis, of course. But I have my reasons, right now.” As Medic knew. “Are you ready for eleven hangovers when they wake up?”

“Sir!” Indignant acknowledgment. Lifted an elbow—waving a bare hand, in the bath, was rude. “Kalr can handle that easily enough.”

“That they can,” I agreed. Ship said nothing, only continued to show me Tisarwat and her Bos, laughing and singing in the soldiers’ mess.

5

If Athoek Station had any importance at all, it was because the planet it orbited produced tea. Other things as well, of course—planets are large. And terraformed, temperate planets were extraordinarily valuable in themselves—the result of centuries, if not millennia of investment, of patience and difficult work. But Anaander Mianaai hadn’t had to pay any of that cost—instead, she let the inhabitants do all the work and then sent in her fleets of warships, her armies of ancillaries, to take them over for herself. After a couple thousand years of this she had quite a collection of comfortably habitable planets, so most Radchaai didn’t think of them as particularly rare or valuable.

But Athoek had several lengthy mountain ranges, with plenty of lakes and rivers. And it had a weather control grid the Athoeki had built just a century or so before the annexation. All the newly arrived Radchaai had to do was plant tea and wait. Now, some six hundred years later, Athoek produced tens of millions of metric tons a year.

The featureless, suffocating black of gate space opened onto starlight, and we were in Athoek System. I sat in Command, Lieutenant Ekalu standing beside me. Two of Ekalu’s Etrepas stood on either side of us, at their assigned consoles. The room itself was small and plain, nothing more than a blank wall in case Ship should need to cast an image (or in case those on duty preferred to watch that way), those two consoles, and a seat for the captain or the officer on watch. Handholds for times when Ship’s acceleration outpaced its adjustment to the gravity. This had been one of the few parts of the ship frequented by Captain Vel that she had not had painted or otherwise redecorated, with the sole exception of a plaque hung over the door that had read, Proper attention to duty is a gift to the gods. A common enough platitude, but I’d had it taken down and packed with Captain Vel’s other things.

I didn’t need to be in Command. Anywhere I was, I could close my eyes and see the darkness give way to the light of Athoek’s sun, feel the sudden wash of particles, hear the background chatter of the system’s various communications and automated warning beacons. Athoek itself was distant enough to be a small, shining, blue and white circle. My view of it was a good three minutes old.

“We are in Athoek System, Fleet Captain,” one of Lieutenant Ekalu’s Etrepas said. In another few moments, Ship would tell her what I already saw—that there seemed to be quite a lot of ships around Athoek Station, definitely more than Ship thought was usual; that besides that nothing seemed amiss, or at least had not been two to ten minutes ago, the age of the light and the signals that had reached our present location so far; and that while three military ships had been stationed here, only one was immediately visible, near one of the system’s four gates. Or it had been some two and a half minutes ago. I suspected it was Sword of Atagaris, though I couldn’t be sure until I was closer, or it identified itself.

I considered that distant ship. Where were the other two ships, and why did this one guard one of Athoek’s four gates? The least important of the four, come to that—beyond it was an empty system, otherwise gateless, where the Athoeki had intended to expand before the annexation but never had.

I thought about that a few moments. Lieutenant Ekalu, standing beside me, frowned slightly at what Ship showed her, that same image of Athoek System that I myself was looking at. She wasn’t surprised, or alarmed. Just mildly puzzled. “Sir, I think that’s Sword of Atagaris, by the Ghost Gate,” she said. “I don’t see Mercy of Phey or Mercy of Ilves.”

“The Ghost Gate?”

“That’s what they call it, sir.” She was, I saw, mildly embarrassed. “The system on the other side is supposed to be haunted.”

Radchaai did believe in ghosts. Or, more accurately, many Radchaai did. After so many annexations, so many peoples and their various religious beliefs absorbed into the Radch, there was quite a variety of Radchaai opinions of what happened after someone died. Most citizens at the very least harbored a vague suspicion that violent or unjust death, or failing to make funeral offerings properly, would cause a person’s spirit to linger, unwelcome and possibly dangerous. But this was the first I’d heard of ghosts haunting an entire system. “The whole system? By what?”

Still embarrassed, Lieutenant Ekalu gestured doubtfully. “There are different stories.”

I considered that a moment. “Right. Ship, let’s identify ourselves, and send my courteous greetings to Captain Hetnys of Sword of Atagaris.” Both Mercy of Kalr and Lieutenant Ekalu thought the ship by the Ghost Gate was probably Sword of Atagaris, and I thought they were likely to be correct. “And while we’re waiting for an answer,” which would take about five minutes to reach us, “see about our gating closer to Athoek Station.” We’d exited gate space farther back than we might have—I had wanted this vantage, wanted to see how things stood before going any closer.

But from this distance it could take days, even weeks to reach Athoek itself. We could, of course, gate in much closer. Even, in theory, right up to the station itself, though that would be extremely dangerous. To do that safely, we would need to know where every ship, every shuttle, every sailpod would be the moment we came out of gate space. The gate opening could itself damage or destroy anything already on the spot, and Mercy of Kalr would collide with anything that might be in its way as it came out into the wider universe.

I’d done that sort of thing before, when I’d been a ship. During annexations, when a little extra death and destruction could hardly matter. Not in a Radchaai system, full of civilian citizen traffic.

“Sir, will you have tea?” asked Lieutenant Ekalu.

I had already returned my attention outside, to the star, its light and heat, its distant planet. The gates and their beacons. The taste of dust on Mercy of Kalr’s hull. I opened my mouth to say, thank you, no. And then realized she really wanted tea herself—she’d done without as the time to exit our self-made gate approached, and now that we’d arrived without event she’d been hoping I’d call for some. She wouldn’t have any if I didn’t. Her asking this way was quite daring, for her. “Yes, thank you, Lieutenant.”

Shortly thereafter, almost exactly one minute before I could expect any reply to my first message, an Etrepa handed me a bowl of tea, and the ship that we all presumed was Sword of Atagaris disappeared.

I had been watching it. Enjoying the view, which for once came close to overwhelming the not-quiteness that was my usual experience of receiving so much data from Ship. Not quite able to process everything, not quite enough to overwhelm the sensation of seeing what I wanted—so close, but not close enough to really touch.

But for those few moments, I could almost forget that I wasn’t a ship anymore. So when Sword of Atagaris disappeared, I reacted immediately, without thinking.

And found myself paralyzed. The numbers I wanted didn’t come, not immediately, and the ship—Ship, which was, of course, Mercy of Kalr and not me—would not move at my mere desire, the way my own body would have. I came sharply back to myself, to my one, single body sitting in Command.

But Ship knew what I wanted, and why. Lieutenant Ekalu said, “Sir, are you all right?” And then Mercy of Kalr moved, just the smallest bit faster than it could adjust the gravity. The bowl tumbled out of my hand and shattered, splashing tea over my boots and trousers. Lieutenant Ekalu and the Etrepas stumbled, grabbed at handholds. And we were suddenly back in gate space.

“They gated,” I said. “Almost as soon as they saw us.” Certainly before they’d gotten our message, identifying ourselves. “They saw us, and thirty seconds later they moved.”

The jar that had dumped tea all over my feet had waked Lieutenant Tisarwat, as well as her Bos. One of Seivarden’s Amaats had fallen and sprained her wrist. Besides a few more broken dishes, there was no other damage—everything had been secured, in case we met some accident coming out of our self-made gate.

“But… but, sir, we’re a Mercy. We look like a Mercy. Why would they run away as soon as they saw us?” Then she put that together with our own very sudden move. “You don’t think they’re running away.”

“I wasn’t going to take the chance,” I acknowledged. An Etrepa hurriedly cleared away shards of porcelain and wiped up the puddle of tea.

“Exiting gate space in forty-five seconds,” said Ship, in all our ears.

“But why?” Lieutenant Ekalu asked. Truly alarmed, truly puzzled. “They can’t know what happened at Omaugh, the gates between here and there went down before any news could get out.” Without any knowledge of Anaander Mianaai’s split, or the varying loyalties of military ships and officers in that struggle, Captain Hetnys and Sword of Atagaris had no reason to react to our arrival as though it might be a threat.

Even citizens who thought the Radch had been infiltrated and corrupted, who believed some officials and captains were potentially enemies, didn’t know the struggle had broken into the open. “Either they already know something,” I said, “or something’s happened here.”

“Take hold,” said Ship, to all of us.

“Sir,” said Lieutenant Ekalu, “how do we know where Sword of Atagaris is, when we come out?”

“We don’t, Lieutenant.”

She took a breath. Thought of saying something, but didn’t.

“We probably won’t hit Sword of Atagaris,” I added. “Space is big. And this morning’s cast was fortunate.”

She wasn’t sure if I was joking or not. “Yes, sir.”

And we were back in the universe. Sun, planet, gates, background chatter. No Sword of Atagaris.

“Where is it?” asked Lieutenant Ekalu.

“Ten seconds,” I replied. “Nobody let go of anything.”

Ten and a half seconds later, a blacker-than-black hole opened up in the universe and Sword of Atagaris appeared, less than five hundred kilometers from where we had just been. Before it was even fully out of its gate, it began transmitting. “Unknown ship, identify yourself or be destroyed.”

“I’d like to see it try,” said Ship, but only to me.

“That’s not Captain Hetnys,” said Ekalu. “I think it’s her Amaat lieutenant.”

“Sword of Atagaris,” I said. Ship would know to transmit my words. “This is Fleet Captain Breq Mianaai commanding Mercy of Kalr. Explain yourself.”

It took a half second for my message to reach Sword of Atagaris, and four seconds for the lieutenant in question to collect herself enough to reply. “Fleet Captain, sir. My apologies, sir.” In the meantime, Mercy of Kalr identified itself to Sword of Atagaris. “We… we were afraid you weren’t what you appeared to be, sir.”

“What did you think we were, Lieutenant?”

“I… I don’t know, sir. It was just, sir, we weren’t expecting you. There are rumors that Omaugh Palace was under attack, or even destroyed, and we haven’t had any word from them for nearly a month now.”

I looked at Lieutenant Ekalu. She had reverted to the habit of every soldier on Mercy of Kalr and cleared her face of any expression. That alone was eloquent, but of course I could see more. Even discounting what had just happened, she did not have a high opinion of Sword of Atagaris’s Amaat lieutenant.

“If you’d had your way, Lieutenant,” I said dryly, “you’d be waiting even longer for word from Omaugh. I’ll speak to Captain Hetnys now.”

“Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence,” replied the lieutenant. “Captain Hetnys is on Athoek Station.” She must have realized how that sounded, because she added, after a very brief pause, “Consulting with the system governor.”

“And when I find her there,” I asked, making my tone just slightly sarcastic, “will she be able to better explain to me just what it is you think you’re doing out here?”

“Sir. Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Ship cut the connection, and I turned to Lieutenant Ekalu. “You’re acquainted with this officer?”

Still that expressionless face. “Water will wear away stone, sir.”

It was a proverb. Or half of one. Water will wear away stone, but it won’t cook supper. Everything has its own strengths. Said with enough irony, it could also imply that since the gods surely had a purpose for everyone the person in question must be good for something, but the speaker couldn’t fathom what it might be. “Her family is good,” added Ekalu at my silence, still impassive. “Genealogy as long as your arm. Her mother is second cousin to the granddaughter of a client of a client of Mianaai itself, sir.”

And made sure everyone knew it, apparently. “And the captain?” Anaander Mianaai had told me that what Captain Hetnys lacked in the way of vision she made up for with a conscientious attention to duty. “Is she likely to have left orders to attack anything that came into the system?”

“I wouldn’t think so, sir. But the lieutenant isn’t exactly… imaginative, sir. Knees stronger than her head.” Ekalu’s accent slipped at that last, just a bit. “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence.”

So, likely to be acting under orders that suggested incoming ships might be a threat. I would have to ask Captain Hetnys about that, when I met her.

The hookup to Athoek Station’s dock was largely automated. When the pressure equalized and Five opened the shuttle hatch, Lieutenant Tisarwat and I pushed ourselves over the awkward boundary between the shuttle’s weightlessness and the station’s artificial gravity. The bay was dingy gray, scuffed, like any other bay on any other station.

A ship’s captain stood waiting there, an ancillary straight and still behind her. Seeing it I felt a stab of envy. I had once been what that ancillary was. I never could be that again.

“Captain Hetnys,” I said, as Tisarwat came up behind me.

Captain Hetnys was tall—taller than I was by a good ten centimeters—broad, and solidly built. Her hair, clipped military-short, was a silvery gray, a stark contrast to the darkness of her skin. A matter of vanity, perhaps—she’d certainly chosen that hair color, wanted people to notice it, or notice the close cut. Not all of the pins she wore in careful, uncustomary rows on the front of her uniform jacket had names on them, and those that did I couldn’t read from this distance. She bowed. “Fleet Captain, sir.”

I did not bow. “I’ll see the system governor now,” I said, cold and matter-of-fact. Leaning just a bit on that antique accent any Mianaai would have. “And afterward you’ll explain to me why your ship threatened to attack me when I arrived.”

“Sir.” She paused a moment, trying, I thought, to look untroubled. When I’d first messaged Athoek Station I’d been told that System Governor Giarod was unavoidably occupied by religious obligations, and would be for some time. As was, apparently, every station official of any standing. This was a holiday that came around on an Athoeki calendar, and possibly because of that, because it was merely a local festival, no one had seen fit to warn me that actually it was important enough to nearly shut down the entire station. Captain Hetnys knew I’d been told the governor was unavailable for some hours. “The initiates should be coming out of the temple in an hour or two.” She started to frown, and then stopped herself. “Are you planning to stay on the station, sir?”

Behind me and Lieutenant Tisarwat, Kalr Five, Ten, and Eight, and Bo Nine hauled luggage out of the shuttle. Presumably the impetus behind Captain Hetnys’s question.

“It’s only, sir,” she went on, when I didn’t answer immediately, “that lodgings on the station are quite crowded just now. It might be difficult to find somewhere suitable.”

I’d already realized that the destruction of even a few gates would have rerouted traffic this way. There were several dozen ships here that had not expected to come to Athoek at all, and more that had meant to leave but couldn’t. Even though Anaander Mianaai’s order forbidding travel in the remaining gates couldn’t possibly have reached here yet, the captains of plenty of other ships might well be nervous about entering any gates at all for the next while. Any well-connected or well-funded travelers had likely taken up whatever comfortable lodgings might have been available here. Mercy of Kalr had already asked Station, just to be sure, and Station had replied that apart from the possibility of an invitation to stay in the system governor’s residence, the usual places were full up.

The fact that my possibly staying on the station appeared to dismay Captain Hetnys was nearly as interesting as the fact that Station apparently hadn’t mentioned my plans to her. Perhaps it hadn’t occurred to her to ask. “I have a place to stay, Captain.”

“Oh. That’s good, sir.” She didn’t seem convinced of it, though.

I gestured her to follow me and strode out of the bay into the corridor. Sword of Atagaris’s ancillary fell in behind the three of us, with Kalr Five. I could see—Mercy of Kalr showed me—Five’s vanity over her ability to play ancillary, right beside the actual thing.

The walls and floor of the corridor, like the docking bay, showed their age and ill-use. Neither had been cleaned with the frequency any self-respecting military ship expected. But colorful garlands brightened the walls. Seasonally appropriate garlands. “Captain,” I said after ten steps, without breaking stride. “I do understand that this is the Genitalia Festival. But when you say genitalia, doesn’t that usually mean genitals generally? Not just one kind?” For all the steps I’d taken, and as far down the corridor as I could see, the walls were hung with tiny penises. Bright green, hot pink, electric blue, and a particularly eye-searing orange.

“Sir,” said Captain Hetnys just behind me. “It’s a translation. The words are the same, in the Athoeki language.”

The Athoeki language. As though there had only been one. But there was never only one language, not in my considerable experience.

“With the fleet captain’s indulgence…” As Captain Hetnys spoke, I gestured assent, not looking behind me to see her. Could, if I wished, see her back, and my own, through Kalr Five’s unsuspecting eyes. She continued. “The Athoeki weren’t very civilized.” Not civilized. Not Radchaai. The word was the same, the only difference a subtlety expressed by context, and too easily wiped away. “They mostly aren’t even now. They make a division between people with penises and people without. When we first arrived in the system they surrendered right away. Their ruler lost her mind. She thought Radchaai didn’t have penises, and since everyone would have to become Radchaai, she ordered all the people in the system with penises to cut them off. But the Athoeki had no intention of cutting anything off, so they made models instead and piled them up in front of the ruler to keep her happy until she could be arrested and given help. So now, on the anniversary, sir, all the children dedicate their penises to their god.”

“What about the Athoeki with other sorts of genitals?” We’d reached the bank of lifts that would take us away from the docks. The lobby there was deserted.

“They don’t use real ones, sir,” said Captain Hetnys, clearly contemptuous of the whole thing. “They buy them in a shop.”

Station didn’t open the lift doors with the alacrity I had grown used to on Mercy of Kalr. For an instant I considered waiting to see just how long it would let us stand there, and wondered if perhaps Station disliked Captain Hetnys so much. But if that was the case, if this hesitation was resentment on Station’s part, I would only add to that by exposing it.

But just as I drew a breath to request the lift, the doors opened. The inside was undecorated. When we were all in and the doors closed, I said, “Main concourse, please, Station.” It would take Eight and Ten a while to settle into the quarters I’d arranged, and in the meantime I would at least make a point of showing myself at the Governor’s Palace, which would have an entrance on the main concourse, and at the same time see some of this local festival. To Captain Hetnys, standing beside me, I said, “That story strikes you as plausible, does it?” One ruler for the entire system. They surrendered right away. In my experience, no entire system ever surrendered right away. Parts, maybe. Never the whole. The one exception had been the Garseddai, and that had been a tactic, an attempt at ambush. Failed, of course, and there were no Garseddai anymore, as a result.

“Sir?” Captain Hetnys’s surprise and puzzlement at my question was plain, though she tried to conceal it, to keep her voice and expression bland and even.

“That seems like it might really have happened? Like the sort of thing someone would actually do?”

Even restated, and given time to think about it, the question puzzled her. “Not anyone civilized, sir.” A breath, and then, emboldened, perhaps, by our conversation so far, “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence.” I gestured the bestowal of it. “Sir, what’s happened at Omaugh Palace? Have the aliens attacked, sir? Is it war?”

Part of Anaander Mianaai believed—or at least put it about—that her conflict with herself was due to infiltration by the alien Presger. “War, yes. But the Presger have nothing to do with it. It’s we who’ve attacked ourselves.” Captain Vel, who had used to command Mercy of Kalr, had believed the lie about the Presger. “Vel Osck has been arrested for treason.” Captain Hetnys and Captain Vel had known each other. “Beyond that, I don’t know what’s happened to her.” But anyone knew what was most likely. “Did you know her well?”

It was a dangerous question. Captain Hetnys, who was nowhere near as good at concealing her reactions as my own crew was, quite obviously saw the danger. “Not well enough, sir, to ever suspect her of any kind of disloyalty.”

Lieutenant Tisarwat flinched just slightly at Captain Hetnys’s mention of disloyalty. Captain Vel had never been disloyal, and no one knew that better than Anaander Mianaai.

The lift doors opened. The concourse of Athoek Station was a good deal smaller than the main concourse of Omaugh Palace. Some fool, at some point, had thought that white would be an excellent color for the long, open—and heavily trafficked—floor. Like any main concourse on any sizable Radchaai station it was two-storied, in this case with windows here and there on the upper level, the lower lined with offices and shops, and the station’s major temples—one to Amaat, and likely a host of subsidiary gods, its façade not the elaborate riot of gods the temple at Omaugh boasted but only images of the four Emanations, in purple and red and yellow, grime collected in the ledges and depressions. Next to it another, smaller temple, dedicated, I guessed, to the god in Captain Hetnys’s story. That entrance was draped in garlands nearly identical to the ones we’d seen on the docks, but larger and lit from inside, those startling colors glowing bright.

Crowding this space, as far as I could see, citizens stood in groups, conversing at near-shouting level, wearing coats and trousers and gloves in bright colors, green and pink and blue and yellow, their holiday clothes, clearly. They all of them wore just as much jewelry as any Radchaai ever did, but here it seemed local fashion dictated that associational and memorial pins weren’t worn directly on coats or jackets but on a broad sash draped from shoulder to opposite hip, knotted, ends trailing. Children of various ages ran around and in between, calling to each other, stopping now and then to beg adults for sweets. Pink, blue, orange, and green foil wrappers littered the ground. Some blew across the lift entrance when the doors opened, and I saw they were printed with words. I could only read scattered fragments as they tumbled… blessings… the god whom… I have not…

The moment we stepped out of the lift a citizen came striding out of the crowd. She wore a tailored coat and trousers in a green so pale it might as well have been white—gloves as well. No sash, but plenty of pins, including one large rhodochrosite surrounded by elaborately woven silver wire. She put on a delighted, surprised expression and bowed emphatically. “Fleet Captain! I had only just heard that you were here, and look, I turn and there you are! Terrible business, the gate to Omaugh Palace going down like that, and all these ships rerouted here or unable to leave, but now you’re here, surely it won’t last much longer.” Her accent was mostly that of a well-off, well-educated Radchaai, though there was something odd about her vowels. “But you won’t know who I am. I’m Fosyf Denche, and I’m so glad to have found you. I have an apartment here on the station, plenty of room, and a house downwell, even roomier. I’d be honored to offer you my hospitality.”

Beside me, Captain Hetnys and her ancillary stood serious and silent. Behind me, Five still displayed ancillary-like impassivity though I could see, through Mercy of Kalr, that she resented Citizen Fosyf’s familiarity on my account. Lieutenant Tisarwat, behind the remaining traces of antinausea meds and her normal background unhappiness, seemed amused, and slightly contemptuous.

I thought of the way Seivarden would have responded to an approach like this, when she’d been younger. Just very slightly, I curled my lip. “No need, citizen.”

“Ah, someone’s been before me. Fair enough!” Undeterred by my manner, which argued she’d met it before, was even used to it. And of course, I almost certainly had news from Omaugh, which nearly everyone here would have wanted. “But do at least have supper with us, Fleet Captain! Captain Hetnys already has my invitation, of course. You won’t be doing any official business today.”

Her last few words rang out clear in a sudden hush, and then I heard a dozen or more children’s voices singing in unison. Not in Radchaai, and not a Radchaai tune, but one that arced in upward leaps, wide, angular intervals, and then slid downward in steps, but moving upward overall, to stop somewhere higher than it began. Citizen Fosyf’s nattering about supper stopped midsentence, brought up short by my obvious inattention. “Oh, yes,” she said, “It’s the temple’s…”

“Be silent!” I snapped. The children began another verse. I still didn’t understand the words. They sang two more verses, while the citizen before me tried to conceal her consternation. Not leaving. Determined to speak with me, it appeared. Certain that she would get her chance, if only she was patient enough.

I could query Station, but I knew what Station would tell me. Fosyf Denche was a prominent citizen here, one who believed her prominence would mean something to anyone she introduced herself to, and in this system, on this station, that meant tea.

The song ended, to a scattering of applause. I turned my attention back to Citizen Fosyf. Her expression cleared. Brightened. “Ah, Fleet Captain, I know what you are! You’re a collector! You must come visit me downwell. I’ve no ear at all, myself, but the workers on the estate near my country house let loose with all sorts of uncivilized noises that I’m assured are authentic exotic musical survivals from the days of their ancestors. I’m told it’s quite nearly a museum display. But the station administrator can tell you all about it over supper this evening. She’s a fellow collector, and I know how you collectors are, it doesn’t matter what you collect. You’ll want to compare and trade. Are you absolutely sure you’ve already got somewhere suitable to stay?”

“Go away,” I said to her, flat and brusque.

“Of course, Fleet Captain.” She bowed low. “I’ll see you at supper, shall I?” And not waiting for any answer, she turned and strode off into the crowd.

“Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence,” said Captain Hetnys, leaning close so she didn’t have to shout aloud to the entire concourse. “Citizen Fosyf’s family’s lands produce nearly a quarter of all the tea exported from Athoek. Her apartment is very near Administration, on the upper concourse, in fact.”

More and more interesting. Earlier it had been clear that Captain Hetnys had neither expected nor wanted me to stay. Now she seemed to wish that I would stay with this tea grower. “I’m going to the Governor’s Palace,” I said. I knew the system governor wasn’t there. I would still make an issue of it. “And then while I’m settling into lodgings, you can give me your report.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” And then, when I said nothing further, “If I may ask, sir. Where are you staying?”

“Level four of the Undergarden,” I replied, my voice bland. She tried valiantly to keep her surprise and dismay off her face, but it was obvious she hadn’t expected that answer, and didn’t like it.

6

Station AIs were built—grew—as their stations were built. Shortly after Athoek Station had been finished, when resentments from the annexation had still been fresh, there had been violence. A dozen sections on four levels had been permanently damaged.

Installing an AI into an already existing construction was a dicey business. The results were rarely optimal, but it could be done. Had been done, quite a few times. But for whatever reason—perhaps a wish to forget the event, perhaps because the casts hadn’t been auspicious, perhaps some other reason—the area had not been repaired, but blocked off instead.

Of course, people had still managed to get in. There were several hundred people living in the Undergarden, though they weren’t supposed to be there. Every citizen had a tracker implanted at birth, so Station knew where they were, knew those citizens were there. But it couldn’t hear them or see them the way it could its other residents, not unless they were wired to send data to Station, and I suspected few of them were.

The section door leading to the Undergarden was propped open with the crushed remains of a table missing one of its legs. The indicator next to the entrance said that on the other side of that (supposedly closed) door was hard vacuum. It was serious business—section doors would close automatically in the event of a sudden pressure drop, to seal off hull breaches. We were likely not even close to hard vacuum, despite the indicator on the wall by this door, but no one who spent much time on ships—or who lived on stations—took such safety measures lightly. I turned toward Captain Hetnys. “Are all the section doors leading to the Undergarden disabled and propped open like this?”

“It’s as I said, Fleet Captain, this area was sealed off, but people kept breaking in. They’d just be sealing it off over and over to no purpose.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged, gesturing the obviousness of her words. “So why not just fix the doors so they work properly?”

She blinked, clearly not quite understanding my question. “No one’s supposed to be in this area, sir.” She seemed completely serious—the train of reasoning made perfect sense to her. The ancillary behind her stared blankly ahead, apparently without any opinion on the matter. Which I knew was almost certainly not the case. I didn’t answer, just turned to climb over the broken table and into the Undergarden.

In the corridor beyond, a scatter of portable light panels propped against the walls flickered into a dim glow as we passed, then faded again. The air was oppressively still, improbably humid, and smelled stale—Station wouldn’t be regulating the air flow here, and very possibly those propped-open section doors were a matter of breathing or not breathing. After a walk of fifty meters, the corridor opened out into a tiny almost-concourse, a stretch of corridors where doors had been wrenched off and grimy once-white walls torn through to make a single-storied half-open maze, lit by more portable light panels, though these seemed to be better provided with power. A handful of citizens walking through on their way to or from someplace suddenly found that their paths took them well away from where we were standing, just by chance discovered that they had no desire to look directly at us.

Away in one corner, more light spilled from a wide doorway. Beside the doorway, a person in loose shirt and trousers glanced briefly at us, seemed for a moment to consider something, and then turned back around and bent to a five-liter tub at her feet, straightened again and began dabbing carefully, purposefully around the doorframe. Where the wall was shadowed, red spirals and curlicues glowed faintly. The color of paint she was using must have been too near the shade of the wall to see well unless it was phosphorescing. Beyond the doorway, people sat at mismatched tables, drinking tea and talking. Or they’d been talking before they’d seen us.

The air really was uncomfortably close. I had a sudden flash of strong, visceral memory. Humid heat and the smell of swamp water. The sort of memory that had become less common as the years had gone by, of when I had been a ship. When I had been a unit of ancillaries under the command of Lieutenant Awn (still alive, then, every breath, every move of hers a constant part of my awareness, and myself always, always with her).

The decade room on Mercy of Kalr flashed into my awareness, Seivarden seated, drinking tea, looking at schedules for today and tomorrow, the smell of solvent stronger than usual from the corridor outside, where three Amaats scrubbed the already spotless floor. The Amaats all sang quietly in ragged, off-key unison. It all goes around, the station goes around the moon, it all goes around. Had I unthinkingly reached for it, or had Mercy of Kalr sent it unbidden in response to something it had seen in me? Or did it matter?

“Sir,” ventured Captain Hetnys, perhaps because I’d stopped, forcing her to stop, and Sword of Atagaris, and Lieutenant Tisarwat and Kalr Five. “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence. No one’s supposed to be in the Undergarden. People don’t stay here.”

I looked pointedly toward the people sitting at tables, beyond that doorway, all of them carefully not noticing us. Looked around at the citizens passing by. Said to Tisarwat, “Lieutenant, go see how our move-in is coming along.” I could have any information I wanted from my Mercy of Kalrs with no more than a thought, but Tisarwat’s stomach had settled, now we were off the shuttle, and she was beginning to be hungry, and tired.

“Sir,” she replied, and left. I walked away from Captain Hetnys and her ancillary, through that spiral-decorated doorway. Five followed me. The painter tensed as we passed, hesitated, then continued painting.

Two of the people sitting at different scarred, mismatched tables wore the usual Radchaai jacket, trousers, and gloves—clearly the standard issue, stiff fabric, grayish-beige, the sort of clothing any citizen was entitled to but no one wore who could afford better. The rest wore loose, light shirts and trousers in deep colors, red and blue and purple, vivid against the dingy gray walls. The air was still and close enough to make those jacketless shirts look far preferable to my uniform. I saw none of the sashes I’d seen on the concourse, and hardly any jewelry at all. Most held their bowls of what I had presumed was tea in bare hands. I almost might not have been on a Radchaai station.

At my entrance, the proprietor had gone back to a bowl-stacked corner, and she watched her customers now with careful attention, very obviously could not spare any for me. I walked over to her, bowed, and said, “Excuse me, Citizen. I’m a stranger here. I wonder if you could answer a question.” The proprietor stared at me, seemingly uncomprehending, as though the kettle in her bare hand had just spoken to her, or as though I’d spoken gibberish. “I’m told today is a very important Athoeki holiday, but I see no signs of it here.” No penis garlands, no sweets, just people going about their business. Pretending not to notice soldiers standing in the middle of their neighborhood center.

The proprietor scoffed. “Because all Athoeki are Xhai, right?” Kalr Five had stopped just behind me. Captain Hetnys and the Sword of Atagaris ancillary stood where I’d left them, Captain Hetnys staring after me.

“Ah,” I said, “I understand now. Thank you.”

“What are you doing here?” asked a person sitting at a table. No courtesy title, not even the minimally polite citizen. People sitting near her tensed, looked away from her. Everyone fell silent who had not already been. One person sitting alone a few meters away, one of the two dressed in properly Radchaai fashion, cheap, stiff jacket, gloves, and all, closed her eyes, took a few deliberate breaths, opened her eyes. But said nothing.

I ignored all of it. “I need somewhere to stay, Citizen.”

“There’s no fancy hotels here,” replied the person who had spoken so rudely. “Nobody comes here to stay. People come here to drink, or eat authentic Ychana food.”

“Soldiers come here to beat the crap out of people minding their own business,” muttered someone behind me. I didn’t turn to look, sent a quick, silent message ordering Kalr Five not to move.

“And the governor’s always got room for important people,” continued the person who had been speaking, as though that other voice had never even existed.

“Maybe I don’t want to stay with the governor.” That seemed to be the right thing to say, for some reason. Everyone within earshot laughed. Except one, the carefully silent, Radchaai-attired person. The few pins she wore were generic and cheap—brass, colored glass. Nothing that spoke of family affiliation. Only a small enameled IssaInu at her collar suggested anything specific about her. It was the Emanation of movement and stillness, and suggested she might be an adherent of a sect that practiced a particular sort of meditation. Then again, the Emanations were popular, and given they fronted the temple of Amaat here, might be stand-ins for a set of Athoeki gods. So in the end even the IssaInu told me little. But it intrigued me.

I pulled out the chair opposite her, sat. “You,” I said to her, “are very angry.”

“That would be unreasonable,” she said after a breath.

“Feelings and thoughts are irrelevant.” I could see that I’d pushed her too far, that in a moment she would rise, urgently, and flee. “It’s only actions Security cares about.”

“So they tell me.” She shoved her bowl away from her and made as if to rise.

“Sit,” I said, sharply. Authoritative. She froze. I waved the proprietor over. “Whatever it is you’re serving, I’ll have one,” I said, and received a bowl with some sort of powder in it, which, once steaming water was poured onto it, became the thick tea everyone was drinking. I took a taste. “Tea,” I guessed, “and some sort of roasted grain?” The proprietor rolled her eyes, as though I’d said something particularly stupid, and turned and walked away without answering. I gestured unconcerned resignation and took another taste. “So,” I said to the person across from me, who had not yet relaxed back into her seat but had at least not gotten up and fled. “It will have been political.”

She widened her eyes, all innocence. “Excuse me, Citizen?” Ostensibly, technically polite, though I was sure she could read the signs of my rank and ought to have used the highest address I was entitled to, if she knew it. If she truly meant to be polite.

“No one here is looking at you or speaking to you,” I said. “And your accent isn’t the same as theirs. You’re not from here. Reeducation usually works by straightforward conditioning, by making it intensely unpleasant to do the thing that got you arrested to begin with.” Or the most basic sort did, it could and no doubt did become much more complicated. “And the thing that’s upsetting you is expressing anger. And you’re so very angry.” There was no one here familiar to me, but anger I recognized. Anger was an old companion of mine by now. “It was an injustice, start to finish, yes? You hadn’t done anything. Not anything you thought was wrong.” Likely no one here thought it was wrong, either. She hadn’t been driven from the tables here, her presence hadn’t cleared everyone else from the vicinity. The proprietor had served her. “What happened?”

She was silent a few moments. “You’re very used to saying you want something and then just getting it, aren’t you,” she said at length.

“I’ve never been to Athoek Station before today.” I took another sip of the thick tea. “I’ve only been here an hour and so far I don’t much like what I see.”

“Try somewhere else, then.” Her voice was even, very nearly without any obvious trace of irony or sarcasm. As though she meant only what the words she said meant.

“So what happened?”

“How much tea do you drink, Citizen?”

“Quite a bit,” I said. “I’m Radchaai, after all.”

“No doubt you only drink the best.” Still that apparent sincerity. She had regained most of her composure, I guessed, and this overt pleasantness with its near-inaudible undercurrent of anger was normal for her. “Handpicked, the rarest, most delicate buds.”

“I’m not so fussy,” I said, equably. Though, to be honest, I had no idea whether the tea I drank was handpicked or not, or anything about it, except its name, and that it was good. “Is tea picked by hand, then?”

“Some,” she said. “You should go downwell and see. There are some very affordable tours. Visitors love them. Lots of people only come here to see the tea. And why shouldn’t they? What are Radchaai without tea, after all? I’m sure one of the growers would be happy to show you around personally.”

I thought of Citizen Fosyf. “Perhaps I will.” I took another sip of the tea-gruel.

She raised her bowl, drank the last bits of her own. Rose. “Thank you, Citizen, for the entertaining conversation.”

“It was a pleasure to have met you, Citizen,” I replied. “I’m staying on level four. Stop by some time when we’re settled in.” She bowed without answering. Turned to depart, but froze at the sound of something heavy thunking hard against the wall outside.

Everyone in the tea shop looked up at that sound. The proprietor set her kettle down on a table with a smack that should have startled the people sitting there but did not, so intent were they on whatever was happening out on the shadowed small concourse. Grim, angry determination on her face, she strode out of the shop. I stood and followed, Five behind me.

Outside, the Sword of Atagaris ancillary had pinned the painter against the wall, bending her right arm back. It had kicked the tub of paint, to judge from the pinkish-brown splotches on its boots, the puddle the tub now sat in, and the tracks on the floor. Captain Hetnys stood where I had left her, observing. Saying nothing.

The tea shop proprietor strode right up to the ancillary. “What has she done?” she demanded. “She hasn’t done anything!”

Sword of Atagaris didn’t answer, only roughly twisted the painter’s arm further, forcing her to turn from the wall with a cry of pain and drop to her knees and then facedown onto the floor. Paint smeared her clothes, one side of her face. The ancillary put one knee between her shoulder blades, and she gasped and made a small sobbing whimper.

The tea shop proprietor stepped back but didn’t leave. “Let her go! I hired her to paint the door.”

Time to intervene. “Sword of Atagaris, release the citizen.” The ancillary hesitated. Possibly because it didn’t think of the painter as a citizen. Then it let go of the painter and stood. The tea shop proprietor knelt beside the painter, spoke in a language I didn’t understand, but her tone told me she was asking if the painter was all right. I knew she wasn’t—the hold Sword of Atagaris had used was meant to injure. I had used it myself for that precise purpose, many times.

I knelt beside the tea shop proprietor. “Your arm is probably broken,” I said to the painter. “Don’t move. I’ll call Medical.”

“Medical doesn’t come here,” said the proprietor, her voice bitter and contemptuous. And to the painter, “Can you get up?”

“You really shouldn’t move,” I said. But the painter ignored me. With the help of the proprietor and two other patrons, she managed to get to her feet.

“Fleet Captain, sir.” Captain Hetnys was clearly indignant, and clearly struggling to contain it. “This person was defacing the station, sir.”

“This person,” I replied, “was painting the doorway of a tea shop at the request of that shop’s proprietor.”

“But she won’t have had a permit, sir! And the paint will certainly have been stolen.”

“It was not stolen!” the proprietor cried as the painter walked slowly off, supported by two others, one of them the angry person in the gray gloves. “I bought it.”

“Did you ask the painter where she had gotten the paint?” I asked. Captain Hetnys looked at me with blank puzzlement, as though my question made no sense to her. “Did you ask her if she had a permit?”

“Sir, no one has permission to do anything here.” Captain Hetnys’s voice was carefully even, though I could hear frustration behind it.

That being the case, I wondered why this particular unpermitted activity warranted such a violent reaction. “Did you ask Station if the paint was stolen?” The question appeared to be meaningless to Captain Hetnys. “Was there some reason you couldn’t call Station Security?”

“Sir, we’re Security in the Undergarden just now. To help keep order while things are unsettled. Station Security doesn’t come here. No one…”

“Is supposed to be here.” I turned to Five. “Make sure the citizen arrives safely in Medical and that her injuries are treated immediately.”

“We don’t need your help,” protested the tea shop proprietor.

“All the same,” I said, and gestured at Five, who left. I turned again to Captain Hetnys. “So Sword of Atagaris is running Security in the Undergarden.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Captain Hetnys.

“Does it—or you, for that matter—have any experience running civilian security?”

“No, sir, but—”

“That hold,” I interrupted, “is not suitable for use on citizens. And it’s entirely possible to suffocate someone by kneeling on their back that way.” Which was fine if you didn’t care whether the person you were dealing with lived or not. “You and your ship will immediately familiarize yourselves with the guidelines for dealing with citizen civilians. And you will follow them.”

“Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence, sir. You don’t understand. These people are…” She stopped. Lowered her voice. “These people are barely civilized. And they could be writing anything on these walls. At a time like this, painting on the walls like that, they could be spreading rumors, or passing secret messages, or inflammatory slogans, working people up…” She stopped again, momentarily at a loss. “And Station can’t see here, sir. There could be all sorts of unauthorized people here. Or even aliens!”

For a moment the phrase unauthorized people puzzled me. According to Captain Hetnys, everyone here was unauthorized—no one had permission to be here. Then I realized she meant people whose very existence was unauthorized. People who had been born here without Station’s knowledge, and without having trackers implanted. People who were not in Station’s view in any way.

I could imagine—maybe—one or two such people. But enough to be a real problem? “Unauthorized people?” I leaned into my antique accent, put an edge of skepticism into my voice. “Aliens? Really, Captain.”

“Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence. I imagine you’re used to places where everyone is civilized. Where everyone has been fully assimilated to Radchaai life. This isn’t that sort of place.”

“Captain Hetnys,” I said. “You and your crew will use no violence against citizens on this station unless it is absolutely necessary. And,” I continued over her obvious desire to protest, “in the event it does become necessary, you will follow the same regulations Station Security does. Do I make myself clear?”

She blinked. Swallowed back whatever it was she really wanted to say. “Yes, sir.”

I turned to the ancillary. “Sword of Atagaris? Am I clear?”

The ancillary hesitated. Surprised, I didn’t doubt, at my addressing it directly. “Yes, Fleet Captain.”

“Good. Let’s have the rest of this conversation in private.”

7

With Station’s advice and assistance, I had claimed an empty suite of rooms on level four. The air there was stagnant, and I suspected the few light panels that leaned against the walls had been appropriated from the corridors on the way here, given shops probably weren’t open today and station stores might or might not be staffed. Even in the dim lighting, the walls and floors looked unpleasantly dusty and grimy. Besides our own luggage, a few fragments of wood and shards of glass suggested whoever had lived here before the Undergarden was damaged hadn’t taken everything, but anything useful had been scavenged over the years.

“No water, sir,” said Lieutenant Tisarwat. “Which means the nearest baths are… you don’t want to see the nearest baths, sir. Even though there’s no water, people have been using them for… well. Anyway. I’ve sent Nine for buckets, and cleaning supplies if she can find them.”

“Very good, Lieutenant. Is there somewhere Captain Hetnys and I can have a meeting? Preferably with something we can sit on?”

Lieutenant Tisarwat’s lilac eyes showed alarm. “Sir. There’s nothing to sit on, sir, except the floor. Or the luggage.”

Which would delay unpacking. “We’ll sit on the floor, then.” Mercy of Kalr showed me a wave of indignation from every Kalr present, but none of them said anything or even changed expression, except Lieutenant Tisarwat, who did her best to conceal her dismay. “Is there anyone near us?”

“Station says not, sir,” replied Lieutenant Tisarwat. She gestured toward a doorway. “This is probably the best place.”

Captain Hetnys followed me into the room Tisarwat indicated. I squatted on the dirty floor and waved an invitation for her to join me. With some hesitation she squatted in front of me, her ancillary remaining standing behind. “Captain, are you or your ship sending any data to Station?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “No, sir.”

A brief check told me my own ship wasn’t. “So. If I understand correctly, you believe the Presger are likely to attack this system. That they have perhaps already infiltrated this station.” The Radch knew of—had contact with—three species of aliens: the Geck, the Rrrrrr, and the Presger. The Geck rarely left their own home world. Relations with the Rrrrrr were tense, because the first encounter with them had been disastrous. Because of the way our treaty with the Presger had been structured, war with the Rrrrrr had the potential to break that treaty.

And before that treaty, relations with the Presger had been impossible. Invariably fatal, in fact. Before the treaty, the Presger had been implacable enemies of humanity. Or not enemies so much as predators. “Your Amaat lieutenant thought, I take it, that Mercy of Kalr might be a Presger ship in disguise.”

“Yes, sir.” She seemed almost relieved.

“Do you have any reason to think the Presger have broken the treaty? Do you have any hint that they might have even the remotest interest in Athoek?”

Something. Some expression flashed across her face. “Sir, I’ve had no official communications for nearly a month. We lost contact with Omaugh twenty-six days ago, this whole part of the province has. I sent Mercy of Phey to Omaugh to find out what happened, but even if it arrived and turned right back around I won’t hear from it for several days.” It must have arrived at Omaugh shortly after I’d departed. “The system governor has the official news channels reporting ‘unanticipated difficulties’ and not much more, but people are nervous.”

“Understandably.”

“And then ten days ago we lost all communications with Tstur Palace.” That would be about the time the information from Omaugh reached Tstur, plus the distance from here to there. “And the Presger were never our friends, sir, and… I’ve heard things.”

“From Captain Vel,” I guessed. “Things about the Presger undermining the Radch.”

“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged. “But you say Captain Vel is a traitor.”

“The Presger have nothing to do with this. The Lord of the Radch is having a disagreement with herself. She’s split into at least two factions, with opposing aims. Opposing ideas about the future of the Radch. They’ve both been recruiting ships to their causes.” I looked up, to where the attending ancillary stood, expressionless. Apparently uncaring. That appearance was deceptive, I knew. “Sword of Atagaris. You’ve been in this system for some two hundred years.”

“Yes, Fleet Captain.” Its voice was flat, toneless. It would betray none of the surprise I was sure it felt at my addressing it directly this way for a second time.

“The Lord of the Radch has visited during that time. Did she have a private conversation with you? Here in the Undergarden, perhaps?”

“I am at a loss to understand what the fleet captain is asking,” said Sword of Atagaris, in the person of this ancillary.

“I am asking,” I replied, knowing the evasion for precisely what it was, “if you had a private conversation with Anaander Mianaai, one no one could overhear. But perhaps you have already answered me. Was it the one that claims the Presger have infiltrated the Radch, or the other one?” The other one being the one that had given me command of Mercy of Kalr. And sent me Tisarwat.

Or, gods help us all, was there even a third part of Mianaai, with yet another justification of whatever it was she was doing?

“Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence,” interjected Captain Hetnys into the brief silence that followed my question, “that I might speak frankly.”

“By all means, Captain.”

“Sir.” She swallowed. “Begging your very great pardon, I am familiar with the fleet captains in the province. Your name isn’t among them.” Sword of Atagaris had no doubt shown her my service record by now—or as much of it as was made available to her—and she’d seen that I’d been made fleet captain only a few weeks ago. The same time I’d joined the military. There were several conclusions one might draw from such information, and it appeared she’d chosen one—that I had been hastily appointed to this position for some reason, with no military background. Saying so aloud, to me, was potentially as much as her life was worth.

“My appointment is a recent one.” That alone raised several questions. In an officer like Captain Hetnys, I expected one of them to be why she hadn’t been appointed fleet captain herself. Possibly this question would occur to her before any others.

“Sir, are there doubts about my loyalty?” Realized then that her career was hardly the most pressing issue. “You said my lord was… divided. That this is all a result of a disagreement with herself. I’m not sure I understand how that’s possible.”

“She’s become too large to continue to be one entity, Captain. If she ever was just one.”

“Of course she was, sir. Is. Begging the fleet captain’s pardon, perhaps you don’t have much experience with ancillary-crewed ships. It’s not exactly the same, sir, but it’s very similar.”

“Beg to inform the captain,” I said, making my voice cold and ironic, “that my entire service record is not available to her. I am quite well acquainted with ancillaries.”

“Even so, sir. If what you say is true, and this is my lord split in two and fighting herself, if they’re both the Lord of the Radch and not… not counterfeit, then how do we know which one is the right one?”

I reminded myself that this was a new idea to Captain Hetnys. That up until now, no Radchaai had ever questioned the identity of Anaander Mianaai, or wondered about the basis of her claim to rule. It had all been mere evident fact. “They both are, Captain.” She showed no sign of comprehension. “If the ‘right’ Anaander had no concern for the lives of citizens so long as she won her struggle with herself, would you still follow her orders?”

She was silent for a good three seconds. “I think I’d need to know more.” Fair enough. “But, your very great pardon, Fleet Captain, I’ve heard things about alien infiltration.”

“From Captain Vel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She was mistaken.” Manipulated, more likely, easier for the one Anaander to gain her sympathies—and perhaps belief—by accusing an outside enemy, one nearly all Radchaai feared and hated.

But I couldn’t say truly that the Presger were not involved at all. It was the Presger who had made the gun I wore under my jacket, invisible to any scanner, its bullets capable of piercing any material in the universe. The Presger who had sold those guns, twenty-five of them, to the Garseddai, to use to resist annexation by the Radch.

And it was the destruction of the Garseddai as a result, the complete and utter obliteration of every living thing in that system, that had triggered Anaander’s crisis, a personal conflict so extreme that she could only resolve it by going to war with herself.

But it had been a crisis waiting to happen. Thousands of bodies distributed over all of Radch space, twelve different headquarters, all in constant communication but time-lagged. Radch space—and Anaander herself—had been steadily expanding for three thousand years, and by now it could take weeks for a thought to reach all the way across herself. It was always, from the beginning, going to fall apart at some point.

Obvious, in retrospect. Obvious before, you’d think. But it’s so easy to just not see the obvious, even long past when it ought to be reasonable.

“Captain,” I said, “my orders are to keep this system safe and stable. If that means defending it from the Lord of the Radch herself, then that is what I will do. If you have orders to support one side or the other, or if you have strong political ideas, then take your ship and go. As far away from Athoek as possible, by my preference.”

She had to think about that just a shade longer than I liked. “Sir, it’s not my job to have any political ideas at all.” I wasn’t sure how honest an answer that was. “It’s my job to follow orders.”

“Which up till now have been to assist the system governor in maintaining order here. From now, they are to assist me in securing and maintaining the safety of this system.”

“Sir. Yes, sir. Of course, sir. But…”

“Yes?”

“With no aspersions cast on the fleet captain’s intelligence and ability…” She trailed off, having, I thought, chosen a beginning to her sentence that would lead to an awkward ending.

“You are concerned at my apparent lack of military experience.” It was potentially worth Captain Hetnys’s life to bring it up. I gave her a small, pleasant smile. “Granted, Administration makes some fucked-up appointments.” She made a tiny, amused sound. Every soldier had complaints about how Military Administration arranged things. “But it wasn’t Administration that appointed me. It was Anaander Mianaai herself.” Strictly true, but not much of an endorsement, and not one I was particularly pleased about claiming. “And you may say to yourself, she’s Mianaai, she’s the Lord of the Radch’s cousin.” A quick twitch of her facial muscles told me she’d had that thought. “And you’ve had experiences with people promoted because they were someone’s cousin. I don’t blame you, I have, too. But despite what you see in the available version of my service record, I am not a new recruit.”

She thought about that. Another moment more and she would conclude that I had spent my career up till now with Special Missions, everything I had done far too secret to admit any of it had ever happened. “Fleet Captain, sir. My apologies.” I gestured away the need for any. “But, sir, Special Missions is accustomed to operate with some amount of… irregularity and…”

Astonishing, coming from someone who had not blinked at ancillaries under her orders injuring citizens. “As it happens, I’ve had some experience with situations that went badly wrong when someone was operating with too much irregularity. And also when someone was operating with far too narrow an idea of the regular. And even if Athoek were completely problem-free, all of Radch space is in the midst of an irregular situation.”

She drew breath to ask more, seemed to reconsider. “Yes, sir.”

I looked up at the Sword of Atagaris ancillary standing still and silent behind her. “And you, Sword of Atagaris?”

“I do as my captain commands me, Fleet Captain.” Toneless. To all appearances emotionless. But almost certainly taken aback by my question.

“Well.” No point in pushing too hard. I stood. “It’s been a difficult day for all of us. Let’s start fresh, shall we? And you have a supper invitation, Captain, unless I misremember.”

“As does the fleet captain,” Captain Hetnys reminded me. “It’s sure to be very good food. And some of the people you’ll want to meet with will be there.” She tried to suppress a glance at the dim, dingy surroundings. No furniture. No water, even. “The governor will certainly be there, sir.”

“Then I suppose,” I said to Captain Hetnys, “I ought to go to supper.”

8

Citizen Fosyf Denche’s apartment boasted a dining room, all glass on one side, looking out over the still-crowded concourse below. Four meters by eight, walls painted ocher. A row of plants sat on a high shelf, long, thick stems hanging down nearly to the floor, with sharp spines and thick, round, bright green leaves. Large as the dining room was by station-dwelling standards, it wouldn’t have been large enough to seat all of a wealthy Radchaai’s composite household—cousins, clients, servants, and their children—and to judge by the half dozen or so small children in various stages of undress and stickiness sleeping on cushions in the nearby sitting room, this was at least the second round of holiday supper.

“The fleet captain,” said Fosyf in her seat at one end of the table of pale, gilded wood, “is a collector just like you, Administrator Celar!” Fosyf was clearly pleased at having discovered that. Enough to almost completely conceal her disappointment at my not offering any information on the loss of communication with the nearest palaces, or her inability to politely ask me for it.

Station Administrator Celar ventured an expression of cautious interest. “A collector, Fleet Captain? Of songs? What sort?” She was a wide, bulky person in a vividly pink coat and trousers and yellow-green sash. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, voluminous tightly curled hair pulled up and bound to tower above her head. She was very beautiful and, I thought, aware of that fact, though not off-puttingly so. Her daughter Piat sat beside her, silent and oddly indrawn. She was not so large nor quite so beautiful, but young yet and likely to equal her mother on both counts someday.

“My taste is broad-ranging rather than discriminating, Administrator.” I gestured refusal of another serving of smoked eggs. Captain Hetnys sat silent beside me, intent on her own second helping. Across the table from me, beside the station administrator, System Governor Giarod sat, tall and broad shouldered, in a soft, flowing green coat. Something about the particular shade of her skin suggested she’d had it darkened. From the moment she’d entered, she’d been as collected as though this were a routine supper, nothing out of the ordinary.

“I have a particular interest in Ghaonish music,” confessed Administrator Celar. Fosyf beamed. Fosyf’s daughter Raughd smiled insincerely, fairly competently concealing her boredom. When I’d arrived she’d been just slightly too attentive, too respectful, and I’d seen so many young people of her class, so intimately, for so long, that even without an AI to tell me so, I knew she’d been nursing a hangover. Knew, now, that the hangover med she’d taken had started working.

“I grew up only a few gates from Ghaon, you understand,” Station Administrator Celar continued, “and served as assistant administrator at the station there for twenty years. So fascinating! And so very difficult to find the real, authentic thing.” She picked up a small piece of dredgefruit with her utensil, but instead of putting it in her mouth, moved it toward her lap, under the table. Beside her, her daughter Piat smiled, just slightly, for the first time since I’d seen her.

“Ghaonish in general?” The station that Administrator Celar had served on was only just starting to be built when I’d last been there, centuries ago. “There were at least three different political entities on Ghaon at the time of the annexation, depending how you count, and something like seven different major languages, each of which had its own various styles of music.”

“You understand,” she replied, having lost in an instant nearly all her wariness of me. “All of that, and so few really Ghaonish songs left.”

“What would you give me,” I asked, “for a Ghaonish song you’ve never heard?”

Her eyes widened, disbelief apparent. “Sir,” she said, indignant. Offended. “You’re making fun of me.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I assure you not, Administrator. I had several from a ship that was there during the annexation.” I didn’t mention that I had been the ship in question.

“You met Justice of Toren!” she exclaimed. “What a loss that was! Did you serve on it? I’ve so often wished I could meet someone who did. One of our horticulturists here had a sister who served on Justice of Toren, but that was long before she came here. She was just a child when…” She shook her head regretfully. “Such a shame.”

Time to turn that topic aside. I turned to address Governor Giarod. “May one, Governor,” I asked, “properly inquire about this temple ritual that has kept you so occupied all day?” My accent as elegant as any high-born officer, my tone overtly courteous but underneath just the hint of an edge.

“One may,” Governor Giarod replied, “but I’m not sure how many answers anyone can properly provide.” Like Station Administrator Celar, she picked up a piece of dredgefruit and then apparently set it in her lap.

“Ah,” I ventured. “Temple mysteries.” I’d seen several, over my two-thousand-year lifetime. None of them had been allowed to continue, unless they admitted Anaander Mianaai to their secrets. The survivors were all quite nonexclusive as a result. Or at least theoretically so—they could be fantastically expensive to join.

Governor Giarod slipped another piece of fruit under the table. To some child harder to exhaust and possibly more enterprising than her siblings and cousins, I guessed. “The mysteries are quite ancient,” the governor said. “And very important to the Athoeki.”

“Important to the Athoeki, or just the Xhai? And it is, somehow, connected to this story about the Athoeki who had penises pretending to cut them off?”

“A misunderstanding, Fleet Captain,” said Governor Giarod. “The Genitalia Festival is much older than the annexation. The Athoeki, particularly the Xhai, are a very spiritual people. So much is metaphor, an inadequately material way to speak of immaterial things. If you have any interest in the spiritual, Fleet Captain, I do encourage you to become an initiate.”