by Ann Leckie
“Who I am? Exactly?” Translator Dlique frowned. “I’m not… that is, I said just now I was Dlique but I might not be, I might be Zeiat. Or wait, no. No, I’m pretty sure I’m Dlique. I’m pretty sure they told me I was Dlique. Oh! I’m supposed to introduce myself, aren’t I.” She bowed. “Fleet Captain, I’m Dlique, translator for the Presger. Honored to make your acquaintance. Now, I think, you say something like the honor’s all mine and then you offer me tea. I’m bored of tea, though, do you have arrack?”
I sent a quick silent message to Five, and then gestured Translator Dlique to a seat—an improbably comfortable arrangement of boxes and cushions covered with a yellow and pink embroidered blanket. “So,” I said, when I’d sat across from her on my own pile of blanket-covered luggage. “You’re a diplomat, are you?”
All her expressions so far had been almost childlike, seemingly completely unmoderated. Now she showed frank dismay. “I’ve made a hash of it, haven’t I. It was all supposed to be so simple, too. I was on my way home from Tstur Palace after attending the New Year Cast. I went to parties, and smiled, and said, the omens’ fall was very propitious, the coming year will bring Justice and Benefit to all. After a while I thanked the Humans for their hospitality and left. Just like I was supposed to. All very boring, no one who’s anyone has to do it.”
“And then a gate went down, and you were rerouted. And now you can’t get home.” With things the way they were, she’d never make it to Presger space. Not unless she had a ship that could generate its own gate—which the agreement between humans and the Presger had very specifically, very deliberately, forbidden the Presger to bring within Radch space.
Translator Dlique threw up her incongruously gray-gloved hands, a gesture, I thought, of exasperation. Say exactly what we told you to and nothing will go wrong, they said. Well, it all went wrong anyway. And they didn’t say anything about this. You’d think they might have, they said lots of other things. Sit up straight, Dlique. Don’t dismember your sister, Dlique, it isn’t nice. Internal organs belong inside your body, Dlique.” She scowled a moment, as though that last one particularly rankled.
“There does seem to be a general agreement that you are, in fact, Dlique,” I said.
“You’d think! But it doesn’t work like that when you aren’t anybody. Oh!” She looked up as Kalr Five entered with two cups and a bottle of arrack. “That’s the good stuff!” She took the cup Five handed her. Peered intently into Five’s face. “Why are you pretending you’re not Human?”
Five, in the grip of an offended horror so intense even she couldn’t have spoken without betraying it, didn’t answer, only turned to give me my own cup. I took it, and said, calmly, “Don’t be rude to my soldiers, Dlique.”
Translator Dlique laughed, as though I’d said something quite funny. “I like you, Fleet Captain. With Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys, it’s all what is your purpose in coming here, Translator, and what are your intentions, Translator, and do you expect us to believe that, Translator. And then it’s You’ll find these rooms very comfortable, Translator; the doors are locked for your own safety, Translator; have some more tea, Translator. Not Dlique, you see?” She took a substantial swallow of arrack. Coughed a little as it went down.
I wondered how long it would be before the governor’s staff realized Translator Dlique was missing. Wondered for only a moment why Station hadn’t raised the alarm. But then I remembered that gun, that no ship or station could see, that had come from the Presger. Translator Dlique might seem scatterbrained and childlike. But she was certainly as dangerous as Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys feared. Likely considerably more so. They had, it seemed, underestimated her. Perhaps by her design. “What about the others on your ship?”
“Others?”
“Crew? Staff? Fellow passengers?”
“It’s a very small ship, Fleet Captain.”
“It must have been crowded, then, with Zeiat and the translator along.”
Translator Dlique grinned. “I knew we’d get on well. Give me supper, will you? I just eat regular food, you know.”
I recalled what she’d said when she’d first arrived. “Did you eat many people before you were grown?”
“No one I wasn’t supposed to! Though,” she added, frowning, “sometimes I kind of wish I had eaten someone I wasn’t supposed to. But it’s too late now. What are you having for supper? Radchaai on stations eat an awful lot of fish, it seems. I’m beginning to be bored of fish. Oh, where’s your bathroom? I have to—
I cut her off. “We don’t really have one. No plumbing here. But we do have a bucket.”
“Now that’s something different! I’m not bored of buckets yet!”
Lieutenant Tisarwat staggered into the room just as Five was clearing away the last supper dish and Translator Dlique was saying, very earnestly, “Eggs are so inadequate, don’t you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they’re programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.” The entire dinner conversation had been like that.
“You raise a good point, Translator,” I replied, and then turned my attention to Lieutenant Tisarwat. It had been more than three hours since I’d thought much about her, and she’d drunk a considerable amount in that time. She swayed, looked at me, glaring. “Raughd Denche,” Tisarwat said to me, raising a hand and pointing somewhere off to the side for emphasis. She did not seem to notice the presence of Translator Dlique, who watched with an expression of slightly frowning curiosity. “Raughd. Denche. Is a horrible person.”
Judging from even the very small bit I’d seen of Citizen Raughd today, I suspected Tisarwat’s assessment was an accurate one.
“Sir,” Tisarwat added. Very belatedly.
“Bo,” I said sharply to the soldier who had come in behind her, who hovered anxiously. “Get your lieutenant out of here before there’s a mess.” Bo took her by the arm, led her unsteadily out. Too late, I feared.
“I don’t think she’s going to make it to the bucket,” said Translator Dlique, solemnly. Almost regretfully.
“I don’t, either,” I said. “But it was worth a try.”
That a Presger translator was here on Athoek Station was problem enough. How long would it be before whoever had sent her began to wonder why she hadn’t returned? How would they react to Athoek having essentially made her a prisoner, even if somewhat unsuccessfully? And what would happen when they found the Radch in such disarray? Possibly nothing—the treaty made no distinctions between one sort of human or another, all were covered, and that same treaty forbade the Presger to harm any of those humans. That left open the question of what, to a Presger, would constitute “harm,” but presumably issues like that had been hammered out between the translators of the Radch and those of the Presger.
And the presence and attention of the Presger might be turned to advantage. In the past hundred years or so the Presger had begun to sell high-quality medical correctives, significantly cheaper than the ones made inside the Radch. Governor Giarod had said Athoek didn’t make its own medical supplies. And the Presger wouldn’t care if Athoek was part of the Radch or not. They would only care if Athoek could pay, and while the Presger idea of “pay” could be somewhat eccentric, I didn’t doubt we could find something suitable.
So why had the system governor locked Translator Dlique in the governor’s residence? And then said nothing to me about it? I could imagine Captain Hetnys doing such a thing—she had known Captain Vel, who had believed that Anaander Mianaai’s current fractured state was a result of Presger infiltration. I was fairly sure Translator Dlique’s arrival here was a coincidence—but coincidences were meaningful, to Radchaai. Amaat was the universe, and anything that happened, happened because Amaat willed it. God’s intentions could be discerned by the careful study of even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant events. And the past weeks’ events were anything but small and i
nsignificant. Captain Hetnys would be alert for strange occurrences, and this one would have set off a multitude of alarms for her. No, her concealment of Translator Dlique’s presence only confirmed what I had already suspected about the captain’s position.
But Governor Giarod. I had come away from dinner at Citizen Fosyf’s, and the meeting after in the governor’s office, with the impression that Governor Giarod was not only an intelligent, able person, but also that she understood that Anaander Mianaai’s current conflict with herself originated in herself, and not anywhere else. I didn’t think I could possibly have misjudged her so badly. But clearly I had missed something, didn’t understand something about her position.
“Station,” I transmitted, silently.
“Yes, Fleet Captain,” replied Station, in my ear.
“Kindly let Governor Giarod know I intend to call on her first thing in the morning.” Nothing else. If Station didn’t know I knew about Translator Dlique’s existence, let alone that she’d had dinner with me and then gone off again, my mentioning it would only panic Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys. In the meantime I would have to try to find some way to handle this suddenly even more complicated situation.
On Mercy of Kalr, Seivarden sat in Command. Talking with Sword of Atagaris’s Amaat lieutenant, also apparently on watch on her own ship. “So,” she was saying, Ship sending her words directly into Seivarden’s ear. “Where are you from?”
“Someplace we don’t fuck around while we’re on watch,” Seivarden said, but silently, to Ship. Aloud, she said, “Inais.”
“Really!” It was plain that the Sword of Atagaris lieutenant had never heard of it. Which was hardly surprising, given the extent of Radch space, but didn’t help Seivarden’s already low estimation of her. “Have all your officers changed? Your predecessor was all right.” Ekalu (at that moment asleep, breathing deep and even) had painted the former Mercy of Kalr Amaat lieutenant as an unbearable snob. “But that medic wasn’t very friendly at all. Thought quite a lot of herself, I’d say.” (Medic sat in Mercy of Kalr’s decade room, frowning at her lunch of skel and tea. Calm, in a fairly good mood.)
In many ways, Seivarden had in her youth been just as unbearable as the former Mercy of Kalr Amaat lieutenant. But Seivarden had served on a troop carrier—which meant she’d spent actual time in combat, and knew what counted when it came to doctors. “Shouldn’t you be looking out for enemy ships?”
“Oh, Ship will tell me if it sees anything,” said the Sword of Atagaris lieutenant, breezily. “That fleet captain is very intimidating. Though I suppose she would be. She’s ordered us closer to the station. So we’ll be neighbors, at least for a bit. We should have tea.”
“Fleet captain is a bit less intimidating when you’re not threatening to destroy her ship.”
“Oh, well. That was a misunderstanding. Once you identified yourselves everything was cleared up. You don’t think she’ll hold it against me, though, do you?”
On Athoek Station, in the Undergarden, Kalr Five put away dishes in the room next to where I sat, and fussed to Eight about Translator Dlique’s sudden, discomfiting appearance. In another room yet, Bo pulled off an unconscious Tisarwat’s boots. I said, to Ship, “Ekalu wasn’t exaggerating, about Sword of Atagaris’s Amaat lieutenant.”
“No,” Mercy of Kalr replied. “She wasn’t.”
Next morning, I was dressing—trousers on, still bootless, fastening my shirt—when I heard an urgent shouting from the corridor, a voice calling, “Fleet Captain! Fleet Captain, sir!” Ship showed me, through the Kalr standing watch in the corridor, a seven- or eight-year-old child in grubby loose shirt and trousers, no shoes or gloves. “Fleet Captain!” she shouted, insistent. Ignoring the guard.
I grabbed my gloves, went quickly out of my room to the antechamber, through the door Five opened for me at my gesture. “Fleet Captain, sir!” the child said, still loud though I was standing in front of her. “Come right away! Someone painted on the wall again! If those corpse soldiers see it first it’ll be bad!”
“Citizen,” began Five.
I cut her off. “I’m coming.” The child took off running, and I headed down the shadowed corridor after her. Someone painted on the wall again. Minor enough. Small enough to ignore, one might think, but Captain Hetnys had overreacted before—how badly clear to read in this child’s urgency, either her own conclusions about what might happen when Sword of Atagaris Var arrived, or conveyed to her by some adult who’d sent her as messenger. Serious enough. And if it turned out to be nothing, well, I would only have delayed my breakfast by a few minutes.
“What did they paint?” I asked, climbing up a ladder in an access well, the only way between levels here.
“Some kind of words,” the child replied, above me. “It’s words!”
So she either hadn’t seen them or couldn’t read them, and I guessed it was the second. Probably not Radchaai then, or Raswar, which I’d learned over the past two days was read and spoken by most of the Ychana here. Station had told me, my first night here, when I’d asked it for some information, some history, that most of the residents in the Undergarden were Ychana.
It was Xhi, though rendered phonetically in Radchaai script. Whoever had done it had used the same pink paint that had been used to decorate the tea shop door, that had been left sitting at the side of the small, makeshift concourse. I recognized the words, not because I knew more than a few phrases of Xhi at this point but because it dated from the annexation, had been emblematic of a particular resistance movement Station had told me about, two nights before. Not tea but blood! It was a play on words. The Radchaai word for “tea” bore a passing resemblance to the Xhi word for “blood,” and the implication was that the revolutionaries, rather than submitting to the Radch and drinking tea, would resist and drink (or at least spill) Radchaai blood. Those revolutionaries were several hundred years dead, that clever slogan no more than trivia in a history lesson.
The child, having seen me stop in front of the paint, not far from the tea shop entrance, took off running again, eager to be safely away. The rest of the Undergarden’s residents had done the same—the small concourse was deserted, though I knew that at this hour there should be if nothing else a steady stream of customers into the tea shop. Anyone passing this way had taken one look at that Not tea but blood! and turned right around to find somewhere safe and out of the way of Sword of Atagaris’s Var lieutenant and her ancillaries. I was alone, Kalr Five still climbing up the access well, having been a good deal slower than I was.
A now-familiar voice spoke behind me. “That vomiting, purple-eyed child was right.” I turned. Translator Dlique, dressed as she had been last night, when she’d visited me.
“Right about what, Translator?” I asked.
“Raughd Denche really is a horrible person.”
At that moment, two Sword of Atagaris ancillaries came rushing onto the concourse. “You, there, halt!” said one, loud and emphatic. I realized, in that instant, that they might very well not recognize Translator Dlique—she was supposed to be locked in the governor’s residence, she was dressed like an Ychana, and like all of the Undergarden this space was erratically lit. I myself wasn’t in full uniform, wore only trousers, gloves, and partially fastened shirt. It was going to take Sword of Atagaris a moment to realize who we were.
“Oh, sporocarps!” Translator Dlique turned, I assumed to flee before Sword of Atagaris could see who she was and detain her.
She had not turned all the way, and I had only had the briefest moment to begin wondering at her using “sporocarp” as an obscenity, when a single gunshot popped, loud in the confined space, and Translator Dlique gasped, and tumbled forward to the ground. Unthinking, I raised my armor, yelled “Sword of Atagaris, stand down!” At the same moment I transmitted to Station, urgently, “Medical emergency on level one of the Undergarden!” Dropped to my knees beside Translator Dlique. “Station, Translator Dlique’s been shot in the back. I need medics here right now.”
“Right now, Station.” I dropped my armor, looked up at the two Sword of Atagaris Vars, beside me now. “Your medkit, Ship, quickly.” I wanted to ask, What do you think you’re doing, firing on people? But keeping Translator Dlique from bleeding out was more immediately important. And this wouldn’t be entirely Sword of Atagaris’s fault, it would have been following Captain Hetnys’s orders.
“I’m not carrying medkits, Fleet Captain,” said one of the Sword of Atagaris ancillaries. “This is not a combat situation, and this station does have medical facilities.” And I, of course, didn’t have one. We’d brought them, as a matter of routine, but they were still in a packing case three levels down. If the bullet had hit, say, the translator’s renal artery—a distinct possibility, considering where the wound was—she could bleed out in minutes, and even if I ordered one of my Kalrs to bring me a kit, it would arrive too late.
I sent the order anyway, and pressed my hands over the wound on Translator Dlique’s back. Likely it wouldn’t do any good, but it was the only thing I could do. “Station, I need those medics!” I looked up at Sword of Atagaris. “Bring me a suspension pod. Now.”
“Aren’t any around here.” The tea shop proprietor—she must have been the only person who’d stayed nearby when they’d seen that slogan painted on the wall. Now she called out from the door of her shop. “Medical never comes here, either.”
“They’d better come this time.” My compression had reduced the blood coming out of the translator, but I couldn’t control internal bleeding, and her breathing had gone quick and shallow. She was losing blood fast, then, faster than I could see. Down on level three Kalr Eight was opening the case where the medkits were stored. She’d moved the instant the order had come, was working quickly, but I didn’t think she would be here in time.