by Ann Leckie
And just as I had that thought, the starless, not-even-nothing black of a gate opened just outside the dome, and Mercy of Kalr appeared, far, far too close to be even remotely a good idea, and I heard Seivarden’s voice in my ear telling me she looked forward to being reprimanded as soon as I was safe. “Sword of Atagaris seems to have gated off somewhere,” she continued, cheerily. “I do hope it doesn’t come out right where we just were. I may have accidentally dropped half our inventory of mines just before we left.”
I was fairly sure I was more starved for oxygen than I realized, and hallucinating, up until half a dozen safely tethered Amaats took hold of the Sword of Atagaris ancillary, and pulled us both through the hole they’d cut in the dome, and into one of Mercy of Kalr’s shuttles.
Once we were all on the safe side of the shuttle airlock, I made sure that Basnaaid was uninjured and strapped into a seat, and set an Amaat to fuss over her. Tisarwat, similarly, but retching from stress and from the microgravity, Bo Nine holding a bag for her, ready with correctives for her lieutenant’s bloody nose and broken ribs. Captain Hetnys and the Sword of Atagaris ancillary I saw bound securely. Only then did I let Medic pull off my jacket and my shirt, push my shoulder bones back into place with the help of one of Seivarden’s Amaats, and immobilize my shoulder with a corrective.
I had not realized, until that pain went away, how hard I’d been gritting my teeth. How tense every other muscle in my body had been, and how badly that had made my leg ache as a consequence. Mercy of Kalr had said nothing directly to me, but it didn’t need to—it showed me flashes of sight and feeling from my Kalrs, assisting the final stages of the evacuation of the Undergarden (Uran assisting as well, apparently now an old hand with microgravity after the trip here), from Seivarden’s Amaats, from Seivarden herself. Medic’s outwardly dour concern. Tisarwat’s pain and shame and self-hatred. One-armed, I pulled myself past her, where Bo Nine was applying correctives to her injuries. Did not trust myself to stop and speak.
Instead I continued past, to where Captain Hetnys and her ship’s ancillary were bound, strapped to seats. Watched by my Amaats. Silver-armored, both of them. In theory, Sword of Atagaris could still gate back to the station and attack us. In fact, even if it hadn’t run into the mines Seivarden had left for it—which likely would only do minimal damage, more an annoyance than anything else—there was no way to attack us without also attacking its captain. “Drop your armor, Captain,” I said. “And you, too, Atagaris. You know I can shoot through it, and we can’t treat your injury until you do.”
Sword of Atagaris dropped its armor. Medic pulled herself past me with a corrective, frown deepening as she saw the ancillary’s wounded wrist.
Captain Hetnys only said, “Fuck you.”
I still held the Presger gun. Captain Hetnys’s leg was more than a meter from the shuttle hull, and besides we had the ability to patch it, if I sent a bullet through it. I braced myself against a nearby seat and shot her in the knee. She screamed, and the Atagaris beside her strained at its bonds, but could not break them. “Captain Hetnys, you are relieved of command,” I said, once Medic had applied a corrective, and the globs of blood that had floated free had been mopped up. “I have every right to shoot you in the head, for what’s happened today. I will not promise not to do so. You and all your officers are under arrest.
“Sword of Atagaris, you will immediately send every human aboard to Athoek Station. Unarmed. You will then take your engines off-line and put every single ancillary you have into suspension until further notice. Captain Hetnys, and all your lieutenants, will be put into suspension on Athoek Station. If you threaten the station, or any ship or citizen, your officers will die.”
“You can’t—” began Captain Hetnys.
“Be silent, Citizen,” I said. “I am now speaking to Sword of Atagaris.” Captain Hetnys didn’t answer that. “You, Sword of Atagaris, will tell me who your captain did business with, on the other side of the Ghost Gate.”
“I will not,” replied Sword of Atagaris.
“Then I will kill Captain Hetnys.” Medic, still occupied with the corrective she’d applied to Captain Hetnys’s leg, looked up at me briefly, dismayed, but said nothing.
“You,” said Sword of Atagaris. Its voice was ancillary-flat, but I could guess at the emotion behind it. “I wish I could show you what it’s like. I wish you could know what it’s like, to be in my position. But you never will, and that’s how I know there isn’t really any such thing as justice.”
There were things I could say. Answers I could make. Instead, I said, “Who did your captain do business with, on the other side of the Ghost Gate?”
“She didn’t identify herself,” Sword of Atagaris replied, voice still flat and calm. “She looked Ychana, but she couldn’t have been, no Ychana speaks Radchaai with such an accent. To judge by her speech, she might have come from the Radch itself.”
“With perhaps a hint of Notai.” Thinking of that tea set, in fragments in its box, in the Undergarden. That supply locker.
“Perhaps. Captain Hetnys thought she was working for the Lord of the Radch.”
“I will keep your captain close to me, Ship,” I said. “If you don’t do as I say, or if at any time I think you have deceived me, she dies. Don’t doubt me on this.”
“How could I?” replied Sword of Atagaris, bitterness audible even in its flat tone.
I didn’t answer, only turned to pull myself forward, to get out of the way while Seivarden’s Amaats brought a suspension pod for Captain Hetnys. I caught sight of Basnaaid, who had been only a few seats away, who had perhaps heard the entire exchange between me and Sword of Atagaris. “Fleet Captain,” she said, as I pulled myself even with her. “I wanted to say.”
I grabbed a handhold, halted myself. “Horticulturist.”
“I’m glad my sister had a friend like you, and I wish… I feel as though, if you had been there, when it happened, whatever it was, that maybe it would have made a difference, and she’d still be alive.”
Of all the things to say. Of all the things to say now, when I had just threatened to shoot Captain Hetnys only because I knew how her ship felt about her. Of all the times for me to hear such a thing, coming from Lieutenant Awn’s sister’s mouth.
And I had gone beyond my ability to remain silent, to seem as though I was untouched by any of it. “Citizen,” I replied, hearing my own voice go flat. “I was there when it happened, and I was no help to your sister at all. I told you I used another name when I knew her, and that name was Justice of Toren. I was the ship she served on, and at the command of Anaander Mianaai herself, I shot your sister in the head. What happened next ended in my own destruction, and I am all that’s left of that ship. I am not human, and you were right to speak to me as you did, when we first met.” I turned my face away, before Basnaaid would see even the small signs I might give of my feelings at having said it.
Everyone in the shuttle had heard me. Basnaaid seemed shocked into silence. Seivarden already knew, of course, and Medic. I didn’t want to know what Seivarden’s Amaats thought. Didn’t want to see or hear Sword of Atagaris’s opinion. I turned to the only person who seemed unaware of me—Lieutenant Tisarwat, who had no attention for anything but what a failure she’d been, at living and dying both.
I pulled myself into the seat beside her, strapped myself in. For a moment I seriously considered telling her just how stupid she’d been, back in the Gardens, and how lucky we all were to have survived her stupidity. Instead, I unhooked her seat strap with my good hand—my left arm was immobilized by the corrective on my shoulder—and pulled her to me. She clung to me and leaned her face into my neck, and began sobbing.
“It’s all right,” I said, my arm awkwardly around her shaking shoulders. “It’ll be all right.”
“How can you say that?” she demanded into my neck, between sobs. A tear escaped, one tiny, trembling sphere floating away. “How could it possibly?” And then, “No one would ever dare offer you such a pl
atitude.”
Over three thousand years old. Infinitely ambitious. And still only seventeen. “You assume incorrectly.” If she thought about it, if she was capable just now of thinking clearly, she might have guessed who it was who might have said such a thing to me. If she had, she didn’t say it. “It’s so hard, at first,” I said, “when they hook you up. But the rest of you is around you, and you know it’s only temporary, you know it will be better soon. And when you are better, it’s so amazing. To have such reach, to see so much, all at once. It’s…” But there was no describing it. Tisarwat herself would have seen it, if only for a few hours, distressed or else blunted by meds. “She never let you have that. It was never part of her plan to let you have that.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” And of course she’d known. How could she not? “She hated the way I felt, she dosed me up as fast as she could. She didn’t care if…” The sobs that had died down began afresh. More tears escaped and floated off. Bo Nine, near all this time, horrified by my revelation minutes before, horror that was not at all relieved by my conversation with Tisarwat now, caught them with a cloth, which she then folded, and pushed it between Tisarwat’s face and my neck.
Seivarden’s Amaats hung motionless, blinking, confused. What sense the universe had made to them had disappeared with my words, and they were unsure of how to fit what they’d heard me say into a reality they understood. “What are you hanging around for?” Seivarden snapped, sterner than I’d ever heard her with them, but it seemed to break whatever had held them until now. “Get moving!” And they moved, relieved to find something they understood.
By then Tisarwat had calmed again somewhat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get it back for either of us. But it will be all right. Somehow it will.” She didn’t answer, and five minutes later, exhausted from events and from her despair and her grief, she fell asleep.
21
Once the repair crew arrived, the shuttle could leave the hole it had cut in the dome. I ordered us back to Mercy of Kalr. Station Medical didn’t need to know what I was, and anyway they were busy enough with problems caused or exacerbated by the lack of gravity, which couldn’t be turned on until the lake water had been contained. And truth to tell, I was glad to get back to Mercy of Kalr, even if only for a little while.
Medic wanted me where she could frown at me and tell me not to get up without her permission, and I was happy enough to indulge her, at least for a day. So Seivarden reported to me where I lay on a bed in Medical. Holding a bowl of tea. “It’s like old times,” said Seivarden, smiling. But tense. Anticipating what I might say to her, now things were calmer.
“It is,” I agreed, and took a drink of my tea. Definitely not Daughter of Fishes. Good.
“Our Tisarwat got banged up pretty badly,” Seivarden observed, when I said nothing further. Tisarwat was in an adjoining cubicle, attended by Bo Nine, who had explicit orders never to leave her lieutenant alone. Her ribs were still healing, and Medic had her confined to Medical until she could decide what else Tisarwat might need. “What was she thinking, charging an ancillary like that without her armor?”
“She was trying to draw Sword of Atagaris’s fire, so that I would have time to shoot it before it shot Horticulturist Basnaaid. She was lucky it didn’t shoot her outright.” It must have been more taken aback by Translator Dlique’s death than I had imagined. Or just reluctant to kill an officer without a legal order.
“Horticulturist Basnaaid, is it?” Seivarden asked. Her experience with very young lieutenants might not have been as extensive as mine, but it was extensive nonetheless. “Is there any interest in return? Or is that what the self-sacrifice and the tears were about?” I raised an eyebrow, and she continued, “It never occurred to me until now how many baby lieutenants must have cried on your shoulders over the years.”
Seivarden’s tears had never wetted any of my uniform jackets, when I had been a ship. “Are you jealous?”
“I think I am,” she said. “I’d rather have cut my right arm off than shown weakness, when I was seventeen.” And when she was twenty-seven, and thirty-seven. “I regret that, now.”
“It’s in the past.” I drained the last of my tea. “Sword of Atagaris has admitted that Captain Hetnys sold transportees to someone beyond the Ghost Gate.” It had been Governor Giarod who had let fall what errand I’d sent Mercy of Kalr on.
“But who?” Seivarden frowned, genuinely puzzled. “Sword of Atagaris said Hetnys thought she was dealing with the Lord of the Radch. But if it’s the other Lord of the Radch on the other side of the Ghost Gate, why hasn’t she done anything?”
“Because it’s not the Lord of the Radch on the other side of the Ghost Gate,” I said. “That tea set—you haven’t seen it, but it’s three thousand years old, at the least. Very obviously Notai. And someone had very carefully removed the name of its owner. It was Hetnys’s payment, for the transportees. And you remember the supply locker, that was supposedly just debris, but Sword of Atagaris insisted on picking up.”
“Where the ship name should have been was all scorched.” She’d seen the connection, but not made a pattern out of it yet. “But there wasn’t anything in it, we found it aboard Sword of Atagaris.”
“It wasn’t empty when Sword of Atagaris pulled it in, depend on it.” I was sure something—or someone—had been inside it. “The locker is also a good three thousand years old. It’s fairly obvious there’s a ship on the other side of that gate. A Notai ship, one that’s older than Anaander Mianaai herself.”
“But, Breq,” Seivarden protested, “those were all destroyed. Even the ones that were loyal have been decommissioned by now. And we’re nowhere near where any of those battles were fought.”
“They weren’t all destroyed.” Seivarden opened her mouth to protest, and I gestured to forestall her. “Some of them fled. The makers of entertainments have wrung hours of dramatic adventure out of that very fact, of course. But it’s assumed that by now they’re all dead, with no one to maintain them. What if one fled to the Ghost System? What if it’s found a way to replenish its store of ancillaries? You recall, Sword of Atagaris said the person Hetnys dealt with looked like an Ychana, but spoke like a high-status Radchaai. And the Athoeki used to sell indentured Ychana away to outsystem slavers, before the annexation.”
“Aatr’s tits,” Seivarden swore. “They were dealing with an ancillary.”
“The other Anaander has her people here, but I imagine events at Ime have made her cautious. Perhaps she doesn’t stay in contact, doesn’t interfere much. After all, the more she does, the more likely she is to be detected. Maybe our neighbor in the Ghost System took advantage of it. That’s why Hetnys didn’t move until she was desperate. She was waiting for orders from the Lord of the Radch.”
“Who she thought was just beyond the Ghost Gate. But, Breq, what will the other Anaander’s supporters do when they realize?”
“I doubt we’ll have to wait long to find out.” I took a drink of my tea. “And I may be wrong.”
“No,” said Seivarden, “I don’t think you are. It fits. So we have a mad warship on the other side of the Ghost Gate—”
“Not mad,” I corrected. “When you’ve lost everything that matters to you, it makes perfect sense to run and hide and try to recover.”
“Yes,” she replied, abashed. “I should know better, of all people, shouldn’t I. So, not mad. But hostile. An enemy warship on the other side of the Ghost Gate, half of the Lord of the Radch maybe about to attack, and the Presger likely to show up demanding to know what we’ve done with their translator. Is that all, or is there more?”
“That’s probably enough for now.” She laughed. I asked, “Are you ready for your reprimand, Lieutenant?”
“Sir.” She bowed.
“When I’m not aboard, you are acting captain of this ship. If you had failed to rescue me, and anything had happened to you, Lieutenant Ekalu would have been left in command. She’s a good lieutenant, and she may well ma
ke a fine captain someday, but you are the more experienced officer, and you should not have risked yourself.”
It was not what she had expected to hear. Her face heated with anger and indignation. But she had been a soldier a long time—she did not protest. “Sir.”
“I think you should talk to Medic about your history of drug use. I think you’ve been under stress, and maybe not thinking as clearly as you might.”
The muscles in her arms twitched, the desire to cross them suppressed. “I was worried.”
“Do you anticipate not ever being worried again?”
She blinked, startled. The corners of her mouth twitched upward. “About you? No.” She gave a short, breathy laugh, and then was flooded with an odd mix of regret and embarrassment. “Do you see what Ship sees?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I ask Ship to show me, or it shows me something it thinks I should see. Some of it is the same sort of thing your own ship would have shown you, when you were a captain. Some of the data wouldn’t make sense to you, the way it does to me.”
“You’ve always seen right through me.” She was still embarrassed. “Even when you found me on Nilt. I suppose you already know that Horticulturist Basnaaid is on her way here?”
Basnaaid had insisted on going over to the dome repair crew’s vehicle, back at the station. She had requested to be brought here while I slept, and Seivarden had acceded, with some surprise and dismay. “Yes. I’d have done just as you did, had I been awake.” She’d known that, but still was gratified to hear it. “Is there anything else?” There wasn’t, or at least not anything she wanted to bring up, so I dismissed her.
Thirty seconds after Seivarden left, Tisarwat came into my cubicle. I shifted my legs over, gestured an invitation to sit. “Lieutenant,” I said, as she settled herself, gingerly. There were still correctives around her torso, cracked ribs and other injuries still healing. “How are you feeling?”