“She was fine when I left her. Your lieutenant too.” Bang. “I did injure the shuttle pilot, she wouldn’t leave her station. I hope she’s all right. Mercy of Kalr, whichever Lord of the Radch has your support, I beg you not to let any on board, or obey her orders.”
The firing stopped. The Lord of the Radch was worried, perhaps, that her gun would overheat. Still, she had plenty of time, no need to rush.
“I see what the Lord of the Radch is doing to the shuttle,” said Mercy of Kalr. “That in itself would be enough to tell me something is wrong.”
But of course, Mercy of Kalr had more indications than just that. The communications blackout, which resembled what had happened on Shis’urna twenty years ago, probably only reported in rumor, but still sobering, assuming rumors had reached this far. My—Justice of Toren’s—disappearance. Its own clandestine visit from the Lord of the Radch. Its captain’s political opinions.
Silence, the four Anaander Mianaais clinging motionless to the shuttle hull.
“You still had your ancillaries,” said Mercy of Kalr.
“Yes.”
“I like my soldiers, but I miss having ancillaries.”
That reminded me. “They aren’t doing maintenance as they should. The hinges on the airlock door were very sticky.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter right now,” I said, and it struck me that something similar might have delayed Anaander Mianaai’s attempts to open the lock on her side. “But you’ll want to have your officers get after them.”
Anaander began firing again. Bang. “It’s funny,” Mercy of Kalr said. “You’re what I’ve lost, and I’m what you’ve lost.”
“I suppose.” Bang. Occasionally, over the past twenty years, I had had moments when I didn’t feel quite so utterly lonely, lost, and helpless as I had since the moment Justice of Toren had vaporized behind me. This wasn’t one of those moments.
“I can’t help you,” said Mercy of Kalr. “No one I could send would get there in time.” And besides, it was an open question, to me, whether in the end Mercy of Kalr would help me or the Lord of the Radch. It was best not to let Anaander inside this shuttle, near its steering or even its communications equipment.
“I know.” If I didn’t find some way to get rid of these Anaanders, and find it soon, everyone on the palace station would die. I knew every millimeter of this shuttle, or others just like it. There had to be something I could use, something I could do. I still had the gun, but I would have just as difficult a time getting through the hull as the Lord of the Radch. I could put the door back on and let her come in the small, easily defensible airlock, but if I failed to kill all of her… but I would certainly fail if I did nothing. I took the gun out of my jacket pocket, made sure it was loaded, pushed over to face the airlock and braced myself against a passenger seat. Extended my armor, though that wouldn’t help me if a bullet bounced back at me, not with this gun.
“What are you going to do?” asked Mercy of Kalr.
“Mercy of Kalr,” I said, gun raised, “it was good to meet you. Don’t let Anaander Mianaai destroy the palace. Tell the other ships. And please tell that incredibly, stupidly persistent sail-pod pilot to get the hell away from my airlock.”
The shuttle was not only too small for a gravity generator, it was too small for growing plants to make its own air. On the aft side of the airlock, behind a bulkhead, was a large tank of oxygen. Right underneath where the three Mianaais waited. I considered angles. The Lord of the Radch fired again. Bang. An orange light on the console flashed and a shrill alarm sounded. Hull breach. The fourth Lord of the Radch, seeing the jet of fine ice crystals stream from the hull, unclipped herself, turned, pulled herself back toward the airlock, I could see it on the display. She moved more slowly than I wanted, but she had all the time in the world. I was the one in a hurry. The sail-pod engaged its small engine and moved out of the way.
I fired the gun into the oxygen tank.
I had thought it would take several shots, but immediately the world tumbled around, all sound cut off, a cloud of frozen vapor forming around me and then dispersing, and everything spinning. My tongue tingled, saliva boiling away in the vacuum, and I couldn’t breathe. I would probably have ten—maybe fifteen—seconds of consciousness, and in two minutes I would be dead. I hurt all over—a burn? Some other injury despite my armor? It didn’t matter. I watched, as I spun, counting Lords of the Radch. One, vacuum suit breached, blood boiling through the tear. Another, one arm sheared off, certainly dead. That was two.
And a half. Counts as a whole, I thought, and that made three. One left. My vision was going red and black, but I could see she was still hanging on to the shuttle hull, still armored, out of the way of the exploded tank.
But I had always been, first and foremost, a weapon. A machine meant for killing. The moment I saw that still-living Anaander Mianaai I aimed my gun without conscious thought and fired. I couldn’t see the results of the shot, couldn’t see anything except one silver flash of sail-pod and after that black, and then I passed out.
23
Something rough and writhing surged up out of my throat and I retched, and gasped convulsively. Someone held me by the shoulders, gravity pulled me forward. I opened my eyes, saw the surface of a medical bed, and a shallow container holding a bile-covered tangled mass of green and black tendrils that pulsed and quivered, that led back to my mouth. Another retch forced me to close my eyes and the thing came all the way free with an audible plop into the container. Someone wiped my mouth and turned me over, laid me down. Still gasping, I opened my eyes.
A medic stood beside the bed I lay on, the slimy green-and-black thing I had just vomited up dangling from her hand. She stared at it, frowning. “Looks good,” she said, and then dropped it back into its dish. “That’s unpleasant, citizen, I know,” she said, apparently to me. “Your throat will be raw for a few minutes. You…”
“Wh…” I tried to speak, but ended up retching again.
“You don’t want to try to talk just yet,” said the medic as someone—another medic—rolled me over again. “You had a close call. The pilot who brought you in got you just in time, but she only had a basic emergency kit.” That stupid, stubborn sail-pod. It must have been. She hadn’t known I wasn’t human, hadn’t known saving me would be pointless. “And she couldn’t get you here right away,” the medic continued. “We were worried for a little bit there. But the pulmonary corrective’s come all the way out, and the readings are good. Very minimal brain damage, if any, though you might not quite feel like yourself for a while.”
That actually struck me as funny, but the retching had subsided again and I didn’t want to restart it, so I refused to acknowledge it. I kept my eyes closed and lay as still and quiet as I could while I was rolled over and laid down again. If I opened my eyes I would want to ask questions.
“She can have tea in ten minutes,” said the medic, to whom I didn’t know. “Nothing solid just yet. Don’t talk to her for the next five.”
“Yes, Doctor.” Seivarden. I opened my eyes, turned my head. Seivarden stood at my bedside. “Don’t talk,” she said to me. “The sudden decompression…”
“It will be easier for her to keep silent,” admonished the medic, “if you don’t talk to her.”
Seivarden fell silent. But I knew what the sudden decompression would have done to me. Dissolved gasses in my blood would have come out of solution, suddenly and violently. Very possibly violently enough to kill me even without the complete lack of air. But an increase in pressure—say, being hauled back into atmosphere—would have sent those bubbles back into solution.
The pressure difference between my lungs and the vacuum might have injured me. And I had been surprised when the tank blew, and preoccupied with shooting Anaander Mianaais, and might not have exhaled as I should have. And that had probably been the least of my injuries, given the explosion that had propelled me into the vacuum to begin with. A sail-pod would have had only th
e most rudimentary means of treating such injuries, and the pilot had probably shoved me into a bare-bones version of a suspension pod to hold me until I could get to a medic.
“Good,” said the medic. “Stay nice and quiet.” She left.
“How long?” I asked Seivarden. And didn’t retch, though my throat was, as the medic had promised, still raw.
“About a week.” Seivarden pulled a chair over and sat.
A week. “I take it the palace is still here.”
“Yes,” said Seivarden, as though my question hadn’t been completely foolish but deserved an answer. “Thanks to you. Security and the dock crew managed to seal off all the exits before any other Lords of the Radch made it out onto the hull. If you hadn’t stopped the ones that did…” She made an averting gesture. “Two gates have gone down.” Out of twelve, that would be. That would cause enormous headaches, both here and at the other ends of those gates. And any ships in them when they’d gone might or might not have made it to safety. “Our side won, though, that’s good.”
Our side. “I don’t have a side in this,” I said.
From somewhere behind her Seivarden produced a bowl of tea. She kicked something below me, and the bed inclined itself, slowly. She held the bowl to my mouth and I took one small, cautious sip. It was wonderful. “Why,” I asked, when I’d taken another, “am I here? I know why the idiot who hauled me in did it, but why did the medics bother with me?”
Seivarden frowned. “You’re serious.”
“I’m always serious.”
“That’s true.” She stood, opened a drawer and brought out a blanket, which she laid over me, and carefully tucked around my bare hands.
Before she could answer my question, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat came partway into the small room. “Medic said you were awake.”
“Why?” I asked. And in answer to her puzzled expression, “Why am I awake? Why am I not dead?”
“Did you want to be?” asked Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat, still looking as though she didn’t understand me.
“No.” Seivarden offered the tea again, and I drank, a larger sip than before. “No, I don’t want to be dead, but it seems like a lot of work just to revive an ancillary.” And cruel to have brought me back just so the Lord of the Radch could order me destroyed.
“I don’t think anyone here thinks of you as an ancillary,” said Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat.
I looked at her. She seemed entirely serious.
“Skaaiat Awer,” I began, flat-voiced.
“Breq,” said Seivarden before I could speak further, voice urgent. “The doctor said lie still. Here, have more tea.”
Why was Seivarden even here? Why was Skaaiat? “What have you done for Lieutenant Awn’s sister?” I asked, flat and harsh.
“Offered her clientage, actually. Which she wouldn’t take. She was sure her sister held me in high regard but she herself didn’t know me and wasn’t in need of my assistance. Very stubborn. She’s in horticulture, two gates away. She’s doing fine, I keep an eye on her, best I can from this distance.”
“Have you offered it to Daos Ceit?”
“This is about Awn,” Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat said. “I can see it is, but you won’t come out and say it. And you’re right. There was a great deal more that I could have said to her before she left, and I should have said it. You’re the ancillary, the non-person, the piece of equipment, but to compare our actions, you loved her more than I ever did.”
Compare our actions. It was like a slap. “No,” I said. Glad of my expressionless ancillary’s voice. “You left her in doubt. I killed her.” Silence. “The Lord of the Radch doubted your loyalty, doubted Awer, and wanted Lieutenant Awn to spy on you. Lieutenant Awn refused, and demanded to be interrogated to prove her loyalty. Of course Anaander Mianaai didn’t want that. She ordered me to shoot Lieutenant Awn.”
Three seconds of silence. Seivarden stood motionless. Then Skaaiat Awer said, “You didn’t have a choice.”
“I don’t know if I had a choice or not. I didn’t think I did. But the next thing I did, after I shot Lieutenant Awn, was to shoot Anaander Mianaai. Which is why—” I stopped. Took a breath. “Which is why she breached my heat shield. Skaaiat Awer, I have no right to be angry with you.” I couldn’t speak further.
“You have every right to be as angry as you wish,” said Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat. “If I had understood when you first came here, I would have spoken differently to you.”
“And if I had wings I’d be a sail-pod.” Ifs and would-haves changed nothing. “Tell the tyrant,” I used the Orsian word, “that I will see her as soon as I can get out of bed. Seivarden, bring me my clothes.”
Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat had, it turned out, actually come to see Daos Ceit, who’d been badly injured in the last convulsions of Anaander Mianaai’s struggle with herself. I walked slowly down a corridor lined with corrective-swathed injured lying on hastily made pallets, or encased in pods that would hold them suspended until the medics could get to them. Daos Ceit lay on a bed, in a room, unconscious. Looking smaller and younger than I knew she was. “Will she be all right?” I asked Seivarden. Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat hadn’t waited for me to make my slow way down the corridor, she’d had to get back to the docks.
“She will,” answered the medic, behind me. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
She was right. Just dressing, even with Seivarden’s assistance, had left me shaking with exhaustion. I had come down the corridor on sheer determination. Now I felt turning my head to answer the medic would take more strength than I had.
“You just grew a new pair of lungs,” continued the medic. “Among other things. You’re not going to be walking around for a few days. At the very least.” Daos Ceit breathed shallowly and regularly, looking so much like the tiny child I’d known I wondered for a moment that I hadn’t recognized her as soon as I’d seen her.
“You need the space,” I said, and then that clicked together with another bit of information. “You could have left me in suspension until you weren’t so busy.”
“The Lord of the Radch said she needed you, citizen. She wanted you up as soon as possible.” Faintly aggrieved, I thought. The medics, not unreasonably, would have prioritized patients differently. And she hadn’t argued when I’d said she needed the space.
“You should go back to bed,” said Seivarden. Solid Seivarden, the only thing between me and utter collapse just now. I shouldn’t have gotten up.
“No.”
“She gets like this,” said Seivarden, her voice apologetic.
“So I see.”
“Let’s go back to the room.” Seivarden sounded extremely patient and calm. It was a moment before I realized she was talking to me. “You can get some rest. We can deal with the Lord of the Radch when you’re good and ready.”
“No,” I repeated. “Let’s go.”
With Seivarden’s support I made it out of Medical, into a lift, and then what seemed to be an endless length of corridor, and then, suddenly, a tremendous open space, the ground stretching away covered with glittering shards of colored glass that crunched and ground under my few steps.
“The fight spilled over into the temple,” Seivarden said, without my asking.
The main concourse, that’s where I was. And all this broken glass, what was left of that room full of funeral offerings. Only a few people were out, mostly picking through the shards, looking, I supposed, for any large pieces that might be restored. Light-brown-jacketed Security looked on.
“Communications were restored within a day or so, I think,” Seivarden continued, guiding me around patches of glass, toward the entrance to the palace proper. “And then people started figuring out what was going on. And picking sides. After a while you couldn’t not pick a side. Not really. For a bit we were afraid the military ships might attack each other, but there were only two on the other side, and they went for the gates instead, and left the system.”
“Civilian casualties?” I as
ked.
“There always are.” We crossed the last few meters of glass-strewn concourse and entered the palace proper. An official stood there, her uniform jacket grimy, stained dark on one sleeve. “Door one,” she said, barely looking at us. Sounding exhausted.
Door one led to a lawn. On three sides, a vista of hills and trees, and above, a blue sky streaked with pearly clouds. The fourth side was beige wall, the grass gouged and torn at its base. A plain but thickly padded green chair sat a few meters in front of me. Not for me, surely, but I didn’t much care. “I need to sit down.”
“Yes,” said Seivarden, and walked me there, and lowered me into it. I closed my eyes, just for a moment.
A child was speaking, a high, piping voice. “The Presger had approached me before Garsedd,” said the child. “The translators they sent had been grown from what they’d taken off human ships, of course, but they’d been raised and taught by the Presger and I might as well have been talking to aliens. They’re better now, but they’re still unsettling company.”
“Begging my lord’s pardon.” Seivarden. “Why did you refuse them?”
“I was already planning to destroy them,” said the child. Anaander Mianaai. “I had begun to marshal the resources I thought I’d need. I thought they’d gotten wind of my plans and were frightened enough to want to make peace. I thought they were showing weakness.” She laughed, bitter and regretful, odd to hear in such a young voice. But Anaander Mianaai was hardly young.
I opened my eyes. Seivarden knelt beside my chair. A child of about five or six sat cross-legged on the grass in front of me, dressed all in black, a pastry in one hand, and the contents of my luggage spread around her. “You’re awake.”
“You got icing on my icons,” I accused.
“They’re beautiful.” She picked up the disk of the smaller one, triggered it. The image sprang forth, jeweled and enameled, the knife in its third hand glittering in the false sunlight. “This is you, isn’t it.”