Lieutenant Tisarwat blinked. Took a breath. “I’ll find out, sir.” Another breath, a frown suppressed with some effort. “Do you mean to dine at home, sir? I’m not sure if there’s anything there worthy of the system governor.”
“You mean,” I said, my voice calm, “that you’ve promised supper to your friends and you’re hoping I don’t kick you out of our dining room.” Tisarwat wanted to look down, to look away from me, but held herself still, her face heating. “Take them out somewhere.” Disappointment. She’d wanted to dine in for the same reason I did—wanted to have a conversation with these particular people, in private. Or as close to private as she could get, attended only by Mercy of Kalrs, with only Ship and possibly me watching. “Make me out to be as tyrannical as you like. They won’t blame you.” The lift door opened on level four, a few meters beyond the lift brightly lit, light panels still leaning against walls beyond that.
Home, for now.
“I admit, Fleet Captain,” said Governor Giarod at supper, later, “that I generally don’t much like Ychana food. When it’s not bland, it’s sour and rancid.” She took another taste of the food in front of her, fish and mushrooms in a fermented sauce that was the source of that “sour and rancid” complaint. On this occasion it had been carefully sweetened and spiced to suit Radchaai taste. “But this is very good.”
“I’m glad you like it. I had it brought in from a place on level one.”
Governor Giarod frowned. “Where do the mushrooms come from?”
“They grow them somewhere in the Undergarden.”
“I’ll have to mention them to Horticulture.”
I swallowed my own bite of fish and mushroom, took a swallow of tea. “Perhaps it might be best to let the people who have become experts continue to profit from their expertise. They stand to lose if it becomes something Horticulture produces, wouldn’t you think? But imagine how pleased the growers might be, if the governor’s residence started buying mushrooms from them.”
Governor Giarod set down her utensil, leaned back in her seat. “So Lieutenant Tisarwat is acting with your direction.” It wasn’t the non sequitur it seemed. Tisarwat had spent the last week encouraging maintenance workers to try food in the Undergarden, and the new plumbing on level one had made work easier for the people who had been providing that food. The aim was obvious to someone like Governor Giarod. “Is that what you brought me here to talk about?”
“Lieutenant Tisarwat hasn’t been acting under any orders from me, though I approve of what she’s done. I’m sure you realize that continuing to isolate the Undergarden from the rest of the station would be just as disastrous as trying to force the residents here to live like everyone else.” Balancing that would be… interesting. “I would be very unhappy to see this end with anything valuable here taken away from the Undergarden so that others can profit by it elsewhere. Let the houses here profit from what they’ve built.” I took another swallow of tea. “I’d say they’ve earned it.” The governor drew breath, ready to argue about that what they’ve built, I suspected. “But I invited you this evening because I wanted to ask you about Valskaayan transportees.” I could have asked earlier, from downwell, but attending to business during full mourning would have been entirely improper.
Governor Giarod blinked. Set down the utensil she’d just picked up. “Valskaayan transportees?” Clearly surprised. “I know you have an interest in Valskaay, you said so when you first arrived. But…”
But that wouldn’t account for a hasty, urgent invitation to a private dinner, less than an hour after my getting off the passenger shuttle from the Athoek elevator. “I gather they have been almost exclusively assigned to the mountain tea plantations, is that the case?”
“I believe so.”
“And there are still some in storage?”
“Certainly.”
Now for the delicate part. “I would like to have one of my own crew personally examine the facility where they’re stored. I would like,” I continued, into the system governor’s nonplussed silence, “to compare the official inventory with what’s actually there.” This was why supper had to be here. Not in the governor’s residence, and certainly not in some shop, no matter how fashionable or supposedly discreet. “Are you aware of rumors that, in the past, Samirend transportees were misappropriated and sold to outsystem slavers?”
Governor Giarod sighed. “It’s a rumor, Fleet Captain, nothing more. The Samirend have mostly become good citizens, but some of them still hold on to certain long-cherished resentments. The Athoeki did practice debt indenture, and there was some traffic of slaves outsystem, but that was over by the time we arrived. And I wouldn’t think that sort of thing would be possible since then. Every transportee has a locator, every suspension pod as well, and every one of those is numbered and indexed, and no one gets into that storage facility without the right access codes. Every ship in the system has its own locator, too, so even if someone did get access and did somehow take away suspension pods without authorization, it would be simple to pinpoint what ship was there that shouldn’t have been.” In fact, the governor knew of three ships in the system that didn’t have locators visible to her. One of them was mine.
The governor continued. “To be honest, I’m not sure why you would have placed any credence in such a rumor.”
“The facility doesn’t have an AI?” I asked. Governor Giarod gestured no. I would have been surprised to learn otherwise. “So it’s essentially automated. Take a suspension pod and it registers on the system.”
“There are also people stationed there, who keep an eye on things. It’s dull work these days.”
“One or two people,” I guessed. “And they serve a few months, or maybe a year, and then someone else cycles in. And no one’s come to take any transportees for years, so there’s been no reason to do any sort of inventory check. And if it’s anything like the holds on a troop carrier, it’s not the sort of thing you can just walk into and look at. The suspension pods aren’t in nice rows you can walk between, they’re packed close, and they’re pulled up by machinery when you want them. There are ways to get in and take a physical inventory, but they’re inconvenient, and no one’s thought it necessary.”
Governor Giarod was silent, staring at me, her fish forgotten, her tea grown cold. “Why would anyone do such a thing?” she asked, finally.
“If there were a market for slaves or body parts, I’d say money. I don’t think there is such a market, though I may be mistaken. But I can’t help thinking of all the military ships that don’t have ancillaries anymore, and all the people who wished they still did.” Captain Hetnys might well be one of those people. But I didn’t say that.
“Your ship doesn’t have ancillaries,” Governor Giarod pointed out.
“It does not,” I agreed. “Whether a ship does or doesn’t have ancillaries is not a good predictor of its opinion of our no longer making them.”
Governor Giarod blinked, surprised and puzzled, it seemed. “A ship’s opinion doesn’t matter, does it? Ships do as they’re ordered.” I said nothing, though there was a great deal to say about that. The governor sighed. “Well, and I was wondering how any of this mattered when we have a civil war going on that might find its way here. I see the connection, now, Fleet Captain, but I still think you’re chasing a rumor. And I haven’t even heard anything about Valskaayans, only the one about Samirend from before I came here.”
“Give me accesses.” I could send Mercy of Kalr. Seivarden had experience with troop carrier holds, she would know what to do, once I’d told her what I wanted. Right now she was on watch, in central command. Ill at ease since that conversation with Ship. Resisting the urge to cross her arms. A nearby Amaat was humming to herself. My mother said it all goes around. “I’ll take care of it myself. If everything is as it should be, you won’t have lost anything.”
“Well.” She looked down at her plate, picked up her utensil, made as if to pick up a piece of fish, and then stopped. Lowered her hand aga
in. Frowned. “Well,” she said again. “You were right about Raughd Denche, weren’t you.”
I had wondered if she would mention that. The fact that Raughd had been disinherited would be common knowledge within a day, I suspected. Rumor of the rest of what had happened would eventually reach the station, but no one would openly mention the matter, particularly not to me. Governor Giarod, however, was the one person here with access to a full, official report. “I was not pleased to be right,” I said.
“No.” Governor Giarod set her utensil down again. Sighed.
“I would also,” I said, before she could say anything more, “like you to require the planetary vice-governor to look into the living and working conditions of the field workers in the mountain tea plantations. In particular, I suspect the basis on which their wages are calculated is unfair.” It was entirely possible that the field workers would get what they wanted from the district magistrate. But I wouldn’t assume that.
“What are you trying to do, Fleet Captain?” Governor Giarod seemed genuinely baffled. “You arrive here and go straight to the Undergarden. You go downwell and suddenly there are problems with the Valskaayans. I thought your priority was to keep the citizens in this system safe.”
“Governor,” I replied. Very evenly, very calmly. “The residents of the Undergarden and the Valskaayans who pick tea are citizens. I did not like what I found in the Undergarden, and I did not like what I found in the mountains downwell.”
“And when you want something,” the governor remarked, her voice sharp, “you say so, and you expect to get it.”
“So do you,” I replied. Serious. Still calm. “It comes with being system governor, doesn’t it? And from where you sit, you can afford to ignore things you don’t think are important. But that view—that list of important things—is very different if you’re sitting somewhere else.”
“A commonplace, Fleet Captain. But some points of view don’t take in as much as others.”
“And how do you know yours isn’t one of them, if you’ll never try looking from somewhere different?” Governor Giarod didn’t answer immediately. “This is the well-being of citizens we’re talking about.”
She sighed. “Fosyf has already been in contact with me. I suppose you know her field workers are threatening to stop working unless she meets a whole list of demands?”
“I only just heard a few hours ago.”
“And by dealing with them in such circumstances, we are rewarding these people for threatening us. What do you think they’ll do but try it again, since it got them what they wanted once already? And we need things calm here.”
“These people are citizens.” I replied, my voice as calm and even as I could make it, without reaching the dead tonelessness of an ancillary. “When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?”
“You don’t understand, Fleet Captain, this isn’t like—”
I cut her off, heedless of propriety. “And what does it cost you to consider the possibility?” In fact, it might well cost her a great deal. The admission, to herself, that she was not as just as she had always thought herself to be. “We need things running here in such a way that no matter what happens outside this system—even if we never hear from the Lord of the Radch again, even if every gate in Radchaai space goes down—no matter what happens elsewhere, this system is safe and stable. We will not be able to do that by threatening tens or hundreds of citizens with armed soldiers.”
“And if the Valskaayans decide to riot? Or, gods forbid, the Ychana just outside your door here?”
Honestly, some moments I despaired of Governor Giarod. “I will not order soldiers to fire on citizens.” Would, in fact, explicitly order them not to. “People don’t riot for no reason. And if you’re finding you have to deal with the Ychana carefully now, it’s because of how they’ve been treated in the past.”
“I should look from their point of view, should I?” she asked, eyebrow raised, voice just the slightest bit sardonic.
“You should,” I agreed. “Your only other choice is rounding them all up and either reeducating or killing every one of them.” The first was beyond the resources of Station Security. And I had already said I would not help with the second.
She grimaced in horror and disgust. “What do you take me for, Fleet Captain? Why would you think anyone here would even consider such a thing?”
“I am older than I look,” I replied. “I have been in the middle of more than one annexation. I have seen people do things that a month or a year before they would have sworn they would never, ever do.” Lieutenant Tisarwat sat at supper with her companions: the grandniece of the chief of Station Security, the young third cousin of a tea grower—not Fosyf, but one of those whose tea Fosyf had condescendingly declared “acceptable.” Skaaiat Awer’s cousin. And Citizen Piat. Tisarwat complained of my stern, unbendable nature, impervious to any appeal. Basnaaid, of course, wasn’t there. She didn’t move in this social circle, and I had, after all, ordered Tisarwat away from her.
System Governor Giarod spoke across the table in the dining room in my Undergarden quarters. “Why, Fleet Captain, do you think I would be one of those people?”
“Everyone is potentially one of those people, Governor,” I replied. “It’s best to learn that before you do something you’ll have trouble living with.” Best to learn it, really, before anyone—perhaps dozens of anyones—died to teach it to you.
But it was a hard lesson to learn any other way, as I knew from very personal experience.
19
Seivarden understood my instructions about transportee storage immediately. “You don’t seriously think,” she said, aloud, sitting on the edge of her bunk in her quarters, her voice sounding in my ear where I sat in the Undergarden, “that someone has managed to steal bodies.” She paused. “Why would anyone do that? And how could they manage it? I mean, during an annexation”—she gestured, half dismissing, half warding—“all sorts of things happen. If you told me someone was selling to slavers that way, at a time like that, I wouldn’t be that surprised.”
But once a person had been tagged, labeled, accounted for, it became another matter entirely. I knew as well as Seivarden what happened to people during annexations—people who weren’t Radchaai. I also knew that cases where people had been sold that way were vanishingly rare—no Radchaai soldier could so much as take a breath without her ship knowing it.
Of course, the past several centuries, the Lord of the Radch had been visiting ships and altering their accesses, had, I suspected, been handing out access codes to people she had thought would support her, so that they could act secretly, unseen by ships and stations that would otherwise have reported them to authorities. To the wrong half of Anaander Mianaai. “If you need ancillaries,” I said, quietly, alone in my sitting room on Athoek Station, now that Governor Giarod had left, “those bodies might well be useful.”
Seivarden was silent a moment, considering that. Not liking the conclusions she was coming to. “The other side has a network here. That’s what you’re saying.”
“We’re not on either side,” I reminded her. “And of course they do. Everywhere one side is, the other side is. Because they’re the same. It’s not a surprise that agents for that part of the tyrant have been active here.” Anaander Mianaai was inescapable, everywhere in Radch space. “But I admit I didn’t expect something like this.”
“You need more than bodies,” she pointed out. Leaned back against the wall. Crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. “There’s equipment you need to install.” And then, apologetic, “You know that. But still.”
“They could be stockpiling that, too. Or they may be depending on a troop carrier.” A troop carrier could manufacture that, given time and the appropriate materials. Some of the Swords and Mercies that still h
ad ancillaries had some in stock, for backup. In theory, there wasn’t anyplace else to get such things. Not anymore. That was part of why the Lord of the Radch had had the problem with Tisarwat that she did—she could not easily get the right tech, had had to modify her own. “And maybe you’ll get there and find everything is in order.”
Seivarden scoffed. Then said, “There aren’t many people here who could do something like that.”
“No,” I acknowledged.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be the governor, since she gave you the keys to the place. Though now I think of it she couldn’t have done much else.”
“You have a point.”
“And you,” she said, sighing, “aren’t going to tell me who you’ve got your eye on. Breq, we’ll be days away. Unless we gate there.”
“No matter where you are you won’t be able to rush to my rescue if anything were to happen.”
“Well,” replied Seivarden. “Well.” Tense and unhappy. “Probably everything will be very dull for the next few months. It’s always like that.” It had been, for both of our lives. Frantic action, then months or even years waiting for something to happen. “And even if they come to Athoek”—by they she meant, presumably, the part of the Lord of the Radch that had lost the battle at Omaugh Palace, whose supporters were destroying gates with ships in them—“they won’t come right away. It won’t be the first place on their list.” And travel between systems could take weeks, months. Even years. “Probably nothing will happen for ages.” A thought struck her then. “Why don’t you send Sword of Atagaris? It’s not like it’s doing much where it is.” I didn’t answer right away, but didn’t need to. “Oh, Aatr’s tits. Of course. I should have realized right away, but I didn’t think that person…”—the choice of word, which was one that barely acknowledged humanity, communicated Seivarden’s disdain for Captain Hetnys—“was smart enough to pull something like that off.” Seivarden had had a low opinion of Sword of Atagaris’s captain ever since Translator Dlique’s death. “But now I think of it, isn’t it odd, Sword of Atagaris being so intent on picking up that supply locker. Maybe we need to take a look on the other side of that Ghost Gate.”