“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.