Ancillary Mercy Read online

  And days ago Tisarwat herself had said, Do you understand, sir, that we’re both doing exactly what she wants? She being Anaander Mianaai. And I had said that I didn’t care much what the Lord of the Radch wanted.

  I turned back. Put my hand on Tisarwat’s shoulder. Said, more gently, “Let’s get through today first, Lieutenant.” Or even through the next few weeks or months or more. Radch space was big. The fighting that was happening in the provincial palaces might reach us here at Athoek tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Or it might burn itself out in the palaces and never arrive here at all. But I wouldn’t bet on that.

  We often speak casually of distances within a single solar system—of a station’s being near a moon or a planet, of a gate’s being near a system’s most prominent station—when in fact those distances are measured in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kilometers. And a system’s outstations could be hundreds of millions, even billions, of kilometers from those gates.

  Days before, Mercy of Kalr had been truly, dangerously close to Athoek Station, but now it was only near in a relative sense. We would be a whole day on the shuttle. Mercy of Kalr could generate its own gates, shortcuts around normal space, and could have gotten us there much more quickly, but gating close up to a busy station risked colliding with whatever might be in your path as you came out of gate-space. Ship could have done it—had, in fact, quite recently. But for now it was safer to take the shuttle, which was too small to generate its own gravity, let alone make its own gate. Governor Giarod’s problem, whatever it was, would have to wait.

  And I had plenty of time to consider what I might find on the station. Both factions of Anaander Mianaai (assuming there were only two, which was perhaps not a safe assumption) surely had agents there. But none of them would be military. Captain Hetnys—the enemy of mine to whom System Governor Giarod had so imprudently passed dangerous information—lay frozen in a suspension pod aboard Mercy of Kalr, along with all her officers. Her ship, Sword of Atagaris, orbited well away from Athoek itself, its engines off-line, its ancillaries all in storage. Mercy of Ilves, the only other military ship in the system besides Sword of Atagaris and Mercy of Kalr, was inspecting the outstations, and its captain had so far shown no inclination to disobey my order to continue doing so. Station Security and Planetary Security were the only remaining armed threat—but “armed,” for Security, meant stun sticks. Which wasn’t to say Security couldn’t pose a threat—they certainly could, particularly to unarmed citizens. But Security was not a threat to me.

  Anyone who’d realized I didn’t support their faction of the Lord of the Radch would have only political means to move against me. Politics it was, then. Perhaps I should take a cue from Lieutenant Tisarwat and invite the head of Station Security to dinner.

  Kalr Five was still on Athoek Station, along with Eight and Ten. The station had been overcrowded even before the Undergarden had been damaged and evacuated, and there weren’t beds enough for everyone. My Kalrs had deployed crates and pallets in the corner of a dead-end corridor. On one of those crates sat Citizen Uran, quietly but determinedly conjugating Raswar verbs. The Ychana on Athoek Station mostly spoke Raswar, and our neighbors on the station were mostly Ychana. It would have been easier if she’d been willing to go to Medical to learn the basics under drugs, but she very vehemently had not wanted to do that. Uran was the only nonmilitary member of my small household, barely sixteen, no relation to me or anyone on Mercy of Kalr, but I had found myself responsible for her.

  Five stood by, to all appearances absorbed in making sure tea was ready for when Uran’s tutor arrived in the next few minutes, but in fact keeping a close eye on her. A few meters away, Kalr Eight and Kalr Ten scrubbed the corridor floor, already a good deal less scuffed than it had been and noticeably less gray than what lay outside the household’s makeshift boundary. They sang as they worked, quietly, because citizens were sleeping beyond the nearby doorways.

  Jasmine grew

  In my love’s room

  It twined all around her bed

  The daughters have fasted and shaved their heads

  In a month they will visit the temple again

  With roses and camellias

  But I will sustain myself

  With nothing more than the perfume of jasmine flowers

  Until the end of my life

  It was an old song, older than Eight and Ten themselves, older, probably, than their grandparents. I remembered when it was new. On the shuttle, where neither Eight nor Ten could hear me, I sang it with them. Quietly, since Tisarwat was beside me, strapped into a seat and fast asleep. The shuttle’s pilot heard me, though, with a tiny swell of contentment. She had been uneasy about this sudden trip back to the station, and what she’d heard about Governor Giarod’s message. But if I was singing, then things were as they should be.

  On Mercy of Kalr, Seivarden slept, dreaming. Her ten Amaats slept as well, close in their bunks. Bo decade (under the direction of Bo One, since Tisarwat was in the shuttle with me) was just awake, running thoughtless and ragged through the morning prayer (The flower of justice is peace. The flower of propriety is beauty in thought and action…).

  Not long after, Medic came off watch, found Lieutenant Ekalu in the tiny, white-walled decade room, staring at her supper. “Are you all right?” Medic asked, and sat down beside her. The Etrepa in attendance set a bowl of tea on the table in front of her.

  “I’m fine,” lied Ekalu.

  “We’ve served together a long time,” Medic replied. Ekalu, discomfited, did not look up, or say anything in response. “Before you were promoted, you’d have gone to your decade-mates for support, but you can’t go to them anymore. They’re Seivarden’s now.” Before I’d come—before Mercy of Kalr’s last captain had been arrested for treason—Ekalu had been Amaat One. “And I suppose you feel like you can’t go to your Etrepas.” The Etrepa attending Ekalu stood impassive in a corner of the room. “Plenty of other lieutenants would, but they didn’t come up out of the decades, did they.” Didn’t add that Ekalu might be worried about undermining her authority with shipmates who’d known her for years as a common soldier. Didn’t add that Ekalu knew firsthand how unequal such an exchange might be, to demand any sort of comfort or emotional support from the soldiers serving under her. “I daresay you’re the first to do it, to come up out of the decades.”

  “No,” replied Ekalu, voice flat. “Fleet Captain was.” Me, she meant. “You knew the whole time, I suppose.” That I was an ancillary, and not human, she meant.

  “Is that the problem then?” asked Medic. She hadn’t touched the tea the Etrepa had given her. “Fleet Captain is first?”

  “No, of course not.” Ekalu looked up, finally, and her impassive expression flickered for just a moment into something different, but then it was gone. “Why would it?” I knew she was telling the truth.

  Medic made a gesture of unconcern. “Some people get jealous. And Lieutenant Seivarden is… very attached to Fleet Captain. And you and Lieutenant Seivarden…”

  “It would be stupid to be jealous of Fleet Captain,” said Ekalu, voice bland. She meant that, too. Her statement might conceivably be taken for an insult, but I knew that wasn’t her intention. And she was right. It didn’t make any sense at all to be jealous of me.

  “That sort of thing,” observed Medic, dryly, “doesn’t always make sense.” Ekalu said nothing. “I’ve sometimes wondered what went through Seivarden’s mind when she discovered Fleet Captain was an ancillary. Not even human!” And then, in response to the merest flicker of an expression across Ekalu’s face, “But she’s not. Fleet Captain will tell you so herself, I imagine.”

  “Are you going to call Fleet Captain it instead of she?” Ekalu challenged. And then looked away. “Your gracious pardon, Medic. It just sits wrong with me.”

  Because I could see what Ship saw, I saw Medic’s dubious reaction to Ekalu’s overly formal apology, Ekalu’s suddenly careful attempt to erase her usual lower-house accent.
But Medic had known Ekalu a long time, and most of that when Ekalu had still been, as Medic put it, in the decades. “I think,” Medic said, “that Seivarden imagines she understands what it is to be on the bottom of the heap. Certainly she’s learned it’s possible to find oneself there despite good family and impeccable manners and every indication Aatr has granted you a life of happiness and plenty. She’s learned it’s possible that someone she’d dismissed and disregarded might be worthy of her respect. And now she’s learned it, she fancies she understands you.” Another thought struck her. “That’s why you don’t like my saying the fleet captain’s not human, isn’t it.”

  “I’ve never been at the bottom of any heap.” Still carefully broadening her vowels in imitation of Medic or Tisarwat. Of Seivarden. Or of me. “And I said there wasn’t anything wrong.”

  “I’m mistaken, then,” replied Medic, no rancor or sarcasm in her voice. “I beg your indulgent pardon, Lieutenant.” More formal than she needed to be with Ekalu, whom she’d known so long. Whose doctor she had been, all that time.

  “Of course, Medic.”

  Seivarden still slept. Unaware of her fellow lieutenant’s (and lover’s) discomfiture. Unaware, I feared, of Ship’s favorable regard. What I had begun to suspect was its strong affection. Any number of things, Ship wouldn’t hesitate to say quite directly, but never that, I was sure.

  Beside me, on the shuttle, Tisarwat muttered, and stirred, but didn’t wake. I turned my thoughts to what I might find on Athoek Station when we reached it, and what I ought to do about it.

  2

  I met Governor Giarod in her office, its cream-and-green silk hangings today covering even the broad window that looked out onto Athoek Station’s main concourse, where citizens crossed the scuffed white floor, came or went from Station Administration, or stood talking in front of the temple of Amaat with its huge reliefs of the four Emanations. Governor Giarod was tall, broad-shouldered, outwardly serene, but I knew from experience she was liable to misgivings, and to acting on those misgivings at the least convenient moments. She offered me a seat, which I took, and tea, which I refused. Kalr Five, who had met me at the docks, stood impassive just behind me. I considered ordering her to the door, or even out into the corridor, but decided that an obvious reminder of who I was and what resources I commanded might be useful.

  Governor Giarod couldn’t help but notice the soldier looming straight and stiff behind me, but pretended she did not. “Once the gravity came back on, Fleet Captain, Station Administrator Celar felt—and I agreed—that we should do a thorough inspection of the Undergarden, to be sure it was structurally sound.” A few days earlier the public gardens, just above the part of the station that had been named for them, had begun to collapse, almost flooding the four levels below them. Athoek Station’s AI had solved the immediate problem by turning off the entire station’s gravity while the Undergarden was evacuated.

  “Did you find dozens of unauthorized people hiding there, as you feared?” Every Radchaai had a tracker implanted at birth, so that no citizen was ever lost or invisible to any watching AI. Particularly here in the relatively small space of Athoek Station, the idea that anyone could be moving secretly, or here without Station’s knowledge, was patently ridiculous. And yet the belief that the Undergarden hid crowds of such people, all of them a threat to law-abiding citizens, was alarmingly common.

  “You think such fears are foolish,” replied Governor Giarod. “And yet our inspection turned up just such a person, hiding in the access tunnels between levels three and four.”

  I asked, voice even, “Only one?”

  Governor Giarod gestured acknowledgment of my point—one person was nowhere near what some—including, apparently, the governor—had feared. “She’s Ychana.” Most of the residents of the Undergarden had been Ychana. “No one will admit to knowing anything about her, though it’s fairly obvious some of them did know her. She’s in a cell in Security. I thought you might like to know, especially given the fact that the last person who did something like this was an alien.” Translator Dlique, the sort-of-human representative of the mysterious—and terrifying—Presger. Who before the treaty with the Radch—with, actually, all humanity, since the Presger didn’t make distinctions between one sort of human and another—had torn apart human ships, and humans, for sport. Who were so powerful no human force, not even a Radchaai one, could destroy them, or even defend against them. Presger Translator Dlique, it had turned out, could deceive Station’s sensors with alarming ease, and had had no patience for being safely confined to the governor’s residence. Her dead body lay in a suspension pod in Medical, waiting for the hopefully distant day when the Presger came looking for her, and we had to explain that a Sword of Atagaris ancillary had shot her, on the suspicion that she’d vandalized a wall in the Undergarden.

  At least the search that had turned up this one person ought to have allayed fears of a horde of murderous Ychana. “Did you look at her DNA? Is she closely related to anyone else in the Undergarden?”

  “What an odd question, Fleet Captain! Do you know something you haven’t shared with me?”

  “Many things,” I replied, “but most of them wouldn’t interest you. She isn’t, is she?”

  “She isn’t,” replied Governor Giarod. “And Medical tells me she’s carrying some markers that haven’t been seen since before the annexation of Athoek.” Annexation was the polite term for the Radchaai invasion and colonization of entire star systems. “Since she can’t possibly be recently descended from a line that went extinct centuries ago, the only other possibility—in the loosest sense of that word—is that she’s over six hundred years old.”

  There was another possibility, but Governor Giarod hadn’t seen it yet. “I imagine that’s probably the case. Though she’ll have been suspended for a fair amount of that time.”

  Governor Giarod frowned. “You know who she is?”

  “Not who,” I said, “not specifically. I have some suspicions as to what she is. May I speak to her?”

  “Are you going to share your suspicions with me?”

  “Not if they prove unfounded.” All I needed was for Governor Giarod to add another phantom enemy to her list. “I’d like to speak with her, and I’d like a medic to be brought to examine her again. Someone sensible, and discreet.”

  The cell was tiny, two meters by two, a grate and a water supply in one corner. The person squatting on the scuffed floor, staring at a bowl of skel, obviously her supper, seemed unremarkable at first examination. She wore the bright-colored loose shirt and trousers most of the Ychana in the Undergarden preferred, yellow and orange and green. But this person also wore plain gray gloves, suspiciously new-looking. Likely they had come quite recently from Station stores, and Security had insisted she put them on. Hardly anyone in the Undergarden wore gloves, it was just one more reason to believe the people who lived there were uncivilized, unsettlingly, perhaps even dangerously, foreign. Not Radchaai at all.

  There was no way to signal that I wanted to come in—not even the pretense of privacy, in Security’s custody. Station—the AI that controlled Athoek Station, that was for all intents and purposes the station itself—opened the door at my request. The person squatting on the floor didn’t even look up. “May I come in, citizen?” I asked. Though citizen was almost certainly the wrong term of address here, it was, in Radchaai, very nearly the only polite one possible.

  The person didn’t answer. I came in, a matter of a single step, and squatted across from her. Kalr Five stopped in the doorway. “What’s your name?” I asked. Governor Giarod had said that this person had refused to speak, from the moment she’d been arrested. She was scheduled for interrogation the next morning. But of course, for an interrogation to work, you had to know what questions to ask. Chances were, no one here did.

  “You won’t be able to keep your secret,” I continued, addressing the person squatting on the floor in front of me staring at her bowl of skel. They had left her no utensil to eat it
with—fearing, perhaps, that she might do herself an injury with it. She would have to eat the thick leaves with her hands, or put her face into the bowl, either option unpleasant and demeaning, to a Radchaai. “You’re scheduled for an interrogation in the morning. I’m sure they’ll be as careful as they can, but I don’t think it’s ever a terribly pleasant experience.” And, like a lot of people annexed by the Radch, most Ychana were convinced that interrogation was inseparable from the re-education a convicted criminal would undergo to ensure she wouldn’t offend again. Certainly the drugs used were the same, and an incompetent interrogator could do a good deal of damage to a person. Even the most Radchaai of Radchaai had something of a horror of interrogation and re-education, and tried to avoid mentioning either one, would walk all around the topics even when they were obviously staring them in the face.

  Still no answer. She did not even look up. I was just as capable as this person was of sitting in silence. I thought of asking Station to show me what it could see of her—certainly temperature changes, possibly heart rate, possibly more. I didn’t doubt that what sensors existed here in Security were set to pick up as much information as possible from inmates. But I doubted I would see anything surprising in that data. “Do you know any songs?” I asked.

  Almost, I thought I saw a change, however small, in the set of her shoulders, in the way she held herself. My question had surprised her. It was, I had to admit, an inane one. Nearly everyone I had met, in my two-thousand-year life, had known at least a few songs. Station said, in my ear, “That surprised her, Fleet Captain.”

  “No doubt,” I responded, silently. Didn’t look up as Five stepped back into the corridor to make way for Eight, carrying a box, gold inlaid with red and blue and green. Before I had left the governor’s office, I had messaged to ask her to bring it. I gestured to her to set it on the floor beside me. And when she had done so, I opened the lid.