Ancillary Justice (20 page)

On the shuttle, in front of One Esk, Lieutenant Awn sat silent, jaw clenched. She was in some respects more physically comfortable than she had ever been in Ors—the temperature, twenty degrees C, was more suitable for her uniform jacket and trousers. And the stink of swamp water had been replaced by the more familiar and more easily tolerable smell of recycled air. But the tiny spaces—which when she had first come to
Justice of Toren
had excited pride in her assignment and anticipation of what the future might hold—now seemed to trap and confine her. She was tense and unhappy.

Esk Decade Commander Tiaund sat in her tiny office. It held only two chairs and a desk close against one wall, barely more than a shelf, and space for perhaps two more people to stand. “Lieutenant Awn has returned,” I said to her, and to Hundred Captain Rubran on the command deck. The shuttle docked with a
thunk
.

Captain Rubran frowned. She had been surprised and
dismayed at the news of Lieutenant Awn’s sudden return. The order had come directly from Anaander Mianaai, who was not to be questioned. Along with it had come orders not to ask what had happened.

In her office on the Esk deck, Commander Tiaund sighed, closed her eyes, and said, “Tea.” She sat silent till Two Esk brought her a cup and a flask, poured, and set both at the commander’s elbow. “She’ll see me at her earliest convenience.”

One Esk’s attention was mostly on Lieutenant Awn, threading her way through the lift and the narrow white corridors that would take her to the Esk decade, to her own quarters. I read relief when she found those corridors empty except for Two Esk.

“Commander Tiaund will see you at your earliest convenience,” I said to Lieutenant Awn, transmitting directly to her. She acknowledged with a brief twitch of her fingers as she entered the Esk corridors.

Two Esk vacated the deck, filing down the corridor to the hold and its waiting suspension pods, and One Esk took up whatever tasks Two Esk had been doing, and also followed Lieutenant Awn. Above, on Medical, a tech medic began to lay out what she needed to replace One Esk’s missing segment.

At the door of her own small quarters—the same that more than a thousand years before had belonged to Lieutenant Seivarden—Lieutenant Awn turned to say something to the segment that followed her, and then stopped. “What?” she asked after an instant. “Something’s wrong, what is it?”

“Please excuse me, Lieutenant,” I said. “In the next few minutes the tech medic will connect a new segment. I might be unresponsive for a short while.”

“Unresponsive,” she said, feeling momentarily overwhelmed
for some reason I couldn’t quite understand. And then guilty, and angry. She stood before the unopened door of her quarters, took two breaths, and then turned and went back down the corridor toward the lift.

A new segment’s nervous system has to be more or less functional for the hookup. They’d tried it in the past with dead bodies, and failed. The same with fully sedated bodies—the connection was never made properly. Sometimes the new segment is given a tranquilizer, but sometimes the tech medic prefers to thaw the new body out and tie it down quickly, without any sedation at all. This eliminates the chancy step of sedating just the right amount, but it always makes for an uncomfortable hookup.

This particular tech medic didn’t care much about my comfort. She wasn’t obliged to care, of course.

Lieutenant Awn entered the lift that would bring her to Medical just as the tech medic triggered the release on the suspension pod that held the body. The lid swung up, and for a hundredth of a second the body lay still and icy within its pool of fluid.

The tech medic rolled the body out of the pod onto a neighboring table, the fluid sliding and sheeting off it, and in the same moment it awoke, convulsive, choking and gagging. The preserving medium slides out of throat and lungs easily on its own, but the first few times the experience is a discomfiting one. Lieutenant Awn exited the lift, strode down the corridor toward Medical with One Esk Eighteen close behind her.

The tech medic went swiftly to work, and suddenly I was on the table (I was walking behind Lieutenant Awn, I was taking up the mending Two Esk had set down on its way to the holds, I was laying myself down on my small, close bunks,
I was wiping a counter in the decade room) and I could see and hear but I had no control of the new body and its terror raised the heart rates of all One Esk’s segments. The new segment’s mouth opened and it screamed and in the background it heard laughter. I flailed, the binding came loose and I rolled off the table, fell a meter and a half to the floor with a painful
thud
.
Don’t don’t don’t
, I thought at the body, but it wasn’t listening. It was sick, it was terrified, it was dying. It pushed itself up and crawled, dizzy, where it didn’t care so long as it got away.

Then hands under my arms (elsewhere One Esk was motionless) urging me up, and Lieutenant Awn. “Help,” I croaked, not in Radchaai. Damn medic pulled out a body without a decent voice. “Help me.”

“It’s all right.” Lieutenant Awn shifted her grip, put her arms around the new segment, pulled me in closer. It was shivering, still cold from suspension, and from terror. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right.” The segment gasped and sobbed for what seemed forever and I thought maybe it was going to throw up until… the connection clicked home and I had control of it. I stopped the sobbing.

“There,” said Lieutenant Awn. Horrified. Sick to her stomach. “Much better.” I saw that she was newly angry, or perhaps this was another edge of the distress I’d seen since the temple. “Don’t injure my unit,” Lieutenant Awn said curtly, and I realized that though she was still looking at me, she was talking to the tech medic.

“I didn’t, Lieutenant,” answered the tech medic, with a trace of scorn in her voice. They’d had this conversation at greater and more acrimonious length, during the annexation. The medic had said,
It’s not like it’s human. It’s been in the hold a thousand years, it’s nothing but a part of the ship
.
Lieutenant Awn had complained to Commander Tiaund, who hadn’t understood Lieutenant Awn’s anger, and said so, but thereafter I hadn’t dealt with that particular medic. “If you’re so squeamish,” the medic continued, “maybe you’re in the wrong place.”

Lieutenant Awn turned, angry, and left the room without saying anything further. I turned and walked back to the table with some trepidation. The segment was already resisting, and I knew that this tech medic wouldn’t care if it hurt when she put in my armor, and the rest of my implants.

Things were always a bit clumsy while I got used to a new segment—it would occasionally drop things, or fire off disorienting impulses, random jolts of fear or nausea. Things always seemed off-kilter for a bit. But after a week or two it would usually settle down. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes a segment simply would not function properly, and then it would have to be removed and replaced. They screen the bodies, of course, but it’s not perfect.

The voice wasn’t the sort I preferred, and it didn’t know any interesting songs. Not ones I didn’t already know, anyway. I still can’t shake the slight, and definitely irrational, suspicion that the tech medic chose that particular body just to annoy me.

After a quick bath, in which I assisted, and a change into a clean uniform, Lieutenant Awn presented herself to Commander Tiaund.

“Awn.” The decade commander waved Lieutenant Awn to the opposite chair. “I’m glad to have you back, of course.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Lieutenant Awn, sitting.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon. I was sure you’d be downside for a while longer.” Lieutenant Awn didn’t answer.
Commander Tiaund waited for five seconds in silence, and then said, “I would ask what happened, but I’m ordered not to.”

Lieutenant Awn opened her mouth, took a breath to speak, stopped. Surprised. I had said nothing to her about the orders not to ask what had happened. Corresponding orders to Lieutenant Awn not to tell anyone had not come. A test, I suspected, which I was quite confident Lieutenant Awn would pass.

“Bad?” asked Commander Tiaund. Wanting very much to know more, pushing her luck asking even that much.

“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Awn looked down at her gloved hands, resting in her lap. “Very.”

“Your fault?”

“Everything on my watch is my responsibility, isn’t it, sir?”

“Yes,” Commander Tiaund acknowledged. “But I’m having trouble imagining you doing anything… improper.” The word was weighted in Radchaai, part of a triad of justice, propriety, and benefit. Using it, Commander Tiaund implied more than just that she expected Lieutenant Awn to follow regulations or etiquette. Implied she suspected some injustice was behind events. Though she could certainly not say so plainly—she possessed none of the facts of the matter and surely did not wish to give anyone the impression she did. And if Lieutenant Awn were to be punished for some breach, she wouldn’t want to have publicly taken Lieutenant Awn’s part no matter what her private opinion.

Commander Tiaund sighed, perhaps out of frustrated curiosity. “Well,” she continued, with feigned cheerfulness. “Now you’ve got plenty of time to catch up on gym time. And you’re way behind on renewing your marksmanship certification.”

Lieutenant Awn forced a humorless smile. There had been no gym in Ors, nor anyplace remotely resembling a firing range. “Yes, sir.”

“And Lieutenant, please don’t go up to Medical unless you really need to.”

I could see Lieutenant Awn wanted to protest, to complain. But that, too, would have been a repeat of an earlier conversation. “Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

By the time Lieutenant Awn finally entered her quarters, it was nearly time for supper—a formal meal, eaten in the decade room in the company of the other Esk lieutenants. Lieutenant Awn pled exhaustion—no lie, as it happened: she had barely slept six hours since she’d left Ors nearly three days before.

She sat on her bunk, slumped and staring, until I entered, eased off her boots, and took her coat. “All right,” she said then, closed her eyes and swiveled her legs up onto the bunk. “I get the hint.” She was asleep five seconds after she laid her head down.

The next morning eighteen of my twenty Esk lieutenants stood in the decade room, drinking tea and waiting for breakfast. By custom they couldn’t sit without the senior-most lieutenant.

The Esk decade room’s walls were white, with a blue-and-yellow border painted just under the ceiling. On one wall, opposite a long counter, were secured various trophies of past annexations—scraps of two flags, red and black and green; a pink clay roof tile with a raised design of leaves molded into it; an ancient sidearm (unloaded) and its elegantly styled
holster; a jeweled Ghaonish mask. An entire window from a Valskaayan temple, colored glass arranged to form a picture of a woman holding a broom in one hand, three small animals at her feet. I remembered taking it out of the wall myself and carrying it back here. Every decade room on the ship had a window from that same building. The temple’s vestments and equipment had been thrown into the street, or found their way to other decade rooms on other ships. It was normal practice to absorb any religion the Radch ran across, to fit its gods into an already blindingly complex genealogy, or to say merely that the supreme, creator deity was Amaat under another name and let the rest sort themselves out. Some quirk of Valskaayan religion made this difficult for them, and the result had been destructive. Among the recent changes in Radch policy, Anaander Mianaai had legalized the practice of Valskaay’s insistently separate religion, and the governor of Valskaay had given the building back. There had been talk of returning the windows, since we had still at that time been in orbit around Valskaay itself, but ultimately they were replaced with copies. Not long after, the decades below Esk were emptied and closed, but the windows still hung on the walls of the empty, dark decade rooms.

Lieutenant Issaaia entered, walked straight to the icon of Toren in its corner niche, and lit the incense waiting in the red bowl at the icon’s feet. Six officers frowned, and two made a very quiet, surprised murmur. Only Lieutenant Dariet spoke. “Is Awn not coming to breakfast?”

Lieutenant Issaaia turned toward Lieutenant Dariet, showed an expression of surprise that did not, so far as I could tell, mirror her actual feelings, and said, “Amaat’s grace! I completely forgot Awn was back.”

At the back of the group, safely shielded from Lieutenant
Issaaia’s view, one very junior lieutenant cast a look at another very junior lieutenant.

“It’s been so very quiet,” Lieutenant Issaaia continued. “It’s difficult to believe she
is
back.”

“Silence and cold ashes,” quoted the junior lieutenant who had received the other’s meaningful glance, more daring than her companion. The poem quoted was an elegy for someone whose funeral offerings had been deliberately neglected. I saw Lieutenant Issaaia react with an instant of ambivalence—the next line spoke of food offerings not made for the dead, and the junior lieutenant conceivably might have been criticizing Lieutenant Awn for not coming to supper the night before, or breakfast on time this morning.

“It really is One Esk,” said another lieutenant, concealing her smirk at the very junior lieutenant’s cleverness, looking closely at the segments that were at the moment laying out plates of fish and fruit on the counter. “Maybe Awn broke it of its bad habits. I hope so.”

“Why so quiet, One?” asked Lieutenant Dariet.

“Oh, don’t get it started,” groaned another lieutenant. “It’s too early for all that noise.”

“If it was Awn, good for her,” said Lieutenant Issaaia. “A little late though.”

“Like now,” said a lieutenant at Lieutenant Issaaia’s elbow. “Give me food while yet I live.” Another quote, another reference to funeral offerings and a rebuttal in case the junior lieutenant had intended insult in the wrong direction. “Is she coming or not? If she isn’t coming she should say so.”

At that moment Lieutenant Awn was in the bath, and I was attending her. I could have told the lieutenants that Lieutenant Awn would be there soon, but I said nothing, only noted the
level and temperature of the tea in the black glass bowls various lieutenants held, and continued to lay out breakfast plates.