Ancillary Justice (29 page)

I was compelled to obey this Mianaai, in order to lead her to believe that she did indeed compel me. But in that case, she
did
compel me. Acting for one Mianaai or the other was indistinguishable. And of course, in the end, whatever their differences, they were both the same.

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

Lieutenant Awn lay on the floor of the Var decade room, facedown again, dead. The floor under her would need repair,
and cleaning. The urgent issue, the important thing, at that moment, was to get One Esk moving because in approximately half a second no amount of filtering I could do would hide the strength of its reaction and I really needed to tell the captain what had happened and I couldn’t remember Mianaai’s enemy—Mianaai herself—laying down the orders I knew she had laid on me and why couldn’t One Esk see how important it was, we weren’t ready to move openly yet and I’d lost officers before and who was One Esk anyway except me, myself, and Lieutenant Awn was dead and she had said,
I should have died rather than obey you
.

And then One Var swung the gun up and shot Anaander Mianaai point-blank in the face.

In a room down the corridor, Anaander Mianaai leaped with a cry of rage off the bed she’d been lying on. “Aatr’s tits,
she was here before me
!” In the same moment she transmitted the code that would force One Var’s armor down, until she reauthorized its use. It was a command that didn’t rely on my obedience, an override neither Anaander would have wanted to do away with.

“Captain,” I said, “now we
really
have a problem.”

In another room down the same corridor, the third Mianaai—the second, now, I suppose—opened one of the cases she had brought with her and pulled out a sidearm, and stepped quickly into the corridor and shot the nearest One Var in the back of the head. The one who had spoken opened her own case, pulled out a sidearm and also a box I recognized from Jen Shinnan’s house, in the upper city, on Shis’urna. Using it would disadvantage her as well as me, but it would disadvantage me badly. In the seconds she took to arm the device I formed intentions, transmitted orders to constituent parts.

“What problem?” asked Captain Rubran, now standing. Afraid.

And then I fell to pieces.

A familiar sensation. For the smallest fragment of a second I smelled humid air and lake water, thought,
Where’s Lieutenant Awn?
and then I recovered myself, and the memory of what I had to do. Tea bowls rang and shattered as I dropped what I was holding and ran from the Esk decade room, down the corridor. Other segments, separated from me again as they had been in Ors, muttering, whispering, the only way I could think between all my bodies, opened lockers, handed guns, and the first to be armed forced the lift doors open and began to climb down the shaft. Lieutenants protested, ordered me to stop, to explain. Tried fruitlessly to block my way.

I—that is, almost the entirety of One Esk—would secure the central access deck, prevent Anaander Mianaai from damaging my—
Justice of Toren
’s—brain. So long as
Justice of Toren
lived, unconverted to her cause, it—I—was a danger to her.

I—One Esk Nineteen—had separate orders. Instead of climbing down the shaft to central access I ran the other way, toward the Esk hold and the airlock on its far side.

I wasn’t, apparently, responding to any of my lieutenants, or even Commander Tiaund, but when Lieutenant Dariet cried, “Ship! Have you lost your mind?” I answered.

“The Lord of the Radch shot Lieutenant Awn!” cried a segment somewhere in the corridor behind me. “She’s been on Var deck all this time.”

That silenced my officers—including Lieutenant Dariet—for only a second.

“If that’s even true… but if it is, the Lord of the Radch wouldn’t have shot her for no reason.”

Behind me the segments of myself that hadn’t yet begun their climb down the lift shaft hissed and gasped in frustration and anger. “Useless!” I heard myself say to Lieutenant Dariet as at the end of the corridor I manually opened the hold door. “You’re as bad as Lieutenant Issaaia! At least Lieutenant Awn
knew
she held her in contempt!”

An indignant cry, surely Lieutenant Issaaia, and Dariet said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not functioning right, Ship!”

The door slid open, and I could not stop to hear the rest, but plunged into the hold. A deep, steady thunking shook the deck I ran on, a sound just hours ago I thought I would never hear again. Mianaai was opening the Var holds. Any ancillary she thawed would have no memory of recent events, nothing to tell it not to obey this Mianaai. And its armor wouldn’t have been disabled.

She would take Two Var and Three and Four and as many as she had time to awaken, and try to take either the central access deck or the engines. More likely both. She had, after all, Var and every hold below it. Though the segments would be clumsy and confused. They would have no memory of functioning apart, the way I had, no practice. But numbers were on her side. I had only the segments that had been awake at the moment I fragmented.

Above, my officers had access to the upper half of the holds. And they would have no reason not to obey Anaander Mianaai, no reason not to think I had lost my mind. I was, at this moment, explaining matters to Hundred Captain Rubran, but I had no confidence she would believe me, or think me even remotely sane.

Around me, the same thunking began that was sounding below my feet. My officers were pulling up Esk segments to
thaw. I reached the airlock, threw open the locker beside it, pulled out the pieces of the vacuum suit that would fit this segment.

I didn’t know how long I could hold central access, or the engines. I didn’t know how desperate Anaander Mianaai might be, what damage she might think I could do to her. The engines’ heat shield was, by design, extremely difficult to breach, but I knew how to do it. And the Lord of the Radch certainly did as well.

And whatever happened between here and there, it was a near-certainty I would die shortly after I reached Valskaay, if not before. But I would not die without explaining myself.

I would have to reach and board a shuttle, and then manually undock, and depart
Justice of Toren
—myself—at exactly the right time, at exactly the right speed, on exactly the right heading, fly through the wall of my surrounding bubble of normal space at exactly the right moment.

If I did all that, I would find myself in a system with a gate, four jumps from Irei Palace, one of Anaander Mianaai’s provincial headquarters. I could tell her what had happened.

The shuttles were docked on this side of the ship. The hatches and the undocking ought to work smoothly, it was all equipment I had tested and maintained myself. Still, I found myself worrying that something would go wrong. At least it was better than thinking about fighting my own officers. Or the heat shield’s failing.

I fastened my helmet. My breath hissed loud in my ears. Faster than it should have. I forced myself to slow my breathing, deepen it. Hyperventilating wouldn’t help. I had to move quickly, but not so hastily that I made some fatally foolish mistake.

Waiting for the airlock to cycle, I felt my aloneness like
an impenetrable wall pressing around me. Usually one body’s off-kilter emotion was a minor, easily dismissable thing. Now it was
only
this one body, nothing beyond to temper my distress. The rest of me was here, all around, but inaccessible. Soon, if things went right, I wouldn’t even be near my self, or have any idea when I might rejoin it. And at this moment I could do nothing but wait. And remember the feel of the gun in One Var’s hand—my hand. I was One Esk, but what was the difference? The recoil as One Var shot Lieutenant Awn. The guilt and helpless anger that had overwhelmed me had receded at that moment, overcome by more urgent necessity, but now I had time to remember. My next three breaths were ragged and sobbing. For a moment I was perversely glad I was hidden from myself.

I had to calm myself. Had to clear my mind. I thought of songs I knew.
My heart is a fish
, I thought, but when I opened my mouth to sing it, my throat closed. I swallowed. Breathed. Thought of another one.

Oh, have you gone to the battlefield

Armored and well armed?

And shall dreadful events

Force you to drop your weapons?

The outer door opened. If Mianaai had not used her device, officers on duty would have seen that the lock had opened, would have notified Captain Rubran, drawing Mianaai’s attention. But she had used it, and she had no way of knowing what I did. I reached around the doorway for a handhold and pulled myself out.

Looking at the inside of a gateway often made humans queasy. It had never bothered me before, but now I was
nothing but a single human body I found it did the same to me. Black, but a black that seemed simultaneously an unthinkable depth into which I might fall,
was
falling, and a suffocating closeness ready to press me into nonexistence.

I forced myself to look away. Here, outside, there was no floor, no gravity generator to keep me in place and give me an up and down. I moved from one handhold to the next. What was happening behind me, inside the ship that was no longer my body?

It took seventeen minutes to reach a shuttle, operate its emergency hatch, and perform a manual undock. At first I fought the desire to halt, to look behind me, to listen for the sounds of someone coming to stop me, never mind I couldn’t have heard anything outside my own helmet.
Just maintenance
, I told myself.
Just maintenance outside the hull. You’ve done it hundreds of times.

If anyone came I could do nothing. Esk would have failed—
I
would have failed. And my time was limited. I might not be stopped, and still fail. I could not think of any of that.

When the moment came, I was ready and away. My view was limited to fore and aft, the only two hardwired cameras on the shuttle. As
Justice of Toren
receded in the aft view, the rising sense of panic that I had mostly held in check till now overtook me. What was I doing? Where was I going? What could I possibly accomplish alone and single-bodied, deaf and blind and cut off? What could be the point of defying Anaander Mianaai, who had made me, who owned me, who was unutterably more powerful than I would ever be?

I breathed. I would return to the Radch. I would eventually return to
Justice of Toren
, even if only for the last moments of my life. My blindness and deafness were irrelevant. There was only the task before me. There was nothing to do but sit
in the pilot’s chair and watch
Justice of Toren
get smaller, and farther away. Think of another song.

According to the chronometer, if I had done everything exactly as I should,
Justice of Toren
would disappear from my screen in four minutes and thirty-two seconds. I watched, counting, trying not to think of anything else.

The aft view flashed bright, blue-white, and my breath stopped. When the screen cleared I saw nothing but black—and stars. I had exited my self-made gate.

I had exited more than four minutes too soon. And what had that flash been? I ought only to have seen the ship disappear, the stars suddenly spring into existence.

Mianaai had not attempted to take central access, or join forces with the officers on the upper decks. The moment she realized I had already fallen to her enemy, she must have resolved immediately to take the most desperate course available to her. She and what Var ancillaries she had serving her had taken my engines, and breached the heat shield. How I had escaped and not vaporized along with the rest of the ship, I couldn’t account for, but there had been that flash, and here I still was.

Justice of Toren
was gone, and all aboard it. I was not where I was supposed to be, might be unreachably distant from Radch space, or any human worlds at all. All possibility of being reunited with myself was gone. The captain was dead. All my officers were dead. Civil war loomed.

I had shot Lieutenant Awn.

Nothing would ever be right again.

Luckily for me, I had come out of gate-space on the fringes of a backwater, non-Radchaai system, a collection of habitats and mining stations inhabited by heavily modified people—not human, by Radchaai standards, people with six or eight limbs (and no guarantee any of them would be legs), vacuum-adapted skin and lungs, brains so meshed and crosshatched with implants and wiring it was an open question whether they were anything but conscious machines with a biological interface.

It was a mystery to them that anyone would choose the sort of primitive form most humans I knew were born with. But they prized their isolation, and it was a dearly held tenet of their society that, with a few exceptions (most of which they would not actually admit to), one did not ask for anything a person did not volunteer. They viewed me with a combination of puzzlement and mild contempt, and treated me as though I were a child who had wandered into their midst and they might keep half an eye on me until my parents found me, but really I wasn’t their responsibility. If any of them
guessed my origin—and surely they did, the shuttle alone was enough—they didn’t say so, and no one pressed me for answers, something they would have found appallingly rude. They were silent, clannish, self-contained, but they were also brusquely generous at unpredictable intervals. I would still be there, or dead, if not for that.

I spent six months trying to understand how to do anything—not just how to get my message to the Lord of the Radch, but how to walk and breathe and sleep and eat as myself. As a
myself
that was only a fragment of what I had been, with no conceivable future beyond eternally wishing for what was gone. Then one day a human ship arrived, and the captain was happy to take me on board in exchange for what little money I had left from scrapping the shuttle, which had been running up docking charges I couldn’t pay otherwise. I found out later that a four-meter, tentacled eel of a person had paid the balance of my fare without telling me, because, she had told the captain, I didn’t belong there and would be healthier elsewhere. Odd people, as I said, and I owe them a great deal, though they would be offended and distressed to think anyone owed them anything.