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“Fire,” Anaander Mianaai said.
One Esk Nineteen raised the weapon and fired.
“Lieutenant,” One Esk Nineteen said, “please come this way.”
Awn blinked. Before her, stretched out on the white-painted metallic floor, the dead body of the Lord of the Radch. Behind her, One Esk Nineteen’s steady presence. Beneath her, the textured metal, digging into her knees through the thin fabric of her uniform leggings. Above her, the dim red flicker of emergency lighting. Faintly, she could hear Justice of Toren’s combat klaxons going off, the deep tones she had never head outside of combat drills.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered.
“Lieutenant,” One Esk said again. One Esk, who had just shot Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch. For her.
Awn tried to get up, and found that her leg muscles were weak and her body was trembling. A moment ago, filled with rage and despair, she’d told herself that she was prepared to die, that it was the only just and proper route available to her. But she hadn’t died, and now the fear was catching up to her. Half consciously, she waited, on the floor, for ancillaries to take her elbows, help her up without needing to be asked. When the helping hands didn’t appear, she stumbled to her feet on her own.
One Esk’s face was as calm and expressionless as ever, but its body was shaking worse than Awn’s. The segment stared at the hand holding the gun, and slowly it stilled.
A ship had shot the Lord of the Radch. Awn didn’t understand. It shouldn’t have been possible. “Are you all right?” she asked, more timid than she’d been with One since her days as a baby lieutenant, eight years previously.
“Please,” one of the Var ancillaries said. “There’s another of her here and she’ll try to get to my core.”
Awn nodded. “What should I-”
A door to the Var dormitories opened, and another, slightly younger, Anaander Mianaai entered, holding a raised weapon, rage distorting her classical features. Awn felt herself knocked to the floor again, One Esk Nineteen a heavy weight on top of her. She gasped, breath knocked out of her. There was the sound of a gunshot, and then shouts. One Esk rolled off of Awn, and she lifted her head to see a struggling Anaander, silver shield glittering, pinned between two Var segments. Another Var lay dead on the ground. “But your shields,” Awn murmured, dazed.
“Disabled,” one of the Vars said. “She has access.”
“There’s another one.” The other Var. “You need to leave.”
One Esk stood up, told her “This way,” and gestured down the left hand corridor, towards the airlock. Awn pushed herself up, and then to motion, walking at a speed just short of a jog. One Esk followed, close enough on her heels to be uncomfortable, constantly turning to look around them, which was odd. The segment was humming, almost too quiet to be audible. Music, for the firsts time in weeks. Awn found herself bizarrely comforted. Blood was still rushing loudly through her ears, but listening to the humming- my heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass- she felt her heart rate slow.
Twenty meters out of the decade room three more Var ancillaries came out of side corridors. “The Lord,” One Esk asked them, still pushing Awn forward. Awn had only heard Justice of Toren talk to itself once before- on Shis'urna, in Ors- when communications had been cut off, probably by Anaander Mianaai, because nothing else made sense, and things still didn’t make sense but she grasped at the realization that it had happened again, that Justice of Toren was fragmented.
“Killed four of us,” one of the Vars said, dispassionately, keeping pace. “She took a lift down level. The rest of Var went after her.”
“She’ll wake the other decades.”
“Yes. Tell Captain Osk.”
“Tell her yourself,” One Esk said, pushing Awn through the open pressure door at the end of the corridor. “I’m getting the lieutenant to safety.”
“There are more important-”
“No,” One said, and the pressure door closed, and Awn realized they were in the room before the airlock. One went to one of the lockers and opened it, pulling out a vacuum suit and tossing it at Awn. “Put it on,” she said, and opened a second locker to get a suit of her own.
Awn obeyed. It ought to have felt strange, and wrong, obeying orders from an ancillary. But the world had tilted upside-down, and she welcomed the reassurance that came with orders to be followed, from a source she trusted. There was no one, she realized, that she trusted more than One Esk. She’d already put her life in Justice of Toren’s hands, every day since she’d been commissioned. Maybe this wasn’t so different.
“The decades?” she asked, pulling the suit’s top piece over her head.
“She’ll defrost them,” One Esk said. “She has accesses, of course. She’ll be able to control them. The rest of me will try to defend the core, but she’ll have the advantage of numbers.” The ancillary tilted its head, listening, and Awn finally noticed the roar of Justice of Toren’s great engine, going at full power when it should have been nearly silent. Justice of Toren would arrive at Valskaay ahead of schedule.
“How come she wasn’t able to control you?”
“Too long a story,” One Esk said. It was finished with the suit already, and moved to help Awn, sealing the pieces together.
The pressure door opened again, and two more Esk soldiers entered. Three and eleven, Awn noted abstractly. The shoulder and front of Three’s uniform was dark, wet with some spilled liquid. Awn half thought it ought to be blood, but there was no red. Water, or tea perhaps. They both looked first at her, then at Nineteen.
“Is this best?”
“I don’t know. It’s what we came up with, when we were us. Do you have a better idea?”
“No. I- we- no.”
“Is she-”
“Fine. The others?”
“Confused. They won’t be any use.”
Nineteen nodded. Eleven moved to help with Awn’s suit. Three went to the panel by the airlock and began tapping out a sequence.
Awn felt a shudder pass through her body, from neck to knees. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe,” Eleven said.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” Three said from across the room. “I- we- I’ll explain as much as I can as soon as I can. Please trust me.”
“I do,” Awn said, and the hands busily checking the straps on her suit stilled, the tapping stopped.
Then One Esk- all of the One Esks- said, in ragged chorus, “Thank you,” and moved once again at inhuman speed.
One Esk Nineteen tightened the last strap, looked Awn over and nodded. “Ready.”
Three and Eleven looked at Awn. “Goodbye, Lieutenant,” one said, and the other, gravely, “It has been an honor to serve under you.”
“Oh, God,” Awn cried, voice suddenly choked. “The others- the Captain- Dariet- everyone-”
“Don’t worry,” Eleven said. “We’ll protect them.”
It was wrong- Awn felt the wrongness, knew she was running away, letting Justice of Toren prioritize her above her fellow officers, for some reason she couldn’t begin to understand- but she also felt the urgency of the situation, knew that she didn’t have enough knowledge to do anything but trust in her ship. “Thank you,” she said, and impulsively reached out to embrace first Eleven and then Three in quick hugs, face burning red with embarrassment. The segments stood frozen and awkward, and Awn stepped back hurriedly, still blushing. She remembered Nineteen on the floor in the medical room, clinging to her, sobbing. “Thank you,” she said again.
“Now,” Nineteen said behind her, and the other two exited, and there was a rush of air as the airlock cycled, and Awn closed her eyes and tried to breathe slowly. She was alive. Two Anaander Mianaais were dead. Another was engaged in battle with Justice of Toren. Skaaiat- Skaaiat was a suspected traitor, but there couldn’t be any proof- because there wasn’t any, of course, and because the Lord of the Radch hadn’t been able to move against her directly- Skaaiat must be safe for the moment, she had to be. Skaaiat was on Shis'Urna, in Ors, dealing with the relatives of all the people Awn had ordered killed in the temple. The people who had died because the Lord of the Radch was at war with herself. The people gunned down by Justice of Toren One Esk, who had disobeyed a direct order, who was giving Awn orders, protecting her, when she’d done nothing to deserve it-
The airlock finished cycling. One Esk bent over, clambered into the shuttle. Awn followed, strapped herself into the copilot’s seat on automatic, looked up and out at the sickening view of gate space. She could hear her breathing inside her helmet, could hear One Esk Nineteen’s breathing over the direct shuttle communications.
There was a sickening lurch as they moved away from the troop carrier and left its artificial gravity. Awn breathed in and out, watching Justice of Toren shrink in the rear view monitor. She remembered her last shuttle trip, only a few weeks ago. It seemed longer now. It had been a long trip. She’d been heavy with misery, and One Esk had been silent.
“Where are we going?” she asked, again. There was a pause, then the segment next to her in the pilot’s seat said,
“If my calculations were correct, we should exit gate space into a populated, non-Radch system.”
“The other officers-”
“They wouldn’t have listened to me. They probably still aren’t listening to me.”
Awn looked back at the monitor, at Justice of Toren’s great bulk, the glow of its engines. It was shrinking swiftly now. She tried to imagine what was happening on board, and couldn’t.
She didn’t look at One Esk Nineteen when she next spoke. “Why didn’t you shoot me?”
Silence again. Then quiet words, crackling through the helmet speakers. “If you’re going to do something crazy, you do it when it will make a difference.”
She’d known One was listening, of course. One was always listening. But she hadn’t imagined the conversation would mean anything to a Radchaai troop carrier. In retrospect, she’d been so very arrogant.
“Four more minutes,” One Esk Nineteen said, “and then we’ll-”
There was a flash of bright, pale blue light, a blur of spinning stars, and then they were tumbling back out into the universe.
One Esk Nineteen was crying.
Awn sat very still in the shuttle’s copilot seat, the restraining belt digging into her ribcage. It had automatically locked when they had been thrown out of gate space. Breathing was now a mildly uncomfortable undertaking, but she wasn’t quite ready to release the straps yet. She just sat, watching a few stars wheel past on the monitors, listening to an ancillary sob.
One Esk Nineteen wasn’t crying the way humans usually cried, either muffled and embarrassed or plaintive, attention-seeking. It was simply crying out of pain, tears and mucus dripping down its very young face, its small, compact frame convulsing in a regular rhythm, the body expressing itself freely with no intervention from the brain. Perhaps there was no overriding personality sending messages from the brain any more. Awn had never heard of ancillaries surviving the destruction of a ship. As far as she knew, it had never happened. Ships were not destroyed, not for millennia, not except in the most extremely unusual circumstances, freak accidents due to unpredictable factors, a miscalculated Gate or a catastrophic systems failure, and they always went down with all hands aboard.
Until now. Until the two of them. Though for how long they would survive, Awn had no idea.
Wherever Justice of Toren had intended the shuttle to arrive, it clearly hadn’t been here, this far edge of an empty system. The shuttle radio picked up only faint static from very distant, non-Radchaai signals. Awn had checked the inventory and there was enough water and rations to last them about a week, perhaps twice that if stretched, if there was no problem with life support, and there shouldn’t be; Justice of Toren equipment was always kept to peak condition and rarely failed.
Awn had entertained the idea of being rescued and making their way home, for about ten minutes. If she’d understood that brief, confusing conversation in the Var decade room correctly, there were at least two Anaander Mianaais, and the one that favored an end to annexation- the one who had first visited and coopted Justice of Toren- would have no clear reason to wish Awn any ill. But the other Anaander Mianaai had been on board for several weeks, had arranged the situation on Ors months before that, had presumably begun investigating Awn ever since she’d set foot on Shis'urna and decided that she would follow her own judgment in handling the annexation. If Awn and One Esk reappeared, the lone survivors of terrible destruction, she would surely guess at the sequence of events leading to their ship’s annihilation. She would have great motive to prevent either of them from ever reaching any briefing or interrogation.
One Esk Nineteen was crying and Awn should be doing something, anything, to comfort, to ease pain, to console.
She stared at her gloved hands, resting in her lap, and indulged in some minor self loathing.
Awn Elming had been assigned to Justice of Toren’s One Esk decade at seventeen, a junior officer- or baby lieutenant, as the more senior officers called her- with only two years of specialized schooling to prepare her. Two weeks after she received her assignment, and two days after she came aboard the ship, Justice of Toren was assigned to the annexation of a world known to the Radch as Andaara. The annexation had been in progress for two years, but the fleet captain in command of the annexation had been unable to adequately pacify an inventive and tenacious guerrilla resistance and had requested backup in the form of Justice of Toren’s two thousand armored troops.
Awn was the twentieth and most junior Esk officer. Fifteen years later, she would be the most senior, having served in the Esk decade longer even than the decade commander. Having watched every last one of her fellow officers ascend to more prestigious postings, while she, cooks’ daughter, remained safely out of sight in the middle ranks of a Justice relegated to the edges of Radch space. She hadn’t anticipated that, when she was seventeen and full of nervous determination. She’d been thrilled to be on a military ship at all, excited to be given a chance to prove her value to the cause of civilization.
That thrill had lasted even when One Esk was dropped into Andarra’s most rebellious province, even when she’d followed her senior officer into a scorched, half-collapsed municipal building and observed as the officer barked questions at a small pale person who stared at the Radchaai officers with a dull mix of fear and disgust, who flinched whenever a One Esk segment passed too close to her. It lasted when the senior officer ordered the decade into a parade through dusty, bombed-out streets. It lasted until a thin dust-coated figure standing on the edge of the road spat at Awn when she walked by, and Lieutenant Kalaat made a brief, short gesture with one hand, and One Esk Thirteen immediately drew its weapon and shot the figure in the head.
One Esk Thirteen was decapitated two months later, setting off a homemade explosive while clearing an abandoned medical center for Radchaai use. In total, One Esk lost a third of its segments in the five months it was stationed in Okar Province. The medics on ship had already connected replacements by the time One Esk was recalled, so Awn didn’t observe the replacement process. Not then.
At some point, Awn slept. When she woke, the first thing she noticed was that One Esk Nineteen was no longer crying. Awn opened her eyes, and saw One Esk Nineteen looking at her, black pupils surrounded by pale brown irises, in a painfully young face as blank as stone. The tear tracks on its face were smudged.
One Esk Nineteen said, “A ship has been hailing us for the past seventeen minutes.”
Awn scrambled for the control interface. Her heartrate slowly leveled as she took in the information the shuttle’s instruments were giving her. The signal was decidedly not Radchaai military, not Radchaai at all, the inquiry in a language Awn didn’t read. “Er-” she said, uncertain. “One- do you- can you-” Justice of Toren could read any language recorded by the Radchaai translator corps. But Justice of Toren was gone, and Awn had no idea how much of the ship still lived in this lone ancillary. But it was speaking- it seemed to know who Awn was-
“It is a standard offer of assistance,” Nineteen said, in One Esk’s blank ancillary tone. “The language appears to be an Itran trade pidgin used on the far hubward side of the Tetrarchy. I-” The young, unlovely voice wavered slightly. “I should be able to determine our present location from that information, but- I can’t remember.”
“That’s all right,” Awn reassured her- it, though the pronoun seemed suddenly uncomfortably ill-fitting, for a savior and fellow survivor of disaster. A single ancillary was harder to see as an appendage of the ship rather than an individual, perhaps.
Awn took a deep breath, and let it out in a long sigh. It looked like they probably weren’t going to starve to death in the void, at least.
Though that might have been easier.
The station they were brought to was small. It was not aesthetically pleasing, not in the elegant sweeping Radchaai way or in the overbearing opulence of the Tanmind stations orbiting Shis'urna. Its bare wide steel-plated corridors and exposed wiring reminded Awn of stations she’d visited during her second annexation, but none of those had been so loud. This station thrummed and roared with unseen machinery. Awn focused on the noise, trying to pick out different sources, because it was better than focusing on the station’s inhabitants as they passed by, going in and out of different openings on the walls or ceiling. What Awn’s mind insisted on calling the ceiling.
Next to her on the spartan metal bench, One Esk hummed, as she had the whole ten hours’ journey here, though the sound was utterly drowned in the ambient cacophony. She did not seem to mind the noise, or the lack of gravity, sitting perfectly still on the bench. Awn had to restrain herself from shifting and accidentally launching herself upwards. She’d been trained to stillness and patience, but she was extremely tired, and on the edge of her endurance.
The door to what Awn assumed was some kind of administrative office hissed open and their rescuer came out. Slithered out, was the word Awn’s brain kept providing and she kept trying to avoid. She did not smile at them, but something in her manner seemed more relaxed. She stopped in front of them.
Awn looked at One Esk, still humming, eyes closed. Her instinct was to handle any necessary conversations herself, but she didn’t share any languages with these people. It was like the early days in Ors all over again, before One Esk’s translations started to feel natural. Once again, Awn felt a great lack and a terrible embarrassment, that she was fluent only in her native tongue and had never been able to grasp more than a basic vocabulary in any other. And once again, Awn would have to ask One Esk to translate, now, when there were still tear tracks visible on her face.
“Hello,” Awn said, loud enough to be heard over the noise, loud enough for One Esk to come back to herself. The person nodded at her- Awn felt a bit sick, seeing the motion travel down the length of her long body- and then turned to One Esk, saying something short and brusque.
One Esk said, “They have room for us here, and there is food, but- there is no work, and there are fees to store our shuttle.”
“It’s useless to us anyways,” Awn said, wishing she could speak more quietly. “Perhaps we can sell it.”
“Sell-” the ancillary repeated, and then was silent. Her face, of course, did not betray her emotions. Awn figured it out after a moment’s tired thought. The shuttle was a part of Justice of Toren. The last remaining part. To One Esk, the idea must seem akin to selling a dead limb.
“I’m sorry,” Awn said. “It’s all right, we can think about that later. We both need to sleep. Could you ask her where we might do that?”
The room they were led to was tiny by Orsian standards and incredibly large by Radchaai ones. Awn thanked Amaat when the door closed behind them and the noise level was suddenly reduced by half. Awn pushed herself over to one of the cots. One Esk hung by the door, perfectly still, one hand on a wall rung, and then One Esk was free-floating and seizing, limbs splayed and jerking. It had happened so fast Awn didn’t understand what was happening for a few seconds, and then her brain processed what her eyes were seeing and she pushed herself over to One Esk, desperately wishing her body to remember its zero g training. She stayed out of reach of those flailing arms, but pressed on her side just a little so she floated away from the walls and their dangerously hard surfaces.
But it wasn’t actually a seizure, the movements were all wrong, and One Esk was speaking, whispering to herself, “Don’t, no, not now, please, no, don’t, DON’T-”
It wasn’t a seizure. The convulsions were relatively weak. One Esk could be touched without risk of broken bones. She could be held and calmed and comforted. Awn remembered the med bay, remembered cradling this ancillary in her arms as it wept. But it was different in this room, just the two of them, and the heavy, enormous knowledge that this wasn’t just a lone ancillary body in pain, this was Awn’s ship, all that remained of it. You didn’t hold and comfort your two-thousand-year-old ship, you just didn’t-
One Esk sobbed, hands grabbing at nothing, scrabbling for purchase that wasn’t there. This body wasn’t just Ship, it was One Esk. Songs filling up the house in the mornings. Sweets in exchange for flowers. Voices calling out over the water, reading her sister’s poetry, translating the prayers in the Temple of Ikt. Uniforms covered in blood. In the temple. In the Var decade room.
Awn reached out and wrapped her arms around shaking shoulders. Hands slapped at her weakly and then clung, fisting in the fabric of her uniform jacket. Legs tangled themselves with hers. One Esk buried her face against Awn’s chest, and Awn hung on, and they drifted, unmoored, in the emptiness, feeling nothing but the motion of each other’s breathing.
Rubran, Issaiaa, even Dariet would call this perverse. They were all dead now. Skaiaat- she didn’t know, couldn’t think about Skaiaat.
She’d wasted so much time caring about other people’s opinions, because she’d thought that kind of thing was important, because she’d believed her life would proceed the way it was planned and wouldn’t be wiped out in an instant because she happened to get in the way of the Lord of the Radch’s serpentine plans.
But it had, and Awn had said “I should have died rather than serve you.”
She was certain she’d meant that, had believed it utterly. And if she had the courage to accept that belief, then the much lesser heresy, that her unit was not just a collection of equipment but something that felt and cared and suffered and sang-
She hugged One Esk tighter and said into her hair, “I am so, so sorry.” And felt the utter cosmic inadequacy of the words.