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Awn heard the first shot and assumed she was dead. That was usually what happened when you got shot at by an ancillary. Then the body of the Lord of the Radch hit the floor with a thud, and she realized that no matter how fucked you were, things could always get worse.
“She’s already been here,” the Lord of the Radch was shouting. More shots.
Awn rolled herself out of the way just in time to miss catching the Var segment on its way down, blood streaming from the hole punched between its eyes. Its gun fell to the floor.
“Lieutenant!”
Training kicked in. Awn grabbed the gun, aimed, and fired. In the infinite second between squeezing the trigger and seeing the second iteration of the Lord of the Radch go down, she had just enough time to angry that no training scenario had ever been as hellish as you’re down on the floor shooting at a double agent who’s hijacked your ship’s AI cores. Then this iteration of Anaander Mianaai rocked backwards with a spreading flower of blood across her center mass and Awn considered that her personal definition of hellish might need rethinking.
The Lord of the Radch fell.
Awn ducked into the hall under cover from an ancillary unit.
“Access,” it yelled, and she ran to the nearest access while lights went off overhead and warning sirens blared. Ancillary units swarmed the access. She climbed for her life under a stampede of boots, barely aware of the other units behind her, the sudden absence of the sound of gunfire from the Var deck, and the resurgence of the sound from the hold above.
Someone hauled her off the ladder by the shoulders.
“Airlock!”
No time for questions. No time to take in what was happening down the hallway and across this deck, except that it sounded both impossible and familiar. It sounded like open combat on her troop carrier.
She ran for the airlock. There were hands, a face. Orders. She was pushed, pulled, practically thrown across the boundary between artificial and micro-gravity, the world lost its orientation and spun out of control in a crushing surge of vertigo as she grabbed hold of an exterior maintenance ladder, boot treads flashing on the rungs above her as they climbed, and then she was shouting for a report while someone shoved her into a seat and threw themself at the controls.
“Ship! Status!”
“Report to the provincial palace,” Ship was saying, except it was speaking with an ancillary voice, taut and pitchy with fear, rather than through her implants. Awn had barely any time to register that Ship itself had been silent throughout the entire ordeal, before there was a blinding flash and no ship at all.
And they floated.
*
Crying. Someone was crying. Dull impenetrable sound, as much a part of the shuttle as the rhythmic bleat of the navigation system’s alarm.
Nav system. Pilot. The pilot wasn’t crying. Did that make her the copilot? Was she crying?
Training scenario, maybe. Get a hold of yourself, lieutenant. Academy?
Not the academy.
“We’re drifting,” someone said, or tried to say through a throat scraped out from screaming. Awn swallowed. It hurt like hell. Her eyes, when she tried to rub them clear, were gritty with dried tears.
Awn found that things were easier if she didn’t think about the preceding hours. Instead, she checked the bank of instruments in front of the copilot’s seat. Someone had input a course, but the readings varied between wild impossibilities and error reports. “We’re drifting off course,” she said. Her throat felt a little better, but she couldn’t remember where their course led.
She didn’t remember having chosen a course.
Slowly, Awn unfastened herself from the seat restraints. Her hands were shaking. The pilot was unresponsive, slumped over in the other seat and motionless except for an arrhythmic rattling breath. One Esk Nineteen. The bruises on its face, where Medical had inserted its connective implants, had faded into yellow shadows.
A memory, loud and visceral: screaming and gunfire from the corridor behind her as she frantically suited up to go through the airlock, One Esk Nineteen checking her seals, motioning her through the door. Boots on the ladder rungs above her.
Awn took a moment to reorient herself, then unfastened her seat restraints. Half the controls were sounding alarms, including navigation, and most of the systems were attempting to run some contingency she didn’t recognize, and she wanted more than anything to scream along with the alarms until she woke up on her Esk decade bunk. Which wasn’t happening. They were lost. Panic later.
Awn fumbled at the ancillary’s seat restraints until they came loose and she pulled it, uncomprehending, away from the control panel and into a passenger seat. There had been a drill like this in training. What to do with an unresponsive shuttle pilot. First aid. The drill had assumed your unresponsive pilot was another human.
“Ship? Any other segments?” Her voice came out louder and higher pitched than she’d intended, accent strong, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t anyone else to hear it, or at least not anyone else capable of responding. A quick visual survey confirmed her suspicions. Unless it was hiding them in the toilet or storage locker, Ship didn’t have other segments on board. And it wasn’t speaking to her via implants.
Panic later.
She pulled herself into the pilot’s seat and checked their course. She didn’t remember ordering one, but there it was. Only—
Unfamiliar stars and impossible bullshit. Someone had input coordinates for a provincial palace. Navigation kept trying to reconcile the coordinates with the shuttle’s current position, only wherever they had come out of gate space was so far afield that the shuttle’s limited backup systems couldn’t handle it.
Two problems, then. Or at least two that needed to be immediately death with.
One: the provincial palace.
The only thing worse than sudden knifing hope at the idea of official salvation was the sudden full-body memory of lying on the ground, hearing the bullet she expected to lodge in her head wind up in the Lord of the Radch instead.
The likelihood of finding aid in any government office was slim.
Two: the ship.
She couldn’t see the ship on the shuttle’s camera or on visuals. On the display surface, the panel that should have given her a readout of the ship’s position was instead having the shuttle display surface equivalent of a nervous breakdown. Foreign stars prickled in the distance, far beyond the shuttle windows. They had come out of gatespace without the ship.
A memory: expanding light, terrific awe, the breathless rapid-fire voice of the ancillary segment giving over to screams. It had been in the middle of telling her something.
“Ship,” she said. “Ship, respond. Justice of Toren. One Esk.”
First aid. Swearing, Awn turned back to the ancillary. It slumped behind her with its eyes open and unfocused. She couldn’t hear it breathing over the cacophony of alarms.
Nothing in the first aid locker had been intended for ancillaries. She doubted it would make much difference—there were pain relief patches, sedatives, and a whole host of different correctives, but as far as she could tell the ancillary hadn’t been shot, and it couldn’t get more damn sedate unless she put it back in a suspension pod. It wasn’t even tracking her moment with its eyes.
She shifted it onto the floor of the shuttle and put its feet on the seat, then covered it with a blanket from the locker. She crouched on the floor next to it and focused on not throwing up. The alarms were insistent, somehow louder. This was all wrong. She needed it to wake up, recover, whatever; speak to her and resolve whatever issue it was having with the shuttle so they could go back to the ship.
But there was no going back to the ship.
She had shot the Lord of the Radch.
The Lord of the Radch had ordered her execution.
“One Esk, report,” Awn tried. It didn’t so much as remind her to watch her mouth when she swore violently into its silence. “Come on, ship, anything. I can’t hear you via implants. Do you have visuals through this segment? If you could focus your eyes, even—“ She tried waving her hand in front of its face. Nothing.
How was it you could spend your entire adult life on a warship and fail to understand exactly how its ancillary systems worked? Maybe they were too far from the ship. One Esk had been operational on the planet with its core in orbit, but she didn’t know if anyone had ever tested an AI across a gate.
Awn tried to recall everything she had ever learned about the way ancillary implants worked. Was it because they were too far from the ship’s AI core? Surely not, considering One Esk had been just fine on planet while its core was in orbit. Then again, had anyone ever tested AI ancillaries on either side of a gate?
This was the kind of question One Esk would normally answer for her.
“Alright, it’s taking you a moment,” she said, still crouched on the floor with her head between her knees, hands on her temples. “That’s fine, you’re running some internal repair process, you’ll alert me as soon as you’re able to communicate through this segment again. We were almost killed by the Lord of the Radch. You got me onto the shuttle. There was something important I needed to know. You set coordinates for a provincial palace. I don’t know what you meant to do. I don’t know where the ship is. I think—but no—she must have breached the heat shield. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what we should do.”
No matter how fucked you were, things could aways get worse.
She would not panic.
She would not panic.
Clarity was a miserable thing after so many days spent lumbering through black depression. She could smell her own sweat and fear sharp against the antiseptic cleanliness of the shuttle. Whatever dissociation she’d endured during the gate exit, it was over now. The guns in the lake, the temple shooting, the long silence in the lift down to Var deck, the interrogation and gunfight—she felt it all happening over again with a visceral tug, as if someone were playing an entertainment on her nerves, as if she could vomit all out for examination, as if it were happening again. And then there was nothing but the screaming alarms and the silent, unresponsive body on the floor next to her.
“You’re not there, are you?”
She should have been lying dead on the Var deck of her ship. Or on the floor of the Orsian temple. But she wasn’t. She hadn’t chosen to be here. It didn’t matter.
One Esk’s eyes were still open, staring at nothing. Its chest moved under the blanket, once, like whatever remnant of the AI core still active inside its ruined brain had just remembered that organic bodies needed to breath. Up close, it wasn’t that many years older than the throat-slit Tanmind girl another segment had pulled, slick with mud, from the lake in Ors. The segment did not move again.
A memory: this body, stumbling towards her, sobbing, pleading in some incomprehensible uncivilized language before it had stopped, straightened up, and spoke with a crisp familiar cadence. Every trauma rendered mute by the presence of the ship.
It should have shot her. Instead it had gone to pieces like the shuttle controls were doing now. Instead it had pulled her outside.
What that meant, she couldn’t say.
There was a standardized distress beacon recognized by every vessel across all of Radch space. It was anyone’s guess if it worked outside of Radch space, except in this situation, anyone meant just her. She guessed that even if it would work, she didn’t want to be rescued by anyone from the Radch. No telling where the nearest station was. Navigation didn’t even know where the shuttle was.
At least the oxygen tank was full.
She would probably die anyway.
It wasn’t a funny thought, but huddled there on the floor in the remnants of her ship, listening for the segment to breathe again in case it snapped out of whatever state it was in, she shuddered with unvoiced laughter that screwed itself into quiet sobs, for herself, her shipmates, the people she had failed so monumentally back on the planet, and the people who had never had a chance to be people at all.
“Alright,” she said through the snot and tears, “it’s alright, One Esk, you’d respond if you could. It’s alright. Provincial palace. You had some kind of emergency protocol, I got that much. A report to deliver.”
The segment was still.
“Everything that happens on my watch is my duty,” she said to it. “And if there is anyone left to report to…”
The idea of reporting this incident to anyone felt like opening the shuttle airlock and stepping out, so she shut the door on her end goal until the immediate issues had been dealt with. Silence the alarms, check the course she hadn’t chosen, look for signs of life on the display. Do something about the body.
She squeezed the segment’s shoulder and went to the controls, where she dismissed the error reports and shut down the programs trying over and over to connect to a system that was no longer there. Adrift, directionless, the shuttle floated in uncharted territory.
She was alone.