Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)

by Ann Leckie

I turned to look at her, to study her face. She was taller than most Nilters, but fat and pale as any of them. She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked. She didn’t realize what she was playing with. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way. This language we were speaking now did, and I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms. It didn’t help that cues meant to distinguish gender changed from place to place, sometimes radically, and rarely made much sense to me.

The head priest stopped her with a raised hand. “I know what Seven Issa, or at least those like them, do to people they find on the wrong side of a dividing line. Five years ago it was noncitizen. In the future, who knows? Perhaps not-citizen-enough?” She waved a hand, a gesture of surrender. “It won’t matter. Such boundaries are too easy to create.”

Lieutenant Awn’s throat tightened, and her lips. She had thought of something she wanted to say, but was unsure if she should. “You’ve heard about Ime,” she said, deciding. Still tense and wary despite having chosen to speak.

The head priest seemed bleakly, bitterly amused. “News from Ime is meant to inspire confidence in Radch administration?”

This is what had happened: Ime Station, and the smaller stations and moons in the system, were the farthest one could be from a provincial palace and still be in Radch space. For years the governor of Ime used this distance to her own advantage—embezzling, collecting bribes and protection fees, selling assignments. Thousands of citizens had been unjustly executed or (what was essentially the same thing) forced into service as ancillary bodies, even though the manufacture of ancillaries was no longer legal. The governor controlled all communications and travel permits, and normally a station ...

Until a ship entered the system, came out of gate space only a few hundred kilometers from the patrol ship Mercy of Sarrse. The strange ship didn’t answer demands that it identify itself. When Mercy of Sarrse’s crew attacked and boarded it, they found dozens of humans, as well as the alien Rrrrrr. The captain of Mercy of Sarrse ordered her soldiers to take captive any humans that seemed suitable for use as anci...

Mercy of Sarrse was not the only human-crewed warship in that system. Until that moment human soldiers stationed there had been kept in line by a program of bribes, flattery, and, when those failed, threats and even executions. All very effective, until the moment the soldier Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One decided she wasn’t willing...

That had all happened five years before. The results of it were still p...

Lieutenant Awn shifted on her cushion. “That business was all uncovered because a single human soldier refused an order. And led a mutiny. If it hadn’t been for her…...

“That business was all uncovered,” replied the head priest, “because the ship that human soldier boarded, she and the rest of her unit, had aliens on it. Radchaai have few qualms about killing humans, especially noncitizen human...

Only because wars with aliens might run up against the terms of the treaty with the alien Presger. Violating that agreement would have extremely serious consequences. And even so, plenty of high-ranking Radchaai disagreed on that topic. I saw Lieutenant Awn’s desire to argue the point. Instead she said, “The governor of Ime wa...

“Have they executed that person yet?” the head priest asked, pointedly. It was the summary fate of any soldier who ref...

“Last I heard,” said Lieutenant Awn, breath tight and turning shallow, “the Rrrrrr had agreed to turn her over to Radch authorities.” She swallowed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Of course, it had probably already happened, whatever it was. News c...

“What’s the difference,” Lieutenant Awn said, so quietly it didn’t seem like a break in the silence, “between citizens and noncitizens?”

“One is civilized,” said Lieutenant Skaaiat with a laugh, “and the other isn’t.” The joke only made sense in Radchaai—citizen and civilized are the same word. To be Radchaai is to be civilized.

One of the people along the wall—broad-shouldered, muscled, cradling a broken arm against her torso—wept noisily, moaning each exhale, gasping every inhale. She knew, everyone in this line knew, that they would either be stored for future use as ancillaries—like the ancillaries of mine that stood before them even now, identities gone, bodies appendages to a Radchaai warship—or else they would be disposed of.

Dead in either case.

No one would have cared if she’d taken the butt of her gun and beaten the prisoner senseless. No one would have cared if she’d shot the prisoner in the head, so long as no vital equipment was damaged in the process. Human bodies to make into ancillaries weren’t exactly a scarce resource.

Another few days after that, when she thought I was asleep, she went to the outer door and stared out over the snow, and then put on her clothes and a coat and trudged to the outbuilding, and then the flier. She tried to start it, but I had removed an essential part and kept it close. When she returned to the house she had at least the presence of mind to close both doors before she tracked snow into the main room, where I sat on a bench holding Strigan’s stringed instrument. She stared, unable to conceal her surprise, still shrugging slightly, uncomfortable in the heavy coat, itchy.

“I want to leave,” she said, in a voice oddly half cowed and half arrogant, commanding Radchaai.

“We’ll leave when I’m ready,” I said, and fingered a few notes on the instrument. Her feelings were too raw for her to be able to conceal them just now, and her anger and despair showed plainly on her face. “You are where you are,” I said...

Her spine straightened, her shoulders went back. “You don’t know anything about me, or what decis...

It was enough to make me angry again. I knew something about making decisions, and not making them. “Ah, I forget. Everything happens a...

“You don’t understand,” she said, contemptuous, but her voice trembled with suppressed tears. “You’re not Radchaai.”

Not civilized. “Did you start taking kef before or after you left the Radch?”

“I came here to buy something,” I said, determined to keep from staring at the gun she held. “He’s incidental.” Since we weren’t speaking Radchaai I had to take gender into account—Strigan’s language required it. The society she lived in professed at the same time to believe gender was insignificant. Males and females dressed, spoke, acted indistinguishably. And yet no one I’d met had ever hesitated, or guessed wrong. And they had invariably been offended when I did hesitate or guess wrong. I hadn’t learned the trick of it. I’d been in Strigan’s own apartment, seen her belongings, and still wasn’t sure what forms to use with her now.

“Incidental?” asked Strigan, disbelieving.

Strigan shook her head slightly, disbelieving. “I’d have sworn you were a corpse soldier.” An ancillary, she meant.

The fencing, the feinting, frustrated me. “I want the gun.”

“What gun?”

“The Garseddai did everything in fives. Five right actions, five principal sins, five zones times five regions. Twenty-five representatives to surrender to the Lord of the Radch.”

“Twenty-five representatives to surrender to the Lord of the Radch,” I repeated. “And twenty-four guns recovered or otherwise accounted for.”

“Who are you?”

“Someone ran. Someone fled the system before the Radchaai arrived. Maybe she was afraid the guns wouldn’t work as advertised. Maybe she knew ...

“On the contrary, no? Wasn’t that the point? No one defies Anaander Mianaai.” She spoke bitterly. “Not if they want to live.”

Anandaar Minnaai was/is Lord of the Radch.

“I don’t know why you think I have this gun you’re talking about. Why would I have it?”

“Certainly,” I agreed. “You couldn’t bring yourself to destroy it, or pass it on to someone who might not be wise enough to realize what a danger it presented. You knew, as soon as you realized what you had, that if Radch authorities ever even dreamed of half-imagining it existed, they would track you down and kill you, and anyone else who might have seen it.”

While the Radch wanted everyone to remember what had happened to the Garseddai, they wanted no one to know just how the Garseddai had managed to do what they’d done, what no one had managed to do for a thousand years before or another thousand years after—destroy a Radchaai ship. Almost no one alive remembered. I knew, and any still-extant ships that had been there. Anaander Mianaai certainly did. And Seivarden, who had seen for herself what the Lord of the Radch wanted no one to think was possible—that invisible armor and gun, those bullets that defeated Radchaai armor—and her ship’s heat shield—so effortlessly.

“I’m not leaving until I have what I came for.” There would be little point in doing so. “You’ll have to give it to me, or shoot me with it.” As much as admitting I still had armor. Implying I was precisely what she feared, a Radchaai agent come to kill her and take the gun.

“Why do you want it so badly?”

“I want,” I told her, “to kill Anaan...

“Anaander Mianaai,” she said, bitterly, “has thousands of bodies in hundreds of locations. You can’t possibly kill him. Certainly not with one gun.”

“You’re insane. Or is that even possible? Aren’t all Radchaai brainwashed?”

It was a common misconception. “Only criminals, or people who aren’t functioning well, are reeducated. Nobody really cares what you think, as ...

“I know,” I said. “I took no offense.”

Seven Issa frowned, and made a doubtful gesture with her left hand, awkwardly, her gloved fingers still curled around half a dozen counters. “Ships have feelings.”

“Yes, of course.” Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those wi...

“You hear rumors. About ships and people they like. And I’d swear your face never changes, but…”

Everything Lieutenant Awn did and said was observed and recorded—but as with the trackers everyone in Ors wore, there wasn’t always someone paying attention.

“And then,” Strigan said as we ate, latest in a long list of grievances against the Radchaai, “there’s the treaty with the Presger.”

“You resent the treaty?” I asked. “You’d prefer the Presger felt free to do as they always have done?”