Provenance (Imperial Radch)

by Ann Leckie

What happens if you aren’t selected to be your mother’s heir?” Possibly not much. Possibly she would just continue in her job, in the family, as she had. But Netano had always said that in anything worth doing, the stakes were all or nothing. Most families on Hwae had sent one or more children out for fosterage, or were fostering children from other households, some in temporary arrangements, some in permanent adoptions.

“So why steal a ship?” asked Ingray. “You could have just left. A good mech-pilot can always get a job.” “Partly because it’s not actually that easy to get passage out of that system, if you’re from there,” said Captain Uisine. “But mostly because fuck them, that’s why.”

Zat still smiled. “Most Hwaeans I’ve met feel this way. Your esteemed mother does, I believe, and cares only for the contribution to her reelection fund. I must say, no disrespect intended, excellency, but I have never understood this. You live surrounded by this”—she gestured around, meaning, Ingray supposed, to indicate the parkland and its profusion of ruin glass—“and have so little curiosity about it! Perhaps you use the pieces of it to build a wall. And yet, a floor tile from a building that, it is claimed, one of your Founders might have stood near, badly made to begin with, ugly and cracked and in reality not three centuries old, you will call that a priceless treasure and argue over it bitterly—yes, I see the look on your face when I mention it, I know that the Kaheru family still holds the grudge against Netano for that, though she is not the same Netano and it was a hundred years ago.

The spider mech spoke up from the floor of the groundcar. “Mech from the District Voice news service, you are very stupid.” “Be nice, Ambassador,” said Ingray. “Aren’t you a diplomat?” “And the District Voice has a point,” said Garal. “I’ve put her in a difficult position, while I myself, as she’s just said, have nothing to lose. But I’m telling the truth.” “Diplomat does not mean nice,” muttered the spider mech. “Diplomat means tell the aliens to leave us alone.”

“It is not all right,” insisted the green blob. “It is not. I will tell you a thing. I will tell you. When humans first appeared, many things died. So much died, and the humans were bad to eat. Many wished to remove them, but some said, no, they are very strange and things die all around them, but they are like people in some way. And they have come here to live, how could they live outside the world? Nothing could. Imagine being outside the world, it is a terrible thing. Do we kill these strange, so very strange maybe-people for that? When we might instead help them live? And so we changed them, and now things do not die all around them, and they can live in the world.”

No. She was Ingray Aughskold, who had freed a wrongly convicted person from inescapable Compassionate Removal. Who had, completely unarmed, faced down Danach threatening her with a huge dirt mover. She’d had some help there, but she was also a person who sometimes had help from mysterious and unnerving aliens. She might have help here now.

And once we’d taken control of the freighters, it was simple enough—for certain values of ‘simple’—to break into their mechs’ controls and use them ourselves, with Commander Hatqueban none the wiser. Well, for a little while anyway.”