The person next to me was a civilian in rose and azure, delicate satin gloves that suggested she never handled anything rougher or heavier than a bowl of tea, and an ostentatiously large brooch of woven and hammered gold wire set with sapphires—not, I was sure, glass. Likely the design advertised whatever wealthy house she belonged to, but I didn’t recognize it. She leaned toward me and said, loudly, as Seivarden took the seat opposite me, “How fortunate you must have thought yourself, to find Seivarden Vendaai!”
“Fortunate,” I repeated, carefully, as though the word were unfamiliar to me, leaning just slightly more heavily on my Gerentate accent. Almost wishing the Radchaai language concerned itself with gender so I could use it wrongly and sound even more foreign. Almost. “Is that the word for it?” I had guessed correctly why Captain Vel had approached me the way she had. Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat had done something similar, addressing Seivarden even though she knew Seivarden had come as my servant. Of course, the inspector supervisor had seen her mistake almost immediately.
Across from me, Seivarden was explaining to Captain Vel about the situation with her aptitudes. I was astonished at her icy calm, given I knew she’d been angry ever since I told her I’d intended to come. But this was, in some ways, her natural habitat. If the ship that had found her suspension pod had brought her somewhere like this, instead of a small, provincial station, things would have gone very differently for her.
“Ridiculous!” exclaimed Rose-and-Azure beside me, while Captain Vel poured a bowl of tea and offered it to Seivarden. “As though you were a child. As though no one knew what you were suited for. It used to be you could depend on officials to handle things properly.” Justly, rang the silent companion of that last word. Beneficially.
“I did, citizen, lose my ship,” Seivarden said.
“Not your fault, Captain,” protested another civilian somewhere behind me. “Surely not.”
“Everything that happens on my watch is my fault, citizen,” answered Seivarden.
Captain Vel gestured agreement. “Still, there shouldn’t have been any question of you taking the tests again.”
Seivarden looked at her tea, looked over at me sitting empty-handed across from her, and set her bowl down on the table in front of her without drinking. Captain Vel poured a bowl and offered it to me, as though she hadn’t noticed Seivarden’s gesture.
“How do you find the Radch after a thousand years, Captain?” asked someone behind me as I accepted the tea. “Much changed?”
Seivarden didn’t retrieve her own bowl. “Changed some. The same some.”
“For the better, or for the worse?”
“I could hardly say,” replied Seivarden, coolly.
“How beautifully you speak, Captain Seivarden,” said someone else. “So many young people these days are careless about their speech. It’s lovely to hear someone speak with real refinement.”
Seivarden’s lips quirked in what might be taken for appreciation of a compliment, but almost certainly wasn’t.
“These lower houses and provincials, with their accents and their slang,” agreed Captain Vel. “Really, my own ship, fine soldiers but to hear them talk you’d think they’d never gone to school.”
“Pure laziness,” opined a lieutenant behind Seivarden.
“You don’t have that with ancillaries,” said someone, possibly another captain behind me.
“A lot of things you don’t have with ancillaries,” said someone else, a comment that might be taken two ways, but I was fairly sure I knew which way was meant. “But that’s not a safe topic.”
“Not safe?” I asked, all innocence. “Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.”
“And surely,” added Seivarden with a slight sneer, her mask finally cracking, “it’s always safe to complain about lower houses and provincials.”
“You’d think,” said Rose-and-Azure beside me, mistaking Seivarden’s intent. “But we are sadly changed, Captain, from your day. It used to be you could depend on the aptitudes to send the right citizen to the right assignment. I can’t fathom some of the decisions they make these days. And atheists given privileges.” She meant Valskaayans, who were, as a rule, not atheists but exclusive monotheists. The difference was invisible to many Radchaai. “And human soldiers! People nowadays are squeamish about ancillaries, but you don’t see ancillaries drunk and puking on the concourse.”
Seivarden made a sympathetic noise. “I’ve never known officers to be puking drunk.”
“In your day, maybe not,” answered someone behind me. “Things have changed.”
Rose-and-Azure tipped her head toward Captain Vel, who to judge by her expression had finally understood Seivarden’s words as Rose-and-Azure had not. “Not to say, Captain, that you don’t keep your ship in order. But you wouldn’t have to keep ancillaries in order, would you?”
Captain Vel waved the point away with an empty hand, her bowl of tea in the other. “That’s command, citizen, it’s just my job. But there are more serious issues. You can’t fill troop carriers with humans. The human-crewed Justices are all half-empty.”