“Thank you, sir,” said Lieutenant Awn, sitting.
“I didn’t expect to see you so soon. I was sure you’d be downside for a while longer.” Lieutenant Awn didn’t answer. Commander Tiaund waited for five seconds in silence, and then said, “I would ask what happened, but I’m ordered not to.”
Lieutenant Awn opened her mouth, took a breath to speak, stopped. Surprised. I had said nothing to her about the orders not to ask what had happened. Corresponding orders to Lieutenant Awn not to tell anyone had not come. A test, I suspected, which I was quite confident Lieutenant Awn would pass.
“Bad?” asked Commander Tiaund. Wanting very much to know more, pushing her luck asking even that much.
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Awn looked down at her gloved hands, resting in her lap. “Very.”
“Your fault?”
“Everything on my watch is my responsibility, isn’t it, sir?”
“Yes,” Commander Tiaund acknowledged. “But I’m having trouble imagining you doing anything… improper.” The word was weighted in Radchaai, part of a triad of justice, propriety, and benefit. Using it, Commander Tiaund implied more than just that she expected Lieutenant Awn to follow regulations or etiquette. Implied she suspected some injustice was behind events. Though she could certainly not say so plainly—she possessed none of the facts of the matter and surely did not wish to give anyone the impression she did. And if Lieutenant Awn were to be punished for some breach, she wouldn’t want to have publicly taken Lieutenant Awn’s part no matter what her private opinion.
Commander Tiaund sighed, perhaps out of frustrated curiosity. “Well,” she continued, with feigned cheerfulness. “Now you’ve got plenty of time to catch up on gym time. And you’re way behind on renewing your marksmanship certification.”
Lieutenant Awn forced a humorless smile. There had been no gym in Ors, nor anyplace remotely resembling a firing range. “Yes, sir.”
“And Lieutenant, please don’t go up to Medical unless you really need to.”
I could see Lieutenant Awn wanted to protest, to complain. But that, too, would have been a repeat of an earlier conversation. “Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
By the time Lieutenant Awn finally entered her quarters, it was nearly time for supper—a formal meal, eaten in the decade room in the company of the other Esk lieutenants. Lieutenant Awn pled exhaustion—no lie, as it happened: she had barely slept six hours since she’d left Ors nearly three days before.
She sat on her bunk, slumped and staring, until I entered, eased off her boots, and took her coat. “All right,” she said then, closed her eyes and swiveled her legs up onto the bunk. “I get the hint.” She was asleep five seconds after she laid her head down.
The next morning eighteen of my twenty Esk lieutenants stood in the decade room, drinking tea and waiting for breakfast. By custom they couldn’t sit without the senior-most lieutenant.
The Esk decade room’s walls were white, with a blue-and-yellow border painted just under the ceiling. On one wall, opposite a long counter, were secured various trophies of past annexations—scraps of two flags, red and black and green; a pink clay roof tile with a raised design of leaves molded into it; an ancient sidearm (unloaded) and its elegantly styled holster; a jeweled Ghaonish mask. An entire window from a Valskaayan temple, colored glass arranged to form a picture of a woman holding a broom in one hand, three small animals at her feet. I remembered taking it out of the wall myself and carrying it back here. Every decade room on the ship had a window from that same building. The temple’s vestments and equipment had been thrown into the street, or found their way to other decade rooms on other ships. It was normal practice to absorb any religion the Radch ran across, to fit its gods into an already blindingly complex genealogy, or to say merely that the supreme, creator deity was Amaat under another name and let the rest sort themselves out. Some quirk of Valskaayan religion made this difficult for them, and the result had been destructive. Among the recent changes in Radch policy, Anaander Mianaai had legalized the practice of Valskaay’s insistently separate religion, and the governor of Valskaay had given the building back. There had been talk of returning the windows, since we had still at that time been in orbit around Valskaay itself, but ultimately they were replaced with copies. Not long after, the decades below Esk were emptied and closed, but the windows still hung on the walls of the empty, dark decade rooms.