“Why do you ask, Lieutenant?” I replied. One Esk replied. One Esk attended Lieutenant Awn constantly.
“We were in Ors together a long time,” Lieutenant Awn said, frowning slightly at the segment she was talking to. She had been in a constant state of misery since Ors, sometimes more intense, sometimes less, depending, I supposed, on what thoughts occurred to her at a given moment. “You just seem like something’s troubling you. And you’re quieter.” She made a sound, breathy half-amusement. “You were always humming or singing in the house. It’s too quiet now.”
“There are walls here, Lieutenant,” I pointed out. “There were none in the house in Ors.”
Her eyebrow twitched just slightly. I could see she knew my words for an evasion, but she didn’t pursue the question.
At the same time, in the Var decade room, Anaander Mianaai said to me, “You understand the stakes. What this means for the Radch.” I acknowledged this. “I know this must be disturbing to you.” It was the first acknowledgment of this possibility since she had come aboard. “I made you to serve my ends, for the good of the Radch. It’s part of your design, to want to serve me. And now you must not only serve me, but also oppose me.”
She was, I thought, making it remarkably easy for me to oppose her. One side or the other of her had done that, and I wasn’t sure which. But I said, through One Var, “Yes, my lord.”
“If she succeeds, ultimately the Radch will fragment. Not the center, not the Radch itself.” When most people spoke of the Radch they meant all of Radchaai territory, but in truth the Radch was a single location, a Dyson sphere, enclosed, self-contained. Nothing ritually impure was allowed within, no one uncivilized or nonhuman could enter its confines. Very, very few of Mianaai’s clients had ever set foot there, and only a few houses still existed who even had ancestors who had once lived there. It was an open question if anyone within knew or cared about the actions of Anaander Mianaai, or the extent or even existence of Radch territory. “The Radch itself, as the Radch, will survive longer. But my territory, that I built to protect it, to keep it pure, will shatter. I made myself into what I am, built all this”—she gestured sweepingly, the walls of the decade room encompassing, for her purposes, the entirety of Radch space—“all this, to keep that center safe. Uncontaminated. I couldn’t trust it to anyone else. Now, it seems, I can’t trust it to myself.”
“Surely not, my lord,” I said, at a loss for what else to say, not sure exactly what I was protesting.
“Billions of citizens will die in the process,” she continued, as though I had not spoken. “Through war, or lack of resources. And I…”
She hesitated. Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings. But I did not say so. The most powerful person in the universe didn’t need me to lecture her on religion or philosophy.
“But I am already broken,” she finished. “I can only fight to prevent my breaking further. Remove what is no longer myself.”
I wasn’t sure what I should, or could, say. I had no conscious memory of having this conversation previously, though I was certain now I must have, must have listened to Anaander Mianaai explain and justify her actions, after she used the overrides and changed… something. It must have been quite similar, perhaps even the same words. It had, after all, been the same person.
“And,” Anaander Mianaai continued, “I must remove my enemy’s weapons wherever I find them. Send Lieutenant Awn to me.”
Lieutenant Awn approached the Var decade room with trepidation, not knowing why I had sent her there. I had refused to answer her questions, which had only fed a growing feeling on her part that something was very wrong. Her boots on the white floor echoed emptily, despite One Var’s presence. As she reached it the decade room door slid open, nearly noiseless.
The sight of Anaander Mianaai within hit Lieutenant Awn like a blow, a vicious spike of fear, surprise, dread, shock, doubt, and bewilderment. Lieutenant Awn took three breaths, shallower, I could see, than she liked, and then hitched her shoulders just the slightest bit, stepped in, and prostrated herself.
“Lieutenant,” said Anaander Mianaai. Her accent, and tone, were the prototype of Lieutenant Skaaiat’s elegant vowels, of Lieutenant Issaaia’s thoughtless, slightly sneering arrogance. Lieutenant Awn lay facedown, waiting. Frightened.