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“You presume,” said
Sword of Atagaris
, voice calm and even. Of course. “To tell me what I think. What I feel.”

“Do you want it?” I asked.

And
Sword of Atagaris
said, “Yes.”

8

Once we were finally aboard
Mercy of Kalr
, I left my Kalrs to arrange quarters for
Sphene
, and went to consult with Medic. She was halfway through her supper, eating alone—of course, Seivarden was her usual dining companion. “Sir.” Medic made as if to stand, but I waved away the necessity of it. “Lieutenant Seivarden is asleep. Though she’ll probably wake soon.”

I sat. Accepted the bowl of tea a Kalr offered. “You’ve finished your assessment.”

Medic didn’t say yes or no to that. Knew I was not asking, but stating a fact. Knew that I could—possibly did—know the results of that assessment merely by desiring to. She took another bite of supper, a drink of her own tea. “At the lieutenant’s request, I’ve made it so if she takes kef—or any of several other illegal drugs—it won’t affect her. Fairly simple. There remains an underlying problem, of course.” Another mouthful of supper. “The lieutenant has…” Medic looked up, over at the Kalr who was waiting on her. Who, taking the hint, left the room. “Lieutenant Seivarden has… anchored
all her emotions on you, sir. She…” Medic stopped. Took a breath. “I don’t know how interrogators or testers do this, sir, see so intimately into people and then look them in the face after.”

“Lieutenant Seivarden,” I said, “was accustomed to receiving the respect and admiration of anyone she thought mattered. Or at least accustomed to receiving the signs of it. In all the vast universe, she knew she had a place, and that place was surrounded and shored up by all the other people around her. And when she came out of that suspension pod, all of that was gone, and she had no place, no one around her to tell her who she was. Suddenly she was no one.”

“You know her very well,” observed Medic. And then, “Of course you do.” I acknowledged that with a small gesture. “So when you’re with her, or at least near, she does fine. Mostly. But when you’re not, she… frays at the edges, I suppose I’d say. The recent prospect of losing you entirely was, I think, more strain than she could handle. A simple fix to her kef addiction isn’t going to do anything about that.”

“No,” I agreed.

Medic sighed. “And it won’t fix things with Ekalu, either. That wasn’t the drugs, or anything else really except the lieutenant herself. Well, the collapse a few days after, maybe. But the argument itself, well, that was all Seivarden.”

“It was,” I agreed. “I’ve actually seen her do that sort of thing before, when she was still serving on
Justice of Toren
, but no one ever kept arguing with her, when she insisted they were wrong and unreasonable to insist she treat them better.”

“You don’t surprise me,” said Medic, dryly. “So, as I said, it was simple enough to make her physically unable to return to kef. It was just a matter of installing a shunt. The desire for it and the… emotional instability are more difficult. We
can’t even consult with specialists on Athoek Station at the moment.”

“We can’t,” I agreed.

“I can do a variety of small things that might help. That I can only hope won’t end up doing some sort of lasting damage. Ideally I’d have time to think about it, and discuss it with Ship.” She’d already thought about it and discussed it with Ship. “And I might not get the opportunity to do anything, since my lord is here and not the part of her that’s well-disposed toward us.”

I noticed that
us
but didn’t comment on it. “I’m back aboard for the foreseeable future. You take care of Seivarden. I’ll handle the rest.”

Seivarden lay on a bed in Medical, head and shoulders propped up, staring off somewhere in front of her. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow,” I said. “We should switch places.”

She reacted just the tiniest bit more slowly than I thought normal. “Breq. Breq, I’m sorry, I fucked up.”

“You did,” I agreed.

That surprised her, but it took a fraction of a second for her to register that surprise. “I think Ship was really angry with me. I don’t think it would have talked that way to me if you’d been here.” The merest trace of a frown. “Ekalu was angry with me, too, and I still don’t understand why. I apologized, but she’s still angry.” The frown deepened.

“Do you remember when I said that if you were going to quit kef, you’d have to do it yourself? That I wasn’t going to be responsible for you?”

“I think so.”

“You weren’t really listening to me, were you.”

She took a breath. Blinked. Took another breath. “I
thought I was. Breq, I can go back on duty now. I feel much better.”

“I don’t doubt you do,” I said. “You are filled to the ears with meds right now. Medic’s not quite done with you yet.”

“I don’t think there’s anything Medic can really do for me,” Seivarden said. “She talked to me about it. There’s only a little bit she can do. I said she should go ahead and do it, but I don’t think it will change much of anything.” She closed her eyes. “I really think I could go back on duty. You’re shorthanded as it is.”

“I’m used to that,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

At my order, Lieutenant Ekalu came to my quarters. Her face ancillary-expressionless, and not just because she’d awakened a mere ten minutes before. I could have asked Ship what was causing Ekalu’s distress, but did not. “Lieutenant. Good morning.” I gestured to her to sit across the table from me.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Ekalu said, and sat. “I’d like to apologize.” Her voice even, face still blank. Kalr Five set a rose glass bowl of tea in front of her.

“For what, Lieutenant?”

“For causing this problem with Lieutenant Seivarden, sir. I knew she meant a compliment. I should have just been able to take it as that. I shouldn’t have been so oversensitive.”

I took a swallow of my own tea. “That being the case,” I said, “why shouldn’t Lieutenant Seivarden have taken it as a compliment that you trusted her enough to tell her how you felt? Why should
she
not apologize for being oversensitive?” Lieutenant Ekalu opened her mouth. Closed it again. “It isn’t your fault, Lieutenant. You did nothing unreasonable. On the contrary, I’m glad you spoke up. The fact that it came at a time when Lieutenant Seivarden was near some
sort of emotional breaking point isn’t something you could have known. And the… the difficulties she’s had, that have so recently and dramatically manifested themselves, they weren’t caused by what you said. For that matter, they didn’t cause the behavior you were complaining about. Just between you and me—well, and Ship, of course—” I glanced over at Five, who left the room. “Seivarden has behaved the same way to countless other people in the past, both lovers and not, long before she had the problems that ended with her off duty in Medical now. She was born surrounded by wealth and privilege. She thinks she’s learned to question that. But she hasn’t learned quite as much as she thinks she has, and having that pointed out to her, well, she doesn’t react well to it. You are under no obligation to be patient with this. I think your relationship has been good for her, and good for you, at least in some ways. But I don’t think you have any obligation to continue it if it’s going to be hurtful to you. And you certainly don’t have to apologize for insisting your lover treat you with some basic consideration.” As I had spoken, Ekalu’s face hadn’t changed. Now, as I finished, the muscles around her mouth twitched and tremored, just barely perceptibly. For a moment I thought she was about to cry. “So,” I continued, “on to business.

“We’re going to be fighting quite soon. In fact, I am about to openly defy Anaander Mianaai. The part of her that opposes the Anaander who gave me this command, to be sure, but in the end they are both the Lord of the Radch. Anyone on board—anyone at all—who doesn’t want to oppose Anaander Mianaai is free to take a shuttle and leave. We’re going to be gating in two hours, so that’s how long you get to decide. I know there’s been some concern among the crew about how this is all going to come out, and if they’ll ever see
their homes again, and I can’t make any promises about that. Or really about anything. I can’t promise that if they leave they’ll be safe. All I can do is offer the choice of whether to fight with me.”

“I can’t imagine, sir, that anyone will…”

I raised a forestalling hand. “I don’t imagine or expect anything.
Any
member of this crew is free to leave if she doesn’t want to take part in this.”

Impassive silence while Lieutenant Ekalu thought about that. I was tempted to reach, to see what she was feeling. Realized I hadn’t at all, not since Tisarwat had spoken so angrily on realizing that I was doing it. Her words must have stung more than I’d wanted to think about, for some reason I wasn’t sure of.

“Your indulgence, Fleet Captain.” Amaat One’s voice in my ear. “Presger Translator Zeiat is here and requesting permission to come aboard.”

“Excuse me, Amaat?” That just wasn’t possible. When we’d left Athoek Station, the translator’s tiny ship had still been docked there. If it had followed us, we would have known.

“Sir, your very great pardon, the translator’s ship wasn’t there, and then it just was. And now she’s requesting permission to board. She says.” Hesitation. “She says no one on the station will give her oysters the way she wants them.”

“We don’t have oysters here at all, Amaat.”

“Yes, sir, I did presume to tell her so just now, sir. She still wants to board.”

“Right.” I couldn’t see that refusing the translator would do any good at all, if she had made up her mind to be here. “Tell her she has to be fully docked within two hours, all our respect but we are unable to alter our departure time.”

“Sir,” replied Amaat One, voice impressively steady.

I looked at Lieutenant Ekalu. Who said, “I’m not leaving, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Lieutenant,” I said. “Because I need you to take command of the ship.”

I had not been on the hull of a ship in gate-space since the day twenty years before when I had been separated from myself. Then I had been desperate, panicking. Had pulled myself from one handhold to the next, making for a shuttle so that I could bring word to the Lord of the Radch of what had happened aboard
Justice of Toren
.

This time the ship was
Mercy of Kalr
, and I was well tethered, and not only vacuum-suited but armored. That armor was, in theory, impenetrable, wasn’t so very different from what shielded a Radchaai military ship. Certainly bullets wouldn’t pierce it.

And I was armed with the only weapon that could: I held that Presger gun, that could shoot through anything in the universe. For 1.11 meters, at any rate. And I was not scrambling across the hull, or panicking, or fleeing. But I felt similarly cut off. I knew that inside the ship, everything was secured. Cleared and locked down. Every soldier was at her post. Medic attended to a drugged and unconscious Seivarden. Ekalu sat in Command, waiting. Tisarwat, in her quarters, also waiting. As I waited. Last I’d seen them,
Sphene
and Translator Zeiat had been in the decade room, where
Sphene
had been attempting to explain how to play a particular game of counters, but without much success, to some extent because the board and its dozens of glass counters had just been packed away, part of being cleared for action, and partly because Translator Zeiat was Translator Zeiat. I was
astonished enough that
Sphene
had even been speaking to her. Now, I was certain, they both lay safely in their bunks. But I did not reach, did not ask Ship for confirmation of that. I was alone, in a way I had not been for weeks, since having my implants repaired, since taking command of
Mercy of Kalr
.

We had lost one Kalr, two Amaats, three Etrepas, and a Bo. I had thanked them for their service so far and seen them safely off. Ekalu had gone stiff and stoic on hearing three of her decade were leaving, a sure sign of strong emotion. My guess, knowing her, was that she had felt betrayed. But she hadn’t shown any other sign of it.

I could know for certain. All I had to do was reach. There was nothing else to do right now, except stare at the suffocating not-even-black darkness of gate-space. But I didn’t.

Had Ship thought it would find, in me, what it had lost when it had lost its ancillaries? Perhaps it had discovered that I was a poorer substitute than its human crew, which I knew it was already fond of. What had Ship felt, when those soldiers had left? And should I be surprised at the possibility that Ship had discovered that it didn’t want an ancillary for a captain?

Oh, I knew that Ship cared for me. It couldn’t help caring for any captain, to some degree. But I knew, from when I had been a ship, that there was a difference between a captain you cared for just because she was your captain, and a favorite. And thinking that, alone here, outside the ship, in utter emptiness, I saw that I had relied on Ship’s support and obedience—and, yes, its affection—without ever asking what
it
wanted. I had presumed much further than any human captain would have, or could have, unthinkingly demanded to be shown the crew’s most intimate moments. I had behaved,
in some ways, as though I were in fact a part of Ship, but had also demanded—expected, it seemed—a level of devotion that I had no right to demand or expect, and that likely Ship could not give me. And I hadn’t even realized it until Ship had asked Seivarden to speak for it, and tell me that it liked the idea of being someone who could be a captain, and I had been dismayed to hear it.

I had thought at the time that it was trying to express an affection for Seivarden that, being a ship, it might find difficult to speak about directly. But perhaps it was also saying something to me. Perhaps I hadn’t been much different from Seivarden, looking desperately for someone else to shore myself up with. And maybe Ship had found it didn’t want to be that for me. Or found that it couldn’t. That would be perfectly understandable. Ships, after all, didn’t love other ships.