Instead I continued past, to where Captain Hetnys and her ship’s ancillary were bound, strapped to seats. Watched by my Amaats. Silver-armored, both of them. In theory, Sword of Atagaris could still gate back to the station and attack us. In fact, even if it hadn’t run into the mines Seivarden had left for it—which likely would only do minimal damage, more an annoyance than anything else—there was no way to attack us without also attacking its captain. “Drop your armor, Captain,” I said. “And you, too, Atagaris. You know I can shoot through it, and we can’t treat your injury until you do.”
Sword of Atagaris dropped its armor. Medic pulled herself past me with a corrective, frown deepening as she saw the ancillary’s wounded wrist.
Captain Hetnys only said, “Fuck you.”
I still held the Presger gun. Captain Hetnys’s leg was more than a meter from the shuttle hull, and besides we had the ability to patch it, if I sent a bullet through it. I braced myself against a nearby seat and shot her in the knee. She screamed, and the Atagaris beside her strained at its bonds, but could not break them. “Captain Hetnys, you are relieved of command,” I said, once Medic had applied a corrective, and the globs of blood that had floated free had been mopped up. “I have every right to shoot you in the head, for what’s happened today. I will not promise not to do so. You and all your officers are under arrest.
“Sword of Atagaris, you will immediately send every human aboard to Athoek Station. Unarmed. You will then take your engines off-line and put every single ancillary you have into suspension until further notice. Captain Hetnys, and all your lieutenants, will be put into suspension on Athoek Station. If you threaten the station, or any ship or citizen, your officers will die.”
“You can’t—” began Captain Hetnys.
“Be silent, Citizen,” I said. “I am now speaking to Sword of Atagaris.” Captain Hetnys didn’t answer that. “You, Sword of Atagaris, will tell me who your captain did business with, on the other side of the Ghost Gate.”
“I will not,” replied Sword of Atagaris.
“Then I will kill Captain Hetnys.” Medic, still occupied with the corrective she’d applied to Captain Hetnys’s leg, looked up at me briefly, dismayed, but said nothing.
“You,” said Sword of Atagaris. Its voice was ancillary-flat, but I could guess at the emotion behind it. “I wish I could show you what it’s like. I wish you could know what it’s like, to be in my position. But you never will, and that’s how I know there isn’t really any such thing as justice.”
There were things I could say. Answers I could make. Instead, I said, “Who did your captain do business with, on the other side of the Ghost Gate?”
“She didn’t identify herself,” Sword of Atagaris replied, voice still flat and calm. “She looked Ychana, but she couldn’t have been, no Ychana speaks Radchaai with such an accent. To judge by her speech, she might have come from the Radch itself.”
“With perhaps a hint of Notai.” Thinking of that tea set, in fragments in its box, in the Undergarden. That supply locker.
“Perhaps. Captain Hetnys thought she was working for the Lord of the Radch.”
“I will keep your captain close to me, Ship,” I said. “If you don’t do as I say, or if at any time I think you have deceived me, she dies. Don’t doubt me on this.”
“How could I?” replied Sword of Atagaris, bitterness audible even in its flat tone.
I didn’t answer, only turned to pull myself forward, to get out of the way while Seivarden’s Amaats brought a suspension pod for Captain Hetnys. I caught sight of Basnaaid, who had been only a few seats away, who had perhaps heard the entire exchange between me and Sword of Atagaris. “Fleet Captain,” she said, as I pulled myself even with her. “I wanted to say.”
I grabbed a handhold, halted myself. “Horticulturist.”
“I’m glad my sister had a friend like you, and I wish… I feel as though, if you had been there, when it happened, whatever it was, that maybe it would have made a difference, and she’d still be alive.”
Of all the things to say. Of all the things to say now, when I had just threatened to shoot Captain Hetnys only because I knew how her ship felt about her. Of all the times for me to hear such a thing, coming from Lieutenant Awn’s sister’s mouth.
And I had gone beyond my ability to remain silent, to seem as though I was untouched by any of it. “Citizen,” I replied, hearing my own voice go flat. “I was there when it happened, and I was no help to your sister at all. I told you I used another name when I knew her, and that name was Justice of Toren. I was the ship she served on, and at the command of Anaander Mianaai herself, I shot your sister in the head. What happened next ended in my own destruction, and I am all that’s left of that ship. I am not human, and you were right to speak to me as you did, when we first met.” I turned my face away, before Basnaaid would see even the small signs I might give of my feelings at having said it.
Everyone in the shuttle had heard me. Basnaaid seemed shocked into silence. Seivarden already knew, of course, and Medic. I didn’t want to know what Seivarden’s Amaats thought. Didn’t want to see or hear Sword of Atagaris’s opinion. I turned to the only person who seemed unaware of me—Lieutenant Tisarwat, who had no attention for anything but what a failure she’d been, at living and dying both.
I pulled myself into the seat beside her, strapped myself in. For a moment I seriously considered telling her just how stupid she’d been, back in the Gardens, and how lucky we all were to have survived her stupidity. Instead, I unhooked her seat strap with my good hand—my left arm was immobilized by the corrective on my shoulder—and pulled her to me. She clung to me and leaned her face into my neck, and began sobbing.
“It’s all right,” I said, my arm awkwardly around her shaking shoulders. “It’ll be all right.”
“How can you say that?” she demanded into my neck, between sobs. A tear escaped, one tiny, trembling sphere floating away. “How could it possibly?” And then, “No one would ever dare offer you such a platitude.”
Over three thousand years old. Infinitely ambitious. And still only seventeen. “You assume incorrectly.” If she thought about it, if she was capable just now of thinking clearly, she might have guessed who it was who might have said such a thing to me. If she had, she didn’t say it. “It’s so hard, at first,” I said, “when they hook you up. But the rest of you is around you, and you know it’s only temporary, you know it will be better soon. And when you are better, it’s so amazing. To have such reach, to see so much, all at once. It’s…” But there was no describing it. Tisarwat herself would have seen it, if only for a few hours, distressed or else blunted by meds. “She never let you have that. It was never part of her plan to let you have that.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” And of course she’d known. How could she not? “She hated the way I felt, she dosed me up as fast as she could. She didn’t care if…” The sobs that had died down began afresh. More tears escaped and floated off. Bo Nine, near all this time, horrified by my revelation minutes before, horror that was not at all relieved by my conversation with Tisarwat now, caught them with a cloth, which she then folded, and pushed it between Tisarwat’s face and my neck.