“Why should Lieutenant Tisarwat care?”
“You never had a mother to be angry you offended her cousin,” Skaaiat said, half laughing, “or you wouldn’t ask.”
True enough. “What do you make of her?”
“Flighty, I would have said a day or two ago. But today she’s very subdued.” Flighty didn’t match the collected young person I’d seen in that outer office. Except, perhaps, those impossible eyes. “Until today she was on her way to a desk job in a border system.”
“The tyrant sent me a baby administrator?”
“I wouldn’t have thought she’d send you a baby anything,” Skaaiat said. “I’d have thought she’d have wanted to come with you herself. Maybe there’s not enough of her left here.” She drew breath as though to say more but then frowned, head cocked. “I’m sorry, there’s something I have to take care of.”
The docks were crowded with ships in need of supplies or repairs or emergency medical assistance, ships that were trapped here in the system, with crews and passengers who were extremely unhappy about the fact. Skaaiat’s staff had been working hard for days, with very few breaks. “Of course.” I bowed. “I’ll get out of your way.” She was still listening to whoever had messaged her. I turned to go.
“Breq.” I looked back. Skaaiat’s head was still cocked slightly, she was still hearing whoever else spoke. “Take care.”
“You, too.” I walked through the door, to the outer office. Lieutenant Tisarwat stood, still and silent. The adjunct stared ahead, fingers moving, attending to urgent dock business no doubt. “Lieutenant,” I said sharply, and didn’t wait for a reply but walked out of the office, through the crowd of disgruntled ships’ captains, onto the docks where I would find the shuttle that would take me to Mercy of Kalr.
The shuttle was too small to generate its own gravity. I was perfectly comfortable in such circumstances, but very young officers often were not. I stationed Lieutenant Tisarwat at the dock, to wait for Kalr Five, and then pushed myself over the awkward, chancy boundary between the gravity of the palace and the weightlessness of the shuttle, kicked myself over to a seat, and strapped myself in. The pilot gave a respectful nod, bowing being difficult in these circumstances. I closed my eyes, saw that Five stood in a large storage room inside the palace proper, plain, utilitarian, gray-walled. Filled with chests and boxes. In one brown-gloved hand she held a teabowl of delicate, deep rose glass. An open box in front of her showed more—a flask, seven more bowls, other dishes. Her pleasure in the beautiful things, her desire, was undercut by doubt. I couldn’t read her mind, but I guessed that she had been told to choose from this storeroom, had found these and wanted them very much, but didn’t quite believe she would be allowed to take them away. I was fairly sure this set was hand-blown, and some seven hundred years old. I hadn’t realized she had a connoisseur’s eye for such things.
I pushed the vision away. She would be some time, I thought, and I might as well get some sleep.
I woke three hours later, to lilac-eyed Lieutenant Tisarwat strapping herself deftly into a seat across from me. Kalr Five—now radiating contentment, presumably from the results of her stint in the palace storeroom—pushed herself over to Lieutenant Tisarwat, and with a nod and a quiet Just in case, sir proffered a bag for the nearly inevitable moment when the new officer’s stomach reacted to microgravity.
I’d known young lieutenants who took such an offer as an insult. Lieutenant Tisarwat accepted it, with a small, vague smile that didn’t quite reach the rest of her face. Still seeming entirely calm and collected.
“Lieutenant,” I said, as Kalr Five kicked herself forward to strap herself in beside the pilot, another Kalr. “Have you taken any meds?” Another potential insult. Antinausea meds were available, and I’d known excellent, long-serving officers who for the whole length of their careers took them every time they got on a shuttle. None of them ever admitted to it.
The last traces of Lieutenant Tisarwat’s smile vanished. “No, sir.” Even. Calm.
“Pilot has some, if you need them.” That ought to have gotten some kind of reaction.
And it did, though just the barest fraction of a second later than I’d expected. The hint of a frown, an indignant straightening of her shoulders, hampered by her seat restraints. “No, thank you, sir.”
Flighty, Skaaiat Awer had said. She didn’t usually misread people so badly. “I didn’t request your presence, Lieutenant.” I kept my voice calm, but with an edge of anger. Easy enough to do under the circumstances. “You’re here only because Anaander Mianaai ordered it. I don’t have the time or the resources to hand-raise a brand-new baby. You’d better get up to speed fast. I need officers who know what they’re doing. I need a whole crew I can depend on.”
“Sir,” replied Lieutenant Tisarwat. Still calm, but now some earnestness in her voice, that tiny trace of frown deepening, just a bit. “Yes, sir.”
Dosed with something. Possibly antinausea, and if I’d been given to gambling I’d have bet my considerable fortune that she was filled to the ears with at least one sedative. I wanted to pull up her personal record—Mercy of Kalr would have it by now. But the tyrant would see that I had pulled that record up. Mercy of Kalr belonged, ultimately, to Anaander Mianaai, and she had accesses that allowed her to control it. Mercy of Kalr saw and heard everything I did, and if the tyrant wanted that information she had only to demand it. And I didn’t want her to know what it was I suspected. Wanted, truth be told, for my suspicions to be proven false. Unreasonable.
For now, if the tyrant was watching—and she was surely watching, through Mercy of Kalr, would be so long as we were in the system—let her think I resented having a baby foisted on me when I’d rather have someone who knew what they were doing.
I turned my attention away from Lieutenant Tisarwat. Forward, the pilot leaned closer to Five and said, quiet and oblique, “Everything all right?” And then to Five’s responding, puzzled frown, “Too quiet.”
“All this time?” asked Five. Still oblique. Because they were talking about me and didn’t want to trigger any requests I might have made to Ship, to tell me when the crew was talking about me. I had an old habit—some two thousand years old—of singing whatever song ran through my head. Or humming. It had caused the crew some puzzlement and distress at first—this body, the only one left to me, didn’t have a particularly good voice. They were getting used to it, though, and now I was dryly amused to see crew members disturbed by my silence.
“Not a peep,” said the pilot to Kalr Five. With a brief sideways glance and a tiny twitch of neck and shoulder muscles that told me she’d thought of looking back, toward Lieutenant Tisarwat.
“Yeah,” said Five, agreeing, I thought, with the pilot’s unstated assessment of what might be troubling me.
Good. Let Anaander Mianaai be watching that, too.
It was a long ride back to Mercy of Kalr, but Lieutenant Tisarwat never did use the bag or evince any discomfort. I spent the time sleeping, and thinking.
Ships, communications, data traveled between stars using gates, beacon-marked, held constantly open. The calculations had already been made, the routes marked out through the strangeness of gate space, where distances and proximity didn’t match normal space. But military ships—like Mercy of Kalr—could generate their own gates. It was a good deal more risky—choose the wrong route, the wrong exit or entrance, and a ship could end up anywhere, or nowhere. That didn’t trouble me. Mercy of Kalr knew what it was doing, and we would arrive safely at Athoek Station.