Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(44)

“She made a difference, at least. Listen, Awn, you and I both know something was going on. You and I both know that what happened last night doesn’t make sense unless…” She stopped.

Lieutenant Awn set her cup of arrack down, hard. Liquor sloshed over the lip of the cup. “Unless what? How does it make sense?”

“Here.” Lieutenant Skaaiat picked up the cup and pressed it into Lieutenant Awn’s hand. “Drink this. And I’ll explain. At least as much as makes sense to me.

“You know how annexations work. I mean, yes, they work by sheer, undeniable force, but after. After the executions and the transportations and once all the last bits of idiots who think they can fight back are cleaned up. Once all that’s done, we fit whoever’s left into Radchaai society—they form up into houses, and take clientage, and in a generation or two they’re as Radchaai as anybody. And mostly that happens because we go to the top of the local hierarchy—there pretty much always is one—and offer them all sorts of benefits in exchange for behaving like citizens, offer them clientage contracts, which allows them to offer contracts to whoever is below them, and before you know it the whole local setup is tied into Radchaai society, with minimal disruption.”

Lieutenant Awn made an impatient gesture. She already knew this. “What does that have to do with—”

“You f*cked that up.”

“I…”

“What you did worked. And the local Tanmind were going to have to swallow that. Fair enough. If I’d done what you did—gone straight to the Orsian priest, set up house in the lower city instead of using the police station and jail already built in the upper city, set about making alliances with lower city authorities and ignoring—”

“I didn’t ignore anyone!” Lieutenant Awn protested.

Lieutenant Skaaiat waved her protest away. “And ignoring what anyone else would have seen as the natural local hierarchy. Your house can’t afford to offer clientage to anyone here. Yet. Neither you nor I can make any contracts with anyone. For now. We had to exempt ourselves from our houses’ contracts and take clientage directly from Anaander Mianaai, while we serve. But we still have those family connections, and those families can use connections we make now, even if we can’t. And we can certainly use them when we retire. Getting your feet on the ground during an annexation is the one sure way to increase your house’s financial and social standing.

“Which is fine until the wrong person does it. We tell ourselves that everything is the way Amaat wants it to be, that everything that is, is because of God. So if we’re wealthy and respected, that’s how things should be. The aptitudes prove that it’s all just, that everyone gets what they deserve, and when the right people test into the right careers, that just goes to show how right it all is.”

“I’m not the right people.” Lieutenant Awn set down her empty cup, and Lieutenant Skaaiat refilled it.

“You’re only one of thousands, but you’re a noticeable one, to someone. And this annexation is different, it’s the last one. Last chance to grab property, to make connections on the sort of scale the upper houses have always been accustomed to. They don’t like to see any of those last chances go to houses like yours. And to make it worse, your subverting the local hierarchy—”

“I used the local hierarchy!”

“Lieutenants,” I cautioned. Lieutenant Awn’s outburst had been loud enough to be heard in the street, if anyone had been on the street this evening.

“If the Tanmind were running things here, that was as things must be in Amaat’s mind. Right?”

“But they…” Lieutenant Awn stopped. I wasn’t sure what she had been about to say. Perhaps that they had imposed their authority over Ors relatively recently. Perhaps that they were, in Ors, a numerical minority and Lieutenant Awn’s goal had been to reach the largest number of people she could.

“Careful,” warned Lieutenant Skaaiat, though Lieutenant Awn hadn’t needed the warning. Any Radchaai soldier knew not to speak without thinking. “If you hadn’t found those weapons, someone would have had an excuse not only to toss you out of Ors, but to come down hard on the Orsians and favor the upper city. Restoring the universe to its proper order. And then, of course, anyone inclined could have used the incident as an example of how soft we’ve gotten. If we’d stuck to so-called impartial aptitudes testing, if we’d executed more people, if we still made ancillaries…”

“I have ancillaries,” Lieutenant Awn pointed out.

Lieutenant Skaaiat shrugged. “Everything else would have fit, they could ignore that. They’ll ignore anything that doesn’t get them what they want. And what they want is anything they can grab.” She seemed so calm. Even almost relaxed. I was used to not seeing data from Lieutenant Skaaiat, but this disjunction between her demeanor and the seriousness of the situation—Lieutenant Awn’s still-extreme distress, and, to be honest, my own discomfort at events—made her seem oddly flat and unreal to me.

“I understand Jen Shinnan’s part in this,” Lieutenant Awn said. “I do, I get that. But I don’t understand how… how anyone else would benefit.” The question she couldn’t ask directly was, of course, why Anaander Mianaai would be involved, or why she would want to return to some previous, proper order, given she herself had certainly approved any changes. And why, if she wanted such a thing, she didn’t merely order the things she desired. If questioned, both lieutenants could, and likely would, say they weren’t speaking of the Lord of the Radch, but about some unknown person who must be involved, but I was certain that wouldn’t hold up under an interrogation with drugs. Fortunately, such an event was unlikely. “And I don’t see why anyone with that sort of access couldn’t just order me gone and put someone they preferred in my place, if that was all they wanted.”