“What are you trying to do, Fleet Captain?” Governor Giarod seemed genuinely baffled. “You arrive here and go straight to the Undergarden. You go downwell and suddenly there are problems with the Valskaayans. I thought your priority was to keep the citizens in this system safe.”

“Governor,” I replied. Very evenly, very calmly. “The residents of the Undergarden and the Valskaayans who pick tea are citizens. I did not like what I found in the Undergarden, and I did not like what I found in the mountains downwell.”

“And when you want something,” the governor remarked, her voice sharp, “you say so, and you expect to get it.”

“So do you,” I replied. Serious. Still calm. “It comes with being system governor, doesn’t it? And from where you sit, you can afford to ignore things you don’t think are important. But that view—that list of important things—is very different if you’re sitting somewhere else.”

“A commonplace, Fleet Captain. But some points of view don’t take in as much as others.”

“And how do you know yours isn’t one of them, if you’ll never try looking from somewhere different?” Governor Giarod didn’t answer immediately. “This is the well-being of citizens we’re talking about.”

She sighed. “Fosyf has already been in contact with me. I suppose you know her field workers are threatening to stop working unless she meets a whole list of demands?”

“I only just heard a few hours ago.”

“And by dealing with them in such circumstances, we are rewarding these people for threatening us. What do you think they’ll do but try it again, since it got them what they wanted once already? And we need things calm here.”

“These people are citizens.” I replied, my voice as calm and even as I could make it, without reaching the dead tonelessness of an ancillary. “When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?”

“You don’t understand, Fleet Captain, this isn’t like—”

I cut her off, heedless of propriety. “And what does it cost you to consider the possibility?” In fact, it might well cost her a great deal. The admission, to herself, that she was not as just as she had always thought herself to be. “We need things running here in such a way that no matter what happens outside this system—even if we never hear from the Lord of the Radch again, even if every gate in Radchaai space goes down—no matter what happens elsewhere, this system is safe and stable. We will not be able to do that by threatening tens or hundreds of citizens with armed soldiers.”