Seivarden’s Amaats hung motionless, blinking, confused. What sense the universe had made to them had disappeared with my words, and they were unsure of how to fit what they’d heard me say into a reality they understood. “What are you hanging around for?” Seivarden snapped, sterner than I’d ever heard her with them, but it seemed to break whatever had held them until now. “Get moving!” And they moved, relieved to find something they understood.

By then Tisarwat had calmed again somewhat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get it back for either of us. But it will be all right. Somehow it will.” She didn’t answer, and five minutes later, exhausted from events and from her despair and her grief, she fell asleep.

21

Once the repair crew arrived, the shuttle could leave the hole it had cut in the dome. I ordered us back to Mercy of Kalr. Station Medical didn’t need to know what I was, and anyway they were busy enough with problems caused or exacerbated by the lack of gravity, which couldn’t be turned on until the lake water had been contained. And truth to tell, I was glad to get back to Mercy of Kalr, even if only for a little while.

Medic wanted me where she could frown at me and tell me not to get up without her permission, and I was happy enough to indulge her, at least for a day. So Seivarden reported to me where I lay on a bed in Medical. Holding a bowl of tea. “It’s like old times,” said Seivarden, smiling. But tense. Anticipating what I might say to her, now things were calmer.

“It is,” I agreed, and took a drink of my tea. Definitely not Daughter of Fishes. Good.

“Our Tisarwat got banged up pretty badly,” Seivarden observed, when I said nothing further. Tisarwat was in an adjoining cubicle, attended by Bo Nine, who had explicit orders never to leave her lieutenant alone. Her ribs were still healing, and Medic had her confined to Medical until she could decide what else Tisarwat might need. “What was she thinking, charging an ancillary like that without her armor?”

“She was trying to draw Sword of Atagaris’s fire, so that I would have time to shoot it before it shot Horticulturist Basnaaid. She was lucky it didn’t shoot her outright.” It must have been more taken aback by Translator Dlique’s death than I had imagined. Or just reluctant to kill an officer without a legal order.

“Horticulturist Basnaaid, is it?” Seivarden asked. Her experience with very young lieutenants might not have been as extensive as mine, but it was extensive nonetheless. “Is there any interest in return? Or is that what the self-sacrifice and the tears were about?” I raised an eyebrow, and she continued, “It never occurred to me until now how many baby lieutenants must have cried on your shoulders over the years.”