“It can’t be worse than going understaffed,” Anaander Mianaai said, maybe aware of my momentary distraction, maybe not. “And the child is beside herself at the thought of serving under a fleet captain. She’s waiting for you at the docks.” She set down her tea, straightened in her chair. “Since the gate leading to Athoek is down and I have no idea what the situation there might be, I can’t give you specific orders. Besides”—she raised her now-empty hand as though forestalling some speech of mine—“I’d be wasting my time attempting to direct you too closely. You’ll do as you like no matter what I say. You’re loaded up? Have all the supplies you need?”

The question was perfunctory—she surely knew the status of my ship’s stores as well as I did. I made an indefinite gesture, deliberately insolent.

“You might as well take Captain Vel’s things,” she said, as though I’d answered reasonably. “She won’t need them.”

Vel Osck had been captain of Mercy of Kalr until a week ago. There were any number of reasons she might not need her possessions, the most likely, of course, being that she was dead. Anaander Mianaai didn’t do anything halfway, particularly when it came to dealing with her enemies. Of course, in this case, the enemy Vel Osck had supported was Anaander Mianaai herself. “I don’t want them,” I said. “Send them to her family.”

“If I can.” She might well not be able to do that. “Is there anything you need before you go? Anything at all?”

Various answers occurred to me. None seemed useful. “No.”

“I’ll miss you, you know,” she said. “No one else will speak to me quite the way you do. You’re one of the very few people I’ve ever met who really, truly didn’t fear the consequences of offending me. And none of those very few have the… similarity of background you and I have.”

Because I had once been a ship. An AI controlling an enormous troop carrier and thousands of ancillaries, human bodies, part of myself. At the time I had not thought of myself as a slave, but I had been a weapon of conquest, the possession of Anaander Mianaai, herself occupying thousands of bodies spread throughout Radch space.

Now I was only this single human body. “Nothing you can do to me could possibly be worse than what you’ve already done.”

“I am aware of that,” she said, “and aware of just how dangerous that makes you. I may well be extremely foolish just letting you live, let alone giving you official authority and a ship. But the games I play aren’t for the timid.”

“For most of us,” I said, openly angry now, knowing she could see the physical signs of it no matter how impassive my expression, “they aren’t games.”