“No one I wasn’t supposed to! Though,” she added, frowning, “sometimes I kind of wish I had eaten someone I wasn’t supposed to. But it’s too late now. What are you having for supper? Radchaai on stations eat an awful lot of fish, it seems. I’m beginning to be bored of fish. Oh, where’s your bathroom? I have to—

I cut her off. “We don’t really have one. No plumbing here. But we do have a bucket.”

“Now that’s something different! I’m not bored of buckets yet!”

Lieutenant Tisarwat staggered into the room just as Five was clearing away the last supper dish and Translator Dlique was saying, very earnestly, “Eggs are so inadequate, don’t you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they’re programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.” The entire dinner conversation had been like that.

“You raise a good point, Translator,” I replied, and then turned my attention to Lieutenant Tisarwat. It had been more than three hours since I’d thought much about her, and she’d drunk a considerable amount in that time. She swayed, looked at me, glaring. “Raughd Denche,” Tisarwat said to me, raising a hand and pointing somewhere off to the side for emphasis. She did not seem to notice the presence of Translator Dlique, who watched with an expression of slightly frowning curiosity. “Raughd. Denche. Is a horrible person.”

Judging from even the very small bit I’d seen of Citizen Raughd today, I suspected Tisarwat’s assessment was an accurate one.

“Sir,” Tisarwat added. Very belatedly.

“Bo,” I said sharply to the soldier who had come in behind her, who hovered anxiously. “Get your lieutenant out of here before there’s a mess.” Bo took her by the arm, led her unsteadily out. Too late, I feared.

“I don’t think she’s going to make it to the bucket,” said Translator Dlique, solemnly. Almost regretfully.

“I don’t, either,” I said. “But it was worth a try.”

That a Presger translator was here on Athoek Station was problem enough. How long would it be before whoever had sent her began to wonder why she hadn’t returned? How would they react to Athoek having essentially made her a prisoner, even if somewhat unsuccessfully? And what would happen when they found the Radch in such disarray? Possibly nothing—the treaty made no distinctions between one sort of human or another, all were covered, and that same treaty forbade the Presger to harm any of those humans. That left open the question of what, to a Presger, would constitute “harm,” but presumably issues like that had been hammered out between the translators of the Radch and those of the Presger.