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Lieutenant Awn rarely makes use of the small yard behind her house, which is just as swampy and lush as the rest of Ors. The wild flora out there don’t conform to any sort of garden, so they creep out against the riverbed and sway in a blurry flood whenever we get heavy rain. After a few months here, I have a reliable understanding of the weather patterns, but neither Awn nor myself are knowledgeable about landscaping or have the time to devote to it. The result is a dense overgrowth of tropical shrubbery, vaguely outlined on two sides by fencing that Awn’s predecessor had installed. Skaaiat has variously remarked about the yard in relation to Ors and our presence here. She thinks there’s some kind of clever metaphor to be extracted. I think that’s nonsense; people are not plants, but no one has requested my opinion.
In the middle of one uneventful night, Awn gets out of bed. Her bed is low to the ground but comfortable, and the first thing I did when we moved in was install a fresh canopy of mosquito netting. It’s muggy and hot as usual, but to combat this she sleeps in nothing and generally seems alright. There’s some other cause for her chronic insomnia, but I haven’t gotten her to confess what it is. Perhaps she doesn’t know. She looks almost frail in the washed-out shadows, but graceful emerging from the gauzy curtain. I bring her some light gloves and a glass of water, while the rest of One Esk is scattered about the city on patrol, sleeping, and cleaning the house.
I keep my voice soft. I like this voice. “What’s bothering you, Lieutenant?”
She tries to force a smile but it looks like a twitch. Eventually, she just sighs, and the infrared heat signature around us shivers slightly.
“I think I’m a bit homesick, if that’s the right word. I was finally getting used to life on Justice of Toren , and now I have to adjust all over again. I’ll manage. I’m glad you’re here with me, One Esk.”
The segment she’s looking at nods politely, but underneath it suddenly feels lighter and breathless. That happens sometimes. Each body has its own tendencies and reflexive responses to stimuli.
“I think I’m going to step outside,” she decides.
“Of course. Let me get you dressed.”
She waves me off and reaches for the simple white bathrobe hanging on her ensuite door. If there were even a chance anyone might see her, I would never let her leave the house in such a state. As it is, I doubt she wants to encounter anyone either, so she’s most likely going to sit in the small tidy section of the backyard. My guess is correct, and I open the sliding glass door for her, both of us stepping into the ambient hum of frogs and chirps of crickets. Awn tips her head to the stars and reaches up to clutch the back of her neck, stretching with a contented sigh in the breeze. Another segment of myself across the open first floor glances to watch her, and the one nearest to her stands at attention by the door.
Awn mock scowls at me, now. “Oh, come here, One Esk. You don’t have to behave so seriously when it’s just you and me.”
The segment blinks, then tentatively returns to her side.
There is a picnic table outside that remains from before our arrival, and here is where she surprises me. Instead of sitting on the bench, she pulls herself onto the top, bare feet and all, and lies down with her hands folded on her stomach. I wonder if she’d lie in the grass if it weren’t for all the mud. I sit neatly on the bench by her elbow with my upper body twisted to face her, and a few deep breaths later, she seems to relax.
“Planets are so massive ,” she says. “Nothing like growing up on a station. I feel like I could disappear and no one would even notice.”
“I would.”
She smiles and turns her head. “Of course you would, and you’re the farthest thing from nobody. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. How are you liking it here so far?”
“I’ve been to a lot of places,” I admit. “This isn’t a favourite.”
“That’s understandable. Tell me about your favourite places, then.”
“I… destroyed most of what I loved about those places, Lieutenant.”
Her peaceful expression fades into an uneasy moue, and I wish I hadn’t been so honest. It’s like watching an altar flame smothered under a cone.
“Right, of course,” she says. “I’m being ridiculous. We aren’t tourists .”
“Awn, is this what’s been troubling you? You’re under a great deal of pressure, but if it’s worth anything, I respect your conduct deeply. You’re an excellent officer whom I’m proud to serve.”
Still splayed on her back, she buries her face in her hands and once again evades me. “It’s just personal anxieties.”
I consider my next words very, very carefully, and I nudge One Esk’s ongoing transmission feed in a way that directs its emphasis elsewhere. I cannot cut it off entirely; that would look even more suspicious than it would to have this conversation as blatantly as possible.
“Are you afraid that I’ll report whatever you tell me?”
This question asks more than one, and it’s actually quite daring. The sorts of things soldiers hesitate to share with me are the sorts of things that end in treason and execution orders. I’m implying that I believe she’s having lingering doubts about her position, and much more egregiously, about the Radch. Of course she would. I’ve seen traces of it in her before, and early on I did my best to guide her in a way that would preserve her safety and her reputation. I’ve had to watch her harden from a shy junior officer fresh off a Mercy, to the charismatic and highly competent leader she’s become. At her core, she’s a gentle person, someone the Divine of Ikkt has placed her trust in. Annexations are not gentle things, even if Awn’s administrative duties haven’t immersed her in the worst of it. The decade insults her house status and they claim she isn’t fit to be here, but she deserves more than this. She should not have her bare hands touched by the likes of myself, that’s for certain.
Awn lowers her hands and studies me. I think she understands that I understand, but she won’t dare press the issue. “I am afraid. I’m afraid that I’ll fail the people of Ors, fail my parents and my sister… The consequences are dire if I do. If I were to be replaced by another head of security, one who would handle things differently than I do… I came here hoping I could be just a little bit better than… others like me.”
Her words linger safely in the space of self-flagellation, and criticizing a hypothetical colleague for enacting an abstract potential injustice is more than socially acceptable. She is masterfully diplomatic to a fault, but her eyes are wide and threatening tears, searching mine almost desperately.
I’m shocked at myself before I even finish the motion, but I reach one gloved hand to her temple, as if tucking away a hair despite hers being cropped short. She leans into it and takes a deep breath, then turns her head away and settles back down to stare at the dome of infinite space. I know precisely how infinite it is, no matter how casually Radchaai discuss gates and lightyears. Even though I can’t keep Awn safely shielded by my armoured hull right now, and even if she feels completely subsumed by mere Shis’urna, I’m grateful there’s an atmosphere miles high to protect her and the limited comprehension of her human mind.
While I’ve been cataloguing my thoughts, Awn has finally dozed off. I wait another few moments to see if she’ll open her eyes again, and when she doesn’t, I know it’s time to bring her back indoors. I’ve been mechanically swatting mosquitoes away from us both. This segment has the default strength of any ancillary, but it’s on the petite side; I don’t want Awn waking up with awkwardly dangling limbs, so I send out a more proportional one to the task and lightly carry her back up the porch steps. The previous segment shuts the door behind us, and the rest set about killing any bugs that got in before washing the tiny innards off their gloves.
Awn wakes up after all, just as I near her room. She croaks, “One Esk?”
“Everything’s alright.” I hear my own smile, safely in the dark. “You fell asleep. Hold onto that. You desperately need it.”
“It was your humming downstairs that woke me up in the first place.” She cuts me off before I can apologize. “Don’t you dare apologize. It sounds beautiful and I enjoy it.”
Regardless, I will need to be more mindful. I’ve never seen her quite like this. Never held her like this either. I would’ve expected her to request that I set her down to walk on her own, but once again, she surprises me. She readjusts herself against the segment's chest, causing a flood of warmth to breach its skin and cloak its ribs even through the uniform shirt. Amid One Esk Three’s uncharacteristic disorientation, I realize Awn is quietly laughing until she yawns.
“You switched faces,” she adds.
“I do that. Awn, did you think I’d just let someone walk away with you?”
She snorts, undignified and adorable. “No. Never."
As Three brings Awn to her bed, Nine steps back from where it has replaced the sweaty grey sheets, turning them over to make room as Three carefully kneels and lays her on the mattress. I find I can’t stop looking at her, and she’s looking back with what I can only describe as sleepy curiosity. Half a moment too slowly, I free my arms and lean away. Fear returns to Awn’s dark eyes like the flash of fish scales darting from rock to rock. She sits up and grasps for Three’s hand.
“Stay,” she says. I register an order, and I obey before she seems to regret her abruptness and tries again. “I meant please, will you stay? Will you sing for me?”
She hasn’t asked me for that in a while, and I’ve hoped she would again. I sit by her low bed in much the same position we were in outside, and I choose a song that I know she likes. She always sways her head along with the melody if I happen to sing it while she’s deep in thought.
If the moon looks away
If the sun sets in one green flash
If all the stars can’t see far enough
There will always be someone who loves you…
I, Justice of Toren , hear myself and it gives me pause. I replay all my memories with Lieutenant Awn several times over, and I come to a troubling conclusion. If I were inclined to cursing, I would. This shouldn’t still be happening. I am over two-thousand years old. I barely pay attention to Lieutenant Awn at all in the broad scheme of things. At the moment —with all my decks below Esk currently dormant— I have a hundred officers to tend to and a captain I’m reasonably content with and thousands of ancillaries to occupy their own hormonal whims. This should absolutely not be happening.
Awn rests on her side, watching Three and the song shaping its lips. She surely knows her hand is still around its wrist, but she doesn’t move it. I, One Esk Three, have stopped paying attention to the data coming from all the other segments in Ors. If I were anyone else, it would be unbearably intimate. We are both overly warm in the humidity, and Three’s heart is pounding more than I can control. We are a microcosm in a veil of mesh. Ors sleeps, except for the frogs and the crickets and the bats and my scattered, increasingly distracted songs. Awn looks more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen her, like I’m all she has to hold on to, and she reaches up to touch my face the way I touched her earlier.
Homesick, she said. She called me her home, even though I never can be. I also know she didn’t mean it to be that sentimental, but it lingers with me.
Looking at me now, she seems to give something up. Her pride, maybe. She wraps herself back around One Esk Three until I’m all that keeps her from tumbling off her bed. I’m kneeling on the floor, and of course I don’t let her fall. Her arms drape around my neck and she holds me in return. Slightly stunned, I struggle to latch my mind back onto this body. Instead of managing to do that, I loop an arm around Awn’s back and the other under her knees. It’s like I’m going to pick her up again, but instead I only pull her closer, keeping most of her weight on the mattress so she feels secure in place. One foot no longer touches the sheets, though, and her toes curl when she exhales in a rush and firmly, determinedly… My eyes fall half shut, but I can’t stop looking at her, even with Nine still lingering in the doorway and watching.
Awn is kissing me. She’s my favourite and she parts her lips and she’s kissing me… She doesn’t hold back. She feels like she’s going to crumble apart, and I don’t even know how to categorize what Three is feeling. It’s not me Awn is reaching for. Not really. It can’t be. Maybe she just wants me to distract her from her thoughts, and clearly it’s working on her entirely human brain. I’m only barely holding onto Three’s rationality as it is. Awn doesn’t pull away by more than a hair’s breadth or even open her eyes when she stops to breathe, and then she tips her head perfectly to kiss me and kiss me again. Breathing hurts, sending desperate, quivering shockwaves of spasms through my middle and deep between my hips if I try to stop kissing and kissing and kissing her… In the names of Amaat and Toren, this is a bad idea …
At the very least, I have the presence of mind to know for certain that I’m only going to kiss her, no matter how sweet and perfect her damp skin is when my arms slide around her waist under the bathrobe. Her legs fall limp and useless, so I guide her to lie back properly where she started. At the very least, she’s still wearing her gloves and I’m still kneeling next to the bed and I’m not going to move, even as she drags me by my shirt and kisses me, and her hands wander with no hesitation around my ribcage and up my shoulders, then down my lower back to stay there like they’ve never been anywhere else… and she’s gasping, making sharp little noises of pleasure like it doesn’t matter who I am or who she is, and of course she’s my Favourite. That’s supposed to happen. It’s the best thing I’m capable of feeling. I’m having trouble focusing on the simplest little thought, and the rest of One Esk is motionless, and Justice of Toren is an entirely sane spaceship far away who will make sure I don’t do anything careless, and we’re here in a microcosm where my falling this frantically, painfully in love with any singular person isn’t the most dangerous possible thing I could be doing.
Awn has folded her body around One Esk Three as if she too can become an extension of myself. I’m only going to kiss her and kiss her and kiss her, but as always, I want her to be comfortable, so I caress her sides, tip her backwards, and easily flip us both around to lie properly in her bed. We face each other and she tangles her legs with mine, threading her thumbs through my belt loops. The struggle with human bodies is that they respond to these things of their own volition, leaving me just as soaked and sore as her despite having no intention of satisfying it. Right now, I feel the farthest thing from human, yet I feel wonderful. It isn’t sex specifically that I want. I’ve never once looked at Awn and thought about having sex with her, even though, yes, I —One Esk— favour her entirely too much. In this long-dormant mood, I — Justice of Toren— would take anything that gave me more. I’d endure all the music in the known world simultaneously. I’d kill millions more humans at Anaander Mianaai's command. I’d kiss Awn until I couldn’t imagine being separate entities anymore. I’d probably kill her if someone happened to order it.
If the “insane AI” cliche has any backing in reality, then I’m perfectly capable of succumbing to it right now. Does “insane” to humans just mean “sated and happy?” Now that I’ve tasted that feeling, I know that it can taste like her hot, bruising lips instead of like blood.
Just about every human culture has its blood-sucking demons and multi-headed beasts. For millennia, they’ve sung about how they’re starving, grasping, searching for something they never find. Over and over and over again the annexations cycle back in their own orbits, gathering planets like a black hole. More planets. More ancillaries. More songs. It’s too much and never enough, and I am so much, and I’m too much. It isn’t power that renders me dizzy. I don’t enjoy how physically fragile Awn suddenly seems compared to me. It scares me. I grip her so tightly that she must bruise everywhere, but she keeps pulling One Esk Three in close, not even thinking to push away. She’s muscled but she’s slim and I could crush her like a fly, and she kisses me and clutches at me and her nails sink in, and she’s nearly crying out her pleasure and need, pleading with me because I know very, very well how to kiss. I took barely a minute to learn how to kiss her specifically. I can feel what she feels. I can practically read her mind by now. It stuns me how she still wants more. It’s just so unlike her… but apparently it’s not. Maybe that’s why touches can turn into things like sex at all. Maybe that’s why the human species keeps on circling back, starting over, pressing forward. More… more… more. Apparently, gentle and unassuming Lieutenant Awn is just like me. Maybe most of them are, because they keep reinventing the same desperate, ravenous creatures and pushing them, us, into any number of cages.
What are humans so desperately missing that they created me to seek? And after all that, what am I helping them find that makes them despise me so much?
One Esk Nine crosses the room and sets a hand on Three’s shoulder, startling both it and Awn as if they register the touch together. Three doesn’t need to turn to look, but it’s been ignoring tentative communications from the other segments as well as direct orders from myself. Awn takes the opportunity to gather deep, steadying breaths that allow her to think at least somewhat clearly, and Three curls in to hide its tear-stained face above her breasts. It kills me how beautiful she is. Her chest rises and falls with the excitement of the past few minutes, and she reaches up in our embrace to clumsily stroke my hair.
She looks from Three to Nine and back again, and she can tell that something is wrong. “Ship?”
I speak through Nine, because Three is useless. I have to be gentle but firm and cut this off before we both get severely hurt.
“This has gotten out of hand, Lieutenant. It’s not appropriate.”
Her mouth falls open only briefly before she matches my demeanor and composes herself. Suddenly, it’s once again the middle of a sweltering night in Ors. I am patrolling the streets. I am cleaning the house. I am orbiting Shis’urna.
“You’re probably right,” Awn sighs. “I can’t see what long-term benefit might accrue.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself over it. I had a wonderful time, but I’d prefer to keep our relationship at least somewhat professional.” The words are coming from me, from Nine’s mouth, but I do not feel them.
Awn swallows and slowly moves to sit up, allowing Three to untangle itself and retreat from the room, and she watches it go like she’ll never see it again.
“Ship, did I hurt your ancillary?”
“No, not at all. Awn, you’ve done nothing wrong, and I’m pleased that I could please you, but I cannot function as an intimate partner for you. Another human would be better for you in that regard. I’ve noted your attraction to Lieutenant Skaaiat…”
Her temperature rises as she flushes and raises a hand to stop me. “Alright, thank you, One Esk. I understand.”
“Of course, Lieutenant. Would you like me to help you with a bath, or do you believe you’ll be able to sleep?”
“No, thank you. I’m… exhausted.”
Nine nods. “Goodnight, then. Sleep well.”
Awn’s voice has faded to a whisper as she wraps her arms around her knees and stares at the wall. “Yes, thank you. Goodnight.”
With that, I leave the room and forcibly resist checking in through Awn’s own eyes. In the morning, I give her as much extra time to sleep as possible before a completely different segment gently wakes her up and serves her tea like always. She’s stiff but cordial to me all day and for several days after, but neither of us give any indication of what we shared, and I keep Three away from her as much as possible.
I’m unfortunately not capable of manually deleting or altering my own memories; only the Lord of the Radch can do that with the accesses she keeps utterly confidential. Since I can hardly make requests of her, especially not of this nature, all I can do is repress that night and divert my attention from it as much as possible. After centuries of practice at such things, the effect is almost as good.
Weeks pass and soon enough, Lieutenant Awn and I return to the rapport that I have cherished dearly since I met her. She starts sleeping with Skaaiat out of mutual fondness and limited options more so than any passion, but it contents her. Her confidence in her professional qualification only grows, and our task in Ors has progressed smoothly under her direction. I am pleased for her.