Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,86
you’ve had, since the incident. Who did you mean when you spoke of someone else who would benefit from the situation?”
“If I’d known what name to put there, my lord, I would have used it. I only meant by it that there must be a specific person who acted, who caused it…” She stopped, took a breath, abandoned that sentence. “Someone conspired with the Tanmind, someone who had access to those guns. Whoever it was, they wanted trouble between the upper city and the lower. It was my job to prevent that. I did my best to prevent that.” Certainly an evasion. From the moment Anaander Mianaai had ordered the hasty execution of those Tanmind citizens in the temple, the first, most obvious suspect had been the Lord of the Radch herself.
“Why would anyone want trouble between the upper city and the lower?” Anaander Mianaai asked. “Who would exert themselves over it?”
“Jen Shinnan, my lord, and her associates,” answered Lieutenant Awn, on firmer ground, for the moment at least. “She felt the ethnic Orsians were unduly favored.”
“By you.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“So you’re saying that in the first months of the annexation, Jen Shinnan found some Radchaai official willing to divert crates full of weapons so that five years later she could start trouble between the upper and lower city. To get you in trouble.”
“My lord!” Lieutenant Awn lifted her forehead one centimeter off the floor, then halted. “I don’t know how, I don’t know why. I don’t know wh…” She swallowed that last, which I knew would have been a lie. “What I know is, it was my job to keep the peace in Ors. That peace was threatened and I acted to…” She stopped, realizing perhaps that the sentence would be an awkward one to finish. “It was my job to protect the citizens in Ors.”
“Which is why you so vehemently protested the execution of the people who endangered the citizens in Ors.” Anaander Mianaai’s tone was dry, and sardonic.
“They were my responsibility, lord. And as I said at the time, they were under control, we could have held them until reinforcements arrived, very easily. You are the ultimate authority, and of course your orders must be obeyed, but I didn’t understand why those people had to die. I still don’t understand why they had to die right then.” A half-second pause. “I don’t need to understand why. I’m here to follow your orders. But I…” She paused again. Swallowed. “My lord, if you suspect anything of me, any wrongdoing or disloyalty, I beg you, have me interrogated when we reach Valskaay.”
The same drugs used for aptitudes testing and reeducation could be used for interrogation. A skilled interrogator could pry the most secret thoughts from a person’s mind. An unskilled one could throw up irrelevancies and confabulations, could damage her subject nearly as badly as an unskilled reeducator.
What Lieutenant Awn had asked for was something surrounded by legal obligations—not least among them the requirement that two witnesses be present, and Lieutenant Awn would have the right to name one of them.
I saw nausea and terror in her when Anaander Mianaai didn’t answer. “My lord, may I speak plainly?”
“By all means, speak plainly,” said Anaander Mianaai, dry and bitter.
Lieutenant Awn spoke, terrified, face still to the floor. “It was you. You diverted the guns, you planned that mob, with Jen Shinnan. But I don’t understand why. It can’t have been about me, I’m nobody.”
“But you do not intend to remain nobody, I think,” replied Anaander Mianaai. “Your pursuit of Skaaiat Awer tells me as much.”
“My…” Lieutenant Awn swallowed. “I never pursued her. We were friends. She oversaw the next district.”
“Friends, you call that.”
Lieutenant Awn’s face heated. And she remembered her accent, and her diction. “I am not presumptuous enough to call it more.” Miserable. Frightened.
Mianaai was silent for three seconds, and then said, “Perhaps not. Skaaiat Awer is handsome and charming, and no doubt good in bed. Someone like you would be easily susceptible to her manipulation. I have suspected Awer’s disloyalty for some time.”
Lieutenant Awn wanted to speak, I could see the muscles in her throat tense, but no sound came out.
“I am, yes, speaking of sedition. You say you’re loyal. And yet you associate with Skaaiat Awer.” Anaander Mianaai gestured and Skaaiat’s voice sounded in the decade room.
“I know you, Awn. If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference.”
And Lieutenant Awn’s reply: “Like Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One?”