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Shortly after Mercy of Kalr had arrived in the system, an unbelievably old supply locker had come through it. I was convinced now that Kalr Five’s shattered tea set had also come through that gate, in exchange for shipments of suspended human beings. They were supposed to be cheap, unskilled labor for Athoek, but Captain Hetnys had stolen them, sold them to someone on the other side of the Ghost Gate. “You remember, a few days ago we talked about suspended transportees being stolen.” She could hardly have forgotten it, considering the events of the last few days. “And it was difficult to imagine what the purpose might be behind that theft. I think there’s been a ship on the other side of that gate for quite some time, and it’s been buying bodies to use as its ancillaries. It used to buy them from Athoeki slavers—which is how it had an Ychana body from before the annexation it could send here, and blend in.” More or less, at least. “When the annexation shut down its supply, it bought them from Radchaai officials who were corrupt and greedy enough to sell transportees.” I gestured to Five, standing behind where I sat, to open the tea set box.
    “That’s Fosyf’s,” said Governor Giarod. And then, realizing, “Captain Hetnys sold it to her.”
    “You never asked until now where Captain Hetnys got such a thing.” I gestured to the inscription on the insideof the lid. “You also never noticed that someone had very carefully removed the name of the original owner. If you read Notai”—the language in which that inscription was written—“or if you’d seen enough of these, you’d have noticed that immediately.”
    “What are you saying, Fleet Captain?”
    “It’s not a Radchaai ship we’re dealing with.” Or it was a Radchaai ship. There was the Radch, the birthplace of Anaander Mianaai more than three thousand years ago, when she’d been a single, very ambitious person in a single body. And then there was the enormous territory Anaander had built around that over the past three thousand years—Radch-controlled space, but what connection was there anymore, between those two? And the inhabitants of the Radch, and the space immediately around it, hadn’t all been in favor of what Mianaai had done. There had been battles over it. Wars. Ships and captains destroyed. Many of them had been Notai. From the Radch. “Not one of Anaander’s, I mean. It’s Notai.” The Notai were Radchaai, of course. People in Radch space—and outside it—tended to think of “Radchaai” as being one thing, when in fact it was a good deal more complicated than that, or at least it had been when Anaander had first begun to move outward from the Radch.
    “Fleet Captain.” Governor Giarod was aghast. Disbelieving. “Those are stories . Defeated ships from that war, wandering space for thousands of years…” She shook her head. “It’s the sort of thing you’d find in a melodramatic entertainment. It’s not real .”
    “I don’t know how long it’s been there,” I said. “Since before the annexation, at least.” It had to have been there since before the annexation, if it had been buying ancillary bodies from Athoeki slavers. “But it’s there. And,” Icontinued, relieved that the medic who had examined the captive ancillary hadn’t seen me in person, to turn her newly tuned implants on me, had given the governor her observations without betraying me, “it’s here. I doubt any Undergarden resident will say much about her.” The Undergarden had been damaged, years ago, in a way that made Station unable to sense much of what happened there. It was the perfect hiding place, for someone like this ancillary. So long as it avoided being seen by someone wired to send sensory data to Station—and that wasn’t very common, in the Undergarden, unlike the rest of the station—it could move unnoticed, with no one realizing it shouldn’t be there. “I’m guessing it realized something was going on,