"No, Divine" I said.

"The soldiers of Justice of Ente Issa did all of those things. Not to me, it's true, and not to many in Ors itself. But they did them nonetheless. Would Seven Issa have been any different, if it had been them here instead?"

Lt Awn sat, distressed, looking down at her unappetizing tea, unable to answer.

"It's strange. You hear stories about ancillaries, and it seems like the most awful thing, the most viscerally appalling thing the Radchaai have done. Garsedd--well, yes, Garsedd, but that was a thousand years ago. This--to invade and take, what, half the adult population? And turn them into walking corpses, slaved to your ships' AIs. Turned against their own people. If you'd asked me before you...annexed us, I'd have said it was a fate worse than death." She turned to me. "Is it?"

"None of my bodies is dead, Divine," I said. "And your estimate of the typical percentage of annexed populations who were made into ancillaries is excessive."

"You used to horrify me," said the head priest to me. "The very thought of you near was terrifying, your dead faces, those expressionless voices. But today I am more horrified at the thought of a unit of living human beings who serve voluntarily. Because I don't think I could trust them."< /p>

"Divine," said Lt Awn, mouth tight. "I serve voluntarily. I make no excuses for it."

"I believe you are a good person, Lt Awn, despite that." She picked up her cup of tea, and sipped it, as though she had not just said what she had said.