Ancillary Mercy

 
 
Ancillary Mercy

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2015

 

 

Ancillary Mercy is the final book in Ann Leckie's trilogy following the last surviving segment of an imperial warship's computer mind, now confined in a single cybernetic body. For 20 years, Breq has been living in a single human body, mourning the loss of the rest of herself (both her ship-self and the dozens of other networked bodies that collectively made up her electronic brain), and planning revenge on Anaander Mianaai, the emperor of the Radchaai Empire. 

 

Mianaai is also distributed across countless bodies (clones, in her case). She has ruled the Radch for 3000 years, and for the past 1000 she's been in an unacknowledged cold war with herself after wiping out an entire star system - revenge for them resisting annexation into the Radch using weapons supplied by the alien Presger. After the massacre, Mianaai signed a treaty with the Presger and began reforming the Radch, eventually including no annexing new star systems into the empire, and no longer making ancillaries (the cybernetic bodies, like Breq, made from recently annexed civilians). But part of her never wanted to admit the massacre was wrong, and has been covertly scheming to force a return to unapologetic colonialism and chauvinism ever since.

 

We learned this, in flashback, in Ancillary Justice, as Breq remembered being the warship Justice of Toren, who was overseeing the last annexation, where the ultra conservative part of emperor Mianaai was secretly trying to stir up ethnic conflict as an excuse to start a mass killing of civilians. One of Justice of Toren's officers refused to go along and was summarily executed, Justice of Toren was heartbroken, and that part of Mianaai triggered the destruction of the warship, with the segment-body that eventually became Breq as the only survivor. In the book's present, Breq hunted down the only remaining alien weapon capable of killing Mianaai, the Presger gun, and took responsibility for a former officer, who'd been cryogenically frozen since the planetary massacre, and who, since being awoken 1000 years after her time, had become depressed and addicted to space drugs.

 

Breq managed to kill at least one segment of Mianaai, and more important, forced all of the emperor to realize that she was no longer one coherent mind spread across her many bodies, triggering open civil war. In Ancillary Sword, a reformist segment of Mianaai made Breq a fleet captain, gave her a ship and crew, and sent her to take control of a star system, including the inhabited planet, the space station orbiting the planet, and a couple warships with unknown loyalties. Breq agreed mostly because her favorite officer, the one who was executed for refusing to fire on civilians, that officer's sister worked on the station. 

 

Once she arrived, Breq found a situation similar to the one at the time her ship-body was destroyed - the station was ethnically divided, and someone was cynically trying to stir up violence against the minority for their own benefit. This time the person orchestrating events was merely a wealthy private citizen, not the emperor of known space, so this Breq was able to out-maneuver her, expose the manipulation, and use her authority as fleet captain to impose fairer conditions for the minority group. It's like a more successful replay of the events that led to Justice of Toren's destruction. Unfortunately, during the chaos, a Translator, a human raised by the alien Presger to act as a diplomat, was killed in what was essentially a police shooting, when she was mistaken for a member of the minority group violating curfew.

 

Now in Ancillary Mercy, Breq fears the star system will be attacked by the conservative part of Mianaai, and also that the Presger, who are vastly technologically superior to the Radchaai empire, will retaliate for the killing of their Translator. Very early on in the book, the Presger send a new Translator, and station security arrests an infiltrator - an ancillary from a 3000 year-old star ship that survived the war that led to Anaander Mianaai becoming emperor, that's been hiding out in a neighboring star system ever since. Because the ship is still intact, even if out of communication range, this segment has basically the same mind as the whole, as Breq did when she was just one segment of Justice of Toren. This segment, like its ship, wants to kill Mianaai, and has come to see if Breq might be a potential ally.

 

In the previous book, I really liked Translator Dilique, and missed her after she died. Translator Zeiat is a little more business-like, although she's so psychologically different from human humans that she still seems comedic. We get some cryptic, but still fascinating, hints about how the alien Presger think. They fundamentally can't understand any distiction between different types of humans, between the Radch and non-Radchaai, for example. When Breq is injured and her leg is amputated partway through the book, Zeiat thinks she's now a completely new person who happens to slightly resemble the precious fleet captain. Even 'Dilique' and 'Zeiat' seem like they might be roles instead of names, like if an interrogator introduced themselves as 'Officer Goodcop' - although that's just my interpretation, and it might be wrong.

 

Anyway, as expected, the most conservative part of Mianaai arrives and takes over the station (which, as emperor, no one can refuse her), with the goal of killing Breq, destroying her new ship, and either fully conquering or destroying the station. Breq wants to protect the station and its people, which takes priority over revenge. Fortunately, because of the ongoing civil war, the emperor isn't nearly as laden with resources as she could be - she comes with only a single body, a handful of ships, and no guarantees that reinforcements might arrive before the reform faction does. Plus, Breq still has the Presger gun, which can not only pierce Mianaai's armor, it can destroy Radchaai space ships ... if you can hit one, which isn't easy, because it's a hand gun, and they're, you know, space ships.

 

Breq has the gun, and her pair of strange new potential allies, but her greatest asset is the earned loyalty of almost everyone living on the space station thanks to her actions during the crisis in the previous book. Meanwhile Mianaai shows up angry and paranoid, accidentally damages the station and kills a transport shuttle full of civilians by crashing into them upon arrival, immediately demands the total obedience of everyone on the station, including the station's computer mind, and restricts all the civil liberties and elements of self-government that Breq had been granting. There's no grand violent conclusion, and little about the wider civil war is resolved, but Breq does manage to protect the people counting on her (and they, collectively, protect her) in what feels like a local victory for equality and democracy over hierarchy and authority. 

 

In Ancillary Justice, and to a lesser extent in Sword, the Radchaai's absence of a concept of gender and universal 'she' pronoun for all humans was something Breq had reason to talk about several times, especially when she interacted with gendered non-Radchaai humans. But in Mercy, it fades into the background. Everyone is still she, but the book never draws attention to it or comments on it.

 

Outside this trilogy, Leckie has written a few more books set in Radchaai space, and her success in telling this story has me curious to see more.  Structurally, it seems like these books might be similar to Iain Banks's Culture novels, where they share a broad setting, but don't necessarily have recurring characters or locations, and where we view the society from many angles and perspectives across the books, mostly from the edges where it touches outsiders.