In the first book of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, Ancillary Justice, we met Breq, a lone soldier who used to be a starship with dozens or even hundreds of ancillary bodies, now inhabiting just this lone survivor of an extreme act of violence. She was seeking revenge against the empire’s supreme leader Anaander Mianaai, who destroyed the ship that Breq used to be, the Justice of Toren. At that story’s climax, Breq learned that the emperor Mianaai (who like a starship has dozens of ancillary bodies spread throughout Radch space) has been at war with herself for a millennium. One faction wants to maintain the empire’s rapacious and violent expansion, the other is content with the status quo – which includes no more use of ancillaries, one of the key weapons in the “annexation” of non-Radch systems.
The non-expansionist Mianaai faction has enlisted Breq in the struggle and even adopted her into the Mianaai House, making her a Fleet Commander. Breq still wants all the Mianaais dead and deposed, but takes the promotion and fleet and goes to Athoek Station in order to protect a relative of Lieutenant Awn, whom Breq had loved and had murdered on Mianaai’s order. Most jump gates throughout the system have been shut down as the civil war rages, and Athoek Station is a major transit point in the system of gates.
Breq also still has a gun with near magical powers, which she also still plans to use to kill Mianaai. It’s a relic of a long ago struggle between the Radch and the Presgers. Mianaai accepted a treaty with the Presgers when it became clear that they were infinitely more powerful than the Radch; this gun can shoot through any material or energy field, but it can’t be detected by any Radch sensors.
Breq is a disrupter, a change agent wherever she goes, and the Athoeki system is no different. It doesn’t take her long to take the measure of the social and economic inequities that are rife on the station and its planet, which grows and processes most of the tea in the Radch empire, without which the empire seems unable to function. And to start disrupting those inequities.
This time out she’s accompanied again by Seivarden, whose life she saved in Ancillary Justice and who is now her second in command. She also has a new ship, Sword of Kalr, with whom she is able to link via her old ancillary implants. But Mianaai has also included a trap on the ship, which is the first obstacle Breq must overcome in this next chapter of her quest. And then there’s the resistance to her attempts to do away with some of the exploitation and subjugation taking place at Athoek, which threatens to tip over into violence at any time. Also the little matter of a human (or humanoid) Presger translator, one of the best characters in the book, whose untimely end could bring down the wrath of the uber-powerful aliens down upon them all.
In Ancillary Sword Leckie has created another sweeping space opera, in which she keeps the focus on human actions and emotions. The way colonial conquest and exploitation gloss over the violence done to their subjects, the way all who benefit from colonialism are complicit in that violence, and the echoing effects of trauma through time and space, are Leckie’s themes in this dramatic and entertaining series. Published just a year after Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword won the Locus and BSFA awards for best novel, and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.
(Orbit, 2014)
