Imperial Radch but it takes epidemiology seriously
The True Radch, the Dyson Sphere that Anaander Miaanaai left and will never return to, takes its purity seriously. It doesn’t let anything in that isn’t ritually pure, and ritual purity is unspecified in the series.
The Radch mostly seems to get by by wearing gloves and being proper.
But what if it took diseases seriously?
Ancillaries are popsicle corpses from other worlds, reanimated systems away from their home biomes. They’re given implants to give them a new consciousness, and some other things, but then these ancillaries just go out and be wet and human all over their decade-mates, their officers, and the the planetary/stations populations where they’re stationed.
You know how every so often a chunk of permafrost thaws in Siberia? And how as a result there have been outbreaks of fossil anthrax as a result? Ancillaries are that sort of disease reservoir.
And yes, human officers do fuck ancillaries, and do fuck other humans.
Some ancillary bodies have been on ice for hundreds or thousands of years.
Imagine rolling up to the Medic and saying, “what’s this wart?” Medic replies, “Congratulations, Lieutenant. You’ve got a disease last seen on a planet fifteen Jumps and a hundred and fifty years ago. It has no known cure, and at this stage in the infection, you’ll be braindead in a week, followed two weeks later by everyone else onboard. There’s nothing to be done for it. Ship, tell Captain that I’m ordering the ship sterilized.” One flash-cleanse later, now you have a very lonely Ship wandering the spaceways, without crew or Captain, looking for someone to help bootstrap it back to crewedness.
How might taking this into account change the Imperial Radch novels?
Some plot bunnies for consideration:
thorough screening of passengers arriving from outsystem or outplanet or offstation, with mandatory quarantine
ancillaries walk around in their impenetrable mirror-shields all the time, because it’s a two-way disease barrier
Breq can’t get an in-person audience with Anaander during her first week at Omaugh Palace, but instead spends three weeks in quarantine with Seivarden, working her way through local bureaucrats to get to the point where she can actually meet with Anaander face to face instead of in a telepresence call mediated by Station
thorough disease scanning facilitates thorough biological scanning of all sorts, which might lead to someone discovering that Breq takes the sort of drugs that ancillaries take to support their implants
instead of booking passage in personal cabins within a ship, passengers have personal cabins, which are container-like units transported by a ship: Breq has been using a subsistence-mode container, but has to upgrade to something nice enough to support Seivarden when she discovers her, which in turn needs to be upgraded to something nice enough for the Honored Breq, from the Gerentate
One Esk probably wouldn’t have been as friendly with the Orisians, because the Orisians might not have been able to see one Esk’s faces behind the solid silver of their armor. Or maybe ancillaries can detune their armor to allow light to pass through it, in low-risk situations. Do ancillaries wear their uniforms over or under their armor?
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