Chapter Seven

Valk did not have a head. He did not have a body, outside of the suit he’d worn since he was created. He didn’t have eyes—instead he had cameras built into the suit, cameras that allowed him three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. He could see how crowded the wardroom had become. Bury and Ginger were there, close together right behind him. The marines who had not gone on the boarding mission and the three enlisted neddies were crowded around the room, perched wherever they could find space. Paniet floated directly in front of Valk, his legs tucked up into a zero-gravity lotus position.

“Are you sure everybody should be up here?” Valk asked. “Instead of, you know, at their battle stations?”

Paniet snorted. “As hilarious as I find the fact, ducky, I’m the ranking officer on this tub right now. Until Lieutenant Candless gets back, what I say goes. And I say everyone has a right to see this.”

“Okay,” Valk said. “Coming up on Caina now—we’re about ten thousand kilometers out, still, but we should be able to see them.”

On the main display the image of the protocomet expanded until white light washed out all the stars. Valk could see the new crater down there, its edges sharp and shiny. One of his copied selves was buried down there.

He found, with slight surprise, that the thought didn’t bother him.

“Look, there,” Bury said, pointing. He’d indicated a shadow moving across the surface, little more than a blip. Just big enough that they could make out its furry edges. A second, identical shadow moved into view just behind and to the left of the first.

“I really hope Lanoe’s transmission was accurate,” Paniet said. “Otherwise it’s the devil himself to pay.”

“Lanoe knows what he’s doing,” Valk said.

“You would think that,” Paniet replied. The engineer didn’t look at Valk directly. Instead he glanced up at a camera mounted in the ceiling. He must know that Valk could see through that one, too. Paniet gave the camera a wry look, his mouth twisted over to one side.

Valk had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

“I’ll step up the magnification,” Valk said.

On the main display the two shadows grew until actual details could be made out. The twin destroyers were revealed in all their wicked glory—long, thin ships so covered with guns and missile packs and thrusters that you couldn’t even see their viewports, or any sign at all that there were people onboard.

The cruiser was well inside the range of the destroyers’ missiles now, and drifting closer every second. Valk would never have dared to get so close if Lanoe hadn’t insisted it was safe. Still, he worked up a series of calculations as to how he would run for deep space if the destroyers showed any sign of aggression.

For the moment, at least, they were quiescent. “I’m scanning their guns … looks like all their weapons are cold. I’m pinging them now to establish a datalink. Getting good telemetry and sensor data. They’re making no attempt to keep me out of their systems.”

Paniet nodded. “Let’s all be good sports, now. Take us in closer, as a sign of good faith. Where’s Lieutenant Candless?”

“Inbound now, with my four cataphracts,” Valk said. He could hear his other selves whispering in the dark, feeding him data and logs of everything they’d done while they were away. Reminding him of the promise he’d made them, that as soon as they returned he would erase them, delete them thoroughly. “She said she wanted to stay outside until we were sure about this.”

“Understood,” Paniet said. “Distance?”

“We’re nine thousand kilometers out,” Valk told him. “Closing the gap.”

The cruiser’s engines powered up and Valk accelerated toward the protocomet, ramping up the power so gently that Paniet merely settled to the floor, rather than falling out of the air. The engineer didn’t seem surprised by the return of gravity. “Eight thousand kilometers,” Valk said. A minute ticked by. “Six.”

“Close enough,” Paniet told him. “Send a request to speak with the commander of one of them.”

“Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter. Surprise me, love,” Paniet said.

There was no delay in establishing the connection—the destroyers must have been waiting for the request. “They’re receiving,” Valk told the engineer.

Paniet nodded and jumped up to his feet. “My name is Hassan Paniet, a lieutenant of the Naval Engineering Division. I am the acting captain of the Hoplite-class cruiser in orbit above you. May I ask whom I am addressing?”

“Oritt Batygin here,” the reply came. The connection was audio only, the quality stepped down until the destroyer captain’s voice sounded tinny and distant. It was possible, on an open connection like this, to send signals that could kill or incapacitate anyone who listened to them—earworms and hypnodelic pulses. Valk wasn’t taking any chances. He’d intentionally kept the connection quality poor to rule out such things.

“Well, M. Batygin, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Paniet said. “I’d like to say that you and your compatriots gave us quite a run for our money. You fought admirably and you have the respect of the Navy of Earth.”

Batygin laughed. “That’s very kind of you,” he replied. “And may I say, you got extremely lucky. There is no way you should have survived all we threw at you.”

“Oh, don’t I know it,” Paniet said. “There were times there when I started designing my own coffin in my head, because I was sure I would need one. Well. Glad we can put all of that behind us. I’m sure we’ll all be great friends from now on. Hmm?”

“That’s … one way of describing the current state of play,” Batygin responded.

“So let’s make it official,” Paniet told him. “Will you do the honors?”

“One moment,” Batygin said.

Paniet drew a finger across his throat. Valk muted the connection.

“This is the part,” Paniet said, “where we find out if Lanoe actually does live up to his legend.” He craned his head around and looked at the crowd gathered in the wardroom. “You all might take a moment to brace yourselves.”

On the display, the two destroyers moved closer together, pulling into a standard maneuvering formation. Then, almost in unison, they began to display a string of lights all along their lengths, from nose to engines. An unbroken line of white lamps.

“Back during basic training,” Paniet said, “I might have slept through the class on visual signaling. Can someone remind me what that means?”

It was Bury who answered. “A string of white lights means unconditional surrender,” the kid said.

A cheer went up in the wardroom, and great whoops of joy. Valk raised one arm over his head and waved it in a simulacrum of jubilation.

Maggs’s hands were bound behind his back and someone pulled a sack over his helmet. He could see nothing, hear nothing but meaningless shouts as he was pushed down a corridor. He could feel himself flying, and had a vague sense of hard walls all around him, but couldn’t see anything but the little light that came through the sack. They could be throwing him headfirst down the longest corridor on the carrier and he would have no way of knowing until he collided with the far end.

He refused to scream. He refused to beg for mercy.

Mostly because he knew that with this bunch, that was likely to elicit nothing but peals of mocking laughter.

Maggsy, you’ve been in some hot water in your time, but—

Father, Maggs told the voice in his head, with all due filial respect, shut up or go to the devil. The choice is yours.

Rough hands caught him and shoved him sideways. He was moved now left, now straight, now right.

At one point, with no warning, a fist smashed into his midsection. Even through the layers of his suit he felt like he’d been hit with a hammer. The breath exploded out of him, fogging his helmet, and stars burst behind his eyes.

Eventually he was shoved through some kind of a hatch and then strapped down into a chair. He could hear other people being given the same treatment, though to his ears it sounded like they were having a gentler time of it. There was a long time when he was left with nothing but his thoughts.

He found very little consolation there.

He felt motion—the return of some measure of gravity. He must be on a vehicle of some kind, a ship. His destination, and his fate when he should arrive there, was as great and profound a mystery as the question of what lay outside the bound of the universe.

Even with the sack over his head, he endeavored to maintain the stiff upper lip. He had to admit—if only to himself—that he was not completely successful.

“Maggs,” someone said. Just a whisper. He thought perhaps it sounded like Ashlay Bullam. “Maggs. Can you speak?”

“It is the one faculty that remains mine to use,” he said, speaking as softly as she.

“What are they going to do to us? Where are we going?”

He spent a moment thinking of how to answer. He could be kind and lie, but that seemed entirely pointless, and it was unlikely a woman like Bullam would appreciate being cozened at this particular pass. He considered that what he was about to say might be his final words, and he pondered on some line of poesy, some grandiloquent oration that would cement his place in the annals of myth. Then he realized that there was no one there to record what he said. Even if there were, true eloquence would be utterly lost in the vacuous well that was the mind of the average Poor Bloody Marine.

No, in the end, he was forced to fall back on his least favorite rhetorical strategy. He settled on speaking the absolute, unvarnished truth.

“They’re going to take us somewhere undignified and then they’re going to execute us, one by one. We’re going to the firing squad,” he told her.

“M. Valk, are you receiving my transmission?”

Valk was more than capable of paying attention to more than one thing at a time. He partitioned a section of his consciousness to respond to Candless, who had granted him access to the sensors built into her suit.

“Yeah, I’ve got visual and audio,” he told her. It was a little odd, looking at things from her perspective, but nothing he hadn’t done before. Currently she was in the cockpit of her fighter, orbiting Caina just a few hundred meters from one of the destroyers. As he watched, she lowered her canopy and pushed her way out of her seat, gliding over toward the main hatch of the enemy ship. Former enemy ship, he reminded himself.

“It falls on me to perform an inspection of our new allies,” Candless told him. “Do me the favor, if you will, of scanning them for explosives or informational hazards.”

“Got it.” Twelve people in suits were floating just outside the destroyer. The entire crew of the ship. “I’m showing the captain, the pilot, and ten gunners,” Valk said. He pinged their cryptabs—small data plaques on the fronts of their suits that contained their service records and vital statistics. “All but a couple of them have Navy records,” he told her. “Two of the gunners are just Centrocor militia.”

“Explosives?” she asked. “Informational hazards? Or did you forget?”

Candless appreciated precision and thoroughness. She and Valk had never got along, but he’d developed a real respect for her. “No, I already did the scan. I would have told you if I found anything. Promise.”

One of the destroyer’s crew—the captain—moved forward on tiny puffs of gas from his suit jets. He lifted his hands in a gesture of peace, but Valk could feel Candless edging her hand down toward the sidearm she kept at her hip.

“Rhys Batygin,” he said, introducing himself. Valk had already gotten the name from the man’s cryptab. “Let me be the first to welcome you aboard, Lieutenant.”

“I imagine you might wish it was under different circumstances,” she said.

Batygin laughed. “I’m still alive. I haven’t been put down like a mad dog. I’d say things are working out for me and my brother.”

“One might be forgiven,” Candless said, “for expecting a more bitter reaction. Even a vengeful one.”

“Of course,” Batygin told her. “Yet I think you’ll find us good losers. Really, we aren’t much concerned with who commands us—Centrocor, the Navy.” He fluttered one hand dismissively. “It’s flying and fighting we love, not politics.”

Hellfire, Valk thought. Officers sure do like to talk fancy to each other.

Tannis Valk, the man whose memories Valk carried, had never been a big believer in putting on airs.

There was something wrong with the man’s eyes. Valk checked his biometrics. “You should know this guy is scared,” Valk told Candless. “He’s trying to hide it, but his heart rate is really high, and he’s sweating profusely. The drugs in his system probably aren’t helping. He’s terrified of what you’re going to do to him. What in the devil’s name did Lanoe get up to over on the carrier?”

Candless did not answer his question. “I’ll need to take a look inside,” she said to the Batygin. “I would apologize for violating your privacy, if the necessity wasn’t manifestly obvious.”

“I understand. Please, be my guest,” Batygin told her.

Candless jetted over to the main hatch and wriggled inside. For a moment Valk could see nothing but a shadowy bulkhead and the edge of a hatch—the airlock was a tight enough squeeze that Candless’s cameras were pressed up against the walls. She cycled the lock and moved inside, into the ship.

“This’ll be interesting,” Valk told her. “I’ve never seen the inside of a Peltast-class destroyer before.”

“I doubt it will impress you,” Candless said. The airlock was located near the aft end of the ship, back in the engine shielding. She glanced quickly at the engineering section, which amounted to a single cramped workstation. “Valk, I’m relying on you here. If there are any booby traps you’re likely to notice them before I do. In fact, I’m only likely to notice them at all if I trigger them. Please keep your eyes open.” She paused for a moment. “I meant that metaphorically, of course.”

“Got it,” Valk said.

She moved forward through a narrow corridor lined with utilitarian bunks—six of them in total. Although the destroyer was a hundred meters long, so much of its mass was taken up by overpowered engines and piles of ship-to-ship guns and weapon systems that there wasn’t a lot of room left for the crew. There was no wardroom, or any kind of common space. Only half the crew could sleep at a given time, so they would have to do it in shifts. “Hotbedding,” they called it. Valk remembered the practice—with no fondness whatsoever—from his own days as a pilot.

“Are you seeing anything that should concern me?” Candless asked.

“Only that I don’t ever want to crew one of these things,” Valk said. “Back at Niraya, we had a Peryton-class fighter tender. Twenty meters long and it was roomier than this.” Missions aboard destroyers could last for months. You would have to really like your fellow crew members or life on the ship would quickly get hellish.

“Be glad,” Candless said, “that you don’t have to experience the smell.”

Valk activated a spectroscopic analyzer on the front of Candless’s suit. “I see what you mean. Lots of butyric acid and thioalcohols in the air.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Body odor,” he told her.

“Quite.” Candless moved forward through a passageway so narrow she had to go headfirst. It passed through a rank of canister-shaped gunnery pods—basically armored workstations where a gunner could operate several weapons systems simultaneously. The positions took up a huge amount of space, and they seemed completely unnecessary to Valk. Computers could run the guns much better than human beings, and take up a lot less room. The same law that forbade his very existence prohibited any computerized system to have access to weaponry, though, so the destroyer’s crew had to operate all the guns manually.

Up near the front of the destroyer the passageway widened a little and split off in two directions. There was no actual bridge. Instead there were a pair of awkwardly shaped workstations, separated by more of the armored pods. “One of those is for the pilot,” Valk guessed. “Where does everybody else sit?”

“The captain of the ship is also the information officer and the navigator,” Candless replied. “It takes a rather focused and talented person to captain a destroyer.”

“Or one who’s high on speed all the time,” Valk pointed out.

Candless did not favor that with a reply. Instead she sighed and poked her head into the pilot’s position. Took a quick look through the viewport, a narrow slit of carbonglas that currently showed a huge number of stars and one edge of Caina.

“There’s nothing here. This was a pointless exercise, of course,” she said.

“Had to be done.”

“Hmm. If we had more officers on the cruiser, it might have been done by someone other than the XO. Rank, I am told, has its privileges. I have yet to actually experience any of them.”

“Lanoe really leans on you, I know,” Valk told her. “You know it’s because he believes in you. That you’re capable of everything he hands you.”

“I suppose that’s a sort of compliment. Very well. We need to repeat this futile performance for the other destroyer. But first—Valk. I need to discuss something with you.”

“Yeah? Okay, well, I guess we have time.”

Candless inhaled sharply through her nose. “I spoke with your other selves, before. The copies of yourself that you wedged into our BR.9s.”

“A bunch of charming guys, I bet,” Valk said.

“Hmm. One of them sacrificed himself to save my life.”

“Oh,” Valk said. “Listen, before this gets awkward, I mean, I get you want to thank me, but—”

“Thank you?” Candless said. “Hardly.”

“Okay, so then …”

“I was disgusted,” she said. “You put them in those fighters like it was a Procrustean bed. Tortured them. You tortured versions of your self.”

“Limited versions,” Valk said. “A BR.9 doesn’t have the memory capacity to hold all of my files.”

“That makes it better somehow? Stunted reflections of your self are less worthy of existence? They can be thrown away with abandon?”

“You don’t understand,” he told her.

He’d always known it would come to this. Candless had never hidden her feelings about artificial intelligences—or Valk personally. Her antipathy was hardly surprising. Possession of an AI, or simply harboring one, was a capital crime on every human world. Giving an AI access to weaponry was an automatic death sentence.

The Martians had built an AI, back during the Century War. They’d installed it on a dreadnought, a kind of super-battleship. They’d given it the mission to win that war and bring Earth to heel. It had acted according to pure logic—flying to Earth and shelling the homeworld until half the human race was dead. It only stopped because it needed to reload. It made perfect sense, of course. If everyone on Earth was dead, Mars would win the war by default.

Candless hadn’t even been alive back when it happened. As far as Valk knew, he was the only artificial intelligence built since that time. Yet something in the ancestral memory of humanity had kept that fear—and thus that hatred—alive. Lanoe had forbidden Candless from confronting Valk directly, but she’d never grown to like him.

“What are you?” she demanded now.

“A ghost,” he told her. “The memories of a man named Tannis Valk.”

“I know about the Blue Devil. The hero pilot of the Establishment. That’s not what I’m asking,” she replied. “I’m asking who you are. I’ve spoken with Engineer Paniet. He tells me you’re changing. Becoming less human over time.”

What could he do? Valk decided he would be honest with her. She already hated him. Nothing he could say would change that. “It’s been a process of discovery. That is, I keep discovering things I don’t have anymore. Things I don’t have to do anymore, too. I don’t have to eat. I don’t have to sleep. One day I realized I didn’t need to breathe. That was a real shock.”

He looked for Candless’s reflection in one of the destroyer’s carbonglas viewports. He saw her shake her head in confusion.

“Are you … are you more intelligent than we are? Humans, I mean.”

“No. I don’t think so,” Valk said. “I can do some things better than you can. I can talk to computers without needing an interface. I have better reaction times. But smarter? I feel about as smart as Tannis Valk was. I guess.”

“You could be, though. You could make yourself smarter.”

It was an old belief about AI that because its mental processes could be understood, they could be improved upon. That the first action any AI would take would be to search out additional processor power, faster file handling protocols, ways to overclock its processes. That if left unchecked, any AI would increase its intelligence exponentially, until human beings could no longer comprehend its thoughts. That it would become something better, bigger, than the people who created it.

“I’ve never tried. I won’t,” Valk said. “You—and I mean people in general—hate me enough already. All of you except Lanoe.”

“I don’t understand it,” Candless told him. “How he thinks he can trust you. If you wanted to kill me right now, you could. Couldn’t you?”

It would be pretty easy, actually. Candless’s suit was protecting her in all kinds of ways. It gave her the oxygen she needed, it regulated her body’s temperature. It shielded her from radiation. He could change any number of parameters in the suit’s software and she would be dead within minutes.

“Yes,” he told her. “But I wouldn’t do that.”

“And one is expected to believe you. Simply because you say so.”

“Because—because the same reasons you don’t just walk up to Ehta and strangle her with your bare hands. I know you’ve considered that.” The two lieutenants, one the cruiser’s executive officer and the other its warrant officer, had been at odds since they first met. “You don’t do it for one simple reason, because there are consequences to actions. Lanoe wouldn’t like it if I hurt you. He would never forgive me.”

“His opinion means that much to you?”

Valk lacked the ability to sigh. He could only play an audio file of what it sounded like when Tannis Valk used to sigh. Before he died.

“Lanoe’s the only reason I’m still here,” Valk told her. “You think I’m an abomination, and you know what? I get it. I do. I think the same thing. Tannis Valk hated AI as much as you do.”

“Oh,” Candless said. “But then—”

“I want to die,” Valk told her. “I want to be deleted. I’m not allowed to. Not until Lanoe is done with me. Not as long as I’m still useful.”

Air rushed past Maggs’s head, rustling the sack that obscured his vision. All external sounds went away and he understood. Someone had just opened a hatch onto hard vacuum. His straps were undone and he was hauled out of his seat. Someone kicked his legs until he jerked them forward and found his feet planted on solid deck plates.

Gravity. They’d taken him somewhere with gravity. That meant either he was onboard a ship that was undergoing acceleration, or he was on actual terra firma. The gravity didn’t waver or feel unsteady at all, which suggested the latter.

The protocomet, then. They’d taken him to the protocomet. As good a place as any. It was a tradition that when the Navy executed someone, they had to be buried or ejected into space immediately afterward. Most likely this tradition had begun because there was so little room on Navy ships for the storage of corpses.

Maggs also thought that Lanoe might want to carry out the executions somewhere other than on the carrier for another reason. He wouldn’t want all the Centrocor employees there to witness the deaths of their former officers. It could be bad for morale.

Hands grabbed his arms and legs and he was pushed through a narrow opening, then hauled back up to his feet. Someone stood on either side of him, holding him, forcing him to march forward. There was so little gravity on the protocomet that Maggs was forced to shuffle along, careful to keep from bounding off into the sky.

They didn’t go very far. Maggs was forced to his knees. He felt as light as a feather, no doubt due to the low gravity of the protocomet—it couldn’t possibly be fear that made him feel so empty and sick.

Maggs had a bad habit of being sarcastic even in his own internal monologue.

For what felt like a very, very long time he was left there, kneeling on smooth ice. He attempted to use his suit’s communications faculties but soon discovered—with not a shred of surprise—that they’d been blocked. He was left unable to speak to anyone, unable to see anything, unable to think of anything but what was about to happen.

He supposed that keeping a stiff upper lip had its limits. And surely he could be excused for breaking down a little, now, when no one could see him.

“Dad,” he said. His voice sounded, to his own ears, hoarse and weak. “Father. I beg your pardon for what I said before. I’d very much like to speak with you again now. I don’t want to be alone.”

There was no response. The voice that had lived in his head for years failed to manifest itself.

“Please, Admiral,” he said to his decorated father. “Please. You always have such good advice. Especially when I don’t want it. I could really use some now.”

He felt a distant rhythmic vibration, perhaps footfalls coming toward him. Perhaps that was the step of the executioner.

“Daddy!” he shrieked. “I’m begging you! I’m your son, your only son! Please—please come speak with me. Please, just—just tell me it’s going to be all right. It doesn’t matter that it’s a lie. It would make me feel so much better. Please, Dad.”

He closed his eyes to hold back the tears that pooled in his eye sockets, surface tension overcoming the miniscule gravity.

“Please,” he begged.

Someone pulled the sack off his head. He saw a human form, silhouetted against so many, many stars.

He blinked rapidly to clear away the tears. Looked left and right, and saw he was kneeling in a line of people, some of whom he recognized—Shulkin and Bullam, and the IO from the bridge—and some he didn’t. They were grouped in a very shallow semicircle, a meter away from the rim of a deep crater with steep walls.

Maggs craned his head around, trying to see more. He quickly located Lieutenant Ehta, the warrant officer from the cruiser. He saw several marines he vaguely recognized from the Hoplite, people whose names he’d never bothered to learn. Weapons slung loose in their arms.

Then he looked up again and saw Lanoe. It was Lanoe who’d taken the sack away. Lanoe who was holding a pistol in one hand.

And smiling at him.

Candless took her fighter over to the carrier, a few million kilometers away. Valk stayed with her, linked in through her suit. “We will have further words, you and I,” she told him as she flew.

He didn’t doubt it.

“For the moment, however, we have to stay alert. We can’t very well make the entire crew of the carrier wait outside while we perform our inspection. Nor will I be able to complete this task on my own—the vehicle is just too large. It looks like I need your help now. I worry I’ll find you as convenient as Lanoe does.”

“Always glad to be of service,” Valk said. Tweaking the tone of his voice to convey some sarcasm.

As they approached the round maw of the big ship, Valk couldn’t help but feel a little apprehensive, even after the carrier’s flight deck crew signaled that they were cleared for approach. He could see the old scar along the hull of the ship where Candless had struck it with a disruptor round. The damage was severe and only partially repaired. Still, compared to the cruiser the carrier looked to be in far better condition. If Lanoe hadn’t taken the chance of infiltrating it, Valk knew that they never would have stood a chance. Centrocor would have killed them all.

Candless eased her BR.9 inside the carrier’s flight deck, a vast steel cave lined with docking berths for fifty fighters. Only about two-thirds of that complement remained now—repeated battles had thinned their numbers considerably—but still there were enough Sixty-Fours and carrier scouts to make the flight deck a place of long, sharp shadows.

“They want you to put down over there,” Valk said, indicating the approved berth by superimposing a yellow rectangle on her canopy.

“I’ll dock where I wish to,” Candless told him. She called over to the flight controllers and indicated she would use a berth she must have chosen at random. “It’s important to remind them who’s in charge now, I think,” she told Valk. “As for you, please do not interface with my craft’s computers any further. I don’t care for it.”

“Okay,” Valk said.

Candless was an excellent pilot. She set down without so much as a thump. Long metal restraining bars craned down over the fighter to hold it in place, and a narrow hatch opened up next to the berth, spilling light into the gloom. Candless lowered her canopy and then pushed her way into the hatch, which closed behind her with a hiss.

Every berth in the flight deck had its own dedicated airlock. That way the pilots could get to their ships faster when it was time to scramble. “Have you been on a Hipparchus-class carrier before?” Candless asked him.

“A couple times,” Valk said. “Once as a pilot, during some campaign or other. Once as a prisoner, at the end of the Establishment Crisis. They made us turn our fighters in so we could be processed in the demobilization. There were so many of us they had to bring in a bunch of carriers just to hold us all. We were worried we were boarding prison ships, but the Navy treated us okay. Right up until they stripped our service records and cut us loose to try to find jobs where we could.”

“That wasn’t the Navy’s decision, to leave you out in the cold,” Candless suggested. “That was the Sector Wardens.”

“I guess that ought to make a difference.”

He felt Candless’s irritation through her suit sensors. There was still some bad blood between the Navy and the pilots who had fought for the Establishment. This wasn’t the time for dredging up bad history, though.

The airlock opened into a maze of corridors inside the hull of the carrier. At first no one was there to greet them, but soon a PBM with hexagons painted on his shoulders came puffing up toward them, kicking off the walls.

“Lieutenant?” he asked. “Ma’am? I’m, uh, I’m Sergeant Foulkes. I’m supposed to help you with … with your …”

“Inspection,” Candless told the young man. He couldn’t be over twenty-five. “In the future, when you announce yourself, simply state your name and rank. When you hem and haw like that it makes you sound like you have something to hide.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the marine said. His eyes were trembling in their sockets, he was so scared.

“Ease up,” Valk told Candless. “We have to work with these people.”

Candless did not respond. Perhaps she didn’t want Foulkes to know she had a passenger riding on her shoulder, so to speak.

“Take me to the bridge, Sergeant. Now.”

Foulkes didn’t even say “Yes, ma’am.” He twisted around in the corridor and kicked off the wall, his hands out in front of him to catch the edge of a hatch up ahead. He led Candless into a much larger passage, one lined with hatches. Most of those hatches were open, and people were poking their heads out of them, staring at the newcomer.

Candless didn’t look at them.

“They’re worried, ma’am,” Foulkes said, as if she’d asked. “Worried about what’s going to happen to them.”

“Just a couple kind words now,” Valk suggested, “and—”

“With any change of command,” Candless told Foulkes, “there will be uncomfortable transitions.”

The bridge wasn’t much farther. Foulkes brought them up short at another hatch that opened into a broad space where several corridors came together. At the exact center of the space was one very large hatch.

Or at least there used to be a very large hatch there. Shards of it remained in the frame, triangular lengths of metal with bright, smooth edges. A dismantler had dissolved the rest.

The walls around the broken hatch were stained. Ribbons and splotches of pink had soaked into the padding. There were scorch marks and bullet holes all around, and the air was full of semitoxic chemicals. Complex organic compounds, the residue left over when very nasty weapons went off in an enclosed space full of bodies.

Candless passed it all by, kicking her way into the bridge beyond. The room wasn’t in bad shape, considering. There were a few ruined displays, and one wall looked like it had been scratched by a very large, very ferocious tiger. Valk recognized the trails left behind by the rounds of a particle rifle. Otherwise the bridge was intact.

And almost empty. A pilot and a navigator were seated at their respective positions. There was no one in the captain’s chair.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Candless said. “Please leave me alone now.”

Valk expected Candless to take the captain’s chair, but instead she went to the IO’s position and strapped herself into the seat. She tried to bring up some displays—schematics of the carrier, personnel manifests, damage reports. Only a few of the displays she requested actually appeared. She leaned forward, over the IO’s console. The display surface there was cracked and riddled with bullet holes. Candless reached inside the broken gray plastic of the console. Valk looked inside along with her and saw smashed and burnt-out emitters.

Candless sighed, long and deep.

“I can bring up all that information for you, if you want,” Valk said.

“Very well. Again, the convenience of your abilities trumps my disgust.”

Valk tried to ignore that. “You could have been nicer to Foulkes,” he said.

“Not if I expect these people to respect me. They lost a battle. However, because Lanoe was very clever, it didn’t look like a battle. Most of them didn’t even know it was going on at the time. It wasn’t real to them—they woke up this morning working for Centrocor, and now, without so much as having had a chance to fire a shot in their defense, they are prisoners of the Navy. They need to know something serious happened here. They need to know they lost.”

“I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” Valk said. “Did you … did you see all the blood out there?”

“The reports, please,” Candless said.

“Yeah.” Valk worked with what emitters he could find, any console that was still functional. The displays popped up in the air around her. While she studied the reports, he scanned the room, and then the corridors around them, looking for booby traps.

“Hold on,” he said, because he’d found something. Though not what he expected. “Under the navigator’s position. There.” She got up and moved across the room, following his directions. “There’s something lodged against an air intake there. I don’t know if—”

Candless reached under the navigator’s console. The thing Valk had detected was oblong, about six centimeters in length. Pale in color, mostly soft, but with a harder section at one end. He thought it might be some kind of grenade or something.

Then Candless fished it out of the grille over the air intake. Held it up where he could see it clearly.

It was a human finger, severed below the second knuckle.

“Oh, hellfire,” Valk said. “Oh, hell.”

“Left over from the boarding, no doubt,” Candless said. She looked around until she found a waste disposal hatch. She deposited the grisly trophy, then returned to the IO’s station and the reports.

“Lanoe did this,” Valk said. “He came in here and he—he killed people.”

“He fought his way to the bridge,” Candless told him. “I imagine he killed whomever he needed to kill.”

“This—this isn’t like him,” Valk said. “The man I know …”

“Lanoe is three hundred years old,” Candless said. “He’s been a pilot, a warrior, since he was a teenager. How many people do you think he’s killed in all that time?”

“That’s different. When you’re in a cataphract—”

“It is not different. At all. It may seem that way, because when you pull the trigger on a PBW cannon, you usually can’t see the face of the person you’re killing. But the pilots he’s bested in thousands of dogfights were just as dead after the fact.”

Valk couldn’t shake his head, not so she could see it.

What was it she’d said, though? She’d spoken to Paniet. Who’d said that Valk was losing his humanity. That it was slipping away over time.

Maybe he wasn’t the only one.

Lanoe leaned over Maggs until they were looking each other right in the eye. Then he tapped his helmet. “Can you hear me? I’ve switched your suit comms back on. Say something so I know you can hear me.”

“There are rules about the treatment of prisoners of war,” Maggs said, the words unspooling from his mouth before he’d even considered them. “The Ceres Accords lay out three relevant articles. One concerns torture and standards of confinement. The second requires that prisoners be given medical treatment for any injuries sustained during combat. The third holds that summary … summary executions are … are …”

Lanoe nodded. His smile hadn’t faltered. “Sure. Go on,” he said.

Maggs clamped his teeth together. Forced himself to regain a little of his customary composure. He would not let this lowborn beggar turn him into a sniveling coward. “Summary executions,” he said, forcing the words out now—where before they’d been a spigot, a veritable flood, now they were like the last drips from a switched-off faucet—“are permitted only …” He swallowed. It was difficult. “Permitted only in cases of gross criminal activity. Namely, to wit, acts of high treason, genocide, crimes against the interplanetary economy, the possession of weapons of mass … mass—”

“None of which you’re guilty of. That’s what you’re going to say, right? That you haven’t done any of those things. So I can’t just put a bullet in your head. Betraying your commanding officer—more times than I feel like counting—isn’t on that list. Defrauding entire planetary populations. Being a faithless coward, abandoning your post. Those aren’t on the list.”

“That’s … right,” Maggs said.

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “Just one thing. If we’re going to get all legal about this. One thing you must have forgotten.”

Maggs shook his head. “No. No—”

“You’re not a prisoner of war,” Lanoe told him. “There’s no war between Centrocor and the Navy. Not one anybody bothered to declare.”

Maggs tried to climb to his feet. It wasn’t a conscious action, simply something his body tried to do. Maybe he’d intended to make a run for it, or perhaps he’d simply wanted to die like a man. He didn’t know why he tried to get up.

It didn’t matter. Two marines grabbed him and smashed him down to the ground, grinding his helmet against the ice until it squeaked.

“I saved your life!” Maggs howled. Any pretense to courage was gone now. “I saved your life! Shulkin would have taken that shot! I saved your life! How many times now, how many times have I saved you?”

“Uh-huh,” Lanoe said. “Tell you what. I guess that’s worth something.” And then he started walking away. Over his shoulder, as if it were an afterthought, he added, “So I’ll save you for last.”

The marines didn’t let Maggs get back up on his knees. They pinned him down. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t see where Lanoe was going. But over the radio in his suit he could hear everything that was said.

“Captain Shulkin,” Lanoe said. “I’ve seen your service record. Your time in the Navy was impressive. You retired with a medical discharge. Now you’re working for Centrocor. Are you willing to come back into the fold? Would you be willing to take a new oath of loyalty to the Navy?”

“You’ll let me fight?” Shulkin asked. There was no fear in his voice, none whatsoever.

“I’ll let you fight,” Lanoe said.

“Then it would be an honor,” Shulkin said. “Where do I sign?”

Lanoe chuckled. “What do you think, Ehta? You think we can trust him?”

Ehta didn’t reply, insomuch as Maggs could hear.

“Good enough,” Lanoe said.

Maggsy.

His father’s voice in his head. Back now. Late, but Maggs didn’t mind.

Father? he thought.

“You,” Lanoe said. “Tarash Giles. You were the IO on the carrier. You’ll notice the pilot and the navigator aren’t down here.”

“Yes, sir,” the IO said.

“IOs have a lot of jobs,” Lanoe said. “They run the sensor boards, protect a ship against electronic attack. They work as science officers, and liaise with engineering on bigger ships. Sometimes they work as political officers, too. Checking up on the crew. Making sure everybody stays loyal. That’s a position of trust. Centrocor trusted you, right? They put you on the bridge. Maybe you’re still a corporate spy. Maybe I should—”

“Sir, no—please! I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything you say, just … just don’t shoot me! Please!”

“Maybe I should give you a chance,” Lanoe said.

“Oh, sir, thank—”

“One. One chance. If you make me regret this, there won’t be any further discussion. Do you understand?”

“I do. I do, sir, thank you—thank you.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said.

Maggsy, there’s not much time left. I wanted to talk to you about how a Maggs dies. About how we carry ourselves at the end.

Father? He’s letting them live, he isn’t going to—

“Major Nicholas Yael,” Lanoe said, as if he were reading from a display. “You served on the carrier as commander of Centrocor’s marines. You led the counterattack when I boarded the—”

“That’s right, you bastard!” Yael shouted. “That’s right—I defended my ship. I defended my people! You killed twelve of my best troops, you slaughtered them in cold blood!”

“You fought hard,” Lanoe said. “That means something. Will you—”

“No! I will not sign any damned loyalty pledge, not to you. Not to the man who murdered Corporal Tyre Cassel. Not to the man who murdered Private Max Youlson. Not to the man who murdered—”

Someone must have hit Yael then, because he abruptly fell silent.

“You’re saying you’re still loyal to Centrocor,” Lanoe said.

“I’m loyal to my comrades in arms. If they’re Centrocor, then hell, yes—cut out my heart, you’ll find a hexagon tattooed on it. We’re all in this together! You understand what that means? You understand what—” Yael let out a deep, gasping breath. “You should kill me now. You should kill me now, because if you don’t I will personally—”

“Sure,” Lanoe said.

Then Maggs felt the ground rumble, just for a moment. That—that was a gunshot, he thought.

Yael said nothing more.

Maggs’s whole body shook, as if he was the one who’d been shot.

Maggsy, my boy, when I died I didn’t get a chance to leave any last words behind. That’s fine. Last words, I’ve heard it said, are for people who didn’t say enough in life. Well, that certainly doesn’t describe you.

Father? Please, just—just give me some comfort now. Please.

“Ashlay Bullam,” Lanoe said. “M. Bullam. It says here you’re a Centrocor executive troubleshooter, whatever that means. You’re the real prize here, aren’t you? Shulkin just wanted to fight. You’re the real commander of this mission. You’re the one Centrocor sent to kill me.”

“No,” Bullam replied.

“No?”

“The mission was never to kill you. Don’t be facile. We would have hired assassins to do that. No, we heard that the Navy was going to make an alliance with the … aliens who lived in that strange city. We were supposed to make sure the alliance didn’t happen. It was Shulkin who chased you through the wormhole. I ordered him not to. He didn’t listen to me.”

“So none of it was your fault. That carrier attacked me, nearly killed one of my people. Nearly killed all of us, frankly. But it wasn’t you calling the shots.”

Bullam sighed. “I’m not making excuses. I’m giving you facts. You can choose what to do with them.”

“You don’t sound very frightened, M. Bullam,” Lanoe said.

“Ha. No,” Bullam told him. “No. You don’t scare me.”

“Why not? I just killed a man.”

“Because this is a farce. Loyalty pledges? Really? When did a signature on a file ever stop anyone from doing anything? I’ve read your dossier, I know you aren’t that naïve. You’re letting Shulkin and the IO live because you need them.”

“Is that right?”

“You have a skeleton crew on your cruiser. You’ve just inherited a carrier and two destroyers, but you don’t have the people to crew them. You need us—well, most of us—alive. Otherwise we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You’ve already decided who you’re keeping around.”

“Are you sure you’re on the list?”

“I’m certain of it,” Bullam said.

Terrified as he was, Maggs had to take a moment to admire the woman’s brass.

“You can’t trust anyone. Not me, not Shulkin. None of the enlisted rabble on our ships. You need the two of us to keep them in line. Shulkin wants to fight, and I want to go home. You’re the only one who can grant those wishes. So this isn’t about loyalty, it’s a business negotiation. A simple trade, where everyone gets what they want and we all go home happy.”

“So you’re saying you’ll help me. You won’t sign a pledge—”

“I’ll sign anything you want,” Bullam interrupted. “The file won’t be worth the storage space it takes up, but I’ll sign it. Come now, Commander Lanoe. You’re too old for these stupid games. You’ve seen too many people betray you before. Accept my offer, and release me. Or kill me and see how long it takes for the crew of the carrier to mutiny.”

“Interesting,” Lanoe said.

There was no gunshot. No screaming. The marines holding Maggs down let him up, just a little. Just enough to see Ehta take out a knife and cut the plastic shackles around Bullam’s wrists. Then Ehta turned the knife around to show it to Bullam, to brandish it right in her face.

Bullam rolled her eyes.

“Okay, just one more,” Lanoe said. He came and stood directly over Maggs.

His time had come.

Maggsy, you need to stay quiet. Don’t blubber. Don’t beg, whatever you do. The honor of our family depends on it.

Honor, Maggs thought. Honor. That’s rich.

Son. Son—I won’t tell you I’m proud of you. We both know the kind of life you lived. The things you’ve done. Now, now, I know why you did them. But you must admit the world cares little for our intentions, and much for our deeds.

Dad. I miss you, Dad. It was so hard after you died, and Mother and I had to work to preserve your legacy. We did what we had to do. I did what I had to do.

I know, son. I can’t say I’m proud of you. But I loved you. I really did.

It was—surprisingly comforting to hear that.

“No fancy words now, huh?” Lanoe said. “No protests. No excuses. Yeah. We both knew this would happen, eventually.” He lifted his pistol.

Maggs took what strength he could from his father’s words. Tears welled up in his eyes but he kept his mouth firm as Lanoe placed the barrel of the pistol against the flowglas of his helmet. If he couldn’t meet Lanoe’s gaze, if he couldn’t bear to look up at the gun, well, there were limits to anyone’s—

“Wait,” Bullam said.

Maggs and Lanoe both turned to look at her.

“In exchange for my cooperation,” she said, “I have one condition.”

“Now’s not the time,” Lanoe told her.

“Wrong. This is exactly the time. Because my condition is this—I will work with you, toward our common goal. In exchange, I want you to spare Lieutenant Maggs.”

Maggs’s heart stopped beating. He couldn’t believe it.

Neither, apparently, could Lanoe.

“Seriously?” he asked.