Old Man's War

THIRTEEN

"Oh, you're awake," someone said to me as I opened my eyes. "Listen, don't try to speak. You're immersed in solution. You've got a breathing tube in your neck. And you don't have a jaw."

I glanced around. I was floating in a bath of liquid, thick, warm and translucent; beyond the tub I could see objects but couldn't focus on any of them. As promised, a breathing tube snaked from a panel at the side of the bath toward my neck; I tried to follow it all the way to my body, but my field of vision was blocked by an apparatus surrounding the lower half of my head. I tried to touch it, but I couldn't move my arms. That worried me.

"Don't worry about that," the voice said. "We've turned off your ability to move. Once you're out of the tub, we'll switch you back on again. Another couple of days. You still have access to your BrainPal, by the way. If you want to communicate, use that. That's how we're talking to you right now."

Where the fuck am I — I sent. And what happened to me—

"You're at the Brenneman Medical Facility, above Phoenix," the voice said. "Best care anywhere. You're in intensive care. I'm Dr. Fiorina, and I've been taking care of you since you got here. As for what happened to you, well, let's see. First off, you're in good shape now. So don't worry. Having said that, you lost your jaw, your tongue, most of your right cheek and ear. Your right leg was snapped off halfway down your femur; your left one suffered multiple fractures and your left foot was missing three toes and the heel—we think those were gnawed off. The good news there was that your spinal cord was severed below the rib cage, so you probably didn't feel much of that. Speaking of ribs, six were broken, one of which punctured your gallbladder, and you suffered general internal bleeding. Not to mention sepsis and a host of other general and specific infections brought on by having open wounds for days."

I thought I was dead — I sent. Dying, anyway—

"Since you're no longer in real danger of dying, I think I can tell that by all rights, you really should be dead," Dr. Fiorina said. "If you were an unmodified human, you would be dead. Thank your SmartBlood for keeping you alive; it clotted up before you could bleed out and kept your infections in check. It was a close thing, though. If you hadn't been found when you were, you probably would have been dead shortly after that. As it was, when they got you back to the Sparrowhawk they shoved you into a stasis tube to get you here. They couldn't do much for you on the ship. You needed specialized care."

I saw my wife — I sent. She was the one who rescued me—

"Is your wife a soldier?"

She's been dead for years—

"Oh," said Dr. Fiorina. Then, "Well, you were pretty far gone. Hallucinations aren't that unusual at that point. The bright tunnel and dead relatives and all of that. Listen, Corporal, your body still needs a lot of work, and it's easier for it to get done while you're asleep. There's nothing for you to do in there but float. I'm going to put you into sleep mode again for a while. The next time you wake up, you'll be out of the tub, and enough of your jaw will have grown back for you to have a real conversation. All right?"

What happened to my squad — I sent. We were in a crash—

"Sleep now," Dr. Fiorina said. "We can talk more when you're out of the tub."

I started to craft a truly irritated response but was hit by a wave of fatigue. I was out before I could think about how quickly I was going out.

"Hey, look who's back," this new voice said. "The man too dumb to die."

This time I wasn't floating in a vat of goo. I glanced over and made out where the voice was coming from.

"Harry," I said, as well as I could through an immobile jaw.

"The same," he said, bowing slightly

"Sorry I can't get up," I mumbled. "I'm a little banged up."

"'A little banged up,' he says," Harry said, rolling his eyes. "Christ on a pony. There was more of you missing than was there, John. I know. I saw them haul your carcass back up off of Coral. When they said you were still alive my jaw dropped to the floor."

"Funny," I said.

"Sorry," Harry said. "No pun intended. But you were almost unrecognizable, John. A mess of parts. Don't take this the wrong way, but I prayed you would die. I couldn't imagine they could piece you back together like this."

"Glad to disappoint you," I said.

"Glad to be disappointed," he said, and then someone else entered the room.

"Jesse," I said.

Jesse came around the bed and gave me a peck on the cheek. "Welcome back to the land of the living, John," she said, and then stepped back. "Look at us, together again. The three musketeers."

"Two and a half musketeers, anyway," I said.

"Don't be morbid," Jesse said. "Dr. Fiorina says you're going to make a full recovery. Your jaw should be completely grown by tomorrow, and the leg will be another couple days after that. You'll be skipping around in no time."

I reached down and felt my right leg. It was all there, or at least felt all there. I pulled back the bedcovers to get a better look, and there it was: my leg. Sort of. Right below the knee, there was a verdant welt. Above the welt my leg looked like my leg; below it, it looked like a prosthesis.

I knew what was going on. One of my squad had her leg blown off in battle and had it re-created in the same way. They attached a nutrient-rich fake limb at the point of amputation, and then injected a stream of nanobots into the merge area. Using your own DNA as a guide, the nanobots then convert the nutrients and raw materials of the fake limb into flesh and bone, connecting to already-existing muscles, nerves, blood vessels and so on. The ring of nanobots slowly moved down the fake limb until it had been converted into bone and muscle tissue; once they were done, they migrated through the bloodstream to the intestines and you shat them out.

Not very delicate, but a good solution—there was no surgery, no wait to create cloned parts, no clumsy artificial parts attached to your body. And it took only a couple of weeks, depending on the size of your amputation, to get the limb back. It was how they got back my jaw and, presumably, the heels and toes of my left foot, which were now all present and accounted for.

"How long have I been here?" I asked.

"You've been in this room for about a day," Jesse said. "You were in the tub for about a week before that."

"It took us four days to get here, during which time you were in stasis—did you know about that?" Harry asked. I nodded. "And it was a couple of days before they found you on Coral. So you've been out of it more or less for two weeks."

I looked at both of them. "I'm glad to see both of you," I said. "Don't get me wrong. But why are you here? Why aren't you on the Hampton Roads?"

"The Hampton Roads was destroyed, John," Jesse said. "They hit us right as we were coming in from our skip. Our shuttle barely got out of the bay and damaged its engines on the way out. We were the only ones. We drifted for almost a day and a half before the Sparrowhawk found us. Came real close to asphyxiation."

I recalled watching as a Rraey ship slugged a cruiser on its way in; I wondered if it had been the Hampton Roads. "What happened to the Modesto?" I asked. "Do you know?"

Jesse and Harry looked at each other. "The Modesto went down, too," Harry said, finally. "John, they all went down. It was a massacre."

"They can't all have gone down," I said. "You said you were picked up by the Sparrowhawk. And they came to get me, too."

"The Sparrowhawk came later, after the first wave," Harry said. "It skipped in far away from the planet. Whatever the Rraey used to detect our ships missed it, although they caught on after the Sparrowhawk parked itself above where you went down. That was a close thing."

"How many survivors?" I asked.

"You were the only one off the Modesto," Jesse said.

"Other shuttles got away," I said.

"They were shot down," Jesse said. "The Rraey shot down everything bigger than a bread box. The only reason our shuttle survived was that our engines were already dead. They probably didn't want to waste the missile."

"How many survivors, total?" I said. "It can't just be me and your shuttle."

Jesse and Harry stood mute.

"No fucking way," I said.

"It was an ambush, John," Harry said. "Every ship that skipped in was hit almost as soon as it arrived in Coral space. We don't know how they did it, but they did it, and they followed through by mopping up every shuttle they could find. That's why the Sparrowhawk risked us all to find you—because besides us, you're the only survivor. Your shuttle is the only one that made it to the planet. They found you by following the shuttle beacon. Your pilot flipped it on before you crashed."

I remembered Fiona. And Alan. "How many were lost?" I asked.

"Sixty-two battalion-strength cruisers with full crews," Jesse said. "Ninety-five thousand people. More or less."

"I feel sick," I said.

"This was what you'd call a good, old-fashioned clusterfuck," Harry said. "There's no doubt about that at all. So that's why we're still here. There's nowhere else for us to go."

"Well, that and they keep interrogating us," Jesse said. "As if we knew anything. We were already in our shuttle when we were hit."

"They've been dying for you to recover enough to talk to," Harry said to me. "You'll be getting a visit from the CDF investigators very soon, I suspect."

"What are they like?" I asked.

"Humorless," Harry said.

"You'll forgive us if we're not in the mood for jokes, Corporal Perry," Lieutenant Colonel Newman said. "When you lose sixty ships and one hundred thousand men, it pretty much leaves you in a serious state of mind."

All I had said was "broken up," when Newman asked how I was doing. I thought a slightly wry recognition of my physical condition was not entirely out of place. I guess I was wrong.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Although I wasn't really joking. As you may know, I left a rather significant portion of my body on Coral."

"How did you get to be on Coral, anyway?" asked Major Javna, who was my other interviewer.

"I seem to remember taking the shuttle," I said, "although the last part I did on my own."

Javna glanced over to Newman, as if to say, Again with the jokes. "Corporal, in your report on the incident, you mention you gave your shuttle pilot permission to blow the Modesto shuttle bay doors."

"That's right," I said. I had filed the report the night before, shortly after my visit from Harry and Jesse.

"On whose authority did you give that command?"

"On my own," I said. "The Modesto was getting hammered with missiles. I figured that a little individual initiative at that point in time would not be such a bad thing."

"Are you aware how many shuttles were launched across the entire fleet at Coral?"

"No," I said. "Although it seems to have been very few."

"Less than a hundred, including the seven from the Modesto," Newman said.

"And do you know how many made it to the Coral surface?" Javna said.

"My understanding is that only mine made it that far," I said.

"That's right," Javna said.

"So?" I said.

"So," Newman said, "that seems to have been pretty lucky for you that you ordered the doors blown just in time to get your shuttle out just in time to make it to the surface alive."

I stared blankly at Newman. "Do you suspect me of something, sir?" I said.

"You have to admit it's an interesting string of coincidences," Javna said.

"The hell I do," I said. "I gave the order after the Modesto was hit. My pilot had the training and the presence of mind to get us to Coral and close enough to the ground that I was able to survive. And if you recall, I only barely did so—most of my body was scraped over an area the size of Rhode Island. The only lucky thing was that I was found before I died. Everything else was skill or intelligence, either mine or my pilot's. Excuse me if we were trained well, sir."

Javna and Newman glanced at each other. "We're only following every line of inquiry," Newman said mildly.

"Christ," I said. "Think about it. If I really planned to betray the CDF and survive it, chances are I'd try to do it in a manner that didn't involve removing my own fucking jaw." I figured that in my condition, I just might be able to snarl at a superior officer and get away with it.

I was right. "Let's move on," Newman said.

"By all means, let's," I said.

"You mentioned you saw a Rraey battle cruiser firing on a CDF cruiser as it skipped into Coral space."

"That's correct," I said.

"Interesting you managed to see that," Javna said.

I sighed. "Are you going to do this all through the interview?" I said. "Things will move along a lot quicker if you're not always trying to get me to admit I'm a spy."

"Corporal, the missile attack," Newman said. "Do you remember whether the missiles were launched before or after the CDF ship skipped into Coral space?"

"My guess is that they were launched just before," I said. "At least it seemed that way to me. They knew when and where that ship was going to pop out."

"How do you think that's possible?" Javna asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I didn't even know how skip drives worked until a day before the attack. Knowing what I know, it doesn't seem like there should be any way to know a ship is coming."

"What do you mean, 'knowing what you know'?" Newman said.

"Alan, another squad leader"—I didn't want to say he was a friend, because I suspected they'd think that was suspicious—"said that skip drives work by transferring a ship into another universe just like the one it left, and that both its appearance and disappearance are phenomenally unlikely. If that's the case, it doesn't seem like you should be able to know when and where a ship will appear. It just does."

"What do you think happened here, then?" asked Javna.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"As you say, there shouldn't be any way to know that a ship is skipping," Javna said. "The only way we can figure this ambush occurred is if someone tipped off the Rraey."

"Back to this," I said. "Look, even if we supposed the existence of a traitor, how did he do it? Even if he somehow managed to get word to the Rraey that a fleet was coming, there's no possible way he could have known where every ship was going to appear in Coral space—the Rraey were waiting for us, remember. They hit us while we were skipping into Coral space."

"So, again," Javna said. "What do you think happened here?"

I shrugged. "Maybe skipping isn't as unlikely as we thought it was," I said.

"Don't get too worked up over the interrogations," Harry said, handing me a cup of fruit juice he'd gotten for me at the medical center's commissary. "They gave us the same 'it's suspicious you survived' bit."

"How did you react?" I asked.

"Hell," Harry said. "I agreed with them. It's damn suspicious. Funny thing is, I don't think they liked that response any better. But ultimately, you can't blame them. The colonies have just gotten the rug pulled out from under us. If we don't figure out what happened at Coral, we're in trouble."

"Well, and there's an interesting point," I said. "What do you think happened?"

"I don't know," Harry said. "Maybe skipping isn't as unlikely as we thought." He sipped his own juice.

"Funny, that's what I said."

"Yeah, but I mean it," Harry said. "I don't have the theoretical physics background of Alan, God rest his soul, but the entire theoretical model on which we understand skipping has to be wrong somehow. Obviously, the Rraey have some way to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where our ships are going to skip. How do they do that?"

"I don't think you're supposed to be able to," I said.

"That's exactly right. But they do anyway. So, quite obviously, our model of how skipping works is wrong. Theory gets thrown out the window when observation proves it isn't so. The question now is what is really going on."

"Any thoughts on it?" I said.

"A couple, although it's not really my field," Harry said. "I don't really have the math for it."

I laughed. "You know, Alan said something very much like that to me, not too long ago."

Harry smiled, and raised his cup. "To Alan," he said.

"To Alan," I said. "And all our absent friends."

"Amen," Harry said, and we drank.

"Harry, you said you were there when they brought me on board the Sparrowhawk," I said.

"I was," he said. "You were a mess. No offense."

"None taken," I said. "Do you remember anything about the squad that brought me in?"

"A little," Harry said. "But not too much. They kept us isolated away from the rest of the ship for most of the trip. I saw you in the sick bay when they brought you in. They were examining us."

"Was there a woman in my rescue party?"

"Yes," Harry said. "Tall. Brown hair. That's all I remember right off the top of my head. To be honest, I was paying more attention to you than who was bringing you in. I knew you. I didn't know them. Why?"

"Harry, one of the people who rescued me was my wife. I'd swear on it."

"I thought your wife is dead," Harry said.

"My wife is dead," I said. "But this was her. It wasn't Kathy as she was back when we were married. She was a CDF soldier, green skin and all."

Harry looked doubtful. "You were probably hallucinating, John."

"Yeah, but if I was hallucinating, why would I hallucinate Kathy as a CDF soldier? Wouldn't I just remember her as she was?"

"I don't know," Harry said. "Hallucinations, by definition, aren't real. It's not as if they follow rules. There's no reason you couldn't have hallucinated your dead wife as CDF."

"Harry, I know I sound a little nuts, but I saw my wife," I said. "I may have been chopped up, but my brain was working fine. I know what I saw."

Harry sat there for a moment. "My squad had a few days on the Sparrowhawk to stew, you know," he said. "We were crammed into a rec room with nowhere to go and nothing to do—they wouldn't even allow us access to the ship's entertainment servers. We had to be escorted to the head. So we talked about the crew of the ship, and about the Special Forces soldiers. And here's an interesting thing: None of us knew anyone who had ever entered the Special Forces from the general ranks. By itself, it doesn't mean anything. Most of us are still in our first couple of years of service. But it's interesting."

"Maybe you have to be in the service a long time," I said.

"Maybe," Harry said. "But maybe it's something else. They call them 'Ghost Brigades,' after all." He took another sip of his juice and then set it down on my bedside table. "I think I'm going to go do some digging. If I don't come back, avenge my death."

"I'll do as best as I can under the circumstances," I said.

"Do that," Harry said, grinning. "And see what you can find out, too. You have at least another couple of interrogation sessions coming up. Try a little interrogating of your own."

"What about the Sparrowhawk?" Major Javna said at our next interview session.

"I'd like to send a message to it," I said. "I want to thank them for saving my life."

"It's not necessary," Lieutenant Colonel Newman said.

"I know, but it's the polite thing to do," I said. "When someone keeps you from being eaten toe by toe by woodland animals, the least you can do is send a little note. In fact, I'd like to send the note directly to the guys who found me. How do I do that?"

"You can't," Javna said.

"Why not?" I asked, innocently.

"The Sparrowhawk is a Special Forces ship," Newman said. "They run silent. Communication between Special Forces ships and the rest of the fleet is limited."

"Well, that doesn't seem very fair," I said. "I've been in the service for over a year, and I never had a problem getting mail to my friends on other ships. You would think even Special Forces soldiers would want to hear from their friends in the outside universe."

Newman and Javna glanced at each other. "We're getting off track," Newman said.

"All I want to do is send a note," I said.

"We'll look into it," Javna said, in a tone that said, No we won't.

I sighed and then told them, for probably the twentieth time, about why I gave permission to blow the Modesto's shuttle bay doors.

"How's your jaw?" Dr. Fiorina asked.

"Fully functional and ready to chew on something," I said. "Not that I don't like soup through a straw, but it gets monotonous after a while."

"I sympathize," Fiorina said. "Now let's look at the leg." I pulled down the covers and let him take a look—the ring was now halfway down the calf. "Excellent," he said. "I want you to start walking on that. The unprocessed portion will support your weight, and it'll be good to give the leg a little exercise. I'll give you a cane to use for the next couple of days. I notice you have some friends who come to visit you. Why don't you have them take you to lunch or something."

"You don't have to tell me twice," I said, and flexed the new leg a little. "Good as new," I said.

"Better," Fiorina said. "We've made a few improvements to the CDF body structure since you were enlisted. They've been incorporated into the leg, and the rest of your body will feel the benefit, too."

"Makes you wonder why the CDF just doesn't go all the way," I said. "Replace the body with something designed totally for war."

Fiorina looked up from his data pad. "You have green skin, cat's eyes, and a computer in your skull," he said. "How much less human do you want to be?"

"That's a good point," I said.

"Indeed," Fiorina said. "I'll have an orderly bring in that cane." He tapped his data pad to send the order.

"Hey, doc," I said. "Did you treat anybody else who came off the Sparrowhawk?"

"No," he said. "Really, Corporal, you were challenge enough."

"So none of the Sparrowhawk crew?"

Fiorina smirked. "Oh, no. They're Special Forces."

"So?"

"Let's just say they have special needs," Fiorina said, and then the orderly came in with my cane.

"You know what you can find out about the Ghost Brigades? Officially, I mean," Harry said.

"I'm guessing not a lot," I said.

"Not a lot is an overstatement," Harry said. "You can't find out a damn thing."

Harry, Jesse and I were lunching at one of Phoenix station's commissaries. For my first trip out, I suggested we go as far away from Brenneman as we could. This particular commissary was on the other side of the station. The view was nothing special—it overlooked a small shipyard—but was known stationwide for its burgers, and the reputation was justified; the cook, in his past life, had begun a chain of specialty hamburger restaurants. For a literal hole in the wall, it was constantly packed. But my and Harry's burgers were growing cold as we talked about the Ghost Brigades.

"I asked Javna and Newman about getting a note to the Sparrowhawk and got stonewalled," I said.

"Not surprised," Harry said. "Officially, the Sparrowhawk exists, but that's all you can find out. You can't find out anything about its crew, its size, its armament or its location. All the information isn't there. Do a more general search on Special Forces or 'Ghost Brigades' in the CDF database and you likewise get nothing."

"So you guys have nothing at all," Jesse said.

"Oh, I didn't say that," Harry said, and smiled. "You can't find out anything officially, but unofficially there's lots to know."

"And how do you manage to find information unofficially?" Jesse said.

"Well, you know," Harry said. "My sparkling personality does wonders."

"Please," Jesse said. "I'm eating here. Which is more than you two can say."

"So what did you find out?" I asked, and took a bite of my burger. It was fabulous.

"Understand that this is all rumor and innuendo," Harry said.

"Which means that it's probably more accurate than what we'd get officially," I said.

"Possibly," Harry granted. "The big news is that there is indeed a reason why they're called 'Ghost Brigades.' It's not an official designation, you know. It's a nickname. The rumor, which I've heard from more than one place, is that Special Forces members are dead people."

"Excuse me?" I said. Jesse looked up from her burger.

"Not real dead people, per se," Harry said. "They're not zombies. But there are a lot of people who sign up to join the CDF who die before their seventy-fifth birthday. When that happens, apparently the CDF doesn't just throw out your DNA. They use it to make Special Forces members."

Something hit me. "Jesse, you remember when Leon Deak died? What the medical technician said? 'A last-minute volunteer for the Ghost Brigades.' I thought it was just some kind of sick joke."

"How can they do that?" Jesse asked. "That's not ethical at all."

"Isn't it?" Harry said. "When you give your intent to sign up, you give the CDF the right to use whatever procedures necessary to enhance your combat readiness, and you can't be combat ready if you're dead. It's in the contract. If it's not ethical, it's at least legal."

"Yeah, but there's a difference between using my DNA to create a new body for me to use, and using the new body without me in it," Jesse said.

"Details, details," Harry said.

"I don't like the idea of my body running around on its own," Jesse said. "I don't think it's right for the CDF to do that."

"Well, that's not all they do," Harry said. "You know that these new bodies we have are deeply genetically modified. Well, apparently Special Forces bodies are even more modified than ours. The Special Forces soldiers are guinea pigs for new enhancements and abilities before they're introduced into the general population. And there are rumors that some of the modifications are truly radical—bodies modified to the point of not looking human anymore."

"My doctor said something about Special Forces soldiers having special needs," I said. "But even allowing for hallucinations, the people who rescued me looked human enough."

"And we didn't see any mutants or freaks on the Sparrowhawk," Jesse said.

"We weren't allowed full run of the ship, either," Harry pointed out. "They kept us in one area and kept us disconnected from everything else. We saw the sick bay and we saw the rec area, and that was it."

"People see Special Forces in battle and walking around all the time," Jesse said.

"Sure they do," Harry said. "But that's not saying that they see all of them."

"Your paranoia is acting up again, sweetie," Jesse said, and fed Harry a french fry.

"Thank you, precious," Harry said, accepting it. "But even throwing out the rumor about supermodified Special Forces, there's still enough there to account for John seeing his wife. It's not really Kathy, though. Just someone using her body."

"Who?" I said.

"Well, that's the question, isn't it," Harry said. "Your wife is dead, so they couldn't put her personality into the body. Either they have some sort of preformatted personality they put into Special Forces soldiers—"

"—or someone else went from an old body into her new one," I said.

Jesse shivered. "I'm sorry, John. But that's just creepy."

"John? You okay?" Harry said.

"What? Yeah, I'm fine," I said. "It's just a lot to deal with at one time. The idea that my wife could be alive—but not really—and that someone who isn't her is walking around in her skin. I think I almost preferred it when there was a possibility that I hallucinated her."

I looked over to Harry and Jesse. Both of them were frozen and staring.

"Guys?" I said.

"Speak of the devil," said Harry.

"What?" I said.

"John," Jesse said. "She's in line for a burger."

I spun around, knocking over my plate as I did so. Then I felt like I got dunked directly into a vat of ice.

"Holy shit," I said.

It was her. No doubt about it.

FOURTEEN

I started to get up. Harry grabbed my hand.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm going to go talk to her," I said.

"You sure you want to do that?" he asked.

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "Of course I'm sure."

"What I'm saying is that maybe you'd want Jesse or me to talk to her first," Harry said. "To see if she wants to meet you."

"Jesus, Harry," I said. "This isn't the sixth fucking grade. That's my wife."

"No it's not, John," Harry said. "It's someone entirely different. You don't know if she will even want to speak to you."

"John, even if she does speak to you, you're going to be two total strangers," Jesse said. "Whatever you're expecting out of this encounter, you're not going to get it."

"I'm not expecting anything," I said.

"We just don't want you to be hurt," Jesse said.

"I'll be fine," I said, and looked at them both. "Please. Let me go, Harry. I'll be fine."

Harry and Jesse looked at each other. Harry let go of my hand.

"Thank you," I said.

"What are you going to say to her?" Harry wanted to know.

"I'm going to tell her thanks for saving my life," I said, and got up.

By this time, she and two companions had got their orders and had made their way to a small table farther back in the commissary. I threaded my way to the table. The three of them were talking, but stopped as I approached. She had her back to me as I approached, and turned as her companions glanced up at me. I stopped as I got a look at her face.

It was different, of course. Beyond the obvious skin and eyes, she was so much younger than Kathy had been—a face that was as Kathy was half a century before. Even then, it was different; leaner than Kathy's had ever been, keeping with the CDF genetically-installed predisposition for fitness. Kathy's hair had always been a nearly uncontrolled mane, even as she aged and most other women switched to more matronly cuts; the woman in front of me kept her hair close on her head and off her collar.

It was the hair that was the most jarring. It'd been so long since I'd seen a person without green skin that it didn't register with me anymore. But the hair was nothing that I remembered.

"It's not nice to stare," the woman said, using Kathy's voice. "And before you ask, you're not my type."

Yes I am, a part of my brain said.

"I'm sorry, I don't really mean to intrude," I said. "I was just wondering if you might recognize me."

She flicked her eyes up and down on me. "I really don't," she said. "And trust me, we weren't in basic training together."

"You rescued me," I said. "On Coral."

She perked up a little at this. "No shit," she said. "No wonder I didn't recognize you. The last time I saw you, you were missing the lower half of your head. No offense. And no offense to this, either, but I'm amazed you're still alive. I wouldn't have bet on you to make it."

"I had something to live for," I said.

"Apparently," she said.

"I'm John Perry," I said, and held out my hand. "I'm afraid I don't know your name."

"Jane Sagan," she said, taking it. I held it a little longer than I should have. She had a slightly puzzled expression when I finally let go.

"Corporal Perry," one of her companions began; he had taken the opportunity to access information about me from his Brain-Pal, "we're kind of in a rush to eat here; we have to be back to our ship in a half hour, so if you don't mind—"

"Do you recognize me from anywhere else?" I asked Jane, cutting him off.

"No," she said, slightly frosty now. "Thanks for coming over, but now I'd really like to eat."

"Let me send you something," I said. "A picture. Through your BrainPal."

"That's really not necessary," Jane said.

"One picture," I said. "Then I'll go. Humor me."

"Fine," she said. "Hurry it up."

Among the few possessions that I had taken with me when I left Earth was a digital photo album of family, friends and places that I had loved. When my BrainPal activated, I had uploaded the photos into its onboard memory, a smart move in retrospect since my photo album and all my other Earthly possessions but one went down with the Modesto. I accessed one particular photo from the album and sent it to her. I watched as she accessed her BrainPal, and then turned again to look at me.

"Do you recognize me now?" I asked.

She moved fast, faster than even normal CDF, grabbed me, and slammed me against a nearby bulkhead. I was pretty sure I felt one of my newly repaired ribs crack. From across the commissary Harry and Jesse leaped up and moved in; Jane's companions moved to intercept. I tried to breathe.

"Who the fuck are you," Jane hissed at me, "and what are you trying to pull?"

"I'm John Perry," I wheezed. "I'm not trying to pull anything."

"Bullshit. Where did you get that picture?" she said, close up, low. "Who made it for you?"

"No one made it for me," I said, equally low. "I got that picture at my wedding. It's . . . my wedding photo." I almost said our wedding photo, but caught myself just in time. "The woman in the picture is my wife, Kathy. She died before she could enlist. They took her DNA and used it to make you. Part of her is in you. Part of you is in that picture. Part of what you are gave me this." I held up my left hand and showed her my wedding ring—my only remaining Earthly possession.

Jane snarled, picked me up and hurled me hard across the room. I skipped over a couple of tabletops, knocking away hamburgers, condiment packages and napkin holders before coming to rest on the ground. Along the way I clocked my head on a metal corner; there was the briefest of oozes coming from my temple. Harry and Jesse disengaged from their wary dance with Jane's companions and headed over to me. Jane stalked toward me but was stopped by her friends halfway across.

"Listen to me, Perry," she said. "You stay the fuck away from me from now on. The next time I see you you're going to wish I'd left you for dead." She stalked off. One of her companions followed after her; the other, who had spoken to me earlier, came over to us. Jesse and Harry got up to engage him, but he put his hands out in a sign of truce.

"Perry," he said. "What was that all about? What did you send her?"

"Ask her yourself, pal," I said.

"That's Lieutenant Tagore to you, Corporal." Tagore looked at Harry and Jesse. "I know you two," he said. "You were on the Hampton Roads."

"Yes, sir," Harry said.

"Listen to me, all of you," he said. "I don't know what the hell that was about, but I want to be very clear about this. Whatever it was, we weren't part of it. Tell whatever story you want, but if the words 'Special Forces' are anywhere in it, I'm going to make it my personal mission to ensure that the rest of your military career is short and painful. I'm not kidding. I will fuck your skull. Are we clear?"

"Yes, sir," Jesse said. Harry nodded. I wheezed.

"Get your friend looked after," Tagore said to Jesse. "He looks like he just got the shit kicked out of him." He walked out.

"Christ, John," Jesse said, taking a napkin and cleaning off my head wound. "What did you do?"

"I sent her a wedding photo," I said.

"That's subtle," Harry said, and looked around. "Where's your cane?"

"I think it's over by the wall she slammed me into," I said. Harry left to go get it.

"Are you okay?" Jesse said to me.

"I think I busted a rib," I said. "That's not what I meant," she said. "I know what you meant," I said. "And as far as that goes, I think something else is busted, too."

Jesse cupped my face with her hand. Harry came back with my cane. We limped back to the hospital. Dr. Fiorina was extremely displeased with me.

Someone nudged me awake. When I saw who it was, I tried to speak. She clapped a hand over my mouth.

"Quiet," Jane said. "I'm not supposed to be here."

I nodded. She took her hand away. "Talk low," she said.

"We could use BrainPals," I said.

"No," she said. "I want to hear your voice. Just keep it down."

"Okay," I said.

"I'm sorry about today," she said. "It was just unexpected. I don't know how to react to something like that."

"It's all right," I said. "I shouldn't have broken it to you that way."

"Are you hurt?" she asked.

"You cracked a rib," I said.

"Sorry about that," she said.

"Already healed," I said.

She studied my face, eyes flicking back and forth. "Look, I'm not your wife," she said suddenly. "I don't know who you think I am or what I am, but I was never your wife. I didn't know she existed until you showed me the picture today."

"You had to know about where you came from," I said.

"Why?" she said hotly. "We know we've been made from someone else's genes, but they don't tell us who they were. What would be the point? That person's not us. We're not even clones—I've got things in my DNA that aren't even from Earth. We're the CDF guinea pigs, haven't you heard?"

"I heard," I said.

"So I'm not your wife. That's what I've come here to say. I'm sorry, but I'm not."

"All right," I said.

"Okay," she said. "Good. I'm going now. Sorry about throwing you across the room."

"How old are you?" I asked.

"What? Why?" she asked.

"I'm just curious," I said. "And I don't want you to go yet."

"I don't know what my age has got to do with anything," she said.

"Kathy's been dead for nine years now," I said. "I want to know how long they bothered to wait before mining her genes to make you."

"I'm six years old," she said.

"I hope you don't mind if I say you don't look like most six-year-olds that I've met," I said.

"I'm advanced for my age," she said. Then, "That was a joke."

"I know," I said.

"People don't get that sometimes," she said. "It's because most of the people I know are around the same age."

"How does it work?" I said. "I mean, what's it like? Being six. Not having a past."

Jane shrugged. "I woke up one day and I didn't know where I was or what was going on. But I was already in this body, and I already knew things. How to speak. How to move. How to think and fight. I was told I was in Special Forces, and that it was time to start training, and my name was Jane Sagan."

"Nice name," I said.

"It was randomly selected," she said. "Our first names are common names, our last names are mostly from scientists and philosophers. There's a Ted Einstein and a Julie Pasteur in my squad. At first you don't know that, of course. About the names. Later you learn a little bit about how you were made, after they've let you develop your own sense of who you are. No one you know has many memories. It's not until you meet realborn that you know that anything's really different about you. And we don't meet them very often. We don't really mix."

"'Realborn'?" I asked.

"It's what we call the rest of you," she said.

"If you don't mix, what were you doing at the commissary?" I said.

"I wanted a burger," she said. "It's not that we can't, mostly. It's that we don't."

"Did you ever wonder about who you were made from?" I asked.

"Sometimes," Jane said. "But we can't know. They don't tell us about our progies—the people we're made from. Some of us are made from more than one, you know. But they're all dead anyway. Have to be or they wouldn't use them to make us. And we don't know who knew them, and if the people who knew them get in the service, it's not like they'd find us most of the time. And you realborn die pretty damn fast out here. I don't know anyone else who's ever met a progie's relative. Or a husband."

"Did you show your lieutenant the picture?" I asked.

"No," she said. "He asked about it. I told him you sent me a picture of yourself, and that I trashed it. And I did, so the action would register if he looked. I haven't told anyone about what we said. Can I have it again? The picture?"

"Of course," I said. "I have others, too, if you want them. If you want to know about Kathy, I can tell you about her as well."

Jane stared at me in the dim room; in the low light she looked more like Kathy than ever. I ached just a little to look at her. "I don't know," she said, finally. "I don't know what I want to know. Let me think about it. Give me that one picture for now. Please."

"I'm sending it now," I said.

"I have to go," she said. "Listen, I wasn't here. And if you see me anywhere else, don't let on that we've met."

"Why not?" I asked.

"It's important for now," she said.

"All right," I said.

"Let me see your wedding ring," Jane asked.

"Sure," I said, and slipped it off to let her look at it. She held it gingerly, and peered through it.

"It says something," she said.

"'My Love is Eternal—Kathy,'" I said. "She had it inscribed before she gave it to me."

"How long were you married?" she asked.

"Forty-two years," I said.

"How much did you love her?" Jane asked. "Your wife. Kathy. When people are married for a long time, maybe they stay together out of habit."

"Sometimes they do," I said. "But I loved her very much. All the time we were married. I love her now."

Jane stood up, looked at me again, gave me back my ring, and left without saying good-bye.

"Tachyons," said Harry as he approached my and Jesse's breakfast table.

"Bless you," said Jesse.

"Very funny," he said, sitting down. "Tachyons may be the answer to how the Rraey knew we were coming."

"That's great," I said. "Now if only Jesse and I knew what tachyons were, we'd be a lot more excited about them."

"They're exotic subatomic particles," Harry said. "They travel faster than light and backward through time. So far they've just been a theory, because after all it's difficult to track something that is both faster than light and going backward in time. But the physics of skip drive theory allows for the presence of tachyons at any skip—just as our matter and energy translates into a different universe, tachyons from the destination universe travel back into the universe being left behind. There's a specific tachyon pattern a skip drive makes at a translation event. If you can spot tachyons forming that pattern, you'd know a ship with a skip drive was coming in—and when."

"Where do you hear this stuff?" I said.

"Unlike the two of you, I don't spend my days lounging about," Harry said. "I've made friends in interesting places."

"If we knew about this tachyon pattern or whatever it is, why didn't we do something about it before?" Jesse asked. "What you're saying is that we've been vulnerable all this time, and just been lucky so far."

"Well, remember what I said about tachyons being theoretical to this point," Harry said. "That's sort of an understatement. They're less than real—they're mathematical abstractions at best. They have no relation to the real universes in which we exist and move. No race of intelligence that we know of has ever used them for anything. They have no practical application."

"Or so we thought," I said.

Harry gave a hand motion of assent. "If this guess is correct, then it means that the Rraey have a technology that's well beyond what we have the capability to create ourselves. We're behind them in this technology race."

"So how do we catch up?" Jesse said.

Harry smiled. "Well, who said anything about catching up? Remember when we first met, on the beanstalk, and we talked about the colonies' superior technology? You remember how I suggested they got it?"

"Through encounters with aliens," Jesse said.

"Right," Harry said. "We either trade for it or take it in battle. Now, if there really is a way to track tachyons from one universe to another, we could probably develop the technology ourselves to do it. But that's going to take time and resources we don't have. Far more practical to simply take it from the Rraey."

"You're saying the CDF is planning to go back to Coral," I said.

"Of course we are," Harry said. "But the goal now isn't just to take the planet back. It's not even going to be the primary goal. Now, our primary goal is to get our hands on their tachyon detection technology and find a way to defeat it or use it against them."

"The last time we went to Coral we got our asses kicked," Jesse said.

"We're not going to have a choice, Jesse," Harry said gently. "We have to get this technology. If the technology spreads, every race out there will be able to track Colonial movement. In a very real sense, they'll know we're coming before we do."

"It's going to be a massacre again," Jesse said.

"I suspect they'll use a lot more of the Special Forces this time around," Harry said.

"Speaking of which," I said, and then told Harry of my encounter with Jane the night before, which I had been recounting to Jesse as Harry walked up.

"It looks like she's not planning to kill you after all," Harry said after I was finished.

"It must have been so strange to talk to her," Jesse said. "Even though you know she's not really your wife."

"Not to mention being just six years old. Man, that's odd," Harry said.

"It shows, too," I said. "The being six part. She doesn't have much emotional maturity. She doesn't seem to know what to do with emotions when she has them. She threw me across the room because she didn't know how else to deal with what she was feeling."

"Well, all she knows is fighting and killing," Harry said. "We have a life of memories and experiences to stabilize us. Even younger soldiers in traditional armies have twenty years of experiences. In a real sense, these Special Forces troops are children warriors. It's ethically borderline."

"I don't want to open any old wounds," Jesse said. "But do you see any of Kathy in her?"

I thought about it a moment. "She looks like Kathy, obviously," I said. "And I think I saw a little of Kathy's sense of humor in her, and a little of her temperament. Kathy could be impulsive."

"Did she ever throw you across the room?" Harry asked, smiling.

I grinned back. "There were a couple of times that if she could have, she would have," I said.

"Score one for genetics," Harry said.

Asshole suddenly clicked to life. Corporal Perry, the message read. Your presence is required at a briefing with General Keegan at 1000 hrs at Operational HQ in the Eisenhower Module of Phoenix Station. Be prompt. I acknowledged the message and told Harry and Jesse.

"And I thought I had friends in interesting places," Harry said. "You've been holding out on us, John."

"I have no idea what this is about," I said. "I've never met Keegan before."

"He's only the commander of the CDF Second Army," Harry said. "I'm sure it's nothing important."

"Funny," I said.

"It's 0915 now, John," Jesse said. "You'd better get moving. You want us to walk with you?"

"No, please finish breakfast," I said. "It'll be good for me to have the walk. The Eisenhower Module is only a couple of klicks around the station. I can make it in time." I got up, grabbed a donut to eat on the way, gave Jesse a friendly peck on the cheek and headed off.

In fact, the Eisenhower Module was more than a couple of klicks away, but my leg had finally grown in, and I wanted the exercise. Dr. Fiorina was right—the new leg did feel better than new, and overall I felt as if I had more energy. Of course, I had just recovered from injuries so grave it was a miracle that I lived. Anyone would feel like they had more energy after that.

"Don't turn around," Jane said, into my ear, from directly behind me.

I nearly choked on a bite of donut. "I wish you wouldn't keep sneaking up on me," I finally said, not turning around.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm not intentionally trying to annoy you. But I shouldn't be talking to you. Listen, this briefing you're about to go to."

"How do you know about that?" I said.

"It doesn't matter. What matters is that you agree to what they ask of you. Do it. It's the way you're going to be safe for what's coming up. As safe as can be."

"What's coming up?" I asked.

"You'll find out soon enough," she said.

"What about my friends," I said. "Harry and Jesse. Are they in trouble?"

"We're all in trouble," Jane said. "I can't do anything for them. I worked to sell you as it is. Do this. It's important." There was a quick touch of a hand on my arm, and then I could tell she was gone again.

"Corporal Perry," General Keegan said, returning my salute. "At ease."

I had been escorted into a conference room with more brass in it than an eighteenth-century schooner. I was easily the lowest-ranking person in the room; the next lowest rank, as far as I could tell, as a lieutenant colonel, was Newman, my esteemed questioner. I felt a little queasy.

"You look a little lost, son," General Keegan said to me. He looked, as did everyone in the room, and every soldier in the CDF, no more than in his late twenties.

"I feel a little lost, sir," I said.

"Well, that's understandable," Keegan said. "Please, sit down." He motioned to an empty chair at the table; I took it and sat down. "I've heard a lot about you, Perry."

"Yes, sir," I said, trying not to glance over at Newman.

"You don't sound excited about that, Corporal," he said.

"I'm not trying to be noticed, sir," I said. "Just trying to do my part."

"Be that as it may, you have been noticed," Keegan said. "A hundred shuttles managed to get launched over Coral, but yours was the only one to make it to the surface, in great part due to your orders to pop the shuttle bay doors and get the hell out of there." He jerked a thumb to Newman. "Newman here's been telling me all about it. He thinks we should give you a medal for it."

Keegan could have said, Newman thinks you should star in the army's annual performance of Swan Lake, and I would not have been as surprised as I was. Keegan noticed the expression on my face and grinned. "Yes, I know what you were thinking. Newman has the best straight face in the business, which is why he has the job he does. Well, what about it, Corporal? Think you deserve that medal?"

"Respectfully, sir, no," I said. "We crashed and there were no survivors other than myself. It's hardly meritorious service. Beyond that, any praise in making it to the surface of Coral belongs to my pilot, Fiona Eaton."

"Pilot Eaton has already been decorated posthumously, Corporal," General Keegan said. "Small consolation to her, being dead as she is, but it's important to the CDF that such actions are noted somewhere by us. And despite your modesty, Corporal, you will be decorated as well. Others survived the Battle of Coral, but that was by luck. You took initiative and showed leadership in an adverse situation. And you've shown your capacity to think on your feet before. That firing solution against the Consu. Your leadership in your training platoon. Master Sergeant Ruiz made special note of your use of the BrainPal in the final training war game. I served with that son of a bitch, Corporal. Ruiz wouldn't compliment his mother for giving birth to him, if you know what I mean."

"I think I do, sir," I said.

"That's what I thought. So a Bronze Star for you, son. Congratulations."

"Yes, sir," I said. "Thank you, sir."

"But I didn't ask you here for that purpose," General Keegan said, and then motioned down the table. "I don't believe you've met General Szilard, who heads our Special Forces. At ease, no need to salute."

"Sir," I said, nodding in his direction, at least.

"Corporal," Szilard said. "Tell me, what have you heard about the situation over Coral?"

"Not very much, sir," I said. "Just conversations with friends."

"Really," Szilard said, dryly. "I would think your friend Private Wilson would have given you a comprehensive briefing by now."

I was beginning to realize that my poker face, never very good, was even less so these days. "Yes, of course we know about Private Wilson," Szilard said. "You might want to tell him that his snooping around is not nearly as subtle as he thinks it is."

"Harry will be surprised to hear it," I said.

"No doubt," Szilard said. "I also have no doubt he's also appraised you on the nature of the Special Forces soldiers. It's not a state secret, incidentally, although we don't put information on the Special Forces in the general database. Most of our time is spent on missions that require strict secrecy and confidentiality. We have very few opportunities to spend much time with the rest of you. Not much inclination either."

"General Szilard and Special Forces are taking the lead on our counterattack on the Rraey at Coral," General Keegan said. "While we intend to take the planet, our immediate concern is to isolate their tachyon detection apparatus, disable it without destroying it if we can, but destroy it if we must. Colonel Golden here"—Keegan motioned to a somber-looking man next to Newman—"believes we know where it is. Colonel."

"Very briefly, Corporal," Golden said. "Our surveillance before the first attack on Coral showed the Rraey deploying a series of small satellites in orbits around Coral. At first we thought them to be spy satellites to help the Rraey identify Colonial and troop movement on the planet, but now we think it's an array designed to spot tachyon patterns. We believe the tracking station, which compiles the data from the satellites, is on the planet itself, landed there during the first wave of the attack."

"We think it's on the planet because they figure it's safest there," General Szilard said. "If it were on a ship, there's a chance an attacking CDF ship might hit it, if only by sheer luck. And as you know, no ship but your shuttle got anywhere close to the Coral surface. It's a good bet it's there."

I turned to Keegan. "May I ask a question, sir."

"Go ahead," Keegan said.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. "I'm a corporal with no squad, platoon or battalion. I can't see why I should need to know this."

"You need to know this because you're one of the few survivors of the Battle of Coral, and the only one that survived by something more than chance," Keegan said. "General Szilard and his people believe, and I agree, that their counterattack has a better chance of succeeding if someone who was there in the first attack advises and observes the second. That means you."

"With all due respect, sir," I said. "My participation was minimal and disastrous."

"Less disastrous than almost everyone else's," Keegan said. "Corporal, I won't lie to you—I'd prefer we'd have someone else in this role. However, as it stands, we do not. Even if the amount of advice and service you can give is minimal, it is better than nothing at all. Besides, you've shown the ability to improvise and act quickly in combat situations. You will be of use."

"What would I do?" I asked. Keegan glanced over to Szilard.

"You'd be stationed on the Sparrowhawk," Szilard said. "They represent the Special Forces with the most experience in this particular situation. Your job would be to advise the Sparrowhawk senior staff on your experience at Coral, observe, and act as liaison between CDF regular forces and Special Forces if one is required."

"Would I fight?" I asked.

"You're a supernumerary," Szilard said. "You would most likely not be required to participate in the actual engagement."

"You understand that this assignment is highly unusual," Keegan said. "As a practical matter, due to differences in mission and in personnel, regular CDF and Special Forces are almost never mixed. Even in battles in which the two forces are engaged against a single enemy, both tend to perform separate and mutually exclusive roles."

"I understand," I said. I understood more than they knew. Jane was stationed on the Sparrowhawk.

As if following my train of thought, Szilard spoke up. "Corporal, I do understand that you had an incident with one of my people—one stationed on the Sparrowhawk. I need to know that there will be no other incidents like that one."

"Yes, sir," I said. "The incident was over a misunderstanding. A case of mistaken identity. It won't happen again."

Szilard nodded to Keegan. "Very well," Keegan said. "Corporal, given your new role, I think your rank is deficit to the task. You are hereby promoted to lieutenant, effective immediately, and will present yourself to Major Crick, CO of the Sparrowhawk, at 1500. That should give you enough time to get your things in order and say your good-byes. Any questions?"

"No, sir," I said. "But I have one request."

"Not the usual thing," Keegan said, after I had finished. "And in other circumstances—in both cases—I would say no."

"I understand, sir," I said.

"However, it will be arranged. And some good might come out of it. Very well, Lieutenant. You're dismissed."

Harry and Jesse met me as soon as they could after I messaged them. I told them of my assignment and promotion.

"You think Jane engineered this," Harry said.

"I know she did," I said. "She told me she had. As it happens, I may actually turn out to be useful in some way. But I'm sure she planted a bug in someone's ear. I'm on my way in just a few hours."

"We're being broken up again," Jesse said. "And what's left of Harry's and my platoon is being split up, too. Our platoon mates are getting assignments to other ships. We're waiting to hear our own assignments."

"Who knows, John," Harry said. "We'll probably be back at Coral with you."

"No, you won't," I said. "I asked General Keegan to advance you both out of general infantry and he agreed. Your first term of service is done. You've both been reassigned."

"What are you talking about?" Harry said.

"You've been reassigned to CDF's Military Research arm," I said. "Harry, they knew about you snooping around. I convinced them you'd do less harm to yourself and others this way. You're going to work on whatever we bring back from Coral."

"I can't do that," Harry said. "I don't have the math for it."

"I'm sure you won't let that stop you," I said. "Jesse, you're going to MR, too, on the support staff. It's all I could get you on short notice. It's not going be very interesting, but you can train for other roles while you're there. And you'll both be out of the line of fire."

"This isn't right, John," Jesse said. "We haven't served our time. Our platoon mates are going back out to fight while we'll be sitting here for something we didn't do. You're going back out there. I don't want this. I should serve my time." Harry nodded.

"Jesse, Harry, please," I said. "Look. Alan is dead. Susan and Thomas are dead. Maggie is dead. My squad and my platoon are all gone. Everyone I've ever cared about out here is gone but you two. I had a chance to keep you two alive and I took it. I couldn't do anything for anyone else. I can do something for you. I need you to be alive. You're all I have out here."

"You have Jane," Jesse said.

"I don't know what Jane is to me yet," I said. "But I know what you are to me. You're my family now. Jesse, Harry. You're my family. Don't be angry with me for wanting to keep you safe. Just be safe. For me. Please."

FIFTEEN

Sparrowhawk was a quiet ship. Your average troopship is filled with the sounds of people talking, laughing, yelling and going through the verbal motions of their lives. Special Forces soldiers don't do any of that crap.

As was explained to me by the Sparrowhawk's CO when I came on board. "Don't expect people to talk to you," Major Crick said as I presented myself.

"Sir?" I said.

"The Special Forces soldiers," he said. "It's not anything personal, it's just we're not much for talking. When we're by ourselves, we communicate almost exclusively by BrainPal. It's faster, and we don't have a bias toward talking, like you do. We're born with BrainPals. The first time anyone ever talks to us, it's with one of them. So it's the way we talk most of the time. Don't be offended. Anyway, I've ordered the troops to speak to you if they have something they need to get across."

"That's not necessary, sir," I said. "I can use my BrainPal."

"You wouldn't be able to keep up," Major Crick said. "Your brain is set to communicate at one speed, and ours at another. Talking to realborn is like talking at half speed. If you've talked to any of us for a great deal of time, you might notice we seem abrupt and curt. It's a side effect of feeling like you're talking to a slow child. No offense."

"None taken, sir," I said. "You seem to communicate well."

"Well, as a CO, I spend a lot of time with non-Special Forces," Crick said. "Also, I'm older than most of my troops. I've picked up a few social graces."

"How old are you, sir?" I asked.

"I'll be fourteen next week," he said. "Now, I'll be having a staff meeting tomorrow at 0600. Until then, get yourself set up and comfortable, have some chow, and get a little rest. We'll talk more in the morning." He saluted and I was dismissed.

Jane was waiting in my quarters.

"You again," I said, smiling.

"Me again," she said, simply. "I wanted to know how you're getting along."

"Fine," I said. "Considering I've been on the ship for fifteen minutes."

"We're all talking about you," Jane said.

"Yes, I can tell by the endless chatter," I said. Jane opened her mouth to speak, but I held up my hand. "That was a joke," I said. "Major Crick told me about the BrainPal thing."

"It's why I like talking to you like this," Jane said. "It's not like talking to anyone else."

"I seem to remember you talking when you rescued me," I said.

"We were worried about being tracked then," Jane said. "Speaking was more secure. We also speak when we're out in public. We don't like to draw attention to ourselves when we don't have to."

"Why did you arrange this?" I asked her. "Getting me stationed here on the Sparrowhawk."

"You're useful to us," Jane said. "You have experience that may be useful, both on Coral and for another element of our preparation."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Major Crick will talk about it tomorrow at the briefing," Jane said. "I'll be there, too. I command a platoon and do intelligence work."

"Is that the only reason?" I asked. "That I'm useful?"

"No," Jane said, "but it's the reason that got you onto the ship. Listen, I won't be spending too much time with you. I have too many things to do preparing for our mission. But I want to know about her. About Kathy. Who she was. What she was like. I want you to tell me."

"I'll tell you about her," I said. "On one condition."

"What?" Jane asked.

"You have to tell me about you," I said.

"Why?"

"Because for nine years I've been living with the fact my wife is dead, and now you're here and it's messing me up inside," I said. "The more I know about you, the more I can get used to the idea that you're not her."

"I'm not that interesting," Jane said. "And I'm only six. That's hardly any time to have done anything."

"I've done more things in the last year than I did in all the years leading up to it," I said. "Trust me. Six years is enough."

"Sir, want company?" the nice young (probably four-year-old) Special Forces soldier said as he and four of his buddies held their meal trays at attention.

"The table's empty," I said.

"Some people prefer to eat alone," the soldier said.

"I'm not one of them," I said. "Please, sit, all of you."

"Thank you, sir," the soldier said, putting his tray on the table ."I'm Corporal Sam Mendel. These are Privates George Linnaeus, Will Hegel, Jim Bohr, and Jan Fermi."

"Lieutenant John Perry," I said.

"So, what do you think of the Sparrowhawk, sir?" Mendel asked.

"It's nice and quiet," I said.

"That it is, sir," Mendel said. "I was just mentioning to Linnaeus that I don't think I've spoken more than ten words in about a month."

"You've just broken your record, then," I said.

"Would you mind settling a bet for us, sir?" Mendel said.

"Does it involve me doing anything strenuous?" I asked.

"No, sir," Mendel said. "We just want to know how old you are. You see, Hegel here is betting your age is older than twice the combined ages of our entire squad."

"How old are you all?" I asked.

"The squad has ten soldiers in it including myself," Mendel said, "and I'm the oldest. I'm five and a half. The rest are between two and five years old. Total age is thirty-seven years and about two months."

"I'm seventy-six," I said. "So he's right. Although any CDF recruit would have let him win his bet. We don't even enlist until we're seventy-five. And let me just say, there's something profoundly disturbing about being twice as old as your entire squad, combined."

"Yes, sir," Mendel said. "But on the other hand, we've all been in this life at least twice as long as you. So it comes out about even."

"I suppose it does at that," I said.

"It must be interesting, sir," Bohr said, a little down the table. "You had an entire life before this one. What was it like?"

"What was what like?" I said. "My life, or just having a life before this one?"

"Either," Bohr said.

I suddenly realized that none of the five other members of the table had even picked up their forks to eat. The rest of the mess hall, which had been alive with the telegraph-tapping sounds of utensils hitting trays, had also gone largely quiet. I recalled Jane's comment about everyone being interested in me. Apparently, she was right.

"I liked my life," I said. "I don't know that it was exciting or even interesting to anyone who didn't live it. But for me, it was a good life. As for the idea of having a life before this one, I didn't really think about it at the time. I never really thought about what this life would be like before I was in it."

"Why did you choose it, then?" Bohr asked. "You had to have some idea of what it was like."

"No, I didn't," I said. "I don't think any of us did. Most of us had never been in a war or in the military. None of us knew that they would take who we were and put it into a new body that was only partially what we were before."

"That seems kind of stupid, sir," Bohr said, and I was reminded that being two or whatever age he was, was not conducive to tact. "I don't know why anyone would choose to sign up for something when he really had no idea of what he was getting into."

"Well," I said, "you've also never been old. An unmodified person at seventy-five is a lot more willing to take a leap of faith than you might be."

"How different can it be?" Bohr asked.

"Spoken like a two-year-old who will never age," I said.

"I'm three," Bohr said, a little defensively.

I held up my hand. "Look," I said. "Let's turn this around for a minute. I'm seventy-six, and I did make a leap of faith when I joined the CDF. On the other hand, it was my choice. I didn't have to go. If you have a hard time imagining what it must be like for me, think about it on my end." I pointed to Mendel. "When I was five, I hardly knew how to tie my own shoes. If you can't imagine what it's like to be my age and joining up, imagine how hard it is for me to imagine being an adult at five years of age and knowing nothing but war. If nothing else, I have an idea of what life is like outside the CDF. What is it like for you?"

Mendel looked at his companions, who looked back at him. "It's not anything we usually think about, sir," Mendel said. "We don't know that there's anything unusual about it at first. Everyone we know was 'born' the same way. It's you who are the unusual ones, from our perspective. Having a childhood and living an entire other life before you get into this one. It just seems like an inefficient way to do things."

"Don't you ever wonder about what it would be like not to be in the Special Forces?" I asked.

"I can't imagine it," Bohr said, and the others nodded. "We're all soldiers together. It's what we do. It's who we are."

"That's why we find you so interesting," Mendel said. "This idea that this life would be a choice. The idea that there's another way to live. It's alien."

"What did you do, sir?" asked Bohr. "In your other life?"

"I was a writer," I said. They all looked at each other. "What?" I asked.

"Strange way to live, sir," Mendel said. "To get paid for stringing words together."

"There were worse jobs," I said.

"We don't mean to offend you, sir," Bohr said.

"I'm not offended," I said. "You just have a different perspective on things. But it does make me wonder why you do it."

"Do what?" Bohr said.

"Fight," I said. "You know, most people in the CDF are like me. And most people in the colonies are even more different from you than I am. Why would you fight for them? And with us?"

"We're human, sir," Mendel said. "No less than you are."

"Given the current state of my DNA, that's not saying much," I said.

"You know you're human, sir," Mendel said. "And so do we. You and we are closer than you think. We know about how the CDF picks its recruits. You're fighting for colonists you've never met—colonists who were your country's enemy at one point. Why do you fight for them?"

"Because they're human and because I said I would," I said. "At least, that's why I did at the start. Now I don't fight for the colonists. I mean, I do, but when it comes down to it, I fight—or did fight—for my platoon and my squad. I looked out for them, and they looked out for me. I fought because doing any less would have been letting them down."

Mendel nodded. "That's why we fight, too, sir," he said. "So that's one thing makes us all human together. That's good to know."

"It is," I agreed. Mendel grinned and picked up his fork to eat, and as he did, the room came alive with the clattering utensils. I looked up at the noise, and from a far corner saw Jane staring back at me.

Major Crick got right to the point at the morning briefing. "CDF intelligence believes the Rraey are frauds," he said. "And the first part of our mission is to find out if they're right. We're going to be paying a little visit to the Consu."

That woke me right up. Apparently I wasn't the only one. "What the hell do the Consu have to do with any of this?" asked Lieutenant Tagore, who sat directly to my left.

Crick nodded to Jane, who was sitting near him. "At the request of Major Crick and others, I did some research into some of the other CDF encounters with the Rraey to see if there's been any indication of technological evolution," Jane said. "Over the last hundred years, we've had twelve significant military encounters with the Rraey and several dozen smaller engagements, including one major encounter and six smaller engagements over the last five years. During this entire time, the Rraey technological curve has been substantially behind our own. This is due to a number of factors, including their own cultural biases against systematic technological advancement and their lack of positive engagement with more technologically advanced races."

"In other words, they're backward and bigoted," Major Crick said.

"In the case of skip drive technology, this is especially the case," Jane said. "Up until the Battle of Coral, Rraey skip technology was far behind ours—in fact, their current understanding of skip physics is directly based on information provided by the CDF a little over a century ago, during an aborted trade mission to the Rraey."

"Why was it aborted?" asked Captain Jung, from across the table.

"The Rraey ate about a third of the trade delegates," Jane said.

"Ouch," said Captain Jung.

"The point here is that given who the Rraey are and what their level of tech is, it's impossible that they could have gone from being so far behind us to so far ahead of us in one leap," Major Crick said. "The best guess is that they didn't—they simply got the tech for skip drive prediction from some other culture. We know everyone the Rraey know, and there's only one culture that we estimate has the technological ability for something like this."

"The Consu," said Tagore.

"The Consu indeed," agreed Crick. "Those bastards have a white dwarf yoked to the wheel. It's not unreasonable to assume they might have skip drive prediction licked as well."

"But why would they have anything to do with the Rraey?" asked Lieutenant Dalton, down near the end of the table. "The only time they deal with us is when they want a little exercise, and we're far more technologically advanced than the Rraey are."

"The thinking is that the Consu aren't motivated by technology like we are," Jane said. "Our tech is valueless to them much in the same way the secrets of a steam engine might be valueless to us. We think they're motivated by other factors."

"Religion," I said. All eyes shifted to me, and I suddenly felt like a choirboy who has just farted during a chapel service. "What I mean is, when my platoon was fighting the Consu, they started with a prayer that consecrated the battle. I said to a friend at the time that I thought the Consu thought they were baptizing the planet with the battle." More stares. "Of course, I could be wrong."

"You're not wrong," Crick said. "There's been some debate in the CDF about why the Consu fight at all, since it's clear that with their technology they could wipe out every other space-faring culture in the region without much of a second thought. The prevailing thought is that they do it for entertainment, like we play baseball or football."

"We never play football or baseball," said Tagore.

"Other humans do, jackass," Crick said with a grin, then sobered up again. "However, a significant minority of CDF's intelligence division believes that their battles have ritual significance, just as Lieutenant Perry has suggested. The Rraey may not be able to trade tech with the Consu on an equal basis, but they might have something else the Consu want. They might be able to give them their souls."

"But the Rraey are zealots themselves," Dalton said. "That's why they attacked Coral in the first place."

"They have several colonies, some less desirable than others," Jane said. "Zealots or not, they might see trading one of their less successful colonies for Coral as a good trade."

"Not so good for the Rraey on the traded colony," Dalton said.

"Really, ask me if I care about them," Crick said.

"The Consu have given the Rraey technology that puts them far ahead of the rest of the cultures in this part of space," Jung said. "Even for the mighty Consu, tipping the balance of power in the region has to have repercussions."

"Unless the Consu shortchanged the Rraey," I said.

"What do you mean?" Jung said.

"We're assuming that the Consu gave the Rraey the technological expertise to create the skip drive detection system," I said. "But it's possible that they simply gave a single machine to the Rraey, with an owner's manual or something like that so they could operate it. That way, the Rraey get what they want, which is a way to defend Coral from us, while the Consu avoid substantially disrupting the balance of power in the area."

"Until the Rraey figure out how the damn thing works," Jung said.

"Given their native state of technology, that could take years," I said. "Enough time for us to kick their ass and take that technology away from them. If the Consu did actually give them the technology. If the Consu only gave them a single machine. If the Consu actually give a shit about the balance of power in the region. A lot of 'ifs.'"

"And it is to find out the answer to those 'ifs' that we're going to drop in on the Consu," Crick said. "We've already sent a skip drone to let them know we're coming. We'll see what we can get out of them."

"What colony are we going to offer them?" Dalton asked. It was difficult to tell if he was joking.

"No colonies," Crick said. "But we have something that might induce them to give us an audience."

"What do we have?" Dalton asked.

"We have him," Crick said, and pointed at me.

"Him?" Dalton said.

"Me?" I said.

"You," Jane said.

"I'm suddenly confused and terrified," I said.

"Your two-shot firing solution allowed CDF forces to rapidly kill thousands of Consu," Jane said. "In the past, the Consu have been receptive to embassies from the colonies when they have included a CDF soldier who has killed a large number of Consu in battle. Since it was your firing solution specifically that allowed the quick end of those Consu fighters, their deaths accrue to you."

"You've got the blood of 8,433 Consu on your hands," Crick said.

"Great," I said.

"It is great," Crick said. "Your presence is going to get us in the door."

"What's going to happen to me after we get through the door?" I asked. "Imagine what we would do to a Consu who'd killed eight thousand of us."

"They don't think the same way we do about that," Jane said. "You should be safe."

"Should be," I said.

"The alternative is being blasted out of the sky when we show up in Consu space," Crick said.

"I understand," I said. "I just wish I'd been given a little more lead time to get used to the idea."

"It was a rapidly evolving situation," Jane said nonchalantly. And suddenly I got a BrainPal message. Trust me—it said. I looked back at Jane, who was looking placidly at me. I nodded, acknowledging one message while appearing to acknowledge the other.

"What do we do after they're done admiring Lieutenant Perry?" asked Tagore.

"If everything goes according to past encounters, we'll have the opportunity to ask up to five questions of the Consu," Jane said. "The actual number of questions will be determined by a contest involving combat between five of us and five of them. The combat is one on one. The Consu fight unarmed, but our fighters will be allowed knives to compensate for our lack of slashing arms. The one thing to be especially aware of is that in previous cases where we've had this ritual, the Consu we've fought were disgraced soldiers or criminals for whom this battle can restore honor. So needless to say, they're very determined. We get to ask as many questions as the number of contests we win."

"How do you win the contest?" Tagore asked.

"You kill the Consu, or it kills you," Jane said.

"Fascinating," Tagore said.

"One other detail," Jane said. "The Consu pick the combatants from those we bring with us, so protocol requires at least three times the number of selectable combatants. The only exempted member of the delegation is its leader, who is, by courtesy, the one human assumed to be above fighting with Consu criminals and failures."

"Perry, you get to be leader of the delegation," Crick said. "Since you're the one who killed eight thousand of the buggers, by their lights you'd be the natural leader. Also, you're the sole non-Special Forces soldier here, and you lack certain speed and strength modifications the rest of us have. If you were to get picked, you might actually get killed."

"I'm touched you care," I said.

"It's not that," Crick said. "If our star attraction was killed by a lowly criminal, it could jeopardize the chances of getting the Consu to cooperate."

"Okay," I said. "For a second there, I thought you were going soft."

"No chance of that," Crick said. "Now, then. We have forty-three hours until we reach skip distance. There will be forty of us in the delegation, including all platoon and squad leaders. I'll choose the rest from the ranks. That means that each of you will drill your soldiers in hand-to-hand combat between now and then. Perry, I've downloaded the delegation protocols to you; study them and don't screw up. Just after we skip, you and I will meet so I can give you the questions we want to ask, in the order we want to ask them. If we're good, we'll have five questions, but we have to be ready if we need to ask fewer. Let's get to it, people. You're dismissed."

During those forty-three hours, Jane learned about Kathy. Jane would pop into where I was, ask, listen and disappear, off to tend to her duties. It was a strange way to share a life.

"Tell me about her," she asked as I studied the protocol information in a forward lounge.

"I met her when she was in the first grade," I said, and then had to explain what first grade was. Then I told her the first memory I had of Kathy, which was of sharing paste for a construction paper project during the art period the first and second grades shared. How she caught me eating a little of the paste and told me I was gross. How I hit her for saying that, and she decked me in the eye. She got suspended for a day. We didn't speak again until junior high.

"How old are you in the first grade?" she asked.

"Six years old," I said. "As old as you are now."

"Tell me about her," she asked again, a few hours later, in a different place.

"Kathy almost divorced me once," I said. "We had been married for ten years and I had an affair with another woman. When Kathy found out she was furious."

"Why would she care that you had sex with someone else?" Jane asked.

"It wasn't really about the sex," I said. "It was that I lied to her about it. Having sex with someone else only counted as a hormonal weakness in her book. Lying counted as disrespect, and she didn't want to be married to someone who had no respect for her."

"Why didn't you divorce?" Jane asked.

"Because despite the affair, I loved her and she loved me," I said. "We worked it out because we wanted to be together. And anyway, she had an affair a few years later, so I guess you could say we evened up. We actually got along better after that."

"Tell me about her," Jane asked, later.

"Kathy made pies like you wouldn't believe," I told her. "She had this recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie that would knock you on your ass. There was one year where Kathy entered her pie in a state fair contest, and the governor of Ohio was the judge. First prize was a new oven from Sears."

"Did she win?" Jane asked.

"No, she got second, which was a hundred-dollar gift certificate to a bed and bath store. But about a week later she got a phone call from the governor's office. His aide explained to Kathy that for political reasons, he gave the first place award to the wife of an important contributor's best friend, but that ever since the governor had a slice of her pie, he couldn't stop talking about how great it was, so would she please bake another pie for him so he would shut up about the damn pie for once?"

"Tell me about her," Jane asked.

"The first time I knew I was in love with her was my junior year in high school," I said. "Our school was doing a performance of Romeo and Juliet, and she was selected as Juliet. I was the play's assistant director, which most of the time meant I was building sets or getting coffee for Mrs. Amos, the teacher who was directing. But when Kathy started having a little trouble with her lines, Mrs. Amos assigned me to go over them with her. So for two weeks after rehearsals, Kathy and I would go over to her house and work on her lines, although mostly we just talked about other things, like teenagers do. It was all very innocent at the time. Then the play went into dress rehearsal and I heard Kathy speaking all those lines to Jeff Greene, who was playing Romeo. And I got jealous. She was supposed to be speaking those words to me."

"What did you do?" Jane asked.

"I moped around through the entire run of the play, which was four performances between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, and avoided Kathy as much as possible. Then at the cast party on Sunday night Judy Jones, who had played Juliet's nurse, found me and told me that Kathy was sitting on the cafeteria loading dock, crying her eyes out. She thought I hated her because I'd been ignoring her for the last four days and she didn't know why. Judy then added if I didn't go out there and tell Kathy I was in love with her, she'd find a shovel and beat me to death with it."

"How did she know you were in love?" Jane asked.

"When you're a teenager and you're in love, it's obvious to everyone but you and the person you're in love with," I said. "Don't ask me why. It just works that way. So I went out to the loading dock, and saw Kathy sitting there, alone, dangling her feet off the edge of the dock. It was a full moon and the light came down on her face, and I don't think I'd ever seen her more beautiful than she was right then. And my heart was bursting because I knew, I really knew, that I was so in love with her that I could never tell her how much I wanted her."

"What did you do?" Jane asked.

"I cheated," I said. "Because, you know, I had just happened to memorize large chunks of Romeo and Juliet. So, as I walked toward her on the loading dock, I spoke most of Act II, Scene II to her. 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise fair sun . . .' and so on. I knew the words before; it's just this time I actually meant them. And after I was done saying them, I went to her and I kissed her for the first time. She was fifteen and I was sixteen, and I knew I was going to marry her and spend my life with her."

"Tell me about how she died," Jane asked, just before the skip to Consu space.

"She was making waffles on a Sunday morning, and she had a stroke while she was looking for the vanilla," I said. "I was in the living room at the time. I remember her asking herself where she had put the vanilla and then a second later I heard a crash and a thump. I ran into the kitchen and she was lying on the floor, shaking and bleeding from where her head had connected with the edge of the counter. I called emergency services as I held her. I tried to stop the bleeding from the cut, and I told her I loved her and kept on telling her that until the paramedics arrived and pulled her away from me, although they let me hold her hand on the ambulance ride to the hospital. I was holding her hand when she died in the ambulance. I saw the light go out in her eyes, but I kept telling her how much I loved her until they took her away from me at the hospital."

"Why did you do that?" Jane asked.

"I needed to be sure that the last thing she heard was me telling her how much I loved her," I said.

"What is it like when you lose someone you love?" Jane asked.

"You die, too," I said. "And you wait around for your body to catch up."

"Is that what you're doing now?" Jane said. "Waiting for your body to catch up, I mean."

"No, not anymore," I said. "You eventually get to live again. You just live a different life, is all."

"So you're on your third life now," Jane said.

"I guess I am," I said.

"How do you like this life?" Jane asked.

"I like it," I said. "I like the people in it."

Out the window, the stars rearranged themselves. We were in Consu space. We sat there quietly, fading in with the silence of the rest of the ship.

SIXTEEN

"You may refer to me as Ambassador, unworthy though I am of the title," the Consu said. "I am a criminal, having disgraced myself in battle on Pahnshu, and therefore am made to speak to you in your tongue. For this shame I crave death and a term of just punishment before my rebirth. It is my hope that as a result of these proceedings I will be viewed as somewhat less unworthy, and will thus be released to death. It is why I soil myself by speaking to you."

"It's nice to meet you, too," I said.

We stood in the center of a football field–size dome that the Consu had constructed not an hour before. Of course, we humans could not be allowed to touch Consu ground, or be anywhere a Consu might again tread; upon our arrival, automated machines created the dome in a region of Consu space long quarantined to serve as a receiving area for unwelcome visitors such as ourselves. After our negotiations were completed, the dome would be imploded and launched toward the nearest black hole, so that none of its atoms would ever contaminate this particular universe again. I thought that last part was overkill.

"We understand you have questions you wish to ask concerning the Rraey," the ambassador said, "and that you wish to invoke our rites to earn the honor of speaking these questions to us."

"We do," I said. Fifteen meters behind me thirty-nine Special Forces soldiers stood at attention, all dressed for battle. Our information told us that the Consu would not consider this a meeting of equals, so there was little need for diplomatic niceties; also, inasmuch as any of our people could be selected to fight, they needed to be prepared for battle. I was dressed up a bit, although that was my choice; if I was going to pretend to be the leader of this little delegation, then by God I was at least going to look the part.

At an equal distance behind the Consu were five other Consu, each holding two long and scary-looking knives. I didn't have to ask what they were doing there.

"My great people acknowledge that you have correctly requested our rites and that you have presented yourselves in accordance to our requirements," said the ambassador. "Yet we would have still dismissed your request as unworthy, had you not also brought the one who so honorably dispatched our warriors to the cycle of rebirth. Is that one you?"

"I am he," I said.

The Consu paused and seemed to consider me. "Strange that a great warrior would appear so," the ambassador said.

"I feel that way, too," I said. Our information told us that once the request had been accepted, the Consu would honor it no matter how we comported ourselves at the negotiations, so long as we fought in the accepted fashion. So I felt comfortable being a little flip. The thinking on the matter, in fact, suggested the Consu preferred us that way; it helped reinforce their feelings of superiority. Whatever worked.

"Five criminals have been selected to compete with your soldiers," the ambassador said. "As humans lack the physical attributes of Consu, we have provided knives for your soldiers to use, if they so choose. Our participants have them, and by providing them to one of your soldiers they will choose who they will fight."

"I understand," I said.

"Should your soldier survive, it may keep the knives as a token of its victory," the ambassador said.

"Thanks," I said.

"We would not wish to have them back. They would be unclean," the ambassador said.

"Got it," I said.

"We will answer whatever questions you have earned after the contests," the ambassador said. "We will select opponents now." The ambassador grunted a shriek that would have shaved pavement off a road, and the five Consu behind him stepped forward, past it and me, and toward our soldiers, knives drawn. Not one flinched. That's discipline.

The Consu didn't spend much time selecting. They went in straight lines and handed the knives to whoever was directly in front of them. To them, one of us was as good as another. Knives were handed to Corporal Mendel, whom I had lunched with, Privates Joe Goodall and Jennifer Aquinas, Sergeant Fred Hawking and Lieutenant Jane Sagan. Wordlessly, each accepted their knives. The Consu retreated behind the ambassador, while the rest of our soldiers stepped back several meters from those who had been selected.

"You will begin each contest," the ambassador said, and then stepped back behind its fighters. Now there was nothing left but me and two lines of fighters fifteen meters from me on either side, patiently waiting to kill each other. I stepped to the side, still between the two rows, and pointed to the soldier and Consu closest to me.

"Begin," I said.

The Consu unfolded its slashing arms, revealing the flattened, razor-sharp blades of modified carapace and freeing again the smaller, almost human secondary arms and hands. It pierced the dome with a screech and stepped forward. Corporal Mendel dropped one of his knives, took the other in his left hand, and started straight at the Consu. When they got within three meters of each other, everything became a blur. Ten seconds after it started, Corporal Mendel had a slash across the length of his rib cage that went down to the bone, and the Consu had a knife jammed deeply into the soft part where its head melded with its carapace. Mendel had gotten his wound as he snuggled into the Consu's grasp, taking the cut for a clear shot at the Consu's most obvious weak spot. The Consu twitched as Mendel tugged the blade around, slicing the creature's nerve cord with a jerk, severing the secondary nerve bundle in the head from the primary brain in the thorax, as well as several major blood vessels. It collapsed. Mendel retrieved his knife and walked back to the rest of the Special Forces, keeping his right arm in to hold his side together.

I signaled Goodall and his Consu. Goodall grinned and danced out, holding his knives low with both hands, blades behind him. His Consu bellowed and charged, head first, slashing arms extended. Goodall returned the charge and then at the last second slid like a base runner on a close play. The Consu slashed down as Goodall slid under it, shaving the skin and ear from the left side of Goodall's head. Goodall lopped off one of the Consu's chitinous legs with a fast upward thrust; it cracked like a lobster claw and skitted off perpendicular to the direction of Goodall's movement. The Consu listed and toppled.

Goodall rotated on his ass, flipped his knives up, did a backward somersault and landed on his feet in time to catch his knives before they came down. The left side of his head was one big gray clot, but Goodall was still smiling as he lunged at his Consu, which was desperately trying to right itself. It flailed at Goodall with its arms too slow as Goodall pirouetted and drove the first knife like a spike into its dorsal carapace with a backward thrust, then reached around and with another backward thrust did the same to the Consu's thoracic carapace. Goodall spun 180 degrees so that he faced toward the Consu, gripped both blade handles and then violently cranked them in a rotating motion. The Consu jerked as the sliced contents of its body fell out in front and behind and then collapsed for a final time. Goodall grinned all the way back to his side, dancing a jig as he went. He'd clearly had fun.

Private Aquinas didn't dance, and she didn't look as if she was having any fun. She and her Consu circled each other warily for a good twenty seconds before the Consu finally lunged, bringing its slashing arm up, as if to hook Aquinas through her gut. Aquinas fell back and lost her balance, fumbling over backward. The Consu jumped her, pinned her left arm by spearing it in the soft gap between the radius and the ulna with its left slashing arm, and brought its other slashing arm up to her neck. The Consu moved its hind legs, positioning itself to provide leverage for a decapitating slash, then moved its right slashing arm slightly to the left, to give itself some momentum.

As the Consu slashed to remove her head, Aquinas grunted mightily and heaved her body in the direction of the cut; her left arm and hand shredded as soft tissues and sinews gave way to the force of her push, and then the Consu rolled as she added her momentum to its. Inside the grip of the Consu, Aquinas rotated and proceeded to stab hard through the Consu's carapace with her right hand and blade. The Consu tried to push her away; Aquinas wrapped her legs around the creature's midsection and hung in. The Consu got in a few stabs at Aquinas' back before it died, but the slashing arms weren't very effective close in to the Consu's own body. Aquinas dragged herself off the Consu's body and made it halfway toward the other soldiers before she collapsed and had to be carried away.

I now understood why I had been exempted from fighting. It wasn't just a matter of speed and strength, although clearly the Special Forces soldiers outpaced me in both. They employed strategies that came from a different understanding of what was an acceptable loss. A normal soldier would not sacrifice a limb like Aquinas just had; seven decades of the knowledge that limbs were irreplaceable, and that the loss of one could lead to death, worked against it. This wasn't a problem with Special Forces soldiers, who never could not have a limb grown back, and who knew their body's tolerance for damage was so much higher than a normal soldier could appreciate. It's not as if Special Forces soldiers didn't have fear. It just kicked in at a far later time.

I signaled Sergeant Hawking and his Consu to begin. For once, a Consu did not open its slashing arms; this one merely walked forward to the center of the dome and awaited its opponent. Hawking, meanwhile, hunched low and moved forward carefully, a foot at a time, judging the right moment to strike: forward, stop, sidestep, stop, forward, stop and forward again. It was one of those cautious, well-considered tiny forward steps that the Consu lashed out like an exploding bug and impaled Hawking with both slashing arms, hefting him and hurling him into the air. On the downside of his arc, the Consu slashed viciously into him, severing his head and cutting him through the midsection. The torso and legs went in separate directions; the head dropped directly in front of the Consu. The Consu considered it for a moment, then spiked it at the tip of its slashing arm and flung it hard in the direction of the humans. It bounced wetly as it struck the ground and then twirled over their heads, spraying brains and SmartBlood as it went.

During the previous four bouts, Jane had been standing impatiently at the line, flipping her knives in a sort of nervous twitch. Now she stepped forward, ready to begin, as did her opponent, the final Consu. I signaled for the two to start. The Consu took an aggressive step forward, flung its slashing arms wide, and screamed a battle cry that seemed loud enough to shatter the dome and suck us all into space, opening its mandibles extra-wide to do so. Thirty meters away, Jane blinked and then flung one of her knives full force into the open jaw, putting enough force into the throw that the blade went all the way through the back of the Consu's head, the hilt jamming into the far side of the skull carapace. Its dome-shattering battle cry was suddenly and unexpectedly replaced by the sound of a big fat bug choking on blood and a skewer of metal. The thing reached in to dislodge the knife but died before it finished the motion, toppling forward and expiring with a final, wet swallow.

I walked over to Jane. "I don't think you were supposed to use the knives that way," I said.

She shrugged and flipped her remaining knife in her hands. "No one ever said I couldn't," she said.

The Consu ambassador glided forward to me, sidestepping the fallen Consu. "You have won the right to four questions," it said. "You may ask them now."

Four questions were more than we had expected. We had hoped for three, and planned for two; we had expected the Consu to be more of a challenge. Not that one dead soldier and several lopped-off body parts constituted a total victory by any means. Still, you take what you can get. Four questions would be just fine.

"Did the Consu provide the Rraey with the technology to detect skip drives?" I asked.

"Yes," the ambassador said, without elaborating further. Which was fine; we didn't expect the Consu to tell us any more than they had obligated themselves to. But the ambassador's answer gave us information on a number of other questions. Since the Rraey received the technology from the Consu, it was highly unlikely that they knew how it worked on a fundamental level; we didn't have to worry about them expanding their use of it or trading the technology to other races.

"How many skip drive detection units do the Rraey have?" We had originally thought to ask how many of these the Consu provided the Rraey, but on the off chance they made more, we figured it'd be best to be general.

"One," said the ambassador.

"How many other races that humans know of have the ability to detect skip drives?" Our third major question. We assumed that the Consu knew of more races than we did, so asking a more general question of how many races had the technology would be of no use to us; likewise asking them who else they had given the technology to, since some other race could have come up with the technology on its own. Not every piece of tech in the universe is a hand-me-down from some more advanced race. Occasionally people think these things up on their own.

"None," the ambassador said. Another lucky break for us. If nothing else, it gave us some time to figure out how to get around it.

"You still have one more question," Jane said, and pointed me back in the direction of the ambassador, who stood, waiting for my last query. So, I figured, what the hell.

"The Consu can wipe out most of the races in this area of space," I said. "Why don't you?"

"Because we love you," the ambassador said.

"Excuse me?" I said. Technically, this could have qualified as a fifth question, one the Consu was not required to answer. But it did anyway.

"We cherish all life that has the potential for Ungkat"—that last part was pronounced like a fender scraping a brick wall—"which is participation in the great cycle of rebirth," the ambassador said. "We tend to you, to all you lesser races, consecrating your planets so that all who dwell there may be reborn into the cycle. We sense our duty to participate in your growth. The Rraey believe we provided them with the technology you question after because they offered up one of their planets to us, but that is not so. We saw the chance to move both of your races closer to perfection, and joyfully we have done so."

The ambassador opened its slashing arms, and we saw its secondary arms, hands open, almost imploring. "The time in which your people will be worthy to join us will be that much closer now. Today you are unclean and must be reviled even as you are loved. But content yourself in the knowledge that deliverance will one day be at hand. I myself go now to my death, unclean in that I have spoken to you in your tongue, but assured again a place in the cycle because I have moved your people toward their place in the great wheel. I despise you and I love you, you who are my damnation and salvation both. Leave now, so that we may destroy this place, and celebrate your progression. Go."

"I don't like it," Lieutenant Tagore said at our next briefing, after the others and I recounted our experiences. "I don't like it at all. The Consu gave the Rraey that technology specifically so they could fuck with us. That damn bug said so itself. They've got us dancing like puppets on strings. They could be telling the Rraey right now that we're on our way."

"That would be redundant," Captain Jung said, "considering the skip drive detection technology."

"You know what I mean," Tagore shot back. "The Consu aren't going to do us any favors, since they clearly want us and the Rraey to fight, in order to 'progress' to another cosmic level, whatever the fuck that means."

"The Consu weren't going to do us any favors anyway, so enough about them," Major Crick said. "We may be moving according to their plans, but remember that their plans happen to coincide with our own up to a point. And I don't think the Consu give a shit whether we or the Rraey come out on top. So let's concentrate on what we're doing instead of what the Consu are doing."

My BrainPal clicked on; Crick sent a graphic of Coral, and another planet, the Rraey homeworld. "The fact that the Rraey are using borrowed technology means we have a chance to act, to hit them fast and hard, both on Coral and at their homeworld," he said. "While we have been chatting up the Consu, the CDF has been moving ships to skip distance. We have six hundred ships—nearly a third of our forces—in position and ready to skip. Upon hearing from us, the CDF will start the clock on simultaneous attacks on Coral and the Rraey homeworld. The idea is both to take back Coral and to pin down potential Rraey reinforcements. Hitting their homeworld will incapacitate the ships there and force Rraey ships in other parts of space to prioritize between assisting Coral or the Rraey homeworld.

"Both attacks are contingent on one thing: knocking out their ability to know we're coming in. That means taking their tracking station and knocking it offline—but not destroying it. The technology in that tracking station is technology the CDF can use. Maybe the Rraey can't figure it out, but we're farther along the technological curve. We blow the station only if there's absolutely no other choice. We're going to take the station and hold it until we can get reinforcements down to the surface."

"How long is that going to take?" asked Jung.

"The simultaneous assaults will be coordinated to begin four hours after we enter Coral space," Crick said. "Depending on the intensity of the ship-to-ship battles, we can expect additional troops to reinforce us sometime after the first couple of hours."

"Four hours after we enter Coral space?" Jung asked. "Not after we've taken the tracking station?"

"That's right," Crick said. "So we damn well better take the station, people."

"Excuse me," I said. "I'm troubled by a small detail."

"Yes, Lieutenant Perry," Crick said.

"The success of the offensive attack is predicated on our taking out the tracking station that keeps tabs on our ships coming in," I said.

"Right," said Crick.

"This would be the same tracking station that's going to be tracking us when we skip to Coral space," I said.

"Right," said Crick.

"I was on a ship that was tracked as it entered Coral space, if you'll recall," I said. "It was ripped apart and every single person who was on it but me died. Aren't you a little concerned that something very similar will happen to this ship?"

"We slid into Coral space undetected before," Tagore said.

"I'm aware of that, since the Sparrowhawk was the ship that rescued me," I said. "And believe me, I am grateful. However, that strikes me as the sort of trick you get away with once. And even if we skip into the Coral system far enough away from the planet to avoid detection, it would take us several hours to reach Coral. The timing is way off for that. If this is going to work, the Sparrowhawk has to skip in close to the planet. So I want to know how we're going to do that and still expect the ship to stay in one piece."

"The answer to that is really quite simple," Major Crick said. "We don't expect the ship to stay in one piece. We expect it to be blasted right out of the sky. In fact, we're counting on it."

"Pardon me?" I said. I looked around the table, expecting to see looks of confusion similar to the one I was wearing. Instead, everyone was looking somewhat thoughtful. I found this entirely too disturbing.

"High-orbit insertion, then, is it?" asked Lieutenant Dalton.

"Yes," Crick said. "Modified, obviously."

I gaped. "You've done this before?" I said.

"Not this exactly, Lieutenant Perry," Jane said, drawing my attention to her. "But yes, on occasion we've inserted Special Forces directly from spacecraft—usually when the use of shuttles is not an option, as it would be here. We have special dropsuits to insulate ourselves from the heat of entering the atmosphere; beyond that it's like any normal airdrop."

"Except that in this case, your ship is being shot out from under you," I said.

"That is the new wrinkle here," Jane admitted.

"You people are absolutely insane," I said.

"It makes for an excellent tactic," Major Crick said. "If the ship is torn apart, bodies are an expected part of the debris. The CDF just dropped a skip drone to us with fresh information on the tracking station's location, so we can skip above the planet in a good position to drop our people. The Rraey will think they've destroyed our assault before it happened. They won't even know we're there until we hit them. And then it will be too late."

"Assuming any of you survive the initial strike," I said.

Crick looked over to Jane and nodded. "The CDF has bought us a little wiggle room," Jane said to the group. "They've begun placing skip drives onto shielded missile clusters and tossing them into Coral space. When their shields are struck they launch the missiles, which are very hard for the Rraey to hit. We've gotten several Rraey ships over the last two days this way—now they're waiting a few seconds before they fire in order to accurately track anything that's been thrown at them. We should have anywhere from ten to thirty seconds before the Sparrowhawk is hit. That's not enough time for a ship that's not expecting the hits to do anything, but for us it's enough time to get our people off the ship. It's also maybe enough time for the bridge crew to launch a distracting offensive attack as well."

"The bridge crew is going to stay on the ship for this?" I asked.

"We'll be suited up with the others and operating the ship via BrainPal," Major Crick said. "But we'll be on the ship at least until our first missile volley is away. We don't want to operate Brain-Pals once we leave the ship until we're deep in Coral's atmosphere; it would give away the fact we're alive to any Rraey that might be monitoring. There's some risk involved, but there are risks for everyone who is on this ship. Which brings us, incidentally, to you, Lieutenant Perry."

"Me," I said.

"Quite obviously, you're not going to want to be on the ship when it gets hit," Crick said. "At the same time, you haven't trained for this sort of mission, and we also promised you would be here in an advisory capacity. We can't in good conscience ask for you to participate. After this briefing you'll be provided with a shuttle, and a skip drone will be dispatched back to Phoenix with your shuttle's coordinates and a request for retrieval. Phoenix keeps retrieval ships permanently stationed at skip distance; you should be picked up within a day. We'll leave you a month's worth of supplies, however. And the shuttle is equipped with its own emergency skip drones if it comes to that."

"So you're ditching me," I said.

"It's nothing personal," Crick said. "General Keegan will want to have a briefing on the situation and the negotiations with the Consu, and as our liaison with conventional CDF, you're the best person to do both."

"Sir, with your permission, I'd like to remain," I said.

"We really have no place for you, Lieutenant," Crick said. "You'd serve this mission better back on Phoenix."

"Sir, with all due respect, you have at least one hole in your ranks," I said. "Sergeant Hawking died during our negotiations with the Consu; Private Aquinas is missing half her arm. You won't be able to reinforce your ranks prior to your mission. Now, I'm not Special Forces, but I am a veteran soldier. I am, at the very least, better than nothing."

"I seem to recall you calling us all absolutely insane," Captain Jung said to me.

"You are all absolutely insane," I said. "So if you're going to pull this off you're going to need all the help you can get. Also, sir," I said, turning to Crick, "remember that I lost my people on Coral. I don't feel right about sitting out this fight."

Crick looked over to Dalton. "Where are we with Aquinas?" he asked.

Dalton shrugged. "We have her on an accelerated healing regimen," he said. "It hurts like a bitch to regrow an arm this fast, but she'll be ready when we make the skip. I don't need him."

Crick turned to Jane, who was staring at me. "It's your call, Sagan," Crick said. "Hawking was your noncom. If you want him, you can have him."

"I don't want him," Jane said, looking directly at me as she said it. "But he's right. I'm down a man."

"Fine," Crick said. "Get him up to speed, then." He turned to me. "If Lieutenant Sagan thinks you're not going to cut it, you're getting stuffed in a shuttle. Do you get me?"

"I get you, Major," I said, staring back at Jane.

"Good," he said. "Welcome to Special Forces, Perry. You're the first realborn we've ever had in our ranks, so far as I know. Try not to fuck up, because if you do, I promise you the Rraey are going to be the least of your problems."

Jane entered my stateroom without my permission; she could do that now that she was my superior officer.

"What the fuck do you think you are doing?" she said.

"You people are down a man," I said. "I'm a man. Do the math."

"I got you on this ship because I knew you'd be put on the shuttle," Jane said. "If you were rotated back into the infantry, you'd be on one of the ships involved in the assault. If we don't take the tracking station, you know what's going to happen to those ships and everyone in them. This was the only way I knew I was going to keep you safe, and you just threw it away."

"You could have told Crick you didn't want me," I said. "You heard him. He'd be happy to kick me into a shuttle and leave me floating in Consu space until someone got around to picking me up. You didn't because you know how fucking crazy this little plan is. You know you're going to need all the help you can get. I didn't know it was you I'd be under, you know, Jane. If Aquinas wasn't going to be ready, I could just as easily be serving under Dalton for this mission. I didn't even know Hawking was your noncom until Crick said something about it. All I know was that if this thing is going to work, you need everyone you've got."

"Why do you care?" Jane said. "This isn't your mission. You're not one of us."

"I'm one of you right now, aren't I?" I said. "I'm on this ship. I'm here, thanks to you. And I don't have anywhere else to be. My entire company got blown up and most of my other friends are dead. And anyway, as one of you mentioned, we're all human. Shit, I was even grown in a lab, just like you. This body was, at least. I might as well be one of you. So now I am."

Jane flared. "You have no idea what it's like to be one of us," she said. "You said you wanted to know about me. What part do you want to know? Do you want to know what it's like to wake up one day, your head filled with a library full of information—everything from how to butcher a pig to how to pilot a starship—but not to know your own name? Or that you even have one? Do you want to know what it's like never to have been a child, or even to have seen one until you step foot on some burned-out colony and see a dead one in front of you? Maybe you'd like to hear about how the first time any of us talk to a realborn we have to keep from hitting you because you speak so slow, move so slow and think so fucking slow that we don't know why they even bother to enlist you.

"Or maybe you'd like to know that every single Special Forces soldier dreams up a past for themselves. We know we're the Frankenstein monster. We know we're put together from bits and pieces of the dead. We look in a mirror and we know we're seeing somebody else, and that the only reason we exist is because they don't—and that they are lost to us forever. So we all imagine the person they could have been. We imagine their lives, their children, their husbands and wives, and we know that none of these things can ever be ours."

Jane stepped over and got right in my face. "Do you want to know what it's like to meet the husband of the woman you used to be? To see recognition in his face but not to feel it yourself, no matter how much you want to? To know he so desperately wants to call you a name that isn't yours? To know that when he looks at you he sees decades of life—and that you know none of it. To know he'd been with you, been inside of you, was there holding your hand when you died, telling you that he loved you. To know he can't make you realborn, but can give you continuation, a history, an idea of who you were to help you understand who you are. Can you even imagine what it's like to want that for yourself? To keep it safe at any cost?"

Closer. Lips almost touching mine, but no hint of a kiss in them. "You lived with me ten times longer than I've lived with me," Jane said. "You are the keeper of me. You can't imagine what that's like for me. Because you're not one of us." She stepped back.

I stared as she stepped back. "You're not her," I said. "You said it to me yourself."

"Oh, Christ," Jane snapped. "I lied. I am her, and you know it. If she had lived, she'd have joined the CDF and they would have used the same goddamned DNA to make her new body as they made me with. I've got souped-up alien shit in my genes but you're not fully human anymore either, and she wouldn't be either. The human part of me is the same as what it would be in her. All I'm missing is the memory. All I'm missing is my entire other life."

Jane came back to me again, cupped my face with her hand. "I am Jane Sagan, I know that," she said. "The last six years are mine, and they're real. This is my life. But I'm Katherine Perry, too. I want that life back. The only way I can have it is through you. You have to stay alive, John. Without you, I lose myself again."

I reached up to her hand. "Help me stay alive," I said. "Tell me everything I need to know to do this mission well. Show me everything I need to help your platoon do its job. Help me to help you, Jane. You're right, I don't know what it's like to be you, to be one of you. But I do know I don't want to be floating around in a damned shuttle while you're getting shot at. I need you to stay alive, too. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," she said. I took her hand and kissed it.

SEVENTEEN

This is the easy part—Jane sent to me. Just lean into it.

The bay doors were blown open, an explosive decompression that mirrored my previous arrival into Coral space. I was going to have to come here one time without being flung out of a cargo bay. This time, however, the bay was clear of dangerous, untethered objects; the only objects in the Sparrowhawk's hold were its crew and soldiers, decked out in air-tight, bulky jumpsuits. Our feet were nailed to the floor, so to speak, by electromagnetic tabs, but just as soon as the cargo bay doors were blasted away and a sufficient distance to keep from killing any of us, the tabs would cut out and we'd tumble out the door, carried away by the escaping air—the cargo bay being overpressurized to make sure there'd still be enough lift.

There was. Our toe magnets cut out, and it was like being yanked by a giant through a particularly large mouse hole. As Jane suggested, I leaned into it, and suddenly found myself tumbling into space. This was fine, since we wanted to give the appearance of sudden, unexpected exposure to the nothingness of space, just in case the Rraey were watching. I was unceremoniously bowled out the door with the rest of the Special Forces, had a sickening moment of vertigo as out reoriented as down, and down was two hundred klicks toward the darkened mass of Coral, the terminal of day blistering east of where we were going to end up.

My personal rotation turned me just in time to see the Sparrowhawk exploding in four places, the fireballs originating on the far side of the ship from me and silhouetting the ship in flame. No sound or heat, thanks to the vacuum between me and the ship, but obscene orange and yellow fireballs made up visually for the lack in other senses. Miraculously, as I turned, I saw the Sparrowhawk fire missiles, launching out toward a foe whose position I could not register. Somebody was still on the ship when it got hit. I rotated again, in time to see the Sparrowhawk crack in two as another volley of missiles hit. Whoever was in the ship was going to die in it. I hoped the missiles they launched hit home.

I was falling alone toward Coral. Other soldiers might have been near me, but it was impossible to tell; our suits were nonreflective and we were ordered on BrainPal silence until we had cleared through the upper part of Coral's atmosphere. Unless I caught a glimpse of someone occluding a star, I wouldn't know they were there. It pays to be inconspicuous when you are planning to assault a planet, especially when someone above may still be looking for you. I fell some more and watched the planet of Coral steadily eat the stars on its growing periphery.

My BrainPal chimed; it was time for shielding. I signaled assent, and from a pack on my back a stream of nanobots flowed. An electromagnetic netting of the 'bots was weaved around me, sealing me in a matte-black globe and shutting out light. Now I was truly falling in darkness. I thanked God I was not naturally claustrophobic; if I were, I might be going bugshit at this moment.

The shielding was the key to the high-orbit insertion. It protected the soldier inside from the body-charring heat generated by entering the atmosphere in two ways. First, the shielding sphere was created while the soldier was still falling through vacuum, which lessened the heat transfer unless the soldier somehow touched the skin of the shield, which was in contact with the atmosphere. To avoid this, the same electromagnetic scaffolding that 'bots constructed the shield on also pinned the soldier in the center of the sphere, clamping down on movement. It wasn't very comfortable, but neither was burning up as air molecules ripped into your flesh at high speeds.

The 'bots took the heat, used some of the energy to strengthen the electromagnetic net that isolated the soldier, and then passed off as much of the rest of the heat as possible. They'd burn up eventually, at which point another 'bot would come up through the netting to take its place. Ideally, you ran out of the need for the shield before you ran out of shield. Our allotment of 'bots was calibrated for Coral's atmosphere, with a little extra wiggle room. But you can't help being nervous.

I felt vibration as my shield began to plow through Coral's upper atmosphere; Asshole rather unhelpfully chimed in that we had begun to experience turbulence. I rattled around in my little sphere, the isolating field holding but allowing more sway than I would have liked. When the edge of a sphere can transmit a couple thousand degrees of heat directly onto your flesh, any movement toward it, no matter how small, is a cause for concern.

Down on the surface of Coral, anyone who looked up would see hundreds of meteors suddenly streaking through the night; any suspicions of the contents of these meteors would be mitigated by the knowledge that they were most likely chunks of the human spacecraft the Rraey forces had just blasted out of the sky. Hundreds of thousands of feet up, a falling soldier and a falling piece of hull look the same.

The resistance of a thickening atmosphere did its work and slowed down my sphere; several seconds after it stopped glowing from the heat, it collapsed entirely and I burst through it like a new chick launched by slingshot from its shell. The view now was not of a blank black wall of 'bots but of a darkened world, lit in just a few places by bioluminescent algae, which highlighted the languid contours of the coral reefs, and then by the harsher lights of Rraey encampments and former human settlements. We'd be heading for the second sort of lights.

BrainPal discipline up—sent Major Crick, and I was surprised; I figured he had gone down with the Sparrowhawk. Platoon leaders identify; soldiers form up on platoon leaders—

About a klick to the west of me and a few hundred meters above, Jane suddenly lit up. She had not painted herself in neon in real life; that would have been a fine way to be killed by ground forces. It was simply my BrainPal's way of showing me where she was. Around me, close in and in the distance, other soldiers began to glow; my new platoon mates, showing themselves as well. We twisted ourselves in the air and began to drift together. As we moved, the surface of Coral transformed with a topological grid overlay on which several pinpoints glowed, clustered tightly together: the tracking station and its immediate environs.

Jane began to flood her soldiers with information. Once I had joined Jane's platoon, the Special Forces soldiers stopped the courtesy of speaking to me, reverting to their usual method of BrainPal communication. If I was going to fight with them, they figured, I had to do it on their terms. The last three days had been a communication blur; when Jane said that realborn communicated at a slower speed, it was an understatement of the case. Special Forces zapped each other messages faster than I could blink. Conversations and debates would be over faster than I could grasp the first message. Most confusingly of all, Special Forces didn't limit their transmissions to text or verbal messages. They utilized the BrainPal ability to transmit emotional information to send bursts of emotion, using them like a writer uses punctuation. Someone would tell a joke and everyone who heard it would laugh with their BrainPal, and it was like being hit with little BBs of amusement, tunneling in your skull. It gave me a headache.

But it really was a more efficient way to "speak." Jane was outlining our platoon's mission, objectives and strategy in about a tenth of the time a briefing would take a commander in the conventional CDF. This is a real bonus when you're conducting your briefing as you and your soldiers fall toward the surface of a planet at terminal velocity. Amazingly, I was able to follow the briefing almost as fast as Jane reeled it off. The secret, I found, was to stop fighting it or attempt to organize the information the way I was used to getting it, in discrete chunks of verbal speech. Just accept you're drinking from the fire hose and open wide. It also helped that I didn't talk back much.

The tracking station was located on high ground near one of the smaller human settlements that the Rraey had occupied, in a small valley closed off at the end where the station lay. The ground was originally occupied by the settlement's command center and its outlying buildings; the Rraey had set up there to take advantage of the power lines and to cannibalize the command center's computing, transmitting and other resources. The Rraey had created defensive positions on and around the command center, but real-time imaging from the site (provided by a member of Crick's command team, who had basically strapped a spy satellite onto her chest) showed that these positions were only moderately armed and staffed. The Rraey were overconfident that their technology and their spaceships would neutralize any threat.

Other platoons would take the command center, locate and secure the machines that integrated the tracking information from the satellites and prepared it for upload to the Rraey spaceships above. Our platoon's job was to take the transmission tower from which the ground signal went to the ships. If the transmission hardware was advanced Consu equipment, we were to take the tower offline and defend it against the inevitable Rraey counterattack; if it was just off-the-shelf Rraey technology, we simply got to blow it up.

Either way, the tracking station would be down and the Rraey spaceships would be flying blind, unable to track when and where our ships would appear. The tower was set away from the main command center and fairly heavily guarded relative to the rest of the area, but we had plans to thin out the herd before we even hit the ground.

Select targets — Jane sent, and an overlay of our target area zoomed up on our BrainPals. Rraey soldiers and their machines glowed in infrared; with no perceived threat, they had no heat discipline. By squads, teams and then by individual soldiers targets were selected and prepared. Whenever possible we opted to hit the Rraey and not their equipment, which we could use ourselves after the Rraey were dealt with. Guns don't kill people, the aliens behind the triggers do. With targets selected, we all drifted slightly apart from each other; all that was left to do was wait until one klick.

One klick — one thousand meters up, our remaining 'bots deployed to a maneuverable parasail, arresting the speed of our descent with a stomach-churning yank, but allowing us to bob and weave on the way down and avoid each other as we went. Our sails, like our combat wear, were camouflaged against dark and heat. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you'd never see us coming.

Take out targets — Major Crick sent, and the silence of our descent ended in the tearing rattle of Empees unloading a downpour of metal. On the ground, Rraey soldiers and personnel unexpectedly had heads and limbs blasted away from their bodies; their companions had only a fraction of a second to register what had happened before the same fate was visited on them. In my case I targeted three Rraey stationed near the transmission tower; the first two went down without a peep; the third swung its weapon out into the darkness and prepared to fire. It was of the opinion I was in front rather than above. I tapped it before it had a chance to correct that assessment. In about five seconds, every Rraey who was outside and visible was down and dead. We were still several hundred meters up when it happened.

Floodlights came on and were shot out as soon as they blazed to life. We pumped rockets into entrenchments and foxholes, splattering Rraey who were sitting in them. Rraey soldiers streaming out of the command center and encampments followed the rocket trails back up and fired; the soldiers had long since maneuvered out of the way, and were now picking off the Rraey who were firing out in the open.

I targeted a landing spot near the transmission tower and instructed Asshole to compute an evasive maneuvering path down to it. As I came in, two Rraey burst through the door of a shack next to the tower, firing up in my general direction as they ran in the direction of the command center. One I shot in the leg; it went down, screeching. The other stopped firing and ran, using the Rraey's muscular, birdlike legs to pick up distance. I signaled for Asshole to release the parasail; it dissolved as the electrostatic filaments holding it together collapsed and the 'bots transformed into inert dust. I fell the several meters to the ground, rolled, came up and sighted the rapidly receding Rraey. It was favoring a fast, straight line of escape rather than a shifting, broken run that would have made it more difficult to target. A single shot, center mass, brought it down. Behind me, the other Rraey was still screeching, and then suddenly wasn't as an abrupt burp sounded. I turned and saw Jane behind me, her Empee still angling down toward the Rraey corpse.

You're with me — she sent and signaled me toward the shack. On our way in two more Rraey came through the door, sprinting, while a third laid down fire from inside the shack. Jane dropped to the ground and returned fire while I went after the fleeing Rraey. These ones were running broken paths; I got one but the other got away, pratfalling over an embankment to do so. Meanwhile, Jane had got tired of volleying with the Rraey in the shed and shot a grenade into the shack; there was a muffled squawk and then a loud bang, followed by large chunks of Rraey flopping out of the door.

We advanced and entered the shack, which was covered with the rest of the Rraey and housed a bank of electronics. A BrainPal scan confirmed it as Rraey communication equipment; this was the operation center for the tower. Jane and I backed out and pumped rockets and grenades into the shack. It blew up pretty; the tower was now offline, although there was still the actual transmission equipment at the top of the tower to deal with.

Jane got status reports from her squad leaders; the tower and surrounding areas were taken. The Rraey never got it together after the initial targeting. Our casualties were light, with no deaths to report in the platoon. The other phases of the attack were also going well; the most intense combat coming from the command center, in which the soldiers were going from room to room, blasting the Rraey as they went. Jane sent in two squads to reinforce the command center effort, had another squad police Rraey corpses and equipment at the tower, and had another two squads create a perimeter.

And you — she said, turning to me and pointing to the tower. Climb up there and tell me what we've got.

I glanced up at the tower, which was your typical radio tower: About 150 meters high and not much of anything besides the metal scaffolding holding up whatever it was at the top. It was the most impressive thing about the Rraey so far. The tower hadn't been here when the Rraey had arrived, so they must have put it up almost instantly. It was just a radio tower, but on the other hand, you try putting up a radio tower in a day and see how you do. The tower had spikes forming a ladder leading up toward the top; Rraey physiology and height were close enough to humans that I could use it. Up I went.

At the top was some dangerous wind and a car-size bundle of antennae and instrumentation. I scanned it with Asshole, who compared the visual image with its library of Rraey technology. It was all Rraey, all the time. Whatever information was being piped down from the satellites was being processed down at the command center. I hoped they managed to take the command center without accidentally blowing the stuff up.

I passed along the information to Jane. She informed me that the sooner I got down from the tower, the better chance I had of not getting crushed by debris. I didn't need further convincing. As I got down, rockets launched over my head directly into the instrument package at the top of the tower. The force of the blast caused the tower's stabilizing cables to snap with a metallic tang that promised beheading power to any who might have been in their path. The entire tower swayed. Jane ordered the tower base struck; the rockets tore into the metal beams. The tower twisted and collapsed, groaning all the way down.

From the command center area, the sounds of combat had stopped and there was sporadic cheering; whatever Rraey there were, were now gone. I had Asshole bring up my internal chronometer. It had not been quite ninety minutes since we hurled ourselves out of the Sparrowhawk.

"They had no idea we were coming," I said to Jane, and was suddenly surprised at the sound of my own voice.

Jane looked at me, nodded, and then looked over to the tower. "They didn't. That was the good news. The bad news is, now they know we're here. This was the easy part. The hard part is coming up."

She turned and started shooting commands to her platoon. We were expecting a counterattack. A big one.

"Do you want to be human again?" Jane asked me. It was the evening before our landing. We were in the mess area, picking at food.

"Again?" I said, smiling.

"You know what I mean," she said. "Back into a real human body. No artificial additives."

"Sure," I said. "I've only got eight-some-odd years left to go. Assuming I'm still alive, I'll retire and colonize."

"It means going back to being weak and slow," Jane said, with usual Special Forces tact.

"It's not that bad," I said. "And there are other compensations. Children, for example. Or the ability to meet others and not have to subsequently kill them because they are the alien enemies of the colonies."

"You'll get old again and die," Jane said.

"I suppose I will," I said. "That's what humans do. This"—I held up a green arm—"isn't the usual thing, you know. And as far as dying goes, in any given year of CDF life, I'm far more likely to die than if I were a colonist. Actuarially speaking, being an unmodified human colonist is the way to go."

"You're not dead yet," Jane said.

"People seem to be looking out for me," I said. "What about you? Any plans to retire and colonize?"

"Special Forces don't retire," Jane said.

"You mean you're not allowed?" I asked.

"No, we're allowed," Jane said. "Our term of service is ten years, just like yours, although with us there's no possibility of our term lasting any less than the full ten years. We just don't retire, is all."

"Why not?" I asked.

"We don't have any experience being anything else than what we are," Jane said. "We're born, we fight, that's what we do. We're good at what we do."

"Don't you ever want to stop fighting?" I asked.

"Why?" Jane asked.

"Well, for one thing, it dramatically cuts down your chances of violent death," I said. "For another thing, it'd give you a chance to live those lives you all dream about. You know, the pasts you make up for yourselves. Us normal CDF get to have that life before we go into the service. You could have it afterward."

"I wouldn't know what to do with myself," Jane said.

"Welcome to the human race," I said. "So you're saying no Special Forces people leave the service? Ever?"

"I've known one or two," Jane admitted. "But only a couple."

"What happened to them?" I asked. "Where did they go?"

"I'm not really sure," Jane said, vaguely. Then, "Tomorrow I want you to stick by me."

"I understand," I said.

"You're still too slow," Jane said. "I don't want you to interfere with my other people."

"Thanks," I said.

"I'm sorry," Jane said. "I realize that wasn't very tactful. But you've led soldiers. You know what my concern is. I'm willing to assume the risks involved in having you around. Others shouldn't have to."

"I know," I said. "I'm not offended. And don't worry. I'll carry my own weight. I plan to retire, you know. I have to stay alive a little bit longer to do that."

"Good that you have motivations," Jane said.

"I agree," I said. "You should think about retiring yourself. As you say, it's good to have a motivation to stay alive."

"I don't want to be dead," Jane said. "It's motivation enough."

"Well," I said, "if you ever change your mind, I'll send you a postcard from wherever I retire. Come join me. We can live on a farm. Plant some chickens. Raise some corn."

Jane snorted. "You can't be serious," she said.

"Actually, I am," I said, and I realized that I was.

Jane was silent for a moment, then said, "I don't like farming."

"How would you know?" I said. "You've never done it."

"Did Kathy like to farm?" Jane said.

"Not in the least," I said. "She barely had the tolerance to keep a garden going."

"Well, there you have it, then," Jane said. "Precedent is working against me."

"Give it some thought, anyway," I said.

"Maybe I will," Jane said.

Where the hell did I put that ammo clip — Jane sent, and then the rockets hit. I threw myself down to the ground as rock from Jane's position on the outcropping showered around me. I looked up and saw Jane's hand, twitching. I started up toward her, but was held back by a spray of fire. I wheeled backward and got back behind the rock where I had been positioned.

I looked down at the team of Rraey that had blindsided us; two of them were moving slowly up the hill toward us, while a third was helping a final one load another rocket. I had no doubts where that one was headed. I flipped a grenade toward the two advancing Rraey and heard them scrambling for cover. When it went off I ignored them and took a shot at the Rraey with the rocket. It went down with a thud and triggered its rocket with an expiring twitch; the blast scorched the face of its companion Rraey, who screamed and flailed about, clutching at its eyeband. I shot it in the head. The rocket arced up and away, far from me. I didn't bother to wait to see where it landed.

The two Rraey who had been advancing on my position started to scramble back up; I launched another grenade in their general direction to keep them busy and headed to Jane. The grenade landed directly at the feet of one of the Rraey and proceeded to take those feet off; the second Rraey dove back to the ground. I launched a second grenade at that one. He didn't avoid that one fast enough.

I kneeled over Jane, who was still twitching, and saw the chunk of rock that had penetrated the side of her head. SmartBlood was rapidly clotting, but small spurts were leaking out at the edges. I spoke to Jane, but she didn't respond. I accessed her BrainPal, to erratic emotional blips of shock and pain. Her eyes scanned sightlessly. She was going to die. I clutched her hand and tried to calm the sickening rush of vertigo and déjà vu.

The counterattack had begun at dawn, not long after we took the tracking station, and it had been more than heavy; it had been ferocious. The Rraey, realizing their protection had been ripped away, had struck back hard to reclaim the tracking station. Their attack was haphazard, belying the lack of time and planning, but it was relentless. Troopship after troopship floated over the horizon, bringing more Rraey into combat.

The Special Forces soldiers used their special blend of tactics and insanity to greet the first of these troopships with teams racing to meet the ships as they landed, firing rockets and grenades into the troop bays the moment the landing doors opened. The Rraey finally added air support and troops began landing without being blown up the moment they touched down. While the bulk of our forces were defending the command center and the Consu technological prize it hid, our platoon had been roaming the periphery, harassing the Rraey and making their forward progress that much more difficult. It's why Jane and I were on the outcropping of rock, several hundred meters from the command center.

Directly below our position, another team of Rraey were beginning to pick their way toward us. It was time to move. I launched two rockets at the Rraey to stall them, then bent down and grabbed Jane in a fireman's carry. Jane moaned, but I couldn't worry about that. I spotted a boulder Jane and I had used on our way out and launched myself toward it. Behind me, the Rraey took aim. Shots whipped by; shattered rock cut at my face. I made it behind the boulder, set Jane down, pumped a grenade in the Rraey's direction. As it went off, I ran out from behind the boulder and leaped at their position, covering much of the distance in two long strides. The Rraey squawked; they didn't quite know what to do with the human launching itself directly at them. I switched my Empee to automatic fire and got them at close range before they could get themselves organized. I hurried back to Jane and accessed her BrainPal. Still there. Still alive.

The next leg of our journey was going to be difficult; about a hundred meters of open ground lay between me and where I wanted to be, a small maintenance garage. Rraey infantry lines bordered the field; a Rraey aircraft was heading in the general direction I wanted to go, looking for humans to shoot. I accessed Asshole to locate the positions of Jane's people and found three near me: two on my side of the field, thirty meters away, and another on the other side. I gave them the order to cover me, grabbed Jane again and sprinted toward the shed.

The air erupted in gunfire. Turf jumped up at me as shots buried themselves into the ground where my feet had been or would be. I was hit with a glancing blow to my left hip; my lower half torqued as pain flashed through my side. That was going to leave a bruise. I managed to keep my footing and kept running. Behind me I could hear the crumpled thump of rockets impacting on Rraey positions. The cavalry had arrived.

The Rraey airship turned to get a shot at me, then swerved to avoid the rocket launched at it from one of our soldiers. It accomplished this, but wasn't so lucky at avoiding the other two rockets bearing down on it from the other direction. The first crashed into its engine; the second into the windshield. The aircraft dipped and listed, but remained aloft long enough to get kissed by a final rocket that lodged itself in the shattered windshield and erupted into the cockpit. The aircraft collapsed into the ground with a shuddering rumble as I made it to the shed. Behind me, the Rraey who had been targeting me turned their attention to Jane's people, who were causing them far more damage than I was. I tore open the door to the shed and slid myself and Jane into the recessed repair bay inside.

In the relative calm I reassessed Jane's vitals. The wound in her head was completely caked over with SmartBlood; it was impossible to see how much damage there was or how deep the rock fragments went into her brain. Her pulse was strong but her breathing was shallow and erratic. This is where the extra oxygen-carrying capacity of SmartBlood was going to come in handy. I was no longer certain she was going to die, but I didn't know what I could do to keep her alive on my own.

I accessed Asshole for options, and one was produced: the command center had housed a small infirmary. Its accommodations were modest but featured a portable stasis chamber. It would keep Jane stable until she could make it onto one of the ships and back to Phoenix for medical attention. I recalled how Jane and the crew of the Sparrowhawk stuffed me into a stasis chamber after my first trip to Coral. It was time to return the favor.

A series of bullets whined through a window above me; someone had remembered I was there. Time to move again. I plotted my next sprint, to a Rraey-built trench fifty meters in front of me, now occupied by Special Forces. I let them know I was coming; they obligingly laid down suppressing fire as I ran brokenly toward them. With that I was behind Special Forces lines again. The remainder of the trip to the command center proceeded with minimal drama.

I arrived just in time for the Rraey to begin lobbing shells at the command center. They were no longer interested in taking back their tracking station; now they were intent on destroying it. I looked up at the sky. Even through the brightness of the morning sky, sparkling flashes of light glistened through the blue. The Colonial fleet had arrived.

The Rraey weren't going to take very long to demolish the command center, taking the Consu technology with it. I didn't have very much time. I ducked into the building and ran for the infirmary as everyone else was streaming out.

There was something big and complicated in the command center infirmary. It was the Consu tracking system. God only knows why the Rraey decided to house it there. But they did. As a result, the infirmary was the one room in the entire command center that wasn't all shot up; Special Forces were under orders to take the tracking system in one piece. Our boys and girls attacked the Rraey in this room with flash grenades and knives. The Rraey were still there, stab wounds and all, splayed out on the floor.

The tracking system hummed, almost contentedly, flat and featureless, against the infirmary wall. The only sign of input/output capability was a small monitor and an access spindle for a Rraey memory module lying haphazardly on a hospital bedside table next to the tracking system. The tracking system had no idea that in just a couple of minutes it was going to be nothing more than a bundle of broken wiring, thanks to an upcoming Rraey shell. All our work in securing the damn thing was going to go to waste.

The command center rattled. I stopped thinking about the tracking system and placed Jane gently on an infirmary bed, then looked around for the stasis chamber. I found it in an adjoining storeroom; it looked like a wheelchair encased in a half cylinder of plastic. I found two portable power sources on the shelf next to the stasis chamber; I plugged one into the chamber and read the diagnostic panel. Good for two hours. I grabbed another one. Better safe than sorry.

I wheeled the stasis chamber over to Jane as another shell hit, this one shaking the entire command center and knocking out the power. I was pushed sideways by the hit, slipped on a Rraey body and cracked my head on the wall on the way down. A flash of light pulsed behind my eyes and then an intense pain. I cursed as I righted myself, and felt a small ooze of SmartBlood from a scrape on my forehead.

The lights flicked on and off for a few seconds, and in between those few flickers Jane sent a rush of emotional information so intense I had to grab the wall to steady myself. Jane was awake; aware and in those few seconds I saw what she thought she saw. Someone else was in the room with her, looking just like her, her hands touching the sides of Jane's face as she smiled at her. Flicker, flicker, and she looked like she looked the last time I saw her. The light flickered again, came on for good, and the hallucination went away.

Jane twitched. I went over to her; her eyes were open and looking directly at me. I accessed her BrainPal; Jane was still conscious, but barely.

"Hey," I said softly, and took her hand. "You've been hit, Jane. You're okay now, but I need to put you in this stasis chamber until we can get you some help. You saved me once, remember. So we're even after this. Just hold on, okay?"

Jane gripped my hand, weakly, as if to get my attention. "I saw her," she said, whispering. "I saw Kathy. She spoke to me."

"What did she say?" I asked.

"She said," Jane said, and then drifted a little before focusing in on me again. "She said I should go farming with you."

"What did you say to that?" I asked.

"I said okay," Jane said.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," Jane said and slipped away again. Her BrainPal feed showed erratic brain activity; I picked her up and gently as possible placed her in the stasis chamber. I gave her a kiss and turned it on. The chamber sealed and hummed; Jane's neural and physiological indices slowed to a crawl. She was ready to roll. I looked down at the wheels to navigate them around the dead Rraey I'd stepped on a few minutes before and noticed the memory module poking out of the Rraey's abdomen pouch.

The command center rattled again with a hit. Against my better judgment I reached down, grabbed the memory module, walked over to the access spindle, and slammed it in. The monitor came to life and showed a listing of files in Rraey script. I opened a file and was treated to a schematic. I closed it and opened another file. More schematics. I went back to the original listing and looked at the graphic interface to see if there was a top-level category access. There was; I accessed it and had Asshole translate what I was seeing.

What I was seeing was an owner's manual for the Consu tracking system. Schematics, operating instructions, technical settings, troubleshooting procedures. It was all there. It was the next best thing to having the system itself.

The next shell broadsided the command center, knocked me square on my ass, and sent shrapnel tearing through the infirmary. A chunk of metal made a gaping hole through the monitor I was looking at; another punched a hole through the tracking system itself. The tracking system stopped humming and began making choking sounds; I grabbed the memory module, pulled it off the spindle, grabbed the stasis chamber's handles and ran. We were a barely acceptable distance away when a final shell plowed through the command center, collapsing the building entirely.

In front of us, the Rraey were retreating; the tracking station was the least of their problems now. Overhead, dozens of descending dark points spoke of landing shuttles, filled with CDF soldiers itching to take back the planet. I was happy to let them. I wanted to get off this rock as soon as possible.

In the near distance Major Crick was conferring with some of his staff; he motioned me over. I wheeled Jane to him. He glanced down at her, and then up at me.

"They tell me you sprinted the better part of a klick with Sagan on your back, and then went into the command center when the Rraey began shelling," Crick said. "Yet I seem to recall you were the one who called us insane."

"I'm not insane, sir," I said. "I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk."

"How is she?" Crick asked, nodding to Jane.

"She's stable," I said. "But she has a pretty serious head wound. We need to get her into a medical bay as soon as possible."

Crick nodded over to a landing shuttle. "That's the first transport," he said. "You'll both be on it."

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"Thank you, Perry," Crick said. "Sagan is one of my best officers. I'm grateful you saved her. Now, if you could have managed to save that tracking system, too, you would really have made my day. All this work defending the goddamn tracking station was for nothing."

"About that, sir," I said, and held up the memory module. "I think I have something you might find interesting."

Crick stared at the memory module, and then scowled over at me. "No one likes an overachiever, Captain," he said.

"No, sir, I guess they don't," I said, "although it's lieutenant."

"We'll just see about that," Crick said.

Jane made the first shuttle up. I was delayed quite a bit.

EIGHTEEN

I made captain. I never saw Jane again.

The first of these was the more dramatic of the two. Carrying Jane to safety on my back through several hundred meters of open battlefield, and then placing her into a stasis chamber while under fire, would have been enough to get a decent write-up in the official report of the battle. Bringing in the technical schematics for the Consu tracking system as well, as Major Crick intimated, seemed a little like piling on. But what are you going to do. I got a couple more medals out of the Second Battle of Coral, and the promotion to boot. If anybody noticed that I had gone from corporal to captain in under a month, they kept it to themselves. Well, so did I. In any event, I got my drinks bought for me for several months afterward. Of course, when you're in the CDF, all the drinks are free. But it's the thought that counts.

The Consu technical manual was shipped directly to Military Research. Harry told me later that getting to flip through it was like reading God's scribble pad. The Rraey knew how to use the tracking system but had no idea how it worked—even with the full schematic it was doubtful that they would have been able to piece together another one. They didn't have the manufacturing capability to do it. We knew that because we didn't have the manufacturing capability to do it. The theory behind the machine alone was opening up whole new branches of physics, and causing the colonies to reassess their skip drive technology.

Harry was tapped as part of the team tasked to spin out practical applications of the technology. He was delighted with the position; Jesse complained it was making him insufferable. Harry's old gripe about not having the math for the job was rendered immaterial, since no one else really had the math for it, either. It certainly reinforced the idea that the Consu were a race with whom we should clearly not mess.

A few months after the Second Battle of Coral, it was rumored that the Rraey returned to Consu space, imploring the Consu for more technology. The Consu responded by imploding the Rraey's ship and hurling it into the nearest black hole. This still strikes me as overkill. But it's just a rumor.

After Coral, the CDF gave me a series of cushy assignments, beginning with a stint touring the colonies as the CDF's latest hero, showing the colonists how The Colonial Defense Forces Are Fighting For YOU! I got to sit in a lot of parades and judge a lot of cooking contests. After a few months of that I was ready to do something else, although it was finally nice to be able to visit a planet or two and not have to kill everyone who was there.

After my PR stint, the CDF had me ride herd on new recruit transport ships. I was the guy who got to stand in front of a thousand old people in new bodies and tell them to have fun, and then a week later tell them that in ten years, three-quarters of them would be dead. This tour of duty was almost unbearably bittersweet. I'd go into the dining hall on the transport ship and see groups of new friends coalescing and bonding, the way I did with Harry and Jesse, Alan and Maggie, Tom and Susan. I wondered how many of them would make it. I hoped all of them would. I knew that most of them wouldn't. After a few months of this I asked for a different assignment. Nobody said anything about it. It wasn't the sort of assignment that anyone wanted to do for a very long time.

Eventually I asked to go back into combat. It's not that I like combat, although I'm strangely good at it. It's just that in this life, I am a soldier. It was what I agreed to be and to do. I intended to give it up one day, but until then, I wanted to be on the line. I was given a company and assigned to the Taos. It's where I am now. It's a good ship. I command good soldiers. In this life, you can't ask for much more than that.

Never seeing Jane again is rather less dramatic. After all, there's not much to not seeing someone. Jane took the first shuttle up to the Amarillo; the ship's doctor there took one look at her Special Forces designation and wheeled her into the corner of the medical bay, to remain in stasis until they returned to Phoenix and she could be worked on by Special Forces medical technicians. I eventually made it back to Phoenix on the Bakersfield. By that time Jane was deep in the bowels of the Special Forces medical wing and unreachable by a mere mortal such as myself, even if I was a newly minted hero.

Shortly thereafter I was decorated, promoted and made to begin my barnstorming tour of the colonies. I eventually received word from Major Crick that Jane had recuperated and was reassigned, along with most of the surviving crew of the Sparrowhawk, to a new ship called the Kite. Beyond that, it did no good to try to send Jane a message. The Special Forces were the Special Forces. They were the Ghost Brigades. You're not supposed to know where they're going or what they're doing or even that they're there in front of your own face.

I know they're there, however. Whenever Special Forces soldiers see me, they ping me with their BrainPals—short little bursts of emotional information, signifying respect. I am the only real-born to have served in Special Forces, however briefly; I rescued one of their own and I snatched mission success out of the jaws of partial mission failure. I ping back, acknowledging the salute, but otherwise I outwardly say nothing to give them away. Special Forces prefer it that way. I haven't seen Jane again on Phoenix or elsewhere.

But I've heard from her. Shortly after I was assigned to the Taos, Asshole informed me I had a message waiting from an anonymous sender. This was new; I had never received an anonymous message via BrainPal before. I opened it. I saw a picture of a field of grain, a farmhouse in the distance and a sunrise. It could have been a sunset, but that's not the feeling that I got. It took me a second to realize the picture was supposed to be a postcard. Then I heard her voice, a voice that I knew all my life from two different women.

You once asked me where Special Forces go when we retire, and I told you that I didn't know — she sent. But I do know. We have a place where we can go, if we like, and learn how to be human for the first time. When it's time, I think I'm going to go. I think I want you to join me. You don't have to come. But if you want to, you can. You're one of us, you know.

I paused the message for a minute, and started it up again, when I was ready.

Part of me was once someone you loved — she sent. I think that part of me wants to be loved by you again, and wants me to love you as well. I can't be her. I can just be me. But I think you could love me if you wanted to. I want you to. Come to me when you can. I'll be here.

That was it.

I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life.

I haven't seen her again, but I know I will. Soon. Soon enough.