"Oh, you are so full of shit," Viveros snapped. "You have no fucking clue what they're chanting about. They could be chanting about how they're going to rip off our heads and piss down our necks. They could be chanting for their dead. They could be singing their goddamn grocery list. We don't know. You don't know."

"You're wrong," Bender said. "For five decades I was on the front lines of the battle for peace on Earth. I know when a people are ready for peace. I know when they're reaching out." He pointed to the chanting Whaidians. "These people are ready, Viveros. I can feel it. And I'm going to prove it to you." Bender set down his Empee and started toward the amphitheater.

"God damn it, Bender!" Viveros yelled. "Get back here now! That's an order!"

"I'm not 'just following orders' anymore, Corporal!" Bender yelled back, and then started to sprint.

"Shit!" Viveros screamed, and started after him. I grabbed for her and missed.

By now Lieutenant Keyes and the other officers looked up and saw Bender racing toward the Whaidians, Viveros chasing behind. I saw Keyes yell something and Viveros pull up suddenly; Keyes must have sent his order over the BrainPal as well. If he had ordered Bender to stop, Bender ignored the command and continued his race to the Whaidians.

Bender finally stopped at the lip of the amphitheater, and stood there silently. Eventually the Feuy, the one leading the chant, noticed the sole human standing at the edge of his congregation and stopped his chanting. The congregation, confused, lost the chant and spent a minute or so muttering before noticing Bender as well, and turned to face him.

This was the moment Bender was waiting for. Bender must have spent the few moments while the Whaidians noticed his presence composing what he was going to say and translating it into Whaidian, because when he spoke, he attempted their language, and by all professional accounts, did a reasonable job of it.

"My friends, my fellow searchers for peace," he began, reaching out to them with his hands curved in.

Data culled from the event would eventually show that no fewer than forty thousand tiny needlelike projectiles that Whaidians call avdgur struck Bender's body in the space of less than one second, shot from clubs that were not clubs at all, but traditional projectile weapons in the shape of a tree branch sacred to the Whaidian people. Bender literally melted as each avdgur sliver penetrated his unitard and his body, slicing away at the solidity of his form. Everyone agreed later that it was one of the most interesting deaths any of us had ever seen in person.

Bender's body fell apart in a misty splash and the CDF soldiers opened fire into the amphitheater. It was indeed a turkey shoot; not a single Whaidian made it out of the amphitheater or managed to kill or wound another CDF soldier other than Bender. It was over in less than a minute.

Viveros waited for the cease-fire order, walked over to the puddle that was what was left of Bender, and started stamping in it furiously. "How do you like your peace now, motherfucker?" she cried as Bender's liquefied organs stained the lower half of her legs.

"Bender was right, you know," Viveros said to me on the way back to the Modesto.

"About what?" I asked.

"About the CDF being used too fast and too much," Viveros said. "About it being easier to fight than to negotiate." She waved in the general direction of the Whaidian home planet, which was receding behind us. "We didn't have to do this, you know. Knock these poor sons of bitches out of space and make it so they spend the next couple of decades starving and dying and killing each other. We didn't murder civilians today—well, other than the ones that got Bender. But they'll spend a nice long time dying from disease and murdering each other because they can't do much of anything else. It's no less of a genocide. We just feel better about it because we'll be gone when it happens."

"You never agreed with Bender before," I said.

"That's not true," Viveros said. "I said that he didn't know shit, and that his duty was to us. But I didn't say he was wrong. He should have listened to me. If he'd have followed his fucking orders, he'd be alive now. Instead I'm scraping him off the bottom of my foot."

"He'd probably say he died for what he believed in," I said.

Viveros snorted. "Please," she said. "Bender died for Bender. Shit. Walking up to a bunch of people whose planet we just destroyed and acting like he was their friend. What an asshole. If I were one of them, I'd have shot him, too."

"Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals," I said.

Viveros smiled. "If Bender were really interested in peace instead of his own ego, he'd have done what I'm doing, and what you should do, Perry," she said. "Follow orders. Stay alive. Make it through our term of infantry service. Join officer training and work our way up. Become the people who are giving the orders, not just following them. That's how we'll make peace when we can. And that's how I can live with 'just following orders.' Because I know that one day, I'll make those orders change." She leaned back, closed her eyes and slept the rest of the way back to our ship.

Luisa Viveros died two months later on a shithole ball of mud called Deep Water. Our squad walked into a trap set in the natural catacombs below the Hann'i colony that we'd been ordered to clear out. In battle we'd been herded into a cave chamber that had four additional tunnels feeding into it, all ringed with Hann'i infantry. Viveros ordered us back into our tunnel and began firing at its mouth, collapsing the tunnel and sealing it off from the chamber. BrainPal data shows she then turned and began taking out the Hann'i. She didn't last long. The rest of the squad fought our way back to the surface; not an easy thing to do, considering how we'd been herded in the first place, but better than dying in an ambush.

Viveros got a medal posthumously for bravery; I was promoted to corporal and given the squad. Viveros' cot and locker were given to a new guy named Whitford, who was decent enough, as far as it went.

The institution had replaced a cog. And I missed her.

ELEVEN

Thomas died because of something he ate.

What he ingested was so new the CDF didn't have a name for it yet, on a colony so new it also didn't have a name, merely an official designation: Colony 622, 47 Ursae Majoris. (The CDF continued to use Earth-based stellar designations for the same reason they continued to use a twenty-four-hour clock and a 365-day year: Because it was easiest to do it that way.) As a matter of standard operating procedure, new colonies transmit a daily compilation of all colony data into a skip drone, which then skips back to Phoenix so that the Colonial government can keep tabs on colony matters.

Colony 622 had sent drones since its landing six months earlier; aside from the usual arguments, snafus and scuffles that accompany any new colony founding, nothing of any note was reported, except for the fact that a local slime mold was gunking up damn near everything, popping up in machinery, computers, animal pens and even colony living quarters. A genetic analysis of the material was sent back to Phoenix with the request that someone create a fungicide that would get the mold literally out of the colonist's hair. Blank skip drones started arriving immediately after that, with no information uploaded from the colony.

Thomas and Susan were stationed on the Tucson, which was dispatched to investigate. The Tucson attempted to raise the colony from orbit; no luck. Visual targeting of the colony buildings showed no movement between buildings—no people, no animals, no nothing. The buildings themselves, however, didn't seem to be damaged. Thomas' platoon got the call for recon.