“Oh, he already knows! I discussed the idea with him before broaching it with you. He’s quite agreeable. I think he finds the idea of you having to cope with frontline soldiery quite amusing.” He folded his hands in his lap, and looked from one to the other.

Pirius took that as his cue. He stood up. “I think we’re done here.”

“So we are, Pilot,” Nilis said genially.

“Madam, welcome aboard—”

“Don’t even talk to me, you twisted little freak!” In the windows of her pale eyes he saw the contempt of this earthworm for the soldiers who fought and died to protect her.

But Pirius held his nerve. “Working together is going to be interesting. But I think the Commissary is right. And we only have ten weeks. There’s an empty room down the corridor. Maybe we should start right now.”

Pila stood stock still, and Pirius wondered what even the Commissary could do about it if she refused to cooperate. But with a last murderous glance at Nilis, she stalked out.

Nilis was immersed in his Virtuals before Pirius had even left the room. But he called, “Oh, Pirius. Get those epaulettes sewn back on. That doesn’t look good, not good at all.”

Reluctant or not, Pila was remarkably efficient. Within forty-eight hours she had secured Pirius a small office of his own — small, plain, with hardly any facilities, but a room in Officer Country nonetheless. And she had already pulled various bureaucratic levers effectively enough to line up candidates for the squadron.

The first of them was a woman, a former pilot called Jees.

Long before Jees reached his office Pirius could hear the whir of exoskeletal supports as she clumped down the corridor. When she came in, he was shocked. Her lower body had been sliced away on a line that ran from her ribs on her right hand side to her pelvis on her left, the flesh and bone and blood replaced by a cold mass of silvery prostheses. When she sat down, the chair creaked at her inhuman weight.

But her hair, cut short, was a bright blond, and her skin was unlined. She was even beautiful. She could have been no more than his own age — but her eyes were dull.

She told him her history. She had been involved in two actions. She had survived the first, but had been caught by a starbreaker in the second. She had been lucky to live at all, of course. Most of her squadron, cut apart, hadn’t. She told this story unemotionally, lacing it with dates and reference numbers that meant nothing to Pirius. “If you get back to base they fix you up. The medics.” A half- smile crossed her face. “As long as there’s a piece of you left, they can replace what’s missing.”

It was impossible to feel pity for her; she was too damaged for that.

“Your current assignment is ground crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You really think you can fly again?”

“I volunteered,” she said. “I’m a pilot, not a mechanic. You’ve seen my evaluation. My reflexes and coordination and all the rest are as good as they were. Augmented, some of them are better, in fact. But—”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

Pila watched Jees, coldly evaluating.

Jees tapped her head with a metallic finger. “Everything that counts about me is still here. And what I am is a pilot. I want to get back out there and prove it.”

Pirius nodded, thanked her, and let her go.

Pila waved her hand, and a box in a Virtual checklist turned from red to green. “It’s obvious. We take her.”

“We do?”

Pila shrugged elegantly. “She’s a volunteer, one of the few we’ve had. She can handle the mission technically. Her nerve isn’t broken, according to the psychologists. In fact she’s powerfully motivated; she has a grudge against the Xeelee, and who can blame her? But we aren’t going to find many like her, Pirius.”

From the beginning Pila had complained bitterly about the pool of available candidates. “The superannuated and the criminal,” she said. “That’s all that’s being made available to us. Crew who are useless anywhere else, and so won’t impede Marshal Kimmer’s own grand goals. And there are precious few of them…”

The fact was, in this war walking wounded were rare. Day after day, the fragile greenships flew into Xeelee fire like moths into flames. If anything went wrong, your chances of surviving were slim: death worked efficiently here.

Even “criminals” were hard to find. Penal units were handed the worst, the most dangerous assignments, and if you happened to survive an action, you were thrown back out again. Life expectancy was not long, the turnover rapid. But then, if you fell out with a Doctrine cop, you had demonstrated some incorrigible character flaw — and, deemed beyond hope of rehabilitation, you were eminently disposable.”

But Pila had quickly found that even these battle-damaged antiques and failed renegades were hoarded, like every other resource, by jealous, empire-building local commanders. Pirius decided he was going to have to visit a penal detail to try to drum up volunteers. And that meant he would have to go to Quintuplet Base, where he knew at least one incorrigible rebel was still stationed — himself.

When he told her his decision, Pila grinned, her eyes quite without humor. “For the first time I am glad I have been forced into this assignment. I will enjoy watching you confronting your own unresolved issues, Pirius.”

But he was able to put that aside for a while, as he had a much more agreeable chore to complete first.

A week after Pirius’s promotion, the first test flights of greenships modified to Nilis’s full design were scheduled. Flexing his squadron leader muscles, Pirius decided to take the very first flight himself.

So he found himself sitting in a greenship’s pilot blister, with Torec as engineer and the intimidating presence of Commander Darc as navigator. Before the great dislocation of Blue’s irruption into his life, Pirius Red had actually completed his pilot training, but he had never flown in action. It was a huge relief to be aboard a greenship again, back where he belonged.

He checked over his ship. The greenship sat on its launch cradle on the tightly curving surface of Rock 492. The feather-light gravity of the dock touched the ship gently, and Pirius could see that the rails of the cradle had barely made a groove in the loose surface dust.

Light as a soap bubble it might be, but it was an ungainly beast even so. It was a superannuated fighter, one of just five begrudgingly donated so far by Marshal Kimmer and his staff. And it had been in the wars. The central body was scarred and much patched — and you could clearly see where the nacelle bearing the pilot’s pod had once been sliced clean through. This ship had been sent out again and again, until it was too battered to be worth fixing up: too worn out, in fact, for any use except Nilis’s complicated project.

This beat-up old bird would have been ugly enough if it had been left as nature and the Guild of Engineers intended. But Nilis had made things worse with his “enhancements.” Not one but two of Nilis’s patent black-hole cannons had been fixed to its flanks, along with a bulky pod where the exotic ammunition for these weapons was stored. The whole thing was swathed in a tangle of cables and wires and tubing. The ruining of the greenship’s classic streamlined finish didn’t matter, of course, since a greenship never flew in an atmosphere. What did matter was how the massive pods attached to the main body affected the ship’s dynamic stability.

The greenship was a mess, no two ways about it. Pirius thought the ironic name Darc had given it was apt: Earthworm. This poor ship looked as capable of swooping gracefully through space as fat old Nilis himself.

But still, this was the bird Pirius was going to fly today. And as he and his crew worked through their final preparations, he felt his heart beat a bit faster.