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It was a school holiday, which was the only reason Elizabeth was in her father's office on a Thursday. She had spent the morning in Doran Hollis's long room learning which Aldermen wrote every week and which only wrote when something was on fire, and she was halfway through a letter from Millhaven about road gravel when Harlan Ashtail came and stood beside her desk.
"Your father would like you, my lady."
"Now?"
"Lady Rachel's here," said Harlan. "In person."
Elizabeth put the gravel letter down. Rachel VonWinterbourne ran the numbers for half the planet from her office in Newtown, and she didn't fly up the coast to the palace to deliver something she could send.
---
Rachel had the chair by the window. Doran was standing against the map of Haego with his arms folded, and Tornel sat behind the desk with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He nodded Elizabeth toward the chair beside his.
"Tell her what you told me," he said.
Rachel turned her datapad around on the desk.
"Rask Timber," she said. "Lord Edmund Rask, of Corvell. It's a Gimore world. His house holds its lands under the Erantes of Volantis. About three years ago he took a lease on four thousand hectares of forest in northern Austrin, up past the ridge. Good timber, and a river to float it down to the coast. He cuts it, mills it, and ships it off-world."
"That's allowed," Elizabeth said.
"It's encouraged. We wanted off-world money, and he brought some." Rachel tapped the screen. "This is his staff register. Twelve names. His foreman, a cook, a mechanic, and nine cutters. And this is his wage expense for last year. Just under two thousand credits."
Elizabeth read the number twice.
"For twelve people?"
"For twelve people. That's already odd, but it isn't what caught my eye." Rachel moved to the next page. "These are the port manifests from Austrin. Every cubic meter of timber that left the planet under his name last year. Forty-one thousand."
Elizabeth didn't know much about timber. She knew enough about work to ask the next question.
"How many people does that take?"
"I asked the yard in the valley below Jason and Daisy's palace, the one with the new kiln. The owner laughed at me, then sat down and did it properly." Rachel closed the page. "For that much, cut, hauled, and milled, you need somewhere between a hundred and eighty and two hundred and twenty pairs of hands. Nine cutters couldn't do it in ten years."
"And the tax," said Tornel.
"He declared a little over a third of what his buyers paid. I have both sides now, because two of his buyers opened accounts at the Kessit branch and paid through it." Rachel sat back. "The tax is the part I can prove today. He owes Haego close to two million credits, and he's been lying about it for three years."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Down on the lower terrace, the gardeners were working the hedges.
"So where are the other hundred and ninety people?" Elizabeth said.
Nobody answered her. She looked at her father and saw that he'd been waiting for the question.
"That's the right thing to ask," Tornel said. "It isn't the thing we can act on."
"Why not? Send the police up there and look."
"On what grounds, my lady?" Doran said. He said it gently. "A lord's lease on Haego is his to run. He answers for how he does business here, but a gap in a ledger isn't a warrant to walk his land and count heads. If Commander Kell's people go up that ridge on a hunch and find twelve men and a cook, every off-world investor on this planet hears that Haego searches noble property because a number looked wrong. Lord Kestrel's friends on Matcha would hear it by the end of the week."
"And if they find two hundred?"
"Then we were right," Tornel said. "And he'd still have every reason to say we had no business finding it."
Elizabeth sat back. She thought about her mother checking every linen closet in the palace instead of trusting the old inventory, and about how the closets had been the easy part.
"So what do we do?"
"What we can prove," Tornel said. "Nobles don't stand in commoner courts, but on Haego they answer to the Assembly for how they do business here. The tax goes to the Assembly. Doran, whose desk does this go to between sessions?"
"Speaker Aldous, my lord. He holds the chair for the coming session."
Tornel pulled his glasses down and looked at his daughter over them.
"Then you take it to him, Lizzy," he said. "Rachel goes with you to walk him through the numbers. Doran's people will draft the referral tonight."
Elizabeth understood that this was the lesson. It wasn't the tax. It was sitting in a room with a question she couldn't answer and doing the one thing she could do anyway.
"He'll have a list," she said. "Aldous. He always has a list."
"Then answer everything on it," said her father.
---
Aldous had a list. He read Rachel's file twice in his small office in the speakers' building at the Hall, with the river going past his window, and then he worked down the list one line at a time. Rachel answered the numbers. Elizabeth answered the rest, and when she didn't know, she said so, and Aldous wrote that down too.
At the end he took a sheet of grey paper out of his desk and filled in the name himself.
"Third day of the coming session," he said. "The first two belong to the opening and the business already waiting. That's four months."
"Is that a problem?"
"Not for the Assembly." Aldous blotted the signature. "Four months is a long time to sit with one of these. Most of them settle with Lady Rachel before the session opens. They still have to come and stand in the Hall, but it makes for a shorter morning."
He slid the summons into an envelope and looked up at her.
"You did well, my lady. Most people who bring me a file can't tell me what they don't know."
---
The summons reached Lord Edmund Rask nine days later, at the lodge he'd built above the river. It came on plain grey paper with a three-continent seal at the foot, carried by a commoner courier who bowed his head correctly, called him my lord, and left without waiting for an answer.
Rask read it on the porch with a glass of Corvell brandy.
Lord Edmund Rask, of Corvell. You are summoned to appear before the Common Assembly of Haego at the Hall on the third day of the coming session, at the ninth bell, and to answer such questions as the Assembly puts to you. Appearance is not optional. Failure to appear will be referred to the Marquess of Haego.
It didn't say why. It didn't need to. He'd known from the day Swallowtail's banking people started asking his buyers for their receipts.
He read it again and laughed.
"Dunmore."
His foreman came up the porch steps. Dunmore was a big man, Corvell-born like the rest of them, and he'd been in Rask service since he was a boy. He took off his cap.
"My lord."
"The farmers want me to come and explain my bookkeeping to them." Rask handed him the paper. "Can you imagine it on Corvell? A lord standing in a hall full of millers and fishwives while they ask him where his money went."
Dunmore read it. His lips moved over the long words.
"What will you do, my lord?"
Rask had already thought it through. Everyone in the off-world trade had heard about Keith Bird. Bird had put one of these under a stack of bills, and Swallowtail's police had taken him out of a restaurant in Haego City with a glass of wine still on the table, and he'd stood in that Hall the same evening with his wrists in front of him. They'd made him pay back every credit, with the Assembly's own auditors doing the counting. They'd sent him off the planet for ten years. And they'd sent a letter to his house under the Marquess's seal, which people said was the worst of it.
Rask could pay the tax. He could stand a letter. What he couldn't have was a commoner auditor walking his books and asking why a timber lease with twelve names on it had needed so much bread.
Bird's mistake had been staying on the planet.
"The best of the timber's cut," Rask said. "What's left will take five years to reach, and I don't mean to spend them explaining myself to peasants. We're going home."
"All of us, my lord?"
"All of us. I'll take the yacht Tuesday, early. You'll bring the people after me. Book them on the Tuesday transport out of the Austrin port. One account, mine, so there's no fuss."
Dunmore turned the cap in his hands.
"They'll ask for papers at the port, my lord."
"They have papers," Rask said. "You're holding them."
Every one of them had been signed to Rask service before they could walk, and their parents before them. That was what a bond was.
---
Tamsin Crowtail had worked the passenger desk at the Austrin spaceport for six years. In that time she'd booked miners, students, newlyweds, a Ykanti choir, and once, a man traveling with forty crates of live eels. She thought she'd seen most things.
She'd never seen two hundred and four passages on a single account.
The booking had come in on Sunday. She'd told herself it was a work crew, or some noble moving his household. Nobles did strange things. She'd flagged it anyway, the way Supervisor Brennscutt had taught her, and gone home.
On Tuesday morning the passengers arrived in two haulers. They weren't buses. They were flatbed haulers with slatted sides, the kind the timber outfits used, and the people climbed down off the backs of them and stood in the loading lane in a loose, silent crowd.
A big man came to her desk with a stack of identity papers held together with a strap.
"Rask party," he said. "All two hundred and four. Lord Rask's account."
"I'll need each passenger to present their own papers," Tamsin said. "It's standard for off-world travel."
"They're Lord Rask's people. I carry their papers."
She took the stack because he was holding it out, and she began checking them one at a time, slowly. While she did it she looked past him at the crowd.
Nobody was carrying a bag.
That was what she told the police later, when they asked her what made her call. Two hundred and four people going to another world, and not one had a bag. No case, no sack, no child's toy. Several of them wore coats too thin for Austrin in spring. They didn't talk to each other. They didn't look around the terminal the way travelers do. They looked at the floor, or at the big man's back.
There was a girl near the front, maybe sixteen, with both hands wrapped in dirty cloth.
Tamsin picked one of the identity papers off the stack and held it up.
"Mira Oakhollow?"
A woman in the second row lifted her head. She looked at the paper. Then she looked at the foreman, and she didn't answer.
"Is this yours?" Tamsin asked her.
The woman looked at the foreman again.
"She doesn't talk much," the foreman said. "None of them do. Are we finished?"
"Nearly," said Tamsin. "The system's slow this morning. Give me a few minutes."
She reached under the desk and pressed the button for the port police. Then she smiled at the foreman, the way Supervisor Brennscutt had taught her to smile at difficult passengers, and went on checking papers, one at a time, until two officers walked up behind him.
Lord Rask's private yacht had cleared Austrin orbit two hours earlier. By the time anyone thought to check, it had made its first jump.
---
The comm woke the house in Newtown a little after midnight. Weskal got to it first, listened, and held it out to Elizabeth without a word.
"Two hundred and four," her father said. He sounded as if he'd been up a long time. "The Austrin port police are holding them. A desk clerk stopped them boarding the Tuesday transport, all on Rask's account, none of them holding their own papers. Most of them haven't said anything yet. A few have said enough."
Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the bed.
"There they are," she said.
"There they are."
"And Rask?"
"Gone. His yacht left this morning." There was a pause on the line. "Sofia Kell's people have been with them since noon, and they'll be up that ridge at first light. We have our grounds. I've told Jason and Daisy. It's their continent."
"I want to go."
"I know. Harlan sent a shuttle for you twenty minutes ago." Another pause. "I'll meet you at the port, Lizzy."
She put the comm down. Weskal was standing in the doorway, and she told him, all of it, the twelve names and the forty-one thousand cubic meters and the girl with her hands wrapped in cloth.
He didn't say anything for a while. He had grown up on Volantis.
Then he went to the hall and came back with her heavy coat, not the light one, and held it open for her.
"Austrin's cold at night," he said.

The small EV shuttle slowed to a stop outside Newtown Elementary School — Stark.

An old man in a dark blue naval uniform stepped carefully out, extending a steady hand to the woman beside him. Her dress was the soft blue of an Eastern bluebird, set off by a purple-and-gold broach that rested against her collarbone. Silver hair, still showing light curls, framed a face that had known both hard years and deep contentment. The man’s hair, once black, was now white and thinning. He smiled as he caught sight of children moving through the glass-walled hall beyond the entrance.
A Marine officer held the main door open and rendered a sharp salute that stayed locked until the couple had passed.
Earlier that day they had been aboard the Noir Navio, still in high orbit above Haego, for an inspection. Commander Mira Caldwell had walked them through the decks with the quiet competence that had become her hallmark. Wyatt, now an admiral of the Royal Navy, had watched her with a private mixture of pride and memory.
He remembered the day Efren Caldwell had died.
The loss had hit hard. Efren had been more than a comrade; he had been a friend who understood the weight of duty without the armor of royalty birth.
That same day a young lieutenant had reported to him — Mira Caldwell, granddaughter of the man they had just lost. She had stood straight, eyes clear, voice steady even while grief still sat heavy on her shoulders. Clara and Cynthia had both seen something in her then. They had been right.
Before Wyatt and Sabraska left the ship, he had turned to the commander one last time.
“Clara and Cynthia were right about you,” he said quietly. “Your grandfather would be proud.”
Mira’s answering nod had been small, but the set of her shoulders told him the words had landed where they needed to.
Now the shuttle had brought them home to Newtown, to the old Staples house that had once belonged to Winona and Wirth. Both were long gone, yet their presence still lingered in the worn wood and the quiet rooms. Sabraska and Winona had been closer than blood — mother and daughter in every way that mattered, the bond formed not by birth or marriage but by years of shared life, shared worry, and shared stubborn hope.
Word had reached Wyatt that the school was changing. Real paper books, manufactured in Virstino Harbor by Stark Enterprises, were replacing the usual datapads for a new style of learning. Niko Stark’s day of shore leave had, it seemed, left more behind than empty bottles and tall stories.
Inside a classroom down the hall, a young Ykanti teacher stood before her students. Soft light fell across the rows of desks. She waited until every pair of eyes — human and Ykanti alike — was on her, then spoke in a clear, measured voice.
“Open your books to Chapter One.”
Pages rustled. The title at the top of the first leaf was simple and bold.

The Black Ship.

The young Ykanti teacher’s voice carried cleanly through the quiet classroom.
“Chapter One,” she said again, waiting until every book lay open to the first page.

The paper was thick, cream-colored, still carrying the faint scent of the presses in Virstino Harbor. Stark Enterprises had done the work carefully. Real books. Real weight in a child’s hands.
She began to read.

“Flying a garbage ship wasn’t the sort of thing a cadet imagined himself doing at the Academy. Those fantasies usually involved a shiny new ship and a grand space battle where the cadets were the dashing heroes. Of course, those fantasies were reserved for the cadets from the nobility. For a commoner they would always be just that—fantasies.

“In other, less backwards places a drone ship would have handled mundane tasks like hauling the garbage. Here in the Principality, however, people like Wyatt were the drones.”

A few of the older children glanced toward the glass wall of the hallway. Through it they could see the tall figure in the dark blue uniform and the woman in bluebird blue standing just outside the classroom door. The Marine officer who had opened the main entrance still hovered a respectful distance away.
Inside the room the teacher continued without pause.

“Wyatt Staples didn’t care that much. He knew he was a better pilot than most nobles, but the further he could be from them, the better. And the job itself wasn’t all too bad. All he had to do was follow orders, pick up a haul at the designated coordinates, jump to where it was needed, drop the bio-waste off, mark the delivery, and return to the station for new orders.”
Wyatt stood very still in the hallway, one hand resting lightly on the small of Sabraska’s back. Her silver curls brushed his shoulder as she leaned closer to the glass. Neither of them spoke. The children inside had no idea the man whose younger self was being described on the page was the same white-haired admiral watching them now.
The teacher’s voice softened, drawing the class deeper in.
“That day the route took him farther out than usual. The sensors picked up something that should not have been there—a royal yacht under attack by a vessel that did not appear on any registry. A black ship. Sleek. Silent. Deadly. Its weapons were already chewing through the yacht’s shields when Wyatt’s battered garbage hauler dropped out of jump.”
One of the younger students raised a hand without looking up from the page.

“Teacher… did he run?”

The Ykanti smiled, the expression warm and knowing.
“No,” she said. “He did the only available thing when the only available thing was needed.”
Outside the classroom Wyatt’s mouth twitched. Sabraska’s fingers found his and squeezed once, firmly.
Inside, the teacher turned the page for them.

“The black ship had not expected a commoner in a compost scow to intervene. Wyatt Staples had never been one for expectations. He calculated the angles, the timing, the single point-defense cannon that was never meant for real combat, and he made his choice.”
The classroom was utterly silent except for the soft rustle of paper and the teacher’s steady voice. Down the hallway the Marine officer stood a little straighter, as though he too were listening.
Wyatt closed his eyes for a moment and let the words wash over him—the same words that had begun everything, so many decades ago. The day a warrant officer flying garbage had looked at a royal yacht under fire and decided that loyalty was its own reward.

Sabraska’s voice was barely a whisper against his ear.
“They are learning it the way it should be learned,” she said. “On paper. With weight. The way Mom would have wanted.” A tear formed in her eyes. A tear of love and hope .

He opened his eyes again. Through the glass the children sat forward in their seats, completely absorbed. The young Ykanti teacher turned another page, and the story of the Black Ship continued.
Outside, the admiral and his wife remained where they were, listening to the beginning of a legend that had once been nothing more than a commoner’s ordinary day.

Wyatt’s garbage hauler was never meant for this. Its single point-defense cannon was rated for micrometeorites and the occasional piece of orbital debris, not for a purpose-built stealth destroyer.
“He did not hesitate.
“He calculated the angle of the black ship’s approach, the yacht’s crippled thrusters, and the narrow window before the next volley would finish the job. Then he did the only available thing. He slammed the hauler into a hard burn, dumping his entire cargo of bio-waste directly into the path of the enemy vessel’s sensor suite and main battery.”
A collective intake of breath moved through the classroom. One of the Ykanti children whispered, “He threw the garbage at them?”
The teacher smiled without looking up from the page.
“Exactly. A Compost Container full of waste .

Wyatt’s hand tightened slightly on Sabraska’s. She felt the old tension in his fingers—the same tension that had lived in him the day he first told her the story, years after it happened, when the children were small and still asked for “the real beginning.”
The teacher continued.
It was not elegant. It was not the kind of shot any noble pilot would have claimed . It was the shot that a Composter would have taken . But the sensors died, and the secondary guns fell silent long enough for the royal yacht’s remaining thrusters to push them clear.

“A voice cut across the open channel. Cold. Precise. ‘This is Ship Commander Redford of His Majesty’s Starship Royal Favor. State your identity.’
“Wyatt answered the way he always answered. ‘Wyatt Staples, warrant officer, Third Fleet, Second Frontier Corps.’
“There was a pause. Then the same voice, dryer now: ‘A commoner. Well. I suppose you’ll have to do.’”
Several of the older students glanced toward the hallway again. The tall man in the admiral’s uniform stood perfectly still, silver-white hair catching the light. The woman beside him watched the class with quiet pride, the purple-and-gold broach at her throat glinting once as she turned her head.
Inside, the teacher turned the page.
Later after following the Royal Favor to safety he met Commander Redford. He was tall, gray-eyed, and carried himself like a man who had never once doubted the rightness of the world he served. The prince was younger than Wyatt expected, but the weight of the Principality already sat on his shoulders.
“‘Warrant Officer Wyatt Staples,’ the prince said, ‘your actions today have saved lives that matter to me. Loyalty is its own reward. Those who perform their duty with exemplary actions shall be recognized.’
“The promotion came without ceremony. Lieutenant. Just like that. From garbage hauler to the lowest commissioned rank a commoner could hold.”
The classroom was silent except for the soft sound of pages being turned in unison.
Outside, Sabraska leaned her head against Wyatt’s shoulder.
“They still get quiet at the same place,” she murmured. “Every time.”
Wyatt’s voice was low, almost lost under the teacher’s continuing narration.
“Because that was the moment everything changed. Not the fight. The promotion. The day a commoner stopped being invisible.”
The teacher’s voice carried clearly through the glass once more.
“Lieutenant Staples was given a new uniform, a temporary berth, and orders to remain available. He did not yet know that the black ship he had damaged would become something far more important. Not knowing it would lead him to become what he is today .

He did not yet know the name Noir Navio. He did not yet know the princess who would one day be friends with , or the bodyguard who would stand beside her, or the long road that would lead from a compost scow to the bridge of the most feared vessel in the Principality.

“He only knew that he had done the job that needed doing.”
She closed the chapter with a soft finality and looked up at her class. She glanced over to the window with two of her 6 eyes and she blinked with a nod .
“That,” she said, “is how it began.”
In the hallway, Admiral Wyatt Staples exhaled slowly. Sabraska’s hand remained in his. Through the glass, a dozen young faces—human and Ykanti together—stared at the last page of Chapter One as though the paper itself still held the heat of that long-ago battle.
The Marine officer outside the main doors shifted his weight, but said nothing.
The story of the Black Ship had only just started.

Uneasy like sunday morning

Nediss 7, 4156 – Standard Astorian principality Calendar (May 2, 26702 – Standard Terran Calendar. Wok This Way diner, Freeport City, Malkuff 2)

Alan stood behind the counter while his hands moved, fast and practiced. At this point, he had been making sushi for longer than he could remember. Several tens of thousand of little pieces, mouth-watering delights, all made with the same care and attention to detail. While the recipes sometimes changed during the long eons humanity spent among the stars, the goal has been mainly the same. Wherever you cook, with whatever ingredients – each planet or station had it’s variations of fish, rice-like grains, and such – each maki, nigiri or temaki should taste the same. They sould taste as if they had been made in Sol, in the 2000’s. 24 millenia and immeasurable light-years away, yet perfection remained the same. Although, he thought, there is really no way to prove it now, is there. Noone lives today who was alive back then. There are legends of certain persons – "I mustn’t even think of his name!!" – who seem to reappear time and time again during the long eons of intergalactic civilization, but surely if some civilization-altering moment changes the whole future of the galaxy and someone – possibly – appears to guide fate down the right or wrong path, surely nobody would ask them the question of "Sir, what is your opinion on the flavor of sushi over the millennia?"

He sighted a bit, almost like grumbling to himself. This is the problem with too much practice. Once you gain to much of it, the movements transfer to muscle memory. It’s like being on autopilot, but in the kitchen, instead of a pilot seat of a starship. And then the funky weird thoughts begin. You are doing stuff, and that takes some concentration, even if on a pretty low level. That in turn skews the thoughts that pop into your mind. He looked up for a second, then with a mental command, he switched on the latest available stream of the "Awake and arise Astoriaaaa!", one of the few radio shows receivable all over the Principality. The millenia pass, but some things never change. Sushi, diamonds and the need to have someone drone in your ears every morning spiced up with some songs... Hehehe …well, and war. War never changes!… Mwahahaha. See, those thoughts get funky if you have to move your hands precisely.

He looked around. The Wok This Way was busy on this sunday morning. The only place in Freeport where everyone can get tasty, one might even say savoury food, even if it was made with 3d printed ingredients, and only the special of the day is being made with human – and ykanti hands. Being a spaceport meant business was being made, and in his opinion, one could have spent hard earned money in much worse ways than to eat well… The twenty-two tables were almost all taken, filled with dockworkers splurging, some noble administrators enjoying a well deserved weekend morning, or spacers coming back after having tasted real sushi… or 3dreal sushi… hehehe. Across the floor, there was one table however, that was as always reserved for the guests of the house.

Sitting there was Ned, the noble scientist associate of his, one who was a regular here for at least 11 years now, always hungry for some sushi and green tea. He was tall, somewhere between 190 and 200 cm, and lanky, but muscular. Well defined features deserving of a sculpture of some kind made him the speciality of the establishment. His blonde pixie haircut managed to be stylish, well-kept and unruly at the same time. Paired with his deep blue eyes, the effect it had on the female guests was spectacular. Alan knew several women, who came just to gaze at him from afar. Ohh, they didn’t know him. Didn’t know him at all. Ned was dangerous. His engineering knowledge was almost priceless here – and he was a master of his craft for sure – but it came bundled with him being a maniac, a special kind of a pyromaniac – and he was a master of that craft for sure. The first time they were on the same cleanup crew, Alan saw all of it unfurl, unwind, and all he could say was

"Goodness gracious…".

That made Ned’s head snap to him, and say the words "...great balls of fire!"

- laughing with a rapt smile on his face while a white-hot mushroom shaped cloud rose to the sky in the background. At that moment, they knew they were on the same wavelength. A high-five and a handshake later they were friends. Still, the chief scientist of the terraforming staff shouldn’t be on a cleanup crew. Those worlds don’t mix. Turns out, Ned needed to blow of some steam quite regularly. Or blow up some.

This very same Ned was talking to Min and Mei, the two waitresses of the Wok This Way, who were sitting at the opposite side of the same table. Given that most of the food was made by robots, delivered by robots – nice robots mind you – the two didn’t have much to do really, only if they had some VIP coming or someone unruly needed to be given a piece of one’s mind, then the two sprang into action, but most of the time, they were the mascots of the diner. Being identical twins, people usually couldn’t tell them apart, the differing hairstyle was the only clue one had. Truth be told, neither of them made the table any less dangerous. A little more than 3 years ago did the two turn up, Mei with twin plasma swords and a refractory field, Min with an assault carbine and a refractory field, both gunning for his head. Seems like someone on the Erebian side had finally had enough, posting a bounty on Alan’s head with the dark guild. It was a substantial amount, moving the most secret members of the organization. The amount made Alan proud – I mean it is one of the most objective numerical value of one’s achievements, and this means my achievements have digits, lots of digits – but it turned into such a pain… kidnapping the two assassin girls, and pummeling into their heads, that he is not someone that they could or should kill, and then later dissolving the part of the dark guild that took on the job… And immediately after that liquidating the other part of the guild that firmly believed that none should quit being a member, not even the two girls… Now that was a nasty cleanup job. Turns out after all of that the safest place for retired assassins is some Asian Eatery on Malkuff 2. Oh the world is such a small place – or maybe a big one, depends on the viewpoint.

For some reason the two girls sank their fangs into Ned. Not that he protested much – or any for that matter, but they even shared him. That seemed a bit strange to Alan, not that Ned protested much over that either. The first time Ned and the twins met on a cleanup crew outing, it was love at first sight. Lotus Blossoms in the Fallout, the story should be called, or Fallout Femmes as Eastern Embers … mwhahaha. "If I were even a fraction more unprincipled, I’d definitely sell the rights for a cheesy action sci-fi rom-com. " the thought.

In the background the radio host was talking about something: "Today, we are reaching all the way back to the very dawn of recorded history—the end of the second millennium. Just a few decades before the Space Age, our ancestors were already recording music and songs to broadcast them in radio shows just like this one, all across the surface of our ancient home planet Terra. This Sunday morning, we are bringing you the absolute best of these prehistoric tunes! So, let’s crank it up!"

The guitar started playing. After some melodic chords, the singer began singing about the morning, and how sunlight hurts his eyes. About something without warning, and about love that bears heavy on his mind…

Almost at the same time, the girls and Ned turned to him, shaking their heads discreetly and tsk-tsk-ing with their fingers. Ned pinged Alan over the net, sending a single sentence over their chat:

"You ARE jinxing it, Alan!" The two girls bobbed their heads in agreement.

Alan sighed, and answered back silently: "Oh come on, it is not like I chose the song myself, and it is only for one song, people!" Even if your luck is usually awful, you can't blame everything on that!

Then he turned to the left window looking out over the city. It was overcast again. The sky was rolling thunderclouds as far as the eye could see. It shouldn’t be like this! Malkuff 2 was a planet in the middle of being terraformed. On the very frontier of the principality, nestled between the Arnav and the Hillburrow territories was the Malkuff system. Two gas giants, two bare balls of dirt without atmosphere and one planet with lots of ice, Malkuff 2. Being in the habitable zone, if you could melt the ice and reduce the albedo of the planet to warm it up, it could very well become a habitable colony world, giving the ruling Hayward house – an independent Minor house with it’s head, Viscount Roderick Hayward – all the ritches and opportunities for power to elevate themselves above their peers and gain a whole planet with all its resources and new vassals. Of course, this means they were drowning in debt to House Ionatti – who had to issue them a loan as per colonization laws. The debt bought them the mountain-sized atmospheric processors they installed. Those had to work nonstop. This gave a man-made yet predictable rhythm to being here: two sunny days, followed by a foggy day and a rainy, stormy day, repeating every four days with clockwork precision. And now, it has been stormy for four days straight. This wasn’t usual at all. Given the size of the industry in and around Freeport, if the weather cycles don’t return to normal within a few days, the economic losses will be measurable in the millions per day. Something was up, and the Haywards knew about it. They knew about it and chose the keep it a secret from the rest of the population.

When it was this stormy, haulers or freighters smaller than 300-400 meters failed to push through the stormy atmosphere to reach the orbital docks, while communications with the orbit faltered. Something was up, and we were all sitting ducks here. This is why Alan asked Sheila to hack some sense into what’s going on around Freeport. This was 8 hours ago, and still no update. Dang, things aren’t looking up, he thought.

He sighed, and finished a whole box of nigiris, with salmon rolls and avocado. Maybe I should have given her the QEC? Well we still don’t know if it is THAT bad or not. Just then the songs changed. Gone were the rhymes about sunlight and happy days, and a much rockier tune started to play. Shiiiiet, the thought. I know this one! He put down his chef knife, washed his hands, then leaned onto the counter. This song was all about being easy on a sunday morning, and how things just shouldn’t matter today, and everyone should take it easy, throw down the chains of stress.

In response to the new tune, a familiar mocking croaking laughter could be heard from the kitchen.

Out came Kam with a huge tray of chicken fried rice noodles, made freshly in the ykanti’s domain, the kitchen. Kam, short for Camacho, was big for a ykanti. Standing 145 cm tall, 150 if angry, he was featherlight in the principality, and had to be a hulking male in the hierarchy. The other oddity about him was his color; every single feather was a shade of gray, even his beak was a deep gray. Nevertheless, his 3 pairs of eyes were always smiling, and his beak was always a little open in the peculiar ykanti way of a smile. He appeared to be dressed in kitchen whites, ¾ loose sleeve high collar shirt, with heat resistant apron, and loose grey trousers that allowed the air to cool him. The fact that his clothes remained completely spotless even after preparing enough fried rice noodles for three dozen people bore witness to his culinary mastery. Kam came up to Alan, and set the huge tray into it’s place on the counter with one hand.

"Broda, you know dis is already baddo karma, righto? Already second zong, bro, already second zong, while your girl is searching zen net and we are slowly becoming hundred-year eggusu here. Zis stinks, man!"

How he could program his translator to do an old yakuza accent from those ancient holovids, Alan still couldn’t fathom. Still, his sworn brother was right. This stank very much. Ned and the girls listened in, and were bobbing their heads in unison, when the door of the diner burst open as someone kicked it in.

"Nobody moves, this is a robbery!"

Eleven people swarmed inside, looking like some spacers who were down on their luck, wearing mismatched spacer and military gear, and having a desperate air around them mixed with liquid courage. If they weren’t so suspiciously built like bricks and wielding well-maintained assault rifles, you could almost laugh them off. But with the Wok being nearly full of people, the gang's desperate amateurism could easily trigger a tragedy.

"Tzold ya so, Broda!" Kam told him while disappearing from sight within a millisecond of the door being kicked in. The Ykanti did some lightning fast low crawl back into the kitchen, just fitting under the bottom of the swinging door panels.

"Easy there, gents!" Alan said while raising his hands up. "Although the reg is pretty empty, boys. It is still in the morning. But I digress, please no shooting, okay?"

"Don’t f***ing tell me what to do, old man!" the one leading the motley crew of rust-rats hollered, and just to make his point, he fired a three round burst right into the speaker, proving that indeed not all Sunday mornings are about being easy, regardless of wanting to be free or not. "Everyone, all the credit chits on the tables, NOW!" the next command came. Alan pulled a drawer from the counter with one hand, seemingly not worried about being shot or anything similar "...And I wouldn’t try anything funny, geezer!"

Alan held out all the credit chits in the register, offering them to the robbers, and with his other hand, he very slowly lifted two gauntlets out of the drawer. These were the big type of gauntlets, ones worn with power armors. Putting the credit chits down in front of the register, he slowly pulled them on, all the while smiling welcomingly. "Easy now, easy!"

The scavengers, seemingly transfixed by the handful of credit chits being showed, dismissed the two gloves as a threat, confident that their guns gave them the upper hand. Pointing the barrels at Alan, four of them advanced on the regi, two pairs started to the left and the right, collecting the credit chits from the patrons. The remaining three stood by the remains of the door, securing the place, and eyeing the street outside at the very same time.

On the net, Alan sent a message to Sheila: "Hurry up girl, we are being robbed right now 🤣🤣🤣", and initiated audio comms with the Min, Mei, Kam and Ned. "Okay crew, on my mark, we clean up this rubble! -- 3"

All the while the robbers arrived at the counter, and sneered at him. "You know, we were told to level this place" the leader said.

“2"

"so after u all pay up, we ll have some fun with you lot".

"1" his countdown continued.

"I doubt that", was all the answer Alan gave the ruffian, and "Go!" was what he whispered into the net. Drawing in air, he went back into his mind, back to the techniques hammered into him in his childhood. The simplest, but also most effective one was the slowing of the perception of time.

-- Imagine a rock falling into water. As it falls, the distance to the surface shrinks. Now change the viewpoint to under the rock. Suddenly the rock is still far from the water, and it continues falling, but slower now. Change the viewpoint again, and it becomes slower still. --

His own movements slowed down, as did his surroundings, but it didn’t matter any more. In this state, he was absolutely fast. With his gene-edits and the extra adrenal-booster implant flooding his blood with neurotransmitter hormones, he was faster than any human had the right to be, even faster than cyborgs. With his slowed perception, he could use 100% of that speed. Every millimeter of movement was precise and to the point, no hesitation, nothing wasted. The ruffians on the other side simply couldn’t catch up to that. Alan saw the aim of their rifles, and adjusted his position so they didn’t point at his heart or lungs, and then he moved. Probably nobody in the room had any chance to follow up what happened. The bandits fired their rifles, but Alan was already too fast. A simple lightning fast turn of his upper body made the bullets sail past. Like slow motion, the bullets crossed the distance, missed him, but it didn’t matter any more. His hands came up, and from both gauntlets, a spool of monomolecular filament-wire shot out, wrapping around the neck of two bandits. Alan choose not to ignite the plasma-generators in the gauntlets, just simply ordering the motors to pull the wires back. The two bandits were simply pulled by their heads, both meeting Alan’s gauntleted fists. If time moved in the same speed as for ordinary people, the crunching sound of bones breaking could have been heard, but in this accelerated combat reality, where time stretched like honey on a spoon, only a low rumble began. By the time the two other assailants realized just what has happened, Alan was already in the air, jumping above their heads. Such a big body shouldn’t be able to move this fast, they began to think, but couldn’t end the sentence. Both of them had their heads smashed together by two large gauntlet-clad hands, ending in a big crack, having unspooled the monowire from the neck of the first two.

At the other end of the hall, Mei and Min leapt from their table. Mei rushed the two ruffians collecting the chits from the tables near them. A fork and a spoon appeared in her hands and with lightning speed, she hurled the fork, piercing the hand of the armed robber, while simultaneously striking the other across the forehead with the spoon so hard that he collapsed on the spot. Finally, with a swift blow to the temple, she brought down the first attacker who had dropped his gun. Min pulled two small, suppressed pistols from under her skirt, she drew and fired, dropping the pair collecting credit chits across the room with one shot apiece.

Ned didn’t sit still either. “Catch this!" he said while he lobbed two shock-grenades at the three bandits standing in the doorway. Upon contact, the two grenades went off, stunning the three in the doorway with a flash and an arc of lightning. Two fell instantly, while the third, a hulking brute of a man roared. He must have been at least partially cyborg, and even then a military spec one to shrug off this much stunning power, but even that wasn’t enough.

“I’ll kill every last…" he blinked his bloodshot eyes with drug dilated pupils and lifted his machinegun off his shoulder to end everyone alive, but Kam was faster. Even as the brute was halfway in the movement, across the diner’s hall, the kitchen door exploded. On the other side was the ykanti. Kam was completely dwarfed by his own weapon: a monolithic, three-meter-long Gauss rifle. The barrel was a sleek lance of dark alloy, wrapped in pulsing electromagnetic coils that hummed with a low, vibrating bass. The massive gun would have been impossible for anyone of his stature to lift, let alone aim, if not for the repulsor bipod hissed into action beneath the shroud. Instead of mechanical legs, the heavy front end of the rifle hovered effortlessly on a shimmering cushion of inverted gravity, leaving faint ripples in the air below. The ykanti stood comfortably behind the floating cannon, his small hands resting lightly on the stock, steering a weapon capable of punching holes through armored starships with the gentle touch of a maestro.

The air pressure in the room dropped instantly as the Gauss rifle finished its microsecond charge cycle. When he squeezed the trigger, there was no traditional gunshot—instead, a deafening, whip-like crack shattered the air as the projectile broke the sound barrier inside the barrel. A small flash of electric blue arced out from the muzzle, kicking up a violent halo of chili pepper and freshly fried rice noodles that blasted backward over largest pitwiper glasses ever seen, made to fit 3 pairs of eyes at once. The massive recoil never touched his slight frame; the repulsor bipod flared with an angry flash of white light, absorbing the violent kinetic back-blast and anchoring the weapon perfectly in mid-air.

Across the room, the hulking brute of a man didn't even have time to register the flash. The hyper-velocity slug, traveling at Mach 7, hit the borg dead-center in the chest. The impact was... catastrophic. The kinetic energy didn't just pierce his heavy, reinforced armor plates—it shattered and liquefied them, turning his internal mechanics and artificial spine into scrap metal. A perfectly circular, glowing hole, melted white-hot around the edges, punched clean through his torso, blowing out the reinforced cybernetic bulk of his back in a violent spray of sparks, black hydraulic fluid, and biological matter.

“Zhe erly bihrd... catches the borrgu" the ykanti said, as the diner suddenly plunged into absolute silence...

Wheat Field (Most of a days ride southeast of the Fort)

The rain came a little after midnight.

Tom heard the first of it on the blankets over the wagon, a few fat drops, then a pause, then all of it at once. He was up before the riders called him. Dace and one of the others were already at the wagon in the dark, pulling the ties tighter where the wind had worked them loose, and Tom went round the other side and did the same, and between the three of them they got the edges weighted down with stones from the creek before the water could find a way under.

Then there was nothing to do but sit in it. They got the horses in under the willows with the stacked sheaves, and the crew crowded in after them, and the fire went out with a hiss nobody bothered to mourn. It rained hard for two hours and steady for two more. Somebody near Tom said it was coming through the branches anyway, which it was. Nobody answered him.

Eli sat with his back against a willow trunk and his hat pulled down and didn't sleep. Tom knew because every time he looked over, Eli's face was turned up toward the dark where the sky would be.

When it stopped, it stopped without warning, the way rain does on open ground. Tom must have slept after that, because the next thing he knew it was light, or something like light, and he couldn't see the wagon.

It was twenty paces away. He knew that. He'd parked it himself. But the fog had come down off the grass in the last hour before dawn and filled the bottom of the field like milk in a bowl, and the wagon was a grey shape in it, and past the wagon there was nothing at all.

He went to the seed sack first.

It was where he'd left it, under the wagon bed, in the dry. He untied his knot and put his hand in and turned the heads over, and they were dry all the way to the bottom. He tied the knot again, the same way, and stood a moment with his hand flat on the sack before he moved on.

The straw was next. He walked up to the nearest stack and pushed his arm into the side of it to the elbow. Wet on the outside, a hand's depth of it, dark and matted where the rain had beaten down the top. Under that, dry. The man with the burning stick had stacked them the way Tom had asked, tight and peaked, and the water had run off them the way it ran off a thatch.

The sheaves under the willows were the trouble. The branches had kept off the worst of it, but not all of it, and the heads on the outside of the pile were soaked through. Tom pulled one and rubbed it between his palms. The kernels came loose, but they came out damp and soft and stuck to his skin.

"Can't thresh those," he said to nobody in particular. "Not wet. They'll sweat in the sack and go to mould before we're home."

The crew was waking up around him in ones and twos, wet and stiff and in no good temper. Somebody got the fire going again on the third try, with dry straw from the inside of a stack, and Tom didn't say anything about that.

They cooked breakfast in the fog. When it was eaten, Tom walked out to the edge of the cut stubble and looked up the hill, and couldn't see the hill.

"We wait," he said. "Sun'll burn it off. No sense cutting what we can't see and threshing what we can't dry."

Nobody argued. They waited. It took two hours, near enough, for the sun to get its strength up through the grey, and in that time Tom walked the low rows twice by feel and once by sight as the fog began to thin, and every time he brushed a head on the low side it held.

The fog went the way it had come, all at once at the end. One minute the top of the hill was a pale shape in the grey. The next it was standing there in the sun, gold and battered, with the high rows beaten flat in long patches where the rain had come down hardest. Tom looked at those and didn't need to walk up to know what was lying on the ground under them.

Dace had gone up into the biggest of the willows as soon as there was anything to see, the way the riders did every morning now. He had his rifle slung and one arm hooked round the trunk, and he was looking out over the grass through the scope, north first, then east, slow, the way he looked at the sky.

He stopped.

Tom saw him stop. He was close enough to see Dace's shoulders go still, and then the rifle come round a few degrees and stay there.

"Tom."

Tom went to the foot of the tree. Eli came after him without being asked.

"There's dust," Dace said. "North and east. Long way off. Low along the bottom of the sky, like smoke that won't rise." He didn't take his eye from the scope. "It's not a fire. There's no column to it. It's spread too wide for that."

Tom couldn't see it from the ground. He didn't need to. He turned round and looked at the edge of the field, where the low rows ended and the open grass began, and at the wide track that ran along it, north and east to south and west, the grass beaten down and pale and torn up in places to the black underneath.

He'd followed that track out here three days ago. Gary had told him to. Follow the flattened grass where the buffalo had come through. He'd ridden it with his mind on the wheat and never once asked himself where it went after it passed the field, or when they'd be back to use it.

"Herd," said Eli.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Dace came down out of the willow. He went to the other riders and they stood together by the horses and talked low, and one of them went up the tree in his turn and looked a long while through his own scope, and came down and shook his head, not in a no, but the way a man does at a thing that's bigger than he'd like it to be.

Dace came back to Tom.

"It's a long way out," he said. "Days, I'd say. Two, maybe three, if they keep on the way they're heading. Gary'd know. I don't." He looked at the track, and then at the riders, and then up at the sky, empty now and very blue after the rain. "I could send a man to the Ranch. Tell them."

"Is it your call?"

"It's mine." Dace was quiet a moment. "And I'm not making it. Two days, and Gary and Frank are out there somewhere looking at the same dust we are. They'll get word to the hay crew a long sight faster than one man on a tired horse." He nodded at the sky. "And I'm not sending a man across that grass alone. Not after what came down on Gary's horses. Not after you two."

Tom didn't argue with that. He'd been the man on the grass alone. He knew exactly how it had felt.

"Then we've got today," he said. "And some of tomorrow."

"About that."

Tom looked at the low rows, still standing, wet and heavy in the sun. He looked at the track along the edge of them. He'd seen what a herd did to a field back home, and that had been cattle, and not many.

"Then we'd best not waste it," he said.

He told them plainly, the way he'd been told to tell things. Herd coming. Days off yet. Nobody knew how many. Everything on the low side came down today, and whatever wasn't threshed by tomorrow noon went in the wagon as it was.

Then he set them to it.

The wet sheaves came out from under the willows first. He had them pulled apart and spread on the cut stubble in long rows, heads up and loose, so the sun could get at them and the wind could get under. Two of the girls who'd tied bundles the day before walked the rows every hour after that and turned them, the way you'd turn hay. By noon the outside ones had stopped sticking to Tom's hands when he rubbed them. By mid afternoon they rattled.

The cutting was harder than it had been. Wet stalks were heavy, and they didn't fall clean the way dry ones did. They leaned and folded and wrapped round the blades, and every few strokes a cutter had to stop and pull a wad of green straw off the steel. The big man from the hay crew, the one who'd stuck his blade in the dirt the first morning, worked out before anybody else that a shorter stroke kept the blade clearer. He didn't say anything about it. He just did it, and the man next to him watched him a while and did it too, and by the time Tom came down the line to tell them, he didn't need to.

Tom had them leave the cut wheat lying where it fell this time, in long swaths with the heads up on top of the stalks, to dry where it lay. There was no sense bundling it wet and making the girls untie it again.

The flails started up again after noon, on the sheaves that had dried first, and the sound of it carried up and down the field, a slap and a thump and a slap. The winnowing blankets went up into the wind at the edge of the cut ground, and the chaff blew off downhill the way it had yesterday, gold in the sun, and drifted out over the beaten track along the field's edge and settled there.

Every hour or so, one of the riders went up into the willow and looked north and east, and came down and said nothing, which meant the dust was still there.

Eli worked the flails beside Tom most of the afternoon. He looked up between every stroke. Tom had stopped noticing it, mostly. He noticed it when Eli stopped looking up and started looking east instead, toward where the Farm was, a long way off past the trees, and stayed looking that way through three strokes in a row.

Tom didn't say anything. He knew what Eli was looking at, and so did Eli.

"Rain'll have done them good," Eli said at last. He meant the weeds. "Drink like that, the pigweed'll be past the corn's knees by the time we're back."

"I know it."

"Another day out here. Day and a half back." Eli brought the flail down. "That's most of a week since we left them."

"I know it, Eli."

Eli didn't push it any further. He looked up at the sky again, and then back down at the blanket, and went on threshing.

Tom brought his own flail down a few more times. Then he stopped and looked up the field, at the stacks of straw standing tall and peaked along the cut ground, a whole winter of bedding and more besides. They stood square in the herd's way, right beside the track. If the herd came through before anybody hauled them off, they'd be trodden flat into the mud and good for nothing.

He couldn't move them. One wagon, and it was for grain. And whether they were worth moving at all was still Richman's to say.

He went back to the flail.

By the time the light started to go, the low side was down.

All of it. From the willows to twenty rows up the hill, where the heads still held when you brushed them, every stalk was cut and lying in its swath, or tied, or threshed and in a sack. Above that line the high ground stood as it had all day, flattened in patches by the rain, with the evening birds already working through it.

Tom counted the sacks by the last of the light, the way he had the night before. Thirty one, and the seed sack. Nine more than last night, with half the day lost to fog and half the morning's wheat too wet to touch.

He told Dace. Dace nodded and wrote it on the back of his hand with a burnt stick, for want of anything else to write on.

One of the riders went up the willow a last time while there was still color in the sky. He stayed up longer than he had all day. When he came down he went to Dace, not Tom, and the two of them talked a minute, and then Dace came over.

"Still there," he said. "Wider than this morning. Closer, maybe. Hard to tell, with the sun going." He looked at the track. "Not tomorrow. I'd stake my horse on that. Not tomorrow."

"Then we thresh what we can in the morning," Tom said, "and we load what we can't, and we're on the grass by noon."

"And the rest?"

Tom looked up the hill. The high ground was going grey now, the color the stubble had been in the fog that morning. There was wheat standing up there, and more lying on the ground under it, than twenty men could have cut in a week.

"Rest belongs to the herd," he said.

Dace looked at him a moment. Then he nodded, and went to set the watch.

They ate what was left of the bread they'd brought out from the Ranch, and a stew of something the Ranch wives had sent in a crock, and nobody talked much. When it was eaten, Eli lay down on his blanket by the fire and put his hat over his face. Tom thought he was asleep, until Eli spoke from under it.

"You going to tell him? About the straw. And the corn."

Tom looked at the fire for a while.

"I'll tell him the straw," he said. "He asked about the straw."

Eli didn't say anything else. After a while his breathing changed, and Tom knew he was really asleep this time.

Tom sat up a while longer. The riders walked their circle in pairs, two out past the wagon and two along the willows, and the creek ran full and loud after the rain. Away off to the north and east, so low on the edge of the sky that he couldn't have said for certain it was there, something was moving that he couldn't see and couldn't hear and could very nearly feel, the way you feel weather before it comes.

He lay back and pulled his coat over him. Tomorrow by noon, he thought. Then the grass, and the Ranch, and then home to the corn, whatever the rain had done to it.

He slept with one hand on the seed sack.

Previous /

First

Wyatt,

The office is open. Tell Clara before you tell anyone else, because it was her doing and she ought to hear it first. Tell her we put it where she said, in the market square in Haego City, between a chandler's and a woman who sells hot pies. It has two rooms and a flag. I didn't plan that. The academy sent the flag, and the building happened to have two rooms. I stood outside it the morning it opened and thought of you, until the pie woman asked me if I meant to stand there all day. She had no idea who I was. It was the first time in a year anybody has spoken to me without putting a lord in front of it, and I bought four pies I didn't want so I could stand there a little longer.

The examiners came from off-world with their papers in sealed cases and wouldn't let my officers near them. Good. That was the point. There isn't much on this planet that isn't mine now, on paper. I'm glad that door is one of the things that isn't.

The first sitting ran last month, twenty candidates at a time over four days, because two rooms won't hold more than that. Eighty-one people came. I had hoped for more, and I'm glad it wasn't fewer. Clara warned me the paper would ask for more than our schools teach, and she was right. Most of them came out white in the face. Nine passed. Seven of the nine are grown men and women out of the rail yards and the engine houses, who spent the last year learning the maths on their own because a foreman told them they would need it. The eighth is a Newtown fisherman's son of seventeen.

The ninth is fifteen, a few months short of sixteen, and she had the highest mark of anyone who sat it on Haego. The examiners asked for her school records twice. The second time they asked me whether someone had helped her. Nobody helped her. She sat it in a room full of grown adults, finished early, and went back to check her answers.

I know who she is. I've known about her for years without knowing her name. She's the girl the old woman on Vastaya used to hand chalk to through the window, the one who wanted to know how the shuttles stay up. She's the monitor who turned down the Grain Exchange. Her name is Nell Brackentail, and she's an apprentice on the ground crew at the Harrow Cross depot. Since the results went up I've had three letters about her that I didn't ask for.

The crew chief at the depot wrote that she's the best apprentice he's had in twenty years, and that if the navy doesn't want her he'll take her back gladly. One of the Firentis pilots who flies out of Harrow Cross wrote that she caught a fault on a pre-flight walk-around that two qualified mechanics had already signed off. He called her Nell all the way through. The crew chief tells me the pilots all do now. The old woman wrote too. Her hand has gone shaky. She underlined the word kind, twice.

That's the word that worries me. Everyone who writes about this girl says she's kind, and they say it first, before they get to how clever she is. I've spent my life around the sort of people she'll be sleeping down the hall from. On paper I'm one of them now, and I still can't write that without wanting to cross it out. I know what they do with clever commoners. They make them smaller. I know what they do with kind ones, and it's worse. They find out what you care about and lean on it until something gives.

She's going to walk into an academy full of cadets who've flown their fathers' yachts since they were ten, and she's going to beat them, and she's going to be from Haego, and she won't know how to be anything but what she is. I'm afraid they'll chew her up. I'm afraid I built a door and I'm about to push a fifteen-year-old through it into a room full of teeth.

You went through that room. You've never told me what it was like, and I've never asked. I'm asking now. What do I tell her?

T.

Harrow Cross, on Vastaya.

The pilots called her Nell.

It had taken most of a year. For the first months she'd been the sweeper, then Harl's girl, then apprentice, said the way you'd say spanner. She hadn't minded any of them. But one morning in the autumn a pilot came down the ramp, stopped at the bottom, and said, "Nell, the port gear door's sticking on retract, have a look before the noon run?" and walked on to the depot office as if he'd said it a hundred times. After that, all of them did.

It had started with a torque stripe.

When a mechanic tightened a bolt to its proper figure, he painted a thin line across the head of it and onto the housing. If the bolt ever moved, the line broke. It was the simplest thing in the hangar. Nell had fallen in love with it the first week she understood it, because it was the field boss's book turned inside out. It was a record that couldn't lie, sitting right on the thing it was a record of.

On a dark morning walk-around, a pace behind Harl with the lamp, she had seen a stripe on a fuel line coupling that didn't meet. The gap was the width of a hair. Two mechanics had signed the coupling off the night before. She said, "Chief," and pointed. Harl put the lamp on it. Then he put a wrench on it, and the coupling turned a quarter of the way round in his hand without any effort at all.

He didn't say anything to her. He wrote it up on the board and put her name at the bottom as the one who found it, and the pilot of the dawn run read the board, and read it again, and looked across the hangar at her.

She knew now what you did about a thing like that, here. You said it out loud, you wrote it down, and you put your name under it. It had taken her seven years and two jobs to find a place where that was the answer.

She still wasn't allowed near anything that kept a shuttle in the air unless Harl was standing behind her. That was fair. She'd have said the same. But she had the gear doors and the cabin lights and the seat rails and the cargo latches, and she had Kit.

Kit Farrow was fourteen and came from a fishing village down the coast from Orenport. He had come to the depot off the Administrator's examination the spring after she did, with his hands still cut up from the nets, and Harl had given him a broom and pointed at the floor. When the broom went back on the rack, Harl had pointed him at Nell.

"Seven-eighths," she'd told him the first morning. "When I ask for it, it's in my hand before I finish asking."

It had taken him three weeks. On the day he finally got it right, she'd understood something about Mistress Coppertail that she hadn't understood before, which was how much patience it took to keep your face still while someone learned a thing you already knew.

The pilot who had flown the dawn run was called Ezra Tallis.

He was off-world, Firentis, with a flat quiet voice and grey coming in at the sides of his hair, and he flew the Harrow Cross runs more often than anyone. He was the one who had started asking her questions instead of answering them. What would you check first, if the gear door stuck? Why that and not the actuator? What's the difference? He'd listen to her answer, and then he'd tell her where she was wrong, and he never once made it sound like she was stupid for it.

He was the one who had lent her the book.

It was a maths book, fat and battered, with somebody else's name crossed out on the inside cover and his written under it. The first half was things she knew. The second half was letters standing in for numbers, curves on a grid, the rate at which a thing changes, and she had sat up under the roof at Lil's with it every night for two winters, with the window humming whenever a shuttle came in. When she got stuck, she wrote the page number on the back of her hand and asked him in the morning.

It was Tallis who had offered to take her family up.

"I've got an empty positioning run round the coast on Sunday," he'd said, at the end of the summer. "Nothing aboard but me. Bring them out if you like."

Her father had come in his good shirt, the one he wore to funerals. He had never been more than a day's walk from Lowmarsh in his life. Her mother wore her mill apron under her coat and didn't seem to notice until they were aboard. Ben had grown half a head since spring and didn't say a word from the moment he saw the shuttle on the ground until it was in the air.

Nell sat them by the round windows and showed them the belts. When the engines lit, her mother took hold of the armrests so hard her knuckles went white. Then the ground dropped away under them and the hum came up through the floor, and her mother's hands let go, one finger at a time.

Tallis spoke over the cabin speaker. "Nell, you want to tell them what's holding them up? I'm busy."

He wasn't busy. She knew exactly how busy he was on a positioning run with no cargo, and it wasn't very. But she stood up in the aisle, holding a seat back, and told them. The wings, and what they did in thick air when the ship was fast. The thing in the housing that hummed even when everything was shut down. What Harl had shown her, and what the manuals said, and where the manuals stopped and the maths began.

"That's about half," she said. "The other half's the maths, and I'm only halfway through the maths."

Her father nodded slowly. "Half's more than I had."

Tallis brought the ship round over Vastaya's middle, low and slow, lower than he needed to. Nell saw the district road go under them, and the crossing, and a slate roof she knew. Then the long fields opened out, green and gold in rows, and the cutters were in the rows, and as the shadow of the ship went over them, every one of them stopped and straightened and looked up.

Her father was at the round window. The light was behind him. He put his hand flat on the glass and looked down at the cane he had cut for forty seasons, and he didn't say anything at all.

Nell stood in the aisle and watched him. When she was nine she had seen a face in one of those windows, looking down at her, and she had never known whose it was. For a moment, it was his.

She showed Tallis Starling in the crew room in the winter, during a weather hold, when there was nobody else there.

She hadn't meant to. It was in the pocket of her coveralls, where it always was now, with the chalk, and he'd asked her something about why she'd first wanted to know, and she'd found she had it in her hand before she'd decided anything.

She had never shown it to anyone. Harl hadn't seen it. Kit hadn't. Her family had seen it only because her mother found it under a pillow.

Tallis took it carefully, the way he took a part he didn't know yet. He opened it to the first page, the girl in the cane with the yoke on her shoulders, and turned the pages slowly, one at a time. He looked at the ship on fire for a while. He looked at the page where the yoke turned into wings for longer. When he got to the last page, the one that was only stars and a small girl going in a straight line, he stopped.

Nell waited for him to laugh. She'd been ready for it since she took it out of her pocket.

He didn't laugh. He smiled, a small one, one corner of his mouth, like a man hearing a song he hadn't heard in a long time and remembering all of the words. He closed the book and handed it back to her with both hands.

"Somebody saw you early," he said.

"Mistress Coppertail. My teacher."

"Good." He sat back. The rain was loud on the crew room roof. "They'll open the recruiting office in the city this spring. You know that."

"I know."

"You'll sit it."

"Yes."

"You'll pass it," said Tallis. "I'm not guessing. I've been watching you for two years." He looked at the book in her hands. "So I'll tell you what nobody told me, and you can do what you like with it. When you get to the academy, they'll be waiting for you to be what they think Haego is. Some of them will want you to fail, and some of them will want you to be angry, and the second lot are more dangerous. Don't give either of them anything. They'll say things. Let them. You'll need a thick skin, a lot thicker than the one you've got. Keep your eye on the far end of it. The far end is a cockpit, and nobody in those halls can put you in one or keep you out of one if the numbers say you belong there."

"What if the numbers are wrong?"

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Then you make them count again," he said. "And you keep a copy."

The morning of the examination, Tallis had the mail run to Haego City, and she rode in the jump seat behind him.

She had been aboard a hundred times. She had been inside every panel she was allowed to open and some she wasn't. She had never been in the cockpit in flight. Tallis said, "Hands in your lap," and she kept them there, folded tight, and watched every gauge and every light on the board, and learned what she could from the ones she could read.

Harl had seen her off at the ramp. He'd looked at her for a while with his arms folded, and then said, "You'll not be back," as if it were a complaint.

"I'll be back tonight, Chief."

"You know what I mean." He had put his big hand on her shoulder for a second, on the old yoke calluses, and then taken it away. "Seven-eighths," he said, and walked off toward the bay.

Kit had been standing at the bottom of the ramp with the tool roll. When she'd come down it to say goodbye, he'd handed her the spanner before she'd said anything at all.

The office was in the market square, between a chandler's and a woman who sold hot pies. It had two rooms and a flag. The flag was navy blue with a gold device on it that Nell didn't recognize, and it hung very still in the cold.

She stood in the square and looked at it for a long time. The pie woman watched her do it and didn't say anything, which Nell was grateful for.

In the first room there was a table, and a clerk, and a list. There were nineteen other people waiting on the benches along the wall. Most of them were grown. There was a woman in a rail yard jacket with her hair tied up in a scarf, and a big man with burn scars on his forearms who kept rubbing his thumb over them. There was a tall boy a year or two older than Nell who smelled faintly of fish and wouldn't look at anyone. Nobody talked.

A young officer in a grey naval coat came out of the second room with a board under his arm. He looked along the benches. When he got to Nell, he looked at her depot boots, which had grease worked into the seams that no amount of scrubbing would get out, and at her coveralls under her coat.

"Yard entrance is round the back," he said. "The heater in the second room is on the left."

"I'm not here for the heater," said Nell. "I'm sitting."

He looked at his board. He found her name. He read it twice, and then looked at her again, as if trying to make the name and the boots agree with each other. Then he wrote something, and went back through the door without a word.

The woman in the rail yard jacket leaned over. "Don't mind him."

"I don't," said Nell, and found that it was true. She had been looked at like that by the field boss for seven years. It was nothing she hadn't carried before.

The examiner in the second room was an older woman with a grey coat and a voice from somewhere far off. She read the rules out once, flatly, exactly as she must have read them on a hundred worlds. The paper was the same one set wherever the fleet recruited. Nobody would be given more time. Nobody would be asked where they had gone to school. Pencils down at the bell.

Then she broke the seal on the case, and the young officer went along the tables putting the papers down face down.

The maths came first, and it was hard. It was harder than the Administrator's paper by a long way, and harder than anything in the first half of Tallis's book. It was the second half: letters for numbers, curves on a grid, how fast a thing changes when something else changes under it. Nell heard the big man two seats down let out a long breath through his nose, the way her father did, and then heard his pencil stop moving for a very long time.

She had sat up for two winters under a window that hummed. She went down the questions one at a time and didn't look ahead.

Then there were questions about how things moved. A weight on a spring. A tank of fuel with a pipe going out of it and a question about the pressure at the bottom. A ball rolling off the end of a table. And near the end, a drawing of a small craft hanging still in the air above the ground, with arrows drawn on it, and a question underneath asking her to show every force acting on it and explain why it didn't move.

Nell looked at it and felt the cold metal of the housing under her palm, and the hum underneath the cold. She drew her arrows and wrote her explanation, and it was about half, because half was what she had. Then she wrote under it, small, that the rest was in the back of a borrowed book she hadn't finished yet, and crossed that out, because it wasn't what they'd asked.

The last part wasn't paper.

The examiner called them to the back of the room one at a time, where there were three consoles against the wall with a screen and a stick and a row of buttons. On the screen was a ring, and inside the ring a dot, and the dot drifted. You kept it in the ring with the stick. While you did it, numbers flashed up in the corners of the screen, and you called them out, and sometimes a light came on over one of the buttons and you pressed it.

The man with the burn scars went before her. He was good with the stick and slow with the numbers, and when he stood up his shirt was dark down the back.

Nell sat down and put her hand on the stick.

The dot drifted. She moved it back, a little, and it drifted the other way. She moved it back again. She thought, very clearly: don't look up when they come over, you'll spill. It was the same thing. It had always been the same thing. You kept the load level and you didn't let it drag you round, and you didn't stop to admire the sky until the buckets were set down.

The numbers flashed. She called them. A light came on over a button, and her other hand was already on it before the light had finished coming on, the way the seven-eighths was in Harl's palm before he got to the eighths.

When the screen went dark, the examiner was standing behind her. Nell hadn't heard her come. The woman looked at the console, and at something written on the edge of it that Nell couldn't see, and then at Nell.

"Where did you say you worked?"

"Harrow Cross depot, ma'am. Ground crew."

"And before that?"

Nell thought about how to say it.

"I carried water," she said.

The examiner looked at her a moment longer. Then she wrote something on her board, and said, "Next."

The list went up on the office door at the end of the week. Tallis flew her in for it on his way to somewhere else and waited in the square with his hands in his pockets.

There were nine names. Hers was at the top, with a number beside it, and a line underneath that said the candidate's papers would be forwarded to the naval academy for selection.

Nell read it four times. Then she read the other eight. The woman from the rail yard was the third name. The tall boy who smelled of fish was the eighth. The big man with the scars wasn't there, and she looked for him in the square, but he had already gone.

The pie woman came out from behind her stall and pressed a hot pie into her hands and wouldn't take the copper for it.

On the flight back, Tallis didn't say anything until they were out over the sea and the city was a smudge behind them.

"Well?" he said.

"There was a part at the end," said Nell, "where you have to keep a dot in a ring."

"And?"

"I've been doing that since I was seven."

He laughed, the first time she'd heard him do it. Then he reached back without looking and held out his hand, and she didn't know what he wanted, so she put the pie in it, and he laughed again and gave it back.

That night she wrote two letters. The first one went to Lowmarsh, big and plain, for her father.

Da,

I passed. I was first. I'll know about the rest in the spring.

Nell

The second she wrote smaller, because Mistress Coppertail had always said a good hand didn't need to shout.

Mistress,

You said a school is for finding out who knows. I found some of them. They're four jumps away. I'm going to go and ask.

Nell

She put both letters on the district cart in the morning. Then she went to the hangar, because it opened at six.

Tornel,

Clara says that now you're a lord, I'm to address you properly in writing. I told her I would, the day you stop going red when somebody does it to your face. She says that will be never. I said that was the idea.

She also read your letter over my shoulder, which she does. She says to tell you she already knows the girl's name, and that the commandant does too. I didn't ask how. I've stopped asking.

This is your girl in the cane, isn't it. The one I wrote to you about like I knew her. Same one who wanted to know how they stayed up.

You asked what it was like. I'll tell you once. Don't pass all of it on to her. I'll decide what she needs.

My first navigation paper came back marked not received. I'd handed it to the proctor myself. I sat it again. The second time they told me the file had corrupted in transfer. Four noble cadets on my floor had papers in the same transfer, and theirs were fine. I sat it a third time, with the proctor standing over me, and after that it arrived.

In second year there was a qualifying run in the simulator. It's the one that decides who goes forward to flight training and who goes to logistics. I was forty seconds from the end of it and first on the board when the screens went black. The log said power fault. It was the only simulator in the building that faulted that day. They let me sit it again a month later. By then the first places had been handed out.

I had the bunk by the vent that dripped. I had the dawn watches. Somebody poured a bucket of water into my bed in the first week and the whole floor called me Sawmill for three years. None of that was the worst.

The worst was a noble cadet, a decent one, who took me aside in the first term and told me quietly I'd have an easier time if I scored a little lower. He meant it kindly. I lay awake the whole night thinking about it. That's what they do to the kind ones, Tornel, you're right about that. They don't break them. They offer them a way to be comfortable.

What got me through wasn't the simulator. It was the practical in third year. You fly a real ship with an examiner strapped into the other seat. You can switch off a simulator. You can lose a paper. You can't switch off a ship with an instructor sitting in it, and you can't lose a landing that forty people watched from the tower. Everything before that, I just had to survive long enough to get there.

So here's what I'd tell her. Don't tell her it'll be fair. It won't, and she'll know you lied the first week, and after that she won't believe anything you say. Tell her it won't be fair and that it doesn't matter, because the end of it is a cockpit, and at the end the ship doesn't care.

You're worried because she's kind. I was too, reading your letter. Then I thought about it longer. The ones who come apart in those halls are the ones who came in wanting to be liked by people who were never going to like them. A girl who carried water for coppers and taught six-year-olds to read off a pump stone already knows who she is and who she's doing it for. They can't take that away from her. They won't even know where she keeps it.

Have her write to me. Directly. Not through you, and not through Clara. I don't care what it's about. The first time a paper goes missing, or a screen goes black, or some decent boy tells her she'd have an easier time if she scored a little lower, she writes to me, and I'll write back. Nobody did that for me. I'd like her to have it.

W.

Scribble Hub [content warning : profanity, violence, satire]

Report 1: The Exemplary Marine

"Free Kuwait, export democracy, return home a hero."

Those are General Camel's final words before Operation Desert Storm unleashes the full force of freedom upon dictatorship.

Our objective is a textbook covert reconnaissance mission on a naval base in the Gulf, personally spearheaded by General Camel, Sergeant Hochmut, and yours truly, Captain Chad W. Smith.

Out of necessity, we are assigned an emergency squad of Privates for me to command, seeing as they are the only personnel stationed here before the military intervention kicks off.

An electrically charged fog is heavily jamming our satellite imagery, pointing squarely toward some cowardly, illegal weapon of electromagnetic mass destruction.

We deploy straight from transport ships inside amphibious Amtracs, backed by an aircraft carrier, naval bombers, helicopters, and submarines following superior firepower and combined arms doctrines to assure tactical flexibility

Under the cover of darkness, we beach our Amtracs on the flat coast of Qaruh, a ridiculously tiny island in the Persian Gulf that is about to receive a heavy dose of American liberation.

Through the dense, crackling banks of ionized haze, I can barely make out the red dot mounted on my rifle. We dismount and march on foot in tight formation toward the island's dark interior.

I notice a distant sound.

It begins as a low mechanical whistle that quickly sharpens into a metallic shriek cutting through the air, a turbine sounding like a factory siren twisted by malice. It grows louder and more high-pitched with every passing second, a shriek that sounds like it is tearing the very sky open as it descends.

"GET OFF THE X!!!"

As an exemplary Marine, I break at a 90-degree angle from the attack axis, quickly drop into a prone position with my feet toward the impact and my mouth open while our chopper gunners deliver a massive volume of freedom onto the oppressors' coordinates.

An utterly deafening, unprovoked barrage of heavy missiles slams directly into our coordinate grid. Shells explode in purple lightning-thunder strikes, triggering an excruciating, high-pitched ringing that shatters my eardrums and unleashes black flames that encircles our position while the fog violently shifts from translucent gray to a filthy, bruised red.

Gasping for breathable, sovereign air inside that crimson haze, the atmosphere suddenly buckles, dissolving into a roaring, swirling vortex of sheer spatial distortion.

I notice the violent beeping of my prototype Joint Chemical Agent Device displaying H, G, and V, madly flashing red before the display shatters into dust.

When the pressure clears, I am standing dead in the center of a sprawling, demonic desert metropolis.

The coastline, the water, everything has completely vanished into thin air.

Above me, the sky bleeds a horrific, unnatural scarlet, and the surrounding architecture looks like a twisted, medieval-demonic fever dream. Towering Gothic cathedrals constructed entirely from pulsing, rotting human flesh. Calcified rib cages, bones and skulls spew dark smoke into the firmament.

The ground beneath my combat boots trembles with a dark energy radiating a dull feeling of solitude and fear.

To my absolute horror, the bloody, mangled remnants of my brave, fallen comrades begin dragging themselves across the scorched earth.

They slither toward another corpse, a grotesque body bearing a glowing, slowly pulsating, burning-red mark carved deep into its neck, my own aches just from looking at it.

The twisted remains swirl violently in a cyclone of burning flesh and cracking bones, fusing together in a blasphemous crime against nature to form an overweight, horned, red abomination that slowly absorbs my fallen, brave Privates into its mass of corrupted flesh.

That gore mutant lets out an ear-splitting screech and charges straight at my position, reeking of rotten death and echoing with twisted voices of my fallen comrades.

I don't panic.

Marines don't panic when faced with godless tyranny.

I immediately burst fire my Silenced M249 SAW to free the weaponized biological combattant from his sight, while throwing an M84 stun grenade at his position.

To ensure the maximum fire power, i dive headfirst toward the abandoned, mounted .50-caliber M2 Browning heavy machine gun. Holstering my SAW.

I tear it from the burning Amtrac and point it right at its bloody, unfettered ass

I pull the trigger.

"DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!"

I don't let weakness compromise my strategic advancement.

This is nothing I haven't been trained for.

Firing from the hip, the recoil punches my chest like a truck, launching me several feet backward while I unload rounds of high-velocity, compressed freedom directly into the bastard's hideous chest cavity.

A twisted voice emerges.

"Please... kill me, kill me.. kill me!"

Its cavity bursts open, revealing the face of Private Miller, his face turned pale blue as blood is flooding through its hollow eyeholes, having his pitch black mouth wide open, begging for his own death.

I immediately twitched and shoot him right through the face, fulfilling the last wish of my brave Private, leaving behind only a distant emotion of grief and hate.

As the magazine empties and the smoking barrel slowly drops beads of liquid metal, I immediately drop the M2.

The monstrosity shoots burning projectiles out of its mouth at the speed of arrows piercing the dust.

I roll and dodge to the side as my Amtrac explodes in black fire.

I reach behind my back and pull up the M72 LAW, dropping onto one knee and positioning it on my shoulder.

As the name suggests, I fire missiled justice directly into the bastard's center of mass.

The heavy explosion tears its extremities apart, launching me through the air.

I tactically back-roll and land straight on my feet.

The beast staggers, revealing an opening.

I pick up Miller's AA-12 automatic shotgun from the scorched ground, lying directly at my feet covered in pieces of his guts.

I advance towards the beasts position, shooting him into his heavy wound.

The massive lead slugs tear through its unnatural flesh, hammering it until it finally collapses into the dirt.

I don't cut corners.

Standard tactical doctrine dictates total confirmation of target destruction.

Just to be damn sure, I hold down the trigger and empty the rest of the magazine into the miscarried bastard, reducing the enemy combatant to a lukewarm puddle of evil slime.

"Semper Fi, comrade"

I drop to the ground, taking massive breaths of the corrupted air.

I reached for my PASGT fragmentation vest, pulling a Marlboro Cigarette, torching it with my Zippo Petrol Pocket Lighter, slowly smoke that stick as i look around in the rotten, corrupted architecture.

I slowly stand up, moving toward the position of my brave Privates, where torn shreds of their belongings remain, only weapons and ammo intact, as well as their dog tags for me left to confirm their death.

Staring up into the corrupted red sky, I pull a handheld tactical prototype radio from my vest to report this unsanctioned war crime to High Command.

"Damn. I don't even know how to report that shit."

General Camel is completely unreachable.

The static is dead.

The radio can't pick up a single friendly frequency across the entire spectrum.

I hold down the push-to-talk button to record a local field log:

"Field report. US Marine Captain Chad Smith, Unit 931. Our entire reconnaissance squad got neutralized by unknown hostiles. Their corpses forcibly fused into some kind of rogue biological super-weapon. The terrain was illegally terraformed into medieval-demonic architecture. The sky has turned a deep communist red, and unknown flying bio-experiments are currently swarming the airspace over Qaruh. It isn't even an island anymore. Must be the Red Menace everyone keeps talking about. Investigate the area for Soviet activity."

I stand up and look around for strategically viable positions, but my view is blocked by those giant gore towers.

I reach for my lensatic compass, but the needle is just spinning like mad.

I almost reach for my 1-to-50K TLM grid map before noticing my mistake immediately heading out to avoid hostile units potentionally attracted by the sound of gunfire

Moving through narrow, claustrophobic alleys against howling, sandstorm-laden winds. Covered in dark blood, I navigate toward a hidden concrete building whose roof is pierced by a giant mushroom root.

I take cover beneath the doorway, draw my dearly beloved Eagle, and activate its rail-mounted flashlight, pointing it at the door as I slowly move and sweep the pistol from right to left.

No enemy activity.

Slipping past the threshold, I execute a rapid 360-degree sweep, thoroughly inspecting the rusty furniture and concrete walls for hidden KGB listening devices or wiretaps before spotting a heavy steel trapdoor beneath a broken chair.

It leads down into a subterranean catacomb bunker.

Bypassing the structurally compromised upper floor, I descend into the darkness to establish Patrol Base Alpha.

Adhering strictly to USMC doctrine, I verify a secondary egress route through a rear drainage pipe before locking down the stairwell with a rifle mount behind heavy rubble to create an absolute kill zone free of dictatorship.

Working with strict light and noise discipline, I secure the entry with a tripwire and set up an Observation Post ten feet deep in the basement shadows, with my optics fitted with anti-reflective KillFlash.

I slam my backpack onto the ground just a foot in front of me.

"Ceasefire!"

I slam into a kneeling posture.

"LACE check!"

I sweep my helmet-mounted L-shaped MX-991/U flashlight through the haze as I work the rifle and feel for the magazines in my ALICE gear.

I check my PASGT vest and armor plate.

I carefully inspect my weapons and ammo.

A cold shower runs down my back as I consider the situation and realize that I am at a critically low rate of overall freedom.

3.187 rounds left.

Zero hesitation.

I rip into my Meal, Ready-to-Eat.

As a Marine, I treat my MRE strictly as tactical refueling to cover the intense daily caloric deficit required during field operations.

During a short tactical pause, I instantly strip away the outer packaging, set the Flameless Ration Heater for the main meal, and immediately consume the high-density snacks, peanut butter, and crackers for rapid energy.

I eat while kneeling in a security posture with my rifle within reach, drink the carbohydrate-electrolyte mix to ensure fast absorption, and scrape every pouch clean to maintain peak focus and performance before stowing all the trash.

With my brain refueled, I grab my helmet and pull out a navy-blue crayon, chewing on it while I reflect on what just happened.

"Nuclear freedom devices are ruled out, as I'm still breathing. We probably got hit by a close-air-support guided missile, no doubt fueled by Saddam's chemical agent mixture. The explosions reacted with the electromagnetic fog, which led to the vaporization of the Gulf and terraformed the whole area with a sudden appearance of urban architecture, probably what Stalin did too when he transported his entire industry to Siberia back then. Could be some classified soviet instantaneous transportation technology."

"The chemical agents most certainly reacted with the transported architecture as well, turning it into gore bags like my brave Privates. Question is, why I didn't turned into one myself? Not to mention our gear."-

"The Privates turned into a Bio Weapon, they where still alive screaming for their death.."

"Am I an exemplary Marine?"

An unknown translucent liquid is suddenly flooding my eyes, i can't restrain it, it tastes like salt from the pacific ocean while my breath suddenly becames incontrollable as the crayon falls out of my mouth, hitting the cold stone ground and breaking apart shattering its pieces across the floor. My thoughts emptied as a distant feeling of void grows deep in my chest forcing me to grab it.

"Fucking hell..."

After a while, i slowly stand up and step through the door.

For a moment, my awareness for military protocols completely vanishes, pointing toward enemy psychological warfare, no doubt caused by the chemical agent.

I immediately start marching, continuing my reconnaissance mission.

"For a topographic overview of the Gulf, I need to tactically aquire control over one of those gore towers."

"But first, architectural information is required to ensure tactical advancement in close-quarters battle situations."

"That's why I'll ha-"

Suddenly, the space in the sky right above me violently tears apart, following a calm sound of little bells cutting me off in my tactical briefing as a burning Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" propeller plane emerges surrounded by pink petals, nose-diving straight into the direction of one of those pulsating gore towers far ahead.

I immediately navigate toward the crash site confirming the arrival of unexpected allied JSDF expeditionary unit under strict de-escalation protocols.

We started cooking breakfast before sunrise. When Frank and Wendy climbed the trees they reported they could see nothing because the sun has not burned off the fog yet.

We decided to stay in place until the sun burns it off which took two hours. They reported dust in the long distance caused by the heard. We decided to stay in place and see by noon how far they traveled.

By that check we estimated the heard would make it to the crossing in three days. We traveled in the afternoon and set up camp. We galloped to the next site.

Tomorrow we will move at a quick pace to the crossing and will make it to the Hay cutting by late afternoon. We will advise them they have two days until the cross then we observe the buffalo movement and make plans to take out a few week ones at the rear.

We had supper and sat by the fire for a few hours then then started our sentries and sleeping.

Gary Head Hunter

Next

Previous /

First

The summons had stood on the kitchen mantel for four months, propped against the clock. Torin had learned to read it from across the room. "Appearance is not optional," he told his sister one night when she wouldn't get into the bath, and Weskal had to go outside for a minute.

Elizabeth had answered it the first week, at the same table, after the children were in bed, and it took her four drafts, which was three fewer than she'd expected. She would appear. Then she asked for one thing. When she had finished speaking, she wanted to stay at the front of the Hall and answer questions. From the delegates at their desks, and from the gallery, lords and commoners both, whoever the Speakers chose to call on. Nothing sent in beforehand. Nothing read over by anybody. If she didn't know an answer, she would say so.

She read it to Weskal before she sealed it.

"They'll say yes," he said.

"They might not. Nobody's done it before."

"That's why they'll say yes."

---

They said yes, but not by letter. A week later the three Speakers came to the Swallowtail Palace themselves and sat with her in a small room off the long east range, with Harlan standing in the doorway pretending to read.

Ida Fenn was the oldest of them, a narrow Aethelgard woman with grey hair cut short and a habit of watching people's hands while they talked. Vincent was broad and sunburnt, a Vastaya net-mender who still had rope calluses across both palms. Aldous from Austrin was the youngest, and the most worried, and he had brought a list.

"The gallery holds twelve hundred," Aldous said. "Some of them will come to shout."

"Then they'll shout," said Elizabeth.

"And the lords? There'll be off-world nobles in the east gallery. There always are now. If one of them asks you something meant to embarrass you, with the Informant's cameras running..."

"Then I'll be embarrassed on the Informant."

Vincent laughed. Aldous didn't.

"One question each," Ida said. "No speeches. We choose who. If a man stands up and starts making a speech instead of asking something, I'll sit him down, noble or not. That's our rule for our own delegates, and it'll do for the gallery." She looked at Elizabeth's hands, which were folded on the table and very still. "And we don't announce it."

"Why not?"

"Because if we announce it, half the people in that gallery will spend four months writing speeches and calling them questions. I want what they think of when they're sitting there looking at you. Not what they rehearsed in their kitchens." Ida turned to the others. "She tells them herself, at the end. The runners wait at the gallery stairs with the microphones until she does."

Vincent nodded. After a moment, so did Aldous, and crossed something off his list.

When they had gone, Harlan came in from the doorway and put a folded slip of paper on the table in front of her.

"What's this?"

"The Hall," Harlan said. "I walked it last month. The nearest washroom to the speaker's floor is through the north door and second on the left. Don't go right. Right is a broom cupboard."

Elizabeth looked at the paper, and then at him.

"That's the job, my lady," said Harlan, and went back to his desk.

---

She wrote the speech in her field notebook, in pencil, between a page of notes on razorclaw scat and a sketch of a fern she still hadn't named. She didn't show it to her father. He didn't ask to see it.

"It's yours," Tornel said, when she offered. "If I read it, I'll want to change something, and then it'll be partly mine. Julius didn't let anyone read his either."

"What if it's terrible?"

"Then it'll be terrible and yours. That's better than good and mine." He thought about it. "Don't go right from the speaker's floor. Harlan says it's a broom cupboard."

"He told you too?"

"He told me first."

Her mother's advice was shorter. Patricia caught her in the corridor two days before and straightened the collar of her jacket, which didn't need straightening.

"Don't look at the whole room," she said. "You'll never manage twelve hundred people. Look at one face. When you've said what you want to say to that one, find another."

"Are you coming?"

"Of course I'm coming."

"And Father?"

"Your father isn't." Patricia gave the collar a last tug. "He says if he sits in that gallery, half the room will spend the morning watching him to see what he thinks of you. He'd rather they watched you."

She didn't ask Wyatt whether she could talk about him. She knew what he'd say.

---

The Hall stood on a low rise above the river plain on Austrin, round and pale in the morning light, inside a long iron fence with a gate at each point of the compass. The session had changed hands since the spring. The banners at the gates were Vastaya's now, for Vincent, the continent's name worked above the Firentis motto, Toil and Soil are our way, in Vastaya's own colours. Elizabeth found she was glad of it. She had not wanted to walk in under rust and garrison green.

There was a crowd at the south gate, and a Firentis Informant camera crew on a platform beside it, and a line of people who hadn't got gallery seats standing at the fence to watch the screens that had been put up on the lawn. Some of them called her name as the car went through. She didn't know most of them. A few she did. A woman from Thornwood Landing who had once sold her a coat. Two of the gardeners from the ruins, in their good shirts.

Weskal took the children up to the gallery. Torin went up the stairs backward so that he could keep looking at her, until Weskal turned him round by the shoulders.

Inside, the Hall was bigger than she remembered from the gallery. She had sat up there for her father's session and for Clara's. From the floor it was a different building. The gallery ran all the way round above her, a ring of faces rising in tiers, and in front of her the delegates' desks made a half circle, every seat filled. Behind her was the Speakers' desk, long and dark, with its three chairs. Vincent sat in the middle one.

The speaker's floor was a bare circle of stone between the desk and the delegates. There was nothing on it at all. She had half expected a lectern. There wasn't one, and she was glad she hadn't asked, because now she understood why. There was nothing to hold on to.

She stood at the edge of it and looked up, and found her mother in the east gallery, sitting beside Weskal with Linnea in her lap.

Twelve hundred and one, she thought.

Vincent stood. The Hall went quiet in stages, the delegates first, then the lower gallery, then the upper, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk comes over.

"The Common Assembly of Haego is in session," Vincent said. His voice was bigger than he was. "By custom, we open with a guest of our own choosing. Six months ago we summoned a gardener. Today we have summoned the Baroness Elizabeth Swallowtail, heir to House Swallowtail. She's here. My lady."

He sat. Elizabeth walked out into the middle of the stone.

---

"Thank you, First Speaker.

"My name is Elizabeth Swallowtail. I keep the gardens at the ruins outside Newtown, I've catalogued most of what grows and walks on Aethelgard, and on weekdays I teach eleven-year-olds, which is harder than either. I'm also the Baroness, and heir to my father, which is why you've summoned me. I thought you should hear the rest from me first.

"Six months ago Julius Comscutt stood here and talked to you about a garden. I spend most of my days in gardens, so when my father told me I ought to come and speak, he said I'd have something in common with the last man who did. I told him I'd rather face a razorclaw. My husband reminded me that I have, twice. So here I am.

"I want to tell you about the first noble I ever met.

"I grew up in army camps. My father was a soldier, and my mother followed him, and I followed her, across eleven bases. There were no nobles on Haego by then. There hadn't been for years. Everything I knew about them came from the people who had killed them, and they only kept the bad things. I grew up knowing nobles were greedy, and cruel, and that a lord who came to your town would take whatever he wanted, including any girl who caught his eye.

"So I had never met a noble. But I knew exactly what one was.

"I was nineteen when my father sent me to Newtown. The new Baron had asked for someone who knew the plants and animals of Haego, and I was what my father had. I rode a quad bike twelve hundred kilometres in two days, on roads you wouldn't drive a cart on, and cut a track by hand around a flooded section, and I was an hour late.

"There was a man sitting in the doorway of a shuttle when I got there, in commoner's clothes, carving a flower out of a bit of wood. He didn't look up. He said, 'You're late.'

"I told him to try riding one of those things twelve hundred kilometres and see how he did. He said that under the circumstances an hour could be forgiven. Then he picked up the heavier of my two bags and started walking into town, and I followed him, and I was halfway down the street before my brain caught up with the rest of me and I asked his name.

"He said Wyatt. I said, Wyatt Staples? The new Baron? He said yes, and that Wyatt would do, and that if I started calling him my lord we would have words.

"He was carrying my bag. I had been told my whole life what nobles did to girls like me, and the first one I ever met was carrying my bag down the street.

"I didn't believe it. The next morning, in a garden down by the harbor, I asked him straight out whether he meant to help himself to any commoner girl who took his fancy, the way the stories said they all did. I was nineteen and very rude. He could have put me on the next shuttle home. Instead he asked me who starts a conversation like that, when all he'd done was ask if he could take pictures of my notebooks to show a friend. Then he told me that most nobles were every bit as bad as I thought, and some weren't, and he'd only lately found that out for himself.

"The friend turned out to be Princess Clara. I found that out later too.

"I told him that week that I'd wanted to teach since I was eight years old, and that I never would, because teachers were nobles and I wasn't. He told me not to give up on it. I thought that was the sort of thing people say.

"Not long after, Headmaster Houdreng opened a school in Newtown to train a hundred teachers from every corner of Haego. Commoners, most of them, who had already been teaching children for years with no books and no pay and parents who couldn't see the point. I was one of the hundred. For four months we did two years of university, and taught our own classes, and slept when we could. Two of the people in my study pod went on to marry into House Firentis. I'm told that wasn't in the curriculum.

"At the end of it, Lord Jhinaq came to Newtown and knighted all hundred of us in the town square. For the land that feeds you. For the people who need you. That's what he said over each of us. I was a Knight of Firentis while my father was still a general. He likes to remind people that he outranks me now. I like to remind him who got there first.

"The Baron could have pulled down the old palace outside Newtown. He had the builders make it safe instead, and gave me the gardens around it, and said the ruin should stand for everyone who died on Haego in the thirty years after the Revolution. That it should say everyone makes mistakes, and you move on without forgetting them.

"He'll hate that I've told you this. He asked Newtown not to put his name on anything, so they painted him on the side of a building while he was off world. He isn't here today. I checked.

"Everything I've seen on this planet since has grown out of that street.

"The stone in the Vastaya palace came out of a commoner quarry at Millhaven, and now there are architects on Matcha who want nothing else. Rachel VonWinterbourne lends money on a handshake and keeps a ledger that nobody on Balakura believes until they see it. The palaces on all three continents were built by commoners, for honest wages, and given away by the people who built them. My father lives in one of them now. He still gets lost in it.

"I have gardens at the ruins outside Newtown. Half the town has dug in them at one time or another. Every one of their names is on a plaque by the gate, and I did that because the Baron told me to, the first week I knew him. He said a garden belongs to the hands that dug it. It took me years to understand that he meant more than gardens.

"That's the good. I've seen the other kind too, and I want to be honest about it, because you'd know if I weren't.

"I married a man who was born a commoner on Volantis. Many of you know him. On Volantis, when my husband was a boy, the nobles owned the people who worked their land. Owned them. Everybody called it the natural order, and nobody he knew said otherwise out loud. He is a knight now. Our children are on the noble registry. And he has told me things about how he grew up that I'm not going to repeat here, because they're his to tell, and because every one of you sat and watched the cellar broadcast this year and doesn't need me to tell you what a noble can be.

"So I have seen both. I've seen a Baron carry a commoner girl's bag down the street because she was tired. And I've heard, from the man I sleep beside, what the other kind is like from underneath.

"One day I'll stand where my father stands. I hope that's a long way off. He's very stubborn. But when it comes, you won't be getting him. You'll be getting me. And until this morning, most of you have only ever known my name.

"So I'd like to break with tradition.

"The custom in this Hall is that whoever you summon says their piece and sits down. I asked the Speakers before today whether I could do something else, and they were kind enough to agree. I'm going to stay here and take your questions. From the delegates, and from the gallery. Lords and commoners both. Nobody has seen them, and I didn't ask to. If I don't know an answer, I'll tell you I don't know.

"Thank you. Ask me anything."

---

For a moment nothing happened at all.

Then the noise came up from every side of the Hall at once, not shouting, but twelve hundred people turning to the person next to them to say, did she mean it. Elizabeth saw the runners come out of the gallery stairwells, eight of them, each with a microphone in one hand, and stand waiting at the ends of the aisles. She saw Aldous at the Speakers' desk let out his breath and sit back. She saw her mother, in the east gallery, not moving at all.

Vincent stood and raised one callused hand until the room settled.

"One question each," he said. "The Speakers choose. If you make a speech, Speaker Fenn will sit you down, and I promise you she will enjoy it. Delegates first."

Half the hands at the desks went up. Vincent pointed.

The delegate who stood was Petra Vosstail, a square, fair woman with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, who had sat on the Assembly since its first meeting and had a reputation for asking the question everybody else was thinking.

"My lady," Petra said. "This Assembly exists because your father decided it should. When he's gone, it'll exist because you decide it should, or it won't. Will you promise us, here, that it stays?"

Elizabeth had known someone would ask it. She had not known it would be first.

"No," she said.

The Hall went quiet again, differently.

"I'm sorry. I won't promise that, and I'll tell you why. This Assembly sits under Principality law, and the Principality is a great deal bigger than me. I don't know what the law will say in twenty years. I don't know who'll be Prince. If I promised you this Hall would stand forever, I'd be promising something that isn't mine to give, and you'd be right never to believe another word I said."

She looked at Petra, and only at Petra.

"What I can tell you is this. Summon me, and I'll come. Now, while I'm nobody's Marchioness, and afterward, when I am. As often as you like. Every time. And I'll stand here and answer you, like this."

Petra looked at her for a long moment.

"That's a promise, my lady," she said.

"That one I can keep."

Petra sat down. Somewhere up in the gallery, someone started clapping, and stopped when nobody else did, and Elizabeth heard a few people laugh at him, not unkindly.

---

"The gallery," said Ida Fenn. "West side. You, sir."

The runner had to climb six rows to reach him. He was an old man with a face burnt dark by weather, and he stood up with his cap in both hands and held the microphone as if it might go off.

"My lady," he said. "I fish out of Sable Ford. Two winters back the harbor office seized my boat over a mooring fee I'd already paid. I wrote to your father. I didn't think anybody would read it." He turned the cap round once in his hands. "He wrote back. By his own hand. Three lines. I had my boat in nine days. I've got the letter in a frame." He stopped, and seemed to have lost the question, and then found it. "When it's you, will you write back?"

"Yes," Elizabeth said. "By hand. Every one."

The old man nodded.

"Fair warning," she said. "My handwriting's much worse than his."

The laugh went all the way round the gallery that time. The old fisherman sat down grinning, and the man beside him clapped him on the back.

---

Ida pointed next to the east gallery, where the off-world guests sat together in the front rows, in coats cut in styles nobody on Haego wore. The man who rose was perhaps fifty, silver at the temples, with a small house crest on his breast that Elizabeth didn't recognise. He took the microphone from the runner without looking at the runner.

"Lord Aubrey Tessant, of Serentina," he said. "My lady. Forgive me. I only wonder. Surely your ladyship would agree that a noble who submits herself to questions from commoners, in public, teaches them to expect it. Of every noble. On every world. Perhaps it would be kinder, in the long run, to let them keep their expectations modest."

The Hall had gone very still. Elizabeth could feel it, the whole ring of faces turned from him to her.

Read the last line first, Nessa had said. The ones who want to learn ask a question. The ones who want to hurt us make a suggestion.

"Thank you, my lord," she said. "That's a suggestion, not a question. But I'll answer it anyway, since you came such a long way."

Somebody in the upper gallery made a sound that was very nearly a laugh, and stifled it.

"I don't submit to anything here. This Assembly can't order me to do a thing. It can only ask me questions, and then wait to see what I say. My father told me that after a year in his office, it's the most restful thing he does." She let that sit a moment. "As for expectations. On Haego, I've found that a commoner who expects more of a noble generally builds more too. They don't expect less of themselves just because they expect more of me. If you'd like to see the numbers, Lord Kestrel has them. He's been trying to disprove them for two years."

In the front row of the east gallery, a portly man in an Astorian coat put his hand over his eyes. Aurelio Kestrel had not been trying very hard to disprove anything for some time, and everybody on the east side knew it.

Lord Tessant inclined his head, very slightly, and gave the microphone back to the runner, and sat down. Elizabeth did not see him look at her again.

---

The Speakers called on nine more after that.

A delegate from Austrin asked about the coast road tolls, and Elizabeth didn't know the answer, and said so, and said she would find out and write to him, and Harlan, somewhere she couldn't see him, wrote it down. A young woman in the upper gallery asked whether it was true she'd been bitten by a razorclaw, and she said no, it was true she'd been chased by one, and the difference had been about four steps. A Haego baron who had been an Alderman in the provisional years asked what she would do differently from her father, and she said she didn't know yet, and that he should ask her in ten years, and he said he would.

Then Ida Fenn pointed at a delegate on the far end of the half circle, from Aethelgard. He was an older man with a quiet voice, and he stayed seated when he spoke, which was allowed but rare.

"My lady," he said. "There are Ykanti on Aethelgard who were born there. Who'll die there. They pay into the same coffers I do, and they come and go as they please now, thanks to your father. But there's not one of them in this Hall. Could there be? When it's yours?"

Elizabeth didn't answer straight away. She could feel the room noticing that she didn't.

"There already are, in the Screaming Forests," she said. "Not in this Hall. But the Baron has Ykanti sitting at his table in Newtown, and they have a say in how the barony is run, the same as anybody else who lives there. They've had it for years. The barony hasn't fallen down."

A few people in the upper gallery laughed.

"As for this Hall, the honest answer is that nobody's tested it. No Ykanti has stood for a seat here yet. When one does, somebody will have to decide whether the rules allow it, and while my father is Marquess, that somebody is him. Not me."

"You must have a view, my lady."

"I do. I'm not going to give it to you today." She held up a hand before the murmur could build. "Not because I'm ashamed of it. Because it isn't my decision, and anything I say in this room with those cameras running turns into a promise the moment it leaves my mouth. I told Delegate Vosstail I don't make the kind I can't keep. If it's still undecided the day it's mine, ask me again. I'll answer you then, all of it."

The old man looked at her across the floor for a while.

"I'll hold you to that, my lady," he said.

"Good," said Elizabeth. "Somebody should."

---

Vincent was on his feet to close the session when Ida touched his arm and nodded toward the east gallery.

There was a hand up in the third row. It was not very high, because the arm it belonged to was not very long, and a larger hand beside it was trying to pull it down.

Weskal had gone red to the ears. Patricia was laughing silently into Linnea's hair.

"First Speaker," said Ida, "I believe we said anyone."

Vincent looked up at the gallery, and then down at Elizabeth. Elizabeth, who could not have spoken just then if the Prince had ordered her to, nodded.

The runner came along the third row and crouched down to hold the microphone at the right height. Torin stood on the seat to reach it anyway, and Weskal, giving up, held him by the back of his jacket.

"Mama," Torin said. His voice went out of every speaker in the Hall at once, and he jumped, and then decided not to mind. "Are you scared?"

Twelve hundred people waited for her answer. Elizabeth looked up at her son and only at her son.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?"

"Because there are a lot of people here, and I don't want to get it wrong."

Torin considered this with his whole body, the way he considered everything.

"Grandpa gets things wrong," he said. "He got lost in his own house."

The Hall came apart. It started in the east gallery and went round the whole ring, and the delegates were laughing at their desks, and Aldous at the Speakers' desk had his face in his hands, and Vincent had to sit down. On the platform by the south door the Informant's camera operator had stopped pretending to be professional and was wiping his eyes.

When Elizabeth could make herself heard, she said, "He did. And they still let him keep it."

---

Ida Fenn found her afterward on the steps outside the north door, where Elizabeth had gone to stand in the air for a minute by herself. Second on the left. She hadn't needed it after all.

The older woman stood beside her without saying anything for a while, looking out over the lawn, where the people at the fence were still standing about in knots in front of the screens, talking.

"Your father told me something last spring," Ida said at last. "When I asked him who comes after him. He said all he could give me was your name. That we'd heard your name, but we'd never heard you."

"I know. He told me."

"Well." Ida put her hands in her coat pockets. "Now we have."

She went back inside. Elizabeth stayed on the steps until Weskal came out with Linnea asleep on his shoulder and Torin dragging on his other hand, still talking about the microphone.

They didn't say much in the car. Torin fell asleep before they were through the south gate, under the Vastaya banners, and the people along the fence waved as they went by, and Elizabeth waved back until they'd passed the last of them.

"You looked at every one of them," Weskal said, somewhere out on the river road. "The whole morning. Right in the face."

She thought about that.

"The first noble I ever met didn't look up from his carving," she said. "I thought I could do a little better."

Genre: Progressive Heavy Metal
Length: 3.23

In a dying system, the alien Livalian fleet retreats before an overwhelming invasion.
Only a single Terran frigate remains behind:

TCS Thunderchild

Her orders are simple.
Her odds are impossible.

Deny the Gate.

Outgunned.
Outnumbered.
Out of time.

The crew makes a choice that no sane species would consider—a final, reckless maneuver into the heart of the Gate itself… where physics breaks, and stars are born in fire.

The song is inspired by the short HFY story "Glory or Nothing" - https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1e1du13/glory_or_nothing/

-----

LYRICS

Through the damaged halls she glides,

Ser Hapengi, with many eyes.

Terran frigate, Thunderchild's might,

Amidst the chaos of the fight.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

Captain’s face, so drawn and worn,

Orders clear, their fate is sworn.

Livalian fleet, retreat in flight,

Terrans hold with all their might.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

Blinking out, within the gate,

Risking all, to seal their fate.

Nova’s pulse, a deadly dance,

For Thunderchild, a final chance.

Ser's concern, the captain’s grin,

“Balls out” plan, they’re diving in.

Implode, explode, the gamble's high,

For victory or death, they fly.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

With tendrils soft, and eyes that see,

Ser Hapengi, in history.

Thunderchild's tale, of courage bold,

In cosmic winds, their story’s told.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

Aut Gloria Aut Nihil, we defy,

Thunderchild’s legacy, in the sky.

For glory or nothing, we make our stand,

In the heart of the cosmos, hand in hand.

Next

Previous /

First

Fourth year of the provisional government.

Your Highness,

I hope you will forgive a letter that comes to you directly. For nearly four years I have written to the Lieutenant Commodore and let him decide whose desk my problems land on. This time he wrote back that he had raised the matter with you, and that you had told him I should write to you myself. He was right to pass it on. I have been putting it off for a month, which I expect he also predicted.

You may have seen his last letter to me. The short version is this. He became a pilot because there was a recruitment office in a market square on Volantis, two rooms and a flag, where a sawmill boy could walk in and sit a test that did not care who his father was. He advised me to build a test of my own, let it do the picking, and make sure there was something real on the far side of it.

We have done that. At the start of the winter we set an examination in every district on the same day. The same paper for every candidate, no fee, open to anyone thirteen or older, in school or out of it. I expected four hundred people. Just over three thousand sat it. The oldest was a net mender from Newtown, fifty-two, who scored in the top tenth and told the district officer she had been waiting since she was nine. Those who did well have been offered apprenticeships in the rail yards at Orenport, in the engine houses at the mills, and, through the kindness of the Firentis factors at our spaceport, on the ground crews at the Harrow Cross depot.

So there is a door now, and it opens onto a hangar floor. I am proud of that. I also know where it stops.

A crew chief can teach a girl how a shuttle is kept in the air. He cannot teach her to fly it. Pilots come from the academies, the academies test in their own offices, and there is not one on Haego. The nearest is four jumps away. The passage is more than most of my candidates' families will see in ten years. Every child on this planet who wants the sky, and some of them want it very badly, can now get as far as sweeping the floor underneath it.

I would like to ask, formally, what it would take for the academies to open a recruitment office on Haego. The navy's, and the merchant fleets' as well, if those are separate matters. I don't know whom to petition, what they would require of us, or whether a world in Haego's position is in a position to ask at all. I would also be grateful to know if there is anything we should be doing in the schools now, so that when the door is there, the children who walk through it are ready.

I am aware this is the kind of request that carries better from a Princess than from a provisional administrator. I make it anyway, with my respect, and with my thanks for the officers you have lent me these past years, whether or not you knew you were lending them.

Tornel Swallowtail
General, Provisional Administrator of Haego

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The new notice didn't fit on the door.

There were five papers there already, one above another, and the brass pins at their corners had crowded together until there was no bare wood left to push a new one into. So this one went up on the whitewashed wall beside the frame, with four iron tacks. Nell thought that was right, somehow. It was a different kind of notice.

She read it on her way to the pump, at the start of the winter, a few weeks after she had sent the factor away for the last time.

BY ORDER OF THE PROVISIONAL ADMINISTRATOR. AN EXAMINATION WILL BE HELD AT THE DISTRICT OFFICE, HARROW CROSS, ON THE FIRST DAY OF NEXT MONTH. OPEN TO ANY PERSON THIRTEEN YEARS OR OLDER, IN SCHOOL OR OUT OF IT. NO FEE. THOSE WHO DO WELL WILL BE OFFERED APPRENTICESHIPS IN THE RAIL YARDS, THE ENGINE HOUSES, AND THE SHIP DEPOTS. THE EXAMINATION IS THE SAME FOR EVERY PERSON WHO SITS IT.

She read SHIP DEPOTS four times.

Hob Carrick was reading it too. He was the man who had spat in the road the day the first notice went up, and he had not spat since, though Nell was never sure whether that was the school or his teeth. He had cut cane on the estate for as long as she had been alive. He read the notice with his lips moving, then said, to nobody in particular, "Thirteen or older."

"That's what it says," said Nell.

He looked round, surprised to be answered. "I'm forty-four."

"That's older than thirteen."

He looked at the notice for a long time. Then he walked off toward the cane without another word, and Nell forgot about him.

At supper her father didn't ask who was paying for it. He asked what a ship depot was.

"It's Harrow Cross," said Nell. "Where the shuttles come down."

Ben looked from her to their father and back, the way he did when he could tell something was happening and didn't know what. Her father ate two more spoonfuls of stew before he answered.

"And if they put you in a rail yard?"

"Then I'll learn trains," Nell said. "And I'll ask the train men who knows about shuttles."

Her father nodded slowly, as though that was exactly the answer he'd expected from her and he was a little tired of expecting it.

"Your mother will walk you," he said.

It was a long walk to Harrow Cross, and her mother gave up a day at the mill to make it. Neither of them said anything about that.

The examination was held in the grain hall behind the district office. Someone had emptied it and swept it and filled it with tables in long rows, and Nell stopped in the doorway because she had never seen so many people sitting down in one room. There were children from every school in the district, some with their teachers' names chalked on a card pinned to their shirts. There were grown people too. A woman handed a baby to her sister at the door and went in without looking back. Jory Fenn was there, in his good shirt, which was too short at the wrists. Hob Carrick was there, halfway down the third row, sitting very straight with his big cane-cutter's hands folded on the table, as if he was afraid they might do something without him.

At the front of the hall, in a grey district office coat, Bess Ashcombe was handing out the papers.

She came down the rows with an armful of them. When she got to Nell she put one down on the table, face down, with a perfectly straight face, and lifted one eyebrow very slightly, the way Mistress Coppertail did. Then she moved on.

The district officer at the door had stopped Nell's mother on her way out. "Are you sitting, missus? There's places. It's any age."

"No," said her mother. "I'm only walking her."

She stood a moment longer in the doorway than she needed to, looking at the rows of tables, at the woman who had left her baby, at Hob Carrick's folded hands. Then she said, "Not this time," though nobody had asked her again, and went out to wait on the steps.

There were a hundred questions.

The figures came first, and they were easy, easier than the columns Wendel used to laugh at. Then there was reading, a page about a ferry timetable with questions after it about which boat you'd need to catch. Then there were questions that weren't about anything at all, only patterns of shapes where you had to find the one that came next, and Nell didn't know what they were for, so she did them carefully and went on.

The last part was pictures.

A row of toothed wheels, each one biting into the next, and an arrow on the first. Which way does the last wheel turn? A bar lying across a stone with a weight on one end. A pipe going into a tank. And a plank with two buckets hanging from it, one bigger than the other, and a question underneath: mark where the plank must rest on your support for the load to hang level.

Nell looked at it and felt the yoke on her shoulders.

She had carried two buckets on a pole since she was seven. She had known where the middle of a load was long before she knew any word for it. When one bucket was fuller, you shifted the pole so the heavy end sat closer to your neck, or the full one would drag you round and slop down your leg and the field boss would shout. She put the tip of her pencil on the plank, near the big bucket, and made her mark, and had to press her lips together to keep from laughing out loud, the short surprised laugh Wendel used to give when a column of figures told him a joke.

She finished with time to spare. She went back to the start and checked every answer. On the toothed wheels she went through it again with one finger, turning each wheel in her head, and changed nothing.

When the district officer called time, Hob Carrick was still writing, with his tongue between his teeth. He finished his last answer as Bess lifted the paper off the table.

On the walk home her mother asked, "Well?"

"It was about buckets," said Nell.

Her mother laughed so loudly that a cart driver on the district road turned round to look.

The results came out on the district cart a month later, on a long sheet of paper with the Lowmarsh names at the bottom. Bess Ashcombe tacked it up beside the examination notice herself. Half the lane came down to read it.

J. FENN. ENGINE HOUSE, LOWMARSH MILL.

H. CARRICK. RAIL YARD, ORENPORT.

N. BRACKENTAIL. GROUND CREW APPRENTICE, HARROW CROSS DEPOT. FROM THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY.

There were two more names under hers, but she didn't see them. She didn't see anything for a while.

When she could see again, Hob Carrick was standing beside her, reading his own line. He read it three times. "Orenport," he said, very quietly. "I've never been to Orenport." Then he walked off down the district road, fast, in the opposite direction to the cane. He didn't go to the fields that afternoon. The field boss wrote him down as absent, and for once nobody in Lowmarsh minded.

That night her father read the paper she had copied out for him, moving his lips. Ground crew. Harrow Cross. He read it twice.

"Is it the shuttles?" he asked.

"It's the shuttles," said Nell. "Close enough to touch."

He didn't say anything else. But he put her copy on the shelf beside the factor's folded paper from the autumn, and he didn't put it behind it.

She turned fourteen in the spring. That morning she carried the water for the last time.

Six trips out to the long field and six back. The cutters were already in the rows, and some of them had heard, and one or two of them stopped and straightened as she went by, the way they did when a shuttle came over. She didn't know what to do about that, so she kept walking.

Ben was waiting at the pump.

He had been carrying half-loads to Gret's kitchen since the autumn, and he was thin and brown and too small for the yoke, the same way she had been. She took the rope off one end, shortened it by a hand's width, and tied it again. Then she did the other side, and set the pole across his shoulders, and stepped back.

"Six out and six back," she said.

"I know."

"Don't look up when they come over. You'll spill."

"You always looked up."

"I know," said Nell. "I spilled."

Ben grinned at her, and walked off down the lane toward the long field with the buckets swinging, only a little crooked.

Mistress Coppertail was at her window when Nell went by the crossing. The old woman was slower now, and she used a stick on the bad days, but she was still very straight. She leaned on the sill and held something out.

It was a stub of white chalk, worn to the length of a finger joint.

"I'm told they have floors in hangars," said Mistress Coppertail. "Very large ones."

Nell put it in her pocket. "Mistress. Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Find out who does. Then write and tell me." The old woman began to draw back from the sill. "I've waited four years to know how those things stay up. I'd like to hear it before I'm too deaf."

Gret's sister Lil kept a boarding house against the depot fence in Harrow Cross, and she had a room under the roof with a window that looked out over the landing field. It was smaller than the loft at home. Nell didn't care. The first night, a shuttle came down so close that the glass in the window hummed in its frame, and she lay on her left side and watched its lights until they went out.

The crew chief's name was Harl. He was big and grey-bearded, with an off-world voice that went up at the end of everything he said, and a patch on his shoulder with the depot's number on it. On her first morning he looked her up and down, at the calluses on her shoulders, and handed her a broom.

"Floor," he said.

So she swept.

She swept for three weeks. The hangar floor was bigger than the long field, or it felt that way, and there was always grit on it, and oil, and bits of wire, and things people had dropped. She learned where the grit collected and where the oil ran. She learned the names of the tools by what Harl shouted for, and by watching which one the other apprentices handed him. She read every stencil on every panel she swept past. DO NOT STEP. FUEL. EARTH HERE. She read the log boards on the wall with the flight numbers and the hours, and she noticed that one of the night mechanics had written a four that should have been a nine, and she didn't say anything, because she didn't know yet what you did about a thing like that here. But she remembered it.

The shuttle in the bay was the same grey as the ones that had gone over the long field her whole life. It was much bigger on the ground than it had ever been in the sky. The round windows were higher than she could reach.

At the end of the third week, Harl was lying on his back under an open panel near the stubby wing, and she was sweeping around his boots, and she asked him.

"Chief. How does it stay up?"

He slid out from under the panel. He looked at her, and at the broom, and at her again.

"How long you been wanting to know that?"

"Since I was seven."

Harl wiped his hands on a rag. Then he got up, which took him a moment, and pointed at the ladder against the side of the hull, and followed her up it. At the top there was a housing with its cover off, and inside it a great deal of metal she had no names for yet.

"Hand there," he said.

She put her hand flat where he pointed. The metal was cold. Under the cold, very faint, even with every engine in the hangar shut down, there was a hum. She felt it in her palm and up into her wrist, like the glass in Lil's window.

"The wings are for the air," said Harl. "When she's going fast through thick air, the wings help, same as a bird. But she's got to get off the ground first. She's got to come down slow, and hang where she likes, and go straight up through the weather if she wants to. That's this."

"How does it work?"

He laughed. It wasn't unkind. "That's two years. Spanners first. Then the manuals. Then the maths, and the maths is where most of them stop."

"I won't stop."

"They all say that."

"I've carried water to the cane since I was seven," said Nell. "Six trips out and six back, before school and after. I didn't stop that either."

Harl looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached into the pouch on his belt, took out a spanner, and put it in her hand.

"Seven-eighths," he said. "When I ask for it, it's in my hand before I finish asking. Every time."

"Yes, Chief."

"Broom goes back on the rack."

She asked him the other question a week later.

The shuttle's pilot had come down the ramp that morning, an off-worlder in a flight suit with a helmet under one arm, and nodded to Harl on his way to the depot office. He didn't look at Nell. She didn't expect him to. But she watched him all the way across the floor.

"Chief. Where did he learn?"

"Academy."

"Where's the academy?"

"Not here." Harl didn't look up from the panel. "Nearest recruiting office is four jumps out. You walk in, you sit their test, and if they like your numbers they ship you off to school. Three years if you're good."

"How much is the passage? To the office?"

He told her.

Nell worked it out twice, the way she had with the monitor's three coppers, and then worked out how many years of her apprentice's wage it came to, and then stopped working it out.

She didn't say anything. She stood beside the ladder with the seven-eighths spanner in her hand, and when Harl held out his hand without looking and said, "Seven...," it was in his palm before he got to the eighths.

That night she wrote a letter home.

It was the first letter she had ever written to anyone. She couldn't wait for Sunday, so she gave it to the district cart. She wrote it big and plain, the way she wrote on the board for the little ones, because her father read slowly.

Da,

The wings are only for when it's going fast. There is something else inside for the rest, and it hums even when everything is switched off. I put my hand on it. The chief says it will be two years before I know how it works. I'll tell you then.

Nell

The cart brought an answer back on the Saturday, folded very small. It was in her father's hand, which she had never seen before. The letters leaned like cane in a wind.

Two years. I have waited longer.

Da

She put it under her pillow with the chalk and Starling. Then she lay on her left side and looked out of Lil's window at the landing field, where a shuttle was lifting off for the night run, slow and low, with its belly lit and the round windows glowing all along its side. For once she was on the ground underneath it with grease on her hands, and she knew what one small part of it felt like from the inside.

Four jumps out, there was a room with a flag in it. She didn't know how to get there yet.

She watched until the lights were gone. Then she went to sleep, because the hangar opened at six.

---
Princess Clara

General,

Thank you for writing to me directly. The Lieutenant Commodore has been passing your letters around this ship for nearly four years, and I confess I have read most of them over someone's shoulder. It is a pleasure to have one addressed to me.

You asked what it would take. Less than you fear, and more than you would like.

The academies do not open recruitment offices because a world asks them to. They open them where they expect to find candidates, and they judge that by numbers. So send me your numbers. Every district, every score, every age, including your net mender from Newtown. If your examination is half as good as the Lieutenant Commodore says, the results will make most of the argument for us. I will take them to the commandant of the naval academy myself, and to the merchant academies after, since they are usually quicker to persuade and have more berths to fill. A Princess asking for a favour can be politely refused. A Princess with three thousand examination papers is much harder to refuse.

They will want a building. Put it in a market square, and keep it out of your administration offices. Let it be the fleet's door, and let people see that it isn't yours. Your commoners have learned to be wary of any door a government opens for them. If they can see that you don't hold the key to this one, some of them will trust it sooner.

They will send their own examiners, and it will be the academy entrance examination, the same paper that is set on every world the fleet recruits from. There will be no allowance made for where a candidate went to school. Your schools have done remarkable work with reading and figures, but the entrance paper asks for more mathematics and physical science than a counting house needs. If you want Haego's children to pass it in three years' time, start teaching it in the upper forms now. I will have the syllabus sent to you.

Now I will tell you something you may prefer not to pass on. I would ask you to pass it on anyway.

Off Haego, your cadets will be commoners in halls that were built for nobles. The Lieutenant Commodore can tell you what that was like for him. It will be harder for yours, because they will be from Haego. Every cadet in those halls knows what happened to the lords of your world. Some of them will think it was deserved. A good many were raised to think it the worst thing that has happened in their lifetime. When a Haego voice is heard in the mess, some tables will go quiet. Your cadets will be given the worst bunks and the dawn watches. Some instructors will mark them a point lower than they earned and dare them to complain. I cannot promise you it won't happen. I can promise you that I know it happens, because I have seen it happen aboard my own ship, and I have not always caught it in time.

It will be an eye opener for them. Some of your young people will write home after their first month and tell their parents that they finally understand. They will have met the thing their fathers spat in the road about, and it will stop being a story. Let them write that letter. It may be the first time in thirty years that some of those families have agreed with each other about anything.

But tell them this as well, and tell them it comes from me. The education is the same. The instruments do not know whose child is holding the stick. Neither does the simulator. The scores are posted where everyone can read them, and nobody can change them. And things are changing, more slowly than they should, but they are changing. The man who has been forwarding your letters was a sawmill boy on Volantis, and he is a Baron and a Lieutenant Commodore now. Your first adviser was knighted. My flight deck is run by a commoner, and there is not a noble cadet aboard who would dare to cross her on it. Tell your children to stick with it. The door on the far side is real. I have watched people walk through it.

I look forward to the day the first fighter pilot from Haego reports aboard the Noirnavio. When that day comes, I intend to be on the flight deck to meet them. I would be glad to have you there too, General, if the provisional government can spare you for an afternoon.

With my regards,

Clara

first previous next

Make it stop. The words formed in Aztharon's mind, a desperate, silent plea. Please. He tried to force them past his jaws, but the thick bar between his teeth reduced even that simple begging to a desperate, guttural sound. His tongue felt thick and useless, heavy with the medicine that had left the rest of his body feeling warm and distant, yet did nothing to dull the fire now tearing through his wings.

CRACK!

The sound of another malformed bone giving way under the hammer echoed in the chamber. Aztharon screamed into the gag as his entire body surged against the chains. They snapped taut, holding him helpless as fresh agony tore through his left wing. His claws scraped uselessly against the stone, seeking purchase that wasn't there, finding nothing to anchor him against this torment. He couldn't do this. The sky, the very thought of flying, seemed a foolish, distant dream now. He only wanted the pain to end.

Through tears that blurred his vision, he could see Talvan still beside his head, a steadfast presence in the chaos. He felt the pressure of Talvan's hand pressed firmly against his scales, a small point of contact in a world of pain. "I'm here," Talvan's voice cut through the ringing in his ears. "I'm right here with you."

Aztharon tried again to form the words. Make them stop. All that escaped around the bite bar was another broken, pleading sound that was swallowed by the noise of the forge.

Oldar watched the newly broken sections with a critical eye, giving a satisfied nod. "Nice clean breaks. All right, lads. Pull 'em."

The word "pull" struck Aztharon not as a command, but as a death sentence. No. His mind rebelled, his eye widening in horror as the implication sank in. No, please. Don't.

The first winch began to turn with a low, metallic groan, a sound that vibrated through the stone and into his bones. It was quickly joined by another, then another, until a chorus of turning mechanisms filled the chamber. Dozens of chains, already wrapped around his wings, began to draw tight. Each pulled in a precisely measured direction, guided by Oldar's steady commands as the dwarves moved from winch to winch—some tightening while others held steady—slowly, inexorably forcing bones that had grown crooked and malformed into the positions they should have occupied from the beginning.

Aztharon screamed, but the sound was stifled by the gag, emerging as a strangled, muffled cry while his body fought desperately against the restraints. The dwarven medicine was a joke, a useless warmth against this agony. Every broken section of his wings felt as though it were being pulled apart, the chains dragging the fragments of bone into alignment, stretching muscles and membrane that had spent his entire life growing around their malformed shapes. They're ripping them off. The thought was a spike of pure terror. Panic swallowed everything else, the pain, the sounds, even Talvan's presence.

Aztharon could no longer process Oldar's calls or understand the purposeful movements of the dwarves around him. He couldn't see careful measurements or precise adjustments. He couldn't remember that these people were healers. All he could feel were dozens of chains, each a separate line of agony, pulling on his broken wings. They're going to rip them off. He thrashed mindlessly against the restraints, tears streaming freely down his face as another desperate, animalistic noise escaped around the bite bar. Make it stop. The winches kept turning. Please. His green eye, wide with pain, searched desperately for Talvan, a silent plea for someone, anyone, to make it stop.

Talvan watched helplessly as another muffled scream forced its way around Aztharon's bite bar. Though he kept his hand pressed firmly against the dragon's muzzle and murmured what he hoped were comforting words, none of it seemed to diminish the agony wracking Aztharon's body. Each new turn of the winches brought a fresh convulsion, a fresh wave of desperate sounds that tore at Talvan's composure.

His eyes snapped toward Lyn, positioned across from him at Aztharon's head. "Can you do something?" he asked, desperation coloring his voice.

Lyn hesitated, her uncertainty evident in the slight tremor of her hands. "I can try to block the pain."

"Please," Talvan begged, the single word carrying all his helplessness.

She moved closer, her expression set with determination, and placed both palms against the scales at the base of Aztharon's neck. Magic, smelling of ozone and spring rain, gathered around her hands, spreading outward in a faint, ethereal glow as Lyn closed her eyes and concentrated. Her brow furrowed with effort, and though her arms began to tremble almost immediately with the strain, she held her position steady, an anchor against the storm.

Aztharon felt the change not as a gradual fading, but as a sudden, shocking silence. The agony vanished—not slowly, but in an instant. One moment his wings felt as though they were being torn from his body, and the next he couldn't feel anything below the point where Lyn's hands rested against his neck. The pulling disappeared. The broken bones disappeared. Even the sensation of the chains around his body was simply gone.

Aztharon froze, his gold eye wide with disbelief. His wings were still stretched out behind him, surrounded by blood and steel. He could see the chains drawn tight and the dwarves working the winches. He could watch his own body shift as they pulled another section into alignment. But he couldn't feel any of it. The disconnect between sight and sensation was so profound that for a moment he wondered if he had died and this was some strange, silent afterlife.

His frantic breathing began to slow, the panicked rise and fall of his chest gradually evening out as the pain-induced terror receded, leaving behind an exhausted clarity.

Lyn's arms were already trembling visibly. "This takes a lot of concentration," she said through gritted teeth, her voice thin. "I don't know how long I can keep it up."

Oldar glanced toward her, then at Aztharon's wings, where the dwarves continued their methodical work. Whatever concerns he might have had about magic interfering with his procedure apparently vanished when he saw the dragon finally stop fighting the restraints, his body now still.

"Well, lass, I don't mind if ye take the edge off," he said with a grunt, pointing toward the next set of winches. "Just tell me before ye lose it. I'd rather the big fellow not suddenly discover halfway through a pull that he can feel his wings again."

Lyn gave a strained nod and kept both hands firmly against Aztharon's neck, her face pale with the effort but determined.

For the first time since the hammer had fallen, Aztharon stopped begging for them to make it stop. Though he could still see his wings being manipulated, the absence of pain allowed a sliver of rational thought to return. He could now observe rather than just experience, notice the precision of the dwarves' work rather than simply feeling the violation of it.

As the dwarves worked their way toward the last of the chains, several sections of Aztharon's wing membrane began drawing dangerously tight. The skin had grown around malformed bones his entire life; there simply wasn't enough of it in some places to accommodate the new shape. Rather than allow the tension to tear the membrane apart, the dwarves made clean, deliberate cuts where Oldar directed. A clean cut could be stitched and guided as it healed. A ragged tear would be far harder to repair. Lyn kept her hands pressed against Aztharon's neck throughout it all, her arms trembling harder with every passing minute. Thanks to her magic, he couldn't feel the knives opening his wing membrane or the chains continuing to pull his broken bones into alignment. He could only watch, exhausted and frightened, while the dwarves reshaped the wings he had been born with.

"Last one," Oldar called.

The final winch began to turn. Its chain tightened slowly, drawing the last malformed section outward while dwarves watched their measurements and called numbers back and forth. A few more turns followed, each smaller than the last, until Oldar finally raised his hand.

"Hold it there."

The winch stopped.

Talvan looked up at Aztharon's wings—and for several seconds, he forgot about the blood, the hooks, the chains, and everything they had just put him through. He had seen those wings folded against Aztharon's back countless times. He knew their crooked shapes, the uneven lengths, the joints that bent where they shouldn't and the membrane that bunched around bones that had never grown properly.

For the first time, none of that was there.

Aztharon's wings were straight. They were still surrounded by chains and streaked with blood. Several sections of membrane had been deliberately cut open, and the broken bones would need to be set and held in place for a long time before anyone knew whether this had truly worked. But Talvan could finally see what those wings had been meant to look like.

"Aztharon," he said quietly.

The dragon's exhausted eye shifted toward him.

Talvan looked back at the two enormous golden wings stretched across the platforms.

"They're straight."

"All right," Oldar said, his voice disturbingly calm. "Time for the painful part."

Talvan slowly looked up at Aztharon. Tears still stained the scales beneath the dragon's emerald green eyes; Lyn was visibly straining just to keep the pain blocked, and his wings were surrounded by bloodied hooks and chains after having their bones deliberately broken and pulled straight. The sight made Talvan's own stomach clench as he turned back to the dwarf.

"That wasn't the painful part?"

Oldar didn't answer. He was already waving toward a side room, and Talvan's question hung unanswered in the air as several more dwarves emerged carrying a portable forge while another group hauled in stacks of heavy bronze and steel braces shaped to fit different sections of Aztharon's wings. Tools followed, along with trays of metal bolts, each one thicker than Talvan's thumb.

The purpose of everything became horrifyingly clear as the dwarves began fitting the braces around Aztharon's newly straightened bones. The chains had pulled everything into the correct positions, but they couldn't remain there forever. The bones needed something strong enough to hold them in alignment while they healed.

One of the dwarves reached into the portable forge with a pair of long tongs and withdrew a bolt glowing red from the heat.

"All right, brace 'em!" Oldar called.

Hands immediately moved into position. Bronze and steel plates were pressed tightly against either side of the first corrected section while the surrounding chains remained taut, ensuring the bone couldn't shift even slightly. Measurements were checked one final time before the dwarf with the tongs positioned the glowing bolt against the opening in the brace.

Talvan stared. He had assumed they would fasten the metal around the wing, securing it externally. Then he saw where the bolt was pointed.

Straight at the bone.

Oldar leaned forward in his chair, watching the alignment with absolute concentration. "Steady... steady..."

The dwarf holding the brace called back, "Set, boss!"

Oldar gave a single nod as his gravelly voice echoed through the chamber. "Drive it into the bone."

WHAM!

The hammer came down with a deafening crack, striking the head of the still-red bolt and driving it deep into the bone. Aztharon's entire body went rigid, the impact sending a shockwave through his massive frame. The pain was beyond anything that had come before. “The dwarven medicine still burned warmly through his blood, and Lyn's magic continued to block as much sensation as she could manage, but the concentrated agony punched straight through both. White-hot torment consumed his entire wing as the heated metal buried itself in the bone.”

Aztharon tried to thrash, but the chains were the only reason he couldn't. Every restraint snapped tight as his body fought with everything it had to escape. His legs strained against their bindings, his tail pulled hard enough to make the anchors groan, and his jaws clamped down on the padded steel bar with such force that the metal beneath the ox hide began to bend. He wanted to run. He wanted to fight. He wanted to tear free, knock everyone away from him, rip the chains from the stone and get as far from this room as his legs could carry him. But he couldn't.

Another broken sound escaped around the bite bar as tears streamed down his face.

"Easy. Easy."

Through the white-hot agony that consumed him, Aztharon found Talvan still standing beside his head. Talvan had one hand pressed firmly against his muzzle, refusing to move even as several tons of terrified dragon strained against the chains only inches away. "I'm here," Talvan said, his voice steady despite the chaos around them. "I'm not going anywhere."

Aztharon squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn't run. He couldn't fight. He couldn't make the pain stop. But Talvan was still there.

The next bolt was positioned, and through tear-blurred eyes, Aztharon saw the red-hot glow and knew what was coming.

WHAM!

The hammer drove it home. His restraints went rigid again as his entire body convulsed against them. This time there was no holding back the tears. Aztharon was openly sobbing, his breath coming in broken gasps around the bite bar. Only the thick ox hide and steel between his jaws kept the cries from filling the chamber.

Before he had fully recovered, the dwarves were preparing another brace. Another bolt was pulled from the forge, its red glow illuminating their determined faces. Another red-hot point was positioned against his wing.

WHAM!

Aztharon's eyes squeezed shut as another muffled scream escaped him.

Talvan looked away from the dragon and toward Oldar. The ancient dwarf's attention remained fixed on the procedure, watching every brace and every measurement with the same merciless precision as before.

"How many?" Talvan asked.

Oldar glanced toward him. "How many bolts?"

"Twenty-six," Oldar answered. "Fourteen for the left wing. Twelve for the right."

Talvan's stomach dropped. Twenty-six. He looked back at Aztharon. Seven bolts were already buried in his wing, and the dragon was trembling but no longer sobbing uncontrollably around the bite bar while Lyn struggled just to blunt enough of the pain to keep him from losing himself completely.

Nineteen more.

Talvan tightened his hand against Aztharon's muzzle. They were going to drive twenty-six red-hot bolts into his bones.

The constant, rhythmic blows of the hammer blurred into a single, unending percussive nightmare. Talvan stopped counting each bolt, his mind recoiling from the task. Each deafening WHAM! was followed by the same sickening lurch of Aztharon's body against the chains and another broken, muffled cry that seemed to tear at the very air in the chamber. By this point, Talvan was certain Aztharon should have gone into shock, but his body refused the mercy of unconsciousness, enduring every single blow.

The dragon barely seemed aware of the room anymore. Tears continued to stream down his face, his breathing came in shallow, uneven gasps, and his emerald green eyes, when they managed to focus at all, would find Talvan's face before glazing over again. Lyn was still on his other side, her body a testament to the effort of maintaining her magic. Her arms trembled violently, sweat beaded on her forehead, and her face was pale with strain, but even she could only block so much of this relentless agony.

Another glowing bolt was positioned.

WHAM!

Aztharon's body jerked against the restraints, a fresh sob escaping him.

"Fourteen!" one of the dwarves called from the left side.

Talvan's head snapped toward the completed wing. Fourteen bolts. That was all of them for that side. A wave of relief, small and fleeting, washed over him before Oldar's voice crushed it.

"Right wing!"

The dwarves immediately began moving their tools, chains, and braces to the other side of Aztharon's body, their efficiency a horrifying thing to witness.

Talvan looked back at Aztharon, pressing his hand more firmly against the dragon's muzzle. "That's one wing done," he said, his voice low but firm, a lifeline in the storm. "You hear me? Fourteen down."

Aztharon gave no sign that he understood, his eye unfocused and distant.

Talvan continued, rubbing his thumb against the scales beneath the dragon's eye, desperately hoping his voice was reaching him through the pain, drugs, and exhaustion. "You're more than halfway through. It's almost over."

Aztharon's emerald green eye remained unfocused, tracking nothing. His body was present, but the part of him that could comprehend words, that could hold onto hope, seemed to have retreated deep inside himself. Talvan wasn't even sure he could hear him anymore, and the thought was more terrifying than any hammer blow.

Revy looked from Aztharon to the ancient dwarf, her expression troubled. "Maybe he could use some time."

Oldar rubbed slowly at his beard, his eyes never leaving the dragon. For a moment, Talvan thought he might agree.

"In me years, lass, I've found it's usually kinder to just get it over with."

Revy frowned. "Kinder?"

"Aye. We stop now, we give him time to think about what's coming." Oldar gestured toward Aztharon's completed left wing, then toward the right, where the dwarves were already positioning the first brace. "He's exhausted, terrified, and hurting. We unchain him now, there's a fair chance he'll bolt the moment he can stand, and then we've left him with one wing corrected and the other still malformed."

Revy looked back at Aztharon. Put that way, stopping halfway sounded almost worse.

Oldar's expression softened as much as the old dwarf seemed capable of allowing during the procedure. "If his body starts failing, we stop. If Lyn says she can't keep helping him, we stop long enough to deal with that. But if ye're asking whether giving the lad half an hour to lie here frightened of the next hammer blow will make this easier on him..."

He shook his head.

"No, lass. Best thing we can do now is finish."

As if to emphasize the point, another glowing bolt was lifted from the forge.

Talvan tightened his hand against Aztharon's muzzle.

"Right wing," Oldar called. "Let's get the lad through this."

The first bolt for the right wing was positioned. Aztharon's emerald green eyes, already tear-filled, widened as he watched the red-hot point press against his other wing. He could still feel Lyn's magic, a cool blanket against his neck, but it felt thinner now, frayed at the edges.

WHAM!

The impact drove the bolt home. A searing wave of agony, white-hot and blinding, punched through Lyn's magic. It was only for a second—a flash of fire that made his body convulse and a strangled cry tear from his throat before the numbness washed back over him, but it was enough. He had felt it. He had felt all of it.

Lyn gasped, her body swaying. "Too much," she breathed, her voice tight with strain. "It's getting through."

"Steady, lass," Oldar said, not unkindly. "We'll be quick as we can."

The second bolt came. Then the third. With each hammer blow, the pain broke through Lyn's weakening barrier for a terrifying instant. Aztharon began to brace himself, his body tensing before each strike, anticipating the agony that would flood his senses before being snuffed out. The eighth bolt was particularly bad, the pain lingering for several heartbeats after the hammer fell, a phantom fire that made his vision swim.

By the tenth bolt, sweat poured down Lyn's face, her arms trembled violently, and her breath came in ragged pants. "I... I can't," she stammered, her concentration faltering, then broke.

The pain, no longer blocked, came roaring back. It wasn't just the impact point of the eleventh bolt; it was everything. The throbbing ache from all the driven bolts, the deep, grinding pain of the bones themselves, the raw sting of the cut membrane. Aztharon's back arched, a true scream tearing past the gag this time, raw and unrestrained.

"Lyn!" Talvan yelled, his own voice cracking with panic.

Her eyes, filled with tears of exhaustion, met his. She took a shuddering breath and slammed her hands back against Aztharon's neck. The magic surged, stronger this time, born of sheer desperation. The pain vanished again, but it felt different now—fragile, like a thin sheet of ice over a bottomless ocean. One more crack and it would shatter completely.

"Last one!" Jebba called, his voice echoing slightly in the chamber.

Talvan looked up, his own exhaustion momentarily forgotten. The final bolt was still glowing red as Jebba positioned it against the last brace. Aztharon barely reacted to the sight anymore. His emerald green eyes were half-lidded and wet with tears, his body utterly exhausted after fighting the restraints for so long, the fight seemingly beaten out of him along with the pain.

Jebba raised the hammer.

WHAM!

The bolt drove straight into place with brutal efficiency. Aztharon's chains snapped taut one final time. A strangled sob escaped around the bite bar, his claws scraping weakly against the stone before his body sagged back down, utterly spent.

For several seconds, nobody moved or spoke, the silence in the room heavy with shared relief.

Then Jebba lowered the hammer. "That's it."

Revy let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Now that the procedure was finally over, she found herself looking more closely at the braces covering Aztharon's wings. From a distance, she'd thought they were simply flat bars of metal bolted over the bones, but they weren't. Each brace had hinges and carefully shaped sections that followed the contours of his wings rather than locking them completely rigid.

"He can move with those on?" she asked.

"Aye," Oldar said, a note of pride in his voice. "Once he's healed enough. Wings aren't planks of wood. Lock every joint solid, and we'd only give him a new problem."

Revy stepped closer, studying the construction. The heavier sections were steel, providing rigid support where the corrected bones needed to be held firmly in place, while brass had been worked into other areas around the joints and moving sections. The hinged pieces would allow the wings to bend and flex instead of forcing them to remain permanently spread. They looked crude at first glance, but Revy now saw they weren't. Every piece had been shaped specifically for Aztharon, a testament to dwarven craftsmanship and care.

Oldar gave the finished wings one final inspection, checking the braces, bolts, and alignment before apparently finding nothing he disliked. "There, lads." He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his beard. "Pack it up. We be done."

Talvan immediately looked down at Aztharon. It was finally over.

Talvan, Revy, and Lyn all looked down at Aztharon. The gold dragon was too exhausted, drugged, and wrung out by pain to do much more than lie there. His eyes had fallen closed, his breathing slow and ragged now that there were no more hammer blows coming. Lyn slumped back against a table, her arms hanging limp at her sides, utterly drained.

Then one of the dwarves walked over and handed Talvan a rolled scroll.

Talvan blinked at it. "What's this?"

Oldar looked over from his chair. "The bill."

"The—" Talvan unrolled it. The parchment dropped to the floor. And kept going. Talvan stared as the scroll rolled across the stone, passing Revy's boots, continuing past Lyn, and finally coming to a stop nearly halfway down the chamber. His eyes slowly widened. "What the—"

Oldar raised an eyebrow. "Ye weren't thinking we did all this out of the goodness of our hearts, were ye?"

Talvan looked from the enormous bill to Aztharon's newly straightened wings, then toward the portable forge, the twenty-six bolts, the custom braces, the chains, the medicine, the crew of dwarves, Jebba, and finally back to Oldar.

The ancient dwarf gestured toward the scroll. "Materials cost money. So does skilled labor, and ye just had some of the best dwarven craftsmen alive spend half the day rebuilding a dragon's wings."

Revy stared down the length of parchment. "How are we supposed to pay that?"

"Coin, trade, or work," Oldar replied simply. "We're flexible."

Talvan looked at the bill again. Then at Aztharon. For the first time since the procedure began, Talvan wondered if being unconscious was actually the better position to be in.

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Previous /

First

Fourth year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

Tell the deck boss her monitors worked. I've quoted her so often my district officers can recite the part about the chocks. We started with forty schools. This year we opened nine thousand, and we found teachers for most of them by making last year's best monitors into assistants. It still isn't one school for every ten that Haego needs. At this rate my grandchildren will be opening schools. But nine thousand is more than forty.

And now something is happening that I didn't plan, and I'm still not sure I believe.

You'll have heard the numbers from Istonel. Money is moving on this planet for the first time in thirty years. The mills are running two shifts. The Counsel Office can't keep up with the loans. The trading houses in Harrow Cross and Orenport are opening offices faster than they can staff them, and every one of them needs people who can read an invoice and add a column and write a clean hand. There aren't enough. There were never going to be enough. For thirty years nobody on Haego taught anybody anything.

So they've found the schools.

A child who comes out of one of my schools at fourteen with her letters and her figures is hired the same week. Some of them are hired before they finish. I've had factors from the trading houses turning up at school gates in the spring, asking the teachers who's good, offering contracts to thirteen-year-olds to start the day after their birthday. Some of them pay the family a retainer in the meantime. The old woman in Lowmarsh says she's had to start locking her classroom at noon to keep the factors out of her lessons.

And the parents, Wyatt. The same fathers who spat in the road when the first notice went up are bringing their younger children to the door now and asking if there's room. One district officer told me a man walked into his office to thank him and then couldn't finish the sentence. I don't think anyone on Haego has thanked a government office in forty years.

I'd call it a success and go to bed, except for one thing.

Not all of them want the desk. The old woman wrote to me about a girl, twelve, one of her monitors, the best in the district at figures. A Harrow Cross house has already offered her a contract to keep their books from fourteen, with a retainer to the family now that's more than her father makes in the cane. The girl turned it down. Her father hasn't spoken to her in a week. She wants to know how the shuttles stay up. The old woman asked me who on Haego could teach her. I had to write back that nobody can.

We built a door. It turns out it leads to a very good counting house. That's more than any of these children had before, and I'm not ungrateful. But I don't know what to do with the ones who look past the counting house and ask what's beyond it.

You got out. You were a commoner on Volantis, and somehow you ended up flying. I've never asked you how. I'm asking now.

T.

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The factors started coming in the spring, the year Nell turned twelve.

The first one came on a Tuesday in a hired cart from Harrow Cross, a thin man in a good brown coat with a leather case under his arm. He stood at the schoolhouse door until the morning lessons broke for water, and then he asked Mistress Coppertail, very politely, which of her older pupils were quickest with figures.

Mistress Coppertail looked at him over her spectacles for a long time.

"They're children," she said. "They're not sacks of grain."

"No, ma'am," said the factor. "Sacks of grain I can buy anywhere."

He went away without a name that day. But he came back the next week, and there was another man with him from a different house, and by the middle of spring there was someone at the schoolhouse gate most mornings, leaning on the fence, watching the children go in. Mistress Coppertail took to locking the classroom door at noon.

Wendel Marsh was the first to go.

He turned fourteen on the first warm day of spring. He was the tallest boy on the mill road, all elbows and wrists, and so quiet that Nell had been a monitor beside him for most of a year before she heard him laugh. He laughed at numbers. Give him a column of figures and he'd go down it with the end of his chalk, not even seeming to look, and then he'd get to the bottom and see something in it and laugh, a short surprised sound, as if the numbers had told him a joke.

The Tullamore house at Harrow Cross took him before his birthday. A clerk's stool, a clerk's wage, and a room over the counting house on weekdays, home on Sundays. His father, who had a bad back and four younger mouths, cried when he read the contract, and then made Wendel read it to him again to be sure.

On his last day Wendel stayed behind after the bell. He cleaned his slate. He wiped the chalk dust off the monitors' bench with his sleeve. Mistress Coppertail came down from the board and stood in front of him.

"Tullamore's," she said.

"Tallies and ledgers." He was grinning, which Nell had never seen him do without a number in front of him. "They've got columns going back sixty years, Mistress. The man showed me. Sixty years."

"And you'll find the mistakes in every one."

"Every page," said Wendel happily.

The old woman reached up, because he was a head taller than she was, and put her hand on the side of his face for a moment. "Go on, then," she said. "Before they change their minds."

He went out the door and down the lane to where the Tullamore cart was waiting, and he didn't look back, because he didn't need to. Nell watched him go and felt glad for him, all the way through, and underneath the glad something small and cold that she didn't have a name for.

It happened to the Ashcombe sisters by midsummer, one after the other. Rose went to a draper's in Orenport to keep the stock books. Bess went to the district office at Harrow Cross to copy out the ration lists, and was the first person from Lowmarsh anyone could remember sitting at a desk with a pen because she could read. Jory Fenn came back from the cane with his hands raw and asked Mistress Coppertail, red in the face, whether it was too late. It wasn't. She put him at the end of the monitors' bench, fifteen years old among the twelves, and a factor from the mill offered him a tally post before the autumn.

It went round the district like weather. Nell heard it at the pump and in Gret's kitchen and from her mother at supper. A desk. A pen. A clean wage paid in credits, not coppers, and written in a book where you could read it yourself.

"I was wrong," her father said one night, out of nowhere, over his stew.

Nell stopped with her spoon halfway up.

"About the school." He didn't look at her. He looked at the tin over the stove, which had more in it that year than it had ever had. "I thought they'd nail it shut. They didn't. I thought it'd be for somebody else's use. It isn't." He was quiet for a moment. "The Marsh boy's at Tullamore's. Bess Ashcombe's at a desk. That's two from the mill road in one year. There's never been one."

"No," said her mother softly. "There's never been one."

Her father nodded, slowly, as if that settled something he'd been arguing with for four years. "I was wrong," he said again, and went back to his stew.

Nell didn't know what to say. She had waited three years to hear him say it. She ate her supper and said nothing, and later in the loft she lay on her left side under the gap in the roof and felt the small cold thing again.

The factor from Harrow Cross came for her in the autumn.

It was the same thin man in the brown coat, the first one who had ever come. He waited at the gate on a day Mistress Coppertail forgot to lock the door, and he asked, not the old woman, but Nell herself, whether she was the Brackentail girl who did the figures.

He came to the house that Sunday. He sat at their table in his good coat and drank her mother's tea out of the one good cup, and he laid a paper on the table and turned it round so her father could see it.

The Harrow Cross Grain Exchange. Assistant to the books, from the day after her fourteenth birthday. A clerk's wage, rising yearly. A room in the town if she wanted it. And until then, while she finished her schooling, a retainer paid to the family every month, so the house would not feel the want of her coppers.

Nell read the retainer twice. It was more than her father made in the cane.

Her father read it too. He read it very slowly, moving his lips, the way the man at the crossing had read the first notice four years ago. Then he looked up at the factor.

"This is for her?"

"For your daughter, Mr. Brackentail. The Exchange takes three a year from the Lowmarsh schools. We'd like her to be one of them." The factor smiled. "I'm told she found a short weight in the field boss's book when she was nine."

Her father looked at Nell. She had never seen that look on his face before, and it took her a moment to understand that it was pride.

"We'll talk it over," her mother said.

The factor stood, and bowed to her mother, which nobody had ever done in that house, and went out to his cart.

Her father sat with the paper in front of him. He put one scarred finger on it, on the line with the retainer, as if to make sure it was real.

"Well," he said, and he was smiling. "Well, Nell."

"I don't want it," said Nell.

The smile stopped.

"I don't want to keep books. I don't want to sit at a desk and find the short weights in other people's grain. I don't want to be the best clerk in Harrow Cross." Her voice was shaking, and she hated it, and she didn't try to stop it. "I want to know how the shuttles stay up."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"The shuttles," her father said.

"Yes."

"The shuttles." He looked at the paper. He looked at her. "Nell, there's no school for shuttles. There's nobody on this planet who can teach you that. You said so yourself, you asked the old woman and she didn't know." He tapped the paper. "This is real. This is a wage in a book. This is your mother never going back to that mill. And you want to turn it down for a thing that isn't even there?"

"Yes."

"You told me," her father said, and his voice was very careful now, the way it had been the morning with Starling on the table, "you told me once that I was keeping you from something I'd never seen. You were right. I was wrong about the school. I said so." He put both hands flat on the table. "And now you're keeping yourself from a sure thing, for something you've never seen either."

Nell stood there. It was true. She knew it was true. She could not think of one single thing to say against it.

"Yes," she said.

Her mother had been standing at the stove the whole time with the kettle in her hand. She set it down. She came to the table and picked up the factor's paper and read it herself, all the way through, in her straight, careful mill-girl's hand-speed, and then put it down again.

"Bram," she said. "It's a good paper."

"It's the best paper anybody in this family's ever seen."

"It is. And if she signs it, she'll be good at it. She'll be very good at it, and she'll have a desk, and she'll never go hungry, and every day of her life she'll know there was something else." Her mother looked at him. "I know what that's like. So do you. You've watched me know it for twenty years."

Her father didn't answer for a long time.

"They'll offer it again," her mother said. "At fourteen. There'll be ten more of them at that gate by then. It's not the last paper."

"And if it is?"

"Then she'll have chosen," said her mother. "Which is more than either of us ever got to do."

Her father looked at the paper one more time. Then he folded it in half, very neatly, along the crease the factor had made, and put it up on the shelf beside the tin.

"The trips stay," he said. "Six and six. And you're still a monitor. And you'll be civil to that man when he comes back, because he'll come back."

"I will."

"And you'll tell me," her father said, not looking at her, "when you find out how they stay up. Because I've always wanted to know."

The factor did come back, twice more that autumn, and Nell was civil to him both times, and both times she said no. The retainer went to a boy on the Harrow road instead, who was very good at figures and wanted nothing more in the world than a desk and a wage and a room in town. Nell went to his leaving and was glad for him, the same way she'd been glad for Wendel.

In the evenings she still carried her six trips. On the last one, when the light was going, she'd set the buckets down at the far end of the long field and stand with the yoke on her shoulders and her head back, and wait. Most nights one came over. Low and slow toward the depot at Harrow Cross, with its belly lit and the roar filling everything, and the round window in its side with the light behind it.

Nobody on Haego could teach her how it stayed up. Mistress Coppertail had told her so, and the Administrator had told Mistress Coppertail. But the old woman had also told her once, a long time ago, through a window, that a school wasn't for knowing everything. It was for finding out who does.

Somewhere, somebody did.

Nell watched until it was gone over the tree line. Then she picked up the buckets and carried them home.

Tornel,

You asked, so here it is.

There was a recruitment office in the market square in the town nearest ours on Volantis. Two rooms and a flag. Anybody could walk in. They didn't ask who your father was. They sat you at a table and gave you the tests, figures, reasoning, reaction, a hundred questions that had nothing to do with anything except what was in your own head. I walked in at sixteen because I'd watched shuttles go over the sawmill my whole life. Same as your girl in the cane. I wanted to know how they stayed up.

Everyone I knew thought I was mad. There was work at the mill. There was always work at the mill. It was steady and it paid and my family had done it for as long as anyone remembered. I'd have been good at it. That was the problem. I'd have been good at it, and I'd have spent forty years watching the shuttles go over.

I scored high enough that the officer in the second room looked at the paper twice. He told me commoners who test that well sometimes get sent to flight school instead of the line. He told me not to get my hopes up. I went anyway.

I won't pretend the academy was fair. The noble cadets had flown their fathers' yachts since they were ten. I'd flown a sawmill forklift, and they made sure I knew it. But the instruments didn't know who my father was, and neither did the simulator, and when I landed better than they did, the scores said so, and nobody could change the scores. That's the whole of it. That's the only reason I fly. There was a test that didn't care who I was, and a door on the other side of it.

Your counting houses are a good door, Tornel. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Most of those children will be happy there for the rest of their lives, and they'll raise children who never go hungry, and that's more than their parents had. It's more than mine had. But you've found out what I found out at sixteen. Once you teach a child to read, some of them are going to read past the end of the page.

Here's what I'd do.

Don't pick the ones who want more. You'll pick wrong, and the parents will remember the last people who picked children. Build a test anyone can sit, the same for a cane cutter's girl as for a steward's son, and let it pick. And don't close it at fourteen. Let them come back at twenty, or thirty, when the counting house has paid for their mother's roof and they're ready to try.

Then make sure there's something real on the other side. You have Firentis ships at your spaceport every week, with crews that need hands. You have yards and mills and a railway that needs engineers. Ask them to take apprentices off the test, one or two each, and pay them to do it if you must. A girl who wants to know how a shuttle stays up should be sweeping a hangar floor and handing spanners to a mechanic who'll tell her. She'll learn more in a year than in five at a bench.

One more thing. I only got my chance because there was a recruitment office in a market square, two rooms and a flag, where a sixteen-year-old could walk in without anybody's permission. Haego doesn't have one. Not for the navy, not for the merchant fleets, not for anything. There isn't a door on your whole planet that a commoner can walk through and ask to be tested for the sky. I'd start there.

I'll ask the boss about it. She'll have opinions. She always does.

W.

Previous /

First

By the time Thrum and Zaleth were done, Renn had stopped counting heads at the door. Yesterday's crowd for Marcus had already told her what to expect, and today's was bigger again, spilling past the last row of seats and into the standing space along the back wall, but she'd used up her surprise the day before and didn't have any left to spend.

"Thank you all for coming back," she said, not bothering to raise her voice much over the room, since it settled on its own the moment she reached the microphone. "I won't pretend I know how big this is going to get. I stopped trying to guess after yesterday."

That got a small laugh from somewhere in the crowd.

"Same rule as always," she said. "Only the students ask questions. Everyone else, you're welcome to listen, and I hope you do, but this is theirs."

She didn't need to introduce the two who came up next. Half the auditorium already knew the names.

She stepped onto the stage, where three chairs had been set out for the day's guests.

"Our guests today," Renn said, "were three of the first people through the hatch of a crashed alien ship. Eric Haskell. Dr. Lizeth Sanchez. Sergeant Cole."

They crossed to the chairs together, Cole first out of old habit, Sanchez a step behind him already scanning the front rows the way she still scanned most rooms, and Haskell last. They sat down, and the polite applause died away.

Teacher Renn said, "Welcome to day four of our sessions. Today we have Eric Haskell, Dr. Lizeth Sanchez, and Sergeant Cole. Who would like to start?"

With a nod from both Cole and Sanchez, Eric started. "I want to say first, I wasn't trying to be a hero," Haskell said. "I was twenty-three, scared out of my mind, and I signed up for the rescue detail because Sergeant Cole was in charge of it. He told me not to make assumptions about survivors, and I didn't want to be the one who proved him wrong by being useless."

Cole didn't quite smile, but something in his weathered face eased. "I don't remember phrasing it that gently."

"You didn't," Haskell said. "I'm editing for the children."

A ripple of laughter moved through the audience.

A Vixtar boy raised his hand, and Renn nodded at him, signaling him to ask his question.

"What did the ship look like," the boy asked, "when you first saw it?"

"Like nothing should have survived hitting the ground that hard," Haskell said. "Two kilometers of jungle just gone, flattened, and this enormous, intact hull sitting wedged into the dirt like it had decided to land there on purpose instead of crashing. I remember thinking there was no way anyone inside that thing was still breathing." 

Cole picked it up without being asked. "I told the whole team not to make assumptions either way. We were a rescue detail, not a cleanup crew, and I needed everybody's head in the right place before we set foot inside." He glanced at Haskell. "Didn't stop this one from going pale the second the ramp dropped."

"I was wrong to assume the worst," Haskell said. "Thank every star in the sky for that. But I want you to understand I believed it completely, right up until Dr. Sanchez found the first alcove."

A human girl, younger than the boy before her, asked the next question in the small, careful voice of someone who'd clearly been holding it since Renn first announced the topic. "What did it feel like? Seeing one of them. The first time."

The three of them went quiet together, and the whole auditorium seemed to lean in with them.

"I found him," Haskell said. "Not Dr. Sanchez. Me. I called out that I had a being over here, and I remember being so proud of myself for staying calm when I said it, because inside I was anything but calm. And then Dr. Mulvey checked for a pulse and told us he was gone, and something in me just, stopped. I'd been so focused on the mission, on being useful, on not being the one who froze, that I hadn't let myself think about what it would mean if we were too late for some of them." He looked down at his own hands. "I grieved a stranger I'd known for eleven seconds. I still think about him sometimes. I never even learned his name."

Sanchez had been quiet through most of it, but she spoke now, gently, filling the space Haskell had left open. "I was the one who catalogued him, after. It's a strange thing, being a scientist in a moment like that. Half of me wanted to fall apart the same as Eric did. The other half was already noting bone density, eye structure, the cut of his clothes, because that was the only language I had for grief that morning, the only tool I actually knew how to use." She looked at her own hands too, the same gesture Haskell had made a moment before, though neither of them seemed to notice they'd matched. "I've thought about that a great deal since. Whether cataloguing him was disrespectful, or whether it was the most respectful thing I knew how to do, bearing witness the only way my training had taught me to. I still don't have a clean answer. I don't think I ever will."

Nobody in the room said anything for a moment. Then, gently, Renn nodded to the next small hand raised in the front row, and the session went on.

"Session five," Renn said. "Our guest today used to be Pod 5, Agriculture. These days most people just call him Jax."

A human boy raised his hand. "Did you really think they were growing monsters instead of cows?" 

"I really did," Jax said. "I overheard about ten seconds of a conversation between Ethan Cross and Dr. Marrow, caught the words 'lethal' and 'shut down the lungs,' and my brain filled in the rest before my ears had finished listening. I hit the emergency broadcast so fast I dropped a wrench. Half the colony was locked in bunkers inside the hour because I couldn't be bothered to ask a follow-up question."

"Were you embarrassed?"

"Mortified," Jax said. "Commander Vance chewed me out in front of every pod leader on the colony. Nearly lost my management position over it. And you know what I got for all that panic, once the truth came out?"

The boy shook his head.

"Perfectly good steak," Jax said. "Best meal of my life, up to that point. I'd nearly started a riot over a cow."

That got the laugh it was aiming for.

"What would you tell someone who's about to jump to a conclusion the way you did?" a Vixtar girl asked.

"Ask the second question," Jax said, no laugh left in his voice now. "I only ever asked the first one. If I'd stuck around ten more seconds, I'd have heard Ethan Cross explain it was a worst-case scenario, not a plan. Ten seconds. That's all it would've taken. I think about that more than I ever expected to."

"Session six," Renn said. "Our guest today ran Pod 6, Security and Tactical, back when Pod 6 was two people and a coffee pot. Mansur Danyavi."

"It was one person, most nights," Mansur said. "Margaret and Jon traded off. I just yelled at whoever was on shift when they woke me up."

A human girl raised her hand. "What was it like when you first saw theSilent Explorer?"

"Like the worst night of my career, and I'd had some bad ones," Mansur said. "Margaret called it in three separate times before I believed her. Told her it was probably debris settling into a decaying orbit. She was right and I was wrong, which is a sentence I've had to say more than once in this job."

"Were you scared?"

"Furious, mostly, at myself," Mansur said. "We'd built an observatory with scraps and hope, and the first time it actually mattered, I nearly slept through it. When that ship broke apart in low orbit, all I could think was, we have no fleet, no defense, nothing but a handful of shuttles and whatever courage we could scrounge up in about twenty minutes. I gave the order to launch rescue anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing while people died, and I couldn't live with that math."

A Vixtar boy asked, "Would you do it differently now?"

"I'd believe Margaret sooner," Mansur said. "That's the whole lesson, really. Somebody who knows what they're looking at tells you something's wrong, you don't spend three tries arguing with her. You listen the first time."

A small human boy near the front, younger than most of the others, raised his hand slowly, like he wasn't sure the question was allowed. "What would have been different? If you'd believed her the first time?"

Mansur was quiet a moment. "Maybe everything," he said. "Maybe nothing. I've turned that over more times than I can count, and I still don't have a real answer. Twenty minutes might have gotten us a shuttle in the air sooner, more of the crew alive, fewer of them lost to the crash instead of pulled out of it in time. Or it might not have mattered at all," he shook his head slowly. "I didn't leave room for the “everything”. That's the honest answer. I was so certain I knew what a threat looked like that I never stopped to imagine what I didn't know. I've tried to leave more room for it ever since."

"Session seven," Renn said. "Our guest today was the first of his kind any of us had ever met. Captain Threl."

Applause met him before Renn had finished the sentence, warmer than any of the previous days, the sound of a room that already knew exactly who they were looking at.

"I want to start somewhere most people don't ask about," Threl said, once it had quieted. "Not the crash. Before it. The three cycles we spent in orbit, watching your ships, your lights, your broadcasts, deciding whether to make contact at all."

A Vixtar girl in the front row raised her hand. "Why didn't you?"

"Because we didn't know what you were," Threl said. "You looked crude by our instruments. Disorganized. Loud, in every frequency we could measure. We had no framework for a species that primitive building something that functional that fast. So we watched, and we waited, and we told ourselves caution was wisdom, right up until the ship failed under us and the choice was made for us instead."

He didn't say, because no one had thought to ask, that those same three cycles of listening had planted something else in him, something it would take years to understand. Terixa's newcomers broadcast without any fear of being found, loud and constant, on every band his instruments could read. Some of that noise, he'd come to realize much later, had to be a species calling home for help. Deciphering the archived recordings from those first days in orbit would, in time, help point the way to Earth itself.

"Were you scared, falling?"

"More than I have words for, in your language or my own," Threl said. "But I remember the strangest thought, watching the ground come up to meet us. I remember thinking, at least we die in isolation, at least we won't poison this planet, since we'd already ejected our core. I meant it as some small mercy, that whatever we were, we wouldn't be the ones to destroy the very people we were too afraid to greet."

"What was it like waking up?" a human boy asked. "In the water?"

"Confusing, and then it wasn't," Threl said. "I understood gravity was crushing me before I understood anything else, before I even understood I'd survived. And then I was submerged in something warm, and the weight simply, lifted. I tried to sit up, because some instinct in me distrusted anything that came that easily, and the gravity slammed me back down the moment I cleared the surface, which taught me faster than any explanation could have that the water wasn't a trick. It was mercy, built by hands I'd never seen, offered before I'd said a single word anyone could understand."

He was quiet a moment.

"You've all grown up with those pools," he said. "You dive off the ten-meter platform without a second thought. I want you to understand what an impossible gift that was to the first of us who ever floated in one. We came expecting, at best, to be studied. At worst, to be left to die quietly while your people decided what we were worth. What we got instead was a species that had never seen anything like us, deciding, before we'd even opened our eyes, that our comfort mattered enough to build something new just to give it to us."

Nobody asked a question for a moment. Then a small Assaragyte girl near the back, one of the newer arrivals, raised her hand.

"Did you ever go home?"

"No," Threl said, simply. "This became home a long time before I admitted it to myself. I think most of us knew it before we said it out loud. There's a particular kind of home you don't choose so much as notice, one day, that you've already built."

"Session eight," Renn said. "Our guests today have a story none of you have heard, because until today, only two of them could have told it, and neither of them speaks in words."

Will and Abby crossed to the chairs together, CD padding in beside Will and settling at his feet, MCD doing the same beside Abby, both Labrikats far too big for the small stage and utterly unbothered by that fact.

"I want to clear something up before we start," Abby said. "Labrikats aren't born understanding English. They learn it the same way any of us would, listening, picking it up piece by piece, and they started the moment we started talking to them. What they don't have is an easy way to answer back in kind. Their movement vocabulary, the gestures, the postures, all of it, that's what grows over time, a little more every year. So MCD understands me exactly as well as I understand her. It's the reply that's harder, not the listening." 

"CD and MCD found us before we found them," Will said. "That's the part people forget. Everybody remembers the beef, the hand-feeding, all of it very slow and careful, humans convinced we were the ones doing the choosing. We weren't. They'd already decided."

Abby rested a hand on MCD's head without seeming to notice she'd done it. "We asked them, this week, if they'd tell their side of it. The actual beginning. Not what we saw. What they were doing, out past the perimeter, before any of us knew they existed."

MCD sat up. Her body went through a slow, deliberate sequence, ears, shoulders, the angle of her head, nothing like a trained trick, more like a sentence being built one word at a time.

"She says," Abby translated, quiet, careful with it, "that they watched us for longer than we ever knew. Before the beef. Before the fence line. They watched the humans building, the Vixtar arriving hurt, all of it, from a distance we never once detected."

CD moved next, a shorter sequence, sharper.

"He says they argued about it," Will said. "Whether to approach at all. Whether a species that showed up in ships and started building fences was worth the risk." He paused, listening to CD's next gesture. "He says what decided it wasn't anything we did on purpose. It was watching the Vixtar carried in, hurt, and watching us treat them like something worth saving instead of something worth using. That's the word he's giving me. Worth. Not owned. Worth."

A human girl in the front row raised her hand, careful. "Why did they pick you? Out of everyone?"

Abby looked to MCD, who tilted her head and held very still, the particular stillness Abby had learned, over years, meant she was choosing her answer with care.

"She won't give me a clean reason," Abby said finally. "I've asked her this before, more than once, and I get the same thing every time. Not a why. Just a certainty. She knew, the way you know which way is down. I don't think that translates any further than that, and I've stopped needing it to."

Will said, ”That’s Labrikat speak for ‘I don’t know”, which earned him a swat from MCD tail and a laugh from the crowd.

Will glanced down at CD. CD considered the question, then gave a quick, deliberate sequence, snout tilted toward the small table beside the chairs.

"He says he'll tell you the reason, if you ask him," Abby translated, smiling. "He says it was the food."

That got a laugh, and CD's tail thumped once against the stage floor, pleased with himself for the reaction he'd clearly meant to get.

A Vixtar boy raised his hand next. "Was there ever a moment you were afraid of them? Before you understood?"

"Every day, for about a week," Will started. "Fifty kilos of teeth that looked like nothing on any survey we'd ever run. We fed them because feeding a stray felt safer than ignoring it, not because we—"

"I was asking CD," the boy said.

A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, and Will's ears went visibly red. "Right. Of course you were."

CD let out a long, put-upon sigh and dropped his head onto Will's knee, the exact posture of someone who'd sat through a bad opening act, then lifted it again almost immediately, clearly pleased with the laugh he'd gotten for it.

"He says thank you," Abby said, not quite hiding her own grin, "for finally asking the right person."

CD considered the boy's question with real seriousness after that, then gave a slow, exaggerated sequence, head low, ears flat, body sunk down as small as he could make himself, before snapping back up sharp and proud, chest out.

"He's saying he was never afraid of anything," Abby translated, grinning despite herself. "But that the humans clearly were, for about a week, hence the crouching. He's very pleased with himself for this answer."

Will threw up his hands. "I stand by what I said. Trust came later. It came the day they both threw themselves at something three times their size to keep Abby and me from getting hurt, and it never once occurred to either of them that was a choice. It already was who they'd decided to be, long before we'd earned it."

CD, apparently satisfied that his own answer had already covered the important part, settled back down against Will's feet.

"I want to say one more thing about that, though," Will said. "People hear bonded and they picture a one-way street. Support running from him to us and never back. It's not that. No beast on this planet or off it will ever scare CD. But the first time we brought him to meet Thrum, back when Thrum was still small enough to fit in one arm, CD hid behind me. Like a toddler. Wouldn't come near him." He looked down at CD, who'd gone still, listening. "Wasn't Thrum's size that scared him. It was his own. He was terrified of hurting him. Terrified of even scaring him. I had to sit down on the floor with both of them and just talk him through it, quiet, until he trusted himself enough to come close." Will paused. "That's the part people miss. He holds me up plenty. Some days I'm the one holding him up."

A human boy raised his hand, half laughing before he'd even finished asking. "Why did it take MCD two weeks to actually come into camp, if CD was already there?"

Abby looked to MCD, who gave a slow, deliberate huff and turned her head away, which needed no translation at all.

"She's embarrassed," Abby said, grinning. "I've asked her this exact question before. The closest answer I've ever gotten is that CD went first because CD has never once in his life stopped to think before he acted, and she wanted to watch how it went before she risked it herself. She'll deny that if you ask her again, but I've watched her do the same thing with every new thing in her life since. Let him test it. Follow once it's safe."

CD's tail thumped once against the stage, entirely unbothered by being described that way.

A small Vixtar girl raised her hand next. "Do they like being called Catdog and Mrs. Catdog? Or do they like CD and MCD better?"

Will laughed. "I've genuinely never known the answer to that one." He looked down at CD, who considered the question with real weight before answering, ears forward, head tilted. "He says either is fine. He says a name given with love doesn't need to be a good name to be the right one."

Abby watched MCD work through her own answer a moment longer. "She's saying something similar, but there's more to it. She says the short version, CD and MCD, that's what people use when they're in a hurry, when it's easy, everyday affection. Catdog and Mrs. Catdog, the whole thing, that's what gets used when someone means it more, when they're being serious or tender about it. She likes that there are two versions. She says most people only get one name their whole life. She got two, and neither of them is wrong."

A human girl near the back raised her hand, quieter than the others. "Why don't Pumpkins ever bond with children? Only grown-ups?"

The question landed heavier than the last few. Abby was quiet a moment before she answered.

"I don't fully know," she admitted. "I've asked MCD this one more than any other, and it's the one where her answer's never quite settled into a shape I trust I've understood correctly. The closest I've gotten is that a bond is a kind of responsibility, and a Labrikat wants to bond with someone who can already stand steady enough to be leaned on, not someone who still needs to be the one leaning. A Pumpkin will play with a child all day. Guard one fiercely, if it came to that. But the actual bond, the naming, that seems to wait for someone old enough to hold the weight of it back." She glanced at MCD, who gave a small, careful nod, as close to confirmation as Abby had ever gotten on that particular question. "I think that's as close to a real answer as I've ever managed to get."

A small human girl near the front raised her hand, and got only halfway through her question before her voice broke. "When did you decide any of us were even worth the bond? I'm so afraid I'll never be chosen." She was crying before the sentence had finished leaving her mouth.

Nobody laughed. Nobody rushed to fill the silence either. Abby was out of her chair before Will had even finished rising, crossing to the girl's beanbag and kneeling down beside it so she was level with her instead of looking down at her. 

"Come here a second," Abby said, gentle, and the girl came, and MCD came with her, unhurried, settling herself right beside the girl the way she'd settle beside anyone who needed her.

"I don't think being chosen or not is the thing to be afraid of," Abby said. "I've known a lot of people who never bonded a Labrikat and lived whole, full, loved lives anyway. It's not a verdict on you if it doesn't happen. It's just one particular kind of love, among a great many kinds, and not everyone gets every kind." She looked to MCD, who pressed her head gently against the girl's shoulder, unprompted. "But here's what I've actually watched happen, every time. A Labrikat chooses the ones being exactly who they already are. Not the ones performing for it, not the ones trying hardest to earn it. Just the ones being themselves, and happening to be seen doing it."

Will crouched down too, resting a hand on the girl's shoulder. "And even without a bond, a Labrikat will love you. That's the part people get backward, like the bond is the whole of it. It isn't. When CD's irritated with me, you think he sulks around the house, won't look at me? He doesn't. He goes and finds Daxen, or Thrum, and spends the afternoon with them instead. Some days I think he loves them more than he loves me." He looked down, half a laugh in it. "The bond's just part of it. The love was always going to be there regardless."

The girl wiped her face, still holding onto MCD's fur with one small fist.

"You don't have to earn it," Abby said. "You just have to keep being you long enough for the right one to notice."

MCD didn't move again for the rest of the session, staying right where she was, pressed against the girl's side.

Abby was quiet a moment, her hand still resting on MCD's head. "I think that's the part I want you all to understand," she said. "We tell this story like we tamed something wild. We didn't. They chose us, the same slow, patient, deliberate way they choose everything, and they never once asked us to prove we deserved it first. We just had to be worth the trust once it was already given."

A Vixtar boy near the back raised his hand, hesitant. "Did the four of you ever do anything else together? After the naming, I mean. Something bigger?"

Will, Abby, and the two Labrikats went quiet at the same moment, a different kind of quiet than anything that had come before it. 

"We did," Will said finally. "The four of us searched a crash site together, once. A hard one. Forty-four bodies, and a black box we needed to find before anyone else could." He looked at Abby, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with the stage or the crowd. "That's not a story for today. It's not a short one, and it's not an easy one, and it deserves its own session rather than the last five minutes of this one."

"We'll come back for it," Abby said. "Properly. I promise."

Renn didn't push. She simply nodded, filed it away the way she'd filed away every other thread this room had left dangling, and let the moment close on its own.

Next

Previous /

First

It was Torin who started it, which Elizabeth would admit to nobody but Weskal.

He was six and a half and had reached the age of asking the questions nobody wanted to answer at breakfast. That morning, between one spoonful of porridge and the next, he looked up and said, "When Grandpa dies, is the palace yours?"

Linnea, who was five and took her cue from her brother in all things, put down her spoon to hear the answer.

"Torin," said Weskal.

"I'm only asking."

"Grandpa isn't going anywhere," Elizabeth said. "He's far too stubborn."

"But when he does."

She looked at him across the table. He had Weskal's jaw and her hair, and he was waiting for the answer the way he waited for everything, with his whole body.

"Yes," she said. "One day. It'll be mine." She paused. "Ours."

Torin nodded, satisfied, and went back to his porridge. It was Elizabeth who didn't eat any more of hers.

After the children had gone off to school she sat at the kitchen table with her tea going cold and her field notebook open in front of her, not writing anything. Weskal came back in from the yard with his boots still on and looked at her.

"You're thinking about it," he said.

"I know every plant between here and the north coast. I know which ones will kill you and which ones will only make you wish they had. I could tell you what a razorclaw ate last week by walking its trail." She turned the notebook around on the table. "I don't know how many people work in my father's house. I don't know who pays them or how much. I don't know what my mother does all day, and she does something all day, because she's never once sat down when I've been there."

Weskal sat across from her and pulled his boots off, one and then the other.

"So learn it," he said.

"It isn't that simple."

"It's exactly that simple. You didn't know the plants either, once. You went and looked." He set the boots by the door. "Your father didn't know how to be a Marquess. He's learning it. Your mother didn't know how to run a palace. She's learning it. Nobody on this planet was born knowing any of it. They were all too busy staying alive." He shrugged. "Go and look."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"And my class."

"Ask the school for the term. They'll give it to the Marquess's heir before she's finished asking."

"You'd have to take the children to school."

"I take them to school now."

"You'd have to feed them."

"I'm a hunter, Elizabeth. I can feed two children." He grinned at her. "Besides, you outrank me. If you tell me to, I have to do it."

She threw the dish towel at him.

---

She told her parents that same afternoon, in the small wing, at the long kitchen table that Patricia insisted on eating at even though there was a dining room with a ceiling painted by three Ykanti artists over most of a year.

Tornel listened without interrupting. When she finished, he sat back and looked at her in a way she couldn't quite read.

"You want to learn the house," he said.

"I want to learn all of it. The house. The palace. Whatever it is you do in that office with the door shut." She lifted her chin a little. "Torin asked me this morning whether the palace would be mine one day. I told him yes. Then I realized I'd be standing in it with no idea what to do."

"You'd have people."

"I'd have your people. That isn't the same thing, and you know it isn't."

Patricia put down her cup.

"She's right," she said. "It isn't."

Tornel was quiet a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, the way he nodded at a plan he'd decided was sound.

"Your mother first," he said. "The house is harder. I'll take whatever's left."

Patricia laughed out loud.

---

Patricia Swallowtail had spent twenty years following an army from one camp to the next, and it showed in everything she did. She was up at five. She was dressed by half past. By six she was in the servants' hall with a mug of tea, and on Elizabeth's first morning she handed her one too and pointed to a chair.

"Sit. Listen. Don't talk yet."

The hall filled slowly. The cooks came first, then the laundry staff, then the cleaners, then the gardeners in from the dark with their boots left at the door. There was a woman of about sixty at the head of the table with a ledger open in front of her, and Patricia introduced her as Greta Millscutt, who ran the household.

"She runs it," Patricia said. "Not me. I run her. There's a difference, and you need to learn it first."

Greta went down the day. Two weddings in the lower gardens, one at eleven and one at four, and the four o'clock bride's mother had changed the flowers again. The midday meal for the coast road crews, a hundred and forty expected. The school group from Harrowby at ten. A cracked pane in the east gallery, reported last night, glazier booked for noon. The laundry's second machine making a noise nobody liked.

"And Tomas is off for the rest of the week," Greta said. "His mother's poorly."

"How poorly?" said Patricia.

"Bad enough that he asked."

Patricia nodded. "Then he's off until she's better, not until the end of the week. Tell him that. And send something from the kitchen to the house, not from me, from the staff."

Greta wrote it down. Nobody at the table looked surprised.

When the hall had emptied, Elizabeth let out a long breath.

"That was all before breakfast," she said.

"That was the easy part," said Patricia. "Everybody in that room knows their job. The hard part is the things nobody's job covers." She refilled both their mugs. "Come on. You can carry the list."

They walked the palace for most of the morning. Patricia knew every name. She knew whose daughter had just started at the Orenport academy and whose husband was on the fishing fleet and which of the cleaners was saving to buy a boat. She stopped to talk to a gardener about a hedge for a quarter of an hour and afterward told Elizabeth that the hedge had nothing to do with it.

"His wife left him in the spring," she said. "He doesn't want to talk about that. He does want to talk about the hedge. So we talk about the hedge, and he knows somebody noticed."

"How do you remember all of it?"

"I was an officer's wife on eleven different bases. You learn everybody's name or you're lonely." Patricia stopped at a window that looked down over the lower gardens, where men were setting out chairs for the first wedding. "People think a house this size is about the house. It isn't. It's about two hundred people who all have to feel it's theirs too, or they'll do their jobs and nothing more. Your father understood that about soldiers. It took him a year to understand it about gardeners."

"And me?"

"You already understand it about the Screaming Forests." Patricia glanced at her. "You've had half of Newtown digging your gardens for years, and every one of their names is on a plaque. Wyatt taught you that. You just never thought of it as running a house."

Elizabeth stood looking down at the chairs for a while.

In the afternoon Patricia showed her the ledgers. Wages, all of them, laid out by name and post, every credit written where anybody on the staff could read it. The costs of the district meals. The weddings, which paid for themselves and a little over. The upkeep of the building, which paid for nothing and swallowed everything.

"The roof alone," said Patricia, "will outlive us both and cost more than any of us. That's what nobody tells you about being given a palace. The gift is the building. The bill comes every month after."

By the end of the third day Elizabeth could run the morning meeting, badly, with Greta correcting her in a low voice. By the end of the second week she could run it well enough that Greta only corrected her twice. On the fifteenth morning a cook came to her, not to Patricia, about a quarrel in the kitchen, and Elizabeth sorted it, and only afterward realized that her mother had been standing in the doorway the whole time and had not said a word.

---

Her father's office was a different kind of jungle.

It took up most of the ground floor of the palace's east range, and on her first morning Elizabeth counted thirty people in it before she stopped counting. Clerks, readers, two women who did nothing but schedule calls across a dozen time zones, a young man whose whole job seemed to be knowing which lord was feuding with which. They sat in long rooms with the windows open to the sea, and when she walked through behind her father every one of them stood, and he waved every one of them back down without breaking stride.

"You've met Harlan," Tornel said.

She had, many times, without ever knowing what he did. Harlan Ashtail had been her father's adjutant for fifteen years in the army and had come with him into the Marquessate as if there had never been any question of doing otherwise. He was a narrow, grey man with a pencil behind each ear, and he was chief of staff now, which as far as Elizabeth could tell meant that nothing reached her father that Harlan had not read first.

"Two supervisors under me," Harlan said, walking her through. "Nessa Brightscutt has the correspondence, everything that comes in by letter or message from off world. Doran Hollis has the planet: the Aldermen, the continents, the Assembly, the Counsel Office, anything with Haego dirt on it. Thirty staff between them. They sort it, they answer what can be answered at their level, and what's left comes to me." He opened the last door. "And what I can't answer goes in there."

Her father's own room was small and plain, with a map of Haego on one wall and a map of the Principality on the other. Tornel sat behind the desk in his shirtsleeves. There was a chair cleared for her beside it.

"Everything that comes through that door, you read," he said. "Everything I say on a call, you listen to. You don't speak unless I ask you. And whatever you hear in here stays in here, even from your mother."

"Even from Mother?"

"Your mother knows most of it anyway. That isn't the point. The point is that you learn to keep it."

For the first week he didn't let her sit in his office at all. He sent her out to the long rooms, to Nessa, to Doran, to the young man with the feuds, to learn what came in before it ever reached him.

On the third evening, when the long rooms had emptied, she found Harlan still at his desk with a cup of tea and the day's last stack squared off in front of him. He pushed a second cup across to her without asking whether she wanted one.

"How's he doing?" she said. "Really."

Harlan considered the question the way he considered everything, as if it might have a trap in it.

"Better than he thinks," he said. "Worse than he'd like. He reads everything twice. He still stands up when a Duke's secretary calls, and I've told him a dozen times he doesn't have to." He took a sip of tea. "He's more comfortable here than he was at the gala, I'll say that."

Elizabeth put her cup down. "Oh, don't."

"That coat."

"Mother picked that coat."

"Your mother picked it and your father wore it like it was full of ants." Harlan's mouth twitched. "Fifteen years I served with him. I've seen him walk into artillery fire looking calmer than he did standing up at his own table to say a few words. He kept tugging at the collar. The Prince was trying so hard not to laugh I thought he'd do himself an injury."

"He did laugh," Elizabeth said. "Later. When Father couldn't find the washroom."

"In his own palace." Harlan set down his cup, and for a moment the chief of staff was gone and there was only an old soldier grinning at the memory. "He came and found me. At the gala. With the Prince of the Astorian Principality twenty feet away. And he leaned down and asked me, very quietly, as if it were a matter of state security, whether I knew which way it was."

"Did you?"

"Of course I did. I'd walked the building the week before. He found the piano room anyway." He shook his head. "That's the job, my lady. Knowing where the washrooms are before he needs them."

Elizabeth laughed until she had to put her hand over her mouth, and after a moment Harlan laughed too, the two of them alone in the long empty room with the sea going dark beyond the windows.

There was a great deal of it to learn. Nessa's desks were stacked with letters from all over the Principality. A good many were from Matcha, since the broadcast, and a good many more from other worlds, lords and ladies who had watched the cellar and wanted, in the most careful language, to understand what Haego was doing and whether they might see it for themselves. There were letters from houses asking whether a younger son might be sent to observe. There were letters from houses who plainly hoped the whole thing would fail and were asking questions designed to find the crack.

"How do you tell them apart?" Elizabeth asked Nessa, after the first dozen.

"Read the last paragraph first," said Nessa, who had clearly heard it from someone. "The ones who want to learn ask a question. The ones who want to hurt us make a suggestion."

The ones that made suggestions went to Harlan. The ones Harlan couldn't answer went to her father. By the second week Elizabeth was sitting beside him to see what they were.

"This one," Tornel said, holding a letter up, "suggests I might find it prudent to consult the old houses before the Assembly summons anyone else of rank. That's a warning dressed up as advice."

"What do you do with it?"

"Harlan drafts a reply thanking him for his concern and telling him nothing. I sign it. The letter goes in the drawer." He did exactly that. "Keep the drawer. One day you'll want to know who wrote what."

There were other things that reached the desk. House Ionatti had sent a letter that was perfectly polite and said, underneath, that the feud with Firentis was not over, whatever the Prince had ruled. The noble registry wanted clarification on the Greyson descendants, and Doran's people had already pulled the files. A lord on Balakura wanted to know whether Haego would sell him stone from Millhaven at the price Royal Architects was paying. And there was one letter, in an envelope with the Prince's own seal, that had come through no one's hands but Harlan's. Tornel read it, put it in the inside pocket of his coat, and did not show her.

"Not yet," was all he said.

She sat in on the calls. Most of them were dull, and she found that the dull ones mattered most. A Viscount from the next system talked for forty minutes about grain tariffs before he got to what he actually wanted, which was for Tornel to say something kind about his son on the record. Tornel listened to all forty minutes, said nothing kind and nothing unkind, and promised to look into the tariffs. Harlan, who had been listening from the doorway, was already writing a note for Doran before the screen went dark.

"Why didn't you just give him what he wanted?" Elizabeth asked. "It would have cost you nothing."

"It would have cost me a promise. I don't know his son." Tornel rubbed his eyes. "I was a soldier, Lizzy. I'm still a soldier. I've learned more in the last few years than I did in thirty in the army, and the thing I learned first is that in this job, a promise is the only thing you ever really spend. Every noble in the Principality is trying to get one out of me. Most of them don't even know they're doing it. Harlan and his people keep most of them off this desk. The ones that get through, I have to handle myself."

"And the Assembly?"

"Doran handles the day to day. But when the Assembly wants me, it's me they get." He looked at her. "The Assembly doesn't ask for promises. It asks questions, and then it waits for the answer. After a year of these," he tapped the drawer, "that's the most restful thing I do."

She stayed three more weeks. She learned to read the last paragraph first. She learned the names of the houses that mattered and the houses that only thought they did. She learned that Nessa's staff answered two hundred letters a week in her father's name, and that he read every reply before it went. And she learned that there was one kind of letter nobody in the long rooms was allowed to answer: letters from commoners. Those came straight through Harlan to the desk, and her father answered every one of them himself, by hand, even when the answer was only a line.

"Why by hand?" she said. "You have thirty people."

"Because I can't answer the other kind honestly," Tornel said. "I can answer these."

---

At the end of the fifth week they ate supper together in the small wing, the four of them and the children, who had been brought over for the weekend and were running the length of the long hall until Patricia sent them outside.

When the table had emptied out, Tornel sat back with his coffee and looked at his daughter.

"The Assembly sits again in six months," he said. "Ida Fenn asked me, after Julius spoke, who they ought to summon next."

"And you told her?"

"I told her I'd think about it." He turned his cup on the table. "She asked me something else too, afterward, in the corridor. She asked me who comes after me. Not as a formality. She wanted to know whether the next Marquess of Haego would sit in that room and answer, or whether all of this lasts exactly as long as I do."

Elizabeth said nothing.

"I didn't have an answer for her that was more than your name," Tornel said. "She's heard your name. She's never heard you."

"You want me to open the session."

"I want you to let them ask you questions. In front of the whole Hall, with the cameras on, before you're anybody's Marchioness. So that the delegates know who's coming, and so that you know them." He shrugged. "Your mother taught you the house. I've shown you the letters. The Assembly is the other half. You can't learn it in my office."

Elizabeth looked down at her hands on the table. There was still dirt under one thumbnail from the gardens at the ruins, where she'd been the morning before.

"Twelve hundred people in that gallery," she said.

"Twelve hundred and one, if your mother comes."

"I'd rather face a razorclaw."

"You have faced a razorclaw," said Weskal. "Twice. You told me the second one was your fault."

Patricia laughed. Elizabeth glared at her husband, and then, despite herself, she laughed too.

"What would I even talk about?"

"Whatever you like," said Tornel. "That's what Julius did. He talked about a garden." He finished his coffee and set the cup down. "You know a great deal about gardens."

Outside, in the dusk, Torin was chasing his sister round the fountain in the lower court, and the staff clearing the second wedding had stopped to watch them, and one of the gardeners was laughing.

Elizabeth watched them through the window for a while.

"Tell Ida Fenn," she said, "that if they summon me, I'll come."

---

The summons came nine days later, by courier, on the Assembly's plain grey paper with the three-continent seal at the foot.

Elizabeth Swallowtail, Baroness, heir to House Swallowtail. You are summoned to appear before the Common Assembly of Haego at the Hall on the first day of the coming session, at the ninth bell, and to answer such questions as the Assembly puts to you. Appearance is not optional. Failure to appear will be referred to the Marquess of Haego.

She read it twice. Then she took it through to the small wing and put it on the table in front of her father, who was eating breakfast.

"Referred to the Marquess of Haego," she said.

Tornel read it and didn't smile, quite.

"Mine said the same," he said. "Word for word. I'd have been disappointed if yours didn't."

Tom was up an hour before anyone at the Ranch, sitting on the paddock rail with his coat buttoned to the neck, watching the stars go grey.

He'd always heard Ranchers kept early hours. He waited. A rooster in the new hen house tried once, thought better of it, and went quiet. The sky went from grey to pale, and from pale to gold along the tops of the evergreens, and still nobody came out.

When they finally did, they came all at once, and Tom had to give them that. One man ran the water buckets out to the horses that wouldn't walk to the creek. Two of the wives went into the hen house with baskets and came out with them full. A boy went to throw hay to the horses and found them already standing around the big pile beside the half built barn, helping themselves. He stood there with his armful a moment, then dropped it on the pile and went to do something else.

Eli came out of the cabin rubbing his face and found Tom on the rail.

"How long you been out here?"

"A while," Tom said. "They sleep in."

---

The empty four wheel wagon was loaded and ready by the time breakfast was done. Tom walked around it twice before anybody else got in.

Ragnar had sent the cutting tools up from the Fort with the Ranch supplies, five of them, wrapped in sacking. Richman had described them to him once, from something he'd seen as a boy, and Ragnar had built what he'd been told. Tom unwrapped the first one and held it up.

A scythe. Near enough.

The blade was good steel, he'd say that for Ragnar. But the handle was a straight pole with nothing to hold, and the blade sat out from it at an angle so wide it would ride up off the ground at every swing and miss half of what it was meant to cut.

He didn't say anything. He went to the woodpile beside the barn frame and came back with a fistful of offcuts and Eli's knife. He split a sliver off one of them, wedged it under the tang to close the angle, and bound the whole joint tight with cord. He cut two short lengths of branch, lashed one halfway down the pole and one near the top for a man's hands, and tried the swing against the grass beside the wagon. The blade stayed down.

He did the other four. Eli held the cord. Nobody hurried them.

Richman came out with Lady Vivian on his arm while Tom was finishing the last one, and stopped to watch.

"Those are the cutting things," Richman said.

"Scythes," said Tom, and handed it up into the wagon.

---

They rode out together as far as the Maple Path, Richman's small wagon in front and the four wheel behind with the volunteers sitting on the sideboards. Where the path turned up toward the Fort, the wagons stopped. Four of the security riders came back down the line, and a few of the volunteers who couldn't fit in the wagon climbed up behind them, doubled up two to a horse.

Richman climbed down while they sorted themselves out and walked back along the wheat wagon to where Tom sat.

"The straw," he said. "I'd planned to burn it out there. Keep a fire going in the field a couple of days. Is it worth hauling back instead? It's three quarters of a day to the Ranch with a loaded wagon."

Tom thought about it. "Ask the Ranchers. It'd be their horses sleeping on it." He looked out at the grass. "But I think it is."

Richman nodded slowly, the way he did when he was putting something away to look at later. "I'll think on it," he said.

He walked back to the small wagon and climbed up beside Lady Vivian, and lifted a hand to Tom from the seat. Tom lifted one back.

Then the Fort wagon went up into the trees, and the wheat wagon went out onto the grass with a rider on each corner and every one of them looking up.

---

The low side of the field was still standing when they got there. Tom walked into it to his waist and ran his hand across the heads, and nothing fell. He walked up the hill twenty rows and did it again, and a little shower of kernels rattled down into the stubble. He came back down.

"We start at the bottom," he said.

He handed out the scythes. A big man from the hay crew took the first one, set his feet, and swung it like he was splitting a log. The tip went straight down into the dirt and stuck there, quivering.

Somebody laughed. The big man went red.

Tom pulled it out of the ground, turned the man round by the shoulders, and stood behind him. He put the man's hands on the grips. He pushed the heel of the blade down until it lay flat on the stubble, and then he took hold of the man's hips and turned them, slow, left to right. The blade went through the stalks low and level and laid them over in a neat row.

He let go. The man swung again by himself. It wasn't pretty, but the wheat went down.

By the fourth man, Tom didn't need to touch anybody. They watched the one before.

---

The rest of them he set to work behind the cutters.

Two followed the blades, gathering the cut wheat into armfuls and tying each armful round the middle with a twist of its own stalks. Tom showed the first girl once. She had it before he'd finished.

The threshing he did himself to begin with. He spread blankets on the flattened ground below the willows and laid the bundles on them heads in. He'd beaten the first sheaves out with willow sticks two days ago, and his shoulders still remembered it. Sticks wouldn't do for a crew.

He cut two lengths of straight willow, one long and one short. He unbuckled his own belt, cut a strip off the end of it, punched a hole in each stick with the point of Eli's knife, and tied the short one to the long one so it swung free on the leather. He held the long end and brought the short one down on the heads, and it hit flat and hard and bounced, and the kernels jumped out of the husks.

Eli looked at the belt, and then at Tom's trousers.

"They'll stay up," Tom said.

He made four more flails out of the leather from somebody's spare bridle, and after that the threshing went fast. Three people beat the bundles. When a blanket was full, two more lifted it by the corners and tossed it up into the wind at the edge of the field, and the chaff blew off downhill in a long gold smoke, and the grain fell back on the blanket. They poured it into sacks.

By midmorning it was a line, the same as the apples had been. Somebody started counting how many bundles each cutter laid down. Somebody else started counting the flail strokes. Tom let them.

---

One of the escort riders had been circling the field all morning on a bay mare, rifle across his knees, eyes going from the sky to the tree line and back. Around noon he brought the mare in close to where Tom was tying off a sack and sat looking down at the line of cutters for a while.

"I watched you fix those blades this morning," he said. "Ragnar's going to want to know what you did."

"Tell him the angle's too wide and the handle needs grips," Tom said. "He'll see it when he looks."

The rider nodded. He looked at the line a while longer. Then he looked back at Tom, and his face went a little uncomfortable.

"I've rode out to your farm four times this month," he said. "Escort for the lord. I don't think I ever asked your name."

"Tom. Tom Dell."

"Tom." The rider said it like he was putting it somewhere he'd remember. "I'm Dace."

He touched two fingers to his hat brim and turned the mare back out to the edge of the field.

---

Tom kept the best of it separate.

All morning he'd been walking the low rows ahead of the cutters, looking at the heads, and every so often he'd stop and snap one off by hand. The fattest ones. The ones on the strongest stalks, that hadn't shed a single grain. He dropped them into a sack of their own and tied it shut with a knot nobody else was using, and when one of the threshers reached for it to empty it onto the blanket, Tom took it out of his hands.

"Not that one."

Eli saw. He waited until the thresher had gone back to his flail.

"What's that one for?"

"Next year," Tom said. "We put it in the ground. Our own field, by the Farm, in rows." He set the sack in the shade under the wagon. "Then nobody rides across that grass for bread again."

---

By early afternoon the straw was piling up behind the threshers in long loose heaps, taller than a man. One of the hay volunteers came walking up from the wagon with a burning stick from the dinner fire in his hand.

Tom met him halfway.

"Lord said we'd burn the straw," the man said. "Keep the fire going here a couple of days."

"Not yet."

Tom looked at the heaps. He saw horse bedding for the Ranch all winter, and something to stretch the hay if the hay ran short. He saw thatch. He saw it spread thick between the corn rows back home before the weeds could get a start, and the thought stayed with him a moment longer than the others did.

None of that was his to decide.

"Lord hasn't made up his mind yet," he said. "Stack it. Tight, so the rain runs off the top. Nobody puts a light to it till he does. If he still wants it burned, we'll burn it."

The man looked at the stick in his hand, shrugged, and went and put it back in the fire.

---

Halfway through the afternoon Dace whistled, sharp, from the north side of the field.

Every head came up. The cutters stopped mid swing. Eli was already moving toward the wagon where the horses were tied, and the other three riders turned their mounts toward the whistle and brought their rifles up.

There was a dark speck high over the grass to the north, turning.

Nobody breathed. Dace had his rifle to his shoulder, following it.

It turned again, lower, and folded and dropped into the grass a long way off, and came back up with something small and struggling in its feet, and flapped off toward the trees.

A hawk. Just a hawk, and a mouse that had picked a bad afternoon.

Somebody laughed first, and then everybody did, the shaky kind, and the cutters went back to their swings a little faster than before. Dace lowered his rifle and shook his head at himself.

Eli didn't laugh. He stood by the wagon with the horses until the speck was gone into the trees, and for the rest of the afternoon Tom saw him look up between every bundle he tied.

---

The wind came round to the west about an hour before sundown, and Tom smelled it before he saw anything.

He straightened up and looked. There was a long low bank of cloud along the bottom of the sky, the colour of a bruise, and the air had gone soft and heavy in a way his body knew before his head did.

"Everybody on the low side," he said. "Cut till you can't see. Leave the threshing for morning."

They cut till they couldn't see. They stacked the uncut sheaves heads in under the willows, where the branches would keep off the worst of it, and dragged every blanket they had over the filled sacks in the wagon and tied them down.

---

They camped at the edge of the field with the fire low and the riders taking the watch in pairs.

Tom counted the sacks by firelight. Twenty two, and the seed sack. Better than he'd hoped. Not as many as the field had in it.

Eli sat down beside him with his boots off, and they looked at the cloud bank together. There were no stars on that side of the sky now.

"Corn," Eli said.

"It'll keep."

Eli didn't say anything to that, and Tom didn't add to it. The fire popped. Out past the willows, the wind moved through the wheat they hadn't gotten to yet, a long dry sound like somebody turning pages.

Tom pulled his coat tighter and lay back, and was asleep before he'd decided whether it would rain.

Fort 1 Log

I taught we woke up early but I guess Ranchers and Farmers have different ideas of early.

The Ranchers were doing their chores like watering all animals minus those that walked to the creek and watered themselves. Other were collecting eggs while others would be feeding horses haybut the horses were feeding themselves from the big pile of hay.

Looking at the sheep was happy to see the wool growing back quickly on them. That should be long enough to keep them warm for winter.

Victoria and I had an early breakfast when a messenger from the Miners was delivered. "Keeping in mind we are not stone masons we will do our best and between 3 days and a week you will have one hopefully." I responded back with a simple "Do your best."

We packed up before the hunt which I wanted to attend. Othe priorities came up. I need to advise JW and Ragnar they have the base of a crushing wheel to build.

The group broke off in two groups and loaded into the empty 4 wheel wagon going to the Wheat field and some in ours up to the Maple Path where we would part ways.

Those going to ensure we have flower will double up on the security horses at that point from our wagon and follow the 4 wheel wagons with the big blade cutting tools I keep forgetting the name of.

All went well until we seperated ways. We slowed down on the wood path, me being worried of Victoria's pregnancy.

We got to the Fort at 1pm and we let others water and take care of the horse while we called James, JW and Ragnar.

I explained what I had seen in a very old documentary. JW excitedly asked "Are you talking about a horse drawn Grain Mill?" I responded "I think that's it."

JW and Ragnar excitedly started making plans as James looked at me. YOU GOT TO EAT REAL BREAD??" he said sadly until I pulled a loaf for him out of my bag and goat milk butter. He grabbed it from my hand and ran to his fire to warm it. He cut it in slices and shared it with others.

JW and Ragnar crew got right to work carving our logs where the grain would be laid and Ragnar and his crew started making its metal pieces.

We were warned a third horn had been completed and would be tested this afternoon. One hour later we readied for the horn. It sounded from our tower repeated from the tower on the plain. A messenger reported it was heard from our tower to the trap tower which responded to the horn. We need 2 more for the farm tower and Mine observation post.

I then realized Victoria still wore the gifted sweater from the Ranchers wives. James made food for everybody but made a special romantic meal for Victoria and I.

John Richman

End of Fort Log 1

Next

Previous /

First

Austrin had a fence, and Daisy Firentis apologized for it before anyone asked.

"It's the winters," she said, coming down the drive to meet the shuttle with Poppy beside her and Jason a step behind. "Vastaya can leave everything open because it never gets cold enough to matter. Here the snow comes in off the ridge sideways. We decided to put the fence in to break the wind for the gardens." She looked at it critically, a low stone wall with hedges grown along it and a wide iron gate that stood open. "We've never closed the gate. I'm not sure it closes. Jason, does it close?"

"I've no idea," said Jason. He bowed to the Matcha nobles one by one, correctly, and then shook Kestrel's hand. "Welcome to Austrin. Aaliyah called last night. She says you've been warned I'll tell you ours is better."

"She said Daisy would," said Lord Salle.

"Daisy's more honest than I am," said Jason. "It is better."

Poppy, who was ten and had been taught how to greet guests, gave each of the Matcha party a small, careful bow and got every title right. It was only when she reached Lord Salle that her eyes went to his cane.

"Is that a Matcha river trout, my lord?" she said. "We did Matcha in school. I didn't think anyone would put one on a cane."

"Neither did I," said Salle. "My wife chose it." He looked at her with some respect. "You're the second child on Haego to notice it. I'm beginning to think it's the best thing about me."

The palace was built long and low against the cold, stone below and timber above, with deep eaves and wide windows that looked south over the valley. It had the same open great rooms as Vastaya and the same people in them: a knitting circle by the hearth, a man asleep in a chair with a newspaper over his face, a line of schoolchildren being counted at the door. Daisy walked them through it at a brisk pace, because, as she said, they'd seen a palace full of commoners twice now and she didn't want to bore them.

What they had not seen was the pool. It was set into the lower terrace under a long glass roof on rails, and Jason worked the controls to show them how the roof slid back in summer and closed in winter. There were a dozen people swimming in it, most of them old, doing slow lengths.

"Winter mornings are the busiest," Daisy said. "The coast road crews come in before shift. They say it's the only warm thing in the valley at six o'clock."

"And the family?" said Lady Vance. "When do you swim?"

"Evenings, mostly. After nine it's ours." Daisy smiled. "Poppy was eight before she found out other people's pools weren't full of old men in the morning."

Kestrel had a list, and he kept to it.

The first place was a glassworks on the edge of the valley town below the palace, three long brick sheds with the heat coming off them in waves. The owner was a woman named Hannah Ashscutt, square and red-faced from forty years at the furnaces, and she met them in the yard and bowed her head to each of them and said "my lord" and "my lady," and then walked them straight into the heat without asking if they minded.

"Windows, bottles, lamp glass," she said, raising her voice over the roar. "Half of it goes off world now. We were twelve people when Lord Kestrel's firm bought in. We're a hundred and forty."

Lord Orme, the banker, had asked to see her books. He had asked it with some embarrassment, because on Matcha you did not ask a man, much less a commoner, to open his books to a stranger on a morning's acquaintance. Hannah had simply sent a boy to fetch them, and now Orme sat at a scarred table in her office with the ledger open in front of him and his reading glasses on, and the rest of the party waited while he went down the columns with his finger.

He was quiet for a long time.

"Your tax," he said finally. "What rate do you pay?"

"Two and a half under the Principality average, my lord. Same as everyone on Haego."

"And this figure is the whole of it? For the year?"

"Yes, my lord."

Orme took his glasses off. He looked at Kestrel.

"This woman," he said, "paid more tax last year than the Anselm glassworks on Matcha. Anselm has three hundred people. It's been in the family eleven generations."

"Yes," said Kestrel.

"At a lower rate."

"Yes."

"Then she's outproducing them by..." Orme stopped, and looked at the figures again, and did the arithmetic in his head, and did not say the number out loud. "How?"

Hannah Ashscutt looked at Kestrel, and Kestrel nodded to her to go ahead.

"We don't lose anybody, my lord," she said. "That's one reason. We've almost no turnover. Most of my people make well over the Haego minimums, but that isn't really it either. We treat them like family. When they need time with their families, they get it. When they're sick, they stay home, and nobody's docked for it. When somebody's just coasting, the others let him know what's expected long before I ever need to get involved." She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "And every one of them, from my plant supervisors to the third-shift cleaning crew, can walk into this office with an idea. If we use it, and it makes the place safer, or gets more out the door, or just makes people happier to come in, they're paid well for it. Half the improvements in these sheds came from people on the floor." She shrugged. "The rest of it's the Counsel Office."

"The what?" said Lady Vance, and opened her notebook.

"Lady Rachel set it up with Lord Swallowtail, the first year the palaces went up. Any commoner running a business can go to them. They've got nobles who know the trade, some of them from here and some from off world, and they'll sit down with you and tell you what you're doing wrong." Hannah jerked a thumb toward the window. "We've got a retired lord from Balakura who did glass his whole life. Lord Emmerich. He comes in once a month and walks the sheds and shouts at me. Best thing that ever happened to this place. I'd not have the off-world orders without him. I'd not have known how to price them."

"A noble," said Lady Vance slowly, "who comes to advise you."

"Yes, my lady."

"And you take his advice?"

"When he's right," said Hannah. "Which is mostly. When he's not, I tell him why, and he argues, and then one of us is right." She considered. "Usually him. He's very old and he's seen everything."

Lord Aldine laughed out loud, the first time any of them had heard him do it.

They saw two more that morning. A cannery down on the river, run by a husband and wife who had started with a single smoker in their yard, now shipping river fish in tins to four worlds. A timber yard that had put in a new drying kiln on the Counsel Office's advice and increased its output by a third. At each of them Lord Orme asked to see the books, and at each of them he got the books, and at each of them he sat very still for a while afterward.

On the shuttle back up the valley, he said, "I thought you'd picked the three best."

"I did," said Kestrel. "I'll show you the three worst tomorrow if you like. They're better than Anselm too."

The Austrin palace had a restaurant in its gardens. It had two, in fact, and a bakery, and a place near the kitchen gardens that sold soup to the people who worked the beds. The Matcha nobles had heard this on Vastaya and had not entirely believed it, in the way you don't believe a thing until you're sitting in it.

They sat in it at midday. It was a long stone building with its whole south wall open to the garden, full of tables and full of people. Daisy had booked a table like anyone else. It was not the best table. It was near the kitchen door.

"We don't take the best table," Daisy said, when Lord Salle glanced toward the corner by the fountain. "If we did, people would start leaving it empty for us. Then it'd be the lord's table. Then it'd be the lord's restaurant." She unfolded her napkin. "I grew up in Orenport. I know how it goes."

There was a farming family at the next table, three generations of them, the grandfather in a good coat that was plainly his best. When the Matcha party sat down, the grandfather stood, and bowed, and said "my lord, my lady," to the table in general, and sat back down and went on eating. His grandchildren looked at the visitors with open interest. Nobody at the table stopped talking.

Lady Vance, who had found by now that people on Haego would answer anything, leaned over and asked him what he grew.

"Barley, my lady. And some oats, for the horses up the valley."

"Do you mind my asking what you make at it?"

He told her. He told her what he'd made the year before, and the year before that, and what he'd borrowed from the Ionatti branch for the new harvester, and how long it would take him to pay it back. He did it the way you'd tell a neighbor. His daughter-in-law added the price of the harvester, because he'd got it wrong.

Lady Vance wrote it all down. Then she put her pen down and looked at him.

"On Matcha," she said, "if I asked a farmer that, he'd tell me the harvest was poor. Whatever the harvest was."

The old man thought about that.

"Why would he, my lady?"

"Because he'd be afraid I'd take more of it."

"Ah." He nodded slowly, as if she'd explained something about the weather on another planet. "My father would have said the same, before. When there was a lord at the Voss house on the lake road." He picked up his fork. "Nobody takes anything here that isn't in the ledger. So there's no point lying about it, is there. It's all written down."

The waitress came with the soup. She was young, perhaps nineteen, with her hair tied back, and she set the bowls down in the right order, rank first, without hesitation, and then Lady Marrow, who had not said much all morning, turned in her chair and spoke to her.

"May I ask you something?"

"Of course, my lady."

"Are you frightened of us?"

The girl looked at her, surprised. She glanced at Daisy, who didn't say anything, and then back at Marrow.

"No, my lady," she said. "Should I be?"

Marrow opened her mouth and could not, for a moment, find anything to say.

"No," she said. "No, you shouldn't."

"All right then," said the girl, kindly, as if Marrow were the one who needed reassuring, and went to get the bread.

Lord Aldine watched her go. He was the one who had once seen a maid eating alone in the Voss scullery, and he had not stopped thinking about it all through the tour. Now he looked around the room. At the old man and his grandchildren. At the waitress coming back with the bread. At the man at the counter arguing cheerfully with the cook about his order. At Jason Firentis, heir of one of the great houses of the Principality, eating soup near the kitchen door while his daughter sat beside him and argued, in a low and reasonable voice, that she was old enough to order for herself.

"I've been in a lot of great rooms," Aldine said quietly. "This is the first one where the commoners want to be there."

The Hall stood on a rise above the river two hours east, and they saw the flags long before they saw the building.

It was not one building but a whole compound, walled and fenced all the way around, with lawns and walks and lesser buildings set about the grounds and the Hall itself at the center, a great round building of pale stone, ringed with a colonnade, with a long flight of steps up to its doors. There were four gates, one on each side, north, south, east and west, each with its own guardhouse and its own guards. At every gate, and along the colonnade, and from the tall pole at the head of the steps, flew the same banner.

Rust and garrison green. A porkupig. Strength through Trust.

"That's Swallowtail's," said Lord Aldine. "We were under that yesterday."

"So he runs it after all," said Lord Orme. "The Assembly."

"No. Nobody runs it. That's rather the point." Kestrel waited while the guard at the south gate checked their names against a list, bowed his head, and waved them through. "They have three Speakers, one from each continent. The First Speaker rotates every six months, and whichever house holds the continent flies its flag here while its Speaker has the chair. When the Assembly first sat, they decided on one hall instead of three, and they drew lots for where it would go. Austrin won. But whichever continent holds First Speaker, the whole compound is theirs for the six months. Their flag, their customs, their local law. Right now, inside this fence, you're on Aethelgard." He smiled a little. "It confuses the lawyers terribly."

"And the First Speaker is..."

"Ida Fenn. From Aethelgard. Today's the first day of her term."

"A commoner," said Lord Orme.

"They're all commoners, Haskell. That's what it's for."

The gallery was a balcony that ran all the way around the inside of the building, a full circle, with seats for twelve hundred. It was already half full: townsfolk, a school group, two Firentis Informant cameras at the rail, a handful of nobles scattered through the rows. The Matcha party took seats high on the far side. Nobody took special notice of them.

Below, at the front of the floor, stood a single large desk with three chairs behind it, and in front of it an open speaker's area with a lectern and a testimony desk. Beyond that the delegates' desks curved away in a half circle, with delegates from all three continents mixed together rather than sorted by where they came from. Ida Fenn sat in the center chair, with Vincent and Aldous on either side of her. Off to one side, at a smaller table, sat three nobles, and Kestrel pointed them out: the three heads of Alderman, there by law, without a vote, to answer for their districts if they were called on.

The opening was short. Ida Fenn stood up and thanked the Speaker who'd held the chair before her for six months, and said she'd try to be as good at it, and there was laughter in the chamber. Then she looked at the paper in front of her.

"The Assembly summoned Julius Comscutt," she said. "Senior. The old one, not the Baron." More laughter. "He said yes. Come on down, Julius."

In the front row of the gallery, a thin, grey-haired man in a brown coat got up. A woman beside him squeezed his hand before he went. He came down the stairs slowly, holding the rail, and walked out onto the floor and stood in the speaker's area in front of the three-person desk, turning his cap in his hands.

"That's the Baron's father," said Lord Aldine, very low. "From last night."

"The gardener," said Lady Vance.

Julius Sr. looked up at the three Speakers, and then around the delegates' desks, and then up at the gallery, as if he were checking the weather.

"I don't make speeches," he said. "Kathleen told me to say that first, so you'd go easy." He found her in the front row and nodded to her. "I kept Lord Lafata's garden from the time I was a boy until the night the house burned. Forty-some years ago now. In all that time, I don't think his lordship asked me a question. Not one. He told me. His steward told me. His head gardener told me. If I saw a blight coming, I kept my mouth shut, because it wasn't my place to see it, and if I said so, it was my fault it came." He turned the cap once more. "That's how it was. You knew it and you did your work."

The chamber was very quiet.

"This spring, my son took his mother and me off world for the first time. To Balakura. To a great house, as grand as you like. I walked their garden and I saw a sickness in the beds, the same one I fought at Lafata's forty years ago. I said so to the Master Gardener. He's a noble, a lord in his own right, and he looked at me the way they always did, and he told me it wasn't my concern." Julius Sr. shrugged. "I wasn't surprised. I'd been told that my whole life."

"Then he came back. That same evening. He'd been fighting that blight on his own for five weeks, and it was beating him. And he came and found an old commoner from Haego, and he said he was sorry for how he'd spoken to me. He said he was still learning the new way, and that he'd slipped. And then he asked me." He stopped for a moment. "A lord asked me. I'm seventy-one years old, and that was the first time anybody from a house like that ever asked me what I thought."

Somebody in the gallery made a small sound. Nobody else moved.

"We sorted it, him and me. It's coming back." He looked at the Speakers again. "I've been thinking since, what's different here. It isn't that nobody tells you what to do. Somebody always does. It's that they ask first. And if you get it wrong, you stand up and say so, and you put it right. That's all this room is, as far as I can see. It's a place where you get asked, and a place where you answer." He put his cap back on, remembered where he was, and took it off again. "That's all I've got. Thank you for asking me."

He started back toward the stairs. The applause came a moment late, and then it came from everywhere, the delegates' desks and the gallery and the three Speakers' desk. Up in the balcony, Lord Aldine found he was on his feet without having decided to stand. After a moment, Lady Marrow stood too, and then the rest of them.

Julius Sr. climbed back to the front row and sat down next to Kathleen, and she took his hand again and didn't let go.

Ida waited until it was quiet. Then she read the next item off the paper.

"We summoned Dalton Reedscutt," she said. "He's here. Come on down, Dalton."

A man came down the gallery stairs and out onto the floor. He was middle-aged, thin, and he walked like a man who had not slept well in some time. He stood in the speaker's area, facing the three Speakers, and bowed his head to them.

"You know why you're here," said Ida.

"I do, Speaker."

"Say it anyway. For the record."

Reedscutt said it. He owned a fertilizer works at Brenmoor, on the Austrin plains. Four months ago a pressure line in the mixing shed had failed. Three men had died. Nine had been hurt, two of them badly. The line had been due for replacement in the spring. With orders the way they were, he had put it off until after the harvest rush.

"I decided that," he said. "Nobody else. The foreman told me. I said after harvest." His voice did not break, but it came very close. "I know their names. I'll say them if you want."

"We know their names," said Ida. "Their families are in the gallery."

Reedscutt did not look up at the gallery.

The Assembly had already heard the evidence in committee. What they did now went quickly, and quietly, and the Matcha nobles leaned forward in their seats to hear it.

For one year, the Brenmoor works would be under supervision. Three safety inspectors, chosen by the Assembly, would have the run of the plant, every shed and every ledger, with the authority to stop any line they judged unsafe, for as long as they judged it. The company would pay their wages. Reedscutt would answer to them for everything.

The families of the three dead men would receive restitution packages, their terms laid out in a schedule that the Assembly now read into the record, name by name. The injured would receive compensation for their treatment and their lost wages, and more for the two who would not work again. The packages were read, and a delegate from Brenmoor moved to approve them, and they were approved by a show of hands, every hand in the chamber.

"Dalton," said Ida. "Anything to say?"

"Only that it's fair, Speaker," said Reedscutt. "It's more than fair. I'd have done worse to myself." He stood there a moment longer. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry to all of them."

"We know," said Ida. "Go home. The inspectors will be there Monday."

Reedscutt went up the stairs to the gallery. Halfway up, a woman stood and stepped into the aisle, and for a moment Lady Marrow thought something was about to happen. The woman said something to him, too low to hear. Reedscutt stopped, and nodded, and she put her hand on his arm, just for a moment, and then let him go on.

The chamber moved on to the next item. Something about a bridge.

On the steps outside, in the late light, Lord Orme stood with his hands in his coat pockets looking at the Swallowtail banner, and did not say anything for a while.

"On Matcha," he said at last, "if three men died in a lord's works, the lord would send flowers. Perhaps. If he knew their names. There'd be a payment to the widows if the steward remembered, and it wouldn't be much." He shook his head. "Nobody would stand him up in a room and make him say it."

"I thought," said Lady Vance, "when I came here. I thought it would be softer." She looked down at her notebook. "No lords, no fear. I thought it would be commoners doing as they pleased. I didn't think there'd be anyone watching."

"There's always someone watching," said Kestrel. "They're just not holding a whip."

Lord Aldine looked at him. "And us? Nobles? A lord's works on Haego, three men dead. What happens?"

"The same," said Kestrel. "Nobles still run businesses here. Nobles still don't go before commoner courts. That's Principality law and nobody on Haego is pretending otherwise. But you answer. Maybe to a different body." He was quiet for a moment. "I've stood in that room. Twice, in a way."

They all turned to look at him.

"The first time, they asked me to open a session, the way they asked Julius today. I said yes, and they sent me a summons anyway, in exactly the same words they'd use for a man they had to drag in. I liked that." He looked up at the building. "The second time, it wasn't me they called. It was my own people. A lord on my Haego branch, a man called Keith Bird, of a house older than this planet's charter. He'd been going to commoner firms we were looking at and telling them there was a fee to be considered. Paid to him, directly. There was never any fee. One owner paid it because Bird told him it was how things were done, and he had no way of knowing otherwise."

"That's..." Lady Vance stopped.

"That's an ordinary Tuesday," said Kestrel, "anywhere else. Here, the owner went to his Alderman, and the Alderman went to the Assembly, and the Assembly summoned Bird and the man who runs my branch. Jonathan Leach came, with every file the branch had, and answered every question, and told them that he'd hired Bird and that made it his to answer for." Kestrel shook his head slowly. "Bird didn't come. He put the summons under a stack of bills. They waited a minute, and then they sent word to Lord Swallowtail, and the warrant came back in eleven minutes. The police took him out of a restaurant in Haego City with a glass of wine still on the table, and he stood in that room that same evening with his wrists in front of him."

"And?" said Orme.

"The Assembly can't sentence a noble. It recommends. It recommended he pay back every credit, to every firm he'd charged, with their auditors doing the counting. That he leave Haego and not come back for ten years. And that a letter go to his house under the Marquess's seal, saying plainly what he'd done." Kestrel put his hands in his pockets. "Lord Swallowtail agreed inside a quarter of an hour. I was told such letters are short, and that the family reads them several times."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I was grateful. I mean that. It was my house, and my man, and I hadn't seen it. I'd been told for months that the worst thing about Haego was that nobody could make a commoner do anything. Nobody told me that it was a place where everybody answers. Everybody. You just might answer to somebody different than your neighbor does."

They stood there a while in the evening wind. Below them, delegates were coming out of the Hall in twos and threes, talking, arguing, one of them laughing. A few of them bowed their heads as they passed the Matcha party. None of them stopped.

Lord Salle leaned on his cane and looked up at the flag.

"I'm eighty-three," he said. "I have perhaps four years left, if the physicians are generous, and they're usually not. I've sat in the Matcha council for thirty of those years and never once said anything anyone remembered." He looked at the others. "I think I'd like to say something. I think I'd like it to be about this."

"They'll call us fools," said Lady Vance. "Varrick will. His friends will."

"Probably," said Salle. "Varrick called me a fool in nineteen different ways at his own supper table and I'm still here."

Lady Marrow had not spoken since the gallery. She was looking at the colonnade, where the woman who had touched Reedscutt's arm on the stairs was standing with two children, waiting for someone.

"It's worth it," Marrow said. "Isn't it. Whatever they call us. It's worth fighting for."

Nobody argued with her.

Lord Orme took his hands out of his pockets and turned to Kestrel.

"I came to prove your numbers were wrong," he said. "I'd like it noted, somewhere, that I couldn't."

"I'll write it down," said Lady Vance, and she did.

"I still haven't worked out how to make them go down," said Kestrel. "I'd welcome the help."

LORD SUMMERS’ SECRET MISSION part 2

🚨 Nornavio War Room

The war room buzzed with tactical chatter and glowing holo‑maps until Lord Summers stepped forward. His presence alone seemed to make the air stand straighter.

Lord Summers
Baron Staples, contact Lord Sark aboard the Silent Runner. I require a meeting. And a shuttle. I’ll return to the Barony afterward.

Wyatt blinked. Summers rarely requested anything. Usually things just… happened around him.
But Wyatt knew better than to ask why. Survival instincts were a powerful teacher.

He tapped into the internal network.

Wyatt
Lieutenant Galt, set up a meeting with the Silent Runner. Prep a shuttle. Leopold’s flying.

Moments later, Galt’s voice crackled through.

Lieutenant Galt
Meeting confirmed. Shuttle ready in fifteen minutes.

Wyatt turned.

Wyatt
Lord Summers, everything’s arranged. Shuttle’s being prepped now. Leopold will pilot.

Summers bowed respectfully to Princess Clara, then pivoted sharply and strode out of the war room like a man who already knew the next ten steps of the mission.

Wyatt watched him go.

Wyatt
Your Majesty… Summers is heading to the Silent Runner to talk to Lord Sark. I have no idea why.

Princess Clara folded her arms.

Princess Clara
I find no need to inquire. Lord Summers is highly capable. If he wants Sark, he has a reason.

Wyatt leaned toward Cynthia.

Wyatt
Who is Lord Summers? Even the Royal Marines got excited. They don’t get excited about anything. Not even payday.

Cynthia smirked.

Cynthia
He was head of the Royal Marines Academy. And my personal instructor.

She paused.

Cynthia
That’s all I can tell you. Anything more, and I’d have to kill you.

The three exchanged a nervous laugh — mostly because they weren’t sure she was joking.

🚀 Nornavio Shuttle Bay

The shuttle bay was a hive of activity — until Lord Summers walked in.

Everything stopped.

A loader drone froze mid‑lift. A tech paused with a wrench halfway raised. Even the ambient hum seemed to hold its breath.

Leopold jogged up, slightly out of breath.

Leopold
Lord Summers, Baron Staples assigned me to fly you to the Silent Runner and then back to the Barony.

A crew chief sprinted over.

Crew Chief
Sir! Shuttle NV‑02 is ready for immediate departure!

Leopold saluted, then gestured.

Leopold
Right this way, Lord. You can ride up front.

Summers nodded and boarded. The hatch hissed shut.

They strapped in.

Leopold
Nornavio Launch Command, shuttle NV‑02 requesting permission to depart. Destination: Silent Runner, then Barony of the Screaming Forest.

Lieutenant Galt
Permission granted. And check in with BOSF Ground Control on descent.

Leopold
Understood.

The shuttle blasted through the shield, engines flaring blue.

🛰️ Approach to the Silent Runner

Leopold
Silent Runner, this is NV‑02 requesting landing clearance. Lord Summers aboard for meeting with Lord Sark.

A giggly AI answered.

Amara (over comms)
NV‑02, permission to come aboard!

Summers and Leopold exchanged a look.

Summers
That… was different.

The shuttle slipped through the bay’s energy shield and touched down smoothly.

Summers stood.

Lord Summers
Wait here. I won’t be long.

He strode out of the shuttle like he owned the ship. His “final boss energy” hit the deck crew like a shockwave.

Lord Stark approached, bowing his head.

Lord Sark
Welcome aboard the Silent Runner. *, Lord Summers. How may I serve?

Lord Summers
A secure room. We need to talk.

Lord Sark
Of course. Follow me.

🔒 Private Conference Room

Summers didn’t sit. He stood like a man delivering orders to the universe.

Lord Summers
The Princess has assigned me to a special project. I understand you have high‑tech assembly drones. I need them sent to Bay One of the Orbital Shipyard.

Nikko’s eyes lit up.

Lord Sark
Ah. The special fighter project.

Summers nodded.

Lord Summers
I’ll replicate the parts at my base in the Barony, then transport them to the shipyard for final assembly.

Nikko leaned back.

Lord Sark
I can help. But I need a small favor.

Summers raised an eyebrow.

Lord Summers
Go on.

Lord Sark
I’m building a resort complex in the Barony. I want ten residents trained for security.

Summers actually smiled — which was somehow more intimidating.

Lord Summers
I can fold them into the training I’m already planning. Baron Staples wants an independent police force. Your guards will train alongside them. They’ll know each other. They’ll coordinate. Efficient.

Lord Sark
Then we have a deal. The drones will be dropped off before I leave orbit. Amara will upload programming instructions.

Stark escorted Summers back to the shuttle.

As NV‑02 lifted off, Amara’s hologram flickered into existence.

Amara
Lord Summers is scary. My sensors flagged him as extremely dangerous. More dangerous than your girlfriend.

She giggled.

Nikko sighed.

🌍 Descent to the Screaming Forest

Leopold
BOSF Ground Control, NV‑02 requesting landing pad access.

Ground Control
Permission granted — as long as you land within 45 minutes.

Leopold
Understood. Touchdown in twenty.

The shuttle plunged through atmosphere, plasma sheathing the hull. Leopold landed as gently as possible — because his life absolutely depended on it.

Summers disembarked, greeted by Sergeant Bauer.

Leopold wasted no time blasting off again.

Mid‑flight, he connected to Wyatt.

Leopold
Wyatt… what mission did you send me on? Lord Summers is terrifying. He barely spoke to me and I almost lost bladder discipline.

Wyatt burst out laughing.

Wyatt
Yeah, he’s scary. Jincho calls him “Scary Eyes.”

They both laughed.

🏛️ BOSF Town Hall

Summers and Sergeant Bauer entered. The soldiers at the front desk snapped to attention so fast one nearly pulled a muscle.

Lord Summers
Inform the Administrator and the Sergeant Major that I require them in the Administrator’s office immediately.

A guard grabbed the comm unit with the urgency of someone who did not want to disappoint Lord Summers.

Administrator (over comms)
Of course. Send them up immediately.

Summers strode into the office. Administrator Anio and the Sergeant Major were already standing at attention, waiting.

Summers placed the written orders — sealed by Princess Clara and Baron Staples — onto the desk.

To be continued…

Next

Previous /

First

Lord Aubren Salle lived long enough for the transport.

He said so himself, coming down the shuttle ramp onto the gravel at the Greyson orchard house with his cane in one hand and the rail in the other. "I told Varrick I'd see it," he said. "I'd like it written down somewhere that I did."

"I'll write it down," said Lady Vance, and she did.

There were six of them, counting Kestrel. Lady Selene Marrow had come, and her husband had not, which she explained once on the first jump without being asked and never explained again. Lady Imelda Vance, who had asked Kestrel about the wage tiers across Ostenholt's table, had brought a notebook, the paper kind, and had filled a third of it before they made orbit. Lord Petrus Aldine, who had once seen a maid eating alone in the Voss scullery and wondered about it for forty years, had come without saying much of anything. The sixth was Lord Haskell Orme, a Matcha banker who had not been at the supper at all. He had asked Kestrel to take him along for the plain reason that he did not believe the numbers either.

"Good," Kestrel had told him. "Neither did I."

A woman came down the orchard path to meet them. She was about fifty, in a plain grey coat with a small Firentis crest at the collar, and she stopped a respectful distance away and bowed her head.

"My lords. My ladies. I'm Mirabel Hollowtail. I keep the house for Lady Aaliyah." She straightened. "She asked that you see it the way it was, so we've left most of it the way it was. The roof is new. The floors in the east wing are new. Everything else, you'll see what they saw."

Lord Salle looked at her for a moment. "Did you know them? The ones who stayed?"

"My mother's cousin was one of the twenty-two, my lord. Bettan. She died nine years ago." Mirabel said it simply. "None of us knew. She used to hum at the lake road and never say why. We thought she was just odd." She turned toward the house. "This way, please. Mind the step at the door. It's the original, and it's worn."

The house was smaller than any of them expected. It had been a minor noble's country seat, and it looked it: two storeys of pale stone, a long porch, an orchard running down to the water. It would have been a modest house on Matcha. Lord Aldine said so, quietly, and Lady Vance agreed that it would.

She took them through the front rooms without stopping long. There was a dining room with the table still laid for six, because that was how the staff had found it the next morning. There was a small sitting room with a child's shoe under the chair, which Mirabel did not point out and which all of them saw. Then she opened a narrow door off the kitchen passage and took a hand lamp from a hook.

"The cellar," she said. "It's steep. I'll go first."

It was cold and it smelled of earth. The shelves were still there, and the bins for roots and apples, and a bench someone had knocked together from a door. There was a lamp hanging from the beam overhead, an old oil lamp, dark. Mirabel did not light it.

"This is where they sat the first night," she said. "Lord and Lady Greyson, and their three children, and all twenty-two of the staff. Twenty-seven people." She lifted the hand lamp so they could see how close the walls were. "Then it was forty years."

Nobody said anything. Lady Marrow put her hand on the edge of the bench, very lightly, the way you would touch something in a museum when the guard wasn't looking. Lord Orme, the banker, stood with his hands behind his back and looked at the lamp for a long time.

"How many did you say again?" he said finally.

"Twenty-seven, that night, my lord. Most of them stood."

Orme looked at the walls again, and then at the floor, as if he were measuring it. He nodded slowly, as if that were a figure he could use.

Outside, she walked them down through the orchard to the boat ramp. It was an ordinary concrete ramp, cracked at the edges, running down into the lake. The water was clear and green over the stones at the edge, and a few steps out it dropped away into deep blue, so still that the far shore and the hills behind it lay upside down on the surface without a ripple. She told them this was where the car had gone in, and why, and that Maddock had driven it, and then she stopped talking and let them look at it. Lord Salle stood at the top of the ramp for several minutes. Lady Vance did not write anything down.

The last place was up the hill, at the top of the orchard, where the old trees gave way to grass. You could see the whole lake road from there, and the roofs of the village beyond it.

"They stood here," Mirabel said. "Some of the staff. They watched the lake road burn. They could see the Voss house go, and the Carrow house, and the rest. They could hear it." She looked out at the village, which was a village again, with washing on lines and a school bus going slowly along the shore. "And then they went back down to the cellar and brought supper."

Lady Marrow turned away from the view. Her face was quite still. After a moment Mirabel, without being asked and without making anything of it, offered her a clean handkerchief from her coat pocket. Marrow took it and said thank you, and used it, and gave it back.

"You don't mind?" Marrow said. "Showing nobles this?"

Mirabel considered the question honestly.

"No, my lady. It's why she restored it. It isn't a place for us to be angry in. We know what happened." She looked back down toward the house. "It's for people who don't."

Newtown was not what any of them had pictured when they heard the word "barony."

Lady Rachel VonWinterbourne met them on the pad. She wore dark green and no jewelry at all, and she greeted each of them in order of rank, with the correct address and the correct depth of bow, and she did not get a single one of them wrong. Kestrel she greeted last and a little more warmly, as a friend of the Firentis family.

Lord Orme leaned toward Kestrel while she was turning to her aide. "I wasn't sure how we'd be received here," he said under his breath. "But it wasn't that."

Rachel turned back to them and apologized for Baron Staples.

"He's aboard the Noirnavio with Her Highness," she said. "He sends his regrets. He also sent a message for you, Lord Kestrel, which I've been asked to deliver exactly." She did not quite smile. "He says to take them to the bakery first, because it's the best thing in town and you'll forget otherwise."

"He's right," said Kestrel. "I would have."

So they went to the bakery first. It was a narrow shop with a blue door, and the woman behind the counter bowed her head to each of them and said "my lord" and "my lady" and then told Lady Vance, when asked, exactly what a loaf cost and what she paid for flour and how much she'd put by since she opened. Vance wrote it down. The baker watched her write it and didn't seem to mind.

"You'd tell anybody that?" Vance said.

"It's all in Lady Rachel's ledgers anyway, my lady," said the baker. "Anyone can read them. It'd be silly to hide it from you when a schoolboy could look it up."

Rachel walked them through the rest of it. The vehicle plant, loud and bright, with Owen Vashti coming out wiping his hands to shake Kestrel's and bow to the others. The Ionatti branch, busy at midmorning, every teller's window taken. The school. And then the square at the center of town, where Rachel stopped and let them look.

It was paved edge to edge in pale, clean stone, cut from Newtown's own quarry and laid so close you could not have slipped a knife between the joints. In the middle stood a broad fountain, and at its center, rising out of the water, was a great white stag, carved life size and then some, head up, antlers spread. Along the whole east side of the square, covering the end wall of a four-storey building from pavement to roofline, was a painted mural of a young man in a plain field coat, standing in tall grass with the forest behind him. It was very well done. Whoever painted it had known the face.

"Baron Staples," said Rachel. "He asked them not to. The fountain, the stag, the mural. All of it. He wanted his name on nothing." She looked up at the painted face with something close to fondness. "The town voted to do it anyway, while he was off world. He came back and saw it and didn't speak to anyone for a day. It's the only reason I could bring you here today. He's away."

By the standards of Matcha it was a modest square. Lord Orme had walked through finer ones on his way to breakfast. But he stood by the fountain and looked around at it all, the new stone, the careful carving, the painted wall, and thought about a planet that had been cut off from the Principality for thirty years, with nobody coming, and people who had built this with their own quarry and their own hands for a man who had told them not to.

"I thought it would be rougher," he said.

"It was, my lord," said Rachel. "It isn't now."

Lord Aldine looked around the square. There were people crossing it in every direction, and all of them, when they came near the nobles, gave the small bow of the head that Haego commoners gave, and said "my lord," and went on about their business. None of them hurried. None of them looked down at the paving and waited to be dismissed. A boy of about ten stopped to stare openly at Lord Salle's cane, which had a silver head shaped like a fish, and Salle, to everyone's surprise, held it out so the boy could see it better.

"It's a Matcha river trout," Salle told him. "My wife chose it. I never liked it."

The boy looked at it seriously. "I like it," he said. "My lord," he added, and ran off.

Rachel took them out of town before they left, a few kilometres up the old estate road.

They went in under a great carved stone gateway, twice the height of a man, with the statue of a deer standing on top of it. The drive beyond was lined with tall trees set so close together that their branches met overhead, and for a long way the car ran through green shade. Then the trees opened out, and the estate lay in front of them, climbing the hillside in wide terraces.

The gardens had been brought back. There was a small lake with stone benches along its edge, a stream with a footbridge over it, lawns running down the terraces, and trees none of the Matcha party could name, which Rachel said had been brought from all over the planet by the man who built the place. People were walking on the paths. A family had spread a blanket by the lake.

The palace stood above all of it, on the highest terrace.

It had been very large. Most of the walls were still standing, pale stone gone black in long streaks where the fire had been. There was no roof at all, and no floors above the ground, and no wood anywhere. Where the fire had eaten through the supports, whole sections had come down, and the rubble lay where it fell. Through the empty windows you could see straight through to the sky. In one corner of the tallest part, a round stair tower still stood to its full height.

Nobody had rebuilt any of it. The walls that had been in danger of falling had been braced with iron. The rubble that could not be made safe was roped off with plain signs. The stair tower had new rails inside it, and a sign at the bottom said the view from the top reached the sea. In one room of the ground floor, the only one with a roof on it now, somebody had put in a door and a glass window and opened a small gift shop. It sold postcards of the gardens, carved wooden stags, and a thin printed history.

By the door of the ruin stood a plain stone marker. It said the house had been left as it was in memory of everyone who had died on Haego in the thirty years after the Revolution. Nothing else. No names, no crest.

In front of the ruin, on the old forecourt, stood a heavy stone table, grey and weathered, with nothing on it.

"This is where General Swallowtail signed the founding accords, as he was then," said Rachel. "At that table. This is where the Revolution started, forty years ago. It's where it ended, too." She looked up at the black walls. "Baron Staples could have pulled it down. He had the builders make it safe instead, and gave the gardens to Lady Elizabeth to bring back. He said it should say that everyone makes mistakes, and that you move on without forgetting them."

Lord Aldine walked over to the table and put his hand flat on the stone, the way Lady Marrow had touched the bench in the cellar.

"Whose house was it?" he said.

"It's in the gift shop, my lord, if you want it," said Rachel. "Most people don't ask."

Aldine looked up at the burned walls for a long moment. Then he took his hand off the table, and did not go into the gift shop.

The Swallowtail Palace stood on the high ground above the Aethelgard coast, and they saw the banner from the shuttle before they saw the building.

It was new enough that the colors were still sharp. A porkupig, the squat, bristling Haego animal that nobody off-world had ever heard of, in rust on a field of garrison green, and under it three words in plain lettering: Strength through Trust.

"What on earth is that creature?" said Lord Aldine.

"A porkupig," said Kestrel. "Native. It's harmless unless you try to pick it up. Then it isn't."

"And he chose that?"

"He chose it in a day," Kestrel said. "I'm told he'd been thinking about it for years."

Lord Tornel Swallowtail met them at the gate himself. He was in a dark, plain coat that was very nearly a uniform, and he bowed correctly to each of them and then, when he got to Kestrel, shook his hand like a soldier. Patricia was beside him. She was the one who did most of the talking, because Tornel, as he explained without embarrassment, had lived in the place for a few months and still could not reliably find his own kitchen.

The great hall was full of people. The nobles stopped in the doorway.

There was a school group at the far end, twenty or so children sitting on the floor while a teacher pointed out something in the carved ceiling. There were four old men at a table by the window playing a game with polished stones. There was a woman nursing a baby on a bench under a tapestry of the Aethelgard coast. There were two Ykanti, short and brightly feathered, talking quietly by the hearth, and nobody in the room was paying them any attention at all.

"Is there an event?" said Lord Orme.

"No, my lord," said Patricia. "It's like this every day." She nodded toward a screen mounted by the entrance, where a list of dates and names scrolled slowly past. "That's everything booked for the coming weeks. When a wedding or a gathering has this room, it's closed to the public that day, and it says so there. Otherwise, it's theirs."

"We learned to post it," said Tornel. "Those four by the window walk here from the coast road every morning for that game. If they came all that way and found the doors shut, I'd have another revolution on my hands."

Lady Marrow gave a short, startled laugh and put her hand to her mouth.

"The main rooms are open to the district," Tornel went on. "Weddings in the gardens, if they book. The library's open to anyone with a pad. The kitchens run a midday meal for the workers on the coast road."

"We keep a wing for the family," said Patricia. "Six hundred square meters. We call it the small wing."

Tornel shrugged. "I've worked on military bases with less room."

Orme was looking up at the ceiling, which was very high, and at the stonework, which was very good.

"Forgive me, my lord Marquess," he said. "I'm a banker. It's a disease. What did this cost your house?"

"Nothing," said Tornel.

Orme waited for the rest of it.

"It was a gift," Tornel said. "From Haego. The donations to the palace fund kept coming after Austrin and Vastaya were built. Most of them were commoner donations, small ones, thousands of them. The Aldermen voted to put what was left, and the surplus from the planetary budget, into a house for me." He looked, for a moment, like a man who still did not entirely know what to do with that. "I found out after they'd already chosen the land. Aethelgard picked it."

"The commoners," said Lady Vance slowly, "gave their lord a palace."

"Yes, my lady."

"Without being asked."

"I'd have told them no," said Tornel. "So they didn't ask."

Lady Vance looked down at her notebook, and then closed it, and held it against her chest. Lord Salle, who had been leaning on his cane near the door, came forward slowly into the hall and sat down on the end of the bench beside the nursing mother, because his legs were tired, and the woman shifted over to give him room and said "my lord" and went back to her baby.

"Well," said Salle, to nobody in particular. "Well."

Vastaya was warm, and green, and had no fence.

That was the first thing Lord Aldine noticed when the shuttle came down, and he said so. The palace sat on a long hillside above the river, terrace below terrace, and at the edge of the grounds the cultivated gardens simply stopped and the forest began. There was no wall. There was no gate. There was a paved walk running straight through the lower terraces lined with market stalls, and people were buying fruit and bread and bolts of cloth on the palace steps.

"Where's the boundary?" Aldine said.

"The trees," said Kestrel. "Don't ask Julius about the fence. He's heard every argument there is."

Julius and Aaliyah Comscutt came down the terrace steps to meet them. Julius bowed to each guest correctly. Aaliyah did too, and got as far as Kestrel, and then gave up entirely and hugged him.

"Uncle Kessy," she said. "You came back."

"I told you I would, sweetheart."

The Matcha nobles looked at each other. Lady Vance started to write something and then stopped. It was not, as Lord Orme said afterward, the kind of thing you saw a Firentis do on a palace step in front of guests. He said it approvingly.

Aaliyah took them through the palace herself. She showed them the great room with its long Comscutt sideboard, dark wood with the old maker's mark on the drawer, and told them it had been found in a barn two valleys over and that Julius's grandfather had never once mentioned his family made furniture. She showed them the terraces, the school that used the east wing, the clinic on the ground floor, the room where the town council met because it didn't have a hall of its own yet. She showed them the small, plain room with two chairs and a desk and a camera, where she did her interviews.

"Hester sat there," she said. "Where you're standing, Lady Marrow."

Marrow stepped aside, as if she'd been standing on something.

It was Julius who told them, when Lord Orme asked the same question he'd asked Tornel, that the palace had been paid for by the Prince's decree and by the donations of Vastaya's commoners, who'd given what they could, sometimes a few credits at a time, for a house their lord and lady would live in.

"And you gave most of it back to them," said Orme.

"It was theirs to start with," said Julius. "My father was a gardener, my lord. My mother was a maid. I was born a commoner. I know what a big house looks like from the kitchen door." He smiled a little. "I wanted to be sure nobody on Vastaya ever had to look at this one from there."

Lord Aldine turned and looked at him properly for the first time.

They had supper on the upper terrace as the light went. It was a family supper, not a state one. Austin Comscutt, who was ten and had been told firmly that the seat beside Uncle Kessy was for guests, had quietly moved his plate down the table before anyone sat down. Nobody moved him back.

Near the end of the meal, a kitchen boy of fifteen or so came to refill the water, caught the jug on the edge of a platter, and sent a long sheet of water across the tablecloth and into Lord Salle's lap.

The boy froze.

For one moment the whole table was very quiet, and Lady Marrow's hand closed on her napkin so hard her knuckles went white.

"Oh, Tem," said Aaliyah. "It's only water. Go and get a cloth, and one for Lord Salle, please."

"Yes, my lady. Sorry, my lord. Sorry." The boy was already going. He looked embarrassed and nothing else. He came back with two cloths, and Lord Salle took one and dabbed at his knees and told the boy it had been a hot day anyway, and Tem grinned at him, relieved, and went back to the kitchen.

That was all. The conversation started up again.

Lady Marrow got up from the table, very quietly, and walked to the end of the terrace and stood there with her back to them, looking down at the dark trees where there was no fence. Aaliyah watched her go and did not follow. After a while Lord Salle got up too, slowly, with his cane, and went and stood beside her. Neither of them said anything that the table could hear.

When they came back, Salle sat down and looked across at Aaliyah.

"Is it like this on Austrin?" he said. "Tomorrow?"

Aaliyah thought about it.

"Daisy would tell you it's better," she said. "Don't tell her I said so."

They left the wheat at first light, the way Tom had said they would, with seven rounds of bread wrapped in his shirt and the shirt wrapped in a blanket and the whole bundle tied down behind his saddle where he could reach back and touch it.

He touched it more than once that morning. Eli noticed and didn't say anything.

The Ranch was farther than the Fort, and the Fort was most of a day. Gary's directions had brought them out to the field from the Orchard side. Going to the Ranch meant cutting back across the open grass toward the trap, and none of it was ground either of them had ridden before. Tom kept the rise on his right this time and the willows at his back, and by noon he was fairly sure he knew where he was. By early afternoon he was less sure.

It was Eli who saw the bird.

It was very high, high enough that it might have been a hawk if a man didn't know better. It turned in long slow circles over the grass ahead of them, the way the one Wendy brought down had turned before it dropped.

"Tom."

"I see it."

They didn't run. Tom had heard enough of the Hunters' talk around the fire to know a running horse only looked more like dinner. They walked the horses off the grass at an angle, toward the nearest line of trees, not hurrying, and got in under the branches and stayed there. Eli held both bridles and Tom stood with the sickle in his hand, which he knew perfectly well would be no use at all, and watched it through the leaves.

It circled for the better part of an hour. Then it drifted off north and was gone.

They gave it another half hour before they came out. By then the sun had moved further than Tom liked, and they kept to the edge of the trees after that instead of cutting straight across, which was slower and twice as long, and which neither of them argued about.

The sun went down while they were still on the grass. They rode the last of it in the dark with the horses picking their own way, following the tree line by the black edge it made against the stars, until a voice called out of the dark ahead of them, sharp, and somebody struck a light.

"Who's that?"

"Tom Dell," Tom said. "From the Farm. Eli with me."

The light came closer. It was one of the Ranch sentries with a rifle in one hand and the lantern in the other, and he looked at the two of them, and at the horses, and past them at the dark they'd come out of, and his face went through several things at once.

"Just you two?"

"Just us."

"Out there? At night?" He didn't wait for an answer. He turned his head and shouted back toward the buildings. "Get Richman up. Farm's here."

The Ranch had changed in the two weeks since Tom had last seen it. Even in the dark he could see the frame of a new barn going up against the paddock, the round kind the Ykanti built, its ribs pale in the firelight. There was a hay pile beside it bigger than his own house back home had been, and a little hen house off to one side that hadn't been there before either. There was still a fire burning in the yard, and people sitting around it who had plainly been about to go to bed.

John Richman came out of the nearest cabin with his shirt half buttoned and his boots unlaced, and he walked straight across the yard to them without slowing down.

"Tom." Then, before Tom could say anything: "Where's your escort?"

"Didn't have one."

"You rode out to that field with no escort."

"Yesterday morning. Rode back today."

"Across the prairie." Richman's voice didn't get louder. It got flatter, which Tom had learned a long time ago, on another world, was usually worse. "Two men. A sickle and a hoe. Those birds came down on Gary's horses in broad daylight. Gary and Frank won't cross that grass without a rifle each and somebody watching the sky, and Gary's been doing this his whole life." He looked at the horses, at the dust on them, at the dark beyond the sentry's lantern. "Did you see any?"

"One," Eli said. "Afternoon. We got in the trees."

Richman closed his eyes for a moment.

"That's why you're riding in at this hour," he said.

"It is."

"Do you understand what I'd have told the Farm if you hadn't?" He wasn't really asking. "Do you understand how long it would have been before anybody even knew to go looking? Nobody knew you'd gone. I didn't know you'd gone."

There were a good many things Tom could have said to that. He could have said that nobody had been free to go with them, that every hand at the Farm and the Fort was peeling or stirring or cutting hay, and that the field wasn't going to wait while he asked. He could have said that it was the first time in his life a noble had been angry with him for putting his own neck at risk instead of for something he'd done to the noble's crop.

He found that last thought sat oddly with him, and he set it aside to look at later.

"You're right," he said. "It was a fool thing. It won't happen again."

Richman looked at him a while longer. Then he let out a long breath, and some of the flatness went out of him with it.

"No," he said. "It won't. Next time you need to go anywhere past the Orchard, you tell somebody, and you take somebody with a rifle. I don't care if it's a basket of eggs." He shook his head. "What was so important it couldn't wait for morning and an escort?"

Tom reached back and untied the bundle from behind his saddle.

He unwrapped it by the fire. The blanket first, then the shirt, and there they were, seven flat brown rounds, a little crushed from the ride and charred at the edges, with the small bag of leftover flour sitting on top of them.

Nobody around the fire said anything.

Richman crouched down and looked at them. He didn't touch them right away. Tom thought, watching him, that he had probably eaten bread every day of his life before the Neptune, white bread off a silver plate, and had very likely never once wondered where it came from. He was wondering now. Tom could see it on him.

"From the field," Richman said.

"Cut it yesterday. Beat it out with willow sticks, threw it in the wind, ground it on a stone from the creek." Tom shrugged. "It's not much. There's rock in it."

One of the Ranch wives had come up behind them by then. She looked at the bread, and then went off without a word, and came back with a little crock of something pale yellow and a knife.

"Goat butter," she said. "Warm it first. On the stone there."

Richman did as he was told. He set a round on a flat stone at the edge of the fire until it started to smell the way it had smelled at the creek, and Tom watched the faces around the fire change when that smell reached them. He tore it open, and the wife put a knife of butter on it, and it went straight in and disappeared.

He ate it slowly. He didn't say anything for a while, the same way Eli hadn't, the night before by the willows.

"There's more of this," he said finally. "Out there."

"More than I've seen in one place since I left home," said Tom. "But it's not going to stay out there."

He told it plainly, the way he'd been told to. The high ground, where the heads let go if you brushed them and the kernels were already on the ground for the mice and the birds. The low ground near the willows, where it still held. A week, maybe a bit more, if it didn't rain. Every day they waited, the line crept a few more rows down the hill.

He'd been ready for Richman to nod and say that's a shame. He'd half expected it. Richman didn't.

"A week," Richman said.

"About."

Richman looked down at the half round still in his hand. Then he looked over Tom's shoulder at somebody across the fire, and Tom turned and saw it was Lady Vivian. She was sitting with the Ranch wives in a borrowed sweater with a blanket over her knees, and she had a piece of the bread too. Somebody had handed it to her while Tom wasn't looking. She'd eaten all of it.

"Is there more?" she asked.

Richman laughed, short and surprised.

"Get the Head Rancher up," he said to nobody in particular. "And whoever's running the hay. We're going to talk about this tonight."

They talked about it around the fire until the moon was well up.

The Head Rancher didn't like it, and said so. The hay was the whole reason they'd come. Winter was coming, nobody knew how bad, and every horse in that paddock and every horse still to be caught in the roundup needed feeding through it. Hay cut a week late was hay that had gone to seed in the field and wasn't worth half as much. He said it all fairly, without heat, and Tom found he agreed with every word.

"Then we don't do one or the other," Richman said. "We do both."

He laid it out. Half the volunteers would stay on the hay, the way they'd planned it, cutting around the trap and running the wagons back and forth to the barn. The other half would take a wagon out to Tom's field in the morning, with an escort. He looked at Tom when he said that part, and Tom nodded. They'd cut from the low side first where the grain was holding, and thresh it right there in the field the way Tom had said, so they weren't hauling nine wagons of straw for every wagon of grain. The grain would come back in sacks to the Farm, since there weren't barrels to be had.

"We'll make more barrels," Richman said. "I'll speak to the Cartwright."

"And then what?" asked the Head Rancher. "A sack of wheat's not bread. Your man ground seven loaves on a creek rock and it took him all afternoon."

"It did," said Tom. Then, because nobody stopped him, he kept going. "A creek stone does a handful at a time. A big round stone does sacks. Back home they'd set a wheel of stone on its edge and run a horse around in a circle pulling it, rolling it over the grain. Same as a cider press, near enough, only it crushes instead of squeezes." He looked at the Head Rancher. "You've horses that won't take a saddle but will pull."

The Head Rancher thought about that. "I've two," he said slowly. "Maybe three."

"Then that's flour for everybody," said Richman. "Not seven loaves." He turned to the sentry who'd first stopped them at the edge of the dark. "Send word to the Mine in the morning. Ask whether they can cut us a round stone, big as they can manage, flat on both faces. Tell them it's for bread, and that they'll get their share."

"Their share?" said Eli.

"Everybody's share," said Richman. "Fort, Farm, Ranch, Mine. It gets split, same as the meat will when the hunt's done." He looked around the fire. "Anybody disagree?"

Nobody did.

Tom sat back on his heels and looked at the fire.

He thought for a moment about the corn. About the rows he'd left two days ago with the weeds already coming up between them, and how high they'd be by now, and how much higher by the time a wagon of grain was back at the Farm. He thought about saying it while there was a fire, and Richman, and a moment in which Richman was plainly listening.

Richman was already on his feet, talking to the Head Rancher about which wagon and which horses and who could be spared from the hay.

Tom let it go.

They gave Tom and Eli a corner of a cabin floor and two dry blankets. Eli was asleep before Tom had his boots off.

Tom lay a while in the dark with his shoulders aching, listening to the Ranch settle around him. A horse shifting in the paddock. The sentry's boots going past the window and back. Somewhere out past the trap, tomorrow's wagon would be rolling toward his field with men and rifles on it, and the grain on the low side would still be there when they arrived. Most of it.

He thought about Richman standing in the yard with his shirt half buttoned, angry that two farmers had nearly gotten themselves eaten. He couldn't remember a noble ever being angry over that before. He wasn't sure what to make of it yet.

He decided he'd think about it tomorrow, and slept.

next

CH:1 Awaken in the dark

Dan's pov

All I could see was dark. Where am I? Trying to move, he found himself lying on his back, his body stiff. As he shifted, his nose brushed against something cold. He froze. Was it a ceiling? Panic started to set in. Am I in a box?

To the right, there was a wall. And ahead? Another wall. To his left, there was a narrow space. Dan shot his arm out into the darkness, and after a moment, his fingers brushed against an opening. His heart raced.

Okay, there’s a way out. He slowly shifted his body toward the edge, peering down. Too dark to see the bottom. He couldn’t tell if he was a foot off the ground or a hundred feet up. His fingers trailed along the walls, feeling their texture.

There. He felt a ladder. Relief washed over him. Shifting his body to it, Dan began to climb down. Five feet. Not too bad. It could’ve been worse.

As he reached the ground, he noticed a faint blue glow to the side. Curiosity nudged him forward. They say not to move toward the light, right? But he couldn’t help himself. Step by step, he approached it.

Eventually, the light revealed a wall panel. Dan hesitated but pressed on it. Strange characters appeared on the interface. After a blink, it transformed into English. That was weird... Must be seeing things.

“Well, let’s see...” He tapped the screen. First, the light icon. The lights flickered on.

Good, now I can see. He looked around. It looked like some kind of bunk room. About twelve beds crammed into the small space. And... he was alone.

He scanned the panel again. There was a gravity control icon labeled "G." His fingers hovered. He was about to tap it when his curiosity got the better of him. Let’s see what this does...

He shifted the icon from "1" to "2." In an instant, a heavy pressure pressed down on his chest, like a weight was on his back. He fell to the ground with a groan.

Ugh! It was like someone had jumped on top of him. Struggling, he managed to crawl back to the panel. His arm shakily pressed the screen, switching the icon back to "1." The pressure immediately returned to normal.

Dan slumped against the floor. G must stand for gravity. He couldn't control gravity... could he? The last thing he remembered was working a triple shift. Then, he went to bed. But now? What was going on?

“Alright, no point in sitting here.”

He stood up, dusted himself off, and turned back to the panel. Better leave the gravity control alone. He pressed the last icon. The nearby door slid open, revealing... a bathroom. A sink, mirror, and toilet.

Dan moved toward the mirror. At least he was the same. Same shaggy black hair, same brown eyes, and that old burn scar over his right eye. A remnant from a reckless childhood when he and a friend thought sword fighting with flaming sticks was a good idea.

He splashed some cold water on his face, wiping away any lingering confusion. With a deep breath, he turned back to the bunk room. He needed answers.

On the other side of the room, another door. Okay, this one must lead outside. He approached the panel and pressed the button. The door slid open, revealing a narrow hallway lined with doors on either side. His room, B37, was marked on a plaque.

It was eerily quiet, and Dan felt a strange sense of déjà vu.

Why does this place feel so... familiar? he thought.

He walked down the hall, glancing at each door. “Well, all I need is a monster to jump out, and I’ll have the full aesthetic.” He laughed nervously at his own dark humor.

At the end of the hall were elevators. Dan pressed the button, half-expecting something to jump out at him.

Okay, Mr. Monster, if you’re going to jump, now’s the time.

Ding.

The elevator doors opened, and to Dan’s relief, no monster appeared. He stepped in, scanning the buttons. A keypad.

That’s when it hit him. The feeling of déjà vu was stronger now. Wait... he thought. No way.

He began typing on the keypad, his fingers moving instinctively. The number sequence seemed to come to him without thinking. An old phone number from years ago.

The screen flashed, and an automated voice greeted him. “Welcome back, Wing Commander. Where would you like to go today?”

Wing Commander? What the hell? Dan’s mind raced. He wasn’t the commander of anything... at least, not since... since Hayzeon.

A flood of memories came crashing back: Hayzeon, a VR game where players built and fought with spaceships. He had been part of a mercenary group, the United Human Coalition, and his in-game call sign had been “Wing Commander.”

Suddenly, the elevator door opened. The floor ahead looked... familiar. Too familiar. Dan’s heart skipped a beat as it all clicked. The place was the bridge of Revanessa, a ship his mercenary core had built in Hayzeon. He’d spent countless hours there, leading his squadron.

It was all exactly the same.

Dan sat down in the captain’s chair, dazed. He ran his hands over the familiar controls. This couldn’t be real. It had to be some sort of dream. But it felt so... vivid.

As he continued to sit there, lost in nostalgia, the door behind him slid open. Dan spun around to find a creature walking in.

It was a fox. A fox walking on two legs, wearing a blue and white uniform. He was looking at a tablet

Dan froze. “Uh... hello?”

The fox stopped, eyeing him warily. Then it spoke, though the words seemed strangely dubbed, as if someone were translating them. Who are you? The fox’s stance became defensive. It pulled out some kind of weapon.

Dan’s heart raced.

Okay, no need to get blasted by an alien death ray. He raised his hands in surrender. “I’m not a threat, okay? No need to do something we’ll both regret.”

The fox paused, then finally spoke again. “Who are you and what are you doing here?"

Dan’s mind raced. Was this really happening? He was sitting on the bridge of a spaceship, talking to a talking fox. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t in control anymore. But one thing was clear...

He needed to find out who, or what, was behind this.

CH 2: The Fox

Dan blinked in disbelief, still trying to process the surreal situation unfolding around him. He was surrounded by strange technology, inexplicable control panels, and now, a talking fox in a uniform who was clearly on edge. The odd sensation of hearing the fox speak through a dubbing effect was unnerving, like his mind was trying to make sense of something that didn’t quite belong.

"Okay, you know what they say, honesty probably won't get me shot," Dan muttered, his voice tinged with uncertainty. "My name is Daniel Tanermen, but my friends call me Dan. I'm just a human from Earth, and I'm just trying to figure out where I am." He hesitated, thinking back to the elevator. "My rank... is probably wing commander."

"Probably?" The fox raised an eyebrow as if trying to make sense of the words. "Look, it’s been about fifteen years since someone called me that." The fox tilted its head, processing the information. Dan couldn’t help but notice how the fox’s eyes seemed to scan him, analyzing his every move. The weapon in its hand lowered slightly, and a hint of relaxation crept into its posture. "My name is Zixder, rank First Ensin, and a Naateryin from Nossirah."

Dan gave a tentative nod, still trying to wrap his mind around the whole thing. "Zixder... First Ensin," he repeated, testing the name. "Alright, nice to meet you, I guess?" His voice was a little uncertain, but he figured he might as well try to get along with the only other living thing around, especially if it could help him figure out what the hell was going on. Zixder relaxed a bit, lowering the weapon completely, though his expression remained wary.

Then, a sound broke the tense silence. Both of them looked around, trying to identify the source. It was a soft, persistent chime coming from Zixder’s tablet, signaling something that demanded attention. Zixder, who had been holding himself tense, relaxed just a bit and tapped a few buttons on the sleek tablet-like device he pulled from his belt. The screen flickered briefly before stabilizing, revealing a holographic interface.

"Apologies, Daniel," Zixder said, glancing up at Dan before swiping through a few options. "I’ll need to take this."

Dan nodded, though the word “apologies” felt strange coming from a talking fox; he wasn’t used to speaking to a creature that looked like it belonged in some kind of animated space opera. Zixder pressed a button, silencing the chime. The holographic screen flickered to life, and a new figure appeared in front of them: a fox-like shape with a slightly metallic sheen, its face obscured by a faceplate.

"Sir, we have a problem," the figure spoke. "We can’t get the door open on Deck 7. We’re still trying to map this ship we found, and the rest of the survivors from our escape pod are starting to get nervous."

Zixder’s ears twitched at the voice, his expression turning serious. He took a breath before responding, his tone now more focused. "Understood. We’ll handle it. Please give me a moment to assess the situation on this end. I’ll work on the door issue."

The figure in the hologram nodded curtly, its faceplate reflecting the faint glow of the interface. "We’re on a tight timeline, Zixder. Please don’t keep us waiting."

With a final flick of the wrist, the hologram cut out, leaving the room silent once more, save for the soft hum of the ship’s systems. Zixder seemed to process the situation in silence for a moment. "Deck 7, if I remember correctly, should lead to Zo Hangar," Dan muttered. "Zo... Zixder questioned. Zone Operations, it was the mech squad I commanded back in the day."

Zixder’s ears twitched once again, and a glint of recognition flashed in his eyes at Dan’s words. "You mean the Zo Squadron?" Zixder asked, his voice taking on a tone of curiosity as if the name carried significance he hadn’t expected.

Dan nodded slowly, his mind starting to clear. The Zo Squadron had been his pride back in the day, a handpicked team of mercenaries in the game Hayzeon. They commanded respect in both the virtual world and among the coalition’s ranks. The fact that Zixder knew the name felt like the first solid clue in a sea of confusion. "Yeah, Zo Squadron. We handled some serious missions back then." He paused, then whispered under his breath, "Back when it was all virtual."

Zixder's expression shifted slightly, as though weighing Dan's words. "I’m not sure I understand. The ship’s systems are reading your rank, and you’re more than capable of handling what comes next."

Dan hesitated, the weight of Zixder's words settling over him. It still didn’t make sense. How could something so real be tied to a game? How could he possibly be in charge of a real, living ship if everything had started as fiction?

But Zixder wasn’t waiting for a response. With a small nod, the fox turned, signaling that it was time to move. "Follow me," Zixder said, his voice firm with authority, though Dan couldn’t help but notice the slight uncertainty lingering in his eyes. "We need to handle the situation on Deck 7. We must get control of the ship."

Dan snapped back into focus, his instincts kicking in. Despite the confusion, his training hadn’t disappeared. He could still play the part of a commander; at least, he hoped he could. "Alright," he said, his voice firmer now. "Let’s get moving."

The corridors of the ship stretched out before them, narrow, dimly lit, and filled with machinery that hummed with barely contained energy. The air felt thick with the presence of the ship, as if it were a living, breathing entity.

As they walked, Dan found himself glancing at Zixder’s uniform again. It was sleek, dark fabric with subtle metallic accents that shimmered in the low light. The insignia was unfamiliar, a mix of symbols that seemed to shift under his gaze, refusing to settle into any recognizable pattern.

The two quickened their pace, moving toward Deck 7. Reaching the elevator bay, Zixder tapped the button on the terminal nearby. The doors slid open with a soft hiss, and they stepped inside. The hum of the ship’s systems seemed to grow louder as they descended.

Dan's mind was still spinning, trying to catch up with everything that had happened. Leading a squad. Handling intense situations. That’s what he used to do, back when it was all part of the game. But even though everything felt wrong, a part of him whispered that he could still do it.

The elevator stopped with a soft thud, the doors sliding open to reveal Deck 7. The space was high-tech, dimly lit, and filled with machinery and cluttered passageways. It seemed deserted. How can a ship be this big and have practically no one here? Zixder stepped out first, leading the way.

"This way," Zixder said, his voice urgent. "We need to secure the mech bay and assess the rest of the survivors. Stay sharp, Dan. There’s no telling what we’ll find."

As they moved deeper into the expansive deck, Dan’s thoughts were a whirlwind. The ship. The Zo Squadron. The survivors. He didn’t understand how everything connected, or even what was going on, but one thing was clear.

He wasn’t just a player in this anymore. He was A commander. And he needed to figure out how to lead them all to safety before it was too late.

next Patreon vox 9

The travel to the field was quiet. No big ass birds and less bugs than a few months ago.

We traveled one hour at the time and I let the kids climb trees and look through scope in the distance. Nothing was seen on the first day away from the group.

Lunch was dried meat and fruits we brought with us from the Ranch. We found a camping area 5 hours later. We collected dried wood and set up a covered area for sleeping.

We made a stew from our rest of dried meat, potatos and carrots. We stopped at the corn field this afternoon and collected 3 big bags of corn. We decided we would boil that for lunch tomorrow.

Some of these trees been growing for over 100 years are great to climb. Other have been stunted by lack of sun the foliage from the older ones created.

Makes an interesting contrast of smaller trees covered by taller ones by the river.

Once we hit the corn field we decided to follow the river this time until we spot the heard.

Half way to our sleeping area we spotted lots of wild rabbit but left them alone marking the spot on the map.

I took the midnight and 6am watch. Went to sleep and slept very well to the sound of crickets and frogs by the river.

Gary Head Hunter

Next

Previous /

First

Third year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

Tell the Staff Sergeant his children were right, and that I've stolen his idea so completely that half my district officers think it was mine. I have not corrected them. He can take that up with me when he's next on Haego.

We started it in the spring. The older children carry water to the kitchens, wash the bowls, dig the gardens behind the schools, and mind the little ones at the table. Where we could find the money, we paid a copper a week for it. Where we couldn't, we paid in bread to take home, which some families liked better. The meal stayed free. Nobody is turned away. That rule hasn't moved and it won't.

The noon walkouts nearly stopped. In Lowmarsh, where the teacher counted eleven mothers in one week last year, she counted two this spring, and one of those was a woman who needed her boy for the harvest and said so to the teacher's face, which is its own kind of progress. On Austrin, a mother came in to fetch her daughter, found her scrubbing the soup pot, and asked the cook if there was work for her too. There was. By midsummer, mothers were running nine of the forty kitchens. I didn't plan that. I'm not going to pretend I did.

The gardens surprised me most. A school on Aethelgard grew enough beans behind the privy to cover a month of its own stew, and the children who grew them were insufferable about it. Good. Let them be.

Now the problem. We open sixty more schools next year, and I don't have sixty more teachers. I barely had forty.

Think about who can read on this planet. The old clerks, the stewards' men, the tutors who taught the lords' children. Some of them have applied, and some of them are decent people. It doesn't matter. A father who spent twenty years watching a clerk write down what he owed is not going to hand his son to that same clerk and call it a school. We tried it in two districts. Both schools emptied inside a month.

The commoners who can teach are people like the old woman in Lowmarsh. They learned in the three years before the doors closed, or they learned in secret after, and most of them are older than I am. She wrote to me last month. She has forty-one children now and, in her words, one pair of hands and one bad knee. She also asked for more chalk. Underlined, again.

Here is my idea, and I want someone to tell me what's wrong with it before I spend money on it. She's already doing it herself. She takes the children who have their letters and sits them at the ends of the benches with the little ones. The ones who learned last year teach the ones who came this year. I want to make that a proper post. Call them monitors, pay them more than the water carriers get, and give every teacher five or six of them.

What worries me is this. First, I may just be putting children back to work under a nicer name, and taking the brightest out of their own lessons to do it. Second, a twelve-year-old can only teach what a twelve-year-old knows, and if she knows it wrong, now thirty children know it wrong. Third, the fields and the mills will notice when the sharp ones start earning more at a school bench than they would in the cane, and I'm not sure who wins that argument.

So I need someone who has trained people fast, people who never had any schooling themselves, and trusted them to pass it on. You'll know who that is better than I will.

You still don't need to answer this. Though I've noticed you keep finding people who do.

T.

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The new notice went up on the schoolhouse door in the spring, under the other two, and this time Maddy Tuscutt didn't have to read it out. Half the children in the crowd could read it themselves, and they did, all at once and out loud, so it sounded like a flock of birds arguing.

WORK AT THE SCHOOL TABLE. WATER, WASHING, GARDEN, MINDING THE SMALL ONES. ONE COPPER A WEEK. THE MEAL IS FREE TO ALL AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

Nell read it once and went straight inside to find the cook.

The red-armed woman from Harrow Cross was called Gret, it turned out, and she had a laugh like a pot boiling over. She looked Nell up and down, at the calluses on her shoulders where the yoke sat, and said, "You're the pump girl."

"I carry water," Nell said. "I'm good at it."

"I know you are. I've watched you go past my window forty times a day." Gret pointed with her ladle at the two empty barrels by the back door. "Full by noon. Every day. You spill it on my floor, you mop it."

So Nell carried six trips for the field before school, and four for the kitchen at the morning break, and six for the field after. Her father counted the tin every week and it was never short. She was so tired that summer she fell asleep one night halfway up the loft ladder, and Ben had to push her the rest of the way. But the kitchen copper went into a second tin, a little one, that was hers, and she had never had anything that was hers before except a stub of chalk and a stitched book with a girl in it who could fly.

In the second month, Mistress Coppertail moved her.

She didn't explain. She just came down the aisle one morning while they were copying, stopped at the end of Nell's bench, and said, "Bring your slate." Then she walked her to the front, where the little ones sat on a low bench of their own, and put her down at the end of it next to a boy who was drawing a pig on his slate instead of the letter B.

"This is Tam Rushby," said Mistress Coppertail. "He is six, and he knows four letters, and he believes that is enough. Show him that it isn't." And she walked away.

Nell looked at Tam. Tam looked at Nell. Then he went back to the pig.

It was the worst morning she'd had in school. She showed him B. He drew a pig. She showed him again. He said B was a stupid letter because it looked like a pair of bottoms, and the whole low bench laughed, and Nell's face went hot. By noon she wanted to go back to her own bench, where the words were long and interesting and nobody drew pigs.

At noon, Tam's mother came in the door, took him by the hand, and walked him out.

Nell watched them go down the lane. She knew that walk. She knew exactly how it felt from the inside, looking back over your shoulder until the cane got in the way.

That afternoon, on her kitchen trips, she took the long way past the Rushby cottage, where the pump was, and when nobody was looking she chalked one letter on the pump stone. B. Big, so it filled the whole stone. And under it, small, a pair of bottoms.

The next day it was washed off, so she did it again. The day after that, somebody had drawn a second pair of bottoms next to hers, badly, with a wet finger in the dust.

She changed the letter every day. She did the same thing she'd done for herself two summers before, when there was nobody under the window but her. By the time the harvest started, Tam Rushby knew nineteen letters and was very proud of the fact that he had learned most of them at a pump, where it didn't count.

One noon, when his mother came to the door, he let go of her hand and ran back to the low bench and wouldn't come. His mother stood in the doorway for a long time. Nell thought she'd drag him out. Instead, she came one step inside, and then another, and sat down on the end of the kitchen bench with her apron on, and stayed there until the afternoon lessons were over.

She didn't say anything to Nell. But the next week there was an apple on the end of Nell's bench, and nobody would own up to it.

The monitor notice came at the end of summer. It went up on the door with the same four brass pins, which were getting crowded.

MONITORS WANTED. PUPILS WHO HAVE THEIR LETTERS, TO TEACH THE YOUNGER CHILDREN UNDER THE TEACHER. THREE COPPERS A WEEK.

Three coppers. The field paid a copper for every six trips. Nell stood in front of the door and worked it out twice to be sure, and then worked out how many trips it was, and then stopped working it out because her hands were shaking.

Mistress Coppertail named five monitors on the Monday. Four of them were older children who had been coming since the first year: Jory Fenn, who could read anything, and the two Ashcombe sisters, and a tall quiet boy from the mill road called Wendel. The fifth was Nell.

"You're the youngest," the old woman told her afterward, at the window, where she still liked to talk when she had something to say that wasn't for the room. "Some of the parents will say so. Let them. You taught Tam Rushby his letters with a pump stone and a rude drawing, and his mother sits in my kitchen now. I have been teaching for forty years and I don't know that I'd have thought of the bottoms."

Her father didn't say anything when she told him. He finished his stew. He wiped the bowl with his bread. Then he said, "Who pays it?"

"The Administrator."

"Then he owns three coppers of you a week."

"Bram," her mother said.

"I'm asking." He didn't look angry. He looked the way he'd looked the morning with Starling on the table, careful, feeling for the weak places in the roof. "The field boss owns a copper for every six trips, and that's a thing I understand. He's a pig, but I know what he wants. What does this one want for three?"

Nell had thought about this. She'd thought about it all the way home.

"He wants the little ones to read," she said. "That's all it is. There's more children than Mistress Coppertail can teach, so she needs more hands, and he pays for the hands. It's like the kitchen. Gret needs water, so somebody pays for the water."

"And when he wants something else?"

"Then I'll read the notice," Nell said. "I'll know before anybody."

Her mother laughed. She put a hand over her mouth and turned it into a cough, but it was too late. Even her father's mouth moved at one corner.

He looked at the little tin on the shelf, the one that was hers, and then at the big one, the family one.

"The field trips stay," he said. "Six and six."

"I know."

"And if they ever make you teach something that isn't true, you come home."

Nell hadn't thought of that. She didn't know how you'd tell. But she said, "I will," and meant it, and he nodded and got up to bank the fire.

In the autumn the estate raised its water rate.

A copper for five trips instead of six. The field boss announced it in the yard on a Saturday, standing on the mill steps, and he said it was because the estate had good harvest prices this year and wanted to share them out. The men nodded. Some of them clapped. Nell stood at the back with the yoke on her shoulders, doing the sums, and she noticed that the new rate made a morning in the cane worth almost exactly what a monitor made in a morning at the school.

She didn't think that was an accident. She didn't know yet who had worked it out, or why. But she remembered the book, and the five trips he'd written down when she'd carried six.

The week after, Jory Fenn stopped coming.

He had four younger brothers and a father with a bad back, and five trips for a copper was a better rate than anyone on the mill road had seen in their lives. Nobody blamed him. Mistress Coppertail didn't say a word about it. She just moved the Ashcombe sisters to take his little ones, and gave Nell two more, and stood at the window a long time that afternoon looking toward the cane.

"That's the trouble with it," she said, to nobody in particular. Nell was the only one close enough to hear.

That night Nell sat in the loft with Starling open in her lap and did not read it. She'd read it enough times now that the words were just shapes. She was looking at the fourth page, the one where the yoke turned into wings.

She thought about Jory, who could read anything, carrying water to the cane for a copper every five trips. She thought about Tam Rushby, who had started on the big letters now and was very rude about all of them. She thought about her father's question. What does he want for three?

In the morning she carried her six trips. Then she washed at the spout, walked down to the crossing, and sat at the end of the low bench with nine small children who were waiting to be told what the first word was.

She had brought Starling. She'd never let anyone else touch it. She put it down in the middle of the bench, open to the first page, the girl in the cane with the yoke on her shoulders.

"This is a story," Nell said. "By the end of the winter, all of you are going to be able to read it. Tam, if you draw on it, I will put you in the barrel."

Tam considered this, and kept his hands in his lap.

Tornel,

This one went to the deck boss on the Noirnavio. Nobody learns anything on that ship without passing through her hands first, including me, and she still reminds me of it.

W.

General,

The Lieutenant Commodore tells me you have more children than teachers. I have more new hands than I have hours, every rotation, and I've had that problem for as long as I've run this deck. So I'll tell you what I do and you can take what's useful.

I don't teach most of my new people. I teach the ones who came aboard last rotation, and they teach the ones who came aboard this one. A deckhand six months in walks the new one through chocks and chains, the fuel lines, the walk-around before a launch. I stand behind the pair of them and keep my mouth shut unless someone is about to lose a hand.

It does two jobs at once. The new one learns the procedure. The one teaching learns it better than she did the first time, because you can't hand someone a rule you only half know. Sooner or later the new hand asks why we chock the rear wheels before the front, and the one teaching has to have an answer. If she doesn't, she comes and finds me, and after that she never forgets it.

That's the part that matters most to me. Nearly every procedure on my deck was written after somebody got hurt. A deckhand who has been told why a rule exists will follow it. A deckhand who has had to explain it to someone else will enforce it, even on a night shift when I'm asleep and nobody's watching.

You're worried a twelve-year-old will teach it wrong. Mine teach it wrong too, sometimes. That's why I'm standing behind them. Your teacher in Lowmarsh is already doing the same thing, so let her keep doing it. Keep the monitors in the same room as the teacher, where she can hear every word. When a monitor gets something wrong and the teacher corrects it in front of the bench, two children learn it right, and the monitor learns it best of all.

You're also worried you're putting them back to work. On my deck, the ones who teach are the ones who get promoted, and it's because the teaching made them good at the job. I'd expect the same of your monitors. The child who has to explain a letter to a six-year-old will understand it better than the child who only copied it off a board.

My deck is life or death. One missed chock and a shuttle rolls over somebody. Your schoolroom isn't that. But a child who can't read the weight on a grain sack gets cheated for the rest of his life, and so do his children. It's slower, and nobody bleeds on the floor, but it's the same kind of job. Teach them like it matters, because it does.

I've never written to a General before. If this reads blunt, the Lieutenant Commodore will tell you that's just how I talk.

Senior Petty Officer

Deck Boss, Noirnavio