THE END OF ALL THINGS

The First Instalment

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

JOHN SCALZI

TOR

Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

About the Author

By John Scalzi

Copyright

To my friend John Anderson, dearly departed, and to all who were friends with him.

Let the music play.

PART ONE

So, I’m supposed to tell you how I became a brain in a box.

Huh. Well, that starts off a little dark, doesn’t it.

Also, I don’t really know, technically, how they did it to me. It’s not like once I woke up as a disembodied brain they showed me an informational video about how they did it, just in case I was curious. Here’s the part where we snipped off all the blood vessels and peripheral nerves, the video would say. Here’s how we removed the skull and spinal column, and here’s how we stuffed your brain full of nifty little sensors to track your thoughts. Pay attention, there’s a test later.

Jesus, I’m really bad at this.

I’m not a writer or an orator. I’m not a storyteller. I’m a spaceship pilot, so let me just get that right out there. The Colonial Union asked me to tell what happened to me, because they think that information will be useful to them. Fine, I’ll do it, happy to help. But it’s not going to be, you know, classic literature. It’s going to skip around. I’m going to get lost telling the story and come back to points and then get lost again. I’m doing this off the top of my head.

Well, metaphorically. I don’t have a head anymore. Pretty sure they tossed my head into an incinerator or something.

See what I mean?

Someone’s going to have to edit this if it’s going to make any sense at all. So to you poor anonymous Colonial Union editor: I salute you and I apologize to you. I’m not trying to make your life difficult, I swear. I just don’t know what they really want, or how they want me to do it.

Just tell us everything, I was told. Get it all down. Don’t worry. We’ll sort it out. Which I guess is where you come in, anonymous editor. Happy sorting.

And if you’re reading this: I’m sure the editor did an excellent job.

Where to start this damn thing? I don’t think any of you will give a crap about my childhood; it was standard-issue pretty happy, mostly noneventful, with decent parents and friends. Schooling likewise unremarkable with all the usual bits of stupidity and libidinousness with occasional moments of cramming for tests. Honestly, no one will want to hear about any of that. I hardly do and I lived it.

So, I think I’ll start at the job interview.

Yes, that’s a good place to start. The interview that gave me the job that turned me into a headless wonder.

In retrospect, I kind of wish I hadn’t of gotten the gig.

Oh, and maybe I should say what my name is. Just for the record.

It’s Rafe. Rafe Daquin.

I’m Rafe Daquin, and I’m a brain in a box.

Hi.

* * *

The reason I got the interview at all was because of a university friend of mine, Hart Schmidt. He works as a Colonial Union diplomat, which I always thought was the very definition of a thankless job, and in some recent downtime was in a bar on Phoenix Station and talking to the executive officer of the Chandler, a cargo hauler doing a standard triangle run between Phoenix, Huckleberry, and Erie. Not exactly a prestige job, but a gig is a gig. They can’t all be glamour postings.

Anyway, in conversation the XO was griping about how when they got to Phoenix Station the Chandler was met by a bunch of law enforcement types. Seems one of the Chandler’s pilots had a little side thing going, down on the actual planet of Phoenix, the details of which I’m still a little hazy on but which involved blackmail, intimidation, graft, and bigamy, the last of these being one not so much like the others. The point was the Chandler was now down a pilot and needed one, fast.

Which was nice, because I was a pilot, and I needed a job. Also fast.

“This tells me you were a programmer before you were a pilot,” the XO said, as he looked at my work history. We were in a burger joint on Phoenix Station; I had hauled my ass up from the planet as soon as Hart told me about the gig. The burgers were legend, but I wasn’t really there for the culinary thrills. The XO’s name was Lee Han and he had the look of someone who was going through the motions. I had a feeling that as long as I didn’t admit to murdering adorable kittens in front of children, I was going to get the gig.

“I went to school for computer engineering,” I said. “Graduated and did that and programming for a couple of years. Worked for Eyre Systems, mostly on starship navigation and maintenance software. You might have one of our setups on the Chandler.”

“We do,” Han said.

“I can throw in some technical support,” I said. It was a joke.

I’m not entirely sure Han got that. “It’s not the usual move from programming to piloting,” he said.

“It’s the programming that got me interested in piloting,” I said. “I was one of the programmers who had some semblance of social skills, so eventually I was assigned to go up to Phoenix Station and work on ships to customize the software. So I spent a lot of time in ships and talking to crew and listening to them talk about where they’ve been in the universe. You do that long enough and just sitting at a desk pushing code seems like a way to spend a lot of time wasting your life. I wanted to see what was out there. So I hustled my way into an apprentice piloting gig. That was seven years ago.”

“Not exactly an upward move, paywise,” Han said.

I shrugged. I figured that the shrug would come across as a casual and cool Hey, some things are more important than money rather than Hey, I’m living with my parents who are beginning to resent that fact so I will take what I can get. Anyway both were true. Lots of things can be more important than money when you lacked other options.

Not to paint my parents as the bad people here. It’s just that they had made it clear that it was one thing to support me while I was working my way up a ladder, and another thing to support a thirty-two-year-old human while I was sitting on my ass at home between gigs. Maybe they wouldn’t let me starve, but they weren’t going to make me comfortable.

Which was fine. I wasn’t out of work because I was lazy.

“Says here you’ve been out of work for the last nine months,” Han said.

“I’ve been between ships, yes,” I said.

“Want to explain that?” Han asked.

Well, there was no way around that one. “I’m being blackballed,” I said.

“By whom?”

“By Captain Werner Ostrander of the Lastan Falls.”

I thought I saw a faint smile on Han’s lips when I said this. “Go on,” he said.

“There’s not much to say,” I said. “I was second pilot on the Baikal and the first pilot wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so when I heard there was an opportunity to move up to first pilot on the Lastan, I took it. What I didn’t know was that there was a reason why the Lastan had gone through six pilots in two years, and by the time I found out it was too late. I ended up breaking my contract.”

“That must have been expensive.”

“It was worth every penny,” I said. “Also, as I was leaving the ship I dropped my mother’s name to the chief steward. My mother’s a labor lawyer. The class action suit against Ostrander that followed was, shall we say, very satisfying.”

Han definitely smiled at that.

“But it also meant that Ostrander now goes out of his way to warn off anyone I try to get a pilot’s job with,” I said. “No one likes a troublemaker.”

“No, no one does,” Han agreed, and inside I groaned, because I figured this was where I just blew the gig. “But then, I crewed on the Lastan Falls for a year, early in my career.”

I blinked. “You did?” I said.

“Yes,” Han said. “Let’s just say I can understand wanting to break your contract. And also that at some point I want to hear the details of that suit.”

I grinned. “You got it, sir,” I said.

“I’m going to be blunt, Mr. Daquin, this position is a step back for you,” Han said. “It’s third pilot, and it’s a straight bread-and-butter trade run. We go here, we go to Huckleberry, we go to Erie, we repeat. It’s not exciting, and just like the Baikal, there’s little chance for advancement.”

“Let me be equally blunt, sir,” I said. “I’ve spent nine months at the bottom of a gravity well. You know as well as I do that if I spend too much more time there, I’m going to get stuck. You need another pilot right now so you don’t lose time and money on your trade run. I get that. I need to get off the rock so I can have another shot at first pilot somewhere else without Ostrander’s blackball over my head. I figure we’re both in a spot and can help each other out.”

“I just wanted to be sure everyone’s expectations were in order,” Han said.

“I have no illusions, sir.”

“Good. Then I can give you a day to close out your business here.”

I reached down and patted the crew bag at my feet. “Business closed. The only thing I have to do is find my friend Hart and buy him a drink for setting up this interview.”

“If you can do that quickly there’ll be a shuttle to the Chandler at gate thirty-six in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll be on it, sir,” I said.

“Well, then,” Han said, stood up, and extended his hand. “Welcome to the Chandler, pilot.”

I took the hand. “Thank you, sir. Glad to be aboard.”

* * *

I found Hart a half hour later, on the other side of Phoenix Station, in a reception for his boss, Ambassador Abumwe.

“She got the Meritorious Service Award,” Hart said. He was on his second glass of spiked punch and he was never one who held his alcohol very well, so he was on his way to being a little tipsy. He was also dressed in a formal diplomatic uniform. I thought it made him look like a doorman. But then I had just spent the better part of the year in sweatpants, so who the hell was I to say.

“What did she do that was meritorious?” I asked.

“She kept her entire staff alive while Earth Station was being attacked, for starters,” Hart said. “You heard about Earth Station?”

I nodded. The Colonial Union was pretty good at keeping bad news from reaching the civilians of the colonies, but some pieces of news are harder to hide than others. For example, the news that the Earth’s sole space station was destroyed by unknown terrorists, killing thousands including the cream of the Earth’s diplomatic corps, and that the Earth blamed the Colonial Union for the attack and severed all diplomatic and economic ties.

Yeah, that one was a little hard to hide.

The Colonial Union’s official story about it only said about the attack being the act of terrorists; the rest of it I had filled in from former shipmates and friends like Hart. When you live at the bottom of a gravity well, you only tend to hear the official story. The people who actually move between the stars, on the other hand, hear a lot more. It’s hard to sell the official story to people who can see things for themselves.

“Some people saved themselves,” said Harry Wilson, a friend of Hart’s who he’d just introduced to me. Wilson was a member of the Colonial Defense Forces; his green skin gave him away. That and the fact that he looked the same age as my kid brother, but was probably something like 120 years old. Having a genetically modified, not-quite-human body had certain advantages, as long as you didn’t mind being the same color as guacamole. “Your friend Hart here, for example. He got himself to an escape pod and ditched from Earth Station as it was literally blowing up around him.”

“A slight exaggeration,” Hart said.

“No, it actually was literally blowing up around you,” Wilson said.

Hart waved him off and looked back over to me. “Harry’s making it sound more dramatic than it was.”

“It sounds pretty dramatic,” I admitted.

“Space station blowing up around him,” Wilson said again, emphasizing the last part.

“I was unconscious for most of the trip down to Earth,” Hart said. “I think that’s probably a good thing.”

I nodded toward Ambassador Abumwe, who I recognized from pictures, and who was on the other side of the reception hall, shaking hands with well-wishers in a receiving line. “How was the ceremony?”

“Painful,” Wilson said.

“It was all right,” Hart said.

“Painful,” Wilson repeated. “The guy who gave out the medal—”

“Assistant Secretary of State Tyson Ocampo,” Hart said.

“—was a fatuous gasbag,” Wilson continued. “I’ve met a lot of people in the diplomatic corps who were in love with the sound of their own voice, but this guy. He and his voice should just get a room.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Hart said to me.

“You saw Abumwe’s face while that dude was going on,” Wilson said, to Hart.

“Ocampo,” Hart said, clearly pained that the assistant secretary of state was being referred to as “that dude.” “The number two man in the department. And there was nothing going on with her face,” Hart said.

“She was definitely wearing her ‘please shut the hell up,’ face,” Wilson said, to me. “Trust me, I have seen it many times.”

I looked over to Hart. “It’s true,” he said. “Harry has seen the ambassador’s ‘shut up’ face more than most.”

“Speak of the devil,” Wilson said, and motioned slightly with his head. “Look who’s coming this way.” I glanced over and saw a middle-aged man in a resplendent Colonial Union diplomatic uniform, followed by a young woman, heading our direction.

“The fatuous gasbag?” I asked.

“Secretary Ocampo,” Hart said, emphatically.

“Same thing,” Wilson said.

“Gentlemen,” Ocampo said, coming up to us.

“Hello, Secretary Ocampo,” Wilson said, very smoothly, and I thought I saw Hart relax maybe a tiny bit. “What may we do for you, sir?”

“Well, since you’re standing between me and the punch, perhaps you would be so kind as to get me a cup,” he said.

“Let me get that for you,” Hart said, and nearly dropped his own glass in the process.

“Thank you,” Ocampo said. “Schmidt, yes? One of Abumwe’s people.” He then turned to Wilson. “And you are?”

“Lieutenant Harry Wilson.”

“Really,” Ocampo said, and sounded impressed. “You’re the one who saved the daughter of the secretary of state of the United States when Earth Station was destroyed.”

“Danielle Lowen,” Wilson said. “And yes. She’s a diplomat in her own right, of course.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. “But the fact that she’s Secretary Lowen’s daughter didn’t hurt. It’s one reason why the U.S. is one of the few countries on Earth that will speak to the Colonial Union in any capacity.”

“I’m happy to be useful, sir,” Wilson said. Hart handed him his punch.

“Thank you,” Ocampo said, to Hart, and then turned his attention back to Wilson. “I understand you also skydived from Earth Station all the way down to Earth with Miss Lowen.”

“That’s correct, sir,” Wilson said.

“That must have been some experience.”

“I mostly remember trying not to go ‘splat’ at the end of it.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. He turned to me next, registering my lack of dress uniform and the crew bag at my feet, and waiting for me to identify myself.

“Rafe Daquin,” I said, taking the hint. “I’m crashing the party, sir.”

“He’s a friend of mine who happened to be on station,” Hart said. “He’s a pilot on a trade ship.”

“Oh,” Ocampo said. “Which one?”

“The Chandler,” I said.

“Isn’t that interesting,” Ocampo said. “I’ve booked passage on the Chandler.”

“You have?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s been a few years since I’ve taken a vacation and I decided to take a month to hike the Connecticut mountains on Huckleberry. That’s the Chandler’s next destination, unless I’m mistaken,” Ocampo said.

“You could just take a department ship, I would think,” I said.

Ocampo smiled. “It would look bad to commandeer a State Department ship as a personal taxi, I’m afraid. As I understand it the Chandler lets out a couple of staterooms for passengers. I and Vera here,” he nodded toward his assistant, “have taken them. How are they?”

“The staterooms?” I asked. Ocampo nodded. “I’m not sure.”

“Rafe has just been hired as of about an hour ago,” Hart said. “He hasn’t even been on the ship yet. He’s taking a shuttle over in about an hour.”

“That’s the same shuttle you’ll be on, sir,” Vera said to Ocampo.

“So we’ll experience it for the first time together,” the secretary said, to me.

“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “If you would like I would be happy to escort you and your assistant to the shuttle gate, when you’re ready to depart.”

“Thank you, I’d appreciate that,” Ocampo said. “I’ll have Vera tell you when we’re ready. Until then, gentlemen.” He nodded and wandered off with his punch, Vera following behind.

“Very diplomatic,” Wilson said to me, once he was gone.

“You jumped out of an exploding space station?” I said to him, changing the subject.

“It wasn’t exploding that much when I jumped,” Wilson said.

“And you got out in an escape pod just in time,” I said to Hart. “I’m clearly in the wrong line of space travel for excitement.”

“Trust me,” Wilson said. “You don’t want that much excitement.”

* * *

The Chandler, as advertised, was not exciting.

But it’s not supposed to be. I said before that the Chandler had blocked out a triangle run. That means that you have three destinations, all of which want something that’s made and exported on the previous planet. So, for example, Huckleberry is a colony that’s largely agrarian—a large percentage of the land mass there is in a temperate zone that’s great for human crops. We take things like wheat, corn, and gaalfruit and a few other crops and take them to Erie. Erie colonists pay a premium for Huckleberry agricultural products, because, I don’t know, I think they think they’re healthier or something. Whatever reason, they want ’em so we take them there. In return we load up on all sorts of rare earth metals, which Erie has lots of.

We take those to Phoenix, which is the center of high-technology manufacturing for the Colonial Union. And from there, we get things like medical scanners and PDAs and everything else it’s cheaper to mass produce and ship than try to put together yourselves in a home printer, and take those to Huckleberry, whose technology manufacturing base is pretty small. Wash, rinse, repeat. As long as you’re working the triangle in the right direction, you’ll get rich.

But it’s not exciting, for whatever definition of “exciting” you want to have. These three colonies are well established and protected; Huckleberry’s the youngest and it’s nearly a century old at this point, and Phoenix is the oldest and best defended of any of the Colonial Union planets. So you’re not exploring new worlds by trading there. You’re unlikely to run into pirates or other bad people. You’re not meeting strange new aliens, or really any aliens at all. You’re shipping food, ore, and gadgets. This isn’t the romance of space. This is you and space in a nice, comfortable rut.

But again, I didn’t give a crap about any of that. I’d seen enough of space and had the occasional bit of excitement; when I was on the Baikal, we were pursued for four days by pirates and eventually had to ditch our cargo. They don’t chase you anymore when you do that because then you have nothing they want. Usually. Sometimes when you ditch your cargo they get pissed off and then try to send a missile into your engines to register their displeasure.

So, yeah. As Harry Wilson suggested, excitement can be overrated.

Anyway, right now I didn’t want exciting. What I wanted was to work. If that meant babysitting the Chandler’s navigational system while it crunched data for a run that it had done a thousand times before, that was fine by me. At the end of the stint I’d have the blackball off my career. That was also fine by me.

The Chandler itself was your basic cargo hauler, which is to say a former Colonial Defense Forces frigate, repurposed for cargo and trade. There were purpose-built cargo haulers, of course, but they were expensive and tended to be built and used by large shipping lines. The Chandler was the sole ship owned by its small consortium of owners. They got the obsolete frigate that became the Chandler at an auction.

When I did my research of the Chandler before the interview (always do your research; I didn’t with the Lastan Falls and it cost me), I saw pictures of the frigate at the auction, where it was sold “as-is.” Somewhere along the way it had gotten the living crap beat out of it. But refurbished, it had been doing its run for almost two decades. I figured it wouldn’t accidentally spill me into space.

I took the shuttle ride with Secretary Ocampo and his aide (whose last name I finally learned was Briggs; that came from the crew and passenger manifest, not from the secretary), said good-bye to them at the ship. Then I reported to Han and my immediate boss, First Pilot Clarine Bolduc, and then to Quartermaster Seidel, who assigned me quarters. “You’re in luck,” she said. “You get private quarters. At least until we hit Erie, when we take on some new crew. Then you’ll get two roommates. Enjoy your privacy while you can.”

I went to my quarters and they were the size of a broom closet. Technically you could fit three people in it. But you wouldn’t want to close the door or you’d run out of oxygen. I got to pick my bunk, though, so I had that going for me.

At evening mess Bolduc introduced me around to the other officers and department heads.

“You’re not going to be running any scams in your spare time?” asked Chieko Tellez, who was assistant cargo chief, as I sat down with my tray.

“I did a thorough background check,” Han said, to her. “He’s clean.”

“I’m joking,” Tellez said, to Han. She turned back to me. “You know about the guy you’re replacing, right?”

“I heard a little about it,” I said.

“A shame,” Tellez said. “He was a nice guy.”

“As long as you’re willing to overlook corruption, graft, and bigamy,” Bolduc said.

“He never did any of that to me, and that’s what really counts,” Tellez said, and then glanced over at me, smiling.

“I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not,” I admitted.

“Chieko is never not joking,” Bolduc said. “And now you know.”

“Some of us like a little humor,” Tellez said, to Bolduc.

“Joking is not the same thing as humor,” Bolduc said.

“Hmph,” Tellez said. It didn’t look like she was particularly put out by the comment. I figured she and Bolduc ribbed each other on a frequent basis, which was not a bad thing. Officers who got on okay were a sign of a happy ship.

Tellez turned her attention back to me. “You came over on the shuttle with those State Department mucky-mucks, right?”

“I did,” I said.

“Did they say why they were on the ship?”

“Secretary Ocampo is going on vacation on Huckleberry,” I said. “We’re headed that way so he and his aide rented a couple of spare staterooms.”

“If I were him I would have just taken a department ship,” Bolduc said.

“He said it wouldn’t look very good if he did,” I said.

“I’m sure he’s actually worried about that,” Bolduc said.

“Seidel said that Ocampo told her that he wanted to travel inconspicuously and without having to feel like he was dragging his title around,” Han said.

“Do you believe that?” Bolduc asked. Han shrugged. Bolduc then turned to me. “You talked to him, yeah?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That sound reasonable to you?”

I thought back on what Wilson said about Ocampo being in love with the sound of his own voice, and thought about the shuttle ride, after the polite conversation was over, listening to Ocampo dictating notes to Vera Briggs. “He doesn’t strike me as the kind who prefers to be inconspicuous, no,” I said.

“Maybe he’s just screwing his aide and wants to be inconspicuous about that,” Tellez said.

“No, that’s not it,” I said.

“Explain,” Tellez said.

I shrugged. “I didn’t get that vibe from either of them.”

“And how is your vibe sense in general, Daquin?”

“It’s all right.”

“What’s your vibe about me?” Tellez asked.

“You have a quirky sense of humor,” I said.

“His vibe sense works just fine,” Bolduc said.

Tellez shot a look at Bolduc, who ignored it. “Why would anyone vacation on Huckleberry anyway?” she said. “We’ve been to Huckleberry. A lot. There’s nothing there worth a vacation.”

“He said he wanted to hike the Connecticut mountains,” I said. “Whatever those are.”

“I hope he packed a jacket,” Han said. “The Connecticuts are a polar range, and it’s winter for Huckleberry’s northern hemisphere.”

“He had several trunks,” I said. “His aide Vera complained that he brought three times the clothing he’d need. There’s probably a jacket or two in there.”

“Let’s hope so,” Han said. “Otherwise, he’s in for a disappointing vacation.”

But as it turned out there was no vacation at all.

* * *

I looked up from my chair and saw Captain Thao and Lee Han looking down at me, Thao with a severely pissed-off look on her face, and my first thought was, Shit, I don’t even know what I did wrong this time.

My second thought was to be confused as to why I was seeing her at all. I was third pilot, which meant I got the shifts where the captain was usually not on deck; she was usually sleeping or tending to other ship duties when I was in the pilot’s chair. For the three days I’d been piloting, XO Han sat in the command chair while I sat in mine, and we did a whole lot of nothing—the course from Phoenix Station to our skip point was plotted for us by Phoenix Station and all I had to do was make sure we didn’t drift for one reason or another.

We hadn’t. I could have napped through all of my shifts and it would have had the same effect.

We were twelve hours out from skip. At that time the captain would be in the chair, Bolduc would be piloting with Second Pilot Schreiber assisting, and with any luck I would be asleep in my bunk. Having the captain on deck now meant something was out of whack; that she was standing over my chair said maybe what was out of whack had to do with me. What it was I had no idea. Like I said, we were exactly where we needed to be for the skip. There was literally nothing I could have been doing wrong.

“Yes, ma’am?” I said. When in doubt, be ready to take an order.

Captain Thao held out a memory card. I looked at it, stupidly. “It’s a memory card,” I said.

“I know what it is,” Captain Thao said. “I need you to help me with it.”

“All right,” I said. “How?”

“You worked on the piloting systems as a programmer, yes? Lee tells me you did.”

“I did several years ago,” I said, glancing over at Han, whose expression was blank.

“So you know how it works.”

“I haven’t worked on the code for the most recent versions of the software, but it’s built using the same language and compilers,” I said. “I wouldn’t have a problem catching up on it.”

“The piloting system has the ability to accept encoded commands, yes? Destinations can be plugged in without openly revealing what they are.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s a standard feature. It was put into military piloting software so if a ship or drone is captured, it’d be harder for whoever captured it to find out its destination. We don’t usually use the secure mode on trade ships because there’s no point. We have to file courses with the Colonial Union anyway. They know where we’re going.”

“I have an encrypted destination on this memory card,” Thao said. “Can you tell me where it is?”

“No,” I said. “It’s encrypted.” And then I realized that it was entirely possible that last comment came out in my “condescending nerd” voice, so I quickly added to it. “What I mean is that I would need the encryption key for it. I don’t have it.”

“The system has it,” Thao said.

“Right, but the system doesn’t tell us what it is,” I said. “The point of the secure mode is to let the navigation computer and only the navigation computer know where the ship is going.”

“Could you crack it without a key?”

“The encryption?” I asked. Thao nodded. “How much time do I have?”

“How long until skip?”

I checked my monitor. “Twelve hours, twenty-three minutes.”

“That long.”

“No,” I said. “If you gave me a month I could maybe do it. Or if I had passwords or biometrics or whatever it was that let whoever gave you that memory card into the encryption system in the first place.” I motioned to the card. “Was that encrypted on the Chandler?”

“No.”

“I would need more time than we have, then, ma’am.”

Captain Thao nodded, moody, and looked over to Han.

“May I ask what’s going on, ma’am?” I said.

“No,” Captain Thao said. She reached out to me with the memory card. “I need you to put this new destination into the navigation system. Let Han know when you’ve done it and the new destination is confirmed.”

I took the card. “It’ll take about a minute and a half,” I said.

“Fine,” Thao said. “Tell Han anyway.” She left without saying anything else. I looked over at Han. He was still working on his utterly neutral face.

* * *

“Mr. Daquin,” Secretary Ocampo said, as he opened the door to his stateroom and saw me standing on the other side of it. “This is unexpected. Come inside, please.” He stood aside to let me in.

I entered the stateroom, which was roughly twice the size of my own, which is to say, the size of two broom closets. A lot of the space was taken up by Ocampo’s luggage, which was, as Vera Briggs hinted, a lot for a month-long trip. But Ocampo struck me as a likely candidate for being a clotheshorse, so maybe that volume of luggage wasn’t unusual for him.

“I apologize for it being cramped,” Ocampo said.

“It’s bigger than my quarters,” I said.

“I would hope so!” Ocampo said, and then laughed. “No offense,” he said, afterwards.

“None taken,” I said.

“We’re fortunate Vera isn’t in here as well, we might not be able to move,” Ocampo said, and sat in the chair next to his very small table. “Now, let me guess why you’re here, Mr. Daquin. I’m guessing that sometime in the last few hours, your captain came to you with a new destination, is that correct?”

“It might be,” I said.

“Might be indeed,” Ocampo replied. “And this new destination is secret, and now I strongly suspect that you and the rest of the Chandler crew are having a merry little time speculating about where this destination is, why we might be going there, and why your captain is following an order that no one should have been able to give her. Is that about right?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes.”

“And I bet you were volunteered by the rest of the crew to come see me about it, because you and I shared a boat ride over to the Chandler.”

“No, sir,” I said. “You’re right that the crew is talking about it. But none of them put me up to this. I came on my own.”

“That’s either initiative or stupidity, Mr. Daquin.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Maybe a little of both.”

“That’s equally possible, sir.”

Ocampo laughed. “You understand that if I can’t tell your captain where we’re going, I’m not going to be able to tell you.”

“I understand that,” I said. “I’m not here about the ‘what,’ sir. I’m here about the ‘why.’”

“The why,” Ocampo said.

“Yes,” I said. “As in why the number two person in all of the Colonial Union State Department is pretending to go on vacation to an arctic mountain range and using a cargo ship to get there, instead of just taking a State Department ship with a formal diplomatic mission on it to wherever and whomever he is meeting and negotiating with.”

“Well,” Ocampo said, after a moment. “And here I thought I was being clever about it.”

“You were, sir,” I said. “But it looks different inside the ship than out of it.”

“Fair enough. Have a seat, Daquin,” Ocampo said, motioning to his bunk. I sat. “Let’s talk theoretical scenarios for a moment. Are you okay with that?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you know about how the Colonial Union is doing these days?”

“I know we’re not on very good terms with the Earth anymore.”

Ocampo snorted. “You’ve unintentionally made the understatement of the year. It’s more accurate to say the Earth hates the Colonial Union’s guts, thinks we are evil, and wants us all to die. They blame us for the destruction of Earth Station, which was their major egress into space. They think we did it.”

“And we didn’t.”

“No, of course not. But many of the ships used in the attack were pirated from the Colonial Union. You’ve heard about that, at least? Cargo ships like this one being captured and turned into attack vehicles?”

I nodded. This was one of the more wild rumors out there—that pirates, or someone posing as pirates, would take and board ships, but instead of the cargo, they were after the ships themselves. They would use the ships to attack targets in the Colonial Union and in the Conclave, a big political union of alien races.

I thought it was wild because it didn’t make much sense. Not that the ships were taken; I knew that was true. Everyone in space knows someone whose ship was lost. But it didn’t make sense to use cargo ships as attack platforms. There were easier ways to strike both the Colonial Union and the Conclave.

But now Ocampo was telling me that part wasn’t just a rumor. That these things were happening. One more reason, I guess, to be glad to be doing a trade run safely inside the Colonial Union’s borders.

Except now we weren’t doing that safe trade run anymore.

“Because the ships were originally from the Colonial Union, it looks like the Colonial Union attacked,” Ocampo said. “And so our diplomatic relations with nearly every nation on Earth are entirely shut off. Even those we’re not entirely shunned by we still have to be very careful approaching. Understand me so far?”

I nodded again.

Ocampo nodded in response. “In which case, Mr. Daquin, ask yourself: If the number two man of the Colonial Union State Department wanted to pry open diplomatic relations with the Earth, even just a crack, in a way that didn’t immediately require everyone involved to strike a political pose, how might he do it?”

“By pretending to go on vacation but actually commandeering a trade ship to take him to an unofficial meeting at a secret destination, perhaps,” I said.

“That might be one way, yes,” Ocampo agreed.

“But he would still need to convince that ship’s captain.”

“Convincing takes on many forms,” Ocampo said. “One form might be an official request from the Colonial Union itself, the refusal of which would cause the ship in question to be refused dock at any space station the Colonial Union controls. Which would be all of them, in Colonial Union space.”

“And the refusal would happen because the captain didn’t play ball.”

“Well, officially there would be all sorts of reasons given,” Ocampo said. “It would vary from station to station and from circumstance to circumstance. But in reality, it would be the Colonial Union expressing its displeasure at the lack of cooperation, yes.”

“I don’t imagine the captain would be happy about that.”

“No, probably not,” Ocampo agreed.

“There’s also the problem that the ship, and its owners and crew, would take a loss because their trade route was messed with.”

“If something like that were to happen, in theory, the ship, and its owners and crew, would be fully compensated by the Colonial Union for any losses, with additional compensation for time and other incurred expenses.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yes,” Ocampo said. “And now you know why it doesn’t happen very often. It’s expensive as hell.”

“And you told the captain all this.”

“I might have,” Ocampo said. “But if I did, I don’t imagine it made her any happier. No captain likes being ordered about on her own ship. But at this point there’s nothing to be done for it. How do you feel about it, Mr. Daquin?”

“I don’t know. Better, I suppose, because I have some idea what’s going on. At least, if what you’re telling me is accurate, sir.”

“I haven’t told you anything, Mr. Daquin,” Ocampo said. “We’re just having a conversation about possibilities. And this seems like a reasonable possibility to me. Does it seem like a reasonable possibility to you?”

I thought it did.

* * *

The next day, I got shot in the head.

Before that happened, though, I fell out of my bunk.

The falling out of the bunk was not the important part. The important part was how I fell out of it. I was shoved—or more accurately, the Chandler was shoved, and I pretty much stayed where I was. Which meant one second I had a bunk under me and the next second I didn’t, and then I was tumbling through the air, toward a bulkhead.

When this was happening I had two thoughts. The first thought, which if I’m truthful about it took up most of my brain, was Whaaaaaa, because first I was airborne, and then I smacked into the wall.

The second thought, in the part of my brain that wasn’t freaking out, was that something serious had happened to the ship. The artificial gravity field on the Chandler and nearly all space ships is incredibly robust—it has to be, or even simple acceleration would turn human bodies into jelly. It also acts to dampen skew and yaw inside a ship. It takes a lot of energy, basically, to shove a ship so hard that people fall out of their bunks.

There was also the fact that while I was shoved out of my bunk, I wasn’t falling. Which meant the artificial gravity wasn’t working. Something happened to knock it out.

Conclusion: We either hit something or were hit by something.

Which meant that the part of my brain that was previously going Whaaaaaa was now going, Oh shit we’re all gonna die, we’re dead we’re dead we’re so fucking dead.

And then the lights went out.

All of this took maybe a second.

The good news is I peed before going to sleep.

Then the emergency lights clicked on, as did the emergency gravity, rated at .2 standard G. It wasn’t a lot, and it wouldn’t be on for long. The whole point of it was to give the crew enough time to strap things down and lock them away. Everything that had been previously flying around in my quarters—toothpaste tubes, unhampered clothes, me—began to settle to the floor. I touched down, quickly put on some pants, and opened the door to my room.

And immediately saw Chieko Tellez running down the hall.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Power’s out,” she said as she passed me. “We skipped and then the power went bye-bye.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“Hey, man, I’m just a cargo monkey,” she said. “You’re bridge crew. You tell me.” And then she was gone.

She had a point. I started my way to the bridge.

Along the way I saw Secretary Ocampo, who looked mussed and like he hadn’t gotten much sleep. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Power’s out.”

“How’d that happen?”

I just had this conversation, on the other side. “I’m heading to the bridge to find out.”

Ocampo nodded. “I’ll come with you.” I didn’t think this was a particularly great idea, but I just nodded and kept going, assuming that Ocampo was following me.

The bridge was busy but controlled. The first-shift bridge crew were at their stations, offering up status reports to Thao, who took them in and asked questions. I nodded to Ocampo, who had indeed followed me in, and then went over to Han.

“You’re not on duty,” he said to me as I came up.

“Thought you might want some help.”

“We already have a pilot.” Han nodded to Bolduc.

“Available for other things.”

“Fine,” Han said. “See if Womack needs help with the sensors.” I headed over to Sherita Womack, handling the sensors. Han then turned his attention to Ocampo. “You’re not part of this crew, Secretary Ocampo. You’re officially in the way.”

“Thought I might be useful,” Ocampo said.

“You’re not,” Han said. “Go back to your stateroom.”

“Belay that,” Thao said, turning to the conversation. “I want him here. I’ve got questions for him, and he damn well better have answers for me. Don’t you move, Secretary.”

“I’m at your service, Captain,” Ocampo said.

Thao said nothing to this, and switched her attention to Womack. “Sensors. Report. Tell me if we hit anything coming out of skip.”

“Doesn’t appear so, ma’am,” Womack said. “If we hit anything, we’d probably be dead.”

“Depends on the size of what we hit,” I said. “We get peppered with tiny bits of dust all the time.”

“Those aren’t going to knock out our power,” Womack said. “They’re not going to shift us off course, either.”

“How far have we shifted?” Thao asked.

Womack shrugged. “Can’t give you a precise reading because out inertial sensors are screwed up. So are our outside sensors. I can’t tell you what’s out there, ma’am.”

“Anything before the sensors went out?”

“Nothing pinged,” Womack said. “One second there’s nothing but vacuum and the next we’re jolted and our power is screwed.” Womack stopped talking and frowned at something in her diagnostics screen. I craned my head in to look.

“What is it?” Thao asked.

“The diagnostics say the outside sensors should be working fine,” I said, going off the readings on the screen.

“But we’re not getting anything from them,” Womack said. “Communications should also be working but I’m getting nothing.”

“We’re being jammed, maybe,” I said.

“I think so,” Womack said, and looked over to Thao.

The bridge went silent at this. Thao nodded at the report and then turned her attention back to Ocampo. “You want to explain this?” she said.

“I can’t,” Ocampo said.

“You said that you were meeting diplomats from Earth.”

“Earth and the Conclave both, yes,” Ocampo said. This was slightly different than what he told me, but then he said he wasn’t actually telling me anything, so.

“Why would diplomats want to jam our sensors?” Thao asked.

“They wouldn’t,” Ocampo said. “This is where we’re supposed to meet. They knew I was coming and they knew I was coming on this ship. They know we’re not a threat.”

“And yet our sensors are jammed and we’re sitting here blind,” Thao said.

“It could be pirates,” Han said.

“No,” Thao said. “Pirates follow trade routes. This isn’t a trade route. We followed a route to a secret location only Secretary Ocampo’s diplomat friends would know we’d be at. Isn’t that right, Ocampo? Isn’t this trip supposed to be top secret?” The sarcasm of those last two words coming out of the captain’s mouth was unmistakable.

Ocampo looked uncomfortable with this line of questioning. “Information about the Colonial Union’s diplomatic missions has been leaky in the last year,” he said, finally.

“What does that mean?” asked Thao.

“It means that the State Department might have a problem with spies,” Ocampo said. “I made every precaution so this information would be secure. Apparently it wasn’t enough.”

“You have spies?” Thao said. “Spies for whom? The Conclave? Earth?”

“Either,” Ocampo said. “Or spies for someone else.”

“Who else?”

Ocampo shrugged at this. Thao shot him a look that was a textbook example of disgust. Then she turned back to Womack and me. “There was nothing on the sensors before the power went out.”

“No, ma’am,” Womack said. “Nothing but clear space to the skip point.”

“Outside sensors still down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Womack said. “They should be working fine. They’re just not. I can’t tell you why.”

Thao turned to Han. “Tell someone to go to an airlock and look out the goddamned portal, please,” she said.

Han nodded and spoke briefly into a headset; presumably somewhere belowdecks a crew member was heading to an airlock. “We should start forming security details, Captain,” he said, after he was done.

“You think whoever it is out there is going to board us,” Thao said.

“I do,” Han said. “You said it yourself, whoever this is, they’re not your typical pirates. I think the only thing of value on the Chandler to whoever they are is the Chandler.”

“No,” Thao said, looking back at Ocampo. “There’s something else here, too.”

A ping came up from Womack’s console. We both turned to look at it.

“What is it?” Thao asked.

“An outside signal,” I said.

Womack picked up her headset. “It’s addressing you specifically, Captain,” she said to Thao a moment later.

“Put it on speaker,” Thao said. Womack switched it over and nodded to the captain. “This is Captain Eliza Thao,” she said.

“Captain Thao, you have three Melierax Series Seven missiles locked in on your ship,” a voice said. It had that metallic, grating tone that made it clear it was artificially generated. “The first will impact and detonate midships, at a point where the structural integrity of the Chandler is the weakest. This will not destroy your ship but will kill many of your crew, and open a direct path to your engines, where the second missile will strike. That will vaporize two-thirds of your ship instantly, killing nearly every one of your crew. The third missile is for mop up.

“As a trade ship, you have no significant defenses. Even if you had, we have jammed your external sensors. Your communications are also jammed and you are light-years away from any civilian or CDF station in any event. Your skip drone launchers are already targeted by particle beams. Your power is down and you will discover, if you have not already, that you will be unable to get it back online before your emergency battery power exhausts itself. If you were not already targeted for destruction by our missiles, you and your crew would freeze, and those who did not would asphyxiate.”

“Listen to me—” Thao began.

“If you interrupt again we will launch our missiles,” the voice said.

Thao shut up.

“This is not a negotiation or a parley,” the voice continued. “We are telling you what you will have to do in order for you and your crew to survive the next few hours.

“And it is this. You will open your airlocks for external entry. You will assemble your entire crew in your ship’s cargo hold. We will enter your ship and take control of it. If any of your crew is found outside of the cargo hold when we board, we will destroy the ship and everyone on it. If any of your crew attempts to attack us or thwart us in taking control of your ship, we will destroy the ship and everyone on it. If you attempt to abandon ship, we will target and destroy the lifepods and destroy the ship and anyone remaining on it. If you and your crew do anything other than assemble in the cargo hold and await further instruction, we will destroy the ship and everyone on it.

“You will have five minutes from right now to signal your understanding of these directions. You will then have one hour to signal that these directions have been fulfilled. If we do not receive both, then your ship and everyone on it will be destroyed.

“That is all.”

“Is that channel still clear?” Thao asked Womack.

Womack looked at her panel. “Yes,” she said. “Everything else is still jammed up.”

Thao turned to Ocampo. “These aren’t your friends, I assume.”

“No,” Ocampo said. “This is definitely not how they would have greeted us.”

“And what do you think has happened to your friends?”

“I don’t know,” Ocampo said. “It’s entirely possible they were attacked, too.”

“Options,” Thao said, turning to Han.

“Assuming they are telling us the truth about the missiles, none,” Han said. “Whoever that was is right. We have no real defenses. We can’t outrun them. And even if we direct all emergency power to life support, we don’t have much time.”

“And if they’re not telling us the truth about the missiles?”

“Then we launch lifepods, fight them when they arrive on the ship, and destroy the ship ourselves if necessary,” Han said. “To Hell with these guys.”

“We’ll fight, Captain,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I wasn’t thinking about fighting at any point before. It just came up in my brain at that moment. It was like Lee Han said: To Hell with these guys, whoever they were. And if that meant fighting them with sticks, that was better than nothing.

I looked around the bridge and saw people nodding. We were all ready for a fight.

Thao smiled at me and then nodded, as a way of letting me know my comment had been registered and appreciated. Then she turned back to Han, who was not smiling. “But,” she said to him.

“But they already have knocked out our power in a way we couldn’t and didn’t track,” Han said. “They’re jamming our communications and external sensors. That says to me they have more up their sleeves. Even if they don’t, if we fight them and repel them we’ll likely take losses and additional damage to the ship. We’ll all end up on lifepods just to survive. In which case whoever they are—” Han motioned outward, signifying our attackers. “—can still take the ship without any of us on it. In which case, we’ve risked everything for nothing.”

Thao turned to Bolduc, who was the pilot on duty. “Any chance we could skip out of this?”

“No,” Bolduc said. “We entered this system near a planet. Under the best of circumstances we’d need three days to get to skip distance.”

“We can’t skip without engines anyway,” Han said.

“When can we get them back?” Thao asked.

“Eller estimated twenty hours,” Han said, speaking of the chief engineer. “Our emergency power is going to last six. We’d still have to get the crew to lifepods. Whoever stayed would find breathing difficult until the power’s completely back.”

“No matter what, we lose the ship,” Thao said.

Han paused an almost infinitesimally small amount of time before replying. “Realistically, yes,” he said. “Even if whoever is attacking us did nothing, we’d still have to get nearly all the crew to lifepods. And I don’t think it’s realistic to assume that whoever is attacking us will do nothing. They’ve already done enough.”

Thao sat for a moment, silent. Ocampo and everyone else on the bridge waited, conscious of the timeline for a response.

“Fuck,” Thao said. She nodded to Womack. “Tell them we understand their terms. The airlocks will be open within the hour. We’ll signal when the crew is in the cargo hold.”

Womack blinked, swallowed, and nodded. She turned to her console.

Thao turned to Han. “Tell the crew. We’re under a deadline here.” Han moved.

Then Thao looked over to Ocampo. “Well, Mr. Ocampo. I’m beginning to think I should have refused your request.” Ocampo opened his mouth to reply, but Thao was already ignoring him.

* * *

The three creatures approaching Captain Thao wore black, were armed, and had knees that went the wrong way. One had something resembling a handgun, and the two others had longer weapons I assumed were automatic rifles of some sort. A larger squad of the alien creatures held back and fanned out through the cargo hold, getting good vantages to fire into us, the Chandler crew. There were about sixty of us, totally unarmed. It wouldn’t take them long to go through us, if they wanted to.

“What the hell are they?” Chieko Tellez whispered to me. She was standing next to me in the group.

“They’re Rraey,” I said.

“Not friendly,” she said. “Not counting these ones, I mean.”

“No,” I said. The Colonial Union didn’t spend a lot of time advertising specific battles, but I knew enough to know we’d kicked the Rraey’s asses pretty seriously more than once in the last decade or so. There was no reason to believe any of this was going to end well for us.

The three Rraey reached Captain Thao. “Identify your pilots,” the center Rraey said to her. It spoke in its own language, which was translated by a small object clipped to its clothes.

“Tell me why,” Thao said.

The Rraey raised its weapon and shot Lee Han, standing with the captain, in the face. Han lifted in the low gravity and took a long time to fall to the deck.

“Identify your pilots,” the Rraey said again, after most of the shouting from the crew had subsided.

Thao remained silent. The creature raised its weapon again, this time at her head. I considered stepping forward. Tellez suddenly grabbed my arm, guessing what I was thinking of doing. “Don’t you fucking dare,” she whispered.

“Stop it,” someone said. I followed the sound of the voice to Secretary Ocampo. He stepped forward away from the Chandler crew. “There’s no need for that, Commander Tvann.”

The Rraey turned its head to look at Ocampo. So did Thao. I think she realized, like I just did, that Ocampo had called the creature by name and rank.

“Secretary Ocampo,” Tvann said, nodding its head in salute. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to identify a pilot for me.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. Then he pointed into crew members, directly at me. “He’s one. Take him.”

Two Rraey peeled off and came at me. Tellez put herself in front of me. One of the two advancing Rraey raised its weapon at her. “You son of a bitch,” Thao shouted at Ocampo, and the crew of the Chandler began to agitate.

“Quiet,” Ocampo said. He said it in a loud voice that he was clearly proud of, the sort of speaking voice that had been polished by years of diplomatic speeches and the assumption that people would naturally listen to what he had to say.

And it worked; even the Rraey coming to get me stopped and looked at him.

He held up a hand to further the call for silence. The crew hushed to a low murmur.

“You will survive this,” Ocampo said, loudly. “Let me say this again: You will survive this. But only if you listen to me right now and do as I say. So listen. Quietly.”

The Chandler crew was dead silent now.

“I regret the death of Lee Han,” Ocampo said. “Rraey commanders are not accustomed to having orders questioned or refused. There will be no more killings unless you resist or disobey. I also recognize that from your point of view this looks very much like both piracy and treason. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I am sorry I don’t have time to explain it to you further.

“Now. I require the Chandler and I require a pilot. I am taking the ship and I am taking Mr. Daquin here. As for the rest of you, very shortly you will be escorted to the Chandler’s lifepods. The lifepods will be launched and immediately after the Chandler has skipped away—three days from now—an emergency drone will be sent to Phoenix Station and the Colonial Union with the precise coordinates to this system and your lifepods. You know that the Colonial Union keeps ships at skip distance specifically for rescue missions of this type.

“So you will be rescued in four days, five days at the outside. The lifepods are rated for seven days under a full load. You will be rescued with time to spare.

“I repeat: You will survive this. But in order to do that you must now offer no resistance. You must not fight. You must not argue. If you do, the Rraey here will show no hesitation in putting you down. I want you to see your family and friends again. I want you to make it back safely to Colonial Union space. Help me help you get there. Let’s get to it.”

“I don’t believe you,” Thao said, loudly, to Ocampo.

“That’s fair,” Ocampo said. He nodded to Tvann.

The Rraey shot the captain in the forehead. She collapsed, dead.

Ocampo waited for the screams to die down. “As I said, you must not argue. Now follow the Rraey’s orders, please.” He turned away from the Chandler crew and motioned to Commander Tvann to follow him.

The two Rraey continued toward me, and I saw Tellez tense up to fight.

“No,” I said to her.

“They’re going to kill you,” she said.

“They’re going to kill you if you try to stop them,” I pointed out.

“We’re dead anyway,” she said.

“I’d rather you take your chances with a lifepod,” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder as the Rraey arrived. “Thank you, Chieko. I appreciate that you’re willing to fight for me. I really do.”

“Well, you would for me, right?” Tellez asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s what I’m doing now.” I nodded to the Rraey, letting them know I was ready to go. One of them grabbed me by the shoulder, and we marched away from Tellez and the crew of the Chandler.

I barely knew any of them.

I was already feeling guilty that I knew I was going to survive.

I heard Secretary Ocampo talking to Tvann as I was marched up to him. “How much damage did you do to the ship?” he asked the Rraey.

“Very little and none that would threaten the ship structurally,” Tvann said. “We only needed to disrupt and disable certain systems.”

“Good,” Ocampo said. “The Chandler’s chief engineer said he could get the power back on line in twenty hours. Can you do it in the same timeframe?”

“We will take less time than that,” Tvann said. “We have experience with this, Secretary. As you know.”

“Indeed I do.”

“It will be good to have you with us full time now.”

“Thank you, Commander Tvann,” Ocampo said. “I agree.”

“What do you want to do with the rest of the crew?” Tvann said.

“I told them we’d put them on the lifepods. Let’s do that.”

“It will be a shame to lose the lifepods.”

Ocampo shrugged. “They’re really not going to be needed, are they?”

“No,” Tvann said.

“Then no real loss. One thing, though. One of the lifepods needs to be destroyed. It has to be plausible that my body isn’t recoverable. Having a lifepod torn up will help with that.”

“Of course,” Tvann asked. “You have an assistant, yes? Will she be going into the lifepods?”

“Offer her the choice of the lifepods or coming with us,” Ocampo said. “How much you want to hint to her that the lifepods are a bad idea is up to you.”

“She did not know?”

“About this? No. This was a secret, remember?”

“I believe I will simply order her to come with us. Less complicated that way.”

“It’s your show,” Ocampo said, and clapped the Rraey on the shoulder, dismissing it. Tvann went to direct the herding of the Chandler crew. Then Ocampo turned his attention to me.

“Well, Mr. Daquin,” Ocampo said. “Today is your lucky day. You will survive this day, after a fashion.”

“There’s no emergency drone, is there?” I asked.

“You mean, to let the Colonial Union know about the Chandler’s crew,” Ocampo said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Ocampo shook his head. “No. No, there is not.”

“So you’re going to let everyone on the Chandler suffocate in their lifepods.”

“That’s the most likely scenario, yes,” Ocampo said. “This isn’t a populated system. No one else is likely to come by in the next week. Or year.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“You’re asking why I’ve apparently become a traitor?”

“For starters,” I said.

“The full answer is too long for the time we have now,” Ocampo said. “So I’ll just say that the real question is where one’s loyalties should be, with the Colonial Union, or with humanity. The two are not the same thing, you know. And I’ve come to realize that my loyalties are with humanity first. The Colonial Union’s time is coming to an end, Mr. Daquin. I’m just trying to make sure that when it ends, it doesn’t take the human race with it.”

“If your loyalty is to humanity, then prove it,” I said. I gestured back to the crew of the Chandler. “They’re humans, Secretary Ocampo. Save these people. Send a skip drone back to Phoenix Station letting them know where they are. Don’t let them die in the lifepods.”

“It’s noble of you to try to save them,” Ocampo said. “I wish I could grant your wish, Mr. Daquin. I truly and sincerely wish I could. But for now the Colonial Union can’t know that I’ve abandoned them. They need to think I’m dead. That only happens if there’s no one to report otherwise. I’m sorry.”

“You said you needed me as a pilot,” I said. “I won’t help you unless you save them.”

“I think you’ll change your mind,” Ocampo said, and nodded to one of the Rraey.

My feet were knocked out from under me and I was pushed down hard to the floor of the cargo hold.

Something was pressed to the back of my head. It felt like a gun.

I felt the vibration of the gun firing at the same time I felt something hit the back of my skull.

I don’t remember anything after that.

PART TWO

So now we’re at the part where I actually become a brain in a box.

I don’t remember the first part of it at all. I was shot in the back of the head point blank with some sort of electrical stun gun; I was out. After I got zapped, I was taken to the Rraey’s ship, where a doctor of some sort (at least I hope it was a doctor) put me into a medically induced coma; the first step of the process. I was unconscious through the skip, three days later. I was unconscious when we arrived at our destination.

I was, thankfully, unconscious for the part that came next.

And then there was the recovery period, which is substantial, because, and I think this may be obvious when you think about it, removing someone’s brain from their head and keeping the brain alive in a box creates a considerable amount of trauma for the brain.

All told I was out for eighteen days.

And when I say I was out, I mean that I was out. I didn’t dream. I didn’t dream because I don’t think that technically I was sleeping. There’s a difference between sleeping and what was happening to me. Sleep is an actual thing your brain does to rest itself and tidy up after a day of stimulation. What was going on with me was something else entirely. If sleep was going for an easy swim in a calm pond, what I was doing was fighting to surface in the middle of an ocean storm, far from any land at all.

I didn’t dream. I think it’s probably better that I didn’t.

During all this time I surfaced only once—well, once that I remember. I remember feeling like my consciousness was being dragged hard through sludge, and thinking I can’t feel my legs.

And then: I can’t feel my anything. And then falling back down into the sludge.

I did feel something the next time I regained consciousness.

I had, bluntly, the worst fucking headache I had ever had in my life.

I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it. Try this. Imagine a migraine, on top of a hangover, while sitting in a kindergarten of thirty screaming children, who are all taking turns stabbing you in the eye with an ice pick.

Times six.

That was the good part of my headache.

It was the sort of headache where the best possible course of action is to lie there motionless and quiet, eyes closed, and pray for death. Which is why I think it took me longer than it should have to figure out a few things.

The first thing was that it was dark in the sort of way that shouldn’t be possible.

Go ahead and close your eyes. Do it right now. Is it totally dark?

I just realized you wouldn’t have read that last question if in fact you’d just closed your eyes when I asked you to. Look, I told you I wasn’t a writer.

Let me try this again: Close your eyes for a minute. Then when you’ve opened them up again, ask yourself if it was totally dark when you had them closed.

And the answer was, no, it wasn’t. If you were in a room or place that had any light in it, some of that light found its way through your eyelids. If you were in a dark room, reading this on a screen, then you had afterimages of the screen on your retina. And even if you were in a dark room, maybe listening to this being read to you, eventually the very physical fact of your eyes would eventually make something happen. If you rubbed your eyes, you’d press on your optic nerve and ghost images and colors would appear in your brain.

The darkness is never totally and inescapably dark.

But this darkness was.

It wasn’t the absence of light. It was the absence of anything.

And once I realized that about the darkness, I also realized it about the silence. There’s no such thing as perfect silence, either. There’s always some noise, even if it’s just a phantom hum from the hairs in your cochlea moving around in your head.

There was nothing but the perfect clarity of nothing.

Then I realized I couldn’t taste my mouth.

Don’t look at me like that, because even though I can’t see you I know you’re looking at me like that.

Listen. I don’t care if you ever think about the fact that you can always taste your mouth. You are always tasting your mouth. It’s where you keep your tongue. Your tongue doesn’t have an off switch. You are tasting your mouth right now, and now that I’ve brought it to your attention, you’re probably realizing that you should probably brush or chew some gum or something. Because your mouth, by default, is a kind of a little off, tastewise.

You can taste your mouth. Even when you’re not thinking about it.

I was thinking very hard about it. And I couldn’t taste a goddamned thing.

And this is where I started to lose it. Because you know about blindness. It’s a thing that happens to people. They lose their sight and maybe even their eyes, and while it’s possible to regrow eyes or to create artificial ones, you still accept that blindness is real, and maybe it’s happened to you. The same with deafness.

But who the actual fuck can’t taste their own mouth?

So, yeah. This is where my brain well and truly started saying oh shit oh shit oh shit on a more or less infinite loop.

Because after that everything I wasn’t sensing hit me head on: No feeling in my hands or feet or arms or legs or penis or lips. No smells coming in through my nose. No sensation of air going past my nostrils and into my nose. No sense of balance. No sense of heat or cold.

No nervous swallow. No feeling of fear sweat in my pits and brow. No racing heart. No heartbeat.

No anything.

I would have positively shit myself in fear, except I had no sense of losing sphincter control, either.

The only thing I could feel was pain, because my headache decided that this was a fantastic time to get a dozen times worse.

And I focused on that headache like a starving dog focuses on a steak because it was the only thing in the world I could feel.

And then I passed out. Because I think my brain decided I was feeling too much about not feeling anything.

I can’t say that I disagreed with it.

* * *

When I came to again I did not freak out, and I felt a little bit proud about that. Instead, I tried to calmly and rationally figure out what was going on.

First hypothesis: I was dead.

Discarded because that seemed kind of stupid. If I were dead, then yes, I wouldn’t be feeling anything. But I also probably wouldn’t be aware that I wasn’t feeling anything. I just … wouldn’t be.

Unless this was the afterlife. But I doubted it was. I’m not much of a religious person, but most afterlives that I’d heard of were something more than a blank nothingness. If God or gods existed, and this was all they put together for eternal life, I wasn’t very impressed with their user experience.

So: probably alive.

Which was a start!

Second hypothesis: was in some sort of coma.

This seemed more reasonable, although I didn’t really know anything about the medical facts of a coma. I didn’t know if people in comas could actually think about things while they were in them. From the outside they didn’t seem like they were doing much. Tabled this idea for later thought.

Third hypothesis: not in a coma but for some reason trapped in my body without any sensation.

This seemed like the most reasonable explanation on the surface, but two questions arose that I didn’t have answers for. One, how I got into this predicament in the first place. I was conscious and knew who I was, but otherwise my memory of recent events was shaky. I remembered falling out of my bunk and then going to the bridge, but anything after that was a blur.

This suggested to me I had some sort of event; I knew people’s memories of accidents or injury were sometimes wiped out by the trauma of the event itself. That seemed likely here. Whatever it was, I was in a bad way.

Well, that wasn’t news. I was a consciousness floating around in nothing. I had gotten the “you’re not doing so well” memo.

But that was the second thing: Even if I were in terrible shape, which I assumed I was, I should be able to feel something, or to sense something other than my own thoughts. I couldn’t.

Hell, I didn’t even have a headache anymore.

“You’re awake.”

A voice, perfectly audible, indeterminate in terms of any identifying quality, coming from everywhere. I was shocked into immobility, or would have been, if I had any way to be mobile.

“Hello?” I said, or would have, if I had been able to speak, which I wasn’t, so nothing happened. I started to go into panic mode, because I was reminded so clearly that there was something wrong with me, and because I was desperate that the voice, whoever it was, would not leave me alone again in the nothing.

“You’re trying to talk,” the voice said, again from everywhere. “Your brain is trying to send signals to your mouth and tongue. It’s not going to work. Think the words instead.”

Like this, I thought.

“Yes,” the voice said, and I almost cried with relief. A jumble of thoughts and emotions rose up in a panicky need to be expressed. I had to take a minute to calm down and focus on a single coherent thought.

What happened to me? I asked. Why can’t I speak?

“You can’t speak because you don’t have a mouth or tongue,” the voice said.

Why?

“Because we took them from you.”

I don’t understand, I thought, after a long minute.

“We took them from you,” the voice repeated.

Did something happen to them? Was I in an accident?

“No, they were perfectly fine, and no, you weren’t.”

I don’t understand, I thought again.

“We removed your brain from your body.”

It’s hard, looking back, to accurately convey the amount of utter incomprehension I was experiencing at this moment. I tried very hard to express my level of confusion and incredulity at the statement I just heard. What came out was:

What

“We removed your brain from your body,” the voice repeated.

Why would you do that?

“You don’t need them for what we need you to do.”

I was still not comprehending well, and absent anything else was numbly carrying on with the conversation, waiting for the whole thing to make the slightest bit of sense to me.

What do you need me to do? I thought.

“Pilot your ship.”

I need my mouth for that.

“No you don’t.”

How will I talk to the rest of the crew?

“There is no other crew.”

At this, something surged in my brain—something like a memory, but not an actual memory. A thought that I used to know what had happened to the crew of the Chandler, but now I didn’t, and that whatever had happened wasn’t good.

Where is the rest of the crew, I thought.

“They are dead. All of them.”

How?

“We killed them.”

My sense of panic was back. I knew this was right, that the voice was telling me the truth. But I couldn’t picture how it had happened. I knew I used to know. I desperately wanted to know. But there was nothing in my mind that could tell me, nothing but an approaching wall of dread.

Why did you kill them? I thought.

“Because they weren’t needed.”

You need a crew to run a ship.

“No we don’t.”

Why not?

“Because we have you.”

I can’t operate an entire ship by myself.

“You will or you’ll die.”

I can’t even fucking move, I thought, exasperated.

“This will not be a problem.”

How do you expect me to pilot and operate an entire ship when I can’t even move?

“You are the ship now.”

And then suddenly the complete incomprehension was back.

Excuse me? I finally thought.

“You are the ship now,” the voice repeated.

I am the ship.

“Yes.”

I am the Chandler.

“Yes.”

What the fuck does that even mean?

“We have removed your brain from your body,” the voice said. “We’ve integrated your brain with the Chandler. The ship is now your body. You will learn how to control your body.”

I tried to process what I was being told and failed miserably. I could not imagine a single element of what I was being hit with. I could not imagine being a ship. I couldn’t imagine trying to control such a complex machine all on my own.

And if I don’t? I thought. What happens if I can’t learn how to control it?

“Then you will die,” the voice said.

I don’t understand, I thought, again, and I imagined that the complete helplessness I felt was entirely obvious. Maybe that was the point.

“It’s not important for you to understand,” the voice said.

To which some part of my brain immediately said, Fuck you, asshole. But it didn’t appear to have been sent—or at least the voice didn’t respond to it. So I said something else to the voice instead.

Why would you do this to me?

“This ship needs a pilot. You are a pilot. You know this ship.”

That doesn’t require taking my brain out of my goddamned skull, I thought.

“It does.”

Why?

“It’s not important for you to know.”

I disagree!

“It doesn’t matter that you disagree.”

It matters that I won’t pilot the ship. I won’t.

“You will or you will die.”

I’m already a brain in box, I thought. I don’t care if I die.

I thought this was an excellent point, until a spasm of pain started.

Remember that headache? That was a twinge compared to this. It felt like my entire body was turned in a seizing electrical cramp, and not even the wonder of feeling like I had a body again distracted me from just how much I hurt.

Objectively, it can’t have gone on for more than a few seconds. Subjectively I think I aged a year through it.

It stopped.

“You do not have a body, but your brain does not know that,” the voice said. “All the pathways are still there. All the ways that your brain can still make you experience pain are ours to control. It’s very simple to do. All the settings are already programmed. If we were so inclined we could run them on a loop. Or we could simply leave you in the dark, deprived of every possible sensation, forever. So, yes. If you will not pilot and operate this ship, then you will die. But before you die you will learn just how far and how long your death can be delayed, and how much pain you can feel between now and then. And I assure you that you will care.”

Who are you, I thought.

“We are the only voice you will hear for the rest of your life, unless you do what we tell you.”

Is that the royal we? I thought, not to the voice but to myself. I don’t know why the hell I thought that. I think being made to feel like I had a power station’s worth of electricity run through my nonexistent body might have made me a little loopy.

The voice didn’t respond.

Which was the second time that happened, when I didn’t think directly to the voice.

Which was interesting.

What happens if I do what you tell me? I asked, to the voice.

“Then at the end of it you will get your body back. It’s a simple exchange. Do what you’re told, and you will be you again. Refuse and you will die, in pain.”

What is it you want me to do?

“Pilot and operate this ship. We have already told you this.”

Where and for what purpose?

“That comes later,” the voice said.

What do I do now? I asked.

“Now, you think,” the voice said. “You will think about what your choices are, and what the consequences of those choices will be. I will give you a day to think about it, here in the dark. It will be a long day. Good-bye.”

Wait, I thought, but the voice was already gone.

* * *

So for the next day I thought.

First thought: Definitely not dead. No need for a religious crisis. One small thing off the list of things to worry about. It was the only one, but anything would do at this point.

Second thought: Whoever it was who had me had captured my ship, killed my crew, taken my brain out of my body, and now expected me to run the ship entirely on my own, for their own purposes, and would kill me if I didn’t.

Third thought: The hell with these people. There was no way I was going to do anything for them.

In which case they would be more than happy to torture me just for the fun of it. As I knew from experience. Which was an actual consideration I had to take into account.

Fourth thought: Why me?

As in, why did they take me and not someone else? I was third pilot of the Chandler. I was literally the newest crew member. They could have picked anyone else from that ship and they would have made a better choice, in terms of knowing the ship, how it works, and what its capabilities were. I was not the obvious choice.

Identify your pilots.

The sentence barreled out of my subconscious and stood in front of me, daring me to give it some sort of context. My memory was still spotty; I knew it had been spoken, but not by whom, or when. I would need to rack my brain to figure it out.

The thing was, I had time.

And in time an image popped into my head: a creature dressed in black, knees going the wrong way, giving the order to Captain Thao and shooting Lee Han when she questioned the order.

A Rraey. The Rraey had taken me. That answered the question of who these people were. But it didn’t answer the question of why me. The captain hadn’t identified me as a pilot. She hadn’t identified anyone as anything. Someone else did that.

Secretary Ocampo.

Suddenly the image of that bastard pointing me out blazed into my consciousness, clear as if I were reliving the moment.

And then all the rest of it came back too—every blank spot in the memory suddenly filled with hard force, almost painfully jammed in.

I had to stop.

I had to stop to grieve for the crew of the Chandler. To grieve for the few friends I had made there, and for everyone else who I did not know but who did not deserve to die, just as I did not deserve to live instead of them.

It took some time. But as I said before, I had the time.

I took it.

And then when I was done I started fiddling with the problem again.

Why was I taken? Because Secretary Ocampo knew me. He’d been introduced to me even before we’d gotten to the Chandler, we took the shuttle ride over, and I came to him when I had questions about our change of destination.

He knew I was a pilot, but he also knew me as a person—probably the only person he knew on the Chandler other than Captain Thao and Vera Briggs.

It’s possible he picked me simply because he knew I was a pilot. He knew there were other pilots on the ship—he’d probably seen Bolduc on the bridge—but I was the first that came to mind. Because he’d met me. He knew me. Or thought he did.

So maybe he didn’t just pick me because I was a pilot. Maybe he picked me because he knew me as more than a random crew member. Maybe he saved me because there was a personal connection there.

And wasn’t there? Didn’t I feel like I could go to his stateroom and ask him about the orders he’d given the captain? Wasn’t he at least a little impressed that I had figured it out?

So, yes. Maybe he picked me because he knew me. Maybe because he liked me. Maybe he even thought he was saving me. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favor.

Picking you to have your brain plucked out of your body is not my idea of a favor, some part of my brain said.

Good point, brain, I thought, ignoring that I was now speaking to myself. But the point is not what I thought of it, it was what Ocampo thought of it, and me. I wasn’t flattering myself that I was important to Ocampo—I thought back to him telling Commander Tvann it was up to him whether or not to tell Vera Briggs to stay out of the lifepods. If Ocampo was like that with his own assistant, who he’d worked with for years, he wasn’t going to care much if I got uppity and troublesome.

But until then, there might be something there to work with.

What? And for what purpose?

I didn’t know yet.

That wasn’t the point. The point was that I was now listing my potential assets. And one of those assets was that Ocampo, for whatever reason, picked me to pilot the Chandler—to become the Chandler.

So that was one thing.

Another possible asset: what Ocampo didn’t know about me.

He knew my name. He knew my face. He knew I was a pilot.

And … that was it.

Which meant what?

It could mean nothing. Or it could mean that when they hooked me up to the Chandler’s systems, they wouldn’t know how much I already knew about the systems. Or how to use them.

Don’t get too excited, that other part of my brain said. You’re a brain in a box now. And they can see everything you do. They’re probably looking at you thinking all this right now.

You’re depressing, I said to that other part of my brain.

At least I’m not talking to myself, it said back. And anyway you know I’m right.

It was a fair point. I had to accept that leaving me alone with my thoughts could be part of a test that I was being given, to see how I would respond. If they were able to follow my thoughts right now, I had to accept that they would use that information to decide what to do with me—kill me or torture me or whatever.

But I had a feeling they weren’t. I had a feeling that the day alone with my thoughts was for another purpose entirely. It was to dominate me. To terrify me. To remind me how alone I was and how helpless I was. How utterly dependent I was on them now for my survival.

And you know what? They would be right about that. I was alone. I was dependent on them for survival. I was terrified.

But I wasn’t going to be dominated.

Yes, I was isolated. Yes, I was scared.

But I was also really, really pissed off.

And that was the thing I decided I was going to work with.

If they were listening to me when I was thinking this, they could kill me at any time. In which case they could get on with it, because otherwise they were just wasting my time and theirs.

But I didn’t think they were.

I don’t think they thought they had to.

Which was another possible asset. They assumed they had the upper hand in dealing with me.

Again, fair enough. I was a brain in a box and they could kill me or torture me any time they wanted. That’s a pretty good definition of having the upper hand.

But the fact was, they needed me.

They needed a pilot for the Chandler. They had me.

And they had only me. Everyone else in the crew they had killed off, suffocating them in those lifepods. They were so sure they had the upper hand with me that they didn’t bother with a spare.

Which said to me either they had never done this before, and had no idea what they were doing, or they had done this a lot, and the response by their pilot victims was always the same.

I thought about the Rraey saying that their engineers could repair the ship and get it going again because this was something they were used to. I thought of their efficient way of dealing with the crew, to cow them and get what they wanted.

It was clear this wasn’t something they were new to.

They had done this before. And maybe were right now doing it with pilots other than me. They expected the pilots to be desperate and to be willing to do anything to get their bodies back. They were so used to the response they didn’t really think any other response was possible.

So no, I didn’t think they were listening in on me right then. I didn’t think they thought they had to. I could be wrong, but it was an assumption I was willing to go on.

That gave me free time to think. And plan. Another asset that I had. For now, anyway.

Then there was the final asset I had:

I knew I was already dead.

By which I mean I knew that their promise to return me to my body was almost 100 percent certain to be complete bullshit. There was no way that was going to happen.

I knew that because they killed the crew of the Chandler. I knew it because of what Ocampo said when I pleaded with him to send the skip drone back to Phoenix Station to save the crew. I knew it because of how they lied to the crew to lead them willingly to their deaths.

They had no intention of putting me back into my body. I was as close to certain as I could be that my body was already gone—incinerated or tossed into space or put into a stew because the Rraey had a reputation for eating humans when they had the chance.

I thought about my body in a very large pot, simmering.

I actually found it blackly amusing.

Whatever was done with it, my body was history. I was sure of it.

I was also sure that whatever it was that Ocampo and the Rraey—or whatever it was they were working for—wanted me to do, when I was done with it they would flip whatever switch they had and simply murder me then.

That is, if whatever mission they were going to have me do wasn’t already a suicide mission. Which I suspected it probably would be. Or at least, they wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep if I didn’t come back.

I was under no illusion that my fate wasn’t the same as that of the rest of the Chandler’s crew. It was just a question of when. And the answer of “when” was: when they were done using me for whatever it was they had planned.

Which meant that I had whatever time existed between now and then to, in no particular order, find out who they were (besides Ocampo and a bunch of Rraey soldiers), discover what they had planned, learn how to stop them, and kill the hell out of all of them.

All of them, that is, except Ocampo. If there was some way to bring him back to Colonial Union space, I was going to do it. Because no matter what else, I think they were going to be very interested in what it was he was wrapped up in.

And because he didn’t deserve to get off as easy as him dying would let him.

You’re pretty ambitious for a disembodied brain, that other part of my brain said again.

I’ve got nothing else to do, I replied. Because it was true. All I had right now were my thoughts, and time. Lots of time.

So I took it.

* * *

At some point I think I slept. It’s hard to tell when you have no outside frame of reference to let you know if you’re actually asleep.

I do know I didn’t dream. I was okay with that.

And at some point the voice came back.

“You have had time to think on your situation,” the voice said. “Now it is time to make your decision.”

The voice was right: it was time to make my decision.

Not whether or not I would decide to stay alive. I’d already decided that one early on.

What I was deciding now was how to act in front of the voice.

Should I be cowed and afraid? Should I be defiant and rebellious, but still willing to do what they wanted? Should I just remain silent and do only what the voice told me to?

This was an important decision because how I responded to the voice now would establish what our relationship was and possibly what would be allowed me in the future—and what I might be able to get away with.

If I picked the wrong attitude that would have negative consequences. If I was too complacent maybe they would simply treat me as the machine they made me into. Too rebellious and I’d spend all my spare time getting zapped. Neither was what I wanted, especially getting zapped. Once was enough.

“What is your decision?” the voice asked.

I have questions, I thought, suddenly. Which wasn’t how I was expecting to go, but, okay, let’s see what happens next.

“Your questions are not relevant,” the voice said.

Let me rephrase that, I said. I’m going to do what you want. I’ve decided that. But it would help me if I knew a few things as well. I understand I can’t force you to answer any questions. But it would help me be helpful to you if you would consider answering them.

There was an actual pause here. “What are your questions?”

I have three, I said. Which again, was news to me, but I could come up with three questions, right?

And in fact one popped up in my head. First, do you have a name?

“Why would that matter?”

Because I feel awkward just thinking of you as “that voice in my head,” I thought. If we are going to be working together it would be nice to have a name for you.

“You may call me Control,” the voice said.

Okay, good, I thought. Hello, Control.

Control waited, silent. Well, fine.

Second, would it be possible for me to speak to Secretary Ocampo at some point?

“Why would you need to speak to him?”

I don’t need to speak to him, I thought. I have already agreed to help you. But when I was taken off the Chandler he told me that he was doing this, whatever this is, to help humanity. I want to talk to him more about that, to understand what he meant.

“It doesn’t matter if you understand,” Control said.

I know this, I thought, and though I know you’re under no obligation to care, I disagree. You have my help. But if you had my understanding I might be even more useful. Secretary Ocampo is an admirable man. I respect him. If he’s doing this, he must have a reason. I think that reason could make sense to me. I would like to know more about it.

“We will not let you speak to Secretary Ocampo now,” Control said. “But if in your work you do well, we may consider it for the future.”

Fair enough, I thought.

“Do not ask us about it again.”

Of course not. You’ve already said you’d think about it. That’s enough.

“Your final question.”

Will you give me your word that I will get my body back?

“My word,” Control said.

Yes, your word, I thought. Your promise. I already said I would help you. I will. I will do everything you ask me to. You said that if I did I would get my body back. That was the deal. But there are deals, and there are promises. A deal you can make with anyone. A promise is something you make with someone you trust. If you make a promise with me, that means I can trust you. And that means I can stop worrying about whether I can believe you or not. And that means I can do what you ask me to, better.

And once more there was a pause.

I had a point in asking these questions, even if I didn’t know I was doing it when I started.

Information. Trust. Creating intimacy and a relationship.

I’d asked for a name, and while Control wasn’t much of a name, it was something. A personalization. Something that made that royal we into an “I.” Asking to speak to Ocampo further extended our deal, and turned it from something general—something they probably forced on every pilot whose brain they put into a box—into something specific to me.

And asking for Control’s word? More intimacy—making the deal between me and it. Something with reciprocity. Something with trust.

It was also a test.

“You have my word,” Control said.

Now I knew everything I needed to know about Control.

And Control had no idea that I knew.

That’s all I need, I said. I’m ready to get started when you are.

“Then let’s begin,” Control said.

The Chandler’s bridge appeared all around me.

Or, more accurately, a computerized visual representation of the Chandler’s bridge; cleaner, plainer, and with all extraneous detail stripped from view.

“You recognize this,” Control prompted.

Of course, I thought.

It was the standard bridge simulation program, used for training purposes, configured for the Chandler’s bridge setup, which in itself was pretty standard.

I recognized it because like anyone else who ever did time on a bridge, I’d spent a couple hundred hours using it in addition to actual physical training at the specific bridge station.

I also recognized it because I helped to program it.

Or a slightly earlier version of it, anyway. It’d been a few years. This was probably an updated release of it.

That said, a quick glance suggested that not much had changed in the software since I had worked on it. It didn’t even look like it was a new major release from what I had worked on. A point release, maybe? With some minor fixes? How does an organization clearly not hooked into the mainstream of Colonial Union commerce even get these programs? I felt vaguely annoyed on behalf of my former employer that this program had clearly been pirated.

Not that I was about to mention to Control that I had worked on the program. Control didn’t know because Ocampo didn’t know, and I saw no reason to let either know. Control already thought I was stupid enough to believe its word on things. I wasn’t going to do anything to dissuade it of that notion.

It’s the bridge simulator program, I thought, to Control.

“It used to be a bridge simulator program,” Control said. “And for now, it will continue to be so. But we’ve adapted it to control the Chandler. Ultimately you will be able to control all the ship systems from inside of it.”

How will I do that? I asked. The simulator program is designed as a virtual space but tracks actual hand and body movements. I’m missing both.

“Here,” Control said, and I was in a virtual body. My view was clearly meant to be from head height; by thinking about it I could move it on a swivel, like I had an actual neck. I looked down and a stripped-down, visual representation of a human body was there. I imagined moving my hands and my hands came up from my sides, palms toward me, featureless where there should have been palm lines and fingerprints.

I nearly had a breakdown right then, I was so grateful. Even a fake body like this was better than no body at all.

Even so …

Some part of my brain—I think maybe the same part that argued with me earlier—was going Really? That’s it?

I knew what it meant. It meant that these assholes had taken my brain out of my body to run the Chandler, and I had to run the Chandler all on my own, and the way they intended me to run the Chandler was with a simulation of a human body I no longer had.

Which seemed, I don’t know. Inefficient. If you’re going to take the time to get rid of my body, then maybe take the time to create a control metaphor that takes advantage of not being limited to a human body anymore.

They didn’t take you out of your body for efficiency’s sake, said that part of my brain. Well, yeah, I figured that out a while back. It was about fear and control.

But still. Kind of a waste of effort.

I pulled myself back together (metaphorically), and looked around the simulated bridge.

Are you coming onto the bridge with me? I asked Control.

“No,” it said. “Please go to the captain’s chair.”

I nodded. The captain’s chair had a screen where she could look at the information from all the stations, either at once or one at a time. Captain Thao, like most captains, tended to take reports from her bridge crew, who were better at boiling down the information into what she needed to know immediately. But she could get all the information from the screen if she wanted to boil it down herself. Which meant that I could, too.

Likewise, the captain could control the ship from the screen if she wanted, rather than giving orders. Very few captains did, because things got complicated fast, and besides, if you want to make your bridge crew unhappy, the best way to do it was to try to do their job for them. The fact is that no captain was competent at every bridge station. Most didn’t try to be.

Except now I would have to be.

I sat in the virtual captain’s chair and pulled up the captain’s screen.

I’m ready, I thought to Control.

The virtual captain’s screen lit up, and all the department windows opened in a grid. Tapping twice on one of the windows would cause it to expand to full screen and become fully interactive. Only one department screen could be full screen at one time but you could also chain full-size department screens together and swipe through them to access them quickly. It was all pretty basic except for the fact that I would be responsible for monitoring and dealing with all of them.

I looked further at the captain’s start grid.

Some of these are blank, I said.

“Some of the ship functions you no longer need to control,” Control said. “You will be the only living thing on the ship and your living area is tightly sealed and controlled by us, so you will not need life-support controls. Likewise communications. We control those and several other ship-related functions. Others, such as engineering, you need to control only on a limited basis, and the maintenance of those functions will now be handled by us. The only ship’s functions you need to concern yourself with are navigation, weapons, and propulsion, including skipping.”

That makes things simple, at least, I thought to Control. I made the windows for navigation, propulsion, and weapons full-sized and chained them together.

I’m ready, I sent.

“We’re sending you a simulated mission now,” Control said. “It is a simple one, focused primarily on navigation. Let’s begin.”

* * *

Ten hours of simulation that first day, at least by the simulation clock, almost all of it dead simple navigation that as a pilot I could do in my sleep. I had a suspicion that the simulations were not specifically chosen for me by Control, but might have been simply on a list of simulations to run that it was running through.

It was boring.

But it was also manageable. There was nothing that first day that I wasn’t able to do. The piloting, like most piloting, was about feeding information into the computer and then dealing with anything unusual that might go wrong. Nothing went wrong with any of these initial simulations.

The most difficult thing I had to do was slide the simulated Chandler out of the way of a chunk of rock floating out of space. I considered using the simulated Chandler’s lasers to vaporize it—it was small enough—but I figured that wasn’t what the simulation was about yet, and anyway vaporizing it ran the risk of creating a bunch of even tinier bits of rock, harder to track, that some other ship would then ram into. Most ships could handle a micrometeor impact, but why create a problem for someone else when you didn’t have to.

So I moved the Chandler out of the way, logged the rock’s present location and direction, and then would have simulated sending a data packet to nearby ships, except that I was not in charge of ship’s communications. So instead I made a notation to have the data sent to other ships at the earliest opportunity.

If Control were noting any of this, I didn’t know about it. Control was entirely silent for that entire simulation, and the other runs we ran that day. “You will be controlling the ship alone,” Control said, when I asked it about the silence, between runs. “You will not have us nor any other person to communicate with once you begin your missions. You need to get used to the silence.”

You’re not worried about boredom? I asked. Human minds need a little stimulation outside of monitoring navigation systems.

“This has not been a problem before,” Control said. Which is how I learned for sure that I was not the first person they had done this to.

I thought about other people in the same predicament and would have shuddered if I could.

It also suggested to me that I might not even be the only person currently in my situation. That Control, whoever it was, might also be running simulations with other people and ships, even as it was working with me. It would be something I would need to find out, eventually.

“We’re done for the day,” Control eventually said. “We will continue again tomorrow.”

How many hours will that be? I asked. I didn’t know if Control was human, and wherever we were was almost certainly not a human outpost, so I had no idea of how long a day would be.

“About twelve hours from now,” Control said, after a minute. I think it may have had to look up what “hours” were to make the conversion.

What do I do now? I asked.

“Whatever you like,” Control said.

I’d like to go jogging, I thought.

Control didn’t say anything to that. I was getting the idea that Control, whoever it was, did not have a particularly good sense of humor.

What is there for me to do? I asked.

“If you like, you may reload today’s simulations, and run them again,” Control said. “In fact, I suggest it.”

Is there anything else? I asked. Anything to read? Anything to watch? Anything to listen to?

“No,” Control said.

May I request some form of entertainment? I asked. Anything would be good. If I only have navigation simulations, I think my effectiveness will eventually decrease.

“If it decreases too far then you’ll be punished,” Control said. “If it decreases after that you will be killed.”

Well, that’s motivation of a sort, I thought to Control.

Control didn’t respond. I suspected Control had left the simulation.

You need to get used to the silence, I thought to myself, repeating Control’s words from earlier in the day. Well, I was getting used to it whether I liked it or not.

I looked down at the simulated captain’s chair and at the captain’s screen, on which a small menu tab appeared, with the day’s missions. I could reload them if I liked.

Instead I got up and ran around the simulated bridge, doing laps. Then I did some push-ups and lunges and sit-ups.

I want to be clear I was under no impression that what I was doing constituted actual exercise. I couldn’t feel my simulated body; even the double taps and swipes I made during the day were numbly done. I wasn’t doing it to keep my body in shape. I didn’t have a body to have a shape.

I did it because it was something else to do besides what Control wanted me to do. Something I wanted to do on my own time. My way of exercising my own control. If you want to put it that way.

It even kind of worked. Eventually I got tired. I lay down on the simulated floor to go to sleep.

And discovered I didn’t have simulated eyelids.

It didn’t matter. I was asleep fast enough anyway.

This time I knew I had slept.

* * *

Two days later I broke the bridge simulation and escaped. Sort of.

It happened after hours, once Control had gone off for the night, or what I assumed was night, anyway. I was running one of the day’s previous simulations, this one requiring me to navigate the Chandler into a docking position at a space station. It’s the sort of maneuver that I’d done dozens if not hundreds of times, both simulated and real. There was no challenge to it whatsoever.

So I did what anyone doing a simulated run does when they’re bored and there’s no penalty for misbehavior:

I started wrecking things.

First I rammed the space station with the Chandler, because I was interested, purely for the science, how realistic the impact would be in terms of the simulation’s rendering of classical physics.

Answer: not bad. I had limited control of outside sensors, so I saw both the Chandler and the space station crumple nicely, with appropriate bursts of metal and glass due to explosive decompression as the Chandler plowed through the station. My sensors did not indicate the Chandler’s engines overloading, however, which would have created a nice bit of mayhem.

So I ran the simulation again, this time giving the Chandler enough distance to make for some impressive acceleration before I hit the space station.

This time the Chandler exploded. All my control windows flashed red before blanking out, never a positive sign for the structural integrity of the ship. The simulation did not detail either economic or human losses, but I doubt anyone in the station sections I hit, or the Chandler crew, would have survived.

The Chandler crew didn’t survive already, that other part of my brain said.

I ignored it.

The next run-through I was curious what would happen if I attacked the station. The simulations I’d run didn’t require me to operate any of the weaponry systems, so while Control was around I hadn’t bothered with them.

But I had control of them anyway, and they were fully operational, so. In the next simulation I launched three missiles at the station, just to see what would happen.

A minute later my damage sensors went bright red as ten missiles from the station struck the Chandler at various critical spots, taking out weapons, engines, crew compartments, and outside sensors. About a second after that my screens went blank, because in this simulation the Chandler had just been turned into an expanding cloud of debris.

Well, that was rude, I thought, and would have smiled if I could.

Several more simulations after that, attacking the space station, then attacking other ships at the station, firing at shuttles, basically any combination of tactics that involved surprising someone with a missile. All the simulations ended pretty much the same way: the Chandler being turned into a missile pincushion.

All right, fine, let’s try this, I thought, and ran the simulation again.

This time I didn’t ram the station, or fire on it. I just slid the Chandler into docking position, and waited until the simulation gave me the “victory condition” signal—the signal that I had done what the simulation required of me.

Then I launched a barrage of missiles at the space station, aiming specifically for its weapon systems, the ones I could see visually, but also the ones I couldn’t, going off the data I had of the space station. I timed the missiles so they would impact all the weapons systems at the same time.

Which they did. And then, while everything was blowing up nicely, I opened up the throttles on the engines and headed straight into the mess.

And as the Chandler made first contact with the skin of the space station, something happened.

Everything went black.

Not just the captain’s screens, which would have indicated that the Chandler had been destroyed. No, everything went black. There was the simulation, and then, for several full seconds, there it wasn’t.

I spent those several seconds in the complete blackness wondering what the hell had just happened.

Then the bridge simulation popped up again around me.

I knew what had just happened: I’d crashed the simulator.

And then, I’m not going to lie to you—my brain just went off.

Here is the thing about that bridge simulator: The bridge simulator was now my whole world. I lived in it, running simulations, and nothing else. I couldn’t leave it—I was in it, but I didn’t have any control over it other than being able to run the simulations Control gave me to run. I couldn’t step outside of the simulation, or close it out, or mess with the code in any way. I was trapped in it. It was my prison.

But when I crashed the simulator, it booted me out. For a few seconds there, I was somewhere else.

Where else?

Well, what happens when a program crashes? You get booted back into the system the program runs on.

Not literally in the system; my consciousness hadn’t been sucked into a computer or anything. That’s stupid. My consciousness was in my brain, like it always was.

But before, my senses had been dropped into the bridge simulation. Everything I could see or sense was inside of it. For those few seconds when the simulator crashed, I was somewhere else. The system the simulator ran on.

I wasn’t seeing anything, and then the bridge simulation popped up again, which said to me that the bridge simulator crashing wasn’t entirely unheard of. Control (or whomever) had set up a restart routine to go directly back into the bridge simulator, without giving the pilot any time to figure out what was going on, or to see the computer interface he or she was working within.

But that didn’t necessarily mean the pilot was completely locked out of the system.

I launched the docking simulation again.

If Control knew the program crashed, then that meant it knew where the bugs were—or knew where some of them were. So either it knew where they were and did nothing about them other than relaunching the system directly back into the simulator, or it did something about it and tried to patch the code—and in the process possibly created new bugs when the new code interacted poorly with the old code.

Control wouldn’t know anything about the new bugs unless they glitched during a run it was watching. And no one would do what I just did while Control was watching because Control would probably electrocute them for farting around.

So: Control didn’t know that this glitch was there.

But some glitches are transient and not reproducible. Those are the hardest as a programmer to fix.

I ran the simulation exactly as I had before to see if the glitch would replicate in the same way.

It did.

So I ran it a third time.

And this time, when the program crashed, I thought about the commands that, when the system we programmed the bridge simulator was booted up, would open the diagnostics and modification screens for the system.

I thought about them really hard.

And two seconds later, there they were.

The diagnostics and modifications screens. Ugly and utilitarian, just like they have been since the very beginnings of visual user interface.

They were beautiful.

They meant that I was into the system.

More specifically, I was into the Chandler’s system.

Well, a little, anyway.

This would be the part of the story where, if this were a video piece, the heroic hacker would spew a couple of lines of magical code and everything would open up to him.

The bad news for me was that this was very much not my personal situation. I’m not a heroic hacker with magic code. I was a brain in a box.

But I am a programmer. Or was. And I knew the system. I knew the software.

And I had a plan. And a little bit of time before anyone was going to bother me again.

So I got to work.

* * *

I’m not going to bore you with the details of what I did. If you’re a programmer and you know the system and the hardware, and the code, then what I did would be really cool and endlessly fascinating and we could have a seminar about it, and about system security, and how any system fundamentally falls prey to the belief that all variables are accounted for, when in fact the only variables accounted for are the ones you know about, or more accurately that you think you know about.

The rest of you would have your eyes glaze over and pray for death.

I assume that’s most of you.

So for the rest of you, what you need to know:

First, the work, the first part of it anyway, took more than a single night.

It actually took a couple of weeks. And during all that time I waited for the moment where Control, or whoever, looked at the Chandler’s system and found evidence of me wandering around in it, making changes and trying to get into places where I shouldn’t. I waited for the moment they found it, and the moment they decided to punish me for it.

But they didn’t.

I’m not going to lie. Part of me was annoyed that they didn’t.

Because that’s some lax security. All of it was lax. When whoever it is took over the Chandler, they left the system wide open, with only the basic level of security that would have been outmoded right at the beginning of the computer era. Either they were so sure that they didn’t need to worry about security where they were—everyone could be trusted and no one would try to screw with things—or they were just idiots.

Maybe both! The level of insecurity was actually offensive.

But it worked to my advantage, and without it I would probably be dead, so I shouldn’t really complain.

Those first two weeks were the scariest for me because what I was doing was pretty much out in the open. I tried to hide what I was doing as well as I could, but someone who was looking could have found it. If Control or anyone else looked into my extracurricular sessions, they would have seen me running one particular simulation the same way over and over and could have seen what I was doing.

It meant that if during the simulations where Control was watching, if the program crashed, it might code a patch, and that patch could affect the bug I was using to exit the program. Which meant I would be trapped again.

I was very very very careful in the simulations Control watched. Never did anything rash, never did anything not by the book.

The irony of doing things exactly as they wanted me to, so they wouldn’t find out the things they might torture or kill me for, was not lost on me.

Those two weeks were, literally, the worst two weeks of my life. I already knew that whoever it was that had me was planning to kill me after I did what they wanted of me. But even knowing that didn’t ease any of the stress of messing with the code. Of knowing I was exposed if anyone decided to look, and yet doing it anyway.

It’s one thing to know you’re already dead. It’s another to work on something that might give you a chance to stay alive, as long as no one decides to look.

They never looked. Never. Because they didn’t think they had to.

I was so grateful for it.

And at the same time, so contemptuous of it.

They deserved what I was going to do to them. Whatever it was. I hadn’t figured it out yet.

But when I did: no sympathy.

* * *

What I did with those two weeks: blue pill.

No, I don’t know where the phrase comes from. It’s been used for a long time. Look it up.

But what it means is that I created an overlay for the Chandler’s computer system. A just about exact replica.

I copied it, tweaked it, attached everything coming in from the outside to it, as well as the bridge simulator. It looked like, responded like, and would control things like the actual computer system for the Chandler.

But it wasn’t.

That system, the one that actually ran the Chandler, was running underneath the copy. And that one, well.

That one, I was totally in control of. The reality underneath the simulation. The reality that no one but me knew existed below the simulation. The simulation that everyone thought reflected reality.

That’s the blue pill.

For the next month, every day, all day, I ran more and more complex missions on the bridge simulator. More simulations where I had to juggle navigation with weapons.

It was clear to me that whatever they were training me for, it had a significant military component. They were expecting me to go to battle for them. They may or may not have expected me to survive the battle. I think “not survive” was the more likely scenario.

This was not a surprise.

Through this all, I kept up the chatter with Control. To engage it. To make it feel something for me. To make it see the person it had put into a box.

I was not notably successful.

But I wasn’t expecting to be.

What I had to be was the same person Control thought I was. The one who had decided to help. The one who had decided to trust Control.

I didn’t want to mess that up. I wanted Control and anyone else listening to get exactly what they were expecting. I wanted them to be as smug about their small-c control over me as they ever were.

They did not disappoint.

And while they were thinking that, when Control left me alone after a day of simulations, I had free run of the Chandler.

Which, as it turned out, was undergoing some drastic renovations. Notably, having the actual weapons systems reinstalled. Before it had been the Chandler, the ship had been a Colonial Defense Forces frigate. When it was decommissioned those weapons systems were removed and dismantled.

Now systems were being put back into place. The ship was crawling with workers inside and out. I hadn’t been aware of them before, because why would I be? I was a brain in a box, trapped in a simulation.

But now I could see, and hear, everything that was going on with the ship.

The workers were not mostly human. Most of them, as far as I could tell, were Rraey, just like the soldiers who attacked the Chandler in the first place.

Every now and then, however, a single human would show up on the ship, and advise or direct the weapons installation. It was always the same human.

She was not Ocampo. Or Vera Briggs, his assistant. This was someone entirely new. Whatever was going on, from the human side, there was more than Ocampo involved.

Watching the workers installing the weapons systems, I realized I had gotten lucky. In a couple more weeks, they’d be done with their installation and then the weapons systems would be plugged into Chandler’s computer system. If the work had been done earlier, or I had started my work later, I would have been found out. There was a small window, and I plopped into it.

Which made me feel like the luckiest guy in the universe, until I remembered I was still a brain in a box.

Which brings me to the other thing I found on the Chandler:

Me.

I was on the bridge, in a large rectangular box that looked, for all the world, like a coffin. The top of the box was clear; from my vantage point of the bridge cameras, I could look straight down into it and see: my brain.

And the electronic elements that were attached to it, to the surface of the gray matter and, I assumed, inside of it as well. I could see the hard wires snaking out of it, toward a juncture on the side of the box.

I saw the liquid in which my brain was suspended, discolored, slightly pink. I saw tubes connected to my brain, I assume taking in and bringing out blood or something substituting for it. Something that brought in nutrients and oxygen, and took out waste. The tubes also snaked out to a juncture in the box’s interior wall.

A change in camera and in perspective and I saw another box, into which the wires and tubes went. It’s this box I saw two Rraey, who I assume were doctors, come to and open daily, doing diagnostic work. Inside were filtering systems, intake and sampling valves, hardwired computers to monitor my brain’s well-being, and something else which I couldn’t identify at first, until one of the Rraey accidentally jostled it, and the other yelled at it for doing so.

The Chandler’s system has within it a translation library for several hundred known species. It, like most such libraries on trade ships, almost never gets used because we’re mostly dealing with humans. Nevertheless it’s there and on hand for when or if you need to translate anything. It translated what the second Rraey said to the first.

“Keep that up,” it said. “You’ll blow up all three of us.”

“Then at least our remains would get to go back home,” the first Rraey said.

“I would prefer to go back home in a form that would allow me to enjoy it,” the second Rraey said, and then inserted a dongle into one of the hardwired monitors, I assume to check on how my brain was doing and make adjustments.

I imagine the information showed that at that very moment I had a spike of anxious brain activity.

Because of the bomb.

On top of everything else, they had a bomb attached to me.

In case I was at all concerned that they ever had any intention of letting me get out of this alive.

In case I was thinking I was really going to escape this hell.

PART THREE

“You have performed well in simulation,” Control said one day, more than three months after I had first woken up to find myself a disembodied brain.

Thank you, I thought. I have been trying to live up to my end of our deal.

“You have been,” Control said. “You may find it useful to know that you have become one of our best pilots, in terms of hitting training performance goals.”

Well, of course I was. It was because I was very careful to perform simulations exactly to spec, so the software wouldn’t glitch and they would have to root about in the system to fix it. The blue pill system I made was pretty solid, but why tempt fate.

The other reason was that when Control wasn’t paying attention I was watching videos and listening to music that had been in the Chandler’s entertainment library. Which helped to keep me sane instead of dwelling on my complete and utter isolation from the rest of humanity. It’s not exactly surprising that staying sane is useful when trying to hit performance markers.

None of which I expressed, or even thought, while Control was around.

By now I had some understanding of why Control only “heard” what I thought directly to it—the brain-reading software recognized intentional attempts at communication and filtered that away from the constant low-grade babbling and monologuing every brain does all the time, in order to optimize communication. The software kept the thoughts I meant to myself internal—but if you remember how many times in your life you unintentionally say something out loud you meant to keep quiet, and made a mess of your life for a day because of it, then you’ll know why I tried to keep my mind blank when Control was around.

I’m happy to know that, I thought. And then waited, like I always did.

“You have done well enough that we have agreed to your request,” Control said.

My request?

“You asked if you could speak to Secretary Ocampo at some point,” Control said. “We have arranged for you to speak.”

Is he coming to visit me? I asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Control said. “We have arranged for a feed to be ported through to this simulation.”

So, not on the Chandler itself. Well, that was just fine. Will that be today? I asked.

“No. We have work to do today. But soon.”

Thank you, I thought. I am grateful. And that was certainly true, as far as it went.

“You’re welcome,” Control said. “Let’s begin today’s simulations.”

When will you have an actual mission for me?

“Why do you ask?”

You have been training me all this time. I’ve been doing well, as you said. I’m ready for missions.

“You want to fulfill your obligations to us,” Control said.

I do.

“In order to regain your body.”

I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a big part of it, I thought. Which was also true as far as it went.

“I don’t have any information for you,” Control said. “You will get a mission when we decide the time is right. It is not the right time yet.”

I understand, I thought. I am just anxious.

“Don’t be,” Control said. “You will be busy soon enough.” And then it opened up a simulation in which I was fighting three Colonial Union frigates at the same time.

It was one I had done before, with some variation. The goal wasn’t to destroy all the frigates. The goal was to make them expend as much of their firepower on me as possible so that when three other ships skipped in to attack them, they wouldn’t have the defenses to survive.

Basically I was bait in the scenario.

It wasn’t the only scenario that I’d been bait for, recently.

Let’s just say I wasn’t loving the pattern to the simulations I was seeing.

* * *

The communications window on my captain’s screen, normally dead as the famous doornail, lit up. I put the feed inside of it onto the virtual bridge’s largest monitor.

On the feed, as advertised, was Secretary Ocampo.

“Mr. Daquin, are you there?” he asked. He was looking into his PDA camera, inside what looked like a stateroom even smaller than the one he had on the Chandler.

I am, I thought.

“Okay, good,” Ocampo said. “I only have an audio feed for you. They didn’t give me a video feed for some—” He stopped here abruptly. He had just realized that the reason he didn’t have a video feed was because there wasn’t a body for him to look at, just an exposed brain in a clear box.

But I had a video feed, so I could see a flush rising through Ocampo’s features. He had at least enough grace to be ashamed of himself for forgetting what he had gotten me into.

It’s all right, I thought. I just wanted to talk anyway. If that’s all right. If you have time.

“Today is a religious observance day for the Rraey who run this outpost,” Ocampo said. “So nothing’s going on today. It’s why I’m able to speak to you at all.”

Hooray for Rraey Christmas, I thought, to Ocampo.

He smiled at this. “So, what’s on your mind?” he asked. And then I got to see another flush rise through his face as he realized just how inappropriate that particular phrase might be to me. This time, at least, he didn’t try to run from it.

“Jesus, Rafe,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

It’s all right, I assured him.

“I’m not sure why you even wanted to speak to me,” Ocampo said. “If I were in your shoes—fuck.”

Okay, if I could laugh, I would definitely be laughing right now.

“I’m glad one of us would be,” Ocampo said. “My point is I don’t know why you want to speak to me. I assumed that given what has happened to you, you would never want to speak with me again. That you would be furious.”

I was furious, I admitted, which was 100 percent true. I can’t say I’m happy even now with the situation I’m in. You know what they did to me. To my body.

“Yes.”

That’s nothing to be happy about. But I remember what you said to me the last time I saw you. Do you remember?

“Not really,” Ocampo said. “I, uh.” He paused. “There was a lot going on that day,” he said.

You said that you had to ask where your loyalties were, to the Colonial Union or to humanity. You said there was a difference between the two.

“All right. Yes. I remember that now.”

I want to know what you meant by that, I thought to him. Because while neither you nor I can change what’s happened to me, maybe there’s something you can tell me that makes sense of it all. So I don’t think I’ve lost my body and my freedom for nothing.

Ocampo was quiet at this for a moment, and I was content to let him take his time.

“You understand there is a lot that I can’t tell you,” he said, finally. “That much of what I’m doing now is classified. That my colleagues could be listening in to this conversation so that it wouldn’t be safe to share anything confidential with you, and that even if they weren’t listening in that I wouldn’t share it anyway, because that’s the nature of things.”

I understand that, I thought. Secretary Ocampo, I know what my role is. “Mine is not to ask why, mine is to do or die.”

Ocampo blinked, and then smiled. “You’re quoting Tennyson to me,” he said.

Misquoting him, more likely, but yes. What I’m saying is that I’m not asking about the tactics and strategy, sir. I’m asking about the philosophy. Surely that’s something you can talk about.

“I can,” Ocampo said, and then, jokingly, “but how much time do you have?”

I have all the time you want to give me, I thought, and let that just sit there, between us.

And then Ocampo started talking. Talking about humanity, and about the Colonial Union. He gave me a brief history of the Colonial Union, and about how its first encounters with intelligent alien species—all of which went badly for the Colonial Union, and almost destroyed the young political system—permanently marked it as aggressive and warlike and paranoid.

He talked about the decision to sequester away the planet Earth, to intentionally slow its political and technological progress in order to make it essentially a farm for colonists and soldiers, and how that gave the Colonial Union the raw human resources it needed to become a power among intelligent species far more quickly than any of the other species expected, or could deal with.

He explained how the Conclave, the union of hundreds of intelligent species, was formed in part because of the Colonial Union—how its leader, General Tarsem Gau, realized that more than any other species or government, the Colonial Union had a template that would eventually lead to domination of the local space—and of genocide, intentional or otherwise, of other intelligent species. That creating the Conclave was the only solution: that the Colonial Union would either be absorbed into the Conclave as one voice among many, or counteracted because the Conclave would be too large for the Colonial Union to take on.

He explained how this was a great idea in theory—but in reality the Colonial Union had nearly destroyed the Conclave once, and only General Gau’s personal decision to spare the Colonial Union kept all the species of the Conclave from falling on it like a train bearing down on a rodent on its track. He explained that once Gau was gone, the Colonial Union was a target—and all of humanity with it.

And he explained—only generally, only in vague terms—how he, a few trusted allies, and a few alien races who were presumed to be enemies of humanity but were in fact merely enemies of the Colonial Union thought there was a way to save humans as a species even if the Colonial Union should fall. And by “should” it was understood what was meant was “would,” and that, in fact, the Colonial Union wouldn’t so much fall, as be pushed, and in a particular direction.

All of this Ocampo expounded, with himself in the role as a reluctant catalyst or fulcrum for history, someone who wished it were not necessary to give the Colonial Union that push, but one who, recognizing it was necessary, nevertheless stood up—regretfully, yes; heroically, perhaps?—to administer the push, in the service of the species.

In short: what an asshole.

Which is not what I said.

Which is not what I even came close to allowing myself to think at the time.

What I said and what I was thinking during all this was variations of one simple phrase, that phrase being do go on.

I wanted him to talk, and talk, and then talk some more.

Not because he was the first human I had spoken to since that day on the Chandler. I didn’t like him that much, although of course I didn’t want him to know that.

I wanted him to think I was interested and curious in what he had to say, and thought as well of him as I could under the circumstances.

I wanted him to think I thought his thoughts were golden. Pure nuggets of humble wisdom. Do go on.

I wanted him to think this because while he was talking to me, he was connected to the Chandler. His PDA, more specifically, was connected to the Chandler.

And while he was talking to me, I was going through and copying into the Chandler’s storage every single file he had on his PDA.

Because here was my problem: No matter what sort of free run I had with the Chandler’s system, I was trapped there.

I couldn’t get into the system that Control used to connect to the Chandler. Someone would notice that the Chandler was trying to address the system. They could log every request. And they would eventually figure out who was doing that. And then I would be screwed.

Besides that, whatever system there was, would be entirely alien. I had suspected and Ocampo unwittingly confirmed that wherever we were, it was someplace controlled and run by the Rraey. I knew nothing about Rraey computing systems, or their design, or their programming languages. There was likely to be a computing shell of some sort in which human-designed operating systems could run, and some software that could port documents created on either side to the other.

But full access to the system? That wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t have the time or resources to get up to speed if it did, and I would be found out and probably tortured and then maybe killed if I tried.

Ocampo’s PDA, on the other hand. I knew all about that software and hardware.

Official Colonial Union PDAs were manufactured by lots of different companies but all had to run the same software. They all had to be able to talk to every other PDA, and any computers the Colonial Union used for official business. When you have that level of standardization across a government spanning trillions of miles, every other computer, operating system, or piece of technology is either standardized to it, or is able to communicate with it.

Oh, I knew Ocampo’s PDA, all right. Once he opened that connection to the Chandler, I knew how to access it, how to look around it, and how to extract files.

And I knew how to do it without him knowing.

Not that I expected him to know; he didn’t exactly have the “programmer” look to him, if you know what I mean. He’d be the programmer’s boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays.

I also knew that Ocampo would have all sorts of interesting files on his PDA. Because simply put, where else would he have them? That’s the computing and storage unit that he left the Chandler with. He would be even less familiar with Rraey technology than I would be. Makes sense that he would keep it, and that he would keep his own information on it. I remembered the exchange Ocampo had with Tvann about Vera Briggs. That poor woman was kept in the dark about a lot of things. Ocampo was used to keeping his own counsel about his business.

The longer I kept Ocampo talking, the more I could find out about his business.

Not that I was trying to sort through any of it while he was talking to me. I had to stay attentive and keep him talking. If I gave any indication he was boring me figuratively out of my skull then he’d drop the connection.

So I kept him talking and had a program make a copy of his PDA. All of it, right down to the communication program he was using to talk to me. I could sort out all of the data later, including the encrypted files.

All of which, it turned out, were keyed to the PDA, so opening them in a virtual copy of the PDA would open the files just fine.

Sloppy.

Three cheers for sloppiness.

The entire copying process took just a little under two hours. I kept Ocampo talking the whole time. It required very little prompting.

Ever heard of “monologuing”? The thing where the captured hero escapes death by getting the villain to talk just long enough to break free?

Well, this wasn’t that, because I was still a brain in a box and likely to die the first time I was sent on a mission. But it was something close. And Ocampo had no problem talking and then talking some more.

I don’t think it was sheer megalomania, or, if I wanted to be nice about it, him taking pity on the guy he’d caused to be turned into a naked brain. I don’t know how many other humans there were where we were; I only knew of Ocampo, Vera Briggs, and whoever the woman was who helped supervise re-implanting weapons systems on the Chandler. Of the other two, the weapons systems supervisor looked sort of busy whenever I saw her. As for Vera Briggs, I imagine at this point she might not be feeling especially friendly toward Ocampo.

In other words, I think Ocampo just plain might have been lonely for human contact.

Which I could understand. I had been lonely too.

The difference being, of course, that one of us had made the choice to be lonely. The other one of us rather unexpectedly had the choice thrust upon us.

As it turns out, Ocampo’s desire to monologue lasted about fifteen minutes longer than the time I needed it to. I knew he was done when he said “But I must be boring you” to me, which is narcissist-speak for “Now I’m bored.”

You’re not boring me, I thought at him. But I understand how much of your time I’ve already taken up today. I can’t really ask for more of it. Thank you, Secretary Ocampo.

“Of course,” he said, and then his face got a look. I thought it resembled what the face of someone who felt guilty about something, but didn’t actually want to be troubled by doing anything to deal with that guilt, might look like.

I waited and eventually I think Ocampo’s vestigial sense of moral obligation kicked in.

“Look, Daquin, I know I’ve put you in a bad spot,” he said. “I know they’ve promised to return your body to you, and I know they will. They’ve done this before. But between now and then, if there’s something I can do for you, well…” He trailed off here, letting me imply that he’d be willing to do something for me, without actually saying it, which I think he thought would give him an out.

This guy was a treasure, this Assistant Secretary of State Tyson Ocampo.

Thank you, sir, I thought. I can’t think of anything I need from you right now. On the monitor, I could see Ocampo visibly relax; I had just let him off the hook. Which gave me the space to say what I really wanted to. But there is one thing you can do for me in the future.

“Name it,” Ocampo said.

Someday soon they will give me a mission. My first real mission, not the simulated ones they’ve been having me running. It would mean a lot to me if, on that day, you and Vera Briggs came to see me off.

“You mean, there on the Chandler.”

Yes, sir. I realize that to some extent, in my condition—and that was an intentional knife thrust to the guilt centers of Ocampo’s brain, right there—it wouldn’t matter whether you said good-bye inside of the Chandler or outside of it. But it would mean a lot to me. You and Ms. Briggs are the only people I know now. I’d like someone to see me off. Just a couple of minutes here before I go. If you would.

Ocampo thought about it for a minute, which was either him figuring out the logistics or trying to see if he could get out of it. “All right,” he then said. “We’ll do it.”

You promise? I asked. Because this was the guy who just trailed off on “If there’s something I could do for you.”

“I promise,” Ocampo said, and I believed him.

Thank you, Secretary Ocampo, I said. You’re a good man.

Ocampo either smiled or winced at that.

Either way, then he waved and cut the signal.

* * *

Things I learned from Ocampo’s PDA:

One, there was no doubt Ocampo had known he was going away. He stocked himself quite a library of entertainments—several thousand videos ranging from classic movies from Earth to the latest serials from Phoenix, an equal number of books and musical tracks, and a fair sampling of video games, although these were mostly a decade or more old; I guess when you’re running the universe, you don’t have time to keep up with everything.

Oh, and mountains of porn.

Look, no judgment. Like I said, it’s clear he knew he was going to be away for a long time, and probably without significant human companionship. I’m not going to say I wouldn’t do the same thing in his shoes. I’m just saying there was more of it than any other sort of entertainment.

And yes, I looked at some. I may be a brain in a box, but that saying that the biggest sex organ is the mind? In my case, both literally and figuratively true.

Also I was curious to see if lack of gonads meant lack of response.

The answer: definitely not. Which was more of a relief than you might think.

Anyway, I might have just gone on about porn too long.

The point was: Ocampo planned for the long term.

Also in the PDA: a truly impressive amount of confidential information from the Colonial Union.

To begin, all the information I think there might have been on the Colonial Union’s military capabilities—not just the general Colonial Defense Forces but also its Special Forces and its capabilities. Information on ships, their capabilities, and their state of readiness.

Information about the manpower of the Colonial Defense Forces, its fatality rate over the years, and information about how the lack of relationship with Earth was having an impact on CDF readiness—after all, if you can’t get new soldiers, every soldier you lose becomes one less soldier you can muster.

Detailed files on the civilian arm of the Colonial Union government with particular emphasis on the Department of State, which made sense considering who Ocampo was, but every aspect of the CU bureaucracy was gone over in what looked like exhausting detail (I did a lot of skimming).

Information on the Colonial Union merchant fleet—the thousands of trade and cargo ships that crossed between the planets—including which ones were purpose-built and which ones were repurposed from CDF ships, and their most recent trade routes.

Briefs on the current relationship between the Colonial Union and every known non-human intelligent species, as well as the Conclave as a political entity, and the Earth.

Briefs on every single Colonial Union planet, population, defensive capabilities, and a list of targets that would offer maximum damage, either to population, to infrastructure, or to industrial capacity.

Blueprints and assessments of Phoenix Station, the seat of the Colonial Union government and humanity’s single largest spaceport.

In other words: just about every single bit of information you would want to have in order to plan an attack on the Colonial Union and make it stick. Or at least what I thought you would need. I’m not an expert. But that’s what it looked like to me.

Now, not all this information was classified. Some of this information you could get just from looking at an encyclopedia or public records. Ocampo or anyone else using this information wasn’t exactly going to have the ability to just access a local data network. Ocampo brought with him everything he’d need—or thought he’d need.

But then there was the rest of it.

The new information.

The data Ocampo was given since he got here—here, incidentally, being a military base hollowed out of an asteroid, made and run by the Rraey until some recent tangles with the Colonial Union and some others made them scale way, way back—and information he’d created since he’d been here.

With this group.

With the Equilibrium.

Which is what they were calling themselves, anyway.

I thought it was a stupid name. But they weren’t giving me a vote. And if they did I would probably name it “The League of Assholes,” so I don’t think they would mind not having my input.

This new information included audio and video recordings of meetings and the automatic transcriptions of the same. Those were useful because they tagged who was saying what. This was useful because some of the people in the meetings were from species I’d never encountered before—a fact that was not especially impressive since most of my travel was within the Colonial Union, but still something to deal with.

Most of the transcriptions were of meetings about unexciting things—discussions about the maintenance of the base, for one, which apparently had a mold problem that was aggravating the respiratory systems of several of the species there, to which I thought, well, Good.

But then I found some interesting transcripts after all.

For example: one recorded only a couple of weeks into our stay at the base, which started off with Ku Tlea Dho, a Rraey diplomat, catching Ocampo not paying attention.

“You seem distracted, Secretary Ocampo,” Dho said. The video had him down the arc of the table that dominated a tiny meeting room, which had a dozen people in it, most from different races.

“I’m still getting my bearings on the station, Ambassador Dho,” Ocampo said.

“You will be here for a while, Secretary,” Dho said. “You will have time.”

Ocampo smiled here. “Hopefully not too much more time.”

“How do you mean?” asked Ake Bae. He was an Eyr. The Eyr were members of the Conclave, or so I learned when I checked the files Ocampo brought with him. Increasingly unhappily members of the Conclave.

“The time has come to discuss the endgame,” Ocampo said, to the room. “Our endgame.”

“Has it.”

“It’s why I am here, Ake Bae,” Ocampo said.

“Indeed,” said Ake Bae. “Are you sure, Secretary Ocampo, that you’re not confusing your own endgame with our endgame? I understand that you are now in exile from the Colonial Union for the duration of the campaign at the very least. That does not imply that Equilibrium must now change its schedule to accommodate your personal needs or inclinations.”

Ocampo smiled again, but not exactly a nice smile. “I understand the concern,” he said, looking around the room. “I know very well that many of you have the opinion that humans, individually and as a species, have an outsized opinion of our importance to events, both in general and here with our particular activity. I’m also aware that many of you are of the opinion that I’ve always been a pain in the ass.”

There were noises in the room that I assumed equated to laughter.

“Let me remind you, however, that the roots of this rebellion of ours come from when we, the Colonial Union, struck out against the Conclave at Roanoke,” Ocampo continued. He looked around the room at the assembled species. “How many of your governments watched the Conclave form, and felt helpless to do anything about it?” He looked at Ake Bae. “How many of your governments joined the Conclave rather than fight it? The Colonial Union—humanity—were the only ones to bloody the Conclave. The only ones to show they could be bloodied. The only ones to show that General Gau’s experiment with hegemony could be toppled.”

“You seem to be discounting the attempted coup of Gau after Roanoke,” Ake Bae said.

“A coup given impetus by the Colonial Union’s attack on the Conclave fleet,” Ocampo countered. “My point, Ake Bae, is that we are here today because of what humans have done. If we have a high opinion of our importance to this cause of ours, it’s because we’ve earned it. It’s not merely ego.”

“There’s irony in praising the Colonial Union’s actions against the Conclave when it’s that very action that convinced us all that it must be destroyed along with the Conclave,” said Utur Nove. Nove was from Elpri. I had no idea until that moment that a planet named Elpri even existed.

“We all agree that the return to an equilibrium of power is best for all of our species,” Ocampo said. “Thus the very name of our organization. The Conclave represents the primary threat to that equilibrium. We agree about that. We also agree that the Colonial Union grew too powerful in opposition to the Conclave. But don’t confuse the Colonial Union with humanity.”

He nodded to Paola Gaddis, who was the other human I’d seen, the one who supervised the installation of the weapons systems. She nodded back at him.

“My colleague here represents the interests of several governments of Earth,” Ocampo said. “She will be happy to tell you all the ways those governments are not even remotely concerned about the Colonial Union’s interests. In the end, the Colonial Union is not humanity. It is merely a government. When the Colonial Union falls, and it will, then the Earth might finally take up the mantle of leading the former worlds of the CU. Or those worlds might form other unions. Humanity will survive. Humanity will continue as part of the new equilibrium.”

“Humanity, perhaps,” Ake Bae said. “But I was speaking of you in particular, Secretary Ocampo. You and your own endgame, which is different from that of the Equilibrium.”

Ocampo smiled again, picked up his PDA from the table. The video feed got momentarily wavy, trying to stabilize the image while being lifted. “You know what this is, Ake Bae.”

“It’s a personal data assistant, I believe,” Ake Bae said.

“It is,” Ocampo said. “And it contains nearly all of the last decade of data from the Colonial Union State Department and the Colonial Defense Forces. Nearly every confidential file or report on the CU’s doings and conflicts. Everything they don’t want known, or would want swept under the carpet. Every double-cross of an ally, completed or intended. Every military action on one of its own worlds. Every assassination. Every ‘disappearance.’ All of it true. All of it verifiable. All of it hugely damaging to the Colonial Union.”

“The data you promised us to help us plan our strategy for our next phase,” Ake Bae said.

“No,” Ocampo said. “Not the next phase. The last phase.” He shook the PDA for emphasis, and the video got woozy again. “Understand that every piece of data from the Colonial Union is accurate and verifiable. It all happened. And so it will serve as cover for what I will add to it.”

“What will you add?” asked Dho.

“All of our operations,” Ocampo said. “Every ship we’ve commandeered, human and Conclave. Every agitation we’ve spearheaded on Colonial Union and Conclave worlds. Every attack, up to and including the destruction of Earth Station. All of it altered, to make it look as if it happened under the aegis of the Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense forces. All verified by both my security hash and the security hash of my former boss, the current secretary of state.”

“And how did you get that?” asked Paola Gaddis.

“The weakest part of any security and verification scheme is the people who use it,” Ocampo said.

Right then I nearly paused the video to savor the rich irony of that statement, all things considered.

“And the fact they trust the people they’ve known for years as friends and allies,” Ocampo continued, oblivious to my scorn. “Secretary Galeano is no pushover but she has a soft spot for loyalty. I earned her trust long ago. I’ve never done anything that would cause her to doubt it.”

“Except this,” Gaddis pointed to the PDA. “And everything else you’ve done for Equilibrium.”

“I’m not going to suggest Galeano will ever forgive me,” Ocampo said. “She won’t. I like to think that in time she’ll recognize the necessity.”

“She won’t,” Gaddis said. Ocampo shrugged.

“This does not explain why this would be the last phase,” Ake Bae said, bringing the discussion back around. “It just makes the Colonial Union culpable for our actions.”

“No,” Gaddis said, before Ocampo could speak. “The Earth already believes the Colonial Union made the attack on Earth Station, to cripple us and to keep us dependent. Getting confirmation would mean a state of war between us.”

“Which would force the hand of the Conclave,” Ocampo said.

“Right,” Gaddis said. “Right now it’s playing nice with Earth but still keeping us at arm’s length because it doesn’t want to antagonize the Colonial Union. But if the CU’s verifiably responsible for the destruction of Earth Station, as shown by its own documents, it all falls by the wayside. The Conclave will invite the Earth to join.”

“Which will antagonize those of us who don’t want the humans in the Conclave,” said Utur Nove. “No offense,” he said, to Gaddis.

“None taken,” she said. “And that’s what we want, anyway. The division will weaken the Conclave, just as the Colonial Union decides that it’s a material threat and moves to destroy it.”

“A move which would fail,” Nove said.

Ocampo shook his head. “The Colonial Union will fail if it goes toe-to-toe with the Conclave, yes,” he said. “But it wouldn’t do that. It didn’t do it when it destroyed the Conclave fleet at Roanoke. It didn’t send its ships into combat with the Conclave’s. It sent assassins—Special Forces to sneak up and place antimatter bombs on each ship, and then detonate them all at the same time. It was a psychological blow as much as a physical loss. That’s how the CU did it. That’s how it would do it again. One assassin, one shot—total destruction. Which is how it will happen this time.”

“You plan to assassinate General Gau!” Nove exclaimed, following Ocampo’s implication.

“No,” Ocampo said, and pointed to Nove. “You are going to plan it.” He pointed at Ake Bae. “Or you are going to plan it. You two are both in rather better positions to make it happen. Whoever does it is not my particular concern. The point is whichever of you plans it, it will become obvious that you did it at the behest of the Colonial Union. The CU knows that humiliating Gau nearly brought the end of the Colonial Union. It knows that Gau requires loyalty to him, not the Colonial Union. Killing him destroys that loyalty. Killing him destroys the Conclave.”

“Which leaves the Colonial Union the largest power standing,” Ake Bae said.

“No,” Gaddis said. “Not without the Earth. No soldiers. No colonists.”

“Unless the Earth changes its mind,” said Ku Tlea Dhu.

“At the right time, we will motivate them otherwise,” Ocampo said. “We’ve done it before. We can be equally persuasive this time.” He motioned away from the room, toward, I guessed, the docks in which the Chandler was being worked on and equipped. “Unless you’ve got a better use for all the ships we’ve been taking.”

“A thing which is getting harder to do,” Dhu said. “We can’t trick all the ship captains as you did with the Chandler’s.”

“All the more reason to bring things to an active conclusion,” Ocampo said. “We’ve always been a small but potent unit. Small isn’t the problem. The potency of our actions is the key.”

“And all this begins by releasing the information on that,” Ake Bae said, pointing to the PDA.

“Yes,” Ocampo said.

“And where do you suggest we release it?”

“We release it everywhere,” Ocampo said. “Everywhere, all at once.”

“I think this is a good plan,” Gaddis said. “I even think we have a chance of making it work as we intend to.”

“It’s nice the two humans are in agreement,” Nove said. I noted that sarcasm was a near-universal trait of intelligent species.

“With respect, Ambassador Nove, our agreement is a good thing,” Gaddis said. “Don’t forget that through all of this, it’s my planet that is the most vulnerable. We lack spaceships. We lack military power. The governments I represent believe Equilibrium offers us the best chance to build up our defenses before everyone else turns their attention to us again. This plan can make that happen.” Nove shifted its weight, unhappy.

Gaddis turned her attention back to Ocampo. “Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have risks. Principal among them being that the Colonial Union has to believe you are dead. And died loyal. If they think you’re alive and a traitor, you know they won’t stop looking for you.”

Ocampo nodded. “The Colonial Union knows what it means when a ship is taken,” he said. “They know everyone but the pilot is killed. They won’t think it will be any different for me.”

“You are an undersecretary of the State Department,” Nove pointed out.

“On vacation,” Ocampo said. “Nothing to identify me as anything other than an unlucky civilian.”

“You don’t think they will suspect you,” Gaddis said.

“I’ve been part of this for several years now,” Ocampo said. “I’ve been funneling information to Equilibrium all this time. If they were going to catch me they would have done it before I left.”

“You had people you used,” Thu said.

“I had a small number of people who operated independently and subcontracted,” Ocampo said. “I cleaned up before I left.”

“You mean you had them killed,” Thu said.

“The ones who could bring things back to me, yes.”

“And that won’t look suspicious at all,” Gaddis said, archly.

“Give me a little credit for subtlety,” Ocampo said.

“All this talk,” Ake Bae said. “All this planning, all this strategizing, and yet we still don’t know your endgame, Secretary Ocampo.”

“It’s the same as the endgame for Equilibrium,” he said. “The end of the Conclave. The end of the Colonial Union. The end to superpowers in our little corner of space. And when it’s all said and done, our group, which acts in the shadows, fades into them forever. And we go back to our worlds.”

“Yes, but you’re dead,” Ake Bae said. “Or at least the Colonial Union thinks so. And it is in your—and our—interest for them to continue to believe so.”

“For now,” Ocampo said.

“And later?” Ake Bae asked.

“Later things will be very different,” Ocampo said.

“You don’t think this will be a problem.”

“I don’t.”

“And you’re sure about this.”

“Nothing is ever certain,” Ocampo said. “But to go back to earlier points in this conversation, after what I’ve done for this group of ours, and for our goals, I think I’ve earned some confidence for my opinions. And my opinion is: No. When all is said and done, this won’t be a problem at all.”

And then they started talking about the mold problem some more.

I came away from this with two thoughts.

One, and again: Ocampo was a real piece of work.

Two, that sob story he told me about humanity and the Colonial Union was a load of crap.

Scratch that—not entirely a load of crap. What he told me was the nice version. The version where he was a selfless martyr for humanity rather than the guy who was planting a bomb in order to profit from the chaos. I had no love for that Ake Bae character, but he or she or it was not wrong. Whatever Ocampo was up to, he was in it for himself as much as, of not more so, than he was for anyone or anything else.

And then there was the third thought: Ocampo’s megalomania, or whatever it was, had already gotten thousands of people killed.

Not only his megalomania. He wasn’t working alone. But he sure seemed to be doing some of the heavy lifting.

And soon, they would want to use me to do more of it.

* * *

And then, like that, it was time.

“We are giving you a mission,” Control said, one morning, or at least during the time of day that I’d been thinking of as morning since I got to the Equilibrium base.

Okay, I thought to Control. That’s good news. What’s the mission?

“We will provide you with a mission brief once you’re near the skip point.”

So two or three days from now, I thought.

“Sooner than that,” Control said. “More along the line of eight of your hours.”

That was an interesting admission. Skip drives, which are how we travel immense distances in space, only engage when space-time is flat enough—that is to say, far away from a gravity well.

By telling me the rough amount of time it would take to get to skip distance, Control was telling me something about where we were. That the base was someplace that had a low mass, not especially close to anything more massive, like a planet or moon.

Basically Control was telling me we were at an asteroid, at a far distance from its star.

Which I knew, but which Control didn’t know I knew. Control never told me.

By telling me now, either Control slipped, or didn’t think it mattered.

Since I knew Control had done this before many times, it didn’t seem likely it was a slip. So Control figured it didn’t matter. And I figured it didn’t matter because either they thought I was well conditioned to respond like they told me, or they didn’t plan on me surviving the mission.

I thought about my armaments—a couple dozen missiles and beefed-up beam systems, perfect for blinding communication systems and incoming missiles. And then I thought about my defensive systems, which hadn’t been substantially upgraded from when the Chandler was a trade ship.

So, yeah. I was betting on the “not coming back” scenario.

All right, I thought. It would at least be helpful to know the general sort of mission it is, however. So I might practice some simulations on the way.

“That won’t be necessary,” Control said. “We prefer you to stay focused on the mission once it starts.”

Understood, I said. Does this mean I’ll have control of the ship to skip distance?

“No,” Control said. “We will control the Chandler for the disembarkation and for a short portion of time thereafter. After which a course will be set. You will have full control after the skip. Until then you are to monitor systems. We will keep a communication channel open so you may alert us if there are any problems.”

The further I get from you the longer the lag will be in our communication, I pointed out. The speed of light still applies.

“We don’t anticipate any problems,” Control said.

You’re the boss, I thought. When do we start?

“Secretary Ocampo has asked us to delay the start of your mission until he can say good-bye to you,” Control said. “As was your request.”

Yes.

“As a courtesy to him, we will allow this. He is currently otherwise engaged. When he’s done, he will travel to you. You will have ten of your minutes to say your farewells. This will happen within the next two hours.”

Understood. Thank you, Control. It means a lot to me.

Control didn’t say anything to this; I could see that it had broken its connection. That was fine.

I had a couple of hours to prepare for my mission.

I prepared.

* * *

“I remember the last time I was here,” Ocampo said.

He was standing on the bridge of the Chandler. With him were Vera Briggs and an escort of two Rraey soldiers.

I imagine it looks a little different now, I thought to him. A bit emptier.

Ocampo visibly winced at this; I could see it happen through one of the bridge cameras. Vera Briggs was silent and staring, in a horrified fashion, at the box containing my brain. The Rraey, for their part, were unreadable to me. That’s the thing about aliens, I suppose.

Thank you for coming to see me, I thought, to both Ocampo and Briggs. I really appreciate it.

“You’re welcome,” Ocampo said. “To be honest it’s nice to be off that rock—”

One of the Rraey made a throat-clearing sound here, suggesting some nonverbal cues were universal; that is, if you have a throat.

“—it’s nice to have a change of scenery, I should say.” Ocampo fairly glared at the Rraey.

I don’t want to take up too much of your time, I thought. I know the two of you are busy. Also, Control told me that I had ten minutes with you.

“Right,” Ocampo said. “And in fact we should probably start on our way back. They were annoyed with us enough when I insisted we say good-bye.”

I understand, I replied. And I think I need to get started anyway.

From outside the bridge came a loud clanging noise, followed by what sounded like voices. It might have been the Chandler’s intercom speakers acting up. Or it could have been something else.

Both Ocampo and Briggs jumped. The two Rraey said something to each other in their own language and hoisted their weapons. One of them held a hand out to Ocampo and Briggs, signaling that they were to stay on the bridge. The Rraey then exited the bridge to investigate.

The automatic, reinforced door to the bridge slammed shut, sealing Ocampo and Briggs in and the Rraey out.

“What the hell?” Ocampo asked.

There was a low thrumming sound as the Chandler’s engines ramped up from their resting phase to propulsion phase.

“What are you doing?” Ocampo asked me.

I’m not doing anything, I replied. I don’t have control over the ship yet.

There was a banging on the bridge door. The Rraey were trying to get back in.

“Open the door,” Ocampo said to me.

I don’t have control of the door.

“Who does?”

Whoever it is that has been running my simulations. I don’t know who they are. They just told me to call them Control.

Ocampo swore and pulled out his PDA. Then he swore again when he couldn’t open up a line back to base. When the PDA got to the Chandler, it automatically connected to the ship’s network. The Chandler’s network gave every appearance of being down.

Ocampo looked around at the bridge stations. “Which of these is for communications?”

None of them are right now, I thought at him. The bridge stations are cut out of the command loop. Everything gets routed through a simulated bridge which I’m supposed to control.

“So you are in control of this ship!”

No, I said “supposed to,” I pointed out. I’m not in control of the ship yet. I only get control once the ship has skipped. It’s Control who is behind this.

“Then talk to Control!” Ocampo yelled.

I can’t. I’ve never been given the ability to contact them. I have to wait for them to contact me.

And lo and behold, guess who suddenly came onto the line.

“The Chandler is moving,” Control said. “Explain how.”

I don’t know, I thought. You’re the one in control of this ship. You tell me.

“I’m not in control of the ship.”

Well, someone is.

“It has to be you.”

How can that be? I exclaimed. Check it yourself! I’m not doing a damn thing in the simulation!

There was a brief pause here as Control ascertained that, indeed, inside the simulation I was doing nothing. While this was happening the banging at the bridge door became more insistent and it sounded like fists were being replaced by weapon butts.

Then Control’s voice came over the bridge speakers. “Secretary Ocampo,” it said.

“Yes?”

“You are controlling the Chandler in some way.”

“The hell I am,” Ocampo said.

“You’ve sequestered yourself in the bridge,” Control said.

“We’re locked in here, you asshole,” Ocampo said. “And I can’t help but notice that my Rraey escort is on the other side of the door. What are you up to?”

“Please cease your actions.”

“I am not doing a goddamned thing!” Ocampo yelled. He motioned to the bridge stations. “These fucking things don’t work! It’s you who is doing this!”

There was a pause; Ocampo looked confused. It took him maybe a second or two longer to realize that the hammering on the door had stopped while he was yelling at Control.

“You have purged all the air everywhere but the bridge,” Control said, after a minute. “You have just killed two Rraey.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ocampo said, clearly exasperated. “It’s not me! I’m not in control of this ship! You are! You are the one who is doing this! You’re the murderer, not me! Why are you doing this?”

“Enough,” Control said. By this time I could see on my simulated sensors that the Chandler had completed its disembarkation process and was beginning to accelerate away from Equilibrium base. This would be the point where Control would have no choice but to cut its losses and try to either disable or destroy the Chandler. I was curious to find out what would happen next.

What happened next was that a ping hit my personal set of sensors. It was a signal that was meant for the bomb, nestled next to my brain in my box.

It was supposed to detonate the bomb, killing me.

What it did instead was launch a dozen missiles from the Chandler.

Let’s just say I had a philosophical disagreement with the whole “blow up my brain” strategy. And this was my editorial comment on that plan.

I think I actually heard a squawk of surprise from Control as those dozen missiles popped up on its sensors.

There were three ships aside from the Chandler docked at Equilibrium station, one a refurbished Colonial Union frigate like the Chandler, one that looked like a purpose-built trade ship to me, and one of a design I didn’t recognize, so probably an alien ship. I imagined that all three of them were like the Chandler, currently being repurposed for whatever asshole plan Equilibrium had up its sleeve for each of them.

I tasked a missile to each ship.

If those ships had crews on station, it’s possible that they could have stopped the missiles. But if all they had were brains in boxes, not given control of their own ships, then they were sitting ducks.

Each of those missiles hit home, crippling but not entirely destroying the ships.

Intentional on my part. If there were other brains in boxes in those ships, they didn’t deserve to die at my hand.

They didn’t deserve any of the horror that happened to them.

Six missiles aimed for Equilibrium base’s weapon arrays, because I didn’t want them to have a chance to mess up my getaway with a well-placed missile, or two, or ten.

One missile homed in on the Equilibrium base energy generator, because I figured if they were worried about things getting dark and cold, they would have less time to worry about little old me, or the Chandler.

One missile went to the base communication array, to make it more difficult to get the word out. They’d undoubtedly try to launch some skip drones, but I’d already configured my beam weapons to burn those out before they got anywhere close to skip distance. Factoring in tracking lag from the speed of light would be tricky. But I’d had time to practice.

That left one missile.

That one went to my best guess as to where Control was.

Because fuck that guy.

Yes, you could say that I’d been busy, using the Chandler’s outside cameras to scope out the base, and double-checking the information with the data I had taken from Ocampo’s PDA.

I knew I was going to have one chance to get it right. Any misses and everything suddenly became a lot more complicated.

Fortunately I still had a couple dozen missiles left.

But as it turns out I didn’t need them. When I launched the missiles I was still really close in to Equilibrium base. The targets had anywhere from ten to twenty-five seconds to respond. Which might have been enough in a battle situation.

But as a surprise? When the base and ships were unprepared for attack and the only person who could have raised the alarm was being kept busy with an argument with the very confused and increasingly hostile Secretary Ocampo?

Nope. Not enough time.

Every missile hit its mark.

The resulting chaos was glorious to me.

Glorious.

“Hello?” Ocampo said, and I realized that from his point of view, nothing had happened. He was still waiting for a response from Control.

I’m sorry, Secretary Ocampo, I thought at him. Control isn’t likely to respond to you at this point.

“Why not?”

Because I just stuffed a missile down its fucking gullet, that’s why.

“What?”

I just attacked Equilibrium’s base, I thought at him. Twelve missiles, all in the right places. It’s going to keep them busy while the three of us get to skip distance.

“What?” Ocampo said again. He clearly wasn’t getting it.

“You mean we’re going back?” Vera Briggs said. “Back home? Back to the Colonial Union?” It was, honestly, the first time I remember her speaking a complete sentence.

Yes, I said. That’s the plan. Back to Phoenix Station. Where I think they will be very interested in what Secretary Ocampo has to say for himself.

“You can’t do that,” Ocampo said.

Take you back to the Colonial Union? I asked. Yes I can. Yes I will. In fact, that’s what I was waiting to do.

“I don’t understand,” Ocampo said.

I’ve had control of the Chandler for weeks. I could have tried for an escape long before now. But I needed your data to take back. And I needed you to back it up. You’re going home, Secretary Ocampo.

“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” Ocampo said.

Sure I do.

“No, you don’t,” Ocampo said. “Don’t you understand that what we’re doing here is saving humanity—”

Everything after that point was cut short by the whoofing sound Ocampo made as Vera Briggs walked the couple of feet separating the two of them and kneed her boss square and hard in the balls.

I don’t even have balls anymore and I felt that.

Ocampo collapsed, groaning. Briggs kicked him several more times in the ribs and face, inexpertly but enthusiastically, until he stopped doing anything but lying there in a ball.

“Motherfucker,” Briggs said, finally backing away.

You didn’t kill him, did you? I asked.

“Trust me, I’m going to make sure he lives,” Briggs said. She spat on him; he didn’t even flinch. “Make me look like a fool by perpetrating treason behind my back? For years? Kill a ship full of people and give me the choice of death or being kidnapped? Make me an accomplice to killing even more people? No, Mr. Daquin. This asshole lives. And I’m going to make sure the Colonial Union knows everything I know, too. So you just get us back. You get us back. I promise you I’m going to take care of the rest of it. And you,” Briggs said to Ocampo. “You so much as move an inch between now and then and you’re going to wish I kicked you to death. You understand me, sir?”

Ocampo didn’t move a muscle for the entire rest of the trip.

* * *

“Let’s talk about the future,” Harry Wilson said to me.

It had been a busy week.

I had skipped the Chandler into existence roughly ten klicks from Phoenix Station itself, setting off every single proximity warning the station had. Which was the point; I didn’t want them to miss me.

As soon as I skipped I started broadcasting that I had Secretary Ocampo and critical information about an alien attack, which got everyone’s attention. Less than an hour after that the Chandler was swarming with Colonial Defense Forces, Ocampo and Briggs were taken off the ship—Ocampo to the infirmary of Phoenix Station’s detention facility and Briggs to high-level debriefing—and then the CDF tried to figure out what to do with me.

That’s when Wilson showed up.

“Why you?” I asked him—asked him, because he connected directly to me with his BrainPal, the computer inside his head.

“Because I’ve done this before,” he said. He explained that later, during his debriefing of me, during which I told him of my experiences and gave him all the information I had.

“The future,” I said, back in the present.

“Yes,” Wilson said.

“What I want for the future is to have a body.”

“You’re going to get that,” Wilson said. “We’re already working on it. The Colonial Defense Forces have already authorized growing a clone for you.”

“You’re going to put my brain in a clone?”

“Not exactly,” Wilson said. “When the clone is grown we’re going to transfer your consciousness into it. You’ll leave this brain behind and be put into a new one.”

“That’s … unsettling,” I said. My brain was the only part of me left, and now they were telling me that I was going to leave it behind.

“I know,” Wilson said. “If it helps, I’ve been through the process. You’re still you after it happens. Promise.”

“When can we start?” I asked.

“Well, that’s up to you,” Wilson said. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve already started working on your body,” Wilson said. “If you wanted it—and no one would say anything against you wanting it—we can get you one in a few weeks. But for someone with an already existing consciousness that we need to port into the new brain, it’s not optimal. They’d rather build your body slowly and pre-prime the new brain to accept your consciousness. That way the transfer goes off without a hitch.”

“How long will that take?”

“Less time than making a body the natural way, but still a few months,” Wilson said. “Honestly the longer we take prepping the body for consciousness the better it will be.”

“And in the meantime I’m stuck here on the Chandler.”

“‘Stuck’ is a relative term,” Wilson said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if you want, I might have a job for you. And the Chandler.”

“What’s the job?”

“The job is to be you. Both you, Rafe Daquin, and you, the brain running the Chandler. We want the various species we talk with to be aware that you’re real and that your story is real.”

“I already gave you all the information I have on Equilibrium,” I said. “It’s pretty convincing.”

“We don’t need to be convinced,” Wilson said. “We know you’re telling the truth. But you understand that us knowing about Equilibrium—us knowing that they were the ones behind the attack on Earth Station and the ones who have been setting the Conclave and the CU against each other—isn’t enough. Thanks to what Equilibrium has already done, the CU has almost no credibility. With anyone. Not with independent species. Not with the Conclave, or any species within it. And certainly not with Earth.”

“And having me around changes that?”

“Well, no,” Wilson admitted. I would have smiled at this if I could. “It doesn’t change it. But it does get our foot in the door. It offers others at least the possibility that we might be telling the truth. You can get us a hearing, at least.”

“What about the Equilibrium base?” I asked. “You sent ships there?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you anything about that,” Wilson said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Relax. You didn’t let me finish. I’m not supposed to tell you anything about that. Specifically, I’m not supposed to tell you that we found the base and we found a lot of fresh damage that corresponds to what you told me, but aside from that the base was deserted.”

“What do you mean deserted?” I said. “When did you get there?”

“We sent probes almost as soon as we got coordinates from you, and a couple of warships right after that.”

“Then you should have found something. They couldn’t have disappeared.”

“I didn’t say disappeared,” Wilson said. “I said deserted. There was a lot of evidence of someone having been there, and of the base having been used up until very recently. But whoever was there was gone. They left in a big damn hurry.”

“What about the other ships?” I asked. “The ones like me, I mean.”

“We found wreckage,” Wilson said. “Whether they were the ships like you or some other ships we can’t tell you yet.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere,” I said. “If you found wreckage, it was those ships.”

“I’m sorry, Rafe.”

“I don’t understand how they could have deserted the base that quickly. I knocked out their communications.”

“There’s the possibility that they had drones or ships in other systems set to investigate if there was no communication with the base,” Wilson said. “These assholes were building a fleet with hostage pilots. They probably figured one of them might try an attack or lead someone back to them sooner or later.”

“But I got away. If they planned for it, how did that happen?”

Wilson grinned. “Maybe you were better at it than they expected. They had to decide between evacuating their people or going after you.”

“But we still have all the evidence. You have Ocampo, for God’s sake! Have him talk.”

“He’s not going to be talking to anyone other than CDF intelligence for a while,” Wilson said. “More to the point, he doesn’t really have the capability to talk to anyone else at the moment.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that right now, you and he have a lot in common,” Wilson said.

It took me a second to figure out what that meant. Then I imagined Ocampo in his own little box.

“I don’t know how I feel about that,” I said, eventually.

“I think you should probably feel disgusted by it, but that’s just me,” Wilson said. “I wasn’t in charge of that decision. Look, Rafe, you’re right. We have all the facts. We have names. We have data. And when and if people choose to look at all that rationally, then they’ll realize that the Colonial Union isn’t to blame for a lot of the crap it’s currently getting the blame for. But until that time, being able to have you around to appeal to their emotions and sense of morality doesn’t hurt. We could use you.”

“To evoke pity.”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “Among other things. Also, we kind of need a ship.”

I thought about this. “For how long?” I asked.

“Hopefully not too long,” Wilson said. “Things are moving fast now. We’re already a week behind. We’ve sent back-channel messages to the Conclave and are arranging meetings now. We’re trying the same with Earth. In both cases things are complicated by the fact that some of their people are involved too. And meanwhile Equilibrium is still out there. And you’ve probably accelerated their schedule. Everything’s going to get done very soon, I expect.”

“And if it all works out, then my body is waiting for me.”

“Even if it doesn’t work out your body will be waiting for you,” Wilson said. “Although in that case you may have less time to enjoy it than you’d want.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“Of course,” Wilson said. “If you can give me an answer in a couple of days that would be good.”

“I will.”

“Also, if you say yes, then we’ll be working together,” Wilson said. “You and me and Hart Schmidt. Who is worried about you and quietly furious that he’s not allowed to talk to you yet and that I can’t tell him anything. Let me suggest that you let him in to see you as soon as that’s cleared from above.”

“I will,” I said again.

“You also need to tell us whether you want us to tell your parents about you yet,” Wilson said, gently.

This was something I had been waffling about. I was alive. But I didn’t think my family would be comforted by how I was right now.

“They still think I was lost with the rest of the crew,” I asked.

“Yes,” Wilson said. “We found lifepods and are retrieving the bodies and notifying the families. There was one lifepod that was destroyed. As you know. We can always say to your parents that some bodies haven’t been found. Which happens to be true, as far as it goes.”

“I’ll tell you what to do when I give you my other answer,” I said.

“Fair enough.” Wilson stood up. “One last thing. The State Department asked me to ask you if you’d do a write-up of your experience. A personal history.”

“You’ve already debriefed me.”

“I did,” Wilson agreed. “I got all the facts. I think they’re wanting to know everything else, too. You’re not the only person they’ve done this to, Rafe. I know that for a fact. At the end of this we’re going to have to put other people back together too. You telling us what it’s been like for you might help with that.”

“I’m not a writer,” I said.

“You don’t need to be,” Wilson said. “We’ll get someone to clean it up so it scans. Just talk the whole thing through. We’ll figure it out from there.”

“Okay,” I said.

And that’s what I did.

And that’s what this is.

The life of the mind.

Well, my mind, anyway.

So far.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular and acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, his most recent novel Lock In, and also Redshirts, which won 2013’s Hugo Award for Best Novel. Material from his widely read blog Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com) has earned him two other Hugo Awards as well. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

By John Scalzi

The Old Man’s War Series

Old Man’s War

The Ghost Brigades

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

The Human Division

The End of All Things

First published 2015 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

This electronic edition published 2015 by Tor

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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ISBN 978-1-4472-9842-7

Copyright © John Scalzi, 2015

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