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  Husher wasn’t so sure about that, but he did know that the freer dialog did real harm to discipline and the chain of command.

  It doesn’t help that Kaboh’s real job is to spy on me for the IU, Husher reflected.

  “Still no response from the Gok commander,” the Coms officer said, and the sensor operator spoke on the heels of that: “Enemy—uh, Gok Slags are drawing even with us, Captain.” Winterton blushed as Kaboh’s widened eyes fell on him. No doubt the Kaithian was outraged at the sensor operator for ‘prematurely’ classifying the aggressively maneuvering ships as enemies.

  Fortunately for the young ensign—though unfortunate for the Vesta—his slip-up was vindicated almost immediately. “The carrier just fired two guided missiles!” he said.

  Good enough for me. “Tactical, tell Commander Ayam to scramble Pythons, prioritizing enemy Slags as targets,” Husher rattled off, his speech as rapid and clipped as machine gun fire. “I don’t want those missiles getting anywhere near my hull—neutralize them with a pair of Gorgons.” With their advanced stealth capabilities, Gorgon missiles would likely be perfect, since the Gok missiles’ sensors weren’t sophisticated enough to detect the threat in time to adjust course. Gorgons were propelled by cold-gas thrusters, and they were covered in the darkest material ever made, which absorbed all but one-hundredth of one percent of the light it encountered.

  “The carrier’s continuing to accelerate, Captain,” the sensor operator said. “I think they’re aiming to ram us.”

  Husher’s gaze snapped to the tactical display. I can’t believe it. Even during the Gok Wars, only two of the Gok’s warships had ever attempted a kamikaze run. This really isn’t my day, is it? “Nav, evasive maneuvers, now!” he barked.

  “Aye, Captain,” Kaboh said, tiny blue-white fingers flying across his console.

  But as the Vesta listed to port, its starboard thrusters firing, the Gok warship turned as well, its main gun tracking the supercarrier’s trajectory.

  It was a feint. “Helm, engines all ahead!”

  “Yes, sir,” the Helm officer said, but it was too late. The Vesta had no time to overcome the inertia from her recent reverse thrust, and while her engines were powerful, the Gok’s trickery paid off. Kinetic impactors tore into the supercarrier’s starboard side near the stern, sending violent tremors through her entire frame and rocking Husher in his seat.

  He tried to give another order, but his throat had closed up, and his ears began to ring shrilly. Dark spots danced before his eyes, and suddenly a memory overtook him, so vividly that he might have been watching a vid:

  A white clapboard house, standing proud in the suburbs. Lights on in both the living room and the upstairs washroom, piercing the deepening dusk.

  Then: a fiery gash across the night sky. A deafening explosion. Fire that blossomed until it engulfed the entire house.

  “Captain?” It was Fesky, who’d risen from the XO’s Chair and was standing over him, shaking him. “Captain!”

  “Hit them,” he managed to gasp. “Hit them with everything we’ve got.”

  Chapter 2

  Cybele

  Husher and Fesky walked in silence as they neared the hatch where the crew section of the Vesta ended, their muffled footfalls the only sound other than the rustling of the Winger’s feathers.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Fesky asked, shattering the quiet. “Back in the CIC…I wasn’t sure you’d make it through the engagement. What happened?”

  “I’m not sure, exactly. But we won, Fesky. That’s what matters. We took out the Gok carrier before it could do the same to us.”

  “Don’t you think you should see Doctor Bancroft?”

  He shrugged. “I have a checkup soon. I’ll mention what happened to her then.”

  Fesky sighed, shaking her head a little. “I can come with you to this meeting, you know. You don’t have to go alone.”

  A wry smile played across Husher’s lips. “No thanks, Fesky. I’m not eager to leave the CIC to Kaboh for longer than I already have. I’m worried he’ll go looking for another Gok warship, so he can offer them the Vesta on a platter. I’m fine, and at a time like this, I want you in the command seat.”

  The Gok had always been close allies of the Ixa, and Husher didn’t want to give voice to his worst fear, even though it was probably on Fesky’s mind, too: that the Gok attack might have something to do with the return of the AIs who’d created the Ixa.

  “Understood,” the Winger said, reaching up to straighten his uniform’s lapel using the flat of her thickest talon. “This isn’t ironed properly, by the way.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t. With the number of reports I fill out every day, it’s a wonder I get a chance to eat.”

  “You could easily have someone iron it for you.”

  “A captain should iron his own uniform,” he said, turning toward the hatch and punching his access code into the terminal.

  “But you clearly aren’t doing it properly, human!” Fesky called after him as he strode through the hatch. He didn’t turn back, not wanting her to witness the return of his smile.

  Husher exited the corridor into a vast desert that stretched from horizon to horizon, dotted with cacti and rocks and not much else. Where the desert would have met the sky, it met the base of snowcapped mountains instead. By all appearances, he stood in the center of an enormous valley.

  When he turned to ensure the hatch had closed automatically, he saw that it had—a disembodied metal barrier, stark against the gleaming white of the barren wilderness. An access panel hung in midair beside it. Nodding to himself, Husher turned and continued on his way.

  Other than the sand, which actually did exist, the desert was an illusion conjured by his Oculenses, and it wasn’t nearly as vast as it seemed. It wasn’t anywhere as hot as a desert would be, either, though this section’s heating coils were located here, so it was warmer than elsewhere.

  The Oculenses had conjured the mountains, too, as well as the lush plain he strode toward. As for the gleaming city straddling that plain…that was mostly real. Mostly. Its name was Cybele.

  Not for the first time in the last thirteen years, Husher wondered how things had come to this—how he’d come to have fifty thousand civilians living on his warship.

  You know how, he told himself, and that was true. Even so, he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  In a time with so much talk of cutting the military, the idea of capital starships carrying actual capitals had seemed like the only way to avoid the cuts, even to Husher. They’d represented a way to expand military might that would be palatable even to the new Interstellar Union, who’d been bent on radical downsizing.

  Husher himself had been among the most emphatic to make the case: when the tech underlying the micronet’s instant communication system had been found to endanger the fabric of the universe, galactic society had needed something to bind it together. And so the new supercarriers would serve more than just a defensive function as they patrolled the galaxy with their vast arsenals. Those same arsenals would also keep safe the cities aboard them, and the cities would in turn allow the giant starships to justify their own expense by turning them into roving economic engines.

  The galaxy-wide exchange of news, ideas, and goods that the nomadic cities enabled had singlehandedly saved the military. But the cities’ existence also brought intense scrutiny to the actions of those commanding the warships carrying them. When engaging in battle had come to mean endangering thousands of galactic citizens, government oversight had intensified, and the ROEs became paralyzing.

  A tiny figure standing in the sand up ahead caught Husher’s eye, and he neared it faster than he should have—such was the nature of the illusory desert, which had a way of distorting distance. At first he thought it was a real girl, who’d wandered out here alone. But as he drew closer, he saw that she was just as nonexistent as the desert itself.

  Nevertheless, she frowned in his direction, though she remained completely
motionless. He stopped for a moment, staring back. “I’m so sorry,” he said to her, before moving on. When he glanced back two minutes later, she was gone.

  The Oculenses were one of the few technological gifts the Kaithe had been willing to bestow upon the galaxy’s other species, and the things had a limited ability to detect and interpret brain waves. It was an attempt at a noninvasive brain-computer interface, and usually it worked like it was supposed to. Other times, it picked up on threads from your subconscious and manifested them before your eyes. That wasn’t a pleasant experience, typically.

  The Kaithe’s technological stinginess wasn't due to a lack of proficiency. During their isolationist days, the diminutive aliens had often been called “the children,” but that name had fallen into disuse after their immense physical strength became known. There was also the revelation that they had created humanity millions of years ago, with the intention of using humans as weapons of war. During the eons since, they’d come to regret what they’d done, and now they were staunch pacifists, flatly refusing to contribute any tech that would bolster military capability.

  The Kaithe had, however, been perfectly willing to confer the ability to efficiently synthesize atmosphere in space, so that it didn’t have to be rocketed up from a planet at great cost. That had been the same advancement that had resulted in thousands of civilians living in the bowels of Vin Husher’s warship.

  Of course, the citizens of Cybele didn’t characterize it quite that way. They referred to this part of the ship as the Womb, and on days they were feeling particularly grandiose, they called it the Womb of Civilization.

  The desert sand transitioned smoothly into rolling, green plains overhung by a cloudless, sapphire sky. Like the desert’s sand, the grass of the plains was really there, as well as the soil it grew from—poured by the ton over the cold steel of the deck. Considering it existed inside a starship, this compartment was incredibly spacious, but the Oculenses made it look far, far bigger than it actually was. In reality, most of the city’s inhabitants occupied living quarters that were quite cramped. At fifty thousand people, Husher considered the city inside his ship to be extremely overpopulated.

  He reached the outskirts of Cybele, first passing protein synthesis and hydroponics facilities, where most of the ship’s food was produced. That included the food for his crew, which certainly cut down on the number of supply stops he had to make.

  This place does have its uses, he admitted.

  Next, he passed row after row of cubic residences, all clean and tidy. At least, their Oculens overlays were clean and tidy. Husher knew that underneath those overlays, most of Cybele’s structures were drab and covered in dust. Persistent illusions were a great help when it came to ignoring the need for regular cleaning.

  Everyone was free to take out their Oculenses, of course, but they rarely did. When someone installed an overlay—whether for their house or their body—everyone’s Oculenses forced them to see only that. There wasn’t an option to deactivate someone else’s overlay, even temporarily. Yes, you could leave your house without your Oculenses in, but that was now considered taboo, and anyway, there was a strong correlation between taking out your Oculenses and depression. That correlation was strongest in cities on capital starships like the Vesta, but it was fairly strong on planetary colonies, too.

  As a high-ranking military officer, Husher did have the rare ability to turn off any overlay, for security reasons. But he barely ever took advantage of that ‘privilege,’ since he also found it depressing to look at Cybele without its makeup on.

  Before long he reached Cybele City Hall; a great dot of a building made up of nested, concentric circles. Curiously, it didn’t occupy the city’s center, but a spot just off it.

  The real center of the city was reserved for Cybele University. According to Husher’s Oculenses, the campus’ snowy towers reared against the sky; sturdy obelisks streaming bright banners of many hues. The towers kept a watchful eye on all who lived in the city—according to the overlay, anyway. In reality, Husher knew the university was made up of drab buildings, none of which exceeded three stories. Cracks and vines ran up the beige walls in equal measure, and just a few meters over the roof, instead of sky, a gray, metal ceiling loomed.

  He entered city hall, passing between identical burgundy plaques proclaiming the building’s function. As he made his way toward the council chambers at the center, he was required to provide his ID code at three different checkpoints, despite that everyone on board the Vesta knew who he was.

  Of course, for all they know, my appearance could be just another overlay. That thought almost made him chuckle. He doubted many citizens of Cybele were inclined to dress themselves up as him.

  “Welcome, Captain Husher,” Mayor Dylan Chancey said in his usual warm tones from where he sat in his short-walled enclosure. It wasn’t immediately obvious Chancey was mayor just by looking at his seat—it resembled every other seat ringing the circular council chamber.

  “You know all the councilors, of course,” Chancey continued, “but we also have Maeve Aldaine with us, a Sociology undergrad from Cybele University. As a supplement to her studies, she expressed an interest in observing this meeting. I hope you don’t mind her being here.” The mayor gestured toward the young woman sitting beside him, whose bright red hair hung halfway down her head. She looked about the same age his daughter would have been.

  “That’s fine,” Husher said, nodding toward the young woman before returning his gaze to Chancey. The man never did much with his overlay, other than ensuring it concealed most of his gray hairs. He had a chiseled jaw naturally, as well as piercing eyes so brown they were almost black. Those eyes belied his mostly conciliatory demeanor.

  The woman who spoke next, on the other hand, made ample use of her overlay. “We were starting to wonder whether you’d show up, Captain,” Penelope Snyder said, leaning toward Husher. Her belly top and silk pants would have put a peacock to shame, and a bright, unnatural blue shone through the black feathered mask she wore at all times. Gleaming waves of midnight hair spilled down her face to frame her perfect complexion.

  Penelope Snyder was the president of Cybele University. Underneath her carefully assembled mirage, Husher knew that she carried at least forty pounds more than the overlay suggested, and also that she looked much closer to seventy than twenty. But with the magic of Oculenses, she could continue looking like this until the day she died.

  “I had an unusual amount of desk work to complete, today,” Husher said as he settled himself into the only empty chair. With that, he met Mayor Chancey’s gaze.

  The man nodded. “Yes, I expect you did. Today could come to mark either the end of a long peace or a historical anomaly. But let’s waste no more time in beginning. Today’s meeting won’t follow the typical format, since the event that necessitated it certainly wasn’t typical. We’ll see to our more usual tasks at the next council meeting, so that we can keep Captain Husher away from his duties as briefly as possible.”

  Husher nodded, folding his hands over his right thigh. “That’s appreciated, Mayor Chancey. Though I’m not exactly clear on the necessity for today’s meeting.”

  Chancey looked around at the nine councilors—three humans, four Wingers, a Kaithian, and a Tumbran—before his gaze settled on Snyder. “Would you care to explain our concerns to the captain, Penelope?”

  “With pleasure,” the university president said, smiling sweetly at Husher. “And I will try to stick to the mayor’s prescription for brevity, though as an academic I do struggle with that from time to time.” The remark brought a round of tittering from the other councilors. “To put it quite simply, Captain, we worry about whether you might be…well, prejudiced seems like a harsh word for this particular context. Biased, let’s say. We’re concerned it’s likely you carry an unconscious bias against the Gok.”

  Husher shook his head, his eyes narrowing slightly as he studied Snyder’s face—at least, the digital fantasy she called her face.
“I’m not sure I understand,” he said. “I took pains to ensure my actions followed the ROEs set out by the Interstellar Union.”

  “That’s true,” Snyder said, nodding, her raven feathers gently waving. “Technically.”

  “Technically?”

  The mayor interjected. “What Penelope means to say, Captain, is that while your actions did satisfy the prevailing Rules of Engagement, they satisfied them in letter more than they did in spirit.”

  “I’m still not following,” Husher said, trying not to growl. “If I can be frank, I already feel like the ROEs permitted the Gok warship to maneuver close enough to pose a significant danger to this ship.”

  “Ridiculous,” Snyder said, drawing out the last syllable. “I’m sorry, Captain, but given the firepower you have at your disposal, that carrier was a gnat compared to you. Listen, here’s our issue with what you did: you could have easily given the order to disable the Gok ship rather than destroy it outright.”

  “Ms. Snyder, if we’re about to go to war with the Gok—”

  “But we have absolutely no evidence that a war is actually brewing, Captain. That carrier could have just as easily been acting independently from the Gok government. But thanks to your actions, we don’t know. The handful of Gok pilots you took prisoner certainly haven’t told us. They may not even be privy to what their captain’s objective was.”

  Husher resisted the urge to shift in his seat. Did I act irrationally? He’d given the order to obliterate the Gok warship while coming out of whatever episode he’d suffered. It had seemed like the right call, but now Snyder and the other councilors were causing him to doubt his own judgment.

  Don’t be an idiot, he told himself. “It’s my job to do battle with vessels that attack us,” he said at last. “Often, that leads to destroying them. That’s the reality of war, and if we’re about to start a war with the Gok, then our position will be strengthened with one less carrier to—”