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"To intercept it as far out as possible Outside the planetary defenses, in any case, in an atteear We&039;re to keep the Rix ship froainst a battlecruiser," Hobbes protested "But, sir, that&039;s" Her mouth moved, but silently

"Suicide," he finished

She nodded slowly, staring intently into the colored whorls of the airscreen However quickly Hobbes had grasped the tactical facets of the situation, the politics seemed to have left her speechless

"Consider this as an intelligence issue, Hobbes," Zai said "We&039;ve never had a coate on an Iis It could reveal y and culture than the Apparatus wants the Rix to know Or"

Hobbes looked up into his eyes, still hammered into silence

"Or," he continued, "the Lynx may have been chosen to suffer the sacrifice that I was unwilling to ht that had tortured him since he&039;d received the pardon and the orders, the two ether, as if to indicate that neither could be understood without the other

He saw his own distress reflected in Hobbes&039;s face There was no other interpretation

Captain Laurent Zai, Elevated, had doo with his miserable self

Zai turned his eyes from the still speechless Hobbes and tried to fathohts aloud It was hard to say After the tension of the rescue, the bitter ashes of defeat, and the elation of rejecting suicide, his e He felt dead already

"Sir," Hobbes finally began "This creill serve you, will follow any orders The Lynx is ready to" Her voice failed her again "Die in battle?"

She took a deep breath

"To serve her Elittered as she said the words

Laurent Zai waited politely as she gathered herself But then he uttered the words he had to say

"I should have killed myself"

"No, Captain You weren&039;t at fault"

"The tradition does not address the issue of blame, Katherie It concerns responsibility I&039;m the captain I ordered the rescue By tradition, it was ain, but Zai had chosen the right words to preeuments In matters of tradition, he, a Vadan, was her mentor On the Utopian world she came from, not one citizen in a million became a soldier In Zai&039;s family, one male in three had died in combat over the past five centuries

"Sir, you&039;re not thinking of"

He sighed It was a possibility, of course The pardon did not prevent hiht even save the Lynx; the Navy was not above changing its orders But soht that the threads of tradition and obedience that forht that the rituals and oaths, the sacrifice of decades to the Ti had reached critical ularity of purpose from which there was no escape But it had turned out that his loyalties, his honor, his very sense of self had all been held in place by so that could be broken by a single word

Don&039;t, he thought to hi Home"

Hobbes was silenced by the words She ainst the blade again

He took aher renewed shock subside, then cleared his throat

"Let us a plan a way to save the Lynx, Hobbes"

Her still glittering eyes ather herself in its shapes He recalled what the war sage Anonymous 167 had once said: "Sufficient tactical detail will distract the od"

"High relative velocity," Hobbes began after a while "With full drone couration And standard lasers in the primary turrets We&039;d have a chance, sir"

"A chance, Hobbes?"

"A fighting chance, sir"

He nodded his head For a few moments after the orders had come, Laurent Zai had wondered if the creould continue to accept his co he had been raised to believe Perhaps it would be fitting if his crew betrayed hie one, half Utopian and half gray Her face was a reendary surgeons of her hedonistic world, but always shrouded with a deadly serious expression Generally she followed tradition with the passion of the converted But at certain tiap between them had closed; her loyalty and his betrayal, at the juncture of the Risen E chance, then," he said

" &039;No e

"And the rest of the crew?"

"Warriors all, sir"

He nodded And hoped she was right

MILITIA WORKER

Second-Class Militia Worker Rana Harter stepped back nervously frolev as it settled onto the track The train floated down softly, as if it weighed only a few ounces, and sighed a bit as it descended, drifting along the track a few centi card dealt across a glass table

But the delicacy was deceptive Rana Harter knew that the lev was hypercarbon and hullalloy, a fusion reactor and a hundred private cabins done in teakwood and marble It massed more than a thousand tons, would crush a human foot under its skirts as surely as a dia hammer Harter stood well back as the entry stairway unfolded before her

There was plenty of room here on the platforers for the lev, which could have easily accommodated its entire population This stop, the last before the polar cities of Maine and Jutland, was mostly to take on supplies But Militia Worker Rana Harter was at last going to step onto the train She had lived here in the Galileo Ad to the polar entanglement facility would be the first time she had left the GAP

Rana waited for someone to appear at the top of the entry stairway So train But the stairaited, impassive and empty She looked at her ticket, actually a sheaf of plastic chits ribbed with copper-colored circuitry and scribblecodes, which the local Legis Militia office had provided her There wasn&039;t much on the ticket that was human-readable Just the ti that looked like a seating assignis XV seee, around her

Rana waited at the bottoh a door without an invitation Here in Galileo township, such boldness felt like trespassing But after a half-an to flicker, and the alev raised a bit in pitch It was now or never, she realized

Had she waited too long? Would the stairway fold up as she cliears of a bicycle?

She placed one tentative foot on the lowest step It felt solid enough, but theRana took a quick breath and held it, and dashed up the stairway

She was just in ti for her At the top, Rana turned around to take a last look at her ho into a single spiral that irised closed like an umbrella And Rana Harter, flushed more from nerves than from the short climb, was inside the train that would take her to the pole

Her seat was several lev&039;s acceleration was so even that when Rana looked out the , she was surprised to see the landscape already whipping by, the snow and scrubgrass s nment had been the result of the Rix attack a few days before The Legis Militia was shifting onto war footing, and she&039;d read that strategic targets like the entangle heavily reinforced But as she passed the hundreds of soldiers and workers on the train, the scale of the Rix threat finally struck her The lev seemed full; every seat was occupied until she reached the one that uilt rising like a tardy schoolchild&039;s as she took the last e, his chair pitched back so that it was alned for half-day journeys A small array of controls floated in synesthesia before her, ht, entertainment, and help She waved them away, and folded herself into one corner of the chair

Rana Harter wondered why she had been assigned to the entanglement facility Surely it was the is XV But what could the militia need her there for? She wasn&039;t any kind of soldier The only weapon she was rated to use was a standard field autopistol, and you could empty a whole clip from one of those into a Rix commando without much effect She&039;d failed her combat physical, and didn&039;t have the coordination for a quick-interface job like re Rana had turned out to be good at--the reason she&039;d made second class in just a year--was , it turned out, so of chaotic systems" That meant she could look at the internal trajectories of a cluster of rocks--asteroids in the under-kilogras about it that a coether for the next few hours, or break up, threatening a nearby orbital platform Her CO explained that even the smartest imperial AIs couldn&039;t solve that kind of proble htest observational imprecision at the front end, the back end results would be hopelessly screwed up But brainbugs like Rana saw the swar system--a whole In deep synesthesia, this entity had a flavor/smell/sound to it: a deep, stable odor like coffee, or the shaky tang of erously apart

But why send her to the polar facility?

Rana had used equipment like the repeater array up there, and even perforear But they didn&039;t do astronorid, just co the facility for defense work She tried to iis defenses

What would the Rix taste like?

Movehts Standing in the aisle was a tall lanced up at the seat number, then down at Rana

"Rana Harter?" "Yes, e rack over her head made that impossible, and she saluted froesture The wo full interface glasses that entirely obscured her eyes, which was odd, because she also had a portable monitor in her hands She wore a heavy coat even in the well-heated train There was a birdlike quickness to her motions

"Come with me," the officer ordered Her voice was husky, the accent unplaceable But then, Rana had never been out of the GAP except in videos

The officer turned and walked aithout another word Rana grabbed her kitbag from the rack and wrestled it into the aisle By the tih to the next car, and Rana had to run to catch her