Earth Has Ruined My Average

The blackness of the void, the camera zooms in towards the small red dot of Mars until the fleet becomes visible. The mothership, ten kilometres long, half that tall and wide. Surrounded by twenty other ships. Ten are four kilometres long, the rest a kilometre long. The camera zooms in on Phobos, the larger moon of Mars. Machines are attached to it and it is shifting in its orbit. Calculations show it being moved to orbit over Olympus Mons.

They have not communicated with us. But the trajectory shows them leaving Mars on an intercept course for Earth. Clips of pundits and scientists arguing that they are benevolent or hostile. Speculating about what they want with Mars and Earth.

That they came was a surprise. But it wasn’t the biggest surprise.

Images showing the trajectory of the fleet, moving impossibly fast through our solar system. There is no visible thrust and wide speculation as to how they are powered and moving. Seven days from orbit.

I remember where I was when the announcement came. In a bunker embedded with some members of the Ukrainian drone force doing a story of their success in changing the shape of warfare. The drone commander telling me that their monthly kill target is thirty thousand enemy soldiers. The screens flicker and go black. Confusion and alarm among the troops. These are secure devices. And then, her face and the real shock.

The black of a screen, then a woman’s face, perhaps middle aged, in a uniform. Green eyes, a smattering of freckles. A stern mouth.

They are us. That is what I thought as I saw her. She was undeniably human.

“Citizens of Earth. I am Exarch Canidilla, fleet commander of the 16th UPF expeditionary force code named Quasar Force. I am authorised to assume governance of Earth by UPF Council order XG3459865. Pursuant to this order I offer you, citizens of Earth, the following choice. Tell your governments to cede control of your nation over to the UPF until such time as the situation on Earth is stabilised. Ceding control means laying down all arms, handing over nuclear launch codes for all nuclear weapons, and preparing for UPF governance. Those nations that cede control at the request of their citizens will benefit from our technology. For those nations that do not cede control we will take control of your nation by force. You have seven days to tell us that you cede control.”

They are us and they are invading us. For ‘stabilisation’. The furore was global, especially online.

Footage of politicians calling for calm, pundits saying nations should give up control or fight the aliens. Quieter voices asking how humans could already be in space and be so advanced. A digital referendum result from one nation showing 94.42 per cent of the population in favour of ceding control to the UPF. No other nation makes the same mistake.

That is until they took online away.

Control of the internet infrastructure is taken over by the invaders, shutting down all social media and allowing only sites that post factual news or updates.

The mothership sits in the Moon-Earth Lagrange point and a dozen of the larger ships slip into orbit, half above the US.

Exarch Canidilla appears on all screens everywhere. “To the nation whose citizens have ceded control, please prepare for us to visit in the coming days. To those who have refused to cede control the following rules will be enforced. You must cease all ongoing hostilities and return your armed forces to borders as they were on the 1st of January 2014. Any attempt to use nuclear or biological weapons in any context, against each other or against us, will be met with overwhelming force.” She paused then, looking straight out from every screen on the planet. “To the United States of America. As a nation you have twelve hours to cede control or you will be disarmed. Citizens of the country, please remain in your homes. Anyone who takes up arms against UPF forces will be treated as a hostile combatant.”

File footage of the President raving, encouraging citizens to rise up against the alien invaders. Rambling about how he always knew UFOs were real. Promising a rain of fire on the UPF fleet.

UPF file footage of secret orbital missiles the US had in orbit firing, then stopping in open clear space and self-destructing. Star Warriors in powered armour entering drop pods.

Footage from phones of thousands of fiery streaks falling from orbit.

The first-in drop. Sealed pods falling from orbit into unsecured ground. No support below. Thirty per cent average mortality. Star Warrior Calan had survived sixteen. The probability of surviving all sixteen: 0.33 per cent. I prepared for the statistics. I did not prepare for him.

---

Calan prowled into the room like a wolf. He was heavy-set, 1.76 metres tall and 110 kg of solid muscle. But he moved with a predatory grace that belied his bulk. His black dress uniform with its platinum markers of rank and medals enhanced his dangerous grace. When his jade eyes landed on Sofiya a broad smile cracked his face. He reached out to shake her hand, his long-fingered grip engulfing it.

“Exemplar Vanguard Prime Star Warrior Calan, nice to meet you.”

“Ah, call me Calan, nice to meet you too, Sofiya, I’ve followed your reporting almost since day one,” he replied. His English pronunciation carried a strange cadence, emphasising the wrong syllables in the words.

Sofiya blinked twice. “Ah, please take a seat, Calan.”

They both sat.

“I am curious about what your title all means, especially the Exemplar part of it.”

Calan leaned back into his chair and ran a hand over his bald head. “Well, I am a Star Warrior, part of the Star Legion. Analogous to your Marines, but in space. We fly in the fleet and train for ship-to-ship and first-in missions. Like most Earth military forces there is the…grunt track…” Calan grinned. “…great term, by the way. It’s already making its way into some UPF military parlance. We’re the Vanguards. Those who go first. The ones who do the work. Then there’s the Tribune track. Leaders. Prime is as far as you can go up either track.” He nodded at Sofiya.

“And the Exemplar?”

Calan shrugged and looked a little abashed. “What can I say, I am extraordinarily lucky and some…” he searched for a word, “…bigwig thought it was worth a special title. Comes with extra pay, so that’s good.”

Extraordinarily lucky doesn’t do it justice. The UPF is fighting a war on the far side of its systems against a reportedly implacable foe with comparable technology. First-in drops onto planets they want to liberate are more lethal than anything Earth forces have faced. Calan has survived sixteen of them, and countless other engagements beyond. The parts of his service record I have been allowed to see show consistent bravery, even heroism in battle. Numerous life-threatening wounds. And yet he chooses to go back.

“Can I ask you a blunt question, Calan?”

Calan raised his eyebrows. “Of course, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

Sofiya smiled. “Why? I read somewhere that a trooper who survives five drops can be rotated out of those missions. You keep choosing to go back. Surely you’d have been promoted out of such a dangerous role by now?”

“Sorra asks me that question sometimes too. She’s my lifemate, wife in Earth parlance.” Calan stood and went to look out the window. “Why? People still need saving, Sofiya. The Agglomerate are merciless. Not in the sense that they lack mercy they should have, but that they are completely without mercy even as a concept. We are in the Endless War to protect the UPF from them. The people who need saving have no chance of saving themselves. We arrive and the worlds are already burning. So I keep fighting because someone has to.”

He turned from the window. “At least here there was something to protect, to save.”

Sofiya let go of the cross at her neck, looked down at her notes then back at Calan. “So, you earn the title because you are an anomaly.”

Calan stalked back to his seat. It was unsettling to watch. He seemed oblivious to the menace of his movement.

Calan nodded his head side to side. “Yes, that is true. Though the thirty per cent mortality rate was actually projected at seventeen per cent for this drop, due to Earth’s technical inferiority. The final after action reports have it at nineteen per cent. Most due to issues with the drop rather than hostile action. Can I tell you a funny story, Sofiya?”

Sofiya nodded. “Go ahead.”

“The powered armour, and the drop pods, we developed as a way of meeting the superior physical capabilities of the Crus…ah, the Agglomerate. Unit by unit they are bigger, tougher, stronger than the UPF species. Combat drops are notoriously dangerous affairs. I read in your Second World War history that casualty rates were extraordinarily high. Not just due to enemy fire, but because people land in trees, or water, or something. Well, back early in the programme there was a drop onto a planet whose surface was eighty-five per cent water. The landmass for the drop was not large. Many of the drop pods fell in the water, which was okay as it was shallow enough that the troopers could exit the drop pods and walk ashore. But a few troopers got unlucky and dropped into deep sea, their pods sinking kilometres below the surface. Those that tried to exit their pods were crushed. Those that didn’t had no way to communicate and suffocated as their life support ran out.”

Calan chuckled. Sofiya looked at him in horror. “I don’t see how that is funny.”

I saw the same black gallows humour among the front-line soldiers in Ukraine. It’s true that war changes people.

Calan shrugged. “After that we put little drones in the armour that will surface and create a radio link. Fortunately for this drop the water near Cape Canaveral is not more than a couple of thousand metres deep. Easily enabling rescue for the dozen or so that landed in the deep.”

Calan looked at Sofiya. “I think about it sometimes. What I would do. What I would think of. Who I would pray for. If I was caught in the deep with no hope of rescue.”

“Does it make you afraid?”

“Not really. If it’s my time then it’s my time. Until then I keep on fighting.”

The fatalism I had seen among soldiers and civilians in Ukraine, it seems to be something that transcends Earth.

Sofiya crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. “You were in the first drop into the US. To take Cape Canaveral as your first base…”

Calan nodded.

“…could you walk me through it? Starting with your preparation.”

Calan laughed a little. “When would you like me to start? We were doing simulation plans of various scenarios for the entire trip here. Including scenarios that started here.”

Sofiya’s gaze hardened. “And why wasn’t this scenario selected?”

Calan shrugged, an eloquent gesture. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask the Exarch.” Seeing her posture stiffen, he added, “But if I was to guess it was because the people in charge where we dropped were considered most likely to do something stupid. I’ll start the morning of the invasion, about six hours out.”

“We run the ship to a time that suits us. We always planned to invade during night-time on Earth, our superior sensory technology gives us decision advantage in the dark. But for me, it was morning. And I made love to my lifemate Sorra.” Calan’s expression softened at the memory even though his tone was as matter-of-fact as a weather report. “It’s a part of our ritual. We both know this might be the last time we see each other. This was her sixth drop. We celebrate our love.”

It is a luxury to choose your goodbyes. I did not understand, until him, that it was a luxury at all.

“Your life partner is Veteran Tribune Seventh Star Warrior Sorra, correct? Doesn’t that make her your commanding officer?”

“You are correct. She has pursued the path of leadership and is well suited to it. She will go far. I have pursued the path of combat mastery and have mastered it.”

“So you have to follow her orders?”

“In life and on the battlefield.” There was no hint of irony in his voice.

Sofiya arched an eyebrow. “What happened next?”

“We head to the armoury to gear up.” His gaze lifted over Sofiya’s shoulder as he remembered. “Unless it is an emergency drop we pause for a moment in the prayer room outside the armoury. We stand forehead to forehead and pray together…” Calan reflexively closed his eyes. ”…Arneth, Maker, Master, Sustainer, our breath is yours and we commit ourselves to your care. Please help us to serve you well today.” He opened them and looked at Sofiya. She dropped her hand from the cross at her neck. “Then we kiss and go our separate ways. I typically take on a scout role in lighter, stealth-equipped armour, she takes on the Tribune’s heavy armour, she likes the artillery configuration.”

The footage they gave me showed the two suits in schematic. Scout armour, as worn by Star Warrior Calan, has a powered exoskeleton that is cybernetically linked to his nervous system. It has light armour, for these suits, that can withstand most small-arms fire from Earth weapons. A key piece of technology is its mirage circuits, which enable it to blend into the background. And it is light enough for a gravity manipulation function that gives it limited flight and enhances jump distance, though this is described as power intensive.

The heavy armour Tribune Sorra wears is much larger and stronger and, I am told, could withstand a close-range shot from a tank although the concussive force is still likely to kill the trooper inside the armour.

Both suits multiply the body inside them. The documentation is matter-of-fact about this. A trooper in scout armour can lift a truck. A trooper in heavy armour can push a tank. Either of them can hold an average of forty kilometres an hour across open country for as long as the power lasts. Our best marathon runners manage twenty-one, for two hours, and then they stop.

“In the armoury I select my loadout. For this mission I took a magnetic rail gun. It uses magnetic acceleration to fire solid shots, singly or very rapidly. It’s silent except for the crack as the bullets break the sound barrier. It’s an excellent scout weapon, precision sniping and shooting to take out single targets anywhere to the horizon, as well as the ability to deal with large infantry forces with extremely high rates of fire. I eschewed the usual forearm-mounted arc blade for a wrist-mounted stunner. They are only effective at close range but emit a pulse that causes a minor seizure and temporary muscular paralysis, calibrated for humans. As the mission principle was no casualties I thought it prudent to limit my ability to cause them. The heat of battle can lead to automatic responses that can be lethal. I also mounted a communications drone, scout drones, and EM interference and bandwidth control capability.”

Calan paused and sipped his water.

“What then?”

“Gearing up takes some time, but then it’s what I call ‘Pod Time’. We get into the orbital death traps about an hour out from drop time, unless it’s an emergency, which this wasn’t.” Calan replied matter-of-factly. Then there was a flash of a smile. “It’s a long time waiting for the approximately twenty per cent, in this case, chance of dying. People do all sorts of things in the pods while they wait. Me, I had started reading Earth literature on the journey in. So, after rechecking the mission priorities for any last-minute updates, reviewing my predicted landing zone, and doing a last check of the pod and suit hardware, I carried on reading War and Peace.”

Sofiya looked surprised. “You’re reading War and Peace? What did you think of it?”

“I can see why it is considered a great work of art, the complexity of the storytelling, the philosophical and historical context, and more. An excellent read, though I was only halfway through at that point. I was so engaged in it that I was a little surprised at the one-minute warning. I’d missed the five- and ten-minute ones. Though they are only haptic, not aural as well.”

Sofiya crossed her legs and looked down at her notes.

He was falling toward my world reading the story of an army that fell into Russia. He found it beautiful. He was not wrong.

When she looked up at him he was watching her like a hawk, expectant.

“Walk me through the drop, Star Warrior Calan. What does it feel like? What do you do?”

Calan leaned back. “Our sophontologists have devised many things for people to do while hurtling towards a planet in a barely controlled shell.”

A sophontologist studies sapient beings. Based on UPF files it seems they encompass what we would consider psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics.

“But I get ahead of your questions. What does it feel like? The carrier, in this case the UPF Interstellar Lightning Rod, slipped into the upper atmosphere. Often they can’t do this because of the threat of being shot down. But in this case it was an available option. It makes the drop considerably less uncomfortable and risky. The worst moment is when you pass from vacuum into atmosphere, despite the best sentient AI, entry burn-outs still happen. Physicists will talk about local variables, which is cold comfort when you’re burning up.”

“The carrier disposes of the pods using the same magnetic linear acceleration tech that my gun uses. We’re fired out of the drop tube, the pods all sit in interlinking magazines and are fired. As I was in the outer ring, I was in the first wave.”

“Outer ring?”

“Due to…local variables…it is not possible to plot an exact drop location. So we do them in rings. The outer ring is furthest from the core mission target. The mission there is to destroy, disrupt, and disable. We drop in, select nearby targets that reduce the enemy’s ability to respond. Military infrastructure. Communications infrastructure. Physical infrastructure, like bridges. The outer ring is mostly scout with assault and heavy support. This is the most dangerous ring for troopers, essentially being dropped behind enemy lines. The middle ring holds the line. Their role is to capture and hold ground, to secure the perimeter. This is where the most intense fighting happens. The inner ring is last in the drop, they are there to secure the landing zone. The bridgehead to use an Earth military term.”

“Being shot out of a magnetic accelerator is quite smooth, the rattling and shaking happens as soon as you hit resistance, atmosphere. Because we were deployed inside the upper atmosphere it wasn’t as bad as it could be, but it’s still bad, you rattle about inside the pod. You’d think with all of our tech we’d have a way of securing you so you don’t, but there isn’t one that allows speedy exit. It shakes and rattles. The sophontologists have decided that people need things to do, so there are data feeds on trajectory, surrounding environment, location relative to other pods. I shut all that off.”

“Why?”

“Fundamentally the pods are simple aerodynamic heat resistance shells. As simple as can be to remain functional. We could develop individually piloted grav pods that would let us target specific locations. But that creates a risk that we leave our tech to be captured by the enemy and that could lead to ways to disrupt it. All the fancy feeds don’t change the outcome. They offer no actual control because there are no controls. I prefer the reality to the illusion.”

“That seems wasteful of human life.”

“When your allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in your Second World War, some units had over ninety per cent casualty rates. The airborne troopers had high casualty rates. I suppose in this drop we were like those airborne troopers, some had parachutes that didn’t open; others got stuck in trees. For us the failure modes tend to be sensor failure leading to the one-shot grav chute failing meaning you cannonball into the ground. Landing in the deep sea, though that was less of a risk here. Getting shot down. Our fleet was supposed to have air superiority here, but as with anything, intent is not necessarily what occurs. Burn up, less a risk, but still a possibility.”

Calan looked at Sofiya with a level gaze. “In the end I just sit and wait and hope I land on something that has mission priority.”

I see the same pattern in the soldiers and civilians in war. We become habituated to the constant danger, the feeling of being out of control. The desire to home in on what you can control. He kept returning to “local variables”. A physicist’s phrase for why one pod burns and another does not. In his mouth it had become the word for chance, and chance the word for what soldiers do not say aloud. I had heard the trick in other mouths: a technical term made to carry the whole weight.

“What is landing like?”

“The grav chute kicks in at two hundred metres from impact. You go from terminal velocity to soft landing at a speed that would turn you to jelly, but the grav field mitigates this. Still, it feels like your entire body is being forced out your arse. Then the soft thud. Or in my case, worrying splash. Now I take in the feeds. I’ve landed in a swamp, the pod is almost completely submerged. The swamp water plunges in when I pop the lid, but it’s nothing my suit can’t handle. I activate the grav belt. It’s not really a belt, that’s just what we call it. I lift up out of the muck. I trigger the self-destruct sequence for the pod and check the nano swarm has started its work, then float to dry ground and orient myself.”

“What was it like? That first moment standing on Earth?”

Calan frowned. “What was it like? Scan for threats, none, though some alligators. They are not a threat. Release comms and intel drone, orient to landscape. Located on map. Identify nearest mission priority. It turned out I was at the far edge of the outer ring, the 125th Fighter Wing in Jacksonville was a high-priority secondary target. Identify the path to the objective. I noted that Sorra had dropped even further out than me. Likely due to local variables, so pinged her to meet on the way. This is what landing was like.”

“Once I had exited the swampy water I took off running. The scout suits are nimble and fast. I didn’t bother with mirage circuits or grav assist as it wasn’t hard to jump obstacles as needed. There’s no point in wasting power on being flashy, I angled my path towards the Jacksonville airbase to meet Sorra on the way.”

“Is it a part of mission protocol to meet up with her?”

Calan smiled. “No, not specifically. We meet up as mission priorities require, but I seek her out if it’s practical to do so.”

“What do your higher ups think about that?”

Calan laughed, a low, rumbling laugh. “As I said, we have a high degree of operational authority.”

“Surely they have operating principles that prevent a pair like you two fighting together. It would represent a conflict of interest that could compromise the mission.”

Calan rolled his shoulders in an elegant shrug. “Can I tell you how I met Sorra, Sofiya?”

Sofiya’s smile was slight. “Go ahead.”

“Ten standard years ago. It was her first drop as a Star Warrior. We didn’t meet before the drop. I was in an assault suit, no scouting on this drop. We weren’t going to take a bridgehead, this was, well, a suicide mission. An Agglomerate Reef had been secretly developing on a remote island of a new joint human-Arxcronix colony. Because it was a new colony it wasn’t detected quickly. And it was quite far inside UPF space. If they got a foothold. Well, it would be bad. We dropped in urgently to take it out. Reefs are brutal, very hard to breach without weapons of mass destruction, so you have to get in, take it room by room. It’s ugly, brutal.”

“I had breached and was making my way in. Those I’d joined up with were dead or dying. I crept along. My densiometer picked up a large mass moving in my direction deeper in the Reef. I ducked into a side passage. As it moved past me I attacked, hitting it in a weak spot. I delivered a fatal blow, but their warriors die hard and it impaled me through the stomach. I thought this was it until hands gripped my hips and pulled me off the spike. It hurt like gvetch…”

A Duravanhi swear word.

“It was Sorra. Then Vanguard Sixth Star Warrior. She helped my suit patch me up. She was one of the troopers carrying a buster. A very small plasma bomb designed to break Reefs from the inside. We made our way through. It took a day. We joined up with some others. Got deep inside, losing another three troopers, and planted it. Then the race to get out.”

“In that time we’d moved to a private channel. There was something there, something more. There are a lot of emotions that battle brings. In that battle we found a home and a way to process all of that in each other.”

Calan stopped there.

Sofiya waited. He did not add anything.

He had spent twenty minutes explaining the mortality statistics of orbital insertion. He described falling in love in four sentences and then he was finished.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Sofiya said.

Calan tipped his head. “No. I didn’t.”

“Then answer it.”

“Command does have principles about it. They are not the ones you are imagining.” He turned the empty glass a quarter turn on the table and left it there. “You are thinking of a conflict of interest. Divided loyalty. Two troopers who protect each other instead of taking the objective. That is the real risk and I will not pretend it isn’t. It’s in our training material. They show you the after action reports from where it happened. Objectives lost, positions overrun, because somebody went back for a lifemate.”

“And?”

“And the Star Legion decided a long time ago that it would rather have that problem than not have it.” He leaned forward. “A trooper with nothing waiting for him will take the objective. A trooper with someone waiting for him will take the objective and then come home. Command prefers the second one. We are expensive to train.”

Sofiya did not smile. “Have you ever chosen her over an objective?”

“No.”

“What happens the day you have to?”

Calan did not answer straight away.

“I would follow doctrine.” He said it flatly. Then he sat with it a moment longer. “That is the answer I am obliged to give you. It is also the one I have settled on, which is not the same thing. Keep both of those in.”

He had an answer ready for everything I asked him that day. That one he had to go and get. I kept both.

“You were running towards Jacksonville,” Sofiya said.

“I was. And sending pulses the whole way.”

“Explain that.”

“A pulse is a coded burst. Position and status query, fixed pattern, no content beyond the pattern itself. Two hundred milliseconds. I put it through my own comms drone and had it relay down the bearing where the drop data had her. Tight beam on both legs, the lowest power that would carry. If she was up and her suit was functional her armour would return a matched pattern, and I would have her position and her condition in the same reply.”

“Why so careful? You’ve told me Earth couldn’t touch you.”

“Earth couldn’t read it. Earth almost certainly couldn’t detect it.” He shrugged. “I did it that way regardless.”

“Why?”

Calan considered that. “Because I have never done it the other way. Where I usually work, a broad transmission is a request to be killed. The Agglomerate listen better than we do. You learn that in your first year, and then it stops being a habit and becomes how your hands move.” He turned the glass again. “I sent a tight-beam pulse across a planet that had nothing capable of hearing it. I’ve thought about that since.”

Twenty years of fighting something that hunts by listening, and then a world where nobody was listening at all. He offered it as a professional observation. I don’t believe that was all of it.

“How often did you send?”

“First at four minutes after landing. Then every three minutes.”

“And she answered.”

“Eventually.”

“How long?”

“Fifty-one minutes.”

“What were you doing in that time?”

“Working. There was no reason not to. I had a target and a route and I was closing on it at speed.” He counted it off on those long fingers. “Assessed the approach from three directions and discarded two. Put a scout drone up at eight hundred metres to build the picture of the base. Counted the airframes on the apron and in the open hangars, twenty-three, and identified them by type. Marked the fuel farm, the tower, the barracks. Located the road they would bring reinforcements up. Selected a hangar roof for a firing position and worked out how I would get onto it. Then I sent another pulse.”

He gave me the drop mortality rate as an average and then corrected himself with the after action report, because the average was not accurate enough for him. He gave me the fifty-one minutes without correcting anything.

I have sat with people who check a phone that is not going to ring. This was the same act, performed at a run, in armour, with a rail gun in his hands, every three minutes for fifty-one minutes, while he counted aircraft. He described it as procedure.

“And then she answered.”

“At fifty-one minutes. Matched pattern. Position, condition, nothing else.”

“What did it say?”

“It doesn’t say anything. It’s a pattern.” Calan held up three fingers and folded them down as he went. “I am up. This is where I am. This is my condition. Three elements, fixed. No words in it anywhere.”

“Nothing else at all.”

“Nothing else at all.” He nodded slowly, as though she had arrived somewhere. “That was the good part. The pattern is fixed because a trooper who starts improvising on a comms protocol is a trooper with a problem. If there had been anything extra in that reply, anything, I would have had a decision to make.”

Sofiya let that sit where he had put it.

“So we went to voice,” Calan said. “Private channel. She was nine kilometres out from me when she answered, and further from the objective than I was, which we expected, and she had already worked out that she was not coming to the base.”

“Why not?”

“Because she doesn’t need to be at a place to hit it. She was in the artillery configuration, and most of what that carries reaches a long way without her seeing it. She puts smart micro missiles up and they find their own way down. She needs a firing position with overhead clearance, a drone feed to tell her what she is shooting at, and cover. Nothing else. The one thing she does not want is to be anywhere near the perimeter, because heavy armour is a large object and she has no mirage circuits. Concealment for her is lying still in something.”

“And you?”

“I go in. That is what scout armour is for.” He shrugged. “She covered the distance quickly and settled in scrub two kilometres back from the fence, in cover. I jumped the fence and, miraged, quickly got to the hangar and jumped on the hangar roof, using grav to enhance and to land softly. She could see everything through the drone, and my sensors, and I could see everything with my own eyes, between us that is the whole base.”

“What if it had gone wrong?”

“Then she comes.” He said it without any particular weight. “Two kilometres in heavy armour is nothing. That was not written down in the plan. It did not need to be.”

Two people who had said goodbye six hours earlier, forehead to forehead, in the expectation that it was the last time. They found each other after fifty-one minutes and spent the conversation agreeing who would take which building.

“In fifty-one minutes you did not know whether she was alive,” Sofiya said. “Then you had a private channel. What did you actually say to each other?”

Calan thought about it.

“She told me about a jogger.”

Sofiya waited.

“She was lying in a drainage ditch about two kilometres back from the fence, in cover, waiting for me to get into position. It’s the middle of the night. And a man comes past, running, with a dog on a lead.” Calan’s face had changed. “The man doesn’t see her. Of course he doesn’t. He’s looking at the path. But the dog stops dead. Will not move. Standing there staring straight into the ditch at eight hundred kilograms of powered armour making no sound at all, and growling.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing. That is the entire skill. She lay there and did not move and let the animal have its opinion.” He was starting to laugh. “And the man is pulling on the lead and telling the dog off, and apologising to it, and eventually he drags it away up the path still looking back over its shoulder.”

He had to stop for a moment, shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

“She said the dog was the only thing on this planet that detected her all night.”

That night ten thousand people came out of orbit over Florida in sealed pods, and the sum total of the planet’s early warning was a dog on a lead that nobody believed.

“What would she have done if the man had seen her?”

“Let him go.”

“He would have told someone.”

“He would have told someone,” Calan agreed. “And then a vehicle comes out from the base to look at a ditch, and we take the base twenty minutes early and considerably less tidily, and somebody gets hurt who did not need to be. That is the cost of him seeing her. It is not a cost we transfer to him.” He looked at her levelly. “You keep waiting for me to say we would have killed him.”

“Yes,” Sofiya said. “I do.”

“I know.”

He had taken me through orbital insertion, the failure modes, the mortality arithmetic and the whole architecture of the drop without once losing the thread of a sentence. He lost it over a dog. He had to stop and start again, and I let him, and I have kept every second of it in the cut.

I had asked him what two people say to each other after fifty-one minutes of not knowing whether the other one is alive. He gave me a joke his wife made about a dog, and a comms pattern with nothing added to it. It took me until the edit to understand that both of those were the answer.

People have told me they loved me using many more words than that.

The UPF supplied a schematic for what they call the micro assets. I had been picturing the quadrotors I filmed for four years, the ones you can hear coming. That is not what these are.

A micro drone is the length of a finger. It moves on the same gravity manipulation that lifts their armour, so it has no rotors and it makes no sound. The body is a superdense composite that gives back almost nothing to sight or to radar. A densiometer will find one. Nothing on that base would.

A scout carries around fifty. Heavy armour carries hundreds. They are not built for separate jobs. A drone is given a task and can be given a different one in flight, which means the object relaying Calan’s coded pulse to his wife and the object that broadcast a surrender demand across an American air base’s own radio net were the same thing running different instructions.

The micro missiles are the same size and the same propulsion, with the sensor package replaced by a warhead. High explosive, armour piercing, fragmentation. Sorra was carrying about two hundred of them.

In a unit on her back she carried ten more drones, each about the length of a human arm. Those are for vehicles and buildings. They chase a target and shoot it with a laser and come back to her, or they fly into it and detonate.

Every figure in that document was declassified for me. I have thought since about why.

“You were on the hangar roof,” Sofiya said. “She was two kilometres out in the dark. What happened first?”

“We told them we were there.”

“You told them.”

“A drone went up over the parade ground and broadcast on the base’s own frequency. Lay down your arms. Evacuate the buildings. Assemble at the parade ground. It ran the message three times.”

“You had complete surprise and you gave it away.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Calan sat back. “Because surprise is worth a great deal and we were not permitted to spend it. If we had used it we would have had that base inside two minutes. The duty watch would have died where they were sitting, the pilots would have died in their beds, and by the standard of any army on this planet it would have been an excellent piece of work.” He turned a hand over. “The order was to take the world without killing the people on it. You cannot offer a man the chance to surrender after you have shot him. So you offer it first and you accept what that costs.”

“What did it cost?”

“At that base, nothing. Not everywhere.”

I wrote that down and came back to it later, and he knew I would.

“What did they do?”

“What we expected. Base security came out armed and took up positions. The pilots ran for the flight line.” He paused. “I would like something recorded, if you don’t mind. Nobody on that base did anything cowardly. They were told by a voice out of the sky that their planet had been invaded and they went out into the open to fight it. I have taken bases from people who ran. That was not this.”

“And then Sorra fired.”

“Sorra fired. Forty-six missiles into the fixed wing on the apron and in the open hangars. Two into each aircraft.”

“Why two?”

“Because one might not seat properly and she did not want to have to do it twice.” He said it as though it were obvious. “They go in and detonate inside the engine. There is very little noise and no fire to speak of. Twenty-three aircraft became twenty-three pieces of ground equipment in about four seconds, and nobody was standing near enough to any of them to be hurt. She confirmed that before she fired. That is what the feed is for.”

“Then the second message.”

“Lay down your arms or you will be shot. With a count.”

“And they didn’t.”

“Some did. A number of them put their weapons down and walked to the parade ground and sat, and nothing whatsoever happened to those people. Some did not. The helicopters were at the far end of the field and four pilots were running for them.”

“What did you do?”

“I shot them in the legs.”

Sofiya did not move.

“With a rail gun,” she said.

“With a rail gun.” He seemed to understand exactly what she was asking. “It fires a solid slug faster than the speed of sound that will pass through a human body and keep going. That sounds worse than it is. A clean through-and-through of the outer thigh is survivable if it does not open the femoral artery, and where the femoral artery runs is not a mystery. It is in the same place in every human being. I put the shots through the outside of the thigh, five or six centimetres clear of it, from a roof about four hundred metres away. They went down. They did not reach the helicopters and they did not bleed out on the apron.”

“Four hundred metres. At night. Running.”

“Yes.”

“How certain were you?”

“Completely. That is not a boast, it is equipment. The suit does the arithmetic and I have been doing this for twenty years.” He looked at her. “If I had not been certain I would not have taken the shot. Then they reach the helicopters, and then Sorra has to bring the helicopters down with them inside. That would have been a different night.”

“And then the base worked out where the missiles had come from.”

“They did, and faster than I expected. Somebody competent backtracked the flight paths and put a party out through the wire on her bearing. Two vehicles, about sixteen people.”

“Could she have dealt with them herself?”

“Easily. That is rather the point.” Calan spread his hands. “She has a plasma gun that would have removed both vehicles and everyone in them, and doctrine does not allow her to point it at people. She has a rail gun on her wrist for personnel and she is extremely good with it. But she was set up to fire and I had a clear line, so I took them.”

“How?”

“Upper arm. Through the muscle, outside the bone. A man with a hole through his upper arm cannot hold a rifle and is not going to die of it. Ten of them. The other six stopped and put their weapons down when the people beside them fell over, which is the entire reason for doing it that way.”

“What else was she carrying?”

“Two hundred micro missiles, warhead selectable. High explosive, armour piercing, fragmentation.”

“Fragmentation is for people.”

“Fragmentation is for people.”

“She didn’t use any.”

“She did not fire one. She did not fire the plasma gun. She fired her wrist weapon once, into the dirt in front of a man who had not yet understood the situation, and he understood it after that.” Calan was quiet for a moment. “I have thought about this more than most people would. That night my wife was carrying enough to kill everybody on that base several times over, and what she used was the smallest and most accurate thing she had, forty-six times, on machinery.”

“Then the barracks.”

“An empty one. She confirmed it was empty and then she took the roof off it.” He anticipated the question. “People do not really believe a thing until they have seen it. We had killed their aircraft in near silence and put fourteen of their people on the ground without killing any of them, and there were still officers in the headquarters building deciding what to do about us. So we showed them what we do to a building.”

“And the last message.”

“The control tower and the headquarters building will be destroyed in five minutes. Evacuate them.” He shrugged. “They evacuated. We destroyed them. That was the end of it. The base surrendered twenty-seven minutes after the first broadcast.”

Sofiya turned a page she did not need to turn.

“How many people did you shoot that night?”

“Fourteen.”

“And you know what happened to all of them.”

“Yes.” He did not decorate it. “Four through the thigh, all four walking inside a month. Ten through the upper arm, one of which took a nerve and needed regeneration, which he received. Nobody at that base died on the night or afterwards from anything I did. Two people were injured at the barracks, not by the strike. They fell coming out of the building beside it. One of them broke a wrist.”

“Did you look that up before you came here?”

“No.”

He gave me the number without pausing. He had given me the drop mortality rate as an average and then corrected it against the after action report, because an average was not accurate enough for him. He gave me the fourteen the way he gave me the fifty-one minutes.

I have interviewed men who could not tell me how many people they had killed. This one could tell me where every person he shot was hit, and what it did to them, and how long it took to get each of them to a surgeon. He had not looked it up before coming to see me. He had simply never put it down.

I have been asking one question since the day the fleet appeared, and I have been asking it in the abstract. Why let people die when you had the power to stop it. Somewhere over Jacksonville that night it stopped being abstract. It was a man on a roof, four hundred metres out in the dark, working out where the artery runs and going wide of it, fourteen times.

“You left the base.”

“There was an element inbound to take custody of it and we were not needed for that. Our objectives were between there and Canaveral, so we went south.”

“Together this time.”

“Together.” He said it the way other people say the name of a road. “About thirty kilometres down we found a column coming the other way. Two tanks and nine trucks with infantry in them, moving north to reinforce the base we had just taken.”

“And you did what you did at the airfield.”

“Faster, and with no conversation to begin with.” He caught the look. “We disabled the vehicles before we said anything to them at all. That is not a breach of anything. A warning is owed to a man before you shoot him. It is not owed to a truck.”

“How long did it take?”

“Under two minutes. Sorra put missiles into the tank tracks and along the barrels, which makes a tank a building. I put rail gun rounds through the engine blocks of the trucks, front to back, one each. An engine block is a large target that moves predictably and does not have a femoral artery in it.” He almost smiled. “That part is not difficult.”

“And the infantry.”

“Got out and engaged us.” Calan sat back. “I would like that recorded too. They had just watched their armour stop working for reasons they could not see, in the dark, and they got down out of the trucks and shot at us anyway. Small arms against scout armour is…” he hunted for it, “…weather. But they did not know that. They were doing the correct thing with what they had.”

“You didn’t shoot any of them.”

“There was no reason to. They had no vehicles and we had somewhere to be. They were the better part of two hundred kilometres from Canaveral on foot.”

“So they walked.”

“They walked.”

“And when they got there?”

Calan was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know. That is not my account to give.” He said it without any softening at all. “By the time a man walks that far the middle ring has a perimeter around Cape Canaveral, and a perimeter is a different thing from one scout on a roof with time to think about angles. Holding a line is close work and it goes badly more often. I have not asked what happened at that perimeter and I would rather not be told.” He looked at her. “Some of those men may have died at Canaveral. When I tell you I killed nothing, I am telling you about my hands and my night. I am not telling you about the operation. If you want the operation, ask somebody who commanded it.”

He volunteered that. I had not asked him for it and I would not have known to.

“How did the column know you were on that road?”

“The airfield told them. Before it surrendered it made a number of calls.” Calan shrugged. “The column was already moving. Your country had been given twelve hours’ notice that it would be disarmed, so there were units on roads all over that state before we ever came down. The calls did not summon them. The calls told them where to point.”

Sofiya looked at her notes for a moment.

“Your loadout includes EM interference and bandwidth control.”

“It does.”

“You didn’t use it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because a base that cannot talk cannot surrender.” Calan leaned forward, and for once he did not decorate it. “Think it through. I take their communications down. Now the tower cannot tell the headquarters what is happening. The headquarters cannot give an order to lay down arms. The men out at the dispersal cannot be told that it is over, so they go on being a threat, alone, in the dark, each of them working it out separately or not at all. And then I have to deal with each of them separately.” He turned a hand over. “Jamming is how you win an engagement. It is not how you take a planet without killing the people on it. We left every radio on that base working.”

“So they called for help.”

“They called for help. They called the column. Later, somebody called for air support.”

“You knew that would happen.”

“I knew it would happen when I decided not to do it. Yes.”

Everything he did that night to keep people alive is the reason an aircraft knew where to come looking for him. He said so himself, flatly, as a professional matter, and then he waited for the next question.

“What happened then?”

“Then they found us.”

“You were still at the column.”

“We were. Sorra was walking the line confirming the vehicles were properly dead, which takes a few minutes and is worth doing, and I was watching the road south.” Calan turned the glass a quarter turn. “Being under fire does something useful to your attention. It narrows it. That is what it is for. It also means that the thing which kills you is very often something you were not looking at.”

“The aircraft.”

“My suit had been telling me about an aircraft for eleven seconds. I know that because it is in the log. I did not look at it.”

“And then?”

“And then it made its run.”

Sofiya waited.

“There is not much I can give you about the next part. I have tried before.” He said this as a man reporting a professional failure. “Dust. The noise arriving after the shells do, which is a thing you never become used to. Being on the ground without any transition between standing up and being on the ground. Pain somewhere I could not immediately locate.” He opened one hand. “That is what I have. It is not a good account. It is the only one I own.”

“Your leg.”

“Below the knee, and then above the knee where the suit closed it off. I did not know that at the time. I knew there was something wrong with the arithmetic of my body.”

“You stayed conscious.”

“I was not permitted to do anything else. The suit runs nano hives, which is a medical system, and its first priority is to keep you awake, because unconsciousness is a leading indicator of death.” A flicker. “It is a very unwelcome kind of care. You would like to be somewhere else and it will not let you go.”

“Where was Sorra?”

“About sixty metres away, and already moving before I was.”

“And the aircraft?”

“She released one of the heavy drones. I saw it leave and then I saw nothing else in real time, because I was not in a condition to track anything. The rest of it I read afterwards in the sensor record.” He sat back. “It runs on grav. It left her at something over twice the speed of sound and it caught the aircraft without difficulty. It is not a fair contest and it is not designed to be one.”

“And it took the aircraft down.”

“It took the engines out with the laser. Not immediately.”

“Not immediately.”

“No.”

I let the silence do the work and he let me.

“There were three conditions on that drone before it was permitted to fire, and she set them while I was on the ground behind her,” Calan said. “The aircraft had to be clear of us. It had to be over ground where it would come down without landing on anything. And it had to be wings level and climbing away from its run, because a man who ejects from an aircraft that is banked over at low level goes into the ground with it, and a man who ejects from one that is straight and climbing does not.” He said it the way he said everything. “It came out of its turn and put its nose up, and she took the engines.”

“How long did she wait?”

“Nineteen seconds.”

Sofiya’s hand went to the cross at her neck. She took it away again.

“Nineteen seconds is a long time to stand beside somebody who is bleeding.”

“It is. The suit had already closed the leg off, which takes about two seconds and is automatic, so there was nothing she could usefully have been doing with her hands.” Calan looked at her steadily. “You are asking me whether she thought about it. I have asked her that myself. She says there was nothing to think about. That is what people say when they thought about it once, a long time ago, and settled it.”

“Did the pilot survive?”

“Yes.” He let that sit for a moment. “That was the point of waiting.”

He described losing the leg in the same register he had used for the engine blocks of the trucks. I let him. There was a question I did not ask him, and I have thought since about why I did not ask it.

“And then she picked you up.”

“She got a hand under me and put me over her shoulder. One arm.” Calan’s mouth moved. “I turned the grav system in my suit up to take most of my weight, which she did not need, but I was not going to be carried like luggage.”

“You have a grav system,” Sofiya said. “You could have flown.”

“I mean, I could have flown home. But who doesn’t want to be carried by his wife?”

It was the first thing all day he had said sideways. He had described his own leg coming off without a change of tone, and this is what moved him: the fact of being carried.

Nineteen seconds. A woman standing over her husband in the dark with his leg gone, waiting for an aircraft to climb high enough that the man flying it could get out of it alive.

I have looked for the right word since. Mercy is wrong; mercy is something you extend to a man already at your feet. Restraint is wrong; restraint means she wanted to and stopped herself. She did not want to and stop herself. She simply did not do it.

And then she picked her husband up and carried him, and he made a joke about it.

Archive footage, timestamped just after six in the morning. A woman in heavy powered armour walks in through the northern perimeter of the Cape Canaveral bridgehead with a man over her right shoulder. The armour is scorched down one side. She is not hurrying and she does not put him down. Away to her left the sky over the Atlantic has gone grey.

Twenty metres inside the wire she kneels and lays him on the ground, and then the frame jerks and resettles, because the camera operator did not expect what happens next. The armour opens. It comes apart along seams that were not there a moment earlier, backplate and shoulder unit and leg sections folding away from her into the dirt, and she steps out of eight hundred kilograms of machinery in a grey undersuit.

She kneels down beside him. He has his helmet open. She puts a hand against the side of his face and leaves it there, and nothing either of them says is picked up by the audio. It lasts twenty-two seconds. Then the medical team reaches them and she stands and moves out of the way.

This is the first time I saw Soranthi’s face. She is fair, and lightly built for a woman who had just run a hundred and seventy kilometres carrying her husband. If she walked past me on Khreshchatyk I would not look at her twice.

Calan gave me that night in order, with the numbers, for four hours. He did not mention this. I found it myself, in footage nobody had flagged, and I have watched it more times than I am going to put in writing.

“That footage is timestamped a little after six in the morning,” Sofiya said.

“It is.”

“You were hit south of Jacksonville.”

“About a hundred and seventy kilometres north of where that was taken.”

Sofiya looked up from her notes.

“She carried you a hundred and seventy kilometres.”

“She did. Four hours and some. She could have done it a little faster without me on her shoulder, but not much.” Calan said this as though it were a point of no interest whatsoever. “I offered to be put down at intervals. She declined.”

“There was a medical lift available.”

“There was. There were also a great many people from that airfield and that column in worse condition than I was, and not many lifts.” He turned the glass. “And she is my wife, and she had hold of me, and she was not going to hand me to somebody else. Both of those things are true. I have never asked her which one she was thinking about.”

“What was it like?”

“Dark, mostly. Then not.” For a moment he was not in the room. “The forward base was coming down as we came in. They bring a station out of orbit and set it on the ground, and it is a very large object descending very slowly with the sun not up yet. I have seen it seven times. It is still the most impressive thing I have ever seen.”

“Your commander met you.”

“She came to look at me on the pad. I told her it was a flesh wound.”

Sofiya’s eyebrows went up. “You had lost a leg.”

“I had lost part of a leg,” Calan said. “It is important to be accurate.”

He was on a stretcher with his leg ending above the knee and he was correcting the record.

“They offered you a choice.”

“Regrowth or a cybernetic replacement. The cybernetic is better in almost every measurable way. It is stronger, it does not tire, and it would have had me back on the line in two days instead of eleven.”

“You regrew it.”

“I regrew it.”

“Why?”

“Because I already have enough technology inside me.”

Sofiya waited. He did not continue.

“What technology?”

“That is classified.” The grin arrived unhurried and entirely comfortable.

“Classified from me, or classified from Earth?”

“Yes,” Calan said.

He had twice asked me to keep something in. Both times it was so that the record would say the right thing about somebody else. This was the first time in four hours he had closed a door, and he did it about himself, and he enjoyed it.

Sofiya set her notes down on the arm of the chair.

“You have told me what you did,” she said. “I want to know what it meant.”

Calan did not answer immediately. When he did, it was four words and he offered them the way another man might offer a decoration.

“I killed nothing.”

“That is what it meant.”

“That is what it meant.”

“Explain it to me.”

“Then you need the other number.” He sat forward, elbows on his knees, hands loose. “Across my first fifteen deployments my confirmed count averaged two hundred and thirteen. That is not a good number or a bad number, it is simply the number. It is what the work is. I am trained to kill, I am equipped to kill, and my body has been altered so that I can do it better and for longer than an unaltered person could. The Agglomerate are stronger than us unit for unit. Only the Chelva match them without help. The armour exists because we needed something to close that gap, and closing it is the entire purpose of my professional life.”

Two hundred and thirteen. Fifteen times. He gave me that figure the way he gave me the mortality rate on the drop, as a correction to something I had not yet said.

“So.”

“So.” Calan looked at her, and the pride in it was completely undisguised. “I am a killer. I was made to fight a genocidal war against something that has never once offered mercy or accepted a surrender. I came to your planet. I dropped into an unsecured landing zone. I took an air force base and I stopped a reinforced column…”

He leaned down and rolled up his trouser leg, the light brown skin of his lower leg gave way to older tanned skin above the knee.

“…and I gave up my leg doing it.”

He let that stand a moment.

“And I killed nothing.”

Sofiya watched him quietly.

“Sixteen drops,” Calan said, “and this is the one I will be telling people about when I am old.” Then his mouth twitched, and the dry thing surfaced, and he shrugged as though the whole night had been a mild professional inconvenience.

“Earth has ruined my average.”

Sofiya laughed, once, and stopped.

I have heard that joke in another language, from men who came back from the east and made it about themselves. I laughed because I recognised it. I have left the laugh in the cut.

She looked down at her notes for longer than she needed to.

“An American chaplain called William Thomas Cummings said that there are no atheists in foxholes. You pray before every drop, with your wife, forehead to forehead. You have killed something like over three thousand sentient beings. You have nearly died more times than I have been able to count from the record I was given.” She looked up. “Tell me about the faith that holds you in that.”

Calan did not say anything for a while.

“That is a good line and it is not true,” he said. “I have known atheists in foxholes. I have been in the hole with them. I watched a man who believed nothing die beside a man who believed everything, in the same minute, from the same weapon, and neither of them changed at the end. War does not make faith. War makes you show what you already had.”

“Then what do you already have?”

“Arneth. Maker, Master, Sustainer.” He said the three words the way he had said them in the prayer room, with his eyes shut. “He made what there is and he holds it in existence continuously. Not once at the beginning. Continuously. If he stopped, there would not be a universe running badly. There would be nothing at all.”

Sofiya turned a page.

“You keep using a phrase,” she said. “Local variables.”

“I do.”

“It is a physicist’s phrase. You use it to mean chance. Why one pod burns up and another does not.”

“That is what it means.”

“But you have just told me that nothing exists for a moment unless Arneth is holding it there.”

Calan looked at her.

“Then which one is it?” Sofiya said. “Did those pods burn because of local variables, or because Arneth let them burn?”

The room was quiet enough to hear the traffic on the boulevard below.

“Both,” Calan said. “Both are true, and I will not give up either one to make the other easier to hold.”

He put the glass down and left his hand on it.

“The pod burned because of local variables. That is a complete and correct account and I would not alter a word of it. The pod burned, and Arneth held it in being for every moment that it was burning. That is also complete and also correct. They are not two halves of one thing waiting to be fitted together. They are one event described at two depths, and I cannot stand far enough back to see it whole.” He shrugged slightly. “That is a fact about how far back I can stand. It is not a defect in the thing I am looking at.”

“That sounds like a man refusing to choose.”

“It is a man refusing to choose.” He did not soften it. “I have had twenty years to choose and I have declined, because choosing would mean discarding something I know to be true in order to be more comfortable. I would rather be uncomfortable and correct.”

He was still looking at her.

“Nobody has asked me that before. Twenty years, and the people who ask about the faith ask me whether it is a comfort.”

“Is it?”

“Sometimes. Not always. It is not primarily for that.” Then, without any change in his voice: “War is brutal, but I guess you know that.”

He had not asked me a single question all afternoon. That was the first one, and it was not phrased as one, and there was no way to answer it that would not have been an answer.

Sofiya’s hand went to the cross at her neck. She did not take it away this time.

“Tell me what your faith says about what you did in Florida.”

“In your language it would be a truth of my faith to say that it is a sin to kill another sentient being,” Calan said. “And also a sin to allow one to be killed.”

“Both.”

“Both. They are not ranked. That is the difficulty, and there is no version of my life in which I am not standing in the middle of it.” He opened one hand. “So I carry every one of them. Three thousand and some. Not as a total, as individuals, which is why the number is exact. I repent of each one. Then I go back, because the alternative is to allow, and allowing is the other sin. It has saved a great many more than it cost. That is true and it does not settle anything.”

“You expect to die doing it.”

“I expect to die doing it. I expected to die here, and I was very nearly right.” He paused. “And afterwards I will be…”

He stopped.

“There is a word in Duravanhi that I cannot give you. It is not resurrection. You have that word and it is not the same one.” He tried again. “It is nearer to being read back. Something that was written down, and is written out again, and nothing is lost in the copying. Not a soul going somewhere. The thing itself, said a second time, correctly.”

He shook his head.

“That is a poor translation and I apologise for it. It is the one part of this I have never been able to say properly in any language, including my own.”

Sofiya let the silence run.

“Do you use your faith to justify the killing?”

Calan sat back as though she had reached over and pushed him.

“No. Not at all.” His voice had changed. “No. I do what I do because I want to protect people who cannot protect themselves. I repent every time, of every killing. The loss of any sapient life, of any species, is a thing to mourn and I mourn it. But we live in a universe where some of us can protect others and some of us cannot, and that sometimes means taking a life, and I will not pretend otherwise.” He put a hand flat on his knee. “But no. I could not religiously justify war. I do not think it can be done. I would not want to meet the man who had managed it.”

“So your faith makes it harder.”

“My faith makes it cost more.” He said this as though it were obvious and as though it had taken him twenty years. “That is what it is for.”

Sofiya did not ask anything else for a moment. Calan waited, hands loose, entirely still.

“You are going back.”

“On Thursday.”

I went into that room with a question I have been carrying for three years and a technique for finding the place where a man’s account gives way. The technique works on nearly everybody. It found nothing in him, and not because he was hiding it well. He had put the entire cost on the table an hour earlier, itemised, and he was going back on Thursday to pay it again.

He was not offended when I asked whether his god excused what he had done. He was appalled. Those are different things and it is the difference I have not been able to put down since.

I have cut this episode four times. I keep the same forty minutes every time and I build around them differently, and it does not change what he is, and it does not change what I came in believing about people who arrive from the sky and decide who lives. Somewhere in the middle of those two facts is the thing I have not worked out yet.

He asked me one question in four hours. I have not answered it.