It had been weeks since Pirate said, “Tomorrow.” I suppose he lost his nerve. After the midnight showing of his tiny sculptures, he was on edge for days. No tall tales, no boasting, and he always had one eye on the door as if he expected the drills to burst in and drag him to the airlock at any moment. Eventually, Pirate must have realized I wasn’t going to rat him out, but still, he was distant.

I think he could tell I didn’t believe in the mission any longer, and he didn’t want to be contaminated. The burst of zeal I’d experienced after learning about Arcturus had faded. I’d settled back into comfortable certainty we were all doomed.

Things were changing. Since the interrogation, the drills had shifted on us slowly, just a degree a day. There was never a point where I could speak up and tell the others we were being boiled. The struggle sessions ended, and Pirate’s hair grew back thicker than ever. The drills weren’t as derisive, and the beatings were less severe. Now, we had to actually screw up to get hit. Imagine my disappointment.

When Glutton was executed, the opinion around the squadron was: “Well, of course! He was a fuckup.” As if we were somehow immune. But I knew we would all have our time in the bore. It’s funny how adaptable people are. The training was so long and boring it felt normal. If you’re in the belly long enough, you forget you’re being eaten.

Being aware of their tactics didn’t make me immune to them. One day at flight training, everything lined up perfectly for me. I was running the most challenging course, but it didn’t feel difficult. I was fully awake, totally alive in the moment. The Yama felt like a part of my body and maneuvering through the rings was effortless. I beat my previous run by almost seven seconds.

As the drills pulled me out of the Yama, I trembled with exuberance. I wanted to raise my fist and cry out in triumph. All eyes were on me. I remembered that day at the arcade, the recruiters lying in wait outside of the champion’s pod. From the ship bay door, Tsuros called out to me.

“Traitor!”

I snapped to attention, ready to get belted for who-knows-what.

“Good run,” Tsuros gruffed.

He turned on his heel and left the ship bay. Everyone was frozen in astonishment, even the drills. I blushed in front of the whole squadron, naked and dripping compression fluid. For so long, the drills had been crushing us, literally grinding us into the deck with their boots. My whole body tingled with pleasure at the unexpected compliment.

Good run.

The others mocked me incessantly for days afterward, but I could hear jealousy behind their jibes. Tsuros’ words echoed in my ears and churned in the pit of my stomach. This was the man who put me in the infirmary for a week with one punch. He’d starved me, tortured me, taken away my name, and condemned me to death. Two words of praise and I was practically on my knees for him. I’m such a worm.

The drills were satisfied we’d been broken, and they were building us back up. Our briefings became sermons about the fall of mankind, our looming extinction, the virtue of sacrifice. I tried hard to believe. It would have been so much simpler. But that part of me was dead and gone. Two weeks after we watched Glutton’s execution, Pirate returned to my bunk.

“Pssst.”

Once more, we crept into the red light of the latrine.

“You want to know about Tau Ceti? I’ll tell you. But fair is fair. You have to tell me how you got your name.”

I shook my head and looked away.

“It’s not even a good story,” I grumbled. It wasn’t, and I didn’t want to tell it. But I wavered.

“Let me see her again, and I will,” I bargained.

Out came the short-handled mop. Pirate climbed back onto the toilet to retrieve his miniature masterpiece from the vent. I spent a few minutes marveling at the tiny Venus until anxiety impinged on my enjoyment. There hadn’t been a night inspection in a long time, but the fear was still fresh.

With sadness, I relinquished her. We cut the lights and cracked the door. Pirate had a strange look. He was eager, yet afraid. Once he began the story, it all poured out of him.

“Tau Ceti was a mechanic’s nightmare. You couldn’t have picked a worse place to fight. A system choked in ruby-red dust, rife with ion storms, debris, and ambushes. I’m lucky I only had to pick up the pieces. I was stationed at the Ahklys Orbital Repair Bay. The workload was soul-crushing: meteoroid strikes, shrapnel from minefields, and even sabotage. We were at twenty-five percent casualties before we even spotted a collaborator ship!

“Worse, the dust and debris didn’t seem to bother the Clabs. This was their home. The attack wings we sent to hunt them never returned. Destroyed? Deserted? No one knew. We never found a trace. Morale was awful. High Command had us disable every ship’s escape pods. Too many deserters.

“After a year of watching their ships disappear, High Command decided something had to be done. They brought two fleets to Tau, trying to force the Collaborators to flee, or stand and fight. If they fled, the second fleet waited to annihilate them. If they fought, they were surrounded and vastly outnumbered. But the Clabs didn’t do either. They hid in the dust like mites.

“They would pop out to bait us into chasing them, then they’d vanish into the red without a shot. They didn’t even need to shoot at us. Our ships came back so chewed up by debris they could barely fly. Those were busy times for me, eighty-hour weeks. If the Hezo had any wits, they would have simply abandoned the system.”

“Yet, here we are,” I said, gesturing around the red-lit latrine. Pirate nodded.

“High Command was too proud to turn tail, even though we were on the verge of losing the war without fighting a single battle. Finally, they came up with a plan.”

Pirate glanced back at the door. He was about to get into the deep water.

“Do you know about the Silt City Datasha?”

I had come across a few references to the massacre, but I shook my head and feigned ignorance. I wanted to see what Pirate knew.

“The plan was to pacify Ahklys to lure the Clabs into a fight…” Pirate trailed off. His eyes grew distant.

“What happened there?” I pressed.

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Pirate swallowed and shook his head.

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t see what happened, and the Hezo kept everything quiet. But I could see a change in the ones who went. Atrocities written on their faces. Like Addict’s scars.”

Both of us glanced back at Addict’s bunk through the crack in the door. He had wept himself into an uneasy sleep. His face was furrowed in the crimson light, lost in some nightmare.

“How many?” I asked.

Pirate just shook his head.

“It must have been bad,” I ventured. I knew it was. Calling the Datasha at Silt City bad was like calling UY Scuti big. But I had to pretend I didn’t know. There was a long silence, and I remembered a legend from Old Earth.

天生萬物以養人

人無一善以報天

殺殺殺殺殺殺殺

I recited, counting the seven kills on my fingers so I didn’t lose track.

“I haven’t heard Polexian in a long, long time. What does that mean?” Pirate asked.

“Can you understand any of it?” I was still testing him.

“Something about gods that died of starvation? Then it’s just death, over and over.”

At last, I knew Pirate was really a Polomen. Polexian is as far removed from Middle Mandarin as the Archaic Chinese on the Shang oracle bones. But traces linger.

“It’s Mandarin,” I told Pirate. His eyebrows raised.

“Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill,” I translated.

“Is that Mao?” Pirate guessed.

“Close, but no. The author’s name was Yellow Tiger. He led a bloody peasant revolt. He had that poem inscribed on a monument to murder called The Seven Kill Stele. They said he would cut off the feet of women and burn them in great piles he called heavenly candles. It’s probably all exaggerated. Nothing from that era can be trusted.”

“What’s changed?” Pirate joked.

Instead of laughing, I searched his eyes. Was he starting to crack? What if he lost his faith? Until now, the thought of escape had been impossible. But Pirate had done it before. With the drills weakening, did we have a chance?

“What happened after the Datasha?” I asked, not letting myself get too carried away. Pirate could still roll on me.

“Lancers,” Pirate whispered. “Collaborator artillery ships. At the time, most Hezo space weaponry was missile-based. They set up their defenses and countermeasures assuming they would face similar opponents. Effective in open space, but worthless in a system-wide debris disc. We weren’t worried about it because the Clabs weren’t shooting back. But everything changed after the Datasha. It was like popping a hull-worm cyst.”

I grimaced. It was one of those experiences no one ever forgot. That rotten smell, the little shrieking sound they make, the white lines writhing off in every direction. Pirate watched me closely, testing me like I’d tested him. Only someone who’d worked on ships would have that reaction. I gave him a quick nod of acceptance. There was no use trying to hide it.

“I figured. Good, I can be technical. The lancers were mass-drivers, like nothing we’d ever seen before. Eight KT slugs at three thousand kips.”

I sucked in air through my teeth as I calculated. Throwing that much mass required enough juice to power a small moon for a year. It meant the Collaborators had discovered something groundbreaking, an entirely new kind of reactor or one hell of a battery. It tracked with Tsuros’ story of the Titan Forge.

“That’s a hell of a shot,” I ventured.

“All of our interceptors were worthless. Point defense arrays, chaff, flares, nothing worked. You can’t shoot something like that down. We couldn’t retaliate. The Clabs were nowhere near us. Some of the shots came from a million kilometers away. Direct hits on reactors through a million clicks of dust and debris. What can do that?”

“Tai Di,” I whispered. My hand shot to cover my mouth afterward. I couldn’t help it. The aversion to the name had been beaten into me deep. Pirate blanched, and we both shot our eyes back to the barracks door. I felt like the drills would kick down the door and execute me for breaking the taboo.

“We called it Big Two in those days,” Pirate said, smoothing over the gaffe.

“I thought it couldn’t kill people?” I said. I’d never heard of Tai Di attacking people directly. If it could, why were any of us still alive? The entire Hezo should have been eradicated.

“Here’s my guess. The slaughter at Silt City hit some threshold where Tai Di was willing to intervene. It lined up the shots, then maybe it needed a human to actually pull the trigger. Dim Mak! The Hezo spent generations building those fleets. The Zhanwu carriers had crews of ten thousand. A single shot and boom! Instant death.”

“How many?” I asked, trying to imagine it.

“Forty! Forty capital ships in less than a day. They lost a dozen more on the retreat, everything in chaos. The command ships were the first to die. Once the big boys ran, the wolves came out. The Clabs hunted down everything that flew, from scouts to supply ships. The call came down to evacuate the ORB. On the way out, I caught a glimpse of the night side of Ahklys.”

Pirate swallowed hard, his jaw tight with anger.

“It was dark! The whole fucking planet was dark!”

“Maybe they were blacked out against bombardment,” I suggested. I was afraid Pirate was about to start screaming. But he bit it down, furiously shaking his head.

“Two billion people lived on Ahklys,” Pirate hissed. “That was the day I made up my mind.”

“To desert?”

Pirate nodded. His eyes glittered in the red light.

“But I couldn’t get away. I’d been too proud of my skills, I showed them too much. The leash was tight in all the chaos that followed. I’d been a prisoner all along, you see. They just didn’t call me one. I kept getting shuffled to new posts, then there’d be another coup, and they’d send me somewhere else. After the Severance, I was reassigned to a prototype vessel, The Ganglion. It was a kind of stealth mobile shipyard, meant to hide in comet trails and orbital rings, slowly assembling an armada. Very mi.”

I nodded, it sounded like exactly the kind of harebrained Wunderwaffe the Hezo would fund.

“We didn’t just lose ships at Tau Ceti. It was a turning point in the Cipher War. There were many deserters and captured ships. After that point, only full-organic ships were considered safe to fly. Like these bombers we’re training in, they’re all meat except the hull and reactor.”

“You think they’re bombers?” I asked. I’d been wondering what our mission could be.

“That’s what I think. Why else would they be so big?” Pirate reasoned. “The training doesn’t make much sense to me. All maneuvering, no targeting? Bombers don’t dogfight.”

“Maybe the targeting comes later,” I guessed. I was glad to hear I wasn’t the only one who thought it was strange.

“Maybe. Do you remember the drills used to have radios?”

I managed not to gasp. I nodded carefully.

“They’re regressing tech all over. The Clabs are getting closer,” Pirate said. “Supplies are spent, no freighters coming. Whatever their Shengmu mission is, they’d better get to it. Time’s running out.”

I nodded, giving Pirate a meaningful look. Had he broken through the brainwashing? Was he open to making a break for it? If I guessed wrong and Pirate rolled on me, I would die.

“Want out?” I whispered.

Pirate shook his head.

“Too old. I don’t have that kind of fight in me anymore. Besides, it’s impossible—”

There was a sputtering sob from the barracks. I could see Addict’s eyes were open. He stared at the ceiling through the slats of the vacant top bunk.

“Tomorrow,” I promised Pirate in my lowest whisper.

I walked over to Addict’s bunk. He looked up at me without a word. I pointed to my mouth, then to him, then ran my finger across my throat.

You talk, you die.

Addict nodded. I could only pray it would be enough.