“What is your crime?”

“I robbed from those in my care. I stole from the mouths of children.”

“What is your name?”

“Corrupt.”

“You are a worm, lower than dirt! Get down where you belong, scum.”

Tsuros would gut-punch Corrupt, dropping him like an empty sack. After that, the whole squadron had to march on him, grinding him into the deck. It was a delicate balance; if we stomped too hard, he’d be useless and we’d have to work harder to pick up his slack. If a drill caught us stepping too gingerly, we’d share his fate.

I never had that problem. If no one else was there, I would have jumped up and down on his spine like a trampoline until he was dead or paralyzed. Obviously, I’ve spent some time thinking about it.

Corrupt was a bureaucrat from Niejingdiyu, who was found guilty of planetary-scale embezzlement. His crimes nearly defied belief, theft so flagrant even the Hezo couldn’t stomach it. That’s like being so shitty flies won’t land on you. It made me smile, knowing I was scrubbing toilets shoulder to shoulder with a man who used to be the Governor of Ushan’s largest moon.

Corrupt was in his mid-fifties. He was blue-eyed and serpent-tongued, standing two meters tall with a swoop of thinning blond hair and a perpetual smirk. Three qualities had propelled him through the Hezo: he was good-looking, his family was well-connected, and he would tell anyone anything he thought they wanted to hear.

Corrupt was one of those tiresome prisoners who never quite realized there had been no mistake. Prison was exactly where he belonged, forever. He couldn’t accept this, couldn’t process there was no talking his way out of this predicament. A lamprey would have blushed at the way he sucked up to the drills. He was forever in earshot, ready to tattle at the slightest infraction. When the going was smooth, he liked to pretend he was our leader. When things went sideways, he was the first to shift blame.

I despised him.

Corrupt tried me one morning when I’d drawn airlock cleaning duty. It was a meticulous task. Tsuros liked to whip out the white gloves, whistling Boléro as he went over every nanometer of the airlock interior. If he found the slightest speck, the whistling would stop, but the inspection would go on. The screwup inmate would stand at attention in silence, awaiting the inevitable beating. A blown airlock inspection meant a trip to the infirmary, every time.

The other inmates were usually relieved when I drew lock duty; I never failed. But Corrupt had a funny look that morning. As I was headed to the lock, he stepped into my path and dressed me down for not cleaning the underside of the slop sink. The drills never even checked the slop sink.

I thought he must be joking. The squadron never got in trouble because of me, not once. But he meant it. This upright parasite, who once embezzled the funding meant to feed an entire moon, somehow dared to chide me. I tried to walk away, but Corrupt followed me and kept needling.

He got under my skin. I wheeled around on him, holding the lock-knocker in my hand. The lead-cored mallet was part of of the airlock cleaning kit. It took a few good whacks to get the ancient safety latch to release. I figured a couple taps would be enough to disengage Corrupt’s jaw. The drills would execute me, but what did it matter? We were condemned.

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I grinned and stepped closer.

The look in his eyes!

Corrupt went from tormentor to terrified in a spasm of glorious transilience. He held up his palms and shrank away, a timid smile like he’d only been joking. I glared at him until he left the room. One more word and I would have brained him.

After that, he wouldn’t be alone with me. It was an unexpected bonus, until the other inmates started shying away too. Corrupt told them I’d gone rabid and flipped on him for no reason. I didn’t bother to challenge him, no one would believe me. I had always been apart from the other inmates. Now I was isolated.

It took a few days for me to understand how I’d lost the exchange. I’d written Corrupt off as a complete imbecile and wondered how in Diyu anyone had ever let him be in charge of a moon. But Corrupt wasn’t oblivious, he was operating. Everything he did had intent. He was a sapper, undermining the others to shore up his own shaky foundation. He would tug Pirate one way to wind him up and nudge Murderess another to make her unravel. Then he would tie the two threads together and wait for the imbroglio to erupt. He got off on it, maneuvering the rest of the squadron into these little passion plays where he was always the hero. Once I was on the outside of his little web, it was easy to see the strands.

Corrupt’s favorite weapon was an innocuous-seeming comment that ate in like acid. He asked Murderess how she’d broken her nose. When she asked him what he was babbling about, he shrugged it off. Days later I caught her at the latrine mirror, squinting at her reflection as she turned her head side to side. He had her.

Soon he was acting as her confidant, telling her all the shitty things the other inmates said about her. There was no shortage of them. Liar had called her “that balding bitch!” when he found a bunch of her hair in the shower drain. It got a big laugh, we were all losing our hair from stress and the terrible diet. Corrupt omitted the self-deprecating context when he ratted and spun it as a dire insult.

Murderess confronted Liar and, of course, he lied, claiming he’d never said it. Addict contradicted him. Liar was caught and it was too late to explain he hadn’t meant anything by it. They got in a terrible fight, screaming so loud the rest of us had to shut them up before they drew the drills.

During a flight exercise two days later, Murderess listed her ship dangerously close to Liar’s. Liar kept banking, trying to get clear. Murderess wouldn’t let up. She nearly chased him out of the bounds of the exercise.

If it had gone on for ten more seconds, the drills would have shot both of them down. Afterward, the whole squadron got two days of no rations as punishment.

I’d learned from the sewing needle incident and had stashed a tiny bit of food in the right-hand side of the latrine vent over the toilet. My emergency rations were foil packets of vatchup, the pungent, vat-grown ketchup we were issued once per week at chow. I sucked them down like a vampire in the dead of the night, rolling them into tight little spirals to extract every atom of fake tomato paste.

I hid the wrappers in the vent until I could find a way to dispose of them. The drills only felt arm-deep during inspection, so I pushed them out of reach with the short-handled mop.

The others weren’t so prescient. Towards the end of the punishment, they were coming unglued, wobbly and frantic with hunger. Murderess and Liar got into it again, shouting and shoving. It was dangerous. If a drill came, one of them was getting airlocked. Maybe both.

Corrupt stepped in, playing the diplomat. He knew exactly how to defuse the bomb because he had built it.

“This has to stop! We all buried an entire flight to get here. All of us were chosen. Don’t throw it away! Remember the mission and start thinking like a squadron. We have to succeed, the Hezo needs us! If we work hard and watch each other’s backs, we will succeed. We can be heroes. Our names will ring out for thousands of years!”

I remember listening to his spiel and thinking it would fall flat, that no one could be that stupid.

Everyone bought it. They all treated Corrupt like a hero for breaking up the fight. He beamed for a week afterward. Like an arsonist-fireman, mugging for the camera with a singed kitten in his hands.

Though I was wise to his game, I didn’t interfere. In prison, anything that breaks up the monotony is invaluable. I kept expecting the others to wise up and turn on Corrupt, but they never did. Were they that stupid, or were they willing participants in the charade? Either way, I had to laugh.

Watching Sergeant Tsuros, I had learned we were losing the war. Watching Corrupt, I learned why.

We’re just too stupid to survive.