“It was a long, long time ago, Traitor. The Navy was different then. We thought we were pure enough to wield the devil’s weapons without becoming demons ourselves. What a price we paid! The Hezo Collective Prosperity Sphere was young and wild, heady off a string of victories that seemed never-ending. We’d yet to accept the inevitability of entropy.”

Tsuros gestured around to the various inept repairs. His eyes lifted to the rusting bolts in the ceiling.

“Look around you! Everything falls apart. Back then, if you’d told me I would be drilling a herd of incompetent convicts in some dilapidated VTS shit-hulk, I would have laughed in your face. Then I would have knocked your fucking teeth out. Yet, here we are. What brought us here?”

In my case, a JDM prisoner barge. Tsuros probably arrived in a Yun-Zitanwon carrier. Luckily, I realized his question was rhetorical before I could blurt out an answer. My mind was still in silhouette training mode.

“Weakness, Traitor. Since we left the trees, one enemy has defeated all of our greatest leaders and toppled our mightiest empires. Degeneration. Sinister whispers that the weak would be strong, if only life were fair! Misfits must be included! The aberrant must be tolerated! The steadfast ought to feed the slothful! Time and time again, when the war is won, the meek rise up to swallow the weary victors. The result is inevitable. Chaos. Confusion. Discord. Bureaucracy. Aftermath.

“Before the fall, the Hezo claimed a hundred systems, and we had eyes on a thousand more. I served Z-Admiral Tong Lang Chinci in Strike Force Liu. Think of the Hezo’s greatest victories: Teegarden, Epsilon Indi, Ran. What fleet spearheaded them all? You know the name, say it!”

“Steel Wave, sir!” I barked on command.

“That’s right, inmate. Steel Wave.”

Tsuros threw a register of ships onto the projector, Steel Wave at its height. I immediately recognized mark III battleships, Zhanwu carriers, and a VTS ultra-dreadnaught. There were also a few classes of ships I had never seen before, the bottom of the sheet was stamped with a mi classification. I was dying to know more, but I kept my mouth shut.

“The bloodiest enterprise in human history. We swept through Collaborator systems, crimson in our wake! Planets evacuated if we so much as glanced in their direction. Admiral Chinci understood the basic truth of the Clabs. It wasn’t enough to defeat them. They had to be eradicated.

“Decades of battle led to the Eye of Dagon. In that smoldering disc, we charged directly into the collaborator fortifications. Steel Wave never crested. When the day was done, Fomalhaut Fortress lay in ruins, and the backbone of the Collaborators was broken forevermore. They would never again field the grand fleets we battled at Curve Array and the Celestial Spear. Our boot came down, and the cockroaches scattered to the stars!”

A smile had crept onto my face. I caught myself and jolted back into military bearing. Any show of emotion usually meant I’d be struck, but not today. Tsuros let it slide, looser than I’d ever seen him before. When he spoke of the old battles, his eyes blazed with a lurid incandescence.

“Steel Wave fought the longest. We were frontline in all the pivotal battles, and we took the most grievous casualties. Still, the work of finishing the war fell to us. The other fleets returned home to victory parades. They settled down, got fat, and raised families. Our hands stayed bloody. We knew what had to be done.

“System by system, we hunted down the cowards and put them to the knife. There was much work to be done, and we had the stomach for it. We were good at it. If we’d been left alone, there wouldn’t have been two Collaborators left in the galaxy to conspire together.”

Tsuros shook his head with regret.

“But you’re sitting here. You know that wasn’t to be. People forget, Traitor. When the danger is passed, they love to puff themselves up and pretend they were never frightened. After the great rout at Fomalhaut, everything changed.

“High Command was eager to shift away from the austerity of total war. A new class of soft-bellied usurpers rose, eager to reap what Steel Wave had sown. They had no use for warriors who would not compromise or relent. We were an obstacle to their schemes, and they feared us. Our teeth were still sharp.”

“High Command sent Steel Wave to the most distant posts, far away from their schemes. The outcome was inevitable. Without our voices on the council, there was no one to quell their idiotic ideas. After all of our valor, all of our sacrifice, we handed over the reins to a pack of squabbling children!

“Understand this—the Collaborators were not finished! The wound we inflicted at Dagon was grievous but not mortal. No military can afford to be of two minds in a war. Collaborator vermin will rise, again and again.

“The civilians could never understand this. A new faction rose, administrators and bureaucrats who traded empty promises for power. They called themselves Reconcilers. They spoke of the need for unity, the imminence of peace. The fools had the masses convinced the Collaborators would surrender if only Steel Wave would stop killing them. They whined that our assaults damaged infrastructure, our purges liquidated labor pools.”

I struggled to process this. I was a child when Keilu capitulated to the Hezo Collective Prosperity Sphere. I couldn’t even remember a time when they weren’t in charge of every aspect of my life. They were a monolith, a star-spanning bureaucracy too vast to even dream of opposing. Tsuros spoke of them like a pack of squabbling children, no better than Corrupt and Liar fighting over whose turn it was on chute duty. I had never even heard of the Reconcilers. All mention of them had been purged.

“The Reconcilers were swine, filth who never fought, never flew a mission! Yet, there were plenty of cowards and cripples to glom onto their stupid ideas. There are always more worms than warriors. As we hunted in the wilderness, their corruption spread. The constant combat kept us pure. Steel Wave was Absolutist to the core. Do you know what Absolutist means? It means the only good Clab is a dead Clab. Collaboration is a cancer, and every infected cell must be purged. Tolerance is treason!”

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My eyes were locked on Tsuros’ right fist, watching it shake with each point. He could turn on me in an instant. Instead, he rose to his feet, and paced across the projector beam as he spoke.

“Admiral Tong Lang Chinci was as constant as caesium. Steel Wave never relented, discipline and morale never wavered. If we’d had just one more like her, you and I would have never met. You would have never been born. That vile nest of sympathizers that spawned you would have been purged with fire.”

Silently, I wished it had. I never asked for this. Tsuros prodded at me, unwilling to let me wallow.

“Tell me something, Traitor, what’s the rarest element in the universe?”

“Astatine, sir!”

“Not astatine, you literal-minded fool. It’s leadership. Great leaders are the rarest element in the universe. We’re lucky to see one a century. The Hezo squandered their conquering empress. Tong Lang Chinci spent years in null-space, sweeping from star to star as an exterminator.”

Tsuros threw a transparency on the screen that read STEEL WAVE - WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN at the top. The left side was a star map where the cyclonic path of Steel Wave had been rendered as a numbered sequence of arrows. There were hundreds of them. Diverging lines indicated splits into wings which hit multiple targets simultaneously.

The right side of the sheet was a table. The first column was titled CLAB BASES. Stretching to the bottom of the sheet was a long list of planets I had never heard of before. The next column was titled PURGED. A date was listed for each planet.

I squinted at the figures. Obviously this had to be some mistake. My eyes darted from the orderly list of planets to the sprawling warpath. Purged, not defeated. I was in free-fall, terrified to look down. They were just numbers. The transparency was a prop in Tsuros’ fable.

Tsuros rapped a finger on the glass, snapping my attention to the next sheet. It was an org chart of the High Command with Reconciler name printed in red. Just like the dead planets, I had never heard of any of them.

“See how the Reconcilers consolidated their power while we were occupied? It’s the great tragedy of politics, competent people are too busy actually producing to bother with bureaucracy. Governance is the province of the inept.”

Tsuros paused to gauge my response to what he’d just shown me. The stakes had changed. This was nothing like the way the other drills watched me suffer in dead-eyed detachment. Tsuros was invested. He was animated and eager, an electric newness to his words like it was the first time he’d told anyone.

This was no fable.

The station creaked around us as I fought back the urge to scream. A series of clangs reverberated through the vents, then I could hear distant cursing.

“The grid closet,” I blurted, recognizing the particular timbre of the impacts. The hatch of the electrical distribution closet was almost impossible to pry open. The insulating gel had swollen with age. Desperate for any diversion, I wondered what had broken.

Tsuros snapped his fingers. My mouth clapped shut like a magic trick.

“Our surroundings are temporary and irrelevant. Only the objective matters. Focus!”

Tsuros threw another sheet up, a chart that showed the intervals of Steel Wave’s resupplies and reinforcements. Tsuros snapped a finger on a spot where the steady ticks developed an arrythmia that worsened with time.

“Here’s where they gain power. The Reconciler cowards realized we would never lose our edge, but they didn’t dare oppose us directly. There was no need. Time is the ally of decay. The right course is never popular. The media turned, smearing shit on the heroes they’d once spangled with glory. Subterfuge was everywhere. Our orders were jumbled, our supply trains were disrupted. We arrived at systems only to find the Collaborators had fled. Someone in High Command was leaking.”

“The captains of Steel Wave advised Admiral Chinci to lead a delegation to Sigma Draconis and throw our hat into the political ring before it was too late. The Reconciler dogs wouldn’t be so quick to laugh if we were in striking range.

“Admiral Chinci refused to sully herself in that pit of snakes. Instead, she announced a great reorganization of the fleet to make us more agile and more self-sufficient. After the great shake-up, she filed a battle plan with High Command for an all-out attack on the Collaborator infestation at Barnard’s Star. Once more, the Collaborators were warned. Our ships arrived to find the system deserted.”

A wicked grin cracked Tsuros’ face, filling me with expectant fear.

“Strangely, only two ships arrived at Barnard’s Star that day. They were Ta Bing and Despicable. It must have seemed an odd pairing for an assault. Despicable was a top-of-the-line Mark VI Jiangan Destroyer. Ta Bing was the oldest destroyer in the fleet. Minutes after arrival, Ta Bing suffered catastrophic engine failure. Her captain broadcast a distress call. The captain of Despicable answered by powering up his main cannons.”

“If only I could have been there,” Tsuros lamented. “I would die one thousand deaths just to see the looks on their faces. All the Reconciler sympathizers and High Command moles, every turncoat in the fleet had been reassigned to the Ta Bing. The guns of Despicable were their firing squad!”

Tsuros raised a fist in triumph. His laugh was coarse and cruel. I was so caught in his story, I almost fucked up and laughed along. Tsuros’ face was livid with a hate that had burned for decades.

“Sic semper proditores,” Tsuros spat, staring at me.

“Fiat justitia ruat caelum,” I dared to agree.

Tsuros blinked at my outburst. His eyes rolled from his fist to my face. I was hungry for it, anything to blot out those terrible figures. He wanted to beat me, and I needed to be beaten. But Tsuros saw right through me.

“If you only knew how right you are. That will be all for today. Dismissed.” He pointed at the door.

No! He couldn’t leave me like this. I was in ruins.

“You want the rest of the story, inmate?” Tsuros taunted, leaning in close. I could see my reflection in his eyes. I gazed at him with the arrant submission of a begging dog.

“Yes sir,” I rasped.

“I know you do. I know what you are, Traitor. You’re weak. Spineless and afraid, with a head full of heresy. You think you’re at the bottom? I’ve barely begun. I will hammer you flat! I’ll knock the slag off your rotten soul. From this worthless scrap, I’ll make something new, pure with purpose. Raw, gleaming steel, aimed at the heart of our adversary. Are you ready?”

“Yes sir,” I whispered, flush with desire.

“No more doubts. No more holding back. Get those scores up. Bury the other inmates.”

Tsuros dismissed me. I limped back to the barracks, aching with every step.