“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Most of us have already figured out that this mission is some fucked-up brainchild of the higher echelons. Why else would they have replaced our regular captain?”

“Was he your regular partner?”

Her eyes widened. “You are a stranger, aren’t you? Soldiers don’t have regular partners. The army decides who you pair with, just like the army decides everything else in life.”

I began to understand. These soldiers are created by the army, to serve in the army. They know no other life. No parents, no families. Nothing but the military way of life. Nothing but serving in the army.

“I wonder why,” I mused aloud, “the army didn’t do away with the sex drive altogether. Or even make its soldiers sexless.”

Frede made a noise that sounded like an angry snort. “Might as well ask why they don’t use robots instead of cloned humans.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because we’re cheaper, that’s why! And better, too. Because we have emotions. Ever see a robot charge in where it’s hopeless? Yeah, sometimes we get scared, sometimes we even run—but more often we stand and fight and kill our enemies even when we’re dying ourselves.”

I took a deep breath, considering all that. Then I said, “So the army allows sex as a form of reward, then.”

For an instant I thought she was going to slap me. Her eyes blazed with fury. “Where are you from? The army allows sex because without it we don’t fight as well. The sex drive is intimately entangled with human aggression and human protectiveness—both of them—at the deepest genetic levels. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you know anything?”

“Guess I don’t,” I admitted.

“By damn, I hope you know more about fighting than you do about the army.”