Marshal of Space Rudolfo Billingsley enjoyed a rank high enough to make tact a function of the moment’s whim—and it was obvious that he rarely indulged such moments. “Head thick as a rocket wall and a mouth as filthy as a burned-out exhaust, but he can figure out, down to the smallest wound on the greenest corporal, exactly how much blood any attack is going to cost.” That was what the line officers said of him.

And that, after all, Mardin reflected, was just the kind of man needed in the kind of world Earth had become in eighteen years of Jovian siege. He, himself, owed this man a very special debt…

“You probably don’t remember me, sir,” he began hesitantly as they paused beside a metal armchair that was suspended from an overhead wire. “But we met once before, about sixteen years ago. It was aboard your spaceship, the Euphrates, that I—”

“The Euphrates wasn’t a spaceship. It was an interceptor, third class. Learn your damned terminology if you’re going to dishonor a major’s uniform, mister! And pull that zipper up tight. Of course, you were one of that mob of mewling civilians I pulled out of Three Watertanks right under the Jovians’ noses. Let’s see: that young archaeologist fellow. Didn’t know then that we were going to get a real, first-class, bang-up, slaughter-em-dead war out of that incident, did we? Hah! You thought you had an easy life ahead of you, eh? Didn’t suspect you’d be spending the rest of it in uniform, standing up straight and jumping when you got an order! This war’s made men out of a lot of wet jellyfish like you, mister, and you can be grateful for the privilege.”

Mardin nodded with difficulty, sardonically conscious of the abrupt stiffness of his own back, of the tightly clenched fingers scraping his palm. He wondered about the incidence of courts-martial, for striking a superior officer, in Billingsley’s personal staff.