“I don’t—”

“Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It’s the lieutenant.”

I stayed off the axial deck after that.

Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers’ convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring out of the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said for fuck’s sake. Not much point in looking after yourself, if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.

“Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.”

It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d got shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.

“Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.” He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. “I really appreciate you not ah, not—”

“Forget it. I had.”

“Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.”—I stirred impatiently—“Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—”

“Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.” I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. “All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?”

He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.