“You could get an AI to run these same simulations,” he added at the end of his third shift. “Faster, more efficient, probably with better results—sir.”
“We have,” said Asarus. She steepled her fingers and glanced at Imbra over a shoulder. “And, no, recruit. It’s a failure every time. But as I told you in our first conversation, it doesn’t matter—none of it—in the long run.”
“Sir?”
“They even anticipated you. Did you know that? Not you, specifically, but the trouble you caused. Just as they anticipated—and maybe even con-structed—me.”
Imbra wore his confusion too plainly to answer.
“The Allegiance,” the general explained. “There’s been talk that they’re shaping the whole contest. That the game was rigged before it began. The well-loved general, the underdog story, the hotshot hero pilot—all of it. Wild theories about their reasons, too, but then, that’s what you get when you deal with an ancient people, a people living in time-dilation like nothing we’ve ever known. Have you heard any of these wild reports?”
Imbra thought of the look on Biggs’ face a lifetime ago—the hesitation of a man who knew crazy when he saw it, and who apparently had seen it in archives, but who had decided at the last against passing on the disease. “I’ve heard that the theories get wild, sure.”
“But not the theories themselves.” Asarus nodded. “Good, I suppose. Some ideas are hard to let go of, once they take root. They eat at your sense of being, your sense of purpose, until there’s almost nothing left. You do have a creed, don’t you?”
“Of a kind.” Imbra noted the general’s quick glance at his bare skin—no tattoos to indicate his side on the question of the sun. “Enough to get by.”
At the emotion rising then on General Asarus’s face, Imbra surprised himself with a sudden tightness, a knot in the muscles below his ribs. He’d almost thought that sort of eagerness behind him, but hers was such a sad, unexpected smile. Another kind of try harder.
So he did.
At the beginning of his next shift, Imbra took a different tack, opting to review the ship’s onboard archives before taking another run at the simulator. After all, the main trouble with the simulations was temporal: The Allegiance simply had more time on their side. But why? Life on Nov’s northern continent hadn’t offered the greatest education in system-wide or interstellar history, but Imbra knew that the Allegiance and the Novuni had first met centuries ago, which seemed like plenty of time to stabilize tech trade with such a vast economic power. And sure enough, as the Ragnara’s records showed, since first contact the Allegiance had indeed offered all the Novuni all manner of trade packages, including one bundle of neurotech responsible for declaw procedures, in exchange for raw and semirefined resources system-wide. There had, however, always been one notable exception to the Allegiance’s side of the pot: In every trade brief Imbra came across, any advances related to interstellar travel remained strictly off the table.
Certainly, the Novuni had developed significant EM technologies on their own over the centuries, but they hadn’t yet mastered the energy reserves needed for proper long-distance shielding—nor the systems needed to protect human beings through huge shifts in speed at the end of the ride, though the lifepods were getting close. Nor could the Novuni build to such speeds in the first place, although some on Hav were currently tinkering with possibilities involving laser tech. In short, hundreds of years of uneasy partnership on, the Allegiance still largely dictated terms by which anyone around Novun Prime could ever hope to leave the system. And eventually, someone in central gov had objected to this arrangement.
When talks fell apart, though, the Allegiance sent for the fleet surprisingly fast. Imbra remembered hearing tell in the valley of what happened next— how only by dint of General Asarus’s quick thinking had a deal been struck at Fort Five to spare lives and return mining operations to their original trade framework—but the accelerated time frame of initial proceedings baffled him as he sifted through official records. General Asarus’s peace only held until the miners rebelled, too; after that, the Allegiance took even more exaggerated offense to the Novuni, and its representative left with a declaration of total war.
By shift’s end, Imbra could see why so many of his people talked of conspiracy: The point of growing contention between the Novuni and Allegiance could have been predicted from the outset of their dealings, while the Allegiance’s split-second decisions, to wage war at the first sign of protest, suggested that someone in the greater galaxy had been waiting for the Novuni to grow restless. Only the reason for such a long-game approach lay out of Imbra’s reach when he logged off for the night: If the Allegiance simply wanted the Novun Prime system, why not take it from the outset?
On his next shift, Imbra stared for hours at the speckled panels over his desk and remembered Esrin’s Gulch—the heat of it as a child; the threat of magma churning in rivers not so far underfoot, before the dam broke and major bridges fell and the hills and the valleys realigned at great cost to human life. Historians attributed the continent’s haphazard geology to the haste of ancient terraformers, but northerners knew better, whatever side of the sun’s gospel they preferred: Hazards existed because the Novuni existed; because Mother either reviled or adored them so unbearably much.
As a child, Imbra had always been the fastest over the hot valley stones— Dash, to anyone who knew him—but not because he was the fastest on foot. In a straight sprint over a strip of flat land, he would lose to Tripp and Hurley as often as win, if not more. But give him a path that forked in odd ways, give him land that
