They will definitely shoot you.
They might, I agreed, echoing her earlier words. I made my way through the plaza and down to one of the side streets. I turned and looked back at Powell.
It’s not like they won’t know where you are, she said to me. You have a computer in your brain. It tracks your every movement. Hell, I’m pretty sure it can track your every thought.
I know.
They’ll come get you.
They probably will.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I won’t.
What will you do?
I used to be a pretty good musician, I said. I think I’d like to do that again. For a while, anyway.
You’re nuts, Lieutenant. I want it out there on the record that I said that.
Duly noted. Want to join me?
Hell, no, Powell said. We can’t all be deserters. And anyway there’s a lieutenant position opening up. I think I’m in line for a promotion.
I grinned. Good-bye, Ilse, I said.
Good-bye, Heather, she said, and then she waved.
I turned the corner and a building hid her from my view.
I walked down the street, found another street that looked interesting, and started walking down it into the first day of another life.
I think it was a Saturday.
TO STAND OR FALL
To the Committee and attendees of Swancon 40, in Perth, Australia, where this novella—and book—was completed. Hey, didn’t I say I would do this?
PART ONE
There’s a saying: “May you live in interesting times.”
To begin, it’s a curse. “Interesting” in this case uniformly means “Oh god, death is raining down upon us and we shall all perish wailing and possibly on fire.” If someone wanted to say something nice to you, they wouldn’t tell you to live in “interesting” times. They would say something like, “I wish you eternal happiness” or “May you have peace” or “Live long and prosper” and so on. They wouldn’t say “Live in interesting times.” If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do.
Seriously, they are not your friend. This is a tip I am giving you for free.
Second, the curse is almost always ascribed to the Chinese, which is a flat-out lie. As far as anyone can tell it appeared in English first but was ascribed to the Chinese, probably due to a combination of casual racism and because someone wanted to be a shithole of a human being but didn’t want it to be marked down against them personally. A sort of “Hey, I’m not saying this, those terrible Chinese are saying it, I’m just telling you what they said” maneuver.
So not only are they not your friend, they may be also a bigot and passive-aggressive.
That said, the Chinese do have a saying from which it is alleged that the bigoted passive-aggressive curse may have been derived: “,” which, roughly translated, means “It’s better to be a dog in peace, than a man in war.” Which is a maxim which is neither bigoted nor passive-aggressive, and about which I find a lot to agree with.
The point is this: My name is Lieutenant Harry Wilson. I’ve been a man in war for a very long time now. I think it would be preferable to be a dog in peace. I’ve been working toward that for a while.
My problem is, I live in interesting times.
* * *
My most recent interesting time began when the Chandler, the ship on which I was stationed, skipped into the Khartoum system and promptly blew up the first two other ships it saw.
They had it coming. The two ships were attacking the Tubingen, a Colonial Defense Forces ship which had been called into the system to quell a rebellion against the Colonial Union, instigated by Khartoum’s prime minister, who really should have known better. But apparently he didn’t, and in came the Tubingen, which sent a platoon of soldiers to the planet to escort the prime minister off the planet. Which is when these other two ships skipped in and started using the Tubingen for target practice. I imagine they expected that they would be able to finish the job, unmolested. They were not prepared to have the Chandler come at them out of the sun.
In reality we had done no such thing, of course. We had just skipped into the space above Khartoum slightly closer in toward the planet’s star than those two ships, and the Tubingen, which they were busy attacking. And the fact that we were, from their perspective, hidden in the disk of Khartoum’s star did not give the Chandler any special advantage. The ships’ systems would have detected us no later. What gave us an advantage was that they were not expecting us at all. When we showed up, they were giving all their attention to destroying the Tubingen, firing missiles at close range to shatter the ship at its weak points, to end the lives of everyone on the ship and throw the entire Colonial Union into disarray.