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I carried Munchkin’s tray while she strapped Jude into his chair. He made bubbles and looked around, unaware that it was his first birthday.

  At our table’s center, the cooks had made Jude an elongated cake, shaped like Excalibur herself done in chocolate. He grabbed for it, more from curiosity than hunger, but couldn’t get within a foot. Meanwhile, his mother snapped a bib around his neck and mashed vegetables for him with her fork.

  At the front of the buffet line a mess-jacketed string quartet—holo, but such a good recording you couldn’t spot a flicker—played what Howard identified as Vivaldi.

  Howard ignored them and his French toast. He leaned forward and studied Jude, while my godson smeared mashed peas across his cheeks, occasionally landing some in his mouth.

  Munchkin looked up from her omelette at Howard, frowned, then punched his bicep. “Stop looking at him like he’s from another planet!”

  Howard rubbed his arm and pouted. “He is from another planet!”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Howard wrinkled his forehead and pointed as Jude caught a pea gob before it hit the tablecloth. “There’s something about the way he moves.”

  Munchkin swung her fork like a broadsword. “Dammit, Howard! He’s a perfectly normal one-year-old! The ship’s surgeon sees Jude every week. He hasn’t found any tentacles yet.”

  Howard sighed.

  “If you act like he’s a freak, he may grow up to be one!” Munchkin’s lower lip thrust out.

  I had learned that the Munshara-Metzger lip thrust preceded explosion. Time for a subject change.

  My eyes darted around the room, then I pointed. “Look! Ozawa’s here!” Major Ozawa, the pilot who had roasted me for being late on Ganymede, stepped into the buffet line.

  Munchkin raised her eyebrows, while one hand cut sausage with a fork and the other wiped Jude’s nose. “You like her?”

  “Huh? No. I mean, I don’t know her.”

  “You want to know her?”

  It seemed to me that when I was ready to reenter the dating game after Pooh’s death was my decision. However, a month before, Munchkin had shifted into sisterly matchmaker mode. There were thousands of females on this ship. Ozawa was one of the few left, it seemed to me, that Munchkin hadn’t tried to fix me up with.

  I could’ve turned the tables, I suppose. Push Munchkin back into circulation. Metzger died just days after Pooh. But the pain would have been worse for Munchkin. For me, too. She had lost a husband and her son’s father. I had lost a lover.

  Munchkin said, “We work out together. Fantastic body! Smart, too.”

  “Dammit, Munchkin! I’m not interested.”

  “Then why’s your face red?” Munchkin stood and waved her hand. “Major! Mimi!”

  Ozawa smiled and nodded, both hands on her tray.

  I leaned toward Munchkin and whispered, “She hates me!”

  Munchkin cocked her head. “Oh? I thought you didn’t know her.”

  Ozawa set her tray down, then knelt beside Jude and flashed a smile that would melt Neoplast. “How’s my big boy?”

  Jude giggled and grabbed for the ribbons on her chest.

  Babies are better hottie magnets than Maseratis. And Major Ozawa was some hottie. I thought she was pretty when I met her, helmet-head and all. In a dress uniform with everything in place, she sparkled.

  Munchkin said, “Major Ozawa, you’ve met General Wander?”

  Ozawa turned her big brown eyes on me and her smile cooled. “General.”

  Howard extended his hand. “I’ve wanted to meet you. The pilot who tested the VSFV. Amazing!”

  Ozawa grinned at him. I fell into third place in attractiveness among males at this table, behind a guy with four teeth who ate with his fingers and a prune-faced geek who dressed like an unmade bed. No wonder Munchkin had trouble setting me up.

  I made myself noticed. “What’s a VSFV?” I winced. My snappy patter didn’t make Munchkin’s job easier.

  Howard nodded at Ozawa. “Venture Star Fighter Variant. Before Excalibur left Earth, the major test-piloted a Venture Star fitted with a high-capacity thruster system. For space maneuver. The first space fighter.”

  I blinked. It was the sort of assignment Pooh Hart would have killed for.

  Ozawa shrugged at Howard. “It looked like hell, hung with all that plumbing, but it was a hoot to fly.” She leaned toward Howard. “You’re the Slug Spook!”

  Howard shrugged back.

  Everybody at this table seemed to have a purpose in their post-war life but me, the infantryman. A test pilot, a cryptozoologist, a mother, and a preschooler.

  I pointed at the bacon alongside Ozawa’s waffles. “I figured you’d be eating off the sushi bar.”

  She chipmunked her breakfast into a porcelain cheek. “Ozawas are fourth-generation Texan. Raw fish is bait.”

  We sat ten feet from the omelette station, at the end of the line. Brumby sidestepped down the line and arrived in front of the omelette station.

  Three swabbies stood in line behind him, one a skinny, rat-nosed guy I recognized from somewhere. I pointed. “Who’s the little guy?”

  Mimi swiveled her head, swallowed bacon, then snorted. “Brace’s valet.” Mimi and Brace had astronauted together at NASA. About all they had in common was that they were both high achievers and they both took to me like a vegan to veal chops.

  I snorted. Valet? Why the Navy and the Space Force felt that the more senior an officer got the less capable he was of laying out his own uniforms and shining his own shoes was beyond me.

  Brumby held out his plate and it quivered. “Extra bacon, please, ma’am.” Bacon was a premium item. Both Brumby and the mess steward he was wheedling were enlisted, so the “ma’am” was gratuitous. But wheedling cooks was every infantryman’s secondary Military Occupational Specialty. In Brumby’s case, so was a freckled grin.

  The steward smiled back at Brumby and dumped her entire remaining bacon reserve onto Brumby’s eggs. That meant the rest of the lineup would have to settle for reconstituted sausage or soy-based fakon.

  Brace’s rat-nosed valet snorted, then stage-whispered, “You eating for the dead fuckers, too, blinky?”

  Brumby stiffened and blinked as the steward slid the omelette onto his plate. As a corporal, Brumby’s squad’s position had been overrun by Slugs during the first major ground assault of the Battle of Ganymede. Brumby’s leadership and valor had earned him the Distinguished Service Cross. But his bunkmate was decapitated by a Slug round.

  In the lull after the first assault was beaten back, something disconnected in Brumby. He drifted into an aid station, eyes glazed, his headless bunkmate in a fireman’s carry across his shoulders, the corpse’s head in an ammunition bag. Brumby wanted the medics to sew his friend up.

  Brumby had been wound like a quivering spring ever since. Rat-nose’s whisper was shitty to say to any GEF survivor. To say it to Brumby was like pulling a grenade’s pin.

  Rat-nose flipped Brumby’s plate with a finger. Buttered egg spattered Brumby’s tunic. Brumby’s left eyelid flicked.

  I sprang from my chair and lunged for Brumby’s elbow as he cocked his fist, but my fingers closed around recycled air.

  Rat-nose sailed majestically backward across the officers’ mess, his head snapped back by Brumby’s punch. You’d be amazed how far a straight right hand can launch a man in point-six Gee. Tiny white objects arced on the same trajectory as Rat-nose’s back-bowed body. Teeth.

  Rat-nose might have sailed twenty feet, but after fifteen feet, he and his incisors hit the captain’s table.

  Brace’s mouthy little valet crash-landed on a white-linen runway and skidded shoulder-blades-down across the tabletop. Ship’s officers scattered, too slowly. Maple syrup exploded from pedestaled silver tureens. Boysenberry compote napalmed immaculate mess jackets. Sausage patties buzzed past my ear like shrapnel.

  Munchkin snatched Jude from his high chair and ducked under our table.

  In moments the place was still, except
for cocoa dripping from a toppled china urn.

  Brumby stood beside me, brushing eggs from his tunic with his left hand, shaking the sting from his right, and muttering, “Oh, fuck,” over and over. His eyes blinked like old semaphore lanterns.

  Two mess stewards had Brace’s valet under the arms. His eyes were crossed, blood streamed from one nostril, and from the way his bleeding lip sagged it looked like the ship’s dental officer had a new patient. Overall, it wasn’t anything that hadn’t happened a thousand times in bars outside military posts from Fort Benning to Luna Base.

  “Sergeant”—Brace stalked from his end of the table, until he could poke his head forward and read Brumby’s name tag—“Brumby! What the—?”

  In the holos, the band stops during barroom brawls. Since Brace’s quartet was just photons, Vivaldi whispered on.

  Brace spun and stabbed a finger at the quartet. “Somebody shut that damn thing off!”

  The band played on.

  Brace snatched a sugar bowl from a table and pegged it at a bulkhead-mounted control panel. The bowl shattered, but the musicians faded to green silhouettes, then disappeared, leaving no sound to echo in the low-ceilinged room but raspy breathing. Brumby’s, Brace’s, and someone else’s, which turned out to be mine.

  Brace straightened and breathed deep, his quivering face purple. Pasted to his cheekbone with milk was a cornflake. Brace would probably put himself in for a Purple Heart for that. Victim of cereal killer.

  I coughed into my hand to cover a snigger.

  Brace turned his wrath on me. “Wander, you think brutal hooliganism is funny? Anybody heard of discipline aft of Ninety?” Infantry country began at bulkhead ninety-one.

  I mustered a glare at Brumby. “I’ll deal with my sergeant. I’ll leave the seaman to the captain.”

  Brace looked over at Rat-nose. Somebody had propped Rat-nose up on a table edge, a napkin pressed to the lower half of his face, his eyes burning into Brumby. He was breathing through his mouth, and when he adjusted the napkin, I saw a black hole where his front teeth should have been. Rat-nose may have been a smart-mouthed coward, but he was Brace’s coward. Until then Brace hadn’t so much as glanced to see whether his man was alright.

  Brace drew another breath, then frowned. He ran a finger across his cheek and scraped off the cornflake.

  Somebody snorted.

  “Wander”—Brace pointed a quivering finger at Brumby—“have him in my conference compartment in thirty minutes.” He spun on his heel, then shot back over his shoulder. “You, too. And clean him up!”

  Ten minutes later, while we awaited Brumby’s return from aft in a fresh uniform, I sat with Howard in my cabin.

  I rubbed a hand across my face. “I’m gonna have to throw the book at Brumby. You know that.”

  “I think he expects that, Jason.”

  “Brace’s squid struck the first blow. But I’ll have Brumby on extra duty for a hundred million miles.”

  Howard shrugged and unwrapped a nicotine-gum stick. “If it’s up to you.”

  “Of course it’s up to me. I’m Brumby’s CO.”

  Howard rolled the gum stick like a little blanket and popped it in his mouth. “A ship’s captain under way has absolute authority.”

  “That’s crap, Howard.” It wasn’t crap. One of my correspondence courses had been Uniform Code of Military Justice, United Nations modification. Brace could take jurisdiction of any person on this ship, just by saying so. “Anyway, what’s he gonna do? Make Brumby walk the plank?” Maybe. A ship captain’s power extended to summary capital punishment if he felt his ship was in peril. Technically, we were still in combat, so rendering oneself unfit for duty, such as by breaking your knuckles on somebody else’s nose, could even be construed as constructive desertion, a hanging offense. Well, dangling in point-six Gee, it would be more slow strangulation. I let my breath hiss between my teeth and shook my head.

  The dull thud of flesh on metal interrupted as someone rapped on my cabin’s hatch.

  “Come, Brumby!”

  It wasn’t Brumby.

  Nine

  The visitor who sidestepped through the hatch was Ord.

  He hadn’t been at Captain’s Breakfast. And I knew he didn’t attend divine services. Yet he was wearing a Class-A uniform on an off-duty Sunday morning. Not that he would have been caught in Levi’s and flannel. Ord’s idea of casual wasn’t civvies, it was fatigues starched stiff enough to march by themselves.

  I cocked my head toward his chest-full of formal decorations. “Going somewhere, Sergeant Major?”

  “I heard about Brumby, sir. Would the general care to have me attend the upcoming proceedings?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Sergeant Major, whose side are you on, here, Admiral Brace’s or the Infantry’s?”

  “Side, sir?” Ord made his eyes wide.

  Exactly twenty-nine minutes after Brace’s ultimatum I let Brumby rap on the bulkhead next to the closed hatch into Brace’s conference room.

  Brace let us stew in the companionway for six minutes and fifty seconds.

  “Come!”

  Brace sat, hands folded and jaw jutted out farther than usual, at the end of the conference table. To his right sat a stiff Navy lieutenant wearing Judge Advocate General shoulder brass and to Brace’s left sat Rat-nose, slumped in his chair and doing his best to look violated.

  A circular, silver court Stenobot hummed, centered on the gleaming synwood table, sucking in a 360-degree holo of the proceedings.

  Our team consisted of the freckle-faced accused, his CO, being me, and Howard, as a witness more than as anybody who had a clue about helping.

  A discreet moment later, Ord slipped neutrally in, closed the hatch behind himself, then strode to the cabin center and planted himself at parade-rest, equidistant from both camps.

  Brace cleared his throat and skewered Brumby with his eyes. “Acting Sergeant Major Brumby, as commanding officer of this vessel, I have considered the disposition of this matter. Having personally witnessed the inciting incident, I find that no preliminary inquiry is needed. A general court-martial will be convened at the earliest possible time to consider the charges.”

  Brace glanced at the JAG swabbie, who read legalese off a screen. Brace left out constructive desertion but unless Brumby beat the rap his military career was over. In the meantime, he would spend the remaining year of this voyage in the brig.

  Brace asked Brumby, “How says the accused?”

  Brumby swallowed and his head twitched left. “I’m sorry I hit him, sir. But if I plead guilty I’m screwed, right?”

  Brace curled his lip. “Guilty or not guilty? If you’re incapable of a direct answer, ask someone else to speak for you!”

  Silence.

  Brace sighed. “In my capacity as master of this vessel I deem your statement a plea of ‘not guilty.’ The matter will be set for trial. In the interest of fairness—”

  A half snort escaped me.

  Brace shot me a look. “In the interest of fairness, the trial panel will be selected not from the accused’s own unit nor from the unit of the assaulted individual.”

  In other words, the panel would come from the only other outfit within a few million miles, the Third United Nations Division, the follow-on force who shared Excalibur with us. They were experienced infantry, like Ord, drawn from all the world’s services, not exclusively war orphans like GEF had been. They respected my survivors. The Third’s soldiers resented them, too, because the politicians had passed over the Third’s veterans for me and the rest of GEF’s wet-behind-the-ears kids.

  The JAG swabbie whispered something to his screen, then angled it so Brace could read the words.

  Brace nodded. “A preliminary matter. The accused is a noncommissioned officer. As such he may elect to be tried before a panel of his noncommissioned peers or a panel of commissioned officers.”

  Brumby turned to me, palms upturned, cheek jerking.

  I had learned the military justice system’s pr
acticalities the hard way. Majors and colonels didn’t pull extra duty. Crap like court-martial panelist fell to junior officers. Junior officers were inexperienced kids, soft and sympathetic. Noncommissioned officers—sergeants—worked their way up by following the book. Everybody knew that in courts-martial, crusty sergeants regularly threw the rule book at the accused. The choice was obvious.

  I almost said “Commissioned” by reflex, then I caught movement at the corner of my eye. Ord had twitched. I noticed only because I knew him, knew that at parade rest he wouldn’t even twitch. I watched him. There it was again. A head shake.

  Ord wanted Brumby judged by a hanging jury of grizzled sergeants, not squishy second lieutenants. That made no sense.

  I hesitated. Ord was in our corner. Wasn’t he?

  Brace drummed his fingers on the synwood tabletop. The victim shifted in his chair, his cheeks gauze-packed, so he looked more like a blowfish than a rat. That was a more appropriate image for the little squid, anyway.

  Brace cocked his head at me. “Well?”

  The light clicked on for me. “The accused chooses a panel of his noncommissioned peers.”

  Brumby’s jaw dropped.

  The JAG swabbie ran a hand across his face to camouflage a smile.

  Brace raised his eyebrows, then nodded. He stood and clicked off the screens. “Very well. The matter will be set for trial. We stand adjourned.”

  A minute later, Brumby and I headed aft to infantry country. He asked, brow furrowed, eyelids batting like windshield wipers in a downpour, “A noncom jury, sir? I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I turned to ask Ord to confirm that I had read him right when I had chosen Brumby’s fate.

  But Ord had left us alone.

  Ten

  Brumby’s trial started a week later, in the converted operating room that was being used to dissect Slug KIAs. It stunk of formaldehyde. I wondered whether Brace chose the venue to signal that Brumby was dead meat. No, Brace didn’t have a sense of humor enough for that.

  A Space Policeman—the Space Force version of an MP—wearing a sidearm guarded the hatch, in case the accused made a run for vacuum, I supposed. Maybe he was there to quell outbreaks of infantry hooliganism, since both Brumby and I were present.