The Lancer Doctrine: Simulated Sky

The neural gel was three degrees colder than regulation. Mireille felt the chill at the base of her skull before anything else, that familiar bite as the conductive pads pressed against her temples and the interface cradle locked around her cervical vertebrae with a soft pneumatic hiss. The Lancer's cockpit smelled of ozone and old leather, the scent of a hundred prior pilots who had sweated and bled and died inside the Mk VII frame. She drew one breath through her nose, held it, then released it slowly through parted lips as the integration sequence began.

Green light flooded her optic nerve. Not the world. Not yet. Just a lattice of data points mapping the simulation perimeter, the Vesta Belt rendered in wireframe, every rock and shard of ancient ice catalogued by the scenario engine. Her heartbeat registered against the hull acoustic sensors as a steady percussion, sixty-one beats per minute. Lower than she had expected.

The sim-tech's voice arrived through her auditory cortex, bypassing her ears entirely, arriving as pure concept in the center of her mind. "Pilot Vance, scenario seven-Alpha initialized. Fleet engagement, drone fighters, twelve hostiles. You have license to engage. Beginning in five. Four. Three."

She flexed her fingers against the palm contacts and felt the Lancer's hands respond, fifteen meters of tungsten alloy and carbon muscle answering her intent through three layers of haptic feedback. The sensation always arrived a half-second late during calibration, that ghost delay between thought and motion. By the third pulse of integration, the lag had vanished. Her body extended outward through the frame. The cockpit walls became transparent, became nothing, and she stood suddenly at the center of a cold and star-scattered dark.

"Two. One. Mark."

The Vesta Belt opened around her like a cathedral made of stone. Asteroids drifted in their slow ballet, ancient fragments of a planet that had never finished forming, their surfaces pocked and lit by the distant orange smear of a sun that had warmed this sector for four billion years. Twelve drone signatures bloomed crimson against her vision, painted there by the simulation's targeting logic. They were arranged in a standard harassment pattern, two wings of six, and they were already closing.

Then the integration caught.

It began in her peripheral awareness, a softening of the present moment, as if someone had pressed a thumb against the edge of a moving film and stretched the frame just slightly out of true. Mireille felt the world widen. She saw the lead drone bank left, a motion that had not yet resolved into motion, and behind it she saw the ghost of its trajectory, the clean arc it would cut through the void if she did nothing to dissuade it. Three seconds. She had three seconds that did not yet exist, rendered for her in pale violet tracery across her vision.

She did not waste them.

Her left hand lifted, fingers spreading, and the Lancer's heavy gauss cannon tracked with her, the magnetic barrel swiveling on its gimbal with a satisfying thrum she felt through her molars. The first drone's predicted path intersected her firing solution in one-point-seven seconds. She waited. She breathed. She watched the ghost-line tighten.

At one-point-four seconds, she fired.

The gauss round crossed the void at a fraction of c, invisible to anything but instruments, and the drone's port wing vaporized in a silent blossom of metallic vapor. The craft spun, lost its attitude control, and tumbled into the path of its wingmate. Two kills. One shot. The math of perfect anticipation written in fire and debris.

Admiration did not come. There was no time for it. The second wing had seen the engagement and was reforming into an attack cone, six drones accelerating on a converging vector that would bring them within missile range in nine seconds. The ghost-lines spread before her like a fortune-teller's cards, fanning out in pale violet, each one a possible future written in the language of mass and thrust. She picked the most probable. She had to, because the integration did not show her what the drones would do, only what they could do, only what they seemed inclined toward in this branching moment.

Her right hand closed into a fist, and the Lancer's jump drive whined to readiness. The acceleration slammed her against the cradle, gel compressing around her spine, a taste of copper flooding her mouth as the G-forces climbed past nine. The void folded. Space snapped like a wet sheet and she emerged three kilometers off the drones' flank, their formation now broken by her translocation, their predicted paths suddenly useless, the ghosts evaporating into static as new futures wrote themselves across the moment.

They adapted. Of course they adapted. Coalition drone pilots were algorithms written by very clever people, and clever people built clever code. The wing split into pairs, each pair now operating on independent attack vectors, four ghosts blooming where six had been, and the geometry of the engagement became suddenly, brutally complicated. Mireille's jaw tightened. Her heartbeat climbed to seventy-three. The cold at the base of her skull had faded entirely now, replaced by the deep warmth of a system running at peak integration.

A missile warning screamed across her vision in red. She did not flinch. The ghost-line for the incoming warhead drew itself in trembling yellow, and she saw the moment of detonation one-point-eight seconds before it arrived. She lifted the Lancer's left arm, palm open, and a burst of chaff and decoy flares billowed into space. The missile lost its lock, its predicted path collapsing into a confused scribble of amber uncertainty. She pivoted her torso, the heavy frame turning with a grace that belied its mass, and brought the gauss cannon to bear on the drone that had launched it.

Two more shots. Two more vapor blooms. Two more ghosts extinguished from her vision.

Three remaining pairs. Six drones. And somewhere in the back of her mind, the awareness that she had not yet taken a real hit, that her predicted casualty rate was still zero, that something in the back of her skull was keeping a tally she had not asked it to keep. The integration offered her the number unbidden. She ignored it. Numbers were for after.

The leftmost pair dove toward a cluster of tumbling asteroid debris, using the rocks for cover, their ghosts flickering in and out of resolution as the simulation engine struggled to model their behavior around occluding geometry. Mireille felt the integration strain against the uncertainty, her prediction window narrowing to two seconds, then to one-point-five, the violet tracery thinning to a thread. She could push deeper, force the frame to extrapolate further, but she knew from bitter experience what happened when an operator demanded too much from the neural link. Three seconds of prediction was the safe ceiling. Beyond that, the future became a suggestion rather than a fact, and operators who believed too strongly in suggestions tended to die inside their cradles.

She held to the thread. The asteroid cluster resolved into a three-dimensional maze of stone and shadow, and inside it the two drones circled like patient predators. Their ghosts steadied as they cleared the occlusion, two violet lines coiling through the rock.

She did not pursue. Instead she fired the gauss cannon through the heart of the cluster, not at the drones but at the largest fragment of stone, twelve meters across, balanced on the edge of its own weak gravity. The round struck true. The asteroid shattered, and the shockwave of tumbling debris turned the drone pair's careful geometry into chaos. One of them took a tumbling boulder through its ventral thruster and spiraled away, crippled. The other broke from cover, hunting for a clean firing angle.

It found one. Its missiles lit off simultaneously, four streaks of orange against the dark, and for the first time the integration showed Mireille a prediction she did not like. Four detonation points arranged in a tightening diamond, each one closer to her center mass than the last. The ghosts burned red instead of violet. She had one-point-six seconds.

She jump-drifted. Not a translocation, just a sidestep, a micro-burst of the drive that pushed her ten meters sideways in the span of a single heartbeat. The missiles passed through the space she had occupied, detonating against each other in a chain reaction that bloomed white against her vision. The flash seared her retinas through the integration, a ghost-image of false sunlight that lingered like an afterbirth across her sight. She blinked it away. The remaining drone had committed too hard to its attack run, its velocity too high, its trajectory too straight. She tracked it with the gauss cannon and held fire until the ghost-line turned from violet to the deep, certain blue of a confirmed kill.

The round took it through the cockpit.

Silence. Or rather, the simulation's approximation of silence, the soft hiss of recycled atmosphere inside the cockpit and the distant thrum of the Lancer's reactor settling back to its idle rhythm. Six ghosts remained. Mireille surveyed the field, reading the new geometry, and found that the engagement had resolved into something almost simple. Four drones now held the center of the belt, defensive, waiting for her to commit. Two drones circled wide, looking for her flanks, their ghosts tracing long patient arcs through the void.

She exhaled. The copper taste had faded. Her heartbeat had climbed to eighty-one and held there, steady as a metronome, a drummer keeping time inside her chest. The integration pulsed warm at the base of her skull, and for a moment she allowed herself to feel the strangeness of what she had become. Three seconds of borrowed tomorrow, six seconds of total prescience if she counted the standard prediction window plus her own reaction time. A ghost-reader. A future-thief. A pilot of the new Lancer corps, built from the bones of dead soldiers and the minds of the living.

The final pair of flankers committed. Their ghosts tightened into attacking arcs, and Mireille lifted both hands, opening the Lancer's full weapons suite, and waited for the futures to crystallize into the only outcome that mattered.

The two flankers committed in unison, their ghost-traces brightening as they locked onto attack vectors, and Mireille's hands moved before her mind could name the motion. The Lancer's weapons suite bloomed open across her peripheral awareness, every hardpoint armed, the gauss cannons cycling to fire solution. She did not smile. There was no joy in the precision. There was only the clean arithmetic of prediction meeting reaction, the future threading backward into the present like a needle through cloth.

The first flanker took a gauss round through its port thruster assembly and spun, its ghost flickering into the broken orange of a damaged unit. The second adjusted, banking hard, and Mireille felt the integration slip her sideways into a future where it would overshoot by three degrees, exposing its stern. She fired again. The round took it amidships, and the ghost went dead.

Three seconds left on her borrowed tomorrow. The four defenders at the belt's center had not moved. They held their formation like statues, waiting for her to commit, waiting for her to make the mistake.

She did not commit. She held at range, breathing through her nose, and let the integration fade. Her heartbeat was steady at eighty-four. Her mouth tasted of copper and the dry recycled air of the cockpit.

"Holding pattern," she said, though no one was listening. The Oracle ran the exercise in silence, feeding telemetry to a sim-tech somewhere in the bowels of the facility, recording every twitch of her fingers for the next candidate's briefing.

A flicker. That was the first thing. Not in the simulation. In the integration itself. A hiccup in the warm pulse at the base of her skull, like a skipped heartbeat, like a synapse firing twice.

Mireille frowned inside her helmet.

Then the stars went wrong.

Not all of them. Just one. A single point in the field that the Oracle had drawn for this exercise, a field designed to approximate the contested space near the Proxima Centauri border, where the Coalition's patrol routes bled into the empty sectors beyond. One star, just left of center, began to swell. It grew. It should not have grown. The Oracle did not draw growing stars. The Oracle did not deviate.

A shape emerged from the swelling light. Long, predatory, the geometry of a wolf dressed in the architecture of a warship. Its profile resolved through the static of a corrupted simulation: the swept-back sensor array, the heavy forward batteries, the distinctive ventral cooling fins that marked it as Coalition heavy cruiser design, but wrong, twisted, larger than any cruiser had a right to be.

Mireille's hands froze on the controls.

She knew that silhouette. She had seen it on the after-action reports from Proxima, the only surviving telemetry from the engagement that had ended the Verax and everything aboard her, including the seventeen crew members whose names Mireille had memorized three years ago and recited every night since. She had seen it on the faces of the survivors who would not speak about it. She had seen it in her sleep, in the small hours when the integration did not anchor her to the present, when the borrowed tomorrows ran out and left her alone in the dark.

The Oracle had not drawn a heavy cruiser. The Oracle had drawn the warship that had killed her sister's ship.

A ghost-trace bloomed from the phantom vessel, violet, the color of an unknown contact, the color of something the simulation could not categorize. The trace spread across the field like ink dropped in water, drowning the four defenders, drowning the belt, drowning the stars.

"Oracle," Mireille said, and her voice came out thin and strange. "Oracle, cancel scenario."

The phantom vessel advanced. Its guns aligned with the Lancer's cockpit.

The integration spiked. A future flooded into her skull, bright and absolute, a future in which she fired every weapon she had at the phantom and none of it touched, a future in which the phantom's guns spoke once and the Lancer came apart around her like a struck bell. The future was not a possibility. The future was a memory. The Oracle was showing her a recorded engagement, a three-year-old kill, and forcing her to live inside it again.

She screamed.

The sound tore out of her throat before she could shape it into words, before she could turn it into a command or a curse. It was the sound a child makes in a dark room, the sound of a body remembering what the mind had tried to bury. It filled the cockpit. It filled the integration. It filled the warm pulse at the base of her skull until the pulse itself became the sound, and the sound became a white static that ate everything else.

The phantom vessel fired.

Light.

Then black.

---

The first thing that returned was gravity.

The first thing that returned was gravity. Then the deck plate, hard and real beneath Holt's cheek, its industrial grating pressing a grid of small welts into her skin. Then the cold. Then the copper taste at the back of her throat, the taste of a scream she had not meant to scream.

She lay on her back in the integration bay and stared up at a ceiling she did not recognize. It took her three breaths to place it. White composite, bolted seams, the faint amber pulse of environmental sensors running in a line along the far bulkhead. The smell told her the rest: ozone and the sweet chemical tang of burnt neural lubricant. The integration cradle behind her head was still warm.

Somewhere to her left, a man was retching.

Holt turned her head. The movement cost her more than it should have. The integration hangover was a physical thing, a pressure behind her eyes, a lag in the signals traveling from her brain to her limbs. She focused on the sound of the retching and found its source: a young candidate, barely out of his cadet years, on his hands and knees on the deck with a thin line of saliva hanging from his lower lip. His eyes were wide and wet. His fingers kept opening and closing against the grating as if he were trying to grip something that was no longer there.

Around him, the rest of the cohort was pulling itself upright with the slow, ugly grace of the recently drowned. Six of them. Seven, counting the one still down. Holt did not yet know who had drawn the bottom slot. She suspected she would learn shortly.

A hand settled on her shoulder. She flinched, then recognized the grip, and then the voice.

"Holt." Fenn Roe crouched beside her, close enough that she could smell the coffee on his breath and the faint metallic note of the stimulant tabs he chewed when he was worried. His face was the color of old tallow. His eyes, usually so mild and so carefully empty, were not empty now. "You were in there eleven minutes past the safety threshold. I was about to pull your plug."

"You didn't."

"I didn't." He offered his hand. She took it. The bones of his fingers felt too sharp through his skin. "For the record, Holt, that was the worst scream I have heard from an integration cradle since the Thresher trials."

She sat up. The world listed sideways, corrected, listed again. She planted her palm against the deck and breathed through it until the bay stopped tilting.

"The simulation," she said. Her voice came out scraped and foreign. "Did anyone else see the phantom?"

Fenn's expression did not change. That was how she knew the answer.

"No," he said. "No one saw a phantom. Fourteen candidates ran the standard engagement scenario against the configured task force. Twelve completed and disengaged within tolerance. You did not complete. You did not disengage. You spent eleven minutes screaming at a sky that did not contain anything your cohort could see." A pause. "And you scored the lowest in the cohort."

The words landed on her like a dropped weight. She felt them settle into her chest, into the space between her ribs where the integration hangover had already taken up residence.

"The lowest," she repeated.

"By a margin." Fenn's hand was still on her shoulder. He did not remove it. "Holt. Listen to me. Whatever you saw in there, it was not the scenario. The Oracle ran a clean trace. The only anomaly on the record is you."

She wanted to argue. The phantom had been as real as the deck beneath her, as real as the recorded engagement, as real as the three-year-old kill that had not been a kill at all but a piece of her sister's ship coming apart in a spray of silent light. She wanted to stand up and walk into the evaluation office and demand they pull the telemetry and look at it properly. Instead she stood up, and the room spun, and Fenn steadied her with the practiced ease of a man who had been steadying her for years.

"Blackwood," Fenn said quietly. "He is on the dock."

The announcement system chimed before Holt could respond. The chime was the long, low tone reserved for flag officers, and it silenced the bay the way a stone silences a pond. Every candidate stopped moving. The young man who had been retching wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and drew himself upright with visible effort. The bay doors, twelve feet of reinforced composite, began to part on their tracks.

The smell reached her first. Brine and pipe tobacco and the faintly chemical sweetness of command-grade dress uniform. Then the sound: the precise, unhurried cadence of boots on deck plate, each step a measured beat, each beat a small announcement of authority. Then Admiral Theron Blackwood himself, framed in the widening gap of the doors as if the bay had been built around the shape of him.

He was older than the holos suggested. His hair had gone from gray to white and been cropped close to the skull in the manner of a man who had stopped caring about such things. His face was long, deeply lined, the lines cut at angles that suggested a life spent squinting into vacuum or into the faces of men and women he was about to destroy. His uniform was immaculate. The ribbons on his chest were old. His eyes were the pale, washed blue of a sky that had seen too many winters.

Behind him, two. Cassian Vey, his flag lieutenant, tall and silent as a piece of carved wood. And Jonas Pryce, the diplomatic envoy who had no business being on a training dock and whose presence Holt distrusted on instinct.

The candidates snapped to attention. Holt felt the collective inhale of seven chests.

Blackwood stopped at the center of the bay. He did not greet them. He did not acknowledge the integration cradles or the scorch marks on the deck or the young man whose pupils were still too wide. He looked at them the way a man looks at a shipment of livestock, assessing weight and condition and the distance to the knife.

"Scores," he said.

Fenn stepped forward with the slate. Blackwood did not take it. He waited, and Fenn, after a moment, read the names aloud.

Holt did not listen to the first six. She listened to her own breathing and to the small, ticking hum of the bay's environmental system and to the patient silence at the center of Blackwood's attention. She listened to the seventh name.

"Candidate Holt."

A pause.

"Lowest score in the cohort. Margin of failure on primary engagement, secondary engagement, and command discretion. Integration time exceeded safety threshold by eleven minutes. Scenario disengagement was not achieved." Fenn's voice was careful and even. "Recommendation is removal from the active list and reassignment to groundside review."

Blackwood took the slate from his hand. He held it for a long moment, reading the figures as if they were a personal insult. Then he set it on the nearest cradle and looked up.

"Drag her onto the catwalk."

The words were not loud. They did not need to be. They fell into the silence of the bay with the clean, final sound of a bolt being thrown. Cassian Vey moved first, crossing the deck in four long strides, his hands closing around Holt's upper arm before she had finished understanding what had been said. The young candidate who had been retching stumbled forward, his face a mask of confused terror, and Cassian took his other arm and hauled him toward the inspection catwalk that ran along the bay's upper tier.

Holt's mouth opened. She had been going to speak, to remind Blackwood of procedure, of the tribunal charter, of the thousand small protocols that stood between a candidate and a summary execution. The words died in her throat when she saw Blackwood's face.

He was not angry. That was the worst of it. He was tired, and he was old, and he had made the decision before he had walked through the door, and the decision was not about her at all. It was about the cohort. It was about the fleet. It was about the message that would travel, by morning, to every training dock in the sector.

Cassian threw the candidate onto the catwalk. The young man landed on his knees, his hands splayed, his breathing ragged. He did not beg. He looked at Blackwood with the stunned, glassy expression of an animal that has not yet understood the shape of the trap.

Blackwood drew his sidearm. The sound of the slide being racked was very small, and very precise, and it filled the bay the way a single drop of ink fills a glass of water.

"Insufficiency," Blackwood said, as if he were filing a report. "In the field, this candidate would have failed his crew. In the field, this candidate would have failed his ship. In the field, this candidate would have failed me." He raised the pistol. "He does not get the field."

He fired.

The sound was enormous. It rolled off the bulkheads and came back to them changed, flattened, the echo of a life ending reduced to a piece of geometry. The young man folded. He did not scream. He folded, the way a puppet folds when the strings are cut, and then he was still on the steel grating of the catwalk, and a thin red line was beginning to trace its way down the slope toward the deck.

Blackwood lowered the pistol. He did not look at the body. He looked at the cohort, at each face in turn, and his pale eyes passed over Holt the way a man's eyes pass over a piece of furniture.

"Dismissed," he said.

Holt did not move. The others did not move. The bay held its breath, and then Cassian Vey stepped forward and began to herd them toward the doors with the impersonal efficiency of a man clearing a corridor, and the moment broke, and the cohort began to move, and Holt moved with them because her legs carried her without consulting her.

Behind her, on the catwalk, the thin red line reached the edge of the grating and began, very patiently, to fall.

The cohort filed out of the bay in silence. Holt's legs carried her. She did not look back at the catwalk, but she could hear, behind her, the thin sound of blood finding its way through steel grating, a sound like a slow clock, like a thing taking its time.

Cassian Vey walked them through three corridors and into a receiving hall that smelled of floor polish and recycled air. He stopped at a metal desk, checked a slate, and began calling names. When he reached Holt's, he looked up.

"Adjudicator Holt."

"Yes."

"You're to remain. The rest are cleared to quarters."

The cohort looked at her. Some of them looked through her. One of them, a young woman with close-cropped hair and the bruised expression of the recently martyred, said, "What did you do?"

Holt did not answer. She had not done anything. That was the trouble with her.

The others filed out. The young woman lingered a moment longer, as if she wanted to say something else, and then she too turned and walked away, and Holt was alone in the receiving hall with Cassian Vey and the smell of floor polish.

"This way," Vey said.

He led her down a corridor she had not seen on any of the schematics, narrower than the others, with a lower ceiling and panels of dark wood that had no business being on a station this size. At the end of the corridor was a door, unmarked. Vey pressed his palm to it, and it slid open, and Holt stepped through into a room that should not have existed.

It was a study. Books lined three walls, real books with cracked spines and the dust of old paper. A desk sat beneath a viewport, and behind the desk, in a chair turned toward the simulated sky of the holo-projection, sat Jonas Pryce.

He did not rise. He lifted a glass from the desk, considered the amber liquid in it, and drank.

"Adjudicator Holt," he said. "Please. Sit."

There was a chair across from him. Holt sat.

"I watched the exercise," Pryce said. "I suspect you did as well."

Holt said nothing.

Pryce set his glass down. "Blackwood is a creature of his century. He believes that a man's worth can be measured by the speed of his draw and the steadiness of his hand. He is, in his way, correct, though his applications are unsentimental."

"You knew," Holt said. "You knew he was going to kill the boy."

"I knew he was going to test the cohort. What Blackwood does with the materials I provide him is his own affair."

"Your materials."

"My candidates." Pryce smiled. It was a smile that had been practiced in mirrors. "Adjudicator, you must understand. The Tribunal requires certain kinds of people. People who can witness violence and still pass fair judgment. People who can watch a man die and still weigh his life's account on the scale. Blackwood's exercise is, in its crude way, an attempt to sort such people from the others. He is wrong about the method. He is not wrong about the need."

Holt looked at the viewport. The simulated sky outside was a flawless turquoise, unmarked by cloud or bird. It was the sky of a world that did not exist, projected by a projector that was doing its honest best.

"Why was I kept behind?" Holt asked.

Pryce turned in his chair. He studied her the way a man studies a card he has just been dealt.

"Because you did not flinch," he said. "The others flinched. The young man who drew well enough to live, he flinched before he raised his weapon. The woman with the cropped hair, she flinched when the shot was fired. They flinched, and then they recovered, which is the proper sequence, which is what Blackwood wanted to see. But you." He paused. "You did not flinch at all."

Holt remembered. She remembered the sound of the slide being racked. She remembered the boy's face when he understood. She remembered her own hands, still at her sides, and the absence in her chest where a flinch should have been.

"I didn't feel anything," she said.

"No," Pryce said. "That's the interesting part."

He rose now, and crossed to a cabinet against the far wall, and poured himself another measure from a bottle that looked older than the station. He did not

He offered her the glass. Holt shook her head, and Pryce drank alone, the liquor catching the simulated daylight in amber flashes. He did not flinch either, she noticed. She wondered, briefly, whether that was the same kind of absence or a different one entirely.

"You think I'm broken," Holt said.

"I think you are unusual," Pryce replied. "Broken is a word that implies a previous state of wholeness. I am not sure such a state ever existed in you. That is not a criticism. Blackwood would not have kept you behind if it were."

He set the glass down on the cabinet without a sound. The room had a stillness to it that Holt had not noticed before, the hum of the station's life support tuned so low it felt like the inside of a held breath. The air tasted faintly of recycled metal and the oak of the liquor.

"What does he want from me?" she asked.

Pryce crossed back to his chair but did not sit. He stood behind it, both hands resting on the leather, and regarded her the way one regards a piece on a board that has just moved itself.

"He wants you to see the next one."

"The next what?"

"The next candidate. He has been running this exercise for nine years, Holt. Nine years of Tribunal hopefuls brought up the lift, given a sidearm, told to fire or refuse. Most refuse. The ones who fire, most of them flinch. The ones who do not flinch, most of them cannot explain why they did not, which makes them unsuitable. You are the first in nine years who fired, did not flinch, and can articulate the absence." He paused, and the pause was almost theatrical. "You are also the first in nine years to call it an absence. Most people call it courage. Most people are lying."

Holt considered the statement. She found that she could not disagree with it.

"Who decides," she asked, "who lives and who dies in the Tribunal?"

"That," Pryce said, "is precisely the question Blackwood is trying to answer without asking it. If he asks it directly, the answer is bound by regulation, by precedent, by the comfortable architecture of procedure. He wants to know what is underneath the architecture. He wants to know what kind of person can look at a stranger and decide whether that stranger continues to breathe. Not whether the stranger deserves to. Whether the decider can."

He released the chair and sat, finally, in a motion that was almost feline in its economy.

"And he wants me to watch."

"He wants you to be the witness. The next candidate will be brought up. You will observe. You will not be armed this time. You will not be required to fire. But you will be asked, afterward, to render a judgment on what you saw. Not a legal judgment. A human one. Whether the candidate flinched, whether the candidate could be trusted to make such a decision in the field, whether the candidate is the right material for the work the Tribunal actually does." He spread his hands. "That is why you were kept behind. You are not being recruited. You are being auditioned for a different role."

Holt looked at him. The simulated sun had moved in the viewport, imperceptibly, a slow mechanical migration toward an horizon that did not exist. She wondered whether the sun moved on a loop, whether somewhere in the station a technician adjusted the angle by hand, whether anyone had ever noticed the seam.

"What is the different role?"

"Adjudicator of Adjudicators. The one who watches the watchers. Blackwood believes the Tribunal has been compromised for decades, not by enemies from outside but by the slow erosion of the people inside it. He believes the rot is not malicious. It is fatigue. It is the wear of watching men die on screens and still signing forms the next morning. He wants someone who does not feel the wear. He wants someone for whom the work is not a burden because the work is not, for them, a weight."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you go home. You resume your docket. You hear cases, you render verdicts, you sign your name, and you sleep well at night because the weight of it never touches you, and you have never once admitted that to yourself." Pryce smiled. It was not an unkind smile. It was the smile of a man who had already heard the answer and was simply waiting for the respondent to hear it too.

Holt was quiet for a long time. The station creaked somewhere far below them, the sound of a hull settling against its own age. She could smell the leather of the chair Pryce sat in, could feel the faint vibration of the deckplates through the soles of her boots, could taste the dry metallic tang of the air that tasted like every station she had ever stood in.

The boy in the exercise had been nineteen, maybe twenty. His name had been displayed on the screen before she pulled the trigger, a courtesy she had not been warned about and could not forget. Cassian Vey, it had said. Cassian Vey, nineteen, of no recorded affiliations, of no flagged priors, a clean file and a single entry for a sister who lived in the southern continent. Holt remembered the entry because she had read it twice. She remembered the sister's name because she had not been able to stop herself.

Cassian Vey was dead now. She had killed him. The simulator had done its work, and the room had done its work, and somewhere in the station's patient memory a record had been written that said, in its dry language, that the candidate had elected lethal force and that the candidate had been processed accordingly.

She thought of Fenn Roe, who had been the witness to her, the one Pryce had mentioned only in passing, the silent figure with the slate. She thought of Roe watching her now, through whatever lens Roe watched through, recording whatever Roe recorded. She wondered what Roe would write about this moment. She wondered whether Roe would write that she hesitated. She had not. She had not hesitated at all.

She thought of Blackwood, somewhere in the deep decks, waiting for an answer Pryce would carry back to him. She thought of the other candidates, the ones who had flinched and recovered, the ones who had refused and walked out, the ones who had fired and wept and the ones who had fired and not. She thought of nine years of this room and nine years of that simulated sky and nine years of the same question, asked in the same careful way, to find the same absence.

"I have one condition," Holt said.

Pryce raised an eyebrow.

"Tell me what happened to Cassian Vey. The real one. After the exercise. Whether he went home. Whether he slept that night. Whether he ate breakfast the next morning. I want the file."

Pryce regarded her for a long moment. Then he reached for the glass again, lifted it, and drank.

"That," he said, "is precisely the question Blackwood hoped you would ask."

Holt said nothing. The simulated sun continued its slow migration. Somewhere on the deck below, she heard a door close, and the sound was small and final, like the lid of a coffin set down by careful hands.