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increase in bloodshed and lost lives, without any guarantee of success. Despite the strength of the organization he headed, he was known to question whether humankind could ever win a war with the Amnion.

DAVIES
    He had no idea why he was still alive.
    Of course, there was no physical reason why he should be dead. Nick Succorso's goons hadn't damaged his body. They'd kept him locked in silence while the ship performed a long and brutal deceleration. They'd made him wait for hours as the ship coasted. Then they'd rousted him from his cell, man-handled him across the ship, and sealed him in an ejection pod. But none of that had threatened his life.
    And the pod itself was designed to keep him safe. It enclosed him as tightly as a coffin, allowed him virtually no movement — and certainly no access to its controls.
    He could see nothing except the status screens which were supposed to help him hope; monitors which were intended to reassure him, but which instead told him his heart and lungs were working too hard. Trajectory and thrust were preset: how could anybody who needed an ejection pod be expected to navigate? Nevertheless its pads and restraints protected him from the g of launch: its systems cooled the heat of his terror, supplied him with plenty of oxygen to compensate for his ragged, urgent breathing.
    Yet he should have died. Stress which had nothing to do with the treatment his body received should have killed him.
    He was being sent to the Amnion - to a waiting warship called Tranquil Hegemony — where he would be studied down to his nucleotides to help the enemies of his species perfect their mutagens; and then he would be made one of them. Perhaps he would become simply a monstrous and immaterial part of their genetic imperialism. Or perhaps he would become a human-seeming and direct agent of their will. In either case, everything that he knew or could recognize about himself would be gone; betrayed and transformed.
    Didn't men and women go mad under that kind of pressure? Didn't their hearts burst? Didn't dread clog their lungs until they could no longer breathe?
    Of course they did.
    But for him the situation was much worse. Born without transition into a sixteen-year-old body, he had no idea who he was. His mind was a copy of his mother's; his body replicated a man he'd never met. Unable to satisfy his instinctive and fundamental need for an image of himself, he had no basis on which to think, to feel, to make choices.
    As far as he could remember, he was a woman in her early twenties, a UMCP ensign on her first mission; young and inexperienced, but passionate; a dedicated fighter in the struggle to preserve humankind's right to live or die for what it was. Yet that was nonsense. He was obviously male; so obviously male that his crotch responded when he looked at Morn Hyland - a beautiful woman, not his mother, no, not his mother at all, how could she be? His memories were incomprehensible because they belonged beyond question to someone else.
    And they weren't complete. He had a black hole in his mind where he should have had transitions: at the point where his memories should have revealed how he came into being, what his birth meant, why his existence under these conditions was necessary, his recollections frayed away to nothing.
    Morn had tried to offer him answers. She'd explained that he'd been brought into being by an Amnion 'force-growing' technique which had taken him from her womb to physiological maturity in approximately an hour. And he'd been imprinted with her mind - education, memories, reflexes, and all — because he had none of his own.
    In addition she'd told him that she'd made the decisions which had afflicted him like this for the simple reason that otherwise he and she would both have died.
    He believed that, not because he understood it, but because it fit the person he remembered having been.
    But she'd given him nothing adequate to explain how such decisions had become necessary. And