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men, especially Sid, Isidro Zhulpa. He was quiet, introspective, darkly beautiful. But too well balanced to contemplate a sexual perversion involving me.
    I was still jangled about fantasy, imagination; real and artificial memories. I knew for certain that I had never killed anyone with a club or a knife, but my body seemed to have a memory of it, more real than the mental picture. I could still feel the ghost of a penis and balls, and breastlessness, since all of the ALSC combat templates were male. Surely that was more alien than lying down with another woman. When I was waiting for William to get out of his final range-and-motion stage, reading for two days, I’d had an impulse to try tripping, plugging into a lesbian sex simulation, the only kind that was available for women.
    For a couple of reasons, I didn’t do it. Now that it’s too late—the only trips on Athene are ALSC ones—I wish I had. Because it’s not as simple as “I accept this because it’s the way they were brought up,” with the implied condescension that my pedestal of normality entitles me.
    Normality. I’m going to be locked up in a can with 130 other people for whom my most personal, private life is something as exotic as cannibalism. So rare they don’t even have an epithet for it. I was sure they’d come up with one.
    5

    The lounge was a so-called plastic room; it could re-form itself into various modes, according to function. One of the Athene staff had handed over the control box to me—my first executive function as executive officer.
    When the troop carriers lined up outside for docking, I pushed the button marked “auditorium,” and the comfortable wood grain faded to a neutral ivory color as the furniture sank into the floor, and then rose up again, extruding three rows of seats on ascending tiers. The control box asked me how many seats to put on the stage in front. I said six and then corrected myself, to seven. The Commodore would be here, for ceremony’s sake.
    As I watched the Strike Force file into the auditorium, I tried to separate the combat veterans from the Angels. There weren’t too many of the latter; only fourteen out of the 130 were born on Heaven. For a good and unsettling reason.
    Major Garcia waited until all the seats were filled, and then she waited a couple of minutes longer, studying the faces, maybe doing the same kind of sorting. Then she stood up and introduced the Commodore and the other officers, down to my echelon, and got down to business.
    â€œI’m certain that you have heard rumors. One of them is true.” She took a single note card from her tunic pocket and set it on the lectern. “One hundred sixteen of us have been in combat before. All wounded and brought here to Heaven. For repairs and then rest.
    â€œYou may know that this concentration of veterans is unusual. The army values experience, and spreads it around. A group this size would normally have about twenty combat veterans. Of course this implies that we face a difficult assignment.
    â€œWe are attacking the oldest known enemy base.” She paused. “The Taurans established a presence on the portal planet of the collapsar Aleph-10 more than two hundred years ago. We’ve attacked them twice, to no effect.”
    She didn’t say how many survivors there had been from those two attacks. I knew there had been none.
    â€œIf, as we hope, the Taurans have been out of contact with their home planet for the past two centuries, we have a huge technological advantage. The details of this advantage will not be discussed until we are under weigh.” An absurd but standard security procedure. A spying Tauran could no more disguise itself and come aboard than a moose could. No one here could be in the pay of the Taurans. The two species had never exchanged anything but projectiles.
    â€œWe are three collapsar jumps away from Aleph-10, so we will have eleven months