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had told me not to quote regs at him.
    He leaned over toward the server and punched up a couple of frosty bulbs, tossing the yellowy one to me, saving the purplish one for himself.
    I opened mine and took a deep drink, careful of the way it tended to bubble out of my mouth. Usually, I don't like drinking anything bubbly in low-gee, not even out of a bulb—it feels as if I get more in my nose than in my mouth.
    "Tell me, Emmy—what do you think Buchholtz wanted, more than anything else in the world?"
    I sat back and thought on it for a while. No rush, no rush at all, dammit. Nothing I could say or could think of would bring either of them back. "Maybe . . . maybe he really wanted to die in combat."
    "Bingo. That was Kurt. I knew that from the moment I met him, way back when. He was more of a kraut than you are, kid; wanted to die gloriously, in battle final. Kurt Buchholtz was always a Götterdämmerung , looking for a place to happen. The natives gave him that place—just like he wanted."
    "And McCaw?"
    "C'mon, kid, it's even more obvious about Ari McCaw. He was always bored with the real world. They gave him that way out." Norfeldt rubbed a hand across his face. "Somehow or other, they've developed an esper society based on giving everyone what he wants. And if you've got a strong enough stomach, you'd have to admit that they gave Kurt and Ari what they wanted. A kind of justice, really." He shrugged. "That's the way it goes."
    "But that means we don't have to Drop! We don't have to blow up the Gate."
    The Dutchman didn't like wireguns; he usually carried an old-fashioned Colt & Wesson point-forty-four Magnum. The "forty-four" comes from the old-fashioned measurements of the diameter of the cartridge; it comes to just a bit more than a centimeter across.
    It looks larger when a fat man is holding it in his hand, not—quite—pointed in my direction.
    It looked like a cannon, is what it looked like.
    "Yes, Emmy, we do have to Drop it. And we will, understood? Any further discussion on the matter is going to get you gigged for insubordination, if Idon't shoot you down where you stand. You got me, shithead?"
    "Yes, sir."
    "Granted, it's not the way I'd like to do it—if I had my way, we'd bring Magellan back through the Gate, unleash a worldwrecker, and blow that dirtball to bits. But there's no way I can count on that, so we're going to take the sure way."
    "I . . . don't understand."
    "That's because you're still green, Emmy. If you started giving everybody what they want, too damn many millions of them would end up like Kurt and Ari—or worse. Justice ." He snorted as he shook his head sadly. "Ever ask anyone, back at the Academy, why all Contact Service people are officers? No enlisted. Why?"
    I quoted from memory. "'The responsibilities of each and every member of the Contact Service are—'"
    "No. It's because we're not really military, Emmy. We're cops.
    "Go ask a cop sometime, kid. Ask him whether he thinks people need justice. Or mercy."

Interlude

    Destination: Second no First Lieutenant Manuel Curdova, Tee Double-you TWCS,
    CENSORED
    Contact Service Administrative Bureau Building 5, Level Sub-two
    Very New York
    Routing: I800RQW5R43EE83 change those Os to zeros
    Origin: Second Lieutenant Emile von du Mark, TWCS Aboard TWS MAGELLAN (#LC2-559)
    Subject: Personnel no eye said personal, you
    CENSORED
    File
    Created: 3 September 2241

    if this machine doesn't start listening better it's going to take me more time to clean up this letter than it should to write it in the first CENSORED place and the CENSORED pause button only works when you're pushing down on it? and what is this censored CENSORED question mark
    Ridiculous besides this censorship program is a
    CENSORED piece of
    CENSORED—this is private mail, not

    start again and I've got to check out whether or not this thing is hooked into Magellan 's main computer mmm appears not which is typical service nonsense they're more concerned about me saying CENSORED