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the pink-fluid tanks like the one in which his arm had been regrown. The injury certainly would require something on that order if it were ever going to heal.
    Altin waited until the other nurses left, a matter of several minutes, before he entered the ward. His hands were held out, open, clearly unarmed. “Doctor Singh, please don’t call the guards. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to find Orli.”
    The doctor spun on him, and for the first time in Altin’s memory, there was anger there, a deep, simmering anger, controlled but reflective of the great sense of betrayal that the gentle doctor felt. “She’s probably dead, Altin. They took her down to the planet, or at least they are trying to, and when she gets there, she is going to be tried for treason and executed, just like in the good old days.”
    “They what?”
    “Don’t you dare act surprised now, Altin. Don’t you do it.” He moved to a nearby nurse’s station and picked up a tablet. He tapped it to life with a finger, and called up a video feed from outside the ship. He spun it around to where Altin could see the chaos of activity. The explosions, the streaking laser light, the broken husks of ships and the oozing orange strands of ruptured Hostile innards. “She’s flying through that, Altin. Right now. And if she somehow happens to make it down alive, she’ll be dead in a few days at best. And it’s because of you.”
    “I know how it appears just now,” Altin said. “But I assure you, things are not as they appear. We were manipulated too.”
    Doctor Singh stepped toward him, thrusting the tablet forward at Altin, his large brown eyes glistening with the tears of impotent rage, held barely in check by the kind fibers that made him the man he was and prevented him from the violence he so desperately wanted to act out. “You said you loved her, Altin. That’s what you said. And she believed you. She trusted you. We all did. So congratulations. You win. Yours is the greatest deception of them all, and you can stop the game now. Victory is at hand, just look and revel in what you have done.”
    At first Altin wanted to defend himself again, to try to explain it, to make the doctor see. But he knew it would be pointless; he could tell by the severity of the doctor’s gaze. So instead, he went back to his original query. “So where is she? You don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to believe me about the Hostiles—and I can hardly blame you for that—but you must believe I love Orli. I love her more than anything. Than everything. Tell me where she is, and I can get her out.”
    Anger swelled inside the doctor again, a pulse of it that had his lungs expanding with the breath that might have unleashed another wave of his truest sentiments, his fury, his frustration, his grief. But instead he let it go wordlessly. His head fell, his chin to his chest, resting on the white coat, now marred by the browning smears of the burned man’s blood. “I have no idea where she is. She’s in there somewhere.” He handed Altin the tablet and then went to the nurse’s station where he took a chair. He buried his face in his hands and Altin thought he might be crying, though it might just as easily have been simple weariness and frustration that left him so.
    Altin lifted the tablet and watched the battle playing out upon its glowing screen. Earth, bright and blue, dressed in the same livery as Prosperion, the wisp of clouds and the armor of hard brown and green continents. These were the colors of humanity, serving as the backdrop for what was a seething mass of motion, bright lights moving like dust motes beaten out of an old couch near a sunlit window, the frenzy and random violence of their movements making no apparent difference to the movements of the next nearby. Randomness in action. No pattern and no recourse. A dance with no choreography, only the whirling step-stepping toward death.
    Orli was in that somewhere.
    He turned to the