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to you soon,” he said, and then he was gone.

    The visits, though exhausting, gave her something to occupy her mind—so many issues, so many threads and tangents, each one a little puzzle, a tangled bit of string that had to be unwound and straightened out.
    She dealt with them by compartmentalizing, breaking a large issue down into smaller problems and solving them piece by piece so they could be dealt with individually, preventing her mind from being overwhelmed. The answers could then be applied to strategic and tactical command decisions. She played with the threads in her mind, ravelling and unravelling, rewinding and binding. Each aspect would have to be considered, from short-term gains to long-term.
    Having something to do was good.  
    The Toralii escape pods would not be easy to hide. She would need a plan to expose them. What if they used defoliating agents on the islands where the Toralii had landed? Short-term gain: locate the survivors more easily and deal with them—long-term loss: destroy the only habitat humanity had left.
    Unacceptable. They’d have to find another way.
    What to do about the Kel-Voran? Was it worth keeping them on Velsharn? That would, she reasoned, depend entirely upon their attitude. They would adjust and become helpful or leave if they didn’t want to fit in. If they didn’t want to adjust and didn’t want to go, they would be forced to.
    That was not a problem she looked forward to resolving. She had seen the Kel-Voran in combat firsthand. They were, for good reason, one of the only species who could stand toe-to-toe with the Toralii Alliance and come out ahead. Not even Humans could claim that. Victory for her had always come through having advantages: terrain, surprise, numbers.
    Ben, though—the construct wearing a copy of her face—was a more vexing problem that had no easy solution. Ben had caused a cataclysm of literally universal proportions. His actions had led to the creation of a rip in the fabric of the universe and the destruction of a whole planet, along with the death of many Humans, Toralii, and Kel-Voran. He was the one who had bombed Velsharn and blasted the Telvan colony to ashes. He was a thief, a criminal, and a mass-murderer… yet he had been right . He had warned her that her military stood no chance against the Toralii Alliance and that they would come after the Humans with vengeance and terrible retribution.
    It hurt that she had been wrong, but being right didn’t excuse one from murder.
    What to do with him now? Ben had correctly pointed out, to her chagrin, that he had knowledge—contacts, information. He was a useful asset.
    So often throughout Human history, men of dubious character had been permitted to continue to exist simply because they were useful. Wernher von Braun, a scientist who’d worked for the United States, was credited as being one of the “fathers of rocket science.” He received the National Medal of Science. Many of the best and brightest minds at NASA regarded him as, without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history.
    He was also a lapel-wearing, card-carrying, actual literal Nazi, an honourary lieutenant in the Waffen SS, promoted to major by the end of the war. He was photographed wearing SS uniforms and swastika pins, his position verified by many independent accounts, and was personally given the position of professor by Adolf Hitler himself.
    Wernher von Braun had spent many of his post-war years, the time he was working for NASA, downplaying his role in the Nazi regime, claiming his dream was the application of his rocketry knowledge to a space program. There might have been truth in that. However, there was little doubt he had, at the very least, made a substantial contribution to the blitz weapons that had played a hand in devastating London and to the V-1 and V-2 programs, built using slave labour in concentration camps.
    Their construction killed more people than deploying the weapons against London ever