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was.”
    King leaned back, pressing his body into his leather chair, and looked at Ida down the length of his not insubstantial nose. There was no chair on the other side of the desk. The commandant—who should have been occupying the ready room—probably didn’t want to wear out his fancy rug. Importing it from Earth, along with the fancy wooden desk and the fancy leather chair, had cost the Fleet a fortune; of that Ida had no doubt, no doubt at all. So he just stood and ignored the shooting pains that tap-danced down his side from armpit to ankle, and tried to ignore the fact that Provost Marshal King was the most obtuse officer in the galaxy and that he really, really wished the commandant himself was still on board.
    “Captain Cleveland,” King said. He kept looking down that mother of a nose.
    Ida supposed this was his idea of appearing all-important and commanding to his subordinates; considering the jackasses left on the empty hulk that was the U-Star Coast City, perhaps it worked. On Ida? Not so much. Not least of all because the space station’s security chief was a couple years younger than he was. Didn’t King know who he was talking to? Who he was trying—and failing—to make sweat on the fancy little rug? Ida had been busy saving a whole goddamn planet from the Spiders while the provost marshal here got the Coast City ’s canteen roster nice and straight. And now, with the commandant gone, King was the ranking officer.
    Maybe it was just lack of experience, the self-important paper-pusher suddenly finding himself elevated to commander of a powerful, if only partially active, piece of Fleet military hardware. He seemed a born bureaucrat, content to manage the affairs of the Fleet from a safe distance while field servicemen like Ida were actually out there, taking the fight to the Spiders. Except now he was supposed to be in charge of the station and in control of its personnel, and Ida had just told him that he was anything but. The marines knew something was wrong—Ida had sensed that already, the commandant’s absence clearly a sore point among the station’s crew. And, Ida thought, the marines also knew that the marshal wasn’t capable of replacing their respected commandant, even temporarily. Ida started to feel sorry for King.
    King coughed. “Something funny, Cleveland?”
    The feeling quickly passed. Ida tried opening his black eye, but all he could see through that one before it filled with tears was the provost marshal framed in a dark, grainy slit. Ida let it close again, and noted that King had not only dropped Ida’s title but gone from his first name to his last. King was slipping, beginning to think Ida was part of the shitty little crew of the Coast City . And Ida wasn’t going to let that pass.
    “It’s Captain, sir, and there is a whole lot that I find amusing on board this U-Star. Not the least of which is the deliberate obfuscation of a criminal act, namely the attack on myself by two crewmen under your direct command.”
    King pretended to look busy behind the desk, turning his attention to a stack of papers in front of him that were in desperate need of alphabetizing. He seemed uncomfortable, nervous even. “Captain Cleveland, let me assure you I take such accusations with a certain level of seriousness.”
    Paper shuffling while you told someone who was clearly an annoyance to get the hell out of your office was standard procedure. Ida had used that old trick countless times himself. Back in the day, before saving a planet and getting a robot knee had brought him here, to the back end of a particularly nasty little nowhere.
    “But…”
    Here it came.
    “… right now we’re in the middle of a complex mission, and we’re against the clock. I need all of this station’s personnel working to capacity. Taking apart a platform like this is a difficult and dangerous operation—I don’t think I need to tell you that. While I’m in command I need this ship running as