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freedom was—but the armband he wore trumped her natural sympathy. Law and order were fine things, but what he offered was something else.
    Garcia found something amusing in the scene. “If he’s recruiting League members, this is the right place to do it. Plenty of those farmboys will want to dish out a whipping now.”
    “Against who?” The refugees had seen nothing but bombs. They had no more idea who their attackers were than Prudence did.
    “Do you think they care? They just want to hit somebody back.”
    The officers had finished with the crowd and were making their way over to the Ulysses .
    “Now it’s your turn,” Garcia said.
    “Don’t you mean our turn?”
    “Nope. Them League guys give me the creeps. I’ll be belowdecks. But don’t forget to ask them for money. It can’t hurt.”
    Garcia scuttled away, abandoning Prudence to face the uniforms alone. Jorgun was asleep in his bunk, exhausted after carrying and lifting supplies and injured people for a double shift. Melvin was AWOL, probably locked in the gunnery pod and stoned out of his mind. All of this misery was too much for him to bear. It detracted from his ability to whine about his own suffering.
    That was unfair, she reflected. He’d done what he could, for the first twelve hours. It was only when it became obvious that nothing in his power would be enough that he had given up. Garcia was the one who cared the least, and thus was least scarred by the pain around them. Jorgun was protected by his simpleness. But he kept asking for Jelly, and sooner or later Prudence would have to find an answer for him.
    Knowing what the answer had to be, she had not looked for it.
    She wondered when she got to give up, stop caring, or just trust someone else to take charge. But she silenced that feeling before it grew into a whine. This was the price of command. This was the price of her freedom.
    “Captain Falling. Thank you for your assistance earlier.” Captain Stanton clapped his hands to his side and performed a half-bow. The gesture was entirely unnecessary, but mildly romantic.
    “I’m glad we could help.” Stanton was not really her type. Fleet guys never were. But she could certainly appreciate him as a fellow spacer.
    “May I introduce the commander, Lieutenant Kyle Daspar.”
    She was amazed at how much seething hatred Stanton could inject into such a simple sentence.
    “A pleasure to meet you, sir.” Formality seemed to be the appropriate tack. A spacer might appreciate her for her merits, but a civilian, promoted to authority on political strings, would expect to be deferred to and flattered.
    “Please. Just call me Kyle.” He seemed flustered, uncertain. In his face Prudence recognized a familiar suspicion. Authority never trusted the tramp freighter, never understood why someone would hop from system to system unless they were running away from something. The idea that someone might be running to something never satisfied them. Prudence’s dream, her restless search for something better, only sounded like escape to them. They never looked forward, only behind; never up, only down.
    She sighed, resigning herself to the coming interrogation. Curiously, his eyes flickered, and for a moment she thought he was disappointed. Perhaps she was seeing things. After all, she was tired, and there was enough disaster here to throw anyone off their game.
    “Captain Falling, I have a few questions I need to ask.”
    He was beefy, in a compact way, like ten kilos of steak packed into a five-kilo bag. His jaw was set in perpetual defiance, expecting hostility even while his stubborn eyebrows projected innocence. But he wasn’t as hard as a soldier. His curly black hair was short and neat, but not severely so. She could, with a generous stretch of creativity, imagine his lips pouting in a cute, boyish way, a depth of feeling that most spacers and soldiers had beaten out of them long before they became old enough to interest her.
    As much as she