Lawrence took a quick look at the map, comparing island positions. He left two people to look after the injured man and set off in the boat to the third island and the other divers. He told them to go to the plankton factory and take the medical equipment to the injured man, then set out by himself to the resort. With just himself onboard, he jettisoned all the surplus equipment he could find, allowing the boat to go as fast as possible. In theory, the medical equipment collected by the other divers should allow the injured man to stay alive while he made the long top to the resort to alert a helicopter rescue team.

The AS allowed the scenario, although the chopper paramedics rebuked him for making the boat trip to the resort by himself. There was an experienced sailor in charge of the other diving team who could have made a faster trip. But the injured man survived.

For his second expedition he was in a deep, rocky canyon in a jungle. His little team was moving a lot slower than anticipated because of the difficult terrain; they were starting to run out of food. The canyon walls were too high to be climbed.

Lawrence asked them for their skills and found one member who was proficient with canoes. The team set about chopping down trees and building a makeshift raft. The canoeist was dispatched downriver to contact their base camp.

After two kilometers the canoeist encountered rapids too severe for the raft. He had to wait until the rest of the team caught up on foot and helped rebuild the raft so that it could be taken apart and carried around difficult sections. Right idea, not enough thought for the method.

An Arctic wilderness came next, with Lawrence by himself at the center of a ring of various equipment caches. To get to the food, which was on top of a pressure ridge, he had to collect the climbing equipment to reach it, but the climbing gear was too bulky and heavy to carry in the backpack; he needed the sledge, which was on the other side of a bottomless gorge. The collapsible bridge to get over the gorge needed the sledge to move it.

He just couldn't work that one out. But he did his best, fetching a single coil of rope from the climbing cache and trying to swing across the gorge. He wound up tumbling down into the black abyss when his ice axe anchor broke free.

After that came a classic cell/maze. The AS put him in a room with five doors, each of which led to another room with five doors. The hazards were mostly visible, with hinged flagstones, spikes stabbing out of the walls, flames, a pendulum, lions, walls that closed in, cutting wire at neck level, electrified segments, stones that fell from their ceiling cavities, tripwire-triggered darts, moss with an acid sap, rat swarms—though there were others like gas and ultrasonics that he didn't find until he was already well into the room. The doors all carried clues to what was in the room on the other side, sometimes numerical; then there were symbols, star signs, even poetry.

He was allowed five goes. The farthest he ever got was eight rooms from his starting place.

He was put in a starship just after it had suffered a meteor collision. Environmental support systems were failing, air leaking, power dropping, network glitched, no spacesuit, few tools. He had to make his way from his own badly damaged section to the lifeboat capsule halfway around the life support wheel.

After that the AS dressed him in a spacesuit that was low on oxygen and power reserves and left him clinging to a small asteroid with his ship on the other side. There were different types of survey sensors dotted across the surface, which he could cannibalize for components and gas as he tried to crawl his way back. The rock's microgravity field was just enough to stop him from achieving orbit by muscle power alone, and weak enough to leave him with all the maneuvering problems of freefall. He actually expired within sight of the little silver craft.

The locker room that evening was even more subdued than the previous night. The candidates all looked dazed and shell-shocked. Conversation was all: "But what do you do after that bit where..."

He couldn't see any protesters in the square. And the weather was a lot better that evening, high clouds and a dry wind blowing from off the land. It was still cold. He quite fancied a hot potato.

Joona was in the bar when he arrived, sitting at her usual place, with empty stools on either side. None too sure of his status, he left a vacant stool between them, and ordered his mango and apple.

"Shouldn't you have something stronger?" she asked. "I'd say you've had a hard day."

"Alcohol isn't going to help. I've got an even harder day tomorrow. Have to keep a clear head."

"Is it worth it?"

He took a long drink from his tumbler. "Oh, yes."

"Doesn't seem it to me. Look at the state of you. What did they do to you in there today?"

"Put it this way. If you ever crash-land on a frozen desert populated by flesh-eating zombies, then stick with me, I'll get you out. Piece of cake compared to what I went through."

Joona cocked her head to one side, giving him an interested look. "And how does that help them select their officers, exactly?"

"It's testing our ability to think under pressure. They put us in all kinds of impossible situations today." He rolled the glass between his palms, regarding it with a miserable expression. "I didn't do very well. I lost count of how many times I got killed. Then again, the others were just the same, judging by what they said."

"How good are you?"

"What do you mean?"

She slid her hands across the bar, pushing the tea cup ahead of her, moving with feline grace as she leaned in toward him. "I mean, you're a... you're a soldier who's seen action. You've been in bad situations for real on those other worlds you plunder, right?"

"Yes. But we're trained in how to deal with hostile crowd or ambush situations. I know what I'm doing."

"Right, but what you're basically taught is how to keep cool under fire. And today they simply turned up the heat.

Were those situations genuinely impossible, or did you just flunk them?"

"You don't take many prisoners, do you? I suppose I could have done better in some of them, if I knew more about engineering and stuff."

"Has it occurred to you that these tests were actually dual purpose? It sounds to me like they were testing your character as well as your ability to think."

He slumped down on the stool. "Probably. I'm really up shit creek, then."

"Why is that?" with lazy amusement Lawrence realized just how stoned she was. "I have no character. You said so yourself."

"I didn't say you had no character. I said you had the wrong character, which for the purposes of today's experiment will serve you well. You're what they want."