"My…memory of recent events is unclear," he said. That was a victory of will for he hardly slurred the words at all.

"That's totally understandable," Jeon replied. "I've injected drugs into you to limit the concussion and some powerful anti-inflammatories, but the trauma to your brain…"

He tried something he thought might be safe. "Was my assailant captured?"

"Your guards killed him. He was a subaltern from Engineering," Jeon supplied. "He probably bought into that offer made by Parliament. There will probably be many others like him in Fleet, so perhaps you were right to send all the surgeons away and insist on being treated by only me."

What offer from Parliament?

Even though possessing no knowledge of what Jeon referred to, Harald thought it through and concluded: Parliament must have rejected Fleet's claim on the Defence Platforms and sided instead with Orbital Combine. Knowing Harald to be the main instigator of the present crisis, they must have offered some sort of reward or even just amnesty to anyone in Fleet who managed to bring him down. Parliament's offer would be recorded. He looked around the room, vainly trying to locate his com helmet.

"My helmet?" he demanded.

"You weren't wearing it."

Harald nodded, then wished he hadn't. He reached up and felt the hard line of surgical glue and the stiff blood-crusted hair above. The skin there felt dead to him, probably because of the anaesthetic Jeon had used. He carefully swung his legs to the side of the surgical table and just sat there motionless knowing he wasn't ready to stand yet.

"Earlier you said…you can give me something?"

"I've some Vrastim and Tenoxalate," Jeon replied, picking up a small box plastered over with old-style storage labels. "Obviously, you are aware of the risks?"

Of the drugs suggested one was a battlefield stimulant and the other a cocktail of enzymes, endorphins, vasoconstrictors and sugar accelerants. The Tenoxalate cut down on pain and could force continued usage out of the most damaged tissues, but could also result in dangerous formations of scar tissue prone to turn gangrenous, and also in extreme weariness. The Vrastim served to counter the last effect, so combined the two drugs could even put someone with multiple gunshot wounds back on their feet. Staying on these drugs for too long would result in dependency, followed shortly afterwards by organ failure. Even coming off them before they got their hooks into you would result in shock, then the probable requirement of further surgery to remove dead tissue, after which recovery would be long and slow.

Harald gazed at Jeon, it suddenly occurring to him that she could give him any drugs she might choose, and he wouldn't know the difference until they were in his veins. Could he really trust her?

Then the illogic of his paranoia struck him. She had just cemented his skull back together. Why would she now bother to do that?

"Okay, give them to me," he told her.

Jeon opened the box and removed twinned glass vials, one containing a clear fluid and the other something peaty. She clipped them to the access port in a tube trailing from Harald's arm to a nearby pressurised saline feed—pressurised because gravity feeds weren't used in ships where gravity could fail. Harald watched the twin vials slowly emptying, felt a sudden fizzing in his limbs, and a lightness of breathing resulting from an adrenal surge. Suddenly he felt a great urge to get out into the ship's corridors and run. Instead he carefully pushed himself off the surgical table and stood up.

Jeon picked up a sealed injector pack and placed it beside the labelled box, then turned her attention to the two emptying vials. Once they were drained she took a sterile swab and, pulling the tube from his arm, pressed the swab into place. "Hold that," she instructed.

Harald obliged, feeling thoroughly alert now, but still there were holes in his memory, fuzzy and disconnected incidents he could not put into context, occasional oddities like the phrase 'Polity Consul Assessor'—itself a collection of words that seemed to make no sense at all. Jeon now handed over both the box and the injector pack.

"The two drugs must always be injected together, but use no more than one dose every two hours. I know you'll be strongly tempted to use them more frequently as the initial effect begins to wear off, but be warned that cutting gangrene out of someone's head is a rather different matter to removing it from elsewhere in the body."

"I am not so stupid," Harald protested.

"No, you're not," Jeon admitted, "but you'll still overuse the drugs. People like you, and me, always do." Now she picked up a tube of capsules. "These are painkillers which you dissolve under your tongue. Use them sparingly."

Harald pocketed the drugs then, shaking at first but slowly getting it under control, he walked over to the door. Pausing there, he gazed down at himself. Despite some sponging down of his foamite suit, there were still bloodstains at his shoulder and all down one side as far as his knee. Though tempted to change into a new uniform, he decided that keeping this suit on would remind people of what had happened. He opened the door and stepped through with Jeon behind him. Four guards outside immediately came to attention. Noting that two of them also wore blood-splashed uniforms, he wondered if it was his own blood or that of his would-be assassin.

"We'll head for the Bridge," he decided, because that seemed the most likely location of his missing com helmet—and because, at that moment, he did not know in which direction it lay.

The guards turned smartly to face down the corridor, two setting out ahead of them, with the other two falling in beside himself and Jeon. After a couple of turnings they finally arrived at a bank of elevators. There Harald felt himself tensing up as he warily watched two technicians depart one of the lifts. He had no direct memory of it, but strongly sensed he had been shot in a place like this. One of the guards confirmed this for him by training his disc carbine on the departing technicians, while the other three carefully watched the surrounding area. Harald now transferred his paranoia onto them, nervous of their weapons, which could be turned on him at any moment.

Finally their own lift arrived.

"I'll be returning to my station on the Bridge within the hour," announced Jeon. "I have to check that recent upgrade to the U-space scanner. We need to keep a watch out for that Polity artefact."

Harald nodded to her knowingly, and she departed along the corridor. As he stepped into the lift, he tried to put together all she had said to him. The last he could remember, she had worked from her own separate research area, yet now she must have a station on the Bridge. But 'U-space scanner' and 'Polity artefact'? Obviously there was a great deal of information he needed to reintegrate.

Having drawn smoothly to a halt, the lift unit revolved till its exit aligned with the entrance to the Bridge. Harald stepped out and surveyed, seeing many gazes turn towards him. He knew he should say something encouraging, but was terrified of revealing his ignorance. Raising a hand in greeting instead, he hurried towards the stair leading up to the Admiral's Haven. Leaving his escort below he quickly climbed it alone. Once out of everyone's view he allowed himself to slump in exhaustion. But when he spotted his com helmet and control glove, like an addict drawn to his fix, he quickly stepped over and picked them up.

At first there seemed to be something wrong with the resolution of the eye-screen, then he realised the problem was in his eye itself. This defect required him to use the entire screen for just one image at a time. He proceeded to access his private records and Fleet logs, carefully scanned and reintegrated information, then began to relearn the history of all recent manoeuvres in an attempt to bring himself back up to date. Yet when, many hours later and after another shot of the drugs Jeon had provided, he stood up and prepared to go down into the Bridge to issue orders, he felt a hollow detachment from all he had done or intended to do. It almost seemed as if, like some automaton, he was carrying through the schemes and Machiavellian plans of someone else—and someone he did not know too well.