Out of all that, one word stuck dismayingly in Pirius’s mind: unqualified.

“But why is all this so important to you — to Earth?”

Nilis sighed. “Pirius, have you no sense of history? Perhaps not — you young soldiers are so brave, but so limited in your horizons! Have you any idea at all how long this war has been going on — how long this Front has been stalled here? And then there are the deaths, Pirius, the endless deaths. And for what?”

“The Xeelee are powerful. FTL foreknowledge leads to stalemate—”

Nilis waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes. That’s the standard justification. But we have got used to this stasis. Most people can’t imagine any other way of conducting the war. But I can. And that’s why I am here. Listen to me. Don’t you worry about this absurd trial. I’ll get you both cleared — you and your older twin. And then we’ll see what we will see — eh?”

Pirius stared, bemused. He was no fool, and in fact had been selected for pilot training because of his capacity for independent thought. But he had never in his life come across anybody as strange as this Commissary, and could make nothing of what he said. Bewildered, disoriented, he longed only to be out of here, out of Officer Country, and back in the great orderly warmth of the Barracks Ball, safe under his sheets’ coarse fabric with Torec.

Pirius had to wait an agonizing week for the trial to be called. He tried to immerse himself in the mundane routines of his training.

Arches was under the control of the Training and Discipline Command, jointly run by the Navy and the Green Army, and every child hatched here was born into the Navy’s service. Most were destined to live out their lives performing simple services, administrative or technical support. But at the age of eight, a few, a precious few, were filtered out by a ruthless program of tests and screening, and submitted for officer training.

Pirius had made it through that filtering. Now his life was crammed with instruction in mathematics, science, technology, tactics, games theory, engineering, Galactic geography, multispecies ethics,

even Doctrinal philosophy — as well as a stiff program of physical development. But at the end of it was the prospect of serving the Navy in a senior and responsible role, perhaps as technical or administrative ground crew of some sort, or better yet in one of the prized flight roles — and best of all, as Pirius already knew was his own destiny, as a pilot. After that, if you prospered, there was the possibility of moving on to command, or, if you were invalided out, you could expect a role on the ground, or even in Training Command itself, like Captain Seath.

For young people primed from birth with the importance of duty, no better life could be imagined.

But none of this would come to pass if Pirius flunked his training, no matter what destiny FTL foreknowledge described for him. So Pirius tried to keep working. But his mind wasn’t on it, and as rumors spread about his predicament, his friends and rivals — even Torec — kept their distance.

He was relieved when the trial finally started. But, despite Nilis’s confidence, it didn’t go well.

The hearing was convened in a dedicated courtroom, a spherical chamber close to the geometric center of Officer Country. The judges, officers of the court, advocates and counsels, witnesses, and defendants took their places in tiered seats around the equator of the sphere. The central section was left open for Virtual displays of evidence. As mandated by custom and enshrined in Coalition law, the judging panel contained representatives from many of the great agencies of mankind: the Commission, of course, the Green Army, who governed the destinies of the millions of Rock-bound infantrymen, and the Navy, of which Pirius Blue’s Strike Arm was a section.

Before the trial opened, the president of the court, a grizzled Army general, gave a short instruction about the formal use of language: specifically, the use of historic tenses to describe events occurring in the “past” of Pirius Blue’s personal timeline, though they were in the future of the court itself.

Nilis leaned toward Pirius Red. “Even our language strains to fit the reality of time paradoxes,” he said. “But we try, we try!”

At first it wasn’t so bad: it was even interesting. Prompted by an advocate, Pirius Blue, the Pirius from the future, talked the court through a Virtual light-show dramatization of the incident in question, drawn from the ship’s log and the crew’s eyewitness accounts. The court watched Pirius’s withdrawal under fire from the line around the Rock barrage, his flight to Sag A East, the spectacular showdown with the Xeelee. From time to time he referred to his crew, Cohl the navigator and Tuta the engineer, to clarify details or correct mistakes. The show was stop-start, and if a clarification was conceded it would be incorporated into the draft of the Virtual sequence and that section run again.

Pirius himself — Pirius Red — watched intently. He felt intimidated that a version of himself, only a few years older, had been capable of this.

He tried to assess the reaction of the court members. Despite the legalistic setting, the members of the court watched, rapt, as miniature spacecraft chased each other across the spherical chamber. It was undoubtedly a dashing, daring episode, and it seemed to touch something primitive in people’s hearts, whatever their roles here today.

But Pirius Red’s heart sank at the grim expressions on the panel’s faces as they heard one example after another of how Pirius Blue had disobeyed orders: when he failed to hold the line as the Xeelee broke through the Rock, when he failed to turn back to face the fire of the pursuing nightfighters. Even Dans, obviously a maverick, had shown a closer adherence to duty by ensuring that she sent back a FTL beacon containing data on the engagement to the past, giving the military planners a couple of years’ notice of the Xeelee’s new Rock-busting tactic.

Nilis seemed unperturbed. He nodded, murmured notes into Virtual receptors, absorbed, analytical, his blue, rheumy eyes bright in Virtual light. He seemed most animated, in fact, at the dramatization of Dans’s ingenious countertemporal maneuver. He whispered to Pirius Red, “That’s it. That’s the key to the whole incident — that’s the way to outthink a Xeelee!”

When the reconstruction was over, the panel conferred briefly. Then with a curt, dismissive gesture, the president of the court summoned Nilis to make his response.

As he gathered his robes to stand up, Nilis whispered to Pirius Red, “See that look? He thinks the case is already over, that my defense is just a formality. Hah! We’ll show them — just as Blue showed that Xeelee.”

Pirius turned away, his heart thumping.

Nilis immediately conceded the accuracy of the reconstruction. “I’m not here to pick holes in a story told fully and honestly by three very honorable young people. And I’m not here to question, either, the central charge against Pirius: that he disobeyed orders both standing and direct in the course of the action. Of course he did; he doesn’t deny it himself. I’m not here to ask you to set aside self- evident fact.”

The old general asked dryly, “Then why are you here, Commissary?” Muffled laughter.

Nilis rose up to his full height. “To ask you to think,” he said grandly. “To think for yourselves — just as Pirius did, in extremis. We must think beyond mere orders. Why obey a pointless order if it will cost you your life, and the lives of your crew, and your ship, and gain absolutely nothing? Isn’t it better to put aside that order, to flee, to return — as Pirius self-evidently has done — and to fight again another day? Isn’t it obvious that Pirius disobeyed his orders the better to fulfill his duty?”