"Well, Perry?" Weber said. "Anything you're missing right about now?"

I shrugged. "Only one thing," I said.

"It can't be any stupider than missing roller coasters," Keyes said. "Out with it. That's an order."

"The only thing I really miss is being married," I said. "I miss sitting around with my wife, just talking or reading together or whatever."

This got utter silence. "That's a new one on me," Ridley said.

"Shit, I don't miss that," Jensen said. "The last twenty years of my marriage were nothing to write home about."

I looked around. "Don't any of you have spouses who joined up? Don't you keep in touch with them?"

"My husband signed up before I did," Weber said. "He was already dead by the time I got my first posting."

"My wife is stationed on the Boise," Keyes said. "She drops me a note occasionally. I don't really get the feeling she's missing me terribly. I guess thirty-eight years of me was enough."

"People get out here and they don't really want to be in their old lives anymore," Jensen said. "Sure, we miss the little things—like Aimee says, that's one of the ways you keep yourself from going nuts. But it's like being taken back in time, to just before you made all the choices that gave you the life you had. If you could go back, why would you make the same choices? You already lived that life. My last comment aside, I don't regret the choices I made. But I'm not in a rush to make those same choices again. My wife's out here, sure. But she's happy to live her new life without me. And, I must say, I'm not in a hurry to sign up on that tour of duty again, either."

"This isn't cheering me up, people," I said.

"What is it about being married you miss?" Alan asked.

"Well, I miss my wife, you know," I said. "But I also miss the feeling of, I don't know, comfort. The sense you're where you're supposed to be, with someone you're supposed to be with. I sure as hell don't feel that out here. We go places that we have to fight for, with people who might be dead the next day or the day after that. No offense."

"None taken," Keyes said.

"There's no stable ground out here," I said. "There's nothing out here I feel really safe about. My marriage had its ups and downs like anyone's, but when it came down to it, I knew it was solid. I miss that sort of security, and that sort of connection with someone. Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human. That's what I miss about marriage."

More silence. "Well, hell, Perry," Ridley finally said. "When you put it that way, I miss being married, too."

Jensen snorted. "I don't. You keep missing being married, Perry. I'll keep missing my daughter's cookies."

"Molasses," Keyes said. "Disgusting."

"Don't start that again, sir," Jensen said. "I may have to go get my Empee."

Susan's death was very nearly the flip side of Thomas'. A drillers' strike on Elysium had severely reduced the amount of petroleum being refined. The Tucson was assigned to transport scab drillers and protect them while they got several of the shut-down drilling platforms back online. Susan was on one of the platforms when the striking drillers attacked with improvised artillery; the explosion knocked Susan and two other soldiers off the platform and down several dozen meters to the sea. The other two soldiers were already dead when they hit the water but Susan, severely burned and barely conscious, was still alive.

Susan was fished out of the sea by the striking drillers who had launched the attack; they decided to make an example of her. The Elysium seas feature a large scavenger called a gaper, whose hinged jaw is easily capable of taking up a person in a single swallow. Gapers frequent the drilling platforms because they feed off the trash the platforms shed into the sea. The drillers propped Susan up, slapped her into consciousness, and then reeled off a hurried manifesto in her general direction, relying on her BrainPal connection to carry their words to the CDF. They then found Susan guilty of collaborating with the enemy, sentenced her to death, and pushed her back into the sea directly below the platform's trash chute.

A gaper was not long in coming; one swallow and Susan was in. At this point Susan was still alive and struggling to exit the gaper from the same orifice from which she entered. Before she could manage this, however, one of the striking drillers shot the gaper directly below the dorsal fin, where the animal's brain was located. The gaper was killed instantly and sank, taking Susan with it. Susan was killed, not from being eaten and not even from drowning, but from the pressure of the water as she and the fish that had swallowed her sank into the abyss.

Any celebration by the striking drillers over this blow to the oppressor was short-lived. Fresh forces from the Tucson swept through the drillers' camps, rounded up several dozen ringleaders, shot them and fed them all to the gapers. Except for the ones who killed Susan, who were fed to gapers without the intermediary step of being shot first. The strike ended shortly thereafter.

Susan's death was clarifying to me, a reminder that humans can be as inhuman as any alien species. If I had been on the Tucson, I could see myself feeding one of the bastards who killed Susan to the gapers, and not feeling in the least bit bad about it. I don't know if this made me better or worse than what I had feared I was becoming when we battled the Covandu. But I no longer worried about it making me any less human than I was before.

Those of us who were at the Battle for Coral remember where we were when we first heard the planet had been taken. I was listening to Alan explain how the universe I thought I knew was long gone.

"We left it the first time we skipped," he said. "Just went up and out into the universe next door. That's how skipping works."

This got a nice, long mute reaction from me and Ed McGuire, who were sitting with Alan in the battalion's "At Ease" lounge. Finally Ed, who had taken over Aimee Weber's squad, piped up. "I'm not following you, Alan. I thought that the skip drive just took us up past the speed of light or something like that. That's how it works."

"Nope," Alan said. "Einstein's still right—the speed of light is as fast as you can go. Besides which, you wouldn't want to start flying around the universe at any real fraction of the speed of light, anyway. You hit even a little chunk of dirt while you're going a couple hundred thousand klicks a second and you're going to put a pretty good hole in your spaceship. It's just a speedy way to get killed."

Ed blinked and then swept his hand over his head. "Whoosh," he said. "You lost me."

"All right, look," Alan said. "You asked me how the skip drive works. And like I said, it's simple: It takes an object from one universe, like the Modesto, and pops it into another universe. The problem is that we refer to it as a 'drive.' It's not really a drive at all, because acceleration is not a factor; the only factor is location within the multiverse."

"Alan," I said. "You're doing another flyby."

"Sorry," Alan said, and looked thoughtful for a second. "How much math do you guys have?" he asked.

"I vaguely recall calculus," I said. Ed McGuire nodded in agreement.

"Oy," Alan said. "Fine. I'm going to use small words here. Please don't be offended."

"We'll try not to," Ed said.

"Okay. First off, the universe you're in—the universe we're in right at this moment—is only one of an infinite number of possible universes whose existence is allowed for within quantum physics. Every time we spot an electron in a particular position, for example, our universe is functionally defined by that electron's position, while in the alternate universe, that electron's position is entirely different. You following me?"