I nod mutely.

"Not surprising." He stays tactfully silent while I drain my glass.

To my surprise, I feel a little better. Get a job! "How do I find a job?" I ask. "I mean, not being a man—"

"You phone the Chamber of Commerce and ask for one." He puts his glass down. I look at it, see the two snails climbing opposite sides of the same blade of grass, leaving their iridescent trails of slime. "It's as simple as that. They'll send a car to pick you up and take you somewhere with room for a body. They didn't run you through the induction course when you arrived, but it's easy enough. I don't know what they'll find for you or how much they'll pay you—I'd guess a lot less than they pay men, that seems to be how they did things in the dark ages—but if you find it too boring, you can always phone the CC again and ask for something else."

"A job," I say, trying the words out for sense. It's crazy, actually, but no more so than anything else in this world. "I didn't know I could get one."

He shrugs. "It's not illegal or anything." A sidelong look. "They just didn't set it up by default. It's another of those things we're allowed to game if we're smart enough to think of it."

"And I'll meet people."

"It depends where you work." Sam looks uncertain for a moment. "Most jobs, there are zombies around—but they try to keep at least two humans in every workplace. And there are visitors. But it's pretty boring. I really didn't think you'd be interested."

"It can't possibly be as mind-destroying as this!" I clench my hands.

"Don't bet on it." He shakes his head. "Dark ages work was often meaningless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous."

"Not as dangerous to my sanity as not doing anything."

"That's my Reeve." Sam smiles, a brilliant expression that I don't often see and that makes me really envy the lucky woman he left behind outside the experiment. "I'll get you another drink, then go fix dinner. How about we eat out here instead of inside? Just for once."

"I'd like that a lot," I say fervently. "Just for once."

IN the early hours of the morning I'm awakened by one of my recurring nightmares.

I have several different bad dreams. What distinguishes this one is the quality of the imagery in it. I'm a neomorph, male again and roughly orthohuman in body plan, but extensively augmented with mechabolic subsystems from the cellular level up. Instead of intestines, I have a compact fusion gateway cell. I have three hearts to keep my different circulatory fluids moving, skin reinforced with diamond fiber mesh, and I can survive in vacuum for hours. These are all trappings of my role as a soldier in the service of the Linebarger Cats, because I am a tank.

But that's not what makes the dream a nightmare.

We're one-point-one megaseconds into the campaign, and even though we—my unit—don't normally sleep, we're all under the influence of fatigue poisons from nearly twelve consecutive diurns of high-speed maneuvers. Hostilities with this polity commenced as soon as High Command established the orbital elements on one of their better-connected real-space nodes. The Six Fingers Green Kingdom has been particularly tenacious in its attempts to hold on to its corrupt A-gates, which are still infected with Curious Yellow censorbots and contaminating everyone who passes through them. They're one of the last hold-outs on the losing side; they've survived long after the other censorship redoubts succumbed to our maneuvers by virtue of their fanatically obscurantist network topology and a cunning mesh of internal firewalls. But we've identified the real-space location of one of their main switches, and that means we've got a node with massive fan-out to exploit once we can get our people into it. My unit is on the sharp end.

The assault vector is one end of a T-gate ten meters in diameter, boosted up to about thirty percent of c and free-falling through the icy outer limits of the cloud of debris orbiting the brown dwarf Epsilon Indi B. EI-B is not much bigger than a gas giant planet, and has a surface temperature of under a thousand degrees absolute—by the time you get out to its halo, whole light minutes away, the star is almost invisible. Cometary bodies orbit it in chilly isolation, as cold as the depths of interstellar space.

Our assault gate is unpowered and stealthy. It drifts through the perimeter defense field of the Six Fingers Green Kingdom orbital in a matter of seconds and skims past the huge cylinder at a range of under fifty kilometers, preposterously close yet very hard to spot. As it flashes by, my unit is one of several who make a high-speed insertion through the distal end of the wormhole. As far as the defenders are concerned, we appear out of empty space right on their doorstep. And as far as we're concerned, it's a death trap.

It takes us fifty seconds to cover the fifty kilometers to the habitat, decelerating all the way, mashed flat in our acceleration cages as our suits jink and dodge and shed penaids and decoys and graser bombs. We lose eighty percent of our numbers to point defense fire in that fifty-second period. It's absolute carnage, but even so we're lucky—the only reason any of us survive at all is because we're working for the Linebarger Cats, and the Cats specialize in applied insanity. Everyone knows that only a lunatic would attack across open space, so the Green Fingers have concentrated ninety percent of their firepower on the inside of their orbital, pointing at the proximal ends of their longjump T-gates, rather than outside on the hub, covering the barren real-space approaches.

I'm unconscious for most of the approach, my memories of it spooled by sensors on my suit and buffered for instant recall once my meatbody unvitrifies so I can take over. One moment I'm lying down and the suit is closing around me, and the next I'm standing in the wreckage of a compartment aboard the Green Finger orbital, memories of the insane charge alive in my mind as I pull out my sword, slave my blaster nodes to my eyeball trackers, exude more ablative foam, and head for the inhabited spaces.

Fast forward:

Dealing with the civilians once we've taken the polity is going to be difficult because they've all been censored by Curious Yellow—the original version carrying the censorship payload, not the later hacked tools of various inquisitions and cognitive dictatorships. The censorship payload doesn't just delete memories of forbidden things—it tends to leave spores in its victims' brains and a boot loader in their netlinks, and if they upload into a vulnerable A-gate it can wake up and infect the gate firmware. So we have to round up everyone on board the hab we've just ripped through with swords and blasters, and recycle them through our own crude decontamination gates.

Now, here's where the dreamlike logic kicks in. Their assembler gates are the advanced, elegant products of a mature techgnosis. But our A-gates are crude lash-ups, hand-built in a matter of tens of megaseconds using what knowledge we could salvage. We threw them together in a blind hurry when we realized how far the contamination extended—throughout all the A-gates of the Republic of Is, basically—and they're messy and inefficient and slow. What we've built works, but it isn't fast. So we're running our assault gates in half-duplex mode, disassembling and storing the citizens for subsequent virus scanning and reincarnation. And because we haven't secured all approaches, and because other nodes within the Six Fingers Green Kingdom are fighting back with vicious desperation, we have to move fast.

After about five thousand seconds of collecting struggling civilians and feeding them into the gates, Group Major Nordak calls me with new orders. "The bodies are slowing us up," she sends. "Just harvest the heads. We'll resurrect them all when we've got the situation under control."