“You don’t need fixing,” Surit said. He had no idea if that was true, but he didn’t like the way Tennal said it, as if it were a lost cause. For a moment Surit wished there were another architect and reader pair around so he and Tennal could know what to expect of Tennal’s abilities. Then he thought about the sort of architect who would agree to sync a conscripted reader and took back the wish. “You need analgesics. Not shots,” he added hastily. “Ask for tablets. It will help.”

Tennal looked torn between the dreadful banality of treating his universe-traveling mind with tablets you could buy at a grocery store and his agreement not to contradict Surit in public. “Ugh,” he said. He made a face at Istara, who bickered with him as they helped him out.

Surit rejoined the mothership and spent some time sourcing materials for the fixes, organizing the code patch, and finding the captain on duty to report to.

When he did find them, Surit was—justifiably—reamed out. He accepted the lengthy censure with a blank stare at the wall. The duty captain was right. Surit had failed at his due diligence, and if they hadn’t had Tennal’s reading abilities, the consequences could have been much worse than an hour of panicked patching. Something had gone very wrong before Surit and Tennal had even set foot on that shuttle, and Surit hadn’t caught it.

“You were lucky,” the duty captain said tersely. “If you hadn’t had a reader and a pilot specialist on the ship—”

“We didn’t,” Surit said.

They stared at each other.

“What do you mean?”

Surit had been told he was too detail-oriented, but he couldn’t help who he was. “We don’t have a pilot specialist.”

“Aren’t you a pilot specialist?”

“No,” Surit said, puzzled. Any soldier could be taught the basics of piloting, but the specialists—the ones with years of training—were the smooth, highly educated types who had joined the Note at the fleet rendezvous and now sat on the bridge of the mothership, ready to guide the whole fleet through chaotic space. Pilot specialists were for big ships and fighters. You wouldn’t find them on a retrieval shuttle. Surit privately thought his new unit’s pilots were good, but that wasn’t the same thing.

The duty captain frowned. “You must be. Readers are only recruited for pilot specialists.”

“No,” Surit said.

“Then why did they pick you?” the duty captain asked, nonplussed. “What was the plan there?”

Surit opened his mouth then realized, for the first time in years, he didn’t have a reply.