“You think they want someone disposable for … whatever they have in mind,” Surit said. Even if Surit hadn’t just accepted responsibility for this latest screwup, Marit Yeni’s legacy limited his options. “I know.” He’d rather risk it and try to succeed, however small the chance, than spend years out here. “I still want to take the assignment, sir.” He needed the captain rank; once he was a permanent captain, they’d restore a military pension to his alt-parent. Another quiet backwater post wouldn’t get him there for years.

The district captain threw up her hands. “Well, then!” She entered something on her wristband. “I’ll forward you the briefing. Say your goodbyes and pack fast. It’s on the other side of the sector, and they want you in three weeks.”

“I’ll find a shuttle,” Surit said. He paused. “Sir—”

“Yes?”

“My unit,” Surit said doggedly. “I don’t want any disciplinary marks on their records. They—”

“Will be fine, Lieutenant,” his superior officer said irritably. “I’ll make sure their records remain unblemished. Though the next time they make my traffic routes into a giant omelet, I make no promises.”

Surit saluted. “Thank you, sir. My regards to the goats.”

“I’ll pass them on,” the district captain said. She regarded him with friendly exasperation. “And I suppose I should say—good luck, Lieutenant.”

It took Surit two weeks of traveling to get to the refueling stop.

He spent some of it reading the briefing pack, which was unhelpfully minimal. A Cavalry Division fleet was going on a salvage retrieval mission. What they were trying to retrieve was unspecified. The location of it was unspecified, until Surit looked more closely at the fleet rendezvous coordinates and realized they were inside the maelstrom of chaotic space around the galactic link itself. There must be some mistake. The mass of disturbed space-time around the link was active and dangerous.

When he’d been a teenager, Surit had spent years obsessed with chaotic space. The army had fought battles at the edges of it, back in the Reader War. His mother’s ship—or the fragments of it—must still be in there somewhere, drifting eternally. For a few years, Surit had even tracked the currents to work out where the wreckage might have ended up. He didn’t do that anymore.

Surit dealt with uncertainty by making lists in his head. He started another one.

List: Queries He Probably Wasn’t Going to Get Answered.

Item: Why him? If this mystery post was a salvage mission, he could be useful, but retrieval units of the kind Surit ran were as common as waste-disposal workers. You didn’t headhunt a junior retrieval officer from halfway across the sector.

Item: Did they know about Marit? Surit considered the question for a few seconds then discarded it as useless. Even if someone did have some sort of grudge, they wouldn’t tell him.