“That’s how war is.” The major regards Spider with nuclear disdain. “You think you’re the first person to outlive their entire serving? Or the only one?”

“My captain—”

“I know your captain. She’s in the room. Who or what do you take me for?”

Spider falls silent. Major Reyes sweeps xer glistening arm outward, encompassing the roomful of trainees. “All of you—none born yet when the Truce of Logan was signed. Not one of you was alive to experience what it was like before.”

A small murmur. Maybe Major Reyes was right. The truce had been signed a dozen years before Misery was born; even Diamond, the oldest among them, was a baby when it happened. Misery knows war from wave dramas and tall tales; she doesn’t know it like the major knows it. The hollows from the endless rationing and from watching the buildings around you empty, victims of conscription. Every cloud in the sky a source of fear, every strange tic in a neighbor a suspicion of voidsickness.

“Teá Aubergine Spider,” Major Reyes barks. “How many seraphim are active in the Imperial fleets today?”

“A hundred and eighty-six across the duchies and the royal fleet,” Spider recites sourly.

“Do you know how many we had in AE 450? The year I was born?”

Spider mumbles.

“Speak up.”

“More than three hundred.”

“Three hundred and forty-seven,” Major Reyes says. “So. Between then and the truce, that’s a hundred and forty-six pilots that didn’t make it. Do you know how many of them I knew?”

Xer question hangs in the air like an insect hive; no one dares approach it. The major shakes xer head. “More than I can count. More than I can remember.” Xe starts pacing. “You have all lived in times of peace. None of you know what it was like, to hold advancing lines against the Heretics. To live in constant fear of the creeping nullvoid. In your body, in your mind. To never leave the state of highest alert—all times on the ship, eating, sleeping, fucking. Not knowing when the sky might tear and spit Heretic into your face. Because it happened every other day. Do you know what that’s like? Can you imagine it? No. You can’t. Not until you’ve lived through it.”

“And Forge willing, we won’t have to.” Ono Red-2’s captain stands on the balls of her feet, electric with adrenaline. The captain’s anger is a thick wall that has weight, like steam.

Major Reyes laughs as xe focuses upon the other war hero in the room. “Do you really believe that, Captain Sunyata? You, the great strategist of the Empire of all people, are telling me you don’t know how thin the threads by which the truce hang are?”

“Yes,” Captain Sunyata says sharply, “I do. And all this crying mimosa is premature and counterproductive. My professional opinion. You can put that in a report.”