“What did she do that was meritorious?” I asked.

“She kept her entire staff alive while Earth Station was being attacked, for starters,” Hart said. “You heard about Earth Station?”

I nodded. The Colonial Union was pretty good at keeping bad news from reaching the civilians of the colonies, but some pieces of news are harder to hide than others. For example, the news that the Earth’s sole space station was destroyed by unknown terrorists, killing thousands including the cream of the Earth’s diplomatic corps, and that the Earth blamed the Colonial Union for the attack and severed all diplomatic and economic ties.

Yeah, that one was a little hard to hide.

The Colonial Union’s official story about it, said only that it had been a terrorist attack; the rest of it I had filled in from former shipmates and friends like Hart. When you live at the bottom of a gravity well, you only tend to hear the official story. The people who actually move between the stars, on the other hand, hear a lot more. It’s hard to sell the official story to people who can see things for themselves.

“Some people saved themselves,” said Harry Wilson, a friend of Hart’s who he’d just introduced to me. Wilson was a member of the Colonial Defense Forces; his green skin gave him away. That and the fact that he looked the same age as my kid brother, but was probably something like 120 years old. Having a genetically modified, not-quite-human body had certain advantages, as long as you didn’t mind being the same color as guacamole. “Your friend Hart here, for example. He got himself to an escape pod and ditched from Earth Station as it was literally blowing up around him.”

“A slight exaggeration,” Hart said.

“No, it actually was literally blowing up around you,” Wilson said.

Hart waved him off and looked back over to me. “Harry’s making it sound more dramatic than it was.”

“It sounds pretty dramatic,” I admitted.

“Space station blowing up around him,” Wilson said again, emphasizing the last part.

“I was unconscious for most of the trip down to Earth,” Hart said. “I think that’s probably a good thing.”

I nodded toward Ambassador Abumwe, who I recognized from pictures, and who was on the other side of the reception hall, shaking hands with well-wishers in a receiving line. “How was the ceremony?”

“Painful,” Wilson said.

“It was all right,” Hart said.

“Painful,” Wilson repeated. “The guy who gave out the medal—”

“Assistant Secretary of State Tyson Ocampo,” Hart said.

“—was a fatuous gasbag,” Wilson continued. “I’ve met a lot of people in the diplomatic corps who were in love with the sound of their own voice, but this guy. He and his voice should just get a room.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Hart said to me.

“You saw Abumwe’s face while that dude was going on,” Wilson said, to Hart.