“Correct. The insertion force was strictly marines. The trap closed quickly, with only a few shots fired. From up in space, we could see through small-craft recon that our marines would be wiped out if they fought. We ordered a stand-down.”

He sighed.

“But Private Anante Vargas had been killed in the first exchange of fire,” he said.

Nara nodded. She remembered the official narrative now, the hero Zai trading himself for a dead man.

“His armor diagnostics showed that he’d died cleanly, a chest wound. If we could get the body up within forty minutes, he would take the symbiant easily.”

“But they wouldn’t give him up without an exchange.”

Laurent’s eyes closed, and Nara felt a deep, anguished tremor from the man. She struggled to pinpoint the emotion.

“There was a confluence of interests,” he explained. “The resistance would get another living hostage; we would retrieve our dead. But they demanded a command officer. They asked for a member of the Apparatus, but there were no politicals aboard our ship. They knew that we wouldn’t give them the captain, but a lieutenant-commander would do.”

“Were you ordered, Laurent?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “The propaganda version is true. I volunteered.”

There was the anguish again, as clear as words. If only it could have been someone else. Anyone else. But this regret was entangled with Laurent’s guilt at his own thoughts. In Zai’s gray world, the honored dead were by any measure worth more than the living.

“I inserted in an up-down pod. Ballistic entry, with crude rockets to get it back up. Not much bigger than a coffin.”

“You trusted them?”

“My captain had stated quite clearly that if they reneged on the deal, he’d collapse the whole canyon with a railgun strike, kill us all. So I stepped out of the pod reasonably sure that they’d give up Vargas.

“Two of the resistance fighters brought Vargas’s body over, and I helped them load him. For a moment, the three of us were human beings. We carried the lifeless man together, arranged his hands and feet in the jumpseat. Prepared him for his journey.

“Then we stepped back and I spoke to my ship for the last time, saying Vargas was ready. The pod ignited, carried him heavenward. I suppose I began the Warrior’s Prayer out of reflex. The prayer is Vadan aboriginal, pre-Imperial, actually. But one of the two resistance fighters didn’t hear it that way. He struck me down from behind.”

He shook his head, bewildered.

“I had just handled the dead with these men.”