Now, standing on the tarmac of an unfamiliar world, Thorn tightened his grip on the carryall handle. It was like he could see through the bag’s canvas sides, straight through to the worn cover and yellowing pages wrapped up in his spare clothes. The book’s presence was calming. It always had been.
When he snapped back to reality, he saw Kira had already stepped off. Thorn followed, lengthening his stride a few steps to catch up. When he did, she glanced at him and said, “That building straight ahead is where you’re going. Once I hand you off, the rest is up to you.” She fought a smile, the corner of her mouth quirking and her dimples dancing between visibility and non-existence, before giving in to the grin. “Try not to worry too much about fucking up. Failure is part of training.”
“You’re coming too, right?”
Kira stopped midstride. “What?”
“Aren’t you training with me?” Thorn asked. “We’ve come this far. Might as well keep the team together.”
Kira shook her head and said almost gently, “I’m an officer, Thorn. I’ve already been through training. My job was to deliver you. Your job is to—well, you’ll see.”
When she started walking again, Thorn lagged a step behind. He told himself it was because he wanted a chance to enjoy the view.
Kira placed Thorn in the hands of a bony woman with “Narvez” on her nametape and long frown lines bracketing her mouth. She wore silver double bars on her collar like Kira did. Thorn turned an experimental grin toward her, but the woman didn’t even look at him.
“What fresh idiot you bringing me now, Wixcombe?” Narvez asked Kira.
“Well…” Kira flashed her dimples. “You always yell when I bring them to someone else.”
Thorn cleared his throat. “Them? How many people have you brought here?”
Narvez looked at him for the first time.
“Ma’am,” Thorn added.
He waited for more, but the woman stood there with her lips pressed tightly and her arms crossed, saying nothing. She had a narrow face, somewhere just short of gaunt. With her mouth thinned to a line, she was a study in slashes, like someone had taken a sharp knife to a plug of clay.
He shrugged, his grin fading. “I’m not sure I—”
She cut him off by thrusting her knife of a nose in his face. “You,” she said, her voice a hiss, so he had to stay where he was, nose to nose, to catch every word, “will address her as ma’am. Lieutenant Wixcombe is not your drinking buddy. You will address me as ma’am. You will address all female officers as ma’am, and if you happen to see a male of the species, and he’s wearing officer rank, you will address him as sir. Does that sound simple enough, or do I need to write it down for you?” She pulled back, an arm’s length away, and redirected her gaze to Kira. “What did you say his name was?”
“She didn’t, actually,” Thorn said, a flare of anger piercing his usual calm. “It’s Thorn. But if you want to be drinking buddies, you can call me whatever you want.” He paused just a moment before adding, “Ma’am.”
“His name is Stellers,” Kira told Narvez.
“Stellers.” Narvez said it like she’d just gotten a mouthful of something rotten. “If you’d be so kind as to follow me for swearing in and processing.” She looked him up and down, then delivered a grin of her own. “Enjoy your attitude while you’ve got it. It’s about to be fixed.”
Twenty minutes after that, Thorn sat on a metal table in a pale blue room. He was naked. Everything about the room conveyed a flesh-creeping cold—the shade of the paint, the temperature, a handful of pastel sketches that showed the inner workings of the human reproductive system from different angles, and one unusually large poster of venereal diseases identifiable by sight. The thin paper lining on the table stuck to his butt whenever he shifted. About the time he realized the room was likely a test of some kind and he was probably being watched, someone knocked on the door.
Thorn called out, “Come in.” He stood just as the door handle turned.
A woman walked in, cute, blonde, surrounded by an air of bustle. She had a clipboard with a medical scanner fastened to it. She didn’t bat an eye when a naked Thorn stepped forward to shake her hand. She took it without changing expression, glanced at the clipboard, and asked, “Stellers, Thorn?”
“In the flesh,” he replied. “Obviously.”
She glanced at the clipboard again, unimpressed. “This is your entrance physical.”
He tapped her clipboard, and she looked up, expression still stoic.
“Kira made it sound like I already had the job.”
“It’s just a formality. The ON fixes what gets broken during training or service—if there’s anything left to fix. They’re not likely to deny for a preexisting, but they do want to know what you’re coming in with.”
“Coming in with?”
She shrugged. “Childhood trauma is fairly common in the Magecorps.”
She didn’t add much warmth to the room. For all that she was cute, and seemingly flesh and blood, she could have been a well-designed ’bot. Thorn had dropped Kira’s name, hoping for a connection of some kind—anything to tether him to this new world, and what might be a new life.
Instead, she waved him to the exam table and ran the scanner from his temple to his shoulder and then across his chest at nipple level. Every now and then, it beeped and she made a notation. She worked her way down, then back up, and front and back, without ever saying a word—except twice. Once when she asked him to turn his head and cough, and later when she instructed him to hop off the table and grab his ankles.
“I kind of prefer reclamation work,” he muttered.
“Don’t take it personally,” she said, moving around to his front again, her eyes flat with clinical regard. “We do reclamation work here, too.”
The pale blue walls seemed to muffle background noise. The stylus against the clipboard, the girl’s breath, the shush of the air circulators—he couldn’t hear any of it. It was like being stuck under an ice sheet in a frozen sea, sunlight filtering in from above.
She was scribbling notes after poking and prodding him when Thorn asked her how she liked being in the service. She blinked, puzzled for a moment, and then started to laugh. “The ON’s recruiting comedians now?”
“Apparently.”
She stepped to the door, then through as it opened. “Enjoy your sense of humor while you’ve still got it.” With that, she was gone.
3
Code Nebula was a much smaller planet than the mud-ball Thorn had spent the last few years on, so the darkness that met him as he left the medwing took him by surprise.
Narvez waited, tall and angular, with her hands clasped tightly behind her back. Her sharply angled elbows mocked a hawk’s wings. In contrast to her poise, Thorn sauntered toward her, shoulders slumped forward, hands jammed into the pockets of his oil-worn trousers. Having lived on a planet known for nothing more than mud-slush and monsoons, he’d learned to keep his head down and hands warm. He didn’t expect the sharp—and sudden—two-finger jab to the diaphragm that propelled his body upward in a desperate attempt to swallow the air he’d lost.