VII.

That evening at dinner time it felt like a week had passed since the morning. The board glowed blue over by the countertop where they got their food but Connie didn't pay much attention to it. (Except for a glance at the beginning, when she walked into the room. She had checked to see if her name was there, but her first stumbling attempts toward prowess in the augmentation trials had not gotten her name to number eight, or anywhere else. Of course it hadn't, not with Carolina moving across the arena as fast as a spaceship, dashing from one trooper to another and inflicting them with hits that surely sent some of them to medical with broken bones. Not with Wyoming doing whatever he had done that had left them all light-headed and with a sense of deja-vu.)

She set her tray down next to Wash and watched him bite into an apple and chew. When he swallowed she picked up her fork and said, "So what did you get?"

He said, "I got this EMP thing."

"Electromagnetic pulse?"

"Yeah. It disables electronics."

"That sounds useful."

"He nodded. It can take down cars...even small ships. It works on armor too, so I have to make sure the rest of my team is out of range...or that I don't like them very much." He smiled wryly.

"So it must not affect your armor."

"No. The blast has an interior radius and an exterior radius. The way it's set up, the interior radius is just a few inches. I could have problems with some systems depending on the way I'm standing. Actually I..." He laughed, looked over at North and York. "Look."

Connie came around the other side of the table, noticing other people start to look up, as Wash stood.

He started gesturing. "The EMP - " he pronounced it, smoothly, 'Emp', and since it didn't seem to bother him she wasn't going to point it out in the middle of whatever revelation he was about to have. "emanates from the emitter on this part of the armor." He clapped his right hand against his left forearm. "So if I keep my back and my other arm turned away as much as possible, it has less chance of affecting my systems.

South said, "So basically you act like it's an icky spider and you want to get it off?"

Wash hesitated, took a few steps. "Um. Well. If I stand like this - " and he threw one hand up in the air and looked up at the ceiling. Connie watched the way his neck curved and strained. "It has less chance of touching me."

North and Carolina laughed, Maine's deep laughter following after like a slow echo. Wash sighed and slumped, and York and Connie smiled.

Wash said, "Maybe it looks a little silly."

"Don't do that on the battlefield," Carolina said seriously. "You'll just get shot."

"I have alternatives," Wash said. Connie looked behind her to see if there was anything that she could lean on but the table was taken up by people. Carolina just looked up at her.

Wash said, "If I crouch down, the surface of the floor should redirect some of the waves. I'm not sure. There may not be actual...science involved. But like this."

He crouched, one knee up and the other leg flat against the floor, and raised his hand.

Connie smiled. He looked ridiculous, but he also did look like a superhero. North chuckled again, and York burst out laughing.

"I love you, man! Keepin' it classy."

"See," said North. "That's awesome. He knows what he's doing."

Wash stood up, bowed to each of them. When he went back to the table he slipped a hand around Connie's waist on the way and sat with her for the rest of the meal, his left elbow occasionally knocking against her right as they ate.

She saw, on the far wall in an alcove where no one sat, that the names on the board had only shuffled slightly.

Carolina
York
Wyoming
Washington
North Dakota
Florida
Maine
South Dakota

No Connecticut.

But she had won.

"I don't understand." She looked aside at Wash, sudden;y feeling twitchy and frantic. "I did good on my test. Why am I not on the board?"

Wash looked at it too, pensive and chewing. "I don't know."

Connie muttered, "I don't understand what they want me to do to win."

"It's not about winning." Wash finished his food and turned his attention to her. "It's just about being the best soldier you can."

She looked back and forth from him to the board, wondering whether he felt the pressure that she did. She had to succeed.

She realized that antics with the EMP meant that Wash had not been concerned by the sudden appearance of the augmentation or of one-on-one combat. Wash did not see either of those things as a problem. He was and always would be around the middle of the board, holding his own, usually bested by York or Carolina in combat between them but always able to beat the sim troopers the director threw at him. Wash was steady, reliable, neither the leader of the team nor something ancillary. (Like Connecticut.)

She pressed her palm against her chin and leaned into her own skin, watching Wash as he returned to his meal.

Washington the Wild West, the great frontier, the Northwest Passage, the end to the means of America, and Connie had folded the country at the Mississippi, not slowly through erosion but in floods and rockslides and storms of love, in half to get to him.

She clung to him even more fiercely as the training went on, and instead of regretting this he accepted and reciprocated it.

Sitting in Wash's room with North and Maine on one bed, York on Wash's and Wash and Connie and South on the floor with their backs against the wall they heard the one time York worried about Carolina: "She doesn't talk as much as she used to."

"I'm sure she's just stressed," Wash said, "about staying on top of the board," and York looked at the corner of the room like it was deep space or the clouds above the Great Plains.

"She doesn't have to be," he said. "I'm afraid she's hurting herself."

It was the idea that she doesn't have to be that stuck with Connie.

Because Connie tried and stressed. She fought harder, found herself slipping more often or noticing it more often. She noticed and cursed herself for every shot she missed. Some times she did not take chances that she could have: she did not dodge around the side, did not choose a payload that felt right but was unusual for the given scenario. She kept learning the special assignments given to her. The director knew that she was good at computers and numbers, more so than both with imagining that digital scenarios were real places. York moved digital locks with all the tactility of a locksmith who worked in iron and copper: Connie could use a keyboard in the same way. She liked radio noise and telephone lines: she liked shortcuts and letters and abbreviated names. Long pathways made into two small movements, a press of a button or two.

(CT.)

After afternoon exercises (teamwork) she talked to York about it. He found her, actually, sitting on a bench in the locker room. She had wanted someone to, but hadn't expected it to be York. Anyone except Carolina would have done. Wash would be best but she would probably not have talked to him, just buried her face against his shoulder and maybe talked about something else. Maps, secrets, television. Their usual in-jokes and references and whatever got them through, except it was more often her needing to get through and him just going.

York said, "What's wrong, man?" and sat down on the bench instead of going to his own locker.

She said, "Are you here for a reason, York?"

"Yeah. I had to get my towel. To go take a shower."

"So you need to go there, then."

"I could. Or I could sit here. Unless I smell or something. Do I?" He lifted an armored arm.

"No," she said. "You smell like the rest of us."

"Sweat and tears?"

"Armor."

"Huh." He shrugged. "Well. Connie, I do not think you are sitting here because you find it the most thrilling thing in the world. What's wrong?"

She shook her head, looked at the floor. He was close to Carolina. She wasn't one hundred percent sure that they were dating, if you could call it that in space without a coffee shop or movies, but they were together often enough. He would be sympathetic to Carolina.

But he was York. He would probably be nice to her too.

He was on the top of the board.

Why did that not matter?

She wasn't sure. Maybe because he was nicer. Carolina had gotten increasingly quiet and angry over the last few days, and Connie was sure that York was seeing it too. Maybe he was concerned as well.

She said, "I've been thinking about the board. Carolina's always been on the top. I...it's not fair that she's always been there. What did she do to deserve it?"

"She must have scored the best," York said very calmly.

"According to the mysterious director system."

"According to the plan of the man who recruited us, yeah."

"I just don't like it." She shook her head. "It makes it hard to room with her."

"Are you two not getting along?"

"No, but...we don't really talk. She doesn't talk to me. And I...I just don't know if I want to be her friend right now."

"If you were number one, you wouldn't want people to hate you."

"I didn't say hate, York," she said quietly, and looked at her hands. Then she looked at him, somehow freed to do so by appearing to be scared. She wasn't scared, really. She was right.

He said, "I know."

"And yes I would," she said. She looked into his visor as if she could see through it into the back of his head. Wash goofing around in the afternoon after getting their special augmentations seemed like it was so much more than a few days ago. How could she feel so happy then - with him goofing off but also doing so in a way that showed how smart he was, how proud she was of him - and so devastated and trapped now? "I'd be proud of them. That's the only way I'd know they really wanted my place. That's my proof. And it's the only way that they'd ever succeed too, because you have to be angry enough to go after something."

"You'd see it differently if you were in her place."

"Maybe."

"I didn't use anger to get to my spot."

"I know." She let some time pass: so did he. Then she said, "Don't you get angry, York?"

"I dunno, I just...do my best. I do all the training."

Her thoughts spiraled inward, not thinking about the training, but about the mindset that was necessary for it. "How can not worrying about success lead to success?"

(She thought, Wash would say he didn't know. He worries a little too.)

"Worrying won't help," said York.

"Carolina worries," said Connie.

York glanced to the side and she knew she was right. Carolina refused to be good to herself, and against the odds that was how she succeeded. Anger let her jump higher and run faster.

"That may be true," said York slowly, "but it's not right."

Connie said, "I know. Maybe."

He put a hand on her shoulder, shook her a little. "It's okay, kid. You'll be fine. I'm gonna hit the showers," he said, and stood up and stretched. He gave her one quick look over his shoulder. "Try not to be too hard on yourself, okay?"

"Bye, York."

"Bye Connie!"

He waved. He went away.

In Wash's room Connie ran her hands over his forearms, feeling the bones and the veins. "You look like a superhero today." She smiled, blushed. he kissed her on the cheek.

"And you're getting better with that hologram. So does this mean I can have two of you?"

Her laugh was awkward and he knew he had made it awkward so he laughed it off too. She said, "I don't think it works like that."

Then he moved his hands to her hips and found the notch of her hip bone, pushing his thumbs against her skin in small, heavy circles, and she didn't think about much any more.

The first clue, the first suggestion that she might have something rather than frustration and anger to explain why her dissatisfaction with herself was becoming dissatisfaction with the program, was how still the Alpha stood in the classroom the next morning. He practically stumbled into existence. He immediately stood up, snapping into normalcy, but his head was hanging low, and his voice sounded tired.

"No abuse today?" South sapped at the AI. "I thought that's what you liked best, hating on us helpless humans."

Alpha ignored her.

"He looks sick," Connie said, and Carolina replied without looking at her. "It isn't possible."

"He doesn't have a stomach," North muttered, and South snorted with laughter.

Over the next few days they saw Alpha only a few more times, as he monitored them as they were sent out on training missions, and he went back to normal. He stood normally, he spoke loudly, he mocked and abused and cursed. York and South were relieved. Florida called him "my boy" a lot. Carolina looked at Connie. "See? He isn't sick."

"AI can't get sick," Connie repeated, and she half believed it.

"You messed up!"

Carolina never screamed like this. Just this once because they had come back from a mission more brutal than any before. The director had told them to thin the ranks of the Insurrectionists so the Freelancer heavies - Carolina, Maine, York - had gone in to do that. 479 just dropped them at a facility, something about cryogenics, and the director had told them to withdraw when most of the enemy was dead. It was a scare tactic, a threat. The facility was set into the wall of a cliff, maybe using natural ice from the pole of the planet to work its science, but Connie didn't know. She just knew she had gone in with the others and ended up using her pistols and knives as well as her rifle, emptying her clips and then pulling a knife out of someone's rib cage to keep fighting. The Insurrectionists in their patched-together armor looked thing and disorganized next to the heavily armored, colored Freelancers. The Freelancers were patriotic toward a country made up of only themselves. That made them strong and it was heady.

But now, standing in the hanger just stumbled out of the Pelican and most of them covered with blood, and Connie had been the last one out. The Pelican had waited for her, because, she didn't know why. 479 had made that choice. And Carolina had been there watching the whole time, wanting to hide behind the navigator's seat but unable because she had to babysit Connie.

"You could have died out there," Carolina yelled, pointing at Connie in a fit of rage the younger Freelancer had never seen in her before, and then Carolina hammered the point home - "That was just how Maryland died, being slow."

Connie backed away, wondering why Carolina was doing this. Why was she so angry?

She must be afraid that she would never been fast enough.

The program had done this to her.

At the same time Connie's reaction was not dispassionate: she was tired and hurt and almost shivering with stress, and the sight of the others, her friends, dappled with blood did not help her.

"I did the best I could while you hid in the Pelican!" she fired back, and 479 drew her breath in so loud Connie knew the pilot was going to make a crack about catfights next, and Connie looked back and forth at all the people who weren't Carolina.

(That night Carolina said she was sorry, just in passing as they crossed one another's paths on the way to the bathroom, and Connie made a sound that was supposed to be "okay" or "I forgive you", but because she couldn't decide came out as just a puff of breath.)

She was almost ready. In the classroom, looking at Alpha: in her room, looking at the ceiling, she wondered what she could do about her misgivings, her hatred and fear, and thought about leaving. She would go back to the UNSC. It wouldn't be defection if they would take her. She would join another squad, have another specialty. Maybe she would man a desk and have to give the hologram back. She would wait for Wash to finish his tour and they would - maybe they would settle down somewhere, or, she thought to make herself remember reality and not be so devastated when it didn't live up to her dreams, maybe they would just meet, once at a coffee shop on a terrace overlooking the sea.

She started doing some research. The UNSC had an oversight committee, called, creatively enough, the Oversight Committee - its chairman was no one she recognized, but she didn't expect to know the name. There was a number there to call. Admittedly it was for news, press, not for internal complaints - but maybe she could use it.

And one day she was talking with Carolina - back from the mess or the classroom or training it didn't matter, except that they were both in armor with their helmets under their arms (Connie's ugly and useless and she hadn't had to disarm any bombs yet, and Carolina's two-faced like Janus). They were walking together because Connie had tagged along with Carolina, wanting a familiar face (a familiar body, familiar smell, everything after they had roomed together long enough) and Carolina had been okay with this. (Connie, like Wash, sometimes went through life asking for permission to live it.)

They were walking near the hangars, taking a long way that was usually quiet, until Connie heard something metal roll across the floor.

She looked behind her and to Carolina's right toward a hallway that lead to the hangar proper and where people were likely to be doing mechanical work. A red warning light was on indicating that a ship would be taking off or landing soon, but the blast doors all along the corridor were open instead of closed against potential shifts in pressure. "Did you hear that?"

Carolina glanced up, one graceful turn of her neck. "What?"

"It sounded like..."

The rolling sound got louder, and Connie stopped just in time to see a bolt roll out of the short hallway and fetch up against the wall. It had made a loud, echoing sound for such a small thing, even if it was the heavy material used for starships, and Connie thought that there must be a ship going in or out. Surely this bolt hadn't fallen off it, but she had the sense that there was some odd pressure change in the air that she didn't have enough knowledge of either words or science to express. Something was moving through.

"Wait." She paused.

Carolina said, "A mechanic's going to need to come get that or someone will be after him."

She moved to scoop up the bolt, but when she got within a few steps she could see all the way through to the hanger. The walls inside were lit slightly with blue from the force fields around it. She heard footsteps and put her back against the opposite wall, in an instinctual reaction like a child trying not to be caught up past her bedtime: Carolina kept looking at her from the safety of the parallel hallway, the older sister unamused by the younger one frightened of monsters.

A pack of people walked through the hanger, past the hallway where Connie lurked. First a mechanic ran by, obviously looking for his bolt, but a second later he passed the director, the counselor, and a row of four pilots going in the opposite direction.

Connie held her breath.

"There is nothing to be concerned about," the director was saying. The counselor, predictably, didn't make a sound. Connie inched toward the end of the hall, curious about what they were saying, knowing that the mechanic would be back any minute now. She glanced back at Carolina, who was crouched at the end of the hall, almost comical in her dramatic stance with her knees bent and her head turning from side to side. She completed the look of a concerned child when she pointed with both hands at the hallway from which they had both just come.

Get back here.

Connie put her helmet on and dialed up her audio filters.

The director said, "The process will go as smoothly as can be expected when we have the proper equipment. I fail to see why you would wish to have this discussion now."

The counselor replied, "We are moving into the second phase."

"Second phase?" The director turned around. Connie could hear his boots squeak. "We are moving into the only phase where we are taking any new action. Do you wish us just to sit around?"

"The commissioning of a capitol ship," said the counselor, "is not a phase which I would call...inactive, director."

"You know what I mean." Did the director sound petulant? Childish, even? He was being denied something, or thought that he might be. "We must continue. We must fulfill the purpose for which we came here. We created the ground we walk on, counselor."

"However, the next step has not been tested. You have seen how ONI has dealt with...those who stand out in the field before."

"It does not matter to me what Lord Hood thinks, counselor, and ONI's attempts at psychological bullying cannot touch me here. And I beg you to consider why you wish to discuss this now rather than before. Little has changed except that you have met the Alpha in person. Does he seem too familiar to you, counselor?"

"No, sir." That voice, so sleepy. Always heavy-lidded.

Other footsteps were suddenly headed toward Connie, coming fast. They broke her out of a funk she had barely noticed she was in. She sprinted back toward the hallway, her footsteps alarmingly loud.

A man in a white suit like a pilot but without the wing markings on the front skidded around the corner after her. She could almost see him narrow his eyes through the mask. "There you are," he said, eyes fixed on the bolt at the end of the hallway, and stalked toward it.

Connie walked around the corner toward Carolina, trying to look like she hadn't been running at all. She had just been passing by. Yeah, that was right. That hallway wasn't important.

It does not matter to me what Lord Hood thinks.

Carolina glared.

"Oh, sorry ma'am," said the pilot or tech or whatever he was as he caught sight of Connie, and scooped up the bolt.

"Hey!" Connie's shoulders jumped as she turned to face the same way Carolina was, and even Carolina stood a little straighter as footsteps stamped down the hallway. Connie knew who it would be from the voice before 479 came into view.

"Get back here, you," 479 crowed, and made like to hit the mechanic over the back of the head. "What are you doing." He scurried back toward the hanger, and the pilot looked up at Connie. "Sorry, ma'am. He's all over the place."

"I'm sure he's just...having an off day," Connie said, not sure why she wanted to stand up for him but knowing that she didn't like to be the runt of the group, and 479 tipped her head at her, not unlike Wash.

"Whatever," said the pilot, and walked away.

Connie rushed down the hall. Carolina was still there waiting for her, standing straight with her arms folded and her back to the wall but not pressed against it. She wasn't scared of being caught. She had done nothing wrong anyway, and she must have moved out of the way before the mechanic moved past the corner.

"I should have gotten out of there before he came around," Connie said. If she admitted to her mistakes first no one could use them against her later.

"I guess I just think a little faster, Connie." Carolina said it jokingly, warmly, like a big sister - but the words sat in Connie's mind and twisted up, emerged back out as hatred both that Carolina had said it, casually gloating, and that such an offhand comment could have stuck with Connie and bothered her.

She could have thought faster, though. That was what she was supposed to be good at. She could have used her hologram, maybe, or just...just gotten out of there.

But she needed to know.

And what the director had been talking about didn't sound like it would be a job for the Oversight Committee if he had already gone over what parts of the UNSC did and did not support him.

Connie said, "Did you hear what they said?"

Carolina said, "No. What was it?"

If the director was doing wrong, maybe his enemies were doing right.

To get an outside perspective, she could only talk to the Insurrection. To those people she had seen on the last mission, as bloodied as the Freelancers. Everyone here was under the director's thumb or on his payroll.

She would have to get in touch with them. It would be a conspiracy from inside. It would make her the shadowy organization in control, the people who pulled the strings and told the president what to say. It would mean she knew more than the other Freelancers. It would mean that she, alone, was better. Number one on a board of her own making.

To Carolina she said, "Nothing."

(She never did find out where the director was going and why he had been talking about the Alpha, although she wondered about it on the Mother Invention and on the Staff of Charon, in her bunk and Wash's bunk and on a pile of sandbags at Longshore where she slept opposite the glaring blonde melee expert because Joshua had offered her his bunk and she had shied away from it.

But later, after she saw the video of the woman waving goodbye to the director as he held the camera, calling him Leonard, she thought maybe that he had been - although he would always put duty first, always have lists and rosters to distribute, would always carry the leader board in his pocket - going to visit her grave.)