A Neuronet chime sounded in Liu’s mind as he and Okeke walked into the hotel suite.

  >Enjoy your stay. Thank you for your service.

  The hotel room was spartan. It had a central hall connected to a bathroom, with two identical units with only a single bed along one wall and a digital display screen on the other. The screen projected a sensor image of the outside world. No real viewports, of course. Viewports were a structural weakness, a radiation hazard and only physically possible on exterior rooms. The Directorate provided a safer, more equitable imitation for everyone.

  A blindingly bright arctic wasteland loomed before them, punctuated by brown-gray continents, gray urban regions and a thin strip of equatorial ocean. Clouds swirled in fractal patterns above the desolate land on the day side. The night side was lit by the warm light of dozens of arcologies, each connected by a faint thread of weaker light across an expanse of black ice. The planet felt like a menacing eye hanging in the void, watching their every move.

  “Okeke, you can pick the room. I covered us both,” Liu said.

  Okeke nodded sullenly. “Yes Lieutenant Colonel.”

  Liu shook his head. “The promotion is meaningless, Okeke. I’m still Liu Yang.”

  Okeke stopped and stared forward in space before dropping his small personal bag in the hallway storage.

  “Are you? I don’t even know if I’m still Okeke.”

  Okeke kicked off his dress shoes and collapsed onto a bed. Liu walked over to him with concern. Okeke’s face was a stone mask. There was no outer sign of trauma, no tears in his eyes or mucous in his nose. He simply looked blankly into the ceiling.

  “You did what you had to. You stopped… the damage,” Liu said carefully. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  Okeke didn’t reply. Instead, he simply turned over on top of the sheets, still in his dress uniform. His dark brown skin and the green of the uniform contrasted sharply with the sterile white of the bedding, conjuring an image of a lone sapling struggling for survival in a frigid tundra.

  Liu sighed and walked away. He lay down in his own bed, going through the pile of messages that had accumulated in his Neuronet inbox over more than a century on the outside. 1500+ inbox messages unread. The service had done a good job of removing the junk mail from his brain and synchronizing records across light years, but spam inevitably gets through.

  >Notice: family account updated with social payout assets. dt: -182.5 standard years.

  >Notice: marriage annulled. Initiator: Luo Yue. No contest by reason of absence. Assets automatically divided. dt: -181.1 standard years.

  >Notice: private message. dt: -168.2 standard years.

  He froze. Why would someone send him a message over a decade after he had socially ceased to exist? Liu mentally opened the file and at that instant, his heart shattered.

  >Dad, I have a new job! Beta Sagittarius. It'll only be a few centuries by stasis. If you care or get this anyways. I don’t know why I even sent this. -Xixi

  Liu stood up and looked at Okeke. He had closed his eyes by this time, but his chest still quietly heaved up and down with a rhythm that suggested he was alive and awake.

  “I’m going for a walk. Just message me when you’re ready,” Liu said gently. Okeke did not respond. The only movement was the slow rise and fall of his chest with each breath.

  A torrent of human activity invaded Liu Yang’s senses as the doors slipped open. It was as if he was splashed with cold water after a drunken nightmare. A wall of noise drowned his auditory processing for an instant before his brain autoadjusted to the sensory overload. The murmur of the crowd. Glaring white LED lights. Gray metal floor with a thin veneer of epoxy. The clank of boots against the ground. Propaganda. Blaring advertisements.

  It was too much. It was just right.

  The promenade was filled with the buzz of humanity. Civilians in street clothes, some with the pale, thin appearance of those who had been born in zero-g. Planetary contractors in engineering suits. Soldiers in flight suit green or dress uniform, like himself. The occasional black clad MIA agents. Open shops for the equivalent of every necessary service sprawled into the street. This was his new reality. It felt dangerously exposed. The claustrophobia of the Peacekeeper felt like an old sanctuary.

  He took a deep breath. A taste of ozone combined with the familiar smell of humanity bit into his nose. Laughter, gossip and swirled into a cacophony of noise that drowned his senses. The culture was familiar, yet alien. The dialect had shifted in a noticeable but unobtrusive way. The style of clothing had changed slightly. A few words of new slang that his linguistic processor couldn’t pick up.

  But what was most striking was the hairstyle. The auditor’s haircut seemed to have become the craze among young women. Short bangs in front, a tight bun in the back. It didn’t seem to matter that the framing of the hair on the face was different. He had never found such a mere hairstyle to be so unsettling.

  By this time, he had changed into a light shirt, just another faceless person in the crowd. The only thing that marked him as off duty military were his dress pants and shoes, the same magboots he wore from the debriefing and promotion ceremony. They were functionally extraneous in the rotating sections, but served a subtle purpose as a mark of affiliation.

  Liu walked forward aimlessly. It didn’t matter which direction he walked in. The promenade was a circle anyways. He came across the military club. The epoxied gray metal of the promenade gave way to a hard black tile floor reflecting the light from the screen playing some irrelevant news program. A beverage dispenser synth stood at attention behind the bar, responding sporadically to silence as people placed Neuronet orders. This was one of the few bars in their section of the station.

  Lin and a few other captains were talking at the bar, none from the waking crew on that fateful mission a lifetime ago. They were all still wearing their dress uniforms and magboots. Lin turned her head and noticed Liu. She nodded, a subtle invitation. Liu felt he had no choice but to acknowledge. To refuse would be to sever him from one of the precious threads of human connection he had left.

  “Captain,” Liu said haltingly while sitting down. The gossip died immediately.

  “Lieutenant Colonel,” Lin replied.

  >Beer, Liu commanded the service synth.

  A neutrally cheerful voice replied in his head.

  >Selection? We have the following opt-

  >Whatever the last party had.

  The synth immediately spat out a precleaned glass from its innards and filled it with a frothing, dark straw colored liquid. Liu held the cup to his mouth. Bitter. Dilute. Expected. Some of the captains looked away awkwardly.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “Permission to join in, informally?” Liu inquired, attempting to copy Sanchez’s easy going style over his stilted nature. The captains nodded wordlessly.

  One of the captains looked over deeper into the bar. Liu followed his gaze. In the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of now Vice Marshal Sanchez at a private table. He was wearing a dark suit, laughing and gently clinking glasses with a few other men wearing the same uniform of privilege. A blonde haired woman with a bun was turned away from him at the same table. It was Marshal Laurent, gently nodding her head in response to something Sanchez said. Liu turned his ears towards them, but it was no use. He didn’t have the audio processing upload required to eavesdrop on them over the high ambient noise of the club.

  “Rumor has it that Laurent is going to send us to the front this time. The real front,” the junior officer said.

  “What about Sanchez?” Lin asked.

  “His file is still being evaluated for the best place to put someone like him.”

  Liu spoke up. “What do you mean, someone like him?”

  An awkward silence grew before Lin broke it.

  “People say he’s pushing hard to stay on base in a staff role,” she whispered.

  A sense of dread dawned on Liu. If Sanchez stayed behind in a staff role, he would influence Peacekeeper’s deployment command. They could become the tip of the spear. The tip of the spear often breaks. That’d cleanly solve a problem for Sanchez as he sat safely in his office, Liu thought bitterly. All he would need to do is patiently wait for the reports of their demise through stasis. Sanchez might even decide to simply die of old age before he could be punished and secure his posthumous honor by getting rid of them.

  Sanchez’s gaze swept the bar, even as he was laughing with command. His eyes locked with Liu’s for a fraction of a second before turning back to his small table. It was a look of contemptuous dismissal.

  “When you’re that high, where else would you go?”

  Liu glanced over at Sanchez’s table. The military club’s background was now a low murmur. Several groups had already retired to their hotel rooms for some sleep before the first real day of leave. His unaugmented ears could now pick out some fragments of conversation.

  “... unique insights… difficult decisions requiring weighing multiple contradictory requirements,” Sanchez’s voice whispered.

  “Your log is… under analysis, since field and staff requirements fundamentally differ,” Laurent’s now gentle voice replied flatly.

  “You will be informed when it is time. It will only be a few weeks from now.”

  Sanchez’s facade faded for a fraction of a second before his practiced smile returned. Liu turned back to the captains and took another drink from his beer.

  “Do any of you know what happened on this mission?” Lin asked. “I heard there was alot of action that we slept through.”

  They all shook their heads.

  “I was on shift 5, 10, 15 on maintenance during the cruise phase. The evaluator AI said I needed more experience before combat deployment, so I slept through it all,” one of them said.

  Liu laughed bitterly. “I had almost a decade as captain in systems defense before getting on the Peacekeeper as a lateral transfer. All real time too, no stasis.”

  The captains looked at him with reverence. Liu shook his head with false modesty.

  “Don’t be too impressed. It was all sitting on my ass monitoring systems traffic and sensor feeds. It was nothing.”

  “So what happened?” Lin asked. “What happened on the mission that required a special debrief with the Marshal?”

  Liu froze, carefully parsing his words.

  “There was some insurgent activity. We escorted some packages to their destination. At the end, they got one of our sister ships, the… Relativity.” He chewed the last word. Package escort was correct. Insurgent activity causing loss of the Relativity was correct. The identities of the packages and the details of insurgent activity did not matter.

  The junior officers looked at him with a soft disdain, as if he was a coward by being so cryptic. But there was nothing he could say to them that wouldn’t- he stopped his train of thought immediately. This didn’t matter.

  “So what are you guys going to do for the rest of your leave?”

  One of the junior captains yawned before standing up.

  “I’m going to sleep for tomorrow. Heading down to the planet. Going to breathe some real air.”

  The captain who spoke gave a lazy salute, almost a wave, and ambled toward the club's exit. His departure left a tangible void at the bar, the space between Liu and the remaining officers now charged with an unspoken tension. The synth bartender whirred softly, cleaning a glass with a UV light.

  Captain Lin swirled the dregs of her drink. "Real air," she mused, not looking at Liu. "Must be nice." She finally turned her gaze on him. It wasn't hostile, but it was probing. "You been down yet, Lieutenant Colonel?"

  Liu shook his head. "No. Not yet."

  Visions of soot darkened ice caps overlaid with the pristine ones of Delta Draconis c. The arcology lights blended into a vision of a nuclear fireball. He didn’t know if he could go down there. Perhaps it was for the best that he remained a creature of the void.

  Another captain, a man with a sharp jawline and the name 'Vargas' on his badge, leaned forward. His hair was a carefully maintained buzz cut. "You know, sir, there's talk. About Gamma Centauri."

  Liu's blood cooled. He kept his face a mask of mild interest. "Oh?"

  "Nothing official," Vargas said quickly, waving a hand. "Barracks gossip. But rumors are… it wasn't a clean pacification of rebels. The colony wasn’t saved, it was gone. That the Relativity didn't just hit a mine. That something went sideways in the CIC."

  Liu instinctually defaulted to his true personality, discarding the facade of an easy going commander.

  “OPSEC is important for these missions, Vargas. I am not at liberty to comment on the situation, and I was not the commanding officer. Sanchez was. Grayson was immediately below Sanchez. I was just an officer in the CIC.”

  Vargas's bravado faltered. He was not a fool and knew when he stepped over a dangerous line.

  “Acknowledged sir. You have a good night, sir,” he said, stepping away.

  The silence he left behind was deafening. The club's ambient noise seemed to recede. It was just Liu, Lin, and the silent synth.

  Lin didn't speak for a long moment. She took another sip of her drink, then put the glass down with an abnormally loud clank. When she finally looked at him, all pretense of casual camaraderie was gone.

  "Lieutenant Colonel," she said, her voice devoid of its earlier cheer. "I was on deep-stasis rotation. I have no reason to doubt you."

  She paused, letting the disclaimer settle. "Vargas has a big mouth. He is inexperienced."

  Liu gave a gentle laugh. “What does belief or doubt matter? The thing that is remembered is history.”

  “But doesn’t having the trust of others at least help with that, Lieutenant Colonel?” she asked, turning away from him for a drink. She put her empty glass down on the hard surface of the bar for the last time.

  Liu said nothing. He simply waited for his emotions to reach equilibrium.

  Lin's next words were whispered with a quiet understanding. "I just want you to know, we can trust each other." Her eyes flickered toward the private table where Sanchez was still laughing, then back to Liu. “You're the one sitting here, drinking with the junior crew. He's over there, networking with the brass."

  She stood up without waiting for his reply. With a swipe of her arms, she smoothed her dress uniform. "Goodnight, Lieutenant Colonel."

  Lin walked away, leaving Liu alone at the bar. Her silhouette was neat and precise against the chaotic promenade. She didn’t look back. Instead she stepped forward into the human flow, vanishing into the crowd. Liu pondered on what she said. Trust. She had expressed an emotion that Liu hadn’t felt in centuries of real time, years of subjective time. Trust.

  A manipulator arm extended from the synth to collect her glass. The cheerful facade of the military club was gone. In its place was a labyrinth of hidden threats. Vargas, with his dangerous curiosity. Lin, with her perceptive silence. Sanchez, begging for patronage in the corner. Their mission database. Liu looked down at the smooth, impervious gray of the plastic bar counter.

  His gaze shifted to the dark, straw-colored dregs of the beer. The insurgents had been pacified. The package had been delivered. The Auditor suffered a terminal incident. The Relativity was struck by an insurgent nuclear munition that it did not see coming. These were all factual truths. These were the logs. The details were unimportant. Not all details of a military operation can be captured by a log.

  He left a near empty glass on the bar and walked out into the noisy, chaotic promenade, feeling more exposed than he ever had on the battlefield.