Chapter 4

Pitney crawled back to his cot, wound the ragged sheet around his body, and lay down. Pain from being flung against the wall, from the ordeals of the day, coalesced in the back of his skull, thudding with his heartbeat. Even his tendons ached.

He tried not to think, because that hurt too, but he thought anyway, because that's what he'd been doing with most of his life.

At the heart of all of this was Tristan. There was no reason the HAG wouldn't be more open about arresting, even if it was just over a bug up some top chair-brass's ass. They'd make a big deal of military justice in action, slap him on the wrist in public, and whisk him off to Prowess afterwards; that's how they handled their scandals. So it had to be Tristan, operating alone, or alone enough that nobody but the other generals knew.

But even Tristan wouldn't be stupid enough to level a slew of entirely unverifiable accusations against someone as beloved as Pitney. Not on the record, at what was supposed to be a medal ceremony captured on holo for the military archives.

Pitney played back Tristan's words, saying them softly to the unseen ceiling: "Deception of a fellow officer, three counts..."

Well, okay, telling his superior his dalliance with the Algoraban pilot was politics and not pleasure-that was pretty blatant. But all three counts would only stand if telling those lieutenants trying to tag-team a Tarnib scam that he was "interested in their product" was deemed "deception of a fellow officer" by a reasonable jury.

"Inciting anti-government sentiment, twenty-four counts..."

That one was harder. Pitney was an introvert's introvert, keeping all but necessary words to himself. He never wrote for mass consumption, kept his personal memos brief and factual, and always let someone else be the spokesperson for the HAG. And he was hardly one to stir up trouble, since the person sent to deal with trouble when trouble got bad was Pitney Scolan.

Then he remembered the sign.

Him and those two lackeys, his man Loper and some tag-along whose name he couldn't remember now, they'd seen the sign from the bar. It had said, in temptingly magnetic letters, HUMAN AUTHORITY GOVERNMENT. Plastered on a supply barn, he'd guessed in his drunken state, and they'd stumbled up the hill to rearrange the letters and leave the rest in a neat stack on the ground.

YOUR A HAG, the barn said afterwards, as they giggled on their merry way.

Grammar notwithstanding, it wasn't exactly a menacing or inciting message. But the rebels flying overhead-who, according to the official report, presumably would have just continued their scout run and zipped past the target that was an obvious enemy supply depot-took it as fightin' words, and bombed the shit out of the shed.

Pitney made a mental tally. Shit. The number of magnetic letters he'd vandalized made 24.

Well played, Tristan. Pitney blew out his breath and went back to the list.

"Aiding and abetting the enemy, four counts..."

Now these-these he didn't like to think about. Each one had been an accident, a black mark on his career. The first, fresh out of college, an innocent slip of the tongue against a lover's ear and not two hours later, someone's cover was blown. A quick call from Scolan Senior had chased that away. At least, young Pitney had assumed so.

The second and the third counts had happened together, when his empathy got the better of him. On the field of battle, the cries of two wounded women brought him to their sides. Though they wore enemy colors, he left them with blankets and water. Days later, recovered by his kindness and under cover of night, they'd snuck into camp and slain several of his squadron before he took their lives himself.

The fourth-he shuddered to think Tristan knew about it. He instead faced the final charge.

"Abuse of-" He couldn't even bring himself to finish the sentence, devolving instead into a self-satisfied smirk as he remembered the sound of his slipper connecting with Horus's fat body. Pitney wasn't exactly one for animal cruelty, but-well, sometimes happy accidents happened.

Abuse of government property, indeed.

The smile slipped. Shaky and semantic as parts of it might be, Tristan had the makings of a case against him. Certainly enough to add up to detainment until it could all be cleared up one way or the other.

Or until he was quietly assassinated.

Pitney's stomach turned. He rolled over, mummified in the sheet, and stared at a wall he couldn't see. He always thought it would be the Uprisen who finally caught up to him, tossed him in the clink, and murdered him where he slept.

The Uprisen. What a distant threat those people were, a handful of anti-HAG stragglers still clawing out an existence on the sweltering surface of Earth. For a while, finding creative ways to suppress them had been the majority of his day job. A pathetic part of him wished for the simplicity, the ease of hating a faceless mass instead of a man he'd shared seat with at the highest table.

He and Tristan had fought side by side against the uprising. They'd sat in the War Room on Mars together, drank tea together in between relaying commands to the HAG troops deploying on Earth's surface. They'd even murmured together, late at night when strange thoughts seemed like good ideas, about a peaceful end to the rebellion, about finding a way to convince the Uprisen that the HAG's offer of order and safety and citizenship was the best and only way forward.

Pitney had thought that it was him and Tristan and the HAG against the worlds. Then he'd thought it was Tristan against him, but in the way of a younger rival, stubborn and stupid.

But it turned out it was Tristan and the worlds against Pitney Scolan, a lone old man looking forward to retirement, stuck in a cell feeling sorry for himself.

"Hell," he said, and tried to stop. He knew how poorly he wore self-pity, and it wasn't going to get him out of this place alive.

Unwinding the sheet, he tossed it against the bed and crept back to the door. By now his hands had stopped shaking from the shock, and instead he was quivering with anticipation and the effect of heightened senses. And the cold, which poured in through the food slot.

The bluish weasel thing was still right outside his door, snuffling and breathing bubbles. Pitney cast around on the floor for something small and hard, a pebble or a bit of stale food. His numb fingers came up empty.

Straightening with a groan, he went to the bed and ripped off a piece of the sheet. As best he could, he rolled it in on itself until it was a tight ball. Then he crept back to the food slot and got as close to it as he dared.

He made a chuck-chuck sound in the back of his throat. The creature responded with a noise of interest. After a moment so deadly quiet he could hear the blood in his ears, Pitney saw its cloudy eye slide into view.

He pulled back his arm, hand twitching as he perfected his aim. He drew in his breath to steady his arm. Three, two, one, fire.

The wound-up cloth shot through the opening and bounced off the wall on the other side. The creature shot after it, a blur of greasy flesh and metal.

Pitney was about to fling himself across the cell when he heard bootfalls, sharp ones. The creature snarled and howled but shot back to its post.

"Scolan!" barked a familiar voice. "Eat up. Doesn't come regularly and it doesn't come cheap down here."

A tray sized perfectly to fit through the food slot clattered through. It arced downward in slow motion, falling in time with Pitney's face.

The voice laughed a nasty laugh as the fabfood squares splatted on the floor and froze on contact.

"Jace," Pitney croaked. The hope he hadn't known he'd been nursing was punctured, doubling him over.

"Stow it. You'll address me as Lieutenant McAver," said the disembodied voice sharply, "and our past means nothing. I'm Tristan's loyal man. Remember that."

Pitney's shot a hard look at the slat. He could see McAver's boots, perfectly polished as always, but little else in the murky darkness. He sat down hard on the bed, his legs betraying him. Carefully, he put on Negotiator Voice, the affect he'd cultivated those long years in the field. "So. Easy come, easy go, eh, Macky?"

A little guilt, a little casual familiarity. A little verbal pressure. The bargaining chip of a dead man.

Pitney prayed his lieutenant was playing at newfound prot‚g‚ to appease Tristan. It was a trick they'd run a few times behind enemy lines, designed to lull the other general into a false sense of security until...

What?

Pitney was praying into a cold, dead silence.

"Well. Now I know where you are," McAver said at last, his tone colder than the air. "Enjoy your dinner, Scolan. Might be your last."

Pitney's throat tightened. He pushed away the feelings. With the emotions went all of his energy and all of his motivation to find a way out.

Bootfalls carried McAver away.

Pitney lay down, folding his hands like a corpse over his chest. He stared up at the ceiling he could barely see, his vision dancing with the static a human brain produces in place of stimuli, and he thought bitter thoughts to himself.

Either Tristan was better at politics and manipulation than Pitney had ever given him credit for, or the breadth of his enemies was much greater than he'd realized.

Either way, he was alone in the universe.

"Fuck," he summarized.

Most days, Pitney Scolan loved to be alone. Craved it, sought it out, built an entire planet to perpetuate it.

This isolation was torture.