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Corporal Kinto, he had nothing to say. Contado and Tetran being dutifully occupied at their stations, he—a passenger—should not distract them with chatter. So he whispered good tidings and calm words to the tree, which was departing not only its home world and its honorable dead, but the very soil that had nourished it.
    * * *

    THE TRANSFER TO the Trident was awkward. He was left to negotiate himself and the tree through the transfer port, and emerging, arms full of trunk and branches, he'd been unable to properly acknowledge the captain. Then, as a pilot returning without his craft, there were the docking logs to sign, certifying his ship lost due to enemy action, which duty he performed clumsily, tree propped on a hip, log tipped at an unstable angle, while the quartermaster displayed an unlikely degree of interest in his secondary screens.

    None of his wing met him, which he thought a bad sign, and he'd been directed not to his own billet but to the pilot's lounge, escorted by the assistant quartermaster.

    "I should go to my quarters, change uniforms, clean myself . . . "

    His escort cut him off sharply.

    "Troop, you're just about at the limit, you ought to know," she snapped. "Took the pilots a lot of jawing to convince the captain to come back this way long enough to pick up your signal. Besides, there's no guarantee you've got quarters to go back to . . . "

    That last sounded bad—worse than being at the limit of what would be officially tolerated. He was old friends with the limit. No quarters, though—

    With him up ahead in the corridor, there wasn't a good way to get a look at his escort's face, to see if she was having some fun with him, and just then they reached a junction in the passageway and had to make way for pilots wearing duty cards. Jela managed to hide his face in the branches, pleased that the youngsters—for they were both rookies—could not see his reaction to the gaudy tattoos they wore on their faces. It was while looking away that he saw two of the hatches in the passage dogged to yellow, and another dogged to red.

    "Took a hit?" he said over his shoulder as they continued. "I thought—"

    "Your boat took most of it." Her voice was gentler now, as if she gave due respect to duty done, and done well. "But there was still some pretty energetic debris, and a bad shot from one of ours, too."

    Jela grimaced, partly from the news and partly from the exertion of carrying the tree. He'd have sworn it had been much lighter when he'd grabbed it out of the ground.

    Forced to the side of the passage once more by through traffic he leaned against the metal wall, resting for a moment, until a tap on the shoulder reminded him that he was on ship's business and not his own.

    Moving forward, he vaguely wondered which—if any—of his belongings might have survived, but then let that thought go; he was here, and the tree was here, and that was more than he had a right to expect, after all.

    They came at last to the pilots lounge. The hatch was uncharacteristically dogged—to green at least!—but with ship's air at risk it was only a common-sense precaution. He had time to note that his wing's insignia was pasted roughly to the door, then the assistant quartermaster reached past him to rap—which was her right, after all, to have a lesser open for her from within.

    The hatch swung wide, an unexpected hand between his shoulders sent him through, half-stumbling, and he looked, quick eyes raking past the scraggly leaves of the tree, taking in the six empty helmets sitting with unsheathed blades beside them on a table, and five faces—familiar, strained, concerned, watching him.

    His knees shook. He locked them, refusing to fall, but . . .

    Six? Six gone ?

    Corporal Bicra it was who gently took the tree from him, and Under Sergeant Vondahl who led the salute.

    With Jela, they numbered six—the smallest number Command would recognize as a wing.

    And as luck would have it, he was