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said. “It affected me more than I would have expected.”
    “Your ship was badly hit,” said Sand as Adele paused to drink. “I understand that it will probably be scrapped instead of being rebuilt. You could easily have been killed.”
    Adele smiled faintly and refilled the glass with water. Her mouth was terribly dry. When she laughed, the ribs on her lower right side still ached from where a bullet had hit her years ago on Dunbar’s World. Fortunately, she didn’t laugh very often.
    “I’m not afraid of being killed, mistress,” Adele said, meeting the spymaster’s eyes over the rim of her glass. “I haven’t changed that much.”
    “Go on, then,” Sand said quietly. She was a stocky woman on the wrong side of middle age. In the brown tweed suit she wore at present, she could easily have passed for one of the country squires Adele had seen with Daniel on the sea front.
    Mistress Sand had been more important to the survival of Cinnabar in its struggle with the much larger Alliance than any cabinet minister or admiral in the RCN. What Adele saw in the older woman’s eyes now were intelligence and strength   .   .   .   and fatigue as boundless as the Matrix through which starships sailed.
    “Debris flew around inside the ship after the missile hit us,” Adele said. “A piece of it struck Daniel—that is, Captain Leary—”
    Sand flicked her hands in dismissal of the thought. “Daniel,” she said. “This isn’t a formal report. It’s two old acquaintances talking. Two friends, I’d like to think.”
    “Yes,” said Adele. “Debris struck Daniel in the head.”
    She raised the carafe, but her hand was trembling so she quickly put it back. Sand reached past and filled the glass.
    “It cracked his helmet and gave him a concussion, but the injuries weren’t life threatening,” Adele said. “If it had struck an inch lower, however, it would have broken his neck. Severed it, like enough. That would have been beyond the Medicomp or any human efforts to repair. And I don’t believe in gods.”
    “An RCN officer’s duties are often dangerous,” Sand said, carefully neutral. Adele realized that the spymaster still didn’t understand the problem. Sand was afraid of saying the wrong thing—and equally afraid of seeming uninterested if she didn’t say anything. “That might have happened to any of you.”
    “Yes,” said Adele, “exactly. Whereas I’d been thinking—feeling, I suppose—that it might happen to all of us. That is, if a missile hit our ship, we would all be killed. That event, that incident, proved that there might well be a future in which Daniel was dead and I was alive.”
    She took her glass in both hands and drained it again. This wasn’t coming out well, but she wasn’t sure there was a better way to put it.
    “Mistress,” Adele said, “I’ve built a comfortable life. Rebuilt one, perhaps. The RCN is a family which accepts and even appreciates me. The Sissies, the spacers whom I’ve served with, they’re closer than I would ever have been with my sister Agatha in another life.”
    In a life in which two soldiers hadn’t cut off Agatha’s ten-year-old head with their belt knives and turned it in for the reward.
    “And Daniel himself   .   .   .   ,” Adele said. She didn’t know how to go on. She hadn’t expected this conversation. She hadn’t expected ever to have this conversation. It was obvious that she was in worse shape than she had imagined only a few moments ago.
    It was less obvious to see how she was going to get out of her present straits.
    Adele felt her lips rise in an unexpected smile. The RCN prided itself that its personnel could learn through on-the-job training. No doubt life would prove amenable to the same techniques by which Adele had learned to be an efficient signals officer.
    “There’s no one like Daniel,” Adele said simply. “I don’t mean ‘no one better than Daniel,’ though in some ways that’s probably