The chamber lights had already begun their evening cycle—dimming by increments, the slow administrative signal that the session was over and the building wanted its people gone. Aldric didn't move.

  Around him, the council had emptied in clusters, the winning bloc doing what winning blocs always did: handshakes pulled a half-second too long, voices calibrated to carry without appearing to project. He watched them through the gallery glass until the corridor swallowed the last of them, then he looked at the table in front of him, and he let the quiet settle into his chest.

  He was seventy-eight years old. His left knee ached in recycled air.

  He stayed because leaving too quickly looked like grief, and he had no interest in looking like anything.

  The footsteps that stopped beside him were deliberate. Controlled.

  "General Aldric."

  He didn't look up.

  "Councilor Vane."

  A pause that Vane filled by taking the chair across from him without asking. Thirty-two, perhaps thirty-three. Still, he had the kind of face that had not yet learned what it looked like when it was wrong. He set a datapad on the table between them with the careful precision of someone setting down evidence.

  "I wanted to reach you before the press caught you in the corridor."

  "Thoughtful."

  "I know today wasn't the outcome you'd hoped for."

  Aldric looked at him then. Not long.

  "No," he said.

  Vane absorbed the silence and appeared to interpret it as room.

  "For what it's worth, your service record was central to the case we built. Without your testimony, I don't believe we'd have had the margins we needed." A slight lean forward. "In a way, you made this possible."

  Aldric turned his stylus once between two fingers and set it down.

  "Is that what you came to tell me."

  Not a question. Vane recalibrated.

  "I came to tell you that your concerns have been heard. The deployment protocols, the ROE frameworks you outlined in committee—they'll be carried into the implementation phase. You have my word on that."

  "They'll be filed," Aldric said, "and forgotten inside two weeks once the fleet begins positioning." His voice was level. "I've been through two wars and fourteen border conflicts, Councillor. I know what a review committee looks like when it's performing and when it's working. Today's committee will perform."

  Vane's expression didn't break. He was good at that.

  "You're not wrong that execution will be difficult," he said. "But the strategic reality is—"

  "Don't."

  One word. Vane stopped.

  The room had gone to near-silence. A custodial drone hummed at the far end of the chamber, collecting the papers that sessions always left behind. Outside the gallery windows, somewhere several floors below the building, the city moved through its late afternoon—transit schedules, school dismissals, the ordinary machinery of a civilization that had not yet begun to feel what it had just voted for.

  It always took time. That was the thing. The distance between a declaration and its consequences was long enough that people convinced themselves the consequences would belong to someone else.

  "What is it that you think happens next?" Aldric asked.

  Vane blinked. "Mobilization. The Sixth and Seventh Fleets have already—"

  "To the people in them."

  A beat.

  "They volunteered," Vane said. Measured, now.

  "They volunteered for a Federation. For a salary. For the _possibility_ they might have to." Aldric looked at the table. "Some of them volunteered at twenty years old because they didn't have anything better to do. Some because their brothers did. Some because a recruiter told them that their specialty—logistics, communications, systems tech—was support-only. That they'd probably never see a forward engagement." He turned the stylus over once. Set it down. "When you mobilize the Sixth and Seventh Fleets, Councillor, you'll be sending approximately sixty hundred-forty thousand people into a theater where the current casualty projection for a twelve-month campaign is—" A pause. "Do you know the figure."

  "I've read the briefings."

  "Then say it."

  A longer pause.

  "The projections are modeling-dependent," Vane said. "The upper-range figures assume worst-case scenarios that—"

  "Say the number."

  Vane's jaw moved once. "Thirty to forty percent attrition across forward-deployed units."

  "One hundred ninety to two hundred fifty thousand people," Aldric said. "In twelve months. Under optimistic conditions." He let it sit. "Under the conditions I've personally observed in three comparable theaters over the last twenty years—higher. Significantly higher."

  Vane straightened. "Which is exactly why strong command leadership is essential. Your experience, your record—you're precisely the kind of—"

  "Is that what you're here for."

  "I'm saying your opposition today doesn't preclude your involvement in—"

  "I'll be there." Aldric stood. The chair scraped back against composite tile. "Make no mistake."

  He reached for his jacket from the back of the chair. An old habit, he'd never gotten used to aides carrying things.

  "Then—" Vane started.

  "I'll be there because I'm not going to leave hundreds of thousands of people to die in a war I didn't start and won't walk away from." He shrugged the jacket on. "Not because of your review committees. Not because of your frameworks. Because someone who has done this before needs to be standing where the decisions are made before they become the kind that can't be unmade."

  He picked up the stylus. Pocketed it.

  Vane rose. Something moved across his expression. A sense that he had been wounded but not how.

  "You think this is a mistake."

  "I think," Aldric said, "that you've never lost anything you couldn't replace."

  Vane's chin came up. "That's—"

  "You'll forgive me if I don't take the lift." He buttoned the second button. "My knees do better with stairs."

  He was two steps toward the door when Vane's voice returned—and something in it had shifted. Something younger. Something that wanted, badly, for the old man to simply be wrong.

  "The Sovereignty has been expanding for six years." The practiced composure was thinner now. "Six years of incursion, of violated transit corridors, of dead civilians in the Outer Reaches that nobody in this chamber wanted to talk about. We tried negotiation. We tried sanctions. We exhausted every diplomatic instrument the Federation has, and they kept moving the line." A pause, edged. "What would you have us do? Keep yielding? Keep watching our borders contract and calling it patience? Keep losing good people?"

  Aldric stopped.

  He stood there with his back to the room. One hand on the door frame, not pushing.

  The drone reached the far wall and turned itself around.

  Somewhere below, a tram bell. Afternoon becoming evening.

  He thought about a particular recruitment office on Callisto Station. The way the posters looked. The fluorescent lights. A boy who had his mother's eyes and a communications specialty, and who had come home from the sign-up looking lighter than he had in months, because someone behind a desk had told him the truth as they understood it, which was that support-only personnel almost never saw the front.

  The thing about almost was that it was not the same as never. The front had a way of expanding to include wherever you happened to be standing.

  "My son," Aldric said, "was twenty-four."

  The room was very still.

  "He was in communications. Support specialty." He didn't turn around. "He volunteered because I did, and because a recruiter told him he'd probably never see a forward engagement, and because he was twenty-four years old and believed that the people making decisions about his life understood what they were deciding."

  The stylus in his pocket was a cheap thing. Composite casing, municipal-issue. He'd taken it from a briefing table in Sector Seven Command the morning after the notification came, and he had carried it in every jacket since, and he did not know exactly why, and he had stopped trying to explain it to himself.

  “I didn’t know,” Vane said.

  A pause. “About your son."

  Vane drew a breath, then another, as if aligning himself. "We don't choose these conflicts because we want them," he said.

  "We choose them, because it's our duty to plant trees for shade we may never see. You may not agree, but we make these sacrifices so the next generation won't have to." His voice dipped, barely audible. "It’s not supposed to be meaningless."

  "He was young," he said. "And he believed that too."

  He pushed the door open. Stopped in the frame, half-lit by the corridor beyond.

  "I hope you come to value peace for what it is," he said quietly. Not looking back. "Not for what replaces it. It has always been my hope that you never need to learn its worth through its absence."

  He stepped through.

  "I'll see you on the battlefield, Councilor."

  The door swung closed behind him. The pneumatic seal hissed once, and then there was nothing.

  Vane stood in the empty chamber for a moment. The drone completed its circuit, paused at the base of the councilor's chair, and moved on. On the gallery windows, the city's lights had begun to come up against the dimming sky, one by one at first, then in grids, then all at once.

  The datapad on the table still showed the vote count.

  He picked it up. Set it down.

  His hand moved to his coat. Found the locket, and slowly drew out a silver locket tarnished at the edges. Black flames were etched into the surface in the shape of her corps’ crest: a raging gryphon.

  With a click, the locket opened to expose a single photo.

  A blonde woman in a Lieutenant General's uniform, hands forming a heart. Smiling, and for a moment, she was there again, the anchor to his world.

  "What other choice do we have?" he asked her.

  She didn't reply, as the city lights continued their progression.