BONDED ENEMIES

The room had one table. On the table, one form, and one pen set parallel to the form's edge, and at the start the form was blank. Then the pen moved. It filled the boxes in order, from the top down. A name in the first box, written out at full length. A number in the second. A place in the third. The fourth box asked for a duration, and the pen paused over it for exactly as long as it took to read the small print underneath, and then that box was filled too. Nothing left empty. Nothing crossed out. Nothing corrected in the margin. Halfway down, the print changed size, the way official print does when it wants to be understood. The hand didn't slow for it. At the bottom the pen wrote a name a second time, and the signature matched the name in the first box, letter for letter. Then it came to a stop in the last box. A date. Day, month, year, the whole of it filled in, in the same hand as everything above it. * * * Three days home from the wormhole, and the Admiral was already in the infirmary past midnight, sitting on the edge of the cot with his collar open and his patience spent. Ward did it by the book, the way he did everything. Vitals. Pupils. Reflexes. A scanner run down the length of the spine. He was tabbing the numbers into the chart when he stopped, halfway through the entry, at the back of the Admiral's neck. A bite. The upper arc of teeth and the lower arc of teeth, closed and finished. Not weapon work — no blade track in it, no claw, no burn. Healed, and healed wrong: flat and pale, the skin already set in the shape it meant to keep. Any trained medic needed one second on it and no more. A mark like that only took at the deepest end of a bond, and only if both parties went through with it. Which meant— "A dog bit me," the Admiral said. Ward's hand stayed over the chart. He didn't push. He closed the file and left, and came back with a stack of adhesive dressings from the dispensary, which he set down on the cot within reach. "You'll want these, Admiral." Silas looked at the stack. "Thank you." "I'd also like to run a full physical. I think you need one." "No." "Admiral—" "I don't need it." Silas knew the rest of that sentence anyway. It was the second request for the physical, and the written report that would come behind it, and the questions attached to the report, and he knew Ward wouldn't take it any further than he already had. Six years ago a private hospital had thrown Ward out over a patient who had died of something Ward hadn't done, and fined him a number picked to end him, and Ward had been one decision away from the end of it when a captain — not a First Admiral then, only a captain walking home from the shuttle bay — stopped and stood beside him until he came back. Ward had followed him through every rank since. In six years he had never once made him regret it. Which meant that whatever went into the record about this would go in through Ward's hands. Silas fastened his collar, stood, and pocketed the dressings on his way to the door. There he looked back once. Ward had picked the chart up again and was holding it without entering anything into it. * * * The office window faced the parade yard, and the Admiral kept the blinds up, because a man who shut his blinds three days running acquired a reputation for it and he had no intention of acquiring one. Ward stood at the end of the desk with the console at his shoulder. Physician and aide both, for long enough now that nobody in the building could say where one duty stopped and the other began, including Ward. "First Prison," Silas said. "Level four, the isolation wing, pending trial. File the capture with the Tribunal tonight, then put the notification into the queue before the Cabinet reads it off a news crawl instead, and flag it to President Karsten's desk directly." "Filed." Ward's fingers moved. "The Tribunal's clerk has put the first hearing at sixteen days." "Sixteen." "Yes, Admiral." The month he had been missing had run on every bulletin for four weeks and stopped running the day he came back with the pirate fleets' youngest leader in restraints. The press office had called it a victory. The Admiral had declined to discuss it. He had kept his days full on purpose since — briefings, readiness reports, a second pass over the border patrol schedules at midnight — because a man who stopped moving had time to think, and there was nothing in the last month he intended to think about. Across the city, in his own house, in a room with a lock and no window, Kestrel had been sitting for three days. Silas hadn't gone down there once and hadn't sent anyone down with an explanation, which meant Kestrel had been sitting in it without one. That was a fact he had made himself, and could live with. By morning the order would take the Federation's most wanted man out of his house and put him behind federal steel, which was where he belonged, and where Silas would not have to walk past a door at night and know who was on the other side of it. What Kestrel remembered was a separate problem. The dart had bought Silas one clear second — the man's eyes opening and taking in his face — and after that, nothing. How much a person could keep out of one second was not a calculation Silas had ever had reason to make. He decided against finding out. "You slept?" Ward said. "Three hours." Ward wrote something down and said nothing. "The mark should be looked at by a second party." "No." "Noted." Ward went out with the file. In the console the notification sat in the President's queue with the office stamp across the top of it, and the first hearing sat sixteen days out, and after Ward was gone the Admiral sat another hour without opening the readiness report on his desk, then turned off the light. * * * The collapse came on the seventh day, in the corridor between the operations room and the lift. He had stood up, closed the file, and the deck had gone sideways under him. There was a stretch he didn't get back afterward. Cold plate under his cheek, somebody's boots, his own name said twice. Then the infirmary ceiling, which he had spent his whole adult life avoiding, arriving above him anyway. Ward put him through it for an hour. Shirt up, cold gel across his abdomen, the probe going in slow circles while the machine talked to itself. He had always hated this part. Every checkup was a stack of instruments and half a day gone, and being angry at it had never once made it go faster. By the end of the hour, Ward's face had gone past careful. The reports had gone from one page to a pile, and he had pulled two books off the shelf — real ones, printed, from the bottom corner where nothing was kept — and was going through them with a finger. Silas read the spines from the cot. Symptoms of Omega Pregnancy. Early Indicators. "You're this rattled," he said. "Is it terminal?" Ward pushed his glasses up. He had gone pale around the mouth. "Admiral. I need you to prepare yourself for what I'm about to say." "Skip it. And don't test my patience." "Admiral. You're pregnant." Silence. The kind Silas had only ever heard in the second before a hull breach. "Ward. Do you know what happens to people who make that joke about me?" Ward's voice went up half an octave and both hands went for the pile. He shoved the reports across the cot, all of them, and the words came out of him out of order and half over each other. "I didn't believe it either. I ran the panel four times. I ran it again after that, and every result came back the same, and I would not have brought you this if there were any way it was wrong. Three weeks and change. Not yet four." Silas read them. He was fast with documents, and this was a document. He read the panels, the markers, the second confirmation, and then the bottom sheet, which was a scan: a grey field, and in it a small pale shape. Small. Still an embryo. He looked at that for a while. Nothing in him came forward with the thing he was supposed to feel about it, so he stopped looking and put the sheet at the back of the stack. "I'm an Alpha," he said. "Explain how an Alpha is pregnant." "You've re-differentiated." Ward said it carefully, the way you say a number nobody has double-checked. "Top-tier Omega. The panel is unambiguous on that. On the reason, I don't have an answer yet." "An Alpha doesn't become an Omega." "I know. It's what the numbers say." Outside the door the Federation went on being the Federation: the youngest First Admiral the service had ever stamped, the highest combat rating on the board, and the man half the unbonded Omegas in the known systems would have married on the strength of a photograph. Silas put his shirt back down. "About the wormhole." Ward kept his voice level, and it cost him something. "What happened in that month changes the picture. Anything you can give me, I can use." The month came back to him in pieces, and the pieces didn't sit in order, and he had been arguing with them for seven days and had gotten exactly nowhere. "A dog bit me," Silas said. Ward looked at him for two seconds and let it go. "There's one more thing," he said. "It's a legal one." "Go." "Federal law. The Natal Protection Act. Termination isn't available to you, and with the other parent being Kestrel, nothing about your case goes through a hospital. It goes through the President's office." Silas was quiet for a moment. Then: "If I keep it, what do I have to do?" Ward stopped, because he had been braced for a different question. "The fetus is unstable," he said. "Growth is behind where it should be, and it isn't closing the gap. It needs the other parent's pheromones, continuously, and there's no way to counterfeit that." "Then just have him release them. That's all?" "The most effective way to get them to the fetus is contact." Ward was already stepping back as he said it. "Any contact at all. The closer it is, the better it works." "At what frequency?" "Once a week. At minimum." "For what." Ward looked at the door, at how open it was, and took another step toward it. "You'd have to—" The last word never came out of his mouth. Only the shape of it, off the front of his tongue, and then Ward's ears going red from the lobe up, and then Ward in the corridor with the door shutting behind him. Silas understood it half a second later, and sat with it while the machine beside him went on printing the follow-up schedule. If anyone had handed him a choice between this and the terminal diagnosis, he would have taken the terminal diagnosis, and asked for it in writing. * * * The child hadn't done anything. He had been an orphan for as long as he could remember, and it had left him with one article of faith he had never managed to argue himself out of: he brought people home. On every deployment he burned as much of his own reserves as the field allowed to do it, and took the write-up for it afterward from officers who outranked him on paper and never said it to his face. He wasn't going to end a life on paper because the paper had his name on it. He reached for the console. The transfer order was still open, green, with the notification to the President's office sitting on top of it and the office stamp across the header. He put the cursor in the destination field. First Prison. Level four. Isolation wing. He deleted it, and into the empty box typed the address of his own house, which had a basement, a lock on the basement door, and nobody in it but him and a housekeeper with a schedule. Behind him, Ward came back to the doorway to say something about the follow-up scan, and stopped with his mouth open. "Admiral. The notification went out an hour ago. With First Prison in it." "Yes." "To the President's office." "Yes." Ward had been his physician and his aide for six years, and had learned which sentences in this building were load-bearing, so he stood in the doorway and did not say any of the rest of them. The doorway looked down over the parade yard. He pressed send. The amended order went out green, on top of a notification that said the opposite, and both of them carried the same signature. Below, in the yard, the transport's running lights swung around in a slow half-circle and headed back the way they had come. Ward stood in the doorway and watched them the whole way out, and said nothing at all.