The Battle of Odin: Lists of Sins and Solemn Vows (Don't Make You Any Friends)

April 489 I.C., Odin

In the morning before he left Iserlohn, Mittermeyer and Yang went out to survey the damage to the Thor Hammer. It was funny, in a dark way. Standing on the bridge of his ship, hands on his hips, watching the still-smoldering hole where the weapon had once been, they had both been asking each other for reassurance.

“Do you think it can be repaired?” Yang asked.

“My opinion as an engineer?”

“If you’re willing to give it.”

He stared down into the hole, the raw edges and shards of metal. “We built it once,” Mittermeyer said. “Even if we have to tear the whole thing out and replace it with a new one, we can do it again.”

“We’d have to fight off the rebels in the corridor without it.”

“I thought that you were under the impression that if the rebels really wanted to invade, they’d use the Phezzan corridor.”

Yang glanced at him. “Yes.”

“Then it won’t matter, will it?”

“I don’t know.”

And that was the least reassuring thing that Yang could have said— it made Mittermeyer shiver. But he just shook his head. “Well— it’s done, we’ll deal with the consequences when they arrive. Can’t do anything about it now.”

Yang passed his hand over his eyes in exhaustion. “That’s true.”

Mittermeyer ordered his ship to return to dock, then sat back down in the command chair. Yang followed him to stand beside him.

“I probably won’t see you for a while,” Mittermeyer said. “But as soon as we reestablish communication from Odin, I’ll send you a message— let you know how everyone is.”

“Thank you.”

“If there’s anything you need from me— resupply once we have the capital, troops, anything—”

Yang shook his head. It seemed that there were a million things that he wanted to say to Mittermeyer— both personal messages and instructions on how the invasion of Odin should proceed— but instead he just leaned on the side of the chair (unprofessional, but who cared) like he couldn’t support his own weight. It was a companionable gesture, though. Shoulder to shoulder, like they would have sat at the booth of Josef’s bar a million years ago, or on a couch by themselves. Yang’s arm rested on the shoulder of the chair; his fingers could touch Mittermeyer’s hair. And did, just once, as they were coming in to dock and no one was looking: he tucked Mittermeyer’s hair behind his ear.

But that had been weeks ago, and now Mittermeyer was approaching the planet.

The one saving grace of the journey to Odin was that Mittermeyer was allowed to keep his stolen ship. Flegel had made some overtures towards asking his uncle to take it from Mittermeyer, but once he realized that the ship was nearly completely unfurnished, and its skeleton crew were the only ones trained to operate it, he temporarily abandoned his requests. So, he had the comfort and thrill that the sleek white ship provided, but in all other respects, the journey was miserable: tense and dull at once.

There had been scattered resistance en route. A small patrol fleet of the loyalist faction had correctly predicted which route they would take back to the capital, but Mittermeyer and Merkatz managed to chase them off without too many losses. They also had to pass through the remains of the minefield where Merkatz had once been ambushed, but there was no force waiting to jump out at them there, and the path they had previously cleared through the mines remained. They merely had to slow to a crawl and keep their fleet formation tight to avoid running into any remaining obstacles.

Merkatz was a genius at that kind of tight moving fleet control, to the point where Mittermeyer almost asked that they trade duties when they arrived at Odin. Merkatz had said that he would take control of the landing with Flegel, while Mittermeyer dealt with Littenheim’s remaining ships in the air. Mittermeyer understood why Merkatz had the ground duty— he was Braunschweig’s man in a way that Mittermeyer was not, and him marching into the capital would be a sign of a return of stability, the old order reasserting itself.

He liked Merkatz well enough. He was a steady man, and one whom he felt he owed his life to, in a roundabout way. Had Merkatz, in the year after Yang graduated from the IOA, decided to send Yang to a court martial for his actions at El Facil, Yang would have been summarily executed, and Mittermeyer— he didn’t want to think about what his life would have been like after that point.

In any event, it would have been good to spend more time talking to Merkatz before they arrived, but they traveled on separate ships, and could only speak by radio when they were moving at sub-light speeds, as they were when they approached Odin.

The three commanders, Merkatz, Mittermeyer, and Flegel, were on their own ships, speaking to each other over video call. Mittermeyer was in his office, but Flegel and Merkatz were on their respective bridges. They sent scout ships ahead to determine what the resistance around the planet looked like, and it seemed to be minimal: Littenheim had ships in the air in the system, but they were few in number, and stationed at the distance of Odin’s moon. The initial plan was for Mittermeyer to draw their attention with his forces, while Merkatz and Flegel with their ground ships, would descend towards the capital. The conversation had devolved into Merkatz and Flegel discussing where they should land their ships, and what routes they should take to get to Neue Sanssouci.

Mittermeyer was no longer listening, since nothing he said would be listened to by Flegel anyway, and was instead swiping through the photographs that their scout ships had taken of the planet. It looked nearly unrecognizable. He remembered coming back to Odin after old deployments, seeing the lights of the capital city splayed out like a spider’s web covered in glittering dew. Now, at night, the city was dark: the lights had gone out. The scout ships had grainy pictures of the city in daytime, as well, and there were visible indications of the fighting that had taken place on the surface: buildings knocked to rubble, the hulk of a downed ship landed in the center of the city, streets blocked with barricades, craters where there had been explosions of some kind. It all seemed like a very dire portent.

His thoughts circled Evangeline, who he hoped had followed through on her initial plan to go stay with his parents a distance away from the capital city during the war. As Merkatz and Flegel were talking, he kept opening his mouth, coming close to accidentally interrupting the talk just to ask Merkatz to please, when he landed on the planet, send someone to ask how his wife was doing.

“Did you have something to say about our landing site, Rear Admiral?” Flegel said in his snide voice, noticing Mittermeyer’s expression.

Mittermeyer was startled to be addressed, he didn’t think Flegel had been paying attention to him at all. “No,” he said. “I was just thinking that when you landed, you should try to contact either Rear Admiral Reuenthal, or Captain Oberstein— Leigh left them with instructions for what to do on the planet; they probably have information on what Littenheim’s weaknesses are.”

Flegel sniffed. “I don’t know what they could possibly have. My uncle didn’t leave much of a force on the planet for them to work with.”

“Leigh already let me know how to contact them,” Merkatz said. “I’ll do so if I can.”

“Oh, good.” He paused. “Could you tell Reuenthal to radio me, when he’s able?” When Flegel sneered, he added, “Just a personal matter— he probably knows how my wife is doing.”

“Of course,” Merkatz said.

“Your family, Admiral?”

“My brother brought them to his country estate before the war started,” Merkatz said. “They’re not on Odin.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” He looked down at the pictures again.

Flegel tried to turn the conversation back to tactics. “As soon as we have a surrender from Littenheim, you can land on the planet. It shouldn’t take long. And if we can’t get a surrender, we’ll get his head, which should be good enough that his men in the skies will stand down.”

Mittermeyer ignored him. He would probably be able to completely subdue the small force Littenheim had left in the air, though he would wait to land until the planet was under Merkatz and Flegel’s control.

“What are you going to do with Sabine?” Mittermeyer asked. “I doubt your uncle would want you to kill his wife’s sister and niece.”

“She’ll have to sign something giving up her entire claim to the throne,” Merkatz said. “I’ll make sure she and her mother don’t come to any harm.”

“We can send her to wherever, what’s her name, Ludwig’s wife, went,” Flegel said.

“That will be something for the duke to decide. Perhaps Elizabeth will want the company of her cousin.”

Flegel laughed, though Merkatz hadn’t intended it as a joke.

Despite his sense of doom, Mittermeyer couldn’t help but feel a familiar thrill when going into battle against Litteneheim’s fleet around Odin. It was the excitement that narrowed his vision to a single clear line, that crystallized the here and now into the only thing he could worry about.

The fleet that Littenheim had left in the air was about as small as one of the larger rebel patrol fleets that he had often encountered while in the Iserlohn corridor. While those battles had only been skirmishes, in which the goal was to attack enough to be allowed to retreat without losing face, they had nevertheless been great enough in number that he had gotten a real taste for them. From being in that position so long, his actual battle experience was much greater than the average Imperial admiral, and Mittermeyer was confident as he ordered his ships forward towards Odin.

Watching his fleet move, the gleaming white prow of his own ship visible on the camera, he felt a certain pride in his stolen flagship. Wryly, he thought that he did need to give the ship to Leigh, before he grew too proud of it to let it go.

But that thought left his mind as they got closer to Odin. He tried to pretend that this was one of the battles in the Iserlohn corridor against the rebels. The pretending made it both easier fight them, turning them into an enemy rather than his own countrymen, and it clarified the tactics he would use. The goal didn’t need to be to obliterate Littenenheim’s men— just to get them to retreat into space, or at least to keep them away from the planet.

The tactics for the battle in the air had been left entirely to his discretion, since Merkatz would be on board a landing ship. Mittermeyer decided that the best course of action was a blitz, to surprise the waiting fleet with a charge so rapid that they couldn’t form up and respond quickly enough.

It was a good strategy. Even before Mittermeyer’s fleet entered detection range of the planet, before he had fired a single shot, the Littenheim fleet was already disorganized. It was clear that whoever the commander of the space fleet was, he was not very skilled. The ships were visibly clumped up into smaller sub-units of the fleet, where each captain in charge of a handful of ships tried to keep his own group in line. The overall line of the fleet, if it could be called anything like a line, was ragged, with huge gaps that Mittermeyer’s ships could almost charge through without firing a single shot. He was worried that this was because the orbit of Odin was cluttered with mines or some other kind of anti-ship weaponry, but he saw a few of Littenheim’s ships, with the approach of his fleet, dive recklessly back towards the planet, possibly to report the attack through the complete radio communications blockage. They moved without any interference, so there were no mines, at least.

Just to be sure there wasn’t zephyr gas spread through the planet’s orbit as an ambush, Mittermeyer ordered his ships to begin firing long before they reached the enemy. But there was nothing to ignite— it really was just a badly organized line of ships, lacking a commander able to coordinate a real defense. Mittermeyer’s forces broke through without losing a single vessel of their own. The line was so ragged that their blitz simply carried them past the line of defense, completely cutting off Littenheim on the planet from his forces in the air. Mittermeyer was even able to order his ships to turn around within the moon’s orbit, putting their backs to the planet, before Littenheim’s men organized a coherent retort.

With his new position, Mittermeyer was now on the defense, not wanting to charge back out and allow Littenheim’s ships any opportunity to return to the planet. He disliked the position despite its advantages; being on the defensive made him feel itchy and uncomfortable. He would rather charge. Merkatz and Flegel landed all of their crew transports without incident, and began their ground invasion of the city, and he was able to protect them during their descent.

But it became a waiting game for the radio blockage from the planet to fall, and for Merkatz to radio up that he had taken the capital. As Mittermeyer sat in orbit and easily beat back Littenheim’s defenses, which couldn’t even mount a proper counterattack, the tension grew. Littenheim’s ships would struggle to form up, attack one flank of his fleet haphazardly, and be beaten back immediately. Mittermeyer even let them retreat into space without chasing them— there was no point in wasting life, of his or of Littenheim’s men. It would be better if they abandoned their positions and retreated out into open space, rather than continuing this farce.

It was easy, but miserable. He would have preferred a pitched battle, one that would keep his mind off of waiting. And he knew that it was a personal flaw of his, to want to sacrifice thousands of lives and hundreds of ships so that he could stop thinking about what awaited him on the planet, but that didn’t stop him from wanting it.

There was only one moment in the tepid, miserable battle that stood out in his memory. He was sitting in his command chair, late in the first day, his fingers digging into and picking at the fine leather of the seat.

Littenheim’s fleet mustered a charge against him, trying to sweep around his left flank and get behind his ships. Mittermeyer had ordered the center of his formation to pinch the loose charge in half. His ships leapt at the opportunity— every captain as annoyed with the non-progress of this battle as he was. His central ships cleanly separated the forward half and the long, trailing tail of Littenheim’s fleet.

Any competent commander on the other side would have punished this movement by going through the now-weakened center of his own formation, but it scared back Littenheim’s men, those that could still retreat, anyway. The ones that had been at the forefront of the advance were now trapped in a tight ball, like a school of fish circled by sharks. The action had taken less than half an hour.

“Hold your fire,” Mittermeyer ordered, though he grit his teeth as he did.

Bayerlein, his adjutant, looked at the action on the screen overhead and asked, “Will you ask them to surrender, sir?”

“Do you think they will?”

Bayerlein seemed to think that the question placed him in an awkward position. He scratched his head and answered in a non-commital way. “I would hope so.”

He could hear Yang in his own voice as he spoke. “They’ll refuse, and I don’t want to have to kill them for being stupid.”

“Then, what, sir? Leave them there? Board the ships?”

“Our fleet positioning would get me scolded by anyone with half a brain,” Mittermeyer said. “Send the Valkyries out to chase them back, and get our central ships back in line instead of showing their asses to the enemy.”

Even Bayerlein, who tended to hang on to Mittermeyer’s commands like a lifeline, rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

It was such a tedious catch-and-release that it left everyone on edge. A pointless moment in a pointless battle in a pointless war.

It had been a short war, all told, thanks to Yang’s planning and strategic thinking. Braunschweig’s fleet had fought four battles: Geiersburg, to retrieve the bulk of their fighting ships; Valhalla starzone, which had wiped out most of Littenheim’s fleet and forced him to retreat to the planet’s surface and guard it with his ground forces; Iserlohn, to retrieve their ground forces for the final assault on Odin; and this battle at Odin. If those first two battles had not been such clean victories, the civil war could have lasted for much longer, with Braunschweig and Littenheim striking inconclusively at one another until both sides were completely exhausted. Braunschweig’s fleet, at least, was emerging from the war in a relatively sound condition.

It was only the Iserlohn battle that seemed like a regrettable mistake. Yang, when he had been planning the war, had his hand forced: he had promised the fortress to Braunschweig as a show of strength, and was obligated to build his entire military strategy around it. In all, it wasn’t a bad plan— if things had gone worse, and they had worn down their own fighting force enough that they needed to call in aid, appealing to the rebels would win them the crown (and peace in the galaxy). And if Littenheim had been defeated on Odin by some force left by Litchtenlade, a capture of Iserlohn would have sufficiently demonstrated to the prime minister that a surrender would be wise, sparing pitched battle on the ground of Odin. But as it was, Iserlohn had been nothing more than an unavoidable and costly demonstration, which made an enemy out of the remaining neutral soldiers, and had significantly weakened the Empire as a whole.

Merkatz and Flegel took two days to take the capital city. The fighting was most intense around Neue Sanssouci, though there was resistance around every key site in the region: the airfield, the radio transmission stations putting out the jamming, bridges, the power station, and other key city infrastructure. The jamming was lifted halfway through the second day, and Mittermeyer was finally given a report on what was going on below.

The report came, not from Merkatz, or Flegel, or Reuenthal, but from Leigh’s friend Captain Oberstein. He was broadcasting from some sort of safehouse basement, dim and dusty light filtering in through narrow, horizontal windows placed near the ceiling. Mittermeyer didn’t like the man much, but was relieved to get any update.

Oberstein looked far more gaunt than Mittermeyer remembered, and one of his mechanical eyes was missing— the left one. He had covered the empty hole in his face with a bandage. His hair was lank and unwashed, and he was not in uniform, instead wearing a plain black sweater.

“Were you wounded, Captain Oberstein?” Mittermeyer asked, gesturing to his eye. It was not a standard greeting, but it was the only thing he could think of to say when faced with the usually so proper man.

“I’m attempting to conserve the batteries in my eyes. I’ve had no way to get replacements, so I am only using one at a time. I apologize if it’s disconcerting.”

“No, I understand completely— in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king,” Mittermeyer said. “I’m glad you’re not injured.”

Oberstein looked somewhere offscreen, probably at a map. “Admiral Merkatz’s forces are converging on Neue Sanssouci now. Littenheim will be dead shortly. You should prepare to tell his remaining forces in the air to surrender.”

“And Sabine?”

“She’s dead.”

“Already? Merkatz said they would want to keep her alive.”

“She died before you arrived. She was killed in the capital riots last month.”

“But Littenheim is still fighting— for what claim?” It was almost stupid to ask the question. Littenheim was fighting because he would be killed if he didn’t. He would be killed if he did, too, but that was better than lying down and surrendering. It was the one thing Mittermeyer didn’t feel like faulting him for.

“He has tried to keep the news from spreading. He feared lending legitimacy to the unrest by admitting that his Kaiserin was dead. With your invasion, I believe if he had a hope of victory, he would accuse you of killing her, and he would proclaim Christine Kaiserin, and look for Ludwig’s son, Erwin Josef, to shore up the claim, but he doesn’t have Erwin Josef either.”

“That could become a problem— do you know where he is?”

“Dead, also.”

Mittermeyer wanted to get more details, but the surety in Oberstein’s voice made it feel unnecessary. He would find out later. “And Litchtenlade?”

“In our custody,” Oberstein said. “When Neue Sanssouci has been taken, we will broadcast his affirmation of Elizabeth as the rightful Kaserin and his order for the remaining Imperial troops to stand down.”

“Good,” Mittermeyer said. “That’s good.”

“Yes.”

“It seems like you’ve had everything handled here,” Mittermeyer said. He struggled to find something to say to the dour Oberstein, wanting desperately to ask about everything that he couldn’t see, everything that had happened or was still happening outside the small frame of Oberstein’s camera lens into this dim basement. “Merkatz sent me a text transmission that the fight for the capital is going as well as it can.”

“Littenheim’s men are demoralized from occupying the city for months, especially after the riots of last month and the new secrecy from the palace due to Sabine’s death. Most of them who aren’t in heavily fortified positions have surrendered. The streets are now mostly clear.”

“That’s good. I’m sure everyone living in the city is glad that this is almost over.”

“Yes. The past few months have been— difficult.” Oberstein was not the type of man to readily admit that kind of thing. Mittermeyer heard the unusual strain in his voice— the past few months in the capital city must have been unimaginably bad.

“May I ask, Captain, do you know how my wife, Evangeline, is doing?” He almost feared the answer.

“Several months ago, Lieutenant Kircheis brought her to stay with Fraulein Mariendorf’s cousin, Baron Kummel, in the countryside. That was the last time I saw her. Fraulein Mariendorf likely knows more about her.”

“There hasn’t been much fighting outside the capital, has there been?”

“Not much. I believe that area has been relatively untouched.”

“That’s good to know— thank you.”

Oberstein nodded.

“And where is Rear Admiral Reuenthal?” Mittermeyer asked.

“He and what remains of Braunschweig’s original forces on the planet are about an hour from the city, keeping Lichtenlade prisoner. When I am able to contact him, I’ll let him know that you would like to speak with him.”

“I appreciate that.” Still, although all of this news had been good, Mittermeyer couldn’t shake the coldness he felt— perhaps it was just a byproduct of talking to Oberstein, who cast a pall over every conversation.

“There is one other person who you might wish to speak to, if you have a second,” Oberstein said.

“Who? Lieutenant Kircheis?” he asked, thinking that Yang might have left his little redheaded deputy with specific instructions.

“No— a man who defected from Littenheim’s camp and surrendered to Admiral Merkatz. He claims to know you.”

“Who is this?” Mittermeyer asked, now morbidly curious.

“Vice Admiral Fahrenheit. He says you were classmates.”

Mittermeyer knew him, but it had been a long time since they had spoken. The image Mittermeyer had of him was still the gangly albinistic cadet, two years his senior, who played against him in their wargames at school. “I do know him,” Mittermeyer said, rather startled.

Oberstein turned away from the camera and asked someone offscreen to bring Fahrenheit in. It took just a moment for him to appear on screen. Despite the fact that he was a prisoner under escort, Fahrenheit still looked smug on camera.

“I was hoping it was Leigh I would get to surrender to,” he said. “I’m told that he successfully anticipated my trap outside Odin a few months ago— I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“I wasn’t involved then, so I couldn’t say anything about it— but I see I’m playing second fiddle to Commodore Leigh as usual,” Mittermeyer replied. “I really didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I don’t like being on the losing side, Rear Admiral, so this is the only place left to be. I’m hoping that my recognizing that fact would earn me a place in your camp.”

“Nobody likes losing, but nobody likes a turncoat, either. Especially not one who’s jumping out of a sinking ship.”

Fahrenheit shrugged. “I’ve already done your group on the ground here some favors— Leigh would recognize my usefulness.”

Mittermeyer pinched his lips. “I recognize it, too. But you could have just waited— Braunschweig is going to make everyone bow to his daughter when she arrives. He can’t just dismiss half the fleet, with the rebels just around the corner.”

“I’m aware,” Fahrenheit said. “But I would like special consideration.”

“I can’t decide that,” Mittermeyer said. “You’ll have to speak with Baron Flegel.”

“I don’t mean right now. I’m happy to continue to assist you from my current position as a prisoner, or something like it. But when Leigh arrives, I would like you to mention my name. I did a favor for his protegee— I’m sure he’ll mention me as well. But since you’re here, it’s good to see you.”

When Yang arrived— Mittermeyer had no idea when that would be. The unknown sat heavily on him. “Yes, fine,” Mittermeyer said. “I’ll make sure to speak with him when he gets here. You’ve given Merkatz all the details of Littenheim’s camp?”

“I have,” he said. “I hope you’re all grateful for it; getting myself out of Neue Sanssouci was quite difficult, as you might expect.”

It was several more days before Mittermeyer could land on Odin. He had to go through the process of announcing Littenheim’s death and the capture of Neue Sanssouci, then forcing the remaining ships in the air to stop their useless attacks and give themselves up. Once they had surrendered, he consolidated their crews onto transports to be used as temporary prison ships, then had his own men land the captured ships outside the city. He left his own fleet in the air, under the command of his adjutant, Captain Bayerlein, and descended to Odin. He didn’t ask for permission from Merkatz on the planet, merely announced that he would be landing at the earliest possible convenience, and then did.

In the time between his conversation with Oberstein and his descent to the planet, no one said anything more about his wife. Reuenthal didn’t ever attempt to get in contact with Mittermeyer, even after radio communication had been fully restored. It was this, more than anything else, that caused the sense of dread to claw its way to the forefront of his mind.

In any other time, Reuenthal would have borrowed or commandeered a shuttle to come up to visit Mittermeyer on his beautiful stolen flagship, or at the very least would have stopped at nothing to get a message to him. A letter, if not a radio call.

The joy that Mittermeyer should have felt at the end of the civil war was soured by this nagging fear, the sense that something terrible had happened that no one would tell him about. Perhaps it was just Reuenthal avoiding him for the usual reasons he cloistered himself away sometimes. He recalled the conversation they had on the balcony of the bar at Yang’s bachelor party the previous summer, where they discussed looking forward to the happiness that was waiting on the other side of the civil war. He tried to tell himself that it was just Reuenthal not wanting to be part of Mittermeyer’s saccharine, half-formed visions, or not able, anyway.

He regretted that conversation. It floated through his mind as his flagship descended onto the capital’s airfield. Even as he said that he imagined he would be happy, he knew that it was just the kind of lie he often told himself. And the sight of the ruined capital gave voice to that lie.

He had known what to expect from photographs, but that still was nothing compared to seeing it come closer and closer on the screens of the bridge: there was the smoldering, grey city with its skyline permanently altered; there was the airfield so pitted with holes that the runway was completely destroyed, and only ships capable of vertical takeoff were able to land in the area. The whole place was a pitiful sight, despite the greening of the trees in the forests, and the blueness of the sky, a perfect spring mid-afternoon.

When he touched down on the airfield and stepped out onto his ship’s ramp, he could smell acrid smoke and a fetid rot in the air, carried on the wind brushing in over the city. It made him gag, and he briefly covered his mouth with his sleeve as he regained his composure and looked around.

There was no proper entourage to greet him when he landed, just one small figure leaning on the section of chain link fence that remained upright, watching the glittering and unmarred white ship descend. Waiting some yards away were a handful of soldiers, sharing too-few cigarettes between them. The smoke rose into the air, and they ignored the ship’s descent. The small figure was clearly their leader— when he stepped forward, the soldiers turned to look, waiting for an order. But the person just crossed the tarmac towards him as he descended the ramp of the white ship.

From a distance, Mittermeyer couldn’t tell who it was— wearing a soldier’s jacket draped over his shoulders like a cape, too short and pale to be Yang’s redheaded lieutenant, and not Reuenthal either, nor Oberstein, nor Merkatz’s adjutant Schneider, and for a brief moment he thought it was his wife, but then the figure got close enough for him to see her shaggy hair and her youthful face.

It was Hildegarde von Mariendorf, whom Mittermeyer barely knew, though he remembered that she had been entrusted with some amount of responsibility, first by Yang and then by Oberstein. They had only met once before, at Yang’s wedding, where they had exchanged a few pleasantries.

She gave him a salute as they met in the middle of the tarmac, and he gave one back, though it felt strange to salute a young woman. As he got closer, he could see that she was no longer quite the cheerful girl tagging along after Yang that she had been at his wedding. Her face was hardened, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Her hair was roughly cut and unwashed, and the soldier’s jacket she was half-wearing was torn. Nevertheless, despite her grim expression, she looked over Mittermeyer’s shoulder with an undeniable curiosity in her eyes at his ship.

“Welcome back to Odin, Rear Admiral,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to see that you’re well, Fraulein Mariendorf. Are you my only welcoming party?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said. “Captain Oberstein mentioned that you were landing, and someone needed to— no one else could.”

He could hear something in her voice, see it written on her face, but he just said, “I’m just surprised Lieutenant Kircheis wasn’t the one to come get me.”

A shadow crossed her eyes, her mouth twitched.

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“No,” she said. “He was wounded.”

“Badly?”

“He’s recovering,” Hilde said, which meant nothing.

“I see. I’m sorry for him. If there’s anything I can do…?”

“It’s alright. If you’ll come this way, Rear Admiral. Any of your men who are leaving your ship, they can head towards the outpost we have in the hangars.” She waved her arm, and the soldiers who had been with her hastened towards the ramp of the white ship, waiting for anyone else to come down. But she led Mittermeyer away down the airfield towards the service road, where she had a car waiting.

It was his wife’s car. He blinked at it, not quite believing what he was seeing. She fished in the pocket of her soldier’s coat for the key fob.

“Lieutenant Kircheis told me where to get your car,” she said. “He was the one who escorted— well, your car was left in the city.”

He took the keys, and sat down in the driver’s seat. It was a terribly homesick feeling that gripped him, seeing the bird-shaped charm that dangled from the rearview mirror, and Evangeline’s lipstick left in the cupholder.

“You’ll have to tell me where we’re going, Fraulein,” he said.

But she didn’t answer. He had his hands on the wheel but hadn’t started the car, and he could tell that there was something wrong. Hilde sat down in the passenger seat, and the tension that hadn’t been visible while she was standing was now obvious in the stiff way she held herself. She wanted to get him in private, in some simulacrum of a familiar environment, before breaking the bad news. Perhaps he should be grateful that she wasn’t going to make him wait any longer, that someone was finally going to break whatever bad news they had been collectively hiding from him for days.

“Please tell me what it is that you’re here to tell me, Fraulein Mariendorf,” he said.

“Rear Admiral—”

“Why are you the one chosen to tell me who’s died?” he asked. His voice was completely flat and hard. “Why isn’t Reuenthal here?”

She opened her mouth in a miserable, silent attempt to say something, and he remembered that she had known Reuenthal since she was a child, that he was a family friend of hers. Her voice cracked unpleasantly, like a teenage boy’s, when she finally got the words out. “He’s outside the city.”

“Why isn’t he here?” Being outside the city didn’t exactly mean he was alive.

“He thought it was best that someone else give you the news.” This sounded like a lie, not something that Reuenthal would say, but at least he was alive. There was only one alternative, then. If his parents were dead, it would be Evangeline giving him the news.

“Is my wife dead? She was staying with your cousin— that’s what Oberstein said.”

Hilde closed her eyes. “She’s alive. I’m sorry—”

“Why are you apologizing?”

“She left,” Hilde said. “She went to Phezzan.”

He turned the keys of the car; the engine roared to life.

With the worst of it out, Hilde kept talking. “She was staying at my cousin’s house, with myself, and Countess von Leigh, and Elfriede von Kohlrausch. There was— it was an argument. Elfriede told her about you and Rear Admiral Reuenthal,” she said. “And she left.”

“What did she say?” He didn’t know who he was asking about, Evangeline or the other woman.

“Everything,” Hilde said. “I’m sorry. If I had known— I would have—”

“Would have what?” Mittermeyer asked. He felt empty and flat. If it had been Reuenthal, he would have yelled, but instead there was this near-stranger delivering the news, this woman intruding on his life by accident or coincidence. It would have been like yelling at a news anchor on television. It stopped him from weeping, too.

A numbness settled over him, almost physical, like his face was rubber. He couldn’t feel the heat in his skin or the stinging of his eyes, and when he turned his head to scrape his cheek across the arm of his jacket, to wipe at his face, the heavy weave of the fabric felt like nothing at all, just pressure.

He saw Hilde. The soldier’s coat made her look very out of place, like she would have felt more natural stationed at the front lines with a gun in hand. That made two of them, a small moment of connection in this miserable car.

Hilde kept her eyes fixed on the road in front of them, and silently pointed the way out of the airfield. He swerved around the bombed out craters on the ground, heading for the city streets. He followed her directions blindly.

“It wasn’t your secret to keep, and there was nothing you could have done— should have done. I’ve deserved this for years.” He turned a corner too sharply. “As you clearly know.”

“Please don’t blame Rear Admiral Reuenthal for this,” she said.

“I don’t.” It was a familiar lie, one he told in order to make it true.

She nodded, and there was silence in the car.

“Did anybody think to warn her that the rebels are probably about to invade through Phezzan?”

“I wasn’t there when she left— I didn’t find out until she was already gone. I would have tried to stop her if I had known that’s what she was planning to do.”

Mittermeyer shook his head.

She pointed for him to avoid a city road that was completely blockaded with a mountain of garbage, and Mittermeyer turned the car the other direction. “Where are you leading me, Fraulein?”

“Admiral Merkatz is in Neue Sanssouci,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Tell me where Reuenthal is.”

Hilde seemed about to refuse to tell him, for his own sake, maybe, but she didn’t end up arguing, just said, “We’ll have to go north.”

He turned in the direction that she pointed, and drove through the ruins of the city.

From the pocket of her soldier’s jacket, she pulled out a handheld radio, turned it and honed through the fuzzy static to a clear channel. They listened to the open chatter of Braunschweig’s men, letting it fill the space and wash over them. Sometimes what they said would make her direct the car along different streets. He should have asked her about the past few months on Odin, what everyone left behind had been doing, but while she might have been willing to give a report, he couldn’t open his mouth to ask.

He could see it all clearly in the remains of the city. Even the parts that had not been directly hit with laser fire, everything was touched. Windows were smashed, or boarded up, or boarded up and then crashed through again. The streets were piled with garbage, vehicles were burned-out husks abandoned half hiked up onto the sidewalk, most of the decorative trees had been cut down for easy firewood. Every corner seemed to hold some new detail of misery— half melted pieces of paper pinned to telephone poles bearing the scrawled name of someone’s son, the rectangular patches of upturned dirt that marked shallow graves dug into the grass of the city parks.

He was grateful when they finally made it to one of the few remaining bridges at the edge of the city, where they passed through a guard checkpoint, and then were allowed to drive out into the less dense suburbs and forests beyond. Here, things were less destroyed, and the greening of spring had taken over the trees, putting out fresh buds and unfurling delicate and bright leaves, while daffodils poked their heads out from the ground, and forsythias turned plain bushes a riotous yellow.

He couldn’t care much about that, though. Hilde said that Reuenthal’s current outpost was about an hour’s drive away, and that was enough time for the numbness to fall away, and for his thoughts to begin to churn.

It wasn’t Reuenthal’s fault, of course. Perhaps it had been his fault that Elfriede knew about them, but it wasn’t his fault that Evangeline—

It was hard to even think the words.

It was his own fault, exclusively and completely. His own actions for years, willfully and knowingly done, sometimes while his wife was just one room over. It wasn’t difficult to admit guilt, culpability.

He had managed to continue for so long only because he harbored a fantasy of forgiveness. Imagining himself confessing and her touching his head, his cheek, a benediction and an absolution— he could make that fantasy real enough that he felt the forgiveness before it came. It eased the guilt just enough to keep the tower standing, shored up the dam just enough that it didn’t burst.

Of course, he had known that it was a delusion, and in his clearer moments he had been all too aware that it would all come crashing down, that Evangeline could not possibly forgive him for years of lies. The fear of that truth stopped him from confessing as much as the fantasy of forgiveness did, these two equal forces pressing up against him on either side, keeping him confined to the one track that he was already going down, compelled to follow it to the end.

And the end had arrived, unexpectedly, the ground dropping out from beneath him. Here in the car, next to this near-stranger, he felt the moment before gravity caught him and pulled him down and down, the single moment of continued momentum pushing him heedlessly towards Reuenthal.

If he had waited half a day, he wouldn’t go in Reuenthal’s direction. He had half an impulse to pull the car into one of the highway off ramps and turn around, return to the city, go meet with Merkatz instead. Cordon off every iota of personal feeling into a smaller and smaller chamber of his heart, squash it down, see no one, say nothing. He might never speak to Reuenthal again if he did that. Evangeline leaving might have accomplished the one thing her staying never could, which was to turn Mittermeyer into an upright man, or the husk of one. There seemed to be very little left of him when he searched inside himself.

The only thing that he could find was a roiling anger. It was a self-directed emotion, but that didn’t stop it from needing to fly out through his hands and raw throat. It needed a target like a mirror, one that would direct the violence to the place that deserved it. It needed Reuenthal.

His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that he lost sensation in his fingers. When he reached to adjust the temperature in the car, he found that he couldn’t uncurl his hands from their fused, claw-like bent without real effort.

Reuenthal’s camp was a literal campground, tucked in a mountain valley with a placid lake shimmering under the blue sky. They had to pull off the highway onto a dirt road to get to it, and Hilde rolled down her window and stuck her head out so that the guards could see exactly who was coming long before they rolled up the track. They passed through the gates to the camp itself, where log cabins stood like soldiers in a row between the pines and the shore, and men in uniform stood on guard or walked between the buildings. Hilde, filling up space in the car, explained that Reuenthal had previously been at a much smaller safehouse, but with the arrival of Merkatz’s reinforcements, they had moved back here. This was where Litchtenlade was being kept prisoner, but Mittermeyer tuned her out.

Hilde told him to stop the car in the dirt parking area, where there were a handful of other vehicles haphazardly lined up along the edge of the trees. It was late afternoon by the time they arrived, and the shadows were growing long.

“Where is Reuenthal?” he asked.

“The building near the dock,” she said, pointing towards the lake. “That’s the one he uses as an office.”

It was a cabin like any other, and Mittermeyer marched towards it. He should have asked Hilde if Reuenthal knew he was coming. It was too late now. There was the wooden door, the wax-paper covered windows on the log cabin, the curl of smoke coming up out of the stone chimney. He knocked on the door. Pounded on it.

“Reuenthal!” Anger was at least a comprehensible emotion.

It only took a second for someone to open the door. Aside from Reuenthal, there were three other men inside the dim cabin— one of them was Merkatz’s adjutant, Schneider, but Mittermeyer didn’t recognize the other two— and they were all leaning over a table looking at a galactic map together. It was one of the others who had opened the door, a bearded captain, and he saluted when he saw the stripes on Mittermeyer’s shoulders, but Reuenthal straightened up from his lean over the map and looked at Mittermeyer squarely.

“Rear Admiral Mittermeyer—” Schneider said, alarmed. “I thought you were going to Neue Sanssouci.”

“I have business here.”

“Gentlemen, we can finish discussing this later,” Reuenthal said.

“I have to get back to the capital,” Schneider said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Fine.”

The other men filed out past Mittermeyer, professionalism stopping them from giving him any confused glances on their way out. Mittermeyer shut the cabin door behind himself, and then it was just him and Reuenthal, alone in the dim room, facing each other like they were on a stage.

“Do you want something to drink?” Reuenthal asked.

“No.”

Reuenthal fixed him a drink anyway. From a cardboard box sitting at the foot of the rickety but neatly made twin bunk bed against the back wall of the cabin, he pulled an unopened bottle of scotch, and poured it into two of the aluminum drinking cups that sat on the shelf above the fireplace. He took his own, but simply set the other on the table for Mittermeyer, in case he wanted it.

“A gift from Admiral Merkatz— from Neue Sanssouci’s stores, apparently. As thanks for capturing Litchtenlade.” There was an open bitterness in his voice, one that Mittermeyer didn’t understand, and didn’t have the ability to think clearly about.

“You know what happened to Evangeline?”

“I do,” Reuenthal said. He turned away from Mittermeyer. “Did you come to demand I apologize?”

“There’s no one left worth apologizing to.”

“Not you, then.”

“Hildegarde von Mariendorf told me not to blame you.”

“I don’t know why she insists on involving herself. I told her to stay out of it.”

“She said you didn’t want to be the one to break the news to me.”

“Then she’s a liar. I would have told you, if I had known you were coming.”

“You didn’t know?”

Reuenthal walked over to one of the wax-papered windows, one where the corner of the covering was peeling up. He lifted it with his fingernail and looked out at the tiny sliver of the clear world it exposed. “I knew you were in orbit. The only way I can send messages is by courier— I don’t have any high powered radio here. Mariendorf brought you?”

He must have seen her outside.

“Yes.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t bring you to the Kummel house. Leigh’s wife—”

He was “Leigh” when Reuenthal was angry. “And what would I have to say to her?”

“She was one of the last people to see her, I’m told. She might know where she went, or if she’ll come back.”

“I know the first and can guess at the second. No one runs away to Phezzan if they’re intending to come back.”

Reuenthal turned back around towards Mittermeyer. “And what do you want me to say to you? That I’m glad she’s gone?”

Unlike everyone else on Odin, Mittermeyer noticed that Reuenthal was both clean and clean-shaven, remaining fastidious despite the lack of running water and easy availability of soap. His chin was lifted, and his eyes were narrowed.

“I don’t want you to say anything,” Mittermeyer said.

“Then why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.” He did know. For the first time, he thought he understood Reuenthal completely, understanding things that had once been opaque to him— the way that he had sometimes antagonized Mittermeyer in the hope that Mittermeyer would lash out at him, provide him some kind of catharsis that life had denied. Mittermeyer felt it too— Evangeline’s departure was not so much a punishment as it was a consequence. He realized it was a stupid thing to want, and it was a stupider thing to want from Reuenthal. There might have been something he could say to goad him, if he searched for it, but the thought of doing so sickened him— he didn’t deserve anything he had to seek out.

Reuenthal was silent. He left the window, went back to the table, smoothed his hand out across the paper map, the top layer of protective tissue crinkling audibly under his touch. In a single, sharp movement, he pulled the tissue paper up and crumpled it into a ball, which he then didn’t seem to know what to do with. Mittermeyer took a step forward, and tried to take it from his hand, but Reuenthal whirled on his heel and stepped away. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

He dropped the paper in the overfull garbage can that sat against the cabin door.

“You’re still wearing your wedding ring,” Reuenthal pointed out.

“And am I supposed to take it off?”

“You could.”

“Would that make you happy?” He pulled the ring on his finger, tried to pry it off, but the change in atmosphere and minute shifting of gravity between space travel and being on a planet always left his fingers slightly swollen for a few days of readjustment, and he couldn’t get it to slip cleanly from his finger, despite how much he pulled. Reuenthal watched him struggle, saying nothing.

“Leave it, then.”

“You won’t tell me to cut it off?” Reuenthal’s knife, along with his sidearm, was resting on the bedside table of the lower bunk. Mittermeyer looked at them, and Reuenthal followed his gaze.

“I should, shouldn’t I?” Reuenthal said. But he didn’t.

He didn’t know what he would do with the ring if he got it off. “I’m still married in the eyes of the law, can’t get divorced without her signature or her death certificate. It lets everyone know, when they ask about my wife— it’s a brand.” He held up his hand.

“A brand,” Reuenthal repeated. He laughed darkly, then turned away. “We have something in common, then.”

“Reuenthal—”

“Come back when you’ve figured out what you want from me,” he said. “I don’t have the patience to pry it out of you. It would have been better off for both of us if I never had.”

He found Hilde sitting on the shore of the lake, picking up pebbles from the ground beside her and tossing them into the water. The sun was down low in the sky, the horizon stained red, and it made the ripples on the lake look like blood.

“I’m ready to go.”

“I can take you back to your ship,” Hilde said. She didn’t ask how his conversation with Reuenthal had gone.

“I’d rather see if my home is still standing,” Mittermeyer said.

Hilde didn’t have the authority to contradict him, though he could see in her shadowed face she was coming up with reasons to: there was no running water or electricity; his ship would be a more comfortable place to spend the night. But she didn’t say any of that. “Alright. Let me get you some water for the night, at least.”

She made him wait while she gathered some gallon jugs and ration packs and a battered looking lantern with a fresh battery from Reuenthal’s camp stores, and then she joined him to drive back to his house, going with him all the way with the excuse that he would need her help navigating the city. Although this turned out to be true, he knew he was under observation— suicide watch, maybe. But he felt completely dull and numb, and could only distantly wonder why she had come to the conclusion that he needed it, and if she had appointed herself to the duty or if someone had ordered it. He bet Yang’s wife told her to.

Miraculously, his apartment building was still standing, and the windows of his upper floor suite all remained shut and unbroken. The door was even still locked. Despite his assurances to Hilde that he was perfectly capable of carrying some water jugs, she insisted on helping him bring them up the stairs to his apartment, and he didn’t bother to argue against her misplaced sense of chivalry.

It was dark inside, even with his lantern turned on, and freezing cold. It smelled like still water that had been left too long— probably a scent oozing up from the empty drains. All the plants his wife had tended so carefully in their pots and macrame hangars were dead. Their leaves had fallen off and settled on the floor beneath the windows.

But the furniture was just where he had left it, and there was the photo of their wedding on the wall. He shined his light over it, forgetting for just a second that Hilde stood awkwardly in the doorway behind him.

“Do you need a ride to wherever you’re staying?”

“No, sir,” she said.

He should have insisted, driven her so that she wouldn’t have to walk through the ruined city at night, but she must have been used to it. “Goodnight, then.”

She saluted and slipped out, shutting the door behind herself. When her footsteps had fully receded down the stairs, Mittermeyer let himself wander through the apartment.

In the kitchen, he picked up the single dirty glass that had been left on the otherwise clean counter, with a smear of chapstick where she must last have drank. He pressed the cup to his lips for a second, and then, with a cry and a jerk of his arm that he didn’t feel in control of, threw the glass to shatter on the floor.

He stared at the shards sparkling on the linoleum in the lamplight, and then sank down against the counter, whatever strength had been holding him up all day gone, fell to the ground, curled his arms around his knees, and wept.