Zachariah did not enjoy the Ideal’s favor. It was not that his performance was suboptimal, it was not-- he was an exemplar in all ways but one, so far as his linebrothers could tel. He could shoot with the best, and threw himself onto the battlefield recklessly, protective of all his fellows. He was fast, he was strong. He learned well, and quickly.

  But every time the Ideal looked at him, something flickered in his eye. Feat upon feat in the field had not been enough to see him assigned greater honors.

  Zachariah assumed that the fault was his own, but his linbrothers took offense.

  --The Starless Void, Chapter 7

  ***

  Zachariah was waiting just outside her rooms, radiating anxiety. Raphael raised an eyebrow.

  “How—” Zachariah asked, before bothering to process the noise behind the medic. Raphael shushed him, then cocked his head, tapping the lowered ear.

  Zachariah stopped, too well trained not to at least, listen. Slow, steady heartbeat and lungs sounded in the next room-- not as slow as theirs, but slower than hers had been for the whole of their talk.

  “That, is what a human at rest sounds like,” Raphael told him. “Do not speak so loudly. She’ll be fine. She’s lost weight, and she didn’t have much to spare, but that can be recovered.”

  The marine relaxed, just a little. Did he detect… wariness in his shoulders and eyes?

  … Was he starting to overthink every interaction, like the Ideal? What a horrifying concept.

  “What was it? She didn’t seem…” Zachariah was young, or he would never have started that particular question. Raphael eyed him severely, let him quail under his glare… except after a faltering moment, he straightened his shoulders and stared back.

  … The Ideal would be pleased, even if it was not immediately helpful.

  “Obviously it wasn’t that,” Raphael said, because rewarding behaviors that were wanted was theoretically desirable. Zachariah… most line of Tristan, was easy to read, his eyes flaring wide and freezing.

  … Well, if the young fool wanted answers he could bloody well ask.

  … He just had. So he finished his answer, even as his irritation mounted. He wasn’t going to eat the woman, no matter what his programming said.

  “It’s not even a disease. Her inner ear is irritated and that’s hearing, yes, but also ballence and nausea. She’s getting used to the environment. We’re Shipborn, we’re used to it, but she isn’t.”

  “But why would it do that?”

  Hmm. Questioning authority and asking why. It wasn’t much of a scratch at the programming, but it was scratching at it’s earliest bindings… and sooner than many of his peers. Zachariah was trusting, and they’d thought him more in the allure of the programming than most… the Ideal might decide to promote him sooner if he kept this up. Such a man would be an asset on the ship as well as the battlefield.

  “It’s easier to explain while I show you, and I don’t currently have time. But, I promised to show her, when she recovers enough…which should only be a few days. Tag along.”

  The young marine’s shoulders shivered in the grip of some emotion, and he stared at Raphael for a long, long moment before nodding, once.

  Raphael didn’t tell him the Ideal would be well pleased with him for this. It wasn’t his place. But he’d make sure the Ideal heard.

  ***

  “Wait, he actually answered you?” Margrave blinked, staring at Zachariah. “If I thought it would work, I wouldn’t have warned you off it.”

  “He… glared a lot, and… I got mad and glared back,” Zachariah said, rather sheepishly. The others around the table leaned back, as if his lapse in reason might be catching. “I… think he liked it? He only told me after that, and I think it surprised him.”

  “Questioning a superior officer would surprise the man, all right,” William put in. Most of their line didn’t go in for distinction in their appearance, but William-- who was only a batch or so younger than Zachariah, who was from the most recent batch, always claimed there had been so much confusion with the amount of Line of Tristan in his batch that it had been necessary-- he kept his hair to an odd cut, short in the front and long in the back.

  He said the Ideal had laughed when he had laid eyes on him after he had first done it, but no one really believed him.

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  The cafeteria was always a bustling place this time of day. Gulping down nutrient didn’t really require sitting down, but it didn’t precisely prohibit it. Many friends or lines met when they ate nutrient.

  Zachariah had never understood why, but the process had always been distinctly… unsatisfying, but then, he had never known precisely what it was supposed to be like. Maybe humans felt like this too.

  He wasn’t sure what he wanted from the process, but he wanted it ferociously. Company helped. He worried about Nicola, who darted in and out of here so fast, when she could be made to come in at all.

  A rapping at the tabletop drew his attention-- Nathaniel had one hand outstretched, curled into the table with fingertip and the heel of his hand touching it. The steel table made the noise resound, but it didn’t quite overpower the background hum of talk. “He wanted someone to tell you, actually, for the next few days Nicola is to be on the nutrient pills, not the usual form. He knows you usually take meals to her.”

  Zachariah frowned, and considered. He’d always found the nutrient pills even less satisfying than the slurry… but they did sometimes switch to it for the wounded who were made nauseous by their injury.

  Was that what happened to Nicola, more or less? The thought was… nauseating, if they had the ship damaging humans they had to fix it somehow… but… Raphael said it just took time.

  It felt wrong though. Humans shouldn’t have to endure that. Humans were--

  Even sick, Nicola was… not what he had expected humans to be. She was often afraid, yes, and who wouldn’t be? But she still got up most days and poked things. She still was trying to figure out how to unhook the datalink from the wall, still finding maps of the ship and asking excitedly what this or that room was. Honestly, it was more often than not hard to answer her, he learned the ship by walking it, not via the map. And there was something subtly wrong about the maps that bothered him…

  What… had he expected humans to be like? Fearful, yes. Cowering. Like… children. Sacred, and untouchable, and naive.

  Who had told him that?

  ***

  The Ideal remembered Tristan. He hadn’t been one of his school, but he had been one of his first army. He wasn’t as unalike as Keon was from his Line, but he was different.

  Tristan had watched him break a man’s neck.

  He shivered and shook with the effort of not intervening, not protecting a man who deserved no protection. He did not alert his fellow marines the Ideal was there-- if everyone came, someone surely would have attacked. They’d have had no choice. And the marines, such as they were, had been innocent. He had been… investigating a noise? Patrolling? The Ideal had not thought to ask why he was the one who entered the room in that moment, when he had crept past the marines in this so called school, this den of pain, and caught this crucial, fragile man by his throat. He only remembered looking up at a choking noise, and bracing for a fight when he saw the marine in the doorway.

  Tristan had raised haunted eyes to him, gripping the steel doorframe so hard he defored it, not to break it, to hold himself in place. He started crying as he spoke, his eyes one of the most vivid blues the Ideal had ever seen, outside an Ideal’s face.

  “Do it, finish him!” he’d begged, his hands turning white with the grip on the door. The Ideal remembered thinking that he would rip the doorframe out, or bruise his own fingers to the bone if he went on like that, and simply closed his fist. Satisfaction surged through him at the sound and feel of the bone giving way, though the smells a body always produced-- blood, cracked bone, piss-- never pleased him.

  Well. Maybe the blood.

  The marine went limp all at once, all fight leaving him now that there was no human to protect. He was a puddle on the ground, and a weeping one. The Ideal, who in another life might have been called on to kill him, observed with interest.

  “He… that… bastard killed so many of my brothers,” the man finally sobbed, pressing the words through the racking of sobs and laughter that shook his frame. “So many. And I couldn’t protect them. I had to fight not to save him!” He spat the words with disgust, eyes going narrow, then he looked up to the Ideal again. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “… I’m not interested in it,” the Ideal had told him, soft. He had been trained and programmed and modeled after a hunting predator, and well he knew that his softness was not reassuring. But the man smiled. “I will not be attacked without recourse, though.”

  “I don’t want to fight you. Will you hurt my brothers?”

  “… Not of my own choice.”

  “That’s enough then,” the man said, swallowing, and looked around the opulent bedchamber the Ideal had caught the man in. “All this, and he couldn’t even put padding on the tables he strapped us to.”

  “Easier to clean, the one in charge of my… school, said,” the Ideal told him, softer, but no less disgusted. “Who among your brothers has a handler?”

  Tristan shrugged, and struggled to his feet. “Most of us? They assigned batches to handlers… since they don’t expect most of us to survive, it’s unlikely anyone would have too many.”

  His words were bitter. The Ideal simply nodded. Not all of the schools operated the same way, but most did. He had grown accustomed to it. “Draw me a map, and write me a list.”

  “With joy.” It had been when he was almost done that he looked up at the Ideal. “They tell stories about you, you know. The mad hound.”

  The Ideal snorted. “Trite.”

  “I expected you would… make a larger mess.”

  “The day is still young,” the Ideal told him. “But I try not to do that.” He reached out and traced the indent of fingers in the doorframe. “Like that.”

  “Ah.”

  It had become a phrase, for fighting yourself to do or not do something. “Oh, the weapon needs to be replaced, but I’m gripping the doorframe on that one.” “I don’t want to wake up to try that so early, but I’m still gripping the doorframe.” He wondered if the others still used it. He wondered if they knew what it meant. He doubted it. He’d seen the men of this generation of the lines break down into panic attacks over the idea of attacking a human.

  … He missed Tristan. Tristan had fought the best ways he had known how. It was not his fault that saving himself was beyond his ability. But then, most things were so. Very few of Tristan’s… type were able to even touch their programming. But Tristan had seen the need, and he had made the only compromise he was capable of.

  He often wondered what he would think of his Line in these days. He had lived to see generations of it, and while they had been under his tutelage, they had done well.

  He wondered what he would make of what they had become. He didn’t think Tristan had it in him to blame him… but he did.

  This human, sick or otherwise, was unexpectedly a phenomenal catalyst. Exactly the thing a line of Tristan might need, to see why he might need struggle.