Duncan detested whatever synthetic passed for eggs on this frontier outpost. Waiting in line for the Express Canteen to vend him a portion of scrambled eggs was merely a ruse so that he could stall long enough to see where she would sit. He was in luck: she bypassed the empty seats at the tables hosting clumps of Marines, civilian clerks, or stevedores to sit at a two-seater near the back. Then she pulled out a tablet, clearly signaling her desire to be alone as she ate and read.

Duncan passed his tray under the debit scanner and launched himself toward the empty seat at her table before someone one else could take it.

His wristcom beeped. Duncan winced. If he paused to answer, he would be left standing next to the wrong table. Ignore it.

The wristcom beeped again. Duncan kept moving, balancing the tray in one hand as he used the other to swipe left, rejecting the call.

A moment later, the wristcom started beeping furiously—rapid-fire and at full volume. Heads turned to stare. Whoever it was he’d rejected was calling back using a priority override.

Duncan had almost reached her table. Maybe this could work for him. Making a show of setting down his tray to answer the strident ringtone, he faced away from her as he sank onto the empty seat. When the caller was dealt with, he would look up, discover her there, and initiate the conversation with “Don’t you hate wrong numbers?”

The screen lit up, showing a woman’s unfamiliar face. No surprise there; Duncan didn’t know anyone on this outpost yet. But after a moment, the Major’s insignia penetrated and Duncan drew himself up straighter.

“Captain Duncan,” the face said. “Report to Base Command immediately.”

That couldn’t be right. Base Command dealt exclusively with capital ships. Singleship captains always got their marching orders from Dispatch. “I think you must have the wrong Captain Duncan, ma’am.”

The Major’s brow furrowed with annoyance. “Captain Duncan: pilot of the singleship Elizabet; arrived on post four days ago, after 179 days in space; cis male; single; age 25; bachelor’s degree in Drama Improv; master’s in Ancient History; currently enrolled in a doctorate in Historiography; a fist-shaped scar on your—”

“Yes, yes! Yes, ma’am. I’m your man.”

“Glad that’s established. Now stop whatever you’re doing and go directly to Base Command.”

“Ma’am.” Was Dispatch part of Base Command here? “Um, where in Base Command exactly, ma’am?”

The Major’s expression changed from annoyed to exasperated. “Control Bunker, of course!” She clicked off.

Still a mistake then, Duncan decided. He took a deep breath and turned to face his tray…and her.

Her jumpsuit identified her as Lieutenant Lipkowski. A customs agent. She was staring at him.

“Sorry about that.” He dipped his fork into the dreaded eggs as he gathered the nerve to say his opening line.

“Why are you sitting there?” Lieutenant Lipkowski demanded.

“Oh, sorry,” said Duncan. “I thought I saw an empty table over here, and then my wristcom rang, so I—”

“No,” Lipkowski interrupted. “I mean why are you still sitting there when I heard Major Chang order you to the Control Bunker?”

“Right after breakfast.”

“After breakfast?” Lipkowski took a deep breath, then spoke in the slow, deliberate manner usually reserved for the very young or the dangerously stupid. “This isn’t an ‘after breakfast’ sort of post, Captain. And Major Chang is the sort of officer who believes you should have arrived before she even thought to page you. If you don’t jump to immediately, the best you can hope for is punishment detail or being dropped a grade. Pausing to eat that disgusting glop, instead of running as fast as you can, might actually qualify you for a discharge by way of mental illness.”

“Ah.” He stood up. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

His wristcom beeped, and Major Chang’s face reappeared. “You haven’t moved.”

Monitoring him on GPS, obviously. But why?

“I fell, ma’am,” Duncan improvised. “Thought I might have twisted my ankle.” He hopped experimentally. “Think I can manage, ma’am.”

The Major grunted noncommittally and disconnected.

“Into taking insane risks, I see,” Lipkowski muttered to her tablet.

“What?”

Looking up, Lipkowski feigned surprise. “Still here?”

Duncan reached for his still-full tray to take to recycling, thought better of it, and hurried out into the labyrinth of underground tunnels that constituted Koyczan colony. He followed the markers to Base Command.

Ten minutes later, having taken a wrong turn somewhere, Duncan sprinted the last hundred meters and arrived panting outside the entrance tunnel. He reached out to steady himself against the corridor wall, the stitch in his side almost doubling him over.

The door to the loading dock crashed open, and Duncan was very nearly steamrollered by a clerk rushing an overfilled service cart down the corridor.

“Hey,” Duncan wheezed after him. Then he turned back and found himself looking straight through three open doorways to Major Chang, framed in the entrance lobby.

“What are you standing there for, Captain? Get your ass in here!”

She led him through the crowded reception area into a side office, where another harried clerk paused long enough to hand her an official-looking, mission-sealed memory slice.

“Get the uniform,” the Major barked over her shoulder at the clerk, before propelling Duncan out again.

Unceremoniously, she dragged him through reception to a bank of elevators and pushed him into the one labelled Control Bunker Only. “Report to Brigadier Osei,” she said, tossing him the memory slice as the doors snapped shut.

Duncan’s stomach was dropping faster than the elevator. Singleship pilots dealt with dispatchers, flight leaders, or, on rare occasions—when they had screwed up spectacularly or were being asked to take on insanely dangerous missions—wing commanders. Never Brigadier-Generals.

The elevator opened on a chaotic scene. A dozen technicians were furiously working underneath control consoles, while clerks piled data-cores haphazardly onto a series of already overflowing service carts. Directing them, Brigadier Osei stood in the middle of the bunker, a head taller than the trio of marines supervising operational security.

She turned to face Duncan as the elevator opened. “Have a seat, Colonel.” She gestured toward a chair piled high with disconnected power modules, while shouting at a clerk to leave the carry-crate he was bending over and take the one next to it instead.

“It’s ‘Captain,’ ma’am,” Duncan replied, confused by the disorder all around him. It almost seemed as though they were dismantling the Control Bunker.

“It’s ‘Colonel’ if I say so, Colonel. You’ve been promoted.” She held up her hand to forestall Duncan’s objections. “What’s more, if anyone asks, you’ve been ‘Colonel Duncan’ for the past year. Oh, and you’re in the Assurance now.”

Duncan’s brain collided with the phrase. What the hell was this? How could anyone confuse him with an Assurance officer? Duncan upgraded “mistake” to “catastrophe.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but—”

Brigadier Osei held up her hand again. “Cutting to the chase: your choices are (a) become—that is to say, have been for a year now—a colonel in the Assurance; or (b) remain a singleship captain for the rest of your life.”

Duncan struggled to work out the Brigadier’s meaning. It sounded like she was implying that accepting a posting to the Assurance—arguably the scariest, most fanatical security agency in all of human history—was preferable to continuing as a singleship pilot. But being a courier was brilliant. The months alone in space gave him time to work on his dissertation; the pay was adequate; “Captain” sometimes impressed folk who thought it meant he was in command of a capital ship; and he had no long-term ambitions in the military. Once his doctorate was completed and his current rotation was up, he planned to retire on a modest pension and take up a second career as college instructor.

Whereas no one in their right mind wanted to have anything to do with—let alone be a part of—the Assurance.

“I’m proud to serve as a humble singleshi—”

The Brigadier cut him off. “I should clarify: the current life expectancy of a singleship captain on Koyczan is”—she glanced at the wall chronometer—“about seventeen hours.”

Duncan blinked.

Brigadier Osei indicated the chaos around her. “We’re leaving. The Yelts have somehow gotten a killmass the size of Everest through our defenses. In seventeen hours, it’s going to hit Koyczan at near light speed and this planet will cease to exist. We’ve already commandeered your Elizabet and sent her off with as many memory cores as we could stuff into her. You are now shipless and redundant. There isn’t nearly sufficient transport to get everyone off world; only those on priority assignment will leave. Colonel Duncan of the Assurance has such an assignment. Captain Duncan is one of the walking dead.”

Duncan’s stomach tightened into a knot. He looked at the frantic activity around him and realized there had been no hint of any of this outside Base Command. Once word got out, civilians would mob the field, and even those in Service would abandon their posts to fight over places on the last transports out. Anyone who had seen images from the Cilgameshi Collapse or the Talihaas Retreat knew exactly how bad it could get.

The doors to the elevator snicked open. Major Chang stepped smartly out, followed by her civilian clerk holding the distinctive black jacket of an Assurance uniform.

Duncan stripped off his singleship leathers and proffered his arms to the clerk.

“Smart boy,” said the Brigadier.

She turned to deal with another staffer as the clerk helped Duncan adjust the jacket’s sizing and handed him his new Assurance epaulettes, hat, and Colonel insignia.

“I’m only going to explain this once,” the Brigadier continued over her shoulder. “There are two ships—Illynov and Dzhugashvili—entering Koyczan space in the next six hours. They will barely have enough time to take you and maybe a couple others on board and then get the hell out before the killmass hits. My orders, before any of this happened, directed me to detach one of my Assurance Colonels to take charge of their mission. Given the circumstances, though, I’ll be damned if I’ll give up either of them, because they’re the only decent staff officers I have.” She glanced at the Major. “No offense.”

“None taken, ma’am,” Chang replied smoothly.

“So the Major here suggested that, since the orders didn’t specify the officer by name but left the choice to my discretion, I could keep my own officers and assign someone else to the mission. Which brings us to you, Colonel.” She turned to face Duncan.

“You’re asking me to impersonate an Assurance Colonel?”

“No, I need you to be an Assurance Colonel.” She paused, visibly got a grip on her impatience, and continued in a more conciliatory tone. “We had Personnel run the possibilities, and your name came near the top of the list—excluding my own people, of course. We ran the projections. If you continue in the military, you’d probably make Colonel eventually. We’ve just speeded things up a bit. ‘Field promotion based on an extant emergency.’ Perfectly legitimate. As is your transfer to Assurance.”

“Except for being back-dated a year.”

“That’s more common than you’d think,” grumped the Brigadier. “All right, yes, we fiddled that bit. But damn it, I’m not about to waste an Assurance Colonel on a milk-run mission in the midst of a genuine disaster! It’s exactly for situations like this that the damn Assurance exist. It doesn’t take a Colonel to deliver two ships to the rear; any Lieutenant could handle the assignment. The only reason they specified a Colonel is to make sure the ships remain under Assurance control. Accordingly, I’ve chosen to dispatch one of my ‘less experienced’ officers: you. I get to keep my people, the Admiralty gets the Assurance in charge, and you”—she stabbed a finger at Duncan—“get to stay alive. Everybody wins.”

Duncan could only nod. All objections fell away in the face of the imminent end of the world. “What are my orders, precisely?”

The Brigadier nodded toward Chang. “The Major will brief you.” She motioned for them to leave, then called out as Duncan and the Major stepped into the elevator, “One more thing, Colonel. Now that you’re Assurance, it’s a capital offence to discuss State secrets—which this is—with anyone outside your direct chain of command.”

A second later the doors snapped shut on the Brigadier, and on Duncan’s former life.

The Major spared only a few moments to get Duncan kitted out: identity script, spare uniforms, an Assurance-frequency wristcom, an Assurance Special pistol, Assurance Knowledge slices appropriate to his new rank—and, at Duncan’s suggestion, Assurance recruit-training slices as well, to bring him up to speed.

“Fleet Captain Rideau will be in charge,” the Major explained as she stuffed packages into Duncan’s waiting arms, topping the stack off with an Assurance carryall. “He’s a decent officer with twenty years’ experience, half of that in combat. He knows Illynov and her sister ship. You’re just along for the ride.”

“Doesn’t a Colonel normally outrank—?”

“Don’t be stupid. Officially you may outrank him, but we both know you’re merely a singleship pilot. You don’t even have combat experience.”

Duncan gulped. “We’re going into combat?”

“No. Quite the opposite. You’re delivering two ships to the rear. It’s basically a courier mission, which is why you’re perfect for the job.”

“Then why the insistence on the Assurance connection?”

The Major shrugged. “To ensure the ships don’t get commandeered en route, the way we commandeered your Elizabet.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“Let’s just say the front has been in flux lately, and force assignments have had to be more flexible than usual.”

The Major pushed the now laden Duncan out the door of the storage room and secured the lock. “It’s unlikely you’ll even be needed, but Fleet Captain Rideau may appreciate having an Assurance Colonel in his pocket if some local post commander gets too acquisitive. Just follow Rideau’s lead and you’ll be fine.”

“Then what?” asked Duncan. “I mean, after we deliver the ships?”

“Then you’re a Colonel in the Assurance, and you ask for your next assignment. How bad could it be?” At Duncan’s expression, she added, “Even if they put you on trial for impersonating an Assurance Colonel, that’s down the road a fair bit. You’ll still be out of here.”

There was nothing Duncan could say to that.

“Look, your file says you’re smart.” Major Chang wrapped an arm around Duncan and gave him a motherly squeeze. “You’ll work something out.” Then, without lessening her grip, she bent down and snapped something around Duncan’s ankle.

Duncan stared at the explosive anklet in disbelief.

“In the adventure vids,” Chang continued, “they show those going around the hero’s neck, but that’s to restrict the blast to the victim alone. This one’s got a little more oomph.” She went nose to nose with him. “Let’s be clear. Even thinking about telling anyone what’s going on here—and BOOM. You and everyone in the room.”

Duncan’s eyes widened as Chang’s stare bored into him.

Apparently satisfied, she backed off a little. “And no using your wristcom to contact anyone but me or Brigadier Osei, or again, BOOM—for you and everyone around you. We can’t risk your being willing to blow yourself up to get the word out. Though your profile says you’re not the type.”

“How am I supposed to function without a wristcom?”

“The anklet will deactivate as soon as you’re on board Illynov—in space, and safely out system.”

Unexpectedly, the Major stuck her hand out for Duncan to fist-bump. He awkwardly maneuvered the pile of supplies he was holding to free his fist. Then the Major saluted him—as if he were the one facing down danger—and disappeared back into the Control Bunker.

Duncan stepped out of Base Command and rejoined the flow of passers-by. The poor devils had no idea what was coming, he thought. And then he remembered: Lipkowski!

Finding her was going to prove tricky, given that his anklet wouldn’t allow him to page anyone. Still, she was Service, so that ruled out the civilian quarter, and since she breakfasted daily in the same canteen, she probably bunked or had duties nearby. If worse came to worst, he could try to find her at lunch, though that would be cutting it close.

The real problem was how to get her onto the ship. The Brigadier had said it would carry “you and a couple others,” but Illynov would be expecting a Colonel’s staffers, not random passersby. He needed to get back into that Assurance supply closet.

“Colonel Duncan?”

Duncan turned to find the clerk who had brought him the Assurance uniform. Given the press of Base Command’s other priorities, it did not bode well that he had been sent after Duncan. The last thing Duncan wanted now was for the mission to be scrubbed.

“My name is Crane. I was present at your briefing.”

“Yes, I remember you.”

Had he come to get the uniform back? Duncan regarded Crane closely. He was shorter than Duncan and not particularly athletic-looking. Duncan might be able to take him, assuming Crane wasn’t armed. But there was no knowing the parameters of Duncan’s anklet: any brawl that Duncan started might end explosively.

“I was wondering if you needed an administrative assistant on your mission,” Crane continued. “As someone who works in a Brigadier’s office, I bring considerable experience to the job and have an A3 security clearance.”

Duncan’s train of thought slammed on the brakes. “An assistant?” he echoed.

Crane eyed Duncan’s leg, where the anklet lay hidden under his uniform. “The truth is I’m concerned that I might be made redundant in the next, um, downsizing.”

If Duncan could rescue Lipkowski, he might be able to save this guy too. But was Crane somebody Duncan could trust? “Shouldn’t you be down in the Control Bunker?” he asked.

“I was sufficiently excited by the possibilities of, uh”—Crane glanced at the hidden anklet again—“securing a place on your mission, that I was willing to give up my latrine break to find you. But if you turn me down, of course I’ll report straight back to Base Command.”

Of course he would. If Duncan didn’t rescue him, Crane’s second-best option would be to stay on as the guy pushing the next service cart leaving Base Command.

“I don’t suppose you can get into the Assurance supply closet?” Duncan asked.

Crane held up a fob. “Where I got your jacket,” he explained.

“Good. We’ll need kitting out for two Assurance officers, and I need to find a Lieutenant Lipkowski. If you manage all that, you’re hired.”

Crane nodded and paged Lipkowski on his wristcom. When she answered, he identified himself, then said, “Your file has come up for a random audit, and you need to sign an F-180 verification. I’m authorized to come to your station for this purpose, or you have the option of reporting to Base Command reception at 0600 hours tomorrow.”

Crane paused for a moment, listening to her reply.

“And where will you be for the next forty minutes?” he asked. “Yes, I know it. That will be quite satisfactory. I’ll join you shortly.”

“You sounded so bored,” Duncan said admiringly when Crane had tapped off. “You had even me convinced it was routine.”

“We’ll, I’ve done that for real a few thousand times,” Crane replied. “She’s taking her break at the Express Canteen in the Logistics substation.”

“I know it,” Duncan said, already moving. “It’s where I had breakfast.”

As a reviewer, some features of mass-market science fiction have always annoyed me: the implacable alien enemy; the macho, alpha-male hero (even when gendered as a strong female); the unquestioning acceptance of the right of humans not only to explore but to conquer alien space (i.e. colonialism); the assumption that expansionism, growth, and innovation represent “progress” and that anything else represents stagnation; the projection of our current social hierarchy onto future civilizations; and so on. The typical space-opera hero lands on a planet, identifies the problem, and by dint of his superior physical strength, endurance, intelligence, courage, and moral character overcomes all obstacles to achieve his clearly defined goals. The protagonist is the hero because he is uniquely capable, is always in control, and wins both the battle and “the girl.”

The initial impulse for my novel, then, was to push back against these common clichés of the genre. In contrast to the commanding hero, I wanted a protagonist who is just “some guy,” who gets caught up in a situation he neither understands nor controls. He is so utterly out of his depth that he doesn’t even realize his own limitations. Instead of instantly figuring out every problem and intrigue, he frequently jumps to conclusions, which—although reasonable given the information available—are nevertheless completely wrong. Every time he tries to talk himself out of trouble, he makes things worse. Instead of the heroine falling into his arms, his having saved her from certain death is not sufficient to change her opinion of him. Instead of our protagonist achieving any of his objectives, he comes to realize that they were entirely the wrong goals, and that he has been fighting the wrong battles for the wrong side.

Thus, I have written a spy novel where our protagonist is dropped into a morally ambiguous role and has to solve a mystery of which he has no inkling. As he bumbles his way through one crisis to the next, he is able to survive, and ultimately to rise to the occasion, only because he overcomes his own preconceptions. Finally working out what is actually going on and what is at stake, he ends up stopping one disaster—but he may have made things even worse going forward.