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Everyone showed their hands. Den chuckled as he put down a full twenty-three. "Pure sabacc," he said, grin-ning and reaching for the two pots. "Scan ’em and sob, ladies and-"

Jos laid down his cards. Den and the other players stared in disbelief. It was an idiot’s array: the face card plus a two of sabers and a three of flasks.

"Nice play," Tolk said.

"Thanks," Jos said as he gathered in the credits. But Den, watching the surgeon’s expression, had the dis-tinct feeling that right now, Captain Vondar could not have cared less about winning.

21

The night was, of course, warm. Wingstingers, fire gnats, and other hapless insects flew past and hurled themselves against zappers, adding little blue flickers to the camp lights and what little wan star gleam managed to penetrate the mostly cloudy skies. Drongar’s two moons weren’t even big enough to show disks, so, were it not for the Rimsoo lights, the swamp would be ex-ceedingly dark now. As would the entire night half of the planet. On a rainy evening, the only light was from swamp rot, lightning flashes, and the intermittent glow of the fire gnats.

An unpleasant place in every aspect. Well, no, be hon-est-the enemy personnel were actually fairly decent beings.

There was a tendency, the spy knew, to identify with the people you found yourself among when you were working. There could come a time when you’d forget your original purpose, and start to think of those whom you were detailed to watch, or to damage, as real friends. It was called "going native. " Many agents and spies had done it, in war and in peace. It was all too easy. Enemies were not faceless automata, or amoral monsters who got up every morning with a burning de-sire to rage forth and do evil. No, most of them were just like anybody else-they had hopes, fears, families, and they believed they were doing the right things for the right reasons.

It was hard to demonize such people.

To be sure, you could present it as such to a bunch of young troopers. You could indoctrinate them, visu-alizing the enemy soldiers as maniacal fiends who wanted nothing more than to slaughter innocent younglings, burn down your prime mother’s house, and violate your drove father’s grave. Modern soldiers rarely saw the enemy face to face at any event. Firing a missile at somebody ten thousand meters away was bloodless and uninvolving. But even a brief encounter at close range on the field was sometimes enough to ruin months of training: the first time one of your re-cruits saw a young being who looked a lot like him or her or it, sitting on a battlefield holding in his guts with his hands and crying for a drink of water-well, it was a shock. Your newly battle-trained conscript might suddenly realize that the dying young soldier had hopes and fears not all that different from his own-and maybe that all he, too, wanted to do was just serve his tour and go home. That realization was like an upended flask of liquid nitrogen, chilling to the core.

Thinking along those lines was not a good idea for a soldier. It might make him hesitate next time; might even get him killed. Best to try and ignore it.

But when you were a sub-rosa agent, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t harbor illusions that your enemies were evil; not when you ate with them, drank with them, worked with them. You sometimes grew very at-tached to them. In a place like this, people lived in each other’s pockets. You learned to know the one sitting across from you at the chow hall table, almost as well as you did your own reflection.

The staff at this Rimsoo were good people, almost all of them. The spy knew this-judging beings was a big part of an agent’s business. If this war hadn’t begun, any of them could have been potential friends. There wasn’t a demon among them.

That made the tasks harder. When you weren’t hurt-ing some monster by setting events in motion, but in-stead were harming people who considered you their friend-it hurt. You got up every morning and your life among them was almost totally a lie. Everything you said or did had to remain hidden