Excerpt: A Moment of Night

He seemed all right, though Stavros had known him long enough to tell that he wasn't entirely there. That was fine with him. He knew other people (possibly executive officers on this very ship) considered having attachments to the crew a weakness. They thought the captain was supposed to be aloof, worried only about the mission and the ship itself. He needed to protect the crew as well—no reason to throw lives away needlessly—but they were, ultimately, all expendable. As long as the mission was completed, the captain was happy.
That was the shit they fed you at command school, anyway.
Nobody really believed it, not even the people teaching it. He'd managed to get that admission out of his command ethics professor during a long, post-class argument. The woman was trying to convince them all that crew should be seen as a resource. Not to be expended lightly, but they were still there for the express purpose of completing the mission. If half the crew had to die to complete the objective, then the only ethical thing was to let them die.
As the class objected, she swatted them down. When is the mission worth more than a person's life? When the admirals tell you it is, she had said. They know more than you do. You can question their decisions in order to understand better, but you have to do what you're ordered. Isn't it better to complete a mission and save lives? Of course, but you can't always do that. Sometimes people have to die, and commanders have to order them to die.
He didn't disagree exactly, but the callousness of it seemed wrong. He understood that sometimes people have to die, it's the nature of the military. But he thought that was only justifiable if more lives were being saved. It was math. If the deaths of thirty people saved a thousand, then it was justifiable. If thirty died and no one was saved, then they were wasted.
"Look," she had finally said, after their argument entered its second hour. "You're right."
"I am?" He had at least five retorts chambered, and withered at their loss.
"Yes. And every time people under your command die, even if they save others, even if the mission is completed." The captain stripes seemed to stand out on her uniform; he'd never consciously noticed them before, and wondered how many ships she had had. "You feel it. If you're lucky, you forgive yourself. Not right away, but five years down the line, ten. Maybe if you do something really good, save ten thousand people, you can tell yourelf every night that it was worth it. And you keep telling yourself that. Every time it comes up, you just remind yourself that it was worth it, that they died for a good reason, that you did the right thing and you didn't make any mistakes."
"What if there wasn't a reason?"
"There always is, even if there isn't," she said. "You have to make one. Otherwise you won't make it as a commander, you'll be gone the first time you lose anyone. You justify it because there's no other way to live with what you've done."