“Silence! This exercise is finished! You are commanded to help me stand.”

  I signaled my final handful of troops to help me. Forming a litter, we carried Sateekas and two other Mogwa who were still breathing to the walls.

  Suddenly, the stone sheets parted and slid away. A fire team of six Mogwa marines rushed in. They were wearing full powered armor and combat rifles. They leveled the muzzles of their guns, and I expected to die in a hail of power bolts.

  “Stop!” Sateekas grunted. “Stand down, Marines. Help me exit this cursed chamber.”

  Washburn leaned close. “You think maybe we should jump them right now, sir?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Hold your horses, boys. Grin and try to look friendly. Talk about how great the Mogwa are.”

  “Huh? Great at what, sir? Getting rolled by unarmed humans?”

  A few of my men laughed, but I cuffed them. That earned me angry looks, but I didn’t care.

  “Try to think, boys,” I whispered. “These aliens have all the cards. Just follow my lead.”

  The humans did so, but with poor grace. Eventually, we were all allowed to exit the chamber and marched up to nicer, more modern decks. Given some salves and basic bandages, we patched up the holes in our skins. Mogwa flesh-printers were incompatible with our biology, so we did the best we could with what we had.

  Some hours later, after we’d come to realize that our “waiting area” was really a prison cell, the Mogwa returned. Looking a bit banged-up, Sateekas himself stood behind a fire team of fully armed and armored marines. The Mogwa troops looked at us like they wanted revenge.

  “McGill,” Sateekas said. “I’m glad to have met you on the field of honor. I’m baffled, however, as to how you might have come to be here on my ship?”

  “Uh… how’s that, sir?”

  “I stipulated in no uncertain terms that only humans of primus rank were to be transported to my ship. Imagine my shock at discovering you among these other, less accomplished beasts.”

  “Oh… maybe there was some kind of a mix-up. We were just told to report to your ship for some friendly war games. My boys, here, they were bored and spoiling for a fight, so I volunteered the lot of them.”

  Sateekas swiveled one of his few working eyes over each of us in turn. Only a handful of humans had survived.

  “You’re telling me this gaggle of apes is made up of enlisted men?”

  “Why of course, sirs. Our officers challenge each other all the time to duels and such-like—but they don’t normally fight in person. They send in champions.” I faked a look of shock and smacked myself on the forehead with the palm of my hand. “That must be it! This whole thing was a big misunderstanding. A cultural difference that neither side completely got the gist of.”

  “Hmm…” he said, pacing around with at least two bad limps among his six legs. “Things like this have happened before. It is possible… but then again, it might be an example of abject cowardice on the part of you humans!”

  “Truth well-spoken, sir. I believe it was an honest mistake—but I can’t be certain because I can’t read minds. Maybe the brass on my side did a little weaseling by sending us in their place. It’s hard to know. But the good news is, after we broadcast all this fun action back to our ship for everyone to enjoy, the rank and file of both armies are bound to pull together, men and Mogwa alike.”

  “Broadcast?” Sateekas sputtered. “You’ll do no such thing, McGill! I’ll not have a single frame of such a sick embarrassment transmitted to your fleet or to mine. I’d rather destroy every vessel in the armada.”

  “Uh… okay. Sorry, sir. Don’t worry, we’ll delete our recordings right now.”

  I waved to my men, and I made a show of removing files from my tapper. My troops were bewildered, but I saw them deleting things as well. In my own case, it was all a pretense, but the trick seemed to work. Everyone bought it, even the Mogwa.

  After a lot more grumbling and complaining about our lack of proper slave-love for him, Sateekas kicked us off his ship and sent us back to Dominus.

  -18-

  Once I was at home again in my unit’s module, I broke out the beer and the flesh-printers. Those of us who’d survived the Mogwa hazing ritual were in good spirits. We howled with laughter as we played vids of the hunt, over and over, on the wall of the ready-room. Even Harris, who wandered in from the revival chambers with an awful look on his face, started smiling. He did a little griping at first, of course, but he finally took a beer and plopped himself in front of the show.

  “Play that part again where you’re beating on a dogman with that palm frond,” he said, and I happily obliged.

  We were still playing recordings and hooting at them half an hour later. Some of my troops had managed to recover their deleted files, and we were already editing up a compilation of the best moments for the ship’s social media sites.

  Winslade and Graves came down to talk to us as we were in the middle of an upload, but they didn’t seem to find things as humorous as we did.

  “McGill?” Winslade said. “Did you publicly accuse the officers of this legion of duplicity?”

  “Uh…” I said. “You mean, like, sending ringers into the Mogwa blender instead of your own skinny asses?”

  Winslade’s hands moved to his hips, and Graves pursed his lips and frowned with disapproval.

  “McGill,” Winslade said, “you know we couldn’t send our entire upper-tier officer corps to the Mogwa. That would have been irresponsible.”

  “I get it, sir. I get it. Some people are more important than others, and some people are just plain chicken. Anyway, what can I do for you gentlemen? Maybe you’d like to see more of our troops beating these dog-ape hybrids to death?”

  Right about then, Winslade noticed our vid, which was playing behind his head. He stared and cringed. His eyes crawled all over the wall screen as the vivid, bigger than life action played out.

  “Is that one of the dogmen? I’ve never encountered such a beast in person.”

  “Sure is, sir. They were all over Green World, and now they’re all over that Mogwa flagship. Quite a coincidence, huh?”

  Winslade turned back to look at me thoughtfully. “Are you suggesting the Mogwa bought these creatures from the Clavers?”

  “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck—it’s probably a duck, sir.”

  “Baffling… How did these Mogwa from the Mid-Zone end up encountering Clavers and doing business with them? At the very least, it’s disturbing.” He went back to watching the screen again. “What’s happening there? Are you abusing that animal?” He pointed up at the screen, where I was, in fact, braining a dogman with a big rock.

  “They aren’t animals, sir. They’re hybrids. Part people and part butt-sniffer.”

  “Hmm… I don’t understand this, and I don’t like what I don’t understand. Your unit is hereby suspended from all activity outside your module for the time being, McGill. I’m going to sort this out properly.”

  “What?” Harris had the balls to exclaim. “After a beat-down and a near perming on your behalf, we’re confined to quarters?”

  “That’s exactly what I said, Adjunct. Have a care. I like my junior officers to have a civil tongue in their heads.”

  Harris crossed his arms and glared at everyone. He wasn’t a happy camper.

  After telling us we couldn’t post our recordings publicly, the officers walked back to Gold Deck. My men were fuming mad in their wake.

  “What a nutless wonder,” Carlos complained. “Winslade should be shot in the face for sending us over there in the first place.”

  I signaled Harris, who chased the bio specialist out of the room. We kicked all the enlisted men out, and decided to have a meeting of our own.

  “What are we going to do?” Harris asked. “That was plain unfair, and I don’t think we should stand for it.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Leeson said. He hadn’t gone with us to be one of the hunted, but he’d enjoyed the recordings. “What do you have in mind, Harris? Mutiny?”

  “No. I’m not that dumb—or that crazy. I say we have ourselves a little accident.”

  Leeson leaned forward. “Oh yeah, this is going to be good.”

  Barton stood up suddenly. We all looked at her. Of the four officers in 3rd Unit, she was generally the quietest. She hadn’t said anything since she’d walked into the ready-room. She’d watched the vids with mild interest, but she hadn’t laughed much.

  “Centurion McGill? Can I be excused?”

  After a moment, I nodded, and she walked out in a hurry.

  “Is she late for a date?” Harris asked, watching her go.

  “Nah,” Leeson responded. “You’re not thinking, Harris. Legion Victrix is here, flying along with us in this same fleet. That’s her old outfit. She doesn’t want any more of our kind of stain on her record, that’s all.”

  “Huh… she’s too good for us, is that it? You think she still wants out? You think she’s longing for her snobby old home legion?”

  Leeson nodded. “I’d say so. Can you blame her?”

  For my own part, I held my thoughts in check. Leeson might be right, and he might be wrong. I decided I needed to find out. If one of my officers was applying for a transfer right before a campaign began, that could spell serious trouble.

  I followed Barton to her private quarters, and I tapped on her door. She popped it open and gestured for me to come inside.

  Stepping into the tiny space that had been allotted to her, I put on a happy face—but Barton didn’t meet my eyes. Right then, I knew. She was trying to leave Legion Varus.

  “Bugging out, huh?” I asked her.

  She glanced up at me for a second, then studied the deck plates again. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Yeah. Leeson figured it out pretty much instantly.”

  She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Don’t worry. They probably won’t let me back in—and I’m not going to even try until this campaign is over and done with.”

  “Oh… I get it. You’re avoiding all the dirt you can during this operation, so your record looks clean at the end of it. Well, good luck with that.”

  She finally looked up and met my eyes. “What do you mean, Centurion?”

  “I mean nothing about Legion Varus is acceptable to those prigs over in Victrix. They’re going to sneer at you no matter what. Worse, your own actions can’t possibly fix a reputation as low as the one we’ve got. If you don’t do something off-color the rest of us will. And you’ll get blamed for it.”

  Erin sighed. “I suspect you’re right…”

  “Why do you want to leave so badly, anyways?”

  She shrugged. “It’s partly the nature of our missions. Each campaign takes a long time, they take us to places we can’t even talk about… The secrecy is the worst part.”

  This kind of surprised me, as I would have thought that any sane person would have hated the part about dying all the time in heinous ways—but there’s no accounting for taste.

  “Uh…” I said. “What’s so bad about the secrecy?”

  “When you have to deploy, people who care about you want to at least know why you’re leaving.”

  “Ah… I get it. You were engaged a while back, weren’t you?”

  Erin shrugged.

  “You think that if you’d gotten a Victrix gig—something where you spent a year following a royal family of Skrull around—things would have been better?”

  Erin frowned and thought about that. “I don’t know… maybe it’s the legion life. I can’t have a solid home this way. I can’t have a family.”

  “Oh… that. It is hard. My daughter is older than I am now, isn’t that a kick? Physically, she’s over thirty. It’s kind of weird when I scold her for something.”

  She pointed a finger at me. “Yes. That kind of thing… right there. Our lives aren’t natural. It’s bugging me.”

  “Okay. I get it. That’s totally normal. You want to leave the legions. To become a civvie. That’s okay, recruits do it all the time.”

  “No, I was talking Victrix…”

  I laughed at her. “Come on, girl! You don’t really mean that! You’re tired of the legions. You can’t take the life anymore. That’s no sin—but switching to Victrix isn’t the answer. You’ll have to become a hog—or leave the service entirely.”

  She looked stunned. “But it’s all I know…”

  I stood up, and she did the same. I gave her a light hug. “You’ve got some tough decisions to make after this deployment is over. But you don’t have to make them today. Forget about all that. Be my reliable officer one more time. If you still want to quit when we get back to Earth, I’ll sign off that you served with distinction.”

  She gave me a fluttering smile. “Okay…”

  Walking out of her quarters, I saw Carlos. He must have spotted me going in. He made an obscene gesture with his fingers, and he raised his eyebrows questioningly. I flipped him off in return. Then I contacted Moller and had her assign him some extra cleaning duties.

  -19-

  About four hours after Winslade had issued the confinement to quarters order, I found myself wandering the vaunted halls of Gold Deck. I’d been ordered to stay with my unit in our module—but I got bored.

  Every time someone dared to ask my business, I gave them some horse-hockey about being the eyes and ears of the Mogwa. This earned me plenty of frowns and sneers—but people sure got the hell out of my way real fast.

  Finally, someone who really knew me spotted me hanging around the back of a briefing room. It was Gary, the adjunct who had shanghaied himself into going on this mission at my suggestion.

  “McGill…? What are you doing on Gold Deck?”

  I smiled at him. “I might ask you the same question. I thought you were planning to fly that desk back at Central all the way to an early retirement check.”

  “Imperator Turov listened when I told her she needed me on this mission. I was surprised she did, actually… anyway, you still haven’t answered my question, sir.”

  I pointed into the briefing room. I wasn’t an invited guest, so I was just haunting the doorway. The meeting wasn’t marked confidential, or anything, so I figured it was open information.

  “I’m learning a lot,” I said, lowering my voice. “Did you know the Mogwa gave us some tech before we left Earth? Something to help us make this mission work?”

  Gary looked kind of shifty. “Like what?”

  “Like a new kind of gateway posts. These new models work continuously. They allow a constant flow of materials from one end to the other.”

  “So what?”

  “Imagine there’s our fuel tank at one end, and a pipeline going back through space and time that connects our fuel tank to a bigger one back on Earth.”

  Gary gaped a little. The diagram on the screen behind the pretty centurion who was giving the briefing depicted exactly what I was describing. The truth was I’d stopped by and peeked in because I saw a nice face doing the presentation, but I’d stuck around for the briefing itself.

  “That’s awesome new tech…” Gary gasped. “We could fuel our whole fleet with that. We could go anywhere!”

  I nodded. “Exactly right. It still takes a long time to fly a long distance, but we no longer have to worry about running out of gas or starving.”

  “Impressive… so, who are you here to see, exactly?”

  I glanced at him in annoyance. I’d dodged that questions twice, and I’d done so artfully. But Gary, bless his little heart, he just wasn’t about to let go. He still wanted to know why I was here, and what I was up to.

  A dozen quick lies sprang up into my mind. The trouble was, I needed one that he’d believe. At last, I pointed a finger into the room again.

  I pointed at Galina Turov. She was in the front row, listening intently to the briefing.

  “She called me up here for a date,” I said flatly.

  A cloud went over Gary’s features, but he didn’t call me a liar. He didn’t get mad and stalk away, either. He just nodded.

  “Right. Of course, I should have known.”

  After that slam, he walked away in defeat.

  “Hey, Gary,” I called after him. “If we get into some serious action down on the target planet, you want me to request your presence at the front lines?”

  That stopped him. His eyes were wide with shock. “Why would you do that?”

  “Just to help out an old friend. What’s the point of you having come all the way out here if you don’t at least get your feet wet? Have you ever shot anyone with that gun on your hip?”

  “Um… once. Back in basic, of course. We were all shooting, and the guy went down. Everyone in the squad said it was their kill, but I’m pretty sure it was mine.”

  I smiled at him like I was impressed. “That’s good enough for me. I’ll request you personally if any of my officers are taken out.”

  He wandered off, looking bemused and a little bit worried. I knew he wouldn’t sleep tonight, and I felt I’d done my good deed for the day.

  When the meeting broke up at last, I waited until everyone filed out. The pretty centurion who’d done the talking came out first, and it took some serious willpower on my part not to follow her down the passageway. Fortunately, I managed to exert an unusual degree of self-control and waited for Galina herself.

  Galina wasn’t a disappointment when she finally put away her notes and came walking out the door. She looked at me quizzically. “McGill? Are you waiting for someone?”

  “Bingo!” I pointed at her and gave her my best smile.

  She frowned in return. She glanced up and down the passageway—could she have been looking for someone? It was my impression that she was.

  “You want to go to dinner?” I asked. “I’m famished.”

  “You’re always hungry. But… all right.”