I thought about the Mogwa prison cells far below us, where I’d found old Sateekas. Those cells were all empty—but I didn’t figure it was worth telling Winslade about that.

  “Okay. So what do we do now?”

  Winslade licked his lips, and I squinched up my eyes.

  “I’m concerned about Sateekas. He’s too weak. He did a good speech, and he got everyone on the same page, mind you, but he’s about to fall over.”

  I glanced in the direction Winslade was looking, and I had to admit the weaselly primus had a point. Sateekas was definitely looking poorly.

  Getting a sudden bad vibe, I turned back to Winslade. “Now look, I’m not going to follow along with any further coups and purges. We’ve had enough of that.”

  “Don’t worry your simian skull, McGill. That’s not what I had in mind. I need Sateekas—um, we do, that is. We need a figurehead. I’m just concerned about his status. A figurehead isn’t much good if he’s wheezing and falling out of his chair.”

  “Uh… oh.” Taking several quick strides, I moved to Sateekas’ side. With a grimace of disgust, I pushed his floppy body back onto his seat again. He was passing out—or close to it.

  As I moved to walk away, Sateekas suddenly grabbed at my arm. I bent down and listened to his weak voice.

  “McGill. You must aid me. I must be recycled. I must be renewed—but no one can know of it.”

  Thinking that over, I leaned over the old buzzard. “Don’t worry, sir. I think I can arrange things.”

  Leaving him crouched on a command chair, I returned to Winslade. “We need a working revival machine.”

  “What? There are only a few still operating on this miserable planet. Did you know the anti-Mogwa poison seems to attack the revival machines that are attuned to their biology? I guess it makes sense…”

  “That’s diabolical! I guess we’ll have to use one of our units.”

  Winslade eyed me critically. “What did you have in mind, Centurion?”

  “Give me your blessing, sir. I need the one that’s used for nonhumans.”

  “Hmmm. There are only two of those in service in this city. One for each of the near-human legions. Right now, I’m sure they’re queued up for weeks.”

  “I’m sure they are, but you just told me that you’re in nominal command, and that we need Sateekas as a figurehead. He’s not much of a figurehead now, he’s more like a sad-sack.”

  Winslade eyed the sagging wreck that was Sateekas. Anyone could tell he wasn’t going to make it. He’d survived the bio agent through sheer determination and grit—but that could only take a fella so far.

  “All right, all right,” Winslade told me. “There will be breakage over this, McGill. Countless squid noncoms and adjuncts are going to be very annoyed.”

  I snorted.

  “Go to the lifter parked outside,” Winslade told me at last. “Get him aboard, and I’ll aid you with overriding orders.”

  A few minutes later I was wheeling Sateekas out of the command chamber on an office chair. That elicited a lot of confused stares.

  Trying to stare straight ahead and move with purpose, I wheeled the dying buzzard out of the place. To my irritation, the Mogwa office chair had one squeaky wheel, just like every human chair seemed to. Whenever anyone asked me what the hell I was doing, I told them the same damned thing, whether they were, human or alien. “He has to use the facilities. Step aside and give the Grand Admiral some room.”

  That seemed to do the trick. Mogwa upper class types sometimes wore diapers and crapped in their clothes—but that wasn’t as common of a practice out here in the Mid-Zone.

  When I finally got Sateekas out of the command center, I dropped all pretenses. I picked up his squeaky chair in my arms and trotted off with him.

  If he’d been protesting, I’m sure some Mogwa marine would have stopped me. But Sateekas was with it enough to wave them off and wheeze something like, “make way!” now and again.

  Taking the Mogwa to a skimmer, we were whisked into the skies by a pilot with an upraised eyebrow. She kept glancing at us, and she finally had to ask.

  “Um… Centurion? Is that Mogwa officer okay?”

  “Nope. He’s dying. But we’re going to fix that. Get me to lifter NC-7, pronto.”

  She hit the gas, and we went into a spiral, then a dive. Some anti-air flack was flying around even in the center of the city.

  That was a bad sign. I took a moment to leave Sateekas and look out the skimmer’s windows.

  The city was engulfed in smoke, fire and ruin. The dome was down—that was a shocker. When had they lost the power plants that kept their force field up? The lights were still on, but that took a fraction of the power the dome required.

  Maybe they’d decided the resources weren’t worth the effort, seeing as the city was crawling with bears anyway. I hadn’t even been aware of these setbacks, but they made sense. The bears were pressing the attack on all fronts, and as they captured critical services the city shut down.

  Turning away from the scenes outside, I turned back to Sateekas. He was reaching for me. He had a pleading look in his eyes. His nasty mouth worked, but I couldn’t hear anything intelligible coming out of it.

  Sliding over the seats, I came close to him. “Hey now, don’t you go dying on me, Grand Admiral.” I always used that outdated honorific with him, and I still believed to this day it was part of the reason he was sweet on me.

  “McGill…” he wheezed out.

  Again, he reached out with a trembly arm. I didn’t know what he was trying to do. So I took that leathery foot-hand thing of his into my gloves, and I tried not to look disgusted.

  “What’s the trouble, you old… oh.”

  Sateekas wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at our joined hands. He struggled weakly to lift his hand from mine, so I let him do it.

  Watching in befuddlement, I saw him make a tremendous effort to reach farther. To take that worn-parchment looking hand and reach…

  At last, I saw a flicker on my tapper. All at once, I realized what he’d done, and what I’d forgotten to do. He’d touched his tapper to mine, transmitting his engrams and body scans into the bio-computer on my wrist.

  “Ah-ha!” I said, laughing. “I get it now. You’re just trying to make a backup of your data. No need to worry, sir. Once we get to the Blue Deck on that lifter I see ahead of us, the bio people will take care of all that. If you could just… uh…”

  Sateekas didn’t look so good. After struggling mightily to touch tappers, it was as if all the starch had gone out of his thin bones.

  As I watched, he went limp and slid off the skimmer’s seat. He flopped on the floor. I checked his vitals and made a fuss—but I already knew the truth. He was stone dead.

  -48-

  We recycled the old buzzard with Winslade’s blessing from headquarters. The bio people were rude about it, of course. Nonhuman revivals were more complicated than the ones we legionnaires required—and needless to say, they took longer. On top of that, the grumpy bios didn’t like dumping a gestation they’d been working on for over an hour.

  “Do you know this latest grow is a Cephalopod officer?” one of the lady-bio types asked me. She had her arms crossed and a nasty scowl on her mug. “We just dumped it. Just like that. Crap like this sets us back nearly ninety minutes. People think that a revival for a large alien is the same as for a human, but—”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and I touched my cap to her as I walked out. She flipped me off in return, but I didn’t care. I’d decided I was late for the commissary.

  After getting some good grub and a beer for each hand, I returned to the revival chamber. Sateekas was out of the oven and struggling to sit up. He was almost as floppy as the last time I’d seen him, but his color was better. His carapace had a shiny black sheen to it, and his eye-groups were nowhere near as loose and unfocussed.

  “Well, looky-here!” I declared from the doorway. “The rightful planetary overlord of City World is doing fine. You losers should all bow down and kiss his slimy butt.”

  The revival team avoided my eye. The bio-lady in charge of the place was human, but the others were not. They were saurian types—imported labor with arms big enough to lift half-ton carcasses off the deck.

  One of them stood in the back, but he still didn’t look like the rest… I squinted… was that a saurian with a distinctive blue shade of scales on him? Yes, yes, I think it was.

  I grinned. I hadn’t laid eyes on old Raash for a long while. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but at least when he’d been called as a witness for the prosecution in a particular witch-trial out on Ice World, he hadn’t lied on me. That made me feel a bit more respectful.

  “Raash?” I said, stepping forward and ignoring the scowls of the others. “Is that you? What a surprise! Of all the flea-bitten horny toads I might have expected to meet out here—”

  “You are mistaken, human,” Raash said. “My name is Roark. I know nothing of this Raash creature you speak of.”

  “Uh…” I said, eyeing him. Suddenly, I caught on. Raash had reportedly gone back to Steel World and more or less defected. But now, he was back on the job again.

  How had that worked out? I could easily imagine. He needed a new identity, since his genetics were all messed up. Way back during the Glass World campaign the Dust Worlder’s had revived him from a single burnt claw.

  Naturally, the revival had been a Galactic Crime due to the fact we hadn’t used a sanctioned and licensed revival machine from Edge World. What’s more, it had taken six weeks and hadn’t gone all that well in the end.

  After shocking Raash’s new makeshift, ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ of a corpse back to life, he’d come out… different. He had blue scales, for instance, which was unique for all his kind. Sort of like a human who was somehow born a bright magenta or a turquoise shade, he’d become a laughing stock among his own folk. He’d apparently decided to return to Earth’s service and to do so under an assumed name.

  “Roark, you say? Okay, then. My bad. I must have mistaken you for someone else, Roark.”

  Raash gazed at me suspiciously. His eyes were narrowed to slits of mistrust. But after a few seconds, during which I kept my mouth shut, he finally nodded.

  That was a dead giveaway right there. Normal lizards who hadn’t been living with humans for decades didn’t nod at anyone. It was a distinctly human gesture, one that old Raash had picked up at some point or another.

  Helping Sateekas off the birthing mats and onto a gurney, I followed as the bio people wheeled him out of the place. They dumped him in the recovery room, and I gathered his things and returned them to him.

  “Such a messy process,” Sateekas complained. “I hate dying and being revived.”

  “So do I, but it sure beats the alternative, doesn’t it?”

  He peered at me, not getting it for a moment, but then he finally let out one of those farting Mogwa-laughs. “Yes, yes. It does rank superior to permadeath. I have to thank you, McGill, for your efforts in bringing me back to life again.”

  “Not a problem, sir. This world needs you. That grand field marshal guy—he’s dead, you know. You’re in command now.”

  “Yes. Right. But surely the marshal must be in line to be revived, just as I have been?”

  “Negatory, sir. Your Mogwa revival machines have all caught the same disease that you guys have. Only our human-run machines seem to be operating.”

  “Hmm… most unfortunate. Billions might be permed here. Generations, spawned and then lost.” He sat up straighter and shook himself. “I must rise to this task. I must summon aid.”

  “Uh… what kind aid, sir?”

  “Take me to a deep-link device.”

  That left me scratching my head. I had no idea where one of those might be languishing. I didn’t even know if we had one here on City World.

  Using my tapper, I talked to every tech I knew. They were pretty sure that Legion Varus didn’t have such a device here on this planet. They’d all been left up on the warships, before they’d fled the system.

  As we discussed this difficulty, a figure appeared in the doorway of the recovery room. He was a blue-scaled reptile, and he filled the space of the doorframe quite completely.

  “Raash?” I asked.

  Sateekas turned toward the saurian, and he immediately bristled. “Is this some kind of assassin?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think so. Hey, Raash. Come join us.”

  The saurian stood there, indecisive. At last, he approached and sat at the table with us. His seat creaked under him, as it had been designed to support half his weight.

  “I am curious, human,” Raash said. “I do not understand your actions in the aggregate. One time I meet you, and we growl and snarl like rival studs in mating season. On other occasions, I find you charitably reviving nonhuman debris, such as this being that sits with us.”

  Here, he indicated Sateekas. As old Sateekas wasn’t used to being referred to as a scrap of debris, he scowled and told me he had work to do back at headquarters. I couldn’t argue with that, so I wished him well and sent him on his way.

  All the while this interchange went on, Raash stared at me. If you’ve ever been stared at by a large, predatory reptilian, you’ll know it’s not a pleasant experience. Due to my long association with aliens of every stripe, I didn’t take offense or fuss about it overly much.

  At last, old Raash worked out his thoughts in that big slow brain of his and started talking again. “I can only think that you’ve changed,” he said. “That your prior bigotry and hatred of the nonhuman has abated somewhat.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I still hate most aliens. But I have a few friends in the mix. Sometimes, I’ve even called you a friend, Raash.”

  He pointed a claw at me. “There. You changed my reference back to the old one. I have forsaken that name due to technical difficulties.”

  “I understand, and your secret is safe with me. You don’t mind if I still call you Raash, though, do you?”

  The big lizard shrugged. That was another human gesture. Maybe Raash was right. Maybe we were both picking up customs from one another. “It is acceptable, as long as you don’t speak of the name around my superiors. I will pretend that the name Raash is a nickname we’ve concocted together.”

  I laughed at that. The idea of Raash and I having a nickname for each other—that was a hoot. “What’s your name going to be for me, then?”

  Raash appeared to give this some serious thought. “I will call you primate-excrement. Is this acceptable?”

  “Uh…” I said, not liking the idea overly much, but deciding it would suffice as long as it didn’t catch on. At last, I nodded. “All right. You can call me ape-shit if you want to. After all, it isn’t too far from the mark.”

  Raash stood up after this, and he flipped his tail high. That was a sort of good-bye gesture. “Now, if we are done with this reacquaintance, I must return to my duties.”

  “Okay… but hey, Raash? You wouldn’t happen know about any deep-link devices I could use here on City World, would you?”

  The lizard’s demeanor suddenly changed. When I say changed, I mean it did a one-eighty.

  He snarled and threw the chair he’d been crouching on across the room. Then he flipped the table over as well.

  Without even thinking about it, I had my combat knife out, and I was on my feet. Raash threw a couple of swipes my way, his big claws whistling through the air.

  Now, if I’d been in a less charitable mood, I might have taken one or the other of those scaly hands off at the wrist. As it was, I had half a mind to do it.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you now?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you’re still a bad grow? With murderous tendencies baked-in?”

  Raash wasn’t listening. He was talking to himself instead. “Again, I’ve been duped by the master of lies. Why can I not learn that a human is never a friend? That nothing with ancestors that squatted in trees can ever be trusted?”

  Despite my new moniker, I figured it was Raash who’d suddenly gone ape-shit on me.

  All around us, the room emptied out right-quick. No one seemed to want anything to do with this giant crazy lizard, or the knife-wielding Varus man who’d squared off with him. In a few minutes the MPs would arrive, but that would probably happen too late. By that time, one or the other of us would be dead—possibly both.

  Banging on that dormant organ that slept most of the time between my big ears, I tried to understand what had set the saurian off.

  “Hey, are you going nuts because I mentioned a deep-link machine?”

  “Do not even attempt further obfuscation. Such efforts will not be successful. You knew very well what you were saying.”

  “Uh…” I said, dancing back and ducking two more swiping sets of claws.

  I was clueless and then some. To give myself more time, I took a poke at him with my knife. I scored a jab on his left shoulder. Blood welled up, but he took no notice of this. Saurians weren’t the sensitive type.

  Finally, I thought of something. “You do know where a deep-link machine is, don’t you? That’s why you’re going four-star crazy.”

  “Further discussion is useless, human. I shall take you with me into the embrace of the final sleep. We shall endure everlasting desolation as a pair, and I will at least be rid of your chattering nonsense.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” I said, jabbing now and then to force him to take a step back. “Listen, I need a deep-link to use myself—secretly.”

  Raash stood swaying, but at least he stopped lunging at me. “That is the nature of your proposal? You wish to force negotiation upon me?”

  “Not exactly. I want you to help both of us. This planet is doomed. The bears are going to overrun the place.”

  Raash shrugged, as if he was unconcerned. “As a noncombatant, I will doubtlessly be allowed to return to Earth with the fleet.”

  “But the fleet isn’t here. And the bears aren’t known for their charity.”

  He still seemed unconcerned, and this made me a mite suspicious. If he had a deep-link, and he wanted to keep that a secret… what might he be doing with it? Spying? For who? The bears, maybe?