Honestly, I thought I’d won at that point. But I’d underestimated this thing’s unnatural vitality. It came at me still, kind of dragging its dangling head. The claws were flexing, and I knew they were still deadly.

  “Frigging thing!” I called out to no one, blasting air inside my helmet and steaming up my faceplate. I decided to make the only play I had left.

  I’m not proud of it—but I ran. I sprang up into the air, giving the mightiest leap that I could on injured legs. It turned out that was enough to take me about twenty meters up and away.

  The thing spun around in jerks. The sensory organs were in that lolling head, and it appeared to be having trouble tracking where I’d gone.

  After I came down, I sprang again—and again. Each time, I landed farther from the monster, and though it continued to trot toward me whenever I landed, it was clearly weakening.

  Blood loss, confusion, freezing exposure—the creature was in a bad way. Due to the low pressure, the liquid serving it for blood was boiling in its veins now, venting as steam that instantly froze. The monster’s soft internals were exposed to the harshest environment ever conceived: open space.

  Finally, it sagged down, flopping and kicking. I came close and severed the whole head from the body.

  Breathing hard, I let it die, then I thought about what to do next. In the end, I scooped up some samples of the dusty ash, videoed every inch of the creature, and sawed off one of those curved black claws. The tip was like black glass, but harder than steel. I thought the lab people might get a kick out of it.

  Then, at long last, I teleported home.

  -8-

  When I arrived home, it looked like I’d fallen out of the ceiling, but that was an illusion. The techies always targeted an empty region a couple meters above the landing zone. That way, if they missed by a fraction, the traveler wouldn’t be merged up with the floor.

  To be honest, I thought the crew on Gray Deck was surprised to see me reappear and drop to the deck. Maybe they’d written me off as another permed guinea pig.

  “McGill?” Graves asked, coming to stand over me. “You’re back early—are you all right, man?”

  With teeth-gritting effort, I forced my sore, injured body to stand. The most dangerous place to be in Central was at Graves’ feet, unable to get up. That was a sure-fire way to win a trip through a revival machine, no matter who you were.

  “Just fine, sir. Raring for more!”

  He looked me up and down once, with a critical eye. More than one soldier had tried to escape death by looking fit under his scrutiny.

  “What happened to your legs? Are those ice crystals…? No, that’s frozen blood. Your suit was breached?”

  “Uh…” I said, grinning and not even daring to look down. “It’s nothing, sir. I’ll be fine with a little rest-up.”

  He turned to a techie who was ghosting at his elbow. She looked at me the way girls looked at a prize pig at the fair—one that had just shit itself.

  “Have Blue Deck send a bio up here,” Graves ordered. “Who knows? Maybe he’s infectious.”

  The techie nodded and turned her back to whisper into her tapper.

  “Aw, come on, Primus,” I complained. “Don’t you even want to hear my report?”

  “I’ve got your vids. I’ve already downloaded them off your tapper. What I’m looking for now is a fit man to continue this exploratory…”

  He trailed off and frowned. I’d pulled out the obsidian claw which I’d taken off the monster. Graves eyed it. “What the hell is that?”

  “A little souvenir I brought you, sir. A trophy, if you will.”

  “You found something alive out there? Our reports show there isn’t even an active star within a lightyear.”

  “You don’t say? Well, that would explain why it was so damned dark out there. Anyway, I took this off an ornery inhabitant of that dead world.”

  Graves took the claw and examined it. “Artificial exterior… some kind of crystalline material. Looks brittle.”

  “It’s not, sir. It’s as sharp as a razor and as hard as diamond.”

  Graves nodded, rolling it around in his hand. Then he noticed the meaty part of it, where it’d been attached to the rest of the monster.

  “There’s no bone inside here—just sinew and muscle. This reminds me of a crab, or something with a hard shell instead of bones.”

  “That’s exactly right, sir. But this crab ran around on four legs like a big dog. I had to put it down before it put me down. It was a killer, sir.”

  He looked up at me again. “How’d you beat it?”

  I gave him a brief description, but before I could finish, I felt blood trickling down my legs. The blood had been frozen before, but now it had thawed out and began to flow. What’s more, some of my legs and underparts had begun to burn something awful.

  Toughing it out, I grinned. “I found something else out there too, Primus. My contact.

  She was stone dead by the time I arrived, but at least I nailed her killer.” I indicated the claw in his hand.

  “She? Why am I not surprised your ‘contact’ is female?”

  “Uh… I wouldn’t know about that,” I lied.

  In the meantime, the techie had returned. She had a pinched-faced bio with her. “Aw now, I’m feeling fine!” I protested as she approached.

  “Submit to examination, McGill,” Graves ordered.

  With a sigh, I did so. The bio knelt and flashed a light into my ripped-up suit. She began to paw at my thighs, and she sliced away more of the tough fabric with a laser-cutter.

  “Hey, maybe we should get a room?” I suggested.

  She flashed me a look of disdain. She had her hair wound up in a tight bun—that wasn’t usually a good sign.

  “He’s suffering from exposure, frostbite, and lacerations,” she told Graves. “I have to take him back to Blue Deck for amputation surgery.”

  “Uh…” I said becoming concerned.

  “McGill,” Graves said thoughtfully, “you said something about nailing the creature in question. But you didn’t take your rifle.”

  “Oh, that…” I said. “I always have little extra protection handy.”

  Graves nodded, so I turned back to the bio. She was still on her knees and ripping at my thighs again. “I’m having a floater-chair brought down. We’ll cart you up to Blue Deck and do some work. You’ll live.”

  “Yeah… but what did you say about amputation? I could do without a toe or two, but I can’t serve without a leg.”

  “I’m talking about your testicles. You’re going to lose one—maybe both.”

  “Whoa!” I said, putting a hand between the overzealous bio and my privates. “I don’t know you that well yet, Specialist!”

  She flashed me another of her disdainful looks. I got the feeling she did that to her patients all the time.

  Suddenly, I got an idea. With me, a sudden idea often turned into sudden action. Call it a character flaw or a strength, it’s just how I operated.

  “Hmm,” I said, picking up the laser cutter she’d put down while she examined me. I lifted it and scratched my neck with the tip. “How does this thing work, exactly—?”

  “Centurion! Give me that instrument!”

  She reached for it, but while the tip was prodding my right carotid, it went off in my hand. I will swear to the end of my lives, until I meet St. Peter at the pearly gates, that it was an accident.

  The cutter took about a centimeter chunk of flesh out of my neck. Just a scratch, really, but unfortunately it had ripped open my most important artery. The one that fed my fool brain.

  Everyone looked up in shock and alarm. The bio girl fell back on her ass, throwing her arms and her eyes wide. The techie girl stepped behind Graves, as if she thought I was going to shoot her next.

  Everyone freaked out, that was, except for old Graves. He twisted up his mouth and slowly shook his head.

  For my own part, I slowly sat down, then I lay down on my back on the deck. A warm flood of blood soon around my head.

  “I’m feeling poorly,” I managed to say.

  Graves stepped up to stand over me. His boots were wet with the blood circling my fallen form. “That was a clear violation, McGill. This revive is coming out of your frigging paycheck.”

  “I can’t live with one nut, sir,” I told him in a fading voice. “I need them both.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, watching me die without a hint of emotion, other than being annoyed. “If we’d gelded you that first day back at Mustering Hall, we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble.”

  Then he laughed. Graves always laughed at his own jokes—probably because no one else ever did.

  His laughter echoed through my mind. My body and senses began to shut down. It was the last thing I heard as I faded away and died at his feet.

  -9-

  Coming alive again was like waking up from a bad dream. I’d never enjoyed the process of birth or rebirth. I guess no one really did.

  “Huge… male… died on Gray Deck?” a female bio said in a questioning tone. “What have we got here?”

  “A suicide,” a male orderly replied, “unusual for an officer.”

  “Ah, see here? He’s from Legion Varus. Those thugs are liable to do anything. Maybe he was murdered, and they marked it down as a suicide to cover.”

  I blinked and groaned. The groan turned into a hacking cough.

  “What’s his score?” she asked.

  “He’s a nine… maybe even a nine-five. An excellent grow.”

  “See…?” I mumbled to no one. “It was all worth it.”

  “He’s trying to talk,” the orderly said. “That’s early. A sure sign of a good grow.”

  “All right, all right. Get him out of here.”

  The bio people flashed lights in every hole they could find and pronounced me fit for duty. I staggered out and made my way back to Gray Deck.

  On the way down in the elevator my tapper beeped. It was my tribune, Galina Turov.

  “Hello sir?” I said, opening the channel.

  “McGill? What’s this I hear about you playing with guns on Gray Deck? You could have shot one of my techs—or worse, damaged critical equipment.”

  “It was a laser cutter, sir. An unfortunate accident occurred. It was just an accident, and no one else was in danger.”

  “Enough excuses. There are details to this report and the vids we downloaded that require explanation. Get up here right now.”

  She gave me the elevator codes, and I traveled to her floor without even having a meal or a shower. It was the kind of thing normal legion people weren’t used to, but for a Varus man it was par for the course.

  When I arrived at her office door, I wasn’t even able to touch it or talk to Gary, her secretary. Her interior door was snatched open and left that way.

  “Uh…” I said, walking into the outer office. “I guess I’m going in right away?”

  Gary looked annoyed. He waved his hand toward the entrance. I marched past him and a crowd of primus-level officers who were obviously waiting to be seen. Galina probably hadn’t shown her nose, as she didn’t want to face them and make any excuses.

  “McGill just marches in there…” one of them muttered, with her arms crossed angrily.

  “What was that, Primus?” I asked, stopping at the door. “I didn’t quite catch, that, sorry, sir?”

  She glared at me and waved her hand at me like she was shaking out a match that had burned her fingers.

  Shrugging, I smiled and ambled into the inner office sanctuary.

  Galina was sitting behind her desk today. She didn’t look at me as I approached.

  Instead, she seemed to be staring at a series of open windows displayed on her glowing desk.

  “What seems to be the trouble, Tribune?” I began, but she waved for silence. I immediately looked for a seat to sag into, but she stopped me.

  “Stand at attention, Centurion.”

  Surprised, I did as she demanded. Silently, the door shut itself behind me. I heard a lock snick into place. She had all that kind of stuff automated, and mind you, sometimes it was a little creepy.

  Galina still didn’t look up. She examined the vids—three of them at once—that were playing on her desktop. I heard my puffing breath and the hiss of canned air from the muffled sound. Suddenly, I knew what she was reviewing.

  “That’s the recording from my body-cams, isn’t it? Pretty cool monster, right? Did you see how I—?”

  “Shut up,” she said, still not looking at me.

  I stood there like a recruit on a parade ground for the next solid eight minutes. Maybe that was her intention—to make me feel like a Boy Scout. Instead, I started daydreaming about that bio girl who’d made the call to geld me earlier.

  Something about her and her medical examination had made my mind begin to conjure scenarios of a more pleasant nature. She’d looked all sour when I’d cracked jokes, but that moment when she’d fallen back on her butt in front me, that moment of real concern—she’d looked kind of pretty. Sometimes, a sour woman can show you who she really is if you surprise her, and it could be a good thing.

  “McGill!” Galina barked at me. “Are you daydreaming?”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry sir. I just popped out of the oven down on Blue Deck, you know. I probably could use a few minutes to—”

  “Request denied. Approach.”

  “Uh…” I said, but I walked up to her desk.

  She eyed me like an angry cat. “You found a body on that burnt out husk, didn’t you?”

  “Oh… yes sir, that I did.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Uh… I don’t rightly know, Tribune.”

  She stared at me for maybe three long seconds. During that time, I tried to look as baffled and ignorant as possible.

  “You’re lying,” she pronounced. “She’s the one you went out there to meet. She’s the contact who gave you bullshit information, isn’t she?”

  “I wouldn’t call it bullshit, sir. After all, the wreck was there.”

  “But it was unrecognizable and useless. Even if it was a burnt-out ship, it was in terrible condition. I’m beginning to think you arranged this whole thing as a way to meet her in private.”

  “Uh…” I said, not quite sure where she was going with this particular delusion. “How’s that, sir? She was dead.”

  “Yes, apparently. But that was doubtlessly a miscalculation on her part. She ran into that last guardian creature and paid for it with her life. It’s time to confess, McGill—confess everything.”

  Thinking that over, I realized that a confession was the perfect way to clear the air.

  My mind was coming into focus, and I soon had the tail of what I considered a good idea. “I admit, sir,” I began, “that the woman in question was the one who gave me the coordinates to that spot. But she’s not like a friend or anything. She was more of an acquaintance.”

  “I don’t believe you—but go on anyway.”

  “Just so, sir. She came to me and promised alien tech. I reported that to Central, and I was sent out there to see what’s what. That’s the long and the short of it, sir.”

  Another staring pause ensued. She sniffed in a sudden breath at the end. “The truth is painfully obvious, McGill. You’ve been screwing her, whoever she is. She arranged this rendezvous in space—but something went wrong. Now, she’s dead and—”

  “Hold on, sir, I—”

  “No, you hold on! Let me guess what you’re going to say next. That you’re as innocent as the day is long? That you have no interest in attractive young women, as you’ve had your balls frozen off recently—oh wait, you’ve got them back now, don’t you?”

  “Jeez, Galina,” I said. “I had no idea you could get so jealous about a dead girl I barely know.”

  She approached then, moving from behind her desk at last. She walked close, swaying those nice hips, and she stood quite close—within grabbing distance—and peered up at me.

  “The trouble is that I do know you, McGill,” she said. “You would do anything to chase a new piece of tail. It’s disgusting.”

  I reached for her, but she skipped back, avoiding my clumsy embrace.

  “No, no, I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Maybe we should have a drink or something.”

  “Forget it. You’re getting nothing in this office. Nothing, do you understand?”

  “Yeah…”

  I hung my head as if ashamed. In reality, I was kind of thinking about that bio again.

  She’d wanted to cut off my balls, sure, but she hadn’t succeeded, and—

  “There is one way you can redeem yourself.”

  My head came back up. “How’s that?”

  “You can tell me, right here, right now, who that bitch really is.”

  I thought that over. They had Abigail’s body scans. They even had a trace of blood, maybe, from the claw I’d given to Graves. It wasn’t going to take six kinds of a genius to run genetic tests and realize who Abigail was. After all, her twin brothers were the most wanted men in the universe. Hell, we’d fought an out and out war with Claver’s clones just a year back.

  I shrugged, and I smiled. “Promise you’ll have a drink with me?”

  “I’ll try—if I’m not too pissed off by the truth.”

  She crossed her arms defensively over her breasts, and I nodded.

  “All right then… she’s a Lady-Claver. Abigail Claver, that’s her name.”

  Galina’s jaw dropped. It almost hit the floor. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Nope,” I said, and I proceeded to explain. Soon, she understood the situation.

  My next instinct was to ask her to revive Abigail—but I didn’t. That kind of favor toward this strange woman, one that she’d been hating on jealously just moments ago, wouldn’t fly. I’d have to wait, and Abigail would have to rest uneasily in her grave.

  After absorbing the situation, Galina nodded her head. “It all makes sense. Why didn’t you admit this earlier? I’ve been so full of suspicion—everyone has. And then, when I realized you’d met a young woman out there on a dead alien ship—well, my thoughts got away from me.”