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sergeant’s finger reaches trigger pressure he locks his eyes on mine, which takes guts, because you need courage to look someone in the eyes as you take his life. That’s why killing is a young man’s job and it’s old men who send them out there.
    I nod, to signify I’m ready.
    And he smiles.
    It’s a clean shot, a hit to the chest. I barely have time to register this fact before five other pulse rifles fire in unison and darkness takes me.
     

     
    YOU DON’T WAKE… This is my first thought. You don’t wake after someone shoots you with a pulse rifle. Largely because there isn’t enough of you left to wake up again.
    My second thought is, God, that hurt.
    Even the memory of having my arm ripped off by a dying ferox has paled before an ache that locks tight my chest and forces my lungs to fight for each breath. Every nerve in my body feels on fire.
    “Lowest setting,” someone says.
    When my eyes finally allow themselves to focus, I realize the voice belongs to the colonel, who is sitting on the end of my bed, cleaning a handgun that seems to be constructed mainly of glass.
    Since I was shot in the middle of the desert, and beds out there are few and far between, I decide I must be somewhere else.
    Lowest setting?
    “Bullshit,” I say.
    Beyond the edge of my vision, someone laughs.
    “We adjusted the power packs,” says the colonel. “A small modification, but my own.”
    “Why?” I demand.
    Again that laughter. “You were right,” says the voice. If I didn’t know better I’d say the colonel is relieved.
    “You can go,” the voice adds, and the colonel almost scurries from the room. I wait and the voice waits and after a while it sighs.
    “A legionnaire?”
    I nod, and then, in case that was not enough, add, “Sir.”
    My reasoning is that anyone who can send a Death’s Head colonel from a room deserves all the respect he can get. I have no idea quite how right I am until the voice became a man at the edge of my vision, in simple black and silver. And the man turns out to be General Indigo Jaxx.
    I know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. The general has single-handedly prevented an assassination attack on our dear leader, throwing himself in front of a crazed woman whose son was killed in the eastern spiral.
    “You were a sergeant?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Why were you broken?”
    “I hit an officer.”
    He looks at me, considering. “I didn’t hear that,” he says. “Let’s try again. Why were you broken?”
    “Insubordination.”
    “What kind?”
    I blink…Most officers aren’t even aware there is more than one kind. “I refused an order,” I tell him. “Then punched out my lieutenant before he could issue his order to anyone else.”
    General Jaxx sighs. “And what was this order?”
    “Shoot the lieutenant, shoot everybody else, and then shoot myself.”
    “That never happened,” says the general.
    “No, sir.”
    “Why,” asks General Jaxx, “would he have issued such an order? Had he, which he did not.”
    “He was drunk, sir. And bored.”
    “This was at Fort Libidad?”
    “Yes, sir. The boredom killed him eventually.”
    “And then the ferox killed everybody else.”
    I nod.
    “Except you,” he says, holding my gaze.
    We’ve come to the crux of the problem. We both understand that, and I’m the one who is surprised, because it has never occurred to me that I’m important enough to be a problem, at least not to anybody over the rank of lieutenant.
    “Colonel Nuevo wants to kill you,” says the general. “This would be the commonsense answer. Luckily for you, Major Silva sometimes has his own opinion on things.”
    Walking to the window, General Jaxx looks out at a landscape denied to me. I have no way of knowing if I am in Karbonne or even on the same planet. The temperature in this room is controlled, and walls of black glass keep me from whatever is outside. Also, I’m lashed to the bed with a woven band across my chest and another above my knees, but