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someone far more interesting than a
simple Tams citizen. They would investigate until they discovered my identity,
not only my military rank but also the civilian title I carried. Unless I
waited until the odds were better, I would have no chance of escaping.
    So I fought like a frightened civilian instead of a
Jagernaut. Tarque found it amusing. He took me to his estate in the hills above
the city, holding me prisoner for three weeks. It was late into a long Tams
night, midway between sunset and dawn, when I finally worked free of the
restraints he had used to bind my wrists to the bed.
    Then I strangled him.
    Rex was the one who found me that night, after I fled the
house. He had been searching for me, desperately trying to infiltrate the
estate. He caught me when I was running blindly across a field, my mind still
screaming from the aftershocks of the pain. He held me tight, so tight, as if
he feared I would vanish if his grip loosened even the slightest bit. His voice
shook as he told me, over and over again, I would be all right, I would
be all right, I would be all right.
    But I wasn’t all right. Tarque had been the antithesis of an
empath, a human being with a mental cavity where his capacity for compassion
should have been. Sadist and empath, parasite and host: his mind was the
negative of mine. When he concentrated on me, I fell into his emptiness,
filling it for him, connecting us in a bond he craved even more than orgasm. He
spoke in soft, loving murmurs while I screamed and screamed and screamed ...
    We left Tams that night. I spent only a few days in the
hospital; Tarnth hadn’t wanted his provider scarred, so my physical wounds were
minor. But the doctors told me to see a heartbender. When I didn’t go, my CO
ordered it. So I went and told the heartbender what she wanted to hear; I am,
after all, an empath. In her report she said I would be all right, that all I
needed was time to heal.
    As for my true feelings about what happened—those were my
business. Not my CO’s, not the heartbender’s, not anyone’s.

3. Psibernaut
    T he hallway outside Rex’s room was carpeted with
a rug so thick that it muffled my footfalls like a wine-red cloud. The lustrous
red paneling on the walls was real wood. Next to Rex’s door, a pager showed a
palm-sized relief of a man with the tail of a fish. He was rising up in a spume
of water, huge glistening drops of water spraying about his head and a trident
held high in his hand. When I touched the pager, the door chimed softly, like
bells heard through the whisper of sea waves lapping on a shore.
    Rex’s voice came over a hidden speaker. “Come.”
    I laid my palm against the door and it swung open, revealing
a room paneled in the same sinfully luxuriant wood as the hallway. A carpet
covered the floor like burgundy velvet. The only light came from a lamp with a
rose-hued glass shade. Rex sat in the middle of the bed, cross-legged on its
wine-red cover, his head bent over his work. He was cleaning his Jumbler.
Sections of the gun lay all around him on the bed, the black metal gleaming in
the dusky light.
    “Planning to shoot someone?” I asked.
    He glanced up as I closed the door. “You’re the one who
insists we clean the pugging things so often.”
    I sat on the bed next to him. “I set up a guest account on
the Inn’s system. We can upload our data on the Traders as soon as Taas and
Helda get back from dinner.”
    Rex nodded, still bent over his weapon. He was polishing the
ejector that fit into the accelerator dees inside the main body of the Jumbler.
    “I expected you to be out with that girl from the bar,” I
said.
    He finished the ejector and went to work on the hand grip. “She’s
young.”
    “I thought you liked your women that way.”
    He kept polishing. “I guess I’m just tired tonight.”
    I wondered at his mood. He seemed so subdued. Could it have
been what happened in the bar? But that made no sense; knowing Rex, seeing an
Aristo would have wound