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  Three days. I’d been in limbo for longer than I’d ever been before. I couldn’t get over it.

  Anne came close and stopped talking. I could feel her concern. She was one of those medical people who could compartmentalize her empathy and emotions but who could still feel them.

  I gave into a sudden impulse. I leaned awkwardly forward and kissed Anne. She blinked at me in surprise then she gave a little laugh.

  “That was inappropriate,” she said.

  “No, it wasn’t. I wanted to do it—I’ve been wanting to for several existences. I thought I should give this version of myself a shot since I don’t even know how long he has to breathe. In fact…you know what? I think the last version of me died a virgin. Isn’t that sad?”

  Anne looked troubled. She ran her hand over mine and then gave me a light slap on the cheek.

  “You’re good to go, Specialist. On your feet!”

  I stood up and pressed my body into clean clothing. My fingers were rubbery, and it took me a full minute to get dressed. I think I would have failed entirely if the clothes hadn’t been smart enough to help wrap them over my skin.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said as I stepped toward the door. “I mean the kiss.”

  Anne turned away from her devilish machine and walked up to me. She gave me an odd look. Her expression was thoughtful—but I believed I knew what it meant.

  “You want a date tonight?” she asked.

  I pointed toward the machine. “With you or with that thing?”

  She laughed tiredly. “You know what I mean.”

  “Okay then… When do you get off?”

  “When the shift ends or when this thing stops giving birth. I’ll text you.”

  I gave her an awkward, slimy hug and left the chamber. When I reached my bunk, all I wanted to do was crash into it. But that wasn’t meant to be.

  “There you are, McGill,” Leeson said as he followed me to my bunk. “Had a nice rest?”

  “About three days’ worth of nonexistence, sir. I recommend it highly if you’re feeling low.”

  Leeson’s lips twisted into a grimace. “Never mind about that. This platoon has been short both of our weaponeers for a long time, and we haven’t been deployed. Sargon still hasn’t been farted out of that machine yet. Turov is driving every commander in the legion nuts with the slow-downs.”

  “She excels at that, sir. Do you want me to pass your opinion on to the Imperator next time I meet her?”

  Leeson’s eyes widened. “Hell no! Has she contacted you?”

  “Not since the legion left Earth. But she had a private meeting with me the morning before we lifted off.”

  “About what?”

  “She wanted me to throw the vote concerning our legion’s independence. She asked me to come out online as a supporter and reverse myself.”

  “Ah, I remember your original post. Pretty funny. You were drunk when you wrote that, weren’t you?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  Leeson nodded and crossed his arms. “A man’s true feelings come out of a bottle, sometimes. Anyway, I’m glad you posted your little rant, and that you didn’t back down. Most of all, I’m glad the troops voted with you.”

  I sat up. “That’s just it, sir. I don’t think they really did—I mean, I probably had some effect, but I don’t think they were going to vote to join Hegemony anyway.”

  Leeson narrowed his eyes at me and grinned. “Yeah, maybe not. But then you sealed it when you connected the enlisted people up to file their votes with Central before we left orbit. Just before the deadline there was a flood of votes, you know. That took crazy balls. I’m glad it was you. I’d have been stripped of my rank by now.”

  I didn’t mention to him that I’d suffered plenty of abuse from Turov already over the vote. I’d even been murdered in my own house. A nice calm demotion would’ve been preferable.

  “Is there a special reason you’re paying me a visit right now, sir?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we’re moving out. I’ve been waiting for a weaponeer before deploying. Now that you’re back, we’re heading back into the streets at dawn.”

  “Dawn,” I said, checking my tapper. I had six hours to rest. My eyes closed and I saw strange images. I was so tired that my brain was playing dreams on the inside of my eyelids despite the fact Leeson was still talking to me. Dreaming or not, I was awake enough to respond to Leeson.

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re headed?” he asked.

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Damn, you’re one cool customer, McGill. I didn’t think you’d turn out this way when you first mustered in. To me, you looked like a giant screw-up. Oh, and thanks for covering for me with Graves about that debacle at the bank. I was worried that when I caught my revival I’d be put right back down again.”

  I opened one eye and looked at him blearily. I realized that was why he’d really come in here to talk to me the minute I’d come back from the revival machine. He wanted to thank me—and maybe to make sure I wasn’t going to screw him at this late date by talking about Old Silver and his bribes.

  The odd thing was I hadn’t tried to protect Leeson when I’d made my report. I guess I could have told Graves what I thought of Leeson’s decision to go along with Claver. But I was so pissed at Germanica’s silver-haired devil that I hadn’t even considered my immediate commander’s lack of good judgment. Funny how things worked out sometimes.

  I forced an upward twitch of my lips and closed both eyes again. “No big deal, sir. Could have happened to anyone.”

  “See you at dawn then,” Leeson said, and left.

  Lying on my bunk I thought about what had happened out there with Claver and the rest of my platoon. Was Claver involved with all this violence spreading across the city? I didn’t see how he could be at the bottom of it, but then, he was a wily old bastard.

  As I passed from wakefulness into a deep soulful sleep, I wondered if Claver was still alive out there somewhere. The odds were against it with enemy rebels killing every legionnaire they caught in the streets.

  Claver’s silver hair represented an amazing accomplishment in survival, but I’d realized by now it wasn’t a heroic achievement. It had been done through trickery and deceit.

  Yeah…he could be alive. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was likely.

  Old Silver was as impossible to kill as a slippery river-rat. I felt sure he’d survived out there somewhere, somehow.

  * * *

  I woke up late with about twenty-five minutes to shower, dress, and shove food into my mouth. I was still chewing when I rammed my helmet down over my head and jogged down to the rally point.

  “All right, line up!” Harris roared, marching along the line like we were a bunch of day-old recruits.

  I resented his attitude—nothing new for me—but I lined up with the rest of them. Harris paused in front of me and narrowed his eyes. “Glad to see you felt like joining us today, McGill.”

  “Wouldn’t miss this for the world, Vet.”

  Carlos was there—as were Kivi and even Natasha. It was old home week and as always I felt strange looking at faces I’d seen dead in the mud what seemed like only a few hours ago. That is not to mention the disconnected feeling that came along with knowing my own eyes had been as dead as rubber just last night.

  I did my best to shake it off and get into the mission. Whining about a death was amateur-hour in Legion Varus.

  When we’d all gathered, Centurion Graves appeared and stepped calmly forward to address the unit.

  “People, I’m not going to lie to you. Just about everyone here has died at least once over the last seventy-two hours. I’m here to thank you for your commitment to the cause and to inform you—regretfully—that your sacrifice is not yet done.”

  We tried to stay cool, but this wasn’t Graves’ usual sort of opener. I sensed more than saw people fidgeting and exchanging glances all along the ranks. Graves wasn’t sounding as overconfident as h
e often was—he was downright apologetic. I couldn’t recall a similar briefing.

  The screen behind him lit up from the floor to the ceiling. I was glad not to see Turov’s leering face up there. Instead, a diagram of the city appeared with varied colors for levels of conflict and numbers indicating districts. Our position was in the middle of district-14, a relatively calm region of the city that glowed a cool green. I was surprised by how many areas were yellow, orange, red—even purple, a color that indicated we’d lost the zone and given up on it.

  “As you can see here,” said Graves, gesturing with his hands as if he were grabbing leaves and plucking them from an invisible tree. “The lower decks around the Vents and the umbilical region have been lost to the enemy and are now shown in violet. The red zone contains enemy troops, but fighting still goes on there between government forces, legion troops and the rebels.”

  By my estimate, I’d say a third of the city was violet or red. I immediately suspected that the enemy controlled all of that, and that we were making incursions and patrols now and then to look like we cared.

  His hands shifted, spreading his fingers, and the view zoomed sickeningly. The see-through outline of Gelt Station itself whirled around like a top, and we came in from a different angle focusing on the orange zones.

  “The mid-decks are residential,” he said without any inflection. “We’re fighting in the streets there, block-by-block. The fighting is heavy at times, but quiet right now. Tonight’s mission involves residential-6, an affluent neighborhood directly below the financial district. Intel estimates this region is a key target for the enemy.”

  I had to suppress a snort of disbelief. I wondered what kind of genius adjunct had figured that one out. These Tau thought of nothing but money most of the time. I wasn’t at all surprised they were trying to take over the banks. Hell, that might be the whole point of the uprising in the first place.

  Graves made an erasing gesture, and the three dimensional image of the station vanished. He brought up camera feeds from the streets.

  My interest immediately rose. Here were the faces of the enemy. I could see them, and they looked grimly determined.

  There were more of them in the streets now. Throngs. They were suited up in dull maroon and shimmering silver. I again wondered at the significance of those colors.

  I figured they must be the working class proles from the planet’s surface. Only one in ten of them were armed with anything other than a makeshift weapon. Of those officially armed, a few carried lightning-rod devices. Others carried—my eyes widened in shock.

  “Excuse me? Sir?” I called.

  Graves looked at me for a moment before waving for me to speak.

  “Sir, are they carrying legion regulation weapons?”

  “Yes, yes, very observant,” Graves said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. “They have snap-rifles for the most part. They took down two full cohorts of our light troops last night and distributed the weapons. Notice also that most of them are unarmed. Entire squads follow one leader with a real weapon. When he goes down, they pick it up and keep fighting.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Snap-rifles weren’t much—but they were better than regular gunpowder-based ballistic weaponry. They accelerated tiny needles of mass to great speeds and operated with a high rate of fire. I didn’t want to have to face a mob armed with the same weapons we had. To be shot to death by our own weapons—that would be a tough way to go down.

  What was surprising was that they’d managed to get so many weapons from our troops. They must have killed the light troops pretty fast to keep their grip on them. Our legion recovery teams put a priority on weapons retrieval. They were much more important than bodies or uniforms.

  “Perhaps I should recap what we’ve learned of this conflict for those of you who’ve been out of the picture for a while,” Graves said, pointedly looking at me. “The unrest on the surface has been growing for years. Tau is a world of contrasts. A few have great wealth, but due to their unrestricted population growth, most are poor. Only the wealthy few make it up here into space to seek their fortunes. All of that background information was available on the legion website, and you should have read it on the flight out here.

  “What’s different today,” he continued, “comes down to two key elements. One, they managed to get a large shipment of powerful alien weapons. Two, the population of this world has learned of Imperial weakness. It was bound to get out, and the first world to hear about it was this one, a merchant hub of local trade. They know that the local Battle Fleet has been called to the Core Systems. We’ve been left in charge. How does that look to them? Well, they’ve seen a scrim of fancy troops courtesy of Germanica for years. The rebels on the planet surface weren’t impressed. They decided to make their move before the Empire ships come back.”

  Carlos, of all people, raised his hand. Graves ignored him and pointed to Natasha.

  “Sir,” she asked, “why were they holding back? I mean, the Empire doesn’t care about the purely internal affairs of any system. They could have a civil war and a blood bath without a threat from the Imperial Fleets.”

  “That’s not true in this case,” Graves said. “Remember that Gelt Station is the hub of interstellar commerce. Aliens are here on legitimate Imperial business. If they destroy an alien trade ship without good cause, they risk sanction by the fleets if they come back. The ultimate sanction.”

  Natasha frowned. “Did you say ‘if’ the Imperial fleets come back?”

  “I should have said ‘when.’ In any case, their return might take a long time.”

  The entire subject of warfare among the Core Systems was the topic of countless whispered conversations among the troops, but our officers rarely brought it up. I was alarmed at the idea that Imperial ships might never return. How could the Empire hold together in its current form if they didn’t? At some point, an alien civilization would grow bold and attack another. At that moment, the galaxy would change forever. I hoped someone back on Earth was thinking about these things and working up some kind of plan to deal with the situation.

  “A long time, sir?” Carlos blurted out of turn. “The fleet might not return for…what? Are we talking years, here…or centuries?”

  “A trip to the Core Systems takes over a year each way,” Graves said. “Beyond that, we have no way of judging the situation. If anything, the Galactic Net is more closely policed than it was before. We’re not getting any formal news from the Nairbs or anyone else.”

  I found it remarkable that Graves was freely passing on this information. I wasn’t sure why he was doing it. Maybe it was part of the same disease that had infected the local Tau. They’d figured the cat was gone and may be dead, and they were partying harder every day, celebrating the absence.

  How long would it be, I asked myself again, before more worlds went wild?

  -18-

  Graves slammed his hands together, ending the briefing and dismissing us with one gesture. We hustled for the armory and loaded up. I decided to go with a heavy kit today. I was done fooling around. I asked the quartermaster for a light artillery emplacement, a floater cart to carry it, plus another cart for ammo.

  “You know this 88 has a kick?” the quartermaster asked, as if I was some kind of rookie. “You can’t just put it up to your shoulder.”

  “Yeah?” I responded. “Do you think that’s why it has a tripod base?”

  He looked at me with twisted-up lips for a few seconds, then sighed and contacted Leeson for approval.

  Adjunct Leeson backed me up without a moment’s hesitation. I was gratified that I had a favor to pull in from him, and I hoped that state of affairs would continue. To my mind, it was best to immediately turn gratitude from a superior officer into something tangible. They tended to forget who they owed very quickly.

  I had Carlos assigned to drag my ammo cart around for me. You would have thought I’d put a dog collar on him and sent him into the snow under a heavy lash.
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  “This isn’t cool,” he said, dragging the tether line.

  The floating cart barely weighed anything from the point of view of the soldier guiding it. The cart even had enough automated brains to follow a man on its own if you let it. But none of that stopped Carlos from complaining.

  “I’ve got a cart of my own,” I told him, tugging on my tether. My burden was, if anything, bigger and more unwieldy than his was. The entire gun emplacement rode on it. It looked squatty and had a bulbous nose on the front projector. The tripod of legs had a distinctly insectile appearance. Alien 88s always reminded me of beetles with nozzles, but they were deadly at mid-range against large formations.

  “I’m supposed to be your friend, not your slave,” Carlos continued. “I don’t get this at all. Do you hate me, McGill?”

  “I just wanted to team up with someone I could talk to,” I said. “I guess I was wrong. I’ll contact Adjunct Leeson and get you reassigned on point with Kivi.”

  “Fine, fine, I’ll pull your damned cart. No need to get pissy about it.”

  Carlos was an acquired taste. For some reason I liked the man. We were still friends despite all the trouble between us. I think it was the fact we’d faced death together so many times. Serious combat welds men together. In our case, it gave us the fortitude to overlook one another’s faults.

  “We pulled the lucky card on this deployment,” Adjunct Leeson’s voice crackled in my headset. “We’ve been assigned the high ground. The best part is we’re not going anywhere near the financial district.”

  This was news to me and Carlos. We exchanged glances and continued to listen.

  “We’re going to the high end of the station,” Leeson said, “covering the government buildings. No one expects a serious attack there as the rentable Tau police force is huddled in those structures. All aboard the skimmer—and remember to hold on, these turtles are crazy pilots.”