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  “Experienced troops…” I echoed. “That’s us. The independent legions. There’s no one else who’s been out there.”

  “Exactly.”

  I thought about the situation for a time. The more I thought about it, the less happy I was. I didn’t want to join up with Hegemony. Those guys were self-important pukes.

  “What if we say no?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “No one does. They might disband us. Or they might hire us and send us out anyway. No one really knows how this is all going to go down.”

  “One thing’s for sure,” I said, beginning to work my tapper. “Earth isn’t getting all these credits from the Galactics for us to sit on our hands. They’ll want us to do something soon.”

  Natasha nodded then frowned as I kept working my tapper steadily. She scooted her butt over the couch to see what I was doing, and I let her.

  I’d gone into my settings first and done a full reset. When it booted back up, I tapped in a message and selected the send-all option. It questioned my sanity, and I confirmed the choice—twice. I hit the final acknowledgement before she could stop me.

  Her tapper beeped, and she opened the message I’d just sent to her—and everyone else in the legion. Her jaw sagged.

  “You’re crazy,” she whispered. “You can’t do that. You can’t spam the entire legion at midnight!”

  “I just did.”

  Natasha read my message on her own arm while I downed the rest of my beer and got out two new ones. When I returned to the couch, she waved me away at first, but after a few seconds of reading, she took the second beer and guzzled it.

  She shook her head and laughed. Then she began reading the note again, out loud this time. “‘As one of only two individuals in this legion who was personally involved in negotiating Earth’s new status, I urge my fellow Legionnaires to reject Hegemony’s offer. Let’s stay independent and free rather than chained up by sanctimonious dirt-siders who think they know the stars better than we do. Specialist James McGill, Legion Varus.’”

  “It’s just one man’s opinion,” I said, shrugging.

  Natasha laughed again and drank. I joined her.

  “I didn’t have to come all the way down here to know your answer, did I?” she asked. “All I had to do was think about you, and I would’ve known how you were voting.”

  Somehow, my arm had snaked its way around her shoulders. She sat up close to me, and I could feel her warmth. Usually, I avoided warmth of any kind in August—but this was different.

  “You’re going to get into trouble,” she said.

  I scoffed. “What are they going to do? Kill me?”

  It was a favorite joke of all Legionnaires, and it never failed to garner a bitter chuckle from our fellows. We often died in the field, but we almost always were returned to life. That sounded great—until after you went through the agony and helpless terror of dying a few times.

  Natasha and I ended up making love on that grungy couch. We fell asleep immediately afterward. Outside, the katydids buzzed and the fireflies floated on warm humid air between mossy trees.

  -2-

  The Georgia dawn pinked the skies several hours later. I was startled awake when a fist hammered on my shack’s door, rattling the windows.

  Natasha and I were entangled. We separated and stood up. Natasha grabbed a shirt and pressed it over her bare breasts. It wasn’t smart cloth, so it didn’t cover her very well.

  “Who’s there?” I said gruffly, stepping to the door. Automatically, I stood to one side. Natasha hadn’t moved or said anything, she was just watching me.

  “Open up, McGill. Military Police.”

  Frowning, I threw open the door. Natasha pulled more clothes on quickly, but I stood there in boxers, uncaring.

  Outside, there were three men. The two in front were beefy—one well-built and the other one with a gut that overflowed his belt buckle. In the rear was a thin man with only a few wisps of curly hair around his balding head. He had eyes like a possum.

  It was the thin man in the back who spoke up first.

  “What kind of a shithole is this, McGill?” he asked me. His eyes cruised around my humble home. “We were led to believe you were a specialist, but I’m seeing an inbred knuckle-dragger in a stinking shack. I’ll have to report back that we visited the wrong damned man.”

  I nodded to him. “That’s right,” I said. “You came to the wrong house.” I began to swing the door closed into their faces.

  A hand shot out and stopped it.

  “You’re under arrest, funny man,” the fat one said.

  I took a second to take in their uniforms and ranks. They were Hegemony. The patches on their shoulders depicting blue-green globes told me that. Judging by their other insignia the front two were regulars—probably reservists called up for active duty. Since Earth had been announced as an Enforcement branch for the Empire, Hegemony had panicked and mobilized every reservist they had.

  The thin guy in back was older and wore a specialist’s markings. They were all security detail—MPs.

  “Arrest?” I asked. “What’s the charge?”

  “You’ll be briefed at the station in Atlanta,” the thin specialist snapped. “Come with us—wait, who’s that with you?”

  “A friend,” I said, glancing back at Natasha. She still hadn’t spoken.

  All three men leered for a moment at Natasha. This annoyed me. Her legs were bare and my tee-shirt didn’t cover everything else.

  It was the first thing in the morning, and I hadn’t been arrested for months—especially without good cause and paperwork. The situation struck me as wrong, somehow.

  “This is about the message I sent last night, isn’t it?” I asked. “Who signed the arrest order?”

  “Are you coming willingly, or are you coming in manacles?”

  “I’m not Hegemony,” I told them. “I’m Varus. We’re independent. Send some MPs from my Legion, and I’ll go wherever they take me.”

  “I think you fail to grasp the situation,” the leader said, shaking his head with mock sadness. “This is a priority arrest, and I have my orders.”

  “Screw your orders,” I said, becoming angry. “They’re illegal. You don’t have any jurisdiction here. Get District cops or my own MPs. You can’t come here and demand I submit to arrest without any authority to back you up.”

  The skinny guy finally stopped ogling Natasha and glared at me.

  “You off-world types always think you’re hot shit, don’t you?” he asked. “Well, all that’s over with now. It’s time you became accustomed to new masters. Gentlemen, arrest this—”

  I slammed my door in their faces and threw my shoulder into it. I’m a large man, easily larger and stronger than any of these dirt-siders—but there were three of them. The door bucked against my shoulder and daylight flashed through the crack a moment later. I heard cursing, and one of them shoved a truncheon through the opening.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Natasha hissed at me.

  “Climb out one of the back windows. I don’t like this, and I’m not letting these jokers arrest you too.”

  “You’re holding them off for me?” she asked, surprised.

  The door bucked harder than ever, and I was jostled backward. I almost lost my stance, but managed to get myself set again. The truncheon sticking into my shed crackled with energy. The bastard holding it had switched it on.

  I looked at Natasha. “Go on, will you?”

  She shook her head and stood behind the door. “You’re going to need a witness.”

  I growled in frustration. Timing my next move with their next shove, I threw the door open again. The fat guy fell onto his face at my feet, and his sidekick staggered in surprise. The thin leader in the back was breathing hard and baring his teeth. They hadn’t been in a great mood at the start, and now they were truly pissed.

  I took a step or two backward, and they rushed me.

  Forever afterward, I’ll never be
sure why I decided to resist them. I guess it’s because I knew they were in the wrong and abusing their authority. Sometimes that happened with cops of any kind. I understood they didn’t have easy jobs, but these guys had rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn’t thinking anymore at this point, I was reacting. Violently.

  There’s something different in the way a starman faces a fight after he’s died a dozen times—or a hundred. It starts with an odd expression Legionnaires call the “dead man’s stare.” Maybe the look comes to legionnaires because we’ve been gifted with an unnatural knowledge of death. I’ve had many bitter experiences that should’ve been forbidden to the living, but which to a man like me had become almost familiar.

  “Don’t do it, James!” Natasha said, reading my state of mind accurately. “I’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t even look at her. I didn’t really hear her, either. My eyes were wide with the shining whites revealed all around. My face was otherwise strangely blank—only my staring orbs revealed the intensity of my mood.

  Now, don’t get me wrong—I was pissed. But it was a different kind of pissed. I was in a cold state, with full certainty of mind. I had a confidence in battle that these others couldn’t possess.

  The fat guy climbed to his feet and stepped forward, his face sweating and his eyes blazing. He lifted his truncheon, and it sizzled with energy. One touch would numb a limb and daze the mind, but I ignored the weapon, concentrating instead on the man who held it.

  The start of the fight wasn’t fair, not really. But then fighting isn’t usually about fairness—not to my kind, the brethren of the walking dead.

  As fat-boy took his first steps in my direction with his sizzling shock-stick in hand, my foot snapped out kicking the floater I used as a coffee table. Gliding through the air with great force, the floater caught the MP in the side of the knee—a bad spot. There was a double-crack, and he went down on his face, keening.

  “Crazy redneck!” he moaned from the floor.

  The second guy at least looked like he worked out. I stepped to meet him as he dropped his truncheon and reached to his belt to drag his sidearm free.

  A gun—that raised the stakes. I knew they might well kill me now, but I hardly cared at that moment. If I killed just one of them, that man was going to endure his first death with all the associated terror and pain. As Hegemony men, the MPs had been copied and stored the same as I was, but their first death experience would linger with them for the rest of their lives. To me, a death was like a bad day in the dentist’s chair. Nothing to look forward to, but hardly life-changing. The way I looked at it, as long as I killed at least one of them, I’d won this fight.

  “Shit, James, shit!” Natasha said. But she joined the fight when she saw the guy reaching for his gun. She stepped to the thin Specialist and kicked the guy while he lingered in the doorway. She missed his balls, but nailed his narrow gut.

  The specialist reached for her and the two struggled. She tried to trip him and almost managed it. I had to admire her pluck. She was a Tech Specialist, not really a line combatant. He finally straight-armed her, and she flew right into my toolbox which crashed to the floor.

  Her attack hadn’t been spectacular, but she’d managed to briefly distract them. The muscular goon glanced back to see what was going on with the group’s commander, and I took the opportunity to arm myself.

  Another behavioral trait that’s often shared by men like myself was a tendency to hide weapons around our residences. We typically collected guns, knives—just about anything that could be used to perform a violent act. I’ve read that people who’ve experienced starvation are forever afterward fascinated by food and tended to hoard it. I was like them in my own way.

  I reached into the couch cushions and drew a machete from underneath them.

  When I’d bought that blade, I’d told myself it was to chop down the brush on my parents’ back lot—but part of me had known better. I’d bought it and never used it until this very day. I’d oiled it and slid it under the couch cushions—but I’d never swung it at a bush or anything else.

  The muscular man’s hand didn’t come off, but it was missing two fingers about a half-second later. It’s hard to handle a gun with a thumb and two fingers—just try it sometime. He lost his grip on the weapon and it clattered to the floor.

  I scooped it up and straightened. The thin man at the door finally had his weapon out and held it with shaking hands. He still stood in the doorway framed by the pink light of dawn.

  “This has gone far enough, McGill!” he shouted. “There’s no reason for any of this bullshit. Drop that gun and come in with us.”

  “There are plenty of reasons for this,” I said calmly.

  I held the gun, but didn’t level it at the man in doorway. He had the drop on me after all, and I didn’t want to take the first bullet.

  Instead, I held the gun out to my side. Crawling at my feet was the man with the missing fingers. He’d picked the digits up and was trying to wrap them in a tissue he’d pulled out of his pocket. I could have told him it wasn’t worth the effort.

  The man with the broken knee seemed to be in the most pain. He had gone white from shock and slid himself over to lean back against my box-shaped fridge. His breathing came in hitches and gasps, but at least he wasn’t screeching anymore.

  “Put the gun down, Specialist,” the man standing in my doorway said. “This is insane. You’re under arrest, and you’ll come with us, dead or alive.”

  “You had no warrant,” I said. “You had no cause. You came in kicking and pushing. You can’t treat a Legion man like that. Don’t they treat you hogs anything?”

  “Hogs” was an especially rude term some Legionnaires applied to Hegemony people. The man’s face purpled slightly. I would have thought he was too freaked out to care much about insults—but I would have thought wrong.

  “All right,” he said, anger taking over again. “We’re supposed to bring you in alive. That’s a firm order. But no one said anything about her.”

  He turned his gun on Natasha, who glared and winced away.

  The second the thin man’s gun was off me, I shot the man with the bad knee—the guy whose was resting against my fridge. I’d chosen him first because the gun in my hand was aimed in his direction to start with.

  I aimed low—mostly because I didn’t want to wreck my fridge. His chest popped red, and he sagged down in surprise. I was annoyed to see the shot had gone right through him and ruined my fridge after all. Damn.

  The man in the doorway forgot about Natasha and swung his weapon back in my direction. That was a good move, because my gun was swinging toward him.

  We both fired and staggered back. He fell out into the yard and lay there coughing. He might pull through, but I hoped not.

  I was on my back now, and I knew from experience I’d been hurt bad. When you’re bleeding out, it’s a funny feeling—by funny, I mean a sick feeling. Your vision really does go black, strobing in and out with your heartbeat, dimming more each beat.

  The man with two missing fingers got to his knees and loomed over me staring into my face.

  “Why the hell did you do this?” he demanded.

  “You ask yourself that,” I wheezed, “when the revival machine is crapping you out in about an hour. Maybe you’ll figure it out then.”

  Then I shot him in the head, and we both died.

  -3-

  There are a few funny things that people have to understand about revival machines and how they operate in order to understand what happened later that same hot Friday in Georgia. Our bodies are only backed up occasionally, starting with the day you’re recruited. When you’re brought back to life, you usually came back as you were on the day your cells were copied—at least physically.

  There are exceptions to this however. If you needed corrective surgery of some kind or if you improved your physique with exercise and training, you might back up your body’s cellular scans afterward to ensure you returned to life later in the bes
t possible condition.

  The mind of a Legionnaire is recorded separately. It’s done with incremental backups, transcribing only the changes to our neural nets. This process is done far more regularly so that we can remember our training and life events. Usually, our tappers do the job of transcription. If they’re within range of a transceiver relay unit, they’ll upload the data concerning our neural networks quite often, every minute or so. That’s how we can recall the circumstances of our own deaths.

  The only living witness to the debacle that had occurred in my little shack was Tech Specialist Natasha Elkin. She knew me, and I thought sometimes she might even love me a little. Whatever her true feelings were, she covered for me that morning.

  Natasha was a tech and a good one. She hacked all three of the dead Hegemony pricks’ tappers, dumping their last uploads. The exact circumstances of their deaths were therefore recorded in her mind and restored in mine, but the Hegemony pukes had forgotten the dramatic finish. They knew they’d come to my place. They knew they’d pushed their way in and argued. But they had no idea how they’d died, or who had been at fault.

  When an alien machine in downtown Atlanta gave birth to me once again, there was already a Hegemony squad waiting on site to arrest me. Fortunately, I wasn’t taken by surprise. Stumbling and naked, I had just long enough to read a private message from Natasha on my tapper before they hauled me away to a holding cell.

  “Stay cool, stay dumb, no memories,” her message read.

  I swiped my numb fingers over the text, and the words erased themselves, lost in the mysteries of the net. I allowed myself a small smile.

  Playing dumb comes easily to me—some say it’s my only natural skill. The Hegemony MPs held me, and they grilled me, but they eventually gave up.

  As far as they could determine, I didn’t remember a damned thing. At least, no more than the other three dead men did. Only Natasha’s story of three amateur-hour MPs pawing her and abusing her boyfriend was left behind to fill in the gaps. The memory loss was blamed on bad net service in the region—a believable enough excuse. Even I could testify to that much of the cover-story.