Chapter 7
I was standing in the jungle at dusk, in a deep crater filled with jagged black rocks. Around the rim of the crater, thousands of shadowy spider monkeys capered and shrieked, throwing stones and debris down from the cliff top.
I was surrounded by large boulders, and across each sprawled a dying person covered with a white sheet. Flaco lay in front of me with his throat slashed, one hand dangling over the lip of his boulder, and I needed to sew the pieces of his esophagus together quickly if I was to save him.
Tamara lay face down, slumped over a sharp rock to his right, her fever burning high, brain cells dying at a tremendous rate as she waited for an injection of antimosin. Behind me, Arish also lay on a low flat stone with a slashed throat. He tugged the back of my shirt to beg for help, but I was too busy caring for Flaco.
I bent close in the failing light and stitched at Flaco’s throat. The rip in his esophagus lay between the triangular cricoids’ cartilage just above the Adam’s apple and the first ring of tracheal cartilage beneath—a region hard to treat quickly, since there could be major damage to his vocal cords. But I had no time to worry about niceties like re-stitching vocal cords. I had never performed anything but minor home-surgeries, yet I stitched the esophagus together rapidly, hoping I was doing it right. The monkeys on the crater’s rim shrieked and howled, and I could not think straight, could not decide if I was stitching the right pieces together. The lower section of esophagus suddenly seemed to appear very much like a section of small intestine. I sewed anyway, shook my head at the damage to Flaco’s severed spinal column. He would require much care, more than I can afford to give at the moment. His blood seeped down and stained the white sheet so gently lying over him.
I looked for a clean stone on which to set my bloody sutures, and a small girl, perhaps ten years old, appeared to my left. I handed them to her.
She said, “Thank you, Grandfather,” and smiled at me. I looked at her face—a thin face with prominent features, skin as pale as a European’s and smooth as a china doll’s. She seemed familiar and I was glad to see her, but I could not put a name to her.
I rushed over to Tamara’s slumped figure lying on a rock, filled a syringe with antimosin, gently lifted her head, and injected the antimosin into her neck. Arish tugged at my shirt.
“How about some help over here? I’m dying! How about some help over here?” he yelled.
I glanced back at him, surprised at how well he spoke with his throat cut. Beads of sweat dotted his face, and his pupils were constricted from fear. He tugged at my shirt again, and I slapped his hand away.
“I’m busy!” I said.
“Too busy to help me, you old fucker? Too busy to help me?” His feet started kicking, and he thrashed around. Arish’s legs kicked, making a big “whuff, whuff” sound as they scraped the sheets and billowed them out, and I knew he was dying.
But suddenly the monkeys all let out a roar. Flaco arched his back and cried out; his stitches tore, and the blood poured out. Tamara’s eyes started to glaze, and I knew she needed another injection. Arish raised his hands and held them out, as if pleading for mercy from the air.
Startled, I awoke on a cot in a coffin-sized tube with a single, dim overhead light. The white plastic walls smelled new, and piped-in salsa music trumpeted a gaiety that didn’t reflect the way I felt. The vision of Arish with a wound in his throat filled my mind, and I tried to push it away, concentrate on something else. My broken ankle was braced to the cot, so I couldn’t see my leg, but an ache like an old wasp sting told me the doctors had inserted needles so they could glue my bones together, a time-consuming process usually reserved for athletes.
I knew I should remain immobile for at least three hours so the glue could set. I looked towards my feet for a clock. There was none. I was in a convalescence tube like those in Chinese hospitals, but usually the tube has some amenities—a clock, a drinking straw, a dream monitor. This one appeared empty, except for the blaring radio.
I should find Tamara, I thought. I should check her hormone fusion pump, take care of her hand.
It had been three days—long enough for a thin layer of undifferentiated cells to grow over her wound. Now was the time to paint a new wash over the cells, administer the hormones that would order a hand to regenerate. Otherwise, the undifferentiated cells would just keep growing like a cancer.
I thought, I should also see if she has any major brain damage, see if the log phases and antimosin did the trick. The general I’d spoken with had wanted her alive. I supposed someone was caring for her. But still I thought I should check.
I remembered the blood pumping from Arish’s throat, a red trickle over ebony skin. I tried to force the memory back, but could not concentrate. I felt as if I had a cold lump in my brain. I tried to pinpoint the cold spot, to visualize where it lay, and it seemed to move aside. Morphine overdoses can make it difficult for one to concentrate for several days, but this seemed more than a simple drug reaction. The cold spot felt alive, conscious, like an animal, a large black fly buzzing in my head, batting away thoughts with its wings while stirring up unpleasant images.
The incidents from the past three days gave off a pervasive sense of wrongness, and the more I considered it, the more likely it appeared I was going—no, had gone—insane. This was my reasoning: When I was young, Don José Mirada, a rather eccentric friend to my father, counseled me to serve society. He believed society always rewards best those who serve it best, and destroys those who refuse to serve it. For example, the owner of the clinic in our small town always invested much in his business. Because of this, he had medical equipment other hospitals lacked, so people came from far away to visit his facility. This made him very rich and famous. He had many friends and a beautiful wife, and no one envied him because they felt he deserved everything he got. Society rewarded him for the service he performed. But the don also pointed out that the man of the world, the man who behaves toward society as a parasite behaves towards its host, is never secure. Dictators, dishonest businessmen, or those who become parasites of the social institutions will often be destroyed. If society does not squash them outright, it will destroy their spirits and they will find no lasting happiness.
To prove his point, Don José would dress in his white suit and get his gold-handled walking stick, then take me to the market in our village to point out some of the more wretched people on the street, all the time lecturing me about how society had destroyed their lives. “Look at Osvaldo,” he would say, indicating a merchant. “See how miserable he is. Always in the market he tries to sell his clothes for twice their value, so when fashions change he must give the clothes away to unload his old merchandise. Because of his greed, no one buys from him except when he is desperate to sell, and he will die in poverty! Remember how society hates the greedy, Angelo, and learn from this man’s misfortune.” Or again, pointing to a handsome couple, “Look at Juan, he cheated on his old wife and married his lover. Now his new wife doesn’t trust him to walk across the street alone! She clings to him like a hangman’s rope. Unwittingly she has become the avatar of her society’s conscience, and she punishes him mercilessly for his infidelity.”
Don José Mirada argued that there was great wisdom in letting consensus morality guide one in times when moral codes seemed a burden, and he said we should obey laws even when they seemed irrelevant.
I eventually came to believe there was truth to his argument, and I’ve often wondered if at some subconscious level I chose a career in medicine so I could best serve society and thus gain its greatest rewards.
If this is true, my morality is an external artifice produced by greed.
But I have always wanted to believe I serve society from the heart and that the rewards society gives in return are incidental. Indeed, philosophers say the greatest happiness comes to those who learn to live without wealth, or fame. And if this is true, then the rewards society offers those who serve it are only grains of dust that blind men to the true happiness that comes from the act of serving.
I have preferred to believe this, for it feels more right to my heart.
But killing Arish was an act society did not condone—not when I had disabled him and had him at my mercy. Society jealously guards the right to retribution. In fact, because I had violated society’s right to retribution by killing Arish, my society would now try to punish me.
So, when I’d killed Arish, at the very least I acted contrary to one of my most fundamental beliefs about how the world operates: I had violated consensus morality. Though Arish was a socialist, a murderer, a man dedicated to the belief that he could only advance his own Nicita Idealist doctrines by destroying me and my society, though he represented all this—yet I could not justify killing him. The fact that I acted inconsistent with my beliefs seemed a sure sign of insanity.
I reasoned further that killing Arish had been very impulsive, and I have never been impulsive. Only once had I seriously considered killing a man, and that had been long ago. Even then it was not an impulsive act: When I was young, Gonzalvo Quintanilla, an army general with big cocaine connections in Australia, tried to overthrow Guatemala. For three days he led a reign of terror from Panzós to Belize. But his men were only interested in looting homes and raping women, and they felt no loyalty, so his regime fell. I was at school in Mexico City at the time, and when I learned my mother had been killed by Quintanilla’s looters, I rushed home.
Though my mother had been murdered two days earlier, I found my father sitting in a chair in the living room, staring at the wall and weeping like a child. My sister Eva tried to comfort him while her three children ran about the house playing. My father would not reply when I spoke to him, but Eva took me aside and showed me where Mother had died. Dried blood still smeared the walls and floor tiles in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room—even after much cleaning Eva had been unable to wash it off—and as I crouched to inspect the stains I could smell the blood and could see dried, flaking droplets on the wall behind the china cabinet.
“How did this happen?” I asked.
“Five of Quintanilla’s soldiers came in the house to loot,” Eva said. “Neighbors heard shooting. When the soldiers left, the neighbors came and found her dead.”
“How do they say she died?”
“No one will say.”
I went from house to house, asking how my mother had been killed. The only answer I got was from an old gray-headed woman: “She didn’t lose her virtue. She tried to fight those rapists off, and that counts with God. No virtue is lost if you try your best to fight them off!”
Even in her forties my mother had been a desirable woman. I was sure her killers had abused her. With so much blood around, I feared they had not left her in one piece.
I armed myself with a revolver. For weeks I stalked the streets at night, evading military police who’d come to squash the rebellion, searching in bars and alleys, hoping to find someone who wore the uniform of Quintanilla’s soldiers. Every time I saw a scruffy teenager I imagined he’d been with Quintanilla, wondered if he was responsible for my mother’s death. I never found the men I searched for, and was never able to spend my rage by putting a bullet in someone.
Even as I remembered this incident, my fists tightened and my anger burned. I sweated and trembled with rage. This scared me: I hadn’t felt such fierce emotion since my youth. It seemed to validate my theory that I had gone insane.
I thought of Arish. If he’d lived in Guatemala during the revolt, he would have raped my mother and strewn her pieces around the house. I told myself I should be glad I’d killed him, but my chest burned with guilt.
I felt the fly flapping in my head and wondered when I had gone insane. It seemed only right that I should be able to remember the precise moment. Had it happened at Flaco’s death? I had been shocked and saddened, but I couldn’t remember feeling any different in the head. Did it happen when Arish attacked me? Or when I found that Panamá would extradite me? Had it been when I first saw Tamara staring at the ceiling like a zombie? So many bad things had happened, one of them must certainly have been the trigger.
But I could not recall when the fly had entered my head. Even now I was on my way to fight a war I knew nothing about while an assassin waited for an opportunity to strike. In fact, I lay in this tube weaponless, open to attack at any moment. The tube was like a giant drawer to a cabinet; anyone could open the drawer to strangle me. I was in more danger now than ever.
My hands began to shake, and I wanted to escape the tube, but my foot was anchored to the floor. I tried squeezing to the bottom of the tube to release the brace, but the tube was too narrow and I couldn’t reach the buckles that strapped my foot. I kicked at the brace. When facing Arish, I hadn’t had time to contemplate my circumstances, and so had not been afraid. But now a wave of terror filled me. I struggled to free myself, gulping air, sweat streaming down my sides.
I recalled the words of the metaphysicist Pío Baroja, “It is characteristic of Nature that when it intends to destroy you, it does so thoroughly.” Certainly it seemed that Nature had led me to this place with unerring calculation—stripping me of my position in the community, snatching away my hopes for the future, sucking the life from my best friend. As I considered all the bad things that had happened to me, it was almost as if a voice whispered in my ear, saying: “Just remember, no matter what bad things have happened, the worst is yet to come.”
The certainty that this was true filled me with wonder and dread. A pure terror pierced me, and I lay like a moth pinned and flapping on a board. All my twisting and shouting would come to nothing. I could kick my legs, but there was nowhere to run.
My leg ached from straining at the brace. I remembered the mean dog that had stepped in Rodrigo’s trap. He had twisted off his own foot, extricating himself with as little personal loss as possible. It was a grim choice to make. Yet, like the dog, I knew it was the only choice to make. I’d lost my home in Panamá, my good name, my best friend—and something more. I had lost my grip on reality, my own understanding of who I was. The sum of these losses was overwhelming, yet I resolved to keep my life.
The radio started a song, and to the blare of the trumpets I repeated the litany, “The worst is yet to come; the worst is yet to come,” and filled myself with a new toughness. I clenched my fists and pumped my arms, strengthening them. I felt powerful and vicious. Almost I hoped Jafari’s assassin would come. For if he opened the convalescence tube, he’d be within my grasp.
When I calmed, I noticed two buttons on the ceiling above and behind my head. It was a stupid place to put the buttons. One said, “Call for Assistance”; the other said, “Push to open.” I touched the open button and a latch sprung behind me. The cot rolled out, and I found myself a meter off the floor in an empty operating room. I sat up and removed my foot from the brace.
I lowered myself to the floor, careful not to put any weight on my bad leg. The floor vibrated slightly, and I could feel that the ship was spaceborne. The whole room smelled of new plastic and sterile surfaces. It was spotless, empty. I expected a nurse or a doctor to come in at any moment and tell me to get back into bed.
I left the drawer ajar so I could hear the music pumping into the convalescence tube. I found a crystalline-display note pad above my convalescence tube, and by thumbing the button on the pad I found I was to be released at 20:15. A clock beside the message showed the time—20:07. The glue in my leg had set.
When I’d brought her on ship, Tamara had certainly been too ill to check into a cabin, so I decided to search for her in the convalescence tubes, hoping to learn her condition. Only one tube appeared occupied, and the note pad above it listed the patient as male. I opened thirty other tubes, and found them all empty. When I was half done, the music on the radio stopped and an announcer said, “This is Carlos Carrera with Panamá City’s current news.”
I quit searching tubes, surprised to learn the salsa music came from Panamá.
“Police in Colón have identified the corpse of a man who was dug up in a banana field this afternoon as ‘Flaco’ Alejandro Contento Rivera, a resident of Colón and former friend of the desperado Angelo Himinez Osic.
“Reports say Rivera was stabbed in the throat, just as Osic’s earlier victim, the notorious Arish Muhammad Hustanifad, had been. Rivera is known to have possessed much hard currency before his death, and police believe Osic murdered him for money. Osic may have used the currency later in the day to bribe the mercenaries on Sol Station who helped him flee justice.
“In this second murder, police have uncovered an eye witness …”
A female interviewer with a high voice like the twitter of a parakeet introduced the Chilean woman I’d met in the banana fields. The Chilean said, “Flaco, he was talking to me in the tent, then he went outside for a minute. I heard him scream, and I ran outside and saw that Devil, Osic, standing over Flaco, holding a knife. I screamed and Osic ran away. I got scared and started packing up to leave, but then Osic, he came back with a shovel and threatened to kill me. He took a whole bunch of money out of Flaco’s pockets, then he buried him and told me he’d kill me if I ever told. I have been too frightened to speak about it. I have been scared to death.”
The interviewer chirped, “Are you certain it was Osic?”
“Yes, I’m certain. I got a good look at him!” the Chilena said.
Carrera announced, “Besides Panamá and West Islamidad, three other nations have joined in demand for Osic’s extradition back to Earth, asking that he face charges for planting the bomb that devastated Sol Station, killing seven people and injuring thirty-six.
“Police who had been searching Lake Gatún for the injured woman last known to have been living in the home of Osic have shifted their search to the banana field where Rivera was buried. An eye witness saw Osic and the woman.”
I slammed the convalescence tube closed so I could no longer hear the radio. The news sickened me. I have never trusted the news media, and the things I’d just heard reaffirmed my paranoia. I was consoled by the knowledge that I had been right to flee Panamá. With media coverage like that, I’d have been lucky to live long enough to get the firing squad. But as I considered, my mood brightened. The police were searching for Tamara’s body: Whatever else had happened, Tamara had escaped unnoticed. Jafari and the Alliance might well believe Arish had killed Tamara and disposed of her body, then had been killed when he returned for me. I could hardly believe it—Tamara could well be safe!
I opened the tube again and switched radio stations till I found some good music, Los Arpones singing “My Heart Cries.” The thought that Tamara may have totally eluded the Alliance lifted my spirits so sharply that I wanted to dance. I was opening another tube, when a woman entered the operating room.
I jumped away from the tube. She was a chimera with chocolate-colored hair of a shade I’d never seen before. A silver kimono with red dragons appeared to be her only clothing, leaving her tan legs bare. Her shoulders were broad and muscular in a feminine way, the way a gymnast’s body is firm. She carried a white shirt draped over her arm, and a bowl of green soup in her hand. I thought she must be the nurse.
She stopped just inside the door. “Are you looking for something?” she asked, nodding toward the convalescence tube I’d opened.
“I had a friend with me when I came in. I thought she’d be here.”
“No women were brought in with you,” she said. “Most of your friends from Sol Station are on another module of the ship. You won’t be able to visit until we reach Baker. No one is allowed to pass between modules.”
I looked in the chimera’s eyes—dark brown with strange streaks of silver in them, like webs of light—and I knew I had never seen her before. She hadn’t been one of the mercenaries at Sol Station. She said in a joking tone, “Our beloved employer regrets that for modesty’s sake you must wear this fifty-nine grams of clothing,” and she tossed a pair of white underwear and a white kimono onto the bed beside me and smiled a tight-lipped smile, as if struggling to be pleasant.
“Our employer regrets what?”
“I think the Japanese originally planned to hire only men, and you’d have flown naked. Fifty-nine grams times 10,000 mercenaries is a lot of extra weight—so they regret paying to haul it.” She handed me the soup, then pulled two convalescence-tube drawers open all the way, sat on one of the beds, and motioned for me to be seated on the bed across from her.
I felt embarrassed. My hospital gown was too short, so my privates felt exposed, and my gown was open in the back. I picked up the clothes and started looking for a place to change.
“It’s okay,” she said, “I’ve seen sweet potatoes before.” She jutted her chin, motioning toward my privates. I decided it was okay, and pulled the underwear on. She averted her eyes by looking at the ceiling.
When I had put on the kimono top, she said, “You missed the orientation meetings yesterday, so I thought I’d fill you in. I’m Abriara Sifuentes, commander of your combat team. There are five of us on the team. You’ve met some others: My big brother, Perfecto. You’ll get to meet Zavala soon enough. Mavro’s on our team. You look surprised.”
“I had thought you were a nurse,” I said. Mavro, the Whorehouse Rat. I remembered the little man with the tattooed tears. My stomach turned at the thought of being in a combat team with him. In my drug-induced delirium I’d been sure he was out to kill me, and first impressions die hard. The big chimera, Perfecto, on the other hand, seemed like a good person. I looked at the soup. Out of mere politeness I said, “I’ll be happy to serve under your command.”
Abriara laughed. “Some would think it a slap in the face.”
“How so?”
“There are 700 combat teams on this module, and yours is the only one led by a woman. Truthfully, I’m not as qualified to lead as either Mavro or Perfecto. You’ll be the subject of much ridicule. You may not be able to suffer such a blow to your machismo.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss the problem, an overly animated gesture typical of Chilean women.
“You don’t really expect trouble from one of us?”
She shrugged. “That depends—will you give me trouble?”
I laughed. “You can’t be serious. Who cares about machismo? That’s so old-fashioned! I can’t imagine any of us giving you trouble.” I couldn’t keep from gazing into her eyes, the silver webs of light, they were mesmerizing.
Abriara appeared concerned. “You treat it as a joke, don Angelo, as a man of your background would. But to men here on ship, machismo is no joke. Many of them were culled from prisons in Peru and Colombia, where men who have been stripped of everything else cling to their dignity. You’ve seen Mavro’s tattoos—a symbol of bravery he got for murdering two boys in the ghettoes of Cartagena. You’ve never been part of his world, or you would know that to him machismo is no joke. And Zavala, he’s young and eager to prove himself.
“And I must warn you that among the chimeras we feel something very strongly, something akin to machismo.” She struggled for a definition. “Call it … pride of position. Torres created chimeras for his soldiers—and only males were created to fight, though we women learned to fight since. But the men still jealously guard their role as warriors: They allow us to fight, but never with rank or title. Never has a female chimera commanded a male in battle. And I do not know how Perfecto will react. He may respect my skills, but it won’t be enough to control him. We have another bond that I hope will prove stronger: We were both baptized Catholic. He might treat me with dignity for fear of God.”
I must have appeared incredulous at this. Only a few rogue priests will dare defy the Vatican to baptize a chimera.
Abriara saw my expression and said, “It happens. So, he may feel some loyalty to me, perhaps enough, being Catholic. To make sure, I’d like you to speak to him for me.”
I shrugged. “If you like.” I did not see how my words could affect him. She frowned a bit, upset that I hadn’t made a stronger commitment. I couldn’t judge how Perfecto would treat her, but I could judge how humans would treat her. I’d occasionally met men in Panamá who held machismo as an ideal, but I thought of them as anachronisms. Such a person could indeed give her trouble. “It seems to me that the one you need to fear most is Mavro. I know for a fact that he wants to be a captain, yet the general has made him a private beneath the only woman leader. He may take it hard.”
She laughed, a high-pitched unpleasant laugh meant to be disarming. “I think I like you,” she said. “From your tone, you sound very concerned about me. I like that in a person. Still … you may be right. I don’t trust him much. He sits on his bed and glares at me.”
“That is not a good sign,” I warned.
She nodded. “Indeed. Also, don Angelo, some people have been talking about you. Several governments want to extradite you back to Earth. And some people fear the Allied Earth Marines will board ship to take you. Some men discussed the possibility of turning you in, and Mavro threatened to kill anyone who spoke of it. He called them ‘steers,’ and they backed down for now. But Mavro is using this whole affair as an excuse to prove his machismo. Sooner or later he’ll start a fight. Maybe he’ll kill someone. Anyone who gets within arm’s length of Mavro—they’re the ones in danger.”
I considered this. She was right. “So, what should we do?”
Abriara looked up at the ceiling and shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
And unlike most people, who only say they’ll think about things and then never do, she stopped talking and looked up in the air and almost immediately appeared to lose herself in thought, so I picked up the soup and began to eat. The green algae tasted like broccoli. My ankle still ached, so I got off the cot, found a refrigerator and got out a tube of cortisone cream. I sat at a desk in the corner and applied the cream. There was a computer terminal at the desk.
On a hunch, I flipped on the computer and requested the medical files for Tamara de la Garza. The computer responded: “None Available.” I requested files for Tamil Jafari. The computer responded: “None Available.” I requested a list of mercenaries who’d been picked up at Sol Station, and the computer gave me 19 names.
Tamara wasn’t on the list, unless under a pseudonym. I requested information on the medical status of the 19 persons. None were convalescing from brain damage. General Garzón obviously wasn’t stupid enough to list Tamara in the computer under any name.
Abriara watched me during all this. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to locate the friend I told you about. It’s all right to use this terminal, no?”
She shrugged. “There’s no one here to stop you.” I requested a list of all persons currently occupying convalescence tubes. Five people were listed; none had physical problems remotely similar to Tamara’s. I had no way to learn her location from the terminal.
But another thought struck me: One of the 19 people we’d picked up at Sol Station was an Alliance assassin. I called-up the biographies and current housing assignments for each person, then requested a hard copy. The printer spat out a handful of thin papers with almost microscopic print. I began studying the file of a particularly ugly chimera named Miguel Mendoza.
“Ah,” Abriara said, “I almost forgot. A present from the General.” She reached into a fold of her robe and tossed me a small oblong package wrapped in gold foil. “He also left some liquor and cigars in that big chest you brought. In a few weeks, you can sell them for a fortune.”
I tucked the papers into my kimono and picked up the package and unwrapped it.
“It’s strange, don’t you think? He treats you like a dog, putting you under my command, then gives you extravagant gifts?” She smiled, and when she smiled her teeth were small and strangely even, as Perfecto’s had been. Something about her smile reminded me of a lizard or a porpoise. I looked closely and discovered the difference: She had no canine teeth. Instead, all her teeth were small and round and evenly matched.
“Please don’t do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Stare at my teeth. Or my eyes. Or my hair. Or my breasts. You humans always do that. It makes me nervous.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, looking away. I fumbled with the package. Under the foil was a small box. I opened it and two knives fell out—knives I’d taken from Arish. Both were set in aluminum wrist-sheaths that had Arabic characters written along the length. I hadn’t looked closely at them before. I pulled out a knife and was surprised to see that the blade was made of crystal, flawless molded graphite, pure diamond—sharper than any metal blade.
“Carrumba!” Abriara said. “Those are worth a fortune!”
The blade was slightly longer than my hand; the handle was light and balanced, weighted for throwing. The second knife was identical. When I pulled the blade free, a note fell from the scabbard. I set it on the bed and strapped the wrist-sheaths on under the sleeves of my kimono. The knives remained well concealed. I read the note as I worked.
Señor Osic:
I’m sure you know that weapons aren’t allowed in living quarters. But a hundred years ago, during the Islamic Jihad, it is said the Faithful used these blades as toothpicks, so they are listed as such on the ship’s logs. You may have need for such toothpicks. The Alliance has offered me tremendous bribes for your return to Earth. I’m playing the part of a greedy man, but soon they will figure out that I won’t turn you over for any price. When that happens, watch your back.
I give you Perfecto, since he has already bonded to you. I’d prefer that he were bonded to me, but a man can serve only one master. Mavro also requested to be in your combat team—a very talented and dangerous man. You need friends like him.
Abriara quickly read the note over my shoulder.
“What does he mean here,” I asked, “where he says that Perfecto is bonded to me?”
She stared at me, as if to gauge me. She spoke hesitantly. “I suppose this is something you should know. I’d never mention it if Garzón hadn’t brought it up. And it lies at the root of the real reason I came to speak to you. Remember what our father, General Torres, looked like?”
“An old man with silver hair,” I said, recognizing the similarity in appearance between Torres and General Garzón. “He had a sharp nose, and a strong chin.”
“Close enough,” Abriara said. “In his old age, Torres became paranoid, afraid of assassins within his ranks. So when we were created, some chimeras were given an extra gene containing a biochip. And that biochip makes them loyal to old men with silver hair and sharp features—men who look like Torres. You, with your hair going gray, look almost exactly like Torres.”
I considered the consequences of this. “You mean Perfecto won’t be angry with me for slugging him?”
“You broke his nose; he broke your leg. You’re even.” She sat on her cot and watched me.
“Even after I called him a puto?”
Her feet hung off the bed, and she swung them back and forth. “Perfecto won’t hold a grudge against you because it’s not genetically possible. Understand? You fit the mold of the man he was created to protect and serve, and every fiber of his being knows it.”
This surprised me. I remembered how Perfecto had tried to befriend me from the moment he saw me. “But won’t he know that I fit the mold? Won’t he resent it?”
“On the contrary, he’ll feel comforted to have you around. It’s like eating or breathing. We know why we eat and breathe, but we don’t resent the fact that we must do it.
“But because Perfecto is bonded to you, I had to speak with you. You see, he will imitate you—he will try to seek your approval by doing the things you want him to do. If he believes even for a moment that you resent my command, he could revolt. He might even attack me. He’d certainly conspire with Mavro to undermine my authority. Understand?
“That is why I must have you speak with him about me, convince him to obey me.” Her tone became harsh. “I must warn you, Señor Osic, that I cannot tolerate the slightest disobedience from you.” She stopped a moment, leaving me to imagine what her threat might mean. “If, on the other hand, you treat me with unfeigned respect, Perfecto will show me complete loyalty.”
“Ah, we get to the heart of the matter. So you want assurance of my intentions? Then I must admit: I treat people kindly from long habit, and I seldom become angered.”
She said, “I have already seen this. And I take comfort in your words. The thing I don’t understand is why General Garzón let you aboard the ship. If Perfecto has bonded to you, others may too. Your presence here could disrupt his command.”
“Garzón is indebted to me.” I said. I remembered how excited Garzón had been to get Tamara as a prisoner. His own little spy to interrogate—he might even be wringing information from her now.
But in order to keep her presence a secret, he’d have to resist Earth’s demands for my extradition—as an ambassador from Baker, someone who could grant citizenship to Mavro and me as easily as he had, I believed he’d have authority to refuse extradition.
On top of this, the fact that he had not turned me over suggested that Tamara was still alive and hadn’t suffered too much brain damage. Otherwise, Garzón would have no reason not to ship me back to Earth. In fact, he had every reason to return me as soon as possible.
My presence was certainly causing him trouble with the Alliance; and if more chimeras bonded to me, I could pose a threat to him in other ways.
I realized for the first time: Garzón had put Abriara in command of our team to humiliate me personally, not to humiliate Mavro. He wanted to make sure I remained a peon in the eyes of the chimeras in hopes that they wouldn’t bond to me.
Abriara watched me as if trying to divine my thoughts. “You won’t be able to sway me with your appearance. I was created later than Perfecto—when public opinion against Torres was so strong he knew he’d soon be assassinated. I won’t bond to you.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “A biochip is a powerful tool—especially when used to program the human mind. I was just wondering: Are there other things like this that you’re forced to do?”
Abriara smiled. For a moment, it was as if the web of light in her eyes opened, and her eyes sparkled though her voice was sad. “Don’t you know? Homo homini lupus. We kill people. We are forced to kill people like you, don Angelo.”
The way she smiled, it was like a sad joke. I was certain that she’d killed more than once, that the memory caused her grief.
There are several ways to perform such a genetic manipulation: Some hormonal imbalances can cause severe anger in a patient—so much so that the patient becomes victim to uncontrollable rage. Chimeras are marvelous fighters, but I’d never heard of them going berserk.
On the other end of the spectrum is sociopathy, a lack of capacity to feel emotion—empathy, remorse. And Bastian proved back in the early 2100s that sociopathy can have a biological base—a defective amino acid sequence in a waste product produced in the cerebrum can block the bonding sites of thymotriptine, causing the victim to lose the ability to feel remorse.
But it seemed implausible that Abriara was a sociopath. The tone of her voice showed concern for Mavro, and her sad smile when she spoke of her murders betrayed her pain.
But how much remorse? I wondered. The guilt I felt after killing Arish threatened to tear me apart. Even now it tormented me. But she only managed a wan smile. She presented me with a puzzle, and I decided to watch her, to discover what she was. She studied my face, still trying to discern my thoughts.
“I’d heard rumors of your murderous nature,” I confessed, “but I never believed them. I always thought it was just propaganda the socialists used to overthrow Torres.”
“Propaganda works best when it’s based on fact,” she said. “But we posed no threat to Argentina or even our own people. It was only when the Argentines crossed the border that they had to worry, so they twisted the truth to frighten our own people …”
The door opened and a young cyborg with a round, effeminate face poked his head into the operating room. Both his legs were metal frames, painted black, and his left arm frame was steel. The napalalene cords that served as muscles hung loosely within the frames. The massive form of Perfecto filled the hallway behind him. The bridge of Perfecto’s nose was swollen and his eyes were black, but as Abriara had predicted, he smiled enthusiastically when he saw me.
The young man said, “Sergeant, it’s time to go to practice.”
Abriara turned to him. “Zavala, meet don Angelo Osic.”
The boy nodded. “I’m pleased to meet you, don Angelo.”
“When the steers talked of shipping you back to Earth,” Abriara said, “Mavro and Zavala here swore to rip the tongues out of anyone who continued to talk like old women. Every one of them backed down.”
I took the cue and said graciously, “Thank you, Señor Zavala. You sound like a brave one.”
“It is nothing.” The youth shrugged. By the way he smiled I knew I’d said the right thing.
Abriara got up, and I prepared to follow her and I noticed I was barefoot. Everyone else was barefoot, too. “No shoes?” I asked Abriara.
“Not on ship,” Zavala answered eagerly. “Our employers won’t allow it. Also, I must warn you: When you meet a Japanese, you must lower your eyes and bow. And you must never call them names—not even steer or pubic hair. You must call them master.”
I’d dealt with Japanese clients many times, and had never heard of such a thing. “¡Me pelo rubio!” I said, “You tease me!”
“No! They even hired a cultural expert to tell us these things. On Baker everyone is Japanese. It’s some kind of experiment in social engineering, artificial cultures.”
He said the words “artificial cultures” as if they explained everything. It was obvious that whatever he’d heard had gone over his head. “Hmmmph,” I grunted.
“But you can make them act like pubic hairs,” Zavala said. “I’ll show you the trick!” He waved me forward and walked out the door.
Mavro and Perfecto waited for us to lead the way down the hall. They both slapped me on the back and shouted “¡Hola, muchacho! It’s good to see you again!” and acted so happy I thought they’d throw a party. Mavro was a full head shorter than me, something I hadn’t noticed earlier.
Abriara and Zavala led the way, while the others walked behind, and I realized they’d put me in a protected position in an inconspicuous manner. The cream-colored corridors were narrow, just wide enough for one man to walk easily, and the plastic floors bent when you put your weight on them, so you always felt as if you were sliding either backward or forward between the struts. We passed several men; each had wet hair as if returning from the showers, and we had to stop, turn sideways, and inch past one another. This was very uncomfortable, since I thought any one of them could be an Alliance assassin, and I continually fingered the knives hidden in my sleeves.
We were on the 300 level, so when we came to a ladder, we climbed up.
At the top of the ladder stood a Japanese man wearing a silk kimono, dark blue with white lotuses; a short sword was strapped to his waist. Like the gun of a policeman, the sword was a badge of his authority on ship. His build was stocky, too much like Perfecto’s to have come about as the result of the process of natural selection. It was obvious Motoki was engineering warriors on Baker, but I had to wonder what upgrades he had. He did not look like a chimera. His long hair, tied back in a ponytail, was so black it shone blue, and he had only one dark eyebrow that ran across his forehead. He didn’t even acknowledge our presence when we prepared to squeeze past him in the hall. Instead, he stared down the hallway and pretended we didn’t exist. This seemed very strange.
“Daytime, Master,” Zavala said, bowing to and addressing the Japanese. Then in an excited tone he shouted, “Noses have flown through the pudding, and salmon swim along the intestine! Hurry!” And he pointed down the ladder.
A strange expression washed over the Japanese man’s face and he opened his mouth wide, using body language so alien I couldn’t read it. He appeared very distressed, and muttered, “Hai! Hai!” and a microspeaker pinned to his robe said, “Yes! Yes!” as he hurried down the ladder.
We watched him go, and when he was out of earshot, Zavala chuckled. “See, I told you I could get him to act like a pubic hair. They all wear electronic translators strapped to their necks, and if you talk convincingly, they think that the translators are broken.”
We continued up the ladder until we stepped off at the second level. Another Japanese, a weary-looking clone of the first, walked down the corridor. Zavala sent him rushing down the ladder by shouting, “Water hernias have broken your friend! Downstairs. Japanese, downstairs!”
The corridor was like a spoke on a wheel. Six corridors met at the ladder at the center of the hub, and then each corridor also intersected a corridor that circled the ship. When we got to the wheel’s rim we turned left and followed the hall. The emblem of a green crane crossing the sun shone above a doorway. Beneath the emblem were the words: Battle Room 19.
Abriara stopped for a moment. “Is everyone prepared for a taste of the future?” she said, then opened the door: The room was small, perhaps five meters square. Pale green battle armor the color of aged foliage hung on the walls around the room like chitinous exoskeletons. A replica of a large hovercraft with an open top and elevated plasma turrets occupied most of the room. Two Japanese rigidly sat on the floor in front of the hovercraft in the ancient seiza style—feet under the buttocks, toes pointed back—a feat requiring so much flexibility that few people can manage it. The man on the left was a monster with an enlarged musculoskeletal system; he’d have stood well over two meters tall, and he dwarfed even Perfecto. Like the others I’d seen, he wore a blue flowered robe and a sword. The man on the right was small though, smaller than me, and he carried no weapons. Zavala stared at the floor and bowed as he entered the room, and each of us followed suit. The Japanese acknowledged our bows by nodding in return.
“Put on armor, quickly!” the small one shouted.
We all rummaged through the armor, looking for pieces that fit. The armor design was unlike any I’d seen before. It was thin, without the heavy concussion padding that usually makes armor so hot. It had elegant lines and joints that made its wearer appear taller than normal and made for easy walking. I soon realized why it was different: The armor was designed to reflect the beams of heat weapons, not to absorb impact from projectiles. Also, the helmet had an unusual optic system with a number of polarized lenses that rotated automatically to keep the amount of incoming light constant. This created a bulge around the eyes like the humps on the eyes of a chameleon. Each helmet had a small hole at the base of the skull so we could run lines from our cranial jacks to the simulator in the hovercraft’s computer. Normal helmets have air filtration systems, to protect one from smoke or poisonous gas, planted over the nose and mouth, but this had pipes with filters that wrapped around the face to the back of the head.
It seemed a waste to wear this armor for nothing, when we wouldn’t fight a real campaign, but it did serve a purpose: It stopped sensory leak from the real world. When one is plugged into a cranial jack, the jack bypasses the sensory and motor areas of the brain while the jack’s processor carries on a two-way conversation with the computer—the processor carries sensory input to the brain while the brain sends motor responses back to the computer. In this way, you can maintain the illusion of the dreamworld. However, the cranial jack’s bypass system is not foolproof. One always gets sensory leak from the world outside. Bright lights or loud noises in the real world can adversely affect the quality of a dream world. So by wearing the armor and helmets, we could actually reduce leakage to the aural, tactile, and visual senses, thus locking us firmly into the illusion provided by the simulator. The armor serves the same purpose as the visors on dream monitors, except that the armor shields the senses to a much greater degree.
Zavala dressed quickest, and as he pulled on his helmet he said, “Hey, look at me! I’m a big green grasshopper!” He stuck his fingers up by his head and wiggled them like antennas. The speaker in the helmet made his voice sound like the growl of an animal, but with his bulging eyes and green exoskeleton he did look surprisingly like a grasshopper.
Perfecto laughed and said, “No you’re not. You’re a praying mantis. Remember that. We’re all mantises—and the Yabajin are grasshoppers.”
The big Japanese grumbled something, and the microspeaker on his kimono shouted, “No talking!”
We all put on our armor quietly. When we were done, we no longer looked human.
The small Japanese clapped his hands and pointed to the floor in front of him. “Sit, please,” he said in halting Spanish. And we sat on the floor so we were at a level lower than them.
The small one said, “I am Cultural Envoy Sakura Chimori, and to my right is your master, Master Kaigo. He will instruct you in the arts of the samurai. We are sorry that the situation for instruction is not ideal, but we hope you will find happiness serving Motoki Corporation.”
Abriara said, “Excuse me, but I understood we were to be members of an assault team.” She nodded toward the hovercraft. “That piece of trash doesn’t have enough armor to be an assault vehicle! And what about outriders and snoopers and mini-nukes?”
The big samurai’s back stiffened, and he scowled at Abriara’s tone, though he continued staring straight ahead. The little man, Sakura, sucked his teeth to make a hissing noise and looked at Kaigo. Master Kaigo held out his hand, palm toward the floor, and wiggled it. I knew Abriara had angered them, but I didn’t understand what their gestures indicated.
Sakura turned to Abriara. “Sah,” he said, letting out a hiss. “We have no offensive weapons. If you cannot kill a man with the weapons we give you, then he does not deserve to die.
“Now, I understand that relationships between men and women are relaxed in your country. But I must warn you, Sergeant Sifuentes, things are not the same on Baker. Please quickly adopt the sweet, subservient demeanor that is so becoming to women, lest one of our samurai remove your head in a fit of righteous anger.
“When addressing the Master, drop to your knees and bow your head, then ask permission to speak. This rule is the same for all of you.” Sakura stared at each of us woodenly, to make certain we understood.
“Now,” he said, “we have told you that your work on Baker is strictly of a defensive nature. So, what gives you the idea that you are an assault team? “
Abriara’s fists tightened and she swayed from side to side a little. Her anger was obvious, though her helmet concealed her face. She said in a carefully neutral voice, “Common sense. Our contract says you’re paying our way there and back, with a stay of three months. A defensive team would need to stay years—not months.”
Sakura smiled triumphantly and his gaze drifted over each of us. “See what happens when a woman thinks!” he said. As if speaking to an idiot, he addressed Abriara. “You didn’t read your contract carefully. It said you would have a minimum stay of three months. You may be on the planet for a very long time. Let us have no more talk of attacks. We must be clear: Motoki is hiring you for defensive purposes, as we’ve repeatedly told the Alliance. And since the Alliance prohibits offensive weapons on Baker, an assault would seem implausible.
“But you should also know that the hovercraft, armor, and light plasma rifles are all defensive weapons provided for researchers engaged in field studies outside of protected zones. You may use these weapons as you will.” Sakura let the final words dangle in the air. His meaning was obvious. It was illegal for Motoki to hire us to attack the Yabajin, so they’d just provide the “defensive” weapons and a means of locomotion and let us do the job ourselves.
Perfecto bowed at the waist, unwilling to fall to his knees. “Señor, what will our enemy’s defensive weaponry consist of?” He spoke to the floor.
Sakura nodded politely, indicating that Perfecto’s show of humility was adequate. “Cities are protected by automated perimeter defense systems—puff mines, neutron cannon, and plasma turrets for the outer layers, weasels and cybernet tanks for the inner defenses.”
Abriara stared at the floor, thinking.
Perfecto said, “That’s not so bad.”
He was right. Most of the mercenaries had penetrated defenses just as tough in the jungles of Colombia and the highlands of Peru.
“I don’t understand,” Mavro said, bowing. “It sounds easy. Why do you need us?”
Sakura stared off into the air for a moment, then began an obviously memorized speech: “Over a hundred years ago, Motoki Corporation embarked on a noble experiment. Decades of complacency, Westernization, and overabundant wealth had weakened the spirit of the Japanese people, sapping them of their strength. Economic indicators clearly showed that Japan would soon lose its industrial lead to the Chinese, perhaps forever. The executives at Motoki could not allow this, so they considered alternatives. It became evident that problems in Japan could only be solved by reengineering the very fabric of society—restoring the ancient ideals of unity, honor, and willingness to work that had once made Japan strong. But success could only be assured by isolating a segment of the population, removing it from weaker cultures so it would not be contaminated. If one were to cultivate a rare and beautiful flower, one would not allow it to become pollinated by a lesser flower. So, Motoki removed a portion of its top executives—the best specimens of humanity—to Baker, and initiated a new Meiji, a cultural restoration.
“Unfortunately, we undertook this great plan in concert with the Japanese government. The government hired its own cultural engineers and selected its own representatives—lesser genetic specimens. These people were unable to tear from their souls the ignoble ideals and polluting doctrines that had so bereaved our country. They were worldly, aristocratic, and lazy. As a result, their settlements are populated by Yabajin, barbarians who seek constantly to destroy us. They have sent so many assassins to bomb our incubation stations and slay our upgraded children that the Alliance has officially forbidden the use of incubation vats on the entire planet. Not fifty years ago we were a blossoming civilization with a population of two million. Now our planet is nearly decimated, and only a few thousand remain.”
He said the last words with a tone of heaviness, signifying that the speech was over. “So, we hire you to protect our cities. However, if we exterminated all eighty thousand Yabajin, we would not repay one-tenth the damage they have done to us.”
I did not believe Sakura’s description of the political climate on Baker. I’m sure the Yabajin would have described it differently. It was clear that Sakura’s people were a race of megalomaniacs—a problem typically encountered when visionaries become isolated, as shown time and again by the festering settlements from LaGrange to Barnard’s star. Sakura called his enemies Yabajin, barbarians, yet all the Japanese I’d seen were half naked and carried swords.
When I’d signed on ship, it had been to escape Earth. I’d known Motoki wanted a soldier, but I’d imagined running a cybernet defense system, not scorching women with lasers and killing their children. The idea of committing genocide sickened me. Clearly this was not a job for me.
The big man, Kaigo, spoke in a rumbling voice, and his microspeaker translated, “We start with weapons.”
Sakura left. Kaigo instructed Mavro and Perfecto to take stations at the plasma turrets while the rest of us picked up laser rifles. For the next hour and a half he acquainted us with the weapons. The laser was similar to the one I’d shot Arish with, using the same chemical clip for power, but it had a much longer barrel and delivered 8000 degrees over an area four centimeters in diameter. With so much heat, the lenses and focusing mirrors needed much cooling, so the barrel was wrapped in insulation and cooled with liquid nitrogen. At 100 meters it could deliver a burst that the body armor could withstand for a just over a second, but on the moving hovercraft it was difficult to hold aim so long. For this reason, each laser was provided with a targeting computer connected to a focusing mirror that corrected for jostling after the trigger was squeezed. In other words, once you pulled the trigger, you hit what you last aimed at—whether it was empty sky, the head of a nail, or a man—and you couldn’t shoot again for two seconds.
The plasma turrets mounted to the hovercraft used the hovercraft’s solid fuel to superheat metal balls and explode metallic gases toward the enemy in great bursts. The turrets were more effective than lasers, since at close range the heavy gases could gouge armor in a fraction of a second. Since the turrets were so effective, the gunners became the enemy’s primary target.
After Kaigo discoursed on the strengths and weaknesses of the weapons, he made us practice reloading and targeting until we tired. “Tell me when you are ready for a battle,” he said. His tone held a note of warning.
Abriara shrugged and said, “Let’s do it.”
We got on the hovercraft.
Zavala, with the decreased sensitivity in his metal arm, seemed least capable of handling a weapon, so we put him in the driver’s seat. Perfecto and Mavro took the turrets while Abriara and I held rifles and took seats on either side of the turrets, ready to replace any fallen turret gunner.
Kaigo went to each seat and pulled out the cords that ran from the computer terminal to our cranial jacks. He plugged us in. A message flashed before my eyes too fast for me to read.
And then we were bouncing across a red desert at full speed, the hovercraft droning like a dragonfly. It would hit small dips and rises, and its whole undercarriage would shudder, making my teeth feel as if they’d rattle from their sockets.
The sky was a hazy, indistinct violet with bands of earthy yellow and green clouds that twisted from horizon to horizon like rivers in the sky. These were not gaseous clouds, but it took several moments before I realized they were animals—flocks of birds high in the atmosphere.
In the battle room my armor had smelled fresh and resinous. But the simulator supplied the nauseating odor of stale sweat, as if I’d lived in armor for months without a bath.
“Slow down!” Abriara screamed. The speakers in my helmet made her voice sound like a command from god, coming from all directions at once and filling my head.
“I don’t know how!” Zavala yelled in return.
He was fumbling with a lever when we came over a rise to a forest of giant trees unlike any I had ever seen. Each tree looked like a huge, leafless piece of coral, hundreds of meters in diameter. Yet the tree lacked a trunk, so that many limbs actually just ran over the ground.
The great limbs, as thick around as a horse, were covered with strands of moss and dark hanging vines. In places, the moss had pulled away from the tree—its branches were misshapen and white as bone. The ground around the tree was clean and windswept, but under the tree, desiccated leaves covered the ground and the vines hung in great curtains so that each “coral tree” looked like a miniature jungle in itself.
Zavala had to keep his attention on steering so he wouldn’t hit the coralwood. Abriara held railing on the side of the hovercraft and worked her way to the cockpit. We curved around a line of branches and surprised a small herd of imported peccaries. They squealed and ran under the coralwood.
We passed the coralwood and came into an open desert. Off to our left were seven large brown rocks, three to four meters long and a meter tall. They were all of a regular length and oval shape, and as we got closer I saw that they moved slowly across the sand like giant armadillos without heads or feet or tails. Their only visible sensory organs were antennae as long as whips at the front end of their bodies. They waved these around, smelling the air, as they inched across the desert toward the coralwood. Mavro fired his plasma gun into one experimentally, and the creature’s side exploded into steam while the creature flipped up on its back. We went by so fast I couldn’t see if it had any legs. But I knew it wasn’t anything created by geneticists from Earth.
“I thought they said this planet was terraformed,” I yelled over the helmet speaker.
“It is,” Perfecto shouted back. “They brought the oxygen levels up to standard. Fulfilled the minimum requirements.”
I asked, “What about the local flora and fauna?”
“They’re on their way out,” Perfecto shouted, shooting into another giant armadillo.
Since the armadillos were just computer-generated images, I decided the target practice was a good idea, and started shooting at them. The hovercraft jostled so much it was hard to hold a creature in my sights long enough to squeeze the trigger. The red dot of the targeting laser jumped all around. So rather than try to take a good shot after careful aim, I had to take snapshots. We came over another hill to a flood plain where a large river spilled its banks. Low reddish-blue plants with bulbs shaped like clear yellow pineapples filled most of the flood plain, though there were also groves of fernlike trees, and tall stalks of cotton.
We speeded over the river and began climbing a hill. The ground cleared and we entered a stand of great coralwoods and surprised a whole herd of small, gray, spade-shaped lizards. Each had a single eye on the back of its head, and each lizard trained its single eye on us as the group hopped in unison, two meters to the hop, like waves moving away from a rock thrown in a pond.
As I watched the gray lizards, a piece of red plastic fell from the sky and wrapped itself around one of the largest lizards.
“Hey, that was a manta ray!” Zavala shouted, pointing at the red plastic.
It was indeed shaped like a ray, and I realized this piece of plastic was some type of avian preying on the lizard. As we passed I stood up in my seat to try to get a better look at the struggle.
A siren made a “beep, beep,” and I suspected the hovercraft’s computer was warning me to get back in my seat. A line of vines hung from a coralwood limb in front of us, and I spotted a hovercraft behind them just as jets of white-hot plasma spattered across my neck.
The concussion spilled me backward over the hovercraft and my gun flew into the air. I hit the ground with a thwack, cracking the armor on my chest.
The plasma melted through my neckband, onto my throat, and my helmet filled with steam. I tried to breath, but the smell of charred flesh and smoke made me cough. I began to wretch, struggling to breathe. I curled into a ball and tried to pull my helmet free.
Our hovercraft exploded in a ball of blue.
I lay on the ground pulling at my helmet’s magnetic latches. Oxygen deprivation disoriented me, making me miss. The plasma burned into my neck, and the melted armor soaked down my skin. I vomited and blacked out.
***