“That baseline shot out my eye,” a man’s voice grumbled as I woke up with a splitting headache. The world was entirely black, and briefly I thought I’d been blinded before I realized that my face was covered with a black sack. “Can you believe that? My suit is covered in blood too. I’m gonna have to figure out a story for why I’ll be gone for a week repairing the eye. The suit is going to be a write off, probably.”

  “Would you shut up?” the woman came back. I felt a turn, then, and realized that we were in some sort of moving vehicle. Being moved to a secondary location, clearly. Not a good sign. “Always whining with you.”

  “Look at my friggin’ face!”

  “I’m going to shoot you with something that actually will penetrate your thick skull if you don’t stop whining. By the way, our guest is awake.” My eyes widened a little bit. I hadn’t moved, I was controlling my breathing, how could she have known? “I can hear the change in your heartbeat, Melvin. You have no idea how deep of shit you’re in.”

  “Oh, come on. I feel like I’ve got some idea,” I responded, the words agonizing as they worked their way out of my parched throat. “This already isn’t my idea of a good time,” I groaned.

  “We don’t care,” the man said. “You’re going away for a long, long time.”

  “Somewhere nice?”

  “No, the closest thing to Hell that exists in our dimension. We’re gonna toss you on a prison planet and forget about you. Problem solved.”

  “I don’t even understand what I’ve done! Who are you people?” As I asked this, feeling rather sorry for myself, I felt the car stop and heard the doors open. I was slugged in the gut and dragged out of the car, heaving and gasping for breath. Before I knew what was going on, I was physically lifted off the ground as they pulled me around, a feat which was truly impressive. I don’t think I’d been manhandled like that since I’d made the unfortunate mistake of mouthing off to a platoon sergeant wearing a loading exosuit without realizing his rank. Finally they shoved me into a chair, chained my hands behind my back, and then to a chair.

  That done, they pulled my hood off, and the woman was standing above me. I looked into her beautiful, pale blue eyes, so pure it was as if chipped ice from a glacier ringed her pupils. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Well you’re a sight for sore eyes,” I responded. Perhaps the barest hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips even as she sighed and straightened up. I looked around and realized that I was in a tiny interrogation chamber. Table in front of me, mirror on one wall, steel door, and a room slightly too cold for comfort. All standard interrogation chamber type things.

  As the woman walked out, I checked her out. How could I not? She would put every supermodel and movie star I’d ever seen to shame, and walked with a casual, dangerous grace. It was like seeing a tiger in motion, something exotic, beautiful and deadly. Even though her pale skin and dark hair weren’t unknown to this part of the world, the woman practically screamed that she was something foreign and exotic in the way she moved. She opened the door, turned back as she did and speared me with an odd look. I gave her my best winning smile, which was probably ruined by the blood in my mouth. Despite herself, she chuckled and walked out, shaking her head.

  - - -

  I waited there for some time. It was hard to tell how long, but I figured it was a few hours given my natural clock, my grumbling stomach. Manipulating a subject’s sense of time was a typical part of a good interrogation. During resistance training they’d kept every drop marine awake for days at a time, beat us with anything they had at hand, pulled out fingernails, dislocated limbs, made us eat unspeakable things, and generally abused us in every other way that they could possibly think of that wouldn’t cripple us, for nearly a month and a half straight. For some it was longer, for some it was shorter, half of the point was that you didn’t know how long it was, and there were rumors that occasionally marines would be tortured to death. All the instructors did their very best to make us believe those rumors before we went in, and to this day, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were true.

  As far as interrogations went, this wasn’t so bad yet. No scorpions on the floor, high doses of hallucinogens or freezing water, and they didn’t have subsonics on or anything like that. I doubted they would do anything worse than what was done to me during training. Most people washed out during the training course, as the whole point was to torture the prospective marine until he gave up a code phrase. Honestly, the worst of it was that I was growing a little bit peckish by the time someone opened the door again.

  The woman walked in first, trailed by her companion. She was tall, easily six and a half feet on the heels she wore, while the man had to be at least another three or four inches taller than that. He wasn’t lanky, either, like most beanpoles his size. Instead he was as terrifically muscular as any bodybuilder I’d ever seen. His face on the right side was terribly bruised, a complete mess of black and brown, and his eye had a wad of gauze taped over it.

  “Hey, you got something on your face,” I told him. He walked up and backhanded me, and I saw stars. When my vision cleared, I worked my jaw, feeling that I had a couple loose teeth from the blow.

  “I would suggest that you don’t act smart,” the woman said to me. Perhaps there was the tiniest bit of pity in her gaze.

  “I’ve never been a good actor,” I said, and spat some blood onto the table. “And it sure don’t come natural.” This actually got the briefest of smiles from her before she sat across from me.

  “So, it’s confession time,” she said. “Did you, Melvin Winsor, willingly join into the United States under American Sovereignty’s military forces as a soldier?”

  “Hell no,” I responded. Her trained gorilla leered at me and moved forward to strike me again but I opened my mouth to continue and he stayed his blow. “I was a marine. It’s different.”

  “Noted,” she agreed simply, and waved a hand for the man to back off. He looked like he wanted to break my neck when I said that I was a marine. His contempt for my kind struck me as strange, given that he didn’t appear to be one of those conscientious objector types.

  “Did you willingly participate in the Second Central American Pacification, the Fourth and Fifth South American Police Action, the Second and Third Southeast Asian Police Actions, the Second Japanese Action, and the Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Sino-Slavic Pacifications?”

  “Sure, also a couple tours in Euro Sector, though those were vacation tours.”

  “And during these fights, did you knowingly target civilians?”

  “Nope,” I responded simply. “Never killed anyone who wasn’t a combatant.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “Look, we know how the USAS operates. You guys use atomics or orbital kinetic strikes on people, then they send in you marines to go and kill everything with a pulse. You guys slaughter the natives of the other countries on this world in job lots.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, we are only sent after lawfully identified combatants. I’ve only ever killed rebels and combatants. I’m no daug, I don’t get my jollies in tearing people limb from limb or violating corpses. I’m not an army boy either, they’re the ones who deal with pacified civvies. We are exclusively sent after mean, nasty assholes who need killin’.” She kept staring at me, somehow giving me the distinct impression that she was looking through me. It was kind of a creepy feeling.

  “I can see the electrical impulses firing inside your brain, you know,” the woman finally told me, those hypnotizing eyes unblinking. “I can watch your thoughts as they progress glacially across the surface of your brain.” The creepy feeling definitely got much worse with those words.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Look, you dumb alcoholic,” the man barked, in unnecessarily rude fashion, while he leaned forward and gripped the edge of the metal table. Rudeness seemed to be a theme with these people. “We only look like you.” I noticed that he was bending the metal of the table slightly under his hand.

  “We’re from another version of Earth where instead of the USA undergoing a silent coup in the forties because of a power struggle regarding nuclear munitions, they delegated control of strategic weaponry entirely into civilian authority.” My eyes widened at that. The thought was completely insane to me. Civilians controlling the bombs? “Instead, we got along with our neighbors more or less, until we had to abandon our world for the good of the species or all die. That was six hundred years ago, and since then we’ve developed our technology far beyond what you have on this little dirtball.

  “Me and my partner here are posthumans, genetically engineered to deal with all the hostile aliens that inhabit the galaxy with us. Your planet, here, when it was found, was declared to be the greatest source of sociological research we’ve ever found, and cordoned off by a group who call themselves the ‘Archaeologists.’ I don’t know why, in the decade I’ve been watching I’ve seen nothing but you neobarbs slaughtering, burning, pillaging, and raping one another nonstop. Seriously, in twenty years of service you’ve personally put down nearly ten different ‘rebellions’?’

  “Well, the other peoples of the world need to live under our supervision to achieve the greatness that the USAS has. They’re like teenagers living with their parents.” I didn’t believe the propaganda in my heart of hearts, but the words seemed like they came up and out of me all of their own accord. For all I knew, the line might have been true. She pursed her lips slightly downwards as I said that, examining me as if I’d done something more interesting than regurgitating canned propaganda.

  “More like the USAS has done everything in its power to stomp and grind the other peoples of this planet into compliant slave-states,” she told me with something strange in her voice. Pity? Sadness? Whatever it was, she was about as impressed with the propaganda as I was. “I’m here to try to figure out a way to put a stop to this grand experiment, against the wishes of several other groups. Whether they be other human factions, or alien ones, it doesn’t make a difference to me or the people who hired me.” Comprehension dawned in my mind. Blart. Though I had a pretty damned good poker face, it didn’t seem to impress her, because she leaned back with a satisfied look on her face.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “So, you have met them, then,” she said. “The riders. Disgusting beings, I wasn’t actually certain that they had an interest in you. Thank you for confirming that. Working with them is low, even for a USAS jackboot. You know that they are probably waiting for you to let your guard down to climb inside you, right?”

  “Well,” I started, but she waved her hand.

  “It seems like you actually don’t believe that you shot any civilians, though that might be because you’re drugged, conditioned, trained, and thoroughly propagandized. Probably also a little dumb.” I took umbrage at her statement, but figured it wasn’t worth raising. Besides, she was likely saying it to put me off balance.

  “So, you’re going to let me go?” I asked, hopefully.

  “No, we’re going to have to extradite you to a nation that believes in group justice,” she responded aloofly, but when she went on her tone softened a little bit. “I’ll try to get you a term of hard labor rather than a summary execution. Besides, if I let you back into the population, chances are better than even that the riders who’re puppeting your government will find you and make use of you, for… whatever it is that they want with you.”

  “Wait, that isn’t right!” I protested. “You can’t kidnap me off my homeworld!”

  “Who’s gonna stop us?” The hulking man asked from his position at the door before the pretty woman went on.

  “Your government is hunting for you openly, now, and I’ve got sources that say there’s another group out there looking for you, entirely apart from my people. Therefore, if I remove you from the equation, I stymie them. It isn’t a final victory, but it’ll help to put me ahead. Keeping you out of your government’s hands might gum up some plan of theirs, which I’m always a fan of, and it’ll throw a wrench in the works of whoever else needs you, whether they’re a rival group of riders or some foreign power. I’m not sure which one it is, but I know it’ll screw with them, and that makes me happy.” If I thought I liked the way she looked, I loved the way she sounded. Screwing with the plans of others on principle was something I could always get behind.

  “So… this interview is over? I guess there’s no chance for me to get a date?” She gave me an amused look, and got up from the table. “How about dinner? A sandwich? I’d settle for a side salad,” I said, but she closed the door before I finished the sentence. Her companion remained in the room, giving me a baleful look. “What?” I asked him.

  “Just getting a good image of a fake marine before we put you in stasis and ship you off,” he said, a grin splitting his features. “This all couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.” I was going to ask him what he meant by that, but then an explosion rocked the facility. There was a crashing noise from above, and the rippling cracks of automatic gunfire. “Oh, what now?”

  The man turned and ran out of the room, leaving me alone to think about how thoroughly fucked I was. I couldn’t turn that thought in my head around too many times though, before I got bored of it. Instead I was thinking about when the next time I’d get a sandwich and a beer might be when the ceiling shattered. A familiar-looking potbelly pig dropped from the ceiling directly onto the table in front of me, and bounced off of it with a pained squeal.

  “Blart!” I shouted, happier to see the buttsquid than I’d ever been to see anyone in my whole life. “You came back for me!” The squid got up, and I saw that he had somehow gotten himself equipped. He was wearing a ballistic vest with pouches full of magazines, and what looked to me like a big, boxy rifle on his back. My kukri was in one of his side pouches, and he had a bandolier with several grenades on it. Many of the clips for grenades were empty, I noticed, but didn’t question further. He was kind of cute that way, to be honest, like a little battle pig.

  “Of course I returned to retrieve you! Don’t insult me, I’m a professional, unlike yourself, you drunken, dirty ape!” When he finished that, he drew the kukri out of his side pouch and moved around behind me. The sound of metal-on-metal rang out, and suddenly my hands were free.

  “Awww, I missed you too, Blart!” I stood up and stretched, letting out a groan of satisfaction as what felt like every bone and joint in my body cracked. “Say, don’t suppose you brought lunch and a beer for me?”

  “Of course you’re thinking of getting intoxicated right now. No, I didn’t! Now take this weaponry, we need to get out of here!” I did as he asked, more because it was nice to be armed again than because I cared to follow his commands. “Be careful with the sheath for the knife, it’s magnetically active to keep the edge from contacting anything. Put it in slowly and carefully.”

  “I’ve heard that one before, though usually from better-looking sources.” Blart gave me a look, not understanding. “Don’t worry about it. How did you even get in here?”

  “I used the ship and some grenades to alert the local USAS garrison that an insurgent cell was holed up in here, something which may have further consequences. They’re currently doing a full assault. We’re going up through the hole I came in,” he said, gesturing with his snout to the hole in the roof. I hopped onto the table and started to reach upwards before I felt a nip on my calf.

  “Ouch, you little bugger!” I said giving him a solid kick in return.

  “I can’t climb, you retarded ingrate! Lift me first!” He was right about that, so I didn’t respond except for a grumble, instead grabbing and lifting him with a puff of exhaled air. I’d barely gotten him into the hole when the door crashed open, and the black-haired man in the suit burst into the room, breathing heavily and covered in blood. He had a nice-looking heavy pistol in one hand.

  “We’re blown, we need to-” he started to shout at me, but he’d made a serious mistake when he came in. He was moving through the door while looking behind, probably thinking I was still securely bound to the table. I figured this was as good a time as any to test my new rifle. I snapped it up to my shoulder and let off a burst. To be honest, I was expecting my shots to bounce off him exactly like my shotgun’s, perhaps distract him at best. Instead, the three round burst punched straight through him, passing through his chest lengthwise. He went down instantly, gurgling blood. His remaining eye gave me a hateful look, and he feebly tried to raise his gun.

  I hopped down and kicked it from his remaining hand. “Guess you’re not gonna get to send me anywhere, huh, bud?” He hacked up another gob of blood in answer, then died. “That’s what I thought. Only one life taker in this room, bitch.” I barked a laugh, dropped the rifle to hang from its sling, then hopped up onto the table and heaved myself into the dusty corridor above. Blart was waiting, giving me a distinctly unhappy look. Without another word, he took off when I got myself up. I followed him through the building at a run, and realized that we were in one of the unused barracks complexes on the railgun’s base.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” I asked Blart.

  “This is where they brought you,” he responded simply. “Perhaps they chose this location in order to hide in plain sight. No civilian would ever wander out here or ask about what was going on, and with your pathetic computing technology, faking credentials would be as easy as tricking someone of your limited intelligence.”

  “One of these days I am gonna shoot you, squid,” I muttered.

  “But not today, because you still require my aid,” the pig responded over his shoulder, perhaps with a bit of smugness in his tone. We burst out the back door into the cold air, and I realized that it was a little after midnight. There were four APCs out front of the abandoned barracks, the entire base’s complement of the things. I knew for a fact that they only had thirty men on the whole installation, and I saw a bunch of them out front of the barracks as well. Luckily, nobody manning the guns seemed to notice us leaving in all the commotion. As I followed Blart, I realized we were going the wrong way.

  “Hey, idiot, the exit is towards the fence, not the central railgun.”

  “I know that, we have to take down the railgun,” he said as we turned towards the reactor building.

  “What? Why?”

  “If we’re going to get back into space we’re going to need it to not shoot us down. Therefore, we need it to be offline.” Not a second after he’d finished what he was saying, I heard the roar of an explosion behind me, and glanced over my shoulder. An expanding fireball was rising in the middle of the four APCs, and I could have sworn I saw a humanoid figure charge out of the fireball towards the next vehicle in line. I won’t lie, that scared the living shit out of me. Nothing I’d ever seen would survive being at the center of one of those microfusion plants going up.

  “Quickly now, we don’t have much time,” Blart said as we reached the armored steel door to the base’s reactor bunker.

  I didn’t have the proper identification to get in, so instead, on a hunch, I shouldered the rifle, flipped it over to semiautomatic, and fired off a round into each of the hinges and a few at the lock mechanism. The rounds punched straight through them, and when the last one was down I pulled on the door, letting it fall off its hinges. We rushed in, moving towards the basement, while I wondered what type of rifle I was holding. No weapon of its type I’d ever held before could punch through armor rated for high-yield explosives. When we busted into the control room, there were two nerds on site, both unarmed, standing together with their hands up. One was younger, maybe in his thirties, with blonde hair and brown eyes, while the other was probably in his sixties, bald, and looking more irritated than frightened.

  “Calm the fuck down!” I roared at the two men at the top of my lungs.

  “We are calm!” The younger of the two eggheads said back, his voice cracking with panic. The older one glared at him with naked contempt.

  “Shut up! We need to take this reactor down!”

  “I’m loyal to the USAS! I’d sooner die-” the old four-eyes began, so I shot him dead on the spot. The round slammed through his left eye, causing his head to explode from the hydrostatic shock. Flying wildly, the round tumbled out the back of his head, shearing into a large console behind him which crackled and smoked with uncontrolled electricity. There was a large flat screen behind him that flashed up a warning, saying something about digital safety protocols being inoperable. The bullet shattered and went on to hit a tube behind the console as well, punching a dozen tiny holes in it. These hole punches held for only seconds before they ruptured into one melon-sized hole that hemorrhaged a clear fluid and bled cold mist into the air.

  What can I say, I liked my new rifle. It barely kicked at all and it was extremely well balanced. I suspected there was some sort of magnetic acceleration going on in the barrel, since it had a nice boom-crack sound to it, and it seemed to shudder in my hand a little strangely, but I wasn’t sure. What I was absolutely sure of was that it was an awesome piece of kit. If Blart ever wanted it back he’d have to fight me for it. I changed mags and looked at the other egghead, who was gaping like a fish and half-covered in his coworker’s brain matter.

  “T-that’s the deuterium flow regulator,” he said, gesturing to a large device, high on the wall, that connected to a pipe leading into the reactor chamber. “If I shut it off it will starve the reaction.” He began to move towards it, but I shouldered my rifle, flipped it over to burst fire, and let ‘er rip. The three rounds smashed through the device, which shattered into debris and fell to the ground. A series of heavy, low clangs echoed within the pipe.

  “There, done.” I said, proud of myself for outsmarting the skinny little nerdlinger.

  “Do you… have any idea what you’ve done?” He turned around, panic clear on his face. Emergency lights kicked on, and a blaring set of klaxons began to sound as the world became red and flashing. The hypermasculine automated warning voice bellowed through all the speakers in the base helpfully at that point, letting my know exactly what it was that I’d done.

  “EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY! AUTOMATIC SAFETIES INOPERABLE! FLOW CONTROL MODULE CRITICALLY DAMAGED! DEUTERIUM FLOW INCREASING BEYOND RECOMMENDED MAXIMUM! CASCADE FAILURE IMMINENT! EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!”

  “Fuck.” It wasn’t my best line.