Directly to the right of the entrance, a table of suits were the first to be interrogated by the daug in lead. He charged forward, big, overlong arms reaching forth with grappling hands. With one explosive heave, he tossed away the wooden table between them and smashed one of his titanic, meaty fists into a hapless businessman. It made a sickening crunch, mirrored by the same sound repeating when the suit slammed into the ground two meters away. At that point, the screaming started, and I leaned over to snatch Steve’s shirt, pulling him over the bar. I popped back up to grab his noodles, avoiding making eye contact with the next one through the door who was still trying to figure out who he needed to interrogate. They really didn’t like it when you looked into their eyes.

  As Steve hit the ground on my side of the bar he began blubbering in undignified fashion, but he stayed down so I ignored him. I kind of doubted he’d want a box to go, so I grabbed his order of spicy noodles and chicken and started to tuck into it with abandon. When I heard a pig begin to squeal, I figured that trouble would soon be coming my way, so I drank the last bits of broth and pulled up my rifle, checking to see that it had a round in the breach. Having verified everything was alright, I looked up to take stock of the situation and drained the last of my beer while the daugs rampaged. One of the mutants was beating a drone puke to death with another one, while the other had cornered Blart, a swathe of bloody destruction in his wake.

  “Help me you ape!” Blart’s voice shouted in my mind as I heard the smash of glass and wood. The whole telepathy thing was still surprising to me, so I jumped at the cry, but not hard enough to disrupt me sighting my rifle. Daug craniums were augmented with steel plates all over them, and their brains were massively cushioned by the large interior of their skulls, so it was best to try to shoot them through the heart and lungs, with a normal rifle at least. During my time, I’d had to put down more than one of the things when it’d gone totally berserk, a mildly common occurrence.

  I mentally flicked the gun over to three round burst and fired one off dead center at the daug who was about to kill my pet pig. The rounds easily pierced through his leathery skin and armored plates and punched into the flesh underneath, but the big galoot wasn’t quite ready to die yet. Instead, he turned toward me, wildly firing the gigantic shotgun bolted to his arm as he did. Its sound was like a hammerblow to my temples, seeming to vibrate me down to my bones. Heavy, depleted uranium balls shredded through a pair of businessmen in the corner, and I put another burst into his chest.

  Something must have hit the right place, because he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. His buddy twisted around, having finished beating both of his targets to a bloody pulp, and sighted his big, idiot eyes on me. Blood ran down his chin, and I briefly wondered if he’d bit his tongue or the man that he’d been using as a weapon.

  Seemingly wanting to give me a chance to inspect the body to find out, he slung his makeshift club, now a corpse, at me from across the bar. I ducked down to avoid it, throwing myself to the side. The expected shotgun blast came, and it turned out that I probably hadn’t needed to take cover, as the thing shot about a meter and a half above me. Another concussive kick to the chest barely preceded a blast of wood splinters an inch above me as it fired off another shot, and I suddenly thought better of moving out of cover.

  I scooted myself on my belly down the wet floor of the bar, ignoring the roars of the thing as it kept firing off rounds from its huge backpack belt in the same area. I popped around the far corner of the bar, doing my best to not draw attention. It didn’t even glance over, far too focused on its steady demolition of the bar. It would probably keep firing like that, roaring and carrying on, until its 200 round backpack mag ran out, so I let him go, lining up a nice shot on his big, bald dome. The three round burst scooped his entire head off, and he fell to the ground, his body twitching and shotgun continuing to blast off as his nervous system misfired in death.

  Standing up and dusting myself off, I reloaded the rifle and strolled back to the bar. The daug’s shotgun had left a hole in the bar counter large enough for me to step through, which I did on my way to pour myself another beer. Eventually, as I took a sip, Steve picked himself up from behind the bar, his eyes wide and wild and his pants thoroughly pissed. He wandered around the bartop numbly, holding it to keep himself steady, and flopped down in one of the stools.

  “What… what the fuck was that?” He asked, his voice a bit too loud from likely hearing damage. Strangely, my ears felt fine. I took another long pull of my beer and looked at him like he was crazy. “Did you… why did you do that!?” His voice was steadily building to a crescendo as he continued to panic. I kept staring at him, wanting to see what he’d do. “You destroyed this whole place!”

  “I think they did that,” I said, at conversational volume, gesturing to the daug I’d shot first and giving him an innocent look as I started to bring the beer up to my lips again. Steve stepped forward and slapped it out of my hand, sending the glass sailing to its eventual doom, shattering on a wall. The bar was totally silent after the tinkle of glass finished, and I glared at Steve, who’s eyes grew a little bit wide when he realized what he’d done. He opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t get it out before I punched him in the face over the bar. He dropped onto his back, groaning and holding his nose. At that point, Clark walked out from behind the back, looking like a stormcloud rolling into town.

  “Why the hell did you do that?” He roared at me.

  “Guy was an asshole and was gonna bring me in! I don’t have a passport to be here!”

  “Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to this whole city when they find out that this guy went missing? Do you even know who that guy was?” I wandered over to the corpse and searched it, yanking his dogtag off in the process.

  “Field Agent Darren O’Connor,” I drolly said to him, as if presenting an interesting fact I’d learned from the cap of a juice bottle. I returned to one of the stools and plopped down. “I’ll take another oat stout, by the way.”

  “Why the hell should I do anything for you?” He asked me furiously. I popped my duffel bag open and produced a half dozen ten thousand dollar wads of bills, dropping them on the counter. “Get your family out of here, buy a farm, I don’t care. Look, I’m a wanted man, Clark. I need to meet up with these rebels so I can get the force I need to fix all of this. Do you understand me? I’m not exactly thrilled about the prospect of being tortured to death, so it’s resist or nothing. I can’t go back to my house, neither. This is it, my one shot.” Some of the rage seemed to leave him as I spoke, a change no doubt helped along by the cash. “How about you pour me another beer?” I finished, and he sighed.

  “Fine, yeah,” he said, pouring one for himself too. “I always wanted to see the Caribbean,” he told himself, taking a pull from his own beer. Steve pulled himself to his feet again and found his way back to a stool, not quite glaring at me. “I already contacted the guy I know in the rebellion, he’ll probably be here any second. Soldiers will probably take half an hour or so to respond, if I’m right. I’ve got an arrangement with the local commander about trouble which goes on here, and I doubt our friend Darren got a call out.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  I downed half my drink before asking for a shot of irish cream, and by the time I’d finished throwing back the combined concoction of the two I heard boots on the ground behind me. I spun in my chair to see who it was, and was greeted by four men with soviet bloc assault rifles. They were all distinctly local, and distinctly unhappy to see me. The man in lead came forward, stalking towards me with the precision of a Swiss watch. Tan, black hair receding slightly above his temples, narrow eyes and a square jaw, he looked me up and down. I gave him a winning smile.

  “Who are you? Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused?” I was beginning to get tired of that question.

  “Melvin Winsor,” I said, sticking out a hand to shake with him. I knew that the AI had downloaded a translator for vietnamese and tweaked it for me, but I had no idea how it worked. I resolved to go with it. Like the centipede who thought too much about how he was walking, I didn’t want to accidentally forget Vietnamese. “I have some idea, yes.”

  “Then why!? What did you want so badly that you brought this ruin?”

  “I’m glad you asked!” I told him. “You see, I got in some serious trouble for blowing up a planetary defense railgun back at my hometown.”

  “Holy shit, Cung, you have to see this,” one of his buddies said, gesturing to his phone. The leader turned away from them and I took the opportunity to reach over the bar and pour myself another beer at random from the tap. It smelled faintly of citrus and was a pleasant golden color, I thought, before somebody hit me with a stun rod and threw a hood over my head.

  - - -

  As luck would have it, this wasn’t my first go around at being electrocuted, handcuffed and ziptied, thrown into a van, and driven to a secondary location. It was, however, the first time that I could use a computer and my newly upgraded senses at the same time to fairly accurately gauge my near surroundings by hearing alone. It was something I hadn’t even realized that I could do until I was all but blind and had finished spasming. After that, it came naturally, with a bit of focus.

  I could even tell the guys in the van apart, and could tell that they’d grabbed and taken Steve as well. Something told me that, if I had enough time to concentrate and figure it out, I might be able to discern more exact details, but for the time being able to hear and recognize the heartbeats of the guys I was riding with was more than good enough. Blart was probably off doing something foul and underhanded, which was probably better for us than having to explain why, exactly, I had a talking pig with two huge platinum discs walking around with me. It was an eighteen minute drive, and I could recall exactly the time it took between every single turn from where we’d left, from the memory granted by my NII. It was exhilarating. We stopped, and one of the guys pulled out his stun rod.

  “Hey, no need for the stun rod, I’ll go cooperatively,” I said conversationally.

  “Good,” was all the man formerly in the front passenger seat responded with after he shared a look with his comrade. He moved around and the door opened, and I stepped out deliberately slowly.

  “Say, why’d you grab me anyway?”

  “One hundred thousand dollar reward for your head, Winsor,” Cung said. “That’s a lot of money.” I chuckled in response, and this seemed to make him angry. “Won’t be so funny once we start pumping you for information.”

  “Awwwh, come on now, you don’t want to do that,” I told him as I was pushed through a warehouse. They pulled up what looked like a big trapdoor and led me into a basement below, shoving me roughly towards the stairs. I think the guy wanted me to trip, but I somehow heard the stairs coming and was able to regain my balance after I hotfooted down the first few steps. Once I got to the bottom, they tore my hood off to reveal a classic ‘enhanced interrogation’ chamber, complete with multiple steel tables, chairs, and all sorts of bizarre and looking instruments. I could hear another person’s heartbeat in the connecting room.

  “Real professional setup, it would only be completed by a creepy old man torturer,” I joked. A few seconds later, the torturer walked in, and as luck would have it, he was a stooped, ancient man with only nine fingers and a face covered in burn scars. “Hey, he is creepy and old!”

  “Get him on table one, the smaller one can go on table two,” the torturer said, avarice mixed with something darker in his voice.

  “Look, there’s no need for all of this. We can make a deal. A few hundred grand is nothing compared to freeing the whole planet, right?”

  “What are you babbling about?” Cung demanded.

  So, I told him. Everything that had happened over the past few weeks. I spun it into a pretty long story, going into every tangent and side alley I could think of along the way. It helped that he asked me questions occasionally to test me, many of them repeated ones about the same part of an incident. At one point he had me do incredible feats of math and look up every capital city of the African sector to prove that I’d gotten an implanted computer. Eventually, it got tiring, so I moved right along to the plan I’d cooked up with my former ship’s AI. Finally, I’d run out of things to say, so I simply sat back and watched him, waiting for a response.

  “So…” he started, his voice betraying that he seemed to actually believe me, “you want a huge distraction, and a team of my best men to assault the base, at which point you’ll-”

  “It’s best to think of it in phases, so it sounds more reasonable. We need to find my pig, he’s got what I need. Unfortunately he probably thinks that you’re still my enemy since the last he saw was you kidnapping me. It’ll all work out though, I promise.”

  “Yes, your… talking alien-infested pig. I think I am going to go with my original plan and torture all information out of you then turn you in for that bounty. First off, what is this rifle?”

  “Space technology, it’s got magnetic coils and a space-age battery inside,” I told him simply. “Shoots real good, but it only works for me, because of the computer. Look, I’ll sell Steve to you, he can be your science bitch, build you your own fusion reactor. Or nukes, or whatever it is you want. I’ll give him plans, he can build whatever you like. I need your help in this assault.”

  “Science bitch?” Steve asked.

  “Sell him?” Cung glared at me, disbelieving.

  “Yeah! He’s what you need, you guys are what I need. Let’s make a trade.”

  “We don’t purchase slaves,” Cung declared flatly. “But,” Cung cut Steve’s sigh of relief short, “this trade does seem too valuable to pass up. Unfortunately, there’s no reason for me to not turn you in and keep him.”

  “Well, alright then,” I said, coming close to the end of my rope. The old man picked up a hand drill from a table next to me and showed it to me, leering down at me.

  “So, what’s the local garrison like?” Cung demanded.

  “Oh, come on,” I responded. “I’m from across the planet, how would I know what’s in the local garrison?”

  “Right, have it-” he started, but there was a cry from outside, and the sudden, deep-chested bellow of a heavy gun. The torturer let out a frightened squeak and turned to look up, pure terror in his eyes.

  “Well, now the daugs are here, and we’re no better off than we were five minutes ago. Great.” As the gun sounds got a bit closer, though, I noted with some curiosity that these cannons didn’t sound quite the same as a daug’s. It wasn’t the type of thing I saw fit to tell my soon-to-be torturers.

  “Quick! Break everything down!” Cung shouted. “We have to-”

  He didn’t finish his sentence before the roof fell in.