Cung shouted and raised my rifle, twisting towards the new hole in the roof with great speed. He was definitely a professional, which was unfortunate because I wasn’t lying. There was a loud click as the gun failed to fire, and I got to witness Cung’s fearsome look shift to one of shock and fear. Right after that it shifted to pain as an armored figure stepped out of the billowing dust and slapped the rifle out of his hand. He grabbed the man up by his shirt and lifted him fully into the air.

  It was person-shaped, vaguely. Two arms, two legs, a torso and a head, all encased in gray and black heavy powered armor. It also had long, curving horns, jutting a foot straight upwards from its head. As far as intimidation tactics went, sticking horns on your armor to make yourself look taller was pretty weak. What wasn’t weak, however, was the fact that it was lifting a grown man in full battle rattle a foot off the ground, with a straight arm. Everything was suddenly very still and quiet, except for the occasional boom of a cannon going off outside the warehouse.

  The armored figure held up one of its hands, and a needle extended from its big finger. I noticed, idly, that it only had four, three long ones and a thumb, with a middle finger nearly half again as long as any of the others. Cung made a choked noise as he saw this and snatched his pistol off his belt, firing point blank into his captor’s face. Bullets ricocheted around inside the torture chamber, one grazing my right wrist, another flying straight backwards and punching through Cung, and several more bouncing to unknown ends before he ran out of ammo. The figure didn’t seem to mind the bullets whatsoever, and sunk the needle into Cung’s neck, then stood stock-still.

  Nobody seemed to be minding little ol’ me right then so I glanced down at my bleeding right wrist. The leather strap which held me down had a nice hole at the edge, which gave me a little hope, and I began yanking and jerking my arm. Once again I was glad for the genetic revitalization, because it took all of my strength to free myself, strength I might not have had if I hadn’t had all my fat trimmed. With my free arm I reached over to the torturer’s little table and snatched a scalpel off of it. One quick slash later, and I’d freed my other wrist. I went to work on my ankles while the armored figure grunted something in a language I didn’t understand and dropped Cung, who scooted backwards away from it, holding a hand over his wounded gut.

  The armored monster went to Steve next, who cowered and whimpered a little bit as it jammed the needle into his neck. I paused to wonder if Cung had any bloodborne illnesses, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t my problem and rolled off the torture table. Quickly and smoothly so as to not draw attention, I moved over to my bandolier and plate carrier, still laying where they’d dropped it after stripping it off of me. My rifle was lying behind mister needlefingers, but my kukri was still firmly attached to the plate carrier, and I pulled it out. Clearly, the man was confident in his armor, because he didn’t even turn to look at me as I rushed him. It gave me pause, but I’ve never been one to abort from a stupid plan because it seemed a little impossible.

  Crossing the distance in two steps, I heaved the kukri down at his elbow joint, a snarl of savage joy on my face. The blade sung as it cleft the air in two and cracked straight down through his elbow, unhanding him. He reared back in eerily silent agony and turned to cuff me in the side of the head. The blow tossed me across the room, cartwheeling as I did, and left me reeling on the floor, seeing stars and tasting blood. My kukri had dropped from my hand when I was struck, and the thought occurred to me that maybe I wanted to get that back, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Dimly, I was aware that the thing’s missing hand had already stopped bleeding.

  Then, the armored bulk of my opponent moved in front of me and crouched down so he was face-to-face with me. I tried to say something, but my mouth wasn’t quite working properly, and only blood came out. In the back of my mind, the computer inside my head warned me that my jaw was broken, and that it had already numbed the injury, which I thought was nice. It was less nice when the armored figure jammed his needle in my neck, none too gently.

  “Melvin,” Blart’s voice appeared inside my head. “Are you still alive?”

  “Oh yeah,” I thought, partially to him and partially to myself. “Yeah, I’m alive. Chopped a guy’s arm off.”

  “Good, I’m amazed you haven’t managed to get yourself killed without my guidance. Look, there’s going to be some more company coming, very shortly. You only have to live long enough till they arrive to rescue you. Don’t piss them off, and they’ll probably treat you well. Do you understand?” As he finished, the armored figure straightened up, and my computer detected that he was transferring something to the outside.

  “Sure, whatever you say Blart,” I told him, only barely paying attention. The armored figure went for an odd-looking pistol with a glass pane at the end of its barrel from under the armpit of its wounded limb, so I threw myself to the side. What looked like a straight bolt of blinding white lightning sprang from the gun’s mouth, accompanied by the sound of a handclap. It was accompanied by a stomach-churning wave of agony rolling through my shoulder, but it was better than dying in a flash. The thing, in near silence, reared back and booted me in the ribs, tossing me against the wall and dropping me right on top of my rifle. My ribs felt loose and somehow floaty with the numbing, which I categorized as bad news.

  My left arm wasn’t working that well anymore and my brain had never worked so great in the first place, but my instincts were that of a trained man-killer. My body reacted according to its years of training and experience under violent conditions and little else. I rolled over the rifle, grabbing it up with my working arm, and laid on it to still the recoil. There wasn’t time for a well-aimed shot, so I let the gun rip on full-auto, cutting across the thing’s legs. My rounds punched through his armor, which shattered violently with a terrible cacophany as he dropped to the ground. Just then, Cung leapt on him, having grabbed up my kukri, and with a shout, he brought it down on the horned figure’s throat, cleaving deeply into the less armored joint there.

  Gunsmoke trailed away from the barrel of my gun like a gray serpent slithering its way up through the air between us. Very slowly, he took his hands off the handle of the kukri and raised them in a placating gesture. For my part, I kept clutching closely to the gun. It wasn’t that I expected Cung to try and kill me if I let go of it, it was more that I don’t think I quite had the wherewithal to stand in that state. Perhaps fortunately, I wasn’t going to be given the opportunity to find out.

  The sound of heavy armored boots crunching on stone from above warned me that something bad was about to happen, and I heaved myself to the side, rolling with the gun to point it upwards. Standing up there was another of the armored figures, this one taller and without horns, and carrying a ludicrously huge cannon braced on his hip. It was two meters long and had a massive bore, the type of gun one might mount on an APC, and the man was hefting it like it wasn’t too terribly big of an issue for him. He was raising his weapon to a braced position, probably to shoot me, when something slammed into him from the side, bearing him to the ground. As I watched in stark amazement, the creature, something like an armored cuttlefish with a shell, wrapped its tentacles around the man’s arms and legs. The nightmarish armored squid strained with effort for perhaps two seconds, tops, before twisting and tearing the person’s arms off. Hot black arterial blood burst from the wounds and splashed to the ground in front of me, splattering me with the fluid, but after the initial splash, the wounds didn’t bleed either.

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  “Drop it, baseline,” a voice came from my right, I looked over, my reflexes sluggish, and watched as a person simply appeared before me, wearing a large, streamlined suit of armor and pointing a big ass handgun directly at my nose. I shrugged and allowed my precious rifle to drop to the ground, figuring I didn’t have much fight in me left, anyhow. Above us, the sounds of some inhuman thing shrieking continued, along with the metal-on-metal noise of the squid beating a man to death with his own arms, freshly pried loose from his body. “Good. Hands up.” I raised my right hand, but the other one still wasn’t participating. Opening my mouth to say something dumb, blood poured out instead of words, and I only managed a moan. Despite that I couldn’t see his face, I felt as if he was giving me a profoundly disappointed look.

  Another figure materialized out of thin air, apparently dropping his active camouflage. The pair looked at one another, and I felt like they were communicating through onboard systems without me being privy to it. Finally, after a couple of seconds that seemed much longer, they seemed to come to a decision, and began to quickly move around. Before I could see anything else, I’d already passed out, slipping into a deep slumber.

  I dreamed of my farm, and Lefty’s, and knocking back a few beers with the guys, before all this had happened. It was nice.

  - - -

  When I woke up, I was terrifically thirsty, very cold, and as naked as I was thirsty. Spears of light seemed to pierce straight through my eyes and into my skull, and I spat a curse at the world for deigning to keep me alive once again. I half sat up, my head swimming, and looked around once it cleared. I was in a glass tube on an angled metal gurney, looking out at perhaps a dozen other tubes, their glass blackened. It seemed like my body was working as well as it ever had after a quick once-over, so I heaved myself forward and put my hands on the glass. It didn’t open, so I tried thinking at it to open it. When that didn’t work, I readied myself to kick the glass when a voice entered my mind.

  “Hey, don’t do that, I don’t want to replace the explosive bolts.”

  “What? Who?” I asked back.

  “Daniel Cross,” the voice responded in good cheer. “Captain of the ship you’re on. Also the guy responsible for stitching you back together and purging the drugs from your system.”

  “Purging the drugs from my system?” I wondered to him. After a couple of weeks I’d figured that they’d already all be gone.

  “Yep. Weird cocktail of stuff, looks a lot like hypnotherapeutics. Long-term stuff meant to lurk in your system for a while, but it seemed like you’d missed more than a few doses. They were wearing off already, probably going to start making you act unpredictably. Better off without them.”

  “Thanks,” I told him, not certain whether he’d done me a favor or not. “Say, if this is your spaceship, does that mean we’re already in space?”

  “No chance of that one. Every railgun on the planet is working overtime, scanning and sending out enough active signal that it would be suicide to try to lift off at this point.”

  “Well, shit,” I muttered, working my plan back and forth in my mind.

  “Yep. Gonna have to throw your lot in with me if you want any help. Why exactly did the riders want you, anyway? Them breaking cover to find you is a level of audacity that they almost never show. They’ve got to believe you’re something special. Combine that with your obviously altered genetics and the interstellar age tech you’re lugging around, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. Spill it.”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I’ve been going from one catastrophe to the next on a daily basis for what feels like ages now. First the buttsquid tricks me into banging him, then this huge guy and his extremely foxy girlfriend-”

  “Fellow Dragons,” Cross interjected drily, while I internally noted that useful little detail. “She's his partner, not his girlfriend.” I filed that fact away as far more interesting than the name of the organization these guys were a part of, before going on.

  “Right, those guys tried to kill me, then my own government, and most recently some guys I’ve never met before. It seems like every other person in the world wants me dead.”

  “Any ideas as to why?”

  “Probably my winning personality,” I guessed. “The other… Dragons… seem to think that I’m important to someone, so they wanted to send me off to a prison planet.”

  “Now that is interesting,” he responded, in a tone that I wasn’t so sure that I liked. “So how do you feel about blowing up your whole society?”

  “I’d prefer to return to my house and get a couple beers in me,” I replied honestly. “But seeing as how the USAS wants to kill me and my whole hometown is irradiated, that’s not an option. Matter of fact, the only way I’m gonna get any rest and relaxation is if I go against them. If it’s them or me, and it seems like it is, I’m gonna have to choose me.”

  “Good! We can start working immediately. Do you have a plan?”

  “You have a space ship! Why do I have to make the plan?” The bastard didn’t say anything in response at all, and I sighed. “Yes, I’ve got a plan. We’re gonna blow up the moon base and hold all the lunar He3 processing facilities hostage until they give me a pardon.”

  “Great! That plan is fantastic. The only problems are that it’s incredibly stupid, doomed to fail, and doesn’t help me in my goals at all. But we can fix at least one of those problems. Let’s take it step by step. What do we need to do first?”

  “Well, first we have to find my pig…”