Once I was out of the little glass tube, I had a good stretch and looked around. There were people in the pods around me, I’d heard them breathing, so I went and checked on each of them. They’d grabbed up Cung and one of his men, as well as Steve, all floating in a pinkish fluid. Each of them were nude and still in a coma while their tanks flushed and they were awoken, a process that took several minutes. I heard the sounds of footsteps and slithering from the other end of the room and turned to look. Moving towards me were two humans and a mollusk. The man in lead was wearing a sleek, shiny black suit of armor, and he looked like he’d been pulled directly out of a recruiting poster. Hazel hair, serious, dark blue eyes like the deep oceans themselves, and an incredibly square jaw. He struck me as the captain.

  Following him was a beautiful blonde bombshell of a woman. Light, bright, curious lavender eyes, a heart shaped face, and curves in all the right places. I thoroughly appreciated whoever had designed and built the same sort of streamlined metal suit for her that the captain was wearing. She was flawlessly gorgeous, like she’d stepped out of a movie. If all women in space were as pretty as her and the other space girl I’d met, I resolved that I was going to have to give up living on Earth forever. Finally, to the captain’s right, there was the squid-thing. It was large but low to the ground, with four long tentacles that curled away from its body. Each one had a beady black eye sitting above where the tentacle met its body, and they all seemed focused on me. The thing seemed to glide across the ground, carrying the bulk of its upper body and a huge crystal shell on its back. It was absolutely horrific, but I’d be damned if I was going to show any fear, so I clasped my hands behind my back.

  “So, we meet again!” The captain called, his voice rich and baritone, as perfectly sculpted as the rest of him. He paid my nudity no mind as he offered me a hand for shaking, which I took.

  “Oh, yeah, we meet again, for sure!” I said, having no idea if I’d met him before. Maybe he was the guy in power armor that got the drop on me at the end there, he moved the same. “Say, how about a pair of pants? I’m a little bit cold, here.”

  “Sure! Can also get you your rifle and gear back, if you’d like it.”

  “Don’t gotta ask me twice,” I told him, and he led me to the back of the medpod bay we were in. When we got to the back wall, it sank perhaps two inches with a slight hiss to reveal seams in the walls I hadn’t noticed before, and parted in the middle to reveal an armory, absolutely full of spare suits of armor and weaponry. My eyes must’ve grown wide as saucers, because the captain looked over at me and chuckled.

  “Like what you see?” He asked me, and I nodded dumbly.

  “Maybe one day you can afford some of it,” the woman spoke for the first time, her soprano voice pure, clean, and nearly sing-song in the still air of the chamber.

  “Sooner rather than later,” I said, not worrying too much while I crossed the room to grab a pile of clothing which had been folded on top of my gear. I picked up some clothing for Cung, his buddy, and the nerd, and returned to the other room to put them in front of their tubes. They were still being steadily woken up by the machine. Apparently the proper way to do it took several minutes. While I was waiting, I figured it would behoove me to hold a few more cards, so I popped onto the planet’s datanet through the shipboard computer and helpfully posted some pictures and bulletins.

  A few minutes later, I watched Cung wake up in his pod first. He was confused and surprised at his surroundings, and I helpfully told his pod to open with a thought. The man tumbled out of the pod and onto his hands and knees before me, obviously slightly delirious. I gave him a firm kick to the ribs for good measure, and he fell over and snarled at me.

  “What was that for?” He asked me, rubbing his side.

  “Trying to have me tortured, dick! You’re lucky I don’t shoot you out of hand. It’s been six hours, wake up, it’s time to go kick some ass.”

  “What ass? What are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to go grab my pig, then we’re assaulting the local railgun facility while the daugs are busy burning down half of Hanoi.”

  “I’m not helping you! I need to get my people out of Hanoi and go to ground!”

  “About that…” I said, grinning at him.

  “What have you done?” He asked me, warily.

  “Well, I accidentally posted pictures of you and your men to the internet and flagged multiple agents within the security bureaus. Your identity is very well known nowadays.”

  “You son of a bitch!” He roared, lunging at me. The little guy was fast, and he slammed his knee into my chest before I could lay my hands on him. Unfortunately for him, a plate carrier works pretty well at absorbing regular low-tech attacks as well as bullets, and I barely staggered before I twisted and hammered a fist into his face. He stumbled backwards, seeing stars, and I moved in to grab him.

  This turned out to be a poor decision, as he reversed my grip nearly as soon as I snatched his shirt and swept me to the ground. He tried to get an arm bar on me, but I used my significantly greater weight to roll over onto him and smash my forehead into his nose. If it wasn’t broken before, it definitely splattered with a gush of hot blood on my face when it made contact. His concentration was temporarily broken, so I reared back and dropped a knee into his solar plexus, driving the wind from his lungs. Before I moved to do it again, though, he popped me in the throat, and I rolled off of him, hacking and wheezing, putting some space between us and leaning on one of the med pods. For a few moments we were both still, resting and trying to catch our breath.

  “You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?” He groaned.

  “I’d say we’re about even.”

  “Yeah, fine, if I have no other option, I’ll help you,” he said, finally sitting up.

  “I figured you’d say that,” I responded through gasps of air. “Look on the bright side, your people can finally be free!”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever you say,” he told me. “Why aren’t the people who brought us here helping?”

  “The more they act in public, the more likely the Archaeologists are to notice them. That happens, and they react with extreme force.”

  “How do they do that without getting noticed themselves?”

  “All sorts of ways, but usually they watch for wherever the rider agents go, then drop a rock on them. Call it an ‘accident,’ and both sides are content to sweep it under the rug. They’ll have to be a little bit more creative since the USAS has installed all these railgun bases in the past decade and change, but they’ll figure out a way.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “So the bottom line is that it’ll be our blood spilled and not theirs,” he deadpanned at me.

  “Something like that, yeah. Look, don’t go all cowardly and pear-shaped on me now, Cung. We take over the local railgun, and we’ll be golden. The rest of the plan is fool-proof!”

  “Well that’s fantastic news, given our leadership,” he grumbled.

  “Look, they’ll join us after the railgun is secure and surveillance is offline. Once we get to the moon, everything will go too fast for them to react. Stop whining, call your people, set up a meeting, I’ve got to go.”

  “What are you going to be doing?”

  “I’ve got to see a man about a pig,” I declared confidently, and then set off towards the ship’s airlock.

  - - -

  Blart had been penned up by animal control a few hours into my most recent stay in a medpod, and he’d been sending me messages every few minutes about how bad he had it. His worrying ranged from being discovered, to being eaten, to being purchased as a pet by some family. I didn’t dignify any of what he was saying with responses, instead simply making my way towards him on foot steadily and without concern. The ship had been set down at the edge of a rice field outside of town, the mouth of its airlock peeking out between the twisted, exposed branches of a huge tree and covered in three inches of water, which promptly splashed down over me when I opened it.

  On my way to Hanoi proper, I noticed that there were whole parts of the city which appeared to be on fire. No doubt it was the work of reprisal attacks, done by the occupying forces of the army contingent. Plumes of smoke rose, kilometers high into the air, and as I walked I frequently walked by little knots of people. All of them had a certain look about them, a hollowness to their expressions.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t know where they were going, though they clearly didn’t, it was the profound expressions of loss. Their very postures seemed to be weighed down with the grief of losing everything they had, except the clothes on their back. When they moved by, none would look directly at me, as if letting their gaze wander unbidden onto even my boots would invite further violence into their already destroyed lives. For all I knew, the regulars of the USAS army might do just that. As a marine, I’d never stuck in one place very long to see the aftermath of my missions, and I wondered if this was usual.

  When I was halfway to the city I took a break, leaning against a fence that denoted the edge of a farmer’s field, and watched them go by. The procession was eerily quiet. Not silent, for murmurs and the cries of children still drifted from the line of people, but not nearly loud enough for the scores of people passing by. One woman limped along, carrying a bundled blanket in her arms. There was an awful dark splotch on it that I recognized as blood, and I turned away, no longer able to look. I stood up from the fence, stony-faced. If I couldn’t make what I’d done right, I could at least figure out a way to make their sacrifice mean something. This whole thing couldn’t go on, or at the very least, I couldn’t live with myself anymore without trying to stop it.

  When I reached Blart’s location, nearly on the other side of town from the Watering Hole, I walked straight into the front and looked around. The man behind the counter looked somewhat nervous when I walked in, sitting up straighter and putting down the novel he’d been reading.

  “How can I help you today, sir?”

  “Looking for my pig, you caught him yesterday,” I told him, and he cringed a little bit.

  “Sir, that pig bit five people, three of them very badly. I’m afraid that we have to put it down. Please understand.”

  “Look, I don’t have time for this. I need what the pig was carrying.”

  “Carrying? Sir, the pig wasn’t carrying anything. He’s… a pig, sir.”

  “Right,” I sighed, rubbing my face. Blart had probably anticipated that I’d leave him if I could get away with it and ditched the pack somewhere only he could lead me to. “Look, here’s five thousand dollars,” I said, pulling a wad of cash from one of the pockets on my vest. “I’m going to take my pig back, and you forget you ever had him. Does that work?” The kid’s eyes bulged at the money, probably more than he’d ever seen in his life in one place, even in an account, and he nodded eagerly. “Good. Glad we worked this out.” I walked past him, into the back where the animal cages were, and looked around till I found Blart passed out inside his cage.

  “Hey!” I said, giving the bar of the cage a good kick. “You didn’t sodomize one of these other poor animals while you were stuck, did you?”

  “What?” Blart asked, waking quickly. “No, I don’t sodomize- look, it’s been weeks, I’m integrated with this host, it would take surgical intervention or a days-long process for me to be removed. The host won’t survive.”

  “What, really? That’s the best news I’ve ever heard! That makes you much more bearable to be around! Anyway, come on out of there, we’ve got things to do.” I reached down and unlatched his cage, pulling it open and letting the little porker trot out. “Where did you stash those gravplates?” I demanded as soon as we’d walked out.

  “What, no ‘thanks for saving me?’ No questions about how I pulled off your magnificent rescue again?”

  “You can answer those questions while we go,” I told him, not caring about the answer. Leadership was about giving people enough of what they needed that they’d do what you wanted, after all.

  “Yes, well, we need to go to the roof of the radio station by the river. It’s got some of my tools hooked up to it, too, and we’ll need to get those as well.”

  “Your tools? You had tools?”

  “What did you think that those things I took from the ship were when you were pulling it apart?”

  “I dunno, personal items? Asking a sodomy squid like yourself what he’s got in his bag seems like a good way to learn something you don’t want to know.” In response he glared at me with his beady, piggy little eyes full of hatred, which I steadily ignored. Finally he went on.

  “A few simple tools, though far better than anything your pitifully primitive planet could hope to produce. It was enough for one so clever as myself to affect a rescue, however. You see, I knew from the briefing I received from my people that there were two squads of dragons on the planet, one on each hemisphere. I only had to get their attention.”

  “Oh, so you lit them up on the radio?” I said, it becoming more clear to me. The little guy actually was proving to be kind of useful, definitely more so than the pasty nerd I’d pity-kidnapped.

  “Well, not exactly. I wasn’t sure how to contact them, especially not in a way that would also alert the Archaeologists. I did, however, know how both would react to a force of my people showing themselves in broad daylight. So-” he started, but I gave him a solid boot in the ribs, causing him to squeal and roll over. I pounced on him, dropping a knee into his stomach and baring my teeth.

  “You’re telling me that you told the USAS where I was?”

  “Ah! No, I lied to them about where I was! I transmitted with an encryption I knew that they knew the codes for about an agent of my employers on the planet at your location!”

  “Oh, that’s so much better,” I grumbled.

  “It all worked out, didn’t it? The riders sent their goons in, and the Dragons showed up to deal with them and rescued you!”

  “How did you know the Archaeologists wouldn’t show up first?”

  “Well…” he trailed off. “It seemed… unlikely that they would want to get directly involved…”

  “Pig, you ever pull a stunt like that again, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” I pushed off of him and dusted myself off, angrily.

  “Get over it,” Blart said as he pulled himself up. “The riders probably wouldn’t have killed you, once they got a little bit of your altered genes. They’d have taken you in for questioning. The dragons also usually don’t kill anyone they don’t have to, they’re soft like that, and the Archaeologists are the same. They’d have pulled you off planet. It was a good gamble, and it paid off!”

  “Yeah? Just hope it doesn’t backfire,” I told him darkly as we walked towards the radio station.