After two days, I was able to reliably pick up an egg or a beer mug in my new hand without crushing either of them. Given that I was multidextrous, a trait highly sought after and thoroughly trained in the drop marines, physical therapy was actually a little more difficult for me than for a normal person. After all, when I had difficulties, I could always resort to my other hand. As such, the captain had declared that I was only allowed to drink if I used my new right hand, which meant that I went nearly ten whole hours without drinking a full beer. It was practically cataclysmic for me, though at least I didn’t start getting the shakes. Clearly, they’d repaired that too. Either way, I managed it despite Steve’s poking fun at me.

  At the end of the second day, Cung showed back up with his squad. The nine Vietnamese fighters, along with his buddy who we’d kept in the medpod as an assurance of his return, looked damned fierce. All of them were obviously veterans who’d trained to fight against occupation forces for most of their lives, and they carried their weapons with the casual competence I’d expect from such people.

  “What the hell happened to your arm?” Cung asked me as soon as he saw me.

  “Someone shot it off,” I told him simply. “It’s fine now.” I raised my hand to give him a thumbs up and the limb only jumped up a little faster than I expected. He gave me an uncertain look. “Don’t worry about it. These the guys who are going up with us?”

  “The whole squad,” he agreed.

  “Nice to meet you guys,” I told them. None of them looked as if they agreed. As a matter of fact, the lot of them seemed like they wanted to kill me, and I wondered what Cung had told them.

  “None of them want anything to do with you. We’re here because you represent an opportunity, nothing more. Do you understand?”

  “You’re so warm, Cung. Come on, get your guys suited up. Got some nice new armored plates and helmets that seal against vacuum.”

  “I want to see the captain,” he announced, stubbornly.

  “Up to him if he wants to talk to you,” I said, shrugging. I didn’t send him a message, figuring he had cameras in the belly of the ship. No sooner than I’d finished saying it, the elevator door hissed open, and Captain Cross stepped out, big movie star smile on his face, with the squid following.

  “Gentlemen!” He told them, spreading his hands in a friendly manner.

  “What is your endgame here? Why are you helping this man? Do you know of the things he’s done?” Cross gave them an amused look at the barrage of questions.

  “Look, I understand that you all are under a lot of stress. I want you to understand, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, that I could not possibly give less of a shit what he, or you, have done. He’s one man. The USAS is a whole organization. If he’s the tool I need, he’s the tool I’m going to use. Think you can work with that?” Cung glared at the man with a look like he’d bitten into something he didn’t like. For my part, I wasn’t upset at all. I’d been a tool all my life, usually a hammer, or perhaps a fuel-air bomb.

  “Yes, fine,” he said, and gestured to his men, who went down to the ship’s armory to replace the plates in their carriers and grab laser rifles. They were stripped from a crate and smelled like preserving ointment, but they were all fully charged, with extra batteries. To make a long story short, getting shot with one would probably be unpleasant. “Other than the new toys, what will you be doing for me, Captain Cross?”

  “Soon as it’s clear, I’ll be joining you on my rocket ship. We’ll have ourselves a little pincer move.”

  “Yeah? I guess I just have to believe that, too.” The captain didn’t respond, simply giving him a winning smile. Cung spat on the floor and grunted, then walked away to grab his own new pieces of equipment.

  “One last thing,” Cross said, grabbing my metal arm and turning me towards him. “You’re key to this. I’m loaning you a suit of armor that I got our engineer to retool. It’s light, only powered enough to carry its own weight, but it’ll keep you nice and safe from most harms. Regular infantry weaponry should bounce right off it, but try not to get tagged by anything heavy. HEAT rounds from your tanks will still kill you, and a few tons of rock will still smush you flat. Deal?”

  There was no way I was going to say no to an offer like that. Fully kitted out in a matte black suit of sleek, effortlessly lightweight, and air conditioned armor, I was about as happy as I’d ever been. Despite themselves, the men of Cung’s squad seemed to be enjoying their new tools as well. The lasers were devilishly accurate. If you could see it, you could shoot it. Their armor weighed a third as much as they were used to and would stand up to double the punishment, and the bodysuit we’d given them to wear underneath was totally vacuum sealed. All in all, it was a pretty good deal.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  We’d timed our attack for the last reprisal strike on Hanoi. They’d been raising hell and burning things for days, now, and tonight was their final night out on the town. They’d have left almost nobody in the barracks so they could cause the most trouble with the final raid before they were finished. All of this information had been found by Captain Cross and fed to me while we were working through my plan, doing all sorts of revisions.

  Cung and his men grouped up in the belly, ready to load into their lifted trucks, and I looked across them, counting. I came up one Steve short and turned around to stalk across the bay. I got to the elevator and willed it to come pick me up. Before five heartbeats had passed it popped open to ferry me up to the ship’s workshop area.

  “Hey, skinny, you ready to go up here or what?” I asked, looking into the large room. It was filled with all sorts of interesting-looking tools, about a third of which I couldn’t guess the function of without searching with my NII. The ship’s engineer, a huge, crablike creature moved toward me from the back of the lab, stopping short a few feet from me to speak. The hands at the end of where its pincers should have been were the only things which moved while it “spoke” using a complex form of sign language with its ten fingers per hand. Luckily my NII translated automatically, giving him an irritating, posh British accent for some reason.

  “Steve is ready, and so is the inertial dampening gravplate array. You will return Steve to me. I have become attached to Steve. Do you understand?” I blinked at the crab, wondering when that had started and what exactly he meant by “attached.” It wasn’t terribly important, though.

  “Sure, I’ll do my best to make sure he doesn’t die. Come on, Steve, it’s time!” I shouted, trying to get a view into the workshop from around the engineer, who’s name was a term that described his specific pheromonal signature. My NII didn’t have a concept similar enough to compare for what his name described, and of course it didn’t have a pronunciation. Everyone called him Chief Engineer, which seemed to suit him fine.

  Finally, the huge crab moved to the side and let Steve by. He patted the alien on the side a couple times in friendly fashion as he walked by. Before he reached me he paused and glanced back. Something seemed to pass between them in that second, but it wasn’t for me to know. Either way, Steve must have gotten some work done in the medpod here himself, and seemed much healthier than he had the last time I’d seen him. He was carrying a duffel bag on his back and wearing a Total Environmental Protection Suit, or TEPS, of his own, and I was nearly certain he’d gotten an NII as well. I managed to hold my tongue until we got to the elevator, but no longer.

  “So, attached to the crab alien, huh?” I asked him.

  “We’re good friends!” Steve said. “He doesn’t even have compatible genitalia for-”

  “Oh, you already found out? First question you asked I bet. Hey, no sweat, I’d do the same thing.”

  “No it wasn’t- wait, really? You understand?” I looked over at him with an expression not unlike a cat looking at a cornered mouse.

  “Yeah, I understand what you meant by you never having kissed a real girl!” The guffaw that accompanied the sentence found its way out of me totally involuntarily. “None of them had the exoskeleton for it? Or is it the mouth mandibles that do it for you?”

  “Chief Engineer’s species are hermaphroditic! Tezabians aren’t he’s or she’s!”

  “Oh, that’s mighty kinky. You know, if we get the time we could head down to the islands between here and the Australian sector, I hear-” That’s about the time that he punched me a good one. I grunted, surprised more that the strike had hurt than that he’d done it. I’d have punched me, too. Either way, I drove an elbow into his face and bounced his head off the elevator’s wall, and the brawl was on.

  Between my decade of training and experience and my impervious right arm, he didn’t have a chance, but he got in more hits than I would’ve thought. He’d definitely had work done, and the extra muscles he’d gotten weren’t for show. He seemed faster, too, to boot. By the time the elevator door opened into the ship’s belly, I had him on the ground with my good arm wrapped around his throat, and he’d broken my nose. I let go and shoved him off me, getting up to stretch.

  “Gear up, Steve,” I told him as he turned around, ready to go again. The words seemed to take the wind out of his sails. “Draw a laser rifle and a couple grenades. Gotta get you back safe.”

  “What, really?”

  “Of course. Remember your rifle course from high school? These are set up the same way. I don’t expect you to be our designated marksman or anything, but it’ll keep you safe.”

  “Oh, well, thanks,” he began, but I cut him off.

  “Thank me by not screwing up when you do your nerd shit.” He nodded and turned away from me, but I still saw the small smile on his face. With the pleasantries out of the way, I walked up to Cung, who was waiting for me, wearing a somewhat impatient frown.

  “Go time, anything left to say before we go?”

  “Plenty, but little we have time for,” he practically spat at me.

  “Look, Cung, I can clearly tell that we aren’t going to get along. I’ve killed more than my fair share of you guys and you’ve probably killed a USAS trooper or three yourself. But we’ve got a common goal now. Can we put our differences aside until we finish this whole thing? We can go right back to killing one another afterwards, I promise. You’ll even have a team of your guys beside you to back you up when you stab me in the back.” I offered him my hand to shake. He glared at my limb briefly as if it might bite him, before relenting and snatching it to give it a shake.

  “Fine. Teammates. For now.”

  Just like that, me and Cung were best friends.

  - - -