“Yes, me,” he said again. None of the others said anything; they wouldn’t meet his gaze. That confirmed his decision. Ichika would be safe.
“Huh,” the Aposo said. “You are protecting your mate?” He pointed a finger at Ichika, his rat-like whiskers twitching.
“Yes,” he admitted. “You have your choice, do it.”
“Certainly,” the Aposo said, and shot Ichika through the chest.
He screamed and held her as she bled; he was unable to stop the bleeding. The blood flowed out into little floating constellations of horror, and he cried out her name over and over. Her eyes went blank, and she died in his arms. The Aposo laughed as they left.
* * *
The starport was a backwater affair. The small group of Humans mainly survived off Sato’s technological prowess. He’d learned a lot about alien technology, and his brain never stopped absorbing new knowledge. He didn’t know why he went on living. The others were constantly trying to find a way home, making money wherever they could. One by one they’d disappeared, dead or gone, and Sato didn’t care. His love had died in orbit over this world, and here he would die, as well.
Two days ago, a starship had half landed, half crashed. Its reactor was failing. It should never have been allowed to land, but the place was a real shithole, so it had happened anyway. As it sat there slowly going critical, the starport’s denizens had fled for their lives.
Sato had calmly walked aboard the ship and stabilized the reactor. The captain had given him a thousand credits, which he numbly pocketed, and went back to his dump of a shop. When a pair of his fellow surviving Humans heard about the money, he gave it to them. When they left, he thought he might be the last. It didn’t matter.
“Are you the one who stopped that starship from exploding?”
Sato looked at the new arrival in his ramshackle repair shop/apartment. “Yeah,” he said. The speaker was an alien he’d never seen. It looked a lot like a howler monkey.
“You are Human, right?” the alien asked. Sato nodded. It looked around his shop, and Sato went back to fixing the little autochef someone had brought in. Figuring out tech was one of the few things he still found pleasure in. “Why did you do it?”
“Huh?” he asked and looked up.
“Why did you walk into a fusion bomb to fix it instead of fleeing like everyone else?”
“I wanted to see the reactor. It was a model I’d never examined.”
“You risk your life to look at a reactor?” Sato shrugged, and the alien laughed. “Why are you here, Human, so far from home?”
“Why do you care?”
“I’m curious about your race. It is my job.”
Sato put his tools down and told him, why he’d been out in the galaxy, why he’d been heading home, and how Ichika had died. “There’s nothing left for me on Earth.”
“Why didn’t you kill yourself?”
The question was more straightforward than he’d been prepared for. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Cowardice, I guess.” Suicide was common in his society. Death didn’t scare him. Yet here he was.
“I don’t think so,” the alien said. “You still find pleasure in technology, it would seem.”
“Perhaps,” Sato admitted. “But that might be all.”
“It was Aposo who did it, right? Killed your mate?”
“Yes,” he said icily. “What do you want?”
“The Aposo have been researching a new weapon. They have developed a fascinating particle beam system that shows great promise. Would you be interested in seeing it? I could arrange to get you into their labs.”
“Aposo labs? Only if I could kill them, too.”
The alien smiled. “That can be arranged as well.”
* * *
Sato walked out of the labs calmly and hailed a flyer. A minute later, as it flew toward the starport, a massive detonation went off in his wake. The robotic cab rocked, and alarms sounded. He’d cut it close. Too close. Behind him, nine city blocks were devastated. The blast had been more than was strictly necessary, but he’d found sabotaging the fusion reactor in the basement much easier than simply setting charges. Everyone in the buildings was Aposo, anyway.
When he sat down in the little pub with a view overlooking the starship landing field, the alien who’d set it all up joined him a minute later.
“Kinda got carried away, didn’t you?” it asked. In the months since he’d met him in the shop several systems away, Sato had learned he was an opSha.
“The entire lab complex was involved in the research,” Sato said. “You told me to shut it all down.”
“You get the data?” Sato slid the little case across to him. The alien made it disappear.
Sato held up his hand with the gossamer web-like glove called a slicer. “This went right through their perimeter encryption like it wasn’t there.” The alien held out a hand, and he reluctantly gave the device back. In exchange, the opSha slid a one-million-credit chit over to him. He looked at the money dispassionately, then pocketed it with a shrug.
“Anything else I can do?”
“You know you probably killed a thousand or more?”
“Aposo, no major loss.”
The opSha gave a little grunt. “Congrats, you passed the test.”
“What kind of test?”
“The recruitment kind. You want more work like this?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“You can help keep the galaxy from burning itself to pieces.”
Sato snorted and gave him a sideways look. “The galaxy can take care of itself.”
“How about more credits?”
“I don’t know what to do with the ones you just gave me.”
“Okay, how about technology?”
Sato’s eyebrows went up slightly. “What kind of tech?”
“Like you’ve never dreamed of.”
“Does it involve killing more Aposo?”
“You never know.”
“Okay,
