She gave me a funny look. “What do you think we should do now?”
“Play dead until they’re sure all resistance is broken, then surrender.”
She ran her quick eyes over the scene. Legion Varus troops were crawling over the island. There were brief fire-fights here and there. For the most part, the dog-gorilla-boys took the worst of it. They were still shell-shocked from the air strikes, and nowhere near as well-trained anyway.
“We’ve lost this base,” she said. “Did you arrange this somehow?”
“How could I? I’ve been watching dogs piss on my bars for a week.”
Her eyes got all squinty. “I wouldn’t put anything past you at this point. It seems like too much of a coincidence that your transport showed up a week after you did, and they took us out like they knew exactly what they were doing.”
I shrugged. “It hardly matters now. Let’s just lie low.”
She glared at me, full of suspicion.
“Say,” I said, smiling. “How about after this is all over with—”
Abigail shook her head. “Don’t even try asking for a date in my prison cell. That’s not how things are going to happen—not this time. I’ve got to move on, James. It was nice seeing you again.”
Then, she showed me what she had in her hand. It was a plasma grenade, and it was pulsing brightly.
Scrambling away, I ran over the beach on all fours like a crab. There wasn’t time to get up and run properly—in fact, there wasn’t any time at all.
The explosion caught me right in the tail-feathers. I was kicked and rolled, and my ass burned like hell. A thousand tiny grains of sand had sprung up and shot as many holes in my posterior.
Groaning, bleeding, and gasping for breath, I rolled onto my back. I could hear myself wheezing and giving long slow moans. I was breathing my last.
A trooper showed up less than a minute later. He approached me rifle-first and poked me in the ribs with the muzzle.
“Who are you?” the kid demanded. He looked like a fresh recruit, yanked off the streets of Brooklyn or Miami, scared and dangerous to anyone who wasn’t wearing the same uniform he was.
“Centurion McGill, third cohort, third unit,” I managed to wheeze out.
“Centurion?” Confused, the kid looked around. He signaled a veteran, who trotted over and eyed me critically.
“What’s this?”
“A human prisoner, sir,” the recruit said.
“We don’t take traitors as prisoners, son. Shoot him!”
“But sir…”
“Shoot him now, that’s an order! I won’t have any softies in my squad.”
The kid raised his snap-rifle to his shoulder and spoke to me. “Sorry, dude. I hope you really aren’t a Varus centurion.”
The snap-rifle ripped out a series of pellets, and I surely expected to be struck stone dead. But the rounds missed. Instead of tearing up my fool skull, they kicked sand up into my ear. I put my bleeding fingers over the side of my head, which was stinging in a new spot now.
“What’s this crap about him being a centurion?” the veteran demanded. He’d shoved the kid’s rifle aside at the last moment.
“That’s what he said, Vet. He said he was from the 3rd.”
The veteran came close now, and he peered at me. His face was a mask of suspicion, and never did he allow the muzzle of his rifle to leave the vicinity of my skull.
“Whoa! I know this crazy bastard! James McGill, right?”
“That’s me,” I croaked out.
“Well, what a surprise! Well met, sir.” Then the veteran turned toward the recruit, and his expression transformed into stern rage. “Why didn’t you tell me he was a legionnaire, fool?”
“I tried to, Vet. I—”
“Shut up. Go check on those dead monkey-men with the snouts over there.” He gave the kid a boot in the ass and sent him on his way.
Then he knelt beside me and looked me over critically. “You’re in a bad way, Centurion.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“What can I do for you? My suggestion, if you don’t mind me making one, is to take a bolt right now. There’s no way the bio people will do anything less when they get around to you.”
I nodded, and he lifted his weapon.
“Wait,” I said, stretching out my wrist toward his. “Here, touch my tapper.”
He frowned, as such a formality shouldn’t be necessary. If I’d landed with the drop-pods, I wouldn’t need to have my death recorded separately. It should all have been automatic.
“Uh…” he said as our tappers kissed and my vital data was passed over, “just how did you get out here, sir? I mean… this is weird. You’re out of uniform and everything… I don’t get it.”
I struggled up onto one elbow. “Let me explain it to you.”
Then I reached out a long arm and pushed his finger down on the firing stud. The gun jumped in his hands, releasing a spray of bolts.
I flopped back on the beach, just as dead as Abigail and every dog-boy on the island.
-38-
It felt like my revival took a long time to come, but that was purely subjective. Dying was a lot like sleeping after a really bad day. When you woke up, it often seemed like you’d been tossing and turning for hours.
As it was, I woke up tired instead of refreshed. My mind was churning long before my bare, slimy feet hit the cold deck.
“You should stay down a minute, Centurion,” a business-like bio told me. “Your APGAR score was only an eight—and that’s because I rounded up.”
“Using the recycled stuff today, huh?” I asked.
“That’s right. Nothing toxic, but not the best. If you would just give it—”
But I was already up and moving. I was all
