And these were just the obstacles of the earth itself. Then there was the heat. The dryness of the air. The sweat and the dust that turned to mud and baked hard in the cracks of his body. The sound of his breath rattling and the slow, spreading soreness of his throat. The ache of his over-used muscles. The throb of his bruising feet. Tagen was a soldier and he was accustomed to rough living, but there was such a thing as too much.

When he had at last succumbed to his body’s demand for rest, it had been full-on night and still hot as hell. He had made his camp in the first flat patch of ground he saw, scraping all the organic debris into a pile and igniting it with a shot of plasma. The gods knew he didn’t need the extra heat, but it got rid of the thorns and fallen branches and it was soothing to his strained nerves to see something so familiar as a fire here on this alien world. Then he had stripped out of his uniform, all the way down to his regulation loin-guard with the Fleet insignia on front, and sprawled out flat and exhausted, offering his body freely to the biting insects in exchange for the occasional blessed kiss of a breeze.

It hadn’t been the best night’s sleep, but it surely hadn’t deserved to end so suddenly. Now this human had gotten the drop on him, which was embarrassing as much as it was perilous. And here Tagen was, still in his loin-guard.

The human wasn’t paying any overt attention to him, although it had clearly seen him and was coming down the sloping hill toward him. It was dressed in a uniform of some sort, brown as mud, with short sleeves that showed off grotesquely-haired arms. The human’s gaze was occupied by a pad of papers in its hand. It was scratching at them with a stylus, writing as it approached, and speaking in a relaxed, easy-going manner.

“S’far as I know, it’s still legal to run around the woods in your underoos, but there will be a fairly hefty price for your campfire, which you cannot help but have noticed is illegal and has been illegal since the drought laid on. Son, I hate like hell to have you start your hangover on a low note like this, but you are going to have to pack up and come with me back to the ranger station. If you don’t, you are going to be under arrest.”

Tagen peered closely at the human’s lips, as though he could see the meaning of the words better if he saw how they were made. It was N’Glish, that much he recognized. But apart from a very few individual words, he had no idea what was being said and no way to form context enough to guess.

“You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, if it comes to that, since it’s your right to take this citation to court, but with the fire danger recently, I should warn you that the local judges have been known to slap a few asses in jail. So be a sport, pay up, and don’t make a hassle. You can’t win. Just grab your gear and we’ll make this as painless as possible.”

“Hail,” Tagen said tentatively.

The human looked up for the first time, one eyebrow raised. “Hail?”

Something in the human’s tone told Tagen that he hadn’t used the right word. He tried to think what other greeting might suffice. The slaves he’d encountered in the past…well, there was very little in the way of niceties. The language discs he’d studied on the way to Earth had surely told him one or two, but he’d been paying far greater attention to translating more important phrases, like ‘Take me to your planet’s security array’, and ‘Have you seen the prisoner I am seeking’? or even ‘Where is the privy’?

The human was frowning at him. Tagen switched to Panyol, with which he had greater confidence. “Hola. Mi nombre Tagen Pahnee. Soy un oficial de la ley.”

“No habla espanyol, Paco,” the human said, still frowning. “This here’s—What the hell?” Its gaze had dropped to Tagen’s feet.

Tagen was beginning to feel control of this situation slipping away. He held out his empty hands and began guardedly to rise. “All is well,” he said, picking his words carefully and with great difficulty. “I mean you no harm.”

“Stay where you are!” The human’s voice was tight, frightened but admirably determined to face off. Humans were like that. It made them, for all their foibles, very dangerous. “Don’t you move a step or I’ll shoot you where you stand!”

“I mean you no harm,” Tagen said again. His palms were itching, wanting the weight of his gun. The human’s eyes were wild with fear. “I am come to Earth seeking—”

That was as far as Tagen got. The human dropped its papers and reached for its belt.

Tagen didn’t think. He scarcely felt himself move. He dove and snatched his plasma gun from the belt beneath his cast-off jacket. He had it aimed and fired before the human even drew its weapon.

The plasma hit the human square in the chest and ate rapidly through its target, stealing the breath the human drew to scream as it burned out the human’s lungs. Its heart was gone, but the body took three brutal seconds to die while the plasma finished neutralizing itself on tissue. A small wind chose that moment to come down off the slopes, setting the high branches to muttering. It also blew away the smoke that filled the human’s chest cavity, bringing Tagen the scent of charred meat as well as the sight of trees through the human’s torso. The human staggered, spitting foam in silence, and then dropped facedown, lifeless. It landed in a thorn bush. Vines buckled up through the hole Tagen had put in it, catching in the shirt on the human’s back. He could still hear sizzling.

Tagen stood up slowly, his gun still aimed, tracking the corpse mechanically. His heart was racing, his mouth was dry. He could not take his eyes from that blackened ring that he had made of the human’s torso.

What had come over him? The humans had only the most basic melee weapons, and Tagen had shot the dumb beast with superheated plasma. He could have just reached out and knocked the human unconscious. He could probably have disarmed the thing before it had even finished pulling the weapon. If nothing else, he could have drawn his neural stunner. He could have done a hundred things, and what he’d done instead was burn a hole right through its body nearly large enough to put his own head through.

He had never killed a human before. He had seen them die, yes. Of illness, of malnourishment, of old wounds and infection, even of the stillness and exhaustion that was no more than their own grief.

He had seen them killed. Not half a year past, he had been in on a raid to a Kevrian breeding facility, a fortress of rank rooms and half-dead humans hidden away on a small moon orbiting a lifeless world. The Kevrian operating the facility had taken the not-so unique step of allowing the male humans to control the population and had even armed them. When the Fleet invaded, a staggering number of those males had willingly come swarming out to fight them off while their masters escaped. Tagen could remember fighting them, working his way grimly through a thick knot of the naked, shouting beasts, dodging blades and blaster fire, and he knew that he’d done considerable injury to many of them, but he had eventually brought them under control. As he was wrestling the last of them into shackles, a Jotan cry of alarm had sounded, and he had answered, running down the fetid corridor toward the sounds of battle.

He had come into a slaughter. A breeder male, easily the largest Tagen had ever seen, had retreated to this holding room and had been systemically butchering every female within.

The male had been naked, made perfectly hairless by his master, with a breeder’s brand burned down its left side from its shoulder to its knee. Its tsesac, external and grotesquely swollen, had been cinched and fitted with a stimulator; its penis protruded angry and rodlike, still emitting jets of soapy cum as the human killed. It had a blaster for the Fleet, but a knife for the females, and both its arms worked furiously, swinging and slashing and firing all at once. The females were screaming, struggling, dying all around him.