“Sir, we’ve got ten bogeys closing in. Terran armor. You expecting someone?”

“Not tonight,” Caldswell said with a sigh.

I glanced at Rashid. “You want us to try talking first?”

“You’re sure they’re coming for us?” Caldswell asked.

I looked around at the empty field. “We’re kind of the only target, sir.”

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “Is the ship locked up?”

“Yes sir,” I answered, pulling Sasha from her holster.

“Then do it,” Caldswell said, and the com clicked off.

“You heard the captain,” I said to Rashid with a wide grin. “Pop ’em.”

“Yes ma’am,” he answered, easing his finger onto the trigger of his long, sleek rifle.

As a close-quarters fighter, I didn’t normally get a chance to watch snipers at work, but even I wasn’t ignorant enough to think that what Rashid did was standard practice. There was no hesitation while he lined up his sights, no careful aiming. I didn’t even hear the shot. He simply squeezed the trigger, and four hundred feet away, the plants stopped rustling.

Rashid was already moving to the next target. He pivoted his rifle slightly to the left and squeezed again. I was listening hard this time, but all I heard was a click and a soft whistle of air before another target went down. He’d dropped a third man before the enemy finally realized what was happening and started to charge.

As soon as Rashid squeezed off his second shot, I’d known that if I didn’t get in soon, there’d be nothing left. By the time the third shot fired, I was jumping off the Fool’s edge. No show-off maneuvers this time, though. I fell fast and landed hard, letting my suit roll me back onto my feet. Sasha was ready when I came up, and I hit the first man who broke cover square in the head from across the field.

I watched the bullet hit with visceral satisfaction. Even for me, that was a nice shot, and it just felt so damn good to be back in action after days of worry and bullshit. But as I looked for my next target, I realized something was wrong. Sasha had hit the first man dead-on in the helmet for a clean head shot, but he wasn’t going down.

That happened sometimes with the cheaper suits. Their response system kept them running forward even when the man inside was dead, but I didn’t think that was the case now. The armor’s helmet was dented and its visor cracked, but the enemy was still coming. My shot hadn’t gotten through.

I bit back a curse and fired again, hitting him at the knee joint where armor is always weakest. This time, the shot got through, and the heavy suit went down with a crash. My confusion had cost me, though. The enemy was clear of the crop cover now and close enough that I no longer needed to look at them through my density sensor. In the glare of the Fool’s floodlights, I could see that this was no bandit team in secondhand suits. These men were dressed head to toe in Terran High Velocity Full Plate, which meant we were in trouble.

“HVFP team!” I yelled. “Military grade, you won’t get through on the normal spots.” I pulled up my gun and jumped back, using the shadows at the ship’s base for cover while I lined up my next shot carefully. “Aim for the joints, they’re the hardest to armor.”

“Yes ma’am.” Rashid’s voice was calm in my ear. As he spoke, I saw the man whose leg I’d shot jerk as a sniper shot finished him off.

I shot the next man at the same time, but the enemy was as well trained as they were well armored. Their suits seemed to fly across the field, weaving in a pattern so erratic my targeting computer couldn’t keep up with it. Even with a wide-open field and the light at my back, I only managed to take out two more before they reached me. After that, I holstered Sasha and prepared for hand to hand.

As always, the Lady Gray was looking out for me. My suit had been keeping a running tally on our enemy since I’d first picked them up. Of the ten we’d seen at the start, three were down to Sasha and four were down to Rashid’s deadly silent rifle. That left three to go, the first of which was almost on top of me.

Like all Terran armor, my enemy was huge. His suit was black, sleek, and even larger than Cotter’s had been. But for all the expensive polish, he was still just a Terran tin can, and I let him get in close before I punched him in the side.

The second my fist connected, I let Elsie fly. She shot out of her sheath on the side of my wrist, her thermite edge firing as it touched the air. Phoebe never could have handled a kidney shot like this. She’d been a slashing blade, not a thrusting one. But with Elsie’s steel core attached to my armor, I was able to throw my full weight into the blow, and with the thermite going, the combined effect was breathtaking. The burning tip of Elsie’s tungsten blade lit up like the sun as it melted through the overlapping plates of the heavy suit’s articulated side, melting the blade-catch like a welding torch through a spiderweb to stab deep just below my enemy’s rib cage.

The Terran had braced for a punch, though not too hard. He’d clearly assumed, like most Terrans did, that my smaller suit couldn’t hurt his. If I’d only been punching, he might have been right, but it’s always a bad idea to let your enemy get close before you know her weapons. Unfortunately for him, people who make that mistake with me don’t usually survive to put the knowledge to use.

I could see the Terran’s surprise on his face through his tinted visor as he staggered. Then his breach foam fired, filling his suit with quick-hardening goo as his systems tried to plug the hole I’d made. But breach foam doesn’t mean jack to a thermite blade. I shifted my weight and pushed up, yanking Elsie through his ribs to finish the kill. The gutted man went down with a stagger, dropping his own weapon, a type of gun I’d never seen before, at my feet.

I didn’t have time to examine it. My next enemy was already rounding the Fool’s port side fifteen feet away. He must have been using a density sensor too, because he fired the second his arm was clear, shooting blind around the corner. My shield flipped up to catch the bullet automatically as soon as my camera saw the gun pointed my direction, but it wasn’t a bullet that hit me. It was a lightning bolt.

Electricity arced from the man’s gun, blasting through my shield and hitting my suit hard enough to blow me backward. For a moment, my systems flickered, but my Lady doesn’t go down that easy. She was back on line before I hit, flipping me over to land on my feet. Sasha was in my hand when I came up, and I fired a three-shot spread before I could think.

The man had made it around the Fool’s corner by this point, and all three bullets hit him dead in the face, but not before he fired a second time. The lightning shot out again, and this time I recognized it. He was using a charge thrower, the clunky, extremely expensive guns used to subdue armored combatants without injury. I’d never even seen one outside of the arenas, where they were used to take down blood-mad gladiators. Definitely not the kind of gun a pirate would carry, but then I’d known these assholes weren’t pirates from the second I’d seen the HVFP.

The bullets I’d shot into the man’s face threw off his aim, and the lightning missed me. Thanks to the damn HVFP, though, he was still moving. He jerked his gun up again, but I didn’t give him another chance. I jumped on him like a tiger, slicing through the neck of his suit with Elsie’s burning blade.

It was a beautiful piece of work. Elsie’s white fire was burning full tilt now, and the thermite’s heat combined with the hard strength of her tungsten core ripped through the superheavy armor like paper. But as I pushed up to finish the slice, I realized I probably shouldn’t be doing this. We needed to know who was attacking us, and it was hard to question a man without a head. I was finding it hard to care, though. The battle fury was singing loud and lovely in my head. For the first time in days, I didn’t feel sick, crazy, or confused. I felt powerful, and I took my enemy’s head in a clean, masterful stroke.

I was just finishing the follow-through when my suit’s proximity alarm went off. I looked up from my defeated enemy to see the final man standing directly behind me. I spun as soon I saw him, smoke trailing behind my blade as Elsie burned off the last of his teammate’s blood, but it was too late. The man’s charge gun was already pressed against my back, and my whole suit jerked as he pulled the trigger.

Charge throwers are short-range weapons. The first bolt I’d eaten had lost some of its potency over the fifteen feet of air it had passed through to reach me. This time there was no such problem. The lightning blasted my suit full force, throwing me twenty feet down the Fool’s hull. Or that was what I assumed happened. I couldn’t actually see, because the moment the charge hit, my suit had gone dark.

I landed facedown hard enough to knock my teeth, bouncing across the dirt like a skipping stone. I was sending frantic signals to my cameras, but my suit was overloaded and nothing was coming up. But as I lay panicking in the dark, trying to get my dead systems up and under control so I could see my enemy before he killed me, I had the weirdest sense of déjà vu.

I had no time to worry about it, though. I rolled myself over, thanking the king that I wore a suit light enough to move in when its motor was dead. I pushed my visor up with clumsy fingers just in time to see the man running toward me, charge gun sparking and ready. Elsie was still burning blindingly white on my arm, but a fat lot of good that did. In an unforeseen consequence, the combined weight of my new blade and Sasha made my right arm too heavy to lift without my motor, effectively pinning me to the ground. I could still tilt my wrist, though, so that was what I did.

The man must not have expected me to still be kicking, because he didn’t even try to dodge when I swiveled Sasha toward him. Or maybe he just didn’t think I could do it. Considering the weird angle my hand was pinned at, I didn’t blame him. It would take a miracle for me to land a shot. But when you practice enough, miracles happen more often than you might think.

My first shot whizzed over his shoulder, but the second hit him in the chest hard enough to make his huge suit stagger. By the third shot, I’d gotten the hang of the weird angle, and I got him square in the neck. This close, even his HVFP wasn’t thick enough to save him from a pistol built to shred armor. Sasha’s bullet ripped through the articulated joints at his neck, and the man went down on top of me like a falling tree.

Thank the Sainted King he was the last one, because with my suit dark and the enormous weight on top of me, I was trapped. Even without power, the Lady protected me from most of his bulk, but I didn’t have the strength to push the dead man off. Fortunately, I wasn’t stuck long. As soon as the last man went down, the cargo bay door opened, and Rashid ran out with the captain.

“You all right, Morris?” Caldswell yelled.

“I will be once you get this tank off me,” I yelled back, shoving the huge suit as hard as I could.

Even with the captain and Rashid there to help, I didn’t see how we were going to move a suit of HVFP without a crane. Somehow, though, Caldswell got the body rolling enough that I was able to pop my armor and scramble free.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, gasping for air.

“I don’t know,” Caldswell said, looking out at the fields around us. “But I mean to—”

He cut off abruptly, and I shot to my feet, whirling around with Sasha ready in my bare hands. It was a stupid thing to do. Firing my anti-armor pistol outside my armor was a ticket to a broken arm, but I was still stuck in the battle fury. My body was primed for another attack, but when I saw what had made Caldswell go quiet, all of that drained away.

The monster from my dream was standing at the edge of the Fool’s floodlights. Even this far away, there was no mistaking those glossy black scales. Just like in my nightmare, it was human shaped but covered in black scales like a xith’cal. It had claws like a xith’cal too, only larger, more deadly, and as soon as I saw them, the old wound in my stomach seized up. I was too distracted to wonder about that, though, because the monster wasn’t looking at us. It was looking at me, its black eyes glittering with alien intelligence, and though the creature had no mouth at all, I could have sworn it was smiling.