Warmth. I was bathed in a glowing light that enveloped me and felt like everything was right in the world. Talk about a new feeling.

  Or maybe it was a feeling that hadn’t hit me in a good long while. I don’t think I’d felt that way since I was a kid visiting my grandma’s house on the lower continental mass of Vorath IX. A planet that had been inhabited by humans for a good century, for all that it was in disputed territory.

  No. Wait. That couldn’t be right.

  The entire lower continental mass, along with grandma’s house and grandma, had been vaporized by a livisk mass weapon. I hadn’t understood it at the time, but I’d later learned that was a fancy way of saying the blue sparklies had thrown a giant chunk of rock at the planet to do as much damage as possible with good old-fashioned orbital mechanics and physics.

  No nukes necessary.

  I still remembered the terror of seeing people lifting off through the burning cloud cover created by the impact. The horror of watching a beautiful world destroyed for all complex life in a matter of seconds.

  The only silver lining was it’d provided invaluable scientific insight into the K-T impact for scientists who were into that sort of thing. The livisk had provided the perfect laboratory for an experiment that would’ve been otherwise too ethically dubious even for the people working for the CCF.

  “Bastards,” I muttered, though my voice sounded off. Wrong.

  All that egghead stuff hadn’t mattered to me. I’d been a little boy terrified knowing his grandma’s house had been destroyed and then waiting and seeing her coming up on the lists of likely casualties.

  One of many billions of homes that’d been destroyed in the “low grade” war between humans and livisk as we pushed the borders back and forth.

  Something was very wrong here. That comfort was wrong. That warmth was wrong. I couldn’t possibly be at my grandma’s house if she’d died decades ago in a mass orbital bombardment.

  My eyes flew open. I hovered in that strange glow. It was bright enough that it’d even come through my eyelids.

  There was something else off about that. My eyes had been closed, but she wasn’t there waiting for me. Was I losing it? Had the last year of my life been a fever dream while I was stuck in a med tank? If so, why didn’t this feel like any tank I’d ever been in before?

  I felt the weightlessness that came with free fall, and it wasn’t entirely pleasant. I’d never been a fan of zero-G. Bless the magnificent bastard who invented artificial gravity and made it possible for me to travel through space without losing my lunch.

  I wanted to lose my lunch right about now. The problem being it didn’t feel like there was anything in my stomach for me to lose. Which was another notch in the column of me being in a med tank of some sort.

  “Where am I?” I shouted, knowing that if I was in a tank then there was somebody out there monitoring me in case I woke up.

  I wondered if I was supposed to wake up, or if this was a screwup courtesy of some anesthetist who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing because they were more interested in raiding their own supply than doing their fucking job.

  No answer. Not that I was surprised there was no answer. I squinted, and I thought I could see hazy figures moving around on the other side of the light. Though all I could make out was they were walking on two legs.

  There was something ominous about that. I don’t know why it should feel ominous that there were people out there walking on two legs. Presumably those were humans.

  I tried to remember where I was. Or where I should be.

  A flash of memory hit me. Consoles and various bits of the CIC exploding all around me. Figures moving through the haze. Stun blasts flying through the air above me as I screamed and fired what little ammo I had left into that haze.

  Honestly. What idiot designs a CIC that explodes like that? It was like something out of the kind of movies that had people talking about how ridiculous entertainment was compared to the real world.

  But no. That wasn’t entirely charitable to the people who designed the CIC. Because somebody had thrown an explosive at us powerful enough to get through the blast door. If anything, I should be upset with the people who built a blast door that was clearly incapable of standing up to a blast.

  Knowing how the CCF did things, they probably built the door to standard and then didn’t bother to armor the parts of the ship the door was attached to so it would be able to stand up to the blast. It would hardly be the first time something like that happened.

  If I made it through whatever was happening here then I was going to have words with those designers.

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  “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

  More light. Something blinding flashed in front of my face and moved down. I tried to flinch away from it, but something prevented me from moving.

  This didn’t feel like any human technology I’d ever known, but I’d never been one for going to the doctor unless I was forced to. Going to the doctor just meant a chance of them finding something that would render you unfit to continue duty until you spent downtime in a tank, so it was something a lot of people avoided until it became absolutely necessary. Which usually meant even more downtime in a tank.

  I wondered if this was something new they’d worked up on Earth, even as I also had the strange feeling I wasn’t on Earth anymore.

  The light continued down. Like it was scanning my body. Maybe it was a medical scan, but I had the feeling there was something else going on here. I knew I wasn’t in human hands, but I couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason I felt that way.

  I’d been on my ship. The livisk ship had appeared out of nowhere. The blast door fell to that explosion and…

  Then it hit me. The livisk. The support beam collapsing as the boarders moved in on us. Looking up and seeing her standing over me.

  Damn.

  Once the livisk got on a ship they were like the once mighty cockroach. You either killed them all with your Night Terror Industries hunter-killer bots, or with an armed crew since I was stretching the analogy a bit, or they took over. And I was pretty sure I knew what’d happened in this case.

  I struggled against the invisible bonds holding me. Only the struggle was impossible since there wasn’t anything to struggle against. Like they’d stuck me in an Anti-Newtonian field. Which was an ancient trick, but it was a good one because it worked.

  The harder I tried to break free, the less good it did.

  Finally I gave up and gave myself over to floating.

  “We all float here, Bill,” I said, a thin smile coming to my face despite my situation.

  Something beeped above me. Rather insistently, too. I tried looking around and remembered, too late, that I couldn’t move. Damn it.

  If by some miracle this did turn out to be a human medbay? I was going to rip the doctors a new one.

  The beeping grew more strident until the glow started to pulse around me. A tingle ran up and down my body as I started struggling again. Finally the glow moved down to my neck, and the blur preventing me from seeing out into the world beyond my prison was revealed.

  I found myself wishing I could go back to not knowing where in the sequel trilogy I was.

  Livisk stood all around me as far as the eye could see. In uniforms I’d never seen before, because the only livisk I’d ever run up against were the ones who were doing fighting.

  I looked around until I saw some of their writing. Not that it did me any good. I was good on the spoken language, but terrible at reading it. I could only hope that was their pictogram for medical, and not the torture department.

  Though if they were trying to torture me? They were doing a piss poor job of it with this warm glowing chamber thing. The agony booth it wasn’t.

  “So does somebody want to tell me what the fuck is going on here?” I shouted.

  This time my voice carried through the room. Several of the livisk who’d been standing around looked in my direction, but none of them seemed particularly worried that I was talking to them. No, they were more bored than anything.

  I looked around. I could move now, but only my head. I saw rows of capsules like mine. Some filled with a glowing light similar to my own, but most were empty.

  I wondered how many of my crew made it off 72 if there were so few glowing capsules. Whether this was a medbay or a prison, it wasn’t good that there weren’t many of my crew waiting for me here.

  “Hello? Is my accent not working or something?” I shouted. “I asked you to tell me what happened! Where’s my crew? What have you done to my ship?”

  “I can assure you your accent isn’t the problem. Nor is your ship going to be your problem any longer. It’s floating in the cold space just beyond your star’s heliosphere waiting for a rescue that will come too late. On the bright side, not many of your crew went down with the ship.”

  A chill ran through me. That voice caressed my body. Hearing it over a holoprojection was enough to drive me to distraction, but that was nothing compared to the pure delight of hearing her in person. And that voice spoke the good old-fashioned mix of English, Spanish, and Mandarin with a sprinkling of other languages that had coalesced into Earth Standard centuries ago.

  That made this place feel almost like home. Well, except for all the strange aliens wandering around, of course.

  “Why are you doing this to me? Why have you taken me prisoner?”

  I knew the answer to that. I’d brought her here. This was my fault. I should’ve said something long ago, but I thought I could keep it under control.

  The alien general stepped into view, and my breath caught even as I frowned. It was unfair for the enemy to be so beautiful.

  That was the only word to describe what I saw. I was a military man. I wasn’t big on fancy words, even though I had a broader vocabulary than what the Marines would use to describe a livisk woman between fine dining on Crayolas.

  The joke with the CCF was they only budgeted for RoseArt for the Marines. Which was still a thing despite being the acknowledged shorthand for second best for centuries.

  Whatever. I turned my attention back to the general.

  I the light of a human ship, designed to match the light of Sol, the livisk didn’t look quite as radiant as they did under the light of their weaker star. A weaker star that still supported their species because their planet was much closer in.

  Maybe the joke was on humanity, there. The livisk red dwarf would still be hanging out for potentially trillions of years after Sol stopped fusing hydrogen and destroyed the inner planets it gave life to.

  In this light, which I could only presume was on the livisk ship, which didn’t mean good things for yours truly, her skin sparkled an iridescent blue as she regarded me.

  “Holding me in a stasis cell this small, or whatever in the sequel trilogy this is, is cruel. I thought you livisk had more honor than that,” I said.

  There was no point in going on about the rules of war or anything silly like that. I understood from reading ancient military histories that there’d been rules when human fought human, for all that they were usually more guidelines than actual rules, but there was nothing formal about our occasionally lukewarm war with the livisk.

  It was a savage fight when conflict did erupt. One that humanity had been kinda-sorta winning for at least a century now, aside from them taking the occasional potshot at colony worlds.

  That only made them that much more vicious in their attacks. Which had me wondering why this one had been so focused on taking prisoners.

  Even as I figured I knew why she was so focused on taking prisoners.