Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-

  The agony was a constant, grinding companion. It wasn’t a sharp pain anymore; that had been years ago. This was a deep, systemic wretchedness, a corrosive fire that had long since burned through my nerves and settled into the very marrow of my bones. My Caliban, the magnificent, cursed piece of magitech fused to my spine, wasn’t just malfunctioning—it was dying, and it was taking me with it in the most drawn-out, undignified way possible.

  I’d honestly intended to have the young goblinoid take a look at it before I’d headed out. A foolish hope, perhaps, but it was the only flicker of light in a very dark tunnel. Her identification of the tri-phasic nexus flaw had been startling in its precision. But then the priority alert had shredded my plans, its klaxon a psychic scream inside my skull that brooked no delay. A rift breaking on Gallis 5. A sprite colony.

  Just perfect. The universe’s most delicate teacup, and a sledgehammer is coming for it.

  Sprites. A fairly innocuous specialty breed created by Disney genetics, back when corporate megalomania meant playing with the building blocks of life for profit and entertainment. Lightworlders, they were created before the whole ‘renewable resources’ ethical review craze had finally gotten some teeth and canned the most egregious experiments.

  Biological vegetarians, they were Lightworlders that actually had real, functional butterfly-like wings. Ethereally beautiful humans, they were completely and utterly unsuited to anything resembling combat, or stress, or frankly, existing in a universe that wasn’t permanently set to a gentle, soothing murmur.

  They’d gotten a .3 G Earth-like world by default, since any other human breed that tried to live in such low gravity for extended periods—other than as a short-term retirement home—would be looking at catastrophic bone degradation and muscle atrophy long before they could ever hope to form a stable twin core. The entire planet was a glorified retirement community and vacation spot tended by beautiful, empathic fairies whose entire purpose was to make your dreams come true…

  Well, except for the carnal ones. Any full-G human that tried to do the dirty with a sprite would wind up with a horribly injured local he’d have to explain to the authorities, followed by a long stint in a fleet penal battalion. Fortunately, the planetary planners had thrown in a merfolk colony on the water-world continents. They didn’t have the same structural delicacy and were famously, commercially open to providing a ‘unique aquatic experience’ for the right price.

  So, helpless. Beautiful, peaceful, and utterly helpless. The mer couldn’t go on land to hit the broken rift’s anchor point, and the sprites would get slaughtered by the score if they fluttered within a mile of the necrotic emanations.

  Most fleet commanders would have just written it off. Let the locals hire a merc group to clean it out at exorbitant cost, or let them complain to fleet and wait six months for a bureaucratic risk-assessment committee to finally authorize a response, by which time the colony would be a graveyard.

  Except it was an undead rift. The words alone sent a fresh jolt of sympathetic pain through my Caliban, a sickening lurch in my gut. Undead rifts were the one kind of rift that was guaranteed to overload frequently, to fester and spread its corruption like a cancer. Mercs wouldn’t touch them if they had a functioning brain stem. They were poison. The kind that only Light or Divine energy users had a real chance of purifying.

  Undead cores didn’t control chaos spawns; they enhanced them, twisted them, and were corrupted from their very creation. It happened, rarely, a true system error—proof that nothing, not even the galaxy-wide SI that supposedly was the system, was perfect.

  And I was the closest Paladin powerful enough to end it. The only one whose particular flavor of divine justice could scour that particular stain from reality.

  And I had. It wasn't a glorious battle. It was a grim, methodical purge. A weak rift, barely an iron-core manifestation, but the presence of so much concentrated necrotic essence was like pouring battery acid on my already-damaged soul. The Caliban went into a feedback loop of pure, shrieking agony.

  Every muscle in my body seized, a constant, savage sparking and twitching that was my new, unwelcome normal. It felt like my skeleton was trying to vibrate its way out of my skin. The pain kept me up at night through violent, involuntary motions unless I was deeply sedated, and it sent waves of fire through my limbs every waking moment.

  I was terrified of getting addicted to the pain pills, the sedatives, the muscle relaxants. An addiction like that would be a stain on my soul, a weakness that would kick me off the paladin path as surely as going to work for a loan shark as a leg-breaker or leaving a trail of broken hearts and unwed mothers behind me would. The path demanded purity of purpose, and a body dependent on chemicals to function was not pure.

  I could probably head to one of the slaver worlds on the fringe, the ones that didn’t ask questions, to get a regulator installed, a third-rate replacement for the sputtering Caliban. But those worlds had a very special, very terminal attitude towards paladins. I’d be a prize.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  I likely wouldn’t even wake up from a surgery involving them, my body carved up for valuable parts. And if I did, I’d lose the use of my energy sword, the very symbol of being a paladin. Or more likely, I’d try to use it and accidentally lop a few of my own irreplaceable body parts off without the caliban’s precise energy control to guide its movements safely—a very real risk with my burnt-out meridians offering no stabilizing flow.

  So, I suffered. And as the transiter carried me towards my new duty assignment, the Crow, my mind kept circling back to the one anomaly in my personal hellscape: Petty Officer Roisin Reynard.

  It was creepy how easily our auras had meshed during the drone combat exercises. Even while she was fighting me for control of her swarm, her energy had welcomed mine like a hot shower after a week-long deployment in a toxic jungle. It was… comfortable. Warm in a way I hadn’t felt in decades.

  I knew the danger of a bond was real, a primal Maenad drive I’d been briefed on. There were times I’d had to deliberately pull back, let her have a win, just because I’d felt my own aura trying to slide into place alongside hers. Like a puzzle piece finding its home. A key turning in a lock it was made for. A man fitting himself against a willing woman’s…

  Stop it, Greene. That’s a one-way ticket to a court-martial and a broken future for both of you.

  It was stupid and crazy, because first of all, she looked like a boy. Not even a boy, but a genderless little goblinoid, less than half my height. Big ears, a pug nose, bilious green copper-tinged skin, and those huge, luminous eyes that seemed to see right through all the armor and scars, eyes you could lose yourself in…

  Nope. Not going there. Do not get lost in the goblin’s eyes. That path leads to madness and a very awkward explanation to Command.

  I felt no attraction towards males, and certainly not towards something that looked like it had just crawled out of a reactor vent. It was more… paternal. Protective. I wanted to pick her up and check her for bruises, make sure she was eating enough, tuck her under my arm and keep her safe from the galaxy’s innumerable sharp edges. It was horribly distracting, but you could enjoy petting a kitten without it getting weird, right?

  But more importantly, I needed her help. Desperately. And I wasn’t going to risk both of us getting kicked out of the service for an unauthorized bond. She had identified the tri-phasic mana nexus that was malfunctioning. I’d even passed her observations up the chain to the tech-docs, and they’d stared at the data with utter, profound cluelessness.

  They knew what a standard Caliban was. An ultra-rare drop in a copper rift that resets once a year. A coveted prize that allowed a sorcerer to cast a fireball in a high-tech rift that had a magic rating of like 2, or they’d allow a heavy trooper in the latest power armor and tech 6 juggernaut weaponry to blast his way through a rift where the most advanced weapon was a crossbow.

  Very, very useful. Mine? No one knew. It was a drop from a silver-tier necrotic rift that I’d personally destroyed, the same one that wrecked my meridians. The idea of using it as a stopgap for those injuries was utterly foreign to them.

  They could barely trace the mana circuitry in a common copper caliban… a silver one was like trying to find a single, specific needle in a stack of nearly identical needles, each the width of a micron and length of a football field.

  But Reynard had not only identified the problem… which wasn't hard given the visible arcing and the smell of ozone that followed me around; even some of the other goblins in the class had noticed it. No, she had proposed a solution and claimed that, with enough advancement, she might even be able to fix the meridians themselves!

  That was the sort of impossibility that usually took a master healer and all the high-end cultivation resources an advanced core world could produce for a decade. Fixing a broken foundation, repairing a shattered dantian, even fixing a broken core paled in comparison.

  Burnt meridians were generally a hard stop for advancement, a death sentence for growth. Lop off the arm and regenerate it with powerful life essence? The new limb would be a mundane piece of meat. The pathways for energy were gone, seared shut forever.

  Hell, most researchers weren’t even aware that the magitech had some kind of essence programming, let alone devised a way to recalibrate it and keep my neurology from going insane from sensory deprivation while it was restored!

  And then she’d gone and ‘broken’ the Kobayashi ‘fight until you die’ simulation. That thing had been designed by some of the finest software-developing sadists in the galaxy to test how far you could push a recruit before they shattered. It was impossible to defeat; the damned thing cheated constantly at higher levels, specifically to up the ante and ramp up the pressure until it was mathematically impossible to continue, spawning in greater void beasts without their killer auras JUST to increase the challenge. You were supposed to beat it by advancing past its rank, to at least copper, or by finding a way to cheat the cheater.

  And she broke its core programming. And then she’d had the sheer, baffling audacity to apologize and admit that she knew HOW it cheated, claiming if it had been ‘real’ she would have gotten beat in no time… She completely ignored the fact that she’d beaten an unbeatable system specifically designed to break people.

  A Chaos lord could never have the power to send out titans on a whim; they never just spawned, there was a hulk somewhere that everyone hoped to find someday and destroy, that overloaded and created the monsters, just like the tyrants, planet killers, and creepers.

  Even as a Paladin, that level of raw, unassuming humility was staggering. It was the kind of honest self-assessment that made me, a sworn knight of divine justice, feel vaguely ashamed of my own occasional arrogance. She made me wish I were a better man, a greater Paladin, and some little goblinoid making me feel… less than honorable simply by being straightforward, almost made me ashamed to count myself among the paladins.

  Was I thinking about her constantly? You bet your ass. She was, as Mike had joked, my only hope, and possibly the best hope for the human species. Something the church knew was that there were a lot more than just humans in the galaxy, but humans seemed to have to take on the lion’s share of fighting against the Chaos Lords and rift spawns… and we were not doing well. We’d been losing ground since the destruction of the old empire.

  Not that I wanted the old empire back, it had been corrupt enough that almost no worlds were even capable of spawning someone with the paladin class, and at the time, only old Earth and extraordinarily rare ascetic colonies even produced them... and they usually left a world and promptly got themselves killed or enslaved trying to fight against the entire empire.

  But it was certainly good at containing rifts in a way that today we could only dream of, even necrotic rifts.