Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-

  The walk back to monitoring felt longer than the march out of that necrotic rift on Grunion. Each step was a negotiation between my will and the angry, sparking protest of the ruined magitech implant fused to my spine. The Caliban. A name too grand for the piece of scrap metal that was now little more than a painful reminder of what I’d lost and a cage for what little power I had left. That goofy little big-eared… gremlin… had been right. The diagnosis had been as precise as a surgeon’s laser. When the overlord’s counterstroke had fried the Caliban’s primary regulator, I should have known my path had ended right there in the mud and blood of that godforsaken world.

  I sighed, the sound swallowed by the sterile, recycled air of the corridor. Combat paths were a brutal, unforgiving mistress. They gave you everything—strength, speed, a purpose that burned brighter than a star—and then they took it all away, leaving you with the bill. I’d gotten as far as orichalcum on the Path of the Paladin, a rare category that put me inches from a gold core. Then a damned gold-core necromantic deviant with a grudge and a talent for spiritual corrosion had seared half my base meridians into useless, scarred tissue.

  The Caliban was a stopgap, a complex piece of magitech that acted as a synthetic meridian matrix, allowing me to access a sliver of my former power. It let me hold a force blade without my hand shaking too badly, to project an aura that could still make fresh recruits wet themselves. But it was a leaky bucket. For every joule of essence I channeled, two bled out as agonizing feedback. There’s only so much damage a human body can take, so many repairs, replacements, and upgrades you can handle before progression—purification to a true gold core—becomes a mathematical impossibility. I was a textbook example of that equation. I was well past that point, which meant any further advancement was closed to me. Now, I was just counting down the days until my commission ended, and with it, the last thing that gave my life structure: my driving force.

  I was still fairly young for a human who’d passed the base metals, at only forty years in. The longevity benefits of my cultivation meant I barely looked a scarred thirty. But looking forward to the next two-hundred-plus years as a twisted cripple, a ghost of a paladin, wasn't high on my bucket list, as inevitable as it may be. There had been offers, of course. Whispered promises from third parties with shady credentials and shadier morals to ‘loan’ me a new, lower-ranked but functioning Caliban. But I was a scrotting Divine Paladin, or I had been. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my extended life as a strong-arm for mafia princes or a gladiator on some slaver-world, fighting for the amusement of jaded narcissists to pay off a debt that would never truly be cleared.

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  I keyed the door to monitoring, the hydraulics hissing like a tired serpent. I flopped heavily into the seat next to the school commandant, Commander Mike Jenkins. The same guy who had delivered the stunningly charismatic introductory address that was so bland it had bid fair to put half the new class into a coma. The man himself was a contrast to his public persona; where he played the bored bureaucrat, his eyes were ancient and missed nothing.

  “Hey Dave. You sparking again?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the bank of holoscreens showing a dozen different live-fire exercises on the moon below.

  I nodded slowly, letting out a groan that was part pain, part profound weariness. “Yeah. My Caliban’s throwing a fit again. Feels like a nest of scorpions made of lightning is trying to chew its way out of my spine. I don’t know how long I can deal with this before I just go ahead and get a neural balancer installed and give up on ever seeing a new rank.” A neural balancer would numb the pain, permanently. It would also numb everything else—the faint whisper of spiritual energy, the taste of the air before a fight, the simple joy of a well-cooked meal. It was a chemical lobotomy for the soul.

  “I was monitoring your little speech to the new meat,” Mike said, finally swiveling his chair to face me. “I agree with you, in principle. Troopers are a hell of a lot harder to replace than drones. But you basically just pissed on about half the fleet’s captains with that bit about prioritizing lives over hardware. You’re right, pinching pennies costs worlds, but the admiralty’s accountants don’t see it that way. They see quarterly reports and production quotas.”

  I shrugged, the motion sending a fresh wave of fire down my back. I settled a little more carefully into the chair. “You know I’m a paladin. Big picture by necessity. We’re literally wired for it. A few of them down there… Taxon, Reynard, Grunnik, Denvar, and Milliner… they show huge potential. They get it. What the hell is with that Reynard anyway? He looks scrotting weird for a goblin. All sharp angles and big, luminous eyes. Is he even right about repairing my Caliban? It seems like a hell of a risk, but if it’s a possibility, you know I’ll let him have a shot. I’ve got nothing left to lose.”

  “Her,” Mike replied, his voice flat.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Her. She’s a Gremlin. A First-stage Maenad.” Mike was actually a lot older than me, pushing two hundred, even if he looked like a freshly-minted lieutenant with a face made for recruitment posters.

  The words hung in the air between us. Maenad. The term triggered a cascade of half-remembered intelligence briefings and old, dark legends. “What the scrot?” I finally managed, the profanity inadequate for the seismic shift this information caused.