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final member of the team and its NCOIC, second in command to Captain Bell Toll. Next to Gorilla, he was the biggest and meanest-looking human being I had ever encountered. He was easily six-and-a-half feet tall, a grizzled old bird of the Human Polynesian wrestler race, with a long jagged scar torn down the right side of his face, and nails rather than whiskers growing out of his cheeks. He didn’t shave his whiskers; he chiseled them. There was no exaggeration in the phrase “one tough hard-core old sonofabitch” when it was applied to him.
    “Come with me, fresh meat,” Sergeant Shiva rumbled.
    Blade’s cycling the bolt of his Gauss stopped us. I felt the sniper hard and cold inside my head. I turned to find him aiming his rifle directly at me.
    “There’s no problem while we’re out there as long as the tailless elf does his job,” he said. “But if he fucks up, he becomes my problem.”

C·H·A·P·T·E·R
 
FOUR
    O fficers and senior NCOs of the Federation Army of The Republic were allowed to live off-post if they desired. Zentadon were excluded from the ranks of commissioned officers, but I was a senior NCO and I desired a cubicle of my own in the city rather than the regimented and sterile environment of living in barracks. After my unsettling introduction to the DRT-bags, appropriately so-called, I thought, I needed a drink before I went home to get my affairs in order prior to the beginning of isolation. Cocktails were something Human to which I had become accustomed. They were delicious and cold, mildly intoxicating and wonderful.
    I caught a hovercraft outside the post gates and had the bot controller drop me off at the Starside, a watering hole for upwardly-mobile young professional non-Humans like myself who had acquired certain Human tastes. I took a false tail of golden hair out of my briefcase and attached it to my uniform trousers so that it looked like I possessed the Zentadon’s total number of appendages. Never mind that it lacked prehensile abilities and I couldn’t use it to cop a feel up a female’s kilt if the breeding season suddenly began. Like Commander Mott, I claimed it had been crushed — an old war wound — and therefore dragged out my tracks when I walked. There were some places you didn’t go if you were Human, half-Human, or overly associated with Humans.
    A warty Kutaran breeding pair of indistinguishable sexual characteristics occupied a dark booth at this early hour and a convention of four-armed Zutu merchants in on a flight from the planet Nesshoue were whooping it up with squeals and shrieks under the colored lights. It was cool and relatively clean inside the lounge, especially when compared to the hot dry winds that blew down the streets of the Capital, rattling discarded food containers and whipping other trash about like missiles. My eyes still burned from the smog. The barkeep, a Zentadon, stirred up a potato gin cocktail and, after a contemptuous glance at my wilted member hanging off the back of the stool, delivered the drink with his own adroit appurtenance. He grinned his full-blood Zentadon sharp-toothed grin.
    Show off.
    I was half through the cocktail and already feeling somewhat assuaged toward my unasked-for and unwanted assignment with the Humans of DRT-213 when Mina Li popped through the door. She gave my fake tail a look but kept any untoward comments to herself. Like me, she was golden-haired. Her hair was finely-woven and hung in a snatch down her back. Females had much less hair on their bodies than males. Her face was full with full lips and full green eyes. The end of her tail darted suggestively to her left shoulder and reached out to caress my cheek as she occupied the stool next to me. She assumed I would be available to her when breeding season arrived and urges started roaring.
    I assumed nothing.
    “I buzzed your locater,” she chirped brightly. “It told me you were here.”
    “Lucky me,” I grumped.
    “Are you not happy to see me,