I scanned the crowd of livisk in front of me, looking for a familiar face. My eyes finally came to rest on the son of a bitch I was looking for. Broad shoulders with shoulder pads that made him look like a football player by way of some sort of ridiculous science fantasy video game kids liked to play by connecting to a neural link like what Arvie implanted in my brain.

"Hello there, Oathbreaker," I said, staring at him.

The livisk stood there, breathing heavily. I noted that he wasn't carrying his plasma weapon the way he had been earlier.

"My honor remains intact," he said.

"That's really funny," I said. "Because the last I checked, you swore an oath of allegiance to my girlfriend and decided to break that. I don't know any livisk legalese that makes that any sort of honorable at all."

"I maintain my honor," he said through gritted teeth, like he was holding onto that with all that he could.

And suddenly there was a glowing hole in his chest. He looked down at that glowing hole where his heart and lungs had been, but it'd been cauterized shut by the plasma blast that took him from behind.

He fell down to his knees. Which seemed a touch dramatic if you asked me, but nobody asked me. I wasn't going to begrudge a livisk his sense of the dramatic if it was going to be the final thing he ever did.

Then he fell forward. Smoke rose from the hole in his back where the plasma had taken him. I looked at that for a moment, and then I looked up at the livisk standing behind him with a plasma rifle that had the familiar glow at the tip, along with the ominous hum. One could never forget the ominous hum when it came to threatening somebody with a plasma blaster.

"So I suppose you're the one we'll be negotiating with from here on out," I said.

The faintest hint of a smile spread across the livisk's face. It wasn't a particularly friendly smile. Not that I'd been getting a lot of friendly smiles from any of the livisk I ran up against for the past year or so.

Okay, scratch that. I'd gotten some pretty damn friendly smiles from Varis. A lot of other interesting facial expressions as well, particularly when we were...

Better not to think about that. Better to focus on what was happening in front of us. I wasn't even getting a bunch of friendly smiles when I was back in the tower, though I was starting to miss being in the tower.

Our adventures in the Undercity had taught me that Imperial Seat was far larger and far more dangerous than I ever could've imagined, and I'd imagined a lot of danger when I was taken captive. That danger went far beyond fighter duels with the empress or trying to work my way through a nuclear conflagration because the empress was dumb enough to drop a nuke on her own damn city.

The Undercity was proof enough of how often that strategy was used when the livisk were having trouble with the transition of power in their political system.

"It's bold of you to think we are going to be doing any sort of negotiating," the livisk woman said, stepping forward and putting her plasma blaster within a few inches of my forehead. Close enough that I could feel the plasma tickling against my forehead. It was never a pleasant experience.

I sighed as I stared up at her.

"Are we really going to do this?"

"Do what?" she asked, arching an eyebrow. "I have your life in my hands. I could kill you where you kneel. I could..."

Admittedly I'd been taking a little bit of a risk doing this. My body wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders, but I was down on my knees, which meant I didn't have to concentrate on a lot of stuff going on in my system. She was the one stupid enough to allow me to keep my plasma blade.

Not that I had any intention of giving it up. They could pry it from my cold dead hands. Which moved surprisingly quickly since I didn't have a lot to concentrate on.

She looked down in surprise, and then the top half of her body slid down and away from the bottom half of her body. I grabbed her plasma rifle as it fell to the ground and deftly tossed it over to Varis, who caught it and pointed it up at everyone surrounding us.

I looked at the livisk surrounding us on all sides. A couple of them moved their own plasma rifles like they were trying to figure out if they should shoot us or if they should hold their peace. Only the lady who'd been running everything was currently breathing her last after getting bisected, staring at me with a hatred I could totally understand considering I'd just chopped her in half.

"Okay, so you all took me captive. I'll own that, and I don't want any more of my people to die here. But if we could dispense with threatening each other, that would be nice. Because I will kill more of you if you keep doing that."

Maybe I was having some trouble because of the whole neural link thing. Maybe my body wasn't responding in the way I wanted it to when my brain sent signals down to everything because it'd been short-circuited by all the craziness that was going on, and by me pushing myself a little harder than I should've.

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But none of our enemies knew that. No, they just saw a battle pair kneeling here who'd somehow been taken captive and who could take out a lot of them before we were eventually killed. I could admit they probably had enough people to take us out eventually.

The "eventually" was a big part of that equation though. They could do the math and see a lot of them would die before "eventually" came around to hand them the win.

Another one stepped forward. This one was a gentleman who didn't look at all like the kind of livisk one expected dealing with their warrior class.

No, he was taller and a little thinner than what I'd expect from somebody in their warrior class. Like he didn't even have the look of somebody who'd been a warrior once upon a time and had let himself go.

He let out a sniff as he looked me and Varis up and down. There was a caution and a brightness to his eyes, though, like he'd realized he could potentially be deep in the shit.

"I think I might have discovered a way to take care of the issue that is plaguing you, William," Arvie said in the back of my mind.

"Not right now," I said.

As soon as I stepped out of that mental space, the world seemed to shift all around me again.

It was a good thing I was already down on my knees trying to make these people think I was as harmless as could be. Just a friendly little Terran pussycat who didn't have any claws, for all that I'd just let my claws out and bisected this guy's former boss.

"Oh, right," Arvie said. "Are you sure you wouldn't like me to start blasting these people? I estimate that I could take out at least twenty percent of them without causing any damage to any of your crew. We would probably lose maybe fifteen to twenty percent of the people with us by the time the fighting was done."

"Not right now, Arvie, and definitely don't go attacking anybody. I'd rather try and get one hundred percent rather than losing ten to twenty percent.

"As you say, William," he said, and he said it in a tone that indicated he wasn't sure that was a good idea.

Honestly, I wasn't so sure it was a good idea, either. I mean, we were talking potentially gambling and losing one hundred percent of the people from my crew, and Varis, and some of the new friends we'd met, like Jeraj and Yana.

Arvie would probably be okay. At least for a little while. If anything happened to us, I fully intended to give him permission to rain holy hell down on the empress and anyone down here in the Undercity who gave us a hard time. It would be the kind of vengeance that would ultimately result in a Pyrrhic victory, because he wasn't going to be able to stand up against the empress forever, but at least it would make it a Pyrrhic victory for the empress.

"So what do we do now?" I asked, looking up at the skinny livisk.

He sniffed again. His eyes darted to the plasma blade at my side. It was attached to my belt with a molecular bond. Again, nobody was going to be able to get that thing off of me unless they pried it from my cold, dead hands. And even then it was pegged to my biometrics, so it's not like anyone would be able to use it.

"If we treat you fairly while we take you to the Spider, then do you promise no more antics like that?"

I glanced at Varis. She nodded at me, the link conveying a cool confidence I sure wasn't feeling. I was feeling like a pretty big goddamn failure right about now.

I turned back to the livisk. "Yeah, that sounds like a fair enough deal. I promise to play nice as long as you don't try any more of the threatening or posturing bullshit."

"In my predecessor's defense," the livisk said with another sniff, glancing over to Jeraj and giving him an up-and-down that seemed to hold a little more than professional interest. "It's standard procedure to try and intimidate someone into doing what you want them to do before you resort to other means."

"Oh, I totally get it, and no hard feelings," I said. "Just like I hope you don't have any hard feelings about me killing your former boss."

At least I hoped there'd be no hard feelings about me killing his former boss. The way Yana had been so phlegmatic about me chopping off part of her arm had me thinking the livisk were willing to forgive a lot as long as you did it within the confines of their bullshit honor system.

"A promotion is always welcome, Terran," the livisk said, the corner of his mouth turning up in the barest hint of a smile.

"I'm sure it is," I said, grinning right back at him. I held my hand out.

He eyed it for a moment. It was the sort of look somebody might give a particularly venomous snake that had just started rattling at them. Not that they had the experience of venomous snakes that rattled to provide a warning here on Livisqa. They just had those damned screaming spiders that still sent a shiver running through me and caused a phantom pain in my right ass cheek just above where it met my leg.

Finally he reached out and took my hand, clasping me by the arm. I did the same to him. This time, there was a full grin there.

"I'm Tmors," he said.

"You can call me Bill," I said.

"Thank you for not killing more of us than you had to, Bill," he said, nodding to me. "It's always good to know when somebody knows they're beat rather than trying to fight to the last."

"I thought you livisk were big on making honorable last stands to the death," I said.

"We are," he said. "But we also appreciate when someone knows they're beat. I don't expect a human to fight to the last."

"You have a lot to learn about humans," I said.

"And yet here you are, surrendering when it's obvious you're beat," he said.

I blinked. This asshole thought I was giving up when it became obvious we weren't going to win the fight. He had no idea I was pulling my punches because I had no choice but to pull my punches because of the weird sickness that happened as a result of the chip implanted in the back of my brain.

I really needed to talk to Arvie about how he was going to do a reset, because I wasn't fond of the idea of turning it off and back on again if we were talking about my brain. I wasn't even a fan of doing a soft reset when we were talking about my brain.

"Don't mention it," I said. I had no intent of telling him I had no way of going too hard on them. And so going easy on them was the only way.

"Now, if you don't mind, I would like to have a word with the Terran Fox," Tmors said.

"You mean..."

I paused. I figured it would do away with some of the mystique if I went talking about Olsen as Olsen rather than the Terran Fox. I looked around, wondering where he'd gotten to. I hadn't seen him since the fighting stopped. Then I frowned as I realized he was nowhere to be found.

"That's odd. I don't see him."

The livisk's eyes went wide and then narrowed. He turned and started shouting sharp orders to his men.

"Find the Fox," he said. "That's the whole reason we're here."

"I'm going to try not to be insulted by that," I muttered as I stared at the livisk all around us suddenly moving like a beehive that had been kicked over at the realization the Terran Fox had gone missing.

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