Reactor, March 2026
Commander Graff of the TGS Visigoth arrives on a feudal planet mid-war, perched with his two-person crew — the sharp-tongued Xun and the steady Brown — atop the stone tower of a medieval castle. Their mission is a hostage extraction: five Trade Guild medical workers caught in the crossfire of a primitive gunpowder conflict. The planet has devolved into a feudal pastiche, its society built on spears and swords, with no electronic infrastructure to exploit. For a crew accustomed to hacking comms and tapping networks, the total absence of technology proves disorienting — even dangerous.
The real tension runs beneath the mission itself. Four weeks before, an explosion gutted Graff in the field and revealed what he had long concealed: his body is riddled with illegal augmentations — rapid healing, enhanced memory, processor implants, augmented senses. He is, as he puts it, not entirely human. His crew has known the truth for a month, and the fallout is palpable. Xun flinches when he touches her arm. Brown triple-checks Graff’s rappelling gear like he’s managing a liability. Graff reads their caution as distrust, and quietly wonders whether staying with the Visigoth is a mistake — whether he has already broken the unit cohesion that made them exceptional.
The three descend a chimney shaft into the fortress, navigate stone corridors by stealth, and locate not five but twelve prisoners — the medical mission augmented by Trade Guild diplomatic observers. Dr. Avery, the mission’s fierce, red-haired leader, has kept her people together through exhaustion and hunger. Graff takes charge of the expanded group, improvises a marching order, and follows Brown’s scouting to a stable with an unguarded egress tunnel.
They nearly make it. A squad of young local soldiers pours in from the tunnel, bows drawn, swords up. Rather than stun them all and risk a chaotic melee with arrows flying, Graff strips off his armor and challenges their commander to single combat — sword to sword — wagering the hostages’ freedom on the outcome. The duel is unequal in every technical sense: Graff is faster, stronger, tireless. But the young soldier is skilled, trained from youth, and when Graff finally pins him, the kid drives a knife deep into Graff’s abdomen and twists. Graff chokes the soldier unconscious — and the young man’s heart stops. He doesn’t recover.
The soldiers honor the terms of the duel and let the group go. Outside, Graff walks wounded through the extraction, hiding the severity of the injury from the newly arrived expedition medics — including his partner Ell, the Visigoth’s doctor, who assigns him a green triage rating on Graff’s quiet insistence while already half-healed tissue seals the wound. Afterward, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dust with Xun and Brown, something shifts. They don’t leave. They don’t recoil. Xun pats his knee. The unit cohesion Graff feared was gone turns out to be battered but intact — changed by the truth of what he is, but not destroyed by it.
Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her latest novels are historical fantasies, The Naturalist Society and The Glass Slide World, about 19th century ornithologists and the magic of binomial nomenclature. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.