Shin slammed his fist down on the eject button. Explosive bolts around the faceplate detonated in unison. They blew the faceplate out, wrapping the armored figure in shards of glass. The invader spun up and away, for a heartbeat allowing Shin to believe he was rid of his tormentor.

Hanging on by one hand, the armored raider swung back down, his steel-shod hooves clanging against the lip of the cockpit. The figure bounced up and down, its silhouette resembling nothing so much as an excited ape. It may have been trying to speak, but the warning klaxons blaring in the cockpit drowned out the sounds. The creature raised its right hand and pointed the laser at Shin, making his intent loud and clear.

Fire filled the spherical cockpit as the ejection rockets on the back of Shin's command couch ignited. Inertia jammed Shin back down into the couch's thick padding as the rockets catapulted him free of the doomed Phoenix Hawk.He hurled through the sky, spinning and whirling uncontrollably, which told him he'd struck the raider in the exit from his 'Mech. The wet stickiness running down over his thighs also told him the raider had not missed his dying laser shot.

The couch's gyrostabilizers kicked in and brought an end to the chair's wild ride. Using the foot pedals, Shin turned the chair and directed it down in a small meadow about five hundred meters from where the infantry continued to dismember his lance. He slowed the chair for landing and saw his Phoenix Hawkhit the earth.

His ejection had snapped the 'Mech's head back and imparted a slow backward spin to the humanoid machine. With all the aerodynamics God gave the average mountain, the war machine flipped end over end, then landed on its head. The body crushed the cabin like an empty eggshell, then the 'Mech's broad shoulders hit. Inertia splayed its arms out, grinding clenched fists into the earth and causing the 'Mech's sturdy legs to telescope down into the torso. Fire spurted from all the growing cracks in the Phoenix Hawkas the legs speared the fusion reactor, then the limbs shot up from the doomed 'Mech on jets of ion fire. As the legs spun away, the rest of the 'Mech exploded, sowing the battlefield with mammoth shards of half-melted ceramic armor and jagged slivers of ferro-titanium skeleton.

Arrow Lance's 'Mechs, by dint of their size, weathered the blast easily. Debris from the Phoenix Hawkwashed over them with all the damage of a summer shower. The smaller raiders, however, suffered as armor sheets twice their size sliced through them and bone fragments impaled them. Even those that survived the shrapnel storm fell prey to the explosion's Shockwave. It knocked them flying, freeing their captives.

Shin grounded the command couch and popped the restraints holding him into it. He pulled off his neurohelmet, then looked down to see how much damage the raider had done with his last shot. I don't feel any pain, just blood. That's got to be bad.

He was right. The wound was horrible, unsurvivable. Blood covered him from the lower part of his cooling vest, down his legs, and into the tops of his boots. Already black flies buzzed around him, and in his shocked state, he could barely summon the strength to shoo them away.

Fortunately, the blood was not his.

Weakly, Shin grasped the armor-sheathed left arm and lifted it away from his waist. The smooth metal felt almost warm and fleshlike, and the fingers remained curled around a small piece of weather-stripping from the Phoenix Hawk'sface. A slight dent near the upper arm showed where the command couch's leading edge had hit it during the ejection. Extending up beyond the shoulder, half of the thing's head armor and a broad plate from its chest had been pulled free. Without looking inside at the pieces leaking blood, Shin threw the arm into the long, green summer grasses and climbed out of his chair.

He grabbed the back cushion and yanked it free of the couch. From behind it, compressed into flat packages, he pulled a survival pack, a forest camo jumpsuit, a gun and gunbelt, several clips of ammo, and a cylindrical, diatomic water purification pump. He laid each out on the seat of his couch, then stripped off his cooling vest and bloody shorts. Using several handfuls of grass, he managed to scrape off most of the blood, then pulled on the jumpsuit. After fastening the water pump to it, he shrugged the backpack on and belted the gun around his waist.

Ready to depart, he reached into the command couch's cavity and pulled out his katana.The sword measured a little over a meter, including hilt, and weighed no more than two kilos. The black lacquered wooden sheath showed no decoration, but Shin knew that under ultraviolet light, ghostly purple calligraphy would show up to identify the sword as belonging to a member of the Kuroi Kiri. As he was not a graduate of one of the elite military academies, Shin did not wear a wakizashi sword as well. I am entitled to this one blade, but as myoyabun put it, "Two swords are for show. A blade's work is best done alone."

Holding the sheathed sword in his right hand, Shin started away from his command couch and almost immediately stumbled over the discarded infantryman's arm. He dropped to one knee beside it and turned it over. That's odd. The whole limb has gotten cold! It feels like the armor is chilling itself. And down inside here, a membrane has irised down, and what's this black, sticky stuff leaking all over? It almost looks like a tourniquet to stop the arm from losing blood. It's as though the armor is protecting it so the limb can be reattached .. . that's impossible—but no more so than anything else I've seen today. And it means ...

At the sound of grasses rustling behind him, Shin came up in a whirl. The katanaflashed from its sheath and swung down in a glittering silvery arc. A last-second adjustment to account for the raider's incredible height guided the slash through the side of his neck and splashed crimson over his shoulder. The raider staggered back, and failing to steady himself because of his missing arm, fell awkwardly to his back.

Bile burned Shin's throat. The black, tar-like substance he had seen on the discarded arm coated the raider's exposed flesh with a thin membrane, but leaked a little blood around the cut. New jets of black fluid pumped from the portion of the helmet still in place. It oozed down over the raider's face and head, filling the wound and choking off the flow of blood. Shin heard a hissing and saw clear fluid spurt into the air. The raider moaned in concert with it, then smiled insanely. Eyes and teeth stark white amid a dripping black face, he rolled to his feet.

Shin dropped the sword and pulled his pistol. Unlike most of his compatriots, he preferred a heavy slug-throwing weapon to a lighter needle-shooter. Holding the gun rocksteady in his left hand, he aimed at the raider's exposed left breast and pulled the trigger twice.

Both slugs hit and jerked the raider half around, but did not stop him. Shin shifted his aim up, sighting in on the exposed eye. Seeing the pupil as big as a saucer, he guessed the raider's armor was pumping him full of painkillers. Whatever this guy is, he's not in pain. I hope like hell the body works the same way as ours.

The first shot to the head dropped the raider to his knees, but it took the rest of the clip to kill him dead. Even with such massive trauma, the armor continued to pump the black synthetic flesh out to fill the wounds. Besides sealing the body in a black cocoon, it injected more drugs, then sprayed out some other clear chemical that killed the flies starting to land on the black skin.

Shin stared dumbly at the raider and its armor until the sounds of battle brought him back from his confusion. He knelt and fastened the arm to his pack. I have to take this with me. With its arm torn off, that thing survived a 250-meter drop to the ground and tracked me to this spot where it took eight rounds to kill it—if I have killed it!