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before his backhand throws me against a cave wall. When I roll to my feet with the laser blade in my hand, two other ferox are standing beside him.
    Challenge? asks one.
    “No challenge,” I reply.
    The ferox avoid me after that. They watch from the corner of their eyes, tensing as I turn corners in a tunnel to meet them. I’ve gone from being a member of the tribe to being a problem. I can smell hesitation on their fur, a restrained fury that sees them turn away from me.
    My anger is more open, less wise.
    The pool where we first bathed is almost gone, but I use what water is left to wash out my mouth, then take grit and scrub the fingers that picked crudely roasted chunks of flesh from that evening’s cooking fire. And I sleep curled around a dark void that is my anger, until someone shakes me awake in the early hours of the morning. It is the youngster, the mixture of scents rolling off him too complicated for me to translate.
    He picks me up. Human? he asks.
    Behind him, ferox shuffle in a passageway.
    “Not human,” I reply.
    The youngster allows himself to look doubtful and my guts churn, not from what I have eaten but from what may come next. His paw is holding my face, and a yellow sickle of claw is visible at the edge of my sight, ragged with use.
    We talk later, he says.
    I nod.
    A hundred miles beyond the frontier, trapped in an underground cave system with ferox, in the middle of a summer so hot that the water in the deepest cave pool will eventually be reduced to dampness and nothing…I am in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and that has to be the history of my twenty-eight years to date.
    I sleep alone, I eat alone.
    In so doing I reduce my food intake to scraps and sacrifice the company others might bring me. It is the only way to keep my anger in check.
    The laser blade stays in my pocket.
    Pups who once regarded me as an object of interest start to bristle if I come near, as if what is thought by their elders filters down. Still-soft armor strains to flex, heads are raised, and half-grown fangs are bared, so I nod and smile and begin to count the days until high summer comes to an end, because this heat can’t last much longer.
    After all, how long can it take some scuzzy little planet to negotiate the shallow bend of its solar orbit?

 
    CHAPTER 6

    F LAMEFIRE IS RIGHT…
    When the attack comes it’s not against me, and comes not from the tribe but from outside. I still wonder how Youngster knew it would happen. Can ferox read the future? Or is the answer simpler, with rumor running through his world as swiftly as our own?
    “Death’s Head.”
    The cry is amplified.
    A human voice stretched by electronics into a weapon itself. Its source might be a hundred or more paces away, but my head still hurts from the sudden blast of noise.
    “Surrender Now.”
    The words are said for form only. No quarter is asked or given.
    Above and below, from the sides, through fissures in the rock, tunnels, and natural chimneys, the attack appears to come from every direction at once.
    The Death’s Head clear the cave system with flamethrowers, using the lower vents to flood the main camp with gas, which they then ignite. And flamefire pours in from above, sticky and stinking, igniting everything it touches and flowing relentlessly downhill toward the caverns where the females and the cubs hide.
    What had been hot became an inferno.
    Fire curls against rock, and the darkness of the caves becomes an unholy half-light, with ferox in flames like moving candles. They die fighting, because that’s the way it goes.
    Instinct tumbles me into the last of my pool of water, and common sense holds me there, my face barely above the surface as oxygen burns out of the air and my lungs begin to choke. Anybody who tells you they don’t feel fear in battle is a liar. Fear keeps you alive, by focusing the mind so you know that what you’re about to do is not some childish game.
    This is my own side; these are my own people.