"You did good," I said, and then the nose of the shuttle hit the surface of the lake.

Wrenching, tearing sounds as the nose of the shuttle ripped downward, shearing off the pilot's compartment from the rest of the shuttle. A brief register of my squad and Alan's as their compartment flies spinning away—a still shot with mouths open, screams silent in all the other noise, the roar as it flies over the shuttle nose that is already fraying apart as it whirls over the water. The tight, impossible spins as the nose sheds metal and instrumentation. The sharp pain of something striking my jaw and taking it away with it. Gurgling as I try to scream, gray Smart-Blood flung from the wound by centrifugal force. An unintentional glance at Fiona, whose head and right arm are somewhere behind us.

A tang of metal as my seat breaks off from the rest of the pilot's compartment and I am skipping on my back toward an outcropping of rock, my chair lazily spinning me in counterclockwise direction as my chair back bounces, bounces, bounces toward the stone. A quick and dizzying change in momentum as my right leg strikes the outcropping followed by a yellow-white burst of two-hundred-proof pain as the femur snaps like a pretzel stick. My foot swings directly up where my jaw used to be and I become perhaps the first person in the history of man to kick himself in his own uvula. I arc over dry land and come to ground somewhere where branches are still falling because the passenger compartment of the shuttle has just crashed through. One of the branches comes down heavily across my chest and breaks at least three of my ribs. After kicking myself in my own uvula, this is strangely anticlimactic.

I look up (I have no choice) and see Alan above me, hanging upside down, the splintered end of a tree branch supporting his torso by wedging itself into the space where his liver should be. SmartBlood is dripping off his forehead onto my neck. I see his eyes twitch, registering me. Then I get a message on my BrainPal.

You look terrible — he sends.

I can't respond. I can only stare.

I hope I can see the constellations where I'm going — he sends. He sends it again. He sends it again. He doesn't send it after that.

Chittering. Rough pads gripping my arm. Asshole recognizes the chittering and beams me a translation.

— This one yet lives.

—Leave it. It will die soon. And the green ones aren't good eating. They're not ripe yet.

Snorting, which Asshole translates as [laughter].

"Holy fuck, would you look at this," someone says. "This son of a bitch is alive."

Another voice. Familiar. "Let me see."

Silence. The familiar voice again. "Get this log off him. We're taking him back."

"Jesus Christ, boss," the first voice says. "Look at him. You ought to just put a fucking bullet in his brain. It'd be the merciful thing to do."

"We were told to bring back survivors," the familiar voice says. "Guess what, he survived. He's the only one that survived."

"If you think this qualifies as surviving."

"Are you done?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Now move the goddamn branch. The Rraey are going to be on our ass real soon."

Opening my eyes is like trying to lift metal doors. What allows me to do it is the blasting pain I feel as the branch is moved off my torso. My eyes fly open and I aspirate in the jawless equivalent of a scream.

"Christ!" the first voice says, and I see it's a man, blond, flinging away the massive branch. "He's awake!"

A warm hand on the side of what's left of my face. "Hey," the familiar voice says. "Hey. You're all right now. It's okay. You're safe now. We're taking you back. It's okay. You're okay."

Her face comes into view. I know the face. I was married to it.

Kathy has come for me.

I weep. I know I'm dead. I don't mind.

I begin to slide away.

"You ever see this guy before?" I hear the blond guy ask.

"Don't be stupid," I hear Kathy say. "Of course not."

I'm gone.

Into another universe.

PART III

THIRTEEN

"Oh, you're awake," someone said to me as I opened my eyes. "Listen, don't try to speak. You're immersed in solution. You've got a breathing tube in your neck. And you don't have a jaw."

I glanced around. I was floating in a bath of liquid, thick, warm and translucent; beyond the tub I could see objects but couldn't focus on any of them. As promised, a breathing tube snaked from a panel at the side of the bath toward my neck; I tried to follow it all the way to my body, but my field of vision was blocked by an apparatus surrounding the lower half of my head. I tried to touch it, but I couldn't move my arms. That worried me.

"Don't worry about that," the voice said. "We've turned off your ability to move. Once you're out of the tub, we'll switch you back on again. Another couple of days. You still have access to your BrainPal, by the way. If you want to communicate, use that. That's how we're talking to you right now."

Where the fuck am I — I sent. And what happened to me—

"You're at the Brenneman Medical Facility, above Phoenix," the voice said. "Best care anywhere. You're in intensive care. I'm Dr. Fiorina, and I've been taking care of you since you got here. As for what happened to you, well, let's see. First off, you're in good shape now. So don't worry. Having said that, you lost your jaw, your tongue, most of your right cheek and ear. Your right leg was snapped off halfway down your femur; your left one suffered multiple fractures and your left foot was missing three toes and the heel—we think those were gnawed off. The good news there was that your spinal cord was severed below the rib cage, so you probably didn't feel much of that. Speaking of ribs, six were broken, one of which punctured your gallbladder, and you suffered general internal bleeding. Not to mention sepsis and a host of other general and specific infections brought on by having open wounds for days."

I thought I was dead — I sent. Dying, anyway—

"Since you're no longer in real danger of dying, I think I can tell that by all rights, you really should be dead," Dr. Fiorina said. "If you were an unmodified human, you would be dead. Thank your SmartBlood for keeping you alive; it clotted up before you could bleed out and kept your infections in check. It was a close thing, though. If you hadn't been found when you were, you probably would have been dead shortly after that. As it was, when they got you back to the Sparrowhawk they shoved you into a stasis tube to get you here. They couldn't do much for you on the ship. You needed specialized care."

I saw my wife — I sent. She was the one who rescued me—

"Is your wife a soldier?"

She's been dead for years—

"Oh," said Dr. Fiorina. Then, "Well, you were pretty far gone. Hallucinations aren't that unusual at that point. The bright tunnel and dead relatives and all of that. Listen, Corporal, your body still needs a lot of work, and it's easier for it to get done while you're asleep. There's nothing for you to do in there but float. I'm going to put you into sleep mode again for a while. The next time you wake up, you'll be out of the tub, and enough of your jaw will have grown back for you to have a real conversation. All right?"

What happened to my squad — I sent. We were in a crash—

"Sleep now," Dr. Fiorina said. "We can talk more when you're out of the tub."

I started to craft a truly irritated response but was hit by a wave of fatigue. I was out before I could think about how quickly I was going out.

"Hey, look who's back," this new voice said. "The man too dumb to die."