Lizards. I glanced upward involuntarily. They had ships in orbit that could vaporize my entire command here. I needed to be careful with the lives of the twenty humans under my command, very careful. I turned off my zPhone for a moment, sticking it in a pocket. Hurriedly, I explained to the soldiers around me. "The lizards showed me who they really are, when I was up there for the promotion ceremony. The rumors you heard about messages in fortune cookies are true, they didn't rescue Earth from the Ruhar; they kicked the Ruhar out so the lizards can rape our planet for themselves. We're fucked either way, the only thing we have left out here is our humanity, and I'm not giving that up. The lizards are ordering me to murder eight random hamsters."

"Why eight, sir?" Olafson asked, which I thought was not exactly the most important question to ask at the time.

Holding up my hands, I explained "Lizards have four fingers on each hand, they think in terms of eights, not tens like we do. We're supposed to kill eight civilians for every one human killed. When the Nazis held Rome, and the Italians resisted, the Nazis shot ten or twenty civilians for every German killed. Grabbed random civilians off the street, lined them up on a bridge, shot them and dumped their bodies in the river. The United States Army doesn't do that." My facts were kind of fuzzy on the subject, but the basic elements were correct. The zPhone back on, I responded. "As a soldier in the United States Army, I am required to refuse illegal orders. Deliberately murdering civilians is an illegal act."

There was an enraged Kristang screech that didn't translate, then my zPhone went dead. I mean, completely dead, no lights, the lizards must have deactivated it.

"What now, sir?" Captain Rivers asked.

How the hell was I supposed to know? Nothing in my training had prepared me for this fucked up situation. "Let's get the lead truck detached from that busted trailer." The back of the truck's cab was scorched and the windows blown out, but the solid tires were still round and functional. The other two trucks were in bad shape, their powercells had caught fire from the heat. "I'll take the truck by myself, if the lizards upstairs decide to slap me down for disobedience, I don't want to take anyone else with me. And don't argue, that's an order. We roll out, back to base, keep the hamvees dispersed." While the lizards could hit us from orbit no matter how widely we were dispersed, I wasn't going to make it easy for them. Maybe we should put all the zPhones in a bag and I'd keep them with me, so the lizards couldn't target us by signal-

Rivers put a hand to his earpiece, then handed it and his zPhone to me. "Stinger for you, sir." So, they hadn't deactivated all of our zPhones, only mine.