The broken hand reached out and clutched the opened man’s torso, grabbing his lifeless furs and pulling forward. Somehow, Cole could feel the vehicle’s legs pushing and slipping in the blood; they propelled the scene ahead, lurching for the man with the goggles whose brow hinted at wild, unseen eyes.

A hand grabbed the swordsman’s thigh. Cole watched, completely detached, as it yanked the man down, the slick blood assisting as it spread out beneath them. The man’s arms wind-milled, swinging for balance. He landed in a heap, then brought the invisible blade up, preparing to swing. Cole watched other hands—hands he barely recognized as his own—grab the man’s arms and wrestle them down. He admired the way the good hand pinned the man’s wrist while the mangled hand went to work on his face. That hand was no good as anything but a club, anyway. He wondered what it would feel like to own a hand destroyed like that. What the sensation might be like to ball crushed bone into something resembling a fist and throw it, as hard as one could, into a solid thing. Over and over.

He wondered how that would feel, because he couldn’t know. He watched the scene for a little while, the horror slowly speeding up to real-time before he grew bored of it. The striking stopped.

Cole couldn’t even tell what the hand had been hitting. Below him lay a red mess, the orb of one eye dangling from a bundle of nerves. It hung out of something misshapen and leaking. And what had been a crushed hand, now looked like ground-up meat. Splinters of white bone stuck out where knuckles once were, all of it dripping with blood.

The person he was riding inside staggered to its feet, legs wobbly and shaking. It moved toward the light, toward the rectangle of air filled with sparkling flakes that rode on the wind. Unable to do anything but watch, Cole rode along as the person left the small room, taking him out as well, out into a world full of silent fighting.

Men were everywhere, men and aliens, fighting in clusters. It all had the sloppiness of a dream as people split in two and some seemed to disappear altogether. Cole watched the legs beneath him march away from it all, moving toward the edge of the deck where more light and sparks of whiteness—miniature angels—danced and beckoned, offering a calm, seductive reprieve.

When several men came running after him, after the body he was in, Cole hardly noticed the legs beneath him begin to kick. To Run. He jounced around inside the skull—confused trapped and alone—riding along and screaming for everything to stop.