He badged the spic at the foot of the gangplank, who checked him off against a list on one of them flexi-things and waved him on up. It was a hot bitch of a day, and his shirt was already stuck to his back. The limp started up. The headache got worse. He stopped to catch his breath and when he looked up, it was like standing at the foot of a steel fucking mountain range.

A marine met him at the top—which is to say, a colored broad of some sort, not even a regular nigger. She was dressed in fatigues and sporting a USMC patch, snapped to, and told him to follow her. At least she looked like she had a good ass under those fatigues. Buster was an enlightened guy when it came to ass-related issues. He’d take it wherever he could find it.

As they moved past work details and piles of strange-looking machinery and burned-out wreckage, he could see that the deck of the carrier had taken a beating.

Good. Serves ’em right.

From what he’d heard, these assholes had deep-sixed a lot of good boys out there. Some said it was robots did most of the killing. But from all the spics and rock apes he could see running about, Buster had his doubts. Those bastards were always hot shit on a trigger.

He really had to drag his bad leg along to keep up with the broad, but he’d be damned if he was gonna call on her to slow down. She was probably doing it on purpose, just to show him up. Christ only knows what’d become of the country if the marines were going to be taking on crossbreed trash like her in the future.

Nobody paid him any attention, he noticed. But he guessed they’d be used to sightseers picking their way through the scrap metal by now.

“Are you all right, Detective?” she asked. “Do you require assistance, sir?”

The black dame—she looked part Apache, or maybe even Chinese, now that he thought about it—she’d pulled up and was checking him out as he hauled his injured leg over the baking hot, rubbery surface of the flight deck.

“Don’t you worry about me, doll,” he wheezed. “I’m just saving my energy.”

Buster winked at her, but the woman just gave him a flat, level stare that betrayed nothing of her feelings.

Well, fuck you.

He made himself walk without favoring one leg over the other, and they didn’t speak again. She led him into the first of the two smooth, sort of swept-back cones that dominated the deck. It must have been like the island on the Enterprise, he figured. He could see the other carrier a mile away. It looked like a tin can next to this monster.