I stood atop a black granite flattened pyramid surrounded by a magical forcefield, and ten thousands screaming fans who rooted for my opponent in the Kill-Or-Be-Killed Unlimited Class Aztecan sacrifice fight.

“Twlya, Twlya!” The crowd shouted which encouraged the magically enraged lady commando who could bench press me with her offhand. Problem was, I wanted her to win too. My definition of victory meant her boyfriend down the pyramid on a rack got together with her, and whatever horrible thing had been done to them that prevented them from being able to see each other was undone. No place in the plan for letting Twlya pull my heart from my chest to offer to the Lord of the Sun.



She did not get the memo. And no time remained to cast a spell with her rushing me.



I dove forward, and tried to spring over her by placing a leapfrogging hand on her low head. Halfway through the jump, she turned her head, and tore a chunk out of my left hand with her teeth. I spun to the rock gasping.



She flipped backward, and tried to stomp-stomp me into the rock while I rolled backward desperately. No question about it, Twlya was trying to kill me. She stopped when I got into a corner, and backed off sagging a bit as the spell controllers left her a little free. A look of horror filled her face as she took in my wound.



“Don’t hurt her, Taduesz.” The plea from her pacifist boyfriend floated up to me faint and sad.

“Not a problem, buddy.” I grunted as madness took her again.



I advanced so as to have room to retreat, and we stood trading blocks and giving no quarter for nearly two minutes. Then time was called again, and she backed off.



Despite my rigorous lifestyle, and my training from Master Wau Lei, I panted lightly. She did not pant at all.



“You cannot subdue me, Taduesz. You have to go for a killing strike, and hold nothing back. Nothing. They have forced me to kill innocents. It has to stop here.”

“They force you with magic, I can use magic.”

“This pyramid is soaked with thousands of acts of dark magic, and layered with defenses against people like us. I doubt you could even manage the simplest fire-starting spell against the counterspells built into this pyramid.”



Suddenly she leapt at me with a flying kick from fifteen feet away. I caught her ankle, and slung her to the ground, and followed up with the knee to her ribs,and my knifehand strike was plunging toward her adam’s apple before I saw the clear eyes, and knew her plan. Rolling away from Twyla, I wanted to wretch, but she came at me with true madness reinforced by her real fury at me.

I fended off what I could and soaked up her rage until that was gone, and only a magic impelled her. That was bad enough, and bleeding from a dozen slices from her hands, I turned to run, and fell to the granite.



She leaped down on my chest, and wrapped her hands around my throat as I hoped for. Twlya knew far more efficient means to kill, but either she fought back from inside, or the controllers wanted something more dramatic than a lightning fast punch too quick for the eye to see.



Twlya dragged me to my feet, and for a moment, I wished my Lekostian cyberware worked here because then I might be almost as strong as she was, but I had a plan. She lifted me skyward, and as I dangled from her encircling hands her voice cried out blasphemies while her boyfriend wept in horror, and I took my first free moment to reach out with my mind, and search inside hers.



Accelerating my mental sense of timeflow, I hoped any watchers would be focusing on my imminent demise, and not on any detection methods.



Twlya’s mind was held in a savage grip of fire maintained by a half-dozen priests, and they got to take breaks while her will to survive, to conquer, to dominate fought ceaselessly for freedom.



I slipped quietly past the gate of fire, and deeper down a passageway into her mind while my admiration grew. She had little innate psi talent, but what she had, she used skillfully, and without stinting. My quiet kept the priests from noticing me, and her as well which might be equally fatal.



Seeking a quieter path other than corridors filled with the storming legions, and Revolutionary War minutemen, and paratroopers summoned from her imagination that launched themselves up the corridors of her brain to tear at the fire that held her prisoner, I turned into a small and cool hallway filled with incense for the dead, stacks of plastic newsfax covering the news of the latest raids on the Outer Planets, and a blonde-haired little girl playing with two dolls.

A man walked through and kindly said before stepping into the gravtube to upstairs.

“Five minutes, and then you need to go out for rifle practise. Two hundred rounds.”

She looked at me.

“I’m very good at rifle practise. Me and the others like me have the promise of beating the aliens in a way they can respect. They respect commandos, and we Ubers might get them to stop the War.”

“I’m sure you are very good.” I said sincerely. “That is a good thing you are trying to do.”

“Yes, yes, it was. However, I just wanted to play with my dolls.” Her voice was suddenly older, and her eye color changed to her natural brown.

“Let’s see your dolls.” I said trying for something hoping that I had not caugth the attention of the conscious mind.

She presented them to me. One looked exactly like her current boyfriend, and the other was a blonde.

I tapped the guy.

“Who’s he?”

She took my hand, and led me down the hall to a doorway. It opened.

We stepped in, and I saw a park with people playing, and suddenly a woman, Twlya appeared standing up, ready for action with her gun out braced on her hip. I never really learned to do that very well since my amnesia. I almost always verse in unconscious.

She looked wild, terrified, ready to kill at a moment’s notice. Wherever she had just been to must have been truly unpleasant.

The game in the park stopped, and then it continued.

A man walked up along side her, and stuck a flower in her gun barrel.

She knocked him down, and drew her knife.

“What are you doing? Do you need medical attention for that epilepsy?” He asked in a perfectly bewildered voice. The non sequitor, and the utter calm in his voice saved his life. She put up the knife and stood back looking around for something to kill.

“Oh, is that the way people do dating now in the population centers. Me, I’m old-fashioned. I like to be introduced first before I kiss.” He smiled at her, and she stared at him like seeing an insect just start singing “Yellow Submarine.”

“Um, my names Milos. And yours is?”

“Twlya, uh, Twyla, Sergeant Commando 45892022-B, Special Modification Type 14Delta.”

“I think we’ll just go with Twlya if you don’t mind. It’s a beautiful name, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”



The little girl and I watched them walk off across the park, and she turned to me.

“He’d never heard of a lot of things before. War, killing, all the good stuff. Especially torture. They are torturing him, Taduesz.”

“I know. I owe you blood-debt, remember.” I said and her adult personality subsided.

“What happened next?”

“We fell in love. I was exotic, and beautiful, and he let me play with dolls, and he was the sweetest man I had ever met. And he had no clue what he was getting into. I tried to tell him, but he could not understand. They were not saints, they bickered sometimes enought to drive me to tears, but no one killed ever. Not even after I took him out to show him how my gun worked did he understand.”



Twlya stood, a bit thin, in a loose dress with the now incongruous rifle on her hip. An adoring Milos stood next to her in an empty field. She adjusted the gun to its lowest setting, and shot a branch off a tree at the edge of the field.

Milos ran and got it for her.

“See?” She said. “Violence and destruction if you come with me. Other places aren’t like here.”

“Yes, how neat. You know you could use that ‘gun’ to knock apples down from trees as well as to trim the trees. Very clever, Twlya.”

She growled, and he just smiled at her.

“Look, say I pointed it at someone.”

He looked doubtful.

“Say, I pointed it at you.” And she did. He waited.

“Say I shot you.”

He thought for a while.

“That would hurt.” He said sadly. “But you wouldn’t do it.” He brightened.

“But that’s the point, I might. I-I’m a monster, Milos.” And she turned to run away, and fell.

He caught her, and held her.

“What you are is the only woman in all the worlds for me. It is true, we are different. I will never love another; I cannot as you seem to assume I can. I stood lonely and forlorn for years until I met my black-haired beauty.”

“Oh, all right then.” She said, and kissed him.



I looked at the little girl.

“Sounds nice. I can identify with Milos. I have a lady lost in time and space I will get back to.”

“Yeah, sounds nice. He should have fallen for some blonde haired girl, and had an easy life never knowing more pain than an arguement over what’s for dinner.”

“What color was the hair of the genemods?”

“What difference does that make?” She said fingering her blond curls.

“Answer the question, Twyla.” And I hit her with pure command.

“Sir, the hair color in question, sir, was deemed to be black due to camoflage concerns on the Outer Planets. White skin, and black hair confused the alien visual perceptors most effectively, sir.”

I grunted wondering whether the nitpicker who had chosen that genemod understood the larger picture.

“Thank-you Sergeant. Continue your report.”



Twyla changed to a black and white neophrene-like suited soldier with cold eyes, and a sergeant’s stripes.



We stood in an alley watching two people very much in love bargain with a street vendor for food in the shade of a cloud-piercing skyscraper.



“I died in the world where I met the indigene Milos due to lack of essential vitamins in the planetary ecosystem. Milos came with me. We landed in a future roughly the same year as my home world, sir, but here no aliens or ramscoop sub-light spaceships, or domes on the planets. Instead, the megacorporations ruled the world, and seemingly chose to let their population die off. I assume, sir, because they thought robots would provide the workers, and so they did not need a working class anymore to provide luxuries for the rich. Sir, it was a morally appalling world. If you gave me one division of ShadowKnights we could conquer this world.”



“Go on.” I said even as I agreed with her assessment. Tyrants were appalling, and a good force of freedom-lovers could really mess their day up despite their pretensions to glory.



Jacked up cyberpunks leapt off buildings, and came out of sewers, and filled the both with tranq darts. The man fell the last by a good minute with a puzzled look on his face replaced by enlightenment.



The scene went black…



She and him woke in confined chairs, and were subjected to rough interrogation and threats of harm to each other. Soon, Alexander MegaCorp “Looking for new worlds to conquer” knew all about versers, and genetically modified super-soldiers, and they heard about true love.



They experimented. They thought. And then they brought in some new test subjects. Psi-capable operatives.



The operatives built barriers in Twyla’s and Milos’ mind so that only at the whim of the operator could each one see the other. And they taught her how to send a message psionically to different worlds which they had just learned to do themselves. And they gave her the terms, she could go out into other worlds, and send back data, and they would let her see her love, or not.



And just to keep them from finding a world where such psi barriers did not work, they conditioned them in the old-fashioned way to kill themselves if they landed in such a world.



It involved a lot of pain.



Worlds spun past with her and him spending time searching for technologies that AMC could use, and relaying the data back, and occasionally spending an hour together at the whim of the operators.



It had been a long time since they had found something interesting or so the operators claimed. She had lied in her last message to me; she was trying to keep up her spirits. It seemed like they were less important now, and the operators took it out on them.



More than six months had passed since she had seen him. She wondered if he still cared.



I sent her my image of him begging her not to hurt her. She grabbed the thought, and saw what I hid. His body fastened to a rack of pain. She turned away weeping.



“I should have left him. I am just pain, the Princess of Pain, the aliens called me before the ambush got my patrol.”



Flashes of strange, low-gravity combat against metamorphic, nitrogen-blooded aliens on the surface of Pluto dazzled me. Good thing, she had lost her combat armour somewhere, or we versers would all be calling her “ma’am” most respectfully, I noted with a nibble of humor.



“Some people have called me a few rough names as well.” I said trying for comforting words. She brought her head up in a surprising smile.

“Yeah, I’ve heard. Starbane. Is it true you blew up a star?”

I grimaced at the fangirl-like attitude.

“I was scared of you, Taduesz, when I first met you. I heard what a terror you were before meeting you at Menlo Park.”

“Me?” I squeaked thinking of all the time I had been worried about crossing her.

She nodded with a rueful grin.

“Guess we are not so tough after all. I just want to play with dolls, and you…?”

“Want to sit down and drink a Coke.” I said with a rueful grin of my own.

“Now, let’s say we go about feeding our reputations.”

“How? Outside, I’m strangling you.”

“True, but I’ve accelerated my thinking, and I have a plan or two. Tell your operator you have a data download to make.”

She did as I asked. It was a very complicated piece of psi to reach across dimensions, and she did it without understanding. Condititioning kept the process out of her conscious awareness.



I reached out to the data stream, and with a prayer and crossed fingers followed it. The light web took me to a room in a sunny building with two moons visible even in the daylight. This was not Alexander MegaCorps homeworld. But I could see, the AMC flag snapping in the breeze through the long windows at the front of the broader than tall building. It looked like a pleasant corporate hq of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties.



I looked about, and saw a screen which showed Twyla and me as I turned purple, and the crowd cheered. I came closer, and suddenly the screen flickered.



A young man leaped up from a console below the screen, and screamed to the large room full of people.

“He’s here. Get him.”

Suddenly, dozens of people in the room cast about with psionic skills, and I fled into the Earth shocked. Many things had changed at AMC. What was going on?



Taduesz