"Okay. I don't know what your deal is, but…”

  "But you're going to listen to me if you know what's good for you," he said.

  His voice was gravelly, and it didn't sound like it was something he was putting on. Not like Harris, who had a naturally high-pitched voice he had to pitch down.

  This was the kind of voice a drill sergeant would kill for.

  "Is that a threat?" I asked, turning to him.

  "Son…”

  "I'm not your son," I said.

  "I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to tell you something you need to know. Something you have to know if you went one-on-one against one of them. Particularly if you went one-on-one against one of their lady warriors.”

  I sighed. It looked like I wasn't going to be getting out of this conversation no matter how hard I tried.

  "What's your name?"

  "You can call me Simon," he said.

  "Okay, so what does Simon say?" I asked.

  He grunted. It was a slight chuckle. Like he'd heard that joke so many times and was sick and tired of it, but he had to acknowledge it in some way.

  "Never heard that one before," he muttered, taking a sip of his own drink.

  It was just a bottle of beer. Nothing special. Nothing fancy. Definitely not the glowing green shit Carter gave us because we were enjoying the railroad special.

  "I'm Bill," I finally said, holding my free hand out. "Nice to meet you, Simon."

  "I don't think you think it's nice to meet me," he said. "But what I have to tell you is important. It's something that might even save your life."

  "Fine," I said. "So, shoot. What are you going to tell me that's so critically important?"

  "It's about people who get pulled into one-on-one combat with one of them," he said.

  "Have you ever done that?"

  He took another sip of his drink. He stared off into the distance. It was a thousand-yard stare if I'd ever seen one. The kind of look that said he’d been in all sorts of nasty situations over his long career.

  The lines on his face were proof of just how long that career had probably been, just how bad some of the shit he'd probably seen in the course of that career was.

  "It's never happened to me directly, no," he finally said.

  "Then why the hell are you over here bothering me about it?" I asked.

  "Because I've seen it happen to other men under my command. I've seen it happen to men who commanded me," he said. "And it's important you listen to me on this."

  "It would be really helpful if you could cut the cryptic bullshit and just come out and tell me what's such a big issue."

  "The livisk,” he finally said. "They can do things to you if you meet them one-on-one. You know the Marines train to resist them, right?"

  "I've heard about that," I said, "Like you stare at pictures of livisk while you're getting shocked or something so they don't get you all hot and bothered in the middle of combat."

  "That's something of what goes on," he said, chuckling. "But that's not all it is. The aversion therapy helps, but it's not something that works one hundred precent of the time."

  "Wait, so you're telling me all that bullshit is actually true? All the stuff about them connecting electrodes to your balls and giving you a shock every time you look at a picture of a pretty livisk up on a screen?"

  "You know, the funniest damned thing about that is there’s a certain percentage of soldiers who actually like having those electrodes attached to their junk, and the training creates a positive reinforcement. Those don't ever get sent into situations where they're going to be in direct contact with the livisk. Not unless everything goes to shit, that is.”

  "And I thought the taste for crayons was the weirdest you ground-pounders ever got," I said, chuckling as I shook my head.

  "Oh, you have no idea," he said. “The thing is, even that's not totally effective. There are people who go through who have the curse, or maybe it's the gift. The ability to interact with the livisk on their level. I suppose whether it’s a curse or a gift depends on how you look at it. Sure as shit felt like a curse looking at it from the outside.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  "This is all starting to sound pretty weird," I said.

  "Yeah, well, it is pretty fucking weird," he said. "Because there are men who get one-on-one contact with the livisk, and they come back changed. They talk about how they close their eyes and they see them. They talk about how they were drawn to them. That's where all those stories about people getting so distracted in the middle of combat that they forget what they were doing come from. Or the stories about people dropping everything and trying to fuck in combat, though I think that’s actually a rumor. It's like some sort of psychic link or something."

  I stared at him. A flat stare. A stare where I waited for the moment where he’d tell me he was bullshitting me this entire time.

  Because if he actually believed this shit...

  Only as I kept staring at him I realized that, yeah, he totally believed this bullshit.

  I shook my head and laughed. It was a low chuckle at first, but it quickly turned into more than that.

  "And here I thought you were just fucking with me," I said. "You actually believe this shit."

  "I believe it because I've seen it," he said, sounding indignant. "I've seen it happen to plenty of my men before. Good men. Good soldiers. They come back and they're changed. Some of them even have to be institutionalized. It's something the powers that be want to keep on the down-low, but everybody in the Corps knows about it."

  "If everybody in the Corps knows about it, then why is this the first time I'm hearing about psychic links with the livisk?" I asked.

  Simon looked up. The meaning there was plain enough. There were always people listening in, and he was worried somebody might be listening right now.

  Of course, something was always listening in. It was just a question of whether there was a human being notified by an algorithm to forward on to somebody who could cause trouble and send you to one of those boring re-education seminars.

  “I’m risking a lot even coming over here to tell you about this. I figure the loud music will keep it from being too much trouble, maybe. Plus it's not like they're going to do anything to me. Not at this point. I'm on my way out and they know it.”

  I took another sip of my drink. I leaned against the bar and took a quick glance around the rest of the bar.

  I'm not sure why I did that. I wasn't the kind of person who looked for security personnel out of habit. But there was something about this conversation that made me want to keep a lookout for them.

  "So how do I know if I'm going to go mad?" I asked.

  "You don't know," he said with a shrug, “There are people who have an encounter with the livisk and they have a nice memory. They have a pretty face to look at whenever they close their eyes."

  "And the others?" I asked.

  "The others go mad because they need to get back to the livisk they met and can’t. Especially the ones who ended up killing the livisk they were fighting."

  "Well, I’m in luck," I said, putting my empty cup down and glancing down the bar to where Connors still sat with the bottle. Though it was surprisingly empty at this point. She'd really gone through a lot of it. Damn.

  "You're in luck?" Simon asked.

  "For certain definitions of 'luck,' I haven’t been feeling for the last couple of weeks,” I said, "I suppose a little bit of luck should have been coming my way at some point, right?"

  "I don't know if an affliction that will eventually drive you to madness should be considered lucky," he said with a grunt.

  "Oh, nothing like that," I said, "But the livisk I was fighting is still very much alive. At least she was still very much alive as of the end of the engagement."

  I thought about how I had her ship dead to rights. Even with everything on the starboard side of my ship knocked out. I could’ve blown her out of the stars the same as that station, only I hadn't.

  I’d hesitated. I'd run over that moment again and again. I told myself it was just honor among warriors. That she'd impressed me when we had our back and forth, for all that she'd defied her honor and left after she promised that she was my captive.

  But what if there was something else going on? What if I had been influenced by her and some weird alien psychic link? What if there was a little bit of truth to what this old marine was telling me about people being changed when they came back from single combat with the livisk?

  I shook my head again. I wasn't going to think about that. My life was complicated enough without hearing old space stories from a marine who thought there was something wrong with people who fought the livisk solo. It was probably confirmation bias or something like that.

  "Well, thank you for your time and for your story," I said. "At the very least, it was a good one. Even if I'm not sure how much help it's going to be."

  "Just be careful," he said. “Keep in mind the madness that comes for some, and keep in mind that there are others…”

  He trailed off like he didn't want to say this next bit. Which was a surprise considering the craziness he was already spewing.

  "Others?" I prompted when he didn't say anything.

  "I've seen others who were compelled to do things they would never do before. Good men who threw themselves at their brothers in arms after the livisk had a moment with them. There isn't all that salacious stuff about fucking in the middle of a battlefield, that's just soldiers bullshitting, but I have seen things happen because of that weird psychic link thing they do."

  "Psychic link with aliens, yeah," I said. “And she didn't even have to put her hand to my face and do a mind meld.”

  “This isn't a joke, damn it.”

  "Thanks again for your story," I said. "I'll even get your drink for your trouble. How does that sound?"

  "I wasn't in this for a free drink," he grumbled, but he also didn't say anything as I tapped the payment chip on the side of the bottle so the biometrics would scan me and let the bar know this one was on me.

  I stood and made my way across the bar to where Connors still sat chatting with Carter and the glowing green bottle.

  “…and then he lets her go. Just lets her go. They have this weird thing where they stare at each other and that's it,” she said.

  Carter grunted, and then he turned and looked at me. I was surprised to realize there was something new there. Worry.

  I thought about all the stories Carter heard thanks to his bar. I thought about all the things he knew because people told him stuff in confidence that they weren't supposed to tell anybody, but it was okay because it was just Carter.

  And suddenly having him looking at me worried like that, and then glancing down to Simon over at the other end of the bar, had me more worried than any part of the story I'd just been told.

  Because that was almost like Carter had heard the same stories. Almost like Carter believed it.

  And Carter was a no bullshit kind of guy. So if he believed it? Maybe I really was in trouble.