My troops hardly glanced at me as they pulled on their armor and equipment and hefted the heavy weapons we would be using planetside. They were veterans, despite their seeming youth.

I headed for the bridge without hesitation, finding my way through the labyrinthine passageways of the huge battle cruiser as if I had never been anywhere else. We were part of an invasion fleet, and our approach to the target planet was not unopposed. There was a battle going on, our invading fleet against their defenders.

At each double-doored hatch there was a sentry, a reptilian with insignia painted onto its scales and a sidearm buckled around its middle. Each time I flinched, remembering Set and his minions and how they had tried to make the Earth their own. But each of these sentries stiffened to attention at my approach and saluted with three-taloned hands.

They had one thing in common with Set’s species; their size told their age, and their age told their rank. The bigger they were, the older and higher-ranking. I wondered what happened to reptilians who did not get promoted as they aged.

The bridge was small and cramped and eerily quiet with the tension of battle. Nothing but reptilians at the consoles, the cruiser’s captain at the center bigger than all the others, of course. They were all absorbing data directly through the cyborg jacks plugged into their temples, their eyes covered with wide-spectrum lenses that showed them everything that the ship’s sensors detected, far more than unaided eyes could see.

For me, though, there was nothing to see except these rapt reptilians at their duty stations, claws clicking on keyboards set into the armrests of their chairs. There were no screens for human eyes, nothing but blank metal bulkheads and consoles covered with dials and gauges that meant nothing to me. The bridge was uncomfortably hot, and had a strange dry charred smell to it, like a desert in a blazingnoon sun.