Rafe Skyler was a big man to begin with, and with the heavy armor he was wearing he looked positively monstrous. "I think I'm glad I couldn't see you," Caine told him. "You look like a giant sculpture of a beetle."

Skyler chuckled as he got easily to his feet. "A lesser man might take that as an insult," he commented, unsnapping his helmet and lifting it off for examination. On the top was a flaming-red mark a few centimeters across. "Good shot," he said approvingly. "Clean hit, with enough force to break even a Ryq's skull." Craning his neck, the big man looked down onto his chestplate and the twin red marks left there by Caine's heels. "Nice," he said.

"Of course," a voice behind Caine added, "ideally you shouldn't have let him get that close."

Caine turned, feeling the rush of mixed emotions that always, on some level, accompanied his interactions with Damon Lathe. A blackcollar commando commander—comsquare for short—doyen of the remaining blackcollars on Plinry, Lathe had saved Caine's life at least twice and had succeeded in pulling the younger man's first Resistance mission to success out of what had been wet ashes indeed.

On the other hand, he'd also lied to Caine on several occasions, sent him around the red-herring track more times than Caine cared to remember, and had virtually reduced him to pawn status on that same mission. And to top it off, for the past seven months Lathe had been the one running Caine through Plinry's brand-new floating blackcollar academy.

Which had included a lot of this brand of tooth-grinding test.

Stepping to Caine's side, Lathe glanced over Skyler's armor. "Not bad," he said. "You also got three fast kills and two slow ones with your shuriken. The last one, though, you nearly missed. Let's go to the lodge and run the tapes."