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Our orders came just after noon. The Rebels were believed to be moving north; I was to take my forces and intercept them. I was not to leave any of my forces behind as guards for the captured Rebels.

The orders were no more specific than that … but they could not be misunderstood.

I had them executed in mid-afternoon. I pulled the guards back into a half circle, and had them open fire on the Rebels inside the holding pen. It took most of five minutes before the screaming stopped and I could be certain all seven hundred were dead.

There was no time to bury them.

We marched south to the next battle.

With one thing and another it took almost half a year for the Rebellion on Devaron to be put down. Rebellions are drawn-out affairs, even the failures. When it was over, I submitted my resignation. At first my superiors, humans all, could not decide whether to accept it and let my fellow “natives” kill me once I no longer had the protection of the Imperial Army, or to refuse it and execute me for treason for having made the request in the first place.

I recall I did not much care.

They let me go.

I vanished. Neither my Imperial superiors, nor the family or friends left behind, who lusted for my horns, ever saw me, or my music collection, again.

Time passed.

Halfway across the galaxy from Devaron, on the small desert planet of Tatooine, in the port city of Mos Eisley, in a cantina tucked away near the center of the hot, dusty city, I looked up from my empty drink and smiled at my old friend Wuher.

I gave him the polite one. Devish are more sharply differentiated by sex than most species. Men have sharper teeth than women, designed for hunting; Devish evolved from pack hunters. Women have canines as well, but also have molars and can survive on food that men would starve on. In rare cases, though, about one birth in fifty, a Devish man will be born with both sets of teeth. I’m one of them. In the old days it was a survival trait; Devish men with both sets of teeth were used as solitary scouts by the pack. They could range farther and survive in terrain where most males would starve. It may be cultural and it may be genetic, but there is no question that Devish with doubled teeth are less creatures of the pack than most Devish men.

I doubt most Devish could do what I’ve done, at that.

My outer row of teeth are female, flat and not at all threatening. The inner row, composed of sharp, needle-pointed teeth, is for shredding flesh. When I feel threatened or angry, the outer row of teeth retract. In those circumstances it’s a reflex; but I can do it on purpose.

Sometimes I do it on purpose. It startles humans … well, it startles most noncarnivores, but humans are a special case, a whole species of omnivores. There are not many intelligent omnivorous species out there. I have a theory about them: They’re food that decided to fight back. In the case of humans, tree munchies. They never quite get over their own audacity, I suspect, and they’re a nervous lot because of it.

(A human once tried to tell me that humans were carnivores. I did not laugh at him, despite his molars and his pitiful two pair of blunted incisors, and a digestive tract so long that the flesh he ate rotted before it came out the other end. With a body designed like that, I’d take up leaf eating.)

Wuher gave me the usual scowl in response to my polite, flat-toothed smile. “Let me guess, Labria. The glass is defective.”

Wuher is my best friend on Tatooine. He’s a squat, ugly human with a bad attitude and none of the human virtues. He hates droids and doesn’t care much for anything else. I like him a great deal. There is a purity to his loathing for the universe that is quite spiritually advanced. If I could free him from his love of money, he might well attain Grace. “Yes, my friend. It has ceased functioning. If you would fix it …”

“With?”

“Oh, the amber liquid, I suppose.”

“The Merenzane Gold?”

“The bottle bears that label,” I conceded.