The team followed Adya, hands in front of faces to test heat in the air. Glad for her mask, Yajain brought up the rear. She looked over her shoulder as she reached the open door. The security troops began to close the net on the building where Yajain stood. Gingerly, she tested her burned fingers on the hilt of her vare blade. The skin held, despite more pain. She put on her mask and stepped through the door, mind sharpened by the pain that flared with small movements.
Floor tiles in the passage beyond the door were blackened from the fire, and residual smoke drifted in the air. Fans hummed in the walls, blowing smoke up to vents in the ceiling fifteen feet up. Emergency sprinkler water dripped from charred walls. Smells of charcoal and melted plastic reached Yajain’s nose through the mask’s breather.
Flames had rendered the signs melted and illegible, but Adya led the way confidently down one fork in the hall, like Yajain, too short for the smoke above to bother her. Despite the woman’s light hair, she reminded Yajain of Lin, the way she moved with such presence and grace. Lin, before the accident, Yajain reminded herself. Even on her prosthetics, Lin never was the same after losing her legs. Mosam did that to her, and he did it so he could run off with people like Adya.
The group passed out of the burned section to a room with a door leading into a rough-hewn cave system. Boskem turned to Yajain and Ogidar.
“Weapons ready. Consider everyone down here hostile.”
Ogidar nodded and checked his rifle.
Yajain locked eyes with Boskem.
“Don’t forget what Pansar said. If we can take a tyrant alive Dilinia might be convinced to send a fleet.”
Boskem grunted.
“Defense first.”
“Agreed, finder,” Adya said.
Yajain scowled and removed her coil pistol from its holster at her hip. She didn’t raise it, just held it at her side.
“Getting that fleet out here is more important than any of us.” Her voice sounded dull and alien in her own ears. “Don’t forget that.”
Adya dropped down into the passage without a word, Boskem right behind her. Ogidar turned to Yajain.
“Who could have thought you were a traitor?”
Her scowl slipped and her brow furrowed.
“Ogidar…”
“Don’t worry. I’ll do what I can to capture one of them.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Doctor Aksari.”
She put her undamaged hand on his hand.
“Thank you.”
They turned to the doorway leading into the tunnels.
The passage through the doorway led to a drop shaft that sank for what looked like kilometers into the core chamber. Small scuffs and vacuum blade marks smoothed the walls. Boskem took the long rifle and a small satchel from Adya and turned to Ogidar and Yajain.
“Cabler DiSayul, I’ll cover you with this.” He hefted the rifle. “Setartha informs me the tyrants are probably in the next chamber because its the only one large enough close to the settlement.”
“Sir.” Ogidar saluted.
Yajain glanced at Adya and Boskem.
“Are we ready to go in there?”
Adya nodded.
“There’s a structure at the bottom of this cavern. They’re probably hiding in there.”
Boskem fitted an ill-proportioned eyepiece onto his head. He blinked and turned in different directions. “This heat sensor should give me target sighting inside.”
Adya grimaced as she watched Boskem pull on the eyepiece’s bands with meaty fingers.
“Remember not to shoot anything humanoid.” She turned to Yajain. “Ready, doctor?”
Yajain lowered her pistol to her side, pained, tender fingers clenched on the grip. She gazed down the shaft. It widened into a core-lit space almost as large as the city above, but vacant except for a single broad, flat-roofed building where the core entered the floor of the cavern. The core light was in flux, halfway between the dim of early and the bright light of main shift.
“Let’s do it.”
Pistol in hand and broadening grin on her face, Adya dove over the side. Ogidar and Yajain followed. Boskem set up Adya’s massive rifle looking after them. They fell with purpose and wind blowing them back. From behind the protection of her mask, Yajain searched the floor for movement, but stalagmites and empty paths and dull green core plants were all she saw outside the building. She switched on her hunter’s ears. She fell alongside the brightening column that was the core of Sifar.
A cavern mouth leading to the outside of the pillar blustered hot air across Yajain’s path. She hoped the heat came from an updraft from the solna, and not a wrecked ship. Dara, Firio, keep yourselves safe. Mosam.
She plunged toward the floor, swimming through the arc with wide strokes to level herself out over distance. A fleck of debris struck the side of Yajain’s hood making an acute thump in her ears. She winced, but the tiny sliver hadn’t pierced the material. Onward she fell.
Adya landed first, legs swinging into position to hit the floor moving. She charged toward the building, pistol at the ready. Yajain hit next, not as gracefully, but still upright. She checked her vare blade in its sheath and then her med kit. They were both still clipped on tight. What would father say if he knew where I was now? And what about mother? And Lin?
Yajain fought that last thought from her mind. She loped to the wall of the building where Adya was checking the mouth of an open door tall enough for two humans standing on each others’ heads to enter at once. Ogidar was right behind her.
“They won’t be visible from the outside,” said Adya. “But you can bet they know we’re here.”
Ogidar hefted an oblong grenade in one fist.
“Then this won’t be what gives us away.”
The receiver in Yajain’s hood crackled. Boskem said,
“Two large shapes are making their way down a side passage.”
“That’ll be them.” Adya nods to Ogidar. “Get ready to toss that thing.”
Yajain glanced around the corner into the hall. A single long, gray tentacle crept out of the side passage. It took Yajain a second to realize it was clad in some kind of armor. Ogidar grunted and primed the grenade.
“They’re coming at you now,” Boskem said.
Ogidar rolled around the corner and threw. A pair of looming bulbous shapes each about three meters tall, and with six tentacles all covered in blue-gray armor shot out of the side passage on arc lifts, fast as anything Yajain’s had ever seen swim through the air.
Ogidar’s grenade tumbled to the floor. A beam from the end of one tyrant’s tentacle slashed toward Yajain, scoring the wall black with its passing. The grenade burst under the tyrants. They both screamed, audible as something akin to their sharp-sounding energy beams to Yajain’s enhanced hearing.
She ducked and cringed against the wall. A single tentacle made it out of the entryway before Adya and Ogidar opened up. The tyrants and the grasping limb fell silent. Only the sizzle of charred meat remained.
Yajain raised her coil pistol and turned the corner. What remained of the tyrants lay strewn about the hall. Armor melted. Flesh burnt. Tentacles severed. Yajain’s nose tingled with the odors through her mask. She stopped stock still as smoke drifted to the ceiling.
Ogidar hustled past her, rifle readied, its barrel already steaming. Adya followed him and glanced back at Yajain.
“There are at least three more of them here,” she said. “This kind don’t like to work alone, and they don’t run the show.”
“This kind?”
“Yeah,” Adya said. “These ones are just commoners. From what I’ve seen, the other breeds are in charge.”
“You’re going to fill me in. Once we stop them,” Yajain said.
“I doubt I’ll have much choice,” Adya looked down at the blackened remains of the tyrants. She put both hands on her pistol and turned to watch the corridor ahead of them.
Ogidar peered down the side passage. He tensed, a
rmored form hunched over his rifle.
“They know we took out their guards,” he said.
“How can you tell?” Yajain crept to his side, tuning the artificial ears on her shoulders.
“They’re talking more than before,” Ogidar said.
“You can hear them at this distance?” Yajain tuned her ears and caught snatches of sibilant rasping and grating. Sounds that could be language based on what little she knew of those requirements.
He tapped dipped his masked head toward his shoulder. Tiny hearing ports were locked to his armor plates.
“You’re not the only one who can use hunter’s tools. But you gave me the idea.”
Adya glanced back at them.
“You two can hear the tyrants?”
Yajain nodded.
Adya turned to face the path forward.
“We might not be quite so dead after all.”
Yajain took a step down the side passage. Her shoes made little sound. The floor grew slippery with some kind of clear fluid with which she wasn’t familiar. Ogidar followed her as she made her way twenty meters down to a tall ceiling ramp going down toward the core. Yajain crouched by the ramp, back to the wall. Brightening core light gleamed on the wall across from her.
“This is it,” she said. “The room down there has core access.”
The cores not only offered light and a means to tell time but attracted Solnas and other scanner-based lifeforms with their processing centers. Their study formed the basis for ship and computer core technology. Yajain had only studied core tech in its most basic form, but the naturally occurring computers did far more than track time and shed light. They created the arc field around each pillar. Humans had never been able to turn arc into a weapon, but if Adya was right the tyrants were a step ahead in that field.
She took a deep breath and glanced around the corner. There were tyrants in the huge semicircular room at the base of the ramp that ran around the curve of the core. Four tyrants, three larger even than the one she’d seen in DiKandar Hall, over six meters long each. They wore armor heavier than that of the sentries Adya had called commoners as well, glistening black shells with sharp outgrowths of bone white blades around the mouth and at the end of each tentacle. Hisses, rasps, and more guttural sounds issued from their mouths, and clouds of yellowish dust hung in the air. Tails with barbed stingers lashed this way and that.
The last tyrant was roughly seven meters long and had three tails instead of one. Its wore completely red armor. The red tyrant spoke the most, and mostly in fierce growls. Every now and then a tentacle would slap against the core, perhaps for emphasis. A collection of bizarre equipment lay strewn around the room, including crates the size of people but that the tyrants probably had no difficulty lifting at all.
Adya crouched down beside Yajain.
“Spined soldiers,” she whispered. “Shit.”
Yajain’s eyes went on moving over the scene, bizarre tools and weapons eveywhere.
“Are they a different breed?”
The red tyrant curled its front over a long black crate almost the size of itself, still sealed. The alien’s four legs shifted and it hit a few buttons on the box.
Adya’s eyes widened. “
That’s their core weapon. They’re almost ready.”
Yajain’s teeth clenched, but she said nothing. The lid of the long box unsealed with a hiss and climbing cloud of steam. One of the spined tyrants pulled the lid back. A slender serpent covered in stony black and blue plates rose from the box, wriggling in the arc. It must have been coiled in the box, for it continued to stream forth until it looked over twenty meters long, and less than a meter thick. It had no eyes, but long whiskers bristled from its front. The serpent, a kind of scanner, Yajain realized, swam to the side of the core.
It’s like a small, lightless solna.
Adya holstered her pistol and raised a flare gun. She closed one eye and trained the gun on the creature.
“Finder Boskem,” she whispered. “When you see a flare in the next second, shoot it.”
Boskem’s voice returned to the whole group.
“What are you planning?”
“Do it and you’ll save everyone.”
Boskem’s reply was a low growl.
Yajain opened her channel.
“I think I know what she means, finder. Listen to her.”
“Anytime,” Boskem said.
Adya pulled the trigger. A flare of heat sent Yajain’s shoulder tingling. The hiss of sparks erupted from the flare and it burst against the hide of the scanner snake. Yajain looked away, but not quite fast enough. Hot white light slashed across her vision, half-blinding her. She squeezed her eyes shut. A harsh, alien cry echoed from the room below. Then a single thunder crack split the air, followed by the sound of two loud crashes on the floor.
“Fire at will,” Boskem said.
Tyrants screamed and beams slashed along the wall. A burst of heat from behind pitched Yajain forward onto the floor face first. Her sight returned partially, blurred and washed out with white. She scrambled to her feet and turned toward the ramp, grip on her coil pistol, finger on the trigger.
The light fading from the flare showed the remains of the scanner on the floor, sliced in half by the force of Boskem’s slug. Black gore spread from the wounds on either end of the serpent’s broken body and pooled in the center, sizzling with heat and dripping into the bullet hole in the floor. Yajain whispered a bionetic prayer for the creature. She’d never seen one like it, and already its tail twitched its last motion. Two of the four tyrants stomped along the floor toward the ramp.
Both of them wore heavy black armor with white spines. Hulking bulbous worm bodies surged forward. Stacks belched confusing yellow residue in huge quantities Yajain squeezed the trigger. A dart of coil fluid screamed into the masked face of one tyrant. Ogidar streamed shots from his rifle over Yajain’s shoulder at the same alien. Searing bolts peppered black armor with sparks and splashes of molten metal.
Yajain darted to one side and a burst of fire sliced through the air where she had been. She activated her lifts and kicked to get out of the way as the other tyrant bounded up the ramp on four legs. Tentacles lashed out and reached for Ogidar. Yajain turned and released a fury of blasts at the grasping tentacles. Two ribbon-like limbs were struck and they both recoiled, armor fusing where she hit.
Ogidar ducked and primed a grenade.
“Don’t look at this one!”
Yajain pumped backward on lifts. Ogidar tossed the grenade into the other tyrant’s face. Yajain looked away. Not fast enough.
Light flared from the grenade and burned in the tyrant’s face, and lanced into Yajain’s eyes. A tentacle lashed out at the glowing grenade and batted it back toward Ogidar. It burst in midair. Shards of shrapnel and blazing liquid flew in every direction. Yajain’s eye burned with pain. The tyrant the grenade struck lurched sideways, half its face gone.
The long rifle from high above punched another hole in the ceiling and down into the other spiny tyrant on the ramp, the shot barely visible as a lightning slash of blood across the wall and floor. Both wounded tyrants roared. The one hit by the grenade stumbled toward Ogidar. Its tentacles fluttered in shreds from one side, plastered to broken strips of flexible armor.
Half-blinded by the explosions and gagging on the scent of charred flesh, Yajain stumbled away from the tyrants. Her burnt fingers trembled and she dropped the pistol. The weapon hit the floor, nearly silent in the wake of roaring explosions. Ogidar shouted something, armor blackened and broken in places by the blasts. His coil rifle screamed shot after shot.
Yajain whirled to help him, her shaking hand falling to the vare blade at her side. It had been cycles since father trained her with it, and never had she been so frightened back then. Not like this.
Adya marched past Yajain, firing bullet after bullet into the tyrant one at a time. Yajain’s grip tightened on the hilt of the short blade she
held. She activated her lifts. Her vision still flashed in places, eyes streamed with tears of pain.
One kick into the air, Yajain sailed toward the tyrant on its broken side. The remains of its faceplate clung to one side of its nub of a head. Broken teeth filled its wide mouth. Two remaining tentacle spines sliced into Ogidar’s shoulder and chest armor. Airborne, Yajain drove the vare blade in just above the tyrant’s gaping maw. Her shoulder hit the tyrant below the jaw. Hot, red blood and clear fluid coated her hand, forearm, and sleeve. The tyrant stilled, tentacles stuck in Ogidar’s armor.
Yajain yanked the blade out and dropped to the floor. Her shoulder ached from the impact. Luckily most of the spines on the side she’d hit had been broken by Ogidar’s grenade. Otherwise, they would have impaled her in multiple places.
Ogidar fell to one knee, rifle still gripped in one hand. Two spines remained stuck through his armor, tethering him to the fallen tyrant. He aimed the weapon past Yajain one-handed, gasping breath.
“Doctor,” he said. “Help.”
Adya flews to the corner of the ramp by Yajain. She peered past the hulking bodies of the two tyrants. Yellow particles still hung in the air but most of the residue coated the walls in bursts of color on gray stone.
Yajain stumbled toward Ogidar, throwing blood from the vare blade with a swipe through open air. She sheathed it and reached for the med kit as she reached Ogidar’s side.
The arm on his wounded side hung limp. Blood trickled along both spines embedded in his armor. His face looked pale through his mask.
“Cut me loose,” he said.
Yajain frowned. “I think I can pull one out.”
“Don’t know. They’re angled down,” Ogidar said.
She blinked to still the flashes in her vision. Her armor clippers severed the end of each tentacle with one snip. More blood dribbled from the end of each one. Ogidar tried to stand, his right arm still useless. He staggered to the right.
“Let’s get one alive, doctor.”
Yajain supported him and turned to Adya.
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