“Do you have a smoke grenade?” I turned and hissed to Yegor. He didn’t understand me of course, so I made a shape with my hand as if I was holding an apple, then I bit an imaginary pin, spit it out, and tossed it through the air. The man nodded with understanding, and then he pointed at my grenade launcher.
“No, smoke.” I looked down the hallway to where the twins were taking cover with Varya and Svetlana. I motioned for Kasta to run forward, and I pointed to Yegor. “I need smoke grenades.”
“Got it,” she turned to the bearded man and explained. He shook his head, but then pointed to the group of his guards in the room. They were still pinned down under heavy fire.
“He said they have some smoke grenades, but they aren’t going to be able to pop up and throw them,” Kast explained after he spoke.
“I’ll pop out, pepper the drone with this,” I said as I looked down at the grenade launcher, “and then his soldiers can throw their grenades. Then I’m going to run past the drone and kill the pilot.”
“Uhhh. That sounds all sorts of crazy,” Kasta said with a frown.
“Tell him. We don’t have more than ten seconds to make this work or all of his guards are going to die back there.”
Kasta shook her head, but she turned to tell the big man my plan. Yegor nodded when she finished, put his left hand on my shoulder, nodded at me, and then he said a few words to Kasta. She laughed, spoke a quick sentence in return, and then smirked at me.
“Oh sorry, I shouldn’t be laughing,” she said. “He said that it is no wonder that you have twins as lovers; you must have the biggest penis and pair of balls in the Milky Way.”
“Go back down the hallway. I don’t want you to get hurt,” I said as I turned back toward the corner.
“I told him you actually have two other women as well. He’s very impressed.”
“Kasta!” I growled as I raised the grenade launcher.
“I’m going!” she shouted, but I only have her two seconds before I leaned out from behind the wall with my grenade launcher.
I yanked on the trigger four times as fast as I could. The weapon made the beautiful thwunk sound as it bucked in my hand, and I twisted back around the corner as soon as the chain of explosions and screams crashed through the room.
“Smoke grenade!” I shouted at Yegor as the drone turned its attention to our corner and sent a flurry of bullets into the stone wall.
He bellowed an order out into the large room, and I turned my eyes to see how the guards responded. Three men obeyed the command instantly, and they moved to toss the cylinder grenades at the shield-drone. Two of them did a great toss, but the third got pegged in the arm by a bullet, and his grenade landed in the middle of the field of battle. It would still work.
I just needed to wait a few seconds for the smoke to fill the room. Even then, I was taking a huge risk here. The drone might have thermal vision settings that it would activate when there was smoke in the room. It was a good thirty meters from my position and the hallway where the Lith Dae marines were. I could run really damn fast in my human form, but it was plenty of time for the pilot to get a bead on me and fill me with scores of bullets.
But if I shifted, I’d move like stripped lighting, and I could tear through the men on the other side of the drone before they even knew I was there.
The beast screamed an agreement that coursed through my soul. It filled my muscles with strength. It filled my bones with steel, and it filled my mind with a hunter’s cunning intelligence.
I didn’t fight its power. I knew my shift would probably scare the fuck out of Yegor and his men, but the probability of my death was too high. I needed the monster’s power now if we were all going to live.
The shift happened almost instantaneously. It felt as if one second I was a human, and the next my spine was screaming as new discs formed, I was spitting out my human teeth, and my eyes had shifted to the new spectrum. The shift normally took me twenty-ish seconds of agony, but the last few times were much quicker, and this was the quickest yet.
Yegor was staring at me with panicked eyes, but I handed him the grenade launcher, hoisted my rifle, turned the safety off, and sprinted around the corner before he could think about screaming. Then I was running through the smoke toward a massive robot.
The drone’s gun was spitting bullets at my corner, but I’d jumped out on the inside of the weapon’s stream, and the robot tried to adjust its aim as I sprinted toward it. For a few moments, everything seemed to move in slow motion as the thing’s arm shifted to point at me. Smoke swirled around both of us, and I knew that if I were a fraction of a second too slow, I would catch a large bullet right in the tiger-face.
But I wasn’t a fraction of a second too slow. I was the wind. I was the light. I was faster than the bullets and the most powerful hunter these humans had ever seen.
I threw myself on the ground as soon as I made it to the drone. My body carried a ridiculous amount of momentum, and the armor on my ass, legs, and back coasted across the smooth floor of the hallway as if I was coated in grease.
The slide carried me under and through the robot’s legs, and I aimed my rifle up toward the marines on the other side. A pair of the men were down, probably because of my grenade launcher, but six of them were still standing.
They didn’t expect the sudden appearance of a giant tiger-man carrying a rifle, and the surprise gave me a few extra seconds of initiative on the group. It was all I needed, and I squeezed the trigger of my rifle a fraction of a moment after I switched it to full-auto mode.
I would have preferred my shotgun for moments like this, but the rifle’s mixed bullets still tore through the faces of the marines I aimed at. Blood, metal, and brain sprayed across the wall behind my enemies, and their bodies hit the floor before my slide stopped.
I rolled to my left and swung my rifle around to point down the corner hallway. The drone pilot was some twenty meters down in that direction, and she was surrounded by a group of four marines. The pilot was screaming something, probably that I had slid past her, but I couldn’t tell for sure because my rifle was spraying bullets.
One of my rounds tagged the marine in the front left in the chest, and his torso twisted around to his right. Two of my bullets hit another marine in the chin, and her skull seemed to implode inside of her helmet. The third marine took a bullet to the stomach. I thought his armor would have protected him, but my rifle was shooting inconsistent rounds, and this bullet cut through the armor as if it was made out of papier-mâché.
The last marine actually got a shot off at me, but I was still sliding on my back, so the burst of fire went high over my body. My bullets caught him in the head, and they punched through his armored visor like it was made of ice.
My rifle beeped to let me know the magazine was empty, but I was already on my feet and running toward the pilot. The first marine wasn’t dead, and I doubted the one with a hole in his stomach was either. I really didn’t have time to reload the rifle, so I dropped the weapon onto its sling and yanked my giant chrome revolver out of my chest strap.
The first marine was twisting back around in an attempt to aim his carbine at me, but I was just a hair faster with the draw of my revolver, and the thumb sized bullet left my gun with the sound of a Norse god shouting. The man’s armor had stopped my rifle round easily, but the revolver slug shattered the metal plate like it was made of ceramic, and half of the man’s chest exploded out his back and onto the drone pilot who stood behind him.
The other marine that I guessed was still alive hadn’t gotten up from the ground. I fired another revolver bullet into his chest, and then I pushed the barrel of my weapon into the throat of the drone pilot. She wore a pair of goggles and controllers strapped to her hands, but I guessed she had a view of the normal world through her drone goggles.
“Take off the controls,” I growled.
“Please don’t kill me,” she whined.
“I won’t ask a third time. I can take them off your corpse,�
� I said as I cocked the hammer of the massive revolver. It was an unneeded movement since the weapon was double action, and would fire with only a trigger pull, but the click of the hammer added a dramatic sound that had an effect on the woman.
“Okay,” she gasped as she pulled the controllers off her hands. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Clear!” I shouted back down the hallway as soon as the woman pulled off her visor. She looked young, maybe a few years younger than Zea, and I guessed her to be about sixteen Earth years.
“How many more of you are there down here?” I asked her.
“There is another drone group with ten marines,” she answered quickly.
“Where?” I asked, and I saw Yegor, Varya, Svetlana, Paula, Kasta, and a group of guards come around the corner.
“They are guarding the elevator so we don’t get trapped down here,” she answered.
“What was your purpose in coming down here?”
“We were supposed to kill everyone and upload the new drone software.” The girl’s bottom lip trembled as she spoke.
“How did you find us so fast?” I asked.
“The squad commander said we gave you a phony map. We had the real one that knew where the transmission rooms were located.”
Kasta started to speak in Russian, but I interrupted her, “don’t translate this.”
“Uhh, why?” she asked.
“They will probably kill her,” I said as I nodded to the drone pilot. The girl let out a horrified gasp, and she started to cry.
“Maybe she deserves to die,” the android said with a shrug. “Her drone has probably killed over twenty people.”
“I’ll let them figure that out after this is all over,” I said. “But speaking of the drone, can one of you drive this thing?” I took the controls from the girl’s hands and held it out to the sister.
“Ohhh. I’ll take it,” Paula said, and her eyes glittered like sapphires in the sunlight.
The blonde engineer put the goggles on, then she strapped the controllers on to each of her hands. They looked a bit like fingerless gloves, but there was a bar circling the palms with an assortment of switches and buttons. Each of these hand controls connected via cable up to the back of the goggles.
“What is the password?” Paula asked.
“It is a finger sequence. Left ring, left ring, right pointer, right pointer, left pointer, and then left thumb,” the girl replied.
“Got it,” Paula said as a large smile spread across her face. A few seconds later I saw the man-shaped drone lumber around the corner and walk toward us. It didn’t look like it could move fast, but it probably didn’t need to. The machine gun it carried was rather massive, as was the melted shield, and the robot showed no signs of damage from the many grenades I had shot at it.
“Tell Yegor there is another group of marines at the lift. They have another one of these drones and a bunch of marines. We are going to go up there and kill them, and then we’ll talk about our next steps.”
Kasta translated for me, and the bearded man nodded. Then he pointed at the girl and asked Kasta a question. Then he pointed at me and asked another question.
“He wants to know about the girl,” Kasta said. “He also wants to know why you look like a giant walking tiger-man.”
“Tell him she surrendered so should stand trial for whatever crimes they feel she has committed.”
“What do I say about you?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Fuck, I dunno. I’m a genetically modified super soldier? Maybe the truth is the best.”
Yegor nodded after Kasta spoke to him, and then he said something to Varya. She nodded and gestured for the captured drone pilot to follow her. The burly man said a few words to Kasta and nodded back at me.
“He says you have saved his people from an almost certain death. He understands that we don’t know exactly what is going to be in the temple, but he wants to help. He feels he owes us, and they will follow you until you bring them to freedom or death.”
“Let’s hope it’s freedom,” I said as I reloaded the two thumb sized bullets in my revolver.
Chapter 20
The shield drone couldn’t run as fast as us, but we still made decent time back to the elevator. I went up with four of Yegor’s men first, then we sent the drone up with Paula, and then the rest of our group came up. We were in the main hallway of the second floor now, and it was a straight shot to the place where the remainder of Lith Dae’s forces were.
There was also a shitload of dead bodies.
They were all comrades of Yegor’s, and the group’s mood grew darker as we came across more tattered remains of their people. The drone had cut through them as if they were butter, and none of them stood a chance.
“Paula, how much ammo is in its machine gun?” I figured that there must have been a display somewhere on her goggles.
“It’s at sixty percent capacity. This thing is a serious piece of hardware. It isn’t as nice as the heavy spider drones in Persephone, those are cutting edge military tech, but this guy might get there if I spend some time upgrading him.”
“That’s good to know.”
“You said there was one more up there? We should try and capture it. Having two of these, along with the spider drones, would be really useful.” Paula didn’t seem to have any problem walking, talking, and piloting the lumbering drone simultaneously, but I wondered if that was less because it was easy, and more because she was a genius.
“That will be up to you,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“You are going to send the drone in first. They might not fire immediately. Place your shots carefully and try to take out the other pilot quickly.”
“Got it,” she said. “Zea’s Trojan Horse really saved our ass. If it is still working that is. They probably have no idea their assault team is dead.”
“How could they guess?” Paula asked. “This big guy is almost as tough as Adam. I doubt they thought anything could take it out.”
“We kind of didn’t.” I chuckled, but the sound turned into a bit of a purr. “We took out their pilot.”
“You didn’t even kill her, though. It was amazing. Wish I could have seen it.” Kasta looked at me with hungry eyes, and she bit her bottom lip.
“Hmmm. I can only see half of what is around me with these goggles on, but that sounded a lot like--” Paula started to say, but Kasta interrupted her.
“I wasn’t flirting! Well, maybe a bit. You would be too if you didn’t have those goggles on.”
“No. I don’t want us to get--”
“Adam, I like both your human and tiger-man form.” Kasta nodded. “And I’m gonna leave it at that because someone has to be a prude.”
“I’m not a prude! I’ve just asked you a bunch of times to be respectful of what Adam has with Ev--”
“That’s enough,” I growled, and both women’s mouths closed with audible snaps. “Focus on the mission, please.”
“Aye, Captain,” the both said, and we walked the next few minutes in silence.
I didn’t recall exactly how much farther we had to go, but Yegor started speaking to Kasta, and they exchanged a few words before my friend turned to us.
“We are about two hundred meters from the double doors leading out to the lift room. Yegor wanted to know the plan, so I told him that Paula would take the drone in alone and try to kill the other pilot. He recommends we hold back here while she does it in case they have the door open and are looking down the hall. There is a slight bend in the hallway, and they will be able to see us if we walk another fifty meters.”
“Good call,” I said as I nodded at the bearded man. He nodded back, and I turned to Paula. “You got this?”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, but her smile got larger as the drone lumbered away.
“We should name him,” Kasta said.
“If we get the other one, I’ll name one Kay and the other Arthur.” Paula’s grin grew even larger.
&nbs
p; “Why those?” I asked. I’d reloaded my rifle when we were in the elevator, but I glanced down to make sure the power cell was still good.
“They were brothers in the Arthurian legends. That one kind of looks like a knight with the shield and the armor,” Paula explained.
“They were foster brothers,” Kasta corrected.
“Close enough for me,” Paula said with a shrug. “I see the door. It is opened a bit, and there is a Lith Dae marine at watch. I’m going to walk in like I’m returning, and hope I can get a shot off at the pilot.”
We waited in silence for another half minute, and then Paula smirked a bit.
“They are asking what the hell happened, but I just walked into the room with my gun down. They think something is wrong with my audio. They are saying they still can’t connect with the ships in orbit. Oh, this is really funny.”
“Do you see the pilot?” I asked.
“No. they have an armored carrier on the lift. The back is opened. I think he is in here. No one has tried to stop me yet. I’m going to try and step around there.”
We waited a few more moments, and Paula giggled. “I see him. He has no idea. Well. Here it goes.” Her arm raised and she pulled her pointer finger. “He’s dead. Oh, now they are shooting at me. Their bullets are just bouncing off the armor. This is great.” She raised her arm again, and I saw her finger tighten against the trigger on her hand control. I could only guess at the havoc she was causing. Lith Dae’s entire ground strategy had been around using these knight-drones, and we’d taken that away from them.
“It’s done. They are all dead. Maybe I should feel kind of bad about that, but they are assholes who came down here to kill everyone. They can rot in hell.” Paula’s voice choked off a bit at the end, and she cleared her throat.
“Great job,” I said as I laid my hand on her shoulder. She couldn’t really feel me through her armor, but she turned her goggles toward me, laid her hand on top of mine, squeezed my fingers, and then gave me a half smile.
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