Mago

THEY MOVED SWIFTLY on the base. Vanessa again took point position at Gloria’s behest. She had alien armor, weapons, had spent years fighting subhumans, and—potentially the most important thing of all—she had the immunity. No one argued the choice.

As before, Xavi followed close behind, then Alex Warthen in the middle, in front of Gloria. Alex insisted he would help them, fight if it came to that, but Gloria still had not decided if she could trust him. Besides, he was unarmed, just like Gloria and Beth, who brought up the rear. The three of them were a liability until they could arm themselves, and that seemed unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Unless…

Gloria tried to keep the thought from her head, but it was too tempting. If Dawson was here, alive, then her gear might be, too. Hell, the whole ship. The question was, what state were they in? She imagined dissection, both biological and mechanical, and shuddered. They needed to hurry. Every second may matter now.

Vanessa took a serpentine path. Direct, but opportunistic in its use of shadows for cover. The outer wall of the facility came into view, just beyond a rock-strewn rise of blue-gray. Sunlight bleached the landscape at a forty-five-degree angle, blinding where it fell, making the sky a ceiling of total darkness. Gloria felt glad for that. The night sky always drew her gaze. Always. Her very first memory was of trying to capture the moon in her tiny hand, frustrated that she could not, her mother laughing and soothing at the same time. Now was not the time for such distractions.

At the crest of the last rise Vanessa angled toward a small depression and waited there for everyone to catch up. Gloria pulled up next to her and scanned the view.

The wall was no defensive barrier, of course. Nothing to defend against on this rock, at least not until this moment. But the facility was one large complex of interconnected buildings, and so presented a continuous exterior surface that jutted out in various places. From above she thought it probably resembled an overly complicated puzzle piece. Lights dotted the roof, reds and yellows mostly, indicating who knows what. They painted the areas currently lost in deep shadow due to a large mountain on the opposite side of the base.

Gloria spotted several spherical structures in the middle distance, perhaps chemical tanks, perhaps reactors of some kind. She knew from history classes that humanity used to build them aboveground like that, too, something they’d grown out of ages ago. Maybe these Scipios weren’t quite so advanced as they seemed. She grinned at that thought, then quickly set the feeling aside. Vanessa was on the move again. She’d stopped only long enough to pick a point of entry and, now evidently having selected one, was off. Xavi followed, then Alex, then Gloria. She felt Beth’s presence behind her, pleased that the engineer was keeping pace.

Nearer the wall Gloria eased off her pace, putting a hand on Alex’s shoulder to keep him with her. She wanted Vanessa and Xavi to gain some distance, and Alex Warthen, a career security officer, understood and made no complaint. They allowed a gap of twenty meters to open.

Of Dawson’s errant radio communication, they’d heard nothing more. The distant anguished sobs had ended a minute after they’d started, and not returned.

Vanessa reached the wall without incident. No alarms, no sudden appearance of defensive turrets. Now came the tricky part. Well, the first tricky part. Breaching the outer wall of a building on an airless moon meant exposing the inside to vacuum. Not something to be done lightly, especially when there may be people inside you wanted to remain breathing. Had there been an obvious airlock to enter through, that might have been better, but Vanessa and Xavi both discarded that option right from the beginning. Those, undoubtedly, would be watched. And they’d be too easy to become trapped inside.

Gloria bounded across the last twenty meters, watching as Vanessa teased a hole in the wall with her wrist-mounted beam weapon. A gout of moist air plumed from the hole. It kept coming for several seconds, then diminished, then vanished altogether. This implied much. Rather than some field or self-repairing wall, the Scipios’ base used emergency bulkhead doors to seal a breach. Easier to enter, then, but also her team must now work on the assumption that a repair crew would be dispatched immediately.

Vanessa stepped back and carved a two-meter-high oval in the wall, stepping aside to let it fall away into the gritty “soil” of the moon’s surface. Then she was in, going right. Xavi followed, pistol raised, heading left.

Pushing Alex ahead, Gloria and her group followed. They would remain close to the advance team, following Xavi if the lead pair decided to split up. That was what everyone had agreed to, back on the crater rim. That had been the extent of the plan. Anything more wouldn’t survive contact with the enemy, as Vanessa had put it.

Gloria escorted Alex into the hallway. Beth came in a second later. They paused to let their eyes adjust.

Dim red lights illuminated the space. The floor was a thick metal grating with pipes and other infrastructure visible below. The walls were simple and dark, adorned only with two stripes that ran the length at chest level. Gloria had to stoop slightly to fit. She’d never seen an actual Scipio, but from the dimensions of this place they probably stood a bit more than a meter tall.

Sure enough, emergency bulkhead doors had closed and sealed the punctured hallway, each perhaps five meters away in both directions. Xavi stood near one, ready if anyone came through. Vanessa had moved toward the other bulkhead, but she stopped short. On the interior wall there was a door leading to a connecting room or hallway, and the immune now crouched before it, attempting to decipher the control mechanism. Gloria moved to her side and eased her away. She pointed at the emergency bulkhead and tried to mimic holding a rifle. The other woman understood and moved into a defensive position.

Gloria studied the door. Beth joined her, and after a few seconds they managed to work out the control. A little lever embedded in a C-shaped groove in the frame, that slid around in the half-circle. Twelve o’clock for closed, six for open. So she guessed, at least. She moved it, had to use her pinky for the groove was small. Nothing happened. Perhaps refusing until atmospheric integrity returned. Perhaps it just didn’t recognize her, or she’d misinterpreted the function of the lever.

Then the door opened.

She found herself staring into a square room, housing what looked like tables and chairs. One chair still spun about, another had been knocked over. A hasty evacuation? With a hull breach just meters away, it made sense. There was another exit on the opposite side. Gloria ushered her friends in and shut the door behind them. Within seconds a thin hissing could be heard as air was fed back into the chamber. Other sounds bled back in, too. Something like an alarm—high-pitched E followed by a low doop, repeating every few seconds. The sound echoed, giving the impression that it was bleating site-wide.

Gloria moved aside as Vanessa and Xavi rushed to the opposite door, ready for anything. Just in case, she took a knee behind one of the tables and waited. Beth and Alex followed her example. Since air had filled the room, Gloria decided a small gamble was prudent. She switched on her suit’s external speaker, then instructed the others to do the same. “Just keep the chatter to a minimum, right?” They all nodded. “Vanessa, Xavi, check the next room and make sure we’re not going to get ambushed in here.”

A light above the door went green. Vanessa, copying what Gloria had done, opened this inner door. It reacted instantly, and so did Vanessa, pushing into the space beyond as soon as there was room to do so. Xavi followed her, again covering the left to mirror her focus on the right. They moved like they’d worked together for years, Gloria thought with more than a little pride in how her navigator was handling himself.

Beth moved past her, but not to the door. Her focus was firmly on the table nearby. Dismissed as being empty, she realized now that was wrong. Or rather, it was empty because it wasn’t a table. It was a display, and on it information and graphics begged to be noticed. Gloria allowed herself to rise from her hiding place and stand across from Beth, looking down.

Terror and dread flooded into her at the sights displayed there.

X-rays. A rib cage. A skull. Human.

Close-up imagery of limbs and organs. One showed an entire intestine splayed out, with several Scipios hunched over the gore.

Gloria’s stomach heaved. “Xavi,” she managed to say.

He must have heard the strain in her voice, the fear, because he came back in almost immediately, pistol raised, ready for anything. He saw the look on her face and came to her directly. “What is it?”

The question needed no answer. He followed her gaze and tensed up. “Oh. God.”

“Some of them may still be alive,” a voice said. It took Gloria a moment to realize it was Alex Warthen. “If we hurry.”

If we hurry. Somehow the tone and delivery of that single word told Gloria everything she needed to know about Alex Warthen. Whatever his ultimate motivations or goals, he was with her. He would help. She realized she was nodding at him and stopped, turned to Xavi. “This place is huge. We need to split up.”

“We talked about this. Bad idea.”

“That was before we saw what they’re doing in here, Xavi. I don’t care about our safety now, and you know what? Fuck radio silence. If they figure out how to break the encryption on our signals then so be it, because then they’ll have to figure out our language.”

“It’s triangulation I’m worried about, boss.”

Vanessa poked her head back in the room. “What’s the holdup?” she asked.

Gloria pointed at the display table, ignoring the gasp that came a second later. Her eyes never left Xavi’s. “I’ve made up my mind. Beth? Go with Vanessa. You too, Alex. I’m with Xavi. Remember we have two goals: Get our people out of here, or barring that, make sure there is nothing left of us, them, or their ship big enough to study without an electron microscope. That clear?”

Alex moved without a word. Beth, however, lingered a moment, no doubt trapped between the fear of being separated and the desire to spend more time with the two historical figures they’d become allied with. Soon enough curiosity won, and the young engineer relented. She moved to Vanessa’s side.

Gloria looked at each of them in turn. “We meet back here, go out the way we came in unless a better option presents itself. Our comms are different, so Beth, your job is to act as relay between Vanessa and us.”

“I can do that,” the woman said.

“I know you can. I’m counting on you.” She gave Xavi one last, hard look, pushing the doubt from his expression by sheer force of will. After a second he jerked his chin toward the door and was off.

By unspoken agreement he went left in the next hall, leaving the other direction for Vanessa and her team. Gloria ran along behind him, no easy task in the weak gravity and low-ceilinged hall, but soon enough she found the right stride and posture and was managing to keep up. She and her navigator fell into a rhythm. He would stop at a door, put his back to the opposite side of the hall, and wait for her to trigger the lever. As it opened he would push inside and clear the room, as if he’d trained for this kind of thing all his life. Probably learned how to do it from all those police sensories he lost himself in.

Three times they repeated this without finding anything. No humans, no remains, not even a Scipio to fight or interrogate. Just empty rooms of vague purpose, all with signs of hasty abandonment. All the while the warning lights flashed and their odd erratic version of a Klaxon wailed.

She was approaching the fourth door when white powder began to flood through air vents in the hallway ceiling. It was as if someone had turned on a fan covered with baking powder.

“Virus,” Xavi grunted, stepping back. Only there was nowhere to go. The hall behind them was no less inundated. In seconds her visor had a dusting that obscured her view. Gloria wiped at it, but the arm of her suit was no better off, making the problem only marginally better.

“Suit integrity?” she asked.

“Holding. Beth, are you guys okay?”

The reply came a second later. “Powder all over the place here, too, but we’re managing.”

He didn’t bother to ask if they’d found anything. She’d have said if they had.

Visibility fell to a few meters. Gloria decided this wasn’t such a bad thing, assuming the Scipios didn’t have some way to peer through the fog. For her, unarmed, it meant no one could shoot at her from afar. Given the enemy’s diminutive size, she liked her chances in a fistfight.

Then Xavi struck gold. The door he’d just opened entered into a chamber tailor-made for analyzing technology. Bins of spare parts lined the walls. Half-dissected machinery lay on knee-high tables under bright work lamps. Gloria followed him in, looking for anything that resembled human gear. Her heart sank quickly, though. This was no analysis room, she realized. It was a repair center, or assembly plant. Everything on the tables was run-down Scipio tech. Xavi went to the bins and started rifling through them, stooped over to get a close look.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “Remember the goals. Their crap is not important.”

He stood, holding something up to examine. “Not so fast there, boss.” He tossed the item to her.

It was a length of pipe, about a meter long. White porcelain in color and sheen, and though solid as rock it felt extremely light, almost like paper. She understood immediately, and gave one of the tables a swift whack to test it out. The pipe did not bend or crack. The table, on the other hand…it folded in half, crumpling under the force of the strike.

“This will do for now,” Gloria said with honest admiration.

They continued the search. Two more doors, same lack of result. The hall took an elbow corner, and then ran off into the haze of the virus spray. Gloria kept closer to Xavi lest she lose him in the murk. Hefting the pipe gave her a surprising surge of confidence she tried to quell. To let her guard down now would be foolish in the extreme. She had to remind herself of where they were, and that they had no way to escape this cursed moon. At best, they’d die on their own terms. At worst, they’d be torn limb from limb, their organs stretched out on metallic tables for Scipio scientists to ponder.

Xavi slowed, held her back with an outstretched hand. “What is it?” she asked.

He pulled her forward to stand beside him in the hall, both of them pressed against the walls. The space widened, Gloria saw, and the ceiling angled upward into blackness and smoky blur. Perhaps some kind of junction, she thought. The place had a modular style to it, not much different from human outposts on moons all over the Sol system and beyond.

Undulating red lights created glowing orbs of the virus powder, giving size and shape to the otherwise hidden space. It was large. One of the towerlike buildings she’d glimpsed, located at intervals throughout the complex. She’d assumed they were multistory structures, but the lights here told a different story. They were simply high-ceilinged, square buildings.

“Xavi,” came Beth’s voice.

“Go ahead,” he replied.

“Vanessa’s visor can translate some of their words. We think we’ve found the…security office, or something. Anyway, we’re going to try to turn the lights back on, and kill that alarm.”

It was a lot to process. Xavi glanced at Gloria, eyebrows raised in a “That sounds good” kind of way. She replied, “We’re ready, go ahead. Anything like camera feeds or a blueprint there?”

“No,” Beth replied. “Just controls for the alarms and such. We think.”

Under any other circumstances Gloria would have told her not to touch anything. Tactically, a bad situation that was known beat out an unknown alternative, any day. Any day except today, rather. “If you can do anything about the powder spraying from every air vent, that would be nice.”

“No promises,” her engineer replied.

Even through the tinny speaker and interference, Gloria heard the renewed calm in Beth’s voice. Perhaps due to the company she was in, or maybe that she’d found some way to contribute, Gloria couldn’t be sure. She felt glad for it, though. It had hurt to split up her crew back there, a direct affront to some deeply seated need every captain had to do right by the people who’d placed trust in them. It couldn’t have been helped, though. She needed a way to communicate with Vanessa and Alex, and this was the only option.

All at once the red glow of emergency lights vanished, along with the erratic sirenlike noise. There was a second or two of absolute darkness, long enough for terror to grip and squeeze Gloria’s heart, and then the lights came on. Bluish white and strangely calming. In the absence of the Klaxon came the sound of the laboring ventilation system. Laboring, to Gloria’s ear, at least. It sounded raspy, clanking and grinding inside the ceiling as it struggled to flood the base with the powdery air.

That did not go away. Beth was right not to have promised, Gloria thought wryly. She shifted her focus to the expansive chamber they’d arrived in.

To her surprise it did not just extend upward, but down as well. The hallway they’d arrived in ended at a railing that ran around the interior perimeter of a deep, square shaft. It descended perhaps thirty meters below, to a grated floor. Gloria counted two other levels between here and there, with similar railings and doors leading off into rooms or more hallways.

“Bad news,” Xavi said, for both her and Beth. “This place is bigger than we’d thought. Goes at least three levels underground.” He glanced up. “Maybe the same above.”

“No,” Gloria said. “Not above. We know that from what we saw outside.”

“Good point,” Xavi conceded. “Still, there’s potentially a lot more area to cover.”

“Do you have somewhere else to be?” she asked him, managing to add just enough sarcasm to her voice to let him know she didn’t mean it. Gloria racked her brain, wishing she’d studied the layout from their perch on that dune a bit more closely. Then she smacked herself.

“What is it?” Xavi asked.

Gloria ignored him. She brought her left arm up and began to tap through the menus there, an interface decidedly difficult to manipulate with thickly gloved hands. Her navigator shifted uneasily, waiting, no doubt feeling as if the walls had eyes.

There! She tugged at his arm and pulled him over to look. On the curved screen mounted on her forearm, she’d accessed the video feed constantly recorded by her helmet, pausing the image on her view of the Scipio base from outside, thirty minutes ago.

“So what?” Xavi asked. “We don’t know what any of it is.”

Gloria shook her head. Something had bothered her about this view earlier, she just hadn’t known what. But thinking about the small tower they now stood in had triggered her memory of that vague concern, and now she saw the solution. Plain as day. “Here,” she said, pointing.

She enlarged the image. On the far side of the base, one building did not match the others. It was of medium height, its walls of a different material. Easily overlooked when one didn’t know the purpose of any of it. All she had to do was apply the one thing she did know: They had Dawson here. And Dawson had been aboard the Lonesome.

“That look like a hangar to you?” she asked him. “And a temporary one at that?”

He scrunched his nose.

Gloria pointed to the walls. “Look. No moon dust. These are clean. This thing was just put up.”

“How the hell’d we miss that?” he asked.

She zoomed back out, then pointed at one of the few tall buildings. “I think we’re here,” she said. Xavi nodded agreement. “So, we go this way.” She pointed ahead and to the right.

“On it,” he grunted.

As he bounded away, Gloria marked up the image with her finger and shot a copy of it over to Beth’s suit. “Meet us there,” she said when Beth acknowledged.

Given a purpose, a true goal, Xavi moved like a man possessed. The slow progress and careful checks of doors were set aside. But the path was still invisible to him, and twice he led them into a dead end. It was as they backtracked down the second of these hallways that Gloria noticed the doors on either side had small porthole windows, a feature not present anywhere else. She slowed, curious, and had to bend at the waist to look through one.

Her breath caught in her throat. Human feet pointed upward, the skin bloodied, scabbed. A hand swung at the end of a limp arm. The rest obscured by the medical—presumably medical—bed upon which the person lay.

“Xavi,” she hissed. He heard her and doubled back, at her side in a second. He knew this tone; he knew not to question it. Her navigator took his standard entry position and waited for Gloria to open the door. Only, she hesitated. Afraid of what they’d find in there. What it might mean, and who it might be. Gloria couldn’t help it. She closed her eyes as she yanked on the lever and let Xavi in.

He moved past her in a rush. She felt the wind of it on her suit. And then the pop as his gun fired. Two times. By the time Gloria made it into the room, two Scipios lay dead. Xavi did not spare them a second glance. He was at the table, holstering his pistol. She’d never seen that expression on his face before. She hoped she never would again.

“It’s Dawson,” he said. “It was Dawson.”

Gloria liked to think of herself as tough. She’d been called a cast-iron bitch by her medical officer on more than one occasion, always acting hurt by the remark but secretly proud. Not now, though. She could see Dawson’s body out of the corner of her eye and could not bring herself to focus on it.

“What were they doing when you came in?” she asked Xavi, her words so skewed by nausea that she started to repeat herself, but he’d heard. He stopped her.

“Poking at her brain.”

Gloria staggered to the other side of the room, her gaze unfocused on the dark wall, the corpse at her back, a thing to mourn but not see. Her hands found a surface and she leaned on it, willing her knees to keep her upright.

It was another table before her, a narrow one, higher. There was a bundle of silvery fabric on it. A helmet, tossed carelessly aside. A backpack.

Dawson’s gear. Gloria stared at it for a moment and then, with a shaking hand, she reached into the pack. Her hand curled around the grip of a service pistol. Identical to Xavi’s. Standard issue on a fold-ship.

Gloria pulled the weapon free and turned it from side to side in front of her face. She didn’t even remember dropping her pipe length.

“Good,” Xavi said, seeing what she held. “Come on.”

He moved with absolute purpose. From room to room, finding the same situation in each, his pistol barking once or twice, sometimes three times. Some part of Gloria knew these were just scientists or coroners, studying specimens, but she did nothing to stop him. Because she knew what the Scipios were hoping to learn, and knew what would happen if they found it. That, and because she needed the revenge.

“We need to get to that ship,” she said when the rooms Xavi crashed into started turning up empty. “Make sure they can’t access the data core. Leave nothing but—”

“No argument from me, boss,” he said. “Beth, status?”

“We took a wrong turn,” the engineer replied. “Backtracking now.”

“Hurry it up. We found the Lonesome’s crew.”

“Alive?”

Such hope in her tone. Gloria fought fresh tears.

“Far from it,” Xavi replied.

“Oh…oh no.”

“And if they’re treating that ship the same way they treated her crew…,” Xavi said.

“We understand,” Beth replied. “We’re going as fast as we can.”

There was nothing more to be said. Xavi stormed through the halls, pistol held in front of him, cradled by his other palm, swinging about with each hallway entered or junction crossed. Gloria did her best to mimic his posture, covering the hall behind them and double-checking the halls and doorways he passed.

A minute later the state of alarm returned. Gloria found she didn’t care now. She didn’t much care what they threw at her at this point. Maybe that was the pistol talking, but so be it.

Another turn, another junction. Xavi pushed through, moving by some internal map she could do nothing but trust. He was a navigator, after all.

In the junction now herself, Gloria heard a sound to her left. She turned in time to see three Scipios burst through a bulkhead door about ten meters distant. They were dressed differently from the torturers. Blues and grays, their gliding flaps covered. And they wore helmets, full-face. She noted the moon dust on their shoes and lower legs. They’d been outside, maybe just come in. Out searching the wreckage of the Wildflower, perhaps.

They froze at the sight of her. Gloria had her weapon up already, aimed right at them, but for that instant she’d forgotten it. She wanted to march forward and swing that pipe she’d left behind. Feel the connection against skull ring up through her arm.

“This will have to do,” she said, and fired.

But they were scattering already. She winged the middle one, literally punching a hole in the gliding flap that stretched from forearm to shin. The creature yelped, but was not slowed. The other two scrambled for doors on either side of the wide hall. The third, the one she’d wounded, turned and ran back for the airlock.

Indecision gripped her. Who to shoot at? She settled on the one she’d already hit, not caring that it had its back to her. Not caring that they were unarmed. She fired three times, all misses.

“Focus, dammit,” she rasped at herself.

Then Xavi was beside her, matching her pose. His presence gave her the mental push she needed. Together they felled all three, the last one dying with its foot protruding from the door it was trying to escape through.

“Don’t think about it,” Xavi said to her. “Just keep moving. Remember Dawson.”

“Remember Dawson,” she repeated, for her own benefit. But she hadn’t been able to look at Dawson. She hadn’t given her that little bit of respect. Didn’t want to remember her old friend like that.

No, that wasn’t true. It had been the gore. She’d never had the stomach for that sort of thing. Could never have been a surgeon or a killer, not of humans, anyway. Not on purpose.

These three aliens, though, with their pinkish creamy blood splattered about the hall, she found that didn’t bother her. They were bastards, all of them. A parasite species whose designer viruses were merely extensions of the way they behaved themselves.

Gloria turned and followed Xavi, her own blood as cold as ice water in her veins. She rounded the next corner and almost slammed into his back.

“We’re here,” he whispered.

Gloria moved to his side and took in the sight before her. A vast room, ceilinged in a white hard-shell structure supported by metal trusses and girders. A glorified tent, really, hardened against the airless environment outside. Since receiving that first distress call she’d envisioned a room like a forensics team’s setup after a bombing. Clean, with bits of unrecognizable shrapnel and remains laid out in a careful grid, tagged and numbered, photographers and sensory drones moving methodically from piece to piece. She expected to see an imploder core surrounded by a scaffold, teams of scientists swarming over it, probing at the atomic level to unravel its secrets.

Her knees buckled at what she did see. She dropped to her knees, mouth agape.

It was the Lonesome. Fully intact. Barely a scratch on it. One of its imploders still loaded in the launcher. The implications crashed down on her one after another, threatening to pummel her all the way to the floor.

We have a way off this rock.

We have a way home.

We can still stop them from learning our secrets.

Through all of this she failed to notice the Scipios in the room. They were tiny compared to the ship, which was nearly twice the size of Gloria’s diminutive Wildflower. It had been custom-built to test the new imploder technology, while the Wildflower had been only hastily retrofitted.

“Beth,” Xavi said. “If you’re going to get here, do it quick.”

“Did you find the remains of the ship?”

“Yes,” Gloria found the voice to say. “Better still, it’s all in one piece. We need you guys here. It’s surrounded.”

Surrounded wasn’t quite true. There were a lot of Scipios, but they seemed to be working on their analysis of the ship, just not in the invasive manner Gloria had pictured. Surrounded implied an organized defense, but once again they appeared to have caught the Scipios off guard. She saw no reason to explain any of this to Beth, though. Surrounded was wrong, but it would get the others here sooner.

“Vanessa says to hold on to something,” Beth replied.

Gloria glanced at Xavi, who looked at her in turn, with the same clueless expression she felt.

The Scipios finally seemed to notice their presence. They erupted into chaos, chattering as they scrambled for exits or cover in equal number.

Several came toward Xavi and Gloria’s position, and only belatedly did she realize they were armed. They held small devices in their hands that looked more like black exercise weights than weapons, but when the Scipios lifted them and Gloria saw the ports open and extend, their purpose was not in doubt.

Xavi fired before they could, dancing back at the same time to take cover behind the corner. Gloria found her knees a second later and managed to stand. Something seared through the air beside her helmet. One breath of this air, she had time to think as she dove for cover.

Then the ceiling of the great room exploded inward, punctured and carved by a white-hot beam of roiling energy.

Air rushed from the giant chamber, sucked out into the vacuum beyond. Debris flew up into the air, as well as one unlucky Scipio who went flailing out into space.

And then Vanessa dropped in. She crashed through the hole she’d carved and landed neatly in the center of the floor, taking a knee as she did so.

The Scipios held on for dear life as their air rapidly vanished through the new entrance. The security team no longer aimed weapons at Xavi and Gloria. Instead they clawed at crates and floor tiles for purchase as the air around them rushed inward and up.

Vanessa stood and flicked her beam weapon on again. She drew the beam across the room like an artist with a brush, leaving not paint in her wake but a blackened scorch line and neatly severed bodies.

Another form entered through the roof. Alex Warthen, landing beside Vanessa. His suit, though similar to hers, lacked the weaponry. But he was a capable fighter, and as soon as his feet hit the ground he leapt again, powering into the midsection of a hapless Scipio who crumpled under the weight of the much bigger human.

Beth Lee entered last, through a door at the back of the room, unseen in the chaos except by Gloria.

“Beth. Let them deal with the Scipios,” Gloria said. “Meet me inside the ship.”

Far across the room, through the literal fog of the virus-filled air and the figurative fog of battle, Gloria met Beth’s gaze. She saw the same wonder there she’d felt upon seeing the ship, saw the same realizations slide home in Beth’s eyes. “I…understand.”

Gloria shifted all her attention on the prize. “Cover me, Xavi.”

“You got it, boss.”

And they were running. Hopping, more like, but used to the gravity now and moving fast. Xavi loosed calculated shots from his pistol, more to scare and pin than to kill. Gloria poured all her focus on the ship, and the open airlock halfway down its side.

Xavi stopped at the end of the hallway, taking a knee and opening fire on another of the armed Scipios who was off to their left. Gloria didn’t bother to look. She raced forward. From the corner of her eye she saw Vanessa whirling, beam weapon dissecting the room.

“Down!” Vanessa said.

Gloria dropped, sliding like a baseball star as Vanessa’s beam tore through the space above her. She watched the line of white fire sweep overhead, and above that, the hole in the ceiling revealing the black of space beyond. Two more Scipios were carried up toward it, only to fall and collide with each other as the air in the room finally, fully evacuated.

And something else, too. Gloria glimpsed it, if only for a second, but it was enough. Against that blackness beyond the ceiling, a pair of silvery orbs hurtled toward them from the darkness above.

She didn’t have time to shout the warning. The two swarmers exploded through the fractured ceiling with far more violence than even Vanessa’s grand entrance achieved. They hit the floor in two corners like meteor strikes, the twin explosions showering the room with debris. Vanessa was thrown to the floor. The upright-standing Lonesome rocked on its landing legs. All around, the erected structure of the hangar began to falter and collapse.

And in those two corners, the huge swarmers drew themselves up to full height, each standing on three tentacle legs, the remaining three already stretching out, aiming weapons. They looked different from the ones she’d seen before. Like orbs of liquid metal, polished to a shine.

“Get to the ship,” someone said. Gloria realized she’d said it, and repeated herself over and over.

One of the swarmers focused on Vanessa, galloping toward her, closing the distance in a half-second.

Gloria had only just managed to find her feet when Vanessa let loose with both arms. Two white rails of energy that filled the space between the immune and her attacker. Only the beams did not punch through. They reflected off harmlessly.

Gloria swallowed. “Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” She took her own advice and bounded toward the Lonesome, eyeing the ladder that led up to the airlock. Fuck the ladder, she thought. In this gravity, she might be able to—

A tentacle slammed into the ground in front of her. The whole floor erupted around its length, and Gloria, somehow, managed to use this failed attack to her advantage. Just the boost she needed. As the floor heaved, she leapt. Some instinct she did not know she had guided her muscles, propelling her more forward than up as the buckling floor gave her the lift she needed. Gloria soared through the air and slammed into the hull of the Lonesome just meters above the airlock door. She let herself slide down until her feet could swing into the chamber. She swung, landed on her back, not hard, and was up in an instant.

She ignored the sounds of fighting outside. Her weapon would be useless against swarmers that could deflect those terrible beam weapons. No, she had only one task now, and Gloria meant to accomplish it. She let herself into the ship and began to climb.