THE FIVE OF them stood there, silent and confused, viewing their armored reflections in each other’s visors. Each waited for the others to react or give an order or explain what the shit just happened.
“The damned vermin can null out our stealth fields,” said Arrow in stunned disbelief. Even as he spoke, one of the playing vleez children leaped and crashed into Daggeira’s chest plates. She stumbled back a step as the alien child fell dazed to the ground, the floating ball of morphing colors clutched in its six-digit hand.
Daggeira twisted and flicked her wrists. Her palukai extended long and sharp from either end. A single swipe severed the child’s head. Dark, thick blood spouted onto the terrace grounds. Another vleez child screeched in shrill, inhuman terror. The others stared mutely at their dead companion, immature sense tendrils pricking straight up.
“Daggeira and Sabira, clear the terrace,” commanded Spear. “Quick and quiet. Cannon, cover down-ramp. Arrow, up-ramp. Clean shots.”
Relieved to have a command, to know what to do next, Sabira snapped her stick into a curve-bladed halberd. The men configured their sticks into rifles and took positions as Sabira and Daggeira charged the terrace. The accelerants, now fully activated by Sabira’s increased heart rate, burned through her chest and down into her arms and legs. She set her violence free, exalted to no longer hold back her boiling aggression. She spun the palukai around her, diamond-sharp blade twirling in deadly orbit, and killed the screeching child first. Discipline and aggression moved her now. She didn’t even remember the strike, only the sharp cessation of horrendous screaming when its head split open.
The young vleez scattered. The adults on the far side of the terrace raced in a panic toward their young, desperate to scoop them up and protect them from the invaders. Sabira cut them down next.
When the last adult dropped at her feet, she registered Grandfather Spear’s voice, hollow and distant as if from the far end of a deep shaft. “Request immediate extraction. Fields down. Fields down. Request immediate . . .”
Near the terrace lip, looking out over the homes of thousands of alien infidels, Daggeira cornered the last two youths. They clutched each other, held back from falling over the edge by an ornate stone balustrade. In one stroke Daggeira decapitated both. Blood splashed over the railing’s multicolored cones, coated her armor.
A scratching from behind. Sabira spun blade first, but no enemy attempted an ambush. The back side of the terrace was a wall of blank stone. Halfway up the wall were three alcoves, each harbored grit-covered statues of vleez figures holding orbs that illuminated the terrace below. Between each alcove, long ropes of flowerless vines hung down the length of the wall. A vleez child scrambled up one of the vine ropes.
Sabira snapped her palukai into a rifle, took aim, and fired. A single plasma bolt seared into its upper leg. The claw-like fingers of all four arms clutched at air as it fell. It landed with a crunching thud on the ground.
The little vermin screamed in gargling agony as Sabira strode in for the kill. She flicked her palukai back into a spear and stood over the howling creature. Its immature sense tendrils quivered. Panicked mandibles glistened with fear. Shaking hands clutched its wounded leg. The screaming stopped when it saw Sabira standing over it, spear raised high, poised for the death blow.
The boy had looked up at her that exact same way. His first pit. Her first pit. Both nameless. Both unseen. She had found the spear before him and sliced open his leg. (Just as he would have done to her, she had told herself a thousand times, if only he had found it first.) The nameless boy crumpled, bleeding against the rough pit wall. Clutching his leg. Eyes wide and wet with terror. Sabira over him, sweating and jittery with brew, spear held high. Sabira driving the tip through his chest, skewering his heart. The boy dying at her feet, forever nameless.
“Sabira, what are you doing?” Daggeira came from behind. “We don’t have time to toy around with baby vermin. Let’s go.”
Sabira lowered her stick and looked at Daggs. Saw only the reflection of her own visor mirrored back at her, an infinity of faceless reflections staring blankly one into the other.
“I don’t know,” she said, confused, unsure if she was on an alien planet or deep in the fighting pits of Nahgohn-Za.
What the shit is wrong with me?
Daggeira shoved her to the side. “Will you come on, already? We have to go! Now!” Without even looking, she aimed her gauntlet at the youth’s face and sprayed a dose of toxins. It tried to scream but could only hiss and gargle as its respiratory tract dissolved. All four hands clawed at its face. Mandibles flapped and sizzled. And then it just stopped.
“Right arm, listen up,” came the familiar commands of Caller Arrow in her helm. “This mission is not over. No extraction until we confiscate our targets. So let’s move, skins. Let’s go, let’s go!”
“Come on, Stargazer,” urged Daggeira. “Don’t want to miss all the fun.”
I am a Servant of the Divine Masters, enforcer of Divine Will.
“My life is their weapon.”
“You’re godsdamned right it is,” answered Daggeira. Sabira hadn’t realized she had spoken the last part aloud. “Caller gave the order. We’re moving, Stargazer. Now.” Daggeira ran back toward the rest of the right arm. “Sabira! Now!”
Sabira was already moving by the time she shook off the unbidden memory. She flicked her palukai, reshaping it into an assault rifle with a double-edged blade extending from either side of the barrel. A perfect configuration for close and medium range combat.
Vermin. Infidels. Kiss your old crumbling world down the shaft. The Servants are coming. Righteous, angry certainty felt so much better than doubt.
A new wailing pierced through the city, loud and mechanical. She recognized the noise. Enemy alarms.
Following Spear’s directions, Arrow and Cannon took point and led the arm up the ramp and then forked south on a narrow road. Sabira and Daggeira brought up the rear guard. Caller reminded them to check their vertical sight lines. Behind his commands, Sabira could just make out Spear’s voice. He was trying to coordinate their extraction to coincide with the right arm’s arrival at the target area. They were close. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she could almost hear drums, timing their movements, driving them onward.
Sabira spotted a group of vleez rushing down the street away from them. Perhaps word was spreading with the alarm, bringing the locals running to witness the massacre they had left behind.
While Daggeira hustled to her next point, Sabira posted at a corner covering her and scanning their surrounding. They were extremely vulnerable. If any residents were armed, the crew could be sniped from at least nine different locations.
Sabira had an open view of the city below. About thirty searchlights beamed into the night sky, illuminating the gray undersides of thin, rippling clouds. One by one, the sources of the searchlights rose above the city, rotated over, and pivoted their beams of light down to the streets and buildings below, then scattered off in their different search vectors. Vleez automated sentries. Each carried a full short-range sensor array.
“Sentry drones are up and roving," Sabira informed the arm.
“Engage your hover-field scanners,” commanded Arrow.
Distant echoes of gunfire attracted a swarm of sentries. They converged in on the sounds of fighting to their east. The mission clock read six hours. Had it really only been minutes since the slaughter on the terrace?
“Must be the left arm,” Arrow transmitted. “Our mission is still to locate and confiscate the target. Keep moving and keep quiet.”
Attendant Spear led them through a tangle of twisting roads. Cone-tiled walls echoed with the wailing alarm. She no longer spied any curious vleez venturing out to see what was happening. All around them doors shut, and lights dimmed. No one came forth to challenge them. No sudden sniper fire barked from dark rooftops. Sabira thought they had a chance to actually clear the mission after all. Until the explosion.
The blast came from the north, distant and reverberating, but still loud enough to be heard over the alarms. A fiery glow illuminated the low clouds from the far side of the hive city’s northern rim.
“No,” whispered Grandfather Spear’s transmission. “Gods no.”
Sabira had never heard him like that, so worried, and realized the wrecker was gone. She felt too far away from everyone else, too exposed. Only Daggeira was on the far edges of her view. She needed to get tighter with the rest of them, needed to be closer to Grandfather.
“Now what are we supposed to do? Oh Gods, what a cave-in,” said Cannon, panic in his voice.
“Trickster’s asshole,” said Daggeira.
Sabira’s visor flashed a warning: hover-fields detected.
“Right arm, hold steady. Keep your eyes up,” commanded Arrow.
“Now what? Oh Gods, now what?” asked Cannon.
As if in answer, blinding white light poured down from the sky.