23

Five hours. Five hours of slinking across the fields of gray waste. Five hours of waiting to get caught. Five hours of tension building. The closer we got to the Arvani officers’ quarters, the more I felt like something in the back of my neck was going to snap.

“Worse game of red light, green light ever,” Amira said.

One of us would advance, the other watch from a safe position, and the other two would stay hidden.

Foot by foot.

Inch by inch.

We converged on the airlock. Boris bounded up the last few feet, unslinging an arm-sized black claw with four sharp points at the end. The alien welding torch.

“We ready?” I asked.

Boris held up a disk. “I have explosives,” he said happily. Then he awkwardly held up the welding torch.

Amira walked up to the doors. “I already said there’s no need.”

“We’ll see.” Boris strapped the disk back onto his hip.

Ken stepped forward. “Boris, you and me are in first, we have the guns. Amira, Devlin, come in behind us. Amira: when you’re ready.”

I got in place behind Ken.

“On three. One, two, three.” Amira waved a hand and the airlock doors slid up and open. A cloud of wet air puffed out past us.

We slipped in, the outer door closed behind us, and Amira held up a hand. “There’s a raptor on the other side,” she said. “Wait a second. He’s turning away. And . . . Get ready.”

This was it.

I crouched. Ken pulled the MP9 up tight to his shoulder and Boris held up the torch. The four claw points lit up and glowed white-hot. Energy leapt out from each point and met in the air a foot ahead.

“Anytime,” Boris said.

“Now.” Amira waved her hand and the inner door opened.

Ken jumped into the air. The raptor spun at us, raising a weapon even as Ken arced toward it, firing with quick bursts that did little more than plink off the armor around the raptor’s claws. The shielding was too tough.

But Ken had known that going in. He wasn’t trying to break the armor. The kinetic energy of each bullet was hitting the raptor’s weapon, making it hard to bring the burst of energy to bear on us.

And to give Boris time to close the distance without being carved up.

When Boris struck the raptor, both bodies tumbled end over end. And then he jammed the welding torch up into the raptor’s jaw.

The white-hot energy point at the torch’s end sizzled and spat as it ate right through the alien’s helmet. The inside of the visor filled with steam and heat, then burst open like wet fruit.

Boris shoved the armored corpse off and to the side, jumping up, ready for the next attack.

Nothing.

We stood on metal grating that led down to a very tropical-­looking spit of sand, and beyond that a deep pool. Purple-and-black shrubs cluttered around in transparent tubs, their fronds dropping toward the water.

In other rooms leading off from the main common area, I saw water fountains and tiled wading pools.

“I guess it makes sense the Arvani officers’ club would look like a bathhouse,” Boris said. “Are we going to have to go swimming to find the prisoners?”

“No,” Ken said, coming back around a corner. “They’re all stacked up along the back of this pool.”

Five Arvani bodies had been ripped right out of their traveling armor.

“Beached squid,” Amira said.

“Yeah.” Their long tentacles were coiled like rope in the sand, which had absorbed enough of their spilled fluids to look somewhat jellied.

“That raptor stacked them up nice and pretty,” I observed.

“Movement!” Ken shouted.

Something rippled in the water of the common pool. We moved along the wall, Ken and Boris taking point again. The light of the torch dazzled against the walls and rippled reflections in the wavelets past the sand.

“Come out slowly, or we shoot!” Ken shouted on the common channel.

A familiar, mechanically translated “voice” responded. “Who are you?” Ignoring Ken’s command, the familiar vision of Commander Zeus rose out of the water in full armor.

“Commander, we’re survivors. We came to rescue you.”

Zeus paused on the edge of the waterline and swiveled to regard us. The alien instructor took an extra moment to regard Boris’s sizzling weapon. “Well, good. We were taken by surprise and with no weapons. My options have been limited. Do you have any plans for what you are going to do next?”

We all looked at each other. “Rescue you, Commander,” I said. “And find out if it’s just this base under attack, or if everything is. We escaped the Conglomerate attack, along with some others. They have headed for the mining launch facility. We were hoping, at the least, you would know where to find better weapons. Or what we should do next.”

“I see.” Zeus rotated around quickly and regarded the dead raptor. “This is the spear tip of a Conglomerate attack force. A special swarm, tasked with gaining ground and holding it secretly. They’re mopping up anything left alive now. After that will come other cities on the moon in a rapid sequence, directed from this one. Once consolidated, jamming anything in this moon’s orbit, they will use the shadow of your moon’s orbit to assemble the attack on your world. They likely feel this is less of a waste than a large fleet attack.”

“So Earth isn’t under attack?” Ken asked. He sounded relieved. Much like me. I was slumping forward, a heavy weight sliding right off my back. I hadn’t even realized I was holding that fear so tightly.

“No,” Zeus said. “But it will be. If you don’t help me. We’re going to trigger a self-destruct sequence, maybe take that ship with the base. Together, we can hurt them back. And we’re going to send out a distress call that can punch through that jamming.”

Fuck. Yeah. I grinned widely. Boris gave me a thumbs-up.

As we moved, Ken paused. “What about the bodies of the other Arvani?” he asked. “Is there anything we should do for them?”

Zeus snorted. “They were lower order Gaskation. Never the best of warriors. Leave them where they lie.”

I glanced at Amira.

“A bit cold,” she said on the arm’s private, encrypted network.

“He’s a bastard,” I said. “But he’s our bastard now.”

We followed Zeus to the airlock, buoyed and ready to follow orders. And relieved to have someone who knew what was going on to lead us.