Author: Rachel Bach

I knew this wasn’t over. The moment I set foot on his ship, Brenton would try to take me to Maat. But I’d fight that battle when it came. Right now, we both had to focus and work together if we were going to get off this rock alive.

We had a lot of tunnel left to go, but a symbiont and a suit of Verdemont armor can cover a lot of ground in a very short amount of time. Not three minutes after we started, I spotted the end of the tunnel in the distance. I raised Mia, ready to blast us a path through whatever the hell was going on outside, but there was no need. When we burst out of the dark tunnel into the brightly lit hangar, all the xith’cal were too busy to spare us a glance.

The hangar was swarmed with lizards running around like ants on a kicked-over hill. The males were scrambling the heavy fighters docked against the hangar’s far wall, while the females were frantically loading equipment crates into the smaller civilian craft. Several ships must have already launched, because the huge cavern was much emptier than it had been when we’d landed, but though the hangar door was wide open, I couldn’t see who was attacking through the heavy shield.

“What’s going on?” I shouted at Brenton as I holstered Mia.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” he shouted back, raising his voice over the xith’cal screeching that was blaring through the hangar speakers. “All that matters is getting you out.”

I wasn’t going to argue. Across the hangar, all three of Brenton’s ships were fired and ready. He was already running full tilt toward the largest one, and for a few glorious moments, it looked like we might actually make it. But then, when we were fifty feet away, something exploded through the shield that covered the hangar door.

It was not a xith’cal ship. It wasn’t a human ship either. I wasn’t even sure it was a ship at first. The thing had no windows, no hard edges, and its deep blue hull looked almost spongy. It was so big its nose was the only part that fit through the door, but though it was hanging half in and half out of the gravity, the ship didn’t seem to mind. It didn’t list forward or even put down landing gear. It simply settled onto the hangar’s stone floor and opened its prow like a mouth.

“Lelgis!” Brenton shouted, skidding to a stop in front of me. I slammed into him a split second later, but the man didn’t even budge. He was already changing, his scales slicing through his clothes. By the time I’d backed off, he was fully transformed, and his symbiont was screaming at me. “Get to the ship!”

You’d have thought I was back in the army from how fast I obeyed. I leaped forward, running full speed toward the freighter, the largest of Brenton’s ships. Another transformed symbiont was waiting on the ramp for us. His clawed hand ready to grab me the moment I was in range, but I never got there. Twenty feet from safety, my path was blocked.

If Brenton hadn’t shouted, I never would have connected the thing that jumped in front of me with the dead lelgis Cotter and I had seen back on the tribe ship. Those had looked like popped balloons. This creature was beautiful.

It stood nearly eight feet tall. Its huge purple head floating weightlessly over a dozen spindly white legs with feathery edges that tiptoed along the ground. The effect reminded me a bit of a jellyfish, especially when the lelgis moved like it did now. Seconds after landing just in front of me, the lelgis jumped again, rising into the air like gravity didn’t touch it. I raised my gun to shoot, but it wasn’t coming for me. Instead, the lelgis jumped backward, landing on top of the symbiont on the ramp.

The man started convulsing before the lelgis even touched him. It was like watching someone have a seizure, but the symbiont wasn’t going down. Instead, he reached for the lelgis as it landed, one hand shooting out to claw his attacker while the other flew sideways, pointing at the ship beside his as he shouted something at the top of his lungs.

I couldn’t hear him over the blaring alarms, but I didn’t need to. The message was clear, and I obeyed, turning midstep toward the other ship. The little stealth two-seater we’d arrived in was up and running. I could see Nic in the pilot’s seat through the glass, watching me run, his pale face pinched in fear. For a second, I couldn’t understand why, and then another lelgis landed right in front of me.

My suit reacted before I could. Before my mind could even take in the yards of delicate legs or the huge, featureless mountain of its bulbous body, the Lady launched me into the air.

For five seconds, I was flying. My suit had jumped me over the alien in a graceful arc. As soon as I realized what had happened, I adjusted, flipping in midair a dozen feet above the alien’s head. But as I started to fall, my feet angled perfectly to land right on the ramp of Nic’s ship, something grabbed my ankle.

It was a light touch, like a feather had brushed over my foot, but the second it connected, a presence exploded into my mind. It reminded me of the hand Ren wrapped around my spine when she wanted to drag me around, but that at least had felt like a hand. This felt like nothing I could describe. It was feathery and dry and wiggling, gnawing into my mind almost like a caterpillar eating a leaf, but faster and directed. It shuffled through my brain methodically, like it was looking for something, and I had a pretty good idea what.

The lelgis had exterminated Stoneclaw’s tribe to destroy the plasmex virus, the virus I’d just used, opening me into that weird emptiness where I’d felt the other presence looking at me. The one that had called me the threat. Now, the squids were here on a tiny rock in the middle of nowhere with what sounded like a battle fleet, and it didn’t take a genius to guess what had drawn them. They were here to eliminate the threat, my threat, and if I didn’t want to be exterminated, I had to act now.

My first thought was to use the virus. After all, that was what the lelgis feared. But I dismissed the idea just as quickly. First, I couldn’t actually use the black stuff on command yet, and second, even if I did manage to get the plague going, there was a good chance it would kill everyone else in the process. So, with the virus not being an option, I decided to do the thing I was good at.

I bent over, tucking my legs as I swung my right arm down toward the feathery tentacle wrapped around my ankle. Elsie shot out of her sheath when I was an inch away, but I didn’t even need to fire my thermite. My tungsten blade sliced through the tentacle like a knife through a noodle, and the presence in my mind vanished.

Given how I’d just whacked off a piece of it, I expected a scream like the phantom’s, but the lelgis made no sound at all, mental or otherwise. It just shot another tentacle at me, this time for my neck. But I was in the fight now, and the tentacle had barely made it off the ground before I had Mia in my hand.

Normally, shooting backward while falling is a stretch even for me, but the nice part about plasma shotguns is that you don’t have to be too accurate. I swung Mia over my shoulder, pausing just long enough to make sure her barrel was pointed at the lelgis’ bulbous head before I pulled the trigger. I saw the white-hot plasma slug hit the thing dead-on in my rear cam, and then my feed whited out as the sun-bright clinging fire consumed the alien’s soft flesh.

My suit landed me neatly on my feet a second later. As soon as my boots touched the ground, I started running, keeping one eye on the burning lelgis in my rear cam. Considering its head was now a mass of white fire, I was pretty sure the fight was over, but experience had taught me never to take my eyes off an enemy before I was certain it was dead. But though the lelgis was now smoldering merrily, it still wasn’t making a sound, and it was still coming for me, its wispy tentacles reaching out even as the fire consumed them.

I didn’t even have time to swear as I clicked Mia, now empty, back into place and grabbed Sasha. I spun round, shooting the first burning tentacle off at the base just before it landed on my shoulder. I shot the others off as well, letting my targeting system line up the shots until, at last, the huge thing fell.

The lelgis has been burning all this time, Mia’s fire eating through its head as I shot off its tentacles. But even lying on the ground burned and shot to pieces, the alien was still twitching toward me. I fired one final shot for good measure before I gave up and ran, barreling full tilt toward the waiting ship.

Nic had the ramp down for me, and I charged it full speed, yelling through the com at him to go ahead and get off the ground, I’d jump in. He obeyed, and the thrusters came on with a roar. But as the ship began to rise, something landed on the open ramp, slamming the ship back down.

I skidded to a stop. The thing blocking my path was nothing like the jellyfish alien I’d just shot to pieces. That one had been little more than air and feathery tentacles, but this one had weight, and its tentacles weren’t feathery, but thick and barbed with wicked hooks. It was definitely a lelgis, though, and it was in my way.

Quick as a thought, I whipped Sasha up and plugged a three-shot spread straight at the new alien’s dark, pointed head. The shots struck true, hitting in a tight triangle, but they didn’t split the alien’s skull. Instead, they stuck in the air, caught by something thick and shimmery. A shield, I realized belatedly. But as I was processing this, the bullets flipped in midair, turning around to point back at me, and my eyes went wide. A plasmex shield.

I dove as the lelgis sent my own armor-piercing rounds flying right back at me. I managed to dodge the first two, but the third caught me in the leg. I gritted my teeth as my own expensive ammunition bored through the Lady’s ballistic steel just like it was supposed to and dug into my calf. The pain came a second later, a stabbing blast that made my whole body seize before the soothing cold of the breach foam filled my suit.

I landed on my side, skidding across the hangar’s stone floor for a moment before I slammed my hands down. My fingers dug deep grooves in the compacted landing bed for nearly a foot before I finally jerked to a stop. The moment I was still, I checked my leg.

The shot had chewed a two-inch hole in the plate over my calf. Through it, I could see the puffy white wall of my breach foam. The quick-hardening antiseptic goo had plugged the hole in me as well, soothing the pain and stopping the bleeding, but I was still in a bad spot.

Back on the ship’s ramp, the lelgis was reaching for me, its huge, hooked tentacles stretching out a surprising distance, and I shot on instinct before I remembered not to. Fortunately, it seemed that only the lelgis’ head was shielded, because my bullet blew the barb off the first tentacle’s end. Before I could get a second shot off, though, something big and black barreled into the lelgis from the side.

After bouncing Sasha’s bullet, I half expected the lelgis to bounce this too, but apparently even a plasmex shield wasn’t strong enough to take a pile drive from a symbiont. Brenton hit the thing hard enough to knock it off the ramp, and the two of them slammed to the ground in a tangle of black claws and barbed tentacles. Through it all, though, the lelgis made no sound. It didn’t even seem to feel pain. It just flipped its barbs around and dug them into the new attacker.

The thick spikes went right through Brenton’s scales, drawing blood before I could shoot another one off. I was about to shoot again when Brenton bellowed at me. “What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed, digging his claws into the lelgis below him. “Get on the ship!”

I was scrambling up to do just that when my suit’s proximity alarm began to beep. When I looked away from Brenton’s fight to see why, I nearly dropped my gun. The huge hangar was filling with lelgis. Aliens of all kinds were pouring out of the mouth of the ship that had breached the plasma shield, big spindly giants like the one I’d burned, barbed ones like what Brenton was fighting, and others, huge ones and small ones, flying ones and ones I couldn’t even make sense of. There were so many even my suit couldn’t count them, and though none had eyes so far as I could make out, every single one of them was clearly searching for something. Searching for me.

“Go, Deviana!” Brenton screamed, slamming the lelgis into the floor. “Go now!”