“Do you think I’m not used to pain, Pol-Kai?” she asked, her voice sullen. “If you’re going to kill me either way, then I have no incentive to help you.”
She was stalling, of course. All of this was a stall, but the question was, how long were we going to have to stall for? There was no way of knowing, since we couldn’t communicate past a few meters.
If they don’t hurry up, Deke told me, we’re going to have to go in by ourselves.
Which would be suicide with upwards of thirty armed Tahni inside, but he was right… if it came down to Marikit giving up the code, there wouldn’t be any choice.
“I want the same deal you gave him,” Marikit said, jerking a thumb at Kan-Zin Tel. “If I give you what you want, you leave me here, intact.”
“Somehow, I have a problem seeing you spending the rest of your life among the very people who sold you out to me, Marikit,” Pol Kai sneered.
“Kan-Zin Tel did what he had to do in order to survive. I’m doing the same thing.”
“That would make sense,” Pol-Kai admitted. “And if I were a more forgiving person, I’d be tempted to agree to your conditions.” The steam-shovel jaw parted in a snarling show of squared-off teeth. “However, I am not nearly so forgiving as to forget that you gave the power over us to your fellow desecrations of nature, the Evolutionists. So, I believe I will take the chance on wasting a few days just to gain the satisfaction of tearing you apart.” He raised his hand, gesturing to a gaggle of young Tahni beside him. “Reduce her to a glowing stump.”
And that was that.
Go! I pushed Deke forward and, to his credit, he didn’t question the order.
He slammed through the door and I tumbled out after him, gritting my teeth, prepared for death but really wishing I’d brought my Vigilante along. I certainly wasn’t going to hide behind Deke, because he wasn’t there anymore. The man moved with a speed that couldn’t be explained by cloned muscle tissue or even some kind of synthetic adrenaline, speed I hadn’t seen even from the cyborgs. He was boosted, augmented with something pretty far above my pay grade, and as much as it freaked me out, I would have loved to share in the freakiness.
Tahni soldiers screamed and spun away from his path, blood trailing where his talons had ripped through them, but I had to do things the more run-of-the-mill Marine way and shoot the sons of bitches. Deke had gone around the perimeter, but my concern was guarding Kan-Zin Tel and Marikit because this was my plan and if they got killed, it was on me.
The tunnel exit came out behind a control panel and there was barely enough space for me to squeeze through with the Tahi armor, the shoulder plates scraping against the rock and metal with a sound that set my teeth on edge. Taking a knee, I opened fire before I even had a clear shot, the targeting reticle dancing across the entire group of Tahni warriors. The KE gun was nothing like firing a Gauss rifle, the stream of tantalum needles juddering out of the muzzle with a vibration that traveled all the way back through my shoulder and into my teeth.
The spray of metal darts tore into two of the Tahni who’d been about to fire at Marakit, sparking off their armor as the rounds penetrated chest plates. They toppled backward like felled trees, the clatter of their armor drowned out by the snap-crack of the hypersonic rounds cutting through the air of the control room. Kan-Zin Tel shot down the other two, his KE gun blasting both of them off their feet before they could react to the gunfire from the other side of the room.
We’d had a good two seconds of surprise, and we’d used it up. I wasn’t a commando, but I’d developed a feel for the flux of combat and the momentum had drifted from our side to theirs, a tide that had been coming in starting to wash outward instead. I’d shot everyone in my field of aim except for Pol-Kai, and the Tahni commander had a keen sense of self-preservation. He’d thrown himself forward, into the cover of the central bank of controls for the atmosphere mines, and even though the KE gun might have cut through the panels, I couldn’t try it because Marakit was in the way.
Deke was still engaging the Tahni at the other end of the room, but even as fast as he moved, he wouldn’t make it back to us in time and the rest of the troops had turned our way, probably not even knowing Deke was there. Things were about to get bad. And I was so wrapped up in the threat in front of me I almost didn’t notice the pounding of boot soles behind me, coming from the corridor outside.
It could have been more of Pol-Kai’s men coming to investigate, and if it was we would be dead. But it wasn’t. Tahni barreled through the door, dressed in wartime armor and carrying KE guns. Kan-Zin Tel’s group of family men. Not a lot of them, about a dozen, but enough to turn that tide back again, pouring a fusillade of metal into the incoming squad of enemy troops.
Laser pulses crisscrossed with electromagnetically launched projectiles, a deadly web of interlocking fire cutting off both Pol-Kai and Marikit from the rest of us. If the former Search and Rescue trooper remembered her training, she should have thrown herself flat and low-crawled out of the line of fire, but she didn’t. Instead, she lunged upward and grabbed the neural halo off the top of the quantum core… and took a laser through the base of her neck.
“Goddammit!” I yelled, throwing caution to the wind and throwing myself into a high-crawl across the floor.
It was stupid, insane, but I did it anyway, grabbing at her leg and pulling her down out of the line of fire. She was limp, a rag doll, her biological eye unfocused… dead, the halo still clenched in her hand. The air went out of me, just for a second, long enough for Pol-Kai to lurch out of his hiding place, pistol aimed my way. No one close enough to help, my rifle pointed the wrong direction, more of a hindrance than a weapon.
I let it drop, grabbing at the Tahni’s wrist. It was like trying to wrestle a pneumatic press, even at his age, and the lower gravity did nothing to change our respective natural strengths. But I did have one advantage, one that Pol-Kai could never match. I had a lot of experience fighting people much bigger and stronger than I was.
He was off balance, one knee on the ground, trying to push forward without leverage. All I had to do was fall backward and pull. The Tahni tumbled forward, unable to break his fall because I still controlled his arms, and smashed face-first into the slick, volcanic rock of the floor. He didn’t have much of a nose to break, but blood still splattered from his mouth as cracked teeth skittered away from him and his pistol came free into my hands.
I didn’t try to shoot him. Tahni handguns even more so than their rifles were built for fingers with extra joints, and I couldn’t risk the extra second it would have taken to shift my grip and get my hands wrapped around it in the correct configuration to pull the trigger. But it was big, and heavy, and metal, and it made an excellent club.
Pol-Kai rolled onto his back, raised his hands to try to shield himself, tried to swing his fists at me, but the first blow took the fight out of him. He should have worn a helmet. There’s a reason the military made it mandatory, even if the damned things were claustrophobic and made it hard to breathe, hard to hear, hard to see. But he’d gone Hollywood—that’s what we called it in the Marines, though I didn’t honestly know why—and dressed in body armor with no helmet.
The first blow took him in the side of the head, hard enough to crack the back of his skull against the rock on the rebound, and the energy behind his defensive blows. Not that they did anything through my armor, but now even his attempt to block my downward swings were weak and ineffective. On the third blow, his skull cracked and Pol-Kai’s eyes rolled back into his head. He slumped, hands falling limp, and I stopped, tossing away the pistol and taking a moment to figure out if I was going to live through the next ten seconds.
An eerie silence greeted me, the details of the room hidden by a haze of smoke from laser strikes and shorting control panels, orders and reports contained silently inside sound-proof visors. Deke stepped through the smoke, an angel of death come to claim the souls of the firstborn of every household. Blood dripped from his hands, though the talons had retracted again, hidden from the public eye as if they were some sort of secret shame. And maybe they were.
“Marakit?”
I turned at the question, met Kan-Zin Tel’s forlorn look, his visor propped open. I shook my head, certain he’d know what the gesture meant. On the other side of the room, a few of Pol-Kai’s followers had surrendered and the older Tahni war vets had them under guard. Kan-Zin Tel knelt beside Marakit’s body, waiting in silence for long seconds as if he expected her to awake. I didn’t begrudge him the time, using it to roll back to my feet, steadying myself against the edge of a control panel. It had once been a monitor for an automated refinery barge running from the gas giant to the moon, but lasers and KE guns had reduced it to charred, cratered wreckage.
A quick glance around showed too much of the equipment had been slagged by the brief firefight. None of it was irreparable, but the smoking ruin was a fitting mirror of the death and disorder that had overtaken the Confluence. Was it our fault? Had we caused this by showing up, or would it have happened whether or not we’d sought them out?
“You’re in charge here, Kan-Zin Tel,” I told him. “If you can hold it.”
“Perhaps,” he said, staring down at Marakit’s lifeless body, “we shouldn’t even try. Holding onto this is what got her killed.”
“Kan-Zin Tel.” One of the older vets sketched a Tahni salute, then gestured back at the prisoners. “We have reports of hundreds of others who’ve surrendered to our people. What are your orders?”
“Take their weapons and armor and send them back to their homes,” Kan-Zin Tel ordered, the words dragging themselves out reluctantly, weighed down with grief and sadness. “Without Pol-Kai and his senior lieutenants, they likely won’t have the will to organize anything on their own.”
The Tahni lieutenant saluted again and turned to snap orders at the others.
“Those people on the colony worlds still need your help,” I told Kan-Zin Tel, feeling like a shitheel arguing for him to take over. “If you abandon the Confluence, they’re the ones who are going to suffer.”
He speared me with a glare, and I was suddenly very cognizant of the fact there were still just two of us and a shitload more of them… and for all that Kan-Zin Tel seemed like he was on our side and had worked for Fleet Intelligence, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hold all this against us.
“And you would have me do what, Cameron Alvarez? Become part of your new Commonwealth? Give up our autonomy?”
Deke did something I would not have considered in that moment. He laughed.
Has these Tahni not lived among humans for the last decade, they might not have noticed, but from the look on Kan-Zin Tel’s face, he knew exactly what a scornful laugh meant.
“Give up your autonomy?” Deke repeated. “Does it look to you like we have the capability of imposing our will on anyone at the moment, Kan-Zin Tel? Those days are over. We couldn’t force you to join us any more than Tahn-Skyyiah could make you part of their planetary government. And if we could, why would we want to? What do you have that you think would be that important to us?”
