“Hold your fire!” Will shouted.
Good advice: because of the speed with which she swiveled that lower shield, the Wardenites risked killing themselves with a fatal deflection if they attempted to shoot past it. They could potentially stand up to shoot over it, but that meant putting themselves directly into the line of fire of the Black Hands.
The overhead turret activated. Rhea deflected the attacks with her upper Ban’Shar, protecting her men. Though the turret’s bolts came in fast and furious, she didn’t have to swing the disk through as wide a range of motion as the lower shield, allowing her to take the time she needed to alter its angle until she found the right tilt to deflect the bolts back into the turret. In moments she had disabled it.
With that weapon gone, she lowered the leftmost disk and used it to augment the other Ban’Shar.
“Interesting,” Veil shouted above the fighting. “You’re living up to your new name, Warden. But do you really think I’ve never dealt with a Ganymedean before?”
She removed her black robe, revealing a body that looked like it was made of several smaller humanoid robots. Two of those robots broke away and leaped off the balcony. They crashed into the floor, and rolled into large, separate balls that headed straight for her.
Rhea was forced to bring one of her Ban’Shar forward and braced for the robot spheres to smash into it. Meanwhile, the Wardenites opened fire on the now exposed side, forcing the Black Hands to retreat into the passageways to take cover.
Before striking, the robots transformed into humanoids again and leaped upward, arcing over her disk. The robots reached down, and their fingers elongated, becoming sharp spikes.
Rhea twisted her body, narrowly avoiding a strike to the head; one of the spikes tore into her left shoulder and embedded deep. She cut it away with her Ban’Shar before the robot passed, allowing a plasma bolt from the Black Hands to slip through—it grazed her right side, melting the armor there.
Will and Horatio fired their rifles at point blank range into the vaulting robots, so that by the time the machines crashed into the wall, they were already partially melted into slag. When they bounced to the ground, they didn’t get up.
Rhea hadn’t taken hits to any vital circuitry, and she was able to lower her Ban’Shar to protect herself, and the men, once more.
“You all right?” Will asked.
“Fine!” she replied. “Target Veil! Don’t let her launch any more of those robots!”
Will and Horatio directed plasma fire toward the balcony, forcing Veil to retreat into the upper tunnel from whence she’d come. Meanwhile some of the other Wardenites behind her had apparently decided to risk standing up now and again, judging from the occasional bolt that shot over her shifting Ban’Shar to strike one of the Black Hands.
Since Rhea didn’t have to move her disk-like shields as fast anymore, now that she could devote both of them to protecting herself and her companions, she began to experiment with the tilt of the Ban’Shar, and deflected bolts into the Black Hands who were firing them. This, in combination with the shots the Wardenites occasionally released over her shields, caused the enemy units all around her to begin retreating into the passageways for cover.
As that happened, the barrage she faced lessened, and she could further concentrate on deflecting those bolts, and she redirected them mercilessly into her enemies. Soon they stopped firing entirely and vanished into the side passageways.
Veil had yet to return to the upper balcony, and Rhea wanted to climb that wall in pursuit, but first she had to cross the tunnel without getting anyone killed.
“Let’s go!” Rhea said. She started forward cautiously, keeping an eye on the side passageways, looking for any stragglers among the Black Hands. Behind her, Will and the others scanned the openings as well.
“They’re all empty,” Miles said. “The Black Hands have run off!”
“Cowards,” Will agreed.
And then the rock walls began to come alive.
“Uh,” Brinks said. “The walls.”
“I see them,” Rhea said.
Slithering figures of rock broke away from the stone walls all around them. They were vaguely reminiscent of certain extinct reptiles she had seen on the streaming sites—hooded cobras. They even had leathery tongues that flicked from their open mouths. The difference with these creatures was that they had forelimbs tipped by long, wicked-looking sickles.
They slowly slithered forward, their upper bodies held aloft, their forelimbs slicing eagerly at the air.
Rhea flicked her index fingers forward, transforming the Ban’Shar into glowing short swords of plasma.
“Custom bioweapons of some kind,” Will said. “They’re coming from the passageways, too. The Black Hands are long gone.”
“Fight through them!” Rhea said. “To the balcony!”
She raced forward. The Wardenites followed and opened fire, drilling blast craters into the bodies of the creatures ahead of her. The impacts caused some of the rock creatures to go down, while others were merely injured and kept coming.
As she neared one of those in the forefront, it lunged at her. She twisted to the side and struck down with her Ban’Shar sword, beheading it.
Another creature thrust for her. She ducked, and met the creature head-on, plunging the Ban’Shar blade through its core, and ripping the weapon sideways to extract a good chunk of tissue and the rock flesh coating it. The rock cobra fell.
Three more creatures tried to waylay her. One was struck down by a plasma bolt from behind, while she mowed down the remainder with quick strikes from her Ban’Shar.
One of the rock
